Re: [asa] TE Evangelism...

Excellent. Thanks for sharing.

David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of Law
Seton Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 4:16 PM, John Walley <john_walley@yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> For those of you desiring to see more evangelism from the TE camp, I am
> sharing an excerpt of Fred Heeren's newsletter this month, who embodies this
> attribute remarkably in my opinion.
>
> You can receive the full newsletter by requesting it from
> daystar@day-star.org.
>
> John
>
>
> 7 do's and don'ts — a review
>
> 1. Don't fall for the idea promoted by Richard Dawkins, who says that if
> there's a God, we should be able to find Him through science. The ID people
> keep promoting this idea, too.
> Do promote an accurate understanding of science: that it has its limits.
>
> Why do I say this? Human experience is broader than the realm of science,
> and it includes things like art, love, humor, and faith. We humans have
> created this thing called science and purposely limited it to questions that
> are objectively measurable and repeatable and generally, physical.
> Creationists have taken this as a personal affront, as have many secular
> humanists, but it's simply a way of helping us keep our biases out of this
> particular subject.
>
> 2. Don't encourage people to limit the handiwork of God to His
> interruptions of nature. That's not what David had in mind when he said
> that the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of
> His hands.
>
> Do encourage them to see God's handiwork in nature itself, just as they
> find it.
>
> What do I mean by this? By limiting themselves to the interruptions of
> nature, the extremists on both sides—the atheists on one far side and the
> creationists on the other—will both miss God's handiwork while looking right
> at it.
>
> So instead of picking a fight, how about we start with a commonsense fact
> that we can all agree on, like: the cosmos is orderly. Now we don't have
> to take scientists to court over this, and we don't have to try to change
> science. The literal meaning of "cosmos" is order, after all. The ancient
> Greeks, who first coined the term to mean order, and all people, naturally
> recognize the tremendous order we see in nature. And this is just the
> beginning of the many things we can agree on. We can make greater headway
> in witnessing to educated skeptics when we gently use the nature we both
> know to point them to the Lord, rather than using some strange
> interpretations of science that scare them away.
>
> 3. Don't contribute to the materialist's cause and help them promote the
> warfare model, the idea that people must choose between faith and mainstream
> science.
>
> Do mention that people like Francis Collins and Simon Conway Morris have no
> trouble accepting both mainstream science and Jesus Christ as their personal
> Savior.
>
> 4. Don't expect to make any progress with skeptics by bringing up
> controversial and confrontational statements from the four or five
> Intelligent Design scientists.
>
> Do become acquainted with more helpful statements from mainstream
> scientists, like Simon Conway Morris, who draws our attention to the
> direction we can see in life's formative history, as in the convergence
> between so many marsupial and placental animals widely separated in time and
> space. He also draws our attention to the fact that sponges, without
> nerves, are already equipped with neuronal receptors, so that he calls them
> "animals in waiting." And he draws our attention to another primitive
> animal's genes for organs it doesn't yet possess, which he says "reveal a
> vertebrate in waiting."
>
> 5. Don't lose your faith over the progression of hominids in the fossil
> record.
>
> Do think of those hominids as a case of "humans in waiting," as more
> evidence for God's amazing, unfolding plan.
>
> 6. Don't restrict your thinking about God's planning in nature to
> whatever's most popular among evangelicals at the moment.
>
> Do learn from history. Remember how popular expectations among
> 17th-century Christians (for what nature's design ought to look like)
> changed, shifted in that century, from the idea that God's design could be
> recognized as a Platonic force and that fossils grew in the earth to
> replicate living forms, to the idea that God's handiwork should be taken at
> face value: stones shaped like seashells really had been seashells at one
> time—even if they were different from today's seashells and even if this
> meant that animals had become extinct and changed over time.
>
> 7. Don't limit God's ways to our ways or expect that His designs will be
> recognized because they'll look like our human designs.
>
> Do expect to often find designs in nature that are beyond our human
> designs. Do expect Him to create things that last far beyond human
> lifespans, things that can grow and develop and adapt to changing
> conditions, unlike our engineerings that are shorter term, rigid, and
> immutable.
>
> Then we can learn about, and join in, and rejoice in, the major recent
> discoveries in biology. Specifically, as we explained in some detail in our
> last info-report, we can praise God for organisms designed, not just with
> specified complexity that skeptics dispute, but designed with economy and
> flexibility, designed in ways that everyone can see, designed for change by:
>
> § Changing the time, place, or amount of one little chemical signal,
> § Exploratory behavior we see that explains the growth of
> microtubules, nerves, veins, and muscles so that these end up just where
> they need to be,
> § Extreme flexibility through weak linkage and modularity, and
> § Mutations of recessive genes that allow new traits to be passed on
> without a new kind of animal having to go through a "hopeful monster" stage.
>
> So do begin learning about this very different kind of design that's more
> flexible, more robust, more economical, more creative, than our designs,
> because this differentiates God from us, rather than bringing God down to
> our level, and it's this differentiation that glorifies God. He does things
> we can't do, in ways beyond our ways. And this is one of the ways nature
> truly declares the glory of God.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Received on Tue Nov 11 16:36:19 2008