Friday, October 18, 2013

EVOLUTIONISM IN CREATIONISM AND THE IMAGE OF GOD IN MANKIND

EVOLUTIONARY CREATIONISM AND THE IMAGE OF GOD IN MANKIND
From all indications the entire animal and plant kingdoms are just two twigs on the branch of Eukaryotes . There are still the two other branches of the Bacteria and Archaea to be accounted for. The extrapolation of the Darwinian mechanisms from peppered moths and fruit flies and finch beaks to the production and evolution of every living thing is a breathtaking extrapolation of gargantuan, brobdingnagian proportions. We know that in science such extrapolations often fail. For example, Albert Einstein attempted to extrapolate his principle of relativity from the special theory to a general principle of relativity that would relativize not only uniform motion but also accelerated and rotary motion. But the extrapolation failed. Instead, what Einstein discovered was a new theory of gravitation. The name “general theory of relativity” is thus something of a misnomer.

Where is the evidence for the extraordinary extrapolation the current paradigm involves? Michael Behe says that “the evidence for common descent seems compelling,” but “. . . except at life’s periphery the evidence for a pivotal role for random mutations is terrible.” Now if he’s wrong about this, then what is the evidence?  But what is it? looking at the evidence objectively , there's no good reason to think that the neo-Darwinian mechanisms are sufficient to explain the evolution of the extraordinary diversity of life that we see on this planet during the time available.

So its not convincing that evolutionary creationism is true. It seems that so-called progressive creationism fits the evidence quite nicely. Progressive creationism suggests that God intervenes periodically to bring about miraculously new forms of life and then allows evolutionary change to take place with respect to those life forms. But as for grand evolutionary change, this would not take place by the mechanisms of natural selection and mutation undirected by God. Rather we would need miraculous interventions of God in the process of biological evolution to bring about broad evolutionary change. So instead of evolutionary creationism, we would have a kind of progressive creationism whereby God creates biological complexity over time.

Ancient Near Eastern context, refer to man as God’s representative regent on Earth and in order to fulfill such a function, man would have to possess certain properties inherent to personhood, like self-consciousness, rationality, freedom, and the ability to stand in personal relationships. These are the sort of properties which theologians have traditionally identified as constitutive of God’s image in man. These are not properties belonging to man’s hominid body but to his soul. So it seems a matter of indifference how man’s physical body might have originated. However God chose to bring about our hominid bodies, the crucial thing that makes us human is our soul, invested with the aforementioned features. 

credits to William 
Crain 

Thursday, October 10, 2013

MATHEMATICAL PROOF OF GOD'S EXISTENCE -AN ATHEIST ARGUMENT

Calculating the Probability of God’s Existence
Question
The atheist says by mathematical deduction, to find out the probability of an event happening, you simple divide the event by the total of all events. A simple example of this is the probability of rolling a 1 on a six-sided die, which would be 1 (the event you want) divided by 6 (all possible events). So when you want to know the probability that god exists, you simple divide the one you choose by all possible other events. Since you have no proof that indicate any one god is more likely than any other god, this gives you an infinite number of possible events. So doing the probability you get 1 divided by infinity which is zero." When questioned that infinity is the incorrect constant to use the atheist replies ,why isn't infinity the right number to use? Do you have some proof for a specific god that nobody seems to know about? If you don't, then how is any other god not just as likely? This is basic logic. Since I don't have to prove they exist, I can make up new gods all day long. When something is unprovable it has a infinite set of like instances by default. Again, that's basic logic.
ANSWER

This question raises some technical issues in probability theory, to which I’ll return at the end of this answer.

Probabilities are always relative to some background information. . . . Now the atheist says God’s existence is improbable. You should immediately ask, ‘Improbable relative to what?’ What is the background information? . . . The interesting question is whether God’s existence is probable relative to the full scope of the evidence.
It is evident that the conclusion was made  considering no background information at all! The atheist seems to be talking about a sort of absolute probability of God’s existence Pr (G) in abstraction from any background information B and specific evidence E. That’s a pointless exercise. The atheist seems to be imagining all the possible deities that could exist and asking, “What are the chances apriori that a certain one of these exists?” How silly! That’s like inquiring about the absolute probability that a certain person, for example, you, exists, given the infinite number of possible persons there could be. Nobody is interested in such absolute probabilities, if there even are such things. What we want to know, rather, is the probability of your existence or God’s existence relative to our background information and specific evidence: Pr (G|E & B).

