Money

The less you have to live for the more you need to live on.

Integrity

"Integrity is vital because any breach of our integrity pits us againdt reality, and that is a war no perdon ever won. You can stave off reality only so long before it crushes you."

Chuck Colson

Hyperindividualism

Hyperindividualism leads to loneliness, isolation, and despair. When you live for yourself you will end up an exile on the island of your own self-determination.

Missing a Plane

"Is it possible for people to miss their lived in the same way one misses a plane?"

Meaning of Life

"Fear not that your life will come to an end but rather that it will never have a beginning." Walker Percy

"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less." Vaclav Havel

Reality

"God's best servants are those who wish to shape their life on God's answers rather than shape God's answers to their wishes.".

Augustine

Peace

"We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves. We are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God."

Thomas Merton

The Question

"My question--that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide--was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man...a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It was, 'What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything?' It can be also expressed thus: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not dedtroy?"

Leo Tolstoy

Humility

Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less.

Identity

"A child's need for self-worth is THE condition for his life," so much so that every person is desperately seeking a "cosmic significance." Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially deify. We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion.

Ernest Becker

Sin

The primary sin is not the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into ULTIMATE things.

Sin

Translation: Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from God.

Sin

"Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God. Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God."

Soren Kierkegaard

Sin

"Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God. Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God."

Soren Kierkegaard

Discontenment

"It is only right that if we are discontented with what God offers us every moment, we should be punished by finding nothing else that will content us." Jean-Pierre de Caussade

Path of Least Resistance

"The path of least resistance leads to the road of greatest hardship." Thomas Merton

How Do We Change the Culture?

How Do We Change the Culture?

Here is an interesting summary of a part of a chapter in Andy Crouch’s Culture Making:

“The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”

Because culture is the accumulation of tangible things, not something vague or ethereal, it can be changed only by creating some new tangible things that gain a wide enough acceptance by the public to reshape their world. Since cultures are always “full,” one has to create something new that will convince enough people to set aside some current cultural good and exchange it for the new cultural good. However, Christians often choose other less effective strategies for changing the culture. Condemning the culture usually doesn’t work since people will continue to consume the cultural goods even if we disapprove of them. Critiquing the culture doesn’t work either, merely producing more sophisticated analyses that have no effect on people’s choices of cultural goods. Copying culture doesn’t work either since it merely creates a sub-culture that consumes its goods while the larger culture ignores them. Consuming culture is also a poor strategy for change since individual consumers have a negligible effect on a global, or even national, culture. Instead, the best way to change the culture is to create new cultural goods that are better or more attractive so that the public will consume them, and thus change the culture.

How Did Life Begin?

How Did Life Begin?

Introduction
1. Purpose of apologetics
2. The biggest problem facing evolutionists is molecular biology and the rise of life out of non-living matter.

I. Prescientific Theories of Spontaneous Generation
A. Aristotle
1. Aristotle even believed that under the proper conditions putatively “simple” animals such as worms, fleas, mice, and dogs could spring to life spontaneously from moist ”Mother Earth."
2. Others believed that life had existed on earth for ever. This view is not supported by scientific observation today.

B. Middle Ages
1. Such "spontaneous generation" appeared to occur primarily in decaying matter. For example, a seventeenth century recipe for the spontaneous production of mice required placing sweaty underwear and husks of wheat in an open-mouthed jar, then waiting for about 21 days, during which time it was alleged that the sweat from the underwear would penetrate the husks of wheat, changing them into mice. Although such a concept may seem laughable today, it is consistent with the other widely held cultural and religious beliefs of the time.
2. Maggots were thought to spontaneously generate from rotting meat

C. The death of spontaneous generation
1. Francesco Redi (1668) proved that maggots came from eggs laid by flies on the meat. The invention of the microscope only served to enhance this belief. Microscopy revealed a whole new world of organisms that appeared to arise spontaneously.
2. Lazzaro Spallanzani (1745) replicated experiements which were thought to prove spontaneous generation, but sealed the flask, not allowing outside microorganisms in.
3. The young French chemist, Louis Pasteur (1859) boiled meat broth in a flask, heated the neck of the flask in a flame until it became pliable, and bent it into the shape of an S. Air could enter the flask, but airborne microorganisms could not - they would settle by gravity in the neck. As Pasteur had expected, no microorganisms grew. When Pasteur tilted the flask so that the broth reached the lowest point in the neck, where any airborne particles would have settled, the broth rapidly became cloudy with life. Pasteur had both refuted the theory of spontaneous generation and convincingly demonstrated that microorganisms are everywhere - even in the air.


II. Abiogenesis
A. What is abiogenesis?
1.
1 Certain simple molecules underwent spontaneous, random chemical reactions until after about half-a-billion years complex organic molecules were produced. .
2 Molecules that could replicate eventually were formed (the most common guess is nucleic acid molecules), along with enzymes and nutrient molecules that were surrounded by membraned cells. .
3 Cells eventually somehow “learned” how to reproduce by copying a DNA molecule (which contains a complete set of instructions for building a next generation of cells). During the reproduction process, the mutations changed the DNA code and produced cells that differed from the originals. .
4 The variety of cells generated by this process eventually developed the machinery required to do all that was necessary to survive, reproduce, and create the next generation of cells in their likeness. Those cells that were better able to survive became more numerous in the population (adapted from Wynn and Wiggins, 1997, p. 172).
2. The major links in the molecules-to-man theory that must be bridged include
(a) evolution of simple molecules into complex molecules,
(b) evolution of complex molecules into simple organic molecules,
(c) evolution of simple organic molecules into complex organic molecules,
(d) eventual evolution of complex organic molecules into DNA or similar information storage molecules, and
(e) eventually evolution into the first cells. This process requires multimillions of links, all which either are missing or controversial.

B. Primordial Soup
1. Four and a half billion years ago the young planet Earth... was almost completely engulfed by the shallow primordial seas. Powerful winds gathered random molecules from the atmosphere. Some were deposited in the seas. Tides and currents swept the molecules together. And somewhere in this ancient ocean the miracle of life began... The first organized form of primitive life was a tiny protozoan [a one-celled animal]. Millions of protozoa populated the ancient seas. These early organisms were completely self-sufficient in their sea-water world. They moved about their aquatic environment feeding on bacteria and other organisms... From these one- celled organisms evolved all life on earth (from the Emmy award winning PBS NOVA film The Miracle of Life

