I arrived in Auckland 5:15am Christmas day after a pretty good flight – a little bumpy, but I mostly slept well and it seemed to go quite quickly. I spent most of the day at my sister Michelle’s place with Mum and Dad and my brother Jonathan (and managed to squeeze in a 5 mile run). On Monday my other sister Lynette and her family came up and we were all able to get together at Mum and Dad’s.
Here are a few photos from the last couple of days.
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Sydney Morning Herald, December 22
Another article in the Sydney Morning Herald today questions the chances of stable government emerging from the Iraqi election. A couple of quotes –
Acknowledging the difficulty of forming a national government for voters from within the ghettos and fiefdoms of their tortured demographics, the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, sounded surprised and despairing. “It looks as if people have preferred to vote for their ethnic or sectarian identities,” he said. “But for Iraq to succeed there has to be cross-ethnic and cross-sectarian co-operation.”
…Across Baghdad, Sunni leaders, who had boycotted the democratic process up until last Thursday’s poll, were claiming that the vote was rigged. They couched their demand for a new election in terms that amounted to a threat to reverse back into the arms of the insurgency that has paralysed the country since mid-2003.
Washington’s best hope is that Tuesday’s anger and rhetoric are tactical, rather that heartfelt. But its hopes for a government of national unity dimmed as some commentators read the outcome as further proof of a country falling apart, rather than coming together.
More cause for concern I think.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that the Auckland Regional Council had bought a 51Ha block of land at Pakiri north of Auckland. The NZ Herald reported yesterday that the ARC has also just bought another 126Ha at the southern end of the beach. If I’m not mistaken this is the land in the foreground of the first photo and in the background of the second photo that I previously posted here.
All good stuff. And hopefully some time in the next couple of weeks I will actually get to visit there again.
There’s been a lot of debate in the US this year about how evolution should be taught in schools and whether Intelligent Design should also be given visibility. A high profile court case has been underway for some time in Dover, Pennsylvania, in which a group of parents opposed to ID sued the school board to prevent them allowing a statement sympathetic to ID to be read to students. Their core argument is that ID is a religous position and under the US constitutional separation of church and state should have no place in a high school science curriculum.
The judgement in the case has just been announced today and is described in an article on philly.com. Judge John Jones has sided with the plaintiffs, and made a pretty scathing attack on ID as a religously motivated idea. Here are a couple of quotes:
Jones decried the “breathtaking inanity” of the Dover policy and accused several board members of lying to conceal their true motive, which he said was to promote religion…
the judge said: “We find that the secular purposes claimed by the board amount to a pretext for the board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom.”
Let me say first of all that I don’t yet have a position on ID as a scientific proposition, and I think that it is unwise to advocate teaching ID in science classrooms when it has such little support in the scientific community. However, it is clear to me that ID does make claims that are properly within the bounds of scientific enquiry and do not depend for support on any religous viewpoint. For that reason, it is disappointing to me that the judge has completely mischaracterized the substance of ID.
There is a very comprehensive review of the judgement on the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News and Views website.
The judgement itself (139 page pdf document) can be found here.
I dont feel like I’ve had a huge amount of success with movies lately, but I watched this one in the last few days and really enjoyed it immensely. I’d never heard of it before but I thought it was great. It’s the story of a guy who inherits a defunct isolated railway station when his boss dies from a heart attack. He happens to be a “little person”, and the story is about the relationships he forms with mainly two other people that he meets (and to lesser extent a third person).
He is a very introverted person, played brilliantly by Peter Dinklage, and develops friendships with these two people through the influence of one them, a hilariously gregarious Cuban guy who runs a hot dog and coffee stand outside the station. The other person is a divorced woman, played by Patricia Clarkson (who I don’t think I’ve seen before, but who was also excellent), who is mourning the death of her young son a couple of years earlier.
What is interesting about the story is the different ways that each of the characters, particularly Dinklage’s, experience the processes of forming these friendships, conditioned by their own particular idiosyncracies and insecurities. After initial tentative efforts at getting to know each other they suffer something of a falling out, and two of them attempt suicide, but in the end they forge renewed bonds. Very good acting all round. Great stuff.
Sydney Morning Herald, December 21
From an article entitled “US hopes of secular Iraqi state fade away” -
…a religious alliance is in the box seat. These parties are already imposing a strict religious code on daily life across swathes of the country and are closely aligned with neighbouring Iran, one of George Bush’s “axis of evil” enemies.
I have generally been a skeptic about the rationale for the war, though I haven’t had much chance to comment on it here (and won’t do so in detail now). This observation in the Herald adds to my concern. The US can put democracy in place, but if fundamentalist Islamic thought dominates public opinion, it’s not clear to me that that will be conducive to the kind of freedoms that are generally valued in the West, nor the generally cooperative attitude to international relations to which most Western nations subscribe.
Of course freedom is not an absolute, and maybe a measure of personal freedom can co-exist with a fundamentalist religous government. It will be interesting, however, to see what provision is made for religous and political freedom.
Just three more days and I’ll be heading off to God’s Own Country. It’s been a busy few weeks, and I am totally looking forward to seeing family and soaking up some South Pacific sunshine. However I don’t actually start my vacation till the new year, so I will be working remotely for a week.
I had a great weekend. Saturday night was the annual Singles Christmas Dinner at HBC, and Sunday night I greatly enjoyed dinner with some dear friends.
I’ve managed a little bit of running in the past week. Given the (small) amount I’ve been able to do in the past few weeks, there’s not much chance of breaking any personal speed records at present, but I think I’ve managed to break some personal records for running temperatures, heading out on Sunday in about 6F (about -14C). It’s been something of a revelation to me to find that I can actually run in those conditions (with the help of the appropriate apparel), and it’s actually pretty nice out in the snow when the streets are so quiet in the mornings.
I managed a full six miles on Saturday, which was a major relief after some earlier knee problems, but on Sunday I only got to three miles before breaking down. I stll think the cold weather has something to do with it, but in any case I’ll probably resume running when I get to NZ.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading around the subjects of science, evolution and intelligent design, and have got to thinking that I might write a book related to these areas. I just see such a lot of confusion and misrepresentation on these subjects and I think my background in research may give me an ability to add something useful to the debate.
I’m in Phoenix for a few days. A little warmer down here – 67F forecast for today 
I flew down yesterday afternoon with my boss. On the plane I started reading a book I bought following the Boston University debate on Intelligent Design a few weeks ago – “The Plausibility of Life” by Kirschner and Gerhart. People on both sides of the debate mentioned this work and claimed that it supported their position.
I’ve only read one chapter but it’s looking very interesting, not least because I can see similarities between the way they describe biological processes and the way we architect some of our software systems.
I came across several new things on the Emerging Church this week – a topic I have an interest in mainly because it seems to want to challenge many emphases in contemporary evangelicalism.
Scot McKnight’s JesusCreed blog has four articles dealing with what the emerging church is. He covers the issue under four topics -
I don’t have time to present a full analysis of these articles right now, but I would say that they probably represent the most comprehensive description of emerging principles currently available on the web. And in general my impression is that much of what the emerging church is said to be criticizing in the conservative evangelical church is really a bit of a straw man.
I also came across a paper today critiquing the emerging church – “An Ecclesiological Assessment of the Emerging Church Movement“, by John Hammett, from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Again, I don’t have time to give a comprehensive review here. However, one thing that I think is interesting is that Hammett responds to one particular thing that emerging church people talk about, which is the assertion that the church needs to be able to communicate the gospel to the postmodern culture. However what McKnight’s article makes clear is that the issue with postmodernism in the emerging church is actually that they believe it is necessary to adopt some of the philosophical approaches of postmodernism in order to apprehend the truth of the gospel.
As far as I can tell this is a wholly different issue. And if Hammett found much to express skepticism about in the claim that the church needs to do a better job of communicating to postmoderns, I think there is much more to be uneasy about with this deeper claim.
A December 4 article in the NY Times included the following comments -
The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.
“They never came in,” said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.
“From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don’t come out very well in our world of scientific review,” he said.
In his blog, Uncommon Descent, Bill Dembski responded with the following -