new toy

I now have my christmas present from my parents, which is a digital camera, hurrah!

These two young ladies are my nieces, Emma in the tiger pyjamas, and Beth. Ha, it's not the best picture in the world, but a starting point.

Life at home

Well, I've not posted for a bit, and now I'm at home and feel I could write an essay.

I love to come home, it's an amazing blessing to see my family. I have two beautiful nieces, who thanks to the wonders of digital photography will shortly be appearing here. It's great to see my sister, brother in law, and my parents who have done more for me than I could ever write down.

And now, almost a year after I came home for my Grandpa's funeral, I've come home to find my Grandad has cancer. They've removed the primary tumour from the colon, but there are secondaries in the liver and spleen. It's not good.

These are the strange days, the days where it's tempting to weigh up the blessings and the hardships in life and try to work out whether things are going well or badly. It's hard, so many things to consider. And these are the days when it pays to listen to Paul, when he says that he considers the suffering of this would not worth comparing the glory to come.

Is that enough? On Monday that was fine, today it's hard.

"Dualism is a truncated metaphysic"

It really is, but I just wanted to make that my post title because it looks really scary. Why did I choose it as a title? It was because that was the most memorable one off sentence that I read this week by CS Lewis. I've been doing a lot of reading this week down in beautiful Birmingham, but that's another story for another day. I really wanted to write about the most amazing thing I read this week (apart from the Bible), which is an essay called The Weight of Glory by CS Lewis.

IT IS MIND BLOWINGLY GOOD!

I'm going to include some of my favourite extracts, but I really recommend you spend some time reading the whole thing. (It can be found at http://www.doxaweb.com/assets/doxa.pdf#search=) It's the best thing I've read about understanding how we can relate to heaven now, and how the future glory should inspire us in evangelism today.

At the conclusion of the essay he says this, which will make more sense once you've read the rest:

Meanwhile the cross comes before the
crown and tomorrow is a Monday
morning. A cleft has opened in the pitiless
walls of the world, and we are invited to
follow our great Captain inside. The
following Him is, of course, the essential
point. That being so, it may be asked what
practical use there is in the speculations
which I have been indulging. I can think
of at least one such use. It may be possible
for each to think too much of his own
potential glory hereafter; it is hardly
possible for him to think too often or too
deeply about that of his neighbour. The
load, or weight, or burden of my
neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on
my back, a load so heavy that only
humility can carry it, and the backs of the
proud will be broken. It is a serious thing
to live in a society of possible gods and
goddesses, to remember that the dullest
and most uninteresting person you talk to
may one day be a creature which, if you
saw it now, you would be strongly tempted
to worship, or else a horror and a
corruption such as you now meet, if at all,
only in a nightmare. All day long we are,
in some degree, helping each other to one
or other of these destinations. It is in the
light of these overwhelming possibilities, it
is with the awe and the circumspection
proper to them, that we should conduct all
our dealings with one another, all
friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.
There are no ordinary people. You have
never talked to a mere mortal. Nations,
cultures, arts, civilization—these are
mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of
a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke
with, work with, marry, snub, and
exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting
splendours. This does not mean that we
are to be perpetually solemn. We must
play. But our merriment must be of that
kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind)
which exists between people who have,
from the outset, taken each other
seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no
presumption. And our charity must be a
real and costly love, with deep feeling for
the sins in spite of which we love the
sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence
which parodies love as flippancy parodies
merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament
itself, your neighbour is the holiest object
presented to your senses. If he is your
Christian neighbour he is holy in almost
the same way, for in him also Christ vere
latitat—the glorifier and the glorified,
Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

A Lyrical Break

I'm off to Birmingham today for the Agape National Student Conference. Hurrah. I'll continue with my other thoughts when I return, but I wanted to leave this in my absence. It's called A Song of Patriotic Prejudice, and these are the lyrics:

The English, the English, the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.

The rottenest bits of these islands of ours
We've left in the hands of three unfriendly powers
Examine the Irishman, Welshman or Scot
You'll find he's a stinker, as likely as not.

