Edom

Edom (אֱדוֹם), a Hebrew word meaning "red", is a name given to Esau in the Hebrew Bible (see Gen. 25:30), as well as to the nation purportedly descended from him. The nation's name in Assyrian was Udumi; in Greek, Idoumaía; in Latin, Idumæa or Idumea.
The Edomite people were a Semitic-speaking tribal group inhabiting the Negev Desert and the Aravah valley of what is now southern Israel and adjacent Jordan. The region has much reddish sandstone, which may have given rise to the name "Edom". The nation of Edom is known to have existed back to the 8th or 9th Century BCE, and the Bible dates it back several centuries further. Recent archeological evidence may indicate an Edomite nation as long ago as the 11th Century BCE, but the topic is controversial. The nation ceased to exist with the Jewish-Roman Wars.

The Edomites

The Edomites may have been connected with the Shasu and Shutu, nomadic raiders mentioned in Egyptian sources. Indeed, a letter from an Egyptian scribe at a border fortress in the Wadi Tumilat during the reign of Merneptah reports movement of nomadic "shasu-tribes of Edom" to watering holes in Egyptian territory.

In the Bible

The Bible explains the name "Edom" with no mention of red rock. It refers to the Edomites as descendants of Esau, and the Book of Genesis mentions "red" a number of times in describing Esau and explaining his alternate name Edom.

"The first one [Esau] came out reddish [admoni in Hebrew], as hairy as a fur coat. They named him Esau." Years later, "Jacob was once simmering a stew, when Esau came home exhausted from the field. Esau said to Jacob, 'Give me a swallow of that red stuff [ha-adom, ha-adom, i.e., using the word ha-adom twice]! I'm famished!' He was therefore given the name Edom ['Red' or 'Ruddy']."

The Edomites' original country, according to the Tanakh, stretched from the Sinai peninsula as far as Kadesh Barnea. Southward it reached as far as Eilat, which was the seaport of Edom. On the north of Edom was the territory of Moab. The boundary between Moab and Edom was the Wadi Zered. The ancient capital of Edom was Bozrah. According to Genesis, Esau's descendents settled in this land after displacing the Horites. It was also called the land of Seir; Mount Seir appears to have been strongly identified with them and may have been a cultic site.

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Theodore Beza

Theodore Beza (Theodore de Beze or de Besze) (June 24, 1519 - October 13, 1605) was a French Protestant Christian theologian and scholar who played an important role in the early Reformation. He was a disciple of John Calvin and lived most of his life in Switzerland.

Early life

Theodore Beza was born at Vezelay (8 miles west-south-west of Avallon), in Burgundy.

His father, Pierre de Beze, royal governor of Vezelay, descended from a Burgundian family of distinction; his mother, Marie Bourdelot, was known for her generosity. Pierre de Beze had two brothers; Nicholas, who was member of Parliament at Paris; and Claude, who was abbot of the Cistercian monastery Froimont in the diocese of Beauvais. Nicholas, who was unmarried, during a visit to Vezelay was so pleased with Theodore that, with the permission of their parents, he took him to Paris to educate him there. From Paris, Theodore was sent to Orleans in December 1528 to enjoy the instruction of the famous German teacher Melchior Wolmar. He was received into Wolmar's house, and the day on which this took place was afterward celebrated as a second birthday.

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biblical criticism

Biblical criticism is a form of Historical Criticism that seeks to analyze the Bible through asking certain questions of the text, such as: Who wrote it? When was it written? To whom was it written? Why was it written? What was the historical, geographical, and cultural setting of the text? How well preserved is the original text? How unified is the text? What sources were used by the author? How was the text transmitted over time? What is the text's genre and from what sociologial setting is it derived? When and how did it come to become part of the Bible?

