Jason Pratt: October 17, 2017

Join us on Mission 17-26 of It's Not Rocket Science with Jason Pratt. After launching from Romans 1:16-23 we'll meet this week's Scriptural Scientist, William Herschel. In our last mission, 17-25, we discussed what has been called "the great debate" between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley. This debate is historically important as it garnered favorable attention for the infamous book that was recently released at the time. Before this debate Darwin's ideas presented were not well received by the broader scientific community. We'll play portions of a sermon or talk that was presented a few decades ago by Dr. A. E. Wilder-Smith, our Scriptural Scientist Spotlight from Mission 17-25. With 3 earned doctorates and at least 6 professorships, Dr. Wilder-Smith, deftly explains some very key and basic principles that are necessary to understand and appreciate the nature of the Wilberforce-Huxley debate. Wilder-Smith was one of the presenters at the 1986 Huxley Memorial Lecture at the invitation of the University of Oxford, which was the last time Richard Dawkins publicly debated a Christian. We'll listen as Wilder-Smith summarizes the argument used by Huxley in 1861 which contained a very significant error that was missed 157 years ago. See if you can spot the error, we'll reveal it in an upcoming episode! I also give a brief update to the end of mission for the Cassini orbiter that was crashed into the surface of Saturn this year.