39th Anniversary of the Moon Landing

On July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first two people to walk on the face of the moon. I was twelve and living in Ohio at the time. I remember watching it on TV with my parents and grandparents. My dad, a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, would leave for Viet-Nam for his second tour of duty about a month later. He could recall when they had installed electricity on his parent’s farm while he was growing up. What amazed him most of all about the successful trip to the moon was the fact that it was being televised. He’d always figured we’d get there, he just hadn’t expected we’d get to watch it happen on live TV.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

From the man that brought you Firefly, Serenity, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer:



Check it out; it goes away on Sunday, July 20 at midnight (that is, it will cost money after that; till then, it's free).

Earth and Moon

A video of the Earth and moon taken from 31 million miles away by the Deep Impact probe:

Quote for the Day

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Science Fiction Author Quote for the Day

There is no cause so good or noble that it will not attract fuggheads; and the fuggheads will get all the press

Larry Niven

Mercy

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:...

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Happiness Is Increasing

Americans, and people around the world, are getting happier all the time according to an article at the National Science Foundation. This is consistent with an article I read in Scientific American a few years ago that indicated that most people, in most parts of the world, most of the time, are happy. I wonder if we make a mistake when we accept Voltair's assumption, and that of most critics of theism, who argue that the world is an awful place and that therefore the horrendous suffering of the planet means that there can't possibly be a good, loving, all-powerful God. If most people are happy and getting happier, wouldn't that argue against Voltair's assumption?

Leibnitz argued that if we assume that God is good, loving, and all powerful, then in fact this must be the best of all possible worlds--given the existence of human free will. Perhaps the data supports Leibnitz's position?

Growing Asparagus on Mars

According to Mars Daily, Martian Soil Good Enough For Asparagus:

Washington DC (AFP) Jun 27, 2008 Martian dirt is apparently good enough for asparagus to grow in, NASA scientists said Thursday, as they announced the results of a soil analysis collected by the US Phoenix Mars lander. "There is nothing about the soil that would preclude life. In fact it seems very friendly," said Samuel Kounaves, the project's lead chemist at the University of Arizona in a telephone press conference.

"The soil you have there is the type of soil you have in your backyard," said Kounaves. "You may be able to grow asparagus very well."

The analysis is based on a cubic centimeter of soil scooped up by the lander's robotic arm and introduced into one of its eight ovens, where it was gradually heated up to 1,000 degrees Celsius.

Kounaves said his team was "flabbergasted" at the results that came back.

"We basically have found what appears to be the requirements of the nutrients to support life, past, present or future," said Kounaves.

MSNBC.com reports that while it would be good for asparagus growing, it wouldn't do well for strawberries. The soil is a bit too alkaline.

Overview of SpaceX

Also from the same press release from SpaceX, a nice overview of the company and what they are up to:

About SpaceX

SpaceX is developing a family of launch vehicles intended to reduce the cost and increase the reliability of both manned and unmanned space transportation ultimately by a factor of ten. With its Falcon line of launch vehicles, powered by internally developed Merlin engines, SpaceX is able to offer light, medium and heavy lift capabilities to deliver spacecraft into any altitude and inclination, from low-Earth orbit to geosynchronous to planetary missions. SpaceX currently has 14 missions on its manifest plus indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts with NASA and the US Air Force.

As a winner of the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services competition (COTS), SpaceX is in a position to help fill the gap when the Space Shuttle retires in 2010. Under the existing contract, SpaceX will conduct three flights of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft for NASA, culminating in Dragon berthing with the International Space Station (ISS) and returning to Earth. NASA also has a contract option on Falcon 9 / Dragon to provide crew services to the ISS after Shuttle retirement.

Founded in 2002, the SpaceX team now numbers nearly 500, located mostly in Hawthorne, with four additional locations; SpaceX's Texas Test Facility in McGregor Texas outside of Waco, offices in Washington DC, and launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida and the Marshall Islands in the Central Pacific.

The first Falcon 9 will arrive at the SpaceX launch site at Cape Canaveral by the end of 2008.

SpaceX Conducts Static Test Firing of Next Falcon 1 Rocket

According to a press release I received today, SpaceX conducted a static test firing of its next Falcon 1 rocket:

Hawthorne CA – Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) successfully conducted a full launch dress rehearsal and hold down firing of the Falcon 1 Flight 3 vehicle on June 25, 2008 (Marshall Island Time) on Omelek Island, SpaceX’s launch site at the Kwajalein Atoll. This test is the final step before launch of the Falcon 1 rocket.

This marks the first launch pad firing of SpaceX’s new Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine, which operated at full power with only the hold-down system restraining the rocket from flight. In the coming weeks, SpaceX will conduct a thorough review of all data prior to the opening of the launch window for flight, which runs from late July through early September.

Twenty-fifth Wedding Anniversary

Twenty-five years ago today, my wife and I got married. Things have changed a bit since then: we've added three daughters to the mix.

Theology Quote for the Day

The goal of human life is not death but resurrection.

Karl Barth, TIME magazine (20 April 1962) cover story "Witness to an Ancient Truth"

Stargate Continuum

Teaser trailer for Stargate Continuum:

Solar-Hydrogen House

Not quite cost effective, but it is an interesting technology demonstration, nevertheless:

Mike Strizki has not paid an electric, oil or gas bill—nor has he spent a nickel to fill up his Mercury Sable—in nearly two years. Instead, the 51-year-old civil engineer makes all the fuel he needs using a system he built in the capacious garage of his home, which employs photovoltaic (PV) panels to turn sunlight into electricity that is harnessed in turn to extract hydrogen from tap water.

Although the device cost $500,000 to construct, and it is unlikely it will ever pay off financially (even with today's skyrocketing oil and gas prices), the civil engineer says it is priceless in terms of what it does buy: freedom from ever paying another heating or electric bill, not to mention keeping a lid on pollution, because water is its only by-product.

"The ability to make your own fuel is priceless," says the man known as "Mr. Gadget" to his friends. He boasts a collection of hydrogen-powered and electric vehicles, including a hydrogen-run lawn mower and car (the Sable, which he redesigned and named the "Genesis") as well as an electric racing boat, and even an electric motorcycle. "All the technology is off-the-shelf. All I'm doing is putting them together."

The entire article is interesting: Inside the Solar-Hydrogen House: No More Power Bills--Ever, by David Biello in Scientific American.

Is the Universe All Math?

Discover Magazine has an interesting article, Is the Universe Actually Made of Math, by Adam Frank, theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Rochester in New York. It is an interesting article that is mostly an interview with Max Tegmark, discussing Tegmark's ideas. Tegmark is a cosmologist at MIT:

According to Tegmark, “there is only mathematics; that is all that exists.” In his theory, the mathematical universe hypothesis, he updates quantum physics and cosmology with the concept of many parallel universes inhabiting multiple levels of space and time. By posing his hypothesis at the crossroads of philosophy and physics, Tegmark is harking back to the ancient Greeks with the oldest of the old questions: What is real?

Tegmark has pursued this work despite some risk to his career. It took four tries before he could get an early version of the mathematical universe hypothesis published, and when the article finally appeared, an older colleague warned that his “crackpot ideas” could damage his reputation. But propelled by optimism and passion, he pushed on.

"I learned pretty early that if I focused exclusively on these big questions I’d end up working at McDonald’s,” Tegmark explains. “So I developed this Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde strategy where officially, whenever I applied for jobs, I put forth my mainstream work. And then quietly, on the side, I pursued more philosophical interests.” The strategy worked. Today a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tegmark travels among the world’s top physicists. Backed by this well-earned credibility, his audacious ideas are sparking fascination and taking flight.

Gay Marriage

I was reading in my newspaper today about local pastors standing outside the courthouse and protesting against gays getting married, reading Bible verses at them, and denouncing both those who went in to get married, as well as the government officials who were doing the marrying.

I'm a bit puzzled as to how this is part of the Great Commission, or preaching the gospel.

I'm wondering what Paul would think about it. Oh, I do know what Paul would think about it:

What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?

1 Corinthians 5:12

It also seems to me that Jesus' approach with sinners was somewhat different than how these Pharis--um, preachers--are operating. In fact, I seem to recall he saved his venom for people who were doing the sort of things these preachers were doing.

"Love, and do what thou wilt..."

I've been reading an old book by E.L. Allen, entitled From Plato to Nietzsche: Ideas That Shape Our Lives; it is a thin book, but a good overview of philosophy and theology for the last two thousand years. One phrase from Augustine (from De Genesi ad Litteram) I liked was “Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good”, since it reflects (unsurprisingly) what Paul says in Romans 13:

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet, ”and whatever other command there may be, are summed upc in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself. ”Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

It serves as an antidote to legalism (that is, worldliness; see Col. 2) and the endless concern with rules. If we love our neighbor as ourselves, then we can do as we please, since what we please will not harm our neighbor.

Genetically Modified Bacteria Create Oil?

According to the Times of London, a Silicon Valley company is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to produce 'renewable petroleum.'

The Myth of Moderate Islam

From Foreign Policy, by Steven A. Cook:

Of all the cures commonly proposed for the many ailments afflicting the Middle East, there is one tonic nearly everyone seems to agree on: boosting moderate Islam.

It sounds eminently reasonable. If Islamic extremism is the problem, moderate Islam must be the solution. It follows that Western governments should therefore find ways to make the moderates more powerful and encourage the extremists to become more moderate. Allow Islamists to compete and accumulate power, the argument goes, and they will have little incentive to radicalize. Furthermore, assuming the mundane tasks of day-to-day governance will compel even the most extreme groups to focus more on filling potholes than on destroying the Great Satan.

But this belief is dead wrong. Not only is it impossible to agree on a working definition of the word “moderate,” but there is scant evidence that extremists really do moderate once they assume power.

An interesting, if discouraging, article. Read the whole thing.

Astronomy in Poetry

I open the scuttle at night and see the far sprinkled systems,
And all I see multiplied as high as I can cyper edge but rim of the farthest systems.
Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward, forever outward.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Shuttle Discovery Returns to Florida

The Space Shuttle Discovery has landed safely back in Florida. It touched down about 8:15 AM today, Saturday, June 14, 2008.

Science Quote for the Day

There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.

Robert Oppenheimer

27th International Space Development Conference

Glenn Reynolds posts a report on the 27th International Space Development Conference (May 29-June 1, 2008) on The Atlantic's website:

The main source of excitement at this year's conference was space tourism—folks in the industry prefer the term "personal spaceflight"—involving many companies, from the well-known (Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic) to the sort-of-known (Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin) to the comparatively obscure (XCOR Aerospace). Just this week it was announced that Google co-founder Sergey Brin plans to be a space tourist on a flight to the international space station in 2011. The space tourism business has, according to the results of a study presented at the conference, attracted over 1.2 billion dollars in investment, and grown its revenues from $175 million in 2006 to $268 million in 2007. That's peanuts compared to what NASA is spending on the Space Station or its Constellation project aimed at returning to the Moon, but it's real money and, unlike NASA's budget, it's growing.

Read the whole article: Not Your Father's Space Program

Video from Aboard the Kibo Module on the ISS

The International Space Station is large. Here's video from the recently installed Japanese Kibo module. The Space Shuttle Discovery undocked from the Space Station today and is on its way home.

