Uber Genius

This is absolutely true. The majority of funding for climate research come from the National Science Foundation and they will not fund proposals that don't infer climate change as a result of human industrialization. I was informed by a climatologist at a Big Ten school that he could not fund his proposals for historic warming and cooling trends sans the demonstration of direct coorelation to industrialization. He tell his grad students not to submit dissertations that don't conform to NSF trends unless you are NOT planning on working as a professor anywhere in the US. follow the research and follow who universities are hiring and why and you can see an agenda that has little to do with inductive method and evidence-based practice. Similarly, only those professors with tenure have the freedom to work on the origin of speciation without a NeoDarwinian inference. Climate change is is complex but we can see where scientists have fudged their computer models to produce the desired outcomes. So I have hope we can get back to evidence-based science rather than propaganda as the driver. Historical sciences, like answering the question of what accounts for speciation, are much more complex than climate, and lends themselves to endless ad hoc inferences that are quickly offered as ironclad proof by popular science journals. Crap philosophy of science leads to junk science and a sichophantic secular press and atheists desperate for evidence in support of their naturalistic premises are like a heard of pigs racing down a steep bank into the water. All semblance of a cogent account of speciation will be drowned in an incoherent sea of madness.

Love Dr. MIchael Heiser's work and videos! The intertestimental works should be read at least to give us the context of some of the thinking of that culture. Several NT writers quote passages out of 1 Enoch. Many church fathers argued for canonization of some of these books and quote from them. That said a quick read will demonstrate the dubious inconsistency of the historical accounts. I use them to help understand the some of the beliefs common to the intertestimental culture. Now that we have over 100,000 new translations of Dead Sea Scroll texts I look forward to compendiums on the 700-year period of 400 BCE to 300 CE generally.

Extremely controversial issue. That is to say that if you ask five Christian scholars (not laypeople regurgitating stuff they read on the Internet) that question you are going to get many different views! So how to approach the question? Parse it. Will the gays or anyone living in sin go to hell? There are four views of hell: - Eternal conscious torment - Universal Salvation - Anihilationism - purgation Also we can look at how someone is saved: - trust in the person of Jesus, that he is God and specifically that his sacrifice on the cross is available to forgive our sin now and in the future conditioned on our confession. - we are saved by grace as above but maintain our salvation by works - we obtain our salvation through a combination of church membership, confession, baptism, Eucharist, even marriage - we are saved by works and maintain our salvation by good works alone. Finally the topic of sanctification of which their are 5 or so views which I won't elaborate at this time. Point is when someone responds "Well reading the Bible in a language it wasn't written in, without reference to exegesis of passages, as if it was written to my culture (which it wasn't), and given that I delete the topics relation to sacred space in Jewish Levitical law, and further ignore discussions of all the passages regarding unrepentant sin (see 1 Cor 3:12-15), and if I ignore the grammar of the texts regarding sinners not inheriting the kingdom of God, I can tell you that the gays are certainly going to hell," we may have reason to be dubious of their conclusion. That said, it could be the case that all unrepentant sin ends up sending people to hell. We might look at Gal. 5:19-21, followed by 22,23. we could also look at Gal 3. Why did Paul call those who demanded sinless perfection as a believer "Foolish," "Ignorant," and "Bewitched," which when last I checked were not superlatives. We could ask why the author of Hebrews represents Jesus as our eternal mediator. One far greater than The Law or angels.

So we don't have a defense of evil and suffering in our world anywhere in the Bible and yet this objection is the single largest barrier for non-theists across recorded history (at least since 225-250 B.C.E) so why would we expect the author to intuit lack of understanding by readers that would occur thousands of years after writing it? There are currently 7 viable conservative views of Gen 1 account of creation by scholars. So clarity is not an option, which leave "not important," as the other alternative in your rubric. There is contraversy about the lexical meaning of Bara and Yom both of which are required to nail down a specific interpretive theory for the meaning of the creation account. Structure has elements of anaphora and chiasms, center all to poetry and yet some (non-scholars) claim the language isn't poetic. Hebrew grammar inveigh's against YEC view presented by Ham, Morris, Gish, yet their version is oft repeated and adopted as the "only theory," by pastors. There are are even deniers of the framework 2 sets of three days (again not by scholars so much as laymen). So given the elements mentioned above we don't have clarity and are therefore tautologically left with it doesn't much matter in the scope of living out our lives as Christian disciples.

