Salt and Light

Gotta have respect for the Anglican Church of Uganda

That takes guts and grace.

You don't need to look like a Cosmo model to deserve love.

A class mate of mine recently asked me a question about my faith, generally about how I could have a scientific mind and yet believe in God, and specifically about evolution vs creation. This is a modified version of my response to him.

First, about having a logical mind and yet believing in God, I was reading some philosophy notes that provided a 'proof' that God exists. However, after quickly reading them I didn't really find them helpful. By helpful, I mean to be able to use as an 'argument' for the case that God exists. The best 'argument' that i have ever seen is offered by CS Lewis in his novel Mere Christianity which starts from essentially nothing and builds up the case for God. He uses Natural Law to argue for the existence of God.

from C. S. Lewis: The Natural Law in Literature and Life

The human race is haunted by the idea of doing what is right. In the first five chapters of Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis discusses the fact that people are always referring to some standard of behavior that they expect other people to know about. People are always defending themselves by arguing that what they have been doing does not really go against that standard, or that they have some special excuse for violating it. What they have in mind is a law of fair play or a rule of decent behavior.

Different people use different labels for this law - traditional morality or the Moral Law, the knowledge of right and wrong, or Virtue, or the Way. We choose to call it the Natural Law. This law is an obvious principle that is not made up by humans but is for humans to observe. Lewis claims that all over the earth humans know about this law, and all over the earth they break it; he further claims that there is Something or Somebody behind this.

We can tell from Natural Law that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness. However, the Natural Law does not give us any grounds for assuming that God is soft or indulgent. Natural Law obliges us to do the straight thing no matter how painful or dangerous or difficult it is to do.

For me, the best 'argument' that God exists is not an 'argument' at all, but it simply comes from faith. I know He exists because I know Him. God has revealed Himself to me in a deeply personal way, and no argument that I can offer can explain it, and no argument anyone else can offer can take it away from me.

As for the evolution vs creation, there is so much debate about this topic that I can't even begin to go into it. I will offer some thoughts, but I don't know enough about the topic to go into more detail.

I hated evolution when it was taught to me in high school. I had no desire to study the topic, not because I didn't agree with it, but frankly because it bored me. I have done some reasearch on my own about creation vs evolution, but it is very difficult to find unbiased studies about this controversial topic. And by unbiased, I mean both ways. Try it. It's nearly impossible.

I don't think that evolution can truly be called science, since it cannot be subject to the scientific method. Science starts with the observation of the natural world, and scientists create theories to explain their observations, test their theories and revise them. But evolution cannot be observed! We were not there at the beginning of the earth, the big bang or whatever you want to call it. So science can only speculate about what happened. (And btw, creation theory doesn't insist there wasn't a big-bang, just that there was a Being behind it :P )

I believe that many of Darwin's arguments are interesting, and the theory of natural selection makes sense. But: Although there is plenty of evidence for adaptive changes in species (microevolution), we do not in recorded history see one species becoming an entirely different, more highly evolved organism. For example, we have no examples in recorded history of a fish becoming an amphibian or even a bacteria evolving into anything other than a bacteria.

From what i understand of evolution, it considers humans to be nothing special, just another step along the evolutionary progression. That seems to deny humans their instrinsic value, their dignity as humans, which God created in His image and likeness. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." (Gen. 1:27) Once humans have no intrinsic value, all sorts of horrible things happen: slavery, abortion, euthanasia. And this is where I take exception to it, because I believe that every human life has value from the moment of conception until natural death. This sacredness for human life just doesn't seem to fit with what the evolutionists believe.

Now with comments!

Plus, my comments come with RSS feeds, so I'm trying out NewsMonster for my syndication ... so I'm also actually using Mozilla. I'm going to try using this as my default browser for a while, and see if it grows on me :)

I don't have RSS for my site itself ... Peter has recommended making my own feeds. Perhaps I'll look into it later.

Playing around a bit with the template, seems to be that time of year :) I will eventually get some work done, I promise. I'm not sure if I like the white background; I may go back to the black. But at least I'm starting to understand style sheets a bit more.

