re: Human evolution: astounding new story of the origin of our species

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This is a pass/fail position. You either believe God's explanation or you believe that man evolved from lesser organisms. There is no gray area there.

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This is so wrong.

Wow. I cannot believe shermer said that. Good on him.

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1.) You go beyond claiming that in an atheistic view of the world there is no basis for rationality and claim that the only way rationality exists is with the Christian God.

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Yes, because the other worldviews fall apart upon further critique and examination. They don't present a coherent alternative.

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2.) That's certainly a strawman of the best I, or anyone else, can do. It's not that "that's the nature of the universe", it's "that's the only way this universe or any other universe could be." I've already gone over with you the three classic laws of thought and how they're inescapable and self evident. You can disagree, but pretending I have no coherent reason for rationality in a godless universe is dishonest.

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You basically just rephrased what I said. You can combine the two statements like this: "That's the nature of the universe because it's the only way this universe or any other universe could be".

But again, you haven't provided a reason why it can't be any different than what it is. I have a reason for why it is the way it is: it was created by God and is upheld in a way that is consistent, which is in-line with the very nature and character of God.

Why should this universe or any universe be the way it is out of necessity in your worldview?

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3.) Your "coherent reason" is simply the assertion that, ultimately, you need a higher power to provide rationality to the universe. Without God there'd be no rationality. I challenged you and said so without a God and apple wouldn't be an apple, to which you replied "no the apple wouldn't even exist". I then said even nothing equaling nothing adheres to the law of identity and you stopped responding.

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As I said, I was taken up with other things at the time and lost track of the thread. I hope you aren't accusing me of exiting due to being confronted with that issue, because if you haven't realized by now, I'm stubborn and happy to continue to provide a justification for what I believe is the truth. I'm confident that my worldview is correct and am not worried about responses like what you provided.

To answer your claim about an apple being an apple, there's no justification for immaterial laws and classes like logic and identity or appleness in an atheistic universe. You take for granted the existence of such things today and assume that they would exist without God. I'm saying that such things don't have a justification in a strictly materialistic universe. Where do immaterial, universal, invariable, and necessary things like logic come from in a material, particular, changing, and contingent universe? How do those things come together? You're saying they just do, because the universe is just that way out of necessity but haven't argued for why it's necessary (that I recall, at least).

The laws of logic are a reflection of the very nature of God and exist out of necessity due to God's existence.

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You have the floor. Why is rationality dependent on the Christian God?

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Due to the impossibility of the contrary.

You have three basic types of worldviews that everything falls under: materialism (only matter exists), dualism (material and immaterial both exist), and some sort of religious worldview. Materialism cannot account for immaterial concepts and classes like laws of logic, therefore it has to be irrational by definition because it has to reject the reality of immaterial laws. Dualism can accept immaterial laws of logic but can't account for how they come together with that which is material (the human mind).

What remains boils down to a few religious options: the arbitrary theism based on the guru or wise man (why should we listen to their arbitrary opinions?); the self-defeating religions that violate rational existence (like Nirvana in Buddhism); and those that are based on Biblical teachings (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, etc.) Essentially each belief system can be picked apart to show incoherence in terms of rational experience or a violation of the laws of logic. Only the biblical Christianity stands up to the test in terms of providing the preconditions for intelligibility, including rationality.

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How can you be "perfectly just" and selectively apply punishment? Justice is giving the proper amount of punishment for a misdeed. Being perfectly just is always giving the proper amount of punishment for a misdeed.

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This is why Christianity is ultimately true while Judaism as it exists today is not. Christ's sacrifice paved the way for the mercy God shows by withholding His hand of judgement selectively based on His divine will. In essence, you'd be right that God would not be just if He arbitrarily withheld what was due from each individual without sin being paid for in some way. It's why Christ was sent to die. Christ's death allowed for mercy to be shown on sinners, both in a temporal sense for all people and an eternal sense for those whom God grants the mercy of faith. In the end, all people will receive the "right" amount of justice for their sins: either you will receive eternal judgement or you will receive eternal life through Christ who took that judgement on Himself.

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If God can solve a problem without bloodshed, but chooses to solve it with bloodshed, how is that so different from steering a car into a crowd of people.

God needs to solve a problem (make a delivery). He can choose route A or route B. Route A has a parade of people marching down it, and route B is open to traffic. God chooses to go down route A, killing people, to make his delivery.

Even assuming the delivery is so important that it justifies loss of human life, route B was still an option.

What I said is spot on, God steered his car into a crowd of people and you worship him for it.

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The analogy you gave assumes some level of innocence on behalf of the crowds getting mowed down and a level of unwarranted malice on behalf of the driver. When we think of such an action in our every day experience, we think of someone who is going on a murderous rampage, killing indiscriminately without authority to take those lives. When you compare that to what God does, you show that you don't really understand what God's doing and why it's different than what we humans do.

In terms of what God could do vs. what He chose to do: God determined from before creation that He would create a people in His image who would choose to reject Him and warrant damnation but some of whom God would save by sending His son to die for their sake. Everything that occurs happens because God ultimately either causes it to happen directly or indirectly, either by directing events and actions or by allowing things to happen that results in humans getting what they deserve (punishment) or not deserve (mercy) while God ultimately gets the glory.

In summation: God is perfectly holy and we are sinners who reject Him and who deserve eternal judgement for our sins against Him yet He chooses to show mercy on some, though He doesn't have to.

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Fine, take the negative connotations out of it. I'm simply stating a fact.

You are worshiping a God who steered his car into a crowd of people. Take it as a compliment, and insult, however you want. But it's a good comparison.

