Albert Mohler writes about “Nature-Deficit Disorder” on his blog: Aliens in Creation — A Generation of Nature Know-Nothings. Here are a few quotes:

BBC Wildlife Magazine reports this month that only half of a sample of nine to eleven year old children in Britain could identify a daddy long-legs. A mere 62% rightly identified a frog. Less than half could recognize a tree as an oak.

The findings prompted Sir David Attenborough, the famous British naturalist, to lament the alienation of children from nature. “The wild world is becoming so remote to children that they miss out,” he explained. It turns out that many children gain whatever minimal knowledge of nature they acquire through watching television — not by first-hand observation.

Attenborough went on to argue that this alienation of children from nature could lead to ecological disaster, since these children would grow to adulthood without developing a sense to wonder and appreciation for the natural world.

The BBC Wildlife Magazine study also revealed that playing outside was the least valued pastime for the nine to eleven year olds. Twice as many children preferred time with the computer.

Author Richard Louv has described this phenomenon as “nature-deficit disorder.” In his book, Last Child in the Woods, Louv told of a young boy in San Diego who explained that he preferred to play inside, rather than outdoors, because the electrical outlets are found indoors. Life temporarily apart from electrical devices was, to this boy, an unattractive (or unknown) thought.

God reveals His glory in creation. How can we read the Psalms with insight if we never look and see that the heavens really are telling the glory of God? Something precious is lost when children — or adults — are alienated from the created world. This choice for alienation is a choice to cut ourselves off from what God has given us to enjoy and to appreciate.

Lots of good stuff here. I praise God for Christian leaders like Mohler who point us back to the value of nature as God has made it.

Grace and Peace

After a long streak of days in the 90s here in Denver, it is 49 degrees Fahrenheit (9 C) at noon, and raining. Ahhhhhh.

Oops. Someone in the news business doesn’t know the difference between Georgia and Georgia. This is from a news report about the Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia. Take a look at the accompanying map:

The story is reported here.

HT: The Map Room

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Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day: a combined visible light/x-ray image of the Cat’s Eye Nebula.

This is a planetary nebula (which has nothing to do with planets). A sun-like star (in the center) is in its dying phase, and is expelling large amounts of extremely hot gas. The purple areas in the center are where the gases are so hot–with temperatures in the millions of degrees–that they emit electromagnetic radiation in the x-ray portion of the spectrum.

Grace and Peace

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday, at the age of 89. I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich back in high school and volume one of The Gulag Archipelago in college. These books portray the savage brutality that is all too common in human experience, and yet offer glimpses of hope as well. Here is a quote from the second volume of The Gulag Archipelago from John Piper’s blog this morning:

It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts…. That is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: “Bless you, prison!” I…have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!

Suffering is an ordinary part of life, and as a Christian I might suffer more in this life than I would have if I were not a Christian. May I accept suffering and trials with God’s peace and joy.

Grace and Peace

I posted “Quotes on atheism” a few days ago, and it has generated a good discussion in the comments section. If you are all interested in atheism in light of the Christian arguments for the existence of God, take a look at the string on comments, and feel free to jump in.

Here are some more quotes on atheism from the March/April 2008 issue of Modern Reformation magazine. All of these are from C.S. Lewis:

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.

Now that I am a Christian I do not have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable; but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.

And his classic statement on Christ:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg–or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for  a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any  patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.

Grace and Peace

From NASA’s Earth Observatory, a global (or at least oceanic) water vapor distribution map:

Dark blue areas have high levels of water vapor in the atmosphere. As expected, these areas are primarily over warm tropical oceans. This satellite-derived data is used to correct sea level information determined by radar from space.

I include it here because it is a cool map.

Grace and Peace

Some quotes on atheism, from the March/April 2008 issue of Modern Reformation magazine:

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. — Francis Bacon

If there were no God, there would be no atheists. — G.K. Chesterton

A god who let us prove his existence would be an idol. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It amazes me to find an intelligent person who fights against something which he does not at all believe exists. — Mohandas Gandhi

To sustain the belief that there is no God, atheism has to demonstrate infinite knowledge, which is tantamount to saying, “I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge.” — Ravi Zacharias

Grace and Peace

Here’s another great image from Astronomy Picture of the Day. Mercury is a rather drab planet, without a whole lot of color variation. By using computers to enhance this image taken by the Messenger probe as it flew by Mercury in January, features of various compositions stand out much more clearly. The colors are no longer natural, but the images become much more valuable for scientific interpretation. The small, bright orange areas, for example, may indicate rocks of volcanic origin.

Grace and Peace

This was the Astronomy Picture of the Day for July 4th. Here’s the description from APOD:

A new star, likely the brightest supernova in recorded human history, lit up planet Earth’s sky in the year 1006 AD. The expanding debris cloud from the stellar explosion, found in the southerly constellation of Lupus, still puts on a cosmic light show across the electromagnetic spectrum. In fact, this composite view includes X-ray data in blue from the Chandra Observatory, optical data in yellowish hues, and radio image data in red. Now known as the SN 1006 supernova remnant, the debris cloud appears to be about 60 light-years across and is understood to represent the remains of a white dwarf star. Part of a binary star system, the compact white dwarf gradually captured material from its companion star. The buildup in mass finally triggered a thermonuclear explosion that destroyed the dwarf star. Because the distance to the supernova remnant is about 7,000 light-years, that explosion actually happened 7,000 years before the light reached Earth in 1006. Shockwaves in the remnant accelerate particles to extreme energies and are thought to be a source of the mysterious cosmic rays.

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