So I think that we have a number of various interpretive theories for Gen 1:1-2:3. I haven't landed on one that is compelling currently. YEC is certainly a live option. One of the misunderstandings is that if I assert a poetic (Chiasm) struction rather than say a narrative one, that somehow poetry can't accommodate a literal 6-day creation and that is false. I don't hold the YEC as my top of the seven theories due to some common problems with light and dark before the sun, misrepresentations of scientific findings by certain YEC proponents (Gish, Morris, Ham), the eisegesis of the text rather than exegesis. But we can strip all those issues out and still make a case, but I think it is more likely Moses was writing an account that was a nuanced version of accounts he had read from various cultures during the Mesopotamian Bronze Age. This would explain why accounts that are a 1000 years earlier are so similar. I do think the author retails these accounts to correct the record with info he has received from God. Bringing us back to the topic of suspicion of science and scientist, YEC and their proponents are directly responsible for these views among Fundamentalists and even Evengelicals. it is nothing but a rhetorical trick. Impugn the character and one can ignore the argument! But those whom have the benefit of a Logic 101 class understand that the ad hominem attack is fallacious. imagine I am arguing why theism is true. I give cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, moral and transcendent arguments in support of theism. Now imaging that I'm also being treated for severe psychosis with delusional ideations. What does that new fact do to my arguments? Nothing whatsoever! My my arguments are based on premises and facts that are not effected by the person presenting them in the least. All this condescension does is highlight the lack of education of the person mocking scientists and their beliefs. This is doesn't mean we need to take scientific pronouncements as gospel. Science knowledge changes over time, and some scientific claims are very-well established and others are dubious. LEt's strive to understand the world God has given us sans conspiracy theories.

The context of this discussion is essential vs non-essential Christian Doctrine. Just like the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, insurance, banking, theology has a special lexicon with terms that have technical meanings that differ from how those terms are used elsewhere. I brought up the distinction of essential/non-essential to get some young earth creationists to stop the ad hominem attacks, strawmen misrepresentations, and appeals to ridicule aimed at individuals who wanted to examine the evidence to all the various views. However the individual I was trying to help was unfamiliar with the technical usage in theology and created a equivocation which has led down a rabbit trail. Essential Doctrine is usually associated with the doctrines outline in the various ecumenical creeds from the apostles creed to the Nicene creed through the chalcedonian and Ephesian creeds ending in 451 C. E. Point is holding a YEC view is not considered by any scholar, or Church Historian to be an essential Christian Doctrine. Rupertus Meldeniu developed a phrase around the first half of the 1600s that read, "In Essentials Unity, in Non-Essentials Liberty, in All Things Charity." Once we determine that holding YEC view is not "Essential," according to the technical meaning of that word in the field of Theology, we can affirm Liberty. Unfortunately instead of comprehending my point, we got an equivocation followed by a strawman, followed by an affirmation that they don't need no edumacation from the likes of me. Hope this helps,

Yes. I totally agree that to misrepresent the text and ignore the best explanation of what the authors is trying to say is carnal and intellectually immature. Where we disagree is that I'm not certain which of the seven conservative Evangelical views correctly represents the author is any, and I'm willing to represent the views accurately rather than impugning motives of the authors of those views which has both elements of the genetic fallacy and the ad hominem fallacy. I assume we will not be getting past the fallacious reasoning and onto which explanation of the 7 gives the best account of the data of scripture anytime soon.

As with ALL WRITING, Interpret in relation to context, genre, figures of speech, internal consistency. Hermeneutical and exegetical guidelines have been available since the Reformation and beyond! Read authors of Biblical texts the way you would any text. Thou art giving us an exempli gratia of the very maturity challenges of which I spoke! Thank you. Does one lose their salvation because they beleive in a post-trib rapture if pretrib is correct? Does one lose salvation because they have a Wesleyian view of eternal security rather than say Calvinist? Does one lose one's salvation because they hold to a Augustinian-dispensation all view of sanctification rather than say a Kesickian or Weslian view? If your answer to any of those three questions above is, "No," then they are classified in both ecclesiastical and systematic theological terms as "Non-essential!" Please refrain from making stuff up when a thirty-second search on Google could have provided you with an answer and saved me the effort of educating someone who so clearly despises education.

