Cool Products Expo 2003

Just read a neat article about the Stanford Cool Products Expo 2003. Lizardlike robots, hyper-cool bicycle seats, and a customized scooter–that’s some pretty cool stuff!

Just read a neat article about the Stanford Cool Products Expo 2003.

Lizardlike robots, hyper-cool bicycle seats, and a customized scooter–that’s some pretty cool stuff!

A Unique Perspective On Housing Prices

A friend of mine (Jimmy Tate) just emailed me an article that offers a very unique perspective on the housing prices in Palo Alto. It’s by Thomas Sowell and it’s called “Diversity” for Thee, Not Me.

A friend of mine (Jimmy Tate) just emailed me an article that offers a very unique perspective on the housing prices in Palo Alto. It’s by Thomas Sowell and it’s called “Diversity” for Thee, Not Me. Here’s an excerpt:

Because housing prices are so high in Palo Alto — and up and down the whole San Francisco peninsula.

This is not due to supply and demand in a free market. It is largely due to rich busybodies who have promoted severe restrictions on the building of housing under a variety of high-sounding names like “open space” or “environmental protection.” I don’t begrudge such people the inheritances that have allowed them to live their whole lives without ever having to lift a finger to support themselves. But it is galling that they are imposing huge costs on hundreds of thousands of other people who have to work for a living.

Anyway, I found it interesting. I do think he overstates the case somewhat (there is a huge demand), but he’s correct that the supply has been artificially supressed. Food for thought.

Reflections on Atheism and Amorality

In that class that I guest-lectured in I fielded some questions from atheists. Ive been reflecting on atheism since then, and Id like to offer a refinement of my thoughts.

First, a disclaimer. It is possible that someone could find this hurtful or offensive. I do not seek to deliberately offend, but I do seek to be honest. It seems to me that atheism has several serious problems, and I am about to address one of them: atheism’s intrinisic divorce from morality. This is not a personal attack on anyone–in fact, you can be an atheist and also be quite a moral person. But if you are an atheist you do not have a compelling reason to be moral (or even to believe that morality is a meaningful concept), and that is what I want to address.

I can sum up what Ive been thinking in one phrase: atheism is amoral. Amorality flows directly from a rejection of all nonmaterial reality.

Allow me to explain: a moral law is an entirely different sort of thing than a law of physics. You cannot get a moral ought from a material is.

If all we are is a collection of particles arranged in a complicated fashion, then there is no compelling reason to suppose that any motion of those particles is logically preferable to any other. Say, for instance, a collection of particles driving a knife through another collection of particles versus a collection of particles nursing another, smaller collection of particles.
Continue reading “Reflections on Atheism and Amorality”

I Got To Teach At Stanford

Okay, maybe the title is a little misleading. It’s not like I’m a professor or anything. I did get to give a lecture, though. Let me tell you about it…

Okay, maybe the title is a little misleading. It’s not like I’m a professor or anything.

I did get to give a lecture, though. Let me tell you about it…

Jimmy Lim, a grad student who helps lead worship for Chi Alpha @ Stanford is taking a class called Voluntary Social Systems. The class basically seeks to describe a maximally free society, one in which all laws flow from the maxim that “peaceful, honest people have a right to be left alone.”

Anyway, each student who is taking the class for full credit is required to bring in an outside speaker, and Jimmy chose me!

It was really an astounding opportunity–I was able to talk about “Religion and the Maxim Society” to a group of mostly unbelieving grad students. In fact, I think the bulk of the students were atheists.

In case you’re wondering, the lecture went really well (at least, that’s my take on things). They applauded when I was done and we had a wonderful time of question and answer. I was able to talk very forthrightly about my faith in God, the centrality of religion to human experience, and to present the gospel in a highly contextualized manner.

Woohoo!

Please pray that these students (and the professor, Ron Howard) would become sensitive to God’s presence in their lives. Pray also that Jimmy and Lynn (the other Chi Alpha student in the class) would have opportunities to talk with their classmates about spiritual things.

