Notwithstanding climate denialism, the long-term human implications of climate-change are alarming. World governments will not meet the Paris targets on climate change. We won’t even be close. Following a look at the science, we will examine the consequences of climate change from the perspective of climate-forced human migration. Some 3% of the projected global population will have no choice but to relocate, by about 2100. Nobody, not even the United Nations, which at least recognizes the problem, is doing anything about this looming crisis.
We were privileged to have Dr Hugh Ross give us a presentation on climate change. He covered the following topics:
Is climate change for real?
What can we do about it?
Just to warn you, he does believe it is real and is related to human activity, but he has some novel ideas on how it can be addressed without causing huge disruption to human flourishing.
You can purchase a Kindle version of his book on this topic from Amazon by clicking on the following link: Weathering Climate Change by Dr Hugh Ross.
Dr Hugh Ross was an astronomer/astrophysicist at the University of Toronto. He is the founder and president of Reasons to Believe, (www.reasons.org), and is the author of over 17 books including ‘The Creator and the Cosmos’, ‘Why The Universe is The Way it is ‘ and ‘Navigating Genesis.’ Ross has addressed students and faculty on over 300 campuses in the US and abroad and speaks at various churches and groups on a wide variety of science-faith topics. He runs a weekly meeting for sceptics and agnostics. He is asked to present to government agencies and atheists and leading contemporaries on the powerful evidence for a purpose filled universe.
Sex makes the world go round! Sexual attraction and the resulting sexual activity are vital to almost all forms of animal life, from the simplest to the most complex.
Without sex, life on planet earth would cease to exist. The variation in sexual activity across the animal realm is simply astounding. What is natural for wildlife, such as the birds and the bees and mammals and reptiles and fish and insects and everything else, and what are the implications for human sexuality?
According to Wikipedia, the “God of the gaps” is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are cited as evidence or proof of God’s existence.
This would have been a particularly attractive position at a time when people knew almost nothing, and could thus ascribe everything to God, but now that we know more and more, is God is getting squeezed out? Failures in gap arguments in the past have been embarrassing and counter-productive.
Are we in the process of eliminating God, or do gaps we still point to God, or is this an entirely erroneous concept in the first place?
Brian Schroeder presents the issues, and argue for the standard Christian response to this question. His talk is available on YouTube.
From ancient times people have gazed at the sun, moon and stars observing their consistent daily and seasonal motion, and assumed that all of this was ordered by a maker. The Enlightenment dismissed this as fanciful imagination, but as our power of observation of both the atomic and stellar scale has grown, we see increasing signs of order that only needs the slightest variation to prohibit life supporting conditions. Is there any other reason that can explain this observed fine tuning in our physical environment?
Multiverse?
Steve White presents an outline of Fine Tuning and the Multiverse. He presents evidence for the fine tuning of our universe from the sub-atomic to the stellar scale and then discusses whether Multiverse theory can explain it. Do we just happen to live in one lucky, life-supporting version, among many other universes?
Stephen White
Stephen White has had a career as a physicist and is now retired.
John Lennox has challenged whether science can prove everything? However, in this presentation, Dr Leonard Long will address the question, “Can science prove anything?” Science is practised within a belief system based on unprovable presuppositions, and can study only the patterns of behaviour of an already given functional, predictable, universe. Scientists who wander into bad philosophy will be critiqued, as will scientism – the overblown belief in science.
So Leonard’s address includes the following topics:
Nature of science,
Scientism,
Methodological naturalism,
Ideological corruption within science, and
Interference of politics and funding within science.
When it comes to talking about the development of science as we know it in the West, the standard pop level narrative usually goes something like:
“From the time of the Ancient Greeks, figures such as Aristotle were the fathers of science, and then unfortunately the Roman Catholic Church came into power during the Middle Ages/Medieval period (5th century to around 15th century) and during this 1000-year period, science was stagnated, that is, until science finally broke free from its religious roots in the early modern period i.e. the scientific revolution from the 16th century onwards. At this point modern science developed rapidly (finally) due to the fact that scientists were no longer religiously constrained as they once were.’”(Nathan Bossoh)
However, if we ignore “pop level narrative” and look at actual history we see something very different.
Brian Schroeder argues that, rather than hindering the rise of modern science, Christianity was actually the underlying philosophy and the driving force behind it.
Your DNA is what makes You, You. Irrespective of your world view, the discovery of the inner workings & complexities of life under the microscope should leave anyone with an inquisitive mind in wonderment. Our bodies use, preserve and copy this molecular script in such a way that life and the reproduction of life is made possible.
The goal for this talk is to cover some of the key findings that science has discovered about the structure and expression of DNA, and how this all ties in to what we are. Josh also presents current theories and models that seek to explain how the complexities surrounding DNA has become a reality.
Many people conclude that there must be a designer at least to account for the complexity of living things. However, Richard Dawkins contends that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, through natural selection, can explain the rise of complexity by gradual degrees from simple beginnings. In “The Blind Watchmaker”, Richard Dawkins states:
Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. (p.14)
Dawkins goes on to claim that God is superfluous and highly improbable. Are Dawkins’ argument reasonable?
Christians have responded in quite different ways, ranging from substantial rejection of evolutionary theory, through to acceptance of some form of guided evolution. To the lay person, the divergent claims can be very confusing. So, the following questions often arise:
What can I know?
Who should I trust?
Does the world need a designer?
Kevin Rogers provides an overview and discussion of the arguments presented in “The Blind Watchmaker” and addresses the above questions, including “Does the world in which we live point to a Supernatural Designer?”
This year (2022) we plan to address the elephant in the room.
In past meetings, the discussions have often been diverted
when someone expresses an opinion regarding Young Earth Creationism (YEC) or
Old Earth Creationism (OEC). As the minister responsible for herding cats, it
has been my job to move the discussion back onto the original topic. But this
is an important issue that won’t go away by pushing it under the carpet, so
this year we are going to give it a fair bit of attention.
All Christians are creationists of some sort but disagree on
how or when. Roughly, opinions fall within the following groups:
Young Earth Creationists (YECs) believe that the
6 days in Genesis 1 should be interpreted as 6 literal 24-hour days. Hence the
age of the earth (and usually the rest of the universe) is just a few thousand
years. This view is argued by Creation Ministries International (CMI) and
Answers in Genesis (AIG).
Old Earth Creationists (OECs) and mainstream
science claim that the earth is ‘approximately’ 4.543 billion years, and the
universe is 13.77 billion years. Some OECs believe that God intervened
miraculously in the development of life, whereas theistic evolutionists believe
that evolution proceeded mainly through natural causes.
The time frames between the YEC and OEC positions differ by
approximately a million to one, so at least one opinion is diabolically wrong.
So, this year people can express and argue their opinions (on
both science and Biblical interpretation) and will hopefully listen to others
in a respectful and empathetic way.
On 10 February 2022, Steve White presented a scientific case for a young earth, followed by discussion and questions from the audience. A recording of the meeting is at
