FORT HOOD?Army chaplains working on Fort Hood have been in near perpetual motion since Thursday’s deadly shootings, providing immediate support to the wounded at area hospitals and to first responders, to emergency medical teams, to victims’ families and to teams charged with notifying the families of the dead, Army Chaplain (Col.) Frank Jackson said.

“We support the notification officer and then support the families through pastoral care once the notification is made,” Jackson, a Southern Baptist-endorsed chaplain who as the garrison chaplain oversees all religious services and programs on the Army base, told the Southern Baptist TEXAN.

Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasanis the alleged gunmaninThursday’s killings,which claimed 14 lives, including the unborn baby of a pregnant soldier, and wounded 29 others.

Jackson said 55 chaplains, some from other bases, are on Fort Hood but are spread thin as families of victims arrive and as chaplains partner with behavioral health teams to help those who witnessed the tragedy in what Jackson termed “psychological first-aid meetings.”

“The chaplains are there to support those involved and to provide pastoral care as those persons require it,” Jackson explained. “We have great chaplains who have done an amazing amount of work in the last four days in making sure that families and soldiers and support personnel and those involved in the incident are treated with dignity and respect and encouraged and bring some healing and reconciliation. That’s what we do.”

The chaplains are also heavily involved in the planning of a base memorial service planned for 1 p.m. Tuesday, with reports that the president and first lady plan to attend.

Jackson said there was a mood of anticipation on the base Monday about Tuesday’s memorial service, which he said would hopefully “give those involved a point of reference to look back to as a transition time in the grieving process. It should be very, very powerful.

“And then, the people who have been the caregivers at this point have gotten a little tired. And so we’re trying to adjust schedules to make sure they are getting the rest cycle they need so that they can provide care when it needs to be provided later on down the road.”

Jackson said Southern Baptists can pray that God would grant the chaplains the grace to continue the mission long term, and to identify people who need encouragement or who didn’t process their grief adequately.

“This obviously has been a pretty traumatic experience,” Jackson said. “You don’t have this happen every day. The old adage is true that you don’t want to deal with feelings dead; deal with them alive.”

Jackson said the motto of his office is found in the Apostle Paul’s exhortations to “remain steadfast” and to “not grow weary on well doing.”

“We have to take care of one another so that we may take care of others,” he said.

FORT WORTH?Scholars debunked myths concerning the relationship between science and faith during an inaugural conference sponsored by the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, Oct. 23-24. The conference, titled “Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?” was held on the campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

Aided by certain myths, many people perceive an historical conflict between faith and science, said conference speaker Michael Keas, professor of the history and philosophy of science in the College at Southwestern and a senior fellow with the Center for Science and Culture. In reality, faith played an essential role in the development of the modern sciences.

“It’s like there are huge erasers that have erased our cultural memory of all of the incredible, rich Christian theological roots for science,” Keas said. “And we come into a modern science classroom today, and it is like none of this happened. ? We have got to remember the past. ? Secular scientists today are living off of capital they borrowed from Christianity, and they haven’t given us credit for it. And I think that needs to stop today.”

Two of the most common myths about the historical relationship between faith and science remain in school textbooks to this day, Keas said. According to the first myth, medieval Christians thought the world was flat until Christopher Columbus proved otherwise in his 1492 discovery of the Americas. On the contrary, people knew that the earth was a sphere even in ancient Greece, and this belief was passed onto the thinkers of the middle ages. Any debate in Columbus’ time lay in the size of the earth rather than its shape.

Second, Keas said, it is popularly believed that Copernicus dethroned man from his privileged place in the universe when he discovered that the earth revolved around the sun. To the contrary, medieval men believed that the earth’s central position in the universe implied that it was unprivileged and merely the dregs of the cosmos. For medieval men, Copernicus’ discovery placed the earth in a more privileged position, where it was able to “participate in the dance of the stars.”

Keas argued the Christian faith has actually upheld modern scientific pursuits. In fact, Christianity developed the philosophical foundations upon which science depends. The concepts supported by Christian doctrine include the comprehensibility of the world, the unity of the cosmos, the relative autonomy of nature and the existence of mechanical laws of nature. Also, God’s absolute power and freedom in creating the universe allowed scientists to consider counterfactual examples; that is, scientists realized the universe could have been made in other ways. Because of this belief, they recognized that armchair logic could not in itself reveal how the universe worked. They needed to observe the universe firsthand to see how it actually runs.

