Tonight's Full Moon

Tonight’s full moon will appear larger and brighter than any full moon since 1993. That’s because this full moon comes at the point in the moon’s orbit when it is nearest to the earth. When the full moon and this close orbital point coincide, our moon comes nearer than ever, and the nearer it is, the bigger and brighter it looks.1

Tonight’s moon will be less than 357,000 kilometers from the earth. We’ll have to wait until 2016 for it to come this close again.

As an added bonus for those of us in the northern hemisphere, this full moon will be higher in the sky than any other this year. We can look for it nearly overhead at midnight.

Why not plan an evening walk to enjoy this unusual occurance? You won’t need a flashlight because there will be 30% more light than this year’s other full moons.

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1See the notable difference in the size and brightness of the full moon between it’s perigee (when it’s closest to us) and it’s apogee (when it’s farthest from us).

Birth (4)

Samson Slaying a Lion
by Gustave Dore

There was a certain man of Zorah, of the tribe of the Danites, whose name was Manoah. And his wife was barren and had no children. And the angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, “Behold, you are barren and have not borne children, but you shall conceive and bear a son. Therefore be careful and drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean, for behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor shall come upon his head, for the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb, and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines.” Then the woman came and told her husband, “A man of God came to me, and his appearance was like the appearance of the angel of God, very awesome. I did not ask him where he was from, and he did not tell me his name, but he said to me, ‘Behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. So then drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean, for the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb to the day of his death.’” (Judges 13:2-7 ESV)

And the woman bore a son and called his name Samson. And the young man grew, and the Lord blessed him. (Judges 13:24 ESV)

Reading the Classics: Mere Christianity

I’ve been reading along with Tim Challies in his Reading the Classics Together reading program. This week’s reading was Book 1 (Right and Wrong As a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe) from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. This section consists of five short chapters that together argue for the existence of some sort of god—not necessarily the Christian one—from the existence of a universal moral law. (He puts “moral law” in caps. That seems a little quaint, so I’m not going to do it.)

I remember reading this argument when I was still a teenager and being blown away by it. It was the first time I’d read an apologetic work and I loved logical arguments, so I was delighted to discover that my faith could be defended reasonably.

This time around it was the writing that impressed me. I’m experienced enough to understand that while the argument Lewis makes is a fine one, there are limits to the usefulness of arguments like this. But no one explains difficult concepts using illustrations better than C. S. Lewis and that makes his writing captivating.

I had a few thoughts about the argument itself as I read and here’s one of them. I wondered if in chapter 5 where Lewis discusses what we can know about God from the existence of the universe alone, and then what we can know of God from the additional evidence of the moral law that God has put into our minds, if he wasn’t shortchanging (just a little) what the universe itself can tell us about God. Romans 1 informs us, I think, that we know something more than that God is a great artist (Lewis’s conclusion) from the witness of the universe. We can also know that human beings are obligated to worship this great artist that made the universe. In other words, it is not absolutely necessary to argue for a universal moral law written in our minds to come to the place Lewis is trying to put us, the place where we realize that we have “put [ourselves] wrong with that Power” that made the universe.

Does the use of the existence of a universal moral law make the argument stronger? I’m sure it does. But it also it took four chapters to establish the existence of a universal moral law. (And as a side note, I think, sixty years later, when, for example, it seems less certain that everyone agrees that “you ought not to put yourself first,” it might take more than that to do a bang-up job of it.) It doesn’t take four chapters (or more) to establish the existence of the universe, so I’m wondering if the presence of the universe as an argument in itself might be useful if it were pushed further than Lewis takes it. What say ye?

Oh! One more thing. On the ever-exciting punctuation front, I found a comma splice on page 37.