public domain: Fall In New England
For the Gift of a New Day link
We give you thanks
for the rest of the past night
and for the gift of a new day
with its opportunities to please you.
Grant that we may pass its hours
in the complete freedom of your service,
that at evening we may again give you thanks;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Prayer of Origen (ca. 185-254) link
Lord,
inspire us to read your Scriptures
and to meditate upon them day and night.
We beg you to give us real understanding of what we need,
that we in turn may put its precepts into practice.
Yet we know that understanding and good intentions are worthless,
unless rooted in your graceful love.
So we ask that the words of Scriptures
may also be not just signs on a page,
but channels of grace into our hearts.
Amen
Prayer to God the Father — St Ambrose of Milan (337–397 AD)
O Lord, who has mercy upon all, take away from me my sins,
and mercifully kindle in me the fire of Your Holy Spirit.
Take away from me the heart of stone,
and give me a heart of flesh,
a heart to love and adore You,
a heart to delight in You,
to follow and to enjoy You,
for Christ’s sake. Amen
Benediction link
May the God of peace who raised Christ from the dead
Strengthen your inner being for every good work.
And may the blessing of God Almighty Father, Son and Holy Spirit
Rest upon you and dwell within you
This day and evermore.
Amen.
Lennox gives good talks.
I’m especially impressed with his flat-out rejection of the belief that the universe is its own first cause and its own creator of life.
He pulled no punches and said right up front that it’s utter nonsense and as absurd as trying to divide by zero.
Muff Potter(Reply & quote selected text) (Reply to this comment)
Thank you, Dee.
The first talk is IMO an admirable argument for humility and against scientism.
Prof. Dawkins’ argument against Theism, that a Being as complex as the Deity of the monotheistic religions could never arise spontaneously through natural processes within the universe and therefore cannot exist, is so silly that it’s kind of hard to understand how it gets past the editors of the books in which he makes it. In one of his books (it may be “The God Delusion”) RD mentions a correspondent’s proposal that we are living within a computer simulation created by a programmer who does not dwell within the simulation. RD commented that he had no idea how one could rule out this possibility, but seemed to not recognize that this is analogous to what Theists believe, that the Creator is not part of the Creation, but is beyond it.
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I think there is a flaw in the second talk, in the use (widely-accepted-within-Evangelical circles) of General Relativity and Big Bang cosmology as proof of creation ex nihilo.
The problem is Prof. Lennox’s assertion that a theorem about the inevitability of a singularity in the past history of the visible universe implies that the visible universe must be understood to have been created out of nothing.
It appears to me that this argument has been shown to be invalid by Dr. J. Brian Pitts. Dr. Pitts has pointed out that General Relativity is invariant with respect to time-reversal, so the affirmation that “a past singularity implies the creation of matter from nothing (or from something that is not physical)” requires that one also affirm that “a future singularity implies the destruction of matter into nothing (or into something that isn’t physical).” So, for example, on would be obliged to affirm that the matter that collapses into the singularity at the center of the black hole that forms in a type II supernova is destroyed into nothing (or into something non-physical) when it falls into the singularity. As far as I am aware, there is at present no empirical evidence and no theoretical basis for belief that this is so. Physics at present is not able to describe the state of matter at the density scales entailed by collapse into the center of a black hole.
Here are some papers on the subject written by Dr. Pitts:
https://philpapers.org/rec/PITWTB
https://www.academia.edu/95925264/Does_the_Big_Bang_Demystify_Creation_in_the_Finite_Past
When I first learned of Dr. Pitts’ analysis, more than a decade ago, it was a bit of blow, personally, as I had been impressed with the way that Christian apologists, especially Reasons to Believe, have used the argument that “past singularity implies creatio ex nihilo and affirms Genesis 1:1″. I am no longer confident that this is a valid argument.
I continue to think that there are philosophical grounds for affirmation of creatio ex nihilo, but it appears to me that the evidential-apologetical “holy grail” of an iron-clad empirical proof based on widely-accepted science remains elusive.
Samuel Conner(Reply & quote selected text) (Reply to this comment)
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. My hope is that the talks on this forum might stimulate folks to think. Sadly, for many Christians, they hav been raised in a “Young Earth” culture. These talks are meat to stimulate some different thoughts.
I recently heard from a long ago pastor who is now a proponent of theistic evolution. He wished he had been so far earlier.
dee(Reply & quote selected text) (Reply to this comment)
Muff Potter: He pulled no punches and said right up front that it’s utter nonsense and as absurd as trying to divide by zero.
Thanks for listening, Muff. You have been around TWW from the very early days.
dee(Reply & quote selected text) (Reply to this comment)
If church really had these types of sermons then I might consider returning.
Dr. Knox is an engaging speaker and brings up some great points about science, faith and absolutism on both sides.
Personally, I believe that the absence of answers defaults to more inquiries not automatically God.
But to use the lack of answers or try to bash something in place to prove there is no god is not science.
It’s not binary, you can be a Christian and adhere to scientific methods. Lots on this forum do.
What Knox is saying (in my interpretation) is that all the research is valid, all our discoveries in science and engineering are amazing but doesn’t negate god.
I like how he addresses god as not blunting inquiry. That the god of Christianity is not a god of the gaps. Ie: we don’t know so just say “it’s god” and stop there.
I remember Michio Kaku stating that a singularity is a nice way of saying “we don’t know”
And as a species, whatever our belief, when confronted with the unexplained it’s ok to say “we don’t know”
That being said, if there’s a creator, why does it default to the Abrahamic “he god”?
It reminds of the meme of the dude from “Ancient Aliens” stating “I’m not saying it’s aliens….but it’s aliens.”
Jack(Reply & quote selected text) (Reply to this comment)
If I can believe in creation out of nothing (which I do), it’s not too much of a leap to say that even space itself is not always the well-ordered Cartesian box we’re so used to.
It might be as folded and compressed as the steel in a Katana.
Muff Potter(Reply & quote selected text) (Reply to this comment)
Ed. note:*cough* Please read my email.
Also, according to string theory, our standard 3-D universe is a brane inside a higher dimensional space of 10 Dimensions.
From another physics post online:
Four of the dimensions are the usual four of spacetime. The six (or perhaps seven) extra dimensions are rolled up to be almost unobservable.
First, let’s see why they exist at all. If N=8 Supersymmetry is correct the universe must be 10 or 11 dimensional. Let D be the actual dimensionality of space time. Let d be the apparent dimensionality. (We know d = 4, but let’s think generally.) Then there is a nice relation between D, d and N.
N∗2 ^|d/2|=2 ^|D/2|
It follows from the number of spinor dimensions required by the Dirac equation, which is 2^|D/2|
. The ||s mean round down to the nearest whole number. So plugging in d=4 and N=8 (which is the highest value N can have) we get D = 10 or 11. String theory has D=10, M-theory has D=11. One dimension is reserved for time, leaving space with 9 or 10 dimensions. We don’t see 6 of these extra dimensions because – we assume – they are rolled up a la Kaluza–Klein theory into a 6 dimensional Calabi–Yau space.
But then you have retired pastors that fancy themselves experts in physics that don’t believe in the Laws of General Relativity (cough Wade B cough).
Ras al Ghul(Reply & quote selected text) (Reply to this comment)