Name Voyager

This Baby Name Wizard, which tracks names from 1880 till the present, though unfortunately only in the US, is a lot of fun.

Is your name one of the top thousand? Would you feel luckier if it weren't or if it were?

Why not every scientist worships at Darwin's feet

This is an excellent piece in today's SMH.

The writer is John Lennox, who is a visiting scholar of The Centre for Public Christianity.

I thought his last three paragraphs were particularly good:

One scientist views images captured by the Hubble telescope of the unimaginably large scale of the universe and remains convinced of the random nature of a godless existence. Another stares through a scanning tunnelling microscope at the unimaginably small and complex entities of molecular biology and feels compelled to worship the creator. It isn't the science itself that is definitive for the question of the divine.

The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that science simply cannot "adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature". For Gould, it was a mistake to apply scientific principles to questions of metaphysics.

In 2009, when the champagne is uncorked in celebration of Darwin's legacy, we might pause to consider the presuppositions we bring to the question of what his theory tells us about God. There are essentially only two options. Either the wonder of human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a creator. It remains a mystery to me why some people claim it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second.

I also thought this was worth reporting:

Scattered among the world's top scientists are those who do believe in a conscious intention behind nature's processes. I think of people such as Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, and Professor Bill Phillips, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997.

Indeed, the fact that there are brilliant scientists who believe in God and brilliant scientists who don't makes it clear that the conflict is not a simplistic one between science and religion, but between opposing world views - naturalism and theism.

Tricked again

If you take a look at the link, you will note that the blogservant is Cathy McKay. I got there, via an interesting post she wrote at The Sola Panel, which is a ministry of Matthias Media.

Now my daughter Cathy has been married to Philip Krimmer for nine years, but I still get tricked by the fact that she came into the world as a McKay. So when I recently gave her a gift, guess who I wrote the cheque out to? And when I saw a post by Cathy McKay at The Sola Panel, you will know who I thought wrote it.

But I'm glad this got me thinking, because it also prompted me to look at Cathy's blog, which she calls The Best Book Co-op.

There's lots of great stuff there, but I especially like her lovely comments about her husband. How's this for a birthday greeting:

God has given me the best man in the world to be my husband.

Some years ago my Cathy told me that in one place she worked, the women spent all day running their husbands down, so it is great to see one who thinks God gave her a great deal.

But I also really like the other Cathy's comments on motherhood:

I am trying to remember that being a mum is the most significant evangelistic and discipleship enterprise that I will ever be involved in. There are no other common 'one on one' gospel opportunities that I can think of, that are so intense (every waking hour) for so long (years on end). Motherhood is a tremendous missionary responsibility. And it is a wonderful one!

Imagine what great things would happen in the world if other Christians had this attitude to the person they're married to and the children God has given them!