2. History of the theory
a. Russian scientist A.I. Oparin in the 1920s. The theory held that life evolved when organic molecules rained into the primitive oceans from an atmospheric soup of chemicals interacting with solar energy.
b. Later Haldane (1928), Bernal (1947) and Urey (1952) published their research to try to support this model, all with little success.
c. Then came what some felt was a breakthrough by Harold Urey and his graduate student Stanley Miller in the early 1950s. The most famous origin of life experiment was completed in 1953 by Stanley Miller at the University of Chicago.
The Miller/Urey experiments involved filling a sealed glass apparatus with methane, ammonia, hydrogen gases (representing what they thought composed the early atmosphere) and water vapor (to simulate the ocean). Next, they used a spark-discharge device to strike the gases in the flask with simulated lightning while a heating coil kept the water boiling. Within a few days, the water and gas mix produced a reddish stain on the sides of the flask. After analyzing the substances that had been formed, they found several types of amino acids. Eventually Miller and other scientists were able to produce 10 of the 20 amino acids required for life by techniques similar to the original Miller/ Urey experiments.
For example, equal quantities of both right- and left-handed organic molecules always were produced by the Urey/Miller procedure. In real life, nearly all amino acids found in proteins are left handed, almost all polymers of carbohydrates are right handed, and the opposite type can be toxic to the cell.
The reasons why creating life in a test tube turned out to be far more difficult than Miller or anyone else expected are numerous and include the fact that scientists now know that the complexity of life is far greater than Miller or anyone else in pre-DNA revolution 1953 ever imagined. Actually life is far more complex and contains far more information than anyone in the 1980s believed possible.
3. Problems:
a. Assumes that the atmosphere of the early earth was different from our present atmosphere. Very little scientific evidence exists for this assumption; it is postulated simply because it is necessary for the theory to work.
b. It is a theory that is based upon assumption, not observation. Life is assumed to have arisen from non-living matter, so a mechanism is sought to validate that assumption.
c. No geological evidence exists to support this theory.
d. No experiment has been conducted that has even been able to produce the building blocks of living matter, such as proteins. All experiments so far have fallen way short.
e. Even if an experiment could produce protein molecules, it would not prove that it actually happened. In fact, it would prove that intelligence is needed to produce protein molecules.
f. It is not enough to show that the building blocks of life can be created in a scientific experiment. Life is more than random molecules just as a house is more than a pile of bricks. There must be information, an intelligence that arranges those molecules and animates them. Then these entities need to be able to grow and reproduce. This is an incredible feat that could not happen by mere chance.


3. Before the explosive growth of our knowledge of the cell during the last 30 years, it was known that “the simplest bacteria are extremely complex, and the chances of their arising directly from inorganic materials, with no steps in between, are too remote to consider seriously.” (Newman, 1967, p. 662). Most major discoveries about cell biology and molecular biology have been made since then.
4. Cytologists now realize that a living cell contains hundreds of thousands of different complex parts such as various motor proteins that are assembled to produce the most complex “machine” in the Universe—a machine far more complex than the most complex Cray super computer. We now also realize after a century of research that the eukaryote protozoa thought to be as simple as a bowl of gelatin in Darwin’s day actually are enormously more complex than the prokaryote cell. Furthermore, molecular biology has demonstrated that the basic design of the cell is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals... In terms of their basic biochemical design... no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth (Denton, 1986, p. 250).
5. We now realize that the Urey/Miller experiments did not produce evidence for abiogenesis because, although amino acids are the building blocks of life, the key to life is information because, although amino acids are the building blocks of life, the key to life is information (Pigliucci, 1999; Dembski, 1998). Natural objects in forms resembling the English alphabet (circles, straight lines and similar) abound in nature, but this does not help us to understand the origin of information (such as that in Shakespear’s plays) because this task requires intelligence both to create the information (the play) and then to translate that information into symbols. What must be explained is the source of the information in the text (the words and ideas), not the existence of circles and straight lines.
6. Yet another difficulty is, even if the source of the amino acids and the many other compounds needed for life could be explained, it still must be explained as to how these many diverse elements became aggregated in the same area and then properly assembled themselves. This problem is a major stumbling block to any theory of abiogenesis: ...no one has ever satisfactorily explained how the widely distributed ingredients linked up into proteins. Presumed conditions of primordial Earth would have driven the amino acids toward lonely isolation.
7. The warm pond and hot vent theories also have been seriously disputed by experimental research that has found the half-lives of many critically important compounds needed for life to be far “too short to allow for the adequate accumulation of these compounds” (Levy and Miller, 1998, p. 7933). Furthermore, research has documented that “unless the origin of life took place extremely rapidly (in less than 100 years), we conclude that a high temperature origin of life... cannot involve adenine, uracil, guanine or cytosine” because these compounds break down far too fast in a warm environment. In a hydrothermal environment, most of these compounds could neither form in environment. In a hydrothermal environment, most of these compounds could neither form in the first place, nor exist for a significant amount of time (Levy and Miller, p. 7933). III. Did Life Come from Another Planet?

C. The probability of life arising by chance
1. A major issue then, in abiogenesis is “what is the minimum number of possible parts that allows something to live?” The number of parts needed is large, but how large is difficult to determine. In order to be considered “alive,” an organism must possess the ability to metabolize and assimilate food, to respirate, to grow, to reproduce and to respond to stimuli (a trait known as irritability).
2. As Coppedge (1973) notes, even 1) postulating a primordial sea with every single component necessary for life, 2) speeding up the bonding rate so as to form different chemical combinations a trillion times more rapidly than hypothesized to have occurred, 3) allowing for a 4.6 billion—a trillion times more rapidly than hypothesized to have occurred, 3) allowing for a 4.6 billion- year-old earth and 4) using all atoms on the earth still leaves the probability of a single protein molecule being arranged by chance is 1 in 10,261. Using the lowest estimate made before the discoveries of the past two decades raised the number several fold. Coppedge estimates the probability of 1 in 10119,879 is necessary to obtain the minimum set of the required estimate of 239 protein molecules for the smallest theoretical life form. At this rate he estimates it would require 10119,831 years on the average to obtain a set of these proteins by naturalistic evolution (1973, pp. 110, 114). The number he obtained is 10119,831 greater than the current estimate for the age of the earth (4.6 billion years). In other words, this event is outside the range of probability. Natural selection cannot occur until an organism exists and is able to reproduce which requires that the first complex life form first exist as a functioning
3. It appears that the field of molecular biology will falsify Darwinism. An estimated 100,000 different proteins are used to construct humans alone. Furthermore, one million species are known, and as many as 10 million may exist. Although many proteins are used in most life forms, as many as 100 million or more protein variations may exist in all plant and animal life.
Even using an unrealistically low estimate of 1,000 steps required to “evolve” the average protein (if this were possible) implies that many trillions of links were needed to evolve the proteins that once existed or that exist today. And not one clear transitional protein that is morphologically and chemically in between the ancient and modern form of the protein has been convincingly demonstrated. The same problem exists with fats, nucleic acids, carbohydrates and the other compounds that are produced by, and necessary for, life.
4. Abiogenesis is only one area of research which illustrates that the naturalistic origin of life hypothesis has become less and less probable as molecular biology has progressed, and is now at the point that its plausibility appears outside the realm of probability. Numerous origin-of-life researchers, have lamented the fact that molecular biology during the past half-a-century has not been very kind to any naturalistic origin-of-life theory.

III. Did life come from outer space?
A. Popular ideas
1. Mission to Mars, War of the Worlds, UFOs
2. Asteroids, meteorites and space dust

B. Problems with this view
1. It merely pushes the problem further back in time, but it doesn’t solve it
2. If life can’t spontaneously arise here, it can’t anywhere else


Conclusion
1. How life arose from non-living matter is the greatest problem faced by evolutionists today. Very few talk about how life began because they know that they have no answers. This is the weakest point in the argument of naturalism and I feel that it is insurmountable. It takes more faith to believe that life was generated from non-living matter than to believe that God created life.
2. Life is a gift from God. God breathed into man and he became a living being. The spark of life is the result of God’s touch. All life bears the special mark of God.
3. You are alive because God gave you life. Your life is totally in his hands. You are dependent upon him for your very existence. Every breath you take is a gift from God. Don’t take life lightly but realize how precious it is and live it for the glory of God.

