Binging Creation: Intellectually, Spiritually and Physically

Welcome to my website. I am a Christian and avid fan of exploring the Connecticut outdoors. I made this website to help spread awareness of some amazing places in Connecticut and to share my thoughts on Christianity, science and the Bible. I am a physics teacher and consider myself an arm-chair New Testament scholar. An amatuer for sure but a very well read one with an emphasis on historical Jesus research. So I am both a man of science and faith. No, those terms are not mutually exclusive! I believe the natural world proclaims God's glory and showcases the work of his hands. It can be breathtakingly beautiful, humbling and and also terrifically frightening at times.

This is not an apologetics website. I have little interest in traditional evangelical apologetics nor do I find them particularly convincing. If anyone is looking for proof that the Bible is God's word you will not find that here. I share the sentiments of the late Raymond Brown who wrote, "This may disappoint those of you who think proof is needed that the Bible is the word of God-no such proof is possible beyond biblical self-claim and Church doctrine. It is a matter of faith."

I am interested in sharing my thoughts, research and faith. As I was reading Greg Boyd's book, Inspired Imperfection, I couldn't help but be reminded of my own conversion to Christianity and then subsequent crisis of faith. Boyd recounts how in his Church the Bible was considered inerrant and literally true, and anything else was unacceptable. He remembers his pastor saying, "If the earth wasn't created in six literal days, then the whole Bible may as well be a book of lies." Boyd then recounts how he read a few apologetical books of the fundamentalist variety, then went off to university and took a course on evolution and one on the New Testament. In his hubris and religious zeal, he thought he would overturn the establishment but quickly experienced the same thing many other conservative Christians go through. Deconstruction. In his own words, ". . . my year-old faith came crashing down once I found out the Bible is plagued with all sorts of errors." In a similar vein, I too, once set out to explain every single Bible contradiction and alleged error in order to demonstrate that the Bible was clearly the inerrant word of God. After all, if a collection of 66 (or 73 depending on who you ask) distinct books written over thousands of years by many different authors from all walks of life was error free, it clearly had to be the Word of God. Humans make mistakes and there is no way a purely human text like this could ever be error free. The inerrancy of the Bible was, if I could demonstrate it, in my mind, proof that God authored it. My conservative world came crashing down and with a real lack of guidance or access to sources that knew what I was going through, I slowly turned from a conservative evangelical into a liberal and then an agnostic and finally into an atheist. The peace, love and as Boyd puts it, "blissful certainty and sense of purpose" were gone. I was left with what I felt was a largely meaningless and bleak materialistic universe. Again. This type of story is not a rare occurrence and one of the major thrusts of this website is aimed at helping such people. My goal is to help deconstructing Christians and anyone struggling to make sense of the Bible and science in today's world. Being a Christian, to steal a line Marcus Borg borrowed from someone else, should not mean believing forty-nine problematic statements before breakfast! We should not be forced, on intellectual grounds, to bury our heads in the sand. Ostriches don't actually do this and neither should we. The sentiments behind Myron Penner's book The End of Apologetics mirrors my own for this website:

I am writing this book from the vantage point of a member of the Christian community—the church—and I write it for my own edification as well as that of the church catholic. This is therapy as well as theory. I trust it will be obvious that, while I am engaging in a polemic against a certain form of Christian apologetic discourse, my ultimate goal is to open a pathway for faithful witness, not to close down its possibility. [The End of Apologetics]