Anti-theft sandwich bags

I wish I would have thought of this....It's a sandwich bag that deters thieves. The question is, come 12:00, would it also deter me?

Power on behalf of the over-powered

I'm finding James Edwards' commentary on Mark's Gospel to be excellent. Here is what he has to say in conclusion to Mark 1.21-28, Mark's narrative of Jesus' authority on display in the synagogue in Capernaum:

The initial report about Jesus from the synagogue in Capernaum is not simply of a victory of the Holy One of God over bent and evil forces, as though two chess players were manipulating pawns on the board for their own advantage. Jesus' defeat of the “strong man” (Mark 3.27) is not at the expense of Satan's victims but on their behalf. Not only are unclean spirits expelled, but broken people are restored to health and wholeness and to the possibility of restoration with their Creator, in whose image they are made. The exousia [Greek, means 'authority', 'power'] of Jesus is astonishing not as a display of Jesus' grandeur but as a power of redemption for captives.

I think the Evangelist Peter would be happy with Edwards' concluding statements. They seem to be in agreement with Peter's own attempt to summarize much of the life of Christ:

...God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. (Acts 10.38)

More Lennox resources

A friend emailed me, pointing me to some more resources from John Lennox. The site claims to be dedicated to growing its current offerings. Check it out.

A provocative post on grammar

I never knew, until now, that it was possible to write provocatively on grammar. Abraham Piper has managed to do it. Here's where it all started, and hear's where it all ended up.

The Fed-Ex delivery guy of the cell

[This is a guest post by my friend Margaret. She wrote this for Love for Truth at my request.]

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I have an enormous respect for scientists. Some of them have changed the way we live. Witness the computer. Others have changed the way we view the universe.

Still others have changed the way we view life. New discoveries revealing the complexity of life’s simplest forms are being made continually. And universities are very generous in making these discoveries available to the public, at no cost except a click of the mouse.

Harvard has a site called BioVisions which contains a short, animated movie called "The Inner Life of the Cell". It took a team of animators 14 months to make this 8 minute movie. [BTW, the Wikipedia entry on “The Inner Life of the Cell” has some links at the end of the article. One is the 8-minute animation; another is David Bolinsky’s speech when he introduced the movie.]

Bolinsky describes the cell’s protein micro-machines as “the envy of nano-technologists the world over.” And I love the motor protein which he calls the “Fed-Ex delivery guy” of the cell.

Bolinsky is fascinated by “truth and beauty” in the arts and sciences. He describes these as “awful things, meaning they are things you can worship.” This does not suggest that he believes in God; but it does mean that the things he is talking about are not trivial.

I do not believe in God because of these things. But such things do suggest that belief in an intelligent Creator is a perfectly rational conclusion, based – not on ignorance – but on valid evidence.

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MJK's note: The link provided above for "The Inner Life of the Cell" is the high speed version. Those with slower or faster web connections can view either of the following: slow speed version; super speed version. Also, for a shorter, non-narrated viewing, go here.

Trigg Palin, abortion, and Down's Syndrome

I really enjoyed this article.

HT: Challies

The atheistic Faith

It can be hard getting atheists to own up to the role faith plays in the formation of their own materialistic worldview (witness the comments section in this post). Yet Paul Giem makes the case convincingly in the origin of life context:

But it is heavily faith-based. We have no experimental evidence for this belief, and the theoretical problems appear insoluble. We have here belief against all the evidence, analogous to the most daring leaps of religious faith imaginable, that is to say, faith not only without evidence but in the teeth of evidence. And it is even worse; there is no appeal to a God Who could reasonably do the feat that needs explaining. It is a miracle without God (my emphasis).

Read the whole thing.

Some random links

First, flies escaping death in slow-mo.

Second: This is rich. A prosperity praise parody.

Third: My brothers are being killed in India. If you pray, please pray.

