Blog@GraceJunction

Imagine you were forced to parachute yourself on to the Alps with a bottle of water in your hand. As you touch ground, it starts snowing heavily and so you take cover inside a cave. Keeping down the bottle in your hand, you clean the snow off your attire and then go out to gather rest of your gear. When you return in a few minutes, you observe that the bottle of water has frozen. What was water in liquid form is now ice. You panic and frantically try to search for someone who did this act, but there’s nothing in the cave. Eureka ! you cry out, nothing can convert water in to ice, and you write a book on the theory of everything  and try to explain that God is now fully kicked out from the equation.

This is exactly what Stephen Hawking’s new book “The Grand Design” is trying to explain mankind, about how everything that is, has come in to being. Stephen’s book although has not ignited physics, as the theory proposed by him is just an old idea in a new garb. It is a simplistic approach, yet in our secular age it is one that seems to have resonance with a skeptical public. The reason the book has sparked lot of discussion is the philosophical conclusions that he is drawing from his proposed theory. (more…)

 
Dear Professor,

Your lecture yesterday on the evolutionary theory, well articulated and decorated with witful takes on God and religion has left many questions in my mind. You said that scientific evidence to prove the origin of the universe and the evolution of the species has proved beyond doubt that there is no God. And you were quick to add that such a view did not support a nihilistic approach to erase values and principles on which the society stands, although your hastiness to add this disclaimer seemed like the inevitability of the same. And that made we wonder about the viability of this whole theory. (more…)

The much awaited monsoon had finally descended on our city with a few continuous and long spells. I ve always looked forward towards this time thru the year, a time to be drenched by the rains. It a great time of relief as the cold drops touch you face and drip in to your soul to soothe. This time I was with my son, who equally enjoys the rains. It was fun splashing and jumping in the poodles created in the courtyard of our house. Suddenly my son stopped playing and asked me a question – Dada where does this water come from, Is there a shower tap in the skies? Does God operate them ?. Why are there bubbles in the water? Why is water flowing away, I want to play, why cant we stop it. Later he would cry when the rains would stop or when it would just drizzle and I would tell him, ask God to open the shower. However these questions lingered in my mind and put me on to do some research on this simple thing called water. And I found there is much more beyond this simple thing called water. (more…)

A couple of months back, I was sitting on the porch with my son. A heavy spell of rain had just come to an end. There was water all over in the parkway and both of us sat down to enjoy the freshness that the rain had ushered in.

Suddenly my son spotted some movements in the water, that had collected in the parkway. He immediately questioned me,  Dada what’s that in the water ? I realized that there were ripples and bubbles’ springing up in the water as rain was still drizzling. I replied to him, Son its rain. He immediately sprang back and replied, but Dada, there’s no rain. He was true in one sense as we really couldn’t see the rain drops. (more…)

How did the whole creation come in to being? This is the question which still divides the American people, which was also the subject of a court room dialogue back in 1925.

The story goes like this, a famous American defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, while defending a school teacher charged for teaching evolution, called William Jennings Brian, the prosecuting attorney and an avowed Biblical scholar, as a defence witness! Then began a series of questions designed to undermine a literalist interpretation of the Bible. From Noah to Jonah, from Moses to Adam …. After initially contending that everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there, Brian finally conceded that the words of the Bible should not always be taken literally. In fact, in response to some relentless questioning on the number of days taken for creation, Brian replied that “My impression is that they were periods and not 24 hour days.” This clinched the day for Darrow, as it was assumed that one such ‘period’ could be infact a few hundred million years and it is plausible to assume that a Biblical day could be the same as a huge geological epoch or era , big enough to accommodate all the evolutionary changes required by Darwinism.

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I was meeting my friend who working with a premier market research agency, after a very long time. We discussed the case of ‘skippies’ and the discussion took some interesting twists. My friend interrupted the discussions to leave. He had to finish off his business engagements and he promised to return later in the evening to continue our talk. As he walked to the door, he walked past several ‘skippies’ inside the café, and he looked back at me and smiled. I was planning to leave when this young man, apparently having overheard our conversations came over to me to talk.
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