Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Since it involves a kind of questionnaire, or a challenge with arguments given by others, before she answers each, I feel an itch to answer them independently of her first, before even reading a sample.

Meanwhile, here are the 12 questions:

1 Aren't We Better Off without Religion?
2 Doesn't Christianity Crush Diversity?
3 How Can You Say There's Only One True Faith?
4 Doesn't Religion Hinder Morality?
5 Doesn't Religion Cause Violence?
6 How Can You Take the Bible Literally?
[follow up: Contra Craig]
7 Hasn't Science Disproved Christianity?
8 Doesn't Christianity Denigrate Women?
9 Isn't Christianity Homophobic?
10 Doesn't the Bible Condone Slavery?
11 How Could a Loving God Allow So Much Suffering?
12 How Could a Loving God Send People to Hell?

Here is her book:

Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion
Rebecca McLaughlin
https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Christianity-Questions-Largest-Religion/dp/1433564238/

Here are some Xtras not found in that list of 12 QQ.

Xtra 1 Was the Resurrection Real or an Illusion?
Xtra 2 Was Jesus a Schizophrenic?
Xtra 3 Have You Seen a Resurrection Lately?

1 Aren't We Better Off without Religion?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

In the Middle Ages a certain geographic fairly large area known as Christendom:

• allowed people to marry young
• forced no one to stay in school even if parents wanted to take them out
• drove no one to mass shootings like those of Columbine High School in 1998

In a secularised time, in 1998, the US:

• made pretty sure Klebold and Harris could not marry nor study without being with girls
• made sure they could not cease studying
• which certainly contributed to their deed in 1998
• as did the fact they had been encouraged to think of human life as a byproduct of evolution.

2 Doesn't Christianity Crush Diversity?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Catholic Christianity most certainly doesn't.

Calvinism isn't Christianity anyway.

In Catholicism, you are free to marry or not. You are only obliged to stick to choices you have hallowed with a promise. Note, marrying without a marriage promise is not possible.

Homosexual acts are forbidden, not from a will to make all men extreme machos (btw, we make no exceptions in favour of ultra-macho homos), nor from a will to make all women extremely feminine (a lolita dyke doesn't get a free pass for being kawaii). Homosexual acts are forbidden, like all other contraceptive behaviour (i e simultaneous choice of physical infertility and sex), because they mean fewer babies.

Part of the problem with fewer babies is an aging society, but another part is less diversity.

Latin America has been far better in preserving a diversity both culturally and ethnically between descendants of Spaniards and indigenous peoples, than the former English colonies in US or Canada have been.

Algonquian languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquian_languages
Cree language Native speakers 96,000, 27% of ethnic population (2016 census) Ojibwe language Native speakers (50,000 cited 1990–2016 censuses) Mi'kmaq language Native speakers 7,140, 4% of ethnic population (2016 census) Blackfoot language Native speakers 2,900 (2016) Arapaho language Native speakers 1,100 (2015) Fox language Native speakers 700: 250 Sauk and Fox and 400 Kickapoo in the US (2007–2015) 60 Kickapoo in Mexico (2020 census) Maliseet-Passamaquoddy language Native speakers 355 in Canada (2016 census) 100 in the United States (2007)		Cheyenne language Native speakers 380 (2020) Shawnee language Native speakers 260 and decreasing (2015) Menominee language Native speakers 35 (2007) + 25 L2 speakers (no date) Massachusett language evival Revitalization from 1993. As of 2014, 5 children are native speakers, 15 are proficient second-language speakers and 500 are adult second-language learners. Abenaki language Native speakers 14 Western Abenaki (2007–2012) Last fluent speaker of Eastern Abenaki died in 1993. Munsee language Native speakers 2 (2018)
Some languages of the Latin Americas
Quechuan languages Native speakers 7.2 million Guarani language Native speakers 6.5 million (2020) Aymara language Native speakers 1.7 million (2007–2014)		Nahuatl Native speakers 1.7 million in Mexico (2020 census) Kʼicheʼ language Native speakers 1.1 million (2019 census) Yaqui language Native speakers 20,000 in Mexico (2020 census) 640 in the USA (2015 census)

And within a single people and a single language, Catholicism keeps diversity of times into the present. Late Antiquity Benedictines and Latin Liturgy. Somewhat earlier liturgy in Byzantine rite. Crusader era Cistercians. Late Crusader era Franciscans and Dominicans. Renaissance Jesuits. All present into the present time, and their clothing provokes some Calvinist scoffers to speak of "cross dressing" not because they acctually dress in female clothes, but because their male garments are not those of the present day.

