Arrival

If someone were to ask me what I thought of the movie Interstellar, I would enthusiastically speak of some of my favourite parts and tell them how much I had enjoyed the movie. I would give a few outstanding quotes and finish off with the spiritual meaning of those quotes.

Recently, a friend asked me what I thought of the movie Arrival and my immediate answer was, “It was pretty good.” I guess if I was limited to a one sentence answer, that would be it. It is easy to see why no one is rushing to my blog to get my latest movie critique. To say the least, it would be rather uneven.

Arrival is, in many ways, a great movie much like Signs (14 years earlier). In both Arrival and Signs, the directors learned that the best moments of a Sci-Fi movie are those before the aliens are revealed. However, in Arrival, the director realized that one should not reveal too much about the aliens by the end of the movie. Leaving aliens mysterious and shadowy without totally resolving their appearance, behaviour, or motivation makes for a much better movie. Are you listening M. Night Shyamalan?!

However, creating a confusing ending that does not hold up to scientific investigation and covering it with brave and convoluted dialogue does not lend itself to anyone saying, “That was a great movie!” Arrival tries just a little too hard to be clever. Yes, the ending of Interstellar was about time tripping and seeing beyond the constraints of time and space, but it made sense in the movie. There was a natural progression of the characters grasping more and more of this dimension of the universe. It was not a surprise when they got to the point of omni-chronology. You cannot say the same for Arrival. Arrival flows along as an interesting revelation about sociology, war, history, and the nature of espionage and violence before suddenly plunging us into the world of “the future is now” and “yesterday I heard you speak those words that you will say for the first time tomorrow.” It is just too much to take in, in the last few moments of the film.

So, I would still highly recommend Interstellar, Oblivion, and even Signs (mostly for the scare factor) ahead of Arrival. It seems odd that Arrival is getting so much Oscar attention. Perhaps the Academy saw something I didn’t.

Mysteries of the Human Genome

Many who read this blog regularly will know of my interest in human genetics and the evolutionary process by which God guided the creation of humans and imprinted the imago dei upon us. I have frequently written about various creation and evolutionary theories and I recognize that this is a controversial topic in some Christian circles and in discussions with humanistic evolutionary theorists. Some of the greatest evidence that God used evolution to create all life can be found in contemporary DNA studies. We now have the capability to analyze our entire human genome at detailed levels and compare it to ancient humanoid DNA and the genome of other animal species. This has led to remarkable findings as shown in the following quote.

Less than a decade ago, scientists discovered that human ancestors mixed with Neandertals. People outside of Africa still carry a small amount of Neandertal DNA, some of which may cause health problems (SN: 3/5/16, p. 18). Bohlender and colleagues calculate that Europeans and Chinese people carry a similar amount of Neandertal ancestry: about 2.8 percent. Europeans have no hint of Denisovan ancestry, and people in China have a tiny amount — 0.1 percent, according to Bohlender’s calculations. But 2.74 percent of the DNA in people in Papua New Guinea comes from Neandertals. And Bohlender estimates the amount of Denisovan DNA in Melanesians is about 1.11 percent, not the 3 to 6 percent estimated by other researchers.

While investigating the Denisovan discrepancy, Bohlender and colleagues came to the conclusion that a third group of hominids may have bred with the ancestors of Melanesians. “Human history is a lot more complicated than we thought it was,” Bohlender said.  (from Science News October 21, 2016)

 

My own theological paper regarding Denisovan DNA carried by some humans was written in 2010 and 2011 (as partial fulfillment of an MA in Theological Studies at Regent College) just a few months after ancient Denisovan DNA had been analyzed. The paper allowed me to wrestle with theological questions about the nature of the image of God and what makes us human. Such discussion, questioning, and research leads me to understand that my faith in the scientific process and my faith in Jesus, the Son of God, are both well-founded. Both the Bible and the biological world are ways in which God reveals himself to humans. Our theological understandings of both the natural world and the Bible are what must adapt so that we might have a greater perception of God's message for his people.

I encourage us to read widely and in a scholarly fashion. We need not fear what science discovers for it is God who gives us our minds and allows us to discover the insights of our universe. Let us read with the Bible in one hand and scientific writings in the other.

Links:

http://hungerandthirst4.blogspot.ca/2016/03/denisovan-dna.html

http://hungerandthirst4.blogspot.ca/2012/08/adam-and-genetics.html

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neandertal-dna-may-raise-risk-some-modern-human-diseases
http://www.sciencenews.org/article/dna-data-offer-evidence-unknown-extinct-human-relative 
http://spasique.com/genes-of-this-tribe-carry-a-dna-of-a-third-unknown-human-species/ 

If There Is No God

If there is no God, then all that exists is time and chance acting on matter. If this is true then the difference between your thoughts and mine correspond to the difference between shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. You simply fizz atheistically and I fizz theistically. This means that you do not hold to atheism because it is true , but rather because of a series of chemical reactions . . . . Morality, tragedy, and sorrow are equally evanescent. They are all empty sensations created by the chemical reactions of the brain, in turn created by too much pizza the night before. If there is no God, then all abstractions are chemical epiphenomena, like swamp gas over fetid water. This means that we have no reason for assigning truth and falsity to the chemical fizz we call reasoning or right and wrong to the irrational reaction we call morality. If no God, mankind is a set of bi-pedal carbon units of mostly water. And nothing else.
From a debate between Farrell Till and Douglas Wilson. See the transcript here.