Non-fiction, Religion

Like Saying It Was Magic

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Dr. Vern Poythress has written a book on chance and the sovereignty of God. In fact, that’s the title. He says he was thinking about one of his previous books, Redeeming Science, when he developed the concept of chance for this book. People have appealed to chance almost as an intelligence behind questions of our origin, but to say it happened by chance when the odds are inconceivably high against it is like saying it was just magic. It’s nonsense. The real problem, Dr. Poythress explains, is that many scientists have insisted that their naturalistic philosophy is the only way to interpret the data:

Evolutionary naturalism is the view that all forms of life came about through merely material processes, with no guiding purpose at any point. But the narrow study of material causes can never legitimately make a pronouncement about God’s involvement or God’s purposes in the processes. And scientific study ought not say that there can be no exceptions, that is, events in which God acts in surprising ways.

Many pronouncements made these days in the name of science use the successes of science and the prestige of science as a platform from which to advocate the principle that there are no purposes and that God is absent. But such pronouncements represent a form of philosophy; the advocates of materialistic philosophy are importing their own assumptions into their interpretation of the scientific data.

Many of them say they will entertain any theory that explains the data well, but we have seen plenty of examples where this has not been true at all. Even the suggestion that a god of some kind may explain the patterns seen in the data is enough to raise the ire of Darwin’s watchdogs. That’s what the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is about.

Religion

Keeping Quiet about Creation

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I don’t think I wrote here that I thought the Ken Ham vs. Bill Nye debate was less than great. The fact that you can still watch it is impressive, but the debate itself disappointed me. I thought Ham posed a question he did not answer. Though Nye appeared to be prepared to go toe-to-toe with him on specific scientific claims, Ham didn’t want to wrestle for some reason. The next day, his group announced that he would answer all of Nye’s objections that evening, but I want to know why he didn’t do it during the debate. It’s a day too late, sir.

A few years ago, I visited The Creation Museum in Kentucky with my family and enjoyed it. My only complaint at the time was the occasional straw man you saw characterizing evolutionists. I would have been much more impressed if certain presentations had presented teachers of Darwinian evolution as serious scientific people who could handle the data. Other than that, it was a great museum. But we need more than this to overcome the big problem as Joel Belz presents it today:

“The big problem more and more is that those of us who profess to be believers have to such a large extent joined them in their silence. So theoretically, we are still creationists. But practically speaking, we don’t let our allegiance to that great truth affect us much in everyday life.”

Science is not a godless field of study, and Christian need not cede it to them. As Dr. Poythress explains in his booklet, Did Adam Exist? Darwin’s model of evolution is only one valid way of interpreting the data–not the best way and not the only way. Interpretations that include God’s designing hand are also valid.

Authors

Shakespeare’s Dictionary?

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Two booksellers are making a case for the authorship of notes in John Baret‘s An Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionarie, published in 1580. They hope to prove that the marginalia is Shakespeare’s. They have scanned the 300-page dictionary to open it up to the world for review and possible help.

Poetry

Poetry, Brutality In the News

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Austin Kleon shows us how he makes his newspaper marker poems. “Creativity is subtraction,” he demonstrates. I like this, but I think I lean toward more random, more crazy poetic expressions, like this dadaist poem I collected from the blogosphere of 2006.

“This bosses the suggests think Geographic

Washington dogg eu em gasolina

Companhia many book towards Down

Weman probably its USS Neverdock

To haven’t you’re difference am curriculum

first”

You can’t beat that, I tell you.

Also found in the news, much like the marker poems, is this blowback to an NYPD twitter campaign. They asked New Yorkers to post photos of #myNYPD. Did shots of smiles and helpful cops dominate the responses? No, they got more of takedowns and wrestling.

