Jeffrey Shallit Debates ID'er Kirk Durston at the University of Waterloo.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

If someone could please outline Shallit's opening statement on why scientists do not believe, I think he did a very good job of showing us the differences between science and religion. I just don't have the time right now.

bpabbott said...

I thought I'd point out that limits to human understanding of phenomena does not equate to limits of those phenomena.

... or that because we cannot observe phenomena prior to the event called the big bang, and that we are unable to understand the physics of that period, does not mean that no phenomena occurred, or that those phenomena were not natural.

Scott said...

John,

Here's an interesting video series that looks at the difference between the interpretation of conflicting evidence in science and religion.

Video One

Video Two

Video Three

bpabbott, I completely agree.

Nick said...

How about Durston's story of the amazing resurrected rabbits! Now, I had to replay this portion of the video a few times to make sure I wasn't imagining it. I wasn't, and my worst suspicions of Durston's utter credulity on matters supernatural were confirmed. Durston actually said: "I have no explanation as to why two rabbits suffering rigor mortis will suddenly come back to life because two little girls ask God to make it happen"! In other words, he can think of no explanation other than "God did it" which should make one take everything he said earlier about needing God to explain life and the universe with a very large grain of salt. Assuming the basic fact of the rabbits being really dead is true, the key to this story is where one of the girls says that God needs some privacy to work his "miracle" and that they all left the room for "quite some time." Was one girl in cahoots with Mom or Dad and were the dead rabbits replaced with new, live ones? That seems far more probable then a miracle. Why else would God need to do the job when no one was looking? Perhaps the younger girl was being protected from the harsh reality that her pets were dead. I've heard many stories of dead fish, birds etc., being replaced in just such a fashion, with a young child not knowing the difference and being fooled. But Kirk Durston believes in the resurrection version and that God has the ability to bring rabbits back from the dead, but not the dead children of grieving parents, that he will perform a miracle restoring life to the lifeless bodies of bunnies, but stand idle and do nothing while children are kidnapped and raped and killed. Which leads me to ask not only what kind of God this is, but also that if someone as seemingly intelligent and educated in the
21st century as Kirk Durston can so easily come to believe in dead rabbits rising from the grave, how much more so might first century uneducated people have come to believe in the tale of a resurrected God-man?

Quixie said...

Thanks for posting this . . . . I commented on Durston's opening remarks on a post on my own blog.

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