How Did the Universe Begin?

How Did the Universe Begin?

Introduction
1. Cosmological Questions
1) Is the universe finite or infinite in content and extent?
2) Is the universe eternal or does it have a beginning?
3) Was the universe created?
4) If it wasn’t created, how did it get here?
5) If it was created, how was this creation accomplished, and what can we learn about the agent and the events of creation?
6) Who or what governs the laws and constants of physics?
7) Are such laws the product of chance or have they been designed?
8) How do these laws relate to the support and development of life?
9) Is there any noble existence beyond the known dimensions of the universe?
10) Is the universe running down irreversibly or will it bounce back?
2. Cosmological Argument: “The effect of the universe must have a suitable cause.”
1) Everything that begins to exist must have a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.
3) Therefore there must have been a cause for the universe.


I. Five Models of the Universe (Chart)
A. Eternal Universe
1. Steady State
2. Quantum Mechanical Model (Stephen Hawking)

B. Universe had a Beginning
1. Creation from something
2. Order out of chaos
3. Creation from Nothing (Genesis 1)


II. Evidence for the Big Bang
A. Why scientists resisted the Big Band
1. Arthur Eddington
“Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of nature is repugnant to me. I should like to find a definite loophole. We must allow evolution an infinite amount of time to get started.”
2. Albert Einstein
He was threatened by the implications of his theory of relativity because it carries a threat of an encounter with God. Through the equations of General Relativity we can trace the development of the universe backward to its origin. He introduced the concept of the Cosmological Constant to avoid this implication by yielding a Static Model of the universe. He dreamed of a universe that was infinitely old. Later, Einstein considered this to be the greatest blunder of his career. He ultimately gave grudging acceptance to the necessity of a beginning and the presence of a superior reasoning power, though he never accepted the existence of a personal God.

B. Definition of the Big Bang Theory
1. George Gamow: “The Big Bang theory holds that the primeval fireball was an intense concentration of pure energy. It was the source of all matter that now exists in the entire universe. The Big Bang theory predicts that all the galaxies in the universe should be rushing away from each other at high speeds as a result of that initial Big Bang.”

C. Background Microwave Radiation and Big Bang Ripples
1. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Telephone Labs in 1965:
Observation of the background microwave radiation of the universe convinced most scientist of the validity of the Big Bang theory. Further observations of Big Bang Ripples in 1992 have made acceptance of the Big Bang theory nearly unanimous. The data points to a beginning of the universe about 14 billion years ago.
Arno Penzias in NY Times interview: “The best data we have concerning the big bang are exactly what I would have predicted if I only had the five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible to go on.”
Why are some Cosmologists predisposed to an old universe? “Some people are uncomfortable with purpose. In order to come up with things that contradict purpose, they tend to speculate about things they haven’t seen.”
2. NY Times April, 1992: Big Bang Ripples discovered by COBE Satellite
“Most important discovery of the century.” Stephen Hawking
“It’s like looking at God.” Headline
“These findings make the hypothesis that God created the universe more respectable today than anytime within the last 100 years.” George Smoot, head of COBE team
3. Red Shift
Hubble and others realized that the most obvious explanation for the "red shift" was that the galaxies were receding from Earth and each other, and the farther the galaxy, the faster the recession.

All galaxies are accelerating away from each other, and the farther a galaxy is away from us, the faster it is accelerating away from us. This can only be explained if the universe began as a small point and exploded outwards.
III. Explanation of the Big Bang
A. Hugh Ross:
“By definition, time is that dimension in which cause and effect phenomenon take place. If there is no time, there is no cause and effect. If time’s beginning is concurrent with the beginning of the universe, as the space-time theorem suggests, then the cause of the universe must be some entity operating in a time dimension completely independent of and preexistent to the time dimension of the cosmos. This conclusion is important in our understanding of who God is, and who or what God is not. It tells us that the Creator is transcendent, operating beyond the dimensional limits of the universe. It tells us that God is not the universe itself, nor is God contained within the universe.”

B. Leon Lederman, The God Particle
“In the very beginning there was a void, a very curious vacuum, a nothingness containing no space, no time, no matter, no light, no sound. Yet the laws of nature were in place and this curious vacuum held potential. A story logically begins at the beginning, but this story is about the beginning of the universe and unfortunately there are no data for that beginning; none, zero. We don’t know anything about the universe until it reaches a billionth of a trillionth of a second, a very short time after the creation in the Big Bang. When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe someone is making it up; we are in the realm of philosophy. Only God knows what happened at the very beginning.”

C. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
“The actual point of creation lies outside the scope of the presently known laws of physics.”

“It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the universe without introducing the concept of God. My work on the origin of the universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws.”

Are science and Christianity competing philosophies? “Of course not. If that were true, then Isaac Newton would not have discovered the law of gravity.”

“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes the universe to describe them?”

“The idea that God might want to change his mind is an example of a fallacy, pointed out by Saint Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time. Time is a property only of the universe that God created; presumably he knew what he intended when he set it up.”

John 17:24; Eph. 1:4; 1 Pet. 1:20; Rev. 13:8

IV. Stephen Hawking and the Quantum Mechanical Model
A. Explained
He takes a very simplified model of the universe that uses imaginary time. In his model, the universe does not have a sharp point of beginning but a rounded point, so that there is no single point of beginning.

B. Refuted
Imaginary time is useful for solving mathematical equations, but it cannot be used to describe the real world. It is not valuable scientifically because it has no empirical basis, makes no scientific predictions that are not made by simpler models, and it has no research agenda. It simply seeks to evade the cosmological argument, cause and effect, the fact that if there is a beginning of the universe there must be a creator.

“When we go back to the real time in which we live we will encounter singularities.”


V. Science and Christianity: Scientists speak out
A. Alan Sandage
“The nature of God is not to be found within any part of the findings of science; for that one must turn to the Bible.”
Can a person be a scientist and also a Christian? “Yes. I am a Christian. The world is too complex in all its parts and inner connections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life, with all of its order in each of its organisms, is simply too well put together. I am staggered by the high information content of even the simplest biological self-replicating biochemical system.”

B. Donald Paige:
“The mathematical simplicity of the universe is possibly a reflection of the personal simplicity of the gospel message, that God sent His Son Jesus Christ to bridge the gap between Himself and each of us who have rejected God or what He wants for each of us by rebelling against His will and disobeying Him. This is a message simple enough to be understood even by children, quantum cosmologists and the rest.”

C. Chris Eischam:
“The God of Christianity is not only the ground of being, He is also incarnate. Essential therein is the vision of the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the new creation out of the old order and the profound notion of the redemption of time, through the life and death of Jesus Christ. I think it will be a very long time before particle physics has anything to add to that. What I have found in Jesus Christ is infinitely more profound than anything I have found in particle physics, or expect to find.”


