Newsletter
Volume 1, Number 4 September 10, 2001
Monthly Meeting set for September 15 at Resurrection Lutheran Church, Spring – Saturday, 9:30 –11:30 a.m. We continue to work on developing a regional website for Missouri Synod Lutheran churches in our area. Plan to be with us. We need your help.
The Eight Beatitudes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – new meditations are now completed. A larger version of the logo (see above) will be set up on the home page so that one may click on the ‘Cross-Ties’ leading to the center and pop up meditations one by one. The Beatitudes continue to be the foundation for all of our teaching and writing.
Mailing List – Our e-mailing is being sent out by our Internet Service Provider, U.S. Choice.net. This is why you are receiving this letter. You may request that your name be dropped or you may also forward the letter to others who are interested in receiving it. Some congregations have developed an e-mail list. Consider using it to forward this letter.
Dr. Lou Jander’s Leader materials – are now being archived on our website and thus will be available at all times. As these and other materials increase we will also develop an internal search engine for the website.
Love those Links – no, not golf, but links to other websites. We’re compiling a list. Fact is, I’m constantly adding to my personal links. We plan to set up links to all the area churches that have websites and refer you to them from time to time. Some have also set up a link in their website to the developing CrossTies website. We appreciate that.
The Creation-Evolution Issue is a hot topic. That’s why we published an initial paper on the website (A Critical View of Evolution as a Scientific Theory). We welcome your comments and additional papers. Currently I’m reading Mere Creation, W.A. Dembski, ed.(InterVarsity Press, 1998). Some quotes:
“In modern culture science is accorded intellectual authority to define the way the world really is. The persuasive power of Darwinian theory stems from the aura of scientific factuality that surrounds it. If it can be shown that historically the primary motivation for advancing Darwin’s cause was not so much scientific as philosophical, then the theory loses much of its persuasive force” (p.74). . .
The book goes on to demonstrate in one scientific essay after another that evolutionary theory is driven by a philosophy of materialism (it happened by blind chance) as opposed to a creation intelligently designed by the Mind of God. But studies in molecular biology in the last 40 years have revealed that cells are complex information processing systems that “…every naturalistic model proposed has failed to explain . . . Thus mind or intelligence or what philosophers call “agent causation” now stands as the only cause known to be capable of creating an information-rich system, including the coding regions of DNA, functional proteins and the cell as a whole” (p. 137)
In the Postscript, Bruce Chapman, president of the Discovery Institute in Seattle and sometime director of the U.S. Census Bureau, writes,
“But changes in our understanding of science affect the population as a whole, regardless of faith. And changes in science, philosophy and theology, however vast, are only the beginning. Materialism is not limited in its implications to natural science. Materialism is a way of understanding day-to-day existence and responding to it. Materialism has influenced public standards and policies on morals, law and criminology, education, medicine, psychology, race relations, the environment and many other areas” (p.457).
“It can be argued that materialism is a major source of the demoralization of the twentieth century. Materialism’s explicit denial not just of design but also of the possibility of scientific evidence for design has done untold damage to the normative legacy of Judeo-Christian ethics. A world without design is a world without inherent meaning. In such a world, to quote Yeats, “things fall apart; the center cannot hold” (p.458).
But materialistic evolution is still being pushed as the dominant theory to explain the world that is. I ran across it just a week ago when talking with my sixth grade grand-daughter. Her teacher is asking her to read textbooks that push the so-called natural descent of man and animals from some common ancestral glob of proto-plasm millions of years ago. In the light of recent discoveries in biology that is just lousy science, to say nothing of the materialistic, godless philosophy that informs such scientific theory. But it is still being taught on all levels of our educational system, from grade school through graduate.
Let me hear from you.
Al Franzmeier, Dr.Rel. – alandsyl@airmail.net
Acting Director