Evolution

Pro doesn"t find youtube a credible source. This is a smart way of avoiding the evidence by attacking the source. For example, he wants to claim that the NT historians I mentioned are biased Christians, yet, in the youtube debate I posted with Bart Erhman and Mike Licona, Erhman argues many reasons why he doesn"t trust the New Testament, and its skeptical scholars like these who accept the empty tomb, the appearances, and the origin of the disciples" belief. Being NT historians doesn"t make skeptics like James Crossley and John Crossan into Christians. So if Pro has evidence that youtube has edited footage of Bart Erhman"s speech, please provide it, otherwise, stop these claims that youtube isn"t a credible source. As for the Shroud of Turin, all the sources are listed in that youtube presentation so you know where they got the information from. It would take up lost of word space for me to write them all out here, but if Pro insists that I do that (which won"t leave much space to deal with his arguments) I will have to. I just hope he doesn"t complain afterwards that I ignored his arguments, because there are plenty of sources given in that youtube presentation. I'll also treat Pro the fact that the shroud appears in the 1192-1195 AD Pray Manuscript, showing the 1260-1390 AD C-14 dating o the shroud to be in error. http://www.google.com... The actual images were presented in the youtube presentation last round. Pro wants reliable source; is National Geographic good enough for you? New "findings greatly increase the possibility that the shroud may be as old as Christianity itself." http://www.google.com... Furthermore, NT historians don"t assume that Jesus existed, nor do they generally believe the Bible. They come at the Bible in the same way they approach other works of antiquity, applying historical methods of investigation to determine which parts of the NT can be verified as historical fact and which cannot. Even though many of them do not accept the Bible as true, they do accept these facts as historical " that Jesus existed, was crucified by Romans during Pilate"s reign, was buried in tomb, that his disciples had some kind of experiences of seeing him alive afterwards, and the origin of the disciples" belief in his resurrection. Most NT historians don"t even believe in the resurrection, but they can"t deny the facts associated with it on historical grounds. Instead of assuming, they accept that Jesus existed because we have good evidence that he did from Tacitus' Annals and the works of Jewish historian Josephus, both in the 1st entury C.E. "the position that the gospels are a type of ancient BIOGRAPHY is the consensus among scholars today." http://www.google.com... Historians generally agree that the genre of the New Testament is historical biography,not religious text, and just like any other ancient document such as Tacitus Annals, and Josephus" Jewish Antiquities, they don"t treat the Bible as inspired by God, but as a historical document with errors, because all historical documents have errors in them to some degree. When applying the same kind of tests they use with other ancient documents, they find the NT passes these tests better than other ancient documents. For the events of Jesus" burial, empty tomb, appearances and origin of the disciples" belief, we have records written closer to the time of the events than most other ancient documents, is multiply attested by eyewitnesses and contemporaries " more so than other documents, its oldest extant copy is closer to the time of writing than other ancient documents, it passes embarrassment criteria (I can give examples if Pro wants), and the list goes on and on. So to reject the NT as historical, we"d have to reject all the documents we have from Homer, Plato, Thucidides, Herodotus, Josephus, Tacitus, and others, because their works don"t pass the tests of historicity as well as the NT does. I"d also like to point out that Pro"s argument against accepting historical claims from NT historians who are Christians is unjustified because in that case we can"t accept the testimony of Jews when they tell us about the holocaust or black people when they write about slavery. Charges of bias are too easy to make. I could argue that Pro"s sources are biased because they come mostly from atheists and agnostics who have an axe to grind against religion. This kind of argument gets us nowhere on both sides. If you have evidence that my sources are deliberately lying, or inaccurate in some way, please present the evidence, but don"t expect the voters to dismiss the evidence just because some of it may come from Christians sources, for you wouldn"t want me to dismiss your evidence just because it comes from atheistic sources. Having a belief does not mean that a person will be biased when doing his job, be it in history, medicine, science, or otherwise. We trust professionals to acts professionally, truthfully, despite what they may believe on a personal level. Doctors who are Christians generally do good medicine, no less than atheists. They don"t just pray over their patients, no, they do prescribe medication. I see no reason to believe all historians who are Christians deliberately distort history, anymore than Muslim, Jewish, or Atheist historians. Far being Christians, historians in general know from evidence Jesus existed. "Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically." http://www.google.com... Note it doesn't say Christians, but all modern scholars of antiquity. Like the NT, the Quar"an can also be examined under the tests of history which historians use, and it has. You can find a comparison between how the Bible and the Quar"an measure up here. http://www.google.com... http://www.google.com... http://www.google.com... Note, Pro ignored the three-dimensional encoded photo-negative image on the shroud. He can"t explain how this is possible naturally, for it"s a miracle. Evidence that shows Jesus was who he claimed to be. Thus, when he says man was created by God, we should trust him. My opponent then charges me with denying we can tell the distance from the earth to the sun. Actually, we have satellites that have reached father than the sun, and we can track them, we know their speed, so we can do accurate calculations. We get photos from these satellites, I"d challenge Pro to show me a photo of how much carbon-14 decayed in month. He can"t, cause no one has observed it; we do observe the sun. We have telescopes that can zoom in to magnify objects in space, and along with the fact that we can measure the speed of light BY OBSERVATION, we can deduce how far away celestial objects are. We can see with our eyes and time the movement of the light from a supernova. http://www.google.com... We can't see carbon decay. I'll deal with Pro's other arguments next round as I'm out of space. Yet, he can"t prove his dates are accurate, so how then does he know evolution happened at all? Without his millions of years, he doesn"t have enough time, according to him. But he can"t prove the millions of years to begin with. Yes, a virus can become immune to a vaccine, so how does this prove that 2 million years from now it won"t still be just a virus? By proper diet and exercise humans can become less prone to catching the cold, this doesn"t show that we are slowly becoming anything other than human. I also wonder what are these "large" changes that Pro claims happened with E-coli? Previously he argued it takes millions of years to see radical changes, so I guess large doesn"t mean radical for him. Pro denies that evolution teaches simple beginnings, then defines evolution as "The sequence of events depicting the evolutionary development of a species or of a group of related organisms; phylogeny." He doesn"t tell you that the sequence of events depicting the evolution of life on earth begins with simple monomers to polymers to protoboint, till you reach a cell and so on. But no simple life-forms were found, ever. Even a bacteria i