Gamma-Ray Telescope Launched

Today (June 11, 2008) at 9:05 AM PDT , the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) was launched aboard a Delta II 7920-H rocket. GLAST is a joint venture of NASA, the United States Department of Energy, and government agencies in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Sweden.

GLAST's main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT) which will make an all-sky survey of astrophysical and cosmological phenomena such as active galactic nuclei, pulsars, dark matter, and other high-energy sources. A second instrument, the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM), will be used to study gamma ray bursts.

GLAST will orbit at an altitude of about 345 miles. By comparison, the International Space Station orbits at an altitude that varies between a minimum of 173 miles to a maximum of 286 miles.

Climate Change

Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. Minimum activity generally occurs as the cycles change. Solar activity refers to phenomena like sunspots, solar flares and solar eruptions. Together, they create the weather that can disrupt satellites in space and technology on earth.

The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. Today's sun, however, is as inactive as it was two years ago, and scientists aren't sure why.

"It's a dead face," Tsuneta said of the sun's appearance.

Tsuneta said solar physicists aren't like weather forecasters; They can't predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700....

Read the entire article:

Sun Goes Longer Than Normal Without Producing Sunspots

Science Fiction Author Quote of the Day

The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.

Robert A. Heinlein

D-Day

Sixty-four years ago today the Allies invaded the beaches of Normandy. On that single day of June 6, they suffered an estimated 2500 deaths. Total Allied deaths during the entire Battle of Normandy would reach 37,000.

During the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, 2345 military and 57 civilians were killed. So on June 6, 1944, more Allies were killed than were lost at Pearl Harbor.

In Normandy, the Allies were fighting Germans. And yet Germany had had nothing to do with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Quote for a Friday

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Winston Churchill, Speech in the House of Commons, November 11, 1947

Physics Quote for the Day

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

Stephen Hawking

Current List of the Translations for my Book

My editor has sent me a list of the thirteen languages my book, The Bible's Most Fascinating People, will appear in (not counting the currently available version in the original English); most will come out in September, some a bit later:

Swedish, Norwegian, Estonian, Hungarian, French (including a separate version for French Canada), Romanian, Dutch, Danish, Russian, German, Czech, Slovak and Japanese.

I'll be receiving copies as my publisher gets them.

German Edition of My Book

The German edition of my book, The Bible's Most Fascinating People, is also due for release in September. Published by Tosa, it has the German title, Die 100 bekanntesten Gestalten der Bibel: Eine illustrierte Geschichte

See details in German here, at the German version of Amazon.com:

Die 100 bekanntesten Gestalten der Bibel

The title translates as, The 100 best-known figures of the Bible:
An illustrated history which is very close to what the original title of the book was going to be before Reader's Digest changed it.

SpaceX Five Engine Test

From a press release I got from SpaceX this morning:

McGregor TX – Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) conducted the first five-engine firing of its Falcon 9 medium to heavy lift rocket at its Texas Test Facility outside McGregor on Thursday, May 29. At full power the engines generated almost half a million pounds of force, and consumed 1,750 lbs of fuel and liquid oxygen per second. This five engine test again sets the record as the most powerful test yet on the towering 235-foot tall test stand.

The test of the five Merlin 1C engines, arranged in a cross pattern like the Saturn V moon rocket, is the last step before firing the full complement of nine engines, scheduled for this summer. With all engines operating, the Falcon 9 generates over one million pounds of thrust in vacuum - four times the maximum thrust of a 747 aircraft.

“This is the first time that we’ve added more than one engine at a time, and all phases of integration and testing went smoothly,” said Tom Mueller, Vice President of Propulsion for SpaceX. “As with previous tests, we saw no unexpected interactions between the engines, and are on schedule for adding four more engines.”

The first Falcon 9 will arrive at the SpaceX launch site at Cape Canaveral by the end of 2008. The next flight of SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 1 rocket is scheduled for late June or July of 2008.

Video of the test:

Science Fiction Author Quote of the Day

It takes an awful long time to not write a book.

Douglas Adams

More information on my book in Swedish

To my surprise, I learned on Saturday that my book, The Bible’s Most Fascinating People, is going to appear in Swedish in September. Given Sweden’s reputation for secularism, it is perhaps surprising that a book focused on Bible stories should find its way into that language. But Wahlström & Widstrand is bringing out my book on September 18. The book was translated by Gunhild Winqvist Hollman.

According to Wikipedia, Wahlström & Widstrand is a large publisher in Sweden established in 1885 by Per Karl Wahlström and Wilhelm Widstrand, two booksellers in Stockholm. Their company started publishing fiction in the 1890’s. Non-Swedish authors introduced to Sweden by Wahlström & Widstrand include Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, Maxim Gorky and Henri Bergson as well as later authors such as Franz Kafka, William Styron and Joseph Heller. Numerous acclaimed Swedish writers have been discovered by the them, and it has also published several Nobel Prize winners such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gabriel García Márquez, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Joseph Brodsky, José Saramago and V. S. Naipaul. Now, remarkably, my work is about to be introduced by them to Sweden.

While I don’t think my book is in the same class as Solzhenitsyn’s work, I must admit to feeling incredibly pleased to know that I’m being published by his publisher, since he’s one of my favorite authors.

Buzz Lightyear, to Infinity and Beyond!

A 12 inch tall Buzz Lightyear figure (from the movie Toy Story) was launched aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery on Saturday so the astronauts can do some educational activities for kids from orbit.

Orlando Sentinel photographer Red Huber strategically placed a plastic doll of Woody in a tree near the remove cameras that he always sets up for shuttle launches. The resulting photograph shows Woody waving goodbye to his buddy.

