Apprentice Owl Apologetics

            With the advent (no Christmas pun intended) of the COVID vaccine, I have seen a huge uptick of Christians who are claiming some conspiracy theory of aborted fetus tissues being used in the production of the vaccine. I did some digging, and their claims are a little twisted. HEK293 and HeLa cells were used in the studies leading to the production of the vaccine. HEK293 cells were derived from the kidney tissue of an aborted fetus, and HeLa cells were derived from an African American cancer patient without her knowledge or consent. So yes, these cells were derived from aborted tissue and a human source in an unethical manner, but these cells have been immortalized, meaning that the cells can divide continuously. They cannot grow into a functioning human being, as the cells are already specialized into a certain type of cell. These cells being used does not mean that babies are constantly being killed when these cells are used. Does this history of these cell lines means that

            I have taken a little bit of time off, not really by choice, but due to a crazy semester back teaching in person and being a first round father while doing all of that. My wife and I have faced personal and professional challenges, and I believe that we have used them to grow as people, and to grow closer to God. This won’t be my usual fair of apologetics, but rather my thoughts and reflections on a year of a pandemic, a crazy election, a growing and learning daughter, and me getting close to the end of my 20’s. Lesson One: This has followed around our having to teach college classes over zoom. I need to really express my interest in Chemistry in my voice when all I really have to work with is my voice and a screen. My students rarely turned on their cameras, and my usual means of engagement had to change. This had me thinking back in the spring about being all things to all people (1 Corinthians 9:19-23). I work for a university that prides itself on low student to teach

Who wrote the book of Hebrews? One topic of apologetics is defending the reliability of scripture, typically I write about the general reliability of scripture and that the Bible has not been corrupted over time because we have ancient copies (Dead Sea Scrolls), and that the Bible is indeed history (defending historicity of the resurrection, Jesus existed, events of Old Testament, etc.), but today we will take a look at a new topic for me, the authorship of specific books of the Bible. This is more of a Christian to Christian conversation in my view, but since churches split over differences like this, it is worth it to pursue so we have a fair treatment of both sides and can have an honest discussion and hopefully maintain unity in the church, even if we come to different conclusions about issues like this. Today we are looking at the book of Hebrews, a book that really doesn’t have authorship attributed to it today, but is traditionally thought of as being written by Paul. Ancien

               With all the craziness going on the United States and the tearing down of statues and monuments, activist Shaun King has come out against “white depictions” of Jesus, stating that it is a form of white supremacy ( https://twitter.com/shaunking/status/1275106946916499456?lang=en ). He has also unfortunately allegedly received multiple death threats over this tweet, which I do not condone in the slightest. What I want to do, is look at the content of his tweet, and see if there is any reason to think that depictions of Jesus as a white man are any form of white supremacy. Spoiler alert, Mr. King is grasping at straws here, as best as I can tell. We are going to look at artwork from around the world and show that Jesus, and sometimes Mary, are depicted as the ethnicity of the time/culture. I acknowledge that there are some denominations that are uncomfortable with visual depictions of Jesus and we could have avoided the problem altogether, but alas, here we are.        

               I have recently done a series on an intro to apologetics, and in that series I took a look at some of the objections to the resurrection, but not necessarily evidences for the resurrection itself. I had left that to the people who have laid out some awesome evidences for the resurrection, such as Dr. Gary Habermas, Lee Strobel, and others. Recently, I saw a YouTube story, those short little snippets, pop up in my feed from Godless Engineer. He had a ten second clip of himself railing against Christian apologists saying that we have very weak lines of evidence to support the resurrection and that we would be laughed at to use them anywhere else, and cited the principle of embarrassment of the gospel authors as an example. For those who haven’t heard of this, the principle of embarrassment has been used by apologists to demonstrate the validity of scriptures, because the gospel authors wrote themselves as bumbling fools in the face of Jesus, and they reported other event

               To continue our series in “Christian-ese”, the words that Christians throw around that non-Christians may not totally understand, we look at another couple of words that get tossed around a lot by Christians are “Justification” and “Sanctification”. Let’s take a brief look at these and see what they mean for our faith as Christians.               Justification can be viewed as a legal term first, then what it means for us as Christians. As I am a concealed weapons permit holder, I always have to think about justification, in case I ever have to use my weapon in defense of myself or others. Justification means that we are acting within the law and that whatever actions we take are legal. For example, if I have to draw my weapon, I need to make sure that I am somewhere that I am  supposed to be, that my life or someone else's life is in imminent danger, and that I only acted to stop the threat, not to kill. For a concealed weapons holder, it is the difference betwe

               Easter week is an appropriate time to talk and think about the next part of this series to decode “Christian-ese” for the non—Christians and seekers. Salvation is one of the first ideas that evangelists bring about when they are trying to, well, evangelize, but sometimes they don’t have the best grasp on how to communicate that, and they wind up just brow beating people with scriptures, telling them they are evil and condemned to Hell.               To start with salvation, it may be useful to explain why we need it in the first place. We as human beings have a moral covenant with God, in that we have His moral law written on our hearts (Romans 2:15) and are expected to follow that moral law. When we break that moral law, we commit sin, and the consequence of that sin is death (Romans 3:23, Genesis 3). It may sound harsh, but God is described as all good, all just, and all holy, and he cannot tolerate sin, because if we enter into His holiness as sinful beings, we wo

               I’ve prayed a bit about this, and I feel lead to do another series. This time, I am going to tackle a series meant specifically for non-Christians, and try to explain “Christian-ese” the language and concepts Christians may use all the time that non-Christians may not. They simply may not understand or think that we are trying to confuse them on purpose. To start, I want to tackle the holy book of Christians, the word of God, the Bible.               What is the Bible? Christians believe that the Bible is the word of God, spoken to the writers, that they wrote down. The Bible is compiled of these inspired works over the centuries that it took for God’s plan to be revealed to us through the arrival of Jesus and the founding of the early church. Christians believe that the Bible is a living, breathing document, that helps us to learn the heart of God. It is a road map of the history of mankind in relation to God; where we came from, where we are now, and where we are

               I have to give a shout out to the indirect inspiration from this post, I saw a comment while looking at social media and this question popped up on Capturing Christianity’s page. I wanted to try and tackle this question myself. Christians argue that we have objective moral values and duties (see the moral argument for God’s existence), yet Christians have debates over what is moral to do in certain situations. Just look at social media for proof of this statement. If we have to debate over what is moral because the objective moral duty is not obvious, does that make morality subjective? I want to explore this question with this post.               We can look at this like we do scientific theories. There are plenty of competing theories about aspects of reality, but we do not say that science is subjective. We all have the notion that one theory will eventually win out and be the objective truth. We see this with morality. We may still argue over the details now, but

               When I get into discussions online with atheists and agnostics, typically I run into objections of the like that I do not have any evidence for God. What they typically mean by that is that they will only accept scientifically verifiable evidence for the existence of God. Not only can we provide one massive piece of scientific evidence for the existence of God in the form of the big bang theory, I want to demonstrate today that scientific evidence is not the only form of evidence that we consider in our day to day lives, and that non-theists move the goal posts of their usual day to day reasoning skills to deny an otherwise reasonable case for the existence of God.               I want to start off by talking about the 4 gospels at the beginning of the New Testament. These gospels are accounts written by 4 of the disciples of Christ. These are written as eyewitness testimony so that those who would read them would be convinced of the character and mission of Jesus. I