I have run into numerous people whom lack of understanding about how the scriptures came to us and how we exegete rather than eisegete passages. The more mature (both intellectually and emotionally) brothers and sisters recognize that beliefs about origins, or end times, even things like orthodox vs. Catholic, vs. Protestant do not mean much in terms of the core essential truths of Christinity. I try to engage in a way that educates those who want to go deeper, and to at least expose the unintended consequences to some of the poorly researched, poorly thought out views.

This is not helpful. It is just condescending. Please help by specifying exactly where the logic errors or systematic theology errors are and save the pedantics for the New Atheists and their ilk.

Yep. Internal, External, and Bibliographical tests all intersect in terms of proving reliability of a historical text. They just differ in method and content. So the same text has a theme, and some historical details that may be corroborated outside the text, as soon as one looks outside the text for corroboration it is External. But when says what are the chances that forty authors writing about numerous controversial issues have a high degree of cohesion or agreement even throw the authors span many cultures and as much as 1500 years we see reliability. But we only examined data within the text to provide premises in support of reliability of the Bible, so that analysis would be Internal.

So the topic is not about me producing some justification for a particular view as I said earlier, but rather engaging the data of scripture methodically so as to understand what the original audience would have understood. Engaing as a "grade-schooler would" is already falsified by your asking me to provide evidence. So grade-schoolers haven't yet learned about rational arguments supported by premises that are in turn explanations of text or things like genre. Grade-schoolers don't know intuitively that ancient books were not only written in foreign languages by authors who read books common to their own foreign cultures. Grade-schoolers are unfamiliar with stylistic features common to Mesopotamian cultures 3000 years ago which explains ideas like a firmament, or why authors exaggerated about size of armies and military victories rather than just report factually. Grade-schooler Havent master interpreting authors who write using metaphorical language and figures of speech let alone elements of speech that have been out of usage for two thousand or more years. Cultural, language, grammar, genre, meta thematic-ignorance is no way to engage the scriptures that are divinely inspired and that men have sacrificed their lives to maintain, translate, and expose future generation to IMHO. A quick Google search entitled poetic elements found in Genesis 1 should yield a treasure trove of research. Good news is that one doesn't have to have a PhD to benefit from their research and expertise. The other good news is one should be able to find scholars in support of both young and old Earth positions. There are currently 7 separate theories as to how to interpret Genesis 1, all of which are by Evangelical authors who affirm the inspiration of scripture.

This seems to be wrong on its face. Evolution on says nothing about God's existence one way or the other. You may be conflating "Naturalism," with ,"Evolution." There are plenty of Christians that beleive that evolution describes how God populated the Earth with a wide variety of living organisms. That God used evolution as a secondary cause like gravity. We don't drop a glass and when it hits the floor say, "God caused my glass to fall and hit the floor." Further if God created the first life knowing Homo sapiens would evolve and once they get to achieve a certain level of intellectual capacity he will choose a male and female and give those two creatures souls creating a literal Adam and Eve, it is unclear how we lose original sin, or a need for an atoning savior,etc. I don't hold that view above currently, but I don't find it to be incoherent as you suggest.

While I heartily agree with you Agustine reference the second law of thermodynamics has some problems. i do agree that the blanket statement about the second law of thermodynamics eliminates the possibility of evolution being true, we certainly have some more work to do before we concede your larger point. "According to Fred Hoyle's analysis, the probability of cellular life's arising from non-living matter (abiogenesis) was about one-in-1040,000.[5] He commented: Hoyle was an atheist and certainly had no YEC-axe to grind yet he seems to recognize something true of both abiogenesis as well as of NeoDarwinian theory. Both assume that a random process is producing a very unlikely, tightly specified result. We we don't just need to explain energy, which you did nicely, we need to explain order from disorder fitting a closely specified pattern. A random process need to require enormous order in the way of DNA to provide basic function. Further, the more we discover about evolutionary biology the more complexity we have to account for. What you have accounted for is the physical matters energy requirements. It is like giving the formula for a magnetic surface on a metal platter and saying, "See, now this accounts for 50 million lines of code in MS Windows 10." Something has has gone wrong here certainly. So while your specific point seems correct and I applaud the larger nature of your topic, the second law of thermodynamics is getting at the creation of order from disorder. And specifically the rapid appearance of complex specified information, which is not explained in the least by energy inputs.

