Christian doctrine holds that human consciousness is not a purely physical phenomenon.  It is generally believe to be an aspect of Soul or Spirit. The Bible tells us that our Spirit can leave the body and survive death. There are hundreds of references that could be cited, perhaps 1 Corinthians 15: 35-44 gives the best summery.  Out of Body Experiences (OBE) are often referenced as evidence for the existence of a Soul or Spirit. However critics counter that  OBE’s are nothing more then the physiochemical reactions of an oxygen starved brain.  This criticism has been hard to strongly refute, until now.

In 1991 thirty-five year old Pam Reynolds was diagnosed with a deep brain aneurisms.  The only way this aneurisms could be repaired was with the use of “Stand Still Surgery.”  In this technique the body temperature is lowered to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The heart is stopped and all the blood is drained out of the brain. The patient is at this point clinically dead. Because of a fear of inducing a brain seizure, the surgeons wanted to be sure that she had absolutely no brain activity. Consequently, Pam’s brain was thoroughly monitored by EEG, even including her brain stem.   To eliminate any possibility of outside stimulus her ears plugged. She had to be totally brain dead.

After the surgery her doctors were shocked to learn that she experienced a continuous OBE during the surgery because the EEG monitor showed no evidence of brain activity.  Her EEG was completely flat. She went on to inform the doctors of some of their dialogue and was able to describe the surgical procedure.  This included a description of some very unusual surgical instruments and holding cases for the instruments.

Survival of death is central to Christian Faith.  A life with God in Heaven is the ultimate fulfillment of our aspirations and Faith.  This strong evidence for the survival of Soul should be of great interest to us all.

Source:  “Light and Death” Dr. Michael Sobom, 2005.

Matt 5:39 instructs us to turn the other cheek and Matt 5:43 instructs us to love our enemies.  Matt 19:26 also tells us “with God all things are possible.” On May 13, 1981 Ali Agca an Islamic radical shot Pope John Paul II three times in an assassination attempt. After his recovery the Pope visited Ali Agca in his prison cell, forgave, witnessed and prayed for him in a display of obedience to Matt 5:39-43. 

Now just as Matthew told us following God’s instructions in love and forgiveness, what most thought impossible has happened. In a statement that has stunned many, especially in the Islamic world, Ali Agca has announced his conversion to Christianity.  He has also expressed his desire to be baptized and to bear witness. He hopes to some day visit and pray at John Paul II’s grave. 

Source: “The World Over” EWTN TV 5/23/09.

Luke 23:45, Mathew 27:45 and Mark 15:33 recounts that “the sun stopped shining” in mid-day at Jesus Crucifixion. Mathew 27:51 also reports that “the Earth shook and the rocks split.” Many have doubted these claims, arguing that such shocking phenomena would have been recorded in sources beside the Bible. As it turns out, record of it did survive in the works of Thallus a First Century, non-Christian, Roman historian in one of his few surviving writing fragments. In his account Thallus also relates that the darkness was not limited to Judea but was seen “all over the world.” Thallus was writing in the middle of the First Century, consequently the people who it was written for would have been alive at the time of the “darkness”, meaning that they themselves would have actually witnessed the event, eliminating the possibility of it being a false report.

Tallus attributed the “darkness” to what he thought was a solar eclipse. However today it is known from Computer Generated Reverse Solar Eclipse Paths that no solar eclipse occurred during the Crucifixion. Therefore the “darkness seen all over the world” does not have a known natural explanation.

The Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus are central to Christian Faith. These verifications of the Biblical account in Tallus are important to Christians and skeptics alike because they provide further support to the reality of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as historical facts.

Source: F. Jacoby, “Fragments of Greek Historians” pp 1156-1158.

Isaiah 22:15-17 Castigates an official of King Hezekiah’s named Shebna ,who was in charge of the royal palace, for coveting a tomb worthy of a king. Isaiah tells us that Shebna carved out a fine tomb for himself on a high cliff in Jerusalem. This is a seemingly unimportant passage and never expected to be verified.