Look what I finally finished yesterday: Jesus Reflections. Written by some kids in the grade 5 class I help out with ... some of these are really cute. Trying to transform it from a paper book to a decent html version with very primitive tools was interesting ... the teacher I was working for kept commenting on how funny it was that I was editing the html source directly (though I used a WYSIWYG editor: Claris or something, I always went right to editing the source, which provided some basic syntax highlighting.) But I played around with some style sheets and stuff ... I need to do more independent web development to learn this stuff. Maybe starting in January :)

Update 4:25PM: back to black, don't like the white

Why are Catholic priests not allowed to marry?

I think this provides the best answers that I have heard in a while. As for asking if allowing priest to be married would result in more priestly vocations, the next question deals well with it.

Ordaining married men would only mean that one less sacrifice would be required of men already disinclined to live a completely sacrificial life, which is the essence of priestly ministry. That does not seem to be a recipe for good priests.

THE Movie of the Year

I cannot wait. Return of the King will be cool, but this will be beyond cool, beyond ... anything I can describe. I hope that it finds a Canadian distributor ... and if not, road trip to the States, anyone?

And here's a thoughtful review

Anyone seeing this film -- believer and unbeliever alike -- will be forced to confront the central mystery of Christ's passion, indeed of Christianity itself: If this is the remedy, what must the harm have been?

From a friend regarding a previous entry:

I want you to know that whatever this incident was in your past, I do not think any less of you for it- and neither does God. You are who you are. You are, of course broken- there is a "bad girl" streak in you, as there is in each of us. It's called the "stain of sin". And, you are weak. But, that's not the real you! The real you is something beyond all of that! You need to try to see that when you look at yourself, just as you have to when you look at others. Try to see yourself as God sees you- not as a "sum of your sins" but as His daughter! ... You are a beautiful woman- no less.

I really needed to hear that, as textbook-Christian as it is. I forget sometimes. How is it that friends can always find the exact words we need to hear just when we need to hear them?

I must admit, I am a bit confused by Planned Parenthood's Christmas Cards that they send out ... their "Choice on Earth" cards. They seem so pleased that the 'anti-choice' (ie pro-life ... can we just agree on the terms we'll use to describe each other ...) 'zealots' are offended with their cards.

Though I don't consider myself a zealot, I am pro-life. Yes, people do have a right to make choices. But choice itself is not something to be worshipped, it is not an end to itself. And there is a limit, where my right to choose ends and someone else's right to live begins.

What I don't understand is why, of all holidays, PP would use Christmas to promote their agenda ... let's remind ourselves that this holiday is about a young woman, a young teenage girl, saying 'yes' to giving birth to a child who would be the Savior of the world. It's about God humbling Himself to come into our world as a vulnerable baby, a child, or a 'fetus' as PP would have us believe. Mary's choice was not easy, she could have been stoned if she was discovered to be pregnant outside of marriage. But she said yes. She said yes to life. She said yes to God. And because of her yes, her fiat, we *all* have chance to know eternal life.

How does this compare with PP's self-serving, me-first mentality? I really don't understand. Mark Shea has an interesting response to the oft-used excuse for being pro-choice: "Don't Like Abortion? Don't Have One." To those who would find that a reasonable proposition he offers this: "Don't Like Slavery? Don't Own Slaves". Is that reasonable?

"The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."

-Oscar Wilde

I came across this quote a while ago, and it stuck with me. It reminds me that there is always hope, and that there are no limits to God's mercy. But I was reminded of this again very recently, after an online chat with an acquaintance of mine. We were fairly close a few years ago, back when I was a bit of a rebel. And he knew me in that capacity. I have told him that I've changed, but he doesn't seem to believe me.

He said something during that conversation that upset me a great deal. I can't blame him for saying it, he probably thought he was paying me a compliment. He said something about how wild I used to be, and how he was glad that "you've got that deep inside you" I wasn't sure what he was talking about, so I asked him to clarify. He told me that it was great that in addition to a nice and sweet personality, I had a 'bad girl' streak that made me so much more interesting. Even after I assured him that was no longer me, he insisted that it was, 'deep down'.

