Science Fiction

I was reading about idols as objects of mockery this morning in Jeremiah 10:15. 

And then this video shows up on my youtube page.

Huh! The idol of history (amongst others) gets what is coming!

snow chance

I couldn't resist building this when clearing the path this morning. 

The abnormality of man

Take away the first three chapters of Genesis, and you cannot maintain a true Christian position nor give Christianity's answers. (The God Who Is There, p104)

How small we are...

I've been thinking about Psalm 8:3-4 and I stumbled on this neat flash animation: 
How small we are...

Goo or Genesis

An excellent little article on why the debate about marriage is at heart a theological one (for those on both sides of the isle) and why Christians must begin with Genesis and NOT with 'traditional' values. Here are some nuggets:

Marriage is a political act, and not an individual choice. How you marry is a way of testifying to what city you belong to. Who defines marriage? The difficulty we are having in our generation in answering this question shows how theology shapes and drives everything.

If God created the world, and put one man and one woman in it, married them to each other, and established that as a pattern for the rest of human history, then marriage should be defined in accordance with that reality. If He did nothing of the kind, and we actually evolved out of the primordial goo, then we get to shape and define it however we would like it to go.

One other item of Christian theology has to be taken into account, and that is the reality of the fall into sin. The Christian approach to marriage in the context of mere Christendom deals with both of these realities -- the creational given of male and female, and the sinful propensity we have to hump the world. Creational sexuality and sinful sexuality are both factors.

Our laws about marriage must therefore do two things, not just one. They must honor what God has established in the first place, and they must restrain (by not honoring with the recognition of marriage) any of the other forms of sexual congress that sinful men have come up with... 

... The marriage debates are a prime illustration of why governmental neutrality on basic religious issues is an impossibility. He who says A must eventually say B, and now that we are getting to the end of this seamy chain of syllogisms, we are confronted with the demand to allow homosexuals to marry. But this is not the end of it, and shows why it is so important to get down to first principles.
The secularists want to say that in addition to straights, we have a range of options with the fetching label of GLBTQ. Anybody who thinks that list of letters won't grow just isn't paying attention. Pederasty, bestiality, hetero-polygamy, hetero-polyandry, and bisexual-polyoptions are all waiting in the wings.
The reason why homosexual marriage won't end the debates (and the hate crimes of those who take up the wrong side of the debate) is that these marriage "reforms" clearly have not solved the problems of the bisexuals. With our arbitrary limitation of marital status to two and only two people, we are plainly telling the bisexual that he must choose between a heterosexual marriage or a homosexual marriage, but that he can't do both. "But I am both!" he wails . . . suppose this poor little buster wants to express all of his sexual yearnings within the holy bonds of matrimony, and the clerk down at the county courthouse, just seething with hate, won't give him a license with a place on it for three signatures. And then the Muslim guy, next in line, wants one with a place for four signatures... 

... Christians can't fight this on the basis of "traditional values." The sexual traditions of humanity, considered apart from God's Word, have contained way too many child brides, harems, serial polygamists, and concubines to provide us with the appropriate guidance here. 

Mad Marvels

In preparation for our new motiv8 series I watched these:

Not in your wildest dreams would you come up with this stuff!
Yet God spoke
and it was!

God speaks!

a swirl of story

artificial original sin!

Artificial intelligence seems to have an inner bent to destructive behaviour according to this video!

How very human. 

your desire will be for you avatar but he will rule over you

Truly in their makers' image. 

Dr Who?

...the past is not subject to the kinds of controls and observation that science requires. Interpreting the past involves guesswork to a far greater degree than observational science, and thus there is far more room for presupposition and assumptions to play a role. (p126 Creation in Six Days: A Defense of the Traditional Reading of Genesis One)

Run rabbit, run, run, run

Photoshop gives the evolutionary edge to anything!

I once watched a stoat hunt down and kill a rabbit - just the kind of 'selective pressure' that should (according to Darwinian principles) cause the emergence of a tribe of super-rabbits that could outrun stoats. No problem with that. But natural selection is never going to endow cabbages with a turn of speed sufficient to outrun their rabbit  predators, because cabbages can't move in the first place.

Natural selection can only work by preserving or 'selecting' fortuitous improvements in some functional aspect of the organism.  

...complex biological systems cannot evolve step-by-step as taught by new-Darwinianism, because until they have become functioning systems they serve no purpose and natural selection cannot operate upon them. In asking how a irreducible complex system could arise, we're not asking how rapid-rabbits might evolve from also-rans but how a cabbage might grow legs.

 p75-76 Who Made God? Searching For a Theory of Everything

What do you see when you look into the sky?

