melanie's blog

Boiled coke with ginger

Following the footstep of Mel, i have had a taste of that Boiled coke with ginger. It is not too bad actually, much better than i expected. Should give it a try guys.

new 'i' toy

Adding to the family, today we have our new iSqueez. When I first saw it in the living area, I was pretty enthralled and eager to try it, thinking that it will give me the most refreshing and revitalizing calf, ankle and foot massage. I was wrong. It is so painful!!! Ouch…

I think the best in the 'i' range is still the iSymphony. iPamper is great but only if someone else do it for you.

I think I need more time to get to know iSqueez!!!

science

Science originally simply meant the study of the natural world. It was initiated as an attempt to explain the natural world, how it fits in the scale of every other thing that exists. The study of it explains certain truths about the natural world, but the knowledge it reveals is ultimately fractional in the scale of all that exists. For many of the early scientists, their pursuit of science was strongly motivated by their desire to defend their faith in a personal Creator. For Isaac Newton, he believed that scientific study of the world would lead straight to the God who created the world. Science shows us “what is the first cause, what power he has over us, and what benefits we receive from him,” Newton wrote, so that “our duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the light of nature.” The business of science is to “deduce causes from effects, till we come to the very first cause which certainly is not mechanical.”

But today, many intellectuals assume that science is the source of all genuine knowledge. Science has been conflated with scientific naturalism, the philosophy that the natural world is all that exists. Science has become the only source of knowledge and thus everything that exists can be explained in terms of natural forces.

With this philosophy propagating our world, it has immediately reduced by large the sphere of universal knowledge. The fractional knowledge of the explainable natural world has now become all there is to pursue and explore. Any other things or ideas that cannot be reduced to empirical facts or does not contain reasoning based on mathematics – that is, with science – then according to David Hume, an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, “it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” These every other things including love and beauty, good and evil, God and conscience, are being denied, omitted, and pretermitted from human intellect and rendered nothing but rubbish when their very existence suggests a whole new world apart from the natural world yet to be explored and understood.

This scientific naturalism is in every way limiting, limiting human potential and limited in itself. It seeks to subsume everything under naturalistic categories. Human beings are reduced to ‘objects’ or ‘things’ to be inspected, experimented on, and ultimately controlled. This is denounced by philosopher Arthur Koestler as “the ratomorphic fallacy” and described as the “abolition of man” by C.S Lewis, “for it denies the reality of those things central to our humanity: our sense of right and wrong, of purpose, of beauty, of God.”

If we deny the things that make us truly human, in Charles Colson’s words, “we will create a culture that is, by definition, inhuman. If we treat morality as subjective feeling, then moral ideals will be relegated to the private realm, and the public realm will be stripped of all morality. If we deny the reality of the virtues that make us superior to the beasts, then those virtues wither away, reducing is to level beasts. Thus while science has created technological advances that make life easier and healthier, when science is confused with the philosophy of the scientific naturalism, it destroys the very things that make life worth living. We gain control over the natural world at the cost of our own souls.”

So, if the basis for true science is to help our understanding of this infinite universe and lead us straight to the Creator, then has the current understanding of modern science done justice to the original cause of scientific studies? Has modern science in our day and age make human beings more knowledgeable and advanced or more foolish and purposeless?

It is about time for justice to be done to true science.

stuck

Living life in the 21st Century is not an easy thing. It is a place full of sufferings. Unwholesome relationships, unhealthy and unnatural family background, self destructing body, unreasonable high expectations, amoral and disintegrating society, unfair social justice, emotional and psychological struggle, principalities and powers. I have had enough…

If the sufferings we experience now stems from the original act of sin which was committed on the basis of human free choice; and the gift of free choice is given from God to enable human to be fully human, then where do I stand in this?

Maybe for me who have yet to come to terms with what fully human means, these current sufferings are getting the better side of me. If having free choice means I have to bear the consequences of this disintegrating world and somehow embrace and wrestle through the cumulative negative effects it has on my personal life, somehow I would rather not have the free choice to begin with. Maybe it would be a better world if we all live by a certain sets of rules and laws – without the freedom to choose otherwise.

It is true that if we were created with no free choice, we would not be able to experience the fullness of life, how it is to be fully human, experiencing every bit of joy, pain, sorrows, happiness, love, hope…etc. And we might not be able to share in the glory of the Most High. I think to me, as someone who knows and understands too little about what those thing means and how in much greater measure it is compared to my current sufferings, I somehow am feeling the burden and weight of all these sufferings and am barely surviving.

Maybe and maybe, it is time to explore what it means to be fully human and live full as a human as God intended. I am stuck