Drive-in!!!!!!!!!!!!

This Friday night, May 2.  I don't care about temperature or weather.

Good line-up: Ironman, Drillbit Taylor, and a third one that doesn't fit on the marquis yet.

If you won't go with me, I will go by myself.  If you think I'm not serious, count the exclamation points.

The ache of unrealized possibilities

Two dear friends had their unborn babies die this past weekend.  After grieving the news of one yesterday, I found out about the other one today.  It's hard to understand why these things have to happen, and it's hard to know what to say.  I guess we can be reminded of the miraculous and fragile nature of human life and be sure to cherish the loved ones in our lives.

You may not know them, but you could pray for Jeremy and Abby Cashman in their loss of Harper Lee at 23 weeks, and for Chris and Jeni Smith in their loss of Hazel Irene at 31 weeks.  Jeremy is a longtime friend from back in the day, and Chris was my roommate and close friend in college (I was best man in his wedding).  Pray that they would be driven to deeper faith and find comfort in the questioning.

Harper, you get the coolest name award.

Harper and Irene, we look forward to seeing your perfection in another life.

The true signal of summer's return

By my watch, this is opening weekend for the drive-in.  The line-up is pretty iffy right now (Never Back Down, Superhero Movie, The Forbidden Kingdom) but let's get going soon!  (You know who you are, Paul Dopkins.)  Cold schmold - anybody going this weekend?

Eddies in the space-time blog-inuum

A weird thing happened - I just published a new post on evolution, and it appeared below the Einstein/Mariah Carey post (when was the last time you saw those names together?). This is beause it was already started and in draft form when I published the Einstein one last night. Just so you know it's down there.

You can't make this stuff up

I just heard this, and it is not a joke. Mariah Carey's new album is called E=MC².

I guess her talent is relative to the position and velocity of the observer.

R.C. Sproul/Ben Stein (cont.)

Here's my current viewpoint, so we're clear. I am a Christian and believe in the doctrine of creation and the inerrancy of the Bible. Evolution (the whole shebang, from single cells to man) could have occurred (in accordance with the scientific evidence and the consensus of the scientific community who studies that stuff) and is not necessarily contradictory to the idea that God created us. I wish we could all sit down and listen to this excellent lecture together. I have it on my iPod and I listen to it in the car like a (really long) favorite song.

Take a look at that word - evolution. I've already written it twice in this post, multiple times in previous posts, and will most likely continue to use it frequently. To our current brand of 20th/21st century Western evangelical Christianity, it's the e-word! Even just seeing or hearing the word, you have an emotional reaction, don't you?

We've fallen prey to the false dichotomy of evolution OR creation. At some point in the early 20th century (a study of this would be fascinating; I'm sure someone's done it and I just haven't gotten around to finding it), it began to be woven into the fabric of our thinking and belief system that evolution is intended to explain away God, and a naturalistic process (evolution) and God's act of creation must be mutually exclusive. To me, this is illogical if you stop to consider that you believe that God created you, while at the same time believing that you came from a single cell and developed by the well-known (but not yet fully understood, of course) natural processes of genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, etc. I've never heard:

"Well, if you believe that you came from a single cell and you're the result of two people having sex, and the natural process of developmental biology that follows it, then you reject the involvement of God and there's no basis for morality."

But I have heard the viewpoint that if we evolved from a common ancestor that we share with all other organisms on the planet (from the "primordial soup" as creationists love to put it), that leaves no room for the creative acts of God and no basis for morality. It seems to me there are multiple parallel ways of describing the same thing. I was healed of cancer* by medical science and by God - both at the same time, not medicine doing part and God doing part. I was created by God and by sexual reproduction. Life on earth developed by evolution, and was created by God. Believing in the doctrine of creation does not require one to believe that life on earth was zapped into existence a short time ago more or less like it is now, any more than it requires one to believe that a human baby is created by God fully formed and brought by a stork.

All you have to do is believe in that one false dichotomy, and of course Christians should reject evolution, because we know God created the world! From there we get the whole spectrum of creationist and Intelligent Design viewpoints and rhetoric we see today. Notice I haven't talked at all about science, or about the Bible. I haven't proven evolution scientifically, and I haven't defended it from a Biblical perspective. All I'm talking about is that one philosophical stumbling block. At the risk of oversimplification, almost all of what I've seen/read/heard from creationism and ID boils down to adherence to that dichotomy.