Biblical criticism is "the study and investigation of biblical writings that seeks to make discerning and discriminating judgments about these writings." It asks when and where a particular text originated, how, why, by whom, for whom, and in what circumstances it was produced, what influences were at work in its production, what sources were used in its composition, and the message it was intended to convey. It also addresses the physical text, including the meaning of the words and the way in which they are used, its preservation, history, and integrity. Biblical criticism draws upon a wide range of scholarly disciplines, including linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, folklore, oral tradition studies, and historical and religious studies.

Biblical criticism, defined as the treatment of biblical texts as natural rather than supernatural artifacts, grew out of the rationalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. It can be broadly divided between the higher Criticism (the term is perhaps a little old-fashioned today), which is the study of biblical texts to discover their composition, history, and meaning, and textual criticism, which is the close examination of the text to establish variant and original readings. Contemporary criticism has seen the rise of new perspectives which draw on literary and multidisciplinary sociological approaches to address the meaning(s) of texts and the wider world in which they were conceived.

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Christian art

Christian art is art that spans many segments of Christianity. Per each religious sect, art mediums, style, and representations change; however, the unifying theme is ultimately the representation of the life and times of Jesus Christ and in some cases the Old Testament.

History

Much of the art surviving from Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire is Christian art. While the Western Roman Empire's political structure essentially collapsed after the fall of Rome, its religious hierarchy, what is today the modern-day Catholic Church funded and supported production of sacred art. The Orthodox Church of Constantinople, which enjoyed greater stability within the surviving Eastern Empire was key in funding arts there, and glorifying Christianity.

As a stable Western European society emerged during the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church led the way in terms of art, using its resources to commission paintings and sculptures. Christian art is found in architecture principally in the form of churches, cathedrals, monasteries and tombs.
The development of Christian art in the Byzantine empire continued the oriental and Hellenistic previously known trends. The controversy over the use of graven images, the interpretaion of the Second Commandment, and the crisis of Iconoclasm led to two main results: It led to a standardization of religious imagery within the Eastern Orthodoxy, and it led to a minimalist aesthetic in the Protestant Church.

As a secular, non-sectarian, universal notion of art arose in 19th century Western Europe, ancient and Medieval Christian art began to be collected for art appreciation rather than worship, while contemporary Christian art was considered marginal to art history.

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The Roman Empire

The Roman Empire is the term conventionally used to describe the Ancient Roman society in the centuries following its reorganization under the leadership of Caesar Augustus in the late 1st century BC. After Constantinople had been made capital and the Western parts were lost, the Eastern part continued its existence, in what is currently known as Byzantine Empire.

"Roman Empire" is also used as translation of the expression, Imperium Romanum, probably the best known Latin expression where the word imperium is used in the meaning of a territory, the "Roman Empire", as that part of the world under Roman rule.

The expansion of this Roman territory beyond the borders of the initial city-state of Rome had started long before the state organization turned into an Empire. In its territorial peak after the conquest of Dacia by Trajan, the Roman Empire controlled approximately 5.

900 000 km². (2,300,000 sq.mi.) of land surface, thereby being the largest of all empires during the classical antiquity period of European history.

In the centuries before the autocracy of Augustus, Rome (Roman Kingdom and Roman Republic) had already accumulated most of its territory beyond the Italian Peninsula, including former Mediterranean competitors Syracuse and Carthage. In the late Republic, Augustus definitively added Egypt to the Imperium Romanum.

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ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a period in Greek history that lasted for around nine hundred years. It is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the foundation of Western Civilization. Greek culture had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts of Europe. The civilization of the ancient Greeks has been immensely influential on the language, politics, educational systems, philosophy, science, and arts, giving rise to the Renaissance in Western Europe and again resurgent during various neo-Classical revivals in 18th and 19th century Europe and the Americas.

There are no fixed or universally agreed upon dates for the beginning or the end of the Ancient Greek period. In common usage it refers to all Greek history before the Roman Empire, but historians use the term more precisely. Some writers include the periods of the Greek-speaking Mycenaean civilization that collapsed about 1150 BC, though most would argue that the influential Minoan was so different from later Greek cultures that it should be classed separately.