Also, please pray for more cool opportunities to share the gospel at Stanford!

In case you’re curious, a complete set of notes from my presentation is available. I warn you–unless you have a background in libertarian or objectivist political thought it may seem kind of weird. Trust me–it made sense to my target audience.

Religion and the Maxim Society

These are notes from a lecture I presented on “Religion In the Maxim Society” in Ron Howard’s class on Voluntary Social Systems (no class website that I could find).

In case you’re wondering, a maxim society is one in which every law flows from the maxim that “peaceful, honest people have a right to be left alone.” It is a theoretical society without any coercion and with maximal freedom. If you weren’t in the class, this won’t make much sense to you–my apologies. I put this online to help out the students from the class, not to educate the Internet at large about my hypothetical musings on theoretical societies.

If you were in the class, these notes should be close to what I said but not completely identical. Two reasons: I didn’t deliver my notes verbatim and I tweaked one or two points in response to some of the questions that let me know where I had been unclear. Also, in these notes I have attempted to provide all my sources and to hyperlink any references to make it easy to check me out.


Academics Often Ignore Religion (foolishly)
In the world of academics, religion is often overlooked. This point is illustrated quite strikingly by British economist Ernst Schumacher in the opening lines of his book A Guide For the Perplexed:

On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: We dont show churches on our maps. Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. That is a museum, he said, not what we call a living church. It is only the living churches we dont show.

It then occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps. (E.F. Schumacher, A Guide For the Perplexed page 1)

Today I want to help you take a look at the likely nature of religion in a society in which all laws flow from the maxim, Peaceful, honest people have the right to be left alone.

Or, to flesh out the terms in the maxim: People who do not use force on others and who fulfill their contractual obligations to others have the right to not be coerced.

Such a society is a staple in the genre of science fiction. As a science fiction fan, Im always amazed at the widespread assumption in such tales that religion will have at most a marginal role in future societies, and that if religion does survive it will be in a virtually unrecognizable form.

The reasons for such an assumption are myriad, and I could spend the rest of this class period raising and countering them.

Ill give you just two reasons why such an assumption is nave.
Continue reading “Religion and the Maxim Society”

The Message at Gospelcom

Hey– the Bible Gateway now includes The Message translation!

Hey– the Bible Gateway now includes The Message translation!

This is great–I used to use QuickVerse for my sermon prep, but then I got a computer with Windows XP and QuickVerse wouldn’t run under XP. Shortly thereafter, we moved to Palo Alto and got broadband access.

As a result, I use online tools all the time in my sermon prep. My sole regret has been that I haven’t been able to access the Message in all that time. That’s a bigger deal than it would be with most translations, since there is no concordance to the Message. Either you search it electronically or you just rely on your memory.

Now the three translations I use most often are available using the same online tool: The Message, the Contemporary English Version, and the New Living Translation.

The Cold Reaches of Heaven

Sojourner Magazine just ran an article about Nobel laureate William Phillips called The Cold Reaches of Heaven. Phillips is a Christian, and he has something interesting to say about the relationship between science and religion:

“I’m not an anomaly,” he says emphatically. “In fact, I would say that if you were to ask, the majority of physicists would answer that they believe in God in one form or another. Maybe not in exactly the same way that I do, because I believe in a personal God, but God in one form or another.”

in a later section he comments:

“If I want to know how the universe went through its stages of development, I ask observational astronomy and theoretical cosmology,” says Phillips. “If I want to know why are we here, why is there a universe in the first place, or what is the nature of my relationship to my Creator, I turn to the Bible. But when I study cosmology as a science, when I study physics, one of the things that I learn is that there are very clear, beautifully simple laws that describe almost everything that I observe. I see that kind of simplicity and beauty, and I think, this is a put-up job, this didn’t happen by chance.” Phillips laughs.

“That’s a way in which science informs my faith. I don’t want to compartmentalize them, but I am clear that there are questions that are well-posed to science and questions that are well-posed to religion. But they’re not completely separate entities.”

FYI: I’ve updated our list of famous scientists who are Christian with a link to the article.