the tindog coffeehouse

Sunday is the premiere of The Bible on the History Channel, and it looks amazing. Described as a “10-hour docudrama”, the miniseries from Mark Burnett and Roma Downey recreates the biblical narrative from Genesis to Revelation in stunning high definition. Which sounds awesome. But here’s my question: What if it’s not historically accurate?

From the previews, it looks pretty accurate. I mean, Jesus doesn’t have blue eyes, so that’s a plus. But it’s the little things, like the Magi visiting Jesus in the manger when he was a baby (which didn’t actually happen until he was 2-3 years old) or Moses’ lack of a speech impediment. Do those things matter?

Or am I just being picky?

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I love The Matrix. (The first movie, of course. The others not so much.) One of the best scenes of the movie was when Neo was sat down, plugged into the Matrix, and force-fed a lifetime’s worth of knowledge in a matter of hours, finally opening his eyes and saying to Morpheus, “I know kung fu.”

In A Shot of Faith {To the Head}: Be a Confident Believer in an Age of Cranky Atheists, author and Christian philosopher Mitch Stokes attempts to do the same to us. The idea according to Stokes is that if you can download the secrets of philosophical kung fu, then you can defend yourself (and your faith) from the attacks of militant atheists, who see a belief in God as a danger worse than child abuse. ”Believers must be armed with answers,” he says, “for themselves as much as for those who don’t believe.”

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Could challenging the teaching of evolution in public schools be as simple as redefining the starting point? Possibly so, at least according to evolutionary biologist Stephen Sample, who recently submitted several science modules to the Texas State Board of Education for curriculum consideration.

According to Sample, it all depends on what the null hypothesis is. In science, a null hypothesis is “a hypothesis which the researcher tries to disprove, reject or nullify.” It’s the default position, or the commonly accepted hypothesis (H₀) that researchers must disprove (H₁). It’s similar to saying a person is presumed innocent (H₀) until proven guilty (H₁).

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Students shouldn’t be allowed to debate. Students shouldn’t be allowed to draw their own conclusions. Students should never be taught that a controversial issue is in fact controversial and that not everyone agrees on it. Students should be taught one side and only one side of an argument, end of discussion.

At least that’s the position of political science professors Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer. According to surveys conducted by them, they found that a whopping 60 percent of biology teachers around the country allowed room for debate and doubt when teaching the subject of evolution. And that, they argue, is unacceptable.

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Source.

Previously:
The Vatican: Evolution compatible with Christian faith
Angels, unicorns, and Giants
Attempting to translate spiritual realities through scientific equations

As the scientific community prepares to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday tomorrow, the Vatican appears ready to fully embrace his theory of evolution within the Catholic Church.

“In fact, what we mean by evolution is the world as created by God,” said Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture. The Vatican also dealt the final blow to speculation that Pope Benedict XVI might be prepared to endorse the theory of Intelligent Design, whose advocates credit a “higher power” for the complexities of life.

Organisers of a papal-backed conference next month marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species said that at first it had even been proposed to ban Intelligent Design from the event, as “poor theology and poor science”. Intelligent Design would be discussed at the fringes of the conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University, but merely as a “cultural phenomenon”, rather than a scientific or theological issue, organisers said. …

Conceding that the Church had been hostile to Darwin because his theory appeared to conflict with the account of creation in Genesis, Archbishop Ravasi argued yesterday that biological evolution and the Christian view of Creation were complementary.

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