When twentieth-century people step outside and look at the sky, they see a huge atomic furnace burning hydrogen during the day, and a small planetoid reflecting the light of the sun at night. They also see other atomic furnaces that appear very small because they are far away.

When twentieth-century people step back inside their homes and pick up the latest coffee table book of astronomy, they see color-enhanced photographs of distant galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, and binary starts. They see speculative drawings of quasars, neutron starts, and black holes. 

p 53 Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World


We'll be looking at the stars (so to speak) tomorrow at 4pm as we continue in Genesis 1 (Genesis 1:14-19) ! 

What is a Person?

For centuries it was generally accepted that the terms 'person' and 'living human being' were virtually equivalent. But over the last two decades, a number of influential modern philosophers, including Peter Singer, Jonathan Glover and John Harris, have challenged traditional understandings of personhood. As we will see, this has led them to some startling conclusions.

For Peter Singer a person is a being who has a capacity for enjoyable experiences, for interacting with others and for having preferences about continued life. For John Harris a person is any being who is capable of valuing their own life.

Once this kind of definition is accepted, there are a number of logical implications. Firstly it is immediately obvious that in order to be regarded as a person, you must have an advanced level of brain function. In fact you must have a completely developed and normally functioning cerebral cortex. 

Secondly, there must be a significant group of human beings who are non-persons. These include fetuses, newborn babies and infants who lack self awareness, and a large group of children and adults with congenital brain abnormalities, severe brain injury, dementia and major psychiatric illnesses.

Thirdly, there are many non-human beings on the planet who meet the criteria of persons. These include at least chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys and dolphins, but may also include dogs, pigs and many other mammals. In fact it has even been argued that within the foreseeable future some supercomputers may meet the criteria to be regarded as persons.

Those who meet the criteria of persons have moral rights and privileges. They deserve to be protected from those who would injure or kill them. They should be allowed to exercise their own choices or autonomy as much as possible. But the same rights and privileges do not extend to non-persons. Peter Singer puts it like this, 'only a person can want to go on living, or have plans for the future, because only a person can understand the possibility of a future existence for herself or himself. This means that to end the lives of people against their will is different from ending the lives of beings who are not people…killing a person against his or her will is a much more serious wrong than killing a being who is not a person.' In other words killing a chimpanzee is a much greater moral evil than killing a newborn baby or an adult with Alzheimer's disease.

When people respond with incredulity, Singer argues that to make moral distinctions on the basis of species is to be guilty of a new crime, 'speciesism'. Instead we should make moral distinctions on the basis of 'ethically relevant characteristics', such as the ability to choose and value your own life.

Of course there are major logical problems with this kind of definition of personhood. In effect Singer has replaced one form of discrimination with another. Instead of discriminating on the basis of species, he is now arguing that we should discriminate on the grounds of cortical function. In fact if we are into name-calling we could call him a 'corticalist'. But why should corticalism be preferable to speciesism? Of course Singer may wish to argue that cortical functioning is 'ethically relevant' whereas species membership is not. But this is an arbitrary distinction that is hard to defend on entirely logical grounds. Why should the functioning of a 5mm layer of neurones be the central and only moral discriminating feature between beings? On purely logical grounds species membership is a more coherent and fundamental basis for making ethical distinctions between beings. 

  What is a Person? John Wyatt 

Has Science Buried God?

Very helpful!

A humanist is

A humanist is,

‘someone who believes that man is just as much a natural phenomenon as an animal or plant; that his body, mind and soul were not supernaturally created but are products of evolution.’ 

Sir Julian Huxley quoted in Genesis for Today: Creation and Evolution p16

Shell Shocked

Doug Wilson recounts part of his debate with the President of the American Humanist Association: 

Mr. Niose, who struck me as a very nice man, said in the course of the debate that the Bible was a tired and ancient book, with a bunch of irrelevant laws, citing as one example the Old Testament prohibition of eating shellfish. In my reply, I pointed to the stark alternative this presented -- a faith in which the adherents were at one time prohibited from eating shellfish, and on the other hand a faith in which the adherents used to be shellfish.

You can read the rest of his account here. 

HT Pete Jackson

Faith, hope, love and science

You won’t find faith or hope down a telescope

You won’t find heart and soul in the stars

You can break everything, got the chemicals

But you can’t explain a love like ours.

Its the way we feel, yeah this is real

Its the way we feel, yeah this is real

The Script, Science & Faith

A House for My Name

 Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?  

Tell me, if you understand. 

Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! 

Who stretched a measuring line across it?  

