Monday, July 09, 2007

Book reviews - July 9

As you can probably tell from my changing reading list, I have been doing a good bit of reading lately. I must say that reading real books is so much more interesting than only reading medical journals and medical charts. I have finished two more books recently, so I'll share my thoughts on them.


How Now Shall We Live? by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey
This is an excellent book on Christian worldview and I highly recommend it. I can't say that there was a lot that was new for me, but I did get a new perspective on things. The book is split into five parts: Worldview: why it matters, Creation: where did we come from and who are we?, The Fall: what has gone wrong with the world?, Redemption: what can we do to fix it?, Restoration: how now shall we live?.

The authors make a good case for the encouragement of Judeo-Christian values throughout our culture. They also make a strong argument for our working to develop these values in ourselves, our communities, and our nation. They don't just say to get involved in politics, but say to get talking to our friends and neighbors (sounds a lot like the Great Commission!).

The one thing in the book that challenged me was their assertion that "the medium is the message" meaning that the media of pop culture (TV, videos, contemporary music) make it easy for us to become lazy. We have a hard time focusing on anything for any length of time. So, many very intelligent people don't read books because they can't/won't focus for long enough to really read anything. Our music, even Contemporary Christian, is so simple as to allow us to listen and only feel without any thinking. Now, I'm not ready to give up my CCM music, but I did take this as a reminder of the importance of having a wide variety of music in our home. So, today I put on a classical music station (I normally play classical music when the kids are doing schoolwork, but today I had it on while I was cleaning) and Wild Man sat down and just listened. Then, Mr. Math Teacher said, "The bad news is that our son is a head-banger. The good news is that he's head-banging to Beethoven!" Indeed, Wild Man was enjoying a Beethoven trio.

Reading isn't an issue in this house. We use Sonlight curriculum, which is literature based, so we read out loud every day. We also read out loud even when we aren't doing school work (we're waiting with bated breath for the next Harry Potter book!). But, I did realize that one result of our "do everything quickly" culture is that we spend very little time in devotional time. So many Bible studies are advertised as "learn this topic in as little as 15 minutes per day". If you study history, though, the people who really made a difference for Jesus spent hours a day in prayer, meditation, and studying Scripture. I'm still struggling to get in a total of 30 minutes. So, it's important to help our kids develop the habits of reading and praying in more than a cursory fashion.

My conclusion is that this is an excellent book about worldview. I think everyone will be challenged on some level, even if you are familiar with most of the material.

The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism by Ronald Numbers
One of the first things that I noticed about this book was in the introduction. Dr. Numbers was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, but when he was exposed to evolution, his faith didn't have good answers for him. Consequently, he is now an atheist.

That being said, he is very sympathetic to his subject and treats it fairly. Basically, the book traces Creationism (generally, literal young-earth 6 literal day creationsm) from the time of Darwin to the 1980's. It was a little difficult at times to really get engaged in the book when there were names of different men from different universities who were starting different organizations. But, I did get through, and I'm glad I did.

One of the most interesting things that I noticed was that the tenets of Young-Earth Creationism developed along with other Fundamentalist ideas, specifically premillenial dispensationalism. That isn't to say that there were no YEC'ers around before Darwin (think Ussher), but it had never really been a big deal and wasn't discussed very often. But, since many Christians saw where Darwinism leads (naturalistic materialism without a need for God), they went to Genesis and read the first several chapters very literally. The YEC thought went very nicely with those who read Revelation very literally. So, for the Fundamentalists, there was no room for a discussion of the types of literature they were reading. They read it literally, took it at face value, then went to find science to support it.

I also have concluded the importance of teaching our children real science and getting them prepared for the real world. Now, I hold to an "Old Earth Creationist" view (although this view has it's problems, too), but my kids need to know what the theory of Evolution is about, what support there is for it, and what science says that does not support it. When they start to hear evolutionary theory in college or wherever, I want them to have enough understanding to know that scientifically intelligent people can and do disagree on this topic. In addition, I want my kids to have a real relationship with Jesus - something that you don't just walk away from. I think it is very sad that learning about evolution can drive someone to atheism.

I really recommend this book for anyone interested in the creation/evolution debate. Understand that it's not really exciting, but it is very illuminating.


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