Flawed Thoughts (Part 1?)

 One of my earliest blog posts was on The Third Choice in a Two Sided Argument that is something I have pondered for quite some time. I have continued to ponder it since that post and perhaps refine it a bit as well. The question I posed is "Why do people insist that Creationism and Evolution are mutually exclusive theories?" Now, I use God when I could use Supreme Being, but I'm not sugar-coating anything. My belief is in God, not just as the Supreme Being but as the Creator, and besides, anyone who merely believes in a Supreme Being is probably not a proponent of Creationism anyway. Creationism is after all a result of the book of Genesis. And I intend my arguments for people of faith rather than just anyone because they have that singular point as well. In my original post I ended up getting off tangent with a discussion on the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorn. The discussion is not intended to make scientific types accept God, there are other apologetic discussions for that. Rather it is intended to get Christians to accept science and to see that the use of science is not an indication of a weakness or inability to create in any other way.

The first thing I realized after posting initially was that I did not intend to engage the thoughts of the scientific community, only those people of faith. Those who typically see anything scientific as not of God. I describe it as my Christian Flawed Thought. It is every bit as troublesome as the Scientific Flawed Thought. The CFT discounts the fact that science, scientific principles, and even the drive and desire to prove something all comes from God. It is not a worldly concept that merely leads to a humanistic explanation--in its purest form. Now perhaps as often as most of the time this drive does lead to a humanistic explanation. These would be the people I call "educated beyond their intelligence." Having this group of people seems to feed the belief that scientific endeavours are not of God.

Regardless of how the belief came about, or is perpetuated, there is a syllogistic gap in the logic that in itself becomes an incredulous object to those on the other side of the coin. One of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams, used the fact that the religious take any questioning of their faith as an affront to their faith and disallow it as an argument in favor of not believing in God anyway. His thought was that anything that required you to not think about it in order to prove that it exists, or that can only prove it exists by not proving it exists, must not exist. Those thinkers succumb to the Scientific Flawed Thought, that simply proving something (scientifically) is a sign that it is not from God. This also has a syllogistic gap in the logic, right at the very end, but in some ways the two flawed thoughts feed on themselves because the belief that proof shows non-existence increases the belief that the need to prove is a secular non-faith based activity.

There is still more to come on this subject, but the main point remains. Science cannot explain away God, but Christianity cannot explain away science.

Grandpa We Will Eat Slowly

Punctuation is a very important thing. It is the difference between a sign saying "Slow, Children at play" and one that says there are slow children playing. Or in the case of today's title, the difference between telling your grandfather to slow down his eating or telling others we are about to take our time-consuming our patriarchal family member.  This morning I am grappling with a major life choice that needs an answer soon (even if that answer is to wait). My mini-epiphany this morning was to cut the grass. For the uninitiated, we can solve the problems of the world while doing yard work, though the solutions disappear once we turn off the equipment. Thinking I might find the answer I went out into the yard. 

The answer was elusive. A nest of yellow jackets proved to be much less elusive. 

I have been stung before and I know that more than 2 had to have gotten me (the second was when I snuck up on the nest an plunked a wooden stake in it to mark it for later). However, two stings are swollen and smarting still an hour later. One is in my knee, the other my right, ring finger making it hard to hold things or to type o, l, or a period. Had this happened to the pinky finger, I would finally have an excuse for not using the semicolon and continuing my long-standing practice of coma splices.