Image by jurvetson via FlickrDarwinists, it may help to repeat as you read this: it just looks designed, it just looks engineered, it just looks purposeful.
Happy New Year. May God bless scientists and the scientific enterprise in 2011.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Must-read: ARN Top 10 Darwin and Design Science Stories of 2010
Image by jurvetson via FlickrDarwinists, it may help to repeat as you read this: it just looks designed, it just looks engineered, it just looks purposeful.
Happy New Year. May God bless scientists and the scientific enterprise in 2011.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Lamenting PEI's Strong Cultural Norm Of "Sameness"
Image via WikipediaAlthough the province [PEI] welcomed its first non-European premier in 1986, when Islanders elected Joe Ghiz — whose roots extend to Lebanon, and whose son, Robert, is the current premier — the eastern province was long known for its homogeneity and “Island way of life.”
“While a sense of rootedness can be of great value, it should not render our sense of identity so inflexible that we close the doors of our minds to what we are today and what we can be in the future,” reads a 1999 report commissioned by the government, which went on to lament “a strong cultural norm of ‘sameness’” in the province.Rational people might re-phrase the lamented “strong cultural norm of ‘sameness’” as "strong social cohesion" and consider it a desirable characteristic.
The countries immigrates come from all seem to exhibit a "strong cultural norm of 'sameness'. Do we lament this fact in their cultures or only in ours?
On the other hand, if the immigrants are from self-reliant, hard-working cultures, maybe they will help break the Island's strong cultural norm of welfare dependency and handouts.
Thoughts?
Article in the National Post.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
It's Difficult Being a Human Being
Image via WikipediaIt is difficult to be a human being. Illness, injury, death, bereavement, depression, frustrated hopes, unfulfilled dreams, unrequited love, despair, humiliation, hunger, nakedness, want of every kind – the usual illustrations of the problem of evil provide ample evidence of this....
Reason tells us to trust in God, but reason is cold, and falters in the face of a dying child. Yes, we are rational animals. But we are rational animals – creatures of flesh and feeling as well as of thought. And it is simply difficult to be a rational animal, a human being – to bleed, to feel one’s heart break, to suffer. The Son of God in His divine nature is beyond all that. Yet He took on human nature anyway, so that we poor men and women would not suffer alone. In Jesus Christ the God of the philosophers wears a human face. And in the end, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Rev 21:4). But not before crying some of them Himself, on a cross, and in a manger.He came into the world... "I am the light of the world"... "follow me".
Monday, December 27, 2010
Christmas and Abortion
Image via WikipediaGod chose the people of Israel and spent hundreds of years preparing them to be the chosen people in whose midst the Messiah of the world would be born. Through his word to them, he created a culture of life ("thou shalt not kill"); it was a culture that saw children as an heritage of the Lord, a culture that characterized what we refer to as "development of the fetus" as children being "knitted together in their mothers' wombs" by God. In other words, it was a culturally safe place for the Son of God to enter the world. Mary was ground-zero of that people and that culture.
Western leftist pro-aborts would assert Mary's absolute right to abort her child -- a Child who was intended by God. They would provide loving affirmation and support of her decision, her choice. The child wouldn't even enter into the equation.
Canada and the West would be a dangerous place for the Messiah to be conceived today.
He came into the world... to those who receive him, he gives the right to become a child of God.
Now that's a right worth considering.
For a thoughtful article on abortion, and pro-life in general, go here.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Remembering Christians Persecuted for their Faith
Remembering Christians who are persecuted for their faith.
Christianity is being suppressed in China and strangled in Muslim countries while the West looks the other way. The West readily accepts the idea of Muslim states yet reacts in horror at the thought that a country might consider itself Christian. We readily tolerate Muslim countries squeezing out the Christians but insist that once-Christian nations remove even the symbolic trappings of their faith from the public square.Herod has his current imitators. In 1991, China’s state-run press noted the role of the churches in undercutting Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, adding that if China did “not want such a scene to be repeated in its land, it must strangle the baby while it is still in the manger.” Al-Qaeda has declared that all Middle Eastern Christians should be killed, and many Christians in Iraq have cancelled their Christmas celebrations lest they be targeted.Image by Stewf via Flickr
The cosmic battle between good and evil found its ground zero at the Cross. The outworking of Christ's victory achieved there was initiated in the early persecutions against those who named his name; it continues to this day. Fortunately, we know that "he shall reign forever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end". But, until then, "there shall be blood".
Every true Christian identifies with the persecuted and weighs the cost of following Christ in his own life. We remember them as our brothers and sisters at this time of year.
Related articles
Saturday, December 25, 2010
And Christmas Comes Once More
This is a re-post from Christmas 2008.
“The dark night wakes, the glory breaks, and Christmas comes once more.”
Lewis Redner had a problem. His boss, the Episcopal rector of Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia, had assigned him a task. He had handed Lewis, the church organist, a poem he had written after a trip to the holy land and had asked Redner to set it to music. His boss wanted to use it as part of the upcoming children’s Christmas program. Lewis had tried and tried but couldn’t come up with anything. And Christmas was fast approaching.
His boss was Phillips Brooks. Brooks was a great and beloved 19th century American preacher. But Phillips Brooks isn’t best known to us today because he was a great orator, or because he lectured at Harvard, or even because he wrote books on preaching that are still relevant today. He is best known to us because of a simple poem he once wrote.
Brooks had visited the holy land in 1865 and had attended a Christmas Eve Service at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. He was deeply moved by the experience of being in the very town where Jesus was born on the night in which his birth is celebrated. Brooks’ memory of the worship experience, and of the bleak hills overlooking the town of Bethlehem, stayed with him.
Brooks got back to America and three years later decided the poem he had written would make a good children’s hymn. And that’s why he had handed it over to his organist, Lewis Redner. And that’s why Lewis Redner was not a happy camper.
Finally, a night or so before the planned concert, Lewis went to bed in despair. As he lay in bed despairing, and, probably, commiserating with himself, a melody came to him out of the blue. He rolled out of bed, got it all down and presented it to his Rector the next day. When Phillips Brooks heard it, he reportedly said, "I think it was a gift from heaven."
And so do I.
The first performance of the beloved Christmas carol O Little Town of Bethlehem was exactly 140 years ago this Christmas. If you go to a hymn book, you will see that Phillips Brooks wrote the lyrics, and Lewis Redner wrote the music. You might even notice that the tune itself is titled “St. Louis”. It is said that Brooks named the music “St. Louis” as a tribute to his organist Lewis Redner, changing the spelling slightly so as not to embarrass him unduly.
So, now you know "the rest of the story".
O Little Town of Bethlehem
1. O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by;
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee to-night.
"The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight" --
All of human history, all human struggle, all human attainments and defeats, all longed for hopes and dreaded fears, are met and answered in the person born in Bethlehem that night. The fear of God’s anger for our sin, overcome. The fear of death, overcome. The fear of abandonment, overcome. The hope for a better life, for eternal life, brilliantly and wonderfully answered in the affirmative -- all wrapped up and centred in the beautiful baby boy born to Mary.
2. For Christ is born of Mary,
And gathered all above,
While mortals sleep, the angels keep
Their watch of wondering love.
O morning stars, together
Proclaim the holy birth!
And praises sing to God the King,
And peace to men on earth.
“Proclaim the holy birth” --
The birth of Jesus, the incarnation of God, is ground-zero of human history. Every moment prior is a moment of promise and anticipation. People who know about these things have counted the prophecies concerning the Messiah. There are dozens. Hundreds, even. And each one has found, or will find, its fulfillment in Christ. I’m going to point to just one --
"But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times. "
Every moment up to the point of Jesus’ birth was one of expectation and promise. Every moment after is one of fulfillment, if not full and complete, at least the beginning of fulfillment. For on the day Jesus was born, a new race of humanity was born, and we are invited to participate in that new humanity by faith in Christ.
3. How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him, still
The dear Christ enters in.
A story is told of a Christmas Sunday School presentation in a church -- you know the kind, with children playing various parts, the younger the kids, the better it seems to be. When they got to the part about Mary and Joseph knocking on the door, and the Inn-keeper saying he had no room in the Inn, a young child in the audience couldn’t contain herself; she blurted out, “you can stay at our house”! Are we prepared to offer the same invitation? Is there room in our busy lives for Christ? Can he stay at our house?
There is a “Lost Stanza” to O Little Town Of Bethlehem. Most hymnals skip over verse four and cut to the final verse. Here it is:
4. Where children pure and happy
Pray to the blessed Child,
Where misery cries out to thee,
Son of the mother mild;
Where charity stands watching
And faith holds wide the door,
The dark night wakes, the glory breaks,
And Christmas comes once more.