God's Undertaker - Reduction, Reduction, Reduction

CHAPTER 3: REDUCTION, REDUCTION, REDUCTION

The God of the gaps

It doesn't take long in discussions like these for the phrase “God of the gaps” to be mentioned. “This is the idea that the introduction of a god or God is an evidence of intellectual laziness: we cannot explain something scientifically and so we introduce 'God' to cover our ignorance” (p.46). But in the previous chapter's example of Mr. Ford's car, we do not use Mr. Ford to plug in the gaps of our understanding of internal combustion engines. He does not make it into even a footnote of an explanation as to how the engine works, but he does receive credit in an explanation of how the engine came to be in the first place.

So with God. Richard Swinburne:

Note that I am not postulating a 'God of the gaps', a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained. I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains. The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order (p.47).

Lennox continues:

The point to grasp here is that, because God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps. On the contrary, he is the ground of all explanation...It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science—an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth (p.47).

De-deifying the universe – the very first scientists

An ancient hears thunder and ascribes it to some god stirring himself in the heavens. That kind of thinking is not going to lead to scientific discovery, and so, for science to progress, the universe had to be de-deified.

Xenophanes was not content with the popular mythological explanations of his day (c. 570-478 BC). Noting the tendency of people to make gods in their own image, he commented: “If cows and horses or lions had hands and could draw, then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, cows like cows, making their bodies similar to the shape of their own” (p.48). Such criticisms led to the advancement of science.

Lennox notes that Xenophanes wasn't the first to “criticize the polytheistic view”. Centuries before him, “Moses had warned against worshipping “other gods, bowing down to them, or to the sun or the moon or the stars of the sky” (Deuteronomy 17.3). So also had the later prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 8.2). Now here's the striking thing: These Hebrew prophets, in their praiseworthy zeal to suppress the deification of nature, did not jump “to the conclusion that getting rid of gods either necessitate[d] or [was] the same as getting rid of God” (p.49).

The critical thing to grasp here is that, in contrast to the Greeks, whose gods lay inside of the world, the Hebrews understood God to be outside and independent of the world. Those Greek philosophers who pushed the gods out of nature are applauded for their insight, but the Hebrews were ahead of them from the first. The Hebrews didn't need a champion to free them from intellectual enslavement to the concept of gods in nature; they had never allowed nature to be defied in the first place. Thus, for “Moses and the Prophets it was absurd to bow down to various bits of the universe...But they regarded it as equally absurd not to believe in and bow down to the Creator God who made both the universe and them” (p.49).

Neither did Xenophanes lump God with gods. Despite the polytheistic culture that surrounded him he wrote: “There is one God...similar to mortals neither in shape nor in thought...remote and effortless he governs all there is” (p.49-50).

So the relationship between the divine and nature can be conceived of in two ways: (1) Nature is made into gods, or (2) God made nature. The first is an obvious science-stopper. When you find something you don't understand in nature, all you've got to do is make nature into a god and voila! The inquiry can stop.

Does the second understanding of God and nature also hinder science? Not at all. Because in the second understanding, the divine is kept outside of nature, which means that the divine can not be brought in as an explanation of a mechanism within nature. It is the difference between believing a Mr. Ford built the car engine and believing a Mr. Ford is the car engine—or some part of it. And here Thomas Aquinas is of some help to us. Aquinas realized that there could be various levels of causation. “He regarded God as the First Cause—the ultimate cause of all things. God directly caused the universe to exist and it was thus dependent on him” (p.50). Let's call this direct causation. But then Aquinas also recognized “a second level of causation...that operated within the universe. This consisted in the cause-effect web that is spun out of the vast interlocking and interdependent system that is the universe. Thus, the fact that explanations of secondary causation can be given in terms of laws and mechanisms does not imply the non-existence of the Creator on which the very existence of the cause-effect web depends” (p.50). This means that when confronted with a problem at the second level—the level of why the piston moves, for instance—we are not allowed to introduce first level solutions—like Mr. Ford or God.

Lennox finishes this part of the chapter with a warning:

Perhaps there is a subtle danger today that, in their desire to eliminate the concept of a Creator completely, some scientists and philosophers have been led, albeit unwittingly, to re-deify the universe by endowing matter and energy with creative powers that they cannot be convincingly shown to possess. Banishing the One Creator God they would then end up with what has been described as the ultimate in polytheism—a universe in which every particle has god-like capacities (p.50).

