Conversations With RipChurch Contributors About Origins: on Vision Forum's Jonathan Park

“The bottom line is that the real purpose of this lesson was not to teach, inform, inspire or promote independent thought. The purpose was to inoculate. There is no science going on here, not even a retelling of a former curiosity about how the world works. The answer must conform to a particular reading of the Bible, and the question will be molded to fit the necessary answer. The superficial subject matter is irrelevant.”

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The Nature of God: Conversations With An Atheist

To adopt an idea that God is all powerful is, as Touchstone rightly points out, to take on a rather awful burden.  All people are in the position of Pharaoh in Exodus, of whom God says, "I will harden his heart" (Exodus 4:21) so that one is punished for failure to do what God has not allowed one to do.

While I've read a tremendous amount of theology on this, I don't really see a way around it.

And I cannot agree that it would be just, or that such a god would be worthy of worship.

Notice a few things, though, that the Christian notion of God-as-love implies.

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God-Talk: "Supernatural" and The Meaning of God

I believe that humans worship that which is worthy of worship. That is, we "ascribe worth" to a quality in the real world. We might personify it, we might find in it certain unaccounted for properties (miracles and other freaky shit)... but words like "supernatural" are to me pretty meaningless simply because I don't (and you don't) know what the boundaries of the natural are.

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Conversations With Touchstone: Theists, Scientists, & Fairy Giraffes With Butterfly Wings

Science deals with things that are extended in time and space, and insofar as The Big Questions are supernatural or whatever, they are not approachable by science.

The bare-faced lie that is currently being perpetrated on American evangelicals generally is at least an interesting one.  It's that the Bible is itself a form of science, and simultaneously a "fact" that can be interpreted as reasonable persons interpret other facts. 

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Coming Soon: Radiometric Popcorn, An Interactive Guest Effusion

My friend Touchstone and I met on a Christian homeschooling forum.  Over there we got into lots of conversations with Young Earth Creationists [YECs] and Old Earth Creationists [OECs] and Theistic Evolutionsts [TEs].

In one memorable exchange, radiometric dating and its reliability came up.  Together we were trying to explain the basic science involved, in layman's terms but hopefully with some intelligence and accuracy.

Touchstone's bright idea: Radiometric Popcorn.

I've asked him to weigh in here with a presentation of radiometric dating and radiometric popcorn.

Watch for it: it's worth waiting for.