Quantum Weirdness for Monday

Can something come of nothing? Philosophers debated that question for millennia before physics came up with the answer—and that answer is yes. For quantum theory has shown that a vacuum (ie, nothing) only appears to be empty space. Actually, it is full of virtual particles of matter and their anti-matter equivalents, which, in obedience to Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, flit in and out of existence so fast that they cannot usually be seen.

This makes the Casimir effect possible, something that now, according to the Economist.com, may have a practical use.

My Book is Soon to be Available in Swedish

I found out today that my book, The Bible’s Most Fascinating People, has been translated into Swedish; the title of the book in that language is “The Apostles and Prophets.” The translation was done by someone named Gunhild Winqvist Hollman.

The website, translated by Google from Swedish that offers it for sale in Sweden is:

The Apostles and Prophets (You'll have to click the hyperlink "The Apostles and Prophets" to see the cover of the book and other details.)

The original website, in Swedish is:

Apostlar och profeter

I wonder what other languages my book has been translated into? I can’t imagine Swedish is the only one. I had not anticipated such a world wide audience for my book.

Shuttle Discovery Launched Today

The Space Shuttle Discovery launched on time this afternoon on a beautiful sunny afternoon in Florida. It is taking the Kibo, Japan's laboratory, to the International Space Station.

Space Friday

The Space Shuttle Discovery is set to launch on Saturday afternoon about 2 PM PDT. It will be delivering the Japanese Kibo laboratory to the International Space Station, the largest of the space station modules to be taken to orbit. It is 37 feet long and 14 feet in diameter. It cost Japan about 1 billion dollars to build. Already, the International Space Station has the living space of a four bedroom house; on the exterior, it is about as long as a football field. This will simply add to the enormity of the space structure, which is by far the largest object human beings have ever built in space.

Meanwhile, the Phoenix is working perfectly on Mars, sending back images and flexing its 8 foot robot arm preparing to start digging into the permafrost in search of evidence of life. Visit the official JPL website for the Phoenix.

Physicist Quote of the Day

The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling what reality ought to be

Richard P. Feynman

Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes

Scientific American currently has an interesting article, Does Time Run Backward in Other Univeres, written by Sean M. Carroll:

The universe does not look right. That may seem like a strange thing to say, given that cosmologists have very little standard for comparison. How do we know what the universe is supposed to look like? Nevertheless, over the years we have developed a strong intuition for what counts as “natural”—and the universe we see does not qualify.

Make no mistake: cosmologists have put together an incredibly successful picture of what the universe is made of and how it has evolved. Some 14 billion years ago the cosmos was hotter and denser than the interior of a star, and since then it has been cooling off and thinning out as the fabric of space expands. This picture accounts for just about every observation we have made, but a number of unusual features, especially in the early universe, suggest that there is more to the story than we understand.

Among the unnatural aspects of the universe, one stands out: time asymmetry. The microscopic laws of physics that underlie the behavior of the universe do not distinguish between past and future, yet the early universe—hot, dense, homogeneous—is completely different from today’s—cool, dilute, lumpy. The universe started off orderly and has been getting increasingly disorderly ever since. The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.

The arrow of time is arguably the most blatant feature of the universe that cosmologists are currently at an utter loss to explain. Increasingly, however, this puzzle about the universe we observe hints at the existence of a much larger spacetime we do not observe. It adds support to the notion that we are part of a multiverse whose dynamics help to explain the seemingly unnatural features of our local vicinity....

It's a long article, but very interesting.

Physicist Quote of the Day

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.

Richard Feynman, Letter from Feynman to Koichi Mano (3 February 1966)

Quantum Weirdness

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word.

Niels Bohr

Science News reports on an odd experiement:

There’s no way around it: The nature of light seems different depending on how it’s observed. Light can act like a particle or wave, and all shades of gray in between. Now, physicists have the most dramatic demonstration yet that this range of behaviors between wave and particles really is unavoidable, and that light itself doesn’t know what it is while it’s propagating....

“You can change choices which, common sense says, had to be made at the beginning,” comments Wojciech Zurek of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “In some sense, you can rewrite the past by what you measure now.”

Read the whole thing.

Phoenix Has Landed

The Phoenix space probe has successfully touched down on Mars in the Martian Arctic. Touchdown occured at 4:53 PM PDT.

Science Fiction Author Quote of the Day

Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

Gregory Benford, known as Benford's law of controversy

Letter in the LA Times

Sometimes I get upset enough to write a letter to the Los Angeles Times. I've been subscribing to it for over thirty years now and most of the letters I write get published; they seem to like my style (actually, it's relatively easy: keep the letter short, say something inflamatory, and make sure you're responding to something from the front page). In any case, I responded on Monday to an article on the front page of the paper and they published what I wrote today:

Regarding the front page article, News Analysis: Arabs feel bias in Bush's Visit to Mideast (Monday, May 19, 2008): you’ve got to be kidding! The article points out that Bush praised Israel during his visit to celebrate their 60th anniversary, but that the “mood was markedly different” when he addressed the Arab nations. And this is held up as an example of bias? Some simple questions: do women have equal rights in the Arab nations? What is the status of the gay community in Arab nations? What about the status of religious freedom? How about freedom of the press and freedom of speech? Was there anything inaccurate in the president’s criticisms? Then why do you make it out to be a bad thing for the president to point out that those Arab countries remain repressive and backward? And in answer to the inevitable complaint about the Palestinians, another simple question: if I point out that murdering your brother is a bad thing, does your retort about my horse stealing somehow justify your murderous behavior? The only real bias I see here is in the mind of the journalist responsible for this article and in the newspaper that printed it.

Science Fiction Author Quote of the Day

'You're not going to die, are you sir?' he said.
'Of course I am. Everyone is. That's what being alive is all about.'

