Seven videos from the Biola University conference on God and evolution

I have been weaseling out of my apologetics posting this week, and this is my last chance to get something good up so I can make it onto Brian Auten’s weekly apologetics bonus links at Apologetics 315, the best Christian apologetics site ever.

So I am posting SEVEN video clips from a recent Biola University conference on theistic evolution. (H/T Mysterious Jonathan)

Conference details:

Can you believe in God and Darwinian evolution at the same time? Scientists and scholars have an answer that may surprise the audience as they explore this and related questions at the God & Evolution conference on Saturday, October 16, 2010 at Biola University in La Mirada, California.

The conference will focus on the conflict between neo-Darwinism and traditional theological views of Protestants, Catholics and Jews.

What is “theistic” evolution, and how consistent is it with traditional theism?

What challenges does Darwin’s theory pose for Protestants, Catholics, and Jews?

Is it “anti-science” to question Darwinian Theory?

These questions and more will be addressed at the one-day conference by Marvin Olasky, editor of World magazine, biologist Jonathan Wells, political scientist John West, philosopher Jay Richards, attorney and science writer Casey Luskin and authors David Klinghoffer and Denyse O’Leary.

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution, Christians, Jews, and other religious believers have grappled with how to make sense of it. Most have understood that Darwin’s theory has profound theological implications, but responses have varied dramatically.

Some believers have rejected it outright; others, including “theistic evolutionists” such as Francis Collins and Karl Giberson, have sought to reconcile Darwin’s theory with their religious beliefs, often at the cost of clarity, orthodoxy, or both. As a result, the whole subject of God and evolution is a source of confusion for many believers.

Join us for this one-day seminar, featuring contributors to the new book, God and Evolution, exploring these issues and offering a wide-ranging critique of those who seek to reconcile materialistic theories such as Darwinism with belief in God.

Here is the playlist for all SEVEN video clips.

Clip 1 of 7: Jay W. Richards: The Central Issues (34 minutes)

Clip 2 of 7: John G. West: Three Big Questions (22 minutes)

Clip 3 of 7: Casey Luskin: Why the New Atheists Won’t Be Appeased (21 minutes)

Clip 4 of 7: Denyse O’Leary: Catholics & Evolution (29 minutes)

Clip 5 of 7: David Klinghoffer: Judaism & Evolution (17 minutes)

Clip 6 of 7: Jonathan Wells: Science and Theistic Evolution (26 minutes)

Clip 7 of 7: Panel Discussion with Marvin Olasky (99 minutes)

So it looks like there are 2 Catholics (Richards, O’Leary), 2 Jews (Luskin, Klinghoffer), 2 Protestants (West, Olasky) and 1 “Other” (Wells) in that list. It’s a diverse group.

Filed under: Videos, Argument, Atheism, Belief, Biola University, Biologos Institute, Casey Luskin, Christianity, Conference, Darwinism, David Klinghoffer, Denyse O'Leary, Design, Evidence, Evolution, Fact, Faith, Francis Collins, God, God and Evolution, ID, ID Theory, Intelligent Design, Jay W. Richards, John G. West, Jonathan Wells, Junk DNA, Karl Giberson, Marvin O'Lasky, Materialism, Naturalism, Origins, Process, Purpose, Purposeless, Random, Reason, Science, Theism, Theistic Evolution

Profile of Canadian pro-life debater Jojo Ruba

Here’s the article. (I linked to the printable version)

Excerpt:

Before Jose “Jojo” Ruba spoke at St. Patrick’s Church last night as part of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform’s Northern Ontario Truth Tour, he conceded he has a tough task ahead of him; making parallels between the civil rights movement and the abortion debate today would be tough for anyone.

That’s what Ruba, a graduate of Carleton University’s Journalism and Masters of Political Science programs, has set out to do on the Sudbury stop of his tour of Northern Ontario with his talk Injustice Interrupted: From the Civil Rights Movement to The Modern Abortion Debate.

Ruba, who’s approaching his 10th year as a public speaker, debater and educator on pro-life issues, said his talk examines the legacy of the civil rights movement and the lessons that can be taken from the social reform movement as it relates to the pro-life movement.

No stranger to controversy, Ruba said he knows it’s tough to draw comparisons, but added that he wants to give people some ideas as to why he thinks comparisons between the civil rights movement and the modern abortion debate are justified.

Ruba said his presentation focuses on an important question central to the argument : what are the unborn?

“If unborn are human beings like us, just as the civil rights activists fought for equality rights of human beings who were different, but still human beings, we say the same thing about the pre-born child.”

Ruba said that’s what he does as a “pro-lifer,” and a challenge he presents to other pro-lifers.

“If we truly believe there are 300 deaths every day of Canadians through legal abortion, how should we act? With gentleness and respect, of course, following the laws, but without compromise.”

Like those who fought for equal rights in the civil rights movement, Ruba is aware of those who would try to silence him.

