Back from CIY, Thank God…

“I stab you in the face…” — Lewis the Unicorn

For the uninitiated, CIY is an acronym for Christ in Youth, our non-denomination’s (Restoration Movement) yearly summer youth conference. Starting this year the high school conference is now known as Move.

This year, our youth group went to the one held in Bolivar, Missouri on the campus of Southwest Baptist University.

This makes the second time I go to CIY, the first was in ’05 at Lee College in Cleveland, Tennessee. Like last time, the conference featured some outstanding speakers and moving (no pun intended) worship sessions.

Paul doing Science on Mars Hill

“Science is not truth; it is, instead, a method for diminishing ignorance” — From “The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory” by J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page.

Whether or not the above definition is accurate or not is an argument which I don’t necessarily intend with this here post. It could be perhaps if I knew the context of the phrase.

I haven’t read the book but I did manage to get the quote from reading a review of the book in the journal Nature, 447, pp.34-35 (2007) during lunch a couple of days ago.

The authors’ contention did get me thinking though: If science is a “method for diminishing ignorance” then can Paul’s outstanding sermon on Mars Hill be counted as science, so-called?

According to Luke,

So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects.

“For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD ‘ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. — Acts 17:22-23

He sought to liberate the members of the Areopagus from their ignorance, did he not?