Terry Pratchett, Truckers

Quote for the Day

I wonder whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.

Winston Churchill, Roving Commission: My Early Life (1930)

Humor for a Monday

Even if you don't know Modern Hebrew, I think you'll still find this video very funny:

Science Fiction Author Quote of the Day

I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation?

Ray Bradbury, "Why Cartoons Are Forever", Los Angeles Times (December 3, 1989)

Who We'd Really Like to Vote For

McClane (of the Die Hard movies) for President! (obviously, some one has way too much time on his/her hands)

Official Israeli Tourism Commercials

Every year at Passover, a child asks the question: "How is this night different from all the others?" To paraphrase this question, "How is Israel different from all the other countries of the Middle East?"

(WARNING: content may offend some people)


Or:

(WARNING: contains bad language and blasphemy and thus may offend an even larger group of people)

Modern Israel's 60th Anniversary

In 1947, the United Nations approved the partition of the Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Arab League rejected the two-state plan and Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq launched a massive military attack designed to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean. But on May 14, 1948, the Jewish provisional government declared Israel's independence and the nascent country was able to defeat the combined armies that invaded. Meanwhile, Jordan had taken control of the West Bank and Egypt took control of Gaza. The Palestinians living in those regions did not attack Jordan or Egypt, nor did they demand their independence nor complain that they were being oppressed or occupied by foreign imperialists.

The current issue of Commentary Magazine responds to current criticism of the only democratic and free country in the Middle East:

Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West.

During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the “original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its native population.

Read the whole article: 1948, Israel, and the Palestinians: Annotated Text, by Efraim Karsh

Science Fiction Author Quote of the Day

I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior "public service."

Harlan Ellison

Star Trek Quote for the Day

Villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged, waiting for the right climate in which to flourish, spreading fear in the name of righteousness.

Jean-Luc Picard, The Drumhead, Star Trek: The Next Generation

Apocalypse Now

A list of failed end-time prophesies is a rather fascinating time-waster for a lazy Spring Friday:

A Brief History of the Apocalypse

Klingon Proverb for a Friday

A fool and his head are soon parted.

The Final Reflection, John M. Ford

Klingon Proverb of the Day

To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible.

Kahless the Unforgettable

Star Trek Quote for the Day

If winning is not important, why keep score?

Worf, Star Trek: The Next Generation

Slate asks: "Does Christian Pop Culture Have To Be So Wretched?"

Interesting article in the online magazine Slate by Hanna Rosin entitled, "Pop Goes Christianity: The deep contradictions of Christian popular culture":

The entertainers in Radosh's book complain about watchdog groups that count the number of times a song mentions Jesus or about the lockstep political agenda a Christian audience expects. They complain about promoting an "adolescent theology" of Christian rock, as one calls it, where they "just can't get over how darned cool it was that Jesus sacrificed himself." In his interview with Radosh, Powell pulled out an imitation of a 1982 New Wave pop song with the lyrics; "You'll have to excuse us/ We're in love with Jesus." This, he explained, was the equivalent of a black-velvet painting of Elvis. Only it's more offensive, because it's asking the listener to base his whole life around an insipid message and terrible quality music.

For faith, the results can be dangerous. A young Christian can get the idea that her religion is a tinny, desperate thing that can't compete with the secular culture. A Christian friend who'd grown up totally sheltered once wrote to me that the first time he heard a Top 40 station he was horrified, and not because of the racy lyrics: "Suddenly, my lifelong suspicions became crystal clear," he wrote. "Christian subculture was nothing but a commercialized rip-off of the mainstream, done with wretched quality and an apocryphal insistence on the sanitization of reality."

It's an extended review/discussion of a book by Daniel Radosh called, Rapture Ready!Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture.

Kepler Mission

Once again, NASA offers the chance to send your name into space. According to NASA:

“Kepler is NASA's first mission capable of detecting Earth-size and smaller planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars other than our own. The spacecraft is planned to be launched from Kennedy Space Center in February 2009. The spacecraft will be launched into orbit around the Sun, not the Earth, with an orbital period of 372 days. The spacecraft will slowly drift away from the Earth, such that in about 25 years it will be half an Earth orbit away, 300 million kilometers distant from the Earth, passing behind the Sun as viewed from Earth.”

Visit Kepler Mission: A Search for Habitable Planetsbefore November 1, 2008 to add your name to a space-bound DVD.

Quote for the Day

You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Send Yourself to the Moon

Or at least you can send your name there. Just go to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Page and give NASA your name. Not only will your name get to make a long trip, you'll get a nice certificate suitable for framing. It's free! And you have until June 27, 2008 to sign on. Your name is then scheduled to be launched October 31, 2008 aboard an Atlas V rocket.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is designed to go into a polar orbit of the moon. It's mission is set to last a minimum of one Earth year. An optional extended phase of the mission (up to five years) could provide a communications relay for other future ground lunar missions, such as a moon lander or rover.

Quote for the Day

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.

Mark Twain

Science Fiction Author Quote of the Day

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, 'as pretty as an airport.' Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort.

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Quote of the Day

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.

Mark Twain

Stable Superheavy Element 122 Discovered in Nature?

By way of MSNBC's CosmicLog, an article on the physics arXiv blog:

But something else showed up too. An element with a weight of 292 and an atomic number of around 122. That’s an extraordinary claim and quite rightly the team has been diligent in attempting to exclude alternative explanations such as th epresence of exotic molecules formed from impurities in the thorium sample or from the hydrocarbon in oil used in the vacuum pumping equipment). But these have all been ruled out, say Marinov and his buddies.

What they’re left with is the discovery of the first superheavy element, probably number 122.

