PRAYER: Holy Father, we know science and technology have the power to improve lives and change the world -- but to end evil, suffering and death will need you Lord. There is much we do not know or understand but we have Faith in You Lord that through your son Jesus, we have hope and find truth. Please help us remember your WORD, through the gentle nudge of Your Holy Spirit. In Jesus name we pray. AMEN.
Dear reader, we are sharing this TEDTalks from 1998 with Billy Graham giving speech in a technology conference in the Silicon Valley. We hope you will find the following excerpts useful as you read them. God bless Billy Graham and his works in sharing God's word with everyone.
This is not the first time that we've had a technological revolution. We've had others. And there's one that we want to talk about. In one generation, the nation of the people of Israel had a tremendous and dramatic change that made them a great power in the Near East. A man by the name of David came to the throne, and King David became one of the great leaders of his generation. He was a man of tremendous leadership. He had the favor of God with him. He was a brilliant poet, philosopher, writer, soldier — with strategies in battle and conflict that people study even today. But about two centuries before David, the Hittites had discovered the secret of smelting and processing of iron, and, slowly, that skill spread. But they wouldn't allow the Israelis to look into it, or to have any. But David changed all of that, and he introduced the Iron Age to Israel. And the Bible says that David laid up great stores of iron, and which archaeologists have found, that in present-day Palestine, there are evidences of that generation. Now, instead of crude tools made of sticks and stones, Israel now had iron plows, and sickles, and hoes and military weapons. And in the course of one generation, Israel was completely changed. The introduction of iron, in some ways, had an impact a little bit like the microchip has had on our generation. And David found that there were many problems that technology could not solve.
There were many problems still left. And they're still with us, and you haven't solved them, and we haven't heard anybody here speak to that.
How do we solve these three problems?
First one that David saw was human evil.
Where does it come from?
How do we solve it?
Over again and again in the Psalms, which Gladstone said was the greatest book in the world, David describes the evils of the human race. And yet he says, "He restores my soul." Have you ever thought about what a contradiction we are? On one hand, we can probe the deepest secrets of the universe and dramatically push back the frontiers of technology, as this conference vividly demonstrates. We've seen under the sea, three miles down, or galaxies hundreds of billions of years out in the future.
But on the other hand, something is wrong. Our battleships, our soldiers, are on a frontier now, almost ready to go to war with Iraq. Now, what causes this? Why do we have these wars in every generation, and in every part of the world? And revolutions? We can't get along with other people, even in our own families. We find ourselves in the paralyzing grip of self-destructive habits we can't break. Racism and injustice and violence sweep our world, bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death. Even the most sophisticated among us seem powerless to break this cycle. I would like to see Oracle take up that, or some other technological geniuses work on this. How do we change man, so that he doesn't lie and cheat, and our newspapers are not filled with stories of fraud in business or labor or athletics or wherever? The Bible says the problem is within us, within our hearts and our souls. Our problem is that we are separated from our Creator, which we call God, and we need to have our souls restored, something only God can do. Jesus said, "For out of the heart come evil thoughts: murders, sexual immorality, theft, false testimonies, slander." The British philosopher Bertrand Russell was not a religious man, but he said, "It's in our hearts that the evil lies, and it's from our hearts that it must be plucked out." Albert Einstein — I was just talking to someone, when I was speaking at Princeton, and I met Mr. Einstein. He didn't have a doctor's degree, because he said nobody was qualified to give him one.
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