JOLLYBLOGGER

I Love This Planet!!

There is no apology for God's long silence, no word of consolation for Job in his distress.  But nor does God crush and humiliate him.  Instead, God takes him instead on a whirlwind tour of the universe.
Vinoth Rmachandra, quoted by Kelly Munroe Kullberg, Finding God Beyond Harvard, p. 111

Around the Jollysphere 12-13-07

I'm going to try to dust off an old thing I used to do - a link list called "Around the Jollysphere."  I used to do this and then let it fall by the wayside.  I have accumulated quite a lot of links in my del.ici.ous folders and saved rss feeds so I think I can make a go of this.  As I do this I'll try to separate it into categories and share with you some of the best things I have read.  I'm not going to have set categories, but you can expect that each time I do this I'll have some theology/biblical/Christian living links, cultural stuff, and a bit of sports stuff (especially during football season).  I also will share some stuff on diet and fitness as this something I have been very consumed with over the last few months and have quite a bit of material on.  So, without further ado (or is it adieu?) . . .

Theological Goodness

John Barlow has a good quote from Samuel Johnson.  It wasn't written in a theological context but is too good not to mention here:

"Hume and other skeptical innovators are vain men and will gratify themselves at any expense. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity, so they have betaken themselves to error: Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull."

Glenn Lucke gets caught quoting the Bible on the the gospel and the kingdom.  Some of the brethren are troubled that some of the brethren seem to be defining the gospel in terms of the Kingdom of God.  So, Glenn does the unthinkable and searches the Scriptures on the matter.  Be sure and read the post and then look at a few other comments that Glenn made in response to me.  I understand the fear - some have used the "gospel of the kingdom" as an excuse to abandon the historical (biblical) teachings on justification.  But an errant understanding of the relationship of gospel and kingdom does not mean we abandon that which the Scripture plainly teaches - the gospel is the gospel of the kingdom

And of course, if we were still allowed to quote Tim Keller, we might find some wisdom.  But since we can't do that I'll quote Tony Stiff who quotes you-know-who as follows: 

“In general, I don’t think we’ve done a good job at developing ways of communicating the gospel that include both salvation from wrath by propitiation and the restoration of all things. Today, writing accessible presentations of the gospel should not be the work of marketers but the work of our best theologians.” Tim Keller, The Gospel and the Supremacy of Christ in a Postmoderd World (pg. 111)

 

This is what gets to me - Christians just love to fight over things that shouldn't be fought over.  The "gospel is the kingdom" guys want to deny or downplay propitiation in favor of the redemption of all things.  The propitiation guys are afraid that the restoration guys are going to lose propitiation so they don't want to talk about it.  The gospel is both - let's run with it.

And here's a good quote from Michael Bird that sets a correct trajectory for discussing the gospel:

"When Christians speak of salvation, they telll a story. It is a story that stretches from even before the creation of the world to its final redemption, when the plan of salvation conceived by God from eternity is to come to fulfillment. While God's dealings of old with God's chosen people, Israel, play an important role in this story, ultimately it revolves around Jesus Christ and his death on the cross."

David Brondos, Fortress Introduction to Salvation and the Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress, 2007), p.1.

An Important Review of Gary Taubes - Good Calories, Bad Calories

Hello, Jolly the low-carb Nazi here offering more propaganda in favor of the low-carb lifestyle.   Here's a review of Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories by Jeremy J. Stone, past president of the Federation of American Scientists (HT - commenter Kevin at Jimmy Moore's Livin La Vida Low-Carb).  As I've mentioned before, I am very excited about Taubes book.  It's not a diet book per se, it's a science book, a research project, but his research has been enough to motivate me to continue on the low carb plan.

Since June 1, 2007 I have lost 50lbs, weigh less than I did when I get married and am approaching my college weight.  And all this while cheating way more than I should. I am feeling better than I have in a long time and one of the best parts of this is that I no longer vomit when I see myself in the mirror.  I'm no Tom Cruise and will definitely not be taking my shirt off in public any time soon, but it really is nice to get dressed in the morning and not look like I'm pregnant (yes, I have had people make that joke about me before!)

But I also know that a yahoo like me doesn't have the cred to recommend this so I wanted to reference a real live scientist, whose credentials and ability to read technical research material should not be in question.  So, let me encourage you to read what Dr. Stone says about Taubes book after the jump.

Informational Cascades

I may be late to the party on this one but I came across a concept I hadn't really given any thought to recently - its the idea of informational cascades.  John Tierney of the New York Times explains it this way:

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.

If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

I came across that doing a bit of research on Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories and Tierney uses informational cascades as an explanation for the conventional wisdom that a high-carb low-fat diet is good for you, when a massive body of research says otherwise.

JEI - Frank Young, The Relevance of God in a Secular Society

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Jonathan Edwards Institute annual conference in Annapolis and am finally getting around to posting some of my notes.  BTW - this is a terrific conference, its not very well known, but it really is a great conference that I would encourage anyone to attend.  Let me know if you would like more information.

In the post continuation I have the notes I took from a lecture by Frank Young on The Relevance of God in a Secular Society.  I will say that these notes are straight out of the powerpoint slides he was using so they have that staccato bullet-pointed feel. 

Frank Young is a guy you have probably never heard of but who is very brilliant and very high powered.  Here's a bio I found of him.

Dr. Young has served in a variety of governmental positions, including Commissioner of the     Food and Drug Administration (1984-89), Commissioner on the World Health Organization’s Commission on Health and Environment (1990), and Assistant Surgeon General (Rear Admiral, upper half) of the Department of Health and Human Services (1984). He is the former Dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Rochester and is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Church Alliance.

As I say, he is brilliant and I appreciated his talk, though the talk revolved mainly around religion and science.  Because this is such a broad subject, this one talk opened up as many questions as it answered and because of that I was a bit frustrated and you may be too.  I don't want to tell you how to read my blog posts but I will suggest that you may get the greatest benefit out of reading the following notes by looking at these as thought provokers and/or conversation starters.  But feel free to do what you want with them.

A Consequence of the Lust for Academic Respectability

Over at Mere Comments, Russell Moore says this:

Unfortunately, Protestant colleges around the country have twitched in this web for over a century. Lusting after academic respectability, they hire faculty members who follow the repective party lines of their guilds. Often, this includes the religion faculty chasing after the dusty theories of German liberals or the faddish proposals of postmodern philosophers (thankfully, at Samford, with the exception of an orthodox divinity school faculty). But they still must be a "Christian" school, so what makes it so? Well, the same thing that makes an individual so: privatized faith, thoroughly severed from the rest of thought and life. In short, one makes up for Darwinism in biology with chapel attendance and mission trips. But without a coherent worldview vision, this ends up as so much pseudo-Gnostic spirituality reflecting on "self, community, and a personal God"  with, as this student cynic puts it, "no reason for respect."

Read the rest here.

Related Tags: Current Affairs, Education, Science, Religion, Worldview, Christian, Christianity, Faith, Evolution, Philosophy, Postmodernism, Gnostic Spirituality

Intelligent Design, Panspermia and the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Has everyone heard of The Flying Spaghetti Monster?  If you haven't, you are missing out on a real slice of contemporary pop culture.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the creation of Bobby Henderson, a 24 year old unemployed amateur pirate with a physics degree.  Oops, there I go messing things up already.  You see, where I goofed in that last sentence is in saying that The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the creation of Bobby Henderson, when in fact, it is more likely that Bobby (and the rest of us) are the creations of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Bobby, along with many in the scientific community, have recently become distressed at the attempts of Intelligent Design advocates to have ID taught in our public schools.  While there are professors fighting against ID on the academic front, teachers fighting ID on the educational front, and lawyers fighting ID on the legal front, Bobby is fighting ID on the satirical/farcical front.

Opponents of ID think it is ludicrous to teach intelligent design as if it were science.  The idea that there is an intelligent designer (whom some might call "God"), is so ludicrous in fact, that it is just as plausible to believe (scientifically) we were created by a flying spaghetti monster as it is to believe we were created by God.  In other words, if ID'ers want to postulate that there is an intelligent designer behind the universe then we have as much warrant to believe we were created by a flying spaghetti monster as we do to believe we were created by God.

It turns out that hot water does freeze faster than cold!

I have been told in the past that hot water freezes faster than cold.  Not being very scientifically astute I never tried to track down the truthfulness of that, but intuitively it seemed wrong to me, and I just figured it was an old wives tale.

It turns out my intuition was wrong and the old wives were right.

Macht at Prosthesis is a very, very smart person and he tells us that it is true that hot water freezes faster than cold, at least in some circumstances. And, this process actually has a name - the Mpemba effect. It was named after a schoolboy who discovered this in 1969.

Apparently, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Roger Bacon and Renee Descartes had also discovered this but it was lost to science until 1969.   And now, Macht points out that the Mpemba effect has some interesting implications.

This little tidbit may not change your life, but it does show that an old wives tale is true in some circumstances, and it is fascinating to know.  Thanks for sharing it with us Macht.

Technorati Tags: mpemba, mpemba effect, water, freezing, science, Aristotle, Bacon, Francis Bacon, Descartes

Science and Christianity Showcase is Up at Allthings2All

The Science and Christianity Showcase is now up at Allthings2All.   I haven't had a chance to read through it, but with one quick glance you can see that this is full of quality material.  And, Catez has done a great job of organizing it into categories. And she's added some nice graphics to boost the visual appeal.  So, let me invite you to go on over and take a looksee.

Contact with Extra-Terrestrials? Bad news and GOOD NEWS for the folks at SETI

This week has been a weeks of ups and downs for the folks at SETI@home (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence at home). On Thursday of this past weekend, CNN reported the following:

An unexplained radio signal from deep space could -- just might be -- contact from an alien civilization, New Scientist magazine reported on Thursday.

The signal, coming from a point between the Pisces and Aries constellations, has been picked up three times by a telescope in Puerto Rico.

This provided some hope to the SETI folks, but now it looks like there hopes have crashed. Today, Wired News is reporting that the mystery signal is not from aliens:

BBC News Online is reporting that a radio signal from deep space is not from aliens, according to astronomers. The scientists quelled rumors that spread across the web after New Scientist magazine reported that a signal picked up by a telescope in Puerto Rico might be from an alien civilization.

But the Seti@home project's chief scientist, Dr. Dan Wertheimer, told BBC that, "It's all hype and noise…. We have nothing that is unusual."

The BBC News Online story also cited Dr. Paul Horowitz of Harvard University. "It's not much of anything at all. We're not investigating it further," Horowitz said, according to the story. He reportedly said what the telescope picked up was "not new and definitely not a signal."

And, being a preacher and all, this got me thinking about my sermon this Sunday. You know what they say - to a hammer everything looks like a nail and to a preacher everything looks like a sermon illustration. Here are some words I am using this Sunday that are on point from Robert Reymond's New Systematic Theology:

Hundreds of the world’s space scientists are spending vast sums from their nation’s treasuries trying to make meaningful contact with imagined rational beings living in deep space. It is an extremely questionable undertaking for many reasons, but the insatiable thirst for a word to us from another world drives them on in a pursuit that has to date yielded nothing.

The Christian church believes that it already possesses such a word from “outer space,” or, more accurately, a word from beyond space, even from the Triune God of heaven himself.