🙃💀# #BoilerFailureDitty [0800 September30/2018 Mum managed to snatch some kip in-between the numerous murmors of a glass being banged on the wood of the bedside thingy--accompanied by the plaintiff cry of a very elderly person (not me—I’m plain #elderly) saying ‘I'm cold' or 'it's cold' and the electric water heater blazed away the pounds without … Continue reading #heatloss
Month: September 2018
Why We Misunderstand the Beatific Vision
Thanks so much for this post! It seems to me that there is #somewhereinthisdoctrine a key that unlocks/dispels the myth that God’s ‘sole’ purpose (if we are allowed to refer to blueprints within the evolutionary scenario) is the evolution and the ultimate redemption of the biosphere–and that humankind’s ‘sole’ purpose is function (see Middleton) and not relationship. PS. I have been engaged for rather a long time in the pursuit of a satisfactory defense for the ‘Goodness of God’ in the light of the harms of evolution..PPs. Hope that makes sense. DW
I’ve been reading Hans Boersma’s helpful and interesting book Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition (Eerdmans 2018). For a while I’ve been wanting to learn more about this intriguing and often neglected doctrine, so now I’m finally getting around to it.
The beatific vision is widespread throughout the early and medieval church, East and West, and into Protestantism (especially the Reformed tradition). Yet many evangelical today have never heard of it, or misunderstand it. As Kyle Strobel puts it, “few doctrines are as ‘standard’ in the history of theology, and ignored in contemporary theology, as the beatific vision.”
So here, drawing from the work of Boersma and a few others like Strobel, I offer some reflections regarding what this doctrine means and entails, in the spirit of rehabilitating it somewhat among those who (like me) have been curious about it.
1) The beatific vision is not done…
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Is the presupposition of naturalism in science good for the pursuit of truth?
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
This topic came up recently in a discussion, and I wanted to be sure that all my readers were aware of how to think about the work that the presupposition of naturalism does in supporting naturalistic views of science. When I was little, way back in the 1990s, Phillip E. Johnson’s work on the definitions of science, evolution and creation were very important stuff. He was everywhere, doing lectures on university campuses and debates on the radio with Eugenie Scott. I was able to get a bunch of this audio from Access Research Network on AUDIO CASSETTES, but now that’s all obsolete.
Thankfully, I was able to find an old column written by Johnson in the Wall Street Journal, and preserved by Access Research Network.
Excerpt:
A Chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in…
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Guest Post: Entropy, Life and the Kingdom of God
The Crab Nebula, a stellar explosion, a little hard to put back into an ordered state. Photo: Robert Sullivan/ Hubble – creative commons @flickr.com
That brilliant and entertaining atheist Steven Pinker has defined ‘the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.’
That might need a bit of explaining, not least to me. Entropy is, crudely, the measure of disorder in the universe. A low-entropy state is an ordered state; high entropy is a disordered one. Because disorder is much more likely than order, disorder (high entropy) tends to be what everything leads to.
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