From Fathom Events:
The upcoming national movie event with Oxford professor John Lennox and actor Kevin Sorbo, Against the Tide: Finding God in an Age of Science, is going to be great. And here’s some great news: They have expanded from one night to three, November 19, 20, and 23! That’s a Thursday, a Friday, and a Monday.
Here’s the film’s site:
Against the Tide is a travelogue, an examination of modern science, an excursion into history, an autobiography, and more. But at heart, it is the story of one man’s daring stand against the tide of contemporary atheism and its drive to relegate belief in God to society’s catalogue of dead ideas.
Join the conversation between Dr. John Lennox—esteemed Oxford professor, mathematician, and philosopher of science—and veteran Hollywood actor and director Kevin Sorbo as they journey from Oxford to Jerusalem and explore the evidence on which Lennox’s Christian faith stands firm.
One can search on a city in the United States. The rest of us will have to wait for the download.
Also:
as to:
It is a crying shame that ‘contemporary atheism’ is widely taught on many of the top university campuses of today.
After all, the university system itself owes it very origins to Christianity,
In fact, approximately 106 out of the first 108 colleges in America were Christian colleges, including Harvard which was the first university in America.
In fact, besides the university system, modern science itself also owes its origin to Christianity.
Within the Medieval Christian Universities, ancient Greek philosophy was vigorously discussed and debated. As the following article notes, during the 12th to 16th Century, “Scholasticism is best known for its application in medieval Christian theology, especially in attempts to reconcile the philosophy of the ancient classical philosophers (particularly Aristotle) with Christian theology.
During the period of intense discussion and debate in the Medieval Christian universities about the similarities and differences between Greek philosophy and Christian theology, one of the main conflicts that was found to exist between ancient Greek philosophy and Christian theology was the realization that Greek philosophy held to, basically, a deterministic and necessitarian view of creation wherein the universe itself was considered to be eternal, whereas in Christian theology it is held that the universe was created by God and that the universe is contingent, and/or dependent, upon God for its continual existence.
As wikipedia notes, “Aristotle,,, believed in the eternity of the world,,,, This view conflicted with the view of the Catholic Church that the world had a beginning in time. The Aristotelian view was prohibited in the Condemnations of 1210–1277”
And in fact, it was this necessitarian and/or deterministic view of the universe in which the universe was held be eternally existent that prevented the ancient Greek philosophers from ever making the crucial leap into experimental science.
As the following article makes clear, “Both Greek and biblical thought asserted that the world is orderly and intelligible. But the Greeks held that this order is necessary and that one can therefore deduce its structure from first principles. Only biblical thought held that God created both form and matter, meaning that the world did not have to be as it is and that the details of its order can be discovered only by observation.”
In fact, it was only with the Church’s quote unquote, ‘outlawing’ of Aristotle’s deterministic and necessitarian view of creation, in which the universe itself was held to be eternally existent, that experimental science was finally able to find fertile ground, take root, and eventually flourish in Medieval Christian Europe,
As the preceding article goes on to explain, in the Christian’s view of creation, “The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.”
This shift from the Greeks’s necessitarian view of the universe, in which the universe has always existed, and whose order could be deduced from first principles, to the Christians’s contingent view of creation, in which the universe was created, and whose order must be discovered via a posteriori investigation, represented a major shift in the types of reasoning used by each culture.
Specifically it represented a shift away from the ‘top-down’ deductive reasoning that was predominant among the ancient Greeks’s, a form of reasoning in which these ancient philosophers “pronounced on how the world should behave, with insufficient attention to how the world in fact did behave.”,,,,
,,,, to the new form of ‘bottom up’ inductive reasoning of Christians in which the order of creation had to be discovered via a posteriori investigation.
In other words, this major shift in reasoning, from a more or less purely ‘top down’ deductive form of reasoning of the ancient Greeks, to this new form of ‘bottom up’ inductive reasoning of the Medieval Christians represented nothing less than the birth of the scientific method itself.
This new form of inductive reasoning, which led to the birth of the scientific method itself, apparently took a while to take hold in Medieval Christian Europe but this new form of reasoning was eventually, and famously, elucidated and championed by Francis Bacon in 1620 in his book that was entitled ‘Novum Organum’.
Novum Organum is translated as ‘New Method’. In the title of that book, Bacon is specifically referencing Aristotle’s work ‘Organon’, which was Aristotle’s treatise on logic and syllogism.
Thus in ‘Novum Organum’ Bacon is in fact championing the inductive reasoning of the scientific method over and above the deductive reasoning of the Ancient Greeks.
And indeed, repeated experimentation, ever since it was first set forth by Francis Bacon, has been the cornerstone of the scientific method. And has indeed been very, very, fruitful for man in gaining accurate knowledge of the universe.
Obviously, repeated experimentation leads to more exacting, and illuminating, conclusions than is possible with the quote-unquote, educated guesses that follow from Aristotle’s deductive reasoning.
And indeed, each and every branch of modern experimental science was founded by men who were, by and large, deeply Christian in their beliefs,
Here is a list of the ‘deeply religious’ Christians who founded modern science,
Wikipedia itself, which is certainly no friend of Intelligent Design, and which is also often openly hostile to Christianity, basically admits as much in its list of Christians in science and technology before the 18th century
It is also interesting to note that Charles Darwin himself, when he formulated his theory, forsook the inductive methodology that was set forth by Francis Bacon,
Charles Darwin himself, two years prior to the publication of his book, confessed to a friend that “What you hint at generally is very very true, that my work will be grievously hypothetical & large parts by no means worthy of being called inductive; my commonest error being probably induction from too few facts.”
Adam Sedgwick was nothing less than scathing of Charles Darwin for Darwin being deceptive in exactly what form of reasoning he was using in his book.
Specifically Sedgwick scolded Darwin that “Many of your wide conclusions are based upon assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved, why then express them in the language and arrangement of philosophical induction?”
And over a century and a half later the situation still has not changed. To this day, Darwinists still have no experimental research that would ‘inductively’ establish Darwin’s theory as being scientifically true,
As Dr Richard Nelson noted in his book Darwin, Then and Now, “After 150 years of research,,, the scientific evidence is clear: there are no “successive, slight” changes in the fossil record, embryology, molecular biology, or genetics to support Darwinism or neo-Darwinism.”
Much the same criticism as is leveled at Darwinism can also be leveled against much modern day physics. Namely, modern day theoretical physics has largely forsaken experimentation, i.e. forsaken inductive reasoning.
As George Ellis noted, “both string theory and theories of the multiverse have slipped the leash” of experimental science, (i.e. the leash of inductive reasoning).
It is also interesting to note that string theory, for decades, was considered the leading candidate to bring about a purely mathematical resolution between general relativity and quantum mechanics into the much sought after ‘theory of everything’.
That decades long endeavor to find a purely mathematical ‘theory of everything’, via string theory, is now largely seen as lying in shambles,,,
It was somewhat predictable that string theory would ultimately fail since string theory itself is a ‘attempted’ mathematical theory that presupposes that we live in a deterministic, and/or a necessitarian, universe, and it is precisely that exact presupposition that the Ancient Greeks also held and it is precisely that exact presupposition that prevented the rise of modern science in the first place among the ancient Greeks,,,,
but, be that as it may, if we rightly allow the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here are a few posts where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:
To give us a small glimpse of the power that was involved in Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the following recent article found that, ”it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology.”
Verse: