A while back I posted an article about the changing definition of happiness. I noticed then that Wes picked up on the post and he posted a lecture on happiness by J.P. Moreland.
This is really, really good. The same thing applies to love. A lot of people talk about love being a feeling, but I think rather that it is a decision that a person makes when they perceive that someone else can be moved closer to God, and they decide to act to make that happen.
Sometimes I worry about having grown up with non-Christian parents who really didn’t have much to tell me about what life was really about. But lectures like this really help me to learn the kinds of things that people really need to know.
I also just wanted to post a cleaned-up version of the Walter Bradley lecture that I had posted previously, with the noise removed, and the file size reduced. This is my favorite lecture of all. There are a couple of other versions of it in different venues here and here. These are all good, at least if you like Christians talking about the Christian life in a courageous, yet realistic way. I wouldn’t give these the attention I’m giving them unless I felt they were important.
About DropBox
I’m hosting some of those lectures using DropBox. I use it to share files with people.
Here’s a post from Caffeinated Thoughts. It’s about parenting, faith and prosperity.
Excerpt:
It is my job, as a parent, to raise and protect the children that God has given me. It goes beyond the obvious needs of food, clothing and shelter and into an even greater need of “Train(ing) a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” Proverbs 22:6. Raising a child involves love, discipline, education and looking out for their needs now, as it will affect them when they are old. If parents in America only provide for a child’s physical needs, forgetting to nurture the whole child, then American parents have done nothing more than what a wild animal does for its offspring. My work as a parent goes well beyond the obvious and must be intentional in training, raising, and nurturing them into moral, ethical and God-fearing adults who will in turn also raise a generation who live and do likewise.
I must also fight for the ethical and moral rights of my children in the political arena, as they are unable to do so for themselves. As [Thomas] Paine stated, “We ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully.” He was looking at his posterity realizing that the condition of the country in which they lived needed a drastic overhaul and unless the adults stepped up and took the initiative, the children would suffer for it.
I like this post because it mentions protecting children’s relationships with God as well as their future economic well-being. I think that most people look at their children and think that their faith will be fine, and that their standard of living will as good as the parent’s, or better. But if we want to give those good things to our children, we need to be careful about how we teach them and how we vote. We can’t just “hope for the best” and expect things to work out – 80% of the young people who attend church through high school fall away from their faith. And the unemployment rate for young people today is over 50%.
Dr. Dembski has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago where he earned a B.A. in psychology, an M.S. in statistics, and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he also received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1988 and a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1996. He has held National Science Foundation graduate and postdoctoral fellowships.
The lecture:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Summary (snark is in italics)
What is evolution:
Is it enough for Christian students to just retain their faith in college?
Or should Christian students seek to transform their universities?
The word “evolution” refers to a unguided, purposeless, undirected process
Living organisms are not designed, they just appear to be designed
Therefore, it is an atheistic theory – there is NO ROOM for God
Random variations and natural selection can do the creating of life without God
Nothing about evolution suggest that God had anything to do with it
The appearance of design:
The cell is a nano-engineered information processing system.
The cell has engineering, e.g. – signal transduction, message passing, etc.
There are molecular machines similar to man-made machines, but less efficient
E.g. – the bacterial flagellum which has 40 parts
These molecular machines have minimal complexity – all the parts are needed
can’t build a molecular machine step-by-step – all the parts must be present and integrated
How does evolution try to explain molecular machines:
The standard naturalistic response is “co-option”
Each intermediate step has pieces that are used for other purposes
I.e. – Subsets of the parts can have different functions
For example, a subset of the bacterial flagellum can be used as a syringe
The subset, called the Type-3 secretory system, has only 13 parts
The problem is that evolutionists don’t show all the steps, and all the functions
For this to be a good response, you need a smooth path from 1 part up to 40
Each step of the path has to have a working system with a different function
But the atheists don’t have the path, or the intermediate functions
It’s like arguing that you can walk from Seattle to Tokyo via the Hawaiian islands
Is the bacterial flagellum a cherry-picked example?
There are no detailed molecular pathways for any biochemical systems in the cell
The atheistic response is to speculate that pathways will be found as science progresses
The pathways are unobservable entities, just like the multiverse and the Cambrian precursors
Where does the machinery to create proteins come from?
The molecular machines are composed of proteins
The proteins are manufactured by copying protein-building instructions from the DNA
The instructions are carried to the build site by messenger RNA
The build site is called a ribosome
The DNA requires proteins to build, so there is a chicken-and-egg problem
The problem is that protein transcription systems require everything in place
There is no materialistic theory about how to build this step-by-step
So what do the molecular machines tell us about how life began?
The problem of the origin of life is the problem of the origin of information
What needs to be explained are the functional sequences of parts
The sequences are identical to sequences of letters that make sense
The atheist has to say that material processes can create the information
The problem of finding sequences of amino acids or proteins is a search problem
A blind search of the space of possible sequences is not efficient
even with lots time, parts and trials, you can’t converge on functional proteins
information is required and the only known producer of information is a mind
Bill is one of my favorite people. He’s smarter than practically all of the atheists who dominate the universities. But because he is an outspoken Christian, he never gets the recognition he deserves. He just keeps plugging away on his research. He doesn’t make excuses.
Illustra also made two other great DVDs on intelligent design. The first two DVDs “Unlocking the Mystery of Life” and “The Privileged Planet” are must-buys, but you can watch them on youtube if you want, for free.
WINTERY KNIGHT 