Letters From Grandpa #121

• LETTERS FROM GRANDPA
• 121

Dearest grandchild,

Since an increasing number of you are college age, your grandfather has a growing concern about your education. I have a growing concern that our colleges are becoming places of indoctrination where divergent view are automatically rejected. Take for example this article by Charles Haynes, Director of the Religious Freedom Education Project.

Monday, October 14, 2013

Robert Van Tuinen’s run-in with campus police would be a funny story – if it weren’t such a disturbing example of how freedom of speech is under assault on many American college and university campuses.

As reported in The Daily Caller and elsewhere, Van Tuinen, a student at Modesto Junior College in California, was stopped from handing out copies of the Constitution on Sept. 17 – the 226th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.

College officials informed Van Tuinen that he could get permission to distribute the Constitution, but only if he pre-registered for time in the “free speech zone” – a tiny concrete slab big enough for two people.

Looking over the calendar, an administrator told Van Tuinen that she has “two people on campus right now, so you’d have to wait until either the 20th, 27th, or you can go into October.”

Or consider this: When Professor Thomas Scotto, of Essex University’s department of government, invited Israel’s deputy ambassador to give a talk to political science students, he hoped for “lots of disagreement: that the speaker would express his views and that the students would challenge him”. Instead, a noisy protest outside the venue ramped up into an attempt to storm the building, students in the lecture theatre heckled the Israeli diplomat, and it became impossible for him to begin. With feelings running high, university security said they could no longer guarantee the speaker’s safety. The event had to be abandoned”.

While MANY examples can be cited, permit me one more: “Climate Statistics Prof. Caleb Rossiter: If people ever say that fears of censorship for climate change views are overblown, have them take a look at this. Just two days after I published a piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for Africa to be allowed the all of the above energy strategy we have in the U.S., the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) terminated my 23-year relationship with

them...because my analysis and theirs diverge.

As you are people of faith, here is an encouraging article by Dr. Francis Collins which I have condensed from CNN.COM

“I am a scientist and a believer, and I find no conflict between those world views. As the director of the Human Genome Project, I have led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the information molecule of all living things, as God's language, and the elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a reflection of God's plan.

I did not always embrace these perspectives. As a graduate student in physical chemistry in the 1970s, I was an atheist, finding no reason to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of those patients, who asked "What do you believe, doctor?", I began searching for answers.

I had to admit that the science I loved so much was powerless to answer questions such as "What is the meaning of life?" "Why am I here?" "Why does mathematics work, anyway?" "If the universe had a beginning, who created it?" "Why are the physical constants in the universe so finely tuned to allow the possibility of complex life forms?" "Why do humans have a moral sense?" "What happens after we die?" I had always assumed that faith was based on purely emotional and irrational arguments, and was astounded to discover, initially in the writings of the Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis and subsequently from many other sources, that one could build a very strong case for the plausibility of the existence of God on purely rational grounds. My earlier atheist's assertion that "I know there is no God" emerged as the least defensible. As the British writer G.K. Chesterton famously remarked, "Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative."

But reason alone cannot prove the existence of God. Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page. Ultimately, a leap of faith is required. For me, that leap came in my 27th year, after a search to learn more about God's character led me to the person of Jesus Christ. Here was a person with remarkably strong historical evidence of his life, who made astounding statements about loving your neighbor, and whose claims about being God's son seemed to demand a decision about whether he was deluded or the real thing. After resisting for nearly two years, I found it impossible to go on living in such a state of uncertainty, and I became a follower of Jesus . . . I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God's majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.”

Here is a link to Dr. Collin’s personal testimony:

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+testimony+of+Dr.+Francis+Collins&view=detai l&mid=2D30080684FF4D122C192D30080684FF4D122C19&FORM=VIRE

Dr. Collins latest book is "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief."

I love you,

Grandpa Boyce