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transubstantiation

Transubstantiation (in Latin, transsubstantiatio) is the change of the substance of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ occurring in the Eucharist according to the teaching of some Christian Churches, including the Roman Catholic Church. In Greek it is called μετουσίωσις.

Theology of transubstantiation

"Substance" here means what something is in itself. (For more on the philosophical concept, see Substance theory.) A hat's shape is not the hat itself, nor is its colour the hat, nor is its size, nor its softness to the touch, nor anything else about it perceptible to the senses. The hat itself (the "substance") has the shape, the colour, the size, the softness and the other appearances, but is distinct from them. While the appearances, which are referred to by the philosophical term accidents, are perceptible to the senses, the substance is not.

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The old city of Jerusalem

Jerusalem is the holiest city of Judaism (since the 10th century BCE) and some denominations of Christianity (since the 5th century CE) and, after Mecca and Medina, the third holiest city of Islam (since the 7th century CE). A heterogeneous city, Jerusalem represents a wide range of national, religious, and socioeconomic groups. The section called the "Old City" is surrounded by walls and consists of four quarters: Armenian, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim.

The status of the united Jerusalem as Israel's capital is not widely recognised by the international community and Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem is particularly controversial.

Jerusalem's Old City Wall encompasses an area of barely 1km². The existing wall was built in the 16th century (1535-1538) by the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Turks. The 4,018 meter long wall incorporates older parts from the Second Temple, Roman, Byzantine and Medieval periods.

Before King David's conquest of Jerusalem (2 Samuel 5:6-10) in the 10th century BC the city was known as Jebus and the home of the Jebusites. The Bible describes the city as heavily fortified with a strong city wall but not much is known about it.

King Solomon extended the city walls. In about 440 BC, under the Persian empire, Nehemiah arrived from Babylon and rebuilt them.

In AD 41-44 Herod Agrippa, king of Judea, built a new city wall known as the "Third Wall".

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Presuppositional apologetics

Presuppositional apologetics is a school of Christian apologetics, a field of Christian theology that attempts to present a rational basis for the Christian faith, defend the faith against objections, and attack the alleged flaws of other worldviews. Presuppositional apologetics is especially concerned with the third aspect of this discipline, though it generally sees the trifold distinction as a difference in emphasis rather than as delineating three separate endeavors. Presuppositional apologetics developed in and is most commonly advocated within Reformed circles of Christianity.

The key discriminator of this school is that it maintains that the Christian apologist must assume the truth of the supernatural revelation contained in the Bible (that is, the Christian worldview) because there can be no set of neutral assumptions from which to reason with a non-Christian. In other words, presuppositionalists say that a Christian cannot consistently declare his belief in the necessary existence of the God of the Bible and simultaneously argue on the basis of a different set of assumptions (presumably those of the non-Christian) in which God may or may not exist.

Comparison with other schools of apologetics

Presuppositionalists contrast their approach with the other schools of Christian apologetics by describing them as assuming that the world is intelligible apart from belief in the existence of God and then arguing on purportedly neutral grounds to support trusting the Christian Scriptures and the existence of God. Thomas Aquinas himself insists that many crucial truths can only be known through scripture, and none of his arguments are intended to show the entire Christian picture. Specifically, presuppositionalists describe Thomistic (also "Traditional" or "Classical") apologetics as concentrating on the first aspect of apologetics with its logical proofs for the existence of God, simply assuming common ground with the non-Christian and utilizing a piece-by-piece methodology. In this scheme, the common foundation of neutral brute facts leads to a generic concept of deity, then to the various characteristics of the Christian God as revealed in Scripture, and so forth. Piece-by-piece, Christian theology is built up from a neutral common ground.

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Galilee

Galilee (Arabic al-jaleel الجليل, Hebrew hagalil הגליל), meaning "circuit", is a large area overlapping with much of the North District of Israel. It is traditionally divided into three areas:

1. Upper Galilee,
2. Lower Galilee and
3. Western Galilee.

Galilee embraces more than one-third of present-day Israel, extending "from Dan on the north, at the base of Mount Hermon, to the ridges of Mount Carmel and Gilboa on the south, and from the Jordan valley on the east away across the splendid plains of Jezreel and Akko to the shores of the Mediterranean on the west."

The Western Galilee, also called the "Northern Coastal Plain" strays from north of Haifa up to Rosh Hanikra in the border between Israel and Lebanon.

The Lower Galilee strays from Mount Carmel and Mount Gilboa ridge in the south to the Beit HaKerem Valley in the north. Its eastern border is the Jordan River.

The Upper Galilee strays from Beit HaKerem Valley in the south to the Lebanese border in the north. Its eastern border is the Sea of Galilee and the mountains of the Golan Heights. The "Finger of the Galilee" (Etzba ha-Galil) is a region of the upper Galilee and contains the towns Metula and Qiriyat Shemona and the rivers of Dan and Banias.

Most of the Galilee consists of mountainous terrain, at heights of about 500-700 meters. There are several high mountain such as Mount Tabor. The relatively low tempartures and the large amounts of rain pouring every year made the Galilee a center of blossom and wildlife. The streams and waterfalls (mainly in the upper Galilee), along with vast fields of green and colorful flowers made it a popular tourist attraction in Israel.

At and before the time of Jesus, the region of the Galilee had been populated by Gentiles, people who were of neither Jewish nor Samaritan ancestry. Galilee was not part of Judea proper but at times was under Judean control. Galilee was separated from it by a sliver of the Gentile Decapolis and by the ethnically mixed transitional region Samaria. The cultural and fundamentalist, religious Jews (Judeans), considered the region to be lower than the half-breeds of Samaria and therefore, morally, spiritually and physically "unclean".

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Edmund Husserl

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (April 8, 1859 – April 26, 1938) was a philosopher, known as the father of phenomenology. His work was a break with the purely positivist orientation and understanding of the science and philosophy of his day, giving weight to subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena.

Husserl was a pupil of Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf; his philosophical work influenced, among others, Eugen Fink, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Rudolf Carnap, Hermann Weyl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Ricœur, Jacques Derrida, Jan Patočka, Roman Ingarden, Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), Karol Wojtyla and Dallas Willard. In 1887 Husserl converted to Christianity and joined the Lutheran Church. He taught philosophy at Halle as a tutor (Privatdozent) from 1887, then at Göttingen as professor from 1901, and at Freiburg im Breisgau from 1916 until he retired in 1928. After this, he continued his research and writing by using the library at Freiburg.

Education and early works

Husserl was born into a Jewish family in Prossnitz, Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire, after 1918 a part of Czechoslovakia (since 1993, the Czech Republic).

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Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard (September 4, 1935 - ) is an American philosophy professor and author born in Buffalo, Missouri. His work in philosophy has been primarily in phenomenology, particularly the work of Edmund Husserl. His more popular work has been in the area of Christian spiritual formation, within the various expressions of historic Christian orthodoxy.

Education

Willard attended William Jewell College, and later graduated from Tennessee Temple College in 1956 with a B.A. in Psychology, and from Baylor University in 1956 with a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion. He went to graduate school at Baylor University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning a Ph. D. in Philosophy with a minor in the History of Science in 1964.

Academic career

Willard taught at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1960-1965. Since then he has taught at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he served as Director of the School of Philosophy from 1982-1985. He has also held visiting appointments at UCLA (1969) and the University of Colorado (1984).

His publications in philosophy are concerned primarily with epistemology, the philosophy of mind and of logic, and with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. He has translated many of Husserl's early writings from German into English.

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teleological argument

A teleological argument (or a design argument) is an argument for the existence of God or a creator based on perceived evidence of order, purpose, design and/or direction in nature. The word "teleological" is derived from the Greek word telos, meaning end or purpose. Teleology is the supposition that there is purpose or directive principle in the works and processes of nature.

