Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts

Friday, October 10, 2014

Losing My Mind - Religion, Reason, and Truth

I’m fascinated by beauty. It is my final fortification against materialism, a barrier from reducing the world to numbers. Sam Harris’s arguments are very sound—they explain things, fill in the gaps. But atheism specializes in the details and misses the sunsets and the waterfalls and Beethoven’s Ninth and Charles Dickens.

The sky’s on fire in the west tonight
 A chorus of pink, purple, blazing orange
 The air pulses with meaning and—
 I think of random particles,
 of chance and infinite typewriters,
 but no cold device could make the beauty,
 nor make me understand it.


Saturday, May 3, 2014

Sara Groves - Invisible Empires - Album Review

I still remember the day I saw that stories were about more than events, but ideas, characters, and truth. This discovery didn't extend into music until recently. Could there be an equivalent of great literature in music? I watched the ideas. Andrew Peterson’s Light for the Lost Boy takes on the loss of innocence, and ultimate redemption. Matthew Perryman Jones’s impossibly good Land of the Living is so complex I still haven’t figured it all out, but dabbles in sin, death, grief, and redemption. I leapt into the stimulating world of ideas and their expression through music and poetic metaphor.

Sara Groves’s Invisible Empires is a first, though. She takes on ideas, all right, but ones that you generally wouldn’t find in music and certainly not in the mainstream CCM. Ideas like: bio-ethics, escapism, current politically correct ideology, the pressure to conform to society’s ideal, and death. It sounds more like science fiction topics.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Stephen Meyer Makes Me Feel Cool

I'm not much of a scientist, but like everybody, I have a sort of popular culture science learned by osmosis. Increasingly, lately, creationism has seemed so uncool to me that I was tempted to slap the title "theistic evolution" on it just to feel more intelligent. I knew, of course, that that wasn't really based on any knowledge of science, and have been meaning to do some research, just to be informed.

Well, this worked quite well as a refresher to my high school biology class, and certainly gives me some talking points whenever evolution enters the conversation. It also clears up a lot of misconceptions about the Intelligent Design group.

Also, Metaxas is hilarious and charming as ever. Enjoy.



"Darwin's Doubt" with Stephen Meyer from Socrates in the City on Vimeo.

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