Dave Rosborough

One of the chief criticisms that I hear levelled against members of the “intellectual dark ages” like myself (e.g. young-earth Creationist types) is that we’re so close-minded. In fact, a popular trend in anti-Creationism writing these days seems to be to argue that Creationism can’t be science because it can’t change. Any idea that is “fixed” and closed for discussion is non-scientific, it is argued, because science never closes the book on anything. If science doesn’t prove hypothesis, but merely fails to falsify them, we need to be open to the idea that our pet theory might have to be changed somewhere down the road.

Now, one might argue that these same people effectively try to “close the book” on evolution, but that’s an argument for another blog entry. My question in this post is this:

Where do people get the idea that creationism isn’t open to change?

Continue reading ‘Creationism - open for change?’ »

Every few weeks, it seems, some state, county, or other unit of government in the States tables a new piece of legislation to appease the “far-right Creationist / Intelligent Design” camp. The new trend seems to be towards “academic freedom” legislation - shouldn’t we allow our teachers the freedom to teach competing ideas? Shouldn’t we be open-minded? One can hardly imagine such legislation getting any play at all in Canada, but it seems to be quite a common occurrence in the US.

For me, the debate is a bit tiring. Now, oddly, I’m one of those pesky young-Earth Creationists (I don’t even waste my time couching it in “Intelligent Design” language, although I don’t mind it if you want to yourself), so you’d think I’d really enjoy this sort of thing, perhaps cheering quietly in front of my computer when the news article hits one of my favourite news sites.

Continue reading ‘Creationism in Schools - Science?’ »

We had a visitor at church today, a guy who had never been there before. When I was talking to him between services, he was telling us how much God had been doing for him and working in his life. Then he gave us a specific example - it turned out that last night he slept outside our local bank, under the awning, after getting ditched by some friends miles away from the shelter where he could have had a bed for the night. It got down to about -15°C last night (with the wind-chill), so it was a pretty serious situation. When he woke up this morning, he found himself covered in a blanket. If someone hadn’t put that blanket on him last night, he might just not have woke up, period.

Continue reading ‘Crucified to the World?’ »

I got reading a bit of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life this afternoon. Seneca was a Stoic philosopher, meaning that he belonged to a camp that “preached freedom from passion by following reason” (Wikipedia).

Seneca’s main point is that it’s pointless to complain about how short life is. Life, he says, is plenty long enough; the main problem is that we waste most of it. It’s a valid point, from my way of thinking at least. Seneca’s suggestion, of course, is that we’d do a lot better with things if we just spent all our time studying philosophy. As much as I like philosophy, I don’t think that’s the example Jesus would have us follow, however.

Continue reading ‘It takes the whole of life…’ »

A couple of years ago at my school, our chaplain asked me to create a Bible reading plan that our students could follow from September to June, reading through the whole Bible in slightly less than 10 months. A quick search of the internet revealed that virtually every reading plan out there starts January 1st and ends on December 31st. Never one to back down from a challenge, I wrote an algorithm that generates a (roughly) balanced reading plan of an arbitrary length.

I decided that this might prove useful to others, since we don’t always decide to start reading the Bible on January 1st. So, I created a site, yourBibleReading.com, that allows you to set up your own Bible reading plan.

Continue reading ‘yourBibleReading.com’ »