Conclusion
1. The universe began at a point in time in the Big Bang. This was an immensely powerful, yet a very carefully controlled and planned release of matter, space, energy and time. It was very carefully fine-tuned and operated within the laws and constraints that govern the physical universe. The power and care of this explosion exceeds human ability and potential by multiple orders of magnitude.
2. A creator must exist. The Big Bang ripples, Red Shift, and Background Radiation point to a creation ex nihilo. The big Bang is consistent with the creation event described in the first few chapters of the book of Genesis.
3. This creator must have awesome power and wisdom. The quantity of material and energy within the universe are truly immense, and the information and intricacy manifested in any part of the universe, and especially in a living organism, is beyond our ability to comprehend. And what we do see is only what God has shown us within the four dimensions of space-time that we inhabit.
4. If the universe has been created, then there is a creator. If there is a creator, then we are his creatures, owned by him and subject to him. Therefore, the purpose of life is to know and love our creator and glorify him by living in conformity with his nature and will.

Privileged Planet

Intelligent Design in the Cosmos

1. Privileged Planet: Optimized for Life
A. The Denial of Privileged Status
• The Copernican Principle: “The earth occupies no preferred place in the universe”
• The Principle of Mediocrity: “Our position and status in the universe are mediocre, they are unexceptional.”
• Hubble Telescope: The magnificence of the Universe
• SETI: Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
• Astrobiology: Are habitable planets rare or common in the universe?
• But does life on earth really exist for no reason or purpose?
• The number of stars vs. the number of factors necessary for life…

B. Factors Necessary for Life
1) Liquid Water
2) A planet’s distance from its star: the circumstellar habitable zone
3) Orbiting main sequence G2 dwarf star
4) Protected by gas giant planets
5) Within galactic habitable zone
6) Nearly circular orbit
7) Oxygen-rich atmosphere
8) Correct mass
9) Orbited by large moon
10) Magnetic field generated by a liquid iron core
11) Plate tectonics
12) Ratio of liquid water and continents
13) Terrestrial planet
14) Moderate rate of rotation

All these factors have to be met at one place and time in the galaxy

N x fsg x fghz x fcr x fsp x fchz x np x fj x fc x fo x fm x fcp x fmn x fw x ft x fl x fi x fr x flc x flt

1011 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 = 10-15

1
1,000,000,000,000,000

Why did this happen? Is chance a reasonable explanation?




2. Privileged Planet: Optimized for Observation

• The factors that make observation possible coincide with the factors that make complex life possible
• “The same narrow circumstances that allow us to exist also provide us with the best overall setting for making scientific discoveries.”

1) The relative size and distances of the sun and moon to the earth make life possible and also allow us to discover
2) The atmosphere of the earth supports life and allows us to see into space
3) The visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum essential for life also is most informative for discovery is abundantly produced by the sun and allowed to reach the surface of the earth by the atmosphere
4) The center of the galaxy is too hostile to life while the edge of the galaxy would not provide enough heavy elements necessary for life. Likewise, observation would be impossible at the center or edge of the galaxy.

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Albert Einstein

The laws and forces of the universe must be precisely balanced for complex life to exist:

1) Electron mass
2) Atomic mass
3) Proton mass
4) Strong nuclear force
5) Weak nuclear force
6) Electromagnetic force
7) Speed of light
8) Cosmological constant
9) Gravity
10) Mass of the universe
11) Panck’s constant
12) Boltzmann’s constant

The universe is the product of an intelligent mind

Science vs. Faith 2

Science versus Faith

Introduction
1. “Science has disproved the Bible. Anyone who believes in the Bible is an idiot.”
2. How do you handle such claims? How do you stand firm when all your teachers, leaders and friends think you have lost your mind?

I. Science grew out of Christianity
A. Non-Christian cultures did not develop a scientific mindset
1. Superstitious cultures viewed the world as chaotic and controlled by capricious forces
2. Since events were capricious and uncertain, it is impossible to determine how and why they occur
3. Magic, the occult and fortunetelling kept science from emerging as a way of understanding the world

B. Christians developed science based on a theistic world view
1. If God created the world, then it is orderly and follows fixed laws set up by God
2. The more I know about the world, the more I know about God
3. History is moving in a logical direction, directed by God, towards an end or goal

II. Some misguided Christians have made crazy statements
A. Some have misread the Bible and made dogmatic statements
1. Bishop Ussher dated the Bible and said the world was created in 4004 BC
2. Some Catholics refused to believe the earth revolved around the sun

B. Some have tied theology and Biblical interpretation to scientific theories

III. Some misguided Scientists have made crazy statements
A. You must distinguish between facts and interpretation; laws and theories
1. There are many ways to interpret scientific data; everyone is biased, especially scientists
2. Theories are working hypotheses while laws have been verified by repeatable experiments
3. Carl Sagan in U.S. News & World Report interview:
“The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Whatever significance we humans have is that which we make ourselves. If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to worship the sun and the stars?”

B. Scientists cannot make credible statements outside their expertise
1. A biologist has no special credibility when making statements about geology
2. A scientist has no special credibility when making statements about theology or philosophy
3. Science cannot make value judgments
4. Explaining how something works is not the same as explaining why it works, nor does it mean we are capable of making it work

C. Science does not make faith irrelevant
1. Not all truth can be discovered by the scientific method
2. You cannot do experiments to discover truth about history, love, logic, existence of truth
3. All scientists have faith
a. The universe is orderly and understandable
b. Truth exists and is knowable
c. The senses are a reliable source of information about the external world
d. Laboratory experiments are repeatable and verifiable
4. William Paley and the watchmaker; everyone would assume a watch was made
5. Richard Dawkins:
“We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules (of DNA which survived) known as genes.” In his book, The Blind Watchmaker, he says of natural selection, “It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, It is the blind watchmaker.”

IV. Science and Faith should be able to exist side by side
A. All truth is God’s truth
1. Ultimately scientific truth and biblical truth will not conflict
2. We need both to develop a full understanding of the world and how to live in a way that is pleasing to God and ultimately fulfilling to us
3. Conflicts are the result of incomplete information on both sides

B. Humility and patience must be exercised by both sides
1. Christians must realize that we don’t have all the answers
2. When faith and science appear to conflict, be patient and wait for more evidence from science and better interpretation from Christians
In 1861 the French Academy of Science published a book stating 51 scientific facts that prove the Bible is wrong. Today, there isn’t a single scientist who believes any one of those 51 “scientific facts”.
3. Science is a developing field that only can produce probabilities, not absolute certainties and much is superceded or revised by later findings
Newton’s laws of gravity, Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum mechanics

Conclusion
1. Jesus is the truth, speaks the truth and reveals the truth (John)
2. Rejecting God means turning your back on truth (Romans)
3. Those who truly desire to know the truth will find Jesus and believe in him
4. Don’t let anyone shake your faith in Jesus by saying science refutes faith; it doesn’t
5. Learn how to discern truth from error, fact from interpretation, laws from theories, opinions from truth
6. Faith is essential to life; the question is not, “Do you have faith?” but “What have you placed your faith in?”
7. Be humble and patient; wait until all the facts are in before making a final decision
8. Don’t be afraid of the truth; seek after it, love it, study it, commit to it. Jesus is Truth