Ruba recalled a time when he was giving a lecture at St. Mary’s University in Halifax when prochoice audience members shouted him down for 45 minutes.

“At McGill University in Montreal, they shouted me down for two hours,” Ruba said. “They started singing all 99 verses of 99 bottles of beer on the wall and also sang happy birthday for abortion.”

Ruba said that even in such a hostile environment, he was happy to stay afterward and answer questions.

“In fact, one of the protesters who started off chanting as part of the protest group, after hearing a bit of what I’d had to say, said he’d wished he’d heard more of the presentation. Even when it happened in Halifax, more people showed up at the next university on the tour because of the controversy.”

Ruba said it’s a person’s right to disagree with him, but argued the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform is “a good thing, a democratic right.”

Here’s another video featuring Jojo Ruba that I featured previously.

Filed under: Videos, Baby, Canada, Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, CCBR, Fact, Jojo Ruba, Jose Ruba, Objective Truth, Opinion, Personal Preference, Pro-Life Apologetics, Unborn, Unborn Baby, Value

Objective truth in the abortion debate – a pro-life training video

This is a training video from CCBR, a Canadian pro-life group I really like.

That guy in the video is the one who is always getting into trouble at university debates and lectures.

Here is his biography:

Jojo has taught pro-life apologetics for both Christian and secular audiences. He has represented the pro-life side in abortion debates held at universities, trained pro-lifers at conferences and given pro-life talks at different religious venues. Jojo has also spoken to the Parliamentary Pro-life Caucus, a group made up of pro-life Members of Parliament, in 2006.

In 2006, Jojo debated Tracy Davidson, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Ottawa, and Jeannette Doucet of Canadians for Choice in Ottawa. Abortion advocates were so frustrated with the debate that they tried to ban the pro-life club which organized it.

In 2009, abortion advocates at St. Mary’s University in Halifax shouted Jojo down for 45 minutes in an attempt to stop his presentation. Because of the publicity the protests received, more people attended Jojo’s subsequent talks in the area.

Jojo also shares the Christian case for the pro-life view at a variety of different church denominations across the country. He has spoken as the main Sunday morning speaker as well as at various church venues during the week.

One Christian friend, after hearing Jojo’s pro-life presentation, said, “I can’t believe they do this [abortion] in Canada” and now supports his work.

After graduating, Jojo worked for the National Campus Life Network, the only national pro-life student organization, where he organized two national pro-life conferences.

Jojo earned a Bachelor of Journalism and a Masters in Political Science from Carleton University in Ottawa. He is a co-founder of, and works full-time with, the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Ugh! He went to that awful fascist Carleton University! No wonder they turned him into a pro-life debater!

You may also like this longer talk on pro-life apologetics by Scott Klusendorf delivered at an Alliance Defense Fund conference.

Filed under: Videos, Baby, Canada, Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, CCBR, Fact, Jojo Ruba, Jose Ruba, Objective Truth, Opinion, Personal Preference, Pro-Life Apologetics, Unborn, Unborn Baby, Value

Henry F. Schaefer assesses Stephen Hawking’s no-boundary proposal

A little bit about Dr. Schaefer:

Henry F. Schaefer III was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He attended public schools in Syracuse (New York), Menlo Park (California), and Grand Rapids (Michigan), graduating from East Grand Rapids High School in 1962. He received his B.S. degree in chemical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1966) and Ph.D. degree in chemical physics from Stanford University (1969). For 18 years (1969-1987) he served as a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. During the 1979-1980 academic year he was also Wilfred T. Doherty Professor of Chemistry and inaugural Director of the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Texas, Austin. Since 1987 Dr. Schaefer has been Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia. In 2004 he became Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, at the University of California at Berkeley. His other academic appointments include Professeur d’Echange at the University of Paris (1977), Gastprofessur at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochshule (ETH), Zürich (1994, 1995, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010), and David P. Craig Visiting Professor at the Australian National University (1999). He is the author of more than 1250 scientific publications, the majority appearing in the Journal of Chemical Physics or the Journal of the American Chemical Society. A total of 300 scientists from 35 countries gathered in Gyeongju, Korea for a six-day conference in February, 2004 with the title Theory and Applications of Computational Chemistry: A Celebration of 1000 Papers of Professor Henry F. Schaefer III. In May 2010, the University of California at Berkeley will host a large international conference in Professor Schaefer’s honor, the title of the conference being Molecular Quantum Mechanics: From Methylene to DNA and Beyond.

Witness how the experimental scientist disagrees with the theoretical… speculator.

Let us return to Hawking’s no boundary proposal – the idea that the universe has neither beginning nor end. By treating the universe as a wave function, Hawking hopes to rationalize the universe’s popping into existence 12-15 billion years ago. Critical to Hawking’s research in this regard is the notion of imaginary time. The concept of imaginary time is a powerful mathematical device used on occasion by theoretical chemists and physicists. I remember clearly the day in the autumn of 1965, during my Complex Variables class as a senior at M.I.T., when I learned that the result of contour integration was two pi i times the sum of the residues. For me, it was about as close to a revelation as I had received up to that time in my life. My closest colleague at Berkeley, Professor William H. Miller, in 1969 used imaginary time to understand the dynamics of chemical reactions, and it made him a household word in the world of science. The use of imaginary time is indeed a powerful tool.