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It's a bad analogy to what the Bible teaches about God, though. I think a better analogy would be a holy king whose subjects treasonously rebel against him and so he chooses to pardon some while others he gives the death penalty.

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Your justification for "objective moral reasoning" is essentially since nothing is eternal and something can't come from nothing, everything, even immaterial things (time, morality, rationality, etc.) must also come from something. I'm going to call that something the Christian God who sent his son to die on the cross to wash away sin and was resurrected three days later. Oh yea, and that rule I just made up, I'm going to break it because I need to, God is eternal so he doesn't need an explanation like I demand everything you postulate does.

Let's be honest here, you're selling a used Volvo not a Ferrari.

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That's quite a lot of misrepresentations of what I have said.

My justification for objective moral reasoning is thus:
1. Objective morality requires an objective moral standard (one that applies equally and universally to all humanity)
2. An objective moral standard requires an objective/transcendent and personal standard-giver
3. Only an eternal and personal God can provide an objective moral standard

This doesn't even touch on whether the standard is good or bad, but regardless, if you are an atheist, you have no justification for an objective moral standard. To be consistent with your own worldview, you'd have to admit that you have no basis for condemning anyone as "immoral", or at least recognizing that your own personal view of what is deemed "immoral" is nothing more than a personal preference with no more value than your preference for a favorite color or flavor of ice cream and thus, has no bearing on whether another person is truly moral or immoral.

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Great point. Probably not the point you were intending to make, but you arrived at the correct conclusion nonetheless.

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The point I was making was that the Bible's view of origins has significant theological ramifications. It's not something that can be dismissed or reinterpreted with no cost.

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Show where consciousness is primary

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you need an explanation of how there are aspects of our existence that can't be explained by science?

Well, they use previous translations because original sources largely don’t exist. Due to a lack of primary sources, translators must rely on previous translations. The oldest original versions of the 5 books of Moses are the Dead Sea scrolls, and they’re from the 2nd century AD. They are written mostly in Herodic Hebrew, which differs substantially from the Hebrew of King David’s era.

We have versions of these texts handed down from Ancient Hebrew to Modern Hebrew to Aramaic, then Greek, then Latin, then vernacular. Translations are never exact. There is always meaning lost. These waves of translations present multiple opportunities for language to be misapplied or misconstrued simply because of different languages lacking words for certain things or having the same word mean many different things in different contexts. Just think about recent mass revisions. “Also with you” is now “and with your spirit”. “I am not worthy to receive you” is now “I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof”. The literal translation has opportunities to lose a lot of meaning.

That’s why there are so many different versions of the Bible, because there are many different ways to interpret the same phrase when attempting to translate from one language to another.

That’s just assuming that the 5 books of moses the Essenes were using in the second century are identical to those Moses actually wrote likely 1600 years or more before that. And that genesis, which previously was an oral tradition, remained unchanged from Adam to Noah and all the way to Moses.

Sure, the authors (Moses, the prophets, the Apostles, etc) can be assumed to have been divinely inspired, but what about the thousands of scholars who have had a hand in crafting the words on the page you actually get to read between those divine authors and now? For that reason, I think literalism, especially with respect to the stories of the creation and the ark, seems like a narrow minded view that misses the forest for the trees. It doesn’t matter one bit if those stories happened or not because the lessons those stories teach about the relationship we are meant to have with God and our fellow man are relevant whether they be history or parable. The key is to learn the lesson and apply it, not to gatekeep knowledge and exclude others based on purity tests of blind faith. Judgement of your fellow man is God’s job. Man’s job is to be fruitful, multiply, do good works, and treat others the way we wished to be treated while loving God for blessing us with the opportunities to do so.

Scientific knowledge does not undermine our relationship with God, it informs it. The beauty of God’s creation is not diminished by understanding the gears by which he operates it.

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you cannot substantiate rationality being dependent on the Christian God

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one of the easiest tasks in all of epistemology. you wouldn't even have an idea of what rationality is without a rationality giver. otherwise, everything would just be instinct like animals who don't have consciousness.

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Nor was it the case with the Midianites in Numbers chapter 31.

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God told the midianites to stop and they didn't. but make sure you blame God for that.

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why didn't he kill them prior?

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did he need to? was he obligated to do that?

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Why does God even need Pharaoh's cooperation?

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what makes you think he does?

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Odd that children are being killed for Pharaoh's behavior

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did they oppose pharaoh or did they rise up and tell him to obey god?

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They weren't the ones responsible for the Midianites deeds

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you're assuming that God doesn't know that they wouldn't have done the same. you keep assuming that people are somehow "innocent" by default. how did you arrive at this knowledge?

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Why not order the Hebrews to commit genocide on literally the entire world?

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is that necessary?

your questions get answered in job 38 and romans 9:15-26

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No, there are moral judgements of the subjective type

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no there aren't and that's just plain stupid. you're referring to preference, not objectivity. that's not a "moral judgment."

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your god is a driver who steered into a crowd of people to solve a problem he could have solved without bloodshed

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oh my word

before you go criticizing something, you might want to put some work into understanding it because your perspective on God from the bible is really stupid

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And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, and all the laws that govern it, from nothing, in a single instant."

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Big bang doesn't say that...

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There's an extremely high correlation between parents religion and the religious beliefs of their children

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the "high correlation" does not help your point.

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the overwhelmingly majority of people do not

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appeal to majority. the majority is not always right. it is possible that christianity is "right" and truthful and that anyone who disagrees is wrong.

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That's how much of the population that trend covers.

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you're trying to make an epistemological claim by appealing to sociology and demographics. i hope you understand how dumb that is