What does this topic have to do with Science and Faith apologetics? Should this be a discussion about theology of Heaven or eschatology? How would I use this to discuss scientific evidence in support of God's existence?

The article is poorly-worded but no beaks grew! Birds with bigger beaks outcompeted with their fellow kites due to their larger beaks being better adapted to get at seeds inside of tough cones. This feature is dominant just like right-handedness is dominant (>85% of population). 8-12% of the kite population had larger beaks in just two generations. So what? If if we look at 3 inferences: YEC, ID, OEC (God uses secondary causes through evolution) the data gathered can be equally explained by all three inferences. What the evolutionist (especially someone defending naturalism (godless variety of evolution) has to demonstrate is the creation of a new species. So our kite must keep growing beak size until it becomes a toucan! The zebra must directionally turn into a giraffe. We have countless examples of oscillation around a norm. What we lack in the extreme is scientific data of directionality. When we see faster than anticipated results we don't abandon gradualism. We ask, "Is our model of gradualism too narrow given this new data?" There are outliers (data that doesn't comport to the predicted outcome) in every experiment! We certainly don't turn and say, "Well, since that doesn't fit perfectly, I must throw out my model and affirm some other hypothesis. It just means that your relationship between independent and dependent variables is more complex than your model suggests. So while this data does nothing to support a YEC model let alone prove that to be the proper theory. It does nothing to support directional speciation which is necessary if we are to beleive NeoDarwinian evolution is the best explanation for population and variation of life we currently see on Earth.

I think the problem is much greater than just giving offense to a small percentage of the population. The problem is that Christians and non-Christians alike should have their epistemic (method of gaining knowledge) focus on acquiring true beliefs about the world they live in. We all hold false beliefs. Every time we learn or reverse our position based on new evidence we are eliminating false beliefs (or in some cases no belief) with true beliefs. Why can't our scientists be doing the same project? We would expect that if the world had been created 8000-10000 years ago we would have actual scientists touting experimental data in support of same. When we we examine argument after argument of YEC educators misrepresenting scientific findings to affirm an accent account of Genesis 1 and 2 that few Evangelical scholars hold, we commit the fallacy of consequentialism. God is no less creator if he is a primary originator of living organisms, and primary cause of DNA but not secondary. Certainly every Christian would grant that gravity and other physical laws that govern are universe operate secondarily and continuously without God's intervention. We don't say, when we drop a glass and it falls to the floor, "God caused my glass to fall," do we? Yet we interpret a 3500-yr old document like we had PhDs in Semetic languages and pronounce that knowledge of the culture, and it's poetic use of yom must only be interpreted literally in a fashion that any grade-schooler would interpret it. Absurd! we need to care about God's revelation more than we do the shedding of false beliefs it seems. Follow the data of science and see what inference best explains those data. Further follow the data of the text of Genesis 1 and 2 and see which inference best explains those data. Let the ad hominems commence.

Liked the discussion. It seems that the reason God gave us faculties to explore and discover our world and the ability to perceive it through our senses, rational thinking, memories, testimony,many introspection was that he wanted us to know the world he created. Romans 1:19-20 suggests that God created a world that testified about his attributes. Not exhaustively, but certainly some of his essential attributes. Why then would he misrepresent the "Things that were made," to have the appearance of age? Does es he want people to know about him through his creation or is he lying to them through his "Appearence of age?"

Recently, a well-educated individual posted a great response to a exegetically fallacious rendering of a passage. He was technically astute and handle the hermeneutics flawlessly, then he made one of the most ignorant remarks I have heard in a long while. "The majority of Western culture has held a false scientific view of the world as being flat, due to the influence of the Bible on our science understanding." Here is the research: False Flat Earth Myth According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."[1] Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".[2] Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-Earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over biological evolution. Russell claims "with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat", and ascribes popularization of the flat-Earth myth to histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, andWashington Irving.[3,4,5] Atheists in the late 18th and 19th centuries were largely responsible for falsely propagating this myth in order to support an ad hominem attack on theists and especially Christians. Don't be suckered by myths invented by atheists. Call them on this fallacious trick to claim all Christians come from a scientifically ignorant culture. Notes: 1. Gould, Stephen J. (2011) [1999], "Columbus and the Flat Earth: An Example of the Fallacy of Warfare between Science and Religion", Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (e-book ed.), New York: Random House LLC,ISBN 978-0-307-80141-8 2. Lindberg, David C.; Numbers, Ronald L. (1986), "Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science", Church History, Cambridge University Press, 55 (3): 338–354, doi:10.2307/3166822,JSTOR 3166822 3. Russell, Jeffrey Burton (1991), Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and modern historians, New York: Praeger, ISBN 0-275-95904-X 4. Russell, Jeffrey Burton (1993), "The Flat Error: The Modern Distortion of Medieval Geography", Mediaevalia, 15: 337–353 5. Russell, Jeffrey Burton (1997), "The Myth of the Flat Earth", Studies in the History of Science, American Scientific Affiliation, retrieved 2007-07-14

Now before someone has a TIA, I'm a theist. But I also abhor bad arguments and misrepresentations of scripture, and science. In 2001 or 2002 I was invited by a Christian friend to see a presentation by an Aussie named Ken Ham. It was not just eye-opening, but a jaw-dropping experience. I listened for an hour to claims about scripture which were not supported historically or from scripture. But more disturbing was the misrepresentation about scientific claims, scientific knowledge, and how one should approach these discussions with "skeptics." Now have no intention of being drawn into debates about young-earth vs. old-earth theories, or detailed entailment so of "How God created." My primary concern is to highlight bad arguments coming from Ham and his ministry. My hope is that I can dissuade theists from using such constructions in favor of sound and compelling rational arguments. Now Ham has changed some of his approach in the last 15 years so my notes may no longer be representative of his views. 1 - Evolution and the Big Bang Model of cosmology are just "Theories!" Now if you have read some of my other, "Tricks," treads you will be familiar with this informal fallacy...equivocation. The Oxford dictionary defines the word "Equivocation," as, "The use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself." This equivocation is always meant to deceive. But it only deceives the uneducated and those to lazy to do the research. "Theory" in scientific parlance means an inductive inference about the data that has withstood the test of time, hundreds or thousands of confirmatory experiments, and is accepted by all the experts as knowledge. In common usage it is equivocal to a hypothesis. That is a inference that explains data. The trick Ham wants you to miss is he is substituting common usage for scientific usage. Just the way new atheists often want to misrepresent atheism as lack of belief or faith as a way of knowing. If we doesn't pay attention to the fact that "atheism" and "faith" have specific meanings in the fields of philosophy and theology respectively, we can be dragged into equivocations meant to misguide and conflate, with statements like, "common usage is ..." 2 - "We're you there?" Here we find the most damning argument against Ham and his methodology. After Ham's presentation a student asked the question, "How do you account for all the dinosaur fossils that are millions of years old." Without missing a beat Ham responded, "We're you there?" His point was to create skepticism about scientific findings unless we had first-hand knowledge of the events. I decided not to embarrass the fellow. But I did ask him after the talk how he demonstrated the validity of the historical info about Jesus' death and resurrection. He blurted out a bunch of one-liners, to which I responded, "We're you there?" Puzzled, he hesitated and then kept giving me evidence as if he had deleted the cognitively dissonant revelation altogether. Point is Ham's epistemic approach destroys all scientific and historical knowledge. In fact legal knowledge is greatly injured as well as no one on a jury could every "know' something based on eye-witness testimony. Ham is perhaps the Christian equivalent of the plethora of Internet infidels found out on places like YouTube. This is a step below the new atheists in that they are unaware of historic claims, and philosophical claims, and logic in general. Both appeal to a poorly educated audiences focusing on rhetorical flourish alone. (P.S. I have relatives that fall for this Answers in Genesis propaganda) Please share other theistic tricks you have run into. However, beware not to regurgitate internet infidel propaganda mindlessly. They create straw men of theistic arguments and attack those as "fallacious." Straw arguments always make poor substitutes for real ones.