To further confuse the matter, we see atheists (many of them well-known scientists) glory in claiming that evolution explains away the need for God's creation and "makes it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist" (Richard Dawkins). By concluding that a naturalistic process precludes a parallel supernatural involvement, they subscribe to the same false dichotomy. In the process, our mental association of evolution with atheism/philosophical naturalism is strengthened and the false dichotomy gets perpetuated. I am somewhat ambivalent about the "Darwin fish" car emblem; on the face of it, I appreciate the humor, but I am also dismayed (though perhaps not for exactly the same reason that you are). To me, it's a statement that seems to say "not Jesus, Darwin" or "not Jesus, evolution," which frustrates me, not as a rejection of Jesus or Christianity (which we can expect from the world at any and all angles), but because it perpetuates the false dichotomy above.

So I feel that the dichotomy described above is a false one, and should not be a reason for rejecting the theory of evolution. What am I missing?

We are going to get to that Sproul/Stein interview . . .

*Really! 7 years cancer-free this Spring!

R.C. Sproul with Ben Stein on "Expelled"

The movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" is coming out a week from tomorrow, and I don't suppose the tension (to put it lightly) between both sides is going to get better anytime soon.  But it could be a good opportunity for some constructive dialog with my creationist brothers and sisters.  (We'll see - 

"constructive" is not something that either side has demonstrated very well.)

"Expelled" is narrated/hosted by Ben Stein (above right).  From what I understand, "Expelled" is basically an expose' about how some university professors have been shunned, harassed, fired, etc., for advocating Intelligent Design (ID) and/or questioning evolutionary theory.  One of the other major things I've heard about the movie is that it implicates the theory of evolution in things like the World War II-era Jewish holocaust.  [This is so outrageously offensive to scientists and anyone who may have a loved one or ancestor that was lost in (or survived) the holocaust that I can hardly believe it.  I'll comment more below.]

I haven't seen the movie yet, so I can't comment directly, but I have done some thinking about the creation/ID/evolution topic and also have exposed myself to lots of audio and print material on the subject.   With such a large volume of words and skilled rhetoric (on both sides) flying around out there, it's actually a really hard topic to get a good handle on.  I'll try to give you my take on it real quick, but I most likely won't do justice to the issue and won't provide anything you couldn't get better somewhere else.  Also, in a real treatment of this issue, I would start with a large amount of ground work and defining of terms; we don't have that luxury here.

One thing I listened to recently was an interview of Ben Stein on R.C. Sproul's Renewing Your Mind program (thanks, Andrea!).  I'll use that as a springboard, as it hits on some of the major philosophical sleight of hand that this issue beguiles us with.  Actually, that's the interesting stuff, but there's lots of really tiresome stuff too, like the fact that many of the people on each side are intellectuals and/or academics and therefore LOVE to characterize the people on the other side as ignorant, illogical, unreasonable, closed-minded, etc.  At this point, both sides can put a self-satisfied smirk on their face and spin it to convince themselves (and like-minded onlookers) that the other side is as stupid as they want them to be.  This ends up just being a sophisticated version of "I know you are but what am I?" and gets us nowhere.  And, as Christians, let's not forget that how we treat people is more important than being right or winning an argument.

Back the philosophical stuff.  Time and time again, I hear the issue characterized in the following way: Evolution says that everything came about by random chance without supernatural involvement, so you can believe that or you can believe that everything was designed and created by an intelligent God, which is patently obvious as we look at the complexity around us, and is also stated in the Bible, which we know to be the inerrant word of God.  There are so many layers of interesting discussion wrapped up in that, but it gets chopped up (in some ways that I feel are inappropriate) and the sausage that gets churned out is - Christians believe the latter, and atheistic nihilists believe the former.  Can we delve more into the complexity?  I just realized this is getting long, so I think I'll start a new one to trick you into thinking you are reading multiple blog entries instead of just one really long one.  If only I could just keep it as short and sweet as some.

Hello, beautiful

The new iMac came on Friday and I finally got to play with it Sunday night after I got back from the North Shore with the high schoolers.  It does lots of really cool things really fast (like the high schoolers!).  It lovingly cares for all my music, podcasts, and photos.  It's screen is bright and beautiful, and it reads my mind.  What more could I ask for?  Well, video I guess.  That'll be soon.  I can't wait to edit video with iMovie.