A few hours ago, I watched an online debate between acclaimed New Testament scholar and historian Professor Bart Ehrman and evangelical scholar Justin Bass, who is Professor of New Testament at Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary. Dr. Bass, who now lives in Jordan, is also the author of “The Bedrock of Christianity: The Unalterable Facts of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection” (Lexham Press, 2020).

The debate, hosted by Justin Brierley of Premier Unbelievable, was a spirited one, in which Ehrman and Bass went at each other hammer and tongs. At the same time, the tone of the debate was scholarly, and Justin Brierley did an excellent job of keeping it civil. Personally, I thought that both sides presented their case very well, and that it was the best debate I’ve ever seen on Jesus’ resurrection. My personal opinion is that Bart Ehrman clearly won the debate on historical grounds, but that a Christian viewer might find Justin Bass’s arguments convincing, on theological grounds. Without further ado, here it is. Happy Easter!

Tyler Vela, a Calvinist apologist and an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in America who converted from atheism to Christianity as a young man, graduated with a Pre-seminary B.A. in Biblical and Theological Studies from the Moody Bible Institute, and was partway through a Masters of Biblical Studies at Reformed Theological Seminary, has announced his deconversion at his Youtube channel, The Freed Thinker. Recently, he was interviewed by Derek Lambert of Mythvision on his reasons for leaving Christianity, several months ago. The interview may be viewed here:

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The field of bioelectricity is very enlightening. The intro to Michael Levin’s lab states:

We work at the intersection of developmental biology, computer science, and cognitive science. Our goal is to understand degrees of intelligence at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems; we use these insights to develop interventions in regenerative medicine.

This discussion with Michael Levin gives more details on their operation and experiments. Continue reading →

Those are terms I found in descriptions of wine and high fidelity sound, respectively. Descriptors like that have always made me wonder: Do they name anything objective? Do wine experts agree on whether or not a particular wine exhibits an ‘energetic, stony character’? Do audiophiles agree on what a ‘chocolatey mid-range’ sounds like? Continue reading →

Perhaps the most disturbing idea in Christian dogma is the notion of hell — a place of unending torment for the detestable souls who don’t qualify for a blissful eternity with God and the angels in heaven. Who are these horrible people who are condemned to agonizing, eternal punishment? Those who don’t believe in Jesus. That’s it. Merely failing to believe in Jesus means you are one of the loathsome vermin who must suffer forever, with no possibility of a respite, and not even the prospect of a welcome oblivion. Continue reading →

In this blog article, I’ll be summarizing Dr. Gavin Ortlund‘s recent rehabilitation of C. S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic or Lord” trichotomy, which he defended last year in a 41-minute interview (shown below) with Cameron Bertuzzi, who runs the Youtube channel, Capturing Christianity. After that, I’ll be playing devil’s advocate and responding as if I were a skeptic, instead of a Catholic. The views I advance here are not my own: my intention in playing devil’s advocate is to illustrate how an intelligent unbeliever might go about refuting this popular argument for Christianity. In so doing, I hope to persuade apologists like Dr. Ortlund that the argument should not be used against skeptics. Without further ado, here it is:

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I came across the following by Kairosfocus while wasting time reading comments at uncommon descent:

FP, do you not see many who gain much by lies and fraud, and die in full benefit of ill gotten gains? Is that not a commonplace? In short, VB is right to highlight that without the eternal reckoning, it is simply not the case that truth telling is to one’s advantage, short or long term. More to the point, kids have to be taught is a fallacy in this context, as was noted. KF

is he correct?

Earlier this week there was a debate on Consciousness in the Machine, basically asking whether machines can be conscious. In a somewhat different manner than myself, Bernardo Kastrup rejects the idea. Kastrup says that it’s a hypothesis not worth entertaining, and from entertaining the idea bad things follow. From Kastrup’s blog,

Those who take the hypothesis of conscious AI seriously do so based on an appallingly biased notion of isomorphism—a correspondence of form, or a similarity—between how humans think and AI computers process data. To find that similarity, however, one has to take several steps of abstraction away from concrete reality. After all, if you put an actual human brain and an actual silicon computer on a table before you, there is no correspondence of form or functional similarity between the two at all; much to the contrary. A living brain is based on carbon, burns ATP for energy, metabolizes for function, processes data through neurotransmitter releases, is moist, etc., while a computer is based on silicon, uses a differential in electrical potential for energy, moves electric charges around for function, processes data through opening and closing electrical switches called transistors, is dry, etc. They are utterly different.

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Last semester Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor of art history at Hamline University, was teaching a class in global art history. The syllabus included some works of Islamic religious art, including the painting above which depicts the angel Gabriel dictating the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. Continue reading →

By now, many of you will have heard of ChatGPT. If you haven’t, be prepared — you’re going to hear a lot about it over the coming weeks and months.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model with an impressive ability to understand and generate humanlike text, drawing on a vast reservoir of knowledge gleaned from the internet. (It also makes stuff up, which can be a real problem.) It answers queries and can write stories, articles, computer code, and even (bad) poems. I don’t yet understand much about how it works, but when I learn more, I’ll describe it in the comments. Continue reading →

In the previous thread I examined (starting here) a couple of Richard Swinburne’s arguments for the soul, pointing out why I think they are flawed.

Because I find this stuff so interesting, I thought I would look for some more pro-soul arguments and open another thread to discuss them. This topic is important to a lot of people, particular those whose religious or spiritual beliefs invoke some concept of a soul or a soul-like entity. Continue reading →

That’s the title of a new article at the Patheos website, which describes itself as “the world’s homepage for all religion”. The article is the first in a series by Ted Peters, emeritus professor of theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, who understands the threat that materialism (aka physicalism) poses to traditional religious views regarding the self. Continue reading →