As for the technical issues, when the question of , “If you don't [have evidence of God’s existence], then how is any other god not just as likely? arises,it's logical to say,” the atheist is presupposing a theory of logical probability which is highly controverted and is rejected by almost all probability theorists today. Timothy McGrew, Professor of Philosophy at Western Michigan, who writes on probability theory explains that most theorists would deny that in the absence of evidence would conclude on the premise of  absolute probability just as the atheist would.

It is correct that in the complete absence of evidence there is a sort of symmetry of ignorance about competing views. We’d have no idea which is true. But the atheist interprets this to mean that the competing options are all equally probable. And that’s false. To see why, consider an illustration provided by the mathematician Peter Walley of a closed bag of colored marbles. If you reach in and draw a marble, what is the probability that the marble will be red? Walley says,

A naïve answer is to say that, because there are two possible outcomes (red or non-red) and no information to favour either, the probability must be 1/2 . . . . But one could apply the same principle to the colors blue and green instead of red . . . and they cannot each have the probability 1/2 . . . . Any precise assessment seems quite arbitrary.1

According to Walley, the correct answer is to say, “I don’t have any information at all about the chance of drawing a red marble, so I do not see why I should bet on, or against, red at any odds.”

Wally then provides a different model of probability which assigns, not precise values to different alternatives, but intervals. For example, in the absence of any information about the color of the marbles in the bag, the model assigns the vacuous probability of 0 to 1 of drawing a red marble, which is just what it should be for a state of complete ignorance.

Applied to the existence of God, what this means is that in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, we should simply have no opinion about whether or not God exists. There is no implication that the probability of God’s existence is 0.

The atheist' theory resembles Rudolf Carnap’s Logical Foundations of Probability (1951), in which Carnap attempted to formalize prior probabilities in terms of state descriptions and structure descriptions of a system. McGrew comments,

The attempt to nail down prior probabilities in an objective manner using state descriptions and structure descriptions does capture two of our intuitions: it permits learning from experience, and it endorses the commonsense idea that in the utter absence of information, it would be rash to be very confident of a complex contingent claim. But it also has many problems that have been well known since the publication of Carnap’s Logical Foundations of Probability in 1951. In particular, the probabilities are relative to the language used in the description – adding more predicates changes the probabilities, a fact that Carnap himself understood very well. There are other approaches to learning from experience that do not suffer from this defect. To use this sort of artificial system to raise a presumption against the existence of God is really rather comical.

As confident and appealing as it may seem to “basic logic.” the atheist' position lacks commonsense .

Notes

[1] Peter Walley, “Inferences from Multinomial Data: Learning about a Bag of Marbles,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society B 58/1 (1996): 3-57, pp. 4-5.
Culled from
William Lane Craig

Monday, October 7, 2013

MIRACLES : A VIOLATION OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY . AN ATHEIST ARGUMENT .

Arguments for the Possibility of Miracles  There are two arguments for the possibility of miracles: one from the side of God, the miracle-worker, or the cause, and the other from the side of the world, or the effect. We must show that both are open, not closed, to miracles.   First, there is no defence against miracles in God’s nature, no assurance that God would not work a miracle. For if there is a God, he is omnipotent , and thus able to work miracles. Whether he would freely choose to do so or not is not a matter we can know a priori, for it would depend on his free choice. An omnipotent God could not be compelled to work or not work a miracle. So there is no obstacle to miracles in God. If there is a God, miracles are possible.   Second, there is no obstacle to or defense against miracles on the part of the world of nature. If God created it in the first place, that is, if nature is open to the possibilities of existing or not existing, then it is open to the possibilities of containing miracles or not containing them. In other words, if God can bang out the Big Bang of creation, he can certainly add some smaller bangs of miracles. If the author can create the play, he can change it too. And if the play is dependent on God, its author, for its very existence, then it is also dependent on him for whatever else he may want to do in it.  

Objections Against Miracles  Each objection tries to prove that miracles are impossible (or overwhelming improbable). If miracles are impossible, then they are not actual, and if no miracles ever actually happened, then Christianity is false. For the fundamental claims and doctrines of Christianity are all miracles: Incarnation, resurrection, salvation, inspiration. If any one of these objections is valid, the whole of Christianity is refuted.     

Objection 1: Miracles violate the principle of the uniformity of nature.
Reply: What is meant by the “uniformity of nature”? If it means that we can explain whatever happens wholly in terms of the system of natural causes, then the objection begs the question. It amounts to saying “miracles violate the principle that miracles never happen.”
 
