Making Sense of the World: Stephen Hawking on “Why God Did Not Create the Universe”

Published on September 5th, 2010.

According to Viking mythology, eclipses occur when two wolves, Skoll and Hati, catch the sun or moon. At the onset of an eclipse people would make lots of noise, hoping to scare the wolves away. After some time, people must have noticed that the eclipses ended regardless of whether they ran around banging on pots.

Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world. But eventually, people turned to philosophy, that is, to the use of reason—with a good dose of intuition—to decipher their universe. Today we use reason, mathematics and experimental test—in other words, modern science.

So begins an article in the Wall Street Journal by Stephen Hawking telling us “Why God Did Not Create the Universe.” According to the subtitle, “There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world—no gods required.”

Read the whole thing, or just the paragraph where he gives us that explanation:

As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Granted, an article published in the Wall Street Journal can’t be comprehensive. Still, Hawking has provided an answer sufficient only to those who are already committed against the idea that a Creator is necessary to explain the fact and wonder of our existence. He is a product of his times, and in that way, much like the Vikings. This is modern mythology, and it is good for us to hear it told.

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Of Mice and Men

Published on July 31st, 2010.

Our good friends, Travis and Andrea Williamson, are doing linguistic work in Ethiopia. They visited our children before we picked them up, and hosted us twice for a week at a time when we visited Ethiopia to receive them. We are regularly encouraged by their blog, and yesterday’s post was no exception.

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Funny The Way It Is

Published on July 27th, 2010.

I have always enjoyed Dave Matthews. There are songs to skip, there are many to enjoy, and there are some to think about carefully.

There is a song on Dave’s newest album that has my attention. Funny The Way It Is is a reflection on the reality of life with all of its conflicting circumstances. People die on the same streets where children play. In this world the most beautiful things happen along side the most terrible things.

Funny the way it is.

Apart from divine revelation and the knowledge of Christ, that’s about all we can say. And that’s a line from the chorus of a song by Dave Matthews by that title.

1. Lying in the park on a beautiful day
Sunshine in the grass and the children play
Sirens passing, fire engine red
Someone’s house is burning down on a day like this?

2. And evening comes, and we’re hanging out
On the front step and a car goes by with the windows rolled down
And that War song is playing, “Why can’t we be friends”
Someone is screaming crying in the apartment upstairs

Funny the way it is, if you think about it
Somebody’s going hungry, someone else is eating out
Funny the way it is, not right or wrong
Somebody’s heart is broken – it becomes your favorite song

3. The way your mouth feels in your lover’s kiss
Like a pretty bird on a breeze, or water to a fish
The bomb blast brings the building crashing to the floor
Hear the laughter while the children play war

Funny the way it is, if you think about it
One kid walks 10 miles to school, another’s dropping out
Funny the way it is, not right or wrong
On a soldier’s last breath, his baby’s being born

Standing on a bridge, watch the water passing underneath
It must have been much harder when there was no bridge, just water
Now the world is small, compared to how it used to be
With mountains and oceans and winters and rivers and stars

4. Watch the sky, the jet plane so far out of my reach
Is there someone up there looking down on me
Boy chase a bird, so close but every time
He’ll never catch her, but he can’t stop trying

Funny the way it is…

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A Literal Following of Jesus

Published on July 23rd, 2010.

by Josh Harris

HT: Zach Nielsen

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Lewis on Democracy

Published on July 20th, 2010.

Justin Taylor is the evangelical internet digestive system. Here’s a great quote posted today from C.S. Lewis about the ground for democracy. This is becoming an increasingly critical matter about which to think theologically. What Christians believe about who human beings are on the basis of the word of God has much to do with how best to organize the lives and activity of people for their protection from themselves and their flourishing in this world.

Here’s the quote from Lewis:

I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.

I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.

The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation. . . .

The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

—C.S. Lewis, “Equality,” in Present Concerns (reprint: Mariner Books, 2002), p. 17.

HT: Justin Taylor

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Socrates on Partying

Published on July 18th, 2010.

My good friend, Brian Trapp, is blogging again. He is prolific and he is one of a few philosopher scholars who actually know all of the secrets of the universe. That’s because he’s a believer in Christ. I enjoyed this quote recently posted to his blog.

Socrates:

Therefore, those who have no experience of reason or virtue, but are always occupied with feasts and the like, are brought down and then back up to the middle, as it seems, and wander in this way throughout their lives, never reaching beyond this to what is truly higher up, never looking up at it or being brought up to it, and so they aren’t filled with that which really is and never taste any stable or pure pleasure. Instead, they always look down at the ground like cattle, and, with their heads bent over the dinner table, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. To outdo others in these things, they kick and butt them with iron horns and hooves, killing each other, because their desires are insatiable. For the part that they’re trying to fill is like a vessel full of holes, and neither it nor the things they are trying to fill it with are among the things that are.

– Socrates, in Plato, The Republic, Book IX, translated by G. M. A. Grube

To this, Solomon, who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, would probably say, “there’s nothing new under the sun.” In his own words, “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart” (7:2).

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Nothing Natural About Porn

Published on July 17th, 2010.

Doug Wilson on the nature and effect of pornography on the actual enjoyment of sex.

One of the older fears about pornography that has not been borne out has been the fear that widespread pornography would create a sexually enflamed male populace. But what has happened is that porn has actually dampened sexual interest in real women, serving many men as a cheap substitute. When it comes to real people, and real lives, and real beds, it turns out that restraint and prudence are erotic.

Of course the older arguments in favor of porn tried to assert that since sex was natural and healthy, it follows that this porn interest represented something open and fresh after generations of previous repression. Now that we started letting it all hang out, all our hang ups would disappear and what a lovely time it would be too.

But the reality has started to set in, and pastors and counselors are starting to notice. The presenting symptom for husbands with a secret porn problem is often a radically decreased libido for real time sex. If a husband is routinely going without for stretches of time that would render a faithful and normal husband cross-eyed, then porn may well be at the root of it. The “porn is sex and sex is natural” meme has run its course. There is nothing natural about this. Porn provides the kind of sex life that someone living in a Matrix pod could enjoy.

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Shepherding on the Job

Published on July 16th, 2010.

Pastors shepherd people.

Justin Buzzard, has a helpful pastoral reflection on the importance of visiting men at work, and how to do it.

Pastors, go to where your men work.

During my past 4 years as a pastor in the Bay Area I quickly discovered that one of the most important things for me to do was to hang out with men in my church at their workplace.

This helped the men. It showed them that I care about their callings, how they spend 50+ hours of their week, and the people they work with.

This helped me. It taught me about the unique opportunities & challenges men were facing in their different workplaces, it opened my eyes to a world bigger than our church, and it helped set new trajectories for my preaching and discipling.

This is how I did it (and how I will continue doing it once I get started in Phoenix):

-Schedule a lunch-time visit with a man in your church. The best use of your time is to make most of these visits with men who are leader types. Schedule to meet the guy at his office, not at the lunch spot.

-Once you show up have the guy show you around his workspace. If you’re naturally curious like me, you’ll quickly have 20 questions about all that you’re seeing around you. Ask your questions. Learn the man’s world.

-Introduce yourself to his co-workers. Don’t tell people you’re a pastor, unless asked or introduced that way. They will find out eventually and they’ll be incredibly surprised that a pastor looks and talks like a normal person and doesn’t spend all his time on church property.

-Once you get the tour, take the man out to lunch (if there’s a lunch place on the work campus, go there, it will lead to more learning about the workplace) and let him talk to you at length about his work. You’ll quickly discover how you can best encourage and empower the man in his calling.

-Always speak out against the “higher calling of ministry” idea if it surfaces. Three out of five times when I meet a man at his work he talks to me about how the work I’m doing as a pastor is “so much more important” than what he’s doing as a software engineer, financial analyst, etc. I always immediately crush and correct this unbiblical view of vocation. Your men need you to tell them that all work is a means of glorifying God, and that working for a church is not superior to working for Google. It’s your job to empower your men, to help them see the nobility of the work God has called them to do.

Men need pastors to jump into the fire of their work world with them and empower them to keep their eyes on Jesus and do their work in Jesus’ honor, whatever that work might be.

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The Meaning of Pain in Heartbreak

Published on July 14th, 2010.

In a recent article at TIME, Why Break Ups Hurt, Belinda Luscombe writes about a study conducted on about fifteen recently dumped college students, to find out why breaking up hurts so much. The article begins,

Say you’re a college student who was recently dumped by the person you thought was the One. You’re moping around campus in your I’ve-given-up sweatpants and eating crappy comfort food when you come across a flyer seeking people who are still pining for their exes. You think, at last, someone to talk to!
Well, not exactly. When about 15 sad sacks responded to the flyers, which had been distributed around the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Rutgers University, they discovered they were actually being invited to take part in a psychological study: researchers wanted to gauge the kind of pain felt by people on the business end of a breakup.

The study required students to stare at a photo of their ex and count backwards from 8,211 by 7s. Then, they were required to do the same while staring at a photo of someone they knew but were not heartbroken over. Not to the researchers surprise, “the brain areas associated with the pain of romantic rejection were the same ones involved in reward, motivation, physical pain, craving and addiction.”

All very interesting. But, of course, there has to be some meaning for this. What is the meaning of the heartbreak we feel when are rejected by a loved one?

The article goes there in this paragraph:

It also helps explain why feelings of heartbreak are so hard to get over and even harder to control. The study notes, with classic academic rigor, that the spurned students had engaged in activities such as “inappropriate phoning, writing or e-mailing, pleading for reconciliation, sobbing for hours, drinking too much and/or making dramatic entrances and exits into the rejecter’s home, place of work or social space to express anger, despair or passionate love.” Sound familiar, anyone?

At least in one sense, this pain is a good thing, according to Brown. “In a way, nature gave us this response as a protection,” she says. “It helps us keep relationships going under adverse circumstances, which is important for keeping our species going.”

Brown is a professor of neuroscience and neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She is a smart, smart woman. But are we to believe that the ultimate meaning in our feelings of heartbreak are really just an evolutionary mechanism naturally selected for “keeping our species going?”

There are some things we can’t get by watching brain activity, and the meaning of our reaction in the shadow of a break up is one of them.

We need the revelation of God in Scripture to know anything about our creation in God’s image, our need for the union of marriage, our broken injustice meter after the fall, our propensity to worship created things, and the ultimate horizon of eternity. Apart from Christ, we are all without “hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). All these things matter for what we make of “15 sad sacks” and the activity in their brains in this study.

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How to Sin Double

Published on June 30th, 2010.

From J.C. Ryle’s, The Duties of Parents:

Take care what you do in front of your child. It is a true proverb, ‘He who sins before a child, sins double.’ Strive rather to be a living epistle of Christ, such as your families can read, and that plainly too. Be an example of reverence for the Word of God, reverence in prayer, reverence for means of grace, reverence for the Lord’s day. Be an example in words, in temper, in diligence, in temperance, in faith, in charity, in kindness, in humility.

Do not think your children will practice what they do not see you do. You are their model picture – and they will copy what you are. Your reasoning and your lecturing, your wise commands and your good advice – all this they may not understand, but they can understand your life!

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