Science vs. Faith

Science vs. Faith

1. A Brief History of Science

1600-1750 1750-1940 1940-1960 [WWII] 1960-Present
Discovery Control Use Consumption
“Think God’s thoughts” Manipulate and control Massive production Enjoy life-enhancing technologies
Worship Convenience Productivity
Efficiency Choice

Science is founded on the Christian worldview
Almost all scientists for the first 200 years were Christians
Christians began to abdicate their place and allowed non-Christians to take over
Modern World: Choice + Efficiency —> Convenience [no place for God]


2. Science vs. Scientism
Science: discovery based on careful observation and analysis
Scientism: philosophical and religious claims about science
Science Fiction: reconstructions and hypotheses that have no evidence

There are limits to scientific knowledge, things it cannot know
Scientific knowledge is probabilistic and not absolute
Be skeptical about “scientific” claims that are outside the realm of science

3. Don’t Fall for the False Dichotomy of Science vs. Faith
Truth is Truth no matter who finds it
Christians should never fear Truth no matter where it comes from
Differences between Science and Faith must be handled with care:
• Scientific data may be incomplete
• Interpretation of the Bible may be inaccurate
• Scientific theories may conflict with Biblical interpretation
The “War” between Faith and Science is a fabrication
Fight bad science with better science not with appeals to faith


4. We Need More Excellent Christian Scientists
Science is a calling just as important as a pastor or missionary
A Christian scientist can have more influence than a pastor or missionary
You need to have a Christian mindset if you are to be effective:
• A passion to know God and discover his creation
• A commitment to Truth even when it is not accepted
• The boldness to speak the Truth even opposed

Conformed to His Image

CONFORMED TO HIS IMAGE
Biblical and Practical Approaches to Spiritual Formation
KENNETH BOA

ANNOTATED CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: A Gem with Many Facets

FACET 1
Relational Spirituality: Loving God Completely, Ourselves Correctly, and Others Compassionately
As a communion of three persons, God is a relational being. He originates a personal rela¬tionship with us, and our high and holy calling is to respond to his loving initiatives. By lov¬ing God completely, we discover who and whose we are as we come to see ourselves as God sees us. In this way, we become secure enough to become others-centered rather than self¬-centered, and this enables us to become givers rather than grabbers.

FACET 2
Paradigm Spirituality: Cultivating an Eternal versus a Temporal Perspective
This section contrasts the temporal and eternal value systems and emphasizes the need for a paradigm shift from a cultural to a biblical way of seeing life. The experience of our mortality can help us transfer our hope from the seen to the unseen and realize the preciousness of present opportunities. Our presuppositions shape our perspective, our perspective shapes our priorities, and our priorities shape our practice.

FACET 3
Disciplined Spirituality: Engaging in the Historical Disciplines
There has been a resurgence of interest in the classical disciplines of the spiritual life, and this section looks at the reasons for this trend and the benefits of the various disciplines. It also focuses on the needed balance between radical dependence on God and personal discipline and discusses the dynamics of obedience and application.

FACET 4
Exchanged Life Spirituality: Grasping Our True Identity in Christ
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the growth of an experiential approach to the spiritual life that is based on the believer's new identity in Christ. Identification with Christ in his crucifixion and resurrection (Romans 6; Galatians 2:20) means that our old life has been exchanged for the life of Christ. This approach to spirituality moves from a works to a grace orientation and from legalism to liberty because it centers on our acknowledgment that Christ's life is our life.

FACET 5
Motivated Spirituality: A Set of Biblical Incentives
People are motivated to satisfy their needs for security, significance, and fulfillment, but they turn to the wrong places to have their needs met. This section presents the option of looking to Christ rather than the world to meet our needs. A study of Scripture reveals a number of biblical motivators: these include fear, love and gratitude, rewards, identity, purpose and hope, and longing for God. Our task is to be more motivated by the things God declares to be impor¬tant than by the things the world says are important.

FACET 6
Devotional Spirituality: Falling in Love with God
What are the keys to loving God, and how can we cultivate a growing intimacy with him? This section explores what it means to enjoy God and to trust in him. Henry Scougal observed that "the worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love." We are most satisfied when we seek God's pleasure above our own, and we gradually become conformed to what we most love and admire.

FACET 7
Holistic Spirituality: Every Component of Life under the Lordship of Christ
There is a general tendency to treat Christianity as a component of life along with other com¬ponents such as family, work, and finances. This compartmentalization fosters a dichotomy between the secular and the spiritual. The biblical alternative is to understand the implica¬tions of Christ's lordship over every aspect of life in such a way that even the most mundane components of life can become expressions of the life of Christ in us.

FACET 8
Process Spirituality: Process versus Product, Being versus Doing
In our culture, we increasingly tend to be human doings rather than human beings. The world tells us that what we achieve and accomplish determines who we are, but the Scriptures teach that who we are in Christ should be the basis for what we do. The dynamics of growth are inside out rather than outside in. This section talks about becoming faithful to the process of life rather than living from one product to the next. It also focuses on what it means to abide in Christ and to practice his presence.

FACET 9
Spirit-Filled Spirituality: Walking in the Power of the Spirit
Although there are divergent views of spiritual gifts, Spirit-centered believers and Word¬-centered believers agree that until recently, the role of the Holy Spirit has been somewhat neg¬lected as a central dynamic of the spiritual life. This section considers how to appropriate the love, wisdom, and power of the Spirit and stresses the biblical implications of the Holy Spirit as a personal presence rather than a mere force.

FACET 10
Warfare Spirituality: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil
Spiritual warfare is not optional for believers in Christ. Scripture teaches and illustrates the dynamics of this warfare on the three fronts of the world, the flesh, and the devil. The worldly and demonic systems are external to the believer, but they entice and provide opportunities for the flesh, which is the capacity for sin within the believer. This section outlines a biblical strategy for dealing with each of these barriers to spiritual growth.

FACET 11
Nurturing Spirituality: A Lifestyle of Evangelism and Discipleship
The believer's highest call in ministry is to reproduce the life of Christ in others. Reproduction takes the form of evangelism for those who do not know Christ and edification for those who do. This section develops a philosophy of discipleship and evangelism and looks at edifica¬tion and evangelism as a way of life; lifestyle discipleship and evangelism are the most effec¬tive and realistic approaches to unbelievers and believers within our sphere of influence.

FACET 12
Corporate Spirituality: Encouragement, Accountability, and Worship
We come to faith as individuals, but we grow in community. This section discusses the need for community, challenges and creators of community, the nature and purpose of the church, soul care, servant leadership, accountability, and renewal.

CONCLUSION
Continuing on the Journey
What does it take to stay in the race? This concluding chapter considers a variety of issues related to finishing well, including intimacy with Christ, fidelity in the spiritual disciplines, a biblical perspective on the circumstances of life, teachability, personal purpose, healthy rela¬tionships, and ongoing ministry.


APPENDIX A:
The Need for Diversity
This appendix portrays the current hunger for spirituality and the reasons for this hunger. There are a variety of approaches to the spiritual life, but these are facets of a larger gem that is greater than the sum of its parts. Conformed to His Image takes a broader, more synthetic approach by looking at all of these facets and seeing how each can contribute to the whole. Some people are attracted to different facets, and this relates in part to our personality profile (the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a valuable tool for this purpose). Readers are asked to identify the ones they are most and least attracted to and are encour¬aged to stretch themselves by trying one they would normally not pursue.

APPENDIX B:
The Richness of Our Heritage
This appendix outlines a brief history of spirituality by tracing prominent approaches to the spiritual life through the ancient, medieval, and modern churches. This provides a broader perspective and a sense of continuity with others who have pursued intimacy with God before us. Twelve recurring issues and extremes emerge from this overview, and this appen¬dix concludes with a word about the variety of approaches that can illuminate our journey.

Flight

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

10. Flight
“The West has finally achieved the rights of man, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Stanley Milgram
65% continued shocking when the subject pounded on the wall.
62% continued shocking when the subject’s cries could be heard.
40% continued shocking when the subject was in the same room.
30% shocked the subject even when they had to force his hand onto the shock plate, and still shocked the subject up to 450 volts.
Virtually all of hem, when interviewed, stated their opposition, in principle, to hurting innocent people. Yet, what they rejected in principle they did in practice, however distressed they felt about it. They did it because somebody in a laboratory coat told them they had no choice.

Living Tools
Human beings’ tendency to obey helps keep order and stability in society but can also be transformed into a tool of evil.
When a person is in a hierarchical structure he no longer thinks of himself as a responsible moral subject but an agent of others, an instrument or a tool, not a responsible moral agent.
When he finds himself bound to a morally deteriorating situation that he wants to abandon, he cannot find a good, clean place to break off.
Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, trained men to become ruthless by giving officers more difficult assignments, such as the mercy killing of nursing home patients, and when they began to balk he would remind them of what they had already done. Finally, his loyalty to the Nazi party would be questioned and he would be threatened with the same fate of the prisoners if he refused. Obedience got him his position, and cowardice pinned him to it.
A German priest absolved Stangl of all his guilt: “Before God and my conscience, if I had been in Franz’s place I would have done the same. I absolve him of all guilt.”
Rudolf Höss, ordered to carry out mass exterminations at Auschwitz, later stated, “I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”

Multiple Evasions

Conforming
Lakewood, CA 1993 and the “Spur Posse” that sexually exploited a large number of girls in a contest for who could have sex with the most girls. Parents didn’t blame the boys at all.

Conniving
To shut one’s eyes to an injustice, to look the other way, to pretend ignorance of evil, is to connive.
Kitty Genovese, March 13, 1964 in Queens was brutally raped and murdered and no one helped.

Leaving Town
Winston Churchill could not convince Europe’s leaders to take action to oppose Hitler.

Specializing
In Stanley Milgram’s experiment, some people dealt with the stress by doing their task with the utmost care in order to avoid the moral dilemma.

Minimizing
Apologize instead of repent, show kindness instead of love, seek happiness instead of joy, talk instead of do.

Going Limp
Making a career of nothing robs the community of our gifts and energies and shapes life into a yawn at the God and savior of the world, and in effect says to God, “You have made nothing of interest and redeemed no one of consequence, including me.”

Cocooning
Some people retreat into the small world of their friends, work, church, and family.

Amusing Ourselves to Death
Our flights of amusement cost us more than time and money. They also may cost us our grasp of the general distinction between reality and illusion.
Neil Postman says, on TV, “everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.”

The Flight from Shalom
At the heart of all evasions lies two others: He has turned his back on his neighbor and his God, and in some way, on himself. By refusing his calling, he extracts his own core, hollowing himself out to a shell of a human being, without weight or substance. He has made himself an alien to the gospel and a stranger to Jesus Christ. To sell a neighbor short is to sell God short.
The gifts of God—vitality, love, forgiveness, courage, joy, and everything that flows the work of Christ—may be found only in the company of God. And we keep company with God only by adopting God’s purposes for us and following through on them even when it is difficult or initially painful to do so.
Many people have fallen into a “functional godlessness.”
Life with God is not mainly a matter of knuckling under to our superior. Rather, we trust and obey because these responses are fitting.
We must trust and obey to rise to the full stature of sons and daughters, to mature into the image of God, to grow into adult roles in the drama of redeeming the world. God wants not slaves but intelligent children. God wants form us not numb obedience but devoted freedom creativity, and energy. In short, we are to become responsible beings, people to whom God can entrust deep and worthy assignments, expecting us to make something significant of them—expecting us to make something significant of our lives.
God has called us, graced us, to delight in our lives, to feel their irony and angularity, to make something sturdy and even lovely of them. We have to find the emotional and spiritual energy for these tasks from the very God who assigns them, turning our faces to God’s light so that we may be drawn to it, warmed by it, revitalized by it. To be a responsible person is to find one’s own role and then, empowered by the grace of God, to fill this role and to delight in it.


Epilogue
Evil rolls across the ages, but so does good.
Creation is stronger than sin and grace stronger still.
God wants Shalom and will pay any price to get it back.
Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.

Attack

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

9. Attack
“He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.” Iago in Othello.
The complex character of Lyndon Baines Johnson who was both one of our greatest politicians and our greatest liars. He not only had trouble “telling” the truth but in “seeing” it. He was a master of using lies to attack his opponents.

Attack and Flight
Sin alternates between attack and flight. Sinners assault other human beings or else they ignore them. They invade somebody else’s life or they flee their responsibility for it. They transgress God’s prohibitions and avoid God’s requirements. They may even treat themselves with self-abuse or self-neglect.
This approach/avoidance pattern lies deep within Scripture. There are those who attack the light of God, and are consumed by his heat, and there are those who turn their backs on the light of God, and freeze in the cold darkness.
We use lies to avoid our responsibilities and to assault other human beings.

A Select History of Envy
In Iowa, Miss Harvest Queen strangled Miss Homecoming Queen with a leather belt.
High school yearbook editor in Indiana draws facial hair, underarm hair, blackens teeth of girls she envies just before sending it to the printer.
An African-American girl in Oakland works hard to get into medical school but is ridiculed and scorned by her peers.
In Chicago, subordinates spread lies about a publishing executive that cause him to be fired.
In Texas a mother of a thirteen-year-old cheerleader hired a hit man to kill the mother of a rival cheerleader to disrupt her ability to do well at tryouts.
An envier doesn’t care whether you have earned part of your success or whether some golden parachute from heaven has dropped into your lap; to an envier, your advantage is totally unfair either way.
Envy is nastier than covetousness in that what envy wants is not what another has; what an envier wants is for another not to have it.
To covet is to want somebody else’s good so strongly that one is tempted to steal it while envy is to resent somebody else’s good so much that one is tempted to destroy it.

Resentment, Pride, and Destruction
The advantages of others makes the envious angry. Envy is a corrupted form of anger. Resentment is a protracted form of anger.
The envier resents another’s good because it scuffs his pride.
The envier usually resents someone that is slightly superior to him or equal to him.
The proud envier keeps running for the office of God.
Enviers also rejoice in the misfortunes of others (Schadenfreude).
Envy poisons the envier and introduces gangrene into his own soul.
Enviers want to be envied.

