08.22.09
What’s Going On? (Lost in the Cosmos)
This is the question of the decade: “What the heck is going on?” We ask this question of the housing market, health care, geo-politics, global climate, education, marriage, church culture, and religion in general. This could either be a long and non-conclusive blog thesis or a brief and still inconclusive post. I’ll bet, given the pace at which society operates, you’ll prefer the brief and inconclusive version: (legal disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this post reflect very accurately the opinion of the masses. Don’t call us.)
05.20.09
“Missing Link” Ida and Today’s Google Homepage Agenda
Today, May 20, 2009 the secularists at Google (and many other media outlets) believe that they have lobbed a hand grenade into the laps of believers in Creationism and I.D. The homepage at Google today depicts “Ida,” a fossil dated to be as old as 47 million years. When you click on the fossil, you are essentially doing the equivalent of a “Google Search” for “Missing Link.” The first link to appear in the list of results from that Google search brings you to this site; NY Daily News, US/World News. I have cut and pasted the last portion of that article here:
The unveiling of the fossil came as part of a carefully-orchestrated publicity campaign unusual for scientific discoveries. Read the rest of this entry »
04.07.09
Short Shelf Life
It amazes me how quickly ideas expire. This post will expire before my bananas or a gallon of milk. Intellectual knowledge is old at the moment it is sold. In the case of the printed news, the many newspapers have been dubbed “wastepapers” overnight–many of them are bankrupt or currently going under. Our culture moves so fast that the news at 7 am is old by the evening news at 6:30 pm that very same day. It’s worse than technology or automobiles. I’m referring to ideas, inventions, conversations, movements, nationalities, currency, music and the arts, etc.–everything from talk show episodes to ways in which we catalog, access, and reference libraries of information. Read the rest of this entry »
03.30.09
Glory of Creation
I spent a few hours hiking in the Ocala National Forest today. Among other wildlife, I came across a family of three raccoons, and most interestingly, I spotted a crawfish on the floor of the forest. I thought that a bird had dropped it from its beak as it flew overhead because I wasn’t near a stream. I came home to read up about him online.
His name alone clears it all up; Procambarus clarkii. This is the Latin name for the “Red Swamp Crawfish.” Read the rest of this entry »
02.22.09
Comparing Your Professor With a Satanist
Empiricists and Rationalists Are More Superstitious Than I Am
The basic tenant of humanism is the same as the basic tenant of Satanism-it puts man in the center. Man decides what is good, what is best for himself, what matters, what works, and what he wants. Man is the final rule and authority over himself. He is the existential norm, the ethical norm, and the starting point for all knowledge of himself and his world.
Scientific Positivism/Empiricism:
In many ways, any attempt by modern man to define intellectual truth as a case against religion has only resulted in producing another religion–a religion of science, nature, and experimentation. Any attempt to define God in empirical terms has produced in his place a religion of experience. The object of worship becomes the creation and not the Originator or First Cause that created it. “Scientific faith” is centered on the experimental and experiencing self first and the object of that exam, second. Faith in experience alone is more superstitious and deceitful than acknowledging the thing that created the experience.
An empiricist cannot speak about the nature of God because the nature of God is hidden from human experience until one admits that he cannot trust his experiences alone (or exclusively) to be valid. That individual is worse than the man with a brain tumor telling the surgeon how to kill the tumor. He is a man who pretends that there is no such thing as a tumor in his brain because he cannot find the cause of it.
Rationalism:
A religion of rationalism can offer a great deal to our understanding of metaphysics, but only after it is submitted to He who makes reason reasonable. Whether or not a God exists is above reason-it is the place where reason starts-it is the norm that makes reason possible. This human-first thinking is not submitted to an absolute, but an autonomous and subjective thinking individual. This is more than irrational, it is the most arrogant position a mortal can take on metaphysics.
For a Cartesian, not only is the passenger telling the pilot how to fly the plane, he is pretending that he himself is that pilot. “Nothing exists unless I can know it logically” + “I only know myself,” therefore, “I alone can fly this plane.” (also autonomy).
1) I am free, powerful, and limitless, and I did it all by myself. 2) Because I am free, I can go wherever I wish.
Satanism:
Most modernists don’t know that their faith is in line with Satanism. Satanism does not substitute the worship of God for that of Satan-only that of the self. Satanism and modernism are synonymous. From Wiki:
LaVeyan Satanism is a religion founded in 1966 by Anton Szandor LaVey. Its teachings are based on individualism, self-indulgence, and “eye for an eye” morality. Unlike Theistic Satanists, LaVeyan Satanists are atheists and agnostics who regard Satan as a symbol of man’s inherent nature. According to religioustolerance.org, LaVeyan Satanism is a “small religious group that is unrelated to any other faith, and whose members feel free to satisfy their urges responsibly, exhibit kindness to their friends, and attack their enemies”. Its beliefs were first detailed in The Satanic Bible and it is overseen by the Church of Satan.
Essentially, the modernist mind says this: Although I am in no way responsible for where I came from, nor am I able to contribute to my improvement, I will not submit to any power outside of the thinking and feeling self. Although there is order which implies meaning, and meaning implies ethics, and ethics implies accountability to something outside myself, I am going to pretend that none of this is true. Instead, I am not accountable to anyone or anything other than myself. I will do that which I believe is right to me. It is my self-religion.
