Skip to main content

Posts

I Really Like Music

Apart from the word of God itself, with the work of the Spirit in a person to inspire the faith to believe, there are certain things amongst the created order, that really serve to prove the existence of God to us and to stimulate devotion to him. These are usually pretty universally appreciated things. We all love music, we all enjoy food and no-one in their right mind can observe the beauty of country or coast with indifference. But again, for most of us, there is usually one thing that captures our imagination more than the other things. You know, the things we turn into hobbies, pursue as professions or vocations and those which become part of our identities and what we are known by. For me, this is music. Music generally is appreciated from birth. But it takes a little bit of growing up to become a true fan. It takes time for us to develop enough discernment, to be able to define our particular tastes, and to be ready for true appreciation. Yet when we are ready, even though not a
Post a Comment
More posts »
Recent posts

Feed Your Head: A Thought for the New Year

One of the fun things about having children is that you get to share with them all the experiences that you enjoyed yourself, as a child. Scarlett has always enjoyed music. Rather indiscriminately, but nevertheless, she enjoys the phenomenon very much. We bought her a cd player for her room for her birthday just a few days ago and it's been a great chance to share with her some of my own favourite records. Album art is, of course, a big influence in what she wanted to try out, but she has ended up digging out some real classics that I was able to take great joy in rediscovering with her. She's particularly fond of Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, some Dolly Parton (Katie's input), and today, we enjoyed together Jefferson Airplane. The song in particular which she gravitated toward was the song White Rabbit. You can listen to it here . I'm particularly fond of this song because I saw Patti Smith perform it live many years ago and she really spun out the intro, crawling about on
Post a Comment
More posts »

Old Earth Aesthetics: The Duck Test

Prompted by something I heard in a Kent Hovind seminar, I recently asked a colleague what he thought was more absurd: to say I don’t believe in evolution, or to say I think the earth isn’t billions of years old. Now, I asked this particular colleague partly because I knew he was smart enough to give me the answer I was looking for - the correct answer - which is that it’s more absurd to claim the earth is you and not billions of years old. Suffice to say he didn’t let me down and explained why. He thought about the question for a little moment and said that the reason it’s more absurd to say the earth is old is because evolution is automatically untrue (to his mind) if the age of the earth is young. So if you kill the old age idea, you necessarily kill the evolution idea. If you disprove evolution you don’t automatically disprove the old age theory, but if you dismiss with billions of years, you at the same time disprove evolution. Therefore the claim that the age of the earth is only
Post a Comment
More posts »

Old Earth Aesthetics: Wrinkles in my Birthday Suit

I'm 32 years old. I don't have any wrinkles. Except when I smile or pull funny faces at the kids. So I'm 32 years old and I have wrinkles. I have a teeny flash of grey hair in my right-hand sideburn. You can see every vein that meanders through my hands, and I'm allergic to the rain. I'm allergic to gluten, pollen, mold, and furry animals. I've had a small piece of my lung removed and the left-hand side of my rib cage is still sensitive to the effects of that operation 14 years ago! I'm 32 years old and I'm well aware that my body is in decline. I'm dying. Like everyone else on the planet, sure. I'm wearing out. Entropy. Daily proving true the second law of thermodynamics. I will expire. You will expire. In short? I'm young, but I'm looking older by the day (despite being asked for i.d. recently). I'm not going to make 96 years old, that's for sure. My age will not triple. Even though the age of my greatest grandfather was triple
Post a Comment
More posts »

Old Earth Aesthetics: Why Wait So Long?

I usually get a bit of flack from people when I post on social media about the age of the earth. It really does seem to rub Christians up the wrong way. So I'll air my opinions in the more acceptable context of a private blog post. And I'm no scientist of course. I am, however, a lover of beauty and, being a graphic designer, I understand better than most how aesthetics work and feel qualified to offer a non-scientific, yet entirely legitimate perspective on how we could help determine something like the age of the earth or evolution. To my mind, the aesthetics of an old earth (and evolution for that matter) are all wrong. I mean, why would God want to create a process for creation that took billions of years? The heavens declare the glory of God means he always does things for a reason. Nothing that has happened has happened by accident, therefore the created order is somewhat revelatory. Less reliable than the special revelation of scripture, but nevertheless revelatory. Ther
Post a Comment
More posts »

A Working Definition of Beauty

How would you define beauty? It's actually really hard when you start thinking about it. I'm reading a book at the moment called The Beauty of the Infinite The Aesthetics of Christian truth. It's written by a man with a bigger brain than I'll ever have. It's the kind of book which, when you read it you can tell that he has so much to say he almost doesn't know where to start - or when to stop - and eventually ends up telling you more than perhaps he intended to. Not a criticism, just an observation. He won't go down as one of the great writers of our time, but he's absolutely one of the deepest thinkers. Anyway, he says this of beauty: "the modern disenchantment with the beautiful as a concept reflects in part a sense that while beauty is something whose event can be remarked upon, and in a way that seems to convey meaning, the word "beauty" indicates nothing: neither exactly a quality, nor a property, nor a function, not even really a su
Post a Comment
More posts »

The Importance of Plastic

What I like about philosophy is that you have an idea which you express in a certain way, according to the language you use, the words you know, the analogies you can think of, the categories you have defined, the context you exist in etc... But then you spot something, another idea, expressed rather differently and related to a different situation, yet somehow it seems eerily familiar. I love it when I see a conceptual crossover of ideas. I love Francis Schaeffer's 'line of despair' idea, I love Elaine Scarry's 'beauty makes copies of itself' idea and I love Piet Mondrian's 'plastic art' idea, to name but a few off the top of my head. It's quite reassuring and encouraging to find resonance in your own thinking with the ideas of great minds. But not necessarily surprising. God made the world to work a certain way, so why shouldn't people come up with similar ideas about how to interpret the material and spiritual universe? Anyway, I want to b
Post a Comment
More posts »