"The dark night wakes, the glory breaks, and Christmas comes once more."
As the Queen’s chaplain said recently in a sermon preached at St. Andrew's Cathedral in Singapore, “Jesus Christ transforms every situation he enters”. He never leaves a situation the same as it was. He never leaves a person the same as he was. It is as Scrooge cries out on Christmas Day, “I’m not the man I was! I’m not the man I was!”. Dicken's A Christmas Carol may have been a work of fiction, but, steeped in the vapors of Christianity, its pages bear the sweet fragrance of the timeless truths of repentance and transformation.
5. O holy Child of Bethlehem!
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin and enter in,
Be born in us to-day.
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us, Our Lord Emmanuel!
The final verse is a prayer. Implicit in this prayer is the sure belief that the babe was not only born in Bethlehem, he also suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, and on the third day he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. It is to this One, whose "origins are from of old, from ancient times" that we offer our prayer at Christmas:
"Lord, you can stay at our house! Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us to-day."
Those of us who do will find that, in our hearts, "the dark night wakes, the glory breaks...
And Christmas comes once more".
Merry Christmas to all who happen this way. May you be blessed.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
God Kissed The World On Christmas Day 2010
God Kissed The World On Christmas Day 2010
A Christmas-season song from Canadian song-writer Richard K. Ball.
And that's the way the Ball bounces!
Merry Christmas to all!
He Shall Reign Forever and Ever - Hallelujah!
Hallelujah all over again. This time, it's the Philadelphia Opera Company.
h/t my friend Leeky.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Christmas: And Is It True?
Image via WikipediaThe most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?
And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant.
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives to-day in Bread and Wine.
— John Betjeman (1906 - 1984)
Monday, December 20, 2010
Mohler Monday: "Irreconcilable worldviews cannot be bridged by accommodationist theories"
"... irreconcilable worldviews cannot be bridged by accommodationist theories. The dominant evolutionary model denies the possibility of divine design within the process of evolution. This model cannot be reconciled with the Bible and the Christian truth claim." -- Albert Mohler, An Evolving Position on Evolution? Interesting Developments in the Roman Catholic Church.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
There's No Business Like No-Snow Business
Image via WikipediaDrudge reminds us of the predicted no-snow apocalypse via this, circa 2000:
Britain's winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives....
... According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".
"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.Fast-forward to 2010, and the photo of a single, solitary
In the Bible, Christ says that a good God makes his sun to shine on the just and the unjust. He also apparently makes his snow fall on global warming deniers and believers alike.
Merry Christmas!
Quote of the Day: "The fact that some scientists get a sour stomach over the metaphysical implications of intelligent design is no excuse for ignoring the evidence"
Image via WikipediaThe fact that some scientists get a sour stomach over the metaphysical implications of intelligent design is no excuse for ignoring the evidence. Cellular life, even at the most fundamental chemical level, has the properties of purpose, which should inform our scientific perspective. Meyer has provided us with a compelling argument drawn from academically rigorous presuppositions, so that, whatever one’s metaphysical squeamishness may be, he can confidently approach DNA as a written code and the cell as a complex factory. -- Heather Zeiger, reviewing Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell, at Salvo.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
What To Buy Your Darwinian Friends For Christmas
Wait a minute. Christmas? If the message of Christmas -- a God-incarnate, uncorrupted-natured Man --is real and true, then philosophical darwinism is both false and shabby. No Christmas? No Easter. No Easter? No hope.
No hope. Nohope. Noope. Nope. In four easy mutations.
I can understand the beliefs of darwinists; what I don't understand is the gloating. The idea that there is no God, and therefore we face extinction with no hope of redemption beyond bodily death, should be the cause of extreme mental horror and angst. Philosophical darwinists, at a minimum, should wish Christianity were true; instead, they both hate it and trample evidences for it underfoot -- ironically, fulfilling Scripture.
Merry Christmas!
Friday, December 17, 2010
Miller Time or Mecca Time: "Red Cross Bans Itself"
Image via WikipediaGive it a few years. It's getting to the point where parody headlines write themselves. How can anyone take western society seriously when it can't stand itself?