External evidence test has to do with archeological and historical facts such as Luke's specification of censuses, names of procouncils, and other Roman prefects, existence of towns, cities, architectural features that were known to exist mid-first century. It it does not look at coherence of the ideas in the narrative. Internal evidence has to do with answering, "How reliable is the Biblical account? It asks why would there would be such a tight agreement by 40+ authors on dozens of controversial issues spanning dozens of cultures, over a period of 1500 years. It drills down on individual accounts by specific authors. It looks to see if there are any contradictions in their accounts. It looks to see if their account can be supported by other historical accounts. Does the authors account fit in with other known facts, or even better, does it produce unintended consequences of filling in details of another separate account that make that account more coherent. One can apply the internal evidence test to the credibility of any historical work. We could ask similar question about Shelby Foote's account of the Civil War. So this is a common method to all historiography 101 classes.

Well the same way you would respond to someone who claims the Copernican model of the universe is the best explanation of the scientific data we have about the universe. Explain how most ancient cultures adopted the Ptolemaic view that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Then argue that all science is corrupt. Then argue the Bible has only source of truth, and that there is only one (not 7 as most Evangelical scholars claim) possible interpretation(s) for Gen 1 and 2. And then pronounce loudly, "The Bible said it, I beleive it, that settles it!" And walk away before any counter-argument can ensue.

These are completely arbitrary! space / time/matter/energy -4 so that points to a quadrinary nature right? night/day black/white computers are binary switches are binary propositions are either true or false therefore the godhead is binary! See the problem with reading in a false relationship between examples of sets of three items and extending those examples as evidentiary support of the Trinity. It allows anyone to read into scripture any idea they want. It gives a license to create heretical theology. I would focus on God being the first-cause or uncaused cause. God is the origin of moral standards, oughts and duties. God is the origin of design (complex specified information) God is the origin of beauty God is the best explanation for mankind's search for meaning. These items above are cross-cultural truths recognized by the best thinkers for over 2500 years. That at seems to be enough info to drive one towards a deeper inspection of who God is as revealed in the scriptures. philosophers have discussed this point since Augustine and have agreed that while we can kno God exists from things that are made, we can only intuit characteristics like all-powerful, all-knowing, personal, loving, not bounded by time, eternal! We require God's special revelation through the scriptures to unfold His triune nature, or that Jesus is the messiah, or that the HS and the Father don't have bodies, etc.

Tape recording a conversation is both easy and legal in most states. It can serve to expose the things leaders only want to tell you in private. Learned this his the hard way in 2004 with a pastor who lied to me and about me then claimed he never said any such thing. My best friend had just sued someone for defamation and had acquired secret recording equipment he wore under his cloths. I borrowed the equipment but never had a chance to engage that pastor one-on-one again. One should be slow to engage. I left a ministry post but not the Church. I reported the details of the incident to the senior pastor in a letter. Ten years after the incident and 8 years after the assistant pastor left the senior pastor told me that I was the first of a half-dozen people who made similar claims of defamation and he regretted not firing the assistant pastor. it can be a difficult task to assess whether a leader is emotionally immature or a wolf in sheeps clothing. My 43-year history with church leaders suggests that sycophants, rather than mature disciples who have proven themselves worthy to minister, are most likely to be promoted to lay leadership, or even pastoral roles.

Textbook example of the genetic fallacy! No need to proceed with any discussion. But for humor's sake one can respond, "Were you believe there is no God because it gives you peace you wouldn't have elsewise because you live a godless lifestyle?" I prefer to avoid incoherent claims altogether. Another genetic fallacy, "We only beleive in God or act morally because we are programmed by evolution to do so." Laughable, yet incoherence is the cross we bear these days when having to suffer New Atheists' arguments.