I've been negligent these two weeks in keeping this current! As editors tell their book writers, blogging and books don't mix. And I've been writing a book. Or at least that's how it feels. I still have the footnotes and bibliography to clean up, but here's an excerpt:

* A Scientific Survey of Genesis 1-2 and Surprising Support for Trichotomy (paper for Topics in the Doctrine of Man).

So to summarize this second creation of Genesis 2, this personal, specific, Edenic, Adamic, Neolithic creation, we note all the differences from the first creation of Genesis 1, the general, bodily, Cro-Magnon, Paleolithic creation.

1) A personal, artistic formation from pre-existing bodily material imbued with divine breath, not just life in general, but a holy spirit.
2) The first blessing was the appointment as cultivator of a garden, with cultivars (plants specially chosen for food).
3) The (first implied, third direct) command was the act of naming: places, rivers, animals.

All of these properties are duplicated in the Neolithic Revolution, which was the spread of a special people group that didn’t melt into the Cro-Magnon genetic landscape (divine spirit), bringing farming technology (cultivars, gardens), who had a language (Indo-European).

*  The Expelled Movie is available on DVD, as of October 21 (review it here). Get your copy now, while you can still push the Amazon counter higher! As of the 23rd, the counter had the DVD at #12 (or #8 if you exclude duplicates) in the standings. This is driving the critics nuts. Over 250 scathingly negative reviews of the DVD had been posted, and still the platters are selling fast. One colleague sent me this note:

Hmmm -- a video comes out saying that if you question Darwinism, you get trashed and denounced.
And the mass response is to trash and denounce the video.
Don't the denouncers realize their own conduct proves the video is true? Do the denouncers not realize the irony of their own behavior?
Or are they really taking the position that those who doubt Darwinism are typically free of being denounced?

The American Scientific Affiliation (a group of scientists who enjoy religion) has countered by mailing, free, their own DVD on the subject, coincidentally on the same date. Here's some excerpts from their e-mail blurb:

I am pleased to inform you that you will soon be receiving a mailing of a DVD from the Wesley Ministry Network. This sampler DVD contains 135 minutes of free video, including the entire first lesson from the new Religion and Science course, taught by Francis S. Collins. It also includes a complete lecture by Alister McGrath titled "The Dawkins Delusion?" and short clips from lessons 2-9, featuring John Polkinghorne, Keith Ward, Darrel Falk and Ted Peters, among others...
As you know, ASA does not take a position or endorse any particular viewpoints in areas of honest disagreement among Christians but seeks to encourage the dissemination of quality materials that help educate our communities on issues of science and faith. In that spirit, we are pleased to accept WMN's offer to send a free sampler DVD to all our members.

* Richard Dawkins on the debate circuit, admits that a case could be made for the deist God (a nod to Anthony Flew). Xopher Hitchens on the debate circuit, will come to Westminster Seminary. Calling it a debate is being generous, other people call it book-flogging, nevertheless I will blog the debate here, stay tuned.

Some Christians view this as an important opportunity to confront the spirit of the age. But be forewarned, the age has changed. Neither one of these men are Modernists, they are Post-Moderns who (a) put ideology above rationality; (b) happen to have an anti-Christian ideology; (c) portray themselves as arch-rationalists. So don't get bent out of shape about their irrational statements about their own rationality, that really isn't their argument and they love to use it as bait. Rather, notice how they attempt to authenticate their message the old-fashioned PoMo way: ad hominem attacks and anger. Except, of course, its directed against God and called rebellion...

* Evolution excerpt from a lecture series given by John Laidlaw in 1879, concering the "Bible doctrine of man". Recall that Darwin had published his Origin of the Species in 1859, or twenty years before, created a huge stir, and then search for his "inherited elements" led nowhere, and not until Austrian monk Gregor Mendel published his work with genes, did Darwin get any respect. Considering that this year is the 200th anniversary of his birth, it is surprising how little his contemporaries valued his science.

Laidlaw 1879 "The evolution hypothesis at present in vogue, namely, that of derivation by natural selection, the actual rise of the present animated world by slow emergence from lower types of creation, plausible though it be in some of its proofs, and undoubtedly grand in its conception, is nevertheless surrounded with difficulties that can hardly be exaggerated. The practically infinite demand which it makes upon the past duration of the globe is the ground of serious attack now made upon it by mathematical physics. Not less serious is the objection taken a quarter of a century ago by Sedgwick, and now renewed by Virchow, that however many analogies may seem to favour it, not one direct and unmistakeable instance of transmutation of species has been established.... Then there are the physiological and geological difficultities, and the confessedly speculative elements in the theory itself. Yet it would be quite rash to say that in the abstract this theory of origins contradicts the Scriptures..."

You will note that the weaknesses recognized in 1879 are still the same weaknesses recognized today. 130 years have not solved them. By the second edition of Laidlaw's book in 1895 some 16 years later, his opinion of Darwin had fallen even futher:

Laidlaw 1895: "That account of the origin of species with which Darwin, more than a generation ago, took captive the scientific, and even the popular imagination of his time, owed its predominance almost entirely to his brilliant suggestion of "natural selection" as the mode or law by which the supposed principle of "descent with modification" had produced the myriad forms of organic life.  In the words of one of his closest followers, "The evidences which Darwin adduced in favour of 'natural selection' as a method have constituted some of the strongest reasons which scientific men have felt for accepting evolution as a fact" Already, however, the method is discredited in scientific circles. The suggested cause is no longer admitted adequately to account for the effects. It has to submit to the help or rivalry of several other proposed causes, such as the "physiological selection" of Eomanes himself, the "germ-plasms" of Weismann, the "discontinuous variations" of Galton and Bateson. Under this disintegration of scientific opinions the evolution hypothesis, which had gained, as has been said, such vogue through the Darwinian suggestion, threatens to fall back into the region of philosophic speculation, where it has never been wanting since the time, we may say, of Lucretius certainly of Leibnitz.
 In face of these recent confessions of the merely tentative character of the hypothesis, the lesson for the interpreter of Scripture is plain. For him to hasten to propound schemes of conciliation between the Mosaic account of Creation and the Darwinian pedigree of the lower animals and man would be to repeat an old and now unpardonable blunder."

So the current Darwin worship has all occurred in the past 30 years! That is very unlike Pascal, Newton, Einstein, Feynman and any number of scientists who never fell out of favor for 100 years like Darwin. Either we are only now recognizing his genius, or we have created one recently.

* The election is getting closer, and the Obama advantage keeps growing. Yesterday, RealClearPolitics ran an average that said +7.8 advantage. Looks like a blowout.

But looks can be decieving. Drudge Report carried this interesting headline yesterday that the most accurate pollster in 2004 election showed a +1.1% gap on Thursday, though todays report says it has rebounded to a +3.3% gap. The lesson in all this is that the polls are all biassed, both by the higher numbers of registered Democratic voters, and the extreme pressure of the main stream media. My college roommate is now a chaplain in Ninevah, and he wrote to ask us to make October 28 a day of prayer and fasting. I do not know what the election will bring, but I do know it will be as close as the 2000 election. Fast and pray.