Just watched an incredible show: Compass – Billy Graham Down Under (click to watch it)

Oh, that God would again do such a work in our country! That He would raise up preachers like Billy to declare God’s free gift of forgiveness!

Pray for revival!

This is the feature picture at the moment on SydneyAnglicans.net:

How many unchurched men in NSW, do you think, would be comfortable in that picture?
How many would come to church after seeing it?

Just a thought….

“Dear Jesus, I pray for my chicken who we sent to the farm because he turned into a rooster, that he would have a good time…” — One of my Sunday School boys

And:

“… then we played the best game of twister ever… because, like, we’re all gymnasts…” – My little sister (who does gymnastics at national level)

Interesting article in todays Herald by Prof. Tom Frame:

Early interpreters of Darwin’s work were plainly ill-equipped to deal with the ramifications of this potentially devastating message. Since religion based its claim for God’s existence squarely on the evidence of design in nature, denial was one of the few options available.

It took more than 30 years for theology to perceive that evolution might, in fact, disclose an even more creative God, and that Darwin had actually paved the way for more profound theological thought….

Read the rest here.

- (Or, how God created your brain)
Fascinating cover story in this week’s New Scientist: Natural Born Believers. Read the full article there, but here’s a taste:

It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. … It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods. … Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. …

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation … [but] the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works. … [1] Our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things – things with minds… – and inanimate objects. … [2] an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere, even where there is none.

It’s a nice attempt….
Here’s mine:

• our minds are finely tuned to believe in God because He exists, and “has put eternity into man’s heart” (Ecc. 3:11),
• religous belief is common to all cultures because God exists and “his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20)
• we see purpose and design everywhere, because everything we see is purposed and designed by “God who fulfills his purpose for me” (Psalm 57:2)

Though, I agree: “All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it.”

Interesting, though, isn’t it… that “children tend to spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention”…