3 How Can You Say There's Only One True Faith?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Because religions really and truly contradict.

In some cases it is obvious because of splits.

Samaritans, Jews and Christians represent two splits in the times after those of Solomon and of Jesus Christ.

Catholics, Non-Chalcedonians, Orthodox, Protestants, this represents splits around Third and Fourth Ecumenical council, two splits, and in the 11th C leading up to the councils of Pisa and Florence, and in the 16th C. (mainly) leading up to the Council of Trent, on the Catholic side.

If both sides of a split cannot be right, then these people cannot all be right.

One could argue they are all wrong, but the question was, about why one could say there is ONLY one true faith, not why there is even as many as one.

And note, the main alternative over the last 200 years in the Western World, namely Secularism (sometimes in the guise of Freemasonry) is also another split, if not in all its doctrines, at least in its main culture.

If you want to confer with Japan, it is true some people there manage to be both Shinto and Buddhist — but this is in a compromise where the two religions take part of different aspects of life. You marry Shinto, you usually get buried Buddhist. It could be because of kind of a make-believe : you take the religion which is most optimistic for the occasion. When it comes to a third belief system in Japan, Scientism, one of the aspects of secularism over here, Michio Kaku has shown he takes it more seriously, but that might be because he is living in the US, not in Japan.

Catholicism, as well as its alternatives, like Fundie Calvinism or Orthodox Lutheranism, have a very obvious knack of combining the areas of life which a Japanese would outsource between different religions. Marriage? We have the Catholic sacrament of matrimony. Funerals? We have Masses for the dead, and for some very good people, masses for gratitude for God granting them holy lives. Science? We have scholasticism.

The alternative to Catholicism being true would be some other combination on all areas being true — even if it were outsourcing the areas to different origins, like the Japanese tend to do. But if Catholicism is true, this means Christ rose from the dead and founded the Catholic Church. Therefore Catholicism + some other is not a real option. That includes Catholicism + Santería and also Catholicism + Deep Time + Deep Space + Big Bang + Evolution. Not real options.

4 Doesn't Religion Hinder Morality?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

I can only think of two kinds of morality that the Catholic religion hinders.

• Kantian morality says you should do what is right without thinking of any reward, it becomes wrong if you want a reward;
• Woke morality says you should fight all situations, not just of oppression, but also which lead to oppression.

How does the Catholic religion hinder that?

• It hinders Kantian morality by:
  
  
  • offering an ultimate reward, in Heaven;
  • offering an emotional reward in pleasant prayers.
  
  
  
• It hinders woke morality by:
  
  
  • refusing to stamp certain situations as oppression (being stuck in your body, the sex it is, or not being allowed to abort, that's not oppression);
  • refusing certain ways out of situations that could lead to oppression, like pregnancy with a not very good man might lead to oppression from his side or to sharing oppression he undergoes, and Catholicism refuses to end the pregnancy by abortion.

Well, so much the worse for Kantian and woke moralities!

I am glad Catholic morality is fighting them. Apart from being very glad for the things in Catholicism I just said, I also hate these two non-Catholic moralities, because:

• Kantian morality which sees an even emotional reward for one's choices as suspect makes obedience not just a virtue, but the virtue, since obedience is so much more "objective" to Kant than going by one's conscience (which could be tainted), and therefore leads to overobedience to the state or similar authorities;
• woke morality makes normal happiness suspect, and basically makes disobedience to certain established moral themes the paramount virtue which Kantianism makes of obedience to the state.

This is the kind of thing that the Romeike's were forced to flee from 15 years ago. A wokeness which considers homeschooling an oppression on the part of the parents, and a Kantianism which refuses to see the oppression against parents and children in state schools, if going there is obeying the laws.

The kind of morality that the Catholic religion hinders is the kind of morality which makes for new types of slave hunt, new types of slavery and oppression.

