Xor News

Dear students -

If you believe that God has allowed you access to a college education then you would want to be a good steward of that which is provided by that education. Yet, it never ceases to amaze me how many students, many very well intentioned, lose focus on the stewardship of their education and don’t nearly receive the return that they should on it. Invariably it is accountability that determines the return on your education.

Personal Financial Stewardship, Ed C. Anthony, p. 16

In which I find a quote from an unreliable source in a book by a normally reliable author and lose much confidence in the other material contained therein.

I would be extremely hesitant to quote anything pithy or witty sounding from M. Muggeridge without pages of context around why it was necessary to do so. Perhaps even tricking a man on the street into reading the desired MM quote and then quoting the M.O.T.S. instead of MM would be preferable.

From the virgin birth

Seeing Through The Eye, page 207

To the resurrection

Seeing Through The Eye, page 22

The poison behind the nice sounding witticisms is laid bare.

Last night we concluded watching the DVD of the Does God Exist? debate between William Lane Craig (affirm) and Christopher Hitchens (deny). The debate was sponsored by the Biola University apologetics department and took place on the Biola campus in Southern California. The debate format was classical and some questions were taken from the student section of the audience at the end.

I have read several of Dr. Craig’s books before and have enjoyed them, especially on Jesus Resurrection, Fact or Figment?, a debate in book form with Gerd Ludemann.

We appreciated many of the points made during the debate on both sides. One can particularly sympathize with Mr. Hitchens comments on the banality of man-made religion and the damage, heart-break, and destruction it has caused. It is sad that so many have done so much evil in the name of Christianity. The earthly church attempting to gain political power and be able to “tell people what to do in the name of God” we find a particularly repugnant form of man-made addition to true Christianity. But as Dr. Craig concludes, we ultimately believe Christianity and that there is a God because it is true, not because of the potential or actual benefits to society from holding this world-view.

Debate video highly recommended.

This is the “Stellar Pink” hybrid. It blooms a few days after the C. Florida. The blooms last longer than C. Florida and it has good disease resistant properties. I like the rich smooth green of the leaves.

This particular instance of “Stellar Pink” is special because it was planted in memory of my grandmother.

I sat under Dr. Lennox’s teaching for a week some years back and really enjoyed it. So I anticipated that I would like this book and I have not been disappointed. The book is very readable and very well reasoned. All but the last 30 pages have a very nice flow to them — I don’t know what happened in that end part, either the editor got tired, or perhaps I got tired, but things seemed like they repeated themselves a lot.

Dr. Lennox knows a lot about a broad range of subjects. I think he knows more than I do about every area, even those that I consider my professional specialties. His sections on information conservation in algorithmic design were very insightful and clear.

I have been looking for some time now to see what ever became of the line of reasoning that A. E. Wilder-Smith brought out some years back regarding the shortcomings of the Miller/Urey experiments on spontaneous creation of amino acids from chemical stew triggered by the application of high voltages. If you have only had the standard text-book understanding of Miller’s experiment, Wilder-Smith’s explanation of the requirement that all amino acids that go into making life-as-we-know-it take the L-form simply devastates the Miller results. I have wondered for some time why no one seems to make more of this? Who would carry on Wilder-Smith’s intellectual legacy? I’ve found it in Dr. Lennox’s fine book. He applies further statistical analysis to the generation of amino acid chains, showing that in addition to the L-form requirement all of the bonds must be peptide bonds. This reduces the likelihood, not that further help was needed, by another factor of 2^100 (for chains 100 amino acids in length), that Miller-type amino acid chains would be suitable for life.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the book was the precision with which Dr. Lennox put forward the dichotomies between religion and science. In fact, in contrast to how we most often tend to phrase the debate, Dr. Lennox argued forcefully that the real debate is between theism and atheism, not between science and religion. His arguments on this were backed up with examples from Galileo to Dawkins and will be very helpful in reframing the debate in the coming months.

Highly recommend this book to anyone interested in keeping up with the current wave of thought on this subject.

Full Bibliographic entry:
God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, John C. Lennox, Lion Hudson plc, Oxford England 2007.
ISBN: 978 0 7459 5303 8

From The Name Above Every Name: being Papers on the Excellency, Exaltation and Supremacy of Christ, Edward Dennet, published in London by G. Morrish, n.d.

But when Christ had accomplished the work of atonement, glorifying God in all that He is, having been made sin for us, the veil behind which God had dwelt, and which had concealed Him from His people, was rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and God could righteously gratify His own heard in coming out into the full display of what He is as revealed in Christ on the ground of redemption.

While your English lit teacher might have a fit over the Pauline structure of that sentence, and I readily admit that they don’t write them that way any more, there is a lot packed in there that is worth unpacking.
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Title: Pope John XXIII
Author: Thomas Cahill
Publisher: Viking Books, January 2002

This book isn’t something I would normally have read, but it was loaned to me
by a friend. It was written in an interesting manner and held my attention while
covering a topic that I knew very little about. It was intriguing to read about
some of the machinations of Vatican politics, the promotion of men up the
hierarchical structure the Roman Catholic church has devised, the selection
of popes by the college of cardinals, and the sometimes nebulous, often
nefarious intertwining relationships between the Vatican, Pope, and the nation
states of Europe.
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