Quod Scripsi, Scripsi

BioLogos 2

So just this morning I tuned in to Just Thinking and wouldn’t you know it’s Stuart McAllister doing a series on “Naturalism”.

Now, I only heard part 3 of this 4 part series, but it was certainly difficult for me to separate Stuart’s obvious challenge to Naturalism from an attack on the principles of Evolutionary Theory. I will only say that I feel even more that we need to be clear about challenging and refuting Naturalism and Materialism without rejecting good science. God is not threatened by discovery of truth, why should we fear reason? We should certainly challenge ideas that go beyond the evidence, but let’s be careful not to create ludicrous or foolish explanations for ideas that are not, in themselves, anti-Christian.

Stuart did make a very cool point about religion and violence: 130 million people (at minimum) were killed in the 20th century by or in the name of Atheistic regimes. Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, the Khmer Rouge, and on it goes. Religious conflict has never come close to that level of killing, so what do we make of the claims that religion causes all conflict?

BioLogos

I just finished The Language of God by Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project. It was a refreshing viewpoint, as I have long struggled with the apparent conflicts between Biology, Geology and faith. Collins takes the approach that faith and science need not be opponents, that the conflict is perpetuated by extremists on both sides.

Collins’ theology at times seems a bit too liberal for me, though I agree on the crux (sorry) of the argument. The principles of theistic evolution, or as Collins calls it “BioLogos” are these:

1. The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 Billion years ago.

2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.

3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.

4. Once evolution got underway, no special supernatural intervention was required.

5. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.

6. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.

I still need to chew some of this over, but it seems like a very clear and defensible position on biology and the nature of life on earth.

A Virtual Co-location Center

We’re moving forward with the virtual colo based on VMWare. It just seems that with the buzz around virtualization, the demand for space and cooling, the cost of setting up and maintaining hardware (not to mention securing the software), now is the time to offer an affordable hosted virtual machine service. It also helps that the physical colo is full.

Not surprisingly, there’s no central funding for the project, but the WebLion (plone) group is very interested and we’ve gotten very positive feedback from many IT managers around campus and from the commonwealth.

The Bulletin

The new Penn State web bulletin is going live any day now. There are still a few tasks on the list to complete before final hand-off, but it’s functional and the response has been very positive. It’s built on ColdFusion 8, MySQL 5 and Red Hat Enterprise 4 (5 came out too late to switch).

The content is all managed via a web interface, though I’m not completely happy with it. I will probably continue to tinker with it for a few weeks. We’ve also discussed some features for the second round of updates, like exposing the data via RSS and/or custom XML, allowing construction of “booklets” of PDF pages, and other fun things. I’ve already built some code for that and we’ll be talking to the ANGEL folks soon about piloting some features.

These kinds of web-legacy integration projects are picking up steam. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of this type come along, especially as more of the mainframes are exposed via Java or other modern network interfaces.