Evangelical Realism

From AP and Yahoo News comes word that Embattled Oral Roberts president Richard Roberts resigns.

Roberts, facing accusations in the lawsuit that he misspent school funds to support a lavish lifestyle, resigned Friday….

His resignation is effective immediately, according to a statement e-mailed from George Pearsons, chairman of the school’s Board of Regents…

The school’s regents planned to meet Monday and Tuesday to determine action in the search process for a new president, Pearsons said in the statement.

Searching for a new ORU president, eh? The regents should contact Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship and see if he can supply them with a pool of Christian swindlers, extortioners and felons to choose from.

Via Highly Allochthonous comes this fascinating account of how the air we breathe became breathable. Being a science geek, I can’t help being fascinated by little details like the following:

In today’s oxidising atmosphere, when minerals like pyrite (an iron sulphide) and uraninite (uranium oxide) and siderite (iron carbonate) are exposed by erosion, they are quickly broken down. When you look at very old sedimentary sequences in Australia, South Africa and Canada, however, you sometimes find rounded clasts of pyrite and uraninite that have clearly been eroded and transported some distance by rivers without being altered. This can only happen in low-oxygen conditions (less than 1/1000th of the present atmospheric concentration of O2).

Of course, as an ex-creationist, I also can’t help remembering that, according to traditional creationism, those strata were laid down by the Flood, and contain the bones and stones of the things that existed prior to the sixth chapter of Genesis. Which means that there was virtually no breathable oxygen in the Garden of Eden. Nor would a Flood have done much good.–after all, if you’ve learned to get along without oxygen during the good weather, you’re not going to drown no matter how much it rains.

PZ Myers started it by linking to the original collection. Then Greg Laden singled out the video of Noah’s Flood engulfing the world. Now it’s my turn:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVF2bYeIl0Y&rel=1&border=0]

Just for fun, let’s crunch some numbers, shall we? The last few seconds of the video show the Flood about to strike the Ark. Let’s see if we can calculate the height the Ark would have to fall from in order to equal the impact it’s going to experience when that big wave hits.

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Anthony Horvath is up to his old tricks again, this time with an article on the insidious threat lurking between the covers of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. According to Horvath, this series of books, beginning with The Golden Compass, is even more dangerous than the Harry Potter series.

If we take an example like Harry Potter, whom the author of that article also decries, the difference between the threats is easy enough to detect: Rowling did not present her series as potentially being reality, nor does anyone- even young readers- think that it might be, whereas in the Pullman series, what he presents is explicitly something that he believes could be real, and by connecting with claims that students will hear described as scientific (Ie, Evolutionary theory and the Multiverse), students are led to think the same. There is no line between reality and fantasy, here.

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Focus on the Family was airing another Chuck Colson tape last night. It was a rambling rant against secularism, “Darwinism” and “things-generally-not-Christian-ism,” but there were one or two little gems just tossed out for our edification. For instance, did you know that Sigmund Freud preached a gospel of salvation through unlimited sex?

Now I know I wasted the first 40 years of my life in the wrong church.