On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:
…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
Nick Gathergood, David-Birkett, Harry-Kroto
I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:
Arif Ahmed, Sir David Attenborough, Mark Balaguer, Horace Barlow, Michael Bate, Patricia Churchland, Aaron Ciechanover, Noam Chomsky,Alan Dershowitz, Hubert Dreyfus, Bart Ehrman, Stephan Feuchtwang, David Friend, Riccardo Giacconi, Ivar Giaever , Roy Glauber, Rebecca Goldstein, David J. Gross, Brian Greene, Susan Greenfield, Stephen F Gudeman, Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Theodor W. Hänsch, Brian Harrison, Hermann Hauser, Roald Hoffmann, Bruce Hood, Herbert Huppert, Gareth Stedman Jones, Steve Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku, Stuart Kauffman, Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, George Lakoff, Elizabeth Loftus, Alan Macfarlane, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow, Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff, Jonathan Parry, Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse, Carolyn Porco, Robert M. Price, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees, Oliver Sacks, John Searle, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schaffer, J. L. Schellenberg, Lee Silver, Peter Singer, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ronald de Sousa, Victor Stenger, Barry Supple, Leonard Susskind, Raymond Tallis, Neil deGrasse Tyson, .Alexander Vilenkin, Sir John Walker, Frank Wilczek, Steven Weinberg, and Lewis Wolpert,
Robert Foley (academic)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Professor
Robert Foley
FBA
Foley in 2011
Born
Robert Andrew Foley
18 March 1953 (age 63)
Sussex, England
Nationality
British
Fields
Human evolution
Prehistoric archaeology
Institutions
University of Durham
University of Cambridge
Alma mater
Peterhouse, Cambridge
Thesis
(1980)
Notable awards
Fellow of the British Academy(2007)
Robert Andrew Foley, FBA (born 18 March 1953) is a British anthropologist, archaeologist, and academic, specialising in human evolution. From 1977 to 1985, he was a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Durham. He has been a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge since 1987, and Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution at the University of Cambridge since 2003.[1]
Early career[edit]
Foley was born on 18 March 1953 in Sussex, England, to Nelson and Jean Foley.[2][1] He was educated at Ardingly College and Peterhouse, Cambridge where he earned an MA and PhD in archaeology.
Academic career[edit]
From 1977 to 1985, Foley was a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Durham. He then returned to the University of Cambridge to take up a post in the Department of Biological Anthropology. From 1986 to 1998, he was a lecturer in Biological Anthropology. Since 1987, he has been a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. From 1998 to 2003, he was Reader in Evolutionary Anthropology. He co-founded the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies in 2001 with Marta Mirazón Lahr, and has been its director since its inception. The Centre was designed to provide a home for the Duckworth Collection, and first class laboratories and facilities to support research in human evolution which integrated genetics, anthropology, and other fields.[3] In 2003, he was appointed Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution.[1][4]
Research[edit]
Foley has carried out research in many aspects of evolutionary theory, human evolution, prehistory and more recently human evolutionary genetics. His early work was on the Later Stone Age of East Africa, where he developed methods and ideas to study the landscape distributions of artefacts, giving rise to the sub-field of Off-Site Archaeology.[5] In his work on human evolution he has emphasized an evolutionary ecological approach, seeing human adaptations as solutions to the problems faced by hominins in the environments in which they were living.[6] This evolutionary research has also explored the relationship between climate and evolutionary change,[7] the evolution of social behavior (finite social space model), and patterns of hominin diversity. This approach was summarized in two books – Another Unique Species, and Humans Before Humanity.
Since the 1990s, Foley has collaborated with Marta Mirazón Lahr on research relating to the evolution of modern humans and their diversity. Their work has argued for multiple dispersals of early humans out of Africa, and the use of the ‘southern route’. Their approach has emphasized the role of geographical factors in shaping human evolution, and a central role for dispersals as the process by which diversity evolves.[8][9][10]
He has co-led expeditions and archaeological excavations with Mirazon Lahr in the Solomon Islands, the Central Sahara, and Kenya, particularly in the Turkana Basin. In Turkana, Foley and Mirazon Lahr study the late Quaternary record of human occupation in the basin, and have recently described a group of 10,000 year-old skeletons from the site of Nataruk that died as part of conflict between hunter-gatherer bands.[11]
In the last decade, Foley has been involved in several aspects of evolutionary psychology and linguistics, exploring questions related to the evolution of human cognition, human language and its use as a mechanism is the evolution of society and social boundaries.
Honours[edit]
In 2007, Foley was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).[12]
Categories:
Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge
Evolutionary biologists
Human evolution theorists
In the first video below in the 48th clip in this series are his words and my response is below them.
50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)
Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)
A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)
_________________________________
Below is a letter I wrote to Dr. Foley and in it I respond to his quote from You Tube:
Before I gEt to the letter to Dr. Foley, I want to say that part of the letter below includes a story by Brandon Barnard about the experience of sitting COURT SIDE at a basketball game with thousands of people attending. I just recently got to experience that on January 14, 2017. I got to see the Arkansas State Red Wolves at University of Arkansas Little Rock Trojans basketball game COURT SIDE. It an unique situation because we got the red carpet treatment with the concessions being delivered to our seats and the errant passes landing in our lap. Then when I got home I noticed Luke and I on the news. You can see us below on the right. Luke has on his red Razorback sweater and shorts and I am wearing my blue shirt behind the UALR player (white jersey) on the right side of the screen.
I told Luke, “It took me 55 years to get a seat COURT SIDE!” He responded, “Well, it took me 10 years.”
Below is the letter to Dr. Foley which includes the story about sitting COURT SIDE:
March 27, 2016
Professor Robert Foley, c/o Cambridge Language Sciences Strategic Initiative, Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 9 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP
Dear Dr. Foley,
I learned much from your in-depth interview with Dr. Alan MacFarlane. Since you have studied science all your life I thought you would be interested in the subject of this letter today and when I heard your interview with Dr. MacFarlane that that prompted me to send you two CD’s today. Recently I had the opportunity to come across a very interesting article by Michael Polanyi, LIFE TRANSCENDING PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY, in the magazine CHEMICAL AND ENGINEERING NEWS, August 21, 1967, and I also got hold of a 1968 talk by Francis Schaeffer based on this article. Polanyi’s son John actually won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This article by Michael Polanyi concerns Francis Crick and James Watson and their discovery of DNA in 1953. Polanyi noted:
Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are boundary conditions harnessing the laws of in
animate nature, being themselves irreducible to those laws. The pattern of organic bases in DNA which functions as a genetic code is a boundary condition irreducible to physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of life may be represented as a hierarchy of boundary conditions extending, in the case of man, to consciousness and responsibility.
____
James Watson (1928-) and Francis Crick (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004)
Michael Polanyi, FRS[1] (11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976)
John Charles Polanyi, (born 23 January 1929)
I am sending you this two CD’s of this talk because I thought you may find it very interesting. It includes references to not only James D. Watson, and Francis Crick but also Maurice Wilkins, Erwin Schrodinger, J.S. Haldane (his son was the famous J.B.S. Haldane), Peter Medawar, and Barry Commoner.
