Apprentice Owl Apologetics

               I have been following the apologetics community on social media, and I have seen that channels like Capturing Christianity have been having discussions on Intelligent Design, and some detractors have been bringing up the “puddle problem” objection to intelligent design. I’m sure there are plenty of people who will be writing responses to this themselves, but I wanted to add my own two cents to the problem.               The puddle problem is a response to the Teleological Fine Tuning Argument for the existence of God. It says that humans are merely products (puddles) of the natural forces of the universe around us (the hole we find ourselves in). It is presented as an alternative to the claim that the universe is fine tuned for life by an outside mind. I may be misrepresenting, but it seems to me like the puddle problem totally misrepresents the Teleological argume...

                 I really didn’t want to get political so soon after I said was taking a break from this topic, and I really didn’t want a high profile topic like abortion, but God has a sense of humor like this, and I feel I must put in my two cents. Maybe it’s because I have plenty of pro-choice friends on social media blasting their pride in abortions (or the fact that people should be able to choose to kill their fetus) and even so-called conservative pages condemning Alabama and Georgia in their new laws being passed (and Missouri for considering it). Some of these people fought past issues with fertility to have the children they have in their arms today, so the apparent hypocrisy that I see infuriates me as well as breaks my heart. I wanted to give my thoughts on abortion, look at scripture to see if God values the unborn, and what I think the United States government should be doing about it. I don’t want to bash anyone, but I did w...

                 Eye-catching title aside, I wanted to write this as a sort of blanket response to critics of Christianity who like to nitpick certain aspects of scripture, such as slavery, polygamy, violence, and the like. The Bible is a collection of books, and these books are from multiple genres, such as history, poetry, ethics, songs, and so on. Focusing specifically on history, the Bible covers the history of the people of Israel, and other parties, necessary to understand the scope of God’s plan for humanity and the need for a savior. This history includes it all, and doesn’t white wash any of the players involved, showing their triumphs and failures. This is just the nature of a good historical narrative, and it doesn’t mean that we should do everything that the heroes of scripture that we learn about in Sunday school should do.                 For example...

On March 21, 2019, the UK Immigration Department rejected an asylum seeker, citing verses from Leviticus, Exodus, and Revelation to state that Christianity was not a peaceful religion. What I want to do today is to take a look at the Immigration Department’s claim about Christianity and see if what they have quoted is just cherry picked. So in a sweeping statement, Exodus and Leviticus were written as part of the Old Testament, and a little over 1000 years before Christianity came about, as part of the Old Covenant, which was fulfilled through Christ. The Old Covenant is also tied to the land that God wanted for the nation of Israel. It did involve God commanding Israel to drive out nations before them, but it was also God’s judgment on those other nations for their wicked deeds, such as child sacrifice. If anything these verses show a temporary command of violence for Judaism, but it was just that, temporary. Even here we digress, because we are talking about the “violence” of Chr...

               So we have covered the objections to the resurrection of Jesus, objections to the historicity of Jesus, and now we get to one of the most popular objections to Christianity. The objection goes something like this, the scribes for the Bible have made small mistakes over time, so there is no possible way that the Bibles we have today are the same as the scriptures that were originally written. What I would like to do today is present the evidence for the case that our scriptures that we have today in our bookstores/Christian supply stores are 99.999% identical to the earliest manuscripts that we have recovered from archaeological sites.               First, we should consider all of the ancient copies of scriptures that we have recovered and their dates. The events of the new testament are thought to have been originally written down between A.D. 50-100. We have port...

               To continue with my introductory apologetics series, I wanted to take a step back from the scriptures and Jesus and look at a matter of history. There is a staunch crowd that one can find on the internet that will claim that Christians are crazy for believing in Jesus because Jesus never existed at all. That Jesus is merely a myth like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Is this the case? Have roughly a third of the world deluded ourselves into believing in a myth? I think we will find that historical records, including those outside of the Bible, will side with the Christian. There is a secondary issue, or separate issue entirely depending on who you are talking to, that Jesus did exist, but he wasn’t the son of God, and that the council of Nicea was responsible for the deification of Jesus. What I want to do today is take a brief look at the extra biblical sources for the existence of Jesus and the writings of church fathers to show...

               I have been feeling recently that I needed to get back to basics for apologetics, as my original intent of this blog was to communicate what I have learned as I studied apologetics. I don’t discount my more recent work, but I may have been getting into a rut of writing opinion pieces about current events and politics. I may still contribute a post or two in 2019, but my main goal for the next few months is to write a series that looks at the topics that I think should be “basic training” for up and coming apologists. The first question that I want to look at are objections to the resurrection of Jesus, since that is the cornerstone of our faith (1 Corinthians 15:14).               What I mean by objections to the resurrection, are people who look at the scriptures and think that there are glaring wholes in the gospels that exclude the idea of the resurrection. This...