Rozey Thorn Trees

40 has been my friend for years (I've been rounding up ; )...Happy birthday to me!

“If our highest goal in life is the good of our family, then...we will tend to care less for other families. If our highest goal is the good of our nation, tribe, or race, then we will tend to be racist or nationalistic. If our ultimate goal in life is our own individual happiness, then we will put our own economic and power interests ahead of those of others....[O]nly if God is our summum bonum, our ultimate good and life center, will we find our heart drawn out not only to people of all families, races, and classes, but to the whole world in general.” —Tim Keller in The Reason for God, summarizing Jonathan Edwards’s The Nature of True Virtue, a treatise on social ethics (175).

"When a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and reported that he had not found God, C. S. Lewis responded that this was like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare...." —Tim Keller, The Reason for God (126)

"....The physicist Gerhard Robbins observes that strictly speaking no hypothesis or theory can ever be proven. It can only be disproven. When we say we believe a theory, what we really mean is that we are unable to show that the theory is wrong, not that we are able to show beyond doubt that the theory is right. A scientific theory may stand for years, even centuries, and it may accumulate hundreds of bits of corroborating evidence to support it. If a theory is always vulnerable and a single conflicting finding is all that is required to throw the hypothesis into disarray and call for a new theory, one can never know when such conflicting evidence will arise. Perhaps it will happen tomorrow, perhaps never, but the history of science is strewn with the ruins of mighty edifices toppled by an accident or a triviality...."

"Scientists are very reluctant to ever say that a theory is 'proved.' Even Richard Dawkins admits that Darwin's theory cannot be finally proven, that 'new facts may come to light which will force are successors ... to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition.' But that doesn't mean that science cannot test theories and find some far more empirically verifiable than others...." —Tim Keller, The Reason for God (125).

"What she thinks about you is none of your business!" —Ellen Airgood

Yay! Laura published a back to school article in the Families First Monthly, Aug/Sept 2012: "English As A Second Language Students Go Back To School" (page 6) Families First Aug/Sept 2012

"...the argument from beauty or truth or morality is a lot better when we are dealing with it conversationally than when we are having out some debate with it. Frankly, often our behavior when we're arguing points argues against some of the best things we have going for us as Christian apologists, that is the power of beauty, the power of truth, the power of love, the power of reconciliation." —Michael Spencer

I was very pleased that my favorite jeans fit me well today until my wife observed the big rip: "Did you go out this way?" "Yes." (Cue embarrassed wife.) .... R.I.P. my favorite pants

"Some people value beliefs above relationship and in so doing lose the truth of love. Some people value relationship above beliefs and in so doing lose the love of truth. It is far more important for us to value belief and relationship. In doing so we will have both truth and love. The two cannot be separated. I hold strongly to my Christian faith. But, I hold as strongly to the people in my life that God has called me to love." — Jeff Grenell