Reductionism

Methodological reductionism. Explaining something by breaking the problem “up into separate parts or aspects, and thus 'reduce' it to simpler components that are individually easier to investigate” (p.51).

Lennox discusses this in the light of mathematics. Mathematics has succeeded in reducing very complex phenomena like the elliptical orbit of planets around the sun into simple, elegant equations. However, as Godet proved in his First and Second Incompleteness Theorems, there is a limit to how far the whole can be reduced to parts. As Freeman Dyson said, “Godet proved that in mathematics the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts” (p.52). Therefore Peter Atkins is wrong to say that “the only grounds for supposing that reductionism will fail are pessimism in the minds of the scientists and fear in the minds of the religious.”

Epistemological reductionism.

The view that higher level phenomena can be explained by processes at a lower level. The strong epistemological reductionist thesis is that such 'bottom-up' explanations can always be achieved without remainder. That is, chemistry can ultimately be explained by physics; biochemistry by chemistry; biology by biochemistry; psychology by biology; sociology by brain science; and theology by sociology (p.53).

Richard Dawkins holds this view: “My task is to explain elephants, and the world of complex things, in terms of the simple things that physicists either understand, or are working on” (p.53).

Basically, Lennox says “the ultimate goal of such reductionism is evidently to reduce all human behaviour—our likes and dislikes, the entire mental landscape of our lives—to physics.” But there's a problem: “There is almost always an unresolved residue left by even the most successful attempts at reduction” (quoting Karl Popper, p.53).

Lennox explains why this is so using an illustration of words on the page of a book. The significance of the letters and words on the page cannot be explained by the physics and chemistry of the ink that formed them, or of the paper they're formed on. Even with language itself, “you cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics, or the grammar of a language from its vocabulary” (p.54).

If this is true of information on paper, it is equally true of genetic information encoded in DNA.

Ontological reductionism. Closely related to epistemological reductionism.

A classic example of it is given by Richard Dawkins: 'The universe is nothing but a collection of atoms in motion, human beings are simply machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living' (p.55).

Lennox points out that “the words 'nothing but', 'sole', or 'simply', are the tell-tale signature of ontological reductionist thinking. If we remove these words we are usually left with something unobjectionable'.

Ontological reductionism leads to saying the type of things Francis Crick says:

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules (p.55).

Thankfully, ontological reductionism is self-defeating. John Polkinghorne:

If Crick's thesis is true we could never know it. For, not only does it relegate our experiences of beauty, moral obligation, and religious encounter to the epiphenomenal scrap-heap. It also destroys rationality. Thought is replaced by electrochemical neural events. Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right nor wrong. They simply happen...The very assertions of the reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural network of his brain. The world of rational discourse dissolves into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly, that cannot be right and none of us believes it to be so (p.56).

This reminds us of Darwin's doubt:

With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy (p.56).

Commentary giveaway!

Now that I have your attention, Logos is offering the Matthew-Mark volume of the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary for FREE. David Turner comments on Matthew; Darrell Bock on Mark. I'm not familiar with Turner, but I am with Bock, and, based on his tremendous two-volume commentary on Luke's gospel, I heartily commend this free download to you.

Note that this download is for you even if you're not running Libronix on your computer. See the link for details.

Also, Doug Wilson has a review of Logos Bible Software Scholar's Edition. His conclusion:

This really is a stupendous product. Logos Bible Software is one of the reasons why God included superlatives in His gift of language.

Young men -- weigh in here for a while

There are four types of women in the world:

1. Those who are high maintenance and it shows;
2. Those who are high maintenance and it doesn't show;
3. Those who are low maintenance and it shows;
4. Those who are low maintenance and it doesn't show.

Question for the meta: which type of woman is most desirable?

Flooding in Ukraine

My last post for the night: Malcolm Stanley reports on flooding in Ukraine in the Lviv and Ivano Frankivsk area (which we visited last fall). Please pray.

Red River Raycer

The Red River Raycer has finished in 9th place in the 2008 North American Solar Challenge. It's a great looking car and a great looking finish. I'm mighty proud of my old college, and, in particular, its Mechanical Technology Department.