The Tragedy of Addiction

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

8. The Tragedy of Addiction
Goethe: “Master, I am in great distress! The spirits that I conjured up I cannot now get rid of.”

The Wide World of Addiction
There is undoubtedly a spiritual dimension to addiction that all recovering addicts readily admit.
What drives addiction is longing—a longing not just of the brain, belly or loins, but of the heart.
Addictions eventually center in distress and in the self-defeating choice of an agent to relive the distress. In fact, trying to cure distress with the same thing that caused it is typically the mechanism that closes the trap on an addict. Then every time you meet a demand, it escalates and any good is sapped away by this parasite.

The Deadly Spiral
What converts a delinquent to an addict is when he tries to relieve the despair by indulging his obsession all over again, thereby initiating a new round of addiction.
The same culture that that encourages self-indulgences also punishes the indulgent with scorn fit for a failed god.
Addictions flourish by feeding on human attempts to master them.
An addict stands a chance of recovery only if he is finally willing to tell himself the truth. He must admit that he is helpless.

Sin or Symptom?
Not all addictions are sin.
Perhaps the addict is responsible for his addiction since he made choices before he became addicted that ultimately led to his addiction. We are also responsible for our addictions once we get them in that we must choose to seek help.
Perhaps a better category to use would be “tragedy” since it implies the fall of someone who is responsible and significant, someone who is naturally great but whose greatness has been compromised and finally crushed by a mix of forces, including personal agency, that work together for evil in a way that seems simultaneously surprising and predictable, preventable and inevitable.
Addicts are sinners like everyone else but also tragic figures whose fall is often owed to a combination of factors so numerous, complex and elusive that we cannot fully understand them.

Overlapping Circles

Dynamics of Addiction
Addiction is about our hungers and thirsts, about our ultimate concern, about the clinging and longing of our hearts, and about giving ourselves over to these things.
When it is in full cry, addiction is finally about idolatry, where the addict will do anything for his idol, including dying for it.
The addict needs to turn to God because the “hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and hIs compulsion is our liberation.”

Masquerade

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

6. Masquerade
La Rochenfoucauld: “Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue.”

The Mask of Sanity
Psychopaths are often intelligent, attractive, and charismatic. They wear the mask of a genial and trustworthy human being, but underneath it everything is self-protective chaos.
The lack of a sense of guilt is both dangerous and deviant.
To do its worse evil must look its best. Vices have to masquerade as virtues. Satan must appear as an angel of light.
Most people seek at least the form of godliness while denying its power. They do not want to be good but merely appear to be good.
Evil people are simultaneously aware of their evil and desperately trying to resist that awareness.

A Public Resistance Movement
For the educational elite, moral tolerance is the only good, and moral intolerance the only evil.
Self-Swindling
Self-deception is a shadowy phenomenon by which we pull the wool over some part of our own psyche.
Self-deception is “corrupted consciousness. First we deceive ourselves and then we convince ourselves that we are not deceiving ourselves.”
When we are most religious we my be most at risk of losing touch with God.
There is a vast difference between the truth of religion and the use of religion.
Many believers do not really believe in God but merely some deified image of themselves.
Even when we are at worship the wolves may be howling in our souls.

Sin and Folly

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

7. Sin and Folly
When we say an act was senseless, stupid, tragic, shortsighted, mistaken, unfortunate, miscalculated, erring, regrettable, or out of line, we are agreeing with the Bible that it was “foolish.”

Fitting into the World
Wisdom is the knowledge of God’s world and the knack of fitting oneself into it.
The Bible is a book about the way the world really is, not merely the way it should be.
To be wise is to discern reality, to love it, and then to live according to it.
To discern realities at their deeper levels we have to become engaged with them.
The wise accommodate themselves to reality.

Against the Grain
Borneo: government used DDT to kill houseflies, geckos got sick from eating poisoned flies, cats died from eating poisoned geckos, rats infested the houses and brought the plague.
Folly is the lack of understanding of the world and living contrary to reality.
Intelligence and education are only the raw materials for good judgment.
Folly includes poor judgment, lack of discernment, inattentiveness.

The Main Event
Not all that is folly is sin, but all sin is folly. Sin is both wrong and dumb. Sin is finally futile.
Pride is futile because self-fascination is so often unrequited. The more self-absorbed we are the less there is to find absorbing.
Idolatry is not only treacherous but also futile.
People hungry for love, people who want to “connect,” will often open up a sequence of shallow, self-seeking relationships with other shallow self-seeking persons and find that at the end of the day they are emptier than when they began.
Folly is swimming against the stream of the universe.
It is not only wrong but foolish to offend God because God is our final good, our maker and savior, the one in whom alone our restless heats come to rest.
Those who turn their back on God can find only “black-market substitutes”: instead of joy, they only get excitement; instead of self-giving love they get sex with strangers; instead of unconditional acceptance they get a professional therapist.
Rebellion against God and flight from God only remove us from the sphere of blessing, cutting us off from our only invisible means of support.
Sin is a form of self-abuse. It disqualifies us from the true good: promiscuity keeps us from enjoying intimacy, lack of trust means we condemn ourselves to social superficiality, cheating brings distrust, enmity and suspicion, envy traps us in torment, pride aborts the very possibility of real friendship and communion.
Pride renders fools unteachable. Folly causes a great deal of misery and also prevents the fool from escaping from it.
A proud person tries to reinvent reality.
A fool is essentially out of touch with reality.
Only a fool would describe a meeting with God as “fun.”

Parasite

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

5. Parasite
Bernard Shaw: “You cannot have the power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”
During the civil rights movement, some blacks figured out ways to defraud their own movement.

Ironies and Hybrids
Saints bring dirty weapons to holy wars.
Reform needs constant reform; rescuers need to be rescued.
Evil contaminates every scalpel designed to remove it.
Human beings are extremely complex creatures where great good and great evil often cohabit, sometimes in separate, well-insulated compartments, but sometimes in an intimacy so deep and twisted that we never get to see the one moral quality without the other.
Until the Enlightenment, sinful human pride was widely regarded as the first of the seven deadly sins. Now it is no longer viewed with alarm.
Theology has become therapy, holiness is replaced by happiness, truth by feeling, ethics by self-esteem.
The main problem with pride is that it recognizes neither sin nor grace.
Hubris is a hybrid that can be either titanic or pathetic and it can afflict the great and the would-be great.
Often humility has been used as a club to beat other races, women, children, etc. into submission.
The proud love humility in others.
The humbled sometimes reply by usurping the very pride they had hated.

Privation and Parasite
Even when sin is depressingly familiar, it is never normal; it is unknown, irrational, alien; it is a departure from the norm.
Sin is deviant and perverse, an in-justice, in-iquity, in-gratitude, dis-order, dis-obedience, faith-lessness, law-lessness, god-lessness.
Sin is both the overstepping of a line and the missing of a mark.
Sin is an intruder, a gate-crasher, that has gotten into God’s world uninvited.
Sin is a parasite; nothing about sin is its own: all its power, persistence, and plausibility are stolen goods.
Sin is a spoiler of entities—there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
C.S. Lewis: “Goodness, so to speak, is itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.’
Good is original, independent, and constructive; evil is derivative, dependent, and destructive.
Evil wants good; it needs good to be evil. It merely wants the good without God.
Sin is fruitful because, like a virus, it attaches to the life force and dynamics of its host. It attaches and converts them to a new use.
We are often drawn to men who commit bold evil, not because we love the evil but because we love the boldness and audacity and freedom. Sin is only attractive when it is vital. But these very qualities are borrowed and not original, because the very boldness, imagination, and creativity come from the very God it attacks.
Often we focus on the “good” aspects of evil while choosing not to notice the negative fallout it creates. We only see the vitality of the parasite, glowing with stolen life.

The Progress of Corruption

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

4. The Progress of Corruption
Mesillat Yesharim: “If a man is allured by the things of this world and is estranged from his Creator, it is not he alone who is corrupted, but the whole world is corrupted with him.”
One moral misstep leads to another.
Sin yields more and more sin; each episode of sin gets triggered by trouble from the last.
Sin is a plague that spreads its contagion.
People rarely commit single sins.
Unarrested, sin despoils even its own agents, eventually causing the very death of the soul.

History Echoes
Sin is both fatal and fertile.
Like cancer, sin kills because it reproduces.
Victims of crime are dangerous because they are unlikely to exercise self-control in their attempt to get even.
Most people believe they are a victims and are merely returning fire, never firing the first shot.

Motives, Contexts, and Causes
People have long memories and short fuses when it comes to grievances.
Injustice enrages people and makes them vengeful.
Those who have been abused are more likely to abuse others.
It is easier to chose the short-term stress reliever, that puts long-term stress on our hearts and bodies.
Human beings want security, and our main problem is that we seek security in the wrong places and in the wrong ways because we fail to trust God to take care of us.
Unbelief produces anxiety which produces pride and sensuality.
“The heart wants what it wants.”
The human heart, when it ignores God, turns in on itself, trying to lift itself, please itself, and ends up debasing itself. When we want God’s gifts without God, we end up sagging and contracting into a little wad.
Motives may be mixed, making it difficult to discern them.
There are also social contexts to consider. Society must take some of the blame for sins committed because of injustice and abuse.
Even if we could understand all the motives, contexts, and forces, we would still not be able to fully understand why a certain sin was committed.
Failure to blame people for their sins is dehumanizing. In the Soviet Union the concept of blame disappeared and people were no longer treated as fully human.

The Great Law of Returns
Paul called this “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess. 2:7)
At the bottom, the heart wants what it wants, and it has its reasons that even reason does not know.
“The heart is sinful and desperately wicked; who can know it?”
People not only reap what they sow, they also sow what they reap.
George F. Will: “America’s slide into the sewer is greased by praise.”

Other Causes?
Secrecy fertilizes evil.
God created us to live Shalom and to please Him, but we mysteriously live against the purpose of our existence.
Satan does not take any ground that we do not give him.
Satan seduces only those who want to be seduced.
Sin is not only personal but also interpersonal and suprapersonal.
Sin becomes a living, powerful force with a life all its own.

Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

3. Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration
Seneca: “Devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations.”
Anatole France: “It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.”

Perversion
Perversion is an ends-and-purposes disease. It is the turning of loyalty, energy, and desire away from God and God’s purpose in the world so that energy and resources are wasted on unworthy ends or wrong ends.
Spiritual hygiene requires us to be able to recognize and assess goods, to pursue them with appropriate degrees of interest, and to enjoy them with the appropriate level of pleasure. Ignorance and self-deception often skew our judgments about what is worth longing for in the first place.
Any return to greatness requires a reappraisal of what the primary purpose of man is, his spiritual nature, and his responsibility to God and others.

Pollution
When a church uses hymns or praise songs primarily for entertainment, it simultaneously perverts the hymns and pollutes worship.
To pollute is to defile, to weaken a whole entity by introducing a foreign element.
Idolatry is pollution in that a third party gets in between God and the worshipper, adulterating an exclusive loyalty.
Ingratitude fouls our character and our relation to God.
Dividedness and Disintegration
Idolatry both contaminates and divides proper loyalty to God.
A pure heart is an undivided heart.
When the foundation is cracked the building will crumble.
Sin tends to disintegrate both its victims and its perpetrators.

Amor Mortis
Sin has caused deterioration to spread through our soul and our psychic governing center, making it internally lawless.
Sinners who lose spiritual purpose and control eventually descend into a spiral of increasingly grave assaults on civic and personal integrity.
Sin both numbs us and hollows us out.
Sin eventually creates an upside down morality, showing that evil has crossed some wire within them so that their moral polarity has switched.
“Wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be in love with death.”

Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

2. Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption
Oliver Stone: “I don’t want integrity to block my creative growth.”
Sin corrupts: it puts asunder what God has joined together.
Sin despoils: it removes that which preserves integrity. (The Nazis not only tried to kill the body but also the spirit, and not only to slay the spirit but to corrupt it so that it would recriminate and slay itself. They tried to strip away everything that holds a being together and what joins other beings in an atmosphere of hospitality, justice and delight.)
Spiritual Hygiene
A spiritually whole person longs for God and the beauty of God, for Christ, for Christ-likeness, for the Holy Spirit, for spiritual maturity, for other human beings, for love, for justice, for nature, for beauty.
Spiritually whole people long for character, virtue and goodness.
Most of what we long for cannot be had by trying to get it. The more we pursue these things the more elusive they become. We will find what we long for only when we seek for God.

Vandalism of Shalom

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

Introduction
Walker Percy: Boredom is “the self being stuffed with itself.”
The main human trouble is desperately difficult to fix; sin is the longest-running of human emergencies.

1. Vandalism of Shalom
Jonathan Dimbleby filmed a documentary about the hunger in Ethiopia and found that the government required the aid workers to pay a tariff on the emergency food relief they were bringing in for the starving people.
Shalom
The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight.
A universal flourishing, wholeness and delight.
Sin: A Definition
Sin is both a religious and a moral concept.
It is a breaking of the Law as well as the breaking of the Covenant
Sin is first and foremost a Godward force; any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed that displeases God and deserves blame.
Includes both acts and dispositions.
Sin is a culpable and personal affront to God.
Sin violates Shalom and interferes with the way things are supposed to be.
Sin is unoriginal in that it disrupts the good and harmonious like an intruder.
Sin offends God because it bereaves or assaults God directly or what God has made.
If there is no God, then there is no violation of God’s Law or an affront to Him.
Interscholastic and Intramural Distinctions
Crime is statute-relative while sin is not.
The relationship between sin and immorality is knotty and complex.
We need grace for our sin but mercy and healing for our diseases.
Do not confuse sin with mere error.
Sin is both objective and subjective; objective sin breaks the peace while subjective sin is when we feel we have broken the peace, whether we have or not.
All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad. The badness of a sin depends partly on what kind and how much damage it has done.
There may be mitigating circumstances that need to be taken into account, but involuntariness may mitigate but it doesn’t necessarily excuse. If the sin was acquired in some way through some fault of our own, then we are culpable.
Evil social structures and habits may contribute to a sin, making it more difficult to assess the culpability of a sin.