April 25, 2010 by Dr. Mc.

I am thoroughly enjoying the Life series on Discovery Channel. I’ve set my TV to record them all, and all are excellent. My wife and I watch them half hour at a time during the week. Too much goes by not to stop and talk about it half way through. I laughed last night as I watched the male Darwin’s beetle that plays “King of the Mountain,” climbing 80 feet up a tree, tossing off other would-be suitors in rout, until he reaches the prize at the top, only to toss her off the tree after mating.
There is a frustrating part about the series, though I’ve gotten use to it: I’ve gotten used to it in almost every nature show, but in this series it is particularly obvious. Each show begins in the first few sentences of narrative with some statement about how all this marvelously evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and each show ends in the last few sentences with the same patronage to evolutionary theory. I suppose these bookends ensure the image of intellectually political correctness, even though the word “evolution” seldom appears between the two, and is never used to explain anything. Like where the narrator mentions how frogs have survived hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Translated that means that no matter where you look in the fossil record, frogs are frogs. There is no evidence that they have ever evolved from or to anything.
The most revealing evidence of the problem is that the series consistently personifies with such phrases as “nature has developed…” or even “plants have learned to..”
This occurs because the only way to rationally describe what is there without giving credit to a designer is to say it as if the organism or the environment should take credit for what was obviously not an accident. Personification sounds as if thought were involved without admitting it. This, too, is contrary to Darwin’s theory, but that’s OK. It doesn’t reach the level of blasphemy that attribution to a designer would hit. Even if personification is the only alternative for a semi-rational statement, it’s better than admitting the need for a Person.

Posted in Science and faith | 1 Comment »

April 11, 2010 by Dr. Mc.

The 2010 movie release of The Clash of the Titans is a far cry from the actual Greek myth upon which it is supposedly based, but one of the most intriguing is its synthesis of modern Christian mythology.
Modern mythology says that God created man because He needed to be worshipped, just as is portrayed in this movie. This is not in the Bible. The movie says that God created us as an act of love. This is in the Bible, but love is defined differently.
Then there’s the part about God having a son with human body. The classic Greek myth had this, but only as the result of promiscuity, not an eternal plan.
But the movie writers could not resist one last reference to Christianity when Zeus and Perseus face off at the end. (I don’t think this is going to ruin the movie for any still eager to see it, since any plot is quite secondary to the action and graphics.) After the defeat of the gods, Zeus says that he let the humans win. He then says in affect to his son that he wanted the worship of mankind, but it wasn’t worth the sacrifice of his son. According to the Bible, God does not attempt to force love or worship from us. That’s a contradiction of terms, as defined in the Bible. But then there’s the sacrifice part. According to the Bible, even if He leaves with us the right to reject Him, God thinks the sacrifice is worth it.

Posted in Culture & society | No Comments »