The argument

The teleological argument is consistent with Romans 1:20:

"For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."(Romans 1:20, Paul of Tarsus)

Although there are variations, the basic argument can be stated as follows:

1. X is too (complex, orderly, adaptive, apparently purposeful, and/or beautiful) to have occurred randomly or accidentally.

2. Therefore, X must have been created by a (sentient, intelligent, wise, and/or purposeful) being.

3. God is that (sentient, intelligent, wise, and/or purposeful) being.

4. Therefore, God exists.

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Leningrad Codex

The Leningrad Codex (or Codex Leningradensis) is one of the oldest manuscripts of the complete Hebrew Bible produced according to the Tiberian mesorah; it is dated 1008 according to its colophon. The Aleppo Codex, against which the Leningrad Codex was corrected, was the first such manuscript and is several decades older, but parts of it have been missing since 1947, making the Leningrad Codex the oldest complete codex of the Tiberian mesorah that has survived intact to this day.
In modern times, the Leningrad Codex is most important as the Hebrew text reproduced in Biblia Hebraica (1937) and Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (1977). It also serves scholars as a primary source for the recovery of details in the missing parts of the Aleppo Codex.

Contents

The biblical text as found in the codex contains the Hebrew letter-text along with Tiberian vowels and cantillation signs. In addition are masoretic notes in the margins. There are also various technical supplements dealing with textual and linguistic details, many of which are painted in geometrical forms. The codex is written on parchment and bound in leather.

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Euphrates

The Euphrates (the traditional Greek name, Arabic: الفرات; Al-Furat, Hebrew: פְּרָת) is the westernmost of the two great rivers that define Mesopotamia (the other being the Tigris).

Etymology

The name Euphrates may have originated from Old Persian Ufratu, as it were from Avestan *hu-perethuua, meaning "good to cross over" (from hu-, meaning "good", and peretu, meaning "ford"). Alternatively, some suggest that the name Euphrates is possibly of Kurdish origin.

Course of the Euphrates

In Kurdish, fere means "wide", re means "flowing water" and hat is "flowing", giving fererehat, meaning "wide flowing water". The modern Kurdish name, Ferat, is possibly a reduction of the older name. However, the Indo-European etymology of the name is put into doubt by the Sumerian and Akkadian names for the Euphrates are Buranun and Pu-rat-tu, respectively, Buranun being attested in an inscription associated with king Gudea (22nd century BC). It seems thus likely that the Old Persian name arose by popular etymology based on the pre-Iranian name of the river.

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Job

Job (Hebrew אִיּוֹב,), is a character in the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. In brief, the book begins with an introduction to Job's character — he is described as a rich, blessed man who fears God and lives righteously. Satan, however, challenges Job's integrity, and so God gives Job into Satan's hand, ending in tragedy for Job: the loss of his children, wealth, and physical soundness. The main portion of the text consists of the discourse of Job and his three friends concerning why Job was so punished, ending in God answering Job. Job is also a prophet in Islam.

In the Hebrew Bible

His sons took turns entertaining each other with feasts; each time they completed a cycle of feast days, Job sent to them and purified them, offering burn-offerings for each one in case any of them had cursed God in their hearts. He was "blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. His good character is discussed in depth later in the book. (Job 1:1;4,5)

Job is described as upright, virtuous, and religious, he was wealthy in terms of slaves and cattle, which at the time were the principal wealth of princes in Arabia and Edom. He is said to have lived in the land of Uz. He had seven sons and three daughters and was "the greatest man among all the people of the East." (Job 1:1-3)

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Simon Peter

Saint Peter, also known as Simon ben Jonah/BarJonah, Simon Peter, Cephas and Kepha — original name Simon or Simeon (Acts 15:14) — was one of the Twelve Apostles whom Jesus chose as his original disciples. His life is prominently featured in the New Testament Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. A Galilean fisherman, he (with his brother Andrew) was literally "called" by Jesus to be a disciple. Above all the other disciples, Peter was assigned a leadership role by Jesus (Matt 16:18; John 21:15–16); and many within the early Church, such as St Clement of Rome and St Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses 3:3:20), mention his primacy.