Objection 2: A miracle, by definition, must violate some law of nature, and therefore must be a maximally improbable event. But then it is always more likely that the event never really occurred as described (or remembered), or that it did not really violate the laws of nature.  
Reply A: A miracle does not “violate” the laws of nature – any more than a school principal violates the schedule of classes by cancelling gym for a special assembly. Violations take place whenever someone who has to follow or uphold an established order fails or refuses to do so – for example, when the gym teacher cancels classes on his own to lead his students in an hour of spontaneous prayer. But the principal has done nothing like that if he modifies the schedule within the limits of his authority.   Now the Creator of the universe has authority over all creation. It is truly odd to call his suspending this or that regularly observed sequence a “violation,” as if it were something he should feel guilty or embarrassed about. A miracle violates nothing. When one happens, God has (mercifully) modified the schedule of the day.
 
Reply B: Why are miracles called “maximally improbable”? They are certainly unusual, but how do we know whether they are likely to happen or not? Only if we have already decided whether or not it is likely that God exists – or that he would ever work a miracle. In that case calling miracles “maximally improbable” is not a neutral description: it stacks the deck against them. For it places every report of miracles in a setting where it is most likely that God does not exist or does not intervene in the system of natural causes, and therefore that the event reported is not a miracle at all. Hence the conclusion that reports of miracles should be disbelieved is really assumed in, and assured by, the words used in the premises to describe them.
 
Reply C: We are creatures of habit. Life is one darn thing after another – often the same sort of darn thing. We expect that today is going to be pretty much like yesterday, and we know that people, including ourselves, are given to exaggeration and deceit. So we naturally approach stories of “signs and wonders” with deep suspicion. Our experience of humanity teaches us to have our guard up much of the time. And when we hear of “miracles” from people of questionable or unstable character, we dismiss them as mere oddities, frauds or delusions. But when an event seems for its setting so right, and the person to whom it is imputed so noble, then it seems to demand a more serious response. The place of fittingness has not often enough been acknowledged in discussions of miracles. But surely it is a key factor in the way we concretely assess events we hear about – or even witness.  

Objection 3: To accept miracles would be to abandon the method by which science operates.
Reply: Nonsense. All the natural sciences operate by assuming certain things as given: the world of matter, natural causes operating within that world, and an order or regularity that makes empirical investigation possible. That is why questions like: “How come the world of matter exists at all – rather than nothing?” or “What caused the Big Bang – the absolute beginning of all material being?” are not, strictly speaking, questions within physical science. This does not mean that such questions are unreal, only that science as such cannot answer them. A scientist who believes that God caused the universe to exist has not abandoned scientific method, but, merely acknowledged its limits.   Consider the following example. A doctor witnesses a most unusual event: a patient of his with terminal AIDS is suddenly cured after bathing in the waters of Lourdes. He thinks: “Some cause has reversed the progress of this disease – but what exactly was it?” so he sets out in search of this unknown cause. He checks on all the drugs the patient had taken before, during and after the pilgrimage. He investigates the water of the shrine to see whether some as-yet unknown element in it is able to destroy the AIDS virus. After weeks of fruitless labour, he begins to wonder whether even this terrible disease could be psychosomatically reversed. Finally, he throws up his hands and admits that as a scientist he can find no plausible empirical explanation. This is a possible scenario. But there is another.   Suppose that while visiting Lourdes to gather water for testing, the doctor finds himself deeply moved, even shaken, by the faith of the pilgrims he sees there. He has already been impressed by the faith-filled charity which radiates from his newly-cured patient who was once so bitter and self-absorbed. He feels the same thing here at the shrine, only in almost over-whelming intensity. So he inquires about the message of Lourdes, then about Christianity. Finding no plausible empirical explanation, he comes to believe, as a person who is also a scientist, that God did specially intervene in curing his patient of AIDS, and that no description of the event which left God out would be adequate. But notice: he did not come to disbelieve in empirical explanation. He did not cease to be a scientist. He simply acknowledged that empirical explanation has its limitations, and believed that, in this case, the true explanation transcended them.

  Objection 4: Miracles are an affront to the glory of God. If he designed the system of nature, and then has to intervene in its regular workings he must be an incompetent architect.
Reply: This argument would only be true if God designed a system in which he should never intervene – in which he should never answer prayers or reveal himself in special and spectacular ways. If you acquired a newly-built house and found it had no bathrooms, that would indeed reflect badly on the architect. For the concrete design of the house would lack what it unquestionably ought to have. But if miracles happen, then God did not design a system in which he should never intervene. The intervention is part of the plain; he designed it that way.   Is anyone in a position to say God ought not to have designed the system this way? We do not, and cannot, know the extent of God’s creation. There may be worlds in which there are no specially answered prayers, no interventions in the system of natural causes. How can we really know that it was wrong for him to have created a world in which he does intervene?  