Uncategorized

TV Storytelling Tropes In a Periodic Table

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A trope is a convention, sometimes a cliché, that may be used as a formula for a specific purpose in a story. The quest, foreshadowing, or the faithful sidekick could be considered tropes for their implementation within a story. James R. Harris has given us a periodic table of the information found on TVtroupes.org, weighting each item in kilowicks (thousands of links to the relevant page on the site). To give you a taste of this potential guard against clichés in your own stories, here are items organized under “Setting, laws, plots” with their popularity rating:

  • An Aesop 3.0
  • Serious Business 4.0
  • The Masquerade 1.7
  • Recycled IN SPACE 3.2
  • X Meets Y 2.3
  • Magic A Is Magic A 0.75
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism 1.6
  • Status Quo Is God 2.0
  • Call To Adventure 0.43
  • Redemption Quest 0.20
  • The Hero’s Journey 0.28
  • Saving the World 0.38
  • They Fight Crime .58

Of course, I picked the tame category. The plot device category has fun things like “Applied Phlebotinum“, an object or substance used to advance the plot. Here’s a good bit of dialogue as an example:

Nick Naylor: Cigarettes in space?

Jeff Megall: It’s the final frontier, Nick.

Nick Naylor: But wouldn’t they blow up in an all-oxygen environment?

Jeff Megall: (beat) Probably. But, you know, it’s an easy fix. One line of dialogue: ‘Thank God we created the, you know, whatever device.‘

— Thank You For Smoking

(via Fast CoDesign)

Goofing, Religion

Twelve Reasons Why God Can’t Get Tenure, Rebuttal

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Twelve top reasons why God can’t get tenure (from the Internet of Yesteryear)

  1. He’s authored only one paper
  2. That paper was in Hebrew
  3. His work appeared in an obscure, unimportant publication
  4. He never references other authors
  5. Workers in the field can’t replicate His results.
  6. He failed to apply to the ethics committee before starting His experiments on humans.
  7. He tried to cover an experiment’s unsatisfatory results by drowning the subjects.
  8. When subjects behavior proved his theory wrong he had them removed from the sample.
  9. He hardly ever shows up for any lectures. He merely assigns His Book again and again.
  10. His office is at the top of a mountain, and He doesn’t keep office hours anyway.
  11. When He learned that His first two students sought wisdom, He had them expelled.
  12. His exams consist of only ten assigments which most students fail.

Rebuttal: Why God Did Receive Tenure.

  1. The one publication was a Citation Classic.
  2. The Hebrew original was widely translated courtesy of the author.
  3. Being written before journals existed, references were hard to come by.
  4. Original treatises that found a new area often require their own monograph.
  5. Although research has been sparse since the Creation, the professor has taught a number of courses: Human anatomy 212; Ancient Middle Eastern History 101, 102; Hydrology 207; Human Development 350; seminar on Egyptology; extended field trips to the deserts between Egypt and Palestine; Politics of Theocracies 277; Military Science Special Topic: Use of Voice as a Municipal Assault Weapon; Criminology 114; guest lectures in the Vet School: Digestive Anatomy of Whales; Wisdom & Ethics 550; Special seminar: Fertilization without sperm; Winemaking 870; Healing by miracle 987; Theology 101, 102, 230, 342, 350, 466H, and 980.
  6. The substitute teacher (son) was highly committed to his work.
  7. The substitute teacher cancelled the original ten requirements.
  8. The twelve teaching assistants formed numerous discussion groups.
  9. The substitute teacher knew students names without an attendance sheet.
  10. The professor’s weekly Sunday lectures by surrogate instructors are attended by 974 million students.
Fiction, Publishing

Important publishing news that will change your life!

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The good folks at Nordskog Publishing have made my novel West Oversea available in e-book format now.

Your Kindle version is here.

Your Nook version is here.

Happy Easter.

Writing

Just Stop It, Writers

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Barnabas Piper tells us to stop writing about writing, because we don’t really have anything to say.

“When Stephen King writes a book about writing I read it cover to cover and then start over. And it is marvelous. When a thirty-something, barely published, Internet composer of public journal entries does so, it’s uppity.”

Yeah. Sorry about that.