If I Could Play God
Time Magazine gave the world an article titled, “The 25 Best Inventions of the Year.” If I could play God, I would be one of those inventors. A Olympic-size swimming pool that floats in a dirty body of water and cleans the dirty water flowing into it from its surrounding. A procedure to change a person’s memory–like in the science fiction films. That, in the right hands, would be used to help people suffering from things like PTSD. A light generated by a weight on a very slow-motion pulley that would replace dangerous and polluting kerosene lanterns all across the…
Meeting God after Disaster
In the aftermath of disaster, people worship. It’s happened in the Philippines after the great Typhoon. And we see it wherever there are believers. We’d like to think that when disasters strike, churches would be miraculously exempt from damage. After all, they’re God’s houses. But if they were, I wonder what effect it would have. Would it really make a positive difference? Somehow I think not. I suspect we would start to lean toward a magical take on our beliefs rather than living them out by faith. We would focus on what happened or didn’t happen versus meeting God in…
How Much Life on Other Planets?
I used to have what I called “Star Trek Theology.” I figured that there may be all kinds of creatures or people on other planets and that God may well have given them a revelation of himself something like he did to us on earth. Then I learned that physics are constant throughout the universe, and that the parameters for intelligent life are so incredibly fine tuned that the likelihood of life on another planet is extremely small. Almost to say: “We’re it.” Along comes a new report from the National Academy of Sciences that Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars…