Jesus Creed Admin: August 2009 Archives

Chapters 2-5 of Simon Conway Morris's book Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe ramble through a description of the rather tight constraints required for the formation of life and the lack of current understanding as to how life appeared.There are many interesting ideas, but the general point or direction is a little obscure.  

First (Ch. 2-4) - we don't really have a clue how life developed on this planet.  The synthesis of organic goo - from simple hydrocarbons to larger polyaromatic hydrocarbons and even amino acids is  straightforward. Such compounds are common in the universe. But this alone does not equal life. Scholars, scientists are working on the problem - but the progress to date is less than spectacular. It is an incredibly complex  and multifaceted problem.

Second (Ch. 5) - the planet on which we exist appears by most criteria to be "odd." The band of conditions required for conditions amenable to the stability of the diverse and interconnected set of structures and reactions that support "life" are stringent and potentially (Conway Morris suggests likely) rare.

What thoughts cross your mind when contemplating the remarkable intricacy and complexity of life and the vastness of the universe? Awe, despair, curiosity, reverence, wonder?

The church I attend has an outstanding youth ministry. No question. And intentionally inter-generational worship. The staff is intent on building relationships. The church is thriving, even growing. The number of families with young children is increasing. And yet ...

My daughter graduated from high school this year.  She has been in this church since we moved here just after her first birthday; she "belongs."  There was a big graduation luncheon - complete with video and moving remembrances (we had known roughly half the 15-20 seniors since they were in preschool); the whirlwind of graduation ceremonies, family visits, and open houses.  And the next Sunday as we prepared to leave for church she informed me that she was now supposed to attend one of the adult education communities ... and as she put it "No Way!" For a time perhaps she no longer belongs.

This leads to the question I would like to address today.

What does your church do to intentionally reach, walk along side, and disciple 18-25 year-olds?

Today I start in earnest a series focused on Simon Conway Morris's book Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. This book is an exploration of the evidence for evolutionary convergence - the idea that there are islands of stability and that evolution will identify these islands. Conway Morris is  Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology at Cambridge University. He is also a Christian and puts some effort into integrating his science with a Christian world view. Maggie McDonald commenting on his book in The New Scientist  had no quarrel with his science or the plausibility of his arguments, but ...

...It's his next step that is difficult to contemplate calmly. If you accept that a sentient species would evolve, then "it is reasonable to take the claims of theology seriously. The choice is yours," he says. I found myself forced to resort to the old "define your terms" tactic to escape the grip of his logic. Read twice.

Dawkins famously claims that the understanding of evolution makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. But can this be turned around?

Can the study of evolution - as a mechanism of creation - lead one to take theology seriously? Can it lead to an appreciation for theology as a window on reality rather than an outgrown superstition with natural explanation?

We opened this series with a look as Campus ministry as mission.  This is a theme that is repeated and elaborated by Benson Hines in his blog and book.

Hines spent a year touring College and University campuses and talking with campus ministers and others. In 2007-2008 he spent 370 days and visited 181 campuses in 44 states, Canada and the District of Columbia. He has self-published an e-book (free on his site) Reaching the Campus Tribes describing his observations and some of his conclusions and vision. He visited Vintage Church in Santa Cruz (p. 29), North Park University (with good words p. 44) and the University of Michigan (p. 52) among many many others.

Among the interesting features of Hines's book are his observations on Campus ministry as mission.  This follows nicely on the post from Tuesday. Campus ministries should be approached with much the same concern and planning as any mission endeavor. He puts his hypothesis like this:

The practice of college ministry is far more like Missions than like Christian Education.

So ministering to a college campus is in many ways more like Missions in Mozambique than it is even like Youth Ministry.

Obviously, that's not the way most Christian pastors, church members, parents, or opinion leaders think about college ministry yet. Even college ministers themselves don't always realize that their work really is a form of missions. But in some places this idea - of missiological college ministry - is already clarifying and fueling college ministry practice. Hopefully this book can spread the idea even further. (p. 8)

Ben Hines has visited many campuses to try to get a vision for missional campus ministry, but it is still only a sparse view - even of what is going on at many of the individual campuses. A short visit can hardly see all.  And communication between groups is spotty.

Here is a great question posed by a reader: Who is enjoying wild success on college campuses and what are they doing?

What place can evolution have in a world created by a personal God?

The Darwinian paradigm of random mutation and natural selection seems to suggest that the development of life in the universe and sentient beings on our planet is a process dependent upon highly contingent improbable events.  We are a product of blind cosmic chance - luck as it were.

But is this really true - is this the way the world works? Certainly it is a view that has been discussed in the scientific literature and popularized by writers and thinkers such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould.  One of the most famous images is that given by Gould of a tape of time. Run the tape over and something entirely different will emerge.  From his 1994 article in Scientific American (v. 271, pp. 84-91) The Evolution of Life:

History includes too much chaos, or extremely sensitive dependence on minute and unmeasurable differences in initial conditions, leading to massively divergent outcomes based on tiny and unknowable disparities in starting points. And history includes too much contingency, or shaping of present results by long chains of unpredictable antecedent states, rather than immediate determination by timeless laws of nature.  

Homo sapiens did not appear on the earth, just a geologic second ago, because evolutionary theory predicts such an outcome based on themes of progress and increasing neural complexity. Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.

The idea that we are products of random chance and historic contingency seems at odds with any reasonable theology.

Do you think that evolution poses a problem for a created universe? For the Christian faith? Why or why not?

Yet another academic year approaches - yet another set of fresh new faces on campus. As we approach a the start of term I would like to renew the conversation on campus ministry we began last spring (You can find...

We finish off this series on Alister McGrath's book A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology with a brief look at his conclusions, tying his major themes together. First a reiteration of what a robust natural...

Chapter 15 of Alister McGrath's book A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology is entitled "An Emergent Creation and Natural Theology." This chapter presents some rather interesting ideas.First McGrath returns to Augustine - not to his...

A NY Times Blog Green Inc. reported last week that six universities will test a Kindle text book plan this fall.  The development was also reported in the Wall Street Journal last May: Amazon to Launch Kindle for Textbooks....