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

REPOSITIONED FOR TESTIMONIES OF FINANCIAL INCREASE

POSITION YOURSELF TO RECIEVE TESTIMONIES OF  FINANCIAL INCREASE NOW
The number 10 is the spiritual number for divine sufficiency , accomplishment and prosperity , it is in the light of this truth that this month holds a lot for those who believe and has been prophetically declared as the month of testimonies confirming increase in your finances .
Dear Friend,the supply of our need as promised by the lord is guaranteed however it is POSITIONAL . The scriptures in 1Kings 17. Shows us how God does this through the experiece of Elijah the prophet.1 Kings 17:2-4:And the word of the Lord came unto him, saying, [3] Get thee hence, and turn thee eastward, and hide thyself by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan. [4] And it shall be, that thou shalt drink of the brook; and I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there.Elijah's provision wasn't where he was; it was where God told him to go! This is profound!Some of us have an impression from God to do something. Maybe to start a new business, make a job change, move to another town, go to Bible college, speak to a person, etc. We are persuaded to do it, but we keep holding back because the provision isn't there yet. You're saying, "God, I can't do what You're asking without first seeing the provision. How do I know all these things are going work out?" This principle in 1 Kings applies directly to your situation. God is sending the provision for your needs not to where you are but to where He told you to go! The question is, "Are you positioned to recieve it" Some of us aren't experiencing supernatural provision because we aren't positioned . There is a position  for you.In verse 4,  we see the ravens on their way to where Elijah was supposed to go.First Kings 17:5 says,So [Elijah] went and did according unto the word of the Lord: for he went and dwelt by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan.Elijah wouldn't have seen God's provision if he hadn't gone where God instructed.One of the reasons we aren't seeing a greater provision from God financially, emotionally or in our circumstances is because we aren't doing what God told us to do. We've got a word from God that we haven't acted on. We're somewhere other than where He told us to be.Now, by the doctrine of  God's grace He provides things for us and that it's not based on our obedience or holiness. God loves us independent of our performance-that's absolutely true! But does this mean obeying Him is unimportant? Just the opposite.God has a plan for your life and He chose you from your mother's womb and ordained you to be a servant of God and He has great things planned for you, things earmarked for you that has your name on them. But if we don't obey, step out, and do what He tells us to do, God still would provide, but we would miss out on it. We have to be positioned .God just needs our cooperation to bring things to pass .This isn't intended to hurt or condemn anyone, because I know you doing your utmost best and now thinking, Maybe that's why things aren't working in my life-I haven't been obedient to what God told me to do! Well... that's absolutely correct! It's not that God won't bless you because you haven't obeyed Him; it's that His blessing is positional ! It's like receiving a mobile phone as a gift, you would need to go to where there is sufficient network to use it.  If the reason you won't step out is because you've got some form of "security" but you're miserable and things are just going wrong, I encourage you to do what God told you to do.God is meeting all of your needs-He's sending His supply to where He told you to be. This is one of the great lessons from the life of Elijah.Let's look at 1 Kings 17:6:And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening; and he drank of the brook.As I mentioned before, I believe that since God had already commanded the ravens, if Elijah hadn't obeyed, God would still have been faithful to send the provision where He told him to go. I believe that these ravens would have brought bread and meat every morning and evening but that it all would have piled up beside the brook and gone to waste. Elijah could have starved to death even though God had been faithful to provide for his needs.Here's something else to consider: How did Elijah know which spot along the brook Cherith to go? If the brook was ten miles long, he could have been five or ten miles away from where the ravens were bringing him food. The ravens could fly faster than Elijah could walk or run. I'm convinced that one of the ways he knew he was at the right spot was because the ravens were already "positioned" with the bread and meat. When Elijah saw the provision God had promised, that was one of the signs that he was in the right place.The same will be true of you when you step out. You have to take a step of faith with no guarantees that things are going to work. And then you will start seeing the provision of the Lord. It'll be confirmation that you're going in the right direction and doing what He told you to do. You'll be able to say, "It was God who told me to do this."This is how it's worked in my life. God's provision isnt given accidentally but positionally . I'm a product of  1 Kings 17 taking  steps of faith got me where I am. And I'm going to keep taking steps of faith. All you have to do to get started is take a step of faith this could radically change your life if you would act on it and may the God of Elijah prove himself strong on your behalf in Jesus name.