___
John Scott Haldane (2 May 1860 – 14/15 March 1936)
J. B. S. Haldane
Haldane in 1914
(5 November 1892 – 1 December 1964)
Maurice Wilkins (15 December 1916 – 5 October 2004)
Erwin Schrödinger (12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961)
Sir Peter Medawar ( 28 February 1915 – 2 October 1987)
Barry Commoner (May 28, 1917 – September 30, 2012)
In the You Tube video “A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1),” you asserted:
As a high Anglican school, everybody was expected to be confirmed; I did lessons with the chaplain and at the end he told us to go away and think deeply about why we were being confirmed; I did so and told him that I was only doing it because if I did so I would get an extra Sunday out; as this was the only reason I did not feel I should be confirmed; I was about fourteen at the time and I did not give much thought to religion after that time; I love going to church, and my wife, who was brought up a Catholic, is horrified by my aesthetic enjoyment of it; like many English people I like the sounds, the familiarity, the rhythms, and music; I go to Chapel but technically I am an agnostic in the Huxley sense, that one cannot be absolutely certain, but for all practical purposes I am an atheist; I don’t remember ever having a great deal of anxiety about that; religion for me is a nice social backdrop; obviously, being interested in human evolution I have then thought much about the nature of religion; I am fairly convinced that religion plays a major role in human evolution, which has nothing to do with whether it is true or not; Pascal Boyer’s ideas are very sensible, that religion plays an important role in forming communities, forming largely antagonistic relationships between groups, in providing mechanisms for coercion or conformism – all those things work better with religion; there is a tendency to believe, and to believe what others believe – very few of us think in ways different to those immediately around us – suggest there are strong conformism genes; this is also true of politics and other things, not just religion; on the actual content of religion, I would say that most religions allow you to increase your self belief; I think that Darwinism is one of the least adaptive beliefs in the world as it is basically saying that we are not important in the big scheme of things; one of the reasons that it is not widely accepted is that it is too simple, and this goes against the grain of much of social science; the second is that as a system of belief it downplays the egocentric view; if I want a reason to dominate the world, Darwinism is not going to give it to me; for me, religious belief is a very interesting thing, and I diverge from someone like Dawkins who I think has a very old-fashioned, Frazerian, notion of religion, that magic, witchcraft, religion, science, are somehow a progressive system of thought; …I think the problem with having an Anglican background is that one has a very benign view of religion; we have learned throughout history as well as our own immediate experiences that religion can be very brutal and nasty; that would make me much closer to Dawkins’ position; one can see in Islam with the oppression of women; I am fanatically opposed to capital punishment, so in Saudi Arabia and so on, what is done in the name of religion is appalling; there have been times when religion has made the world a better place, at others, worse, so we have to make ad-hoc decisions; what I would fight very strongly against is the creeping back of religion into governance; I am a child of the Enlightenment, and would not want to see us go back
I am going to answer you in an indirect way. Today is Easter and sometimes a song will just minister to a person in a special way and I heard this song at church today and I wanted to share it with you. It is called MAN OF SORROWS and it can be found on You Tube Man Of Sorrows – Hillsong Live (2013 Album Glorious Ruins) Worship Song with Lyrics and here are the lyrics:
“Man Of Sorrows”
Man of sorrows Lamb of God
By His own betrayed
The sin of man and wrath of God
Has been on Jesus laid
Silent as He stood accused
Beaten mocked and scorned
Bowing to the Father’s will
He took a crown of thorns
Oh that rugged cross
My salvation
Where Your love poured out over me
Now my soul cries out
Hallelujah
Praise and honour unto Thee
Sent of heaven God’s own Son
To purchase and redeem
And reconcile the very ones
Who nailed Him to that tree
Now my debt is paid
It is paid in full
By the precious blood
That my Jesus spilled
Now the curse of sin
Has no hold on me
Whom the Son sets free
Oh is free indeed
See the stone is rolled away
Behold the empty tomb
Hallelujah God be praised
He’s risen from the grave
We sang that song at our Easter service.
On Easter morning March 27, 2016 at FELLOWSHIP BIBLE CHURCH our teaching pastor Brandon Barnard delivered the message THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING based on I Corinthians chapter 15 and I wanted to share a portion of that sermon with you today.
This day is the day that changes everything. The resurrection changes everything and that is why we are gathered here today to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ because it changes everything. HAVE YOU EVER EXPERIENCED A LIFE CHANGING MOMENT? Have you ever had something unexpected happen in your world that really changed the whole experience for you?
Recently I took my son Caleb on a getaway weekend. It was a Father/Son Manhood weekend for us, one of the milestones we do here at Fellowship Bible Church.
