Free Republic

A few of many “science quotes on God”"according to many physicists, the fact that the universe is able to support life depends delicately on various of its fundamental characteristics, notably on the form of the laws of nature, on the values of some constants of nature, and on aspects of the universe’s conditions in its very early stages." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/ A listing of such follows.“I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is...

There is a near universal majority of scholars in many fields—historians, Bible scholars, New Testament scholars, philologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, literature, folklore and oral history specialists, paleographers, linguistics scholars in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, those in the field of the Classics, a Dead Sea scroll specialist or two, and many others—from atheist to Jew to liberal to fundamentalist Christian, who all agree Jesus existed.Over the last two hundred years, there has also been a small group called “mythicists” who have asserted there was no historical Jesus. Very few mythicists are scholars; I know of two currently. They tend to be exclusively atheistic...

General EssaysAnalysis of general principles used by the "borrowing" thesis. Some notes on alleged parallels between Christianity and pagan religions -- an introductory commentary by a classical scholar writing for us as "Justin Martyr" On Napoleon as Myth translated by "Justin Martyr" Glenn Miller's general essay refuting the pagan-copycat thesis Creation Ministries International on Indian creation mythsOld Testament "Borrowing"Figures claimed to be sources for the Old Testament. Named entities in alphabetical order. Akhenaten -- Did the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten influence Jewish monotheism? Sargon -- Did the story of this Assyrian king influence the story of Moses? Sinuhe -- Did the...

The reliable Gospel eyewitness accounts aren’t the only ancient description of Jesus. There are also non-Christian descriptions of Jesus from the late 1st to 5th Century. What do the non-Biblical accounts say about Jesus and how are we to assess them?[...] Hostile Non-Biblical Pagan Accounts[...] Thallus (52AD)[...] “On the whole world there pressed a most fearful darkness; and the rocks were rent by an earthquake, and many places in Judea and other districts were thrown down. This darkness Thallus, in the third book of his History, calls, as appears to me without reason, an eclipse of the sun.” (Julius Africanus,...

Extreme Fine Tuning - Dark Energy or the Cosmological Constant IntroductionFine Tuning?Skeptics like to say that fine tuning cannot be proven by science, since we have only one universe to study. However, the discovery and quantification of dark energy has puzzled a number of scientists, who realize that its extremely small value requires that the initial conditions of the universe must have been extremely fine tuned in order that even matter would exist in our universe. By chance, our universe would have been expected to consist of merely some thermal radiation.Rich DeemThe recent Nature study popularized in the press regarding...

Is it really true that entire universes can appear from nothing? This "science" is based upon the real science of quantum mechanics, which has shown that particles can appear from "nothing" and disappear into "nothing." Atheist scientists say that "nothing" is unstable and spontaneously produces somethings. Although the statement is true in a limited sense, atheists aren't telling you the whole story. Why is that? Although these virtual particles appear based upon some probability statistic, they also disappear spontaneously, based upon the same probability. In other words, these particles are not stable and do not behave like the stuff we...

When we think about our Universe at a fundamental level, we think about all the particles in it and all the forces and interactions that occur between them. If you can describe those forces, interactions and particle properties, you have everything you need to reproduce our Universe, or at least a Universe virtually indistinguishable from our own, in its entirety.[...] As it turns out, it takes 26 dimensionless constants to describe the Universe as simply and completely as possible, which is quite a small number, but not necessarily as small as we like. Here's what they are[...]

In the growing movement known as intelligent design, Stephen Meyer is an emerging figurehead. A young, Cambridge-educated philosopher of science, Meyer is director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute — intelligent design’s primary intellectual and scientific headquarters. He’s also author of Signature in the Cell, a provocative new book that offers the first comprehensive DNA-based argument for intelligent design.[...] What would be your main argument for the evidence of intelligent design in the cell? Well, the main argument is fairly straightforward. We now know that what runs the show in biology is what we call...