Tag: science
Carl Sagan, Steven Hawking, and Arthur C. Clark Discuss God, The Universe, and Everything
by SAB on Oct.03, 2009, under Videos
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos got me looking around for some interesting Sagan interviews on the Youtube. I found some interesting ones, including the one below. As you can tell from the title of this article, this clip shows quite the line-up for a television program: Arthur C. Clark, Carl Sagan, and Steven Hawking discussing some of the biggest ideas of our time! Enjoy!
Daily Beast Posts "Evidence" Of Resurrection of Christ
by SAB on Apr.10, 2009, under News
The Shroud of Turin is one of those ancient artifacts that Christians really, really want to be true. Why? Because it would provide physical evidence that Jesus was real.
Although this evidence, if true, would not confirm that Jesus was the messiah, or even supernatural. For a faith built on such shaky ground, any solid rocks are desperately clung to.
So it’s not a big surprise that anytime someone has anything good to say about the Shroud that Christians flock to it. So it was this morning when The Daily Beast posted a headline story purporting to include 10 reasons that the Resurrection really took place. Seriously.
The Daily Beast, usually a good alternative to Drudge, normally has firmer stuff than this. The author, Jeffery Hart, includes this enlightening quote from the bible in his story:
“If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”
1 Corinthians 15
The 10 claims are themselves all lifted by the author from a book entitled Shroud of Turn: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ written in 1979. Hart has broken up a few “proofs”, basically “the Shroud existed,” “it’s old,” and “there’s a picture on it” into 10 scattered pieces of highly circumstantial, fluffy “evidence.”
Several scientific tests have been done on the Shroud. They have shown it to be from the medieval era. Regardless, even if you could show conclusively that that shroud is from the era when Jesus could have lived you would still be left with evidence that simply showed the shroud contained a human that died.
The Shroud has never provided evidence beyond the highly circumstantial that Jesus existed or that he was supernatural in any way. Articles like the one posted in The Daily Beast do us all a disservice by spreading baseless claims by people desperate to legitamize their somewhat wonky belief structure.