What do we know about 122? Marinov and co say it has a half life in excess of 100 million years and occurs with an abundance of between 1 and 10 x10^-12, relative to thorium, which is a fairly common element (about as abundant as lead).

Theorists have mapped out the superheavy periodic table and 122 would be a member of the superheavy actinide group. It even has a name: eka-thorium or unbibium. Welcome to our world!

The news is still preliminary, but it will be an interesting thing if confirmed.

Quote for the Day

I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution.

Wernher von Braun

God is "Unnecessary"

I've been working on this academic paper, my latest "heresy," for awhile, and it is time I got some feedback on it. It is rather long:

UPDATE: For those who might leave comments based upon a misreading of the title without bothering to actually read the article, here is a quick overview of the admittedly long-winded argument.

Summary

Ignorance of any other explanation does not make God the “necessary” answer, any more than ignorance of any other explanation makes his non-existence “necessary.” Christians who look at an otherwise inexplicable event and argue that God is the reason for it are making the same philosophical error that those who look at suffering and argue that the only explanation for it is that God does not exist. Both depend upon ignorance—a gap in knowledge—for their argument to survive. And both are making a sucker’s bet.

God is “Unnecessary”
By R.P. Nettelhorst

Introduction

The Bible asks, “who is God?” and “what does he want?” But it does not ask, “is he real?” Even so, those who argue that God does not exist will point out that the burden of proof must rest with those who say he does. After all, those who insist on the reality of the Loch Ness monster are required to offer irrefutable evidence. It is not up to the rest of us to demonstrate that they are mistaken. As Carl Sagan pointed out, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Skeptics therefore argue that those who believe in God carry the burden of making the case for Him.

Given that a belief in the existence of the divine, however conceived, has been a part of the human race since its beginning, and since the existence of the divine was not questioned until relatively recently, I’m not entirely certain that the burden of proof indeed rests with those who believe in God or gods.

Or put it this way: what burden exists upon those who claim for a new idea or explanation? Just because the skeptics say it belongs to the believers in the divine, does not mean that they are actually right in foisting it upon them. My question, in fact, is whether there is any need for proof at all.

Skeptics will point out that there are logical explanations for the whys and hows of many things that happen in the universe, things that our ancestors attributed to God. We do not believe any longer that lightning is being tossed down on us by an angry Zeus. So is it reasonable to believe then, that those things which still beg of explanation thereby prove God must be responsible for them? Isn’t it more likely, in fact, that we will find explanations for the remaining mysteries? In fact, why should it be necessary to invoke God at all? Can’t we say that God is, in all such cases, “unnecessary” as an explanation?

This conclusion should neither shock nor alarm those of us who continue to believe that God does, in fact, exist.

God’s existence is not postulated as an explanation

God’s existence is not postulated as an explanation for anything in the Bible by the biblical writers. His existence is simply assumed, and he is described by his actions.

Despite this, those who believe in God for many years have used God as the explanation for why things happen: for why there is a universe, for why the earth exists, for how human beings come to be, or even, more recently, for how such complex features as eyes exist. They use that which people don’t understand or can’t explain as proofs that there must be a God.

The Bible, however, never does this. Perhaps that’s an important clue.

And consider this pattern of behavior from the backside, from those who reject God: we who believe in God don’t fully understand why the righteous suffer, why sin exists, or why God doesn’t stop it. And yet, such ignorance of that which is sad is often used as proof by skeptics that there can be no God. They argue that if God existed, then surely there would be no suffering.

Is that really any more valid than using ignorance of how the universe began as proof that God is?

I don’t think so. Consider:

I’m walking along one morning and slip. I look at the floor and notice a pile of green goo. I don’t know why there is green goo on the floor. I don’t know where it came from. So of course I immediately conclude that God must have made it, thereby proving his existence.

The skeptic will wonder about how hard I must have banged my head on the floor. My conclusion is nonsense, he avers. If there was a God, then there would be no green goo at all, since the green goo is obviously bad. A good and loving God would never allow green goo to exist. Therefore, there must be no God.

Is either of us making reasonable arguments? Does either of us make sense? Does either of our conclusions follow logically from our premises?

And yet, when we theologians argue for the existence of God, or our opponents argue against him, we all use the same exact format and everyone thinks we’re being profound. But I’m starting to think that we’re in fact being silly.

Let’s look at some of the traditional arguments for God’s existence and consider them in light of my green goo analogy.

Arguments for the Existence of God

Thomas Aquinas lists several “proofs” for the existence of God. Most Christian apologetics begins with a discussion of these proofs. The two most commonly discussed of these proofs are First Cause and Design.

It is important to point out here that one failure of Christian apologetics has been a penchant for postulating God as the cause for anything inexplicable. This is known as the “God-of-the-gaps” approach. We don’t know where the green goo came from, so let’s assume it came from God. That which is unknown or unexplained is God’s doing.

The inevitable result, unsurprisingly, has been a growing irreconcilability between scientists and theologians. The position of many Christians has left them with a “God-who-is-spackle” who is constantly shrinking as scientific knowledge grows and shoves the divine spackle out of the way.

First Cause

One of Aquinas’ arguments for the existence of God is called “the first-cause argument.” It goes something like this: every effect has a cause. The universe is an effect. Therefore the universe has a cause and that cause is God.

The problem with this argument is shown by asking a simple question: what is the cause of God? The Christian answer is that God is uncaused: he has always existed. Right away, the atheist can raise an objection: “Why must we assume that the universe has a cause? Perhaps the universe always existed.” Additionally, one can raise the question: why should this imagined God be the God of the biblical stories? Why can’t he be the god Zeus or the gods of the Babylonian creation epic? Why not the god imagined by deists? Or the Hindu pantheon?

