The acquisition of the company I work for has kept me really busy, which I like, but it doesn't allow me to do justice to this blog. There is so much going on in the are of Christian apologetics. You could post daily and still miss items.

Here are some links to good sites on the subject and I will keep the forums open. Note that I am not endorsing the beliefs on any of these pages. Read them for yourself and make up your own mind.

	A Physicist's Perspective - A great blog. He posts several times a week at least.
	God and Science - Dozens and dozens of great articles
	Reasons to Believe - This is one of my favorite sites. I download their weekly 2 hr show in MP3 format and listen to it on my Pocket PC in the car. I highly respect Hugh Ross and what he has done. He has written several good books you should check out in their catalog.  Creation And Time, which is no longer in print it seems, is still available from Amazon and does a great job working through the idea that the six days in Genesis refer to a 144 hour period.
	Institude For Biblical And Scientific Studies - Another good site full of information. They also have a newsletter you can subscribe to so you can get news sent to you via email.

If you have any other resources you'd like to share, send it to the email address above.

Wow! Nearly a month since my last posting. Holidays and year end close at my company really consume a lot of time.

"A study of coral suggests that ancient members of the animal kingdom slithered through the Precambrian mud with a hefty cache of genes in common with humans. Surprisingly, many of these genes are not shared with creatures such as flies and worms, even though these animals evolved millions of years after coral. This calls into question some studies that use these model organisms to unravel the evolution of the human genome."

The brief article then goes on to discuss how existing evolutionary models need to be questioned. It doesn't make sense that gene sequences in the earliest forms of life on Earth exist in humans but do not exist in life forms in between, like worms and fruit flies. Of course, no consideration is given to the possibility that a Creator may have done what inventors do today - rather than starting from ground zero with each creation, He may borrow designs from earlier works to be used in later ones because they are well suited for that purpose. Read Psalms 104. It is a very interesting read when it comes to the various stages of life forms we find evidence for in Earth's history.

 Click here for more info and to discuss.

"Three small ivory carvings found at Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany suggest a high level of artistic skill among craftspeople living between 30,000 and 35,000 years ago. "A lot of colleagues have suggested that art would evolve gradually, with primitive pieces first," said archaeologist Nicholas Conard of the University of Tuebingen, Germany."

These figurines are well developed. One would expect a slow evolution of art to match gradualism claimed in biological evolution. If, on the other hand, humans were created as a species fully developed, remnants of advanced creativity and imagination would be expected.

 Click here for more info and to discuss.

A purported first-century inscription naming Jesus may or may not be the real thing, but Israel's labeling of the find as a fake is premature, scientists and scholars said at a panel discussion. At issue is a limestone burial box, or ossuary, with the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus," that emerged on Israel's antiquities market last year. If authentic, the ossuary would offer a rare physical link to the life of Jesus, but Israel's Antiquities Authority declared the inscription a fraud in June.

 Click here for more info and to discuss.

"It is becoming fashionable to question Darwinism, but few people understand either the arguments for evolution or the arguments against it. Mary Wakefield explains the thinking on both sides."

Most of the discussions I've been involved in or witnessed relating to evolution of species are very polarized and neither side can comprehend or identify in any way with the thinking on the other side. This article gives a good overview of where people come from from the three major sides of the argument - naturalistic evolution, young earth creationists (six, 24 hour days with the Earth generally seen as 6,000-10,000 years old) and old earth creationists (six periods of creation with the Universe seen as approximately 13.7 billion years old), also known as Intelligent Design supporters.

 Click here for more info and to discuss.

"According to a controversial notion known as the anthropic principle, certain otherwise baffling features of the universe can only be understood by including ourselves in the equation. The universe must be suitable for life, otherwise we would not be here to wonder about it."

The anthropic principle basically comes from the recognition that the universe is incredibly fine tuned for the existence of human life. There are factors that came about billions of years ago and billions of light years from here that led to Earth being a suitable place for life. It is becoming more difficult each day to attribute this fine tuning to random chance given that the time needed for random chance to reasonably account for this fine tuning far exceeds any known estimate for the age of the universe, which is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old.

One theory that is being but forth to escape the most likely conclusion of the anthropic principle is that there are a nearly infinite number of universes. "But supporters of the anthropic principle argue that there could be zillions of possible universes, many different possible settings ruled by chance. Their view has been bolstered in recent years by a theory of the Big Bang, known as inflation, which implies that our universe is only one bubble in an endless chain of them, and by string theory — the so-called theory of everything — whose equations seem to have an almost uncountable number of solutions, each representing a different possible universe."

There is a good overview of the anthropic principle at the Reasons To Believe site. The link to the New York Times article at the top may require a free registration to see.

 Click here for more info and to discuss.

"With nicknames such as Gilgamesh, Aphrodite, and Athena—as well as Elvis—10 recently discovered supernovas are something special. Indeed, these supernovas provide what appears to be proof of one of the weirdest properties of the universe: Something is pushing objects in the cosmos apart at an ever-faster rate."

 

You may wonder what this has to do with apologetics. There is an interesting article at Reasons To Believe entitled "The Big Bang - The Bible Taught It First!" "All these scientists, however, were upstaged by 2500 years and more by Job, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other Bible authors. The Bible’s prophets and apostles stated explicitly and repeatedly the two most fundamental properties of the big bang, a transcendent cosmic beginning a finite time period ago and a universe undergoing a general, continual expansion. In Isaiah 42:5 both properties were declared, "This is what the Lord says—He who created the heavens and stretched them out."

 Click here for more info and to discuss.