Can God be trusted, even in the dark? When your world has collapsed, and you can see no way of putting it back together again. When God himself seems to have dealt you a very poor deal, and when you cry out “Why?” heaven remains silent. When your faith is sorely tested. Can you – will you – cling to God nevertheless?
This is the very practical problem that I would like to explore with you from Ruth chapter 1.…
Ned Block is professor of philosophy, psychology and neural science at New York University. His work on consciousness has highlighted how prone people are to miss what is right in front of their eyes. He discusses this on a Philosophy Bites podcast.
Professor Block mentions that examples can be found on YouTube. Here’s one.
The particular reason for missing the obvious mentioned by Block, and demonstrated in the video, is that the observer’s attention is distracted.…
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
(William Cowper)
The longer I live, the more faith I have in providence, and the less faith in my interpretation of providence. (Jeremiah Day)
God’s providences often seem to contradict his purposes, even when they are serving them. (Matthew Henry)
Everything that happens to me can help me along in my Christian life. (E.…
There are three things in providence: God’s foreknowing, Gods determining, and God’s directing all things to their periods and events. (Thomas Watson)
Providence is the perpetuity and continuance of creation. (Richard Sibbes)
…Tell me, if God had never a creature to look to in all the world but thee, wouldst thou believe that He would regard thy heart. and words, and ways, or not? If He would, why not now as well as then!
Interested in seeing what has been published recently on the relationship between science and Christian faith, I chanced upon some reviews on Amazon of Andrew Parker’s The Genesis Enigma (Black Swann, 2010).
Some of the reviews were favourable, others not. Among the latter, one individual informed us:-
[This] book is not worth reading.
Another opined:-
…[This book has nothing] interesting to say at all. [It is] candy for believers, a comforter which has nothing relevant to contemporary discourse.
The writer A.N. Wilson has recently been writing about his return to faith. Associated in his earlier life in turns with the Church of England and with Roman Catholicism, he describes his ‘Damascus Road conversion’ to atheism, which took place in the 1980s.
I’m not sure what flavour of Christian faith Wilson has returned to, but I was struck with one statement in particular in his piece in New Statesman:-
…When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.
We do not subscribe to the myth of progress – the idea, popular in earlier evolutionary thinking, that the world will get better and better. Nor do we believe, with Plato, that we are souls in transit, passing through this illusory world on our way to to something beyond space, time and matter.
The shape of things to come is determined, in biblical thinking, by the threefold story of creation, rebellion, and redemption. We can tell the story of Jesus as the moment all creation has been waiting for:-
I’ve just got round to viewing a recording of this BBC documentary, which was broadcast on 28th September.
It covers much of the same ground as the recent film ‘Creation’, although giving less attention to biographical details and more (in true BBC style) to the presentation of gorgeous images that supplement Darwin’s account of the ‘struggle for survival’ in the world of nature.
We are not surprised to be told, at some length, of a parallel struggle – the struggle between science and religion. …
Here is a Powerpoint presentation used as the basis for a sermon preached in the light of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the 150 anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species, and the recent release of the film ‘Creation’ which documents some of the events in Darwin’s life leading up to the publication of that book.
Psalm 104 was read during the service.
…‘What About Genesis?’, ask Denis Alexander, in his book Creation or Evolution: Do We Have To Choose? What follows is based on Alexander’s discussion.
Two preliminary points. The final authority of Scripture in all matters of faith and conduct is fundamental. Although modern science can shed light on the interpretation of the Bible, the relationship between the Bible and science is not such that we should relying on science to determine the meaning of the biblical text, or vice-versa.…
