ResearchID.org

ResearchID.org is a new wiki - an online encyclopaedia devoted to intelligent design. Its founder is Joey Campana. He describes it as a website where:

• ... any student or professional, in any field of study, can gain instant access to intelligent design research associated with their discipline.
• ... every research project related to intelligent design is summarized and arranged into highly usable research articles that can be taken straight to the lab or library for research application.
• ... all the research resources are set up in a wiki, where anyone interested can collaborate and contribute as they research intelligent design.

That is exactly what we are doing at ResearchID.org. ResearchID.org is a wiki knowledgebase compiling information and knowledge related to intelligent design, written by you! Take a look at our About page for more details.

World Cup Final: Germany v Greece?

It won't be Germany v Greece this year - but here's the highlights of a previous year's International Philosophy final; suprisingly Greece have left out Thales:


HT plurality of blogs

Fernhout pages

I have now added the Harry Fernhout pages to All of life redeemed. Harry is the president of King's University College, Edmonton.

There are two articles by him in pdf on the site:

• Education in a pluralist society (1996)
• Christian schooling: telling a worldview story from Crumbling Walls of Certainty ed Ian Lambert and Suzanne Mitchell (Gracewing, 1998)

Thanks again to Geoff Wilson for scanning the material.

Seerveld's Comment

This week's Comment is from Calvin Seerveld who offers six useful suggestions for a christian student at a secular university: 'Making the most of college: studying ourselves to death'.

James Olthuis pages

The James Olthuis pages have now been added to the All of life redeemed site. James is professor of philosophical philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto. He is the author of Beautiful Risk: A New Psychology of Loving and Being Loved and among many other books. 

 At present there are Chapter 1, Chapter 6 , Chapter 7 from his first book Facts, Values and Ethics: A confrontation with twentieth century British moral philosophy in particular G. E. Moore (Second edition, Assen: Van Gorcum, 1969). More papers will follow! 

Again my thanks to Geoff Wilson for making these scans of James's book available.

Seerveld pages

Calvin Seerveld now has his own pages on All of life redeemed. I have put up the following articles as pdfs:

• God's gifts our thank offering - an interview
• Reading the Bible and understanding art
  
• A Christian tin-can theory of man
  
• Pain is a four-letter word
  
• Philosophy as schooled memory
  
• Reading the Bible like a grown-up child
  
• The gift of artistry - God's clothing for human life

(My thanks to Geoff Wilson for scanning these articles.)

Most of Calvin's books can be purchased through the Tuppence Press. A great place to start if you are new to Seerveld is In the Fields of the Lord: A Calvin Seerveld Reader edited by Craig Bartholomew. It has an excellent introduction to the thought of Seerveld by Gideon Strauss and Craig Bartholomew.

Another site that has some excellent Seerveld resources is: Seerveld Texts.

Zygon 41 (June 2006)

The latest volume of Zygon is out.  It includes and article by Henk Geertsema: 'Cyborg: myth or reality?'

Abstract. The idea of cyborg often is taken as a token for the distinction between human and machine having become irrelevant. In this essay I argue against that view. I critically analyze empirical arguments, theoretical reflections, and ultimate convictions that are supposed to support the idea. I show that empirical arguments at this time rather point in a different direction and that theoretical views behind it are at least questionable. I also show that the ultimate convictions presupposed deny basic tenets of traditional Christianity, while their claim to be based on science confuses scientific results with their interpretation on the basis of a naturalistic world-view.

Schuurman pages

Egbert Schuurman, now has his own Schuurman pages as part of the All of life redeemed website. I have put up two of his papers on a Christian approach to technology:

• Information society: cultural impoverishment or enrichment (c. 1983)
• A confrontation with technicism as the spiritual climate of the West (1996)
  

as well as links to other on-line papers.

Professor Schuurman (1937 - ) is a professor of Reformational
philosophy at the Universities of Delft and Eindhoven and at the
Agricultural University of Waneningen in the Netherlands. He is also a
member of the Senate of the Dutch parliament. He studied under
Dooyeweerd and Van Riessen at the Free University in Amsterdam.

All of life redeemed update

Dick Stafleu's 'Quantum physics and the philsophy of the cosmonomic idea' (translated by H. Kiefte from 'Quantumfysica en wijsbegeerte der wetsidee' Philosophia Reformata (1966) 126) has been added to the Stafleu pages;

and two book reviews:

• Review of Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting by John Cooper
• Review of The Challenge of Marxist and NeoMarxist Ideology for Christian Scholarship. Ed. John Vander Stelt

as well as an early paper by Roy Clouser 'Puritanism on Authority' from Anakainosis have been added to the Clouser pages.

Update: I've just added two papers on art and aesthetics by Duncan Roper:

• 'Aesthetics, art and education: a Christian look at art' [pdf]
• 'Aesthetics, art and education: consequences for curriculum' [pdf]

Russ Reeves in Comment on history

This week's Comment has an article by historian Russ Reeves and former blogger: 'Making the most of college: learning from history'.  He begins by examining Santayana's aphorism: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it', which reminds me of the poet Steve Turner's twist on it: 'History repeats itself - it has to, nobody listens'.

Reeves rightly concludes:

Christians cannot find true identity or purpose in a purely naturalistic understanding of history. It is only through a God who saves his people in history through the sacrifice of Christ. The touchstone for history is not my history, but Christ's history. I need to make sense of the world less through the lens of my experience and more through Christ's. History is the terrain we travel, and we should know it well, but Christ is our compass.

Football videos

A great own goal

Ronaldinho six shots at goal and he can't even score!

And if you get fed up with watching football - here's a book to read:

The semi-Pelagian narrower catechism

Maggi Dawn spotted this one: The semi-Pelagian narrower catechism at Manilla Drive - it certainly made me smile!

Five habits of the passionate book lover

Byron Borger, in this week's Comment, looks at learning to love good books.  He writes of the five habits of the passionate book lover:

1. Make a schedule. Don't postpone your reading to the end of the day when you are most tired. Serious reading takes some serious commitments. Use the library or another favorite, quiet spot;
   
   
2. Carry a book with you almost all the time. You can dip in during 'down time' or during unexpected free time. You needn't be anti-social or a show-off about your bookwormish habits. Still, you'd be surprised how much reading you can do on the run;
   
   
3. Talk to people you trust about what they most enjoy and what they are reading. Talk about books with people you admire. Find a book-buying mentor and a bookseller who cares about you and your literacy and intellectual development. Read book reviews from a variety of sources;
   
   
4. Read in an interdisciplinary way. Wisely chosen novels can obviously enhance your non-fiction course work in pleasurable ways. Some good books come through serendipity and whim, but it may be helpful to have a plan, at least a list; and
   
   
5. Stretch yourself occasionally by reading the more serious books. Perhaps, explore a new and unexpected topic for a year, reading several similar books or books by the same author. But don't read exclusively arcane and heavy stuff. Light fare and sweets can enhance any diet.

Football crazy?

The UK it seems has gone football crazy. Red and white flags are going up all over the place - even on cars. Rather naively I assumed that flags on cars were a message of support to our boys in Germany, however, I was soon put right by this e-mail I received recently:

There is concern over the current driving standards in England, so the Department of Transport have devised a scheme to identify poor and dangerous drivers.

This system will allow all road users to recognise the potentially hazardous and dangerous ones, or those with limited driving skills. From the middle of May 2006 all those drivers who are found to be a potential hazard to all other road users will be issued with a white flag, bearing a red cross.

This flag clearly indicates their inability to drive properly. These flags must be clipped to a door of the car and be visible to all other drivers and pedestrians.

Those drivers who have shown particularly poor driving skills will have to display two flags: One on each side of the car to indicate an even greater lack of skill and limited driving intelligence.

Please circulate this to as many other motorists as you can, in order that drivers and pedestrians will be aware of the meaning of these flags.

Thank you for your co-operation.

Department of Transport.

Stafleu: Time and Again

I have just put up a pdf of the first chapter of Marinus Dirk Stafleu's excellent Time and Again book on the Stafleu pages of All of life redeemed. The first chapter provides an excellent overview of how Dooyeweerd's ideas relates to physics.

There is a review of Time and Again  here, by Arnold Sikkema. He concludes:

Stafleu’s Time and Again demonstrates the utility of the PCI for physics in a convincing way.  Even physicists who are not Christians will find themselves often agreeing with it albeit for completely different reasons. The two main successes of Stafleu are, in my view, an insightful analysis of the development of physics from antiquity through classical to modern as a systematic opening up of creation, and the description of “having” properties as being in the law more than in the entity.

Brian Leftow Interview

There is a interview with Brian Leftow, the Nolloth professor of philosophy at Oxford, here.

Neocalvinists and crime fiction

Many neocalvinists it seems have an affection for crime fiction. Al Wolters admits to liking Swedish whodunnits, Roy Clouser likes P D James, Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill and Gideon Stauss has recently blogged about his five favourite crime authors:

My favourite crime novelists are strong on character and place: Jim Fusilli (my latest discovery) writes about New York City, George Pelecanos about Washington, D.C., Laura Lippman about Baltimore, Scott Turow about Chicago (although fictionalized as "Kindle County"), and P.D. James about London.

He has also written a fine piece about why read crime fiction:

Perhaps crime stories also attract readers because they offer a relatively simple and direct version of that which attracts us in all stories. If N.T. Wright is correct when he follows Vladimir Propp in arguing that we as human beings are hard-wired for stories with a particular structure, then crime novels offer perhaps the most abstracted and uncomplicated contemporary expression of that ur-structure of story. Which, for a fun read on the beach or in a plane, may be just the thing for many of us.

I also enjoy reading crime fiction. So I thought I'd make some recommendations.

My three favourite UK authors are Ian Rankin, who writes about Rebus in Edinburgh, Peter Robinson whose detective, Inspector Banks, is based in Yorkshire and Mark Billingham - set in London. Rankin and Robinson have both written about a dozen books and are all well worth reading (Rankin is more consitent than Robinson) particularly in chronological order as it is interesting to see how the characters develop. Billingham has written about four books all of which are very good.

My favourite US detective is Harry Bosch written by Michael Connolley.

I have recently started to read some Swedish detectives, particularly good is Henning Mankell (Kurt Wallander - though my favourite of Mankell's doesn't feature Wallender The Return of the Dancing Master) and Ake Edwardson - though I have only been able to get hold of one title by Edwardson Sun and Shadow.

I've just obtained from my local library 'A Rejkjavik Murder Mystery' Tainted Blood by Arnaldur Indridason. I've become interested in things Icelandic ever since discovering the music of Stafraen Hakon. So I'm really looking forward to starting this book; reading while listening to Hakon and sipping a great Islay malt (I know it's not Icelandic - but hey who cares!). I'm fresh out of Ardbeg, so it will have to be Bruichladdich. mmmmm

Perhaps one day we'll see a Dooyeweerdian detective who solves the crime by examining the different modal aspects in the crime and identifying the groundmotive and worldview of the culprit by looking at how (s)he commits the crime.

Marius Dirk Stafleu pages

Dick Stafleu, a retired physicist from the Netherlands, now has his own pages on All of Life Redeemed. There is also a new book of his there: Relations and Changes.

I first came across Stafleu through his Time and Again book. It was the first reformational book I tried to read - most of it went straight over my head at first - but it repays close attention. I found it riveting and mind blowing, for the first time I saw that it was possible to think christianly about physics.

Bob Goudzwaard pages

I have now added a set of pages for christian economist Bob Goudzwaard.  There are so far three articles by him on the pages:

• Christianity and economics (1996) [pdf]
• Globalization, exclusion, enslavement (1996) [pdf]
• Bible and economy: two reflections [pdf]

(Thanks again to Geoff Wilson.)

Roy Clouser pages

I have added two more papers to Roy Clouser's pages on All of Life Redeemed:

• "Genesis regained" paper presented at the Templeton Science and Religion Conference June 2006, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• "Social norms and religious belief" a paper delivered at a number of conferences. (Thanks to Geoff Wilson, for making this available.)