Och aye, awa' wi' yon Edinburgh Festival

The Scotsman is mean, as we're all well aware
And bony and blotchy and covered with hair
He eats salty porridge, he works all the day
And he hasn't got bishops to show him the way!

The English, the English, the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.

Ah hit me old mother over the head with a shillelagh

The Irishman now out contempt is beneath
He sleeps in his boots and he lies through his teeth
He blows up policemen, or so I have heard
And blames it on Cromwell and William the Third!

The English are noble, the English are nice,
And worth any other at double the price

Ah, iechyd da

The Welshman's dishonest and cheats when he can
And little and dark, more like monkey than man
He works underground with a lamp in his hat
And he sings far too loud, far too often, and flat!

And crossing the Channel, one cannot say much
Of French and the Spanish, the Danish or Dutch
The Germans are German, the Russians are red,
And the Greeks and Italians eat garlic in bed!

The English are moral, the English are good
And clever and modest and misunderstood.

And all the world over, each nation's the same
They've simply no notion of playing the game
They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won
And they practice beforehand which ruins the fun!

The English, the English, the English are best
So up with the English and down with the rest.

It's not that they're wicked or natuarally bad
It's knowing they're foreign that makes them so mad!

For the English are all that a nation should be,
And the flower of the English are (insert singing partner's name) and Me!

Of Monkeys and Men.

Ok. I've been thinking more about the Intelligent Design (ID) thing, and I've decided to split it into four seperate posts, to avoid writing one absurdly long post. There are four main things that I've been thinking about and they are:
1) What's the underlying philosophical basis for ID?
2) What's the scientific case for ID?
3) My own thoughts/opinions on ID (haha, I'll need to have some by then.)
4) How does ID fit into the area of apologetics, and evangelism generally?

Now I've tied myself down to some kind of writing programme, I guess I should try and approach the first point. It's at this point that I'd like to make a disclaimer that I can't promise that what follows will be either accurate or interesting, but I'll do my best.

And so, what is the underlying philsophical basis for ID?
One of the most important concepts that is being disputed is methodological naturalism. What, I head you scream, is methodological naturalism? Well it basically says that when trying to explain physical phenomena you should look for a natural explanation. For example if an apple falls on my head I should try to discover some kind of natural explanation as to why it happened.

This is where the controversy starts. Methodological naturalism actually says you can only look for natural causes to phenomena. Is this a reasonable conclusion? The argument put forward by the proponents of ID is that it is reasonable and normal in our everyday experience to explain phenomena as being the result of intelligent action. This is the basis for fields like forensics where the aim is to determine whether an event had a natural cause or whether there an intelligent agency behind the events. Did they fall or were they pushed?

Other examples given are films like Contact where they receive an extraterrestial broadcast made up of the sequence of prime numbers. The conclusion made is that this must be the result of intelligent action.

Can we extend this logic to the natural sciences? Can we reasonably conclude intelligent action from data that we observe in the world around us? Logically there's no reason as to why we shouldn't.

My conclusion is that there is no underlying philosophical reason as to why we shouldn't be able to make reference to an intelligent agency when we are doing scientific experiments. How does that work in practice? Well, that's another consideration for another day.

In other news it's been fantastic today to have the team returning to Blighty bringing with the them the Salerno team. Great to see y'all.

Family Film Fun.

My friend Derek came over for lunch today. It was good to see him, we had a good chat about various topics including our favourite films. He was shocked and disappointed to hear that I considered both Braveheart and Robin Hood Prince of Thieves to be films of dubious merit.

He asked me to explain myself at conversational gunpoint. As I thought about it I came to the conclusion that the thing I really don't like in those films is that the characters are all so unreal. They're either all good or all bad. Robin Hood is perfect, so perfect that even when he catapults himself over a wall he manages to land handily in a pile of straw. Similarly in Braveheart the Scottish are unfailingly noble, caring and loving, carrying out extreme violence only because they've been needly oppressed by the inevitably cruel and heartless English.

However I do really like films like American Beauty and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest because the characters are so much more interesting, they're neither all good or all bad. Also I really like Jack Nicholson and Kevin Spacey, top quality actors. Plus you don't have the guarantee of a happy ending.

And so Braveheart bad, American Beauty good.