5 Doesn't Religion Cause Violence?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Yes. So does irreligion.

The Thirty Years' War was started over Catholic and Lutheran and Calvinist religions disagreeing on what services should be held in churches from the Middle Ages, when they were built by the Catholic religion. Note, Luther in Wittenberg and Bucer in Strassburg (which back then was Holy Roman Empire) weren't content to say "we no longer agree with that stuff, let's build our own church" they insisted on doing things in Catholic churches that a Catholic sees as sacrilegious over and above the sacrilege of a false pseudo-mass.

Sacrilege against holy chrism, sacrilege against relics, sacrilege against icons, sacrilege against holy water, and when it comes to sacrilege against persons consecrated to celibacy, the reformers were not just for allowing them to make that choice, but also for foisting it on souls which would be reluctant to forego the choice they had made when consecrating themselves.

The war between Hitler and Stalin was between a man wanting to replace loyalty to God with loyalty to the Germanic meta-nation and races, with an occasional nod to the proletariat as being more race typic and noble than certain types of bourgeoisie, and a man who wanted to replace loyalty to God usually with loyalty to the proletariat, and the revolution, as more evolved and noble than certain types of bourgeoisie, with an occasional nod to Holy Russia.

"But there are lots of atheists who are neither Communists nor Nazis and who didn't fought in World War II!"

Yeah, sure.

Clemens August Graf von Galen and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are two Germans who didn't fight in the Thirty Years War, one a Catholic, the other a Calvinist.

J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis are a Catholic and an Anglican, an Englishman and an Irish born (if not purely Irish) who didn't fought the Anglo-Irish and Stuart-Whig wars of religion.

The Middle Ages may have had as many wars as the Bronze age, but not as bloody, and not as ruthless to the losers. And for that reason, not as long. That's thanks to Christianity.

If your point was simply that religion allows violence in some cases, yes. Why shouldn't it? Do you want a monopoly on violence for only secularised and irreligious uses? That's likely to lead to new circles of violence!

6 How Can You Take the Bible Literally? Adress to William Lane Craig

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

It's a funny question really.

We take both fact and fiction literally. Obviously, we do not take fiction as literally true, but we tend, while enjoying it, to take it literally, not to dissect it into elaborate schemes of what it is metaphoric of. With fact, we usually do not take into account a real fact would be able to also be a real metaphor about some other real fact.

The non-literal taking of a thing means the metaphorical or otherwise figurative taking of it. And the Bible does not come in its entirety with markers for non-literality comparable to "are you pulling my leg?"

The proper question is "how can you take the Bible as literally true?" ...

Before I can answer that, I'd like to ask in return "about what respect?"

A) How can I take the laws of the Old Covenant as literally just laws?

When it comes to slavery, I already observed, though the question has a later number, no motive for slavery is mere power greed given free reins, and it is always less bad than the slavery of other people. Enslaving Canaaneans who had worshipped evil false gods and committed evil sexual acts is not comparable to enslaving Thracians because they speak another language, build another architecture, and are useful when extracting silver. Allowing an owner to go unpunished if the beaten slave survives the third day is not comparable to allowing an owner to be unpunished for feeding a slave to murenas. Allowing an indebted Israelite seven years of servitude (probably means maximally seven years, as it would be interrupted by the Sabbatical year) is not comparable to allowing an indebted Roman permanent enslavement for the rest of his life and for the life of descendants. Allowing an indented servant to chose to stay if marrying is not comparable to allowing all slaves promiscuity, requiring their promiscuity when master asks, and requiring them to stay whether promiscuous or not, but certainly allowing them no marriage. Finally, it is Christianity which in wide swathes of the world abolishes the most typical features of slavery.

When it comes to Old Testament heavy penalties for breaking certain kashrut, I can that because I think the kashrut were metaphorical about Christian justice. Obviously I don't consider the ban on sodomy as one of the kashrut.

When it comes to laws for menstruation — these were kind of a health insurance, since one of the things that has improved since not just antiquity but even the Middle Ages seems to be intimate hygiene for women.

B) How can I take the stories with miracles as literally true and factual?

Because I do not share an antimiraculous bias.

C) How can I take the claims about God as literally true, rather than as an elaborate metaphor for an esoteric message claimed to be behind "all religions" about us being sparks of God, or God being many of us reunited in the original unity or similar?

Because, when some have worked miracles like rasing the dead or parting the Red Sea, I would rather take their words about God than the words of some wannabe freemason with a wannabe position of my future mentor (a situation that is not upcoming).

D) How can I take prophecy literally as foreknowledge?

