Some have cast doubt about many of the large numbers in the OT, as being absurd. In particular, use of the Hebrew word “aleph” as being translated 1000. E.g. ‘600 of aleph’ (600,000) as the number of Israelites of fighting age, implying that the total number of Israelites including old men, women and children, must have been about 2.5 to 3.0 million. This number is inconsistent with other passages of the Bible, which describe Israel as a ‘tiny nation’. There is a strong case that aleph = 1000 is a mis-translation, based upon internal (Biblical) and external (archaeological and scientific) arguments. This would bring many aspects of the Torah and Kings / Chronicles narratives into line with rationality, and hence believability.
Gordon obtained his geology degree in University College London, and a PhD on ‘The Hydrology of the Oman Mountains. Since then he has worked for the Institute of Hydrology (UK), Flinders Uni (8 years), as a ‘Chief Technical Advisor’ (for the United Nations Development Program in Yemen), a stint as a visiting Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (Taiwan), and as a water resources and/or climate-change consultant in about 30 other countries.
Dr Gordon Stanger
He has worked for AusAID (as was), World Bank, Asia Development Bank, and a large swag of development agencies, large and small. He has contributed to numerous books and international symposia, and am the author of ‘Dictionary of Hydrology and Water Resources’. He is currently working on his farewell opus; a trilogy called ‘sensible Christianity’. Most recently he became the project leader for ‘Climate-Driven Migration’ for an NGO called SafeGround (one time co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize).
We were privileged to have Dr Hugh Ross give us a presentation on climate change. He covered the following topics:
Is climate change for real?
What can we do about it?
Just to warn you, he does believe it is real and is related to human activity, but he has some novel ideas on how it can be addressed without causing huge disruption to human flourishing.
You can purchase a Kindle version of his book on this topic from Amazon by clicking on the following link: Weathering Climate Change by Dr Hugh Ross.
Dr Hugh Ross was an astronomer/astrophysicist at the University of Toronto. He is the founder and president of Reasons to Believe, (www.reasons.org), and is the author of over 17 books including ‘The Creator and the Cosmos’, ‘Why The Universe is The Way it is ‘ and ‘Navigating Genesis.’ Ross has addressed students and faculty on over 300 campuses in the US and abroad and speaks at various churches and groups on a wide variety of science-faith topics. He runs a weekly meeting for sceptics and agnostics. He is asked to present to government agencies and atheists and leading contemporaries on the powerful evidence for a purpose filled universe.
‘The Spanish Inquisition’ is a term that rouses thoughts of torture and a fiery death. It is a term that sits uncomfortably with modern views of a God of Love and acceptance of everyone whatever their beliefs and life choices.
Whilst the ‘Inquisition’ is largely used to describe the events in medieval Spain, the Roman Catholic institution to root out heresy started in France in 1184 and officially continues to this day in the Catholic Church under a different name.
This presentation will look at the reasons for the Inquisition, its victims, and compare it with the civil law and processes current at the time.
Stephen White has had a career as a physicist and is now retired. He has been a very supportive member of the Reasonable Faith Adelaide committee for a number of years.
Sex makes the world go round! Sexual attraction and the resulting sexual activity are vital to almost all forms of animal life, from the simplest to the most complex.
Without sex, life on planet earth would cease to exist. The variation in sexual activity across the animal realm is simply astounding. What is natural for wildlife, such as the birds and the bees and mammals and reptiles and fish and insects and everything else, and what are the implications for human sexuality?
Technology is invading every facet of our lives including our sex lives and relationships; and the pace and breadth of technological change is staggering. We are adopting this technology into our lives and are often unaware and of the real “costs” to us, our societies and our relationships.
In this talk we will briefly survey the landscape of technology that affects our existence in the world as “sexual beings” and then look in detail at some of the darker and more damaging areas of this landscape. Examples are high speed internet pornography, the growing evil of child sexual exploitation and how technology is enabling “new” evils to be visited on the vulnerable.
We will look at this topic from a “largely secular” perspective. However, on many issues, such as the challenges and evils of child exploitation, there is good agreement between people of faith and secular minded people. Still there are significant and obvious implications here for the Church, which we will highlight.
Tom Daly is an IT professional, with over 30 years’ experience and is a graduate of the University of Adelaide. Tom has been asking tough questions of his Christian faith for many years now and is confident that the more scrutiny orthodox Christian faith is subjected to the more it provides a coherent (and breathtaking) worldview.
Papias (c 60 AD to c 130 AD) was bishop of Hierapolis in western Turkey. He provides the first extant record about the authorship of the gospels and the manner of Christian oral tradition.
His writings are highly debated and controversial, as they impinge on basic questions such as
Who wrote the gospels?
Are the gospels based on eye-witness sources?
Are the gospels an accurate record of what Jesus said and did?
Kevin Rogers
Kevin Rogers is the director of Reasonable Faith Adelaide. He is also an engineering lecturer and researcher at the University of South Australia.
According to Wikipedia, the “God of the gaps” is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are cited as evidence or proof of God’s existence.
This would have been a particularly attractive position at a time when people knew almost nothing, and could thus ascribe everything to God, but now that we know more and more, is God is getting squeezed out? Failures in gap arguments in the past have been embarrassing and counter-productive.
Are we in the process of eliminating God, or do gaps we still point to God, or is this an entirely erroneous concept in the first place?
Brian Schroeder presents the issues, and argue for the standard Christian response to this question. His talk is available on YouTube.
From ancient times people have gazed at the sun, moon and stars observing their consistent daily and seasonal motion, and assumed that all of this was ordered by a maker. The Enlightenment dismissed this as fanciful imagination, but as our power of observation of both the atomic and stellar scale has grown, we see increasing signs of order that only needs the slightest variation to prohibit life supporting conditions. Is there any other reason that can explain this observed fine tuning in our physical environment?
Multiverse?
Steve White presents an outline of Fine Tuning and the Multiverse. He presents evidence for the fine tuning of our universe from the sub-atomic to the stellar scale and then discusses whether Multiverse theory can explain it. Do we just happen to live in one lucky, life-supporting version, among many other universes?
Stephen White
Stephen White has had a career as a physicist and is now retired.
Mary the mother of Jesus was and is highly revered within the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox traditions of the Christian church.
Mary and child in Hagia Sophia
The reformers believed that there was a lot of superstition surrounding Mary to the point of inappropriately worshipping her as a divine figure or praying to her as if to Christ or God. So there was and is a reaction against Mary within the Protestant traditions. Perhaps this was an over-reaction.
Christopher Sabolidis
Christopher Stabolidis will take us through how Christ’s mother Mary came to be called “the Mother of God” by the Church. There actually was a good reason. Chris’s talk is available on You Tube.
On one level, it is impossible to answer that, given we’re discussing a phenomenon that includes 2 billion people from an astonishing array of backgrounds, cultures, denominations, and with varying levels of devotion.
A Kenyan congregation
Still, Church historian Dr Matthew James Gray from Tabor gives it a shot.
Dr Mathew James Gray
The answer is that the Church is the same as it always has been, and also completely different to what it’s ever been before. This is because the Christ that is its Head, it is always the same, yet is also incarnating into the shifting cultures and situations that humanity experience. Exploring this, in light of its past, as well as peering into the future a little, is an exciting and fascinating topic to dive into.
