A Different Take on Toronto

Burning police cars, broken glass, riot garb, tear gas, people being carried away. Surreal, now repeated in Vancouver. Abuse of power, apparent in Toronto, seems to have been the focus of much of the discussion that surrounded the Toronto G8. How the Toronto fiasco and much more recently the riots that surrounded the Stanley cup loss in Vancouver, interest me is more subtle. Anarchism, radical Islam, Marxist ideologies, violence that demonstrates emerging influences on Canadian or western society. I remember the shock and awe that I felt on September 11, the day the world changed, when I lay transfixed on the sofa all day long, fortunately my day off, unable to move. I had thought my landlady was losing it, speaking in metaphors that morning when sitting eating her breakfast she said to me "America is burning." And yet I sit in a predominantly secular culture with a utopian view of human nature that scoffs at our Judeo Christian heritage. "We don't need God, we can be good all by ourselves," and I ask the question "How much have we taken for granted?" How much of the freedom that we have enjoyed as a society was made possible by a common Judeo Christian ethic? As ethics decline in a society so do standards, so does trust, and inevitably there will be a need for more security, perhaps a wake up call to a culture that has much to say about rights, and little concern for responsibilities.

Reason in Faith.

I'm a big fan of the Veritas Forum, and recently have been enjoying a series of lectures by Oxford mathematician John Lennox, where he talks about some of his experiences and perspectives as an academic and Christian theist. I'm fascinated by the history of science,(in contrast to recent popular opinion),that many of the first scientists were men of faith. More than that though, that science may have come out of a theistic worldview, and that theism may be more consistent with a scientific worldview, in that it provides a basis for rational thought, both for our own capability for reason as human beings, and for the underlying order and rationality that we observe in the created world. I think it's very interesting that what the first scientists expected to find, an ordered universe that flowed from a rational mind, has been confirmed by centuries of science, and that atheism in contrast, may have the potential to undermine that rationality, as there is no basis for intelligence with an atheistic worldview. I'll leave you with a quote and a link.

"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."
— J.B.S. Haldane (Possible Worlds)

I want to submit to you that my major problem with atheism has nothing to do with Christianity or my belief in God. It has to do with the fundamental worldview postulate that undermines the rationality that I need to do science. That is my chief criticism of the new atheism. John Lennox

http://www.veritas.org/Media.aspx#!/v/1038