Partly by not taking all in prophetic utterances literally. Some things are coded. For instance, I would consider the four beasts as having both an Old Testament realisation, and an end times realisation, which nationally speaking is different.

Some things are telescoped between two planes of fulfilment. Matthew 24 is a discourse both foretelling the fall of Jerusalem and the end of times.

Some words are also used in non-obvious ways, or rather ways that are non-obvious outside a certain context. "This generation" refers to some cohorts living both at the prophecy and when the fulfilment came in year 70 — but also to the Church being "one generation" ... still extant in the end times.

E) And what about the men who say they are Christians and you shouldn't?

Quoting William Lane Craig from CMI:

“My greatest fear is that the young-earth creationist might be right in his hermeneutical claim that Genesis does teach those things that I described earlier. And I say that would be a nightmare because if that’s what the Bible teaches, it puts the Bible into massive, I think, irredeemable conflict with modern science, history, and linguistics, and I don’t want that to happen.”

The Conundrum of Compromise (And the damage of not taking the Scriptures at face value)
by Joel Tay, First published in CMI-USA Prayer News, July 2022.
https://creation.com/conundrum-of-compromise
footnoting to:
A Quest for the Historical Adam: A Conversation with William Lane Craig, youtu.be/8TQ8w_9qN4Q .

a) "I don't want this to happen"

This is one reason why Jesus founded a Church with a magisterium. This way, we are not bogged down with what someone wants or doesn't want to happen and how he wants to interpret the Bible accordingly : since it already has obliging interpretations, what we want for the present situation is totally irrelevant.

b) irredeemable conflict with modern science,

Answered in 7 Hasn't Science Disproved Christianity?

c) irredeemable conflict with ... history,

I suppose William Lane Craig considers it history that the city-state of Ur began in 4000 BC, or that Egypt was unified in 3000 BC. If that were the case, yes, it would irremediably be in conflict with the Flood in 2400 BC and Tower of Babel at the earliest in 2299 BC, as some interpretations of the Masoretic timeline go. It would also be in irremediable conflict with the Flood in 2958 BC and Tower of Babel ending in 2556 BC, timeline of the Roman Martyrology. It would also be in conflict with the Flood in 3258 or 3266 BC and Peleg born 2729 BC. In fact, any version of Biblical chronology that did not add swathes of time would be in conflict with the city-state of Ur beginning in 4000 BC, or that Egypt being unified in 3000 BC.

The good news is, first, it's not history, it's arcaheology, and second, my carbon 14 Biblical recalibration takes care of it.

We do not have any "annals ab Ur condita" which state Alexander died as King of Babylon in (4000 - 323 =) 3677 after the founding of Ur. Or that Nebuchadnezzar II became king of Babylon (4000 - 605 =) 3395 after the founding of Ur. The "4000 BC" date is not historically derived, it's archaeologically derived, by carbon dating objects from back the early layers of Ur (which by the way have been redated to 3800 BC). This brings us to my next point.

Second, take my newest version:

Creation vs. Evolution : What Project?
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-project.html

Now, if you go to New Tables you will find that ...

2019 B. Chr.

0.778962 pmC/100, so dated as 4069 B. Chr.

4069 BC in carbon dates equals 2019 BC in real dates.

The real problem would actually be having a pharao of all Egypt available for Abraham in what's carbon dated to 3500 BC. The fact of the matter is, the pharao probably lived a few decades more, which is why the archaeology of royal tombs start with 3100 rather than 3500 BC.

d) irredeemable conflict with ... linguistics

I suppose that Mr Craig refers to the idea that the Tower of Babel event immediately resulted in all languages now spoken, or that languages diverge only miraculously, not by the known processes which made Italian and French two different languages, after Latin of the Paris region and Latin of the Florence region had been the same one (if we went to other regions of France or Italy, we would not be dealing with standard varieties of French and Italian). No. For the Genesis 3 story to be accurately transmitted from Adam to Abraham, we do not need the language to have stayed absolutely the same, nor do we need that between Abraham and Moses, when the Genesis account was formulated into one book, nor do we even need that after Moses. Orally transmitted history can adapt to changes in language pretty fluidly. The 19th C. or early 20th C. collectors of a story from Dürnstein region, about Richard the Lion-Heart having been held captive there did not find the story in the Mittelhochdeutsch spoken at the time of Richard the Lion-Heart — or of his captors, the duke Leopold V of Austria and his squire. And written texts can be updated linguistically also, this is indeed how I explain some of the terminology in the book of Exodus, which Moses wrote before the Ramesside pharaos.

