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Reason. Logic. Evidence. These are among the defining keywords of our contemporary era—they’re values and ideas that shape our approach to science, and to most other aspects of our lives. We like our lives to be organized, quantifiable, and understandable.

That’s certainly not a bad way to approach human life—the rational worldview has spawned countless good advances in science, medicine, and many other fields. But in this Slice of Infinity devotional, Margarat Manning wonders if, in our fascination with this Enlightenment-era worldview, we may be pushing aside some equally important concepts: mystery, wonder, and faith.

Inherent in this Enlightenment mindset, and common in our day as well, is the assumption that knowledge is good, certain, and objective. We often uncritically accept this Enlightenment idea as we look at Christian faith today, and we leave little room for ways of knowing that go beyond the rational or the scientific. As Blaise Pascal once said, “The heart has its reasons which reason cannot know.” But Christians do well to re-think this Enlightenment assumption, for we acknowledge that the fall of humanity impacted the whole self–including the mind.

Without jettisoning intellectual rigor and study, or succumbing to a faith without content, we must make room for the concept of “mystery” and be cautious about assuming an Enlightenment way of viewing knowledge and truth. Sometimes we simply do not know. Our minds are limited and God is infinite. We must reject the hubristic optimism of the endless, upward progress of human rationality to attain to omniscience. Moreover, our faith cannot be “reduced” to a set of fixed doctrines, even while it surely contains them. Rather, we must acknowledge “that the fundamental reality of God transcends human rationality” and “the heart of being a Christian is a personal encounter with God in Christ, who shapes us and molds us.” We come to know in and through personal encounter–both with God and with God’s people in community–and we must reject the notion that we are ultimately and only autonomous, thinking selves. We are reminded by the apostle John that Truth is ultimately and completely revealed in a person–”The Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us”–and it is as a result of this person that we come to know anything that is worth knowing at all.

Does your faith ever feel overly-quantified? Have the doctrines that define your faith ever started to feel less like proclamations of our savior Jesus Christ, and more like a laundry list of lifeless rules and annotations? Maybe it’s time to step back and reclaim the mystery and personal relationship that lie at the heart of Christianity.

Why is there such tension between many Christians and science? Many Christians have developed a suspicion of certain scientific fields (like biology and environmental science) due to the atheist or un-Christian philosophies held by particular outspoken scientists throughout the years. It may be understandable, but if that suspicion prevents us from exploring and appreciating God’s creation, it’s a problem.

The latest Wonder of Creation devotional challenges Christians not only to reconsider their attitude toward the sciences, but to actively claim a spot at the forefront of creation care:

Evangelical theologian John Stott is an avid birder who motivated the founder of A Rocha, a Christian nature conservancy. He writes, “Christian people should surely have been in the vanguard of the movement for environmental responsibility, because of our doctrines of creation and stewardship. Did God make the world? Does He sustain it? Has He committed its resources to our care? His personal concern for His own creation should be sufficient to inspire us to be equally concerned.”

Our relationship to the natural world is that of steward—the one who is responsible to care for what God has made. Homo sapiens is the only responsible species. How responsible have we been?

Read the full devotional at Wonder of Creation.

Does that call to action ring true for you? Have Christians neglected stewardship and creation care, and if so, how do we go about reclaiming it?

If you needed an excuse to get out of the house early this morning, it doesn’t get much better than this: the Leonid Meteor Shower is on vivid display today. The shower’s visibility peaked for North American skywatchers earlier today, but is still visible elsewhere around the world:

“A remarkable feature of this year’s shower is that Leonids will appear to be shooting almost directly out of the planet Mars,” notes Cooke.

It’s just a coincidence. This year, Mars happens to be passing by the Leonid radiant at the time of the shower. The Red Planet is almost twice as bright as a first magnitude star, so it makes an eye-catching companion for the Leonids.

The next stream crossing straddles the hour 2100-2200 UT, shortly before dawn in Indonesia and China. At that time, Earth will pass through a pair of streams laid down by Comet Tempel-Tuttle in 1466 and 1533 AD. The double crossing could yield as many as 300 Leonids per hour.

Photos from the meteor shower are already finding their way online: take a few minutes to browse photos of the meteor shower on Flickr. There’s more info at Astronomy.com, which also has a video about how to watch meteor showers.

I can’t think of anything more appropriate than these words from Psalm 8:

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
above the heavens.

From the lips of children and infants
you have ordained praise
because of your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.

When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him? [...]

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Did you camp out this morning watching the heavens for glimpses of the meteor shower? If so, feel free to share your experience in the comments below (and even better, link to any photos you took)!

The Internet Monk is blogging this week about an especially difficult subject: mental illness, and how Christians do and should respond to it. His post “Is there such a thing as mental illness?”, and the comments below it, are well worth the read.

There’s a great deal of ignorance, confusion, and fear in Christian circles surrounding this issue. Where Christians in the past have been all too quick to blame depression and other types of mental illness on weak faith or Satanic influence, I suspect they’re more likely these days to try to ignore it—as a few wrenching testimonies in the Internet Monk post demonstrate. I grew up in a fairly close Christian community and never heard any talk of clinical depression, bipolar disorder, or other mental illnesses, although I learned years later that several friends and even family members had serious bouts with mental illness. This silence on the issue, and our reluctance to talk about medication and counseling outside the church, must make life very difficult for some of our suffering brothers and sisters in Christ.

