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Saturday, December 22, 2012

Mystery Religions

The so-called 'mystery religions' were a variety of religious movements from the eastern Mediterranean that flourished in te early Roman Empire. They offered salvation in a tight-knit community. They were called mystery religions because those who were initiated into them were sworn to secrecy. They had sacred rites, often a common meal, and a special sanctuary.

The oldest of the Mystery Religions would be the Eleusinian cult of Demeter, which was already established in the Archaic Age of Greece, which would be from 800 to 500 BC. The latest, and certainly the most popular in the later Roman Empire, was the mysteries of Mithras, who started as a Persian god. There were also the mysteries of Cybele and Attis, which were restricted to non-Romans until the middle or late first century.

These religions were tied to the vegetation cycle. The group that later popularized the idea that Jesus' resurrection was derived from the worsship of dying and rising fertility gods was a group of scholars known as Religions-geschichtliche schule. The so-called History of Religions School, which flourished at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. The seminal work by Richard Reitzenstein was published in German in 1910 but not translated into English until 1978. He thought the sacrifice of Christ aligned itself wth the killing of a bull by Mithras. Carsten Colpe and others severely criticized the anachronistic use of sources by these scholars.

On the popular level, Sir James Frazer gathered a mass of parallels in his multivolume work called The Golden Bough, which was published in 1906. He discussed Osiris of Egypt, Adonis of Syria, Attis of Asia Minor, and Tammuz of Mesopotamia, and concluded there was a common rising and dying fertility god. Unfortunately, much of his work was based on misreading of the evidence, but nevertheless this helped introduce these ideas to popular culture. Later, in the 1930s, three influential French scholars claimed that Christianity was influenced by the Hellenistic mystery religions.

One of those scholars said Christ was a 'savior-god, after the manner of an Osiris, an Attis, a Mithras... Like Adonis, Osiris, and Attis, he died a violent death, and like them he returned to life.    

Popular writers made the mistake of taking various fragments of information and manufacturing 'a knd of universal Mystery-religion which never actually existed, at least of all in Paul's day. there was a widespread view that there was a general, common mystery religion, but upon a closer examination of the sources, nobody belives that any longer. Today most Bible scholars regard the question as dead.

Friday, December 21, 2012

Law of Thermodynamics

Modern scientists know that a beginning and an ending are demanded by one of the most validated laws in all nature - the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics is the study of matter and energy, and the Second Law states, among other things, that the universe is running out of usable energy. With each passing moment, the amount of usable energy in the universe grows smaller, leading scientists to the obvious conclusion that one day all the energy will be gone and the universe will die. Like a running car, the universe will ultimately run out of gas.

You say, "So what? How does that prove that the universe had a beginning?" Well, look at it this way: the First Law of Thermodynamics states that the total amount of energy in the universe is constant. In other words, the universe has only a finite amount of energy (much as your car has only a finite amount of gas (the First Law), and whenever it's running it continually consumes gas (the Second Law), would your car be running right now if you had started it up an infinitely long time ago? No, of course not. It would be out of gas by now. In the same way, the universe would be out of energy by now if it had been running from all eternity.

The Second Law is also known as the Law of Entropy, which is a fancy way of saying that nature tends to bring things to disorder. That is, with time, things naturally fall apart. Your car falls apart; your house falls apart; your body falls apart. But if the universe is becoming less ordered, then where did the original order come from? Astronomer Robert Jastrow likens the universe to a wound-up clock. If a wind-up clock is running down, then someone must have wound it up.
The aspect of the Second Law tells us that the universe had a beginning.

Law of Causality

Some people insist that there is no need for God and bring up science to 'try' prove there is no God. I say that science doesn't disprove that there is no God but rather proves He is real. How can we know for sure God exists? By getting back to the basics. People tend to speak of science but leave out the basics of it. So I will try to make this as basic as I can.

Frank Turek and Norman Geisler in their book 'I Don't Have Enough Faith To Be An Athiest' write, "for an argument to be true it has to be logically valid, and its premises must be true."

1. Everything that had a beginning had a cause.
2. The universe had a beginning.
3. Therefore the universe had a cause.

This is a valid argument, but are the premises true? Let's take a look at the premises.

Premises 1 - Everything that had a beginning had a cause - is the Law of Causality, which is the fundamental principle of science. Without the Law of Causality, science is impossible. In other words, science is a search for causes. That's what scientists do - they try to discover what caused what. Even the skeptic David Hume could not deny the Law of Causality. He wrote, "I never asserted so absured a proposition as that something could arise without a cause."

In fact, to deny the Law of Causality is to deny rationality. The very process of rational thinking requires us to put together thoughts (the causes) that result in conclusions (the effects).

Since the Law of Causality is well established and undeniable, premises 1 is true. What about premise 2? Did the universe have a beginning? If not, then no cause was need. If so, then the universe must have had a cause.