In another session of the conference, Jay Richards, a senior fellow with the Center for Science and Culture and co-author of “The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery,” corrected a common misunderstanding about the relationship between Intelligent Design (ID), natural theology and the theology of nature. According to Richards, many opponents of the ID movement claim that it is merely religion in disguise as science. This conclusion, however, is incorrect.

Richards said many opponents of ID critique it based on inaccurate definitions. He said ID proponents make two basic assertions: First, “the activities of intelligent agency are sometimes detectable.” Commonly accepted fields of science are based on the assumption that scientists can observe the effects that intelligent beings have upon nature. Archaeologists, for example, put this into practice when they examine artifacts they believe to be manmade, and forensic scientists apply this principle when they attempt to trace the proof for intelligent causes in homicide cases.

Second, Richards said, ID proponents suggest that “nature exhibits the evidence of intelligent agency.” He added that this aspect of ID is “theologically minimal.” Although ID proponents may observe signs of intelligent activity in nature, they cannot prove scientifically that the intelligent designer is the god of a certain religion, or that the designer is even supernatural. Describing the nature of this designer belongs in the realm of philosophical and theological discussion.

“So notice how lightly it travels,” Richards said. “Notice, there is not a doctrine of creation here. There is not a doctrine of God here. There is not a developed theology. There is not even really a developed philosophy at this point. There is just basically these two claims. ?

FORT WORTH?Scientists of the 21st century may discover evidence of design within nature, proponents of the intelligent design movement said in an inaugural conference sponsored by the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, Oct. 23-24.

The conference, titled “Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?” was held on the campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

“I think we can say that there has been a profound shift away from the materialistic world picture that we inherited from the scientists at the end of the 19th century,” said philosopher and geophysicist Stephen C. Meyer, who is director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

“We have evidence of a definite beginning of the universe,” Meyer explained. “We have evidence of design, of intelligent design, from the very beginning of the universe, built into the very fabric of the physical parameters that govern the universe as we know. We have evidence of design arising later along the cosmic timeline, in the form of irreducibly complex biochemical machines, (and) in the form of the origin of life and the information required for that event to occur.”

Meyer said 19th-century scientists like Charles Darwin believed the natural world must be explained “by reference to purely unguided, undirected materialistic processes” and without reference to design. Although secular scientists have inherited this view of the world, some scientists are breaking loose of this philosophy. Among them are proponents of intelligent design (ID), a research program claiming that humans are capable of detecting design and that evidence for design occurs in the natural world.

“The Darwinian view is that things looked designed, but are not really designed because natural selection has the power to mimic a designing intelligence without itself in any way being designed or guided,” Meyer said. “Now that was maybe a credible perspective in the 19th century, but increasingly that idea is straining credulity. Part of the reason for that is what we’re discovering in the inner recesses of the cell, in the nano-world of the molecular machinery.”

Such evidence, Meyer said, can be seen in the seemingly high-tech structure of microscopic systems, such as bacterial flagellum, which are unable to function if any of their parts are removed. This “irreducible complexity” implies that this system could not have developed through a random evolutionary process, apart from an intelligent designer.

“I think the even more fundamental evidence of design in biology is at a deeper level,” Meyer added. “It’s in the realm of information, the information stored in DNA, and ? probably in some other places in the living system as well.”

Meyer developed this argument for design in his 2009 publication, “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.” According to Meyer, scientists have discovered that DNA molecules contain information “in the form of a four-character digital code” that provide instructions for the arrangement of amino acids into proteins that then “form the parts of nano-machinery inside the cells.” This genetic information is necessary for biological life and biological functions, and any new forms of biological life require new information.

“If you want to build life in the first place, you also need information,” Meyer said. Biologists, however, have been unable to identify the source of biological information.

When Meyer was introduced to this problem of the origin of biological information in 1985, he began to read the works of Charles Darwin. After all, he said, Darwin “had pioneered a rigorous method of studying events in the remote past. In fact, his theory of evolution by natural selection was an historical scientific theory. It was an attempt to give a causal explanation for the origins of the forms of life.”

According to Meyer, Darwin’s theory uses a method of reasoning called “the method of multiple, competing hypotheses” or “the method of inferring to the best explanation.” In order to discover what the best available explanation was for the variety in biological life, Darwin borrowed another concept from his own scientific mentor: “If you want to explain an event in the remote past,” Meyer explained, “you should