An Atheist Professor of Philosophy was speaking to his Class on the problem Science has with God. He asked one of his new Christian students to stand.
- Professor: You are a Christian, aren’t you, son?
- Student: Yes, sir.
- Professor: So, you believe in God?
- Student: Absolutely, sir.
- Professor: Is God good?
- Student: Sure.
- Professor: My brother died of cancer, even though he prayed to God to heal him. Most of us would attempt to help others who are ill. But God didn’t. How is God good, then? Hmm?
- (Student was silent)
- Professor: You can’t answer, can you? Let’s start again, young fella. Is God good?
- Student: Yes.
- Professor: Is Satan good?
- Student: No.
- Professor: Where does Satan come from?
- Student: From.. God.
- Professor: That’s right. Tell me son, is there evil in this world?
- Student: Yes.
- Professor: Evil is everywhere, isn’t it? And God did make everything. Correct?
- Student: Yes.
- Professor: So who created evil?
- (Student didn’t answer)
- Professor: Is there sickness? Immortality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things exist in the world, don’t they?
- Student: Yes, sir.
- Professor: So, who created them?
- (Student had no answer)
- Professor: Science says you have 5 senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Tell me, son.. have you ever seen God?
- Student: No, sir.
- Professor: Tell us if you have ever heard your God.
- Student: No, sir.
- Professor: Have you ever felt your God, tasted your God, smelt your God? Have you ever had any sensory perception of God, for that matter?
- Student: No, sir. I’m afraid I haven’t.
- Professor: Yet you still believe in Him?
- Student: Yes.
- Professor: According to empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, Science says your God doesn’t exist. What do you say to that, son?
- Student: Nothing. I only have my Faith.
- Professor: Yes, Faith. And that is the problem Science has.
- Student: Professor, is there such a thing as Heat?
- Professor: Yes.
- Student: And is there such a thing as Cold?
- Professor: Yes.
- Student: No, sir, there isn’t.
- (The Lecture Theatre became very quiet with this turn of events)
- Student: Sir, you can have lots of heat, even more heat, superheat, mega heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat. But we don’t have anything called cold. We can hit 458 Degrees below Zero which is no heat, but we can’t go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold. Cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of Heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it.
- (There was a pon-drop silence in the Lecture Theatre)
- Student: What about darkness, Professor? Is there such a thing as darkness?
- Professor: Yes. What is night if there isn’t darkness?
- Student: You’re wrong again, sir. Darkness is the absence of something. You can have Low Light, Normal Light, Bright Light, Flashing Light… But if you have No Light constantly, you have nothing and it’s called Darkness, isn’t it? In reality, darkness isn’t. If it is, You would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn’t you?
- Professor: So what is the point you are making, young man?
- Student: Sir, my point is, your Philosophical Premise is flawed.
- Professor: Flawed? Can you explain how?
- Student: Sir, you are working on the Premise of Duality. You argue there is Life and then there is Death, a good God and a bad God. You are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, Science can’t even explain a thought. It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. Death is not the opposite of life, just the absence of it. Now tell me, Professor, do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?
- Professor: If you are referring to the Natural Evolutionary Process, yes of course, I do.
- Student: Have you ever observed Evolution with your own eyes, sir?
- (The professor shook his head with a smile, beginning to realize where the argument was going)
- Student: Since no one has ever observed the Process of Evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor, are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you not a Scientist but a Preacher?
- (The class was in uproar)
- Student: Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the Professor’s brain?
- (The class broke out into laughter)
- Student: Is there anyone here who has ever heard the Professor’s brain, felt it, touched or smelt it? .. No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established Rules of Empirical, Stable and Demonstrable Protocol, Science says that you have no brain, sir. With all due respect, sir, how do we then trust your lectures?
- (The room was silent. The Professor stared at the student, his face unfathomable)
- Professor: I guess you’ll have to take them on Faith, son.
- Student: That is it, sir.. exactly! The link between man and God is Faith. That is all that keeps things alive and moving!
- ----------------------------------------------------
- That student was Albert Einstein.
Mark Driscoll - Religion Saves. Part 4: Grace
A great talk by Mark Driscoll on “something that he struggles with the most in Christianity”. Here is a 15 point sermon on that: grace.
You may be wondering what happened to this blog. A rather odd first post and then nothing for months. Well this blog was just going to be more of an outlet for my thoughts. However, my friend Dave came to me with the idea for a more substantial website and here is the outcome of our discussions: The Orchard.
This has been taking up a lot of my time and so writing has taken a back seat. However, I will be one of the main bloggers on The Orchard and so will also post the blog posts on here too.
Re-entry
I have had a blog for about five years. I remember reading a friends blog and thinking how cool it was, so I had a go. Five years later and I’ve used a number of different services and posted a load of stuff; I’ve made some people laugh, offended some people and asked difficult questions.
Almost a year ago I moved my blog over to Tumblr. Tumblr isn’t really about writing, it’s more about sharing cool stuff that you find online. At the time I was very disillusioned with the point of a blog. Basically, no one was reading mine. And, in the information world we live in, if no one reads your blog then it becomes void.
Lets face it, the main reason we blog is for others to read it. If they don’t read it, we don’t blog; There is no point.
So I moved to Tumblr and have enjoyed the fast pace and ease of posting something I find online thanks to it’s handy bookmarklet. I also found that more people were visiting the site.
However, after a few conversations, I found that people wanted some of the old style blogging back. They liked that I’d ask questions and they enjoyed reading the deeper, usually theological posts.
Around the same time as this conversation I had added Google Analytics to the template of my site. It’s a bit of code that tracks how many people have visited the site, how long they stayed, what the most popular page is and a whole host of other information. It also tracks what country and city someone has visited your site from (someone from Mexico City has visited SteveHeyes.co.uk That is quite cool).
After looking at the reports it became apparent that more people than I thought where reading my blog. I though about 10/20 people read it. Tops. But according to Google Analytics, I was getting over 700 visits a month, 243 of which where ‘absolute unique’.
Also I started to read Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps. I may write a more detailed review, but in essence it talks about being masters of technologies and not slaves to them. It also pointed out that media, and technology in general, are always extensions or amplifications of human capacity (The wheel extends walking, the telephone extends speaking, Facebook extends ‘community’)
So this got me thinking. Why did I blog? What is the point of it? If my view was ‘value-only-if-read’ towards my posts then was there any point if no one read them? Was this view and the apparent value of my posts having any effect on me? However, I did miss blogging; asking questions about faith, life, God and how it all fits together.
I battled with myself for a few weeks. I didn’t want to add to the information overload that we already face. I also didn’t want to be really pretentious, thinking that I have all the right answers (or even all the right questions). But, in the end, I wanted to write again.
So I am going to start it back up but I am going to do it a bit different. This time I know that people will be at least visiting the site, and I have added Analytics again to track that. However, I am going to attempt to move away from a ‘value-if-read’ philosophy and move towards an extension and amplification of human capacity, in this case; my thoughts, ideas and questions.
It is also separate from SteveHeyes.co.uk as that still serves it’s function of sharing stuff I find. I’m just testing what happens as I write, ask questions and join in with discussions and conversations. You could call this blog an experiment. But let’s not get carried away here, it’s just one guys thoughts.
I’d say feel free to join in, but really I don’t need to. This is the internet. You can do what you want. I’m going to do this.
