Supernatural

Ever have a conversation where you think you're communicating, and yet at the end of the discussion you realize you've been talking past one another for an hour or more? Yeah, tonight Derrick and I had one with Tad Colver about intelligent design and why it isn't science. The crux of the misunderstanding was that we were claiming a hard and fast boundary between the natural world and the supernatural world--taking "God off the table," so to speak. Tad seemed to think that division somehow required atheism, or implied science requires that God not exist. It took us a while to convince him that really all we were saying was that science can't test God, and religion can't refute science. God, and all the supernatural, are outside the realm of the testable by science. We will always have the unknown, the time before time, the existence outside the universe to contemplate; it's just that some things that today fit into the category of "supernatural" will eventually be explicable by natural laws. The inevitable clashes with religion will come as we move things from supernatural (like the creation) to the natural with the corresponding scientific explanations (evolution).

Dinner was quite nice--it was good to see Mary, and great to hold her nearly one month old son, Eddie. Sylvia's really grown up, and seeing her next to a younger infant shows just how much she's grown. She's much stronger than she was a month ago, able to hold her head up much of the time, has better control of her muscles in general, and is so much more interactive. She smiles and laughs, and is really quite social (at least, as long as she isn't tired).