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All references from NASB. In the year of Jesus’ death, Thursday was a very important holy day in the Jewish lunar calendar.  The week of the Passover (or Pesach) was under way.  According to Leviticus 23:3, there was a Sabbath day to be celebrated every week on the day called Shabbat which commemorated the seventh day of creation – the day God rested from all His work.  However, there were a number of other “holy convocations” that were held throughout the year.  Every Shabbat was a holy day, but these other holy days were really “high” holy days.  They might be called “great” Sabbaths (John 7:37).  Please consult Leviticus 23:5, 23:7, 23:21, 23:24, 23:27-32, 23:35-37 for more insight, paying particular attention to verses 31-32. In the gospel accounts, the religious authorities were really in a bind.  They wanted the death of Jesus to happen as soon as possible, but they also had to attend to the high holy day of the week of Pesach (John 19:31).  They were worked up and probably had the Roman government on their side and could not wait to tend to the matter of the killing of Jesus, but it would be inappropriate for them to be involved in an execution on a high holy day.  The Romans could not be trusted to do [...]

In a previous blog, The Science Box, I looked at the problem created when God is considered from a scientific perspective.  The scientific method has evolved over time to assure that all persons who are called scientists can find common ground for discussing scientific findings.  That method limits or constrains two important aspects of science.  First, it channels the lines along which various theories are allowed to develop.  In so doing it disallows some channels.  Second, it provides fairly strict rules for the pursuit of knowledge that either supports or refutes various claims made from the theories.  Within the context of science itself, this is a very reasonable arrangement. So far all is well.  Here’s the problem that discussion created for us.  The scientific method places requirements on both the questions we ask and the way we ask the questions.  That’s what the first paragraph was about.  What if we want to ask a question a different way?  Well, if we do that we have to do a lot of other work just to “prove” that is a valid way to ask the question.  Science expands in that way, but it is hard.  But when it comes to the questions we ask it gets a lot trickier.  One requirement of science is that whatever question we ask must be one that suggests we can find [...]

I want to briefly examine why there seems to be such a conflict between science and perceptions of God.  In reality there should be no conflict but we need to understand why there should be no conflict in order to appreciate what science is and is not and how that relates to our notions of God. Let’s start by thinking of science as a sort of box for a moment.  That box is not a simple box as we think of such things but we can think of it that way anyway.  The reason that is handy is because a key property of a box is that it can hold things.  Not all boxes can hold all things.  A box may fail to hold something because the box is too small to hold the thing in question.  The box may be large enough to hold the thing in question in terms of its overall capacity, but some dimension of the thing to be held may exceed the capability of the box.  For example, a small box may be 4 inches by 4 inches by 4 inches in its dimensions.  It volume capacity is then 64 cubic inches (4x4x4).  We may have a small object that is only 45 cubic inches in size.  Obviously, 64 cubic inches is quite a [...]