On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone 

--  while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? 

Job 38:4-7 

"When God first appears in the Bible, He is building a house. 
God makes His house through His Word and Spirit. All three Persons of God are working to build His House. The Father speaks and things are made. He says. 'Let there be light,' and there is light. Other places in the Bible, we learn that the 'Word' that makes the world is the 'Word' that is God (John 1:1-5). And this Word becomes man in Jesus. The Spirit is mentioned too in Genesis 1:2: 'The Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.'"   A House for My Name, p44

From glory to glory

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters (Genesis 1v2)

Thus, the Spirit had been inserted into the earthly realm from the heavenly realm, proceeding from the Father and the Son, evidently at the precise moment of the act of creation. The creation does not exist apart from the presence of the moving Spirit within her. God never needs to 'enter' the creation; by His Spirit He has been present within her from the very beginning. 

Then God said, 'Let there be light.' The only source for that light is the Spirit Himself. When God appears later on in the Bible, He is surrounded by the glory, which is associated with the Spirit. Indeed, His glory hovers over Israel in the pillar of cloud and fire. Thus, the initial light came from the Spirit. Light is energy, fire; so no fire is brought into the earth from heaven. Fire transforms things, and so begins the transfiguration of the earth, from glory to glory. 

Creation in Six Days: A Defense of the Traditional Reading of Genesis One, p175-76

What did God create in Genesis 1:1?

In the beginning God created the heavens(or heaven) and the earth. 

Here is what Bruce Waltke says about Genesis 1v1 (as quoted in Jordan's book): 

'First, 'heaven and earth' is a hendiadys (a single expression of two apparently separate parts) denoting 'the cosmos,' the complete, orderly, harmonious universe. For example, the hendiadys 'kith and kin' indicates all of one's relatives. More specifically, the hendiadys is a merism, a statement of opposites to indicate totality, like the compounds, 'day and night,' 'summer and winter'. 

Now the elements of a compound must be studied as a unit, not in isolation. The hendiadys, 'heaven and earth,' cannot be understood by treating 'heaven' and 'earth' as separate elements any more than 'butterfly' can be decoded by investigating 'butter' and 'fly' in isolation.' 

And here is Jordan's response:

Well, in isolation from everything else in the Bible, and in isolation from the rest of Genesis 1, this might make sense. It is true that heaven and earth are two sides of one cosmic coin, and so the phrase might just mean 'cosmos'. How do we know, however, when to take a phrase like this as a hendiadys and when to take it as two distinguished things? We can only know from context, not from the words themselves. 

...in Genesis 1 we find that God called the firmament 'heaven' (v8) and this firmament-heaven is the place where the sun, moon, and stars are located (v14-19). Is this the same as the 'heaven' of Genesis 1:1? No, because there is water above this firmament heaven (v6-7). Where is that water located? Well, later in the Bible we see a sea of ice around the heavenly throne of God (Ezek.1:22; Rev.4:6). Thus, the narrative text of Genesis 1 clearly assumes that there is a created throne-heaven as well as an 'earth' that, in the largest sense, is a lower cosmos including the stars.   [bold verses are my addition]

Creation in Six Days: A Defense of the Traditional Reading of Genesis One, p38

Now, if you are like me this hurts your head! 

So let's listen again. Here is Jordan in another place:

This heaven (Genesis 1v1) is the 'highest' or 'third' heaven. In Genesis 1:8, God created the 'firmament' within the earth, and called it 'heaven.' The stars were placed in this 'firmament heaven,' and birds are said to fly in it (Genesis 1:17, 20). Thus neither the atmospheric heaven or 'outer space' were established until later in the week, and are actually part of the original 'earth' of Genesis 1:1. 

The heaven created in Genesis 1:1, then, is the special throne-house of God. 'Thus says the LORD, 'Heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool''(Isaiah 66:1; cf. Psalm 11:4; Matthew 5:34; 23:22; Acts 7:49). It exists (to use the language of science fiction) in another dimension from earth, infinitely near to us, yet also infinitely far away. 

The Bible shows us quite a lot about heaven. In fact, if we do not understand heaven, we cannot do our work here on earth; for we pray 'Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' If we do not know what heaven is like, we cannot imitate it on earth. Thus the Bible frequently opens heaven to give man a view of what it is like. Ezekiel's visions of the divine Glory (Ezekiel 1:1ff.; 3:12ff.; 10:1ff.; 11:22ff.; 43:2ff.) are a good place to start. As we shall see, the 'glory-cloud' of God is a picture of heaven; when it appears, we get a view of heaven.  

Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World, p41-42