Maybe

Last updated on: November 16, 2013 at 9:09 am By James F. McGrath

Maybe this is why young-earth creationism is so disturbing and offensive. Young-earth creationists will pretend that mainstream science journals are not filled with abundant evidence for evolution – the course it has taken, the processes involved, and the genetic changes that underpin it. They will point to the things that scientists do not yet know, as though gaps in our knowledge were an argument against the best reconstruction experts have been able to put together. When pieces to a puzzle... Read more

Learn to Roll Your Rs

Last updated on: November 16, 2013 at 8:27 am By James F. McGrath

I have long wanted to be able to make the rolled “r” sound that one finds in Italian, Spanish, Romanian, and many other languages. Until recently I was unsuccessful. But I have made major progress over the past week or so, and I thought I would share what has helped. First, stop thinking of this letter as some kind of “r.” That can throw you off. It sometimes helps to think of it as a kind of “d” as that... Read more

The Joy of Doctor Who

Last updated on: November 16, 2013 at 7:23 am By James F. McGrath

IO9 drew attention to the above commercial for the documentary “Adventures in Space and Time” about the start of Doctor Who. It looks like it is going to be wonderful. Check out the photos on the IO9 site. See also the new book that IO9 drew attention to, Doctor Who: The Vault: Treasures from the First 50 Years, which includes a great deal of trivia, including the connection between Doctor Who and a famous book the title of which begins... Read more

Sneak Peek of The Day of the Doctor (Children in Need)

Last updated on: November 15, 2013 at 4:31 pm By James F. McGrath

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Frequency of Miracles

Last updated on: November 15, 2013 at 9:22 am By James F. McGrath

From TheMetaPicture.com via Pinterest Anyone who has looked into this will know that it is incorrect – for as long as there has been photography, there have been photos of allegedly supernatural or paranormal things. Photoshot is just a more convenient tool for the task. But it is interesting to ask why, despite the fact that few people actually claim to have experienced a miracle themselves, belief in such things has not waned in the manner that modern skeptics and... Read more

Seeing God

Last updated on: November 15, 2013 at 8:14 am By James F. McGrath

Kermit Zarley recently sought to make a clever Christological point based on the premise of divine invisibility. The Gospel of John says that no one has ever seen God, and so therefore Jesus who is visible cannot be God. While there is a whole theme one could discuss here, related to the notion found in Colossians 1:15 about Jesus being the image of the invisible God, I actually want to talk about something else. In the Old Testament, the language... Read more

Newton's Three Laws of Graduation

Last updated on: November 15, 2013 at 7:31 am By James F. McGrath

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The Canon of Whovian Scripture

Last updated on: November 14, 2013 at 11:31 pm By James F. McGrath

As some fans of Doctor Who have already noted, the inclusion of mention of companions of the Eight Doctor's from audiobooks in the prequel minisode “The Night of the Doctor” seems to give the stamp of canonicity to those stories. Of course, that conclusion perhaps needs to be tempered by the fact that even the TV movie featuring the Eight Doctor is not always treated as genuinely canonical – the whole notion of the Doctor being half human on his... Read more

The Liberal Bible

Last updated on: November 14, 2013 at 2:03 pm By James F. McGrath

Benjamin Corey has written two posts, one about how reading the Bible makes you more liberal, the other about how reading the Bible makes you more progressive. (See the Patheos Progressive Christian Digest for this and more!) In related news, Bob Cargill drew attention to the fact that, if you missed last night’s episode of “Bible Secrets Revealed,” you can now watch it online for free. And for an example of backfiring prooftexting, I came across this quote from the... Read more

The Night of the Doctor

Last updated on: November 14, 2013 at 12:41 pm By James F. McGrath

This prequel to the 50th anniversary special is itself something special. It brings back to the show the Doctor who had the least time on the screen, Paul McGann’s Eight Doctor. And it gives us a glimpse of the impact of the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks, the extent to which the former had become no better than the latter in seeking to defeat them, and how the Doctor moved from refusing to get entangled in... Read more