The point is not that there could have been no language differences in Abraham's time without the Tower of Babel, but that Old Egyptian and Sumerian would have been no more different 1000 years after the Flood (a date reached when Abraham was 58, before his calling) than for instance Icelandic and Swedish, or perhaps Scottish and Irish Gaelic. This is not the case. There is no way of getting Sumerian and Old Egyptian from a common parent language in 1000 years. Perhaps in 20 000 or 40 000 years, but definitely not in 1000 years. Which brings me to the next point ....

e) Are you aware of what you want to happen, Mr. Craig?

I place Adam as created in 5200 BC, and consequently dead in 4270 BC. Suppose one agrees with Fuz Rana, who considers Adam lived 150 000 years ago. This would mean, there is no way that the content of Genesis 3 could have been accurately transmitted to the time of Moses. Here is Father George Leo Haydock, 1859, a facing comments Bible way before Scofield, just not a Protestant one:

Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. (Haydock)

I differ in detail, partly by taking a somewhat longer chronology than Ussher's (which Father Haydock was OK with), and on the other hand to compensate that, considering a written transmission could have taken on in the days of Abraham. But the principle remains the same. If Adam lived 146 000 years before Abraham, obviously this becomes impossible, inachievable. If you disagree with Fuz Rana, sorry, your interview with Josh Dowell is long, and it was quicker to jump to his interview with Rana and Swamidass. His 150 000 BP date is obtained from dating methods even worse than carbon 14, like K-Ar.

It seems Swamidass is coauthoring a book with you. He believes the bottleneck was "20 to 30 people" ... but this would clash with Romans 5, and the idea of God punishing justly. A collective sin qua collective is not free-willed, since collectives unlike individuals are not endowed with free-will. On the other hand, if two of the 20 — 30 were sinning, and then immediately punished, why would not the other 18 to 28 take heed and refrain from becoming accomplices? Or if they started out innocent and immortal, what made them mate with fallen mankind?

“I myself don’t hold to that classical doctrine of original sin … What was that first sin? I don’t think we have any idea. I certainly don’t think that it was eating a piece of fruit on a tree. I think that would have been a figurative and metaphorical way of telling the story of man’s fall.”

Yeah, total dark ignorance becomes the consequence of rejecting the light of truth ...

That's one problem. But another one is, accepting carbon dates, you don't just have to take the chapters 1 - 11 as "mytho-history" (a very ill-defined concept, I would say, and I say that precisely because I am aware that much of Greek "mythology" involves what was taken — and what I take — as history). No. Genesis 14 involves Mesopotamians attacking the Amorrhaeans in Asason-Tamar. This can be tied in very precisely with archaeology, as, according to uniformitarian dates, happening in 3500 BC. See the evacuation of a temple treasure from Chalcolithic En-Geddi (which we know is Asason-Tamar), with reed mats carbon dated. But if you wanted to argue Abraham actually lived 3500 BC, apart from the problems this would cause in genealogies and other history, unaccounted for time gaps, this would put Abraham before there was an Egypt, before there was a pharao, since archaeologists date 1st Dynasty as c. 3100 BC — c. 2900 BC, meaning there was no pharao for Abraham to visit in 3500 BC.

On the other hand, if 1935 BC is carbon dated to 3500 BC, and carbon 14 is rising, it makes sense the carbon date 3100 BC would be 1801 BC, or 3200 BC would be between 1845 and 1823 as per my tables (a reason why Abraham's pharao would be the Narmer not found in the first dynasty tombs).

And if you mythologise Abraham too, why believe God's promises to Abraham (Genesis 12) any more than the Proto-Gospel of Genesis 3:15?

Those are just some of the nightmareish problems YOU run into, by your preference for rather learning from fallible scientists than from Moses.

PS, started taking the video with yourself and Sean McDowell, fortunately it didn't take all of it, just to 2:34 to get your timeline, and kudos for allowing Neanderthals, Denisovans, Heidelbergians to descend from Adam, that is a good move. However 750 000 years = transmission problem for Genesis 3. PLUS 100's of 1000's of years in which people were apparently getting saved without Jesus just fine, alternatively were all lost. The traditional view is, people in Peleg's or Abraham's time were saved insofar as they believed God's promise of the upcoming Messiah. And on the traditional view, Peleg was born maximally 2771 years after Adam sinned, the story was perfectly transmittable, especially as the lifespans allowed generations to overlap several ones into the posterity or ancestry beyond what's now possible.

