Vitamin C Provides Evidence for Human Evolution

Hello everyone and happy New Year. Now that I have finished teaching my course on Science and the Christian Faith at Alberta Bible College, I actually have time to write on this blog again! My New Years' resolution is to post one blog a week (I began this resolution today, so ignore the fact that I missed the first week). I certainly have a wealth of things to share from the last semester! Today though I would like to discuss what I consider to be a fairly compelling piece of evidence for the evolution of humans from nonhuman primates, and it comes from a strange source: vitamin C.

Home: A Sermon

The following is a sermon I gave at Pine Lake Life Camp (formerly family camp) over the 2012 May long weekend.

Read Luke10:25-37

HOME: What images or words does this word conjure?

The point for this morning’s talk is quite simple: we all desire home, so loving your neighbour as yourself, being a neighbour to others, means bringing home to the world.  That is the church’s mandate, and it needs to be the basis of our daily living decisions.  We’re going to go through Genesis 1 and 2 to see what home is.  We’ll see how humanity became homeless, but not just humanity; and then we will consider the work of Christ to make this world home again.  Finally, we will see that as Christians we are called to restore this home for others.

Creation, Redemption, and the Church

Last fall, I was invited to give a talk on environmental ethics to the pastors and workers within the Churches of Christ in southern Alberta.  We met at Bow Valley Christian Church in Calgary.   I was nervous going in, knowing that my message would contradict the long-held assumptions of many of those in attendance.  But I was convinced that, being rooted in scripture, they would have no choice but to change their ways of thinking about the environment.  Fortunately, my mind had exaggerated the resistance.  A good number of them already agreed with me, but had not investigated the theology behind it.  Others told me afterward that they were initially sceptical, but I had convinced them.  A third group, in the vocal majority during the Q & A after, but a minority among the pastors, yelled at me and told me to 'get my head out of the sand.'  Fortunately, I think they completely misunderstood my message.  The following is the complete sermon that I delivered, minus the slideshow (when reading Genesis 1-3, I showed pictures of creation followed by human-caused environmental destruction).  Here is the sermon: