Why I ought ?

John Lennox and Richard Dawkins on morality

JB: When you make a value judgement don’t you immediately step yourself outside of this evolutionary process and say that the reason this is good is that it’s good. And you don’t have any way to stand on that statement.

RD: My value judgement itself could come from my evolutionary past.

JB: So therefore it’s just as random in a sense as any product of evolution.

RD: You could say that, it doesn’t in any case, nothing about it makes it more probable that there is anything supernatural.

JB: Ultimately, your belief that rape is wrong is as arbitrary as the fact that we’ve evolved five fingers rather than six.

RD: You could say that, yeah.

Berlinski quote of the Month

Not unrelated to the film ‘Expelled -no intelligence allowed’-I submit for your thoughts and comments:

‘Dawkins is prepared to acknowledge the facts while denying their significance. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.

In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in eastern Europe , an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.

Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.

And then he was shot dead.

What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals,Brown shirts, Black shirts,gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either.

That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.”

(taken from David Berlinski’s book ‘The Devils delusion Atheism and its scientific pretensions’)

More Bono and Bill

Bono & Bill

As a long time fan of U2 -I narrowly missed seeing them on there October tour heres an excelent interview with Willow Creek Pastor Bill Hybels

Happy Birthday Darwin

John Angus Campbell on the a priori assumptions  of Charles Darwin :

What is most revolutionary about Darwin’s Origin is not simply his case for natural selection… or his case for evolution itself. The other, and equally important, revolution going on within his argument for species change is his case for naturalism, which slides insensibly between an innocent methodological precept and a prior metaphysical commitment… The first step in Darwin’s case for metaphysical naturalism… was taken in his flyleaf citations, all of which identified the ordinary mode of divine activity with natural laws. Implicitly and in chapter 2 explicitly, Darwin was laying the foundations for a revolutionary philosophy of science… when Darwin was having a difficult time with an explanation or when he was particularly keen on the reader’s realizing the consequences of a refusal to accept an explanation, he would sometimes draw on the reader’s partial commitment to naturalism to negotiate yet further commitments. At some points Darwin would simply equate naturalistic explanations – evolutionary case histories with the blanks filled in by an ‘it must have been’ story-line – with reality itself.

Leaning on  presuppositions when the data isn’t there is natural to us all, we fill in the gaps-this though is not what science is concerned with ; Science wants objective data,wants  calculated  probability and to narrow the gaps empirically.

Of  course there must be a naturalistic explanation  to the origin of  life; to the increase in information within biological systems across the phyla; to the origin of a code, a system to translate and transcribe that code and keep the fidelity of that code high, The origin of a  means of replicating that code and the origin of a system of controlling expression of that code.

Recently on tv I heard some die hard evolutionists defend themselves against the claim that they were arrogant-they said ‘we are arrogant because we are right!’ Being right  for them means an exclusively closed universe -with no possibility of a supernatural agent.

They presume there metanarative is correct because for them its the only game in town -nothing else is there,the same unproven presumption Campbell says Darwins gradually introduced into his theory.

The evolutionary origins of compulsive bubble wrap poping.

Merry Christmas -don’t be Blue

over the rhine featuring the angelically powerful voice of Karin Bergquist -words fail.

The shadow of Adolf Hitler casts its cold spell on Home-schooling

 

After checking that I hadn’t slipped into a parallel universe I could not believe the news in September; that a family in Germany had there 15 year old daughter forcibly removed from her home and placed with foster parents in an unknown location for 3 months.

This was a government enforced action -apparently home-schooling (the crime which precipitated the German government to intervene ) is such a crime as to be consider worse than forcibly separating a 15 year old girl from her family?!?

The genius behind this law is none other than Adolf Hitler,amazingly this law remains on the statute books ! For a nation that wants to divorce itself from its nazi past, this whole story would not be out of place in Hitler’s Germany.

Happily once Melissa Busekros turned 16 the law no longer could constrain her, she left the foster home and is currently back at home.

This is not the end of the story as there are other home-schooling families  who are under pressure and Melissa may yet have to face further action by the German Government.

 

Please consider contacting the German embassy to complain against this blatant loss of freedom:

In Canada:

German Embassy
1 Waverley Street
Ottawa, ON, K2P 0T8
Tel.: 613-232-1101 Fax: 613-594-9330
Email: germanembassyottawa@on.aibn.com

In the US:

German Embassy
4645 Reservoir Road NW
Washington, DC, 20007-1998
(202) 298-4000
The embassy can be e-mailed from its website: http://www.globescope.biz/germany/reg/index.cfm

 

In the UK the embassy can be contacted here:http://www.london.diplo.de/Vertretung/london/en/Kontakt.html

 

The point is this, Homeschooling is the right of every parent should they choose and the Current German government is acting on a law that removes that right -I hesitate to put Hitlers image at the top of this post as it only serves to polarise but I have the right to protest and that image is part of that!

 

Quarter pounder with Cheese please

 

Stepping off of the plane at Owen Roberts International airport into the heat and humidity of  Grand Cayman in the British west Indies at night; my first impression as I walked down the steps to the tarmac, was the mixed aroma of pine trees and the sea, another  vividly memory to  treasure.

Many thousands of miles from home and the next place I found myself was as familiar as the face I see staring back in the mirror, I was at a KFC!Same food (except for the Zinger) same décor, same tastes and all run  at the same speed as Home.

Perhaps increased mobility and pace of change has produced a subconscious need for familiarity and consistency, KFC, BK and Pizza Hut et al are there to oblige.

Consistency comes at a  price, the loss in some small way of a distinctive place and culture.At the  extremes something has to give, either everything is the same no matter where you are when you step off of the plane, or there is a culture shock and all is different and new.

Today I was informed of an  example of the need for bland sameness, prefering global  rather than a national  identity; the 2012 Olympics are being held in blighty. Some one has decided to ban any overt distinctiveness, it may well offend! I am at a loss as to why distinctiveness is offensive while sameness is not?

The red arrows, the famous RAF aerobatic team, are not allow to perform at the Olympics-the reason  is they are  too British! No that’s not a typo it’s genuine, they are too British!The red arrows are too British to fly in the olympics!!!

History apparently repeats itself, although I cannot recall being too British in Britain as being thought of as a undesirable characteristic?Only in our global culture have we  developed an undeserved poor opinion of ourselves.

Your allowed to be British but there’s a threshold above and below which you are (I assume) either not British enough or too British!?!If you’re born in the UK please consider signing this online petition, here.If you’re not born in the UK please consider the madness that goes on here and point at us and laugh, I would if I were you.  

It’s his fault!

I have found it more difficult of late to update God3′s Blog -and I’m going to blame it on our new 8 month old dog Sam.Currently he has chewed a broken glass bottle (fortunately no cuts) eaten my New Zealand Palm and several other plants including 3 cacti plus there pots.