11.26.08
Cloning and The Christian
Professor Jonathan M. W. Slack, Ph.D., F.Med.Sci., the Director of the Stem Cell Institute, at the University of Minnesota and the other scientists there are at the forefront of reprogramming adult stem cells. By mapping and understanding the nature of DNA, it is becoming more and more promising that we can reprogram a bone marrow cell, for example, to become a heart tissue cell, brain cell, or spinal chord cell. Professor Slack announces, “Stem cell research, and regenerative medicine generally, will have as much impact on our lives in the 21st century as did motor cars, antibiotics, and computers in the 20th.” He and others at the institute “seek the treatments that will make a difference in quality of life for patients suffering from such diseases as Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease, muscular dystrophy, and more.”[1]
I recently emailed Professor Slack to get his opinion regarding guiding principles in medicine. In his response, he stresses a “non-religious ethic,” noting that we ought to honor the “Golden Rule” principle and that “public consensus must be respected.” Read the rest of this entry »
10.08.08
What is “Human?” (The Disappearing Ego)
You’ve seen my first attempt to promote this fantastic book. This is my second attempt. You simply cannot be a critically thinking adult in Western Culture and not be engaged in this critical analysis.
We are already tragically mute, misled, and frustrated in virtually all areas of epistemology–science, religion, politics, history, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, etc. There is no reason not to be looking carefully at the dilemma of being human. We simultaneously boast to be divine while we relegate ourselves to such frailty and impotence. Let’s admit that we are quite small, limited, and unable to pull off half of what we boast. The other half is merely the result of manipulating the people around us–it all reeks of Nietzsche’s “Will to Power.” And yet, everyone that I know is boasting. Read the rest of this entry »
09.28.08
Postmodern Thought Deconstructed
Gene Edward Veith writes the following:
It is odd that a particular theory should be so influential when it is so vulnerable. Those who argue that “there is no truth” are putting forward that statement as being true. Such lines of thought are intrinsically contradictory.
Postmodernist theorists admit this paradox. Steven Connor notes the irony that there is now a consensus that consensus is impossible, that we are having authoritative announcements of the disappearance of authority, that scholars are writing comprehensive narratives on how comprehensive narratives are unthinkable. One postmodernist philosopher says that the only role of the philosopher now is to “decry the notion of having a view while avoiding having a view about having views.”
C.S. Lewis has pointed out the fallacy of any theory that rejects the connection between thought and truth. “All possible knowledge . . . depends on the validity of reasoning.”
No account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such things as proofs—which is nonsense.1
1. C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: HarperCollins, 1947), p. 21-24.
Taken from: Veith, Gene Edward, Jr. Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture, Crossway Books, Wheaton, IL. 1994. pp. 59-60.
Are Science and Religion really at War?
From the Enlightenment until the early twentieth century, scholars generally divided history into three stages–the ancient world, regarded as brilliant though limited in its scientific understanding; the medieval world, dismissed as a time of intellectual and cultural desolation (the “dark ages”); and the modern age, heralded as a time when reason and enlightenment arose to dispel the mists of medieval superstition. But in recent years that simple schema has been challenged, particularly its negative characterization of the medieval period.
The rehabilitation of the Middle Ages began with the work of French physicist Pierre Duhem (1861- 1916).
Duhem’s work inspired other historians to probe the various ways Christianity provided an intellectual environment conducive to scientific endeavor. That such questions are even entertained indicates a dramatic turnaround in thinking about the relation between science and Christian faith. The image most of us grew up with was one of conflict and hostility. Phrases such as “the war between science and religion” are so familiar many people don’t even challenge them. Yet this conception of warfare is actually a misconception, and one of recent lineage. Read the rest of this entry »
08.17.08
Confined
So many of the aspects that make up our total human experience we did not chose for ourselves. We are bound to this single globe suspended in space. Upon this planet, we inhabit only its surface. We utilize only its upper crust. We can only breathe if we remain within the slim 10 miles between the surface of the earth and the lower atmosphere. At an altitude above 62,000 feet, our blood would boil within our veins. On the surface of the planet, we have the elements, hostile temperatures, and rough seas to contend with, confining nearly every living person to continents between 60 degrees north or south latitude.
When it comes to our lives and our health, we have made such strides in medicine, we are lead to believe that an end is coming to all sickness and dying. It would seem that throughout antiquity researchers are pushing back against death and dying with magnificent wonder and miracle. Let’s be reminded, that we still cannot cure the common cold, nor can we add years to one’s life. The life expectancy for humans is highest in Japan with an average of 82 years. Here in the USA it is 77. (CIA World Factbook)
We may stand on the coastline, the edge of a cliff, or the edge of our health, but without the assistance of machinery, equipment, and a fair bit of technology, we are confined to where we are. Although we believe that we are bigger, stronger, or more transcendent (more independent) that we truly are, the reality of human experience is that we are very small, very fragile, and quite insignificant in our small environment. We may be addicted to stretching beyond ourselves and our limits–to reach further than we ever have in human history, but the reality that returns with all of the record-breaking data is that we are tethered here with no where to go, and no business being elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »
06.17.08
My response to Sam Harris’ “Letter To A Christian Nation”
Click here to read my critique of Harris’ argument against the existence of God.
