Mr. Moderate

Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

There are many barriers that mankind cannot cross and return. Hamlet (above) referred to the barrier between life and death. Billions of years ago, the first living things on Earth arose. Since that time, none have died and returned to life so far as science is concerned; at least none for which a sufficiently-loose definition of the word “died” is applied. True death must mean more than mere sleep or hibernation. Some species plant their seeds and disappear for many years, only to reappear on cue when their time comes around once again. Such life-forms are not truly “dead” in the sense implied by the above verses.
Continue reading ‘The Undiscoverable Country’ »

Most English translations of the Christian Bible begin with words like these:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Well, this isn’t a blog post about the word “God” in the above quote, but rather about the word “beginning.” Some prominent Christian apologists (for instance, William Lane Craig) want to take the scientific theory of the Big Bang and assert that this event in the past history of our universe is a “beginning.” Well, I suppose that the nuclear explosion at the Trinity test site in New Mexico was in some sense a “beginning” (it was the first manmade nuclear explosion), but it did not mark “the beginning of time” in any real sense. And frankly, I see no real reason to view the Big Bang as “the beginning of time” in any sense more than the Trinity test explosion.
Continue reading ‘The “Big Bang” Is Not A Beginning’ »