While Shoveling the Driveway

Just a thought. This last weekend we were warned that a major winter storm was about to hit our area. This took me as a surprise because I had checked an online weather site less than 48 hours prior and nothing of the sort was predicted. My wife informed me of the forecast on Sunday - that it was supposed to start snowing Sunday evening and continue through the following day, leaving 10 or more inches of snow. I watched and waited until I retired Sunday night, wondering if schools would close and how long it would take to clear my driveway.

I woke up to find a modest 2-3 inches of snow - a minor inconvenience, not quite what was predicted.

I've seen this pattern repeated over and over, as has anyone who has tried to plan a spring camping trip. Listen to the weather reports on one TV station and you may or may not hear the same thing on another. Online weather services often show different forecasts. If you are looking at the next day forecast, the accuracy is usually pretty good. If the forecast is for three days out, not so much. If the forecast is for five days out - well, you'd better check back in a couple of days.

Theistic Inconsistency

I have been following the review of Steven Meyer's new book "Signature in the Cell" at Jesus Creed and, while the conversation there has been frustrating and at times heated, I have come to one clear conclusion. I find that it is impossible to see intellectual consistency in belief in orthodox Christianity while holding to the standard secularist definition of "science".

If that sounds strong or harsh, hear me out.

Secular science as defined by Judge Overton, insists on a uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. That is, since science can only examine natural phenomena, one can leap to the conclusion that every detectable effect found in nature must therefore have a detectable natural cause, explainable by natural law alone. Any appeal to something other than nature, it is asserted, violates the definition of science (and is sufficient cause for ridicule, insult and questioning the worthiness of one’s PhD.) Theistic Evolutionists like Meyers’ reviewer, do not assert there is nothing beyond nature, only that science, by definition, must never appeal to something beyond nature.

But for anyone who accepts the New Testament as a description of real events, this is a huge problem. If one is an orthodox Christian, one must affirm the creedal statements regarding the suffering, death and resurrection of Christ. Those are the rock bottom central assertions of Biblical Christianity, without which there is nothing left of historic Christianity. And those are events which are asserted as verifiable within the natural world, seen by eyewitnesses, but which by definition have no natural cause.