The ancient Christian Churches, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox, consider Simon Peter a saint and associate him with the foundation of the Church in Rome, even if they differ on the significance of this for the position of the see of Rome and of the Pope in present-day Christianity.

Some who recognize his office as Bishop of Antioch and, later, as Bishop of Rome hold that his episcopacy held a primacy only of honour, as a first among equals.

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Christlike

To be like Christ; showing the spirit of Christ.

³⁵ Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. ³⁶ Simon and his companions went to look for him, ³⁷ and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!” —Mark 1:35-37, NIV

We know about Jesus

•   healing the sick;
•   raising the dead;
•   throwing the money-changers out of the House of God;
•   having mercey on the woman caught in the act of adultery;
•   feeding the five thousand from a few pieces of bread and a few fish;
•   performing many miracles

However, in the above passage we see Jesus in the fullness of His character.

We see Him as one who not only carried out the will of God, but one who sought God's Will during times of solitude in prayer. Jesus sacrificed Himself to carry out the will of God. He could have stopped it at any time, but He allowed it to happen because it was God's Will and because He loves us that much.

Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will." -Matthew 26:39

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Clement of Alexandria

Clement of Alexandria (Titus Flavius Clemens), was the first member of the Church of Alexandria to be more than a name, and one of its most distinguished teachers. He was born about the middle of the 2nd century, and died between 211 and 216.

Life

He was not born in Egypt (Stromata, i. 1). Athens is named as his birthplace by the sixth-century Epiphanius Scholasticus, and this is supported by the classical quality of his Greek. His parents seem to have been wealthy pagans of some social standing. The thoroughness of his education is shown by his constant quotation of the Greek poets and philosophers. He travelled in Greece, Italy, Palestine, and finally Egypt. He became the colleague of Pantaenus, the head of the catechetical school of Alexandria, and finally succeeded him in the direction of the school.

During the persecution of Septimius Severus (202 or 203) he sought refuge with Alexander, then bishop [possibly of Flaviada] in Cappadocia, afterward of Jerusalem, from whom he brought a letter to Antioch in 211. One of his most popular pupils was Origen.

He united Greek philosophical traditions with Christian doctrine and valued gnosis that with communion for all people could be held by common Christians. He developed a Christian Platonism. Like Origen, he arose from Alexandria's Catechical School and was well versed in pagan literature. Origen succeeded Clement as head of the school.

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Michael (archangel)

Michael (Hebrew: מיכאל,) is the archangel mentioned in the Book of Revelation 12:7;

⁷ And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. (Revelation 12:7)

in the Hebrew Bible Michael is mentioned by name in the Persian context of the post-Exilic Book of Daniel. There in Daniel does Michael appear—as "one of the chief princes" (Daniel 10:13) who in Daniel's vision comes to the angel Gabriel's aid in his contest with the angel of Persia, and is also described there as the advocate of Israel and "great prince who stands up for the children of your (Daniel's) people" (Daniel 10:21, 12:1). The Talmud tradition rendered his name as meaning "who is like El (God)? (but literally "El's Likeness")" (compare the late prophet Micah), but according to Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish (AD 230–270), all the specific names for the angels were brought back by the Jews from Babylon, and many modern commentators would agree.

Michael is one of the principal angels in Abrahamic tradition; his name was said to have been the war-cry of the angels in the battle fought in heaven against Satan and his followers.

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Specified complexity

Specified complexity is an argument proposed by American mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and neo-creationist William Dembski, and used by him in his works promoting intelligent design. According to Dembski, the concept is intended to formalize a property that singles out patterns that are both specified and complex. Dembski states that specified complexity is a reliable marker of design by an intelligent agent, a central tenet to intelligent design which Dembski argues for in opposition to modern evolutionary theory. The concept of specified complexity is widely regarded as mathematically unsound and has not been the basis for further independent work in information theory, complexity theory, or biology. Specified complexity is one of the two main arguments used by intelligent design proponents, the other being irreducible complexity.

