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I’m reaching way back, here — this music is just about before my time. The music I’m referring to is Scripture in Song, by David and Dale Garratt. My mom used to have two of their albums on cassette (remember cassettes?), and the music is wonderful.

It’s basically what you would expect — portions of scripture set to music. I believe the songs were first written and/or published in the late sixties/early seventies, and the music definitely reflected the times; the recordings that I remember reminded me of 60s folk music, occasionally edging toward folk-rock (maybe). If my memory serves me correctly, I believe many of these sorts of songs were “written” more or less spontaneously, and only after the fact recorded and written down. That spontaneity remained with the songs, and many of them are very moving in a way that I’ve found to be fairly rare in modern Christian music.

I just found a few of the old songbooks on Amazon, but copies of the recordings themselves are elusive, to say the least. That is, I can’t find them anywhere. Anyone out there heard of these, and where they might be found?

It seems that Lenovo and Novell are collaborating to release a laptop pre-loaded with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.

A couple thoughts:

• I know we’re supposed to have short memories these days, but didn’t Lenovo denounce any and all Linux support just a few months ago? I know they retracted that soon after, but to go from simple retraction to releasing a laptop with Suse pre-loaded is a pretty wide swing.
• I really enjoyed using SLED 10 recently, but regular readers will recall that I was put off by the fact that Suse does not have a DVD player… in fact, can’t have one, legally, as there is no “legal” Linux DVD playing software. Novell, if you want to sell Linux on the desktop, pay the license fee to whomever it needs to go and develop a stinking DVD player that’s legal. Thanks.
• All things considered; still a very cool announcement. We (the pro-Linux nuts) are always spouting off that what Linux needs is for vendors to start offering it as an option, pre-installed on PCs and laptops; so I suppose we ought to be happy when we see it happen. ;-)

This will not be a pro-Intelligent Design post, nor will it even be a comparison. I was raised to reject evolution wholesale, but that’s not what I’m going to write about, either.

In the past few years, as Intelligent Design has moved more into the mainstream, consistently I see articles devoted to the viewpoint that ID is not only wrong, but not even worthy of being considered science.

What I’m wondering, is: what would the scientific community actually consider a “real” scientific argument in favor of creation? What would such a thing look like? I’m not trying to formulate such an argument, just trying to envision what the scientific community, in general, would see as a “reasonable” attempt to argue in favor of a universe created by God? That is, if ID is unreasonable, well, what would a reasonable argument look like?

In other words, let’s suppose — just for the sake of argument — that God created the universe. Should we be able to detect this from simply studying observable phenomena empirically? Should we be expecting to find a “signature” at all? What sort of signature (for lack of a better word) could we expect to find which would cause us to come to the conclusion that the universe was designed, rather than the aggregate result of countless random events?

Interestingly, two viewpoints are portrayed in the books I recently completed, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Mind you, this is fiction — but as near as I can tell, Stephenson faithfully portrays some of the ideas of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Newton and Leibniz were both brilliant, and both held that the universe was created by God; they differed in opinion as to how this actually worked out. In simplistic terms, it would seem that Newton held that God was intimately involved in the events and laws of the universe as they unfold — that is, God is right now causing gravity to work, he is holding the universe in its course, and it’s His continuous influence which makes the whole system continue to move. Leibniz, on the other hand, held that God created the universe in such a way that no further divine influence was necessary; once put in motion, it would simply continue as He had designed it without His intervention in its operation.

Interestingly, both also seem to have held that we have free will, another problematic philosophical labyrinth which I won’t even touch on here.

I would expect that any argument supporting the creation of the universe by God would lean towards either Newton’s or Leibniz’ general schemes. I’ll leave it to the reader to decided which sort of viewpoint, if either, seems most reasonable.

So here is what I’m trying to figure out: if I did not believe that we lived in a universe created, on purpose, by God — what could I possibly observe in nature which would cause me to consider that such a thing could be a real explanation for existence?

For me, the only things that stand out are the really interesting unanswered questions of physics. One is an old chestnut: the “Prime Mover” argument. Old argument or not, if we suppose a universe where every object is in motion because it was pushed into motion by some force — what was the first “push”? Also, given the inexorable trend of the universe toward entropy, how strong must this force have been to still be influencing objects today? How long will it last? Will the universe and everything in it eventually just… stop? I will freely admit that I am not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but this is still a very interesting line of questioning to me, one which is still unanswered, as far as I know.

A second line of thinking that is interesting concerns gravitation. Since Newton, we’ve come a long way in understanding how gravity affects objects; Einstein went even further in explaining some observations which couldn’t be accounted for with pure Newtonian physics. However, the actual cause of gravitation is still open to speculation, to the best of my knowledge. That is, we can explain and predict how objects will act in relation to one another with incredible accuracy — we’ve become expert at describing gravitation. But why does it happen?

Thinking along these lines, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that someone would conclude that God is somehow involved in this process. But the vastness of the amount we still don’t know about why the universe works the way it does, or how it all began, would seem to me to allow room for both God and empirical science to co-exist.

As an afficionado of the interweb, you, reader, are most likely aware that Netscape has re-invented itself into what could be called either Yet Another Social Bookmarking Site, or Digg Clone Number x, depending how nice you want to be.

To simplify life for those who like contributing to these sort of sites, an enterprising blogger created diggscaperedlicious, a bookmarklet to submit to digg, netscape, reddit, and del.icio.us simultaneously. Nice.

The idea was requested by Netscape’s Jason Calcanis, and it’s a pretty good idea. For example, I decided to try it out, which prompted me to get a Netscape account. I’d be willing to wager that Netscape gets quite a few new accounts just as a result of this.

The question remains: will I (or others) actually use Netscape instead of digg, reddit, et al? That remains to be seen.

Myself, I still view del.icio.us to be a completely different animal than the other three, but it has it resemblances. So while I will likely always be a del.icio.us user, I have a strong aversion to digg. This results mostly from the puerile comments which the site seems to generate like flies on manure; at some point I decided I just would go to the site anymore. I avoided it for months; when I finally decided to visit it again, they had improved quite few aspects, but I’m still not a digg-evangelist. I grudgingly peruse digg’s front page only because it has the critical mass which ensures that there’s usually one or two interesting links to be found.

Reddit, I’ve always liked; but the community there tends to be a lot more left-wing than I am, so a lot of the highly-rated newsy links get no more than an eye-roll and a down-vote from me… But I still look over the front page at least once a day, it’s something of a habit.

Netscape? It remains to be seen if Netscape is going to be much different than the others. I’m interested enough to pop in for awhile and check it out.

Daylightmap.com is a pretty cool Google-maps hack showing where, right now, it’s day or night on the globe. Kind of cool.

For example, I can see that my co-workers in Bangalore are working in the middle of the night. Which I ought to be able to infer anyways, because it’s on the other side of the planet, but it’s kind of neat to see a graphical representation of it.