PPS - what the Bible considers as confusion may not be what you consider as such, it doesn't mean agrammatical linguistics in any individual, it simply means social confusion due to the unexpected phenomenon of major language differences. Also, I have no use for casting Babylonian Ziggurat's as the project in Genesis 11, first pericope. Göbekli Tepe, which really is reached by going from the landing place from the East, which is really adjacent to a plain inside the two-river area, rather than in the middle of one surrounding it, and "a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven" not referring to an architectonic structure, but to what was way later seen at Cape Canaveral, when Armstrong went to the Moon.

PPPS - at 14:41 in the video, Sean McDowell confirms you mean "mytho-history" only about chapters 1 to 11. In other words, to you, chapter 12, 13, 14 should already be history. But this is impossible with uniformitarian use of carbon dates.

7 Hasn't Science Disproved Christianity?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

No.

End of the story, now you can go home ...

... you can go home, I said ...

... wait, you want the details?

OK, this will take a little more time. This sounds like one question, but is in fact several questions.

Hasn't archaeology and palaeontology proven the earth and universe are lots older than the Bible and therefore Christianity teaches?
Hasn't evolution proven life, its diversity, and man, owe nothing to God?
Hasn't science proven there are laws of nature so miracles are impossible?
Hasn't Biblical criticism proven the Gospels are unreliable, since too late?
Hasn't Assyriology proven that the stories in Genesis, from Creation to Flood, are polemically tainted plagiarisms?
Hasn't comparative religion proven Jesus is a copy-cat of pagan deities?
Hasn't science shown there is no God?

Let's take them one by one.

Hasn't archaeology and palaeontology proven the earth and universe are lots older than the Bible and therefore Christianity teaches?

Or astronomy? Some stars the light of which we see are supposed to be 13 billion light years away. If they and we are just 7222 years old, their light shouldn't be reaching earth yet.

Well, you have to prove they are 13 billion light years away first. And to do that, you have to prove Heliocentrism first.

And to do that, you have to exclude God — while the existence of God leaves room for Heliocentrism, only the non-existence of God and angels leaves no room for anything other than Heliocentrism.

Palaeontology, then?

Uranium Lead dates are moot because of the uncertainty on how much lead there was in the sample to begin with. Stratigraphy of "Geologic column" is often presented as if one Permian layer were lying blow one Triassic layer and above a Carboniferous one, but in land vertebrates at least, it's more like different faunal types lying side by side in geographic or localised zones in whatever the layer is that's exposed on top. For sea creatures, there is the possibility of several layers having coexisted in the waters before the Flood.

OK, but archaeology?

Not really. The main go to is carbon-14, where a buildup in the atmosphere would skew the dating results more and more the further back to and beyond the Flood you came.

Creation vs. Evolution : What Project? https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-project.html

Hasn't evolution proven life, its diversity, and man, owe nothing to God?

No. Abiogenesis, the development of new cell types, the development of the human language, are all of them major hurdles to this theory.

Hasn't science proven there are laws of nature so miracles are impossible?

Laws of nature do not prove miracles impossible.

Laws of nature describe the working of certain material cause types. For instance, the cause of free fall will not propel the body towards the centre of a much heavier body like the earth other than as accelerating in distance by the square of the time, or in other words, in speed by time. On Earth, this is the value, for the metric system, of ...

At different points on Earth's surface, the free fall acceleration ranges from 9.764 to 9.834 m/s2 (32.03 to 32.26 ft/s2), depending on altitude, latitude, and longitude.

However, this says nothing of other factors than the free fall acceleration.

If a body intervened and stopped the fall, this would not falsify the natural law, it would just mean the situation had changed due to another factor.

If an angel intervened and stopped the fall and saved a life, it would also mean the situation had changed due to another factor.

Hasn't Biblical criticism proven the Gospels are unreliable, since too late?

No. Biblical criticism, as in Higher Criticism, is itself unreliable, and lots of historic sources we usually trust are even later than Higher Criticism pretends of the Gospels, in relation to the events.