Now Shebna’s tomb has been found and just as the Bible tells us, the tomb is cut high on a cliff in Jerusalem’s Kidron Valley complete with his inscribed name. Additionally an inscribed seal indicating that Shebna was indeed a servant of the king has been found.

Critics often question the inerrancy of the Bible. Many claim that the books of the Old Testament were fiction, written in Babylon hundreds of years later then the time reported in the Bible and for political motives. However finding Shebna’s tomb provides one more piece in a growing multitude of concrete evidence of Biblical accuracy and reliability. If the Bible is faithful in the lesser details, surely we can trust it to be faithful in the greater truths.

Source: Biblical Archaeological Review May/June 2009, Vol 35, No. 3, pp 45-49

A number of people asked for the references cited in the discussion that followed viewing the movie Expelled on February 27 Th. at Christ Lutheran Church in Costa Mesa, CA. Here they are in no particular order:

1. “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution”, Edited by Paul Moorhead and Martin Kaplan, The Wistar Institute Symposium Monograph No. 5., 1967

2. “A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization”, Dean Overman, Rowman and Littlefield, Oxford, 2001.

3. “In the Beginning Information”, Werner Gitt, Master Books, 2006.

4. “A Tour of the Calculus” David Berlinski, Vintage Books, New York, 1995.

5. “The Mystery of Life’s Origin” Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen, Lewis and Stanley, Dallas, TX, 1992.

1. Biblical Reliability (Archeology)

Israel Finkelstein is the medias favorite archaeologist. He has earned this position through his tireless efforts to discredit the Bible. He is widely regarded as the world’s leading Biblical Minimalist. Minimalists can generally be described as “scholars” who assert that the Bible is nothing more than a collection of myths and political propaganda written centuries after the time period they claim to report. Despite the fact that dozens of Finkelstein’s claims have been shown by subsequent archaeological work to be wrong, the media still maintains him as their leading Biblical archaeological expert.

Among Finkelstein’s many assertions is the claim that the Edomite nation was a latter day creation of the Bible. The Bible records that Edomites were the descendants of Esau, Jacob’s twin brother, and that Edom was a dedicated enemy of early Israel. In all, Edom is mentioned 99 times in the Bible. However Finkelstein in his book “The Bible Unearthed” states that, “Edom did not exist as a distinct political entity until a relatively late period….there were no real kings and no state of Edom before the late Eighth Century BCE.” According to him the Bible’s record of Edom existing during and before the time of David in the Tenth Century BC is pure fiction.

Unfortunately for Finkelstein he has once again been shown to be wrong. The March- April edition of “Archeology” reports the discovery of an Edomite copper processing center in operation in the Tenth Century BC. The “industrial” level of production of copper in Edom at this early date carries with it large implications. “This means that there was a complex society in the area, known then as Edom, when scholars thought it was unoccupied.” Once again the Bible has proven reliable and a critic is left with egg on his face. One can only hope that at some point Finkelstein and the Minimalists will begin to lose credibility with the media.

2. Materialism’s Failure (Cognitive Studies)

Some Materialists have argued that people are born a blank slate upon which environment writes the personality, ergo, no free will. Therefore we are not responsible for our behavior because we have all been shaped by the environments we were raised in. Other Materialists argue that we are completely programmed genetically; therefore we have no free will and once again are not responsible for our actions. So the media treats the public to a stream of scientific claims which demonstrate one or the other, never bothering to note that these two causal agents are mutually exclusive.

In this vein the February issue of the “New Scientist” carried a major article entitled “Natural Born Believers”. The article notes that religious beliefs, as with language and music are a human universal, occurring in every culture on Earth. Studies are cited that demonstrate that children are born with an ability to conceive of God and are strongly pron to attribute design and purpose to the objects that constitute the world. They refer to this behavior as the brain’s inherent “Default to God”.

This finding should be no surprise to Christians. The Bible for example, tells us in Romans 2:15 “since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness…” A knowledge of God and morality being part of our natural born programing is no surprise. It seems to me that it is arguable that this discovery is strong evidence that humans are indeed the creation of a benevolent God.

However the authors of this article do not see God’s hand in this, they instead argue that this natural inborn belief in God must have originated through a random evolutionary process as a biological adaptation. They postulate an adaptive advantage for this natural tendency to believe in God.

Of course critics have pointed out that the appearance of any biological trait can be claimed to have had an adaptive advantage for some hypothetical ancient band of ancestors. Conveniently, such speculative claims are beyond scientific investigation. On a personal note I’d be curious to know how genetics could explain the fact that I personally was a strident, committed, orthodox, Marxist atheist until I was in my mid 30’s. Then with in the span of a couple of years became a committed Christian? What myriad of genetic adaptive advantages explains this phenomenon?

1. Setting the Record Straight - Islam Did not Save Western Science (Revisionist History)

Revisionist historians are working diligently at their task of creating an alternative history: one which suits their ideological and emotional fancies but does not always comport well with the record. For example, in recent years it has become a common place for revisionist historians and especially journalists to state that “Western science is deeply in debt to Islam.” They usually go on to claim that if it were not for the medieval Islamic scholars, the works of Aristotle, Plato and other great Greek Philosophers would have been lost to the modern world. Anthony Pagden’s new book “Worlds At War” is a good example of such claims.

The actual truth of the matter was much better explored by Nineteenth Century Historians such as the great Ernest Renan. Renan clearly showed that with the exception of Averrois all of the major “Islamic scholarly contributions” came from Last Remnant of Christian Persians who were either “converts” from Christianity or scholars raised in areas where there was a strong recent Christian history and a Christian ethos still persisted. (Who knows what a convert to Islam may actually be? It has often proved to simply be people at sword point who wanted to live.) And even in the case of Averrois working in Spain in the 1100’s, his works were later declared heretical by Islamists and ordered destroyed. They only survived because they had been translated into Latin and Hebrew by Jewish and Christian Scholars, actually reversing the direction of salvaging scholarly thought as claimed by modern revisionists.
Also the assertion that the works of the ancient Greeks only survived because of Arabic translations is an enormous distortion. It is true that some of the major works of Aristotle, such as the Organon had been translated into Latin but were lost in Western Roman lands during the “Dark Ages.” However, they were never lost in Greek translations in the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium). It was from these sources that the Arabs learned about Aristotle and Plato not the other way around. It is true that Western Scholars in some instances were first reintroduced to Plato and Aristotle by reading Arab translations of the Greek but the claim of revisionists that these works were “saved” by Islamic Scholars is simply not an accurate portrayal of what happened.

2. Shocking Contradictions Go Unrecognized by Darwinists (Darwinism Failure)

“Darwin Was Wrong: Cutting down the tree of life” read the cover of the January 24, 2009 issue of “The New Scientist.” Just one week later the cover of “National Geographic” read “What Darwin Didn’t Know.” While neither story is a repudiation of Darwinism they instead reveal the level of confusion and contradiction that Darwinists have learned to live with and pretend or some how manage not to notice.

For example the main thrust of the story in the “New Scientist” is that modern genetics has destroyed the Darwinist contention that all of the life forms on Earth are descended from one single original organism. “…the tree of life which Darwin used as an organizing principle and which has been a central tenant of biology ever since. Most biologists now accept that the tree is not a fact of nature - it is something we impose on nature…” However the “National Geographic” story is still pushing Darwin’s Tree of Life. It reports that, “When Darwin proposed his tree of life he was frankly guessing.” They however claim that modern genetic studies have proven Darwin’s descent from one common ancestor. “-modern Darwin’s don’t have to guess. They consult genetic scripture.”

The author of this article is correct about modern Biologists consulting genetics but unfortunately for this author that consultation of “genetic scripture” has shown that Darwin was wrong, not right. Perhaps what this author should have titled this “National Geographic” article “What I Don’t Know.”

3. The “Father” of anthropogenic Global Warming “Embarrassed NASA” (Misuse of Science)

James Hansen is widely regarded as the man who first sounded the “alarm on global warming.” Hansen is the Chief Climate Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Hansen has made some of the most outlandish claims about the consequences of his alleged “man caused global warming.” Besides being Al Gores main science consultant on this issue he has also led the fight to silence critics and stifle discussion of alternative interpretations of the data. Over time Hansen has also been found to have fudge data, use the wrong data, misuse climate models and generally ignore or actively tried to suppress counter data. However none of this has tarnished is reputation with the “objective”,”main stream” media.

Now in a January 27, 2009 post on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works website, Hansen’s former boss at NASA, Dr. John Theon, has openly broken with him, stating that Hansen had “Embarrassed NASA” with his claims about global warming. Theon was Chief of several NASA Headquarters Programs including Hansen’s and was responsible for all NASA weather and climate research. Theon now says that the claims of man caused global warming are not supported by the data and that the models being used to project climate catastrophe are flawed. “Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.”

Hansen also claimed that the “Bush Administration was trying to muzzle him.” Theon points out that this is absolutely not true. First of all NASA has a policy against making forecasts of mans effect on climate change because the science for it is not yet good enough to do this. However despite this policy and despite the fact that the current science is not up to the task Hansen still gave over 1400 interviews on the topic while he worked for NASA and was never sanctioned for this massive violation of agency policy.

1. Reliability of Scripture - (Archeology)

Source - “Newly Discovered: A Fortified City From King David’s Time,” Biblical Archeology Review, Jan/Feb 2009 Vol. 35 No. 1 pp 38-43.

One of the most hotly contested issues of Biblical archeology is the transition between the periods known as Iron Age I and Iron Age IIa. In Biblical chronology this is the transition between the time of the Judges and the Monarchy and is dated to approximately 1000 BC. The Bible’s description of the early Israelite Monarchy under Kings David and Solomon is one of a prosperous, strong, medium sized, centralized state with a sophisticated government and sizable cities and towns.

However Biblical Minimalists have argued that contrary to what the Bible reports: Israel was really just a group of tribes living in the Judean highlands and David and Solomon (if they actually ever existed) were nothing more then a couple of local Tribal Chiefs. While recent archaeological discoveries have forced the Minimalists to abandon questioning the reality of David and Solomon’s existence, many additional discoveries are also forcing them to continue to retrench other assertions.

For example, recent excavations on a hill top site known as Khirbet Qeiyafa which overlooks the Elah Valley of David and Goliath fame (1 Samuel 17) have revealed a city dated to Iron Age IIa. Among other distinctives of an advanced urban culture, the site revealed a well-planned, fortified city whose center was surrounded by a 2200 foot long 13 foot wide wall, made of stone blocks weighing up to 5 tons each. It is believed that this is the city of Gov (mentioned to in 1 Samuel 17:52). Referring to the Minimalist argument, Biblical Archeology reports that, “Qeiyafa upsets this theory in spades” further Yossi Garfinkel the lead Archaeologist stated “The new excavations clearly indicate that already in the time of King David, urban cities were constructed in Judah.”

2. Materialism’s Failure (Consciousness Research - Mind Over Matter On A Grand Scale)

“The GCP Event Experiment: Design, Analytical Methods, Results,” Journal of Science Exploration, 22: 309, 2008.

If Materialism explains consciousness, then phenomena such as psychokinesis should not exist. If mind is nothing more then a set of physio-chemical reactions, then it should not be able to effect matter. Consequently mind over matter is a concept scoffed at by true Materialists. But are they correct? It appears not.

In a recent experiment conducted by the Princeton based Global Consciousness Project (GCP) a result was produced that should startle Materialists. The GCP attempted to see if “Periods of collective emotional or attentive behavior in a widely distributed population will correlate with deviations from expectations in a global network of Random Number Generators?” So, to test this hypothesis the GCP set up a global network of Random Number Generators (RNG) to see if their output was altered during times of emotional stress in large segments of the world population. The stressors included assassinations, bombings, natural disasters and other events which typically attract a lot of attention.

The experiment was run and to the surprise of some the results showed that when one of these stress events occurred, the random number generators were effected. The numbers they generated tended to deviate from the normal expectation of randomness. The GCP actually found a positive correlation between these large scale emotional stressors and the output of the RNGs.

This result should give Materialists pause for their narrow reductionist view of reality.

3. Beyond Darwinism - (Biology, Evolution)

“Charles Darwin’s Tree of Life is ‘Wrong and Misleading’, Claim Scientists” Telegraph.co.uk 1/23/09

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution rests upon two main mechanisms: unguided natural selection and unguided descent with modification. Christian theologians’ main problem with both of these concepts is the inclusion of the word “unguided”. Biological evolution with Natural Selection as the driver is coming under increasing criticism but that will not be dealt with here.

Darwin depicted “Descent With Modification” as a “Tree Of Life.” On this tree simple one- celled organisms gradually give rise to more complex organisms over time, eventually leading to fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and humans. The morphological record based on fossils seemed to roughly correspond to this chain of descent. However modern genetics, despite loud claims to the contrary, has not supported this model of evolution very well at all. In recent times some Evolutionary Biologists have even begun referring to the “Bush of Life” of the “Lawn of Life” instead of the “Tree of Life.”

Dissenting from Darwinism has been a risky business and few Biologists have been willing to gamble their careers and openly dare to criticize the Darwinian Tree of Life. However the evidence against it has become so unequivocal that some mainline, well-placed Biologists are beginning to state the obvious. This article in the Telegraph recounts some of this new honesty, quoting among others Dr. Eric Bapteste of Curie University in Paris, “Far a long time the Holy Grail was to build a tree of Life. We have no evidence that the tree is a reality.”

1. Freedom of Thought & Speech – (Politics, Misuse of Science)

Source - “Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted” – Huffington Post 1/13/09

Main Points – Al Gore’s simple correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and temperature are very misleading and incorrect. First CO2 only absorbs Earth’s infrared emissions within a certain spectral band width. The CO2 in the atmosphere is currently absorbing almost all of the infrared emissions it can, given its absorption spectrum. Consequently higher level of CO2 will not result in substantially greater amounts of infrared (heat) being retained. (It is often overlooked that the current CO2 level in the atmosphere is 380 parts per million –however at times in Earths past it has been as high as 7500 parts per million). The IPCC is aware this and in order to explain the facts away it has now postulated an as yet undetected (and unknown historically) feedback mechanism between CO2 and water vapor which it claims may raise temperatures.

2. Beyond Darwinism – (Biology, Origin of Life, Evolution)

Source - “Embryonic Stem Cell Research Update” – Faith and Culture – EWTN TV 12/07/08

Main Points – Embryonic stem cell research (ESR) has two main branches – Reproductive and Therapeutic. Therapeutic ESR focuses on finding cures for diseases while Reproductive ESR (also known as cloning) focuses on making living copies of a parent. Therapeutic ESR has so far been a total bust. However, there are currently over 60 therapies available that were derived from using adult stem cells, 0 have come from ESR. Cloning of animals has met with limited success for unknown reasons. Only about 1 in every 200 attempts meets with any success.

There has been stiff resistance to expanding human ESR because it requires destroying a fetus in order to get live stem cells. Human cloning has been prohibited in almost every nation because of its repulsive moral implications. However the human cloners are now changing their tactics. They are arguing that it will be necessary to first clone humans before ESR can produce successful therapies - a dubious claim at best.