In Dembski's terminology, a specified pattern is one that admits short descriptions, whereas a complex pattern is one that is unlikely to occur by chance. Dembski argues that it is impossible for specified complexity to exist in patterns displayed by configurations formed by unguided processes. Therefore, Dembski argues, the fact that specified complex patterns can be found in living things indicates some kind of guidance in their formation, which is indicative of intelligence. Dembski further argues that one can rigorously show by applying no free lunch theorems the inability of evolutionary algorithms to select or generate configurations of high specified complexity.

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history of Ancient Israel

The history of Ancient Israel and Judah is known to us from classical sources including Judaism's Tanakh or Hebrew Bible (known to Christianity as the Old Testament), the Talmud, the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast, the writings of Nicolaus of Damascus, Artapanas, Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus supplemented by ancient sources uncovered by biblical archaeology including Egyptian, Moabite, Assyrian, Babylonian as well as Israelite and Judean inscriptions.

It was also subject to domination by adjacent empires, beginning with Egypt in the late 3rd millennium BCE.

In his book What did the Biblical Writers Know and When did they know it? William Dever suggests that rather than there being just one history there are in fact multiple histories and that we can distinguish nine types of history of Israel and Judah as follows.

1. Theological history – the relationship between the God(s) and their believers.
2. Political history – usually the account of “Great Men”, is generally episodic, chauvinistic and propagandist
3. Narrative history – a running chronology of events, purporting to be factual but always very highly selective
4. Socio-cultural history – a history of institutions, including their social underpinnings in family, clan, tribe and social class and the state
5. Intellectual history – the literary history of ideas and their development, context and evolution as expressed through texts and documents
6. Cultural history – is based upon a larger context of overall cultural evolution, demography, socio-economic and political structure and ethnicit
7. Technological history – a history of the techniques by which humans adapt to, exploit and make use of the resources of their environment
8. Natural history – is a geographic history of how humans discover and adapt to the ecological understandings of their natural environment
9. Material history – as shown in the study of artifacts as correlates of human changes in behaviour.

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Christianity

Christianity is a monotheistic religion centered on the life, teachings, and actions of Jesus, the Christ, as recounted in the New Testament.

With an estimated 2.1 billion adherents, Christianity is the world's largest religion. Its origins are intertwined with Judaism, with which it shares much sacred text and early history; specifically, it shares the Hebrew Bible, known in the Christian context as the Old Testament. Christianity is considered an Abrahamic religion, along with Judaism.

In the Christian scriptures, the name "Christian" (thus "Christianity") is first attested in Acts 11:26: "For a whole year they met with the church and taught a great many people.

And in Antioch Jesus' disciples were first called Christians" (Greek χριστιανους, from Christ Greek Χριστός, which means "the anointed").

Within Christianity, numerous distinct groups have developed, with diverse beliefs that vary widely by culture and place. Since the Reformation, Christianity is usually represented as being divided into three main branches:

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fine-tuned universe

The term fine-tuned universe refers to the idea that conditions that allow life in the universe can only occur with the tightly restricted values of the universal physical constants, and that small changes in these constants would correspond to a very different universe, not likely conducive to the establishment and development of matter, astronomical structures, or life as it is presently known.

The arguments relating to the fine-tuned universe concept are related to the anthropic principle, which states that any valid theory of the universe must be consistent with our existence as human beings at this particular time and place in the universe. In other words even though the actual probability of a universe to be one which supports intelligent life is very low, the conditional probability given our existence in it is 1 - and even if there are other universes devoid of life, there will be no one to observe them.

The premise of the fine-tuned universe assertion is that any small change in the approximately 26 dimensionless fundamental physical constants would make the universe radically different: if, for example, the strong nuclear force were 2% stronger than it is (i.e. if the constant representing its strength were 2% larger), diprotons would be stable and hydrogen would fuse into them instead of deuterium and helium. This would drastically alter the physics of stars, and presumably prevent the universe from developing life as it is currently observed on the earth.

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