Meanwhile, closer to home, the gals manning the Salvation Army kettle at the local Toronto Costco unfailingly wish the shoppers "happy holidays". Haven't heard a "Merry Christmas" yet. Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to favour Christian organizations willing to take a brave public stand and wish passers-by "merry Christmas".
Is it Miller Time or Mecca Time? In the U.K., it's clearly Mecca Time.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Gandalf on Mars: What Bleeping Codes Say About Intelligent Design
Image by jasondondi. via FlickrIn it, you'll find an excellent article, written by Richard W. Stevens (a new name to me) articulating the intelligent design argument. Here's the heart of it:
Dressed as neo-Darwinism, secular humanism, or resurgent atheism, the "scientific" contender in the worldview wars is materialism (aka naturalism). Materialism declares that the entire universe operates by physical laws of energy and matter alone. If intelligence exists at all, it has resulted from a combination of purely impersonal, undirected, purposeless material forces.
Consider the implications of this. If a Thoughtless Thing is impersonal, undirected, and purposeless, then the Thing does not know or even care about future events. Therefore, that Thoughtless Thing cannot and does not plan for future conditions. It does not foresee its own future nor the future or even the existence of any other thing.
Such a Thoughtless Thing cannot and will not create a code, let alone an encoder–decoder device. Why not? Because to encode a message now presumes the belief that the message might be decoded later—in the future. Similarly, to build a decoder device today presumes the belief that a coded message will arrive in the future. Yet a Thoughtless Thing cannot and does not imagine any future event.
No Thoughtless Thing—no impersonal, undirected, purposeless material force—can create a Gandalf system. Neo-Darwinism's mechanisms, undirected mutation and natural selection, are Thoughtless Things. Therefore, neo-Darwinism's mechanisms cannot create a Gandalf system.So, had you guys already heard of Salvo, or are we on this learning-curve together? While you ponder that, I'm off for my second coffee.
[name and link corrected]
Related articles
I Find Myself (Mostly) Agreeing With An Anti-ID Guy
Image via Wikipedia“The problem is that the cosmology in Genesis does not resemble what we know about the origins of the world.... If you believe that the world was created by God in six days because the Bible says so, then you must also believe that the Israelites saw God’s hand, because the Bible says so, and that Moses spoke to God face to face, because the Bible says so, and that God’s feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, because the Bible says so, and so on.... Sanctity is not an excuse for stupidity.” -- Leon Wieseltier, 2005, quoted here.I had to whittle down the comment to pull it off, but, having done so, I agree with what this anti-ID guy says. The valid point he makes is this: the Bible must be interpreted. Not all statements ought to be understood as historic or scientific or literal.
Examples? The parables of Jesus convey profound truths, but they need not have been the recounting of historical events. The sun rising in the east and setting in the west is true in an anthropic sense, but not in a scientific sense. God's hand, face, arm, etc. convey truth about the deity, but are not literally true, at least, not true in the materialistic sense which is just about the only way we are able to think of hands, faces, and arms.
There is no need for the cosmology in Genesis to be entirely scientifically or historically or literally true in order to be true, and indeed, to communicate indispensable truths about God and the human condition. The literalness of Genesis depends on both the communicative intents of the Author/author(s) of these accounts, and the way in which these accounts would have been understood by their original hearers. As 21st century persons, we are "listening in" on an ancient communication that did and still does communicate vitally relevant and true information to humankind.
God created. Man fell. God promised a Saviour. The Saviour Came. There's a new world coming.
It's our move.™
Miller Time or Mecca Time: Austrian Yodelling
You've heard of the offence of driving while drinking? How about yodelling while mowing?
An Austrian court has recently fined a citizen for yodeling while mowing his lawn, according to a report in The Kronen Zeitung newspaper.
Unfortunately for Helmut G., his neighbors were in the middle of a prayer when he started to yodel. The Kronen Zeitung reported that he was fined 800 Euros after judges ruled that he could have tried to offend his neighbors and ridicule their belief.
Helmut G. clarified that “It was not my intention to imitate or insult them. I simply started to yodel a few tunes because I was in such a good mood.”Miller Time or Mecca Time? In Austria, it's Mecca Time.
The western impulse to appease Islam knows no bounds. It's getting ridiculous. And 800 Euros is not chump change.
Enjoy the video.
Enjoy the video.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
I Am The Eggman
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