We decided to go to San Antonio and a San Antonio Spurs game. It was the same weekend that Star Wars was coming out. So I booked a hotel down at the River Walk. We fly down and went to Star Wars during the day and that evening we had trouble buying tickets to the San Antonio Spurs game but we dropped $200 on some seats pretty high up in the area.
After taking selfies we go to the concession stand and as we are approaching the counter and all of a sudden a guy comes out of no where and says, “Hey, is it just you and your son tonite?”
I responded, “Yet it is.” He said, “How would you like to sit COURT-SIDE?”
My son’s eyes got as big as bowling balls. This guy says, “My brother and his wife and I have season tickets and he is not going to be here tonite and if you want to sit court-side these tickets are yours. Merry Christmas.”
I was speechless. We follow this guy to our court-side seats. We went from near the roof to court-side. My son Caleb was giving Hi-Fives to the LA Clipper players. It is a good seat when you have to tell the ref to move.
My wife and Dad and everyone else is texting me, “We see you on TV every time down the court!” At one point the basketball comes out of bounds and I catch it and my son and I are [freaking out.]
The fans behind us tell us that with these tickets you get free access to the buffet and we could eat and drink all we wanted.
At one point I looked down at the tickets they gave us and I saw the price and it was $1650 each ticket. My son Caleb said, “I don’t want this day to end!!”
We were blown away. It was a game changer. I was blown away that someone would give us that kind of opportunity. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and it changed everything for us that evening.
This day is the day that changes everything. The resurrection changes everything and that is why we are gathered here today to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ because it changes everything.
Some of you are going to be blown away by the opportunity before you this Easter morning because the resurrection of Jesus Christ stands at the very heart of Christianity. If what we we are gathered here to celebrate did not happen then people need to pity us as believers. They need to feel sorry for you and me more than anyone on earth because we have set our hopes firmly on a lie.
But if the resurrection really did happen, then we need to repent and we need to believe in Jesus and we need to rejoice that we have hope in this life and the life to come.
Paul wrote this to the believers in Corinth.
1 Corinthians 15:3-6, 13-21 English Standard Version (ESV)
3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.
13 But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. 15 We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised.16 For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.19 If in Christ we have hope[a] in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
20 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.
_____
If Christ hasn’t been raised then these facts are true:
PREACHING AND FAITH ARE IN VAIN.
WE ARE FALSE WITNESSES
WE ARE STILL IN OUR SINS.
THOSE WHO DIED IN FAITH ARE STILL DEAD
WE ARE TO BE PITIED MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD.
Verse 20 says, “but Christ has been raised!!! Therefore, these things are true:
Our faith is significant, valuable and eternal.
we are truth tellers!!
we are forgiven of our sins.
death is not our final stop.
don’t pity us but join us in believing in Jesus Christ.
You said above that you are an atheist. However, would you agree that if the Bible is correct in regards to history then Jesus did rise from the grave? Let’s take a closer look at evidence concerning the accuracy of the Bible.
I know that you highly respected Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and he co-authored with Francis Schaeffer the book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? Below is a piece of evidence from that book.
Francis Schaeffer (30 January 1912 – 15 May 1984[1]) and his wife Edith (November 3, 1914 – March 30, 2013)
C. Everett Koop, MD (October 14, 1916 – February 25, 2013) 13th Surgeon General of the United States
__
Two things should be mentioned about the time of Moses in Old Testament history.
First, consider the archaeological evidence that relates to the period. True, it is not of the same explicitness that we have found, say, in relation to the existence of Ahab or Jehu or Jehoiakim. We have no inscription from Egypt which refers to Moses being taken out of the bulrushes and removed from the waterproof basket his mother had made him. But this does not mean that the Book of Exodus is a fictitious account, as some critics has suggested. Some say it is simply an idealized reading-back into history by the Jews under the later monarchy. There is not a reason why these “books of Moses,” as they are called, should not be treated as history, just as we have been forced to treat the Books of Kings and Chronicles dating 500 years later.