Today, as a result of modern cosmology, a problem exists with the suggested objection that the world has always existed. All the scientific evidence points to the universe having a beginning: the Big Bang. This has been deeply disturbing to skeptics, because the question of causation now becomes very significant. In fact, the theory was only very slowly accepted by the scientific community precisely because of the uncomfortable theological implications of a beginning. And no explanation for the Big Bang has been found.

Yet.

Though there have, in the last few years, been some suggestions that might just work. That explanations for the Big Bang are forming merely illustrates again the danger for Christians in the “God-of-the-gaps” approach. It is never wise to hop on an open question for which there is no firm answer and shout “Ah ha! God caused it. That proves God exists.” This is akin to arguing that the green goo, since we don’t know where it came from, proves God exists.

Design

The next of the popular arguments raised for the existence of God is the teleological—that is, the argument from design. It goes this way: if one finds a beautiful watch, one is legitimate in assuming a designer and builder for that watch. Are you not far more intricate than the finest watch? Isn’t it reasonable to assume a designer for you? The teleological argument is an argument by analogy, and by its nature, therefore, weak. A philosopher named Keith Lehrer in his book, Philosophical Problems and Arguments: An Introduction, states that such arguments can be summarized as follows:

• These three objects have these ten properties in common.
• Two of these three objects also have this eleventh property in common. Therefore, probably
• This third object also has this eleventh property in common with the other two.

Of course, in even the best of cases, we have nothing more definite than probability. Certainty can never be arrived at by using an analogy. Note too, that all the available evidence must be considered if a statement such as that in point number 3 is to be justified in this way, since there are certain kinds of factors which decrease the probability of the conclusion. Therefore, as with any inductive argument, the requirement to use all available evidence is essential.

According to Lehrer, there are four factors which can affect the probability of any conclusion:

1. The greater the number of objects which have the ten properties in common, the more probable the conclusion becomes.
2. The greater the number of properties which all the objects have in common, the more probable the conclusion becomes.
3. The greater the number of objects that have the ten properties in common but that lack the critical eleventh property, the less probable the conclusion becomes.
4. And most important, the stronger the claim made in the conclusion, relative to the premise, the less probable that conclusion becomes.
Thus Philo, presented with the teleological argument, objected that many complex, machine-like things exist in the universe that have a demonstrably natural cause.

The analogy between the universe and machines breaks down because of the third point we just saw above. Lehrer, summarizing Philo’s argument, wrote:

We can find intricate order, design, and beauty in a flower, bush, or tree, and all of these are brought about not by an intelligent being but come from a seed in the ground which receives water and sunlight. In none of these four factors—seed, earth, water, sunlight—is there any hint of intelligence. Furthermore, consider a beautiful Persian cat, a peacock, exotic tropic fish, or even a particular human being. The ordering of parts of such organisms, the interrelating functioning of parts, the beauty of many of them are all the causal result of the fertilization of an egg in an act of animal reproduction....What grounds are there for picking one from among four quite different causes of order and design? It is no less reasonable to claim, and therefore no less probable, that the earth and the other parts of the universe have sprouted from some seed or matured from some egg fertilized eons ago, or some residual part of the instinctive production of some animal long since extinct, than to claim that it is the planned result of some unseen being with great intelligence....because intelligence is only one among many things in this world that produce order and design, there is no reason to think it is any more probable that an intelligent being produced the universe than that one of the other causes of order and design produced the universe.

Criticism of this “God of the gaps” approach

Neither of these so-called proofs of God’s existence is really proof at all; nor do they convince skeptics. In fact, these “proofs” ultimately fail because, in the final analysis, they are sitting on the demonstrably false assumption of “God of the gaps”: explaining the mystery of green goo by invoking God.

Toward the end of the book of Job, God asks Job a series of questions about nature: “do you understand how such and such happens?” Job keeps shaking his head. God’s point is not to prove his existence to Job. He is not arguing that “since you don’t understand where rain comes from, that means I exist.”

Rather, God was responding to Job’s doubts about God’s character: Job could not figure out how to reconcile his suffering with his innocence and with his relationship with God. His misery was leading Job to doubt God was just or that God cared; Job never wondered if God existed. God’s response to Job was to show him that there are many things in life that Job couldn’t understand, none of which seemed to get in the way of his relationship with God. How was his inability to explain the current suffering in his life substantively different from his inability to explain how thunder happened? The question of suffering is simply, according to the argument God makes, no different than any questions Job might have regarding the functioning of the universe. Failure to know the answer does not mean that God doesn’t care, or that God is unjust, or even (to ask and answer a question the Bible itself was not concerned with) that God does not exist. All it means is that we have an unanswered question. Perhaps, if we look at the data long enough, we might figure it out, just like, over the years, we have figured out how the rain comes and thunder happens.

The issue of God’s existence throughout the pages of scripture is always assumed. No more, no less. Even in those rare passages, such as Psalm 14, where the issue of disbelieving in God is raised, God’s existence is not argued. No proofs for the existence of God are ever offered, nor, in any passage of scripture, is the argument ever made that “well, we don’t understand this, so it must mean God did it. Therefore, God really does exist.”

Miracles

Miracles are used for the purpose of authenticating the prophetic status of a given individual and to authenticate that the message being given is genuinely of God, rather than simply the imagination of a messenger run rampant. The question of God’s existence itself is never at issue. The issue instead is merely: is the prophet from God or not?