3. Setting the Record Straight – (History, Economics, Moral Issues)

Source - “Blind Spot” by Paul Marshall – New York Times (NYT) not sure Islamic Terrorists are Actually Targeting Jews

Main Points – The Media either through ignorance or willful denial have enormous blind spots. This has led to absurd statements such as the NYT surprise that the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India included a Jewish Center and their speculation that, “it may have only been accidental” that the hostages taken and murdered included Jews. Similar unbelievably silly and patently false media assertions include the insistence that Islamic terror is the result of “oppression or economics.”

In May of 2008 the British House of Commons passed a new version of its Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill. Under this new set of rules scientists working in Britain are allowed to produce embryos that are part human and part animal. Many were troubled by this possibility and expressed concern, especially about where this might lead in the future. The press of course proceeded to try to paint anyone who questioned the wisdom of such research as backward, ignorant, anti-science bigots.

Sadly these sorts of experiments are nothing new. They had been tried before, however the technology to produce human - animal hybrids had not been sufficiently developed and these experiments failed. The best known of these experiments were carried out by the Nazis. They made a number of efforts to cross apes with Jewish concentration camp victums. One of the goals of such experiments was to prove that Jews were in fact racially inferior. The theory being that, if Darwin was right and all life forms had descended through a chain of ancestors in hierarchical fashion, it would be easier to hybridize a Jew with a lower life form such as an ape because Jews were lower on the “Tree of Life” than other humans. Fortunately it is not necessary to review this disgusting, unimaginably cruel “work” here.

However the Nazis were not the only ones to attempt to cross humans and apes. When many Soviet archives were opened in the 1990’s, new light was thrown on the little known Soviet attempts to hybridize humans and animals. The most famous of these was the work of Ilia Ivanov, a biologist who specialized in hybridization. In the 1920’s Ivanov began going to Africa to collect great apes. These animals were brought back to Russia and experiments were planned to try to produce half human - half apes. At least five women actually volunteered to be inseminated with primate sperm but alas, it was not to be. After several unsuccessful experiments, the program was eventually terminated for a variety of reasons including the untimely death of “Tarzan” the orangutan who was supposed to be the prime sperm donor for the volunteers.

Here is where the spin comes in: these experiments were originally embraced by the world’s Darwinists, however Darwin’s apologists are now trying to cover up what Ivanov was really trying to prove with these experiments. The original proposal to the Soviet Academy of Sciences survives and it gives Ivanov’s reasons as to why the Soviet state should finance his experiments. The primary reason given was to prove that Darwin was correct and that humans had evolved from apes. If a human could be hybridized with an ape, it would provide powerful evidence that we were closely related biologically. It went further and stated that this would strike a blow against religion and provide the Soviets with a powerful propaganda tool. Not surprisingly The American Association for the Advancement of Atheism conducted fund raising on behalf of the project.

Arguably this leaves no doubt as to what Ivanov was out to prove. However no amount of fact dissuades Darwinists from their opinions. Despite the undisputably clear records, Ivanov’s “real motives” are considered a “mystery,” by some. This is a mystery that no doubt requires the efforts of a academic “Inspector Clouseau” to solve. So in the most recent issue of “Studies in the History of Philosophy and Science, Part C” can be found the “real reasons” for Ivanov’s experiments, and low and behold, Darwinism had almost nothing to do with it. It seems that the very absence of evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that the Politburo members were actually out to create the perfect “Socialist Man”. Ivanov’s work was in reality an experiment in “Positive Eugenics.” Given Soviet history perhaps a human - horse hybrid might have been closer to the perfect “Socialist Man” then a human - ape hybrid.

The history of Darwinism is one of ugliness and cruelty. And regrettably the ugliest and cruelest chapters probably have yet to be written.

Source:

“Beyond Eugenics: the forgotten scandal of hybridizing humans and apes”, Studies in History of Philosophy and Science, Part C: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol 39, Issue 2, pp 205-210.