Hasn't Assyriology proven that the stories in Genesis, from Creation to Flood, are polemically tainted plagiarisms?

Once upon a time, a certain Hislop, who was not an Assyriologist, but who wagered on the then budding discipline to prove his hunches right, considered Easter Eggs and the Eucharist as plagiarisms of the Babylonian religion. Well, Assyriologists have so far not even bothered very much about him, that's how wrong he is. Eating eggs is a fairly popular hobby even outside Easter, except we Catholics have tended to forbid it during Lent. And nothing known in any Assyriological find, pictorial or textual, approaches the Eucharist. So, Assyriologists either don't know about him, or don't give him much credit.

However, they are a bit more prone to come up with this other plagiarism charge, but they are not much better than Hislop when doing so. The problem is, they are precluding from the outset the possibility that neither side borrowed from the other, but both sides, both Hebrews and Babylonians, were heirs to those who had lived the events.

Hasn't comparative religion proven Jesus is a copy-cat of pagan deities?

If so, He's a copy-cat of too many of them. And each role fits His own a bit too well to be just tacked on.

Hasn't science shown there is no God?

No. A certain type of science education has been hijacked into an education into Atheism. That's something else.

But what about science? Just plain science? Hasn't that disproven God?

No, and that's precisely what I mean with a certain type of science education.

The good points in favour of scientific methods apply to at least some of the scientific fields. It's misapplied in the case of Heliocentrism or Deep Time. But it has no bearing on whether there is a God, no bearing on whether the miraculous can occur, since the miraculous is precisely a different result than calculations from material factors by natural laws would account for, and accounting for that by God.

I mean of course the scientific methods used in scientific fields. Because philosophy, which deals with God is another field, and it has its method.

Electric calculations may tell you the max speed of a train using that electricity, but it won't tell you whether the train slows down for a station, or whether the train changes tracks to another line. Those things depend on the train driver. And the question about God is pretty much like the question whether the train we are on has a locomotive and a train driver or not. The kind of questions that are so typical for so many sciences and which do not take God into account are like questions about the electric tension in the line from Münster to Bremen. Which does not answer whether the driver will stop between or whether he will continue beyond, like to Hamburg.

Yeah, but natural laws are about ultimate possibility!

Well, natural laws are about potentials of the material factors. Any other possibilities depend on whether anything else than material factors have potential. If a non-material God created material things and allotted them the potentials, He certainly has more potentials than they have.

You couldn't identify the potentials of material (or quasimaterial) factors with "ultimate possibility" if you weren't (without evidence, and against quite a lot of evidence) assuming that they were the only factors in existence.

But haven't the natural laws determined the possible outcomes so that any miracle would be a breach of them?

Precisely not, as I have argued in this series:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Sabine Hossenfelder Studied in Mainly Non-Catholic Schwalbach am Taunus · somewhere else: Do Determinisms in Material Processes Leave Room for Free Decisions by Souls or God Over Matter? · New blog on the kid: Angels chosing orbits = no violation of laws of physics ?

8 Doesn't Christianity Denigrate Women?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Mulier salvavit quae damnavit.

"Woman, same as which damned, saved"

What Eve destroyed by hearing the serpent, Mary repaired.

What Eve destroyed by disobeying God's ban, Mary repaired by perfectly obeying God.

Jesus, Our Saviour, repaired for Adam's sin, by His perfect obedience unto the Cross.

He had this perfect obedience partly from being God, but humanly speaking He also learned it. From Mary, from the new Eve.

9 Isn't Christianity Homophobic?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Christianity says homosexual acts like sodomy are wrong.

Christianity also says, this remains so when infertile — and deliberately infertile — sexual acts are committed between man and woman, even between husband and wife.

Sure, the Lambeth Conference of 1930 has said otherwise, but that is a concern of Anglican heretics. Precisely as putting out "Information for same sex couples" which doesn't tell them to find a same sex couple of the opposite sex and do a partner swap. It's a concern for Anglicans and Lutherans, but the Catholic Church has not participated.

Now, you might wonder "what's wrong with infertile sex anyway?"

Answer:

• God says it's wrong (Romans 1:26-27; Genesis 38:8-10);
• pension reforms and unrests about them show it's disastrous./HGL

10 Doesn't the Bible Condone Slavery?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Most moderns would condone some form of slavery. What do you think prison is? It is a kind of slavery, but one earned by some ill deed, usually.