The unease about mental illness is understandable, to an extent—anyone who’s lived through serious depression or knows somebody who has can tell you that it’s a harrowing experience that doesn’t lend itself well to inspirational stories or pat resolutions. I have often wondered if the church’s difficulty with the issue has its roots in a gnostic, unbiblical belief that our minds are completely separate and disconnected from the rest of our bodies. We readily acknowledge that our bodies can be afflicted by physical maladies, but we tend to imagine that our minds can be influenced only by God, Satan, and our own willpower.

What’s your experience with this issue? How has your church responded to instances of mental illness in your community, and was it a positive experience? Is the church finally getting a handle on the challenge of mental illness?

Does “creation care” have a place in the Christian life? Evangelical Christians in particular have a reputation for neglecting environmental stewardship—a stereotype that has some truth to it, traceable perhaps to Christians’ belief that the Earth will pass away when the Lord returns. But today is Earth Day, and Mart De Haan has written a blog post specifically about this question of Christians and creation care:

I’ll admit that I used to argue that this earth is timed to self-destruct and that followers of Christ need to be far more concerned with things that last than those that will pass away.

I’d talk about what Paul said about worshiping the creation more than the Creator.

But Dean would quote the first part of the chapter where Paul talks about the way God uses the natural world to point to the wonder of his own existence and character.Then he’d talk about Psalm 19 that describes how God not only speaks to us through his written word, but through creation itself.

He’s referring to the Wonder of Creation blog, where Dean Ohlman writes diligently about how Christians can and should better understand the place of Creation in our spiritual lives. His post “Earth Day confessions” sums up much of his approach, and challenges the church to understand its general failure to promote Earth stewardship as a sin and a deviation from a Biblical worldview.

What’s your reaction to these posts? Have you or your church thought through the question of how environmental stewardship does (or doesn’t) fit into Christian theology? How might the church best approach this issue?

How should Christians approach the question of Creation and evolution? It’s a controversy that’s been going strong for many years, and the recent flurry of books by prominent atheist thinkers has once again put the spotlight on Christianity’s relationship to science. Is it possible for Christian to embrace evolution and related theories, or does our faith compel us to reject them?

There are (at least) two ministries in the Gospel.com community that tackle this question. Interesting (and perhaps frustratingly, if you were hoping for any easy answer to the “evolution question”) they come to different conclusions. It’s well worth reading through what both have to say as you ponder the question:

• Answers in Genesis is a major creationist ministry that has published many articles about the importance of believing in a literal creation story. There are dozens of essays there you could read, but you might start with What should a Christian think about evolution?, which lays out the case for rejecting evolution.
• On the other side of the fence is Scibel, which believes (as Answers in Genesis does) that science and Christianity are not incompatible, although Scibel comes to different conclusions. They’re dedicated to challenging myths about the faith/science relationship. They argue that it’s a myth that Christians can’t believe in evolution and have other essays on topics like the historicity of Adam and Eve and whether Christians should take the Bible “literally”.

These two ministries have different answers to the question of evolution and Christianity, but they’re both fighting to show that Christianity is not incompatible with serious science. And whatever side of the issue you identify with, it’s never a bad thing to read through different perspectives!

Long a ghostwriter for several high-profile names, Kevin Miller’s serendipitous encounter with filmmaker David L. Cunningham at a hotel in Hawaii provided the nascent screenwriter with his first professional gig: After…, a psychological thriller set in the world of base jumping and urban exploration.

Miller’s latest project, starring Ben Stein, is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a documentary that looks at the turf wars in the science community over Darwinian evolution and the field of “Intelligent Design.”

As part of Past the Popcorn’s lead-in to coverage of Expelled, I took the opportunity to spend half an hour on the phone with Miller, chatting about his experience in the business. Next week, PtP will publish the second half of the interview, which focuses on Expelled.

Ben Stein’s new project Expelled is a critical look not at the shortcomings of Darwinian theory per se, but at the ways in which the Darwinian scientific establishment is apparently seeking to suppress open dialogue about competing theories. The justification for this suppression is that competing theories are not really “scientific,” so free speech is not the issue, “academic respectability” is.

But as Mr. Stein stated, “I think we’re missing something extremely basic in our understanding of the world, and how it got created and I’d like us to return to that. And, I think, by returning to those bigger subjects of how the world got created and what our place in the world is, we will find a new moral fence which is very much lacking.”

Past the Popcorn Managing Editor Greg Wright reports on a recent conference call with Stein.

If you’re at all interested in the origins debate, keep an eye on this new Answers in Genesis off-shoot. AiG recently launched a new site devoted to peer-reviewed scientific research on creationism.

The Answers Research Journal “is a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework.”

Here are the first three articles from their first volume:

Proceedings of the Microbe Forum

Microbes and the Days of Creation

Catastrophic Granite Formation

Yesterday we highlighted a few articles from the ministry of Scibel. Today, I thought it would be interesting to read responses to some of those same issues from another ministry in our community, Answers in Genesis.

AiG is primarily an apologetic ministry that seeks to enable “Christians to defend their faith and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively.” To that end their web site is brimming with resources for anyone who has questions about how their faith might interact with science.

Here’s a little bit more on their ministry from their about us page:

We focus particularly on providing answers to questions surrounding the book of Genesis, as it is the most-attacked book of the Bible. We also desire to train others to develop a biblical worldview, and seek to expose the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas, and its bedfellow, a “millions of years old” earth (and even older universe).

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