"Knowing"

We saw Knowing last night...an apologetic for Calvinism, or an opportunity to think about providence and prophecy? Depends who's watching it.

While I enjoyed the film, I had a hard time with its black-and-white orientation: "Either determinism or randomness." Either everything is caused, and stands in a long chain of cause and effect, or else nothing is caused. There is no option for metaphysical libertarianism, which defines freedom as the ability to act against a cause (contra-causal power). From this perspective, persons are regarded as agents, as initiators themselves of causal chains, but the film does not countenance that possibility.

To me, the most telling scene occurred in the MIT classroom, as Koestler lectures. He equates purpose with determinism. In a world starved for final causality, it is refreshing to hear the word "purpose" even mentioned in a film. (No, I am not a Purpose- Driven Groupie. If anything, my sympathies lie much further down the line, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas). But what if there is a God who allows us the freedom to determine our own ends? Then there would be purpose without either a "hard" or "soft" determinism. Then we could understand and appreciate Ezekiel 18.

If you roll with its presuppostions, the film is certainly a thriller. It has the definitive image for Malachi's "Day of the Lord," though I found its (super?) natural beings at the end not at all convincing.

Bottom line: Worth the ticket, but Signs was better.

Here's Roger Ebert's review

and there's more (including spoilers) at Roger Ebert's Journal.

There's a great resource for Christians interested in the question of God's omniscience, foreknowledge and human freedom here.

And finally, there's this little video explanation of determinism by David Sosa, chair of the philosophy department at the University of Texas, Austin.

Build a Better Baby

Kyrie Eleison.

Gilbert Meilaender warned about this long ago in
his Bioethics: A Primer for Christians. Life is not a commodity; children are not art projects. Time to go watch Gattaca again; and especially take note of the alternative ending.


Fertility Doctor Will Let Parents Build Their Own Baby

Clinic's Service to Custom-Design Baby's Hair and Eye Color Sparks Controversy
By GIGI STONE
March 3, 2009

Imagine if you could choose your baby the same way you pick out a new outfit from a catalogue. Perhaps some blue eyes, a bit of curly hair, and why not make her tall, lean and smart? One fertility doctor now says that he may be able to deliver....continued here

A Metaphysics Quiz for Physicists

Are periodic tables of the elements

1) discoveries, or

2) inventions?

That is, does a periodic table correspond to something that exists independently of it, pointing us toward that reality; or is it a way human minds can impose an arbitrary order upon an otherwise confusing set of perceptions?

Are there really such substances as helium and polonium "out there" or are they just conventions that enable us manipulate matter in the ways we want?

If you choose 1) explain why there is a correspondence between such tables and reality.

If you choose 2) explain why these tables "work."

You have one hour. ; )

Laminin and Colossians 1:15-17

My uncle just passed this on to me from a friend of his:

A couple of days ago I was watching a DVD sermon by Louie Giglio...and I was BLOWN AWAY! I want to share what I learned....but I fear not being able to convey it as well as I want. I will share anyway.

He (Louie) was talking about how inconceivably BIG our God is...how He spoke the universe into being...how He breathes stars out of His mouth that are huge raging balls of fire...etc. etc. Then He went on to speak of how this star-breathing, universe creating God ALSO knitted our human bodies together with amazing detail and wonder. At this point I am LOVING it (fascinating from a medical standpoint, you know.) .....and I was remembering how I was constantly amazed during medical school as I learned more and more about God's handiwork. I remember so many times thinking....'How can ANYONE deny that a Creator did all of this???'

Louie went on to talk about how we can trust that the God who created all this, also has the power to hold it all together when things seem to be falling apart...how our loving Creator is also our sustainer.

And then I lost my breath.
And it wasn't because I was running my treadmill, either!!!
It was because he started talking about laminin.
I knew about laminin. Here is how wikipedia describes them :'Laminins are a family of proteins that are an integral part of the structural scaffolding of basement membranes in almost every animal tissue.' You see....laminins are what hold us together....LITERALLY. They are cell adhesion molecules. They are what holds one cell of our bodies to the next cell. Without them, we would literally fall apart. And I knew all this already. But what I didn't know is what laminin LOOKED LIKE.

But now I do.
And I have thought about it a thousand times since (already)....
Here is what the structure of laminin looks like...AND THIS IS NOT a 'Christian portrayal' of it....if you look up laminin in any scientific/medical piece of literature, this is what you will see...




Now tell me that our God is not the coolest!!!
Amazing.
The glue that holds us together....ALL of us....is in the shape of the cross.
Immediately Colossians 1:15-17 comes to mind.

'He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
For by him all things were created; things in heaven and on earth , visible and invisible,
whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities;
all things were created by him and for him.
He is before all things,
and in him all things HOLD TOGETHER. '

Colossians 1:15-17


Call me crazy. I just think that is very, very, very cool.
Thousands of years before the world knew anything about laminin, Paul penned those words. And now we see that from a very LITERAL standpoint, we are held together...one cell to another....by the cross.

You would never in a quadrillion years convince me that is anything other than the mark of a Creator who knew EXACTLY what laminin 'glue' would look like long before Adam even breathed his first breath!!

We praise YOU, Lord!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

JoVeta Wescott
Ex. Dir. Kansas Parish Nurse Ministry, Inc.
www.KansasParishNurseMinistry.org

Now, like Thomas, I am not one to accept things without a bit more evidence. So I did a brief google search, and found corroboration
here, here, here

and most incredibly, here.

May those who have eyes to see praise Him.

Just Wondering: Did God Ever Pay Mary?

I am looking for extra work, now that one of the schools I've been teaching at has encountered rough financial waters, and has dismissed all its adjuncts. So I've been faithfully reading our Eugene Craig's List. Tonight I saw this entry. I understand that infertility is a horrific thing, and have had my own experiences with it. But is this really the direction that we should go?

Gilbert Meilaender makes an important distinction between "procreation" and "reproduction." Procreation is a matter of passion, and of receiving a child as a gift from the Lord. "Reproduction" is a matter of our own planning and construction; making a child becomes a project under our own control. Children which are so "made" are products, and like all products eventually are subject to quality control and the whims of fashion.

Somehow this just doesn't sound right:

[WARNING: what follows is meant to be read with the same spirit of irony as Swift's "A Modest Proposal." My apologies in advance for those who might be offended. ]

"In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, 'Greetings, you who are pretty and bright! The Lord wants to employ you for his Next Big Project: the production of the Messiah!'"

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you are in the upper tenth percentile for IQ and have a body mass index of 21.5.Your genome shows a less than 10% chance for developing Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, hypospadias, spina bifida or transposition of the great arteries. So you will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David,and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."

"How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?"

The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be produced will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month, thanks to the Greater Galilee Fertility Clinic! For no word from God will ever fail; his success rate is 100%, according to the Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Report: 2007 Preliminary State Clinics List!"

'Okay, but be sure He pays you the $5000 Donor Matching Fee you deserve, Gabriel,' Mary answered. "And my fee will be $22K in compensations and allowances plus expenses." Then the angel left her.

(c)Beth Bilynskyj, Dec. 10, 2007

---------------------
Surrogates Needed

$22,000 In Compensation and Allowances Plus Expenses


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