Many condone very much less well deserved forms of slavery than prison. Mental hospitals. Child protective services. Enforced desintoxication visits. Pushing homeless into centres where they are isolated among themselves and "off the streets" but not in independent living accomodations.

People who condone such types of slave hunt are hypocrites if they criticise the Bible for "condoning slavery" ...

But this does not dispense from explaining the Bible.

I would say, there are some kind of motives that rationally motivate servitude or at least can do so among non-Christians:

• crime — at least those deserving death penalty, and some do, would be considered as worthy of slavery, of perpetual servitude, too, as a kind of clemency;
• this would involve some war crimes and some crimes leading to wars (Joshua's wars were God's punitive action);
• those born in slavery when treated well do not always and everywhere look for freedom instead — if many a Black man of the Antebellum South was in for running away, it was because of harsh treatment (against the Bible) and also because of a comparison with Europeans elsewhere who neither were nor had slaves (due to Christianity);
• some cultures have held it just to keep debtors in slavery as payment for their debts (common ground to both Rome and Greece before Christian times, and to Jews too, but in that case only for seven years — because the Bible told them so).

Above all, what the New Testament had to say about slavery was indeed not a blank condemnation (as some would have wanted, when all they think of in the context of Biblical slavery is the Black Antebellum), but held such qualifications, involving the equality of men, irrespective of class, irrespective of free or bond, that slavery became an irksome thing, and even less likely to be abused.

Think of it as the reverse of racism. In the Antebellum South, slavery was becoming worse in attitudes from the owners and their abettors, and in humiliations suffered by Blacks, because racism was spreading.

The NT words about slavery are the reverse of that. In the Christian empire, slavery was becoming better in attitudes from owners, and less hard, involving fewer humiliations, because Christianity was spreading. In place after place, in the Latin West, slavery was even abolished totally.

Even in the Old Testament, slavery was more lenient than among other people. Moses and Caesar Augustus forbade the killing of a slave. Yes, I know there is a passage in Leviticus which states when it does not count as killing, but the fact that an earlier death than that would involve penalties was a deterrent. In Rome, people could throw slaves to murenas (a fish pretty like pirayas) just for fun with no punishment, until Caesar Augustus, c. 1500 years later (around the time when Christ was born) put an end to that disregard for the life of a slave./HGL

PS - confer slaveries of new types, like school compulsion, marriage delay, child welfare, psychiatry, which seem to be getting more power the more a society is secularised.

11 How Could a Loving God Allow So Much Suffering?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Giving men freewill involves giving them the possibility to chose wrong, not just within themselves, not just in relation to God, but also in relation to the neighbour.

As C. S. Lewis pointed out in The Problem of Pain, it would be pointless to allow people the freedom to chose doing ill to the neighbour if all the effects of such choices were annulled, and the neighbour never really suffered anything as a result of such a choice.

People are diverse in the power they wield over others.

Parents wield more power than other people, and yet, when people try to save children from bad parents, the results are even worse childhoods.

The extreme example of parental power was Adam's choice.

If he had overcome the temptation, whatever would have happened to Eve, somehow mankind would have been well as a whole. We would have been born good (in fact we aren't, it's just that when we are born we have very little means to make our bad inclinations effective on others). We would have been born into a good world, not just the basic goodness of promoting life, but a perfect goodness of promoting no suffering. When we were born with nothing wrong with us, we would need nothing wrong in our situation as a warning signal.

He did not overcome, he shared Eve's death penalty, we are not born good, we are born in a half good and half bad world, the basic goodness of promoting life yes, but the perfect goodness of promoting no suffering, no, that's lacking. As we are born with something wrong with us, we need something wrong in our situation as a warning signal./HGL

12 How Could a Loving God Send People to Hell?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

How can a loving God reward someone so that he can never fall away from God, so that his salvation is eternally secure?

By making sure that at a certain time, the freedom to change one's mind runs out.

Well, it also runs out for the people who are stubbornly fallen from God, so they can never turn back.

If someone spends the last of his earthly life to spite God, his eternity will be without God to the last, and therefore miserable.

In a certain sense, it is possible that the physical torments of Hell are even a welcome distraction to the damned, compared to that bleakness, that emptiness, that total dysfunction of what should have worked (and in the saved ones does work) for their happiness./HGL