Ezekiel, Calvary, the Tomb, and the ESV Study Bible

Three interviews:
What Did Calvary Look Like? An Interview with Leen Ritmeyer (Part 1)
What Did Jesus' Tomb Look Like? An Interview with Leen Ritmeyer (Part 2)
Interview with David Reimer on Ezekiel in the ESVSB

See the ESVSB's website.

Some complementary links

Andy Naselli has an interesting interview with Andreas Kostenberger on his views on 1 Timothy 2.12 and women's roles in the church. Elsewhere, John Koessler writes

While I am not ashamed of complementarian theology, I am sometimes ashamed of complementarians.

I'm fairly confident that Kostenberger is not one of those complementarians.

Lennox versus Hitchens

First he debated Richard Dawkins. Now John Lennox will square off with Christopher Hitchens. I have no doubt that Lennox will be up to the challenge. The question is, will Hitchens. It is for him we must pray.

HT: David Reimer

We are more than conquerors

Some great quotes I came across recently in preparing a couple messages interacting with positive thinking.

On Romans 5.1-11

Douglas Moo

Sufferings, rather than threatening or weakening our hope, as we might expect to be the case, will, instead, increase our certainty in that hope. Hope, like a muscle, will not be strong if it goes unused. (Romans commentary, p.303)

On Romans 8.35-38

Chrysotom

Yet those that be against us, so far are they from thwarting us at all, that even without their will they become to us the causes of crowns, and procurers of countless blessings, in that God's wisdom turneth their plots unto our salvation and glory. See how really no one is against us! (Moo p.539)

John Stott

Our confidence is not in our love for him, which is frail, fickle and faltering, but in his love for us, which is steadfast, faithful and persevering. The doctrine of 'the perseverance of the saints' needs to be re-named. It is the doctrine of the perseverance of God with the saints. (The Message of Romans, 259-60)

2 Corinthians 4.17

John Piper

Affliction raised his sword to cut off the head of Paul's faith. But instead the hand of faith snatched the arm of affliction and forced it to cut off part of Paul's worldliness. Affliction is made the servant of godliness and humility and love. Satan meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. The enemy became Paul's slave and worked for him an even greater weight of glory than he would have ever had without the fight. In that way Paul—and every follower of Christ—is more than a conqueror. (Don't Waste Your Life, p.97)

Every Christian a Bible scholar; every scholar a Bible-lover

Dave Black puts in a plug for Erasmus, which, as it turns out, is also a plug for reading the Bible (especially in Greek and Hebrew). Here's Erasmus:

“I am now eager, dear Colet, to approach sacred literature full sail, full gallop; I have an extreme distaste for anything that distracts me from it, or even delays me…. Hereafter I intend to address myself to the Scriptures and to spend the rest of my life upon them.”

BTW, I recently listened to a message by Mark Driscoll that really encouraged me in the same way. That is, to read the Bible for myself, to read it lots, and to read it to find Jesus. He disclosed the six practical questions he asks of a text. I'm already working on adopting them for myself:

1. What does the Bible say in this passage?
2. What does this passage mean?
3. What is the hook in the passage?
4. Where is the resistance to this passage? (the apologetical question)
   
5. What is the significance of this passage (to me, to my family, to my church, to my city)?
6. Where is Jesus in this passage?
   

A backlog of links

Download Jonathan Edwards' The Religious Affections for FREE!

John Piper has an excellent article entitled Why God Doesn't Fully Explain Pain.

Scientists beware: the PC police do not like the term 'black hole'. (HT Denyse O'Leary)

A little exercise for young theologians: don't sing too loud when you're going through theological puberty. (While I might add a few qualifications to it, this post offers some wise advise to younger bloggers, writers and preachers like me.)

Actually, Doug Wilson has a number of books out/coming out in response to the evangelists of atheism.

In print to online, and online to in print

Books by David Gooding and John Lennox are available online for free at keybibleconcepts.org . This is huge; avail yourself of it.

Also, that debate I enjoyed so much between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson is now being published as a book. I love the Wilson quote on the front cover:

You gonna do something or just stand there and bleed?

It's rich my friends, oh it's rich.