I'm Pretty Busy

This is not a normal post, but since I haven't posted in over a week, I wanted to come on and let people know that I am pretty busy right now, since the quarter is winding down, and I have some research work to be finished before I move on. Also, we just finished a big event here at Stanford that I helped organize, a gathering sponored by most of the Christian groups on campus aimed at building unity and spurring on the spreading of the gospel on campus. A lot of my time in the past month went toward that. Anyway, if you find any great posts that deal with evangelism in some way or another that you think I ought to link to, or if you have something else in some other form that I ought to post, send me an email (there's an email link on the right hand side bar.)

Cross Cultural Evangelism

This blog is about evangelism, and Adrian Warnock over at his UK Evangelical Blog has a post entitled "How to share the gospel across cultures" that is worth reading. I want to particularly highlight that cross cultural communication is one idea that is attacked by postmodernmism, so it is important to understand what the Word says about the subject, so check out Adrian's post.

Demolishing Darwinism

In the last post, I reported on Dr. Michael Behe's talk at Stanford and the angry response it invoked. Here is a link to an article written by Behe that briefly outlines one of the arguments against evolution. Here is an article in the Boston Review that blasts Behe's claims. Compare for yourself. The blindness and bias of the Darwinist camp is painfully evident. One of the arguments the author of this article makes is that of a programmer writing code for software. You add some feature to your code to make an improvement and then later on down the line, that feature becomes indispensible to the overall operation of the software. This is how a system that appears to be irreducably complex could develop in a Darwinian fashion. This argument illustrates the disconnection from reality that plagues Darwinist theory: the analogy relies upon the intelligent agent (you, the programmer) who is designing the system. In order to have effectively made his point, the author would need to describe a self-organizing system that makes improvements on itself - because these small improvements are the supposedly simple and believeable steps that could have turned into complex, essential parts down the road. Darwinist theories always beg the question: where did this apparent design come from? When you ask that question, they'll tell you about the parts and process from which a particular biological system was formed and somehow downplay or fail to mention the unimaginable complexity of those building blocks, hoping you will not keep inquiring where those came from, and so on until it is apparent that life did not spring from non-life, one of the most important scientific discoveries ever (made by Louis Pasteur, for whom the process "pasteurization" is named.) History has shown many times that an overwhelming majority can be wrong. Near unanimity is not proof.

Veritas Forum/ Intelligent Design

I am a graduate student finishing my MS in electrical engineering at Stanford University this Spring quarter. The Christian groups at Stanford are sponsoring a series of talks and discussions this week called the Veritas Forum; the Veritas Forum happens at colleges and universities across the country. Last night, I attended a talk by Dr. Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. His talk was excellent and simple, based on absolutely solid science and logic. I intend to get my hands on his book as soon as possible.

At the end of the talk, there was 20 minutes for Q&A from the audience. I have never seen so many people jump so quickly out of their seats to question a speaker. Five questions were asked. Four of them were hostile to Behe's thesis, and of the four hostile questions, three of the people asking the questions were visibly and audibly upset. I mean they were angry. It was actually slightly uncomfortable when one gentleman was so angry that the hypothetical scenario he was proposing to Behe in order to make his point wasn't even making sense (to me or to Behe) yet he kept saying the same thing into the microphone.

Imagine one of those suspense movie scenarios where one person is pointing a gun at another person in order to make them do what they want (drive them somewhere, give them information, whatever) and they have the gun in their jacket pocket so that other people may be around but will not realize that this coercion is occuring. If the situation gets out of hand, and the gunman decides the hostage is going to get away, he might have to actually pull the gun out of his pocket and brandish it openly. At that point, the gunman has lost the strategic advantage, because now all the previously ignorant bystanders realize that a crime is in progress and will flee and the police will be arriving shortly. This isn't a perfect analogy, but follow me here. Satan has blinded the minds of the lost into believing delusions, however, they don't even realize that they are being attacked in such a manner, and neither do others around them, for the most part. But when the evidence against the delusion (in this case, the delusion of Darwinism) is convincing far beyond a reasonable doubt, the blinding influence of Satan becomes apparent. I'm telling you, last night it was like the light switch was turned on in the room and it was readily apparent that the Darwinists were wearing blindfolds. You could wave your hand in front of their face and they wouldn't be able to see it at all. The blinding work of the devil was evident (refer to my first post).

I talked to my dad about it after I got home. He reminded me that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation and can crack the hardest heart. At least, some seeds were planted last night. I pray that they grow and flourish and that those who are clinging dogmatically and unreasonably to the Darwinist fantasy will be able to see the plain truth.