Indulge me while I attempt to convey the essence of how imaginary time is exploited in theoretical physics and chemistry. One approaches a well defined problem, with all variables necessarily being real. This means, for example, real positions for all particles, real velocities, and so on. Real problems begin with all quantities real. Then one undertakes a carefully chosen excursion into the complex plane, making one or more variables complex. Subsequently we do some really cool things mathematically. Finally, all the variables revert to real values, and we find that something important has been mathematically derived that would have otherwise been impossible to prove.

Hawking and Hartle’s no boundary proposal begins by adopting a grossly oversimplified model of the universe. Then the authors make time imaginary, and prove in their terribly restricted model that the universe has neither beginning nor end. The flaw in the exercise is that the authors never go back to real time. Thus the notion that the universe has neither beginning nor end is something that exists in mathematical terms only. In real time, to which we as human beings are necessarily attached, rather than in Hawking’s use of imaginary time, there will always be a singularity, that is, a beginning of time.

In an obviously contradictory statement in A Brief History of Time, Hawking actually concedes this point. What we are seeing in this situation is Hawking versus Hawking. I view the following statement as Hawking speaking in his right mind: “When one goes back to the real time in which we live, however, there will still appear to be singularities . . . In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down” (first edition, page 144). Only if we lived in imaginary time (not coming soon to a neighborhood near you!) would we encounter no singularities. In real time the universe was created ex nihilo 12-15 billion years ago.

With some trepidation, I will venture further. A case can be made that the Hartle-Hawking “no boundary proposal” is only of marginal scientific interest. The reasons for this conclusion might include: (a) the theory is a mathematical construct that has no unique empirical support; (b) the theory makes no verifiable scientific predictions that were not achieved earlier with simpler models; (c) the theory generates no significant research agenda. The primary purpose of the theory seems to be an attempt to evade the cosmological argument for the existence of God, via the claim that nature is self-contained and effectively eternal.

I’ll stick with the experimental guy.

Filed under: Commentary, Fact, Fritz Schaefer, Henry F. Schafer, Observations, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Results, Science, Stephen Hawking, Testability, Testable, Theory

Hugh Hewitt demolishes MSNBC’s Larry O’Donnell

I was browsing over at my buddy Muddling’s blog and I found this amazing story. (He finds, without fail, the best stories!)

Hugh Hewitt does a great interview, the best in the business. He’s interviewed tons of people in the mainstream media over the years. This time, he interviews Larry O’Donnell. This is a must listen. I feel like I should put in a policy on the blog that no citations of left-wing journalists will be permitted.

Excerpt:

HH: What was the last book you read about terrorism?

LO’D: The last…I don’t think I’ve read a book about terrorism.

HH: Ever?

LO’D: No.

HH: About al Qaeda?

LO’D: No.

HH: About…how about the mullahs in Iran?

LO’D: No.

HH: I’m just stunned.

LO’D: Well, I’ll tell you, I’ve read Bob Woodward’s books about the accounts inside the Bush administration from what they were doing from the day they got sworn in, okay?

HH: You’ve never read a book about terrorism?

LO’D: There is no, there is absolutely no evidence, and I defy you today, Hugh,

HH: Larry, you’ve never read a book about terrorism?

LO’D: I defy you to point to me, point to me a citation of one memo or one meeting that Dick Cheney was in where he says anything about al Qaeda.

HH: Larry, I’ve got to go lie down. I really do. Do you think you’re a well-informed MSNBC, by MSNBC standards, do you think you’re above the grade of people on that network?

LO’D: That’s a trick question, Hugh.

Good Lord, it’s his job to know about these things. Where is he getting his news stories? Daily Kos? Firedog Lake? Feministing?

Now Hugh asks him to substantiate an assertion that he made:

HH: You said people have been prosecuted for exactly this. Did you mean for waterboarding?

LO’D: Yeah.

HH: Who?

LO’D: Well, we’ve done it, you know, this country has prosecuted that, that, torture method before.

HH: When?

LO’D: Um, I don’t know, what’s…I think it is was…umm, I don’t know. I…you know, I’ve…I know that we’ve done it, and I don’t have the research in front of me as to exactly when we’ve prosecuted who for it and which conflict.

Hot Air has a link to the transcript and MP3 podcast.

The Media Research Center has some admissions about media bias from the lefties themselves.

Filed under: Podcasts, Bias, Check, Fact, Hugh Hewitt, Interview, Larry O'Donnell, Left, Mainstream, Media, Media Bias, MSNBC, Radio, Transcript, Unqualified, Wing