I was so disheartened when he said that. I guess that I need to learn to live with the consequences of my choices that I made in the past. Funny, that was the third reminder in the past week of an incident a few years ago, which I'd rather not recall. I tried talking to a current friend of mine about it, and I was so troubled by recalling it that I couldn't go into details. He was impressed by my modesty, some people has a sense of pride in their past sins. But he also reminded me to not be so hard on myself, which is what I needed to hear.

Faith, Hope, Love. Gotta work on that second one :)

Procrastination is a major problem right now, especially with final exams looming. Not only do I have to study, but I still have some assignments to complete. Not to mention all the work I have to do for my other commitments; working on the PHP calculator for the Lenten Calendar, writing financial reports for the last Challenge weekend. For some reason, I have this calmness of spirit that knows it will all get done ... but I forget that in order for that to happen, I actually have to DO IT.

I love being Catholic: there's a patron saint for everything. Patron Saint of women students:
Catherine of Alexandria

One of my favourite praise and worship songs contains these words:

Take my heart and form it
Take my mind and transform it
Take my will and conform it
To Yours, to Yours, Oh Lord

When I first heard this song, I balked. Conform my will? Heart, mind, whatever, that's fine. But my will is mine alone. Isn't that what God gave me? Gave all of us? Free will, right? He doesn't want a bunch of robots running around and loving Him because they are programmed that way ... He wants us to respond to Him freely ... love isn't love unless it is given freely.

So why ask for your will to be conformed? I was meditating on that today, and a beautiful answer came to me. I'll present it by means of an analogy; not a fabulous one, but it helped me understand the difference.

Let's say I love chocolate bars. I love the way they taste, I love the crinkly sound that the wrapper makes, and I love the caffeine-and-sugar induced high you get after eating them. If I could, I would eat them every day (expanding waistline notwithstanding.)

So then say I also love God, and wish to please Him. And I find out that God's Law says "Thou shall not eat chocolate bars" (Praise God it doesn't, but bear with me, it's an analogy). So I find this out from someone, check it out myself, pray about it, and realize that's exactly what God has set down in His Law. And I might disagree, and I might think they are not so bad, and I might try to wheedle my way out of it, but that doesn't change the fact that it is wrong to eat chocolate bars.

So, the next time I have a chocolate bar in front of me, I am faced with a difficult choice. I can listen to my own desires and wants, my will, and choose to eat the chocolate. Or I can choose to be obedient to God and not eat. This is where free will comes in; it is my choice. God does not prevent me from eating the chocolate; He doesn't put it in a wrapper that doesn't open, He doesn't place some supernatural force field around it. He's letting me choose. He's given me free will.

But what an agonizing choice! (Again, analogy, really the choice between chocolate and God is not so agonizing ...) I know what the morally right thing to do is: obey God and not eat. But my will is so strong to eat the chocolate that it causes conflict within myself. I feel pulled two ways, I am full of anxiety, and I feel that God's Law restricts me from doing what I want to do. And many people suffer this; they may know on some level what activities are right and wrong, and they feel torn apart and resentful of rules because they infringe on their 'freedom.' But are you really free if you are ruled by your desires?

So here's where the part about conforming my will comes in: what if I could just not desire to eat chocolate? What if I could take the gift of my free will and offer it back to God? Not as if I was rejecting it, but because I want to be able to use it properly. So I ask God to take my will and make it like His own, make me not desire chocolate in the first place. So when I am faced with the same choice of eating or not eating, the choice to not eat does not fill me with resentment and anxiety, but simple peace in knowing that I have chosen to do what is right.

My free will is not taken away, it is only changed. I can still choose to eat the chocolate, even though I may no longer desire it. The fact that my will has been made like God's doesn't take away my ability to choose, it only helps me use it properly, to respond to God's love through obedience.

Hmm, all this talking about chocolate is making me hungry ...