Two Tidbits

Here's a couple links you might find interesting on a Monday morning:

1. Heart Health and Touch: Newsweek shows that your chances of dying within six months after a heart attack are four times greater if you are lonely or depressed. It  concludes that community, spirituality and purpose are essential to health. (and a little touch, too). This would tell you who you want at the core of every intergenerational group for Advent this year - someone who has experienced a significant loss in the last six months.

2.  Gallup on Evolution/Creation:  According to Gallup, a large majority of Americans believe there is a Creator, and that Creator should not be kept out of schools. I'd like to  ditch a lot of the excess baggage in the term  "Intelligent Design"  and simply redefine it as the First Article of the Apostles' Creed. If that's our starting point as Christians, and we can agree that there's a Creator, then, as Einstein said, "The rest is detail." ID is a hot topic right now. It was featured on West Wing last night with Jimmy Smitts making a classicly flawed argument - although eloquently. He said that, as a Catholic, he believes in a Creator, but that faith is faith and science is science and one has backing and the other one doesn't.

I don't happen to agree. I believe one can have confidence in the Creator based on evidence. Read your Bible. Read the stars (astronomy, not astrology). Read the rocks. Read the intricate, elegant, ellaborate micro-machines inside a single cell bacteria. Read everything, then come to your conclusions. Even Anthony Flew, the world's premier athiest and debator with C.S. Lewis, now believes there is an intelligent first cause.

The word "confidence" is Latin for "con=with" "fidae=faith". You don't have to check your brain at the door to go to church, or your faith at the door to go to your science class.

Whether you believe this debate is best done in the school, in the home, or in a science fiction or philosophy class, I believe it should at least be done at church on a weekend with teens.

We're working on "Why God?" weekends and have two more scheduled this year, with a dozen or so after the first of the year to give high school kids some time to wrestle with the issues.

Comments

[trogdor]

I like the thought of Mr Einstein there. One interesting thing to note (check me on the details of this) is that in Terry Pratchett's book "The Science of the Discworld" the first one, he states that there are about 50 theories as to how life actually got started on this planet. The funny thing is that while all of them offer some kind of proof, none of them are definitively provable over the others.