Once a month at Sherwood Uniting Church we have two simultaneous church services. A traditional one and "Family Worship"
This week "Family Worship" was in the fellowship room. The traditional service was in the hall because the Church was full of stuff from the festival.
A big thank you to Bob and Jenny for organising it and Jenny who is the organiser if Family Worship in general.
A big thank you to Bob and Jenny for organising it and Jenny who is the organiser if Family Worship in general.
We started with breakfast. I had brought the makings of pancakes but when I got there I discovered that so had someone else. James Erickson did a great job cooking them.There did not seem to be any bowls so I ate my cereal out of some kind of serving bowl and I saw someone else eating out of a piece of random Tupperware. Still tasted good.
We started with a few songs. Joel on keyboard, Jenny on PowerPoint and Grace leading. All abelly supervised by Bob.
Later the kids moved into the main church and created artwork and the adults had a discussion about Intelligent design vs Evolution.
Bob stimulated this by showing a few minutes from a DVD on a thing called a "flagellum motor". It appears that the "Intelligent Design" crowd feel that this little baby is just too simple yet too complicated to have "evolved".
It made for the most fascinating discussion / sermon I have heard for a while. Sure beat the Jesus Seminar vs ACC. It would have been good to have had more time, more coffee and more child minding to discuss this in more detail. Some points that were raised included:-
God of the Gaps theory - This is the idea that because we have not worked out how something happened or evolved then "OK that must be God". The problem being that over time, more and more is explained so God becomes smaller and smaller.
+? What were the other points??? Grant, Margaret, Joel, Bob and others all contributed. Feel free to remind me by posting a comment.
+? What were the other points??? Grant, Margaret, Joel, Bob and others all contributed. Feel free to remind me by posting a comment.
On a slightly related topic, we should remember that the whole "Intelligent Design" thing came about because the Americans do not allow RE in their state schools. So the over enthusiastic Christians found a way to dress up religion as science. You may have read or heard in the news that NSW is trying to replace RE with a sort of Morals and Ethics course. A pity in my view because the side effect will be that it will be the more extreme Christians who use things like intelligent design to get religion back into the schools. Personally I love to see RE in the schools so we can present the kids with a moderate view of a loving God in an open and honest way. Take that opportunity away and we will have the extremists sneaking a dodgy pseudo scientific thing into the schools and present kids with a narrow interpretation and understanding of God. My opinion anyway.
Watch this video or search YouTube for flagellum motor. You will get both the pro and anti "Intelligent Design" folks competing for your devotion.
I was impressed with the interest in debating the topic.
ReplyDeleteI am always interested to watch whether people are prepared to imagine what might be beyond their own envelope of knowledge, or indeed beyond the accumulated envelope of knowledge of any sample subset of mankind.
I was impressed that a few took an interest in my thesis: that only two fundamental hypotheses are presently considered acceptable in this debate: those of Moses and Darwin, and that the body of observed data may be vulnerable to more hypotheses - but for the obstinacy of those observing the data in their vice-like grip on one of those two hypotheses as being essentially invulnerable to critcism.