There is ample evidence about the building projects of the Egyptian kings, and the evidence we have fits well with Exodus. There are scenes of brick-making (for example, Theban Tomb 100 of Rekhmire). Contemporary parchments and papyri tell of production targets which had to be met. One speaks of a satisfied official report of his men as “making their quota of bricks daily” (Papyrus Anastasi III vso, p.3, in the British Museum. Also Louvre Leather Roll in the Louvre, Paris, col ii, mentions quotes of bricks and “taskmasters”). Actual bricks found show signs of straw which had to be mixed in with the clay, just as Exodus says. This matter of bricks and straw is further affirmed by the record that one despairing official complained, “There are no men to make bricks nor straw in my area.”
We know from contemporary discoveries that Semites were found at all levels of Egypt’s cosmopolitan society. (Brooklyn Museum, New York, no. 35, 1446. Papyrus Brooklyn). There is nothing strange therefore about Joseph’s becoming so important in the pharaoh’s court.
The store cities of Pithom and Raamses (Rameses) mentioned in Exodus 1:11 are well known in Egyptian inscriptions. Raamses was actually in the east-Delta capital, Pi-Ramses (near Goshen), where the Israelites would have had ample experience of agriculture. Thus, the references to agriculture found in the law of Moses would not have been strange to the Israelites even though they were in the desert at the time the law was given. Certainly there is no reason to say, as some critics do, that these sections on agriculture were an indication of a reading-back from a latter period when the Jews were settled in Canaan.
The form of the covenant made at Sinai has remarkable parallels with the covenant forms of other people at that time. (On covenants and parties to a treaty, the Louvre; and Treaty Tablet from Boghaz Koi (i.e., Hittite) in Turkey, Museum of Archaeology in Istanbul.) The covenant form at Sinai resembles just as the forms of letter writings of the first century after Christ (the types of introductions and greetings) are reflected in the letters of the apostles in the New Testament, it is not surprising to find the covenant form of the second millennium before Christ reflected in what occurred at Mount Sinai. God has always spoken to people within the culture of their time, which does not mean that God’s communication is limited by that culture. It is God’s communication but within the forms appropriate to the time.
The Pentateuch tells us that Moses led the Israelites up the east side of the Dead Sea after their long stay in the desert. There they encountered the hostile kingdom of Moab. We have firsthand evidence for the existence of this kingdom of Moab–contrary to what has been said by critical scholars who have denied the existence of Moab at this time. It can be found in a war scene from a temple at Luxor (Al Uqsor). This commemorates a victory by Ramses II over the Moabite nation at Batora (Luxor Temple, Egypt).
Also the definite presence of the Israelites in west Palestine (Canaan) no later than the end of the thirteenth century B.C. is attested by a victory stela of Pharaoh Merenptah (son and successor of Ramses II) to commemorate his victory over Libya (Israel Stela, Cairo Museum, no. 34025). In it he mentions his previous success in Canaan against Aschalon, Gize, Yenom, and Israel; hence there can be no doubt the nation of Israel was in existence at the latest by this time of approximately 1220 B.C. This is not to say it could not have been earlier, but it cannot be later than this date.
Christ came and laid his life down to die for our sins and there is evidence that indicates the Bible is true!!!!! Some 400 years before crucifixion was invented, both Israel’s King David and the prophet Zechariah described the Messiah’s death in words that perfectly depict that mode of execution. Further, they said that the body would be pierced and that none of the bones would be broken, contrary to customary procedure in cases of crucifixion (Psalm 22 and 34:20; Zechariah 12:10). Again, historians and New Testament writers confirm the fulfillment: Jesus of Nazareth died on a Roman cross, and his extraordinarily quick death eliminated the need for the usual breaking of bones. A spear was thrust into his side to verify that he was, indeed, dead.
Psalm 22 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
A Cry of Anguish and a Song of Praise.
For the choir director; upon <sup class="footnote" style="box-sizing:border-box;font-s