THURSDAY
JANUARY 16, 2025

7 pm EST

How Could a Loving God Allow So Much Suffering?
Dr. REBECCA McLAUGHLIN, PhD Cambridge University, Speaker, and Author of several books, including Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion

The Christian worldview claims that there really is a God and that the God of the Bible is a loving and all-powerful God. For many, this raises a legitimate question and causes some to reject God and Christianity. If there is an all-powerful God who could change things, and this God is a loving God, why is there so much suffering in the world? We have all been touched by suffering in some way, either through personal experience, or through someone we know, or what we see in the news. While our world is a place of beauty and love it also contains pain, suffering, and death. If God is truly an all-loving God and all-powerful, he could end this suffering. So either God is not all-powerful, or worse, God is all-powerful, but doesn’t care. Come hear from an awesome speaker who will help us examine this question with depth and insight.

TUESDAY
JANUARY 21, 2025

7 pm EST

Science and Faith - Friends or Foes? - A Look at Origins, Evolution and the Creation story of the Bible

Dr. Tom Rudelius, Professor of Mathematical Physics at Durham University in England. His research focuses on string theory, quantum field theory, and early universe cosmology. He has a blog on science and faith called Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae

Many people have difficulty reconciling modern science with the Christian faith - especially the Biblical account of cosmology and human origins. In this talk, we'll discuss how God, the Bible, creation, and evolution can fit together...and why atheism and science are less compatible than they might seem.

THURSDAY
JANUARY 23, 2025

7 pm EST

How Can There be One True Religion? Isn’t Christianity Exclusive and Intolerant in its Claim to be the Only Way to God?

Abdu Murray - author, speaker, and lawyer. He received his Juris Doctor from University of Michigan Law School. He is the author of several books, including the recently released book entitled, “More Than a White Man’s Religion” For most of his life, Abdu was a Muslim until a nine-year historical, philosophical, theological and scientific investigation pointed him to the Christian faith.

A crowd favorite last year, Abdu is back this year to help us wrestle with whether it is intolerant and exclusive for Christianity to claim it has the true way to God and that other religions are wrong?  Christianity, as well as several other religions, claim to be the correct path to God. How do we search for truth among the many world religions that have competing truth claims? Isn’t claiming to have the only way to God narrow minded, and even unkind and immoral?  Why can't I just believe what I want to believe and you believe what you want to believe?  To address these questions, Abdu brings his research and his own lived experience as one who (at different seasons of life) has lived as a follower of the world’s two largest religions.

TUESDAY
JANUARY 28, 2025

7 PM EST

As Scientific Progress Closes the Gaps in our Understanding of the Natural World, is there any Reasonable Evidence for God’s Existence?

Sam Detmer - Sam is a fifth-year PhD student at MIT in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. Research focus - the development of more robust and deliverable siRNA and mRNA therapeutics. Sam received a Bachelors (in Chemistry and Physics) and Masters (in Physics) from Harvard before starting his PhD at MIT.

Before the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, belief in God provided a convenient explanation for many phenomena in the natural world. Today this no longer seems to be necessary. Evolution explains the formation of biological organisms, computational advances provide insight into the workings of the human mind, and physics explains a vast array of processes from chemical reactions to galaxy formation. Is belief in God just a relic of an antiquated system for explaining the world? Has scientific progress left God behind?

Werner Heisenberg, who gave his name to the famous uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, would beg to disagree. He claimed, “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

In this talk, we will explore Heisenberg’s claim through the eyes of an MIT student. Do the discoveries of modern science make God obsolete? Come to hear how one young scientist currently weighs the evidence by grappling with the overlapping claims of science and faith.

Date TBA
MARCH 2025

7 PM EST

LOCATIOn: MIT

Veritas Forum