Elijah? Elijah had a god contest, but the issue again was not, does God exist; rather, the issue was: which god should we worship? Which god is able to act? Which god matters? Which god is most powerful? The issue of whether a deity or deities exist was never at stake. Everyone already assumed there were gods. Now they had to decide which one was worthy of their attention. The miracle, in its final outcome, merely demonstrated that Yahweh was the better god, a god who actually paid attention to his servant. This did not stop those who worshipped Baal instead from continuing to worship him, and it did not stop them (as expressed by Jezebel) from attempting to kill Elijah, who worshipped Yahweh instead. In the Bible, miracles do not seem to be an effective means of convincing unbelievers.

What of Jesus and his miracles? In fact, this failure of miracles to convince the unbelievers is amply illustrated by the reactions to Jesus’ miracles. Those who sought to kill him—the religious establishment—were not swayed by his miracles. They did not doubt that Lazarus had been raised from the dead, they did not question that blind and deaf, ill and demon possessed had been cured by Jesus. But they still refused to accept him as the Messiah. It is reminiscent of what Abraham said to the rich man in Hell who requested that Lazarus be sent back to warn his brothers: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced by a dead man rising to life.” But the question of God’s ultimate existence was never at issue. Doubting God’s existence was akin to questioning one’s own existence, or the existence of a brother or wife.

The purpose of the prophets, the purpose of those who wrote Scripture, was to interpret the events around them as acts of God. If no prophet spoke, “thus saith the Lord,” no one would be able to tell for sure that the Exodus, or the Babylonian captivity, or any of the other events described in the Bible had anything to do with God. In fact, even with the prophet to interpret the world for them, people continued to doubt that God had actually acted.

God’s existence, in the minds of many, is dependent upon certain proofs or evidences remaining inexplicable by any other means. They believe that no one must know, ever, where the green goo originated. Only in continued ignorance can God’s existence to be reasonable and viable. This is the bottom line for the traditional proofs for the existence of God. If we discover some explanation for the goo, God will be vaporized. Explanation is a raygun held at the deity’s head.

In the exact same way, however, atheism has allowed itself to become just as dependent upon not understanding suffering in order to be reasonable and viable.

So, many Christians are terrified of explanations. If you can show how the blowing wind moved the water to allow the Israelites to cross the Red Sea as described in Exodus (despite the fact that the author of Exodus says the very thing), many will get mad, suggesting that faith is being undermined, or that you don’t believe in God. If an explanation for the beginning of the universe is discovered that shows how perfectly normal physical processes caused the universe to be, then the god predicated upon its eternally remaining a mystery vanishes in a puff. If complexity in biological systems can be explained by purely physical means, then the teleological argument, sometimes called the watchmaker analogy, will also dissolve like Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water.

Depending on Ignorance

Frankly, to pin one’s hopes for the existence of God on what amounts to a bet that we will remain forever ignorant about certain matters, and that we can never, ever understand them, strikes me as a bet we are guaranteed to lose, given the historical pattern of the inexplicable becoming explicable. It is, in fact, a serious structural error on the part of Christian theology: we have built our house on a beach below sea level along the Gulf coast of Louisiana and the levees have failed. On top of that, there’s a CAT 5 hurricane blowing.

While in an ultimate sense, we believe that God is the final cause, such is not actually a demonstration of God’s existence, nor was there ever in the biblical picture of things, a felt need for such an argument or demonstration. In the Bible, God’s existence was simply assumed.

It is therefore unnecessary to try to demonstrate his existence by recourse to some mystery or inexplicable occurrence. Such recourse, ultimately, is bound to be futile, because the universe, being God’s to manipulate as easily as we ourselves manipulate it, will always reveal an explanation for whatever happened, happens or will happen, that is in keeping with the laws of physics. John Derbyshire, of National Review Magazine, pointed out in an online posting in December, 2005 that “yes, material causes only are admitted in science, because science is the attempt to find material explanations for observed phenomena. Likewise, only hollow balls 2.5 inches in diameter are allowed in tennis, because tennis is a contest played with 2.5 inch diameter hollow balls. Whether other kinds of balls exist is a matter of opinion among tennis players and fans, I suppose; though if a player were to come on court and attempt to serve a basketball across the net, the rest of us would walk away in disgust.”

While the explanation of how rain came was a mystery to the author of the biblical book of Job, it is not a mystery to us. Does our ability to not only explain it, but in some cases to actually make it happen, mean that God has been disproved? Has God further hidden himself in the universe, has he made himself still more inaccessible as we come to gain a better and better understanding of him? Does he shrink as we learn more? Does he disappear among the baggage?

Or is it rather, perhaps, that the assumption which has moved Christian apologists for these last many centuries, is at its core, flawed and untenable?

There is no need for a ghost in the machine. Do we look at an engine in our car and ever consider the possibility that there is a small fairy in it who is the real source of its power? Is there really a demon lurking in our computer that makes the magic happen—or sometimes not? All joking aside, to postulate such invisible sprites is the babbling nonsense of the insane. And yet how often do we as Christians do something exactly like this with the universe by our odd arguments? Does it seem any more sane if we call the ghost in the machine of the universe God rather than an elf?

It is not that God does not exist. What does not need to exist is the assumption that his existence is dependent upon finding something that cannot be explained. God does not need to be blamed for something in order to exist. Most Christian apologetics since at least Aquinas has sprung from this same basic mistake: asking questions of the text of scripture that it was not trying to answer. We have falsely assumed that the existence of the universe in any way makes the existence of God necessary or demonstrable.

The Unnecessary Deity

God, in the final analysis, even biblically, is “unnecessary” in the sense that a superstitious notion of the functioning of reality is at odds with the biblical picture of reality. God can always be explained away.

And this is as he wished it, both because to assume otherwise lessens him and makes him then just a wonder-worker if God of the gaps theology is right, and also because of the need for human freedom.

To find God’s hidden cameras watching us would get in the way of what God intends for us to be: free. Just as one is nervous and oppressed when the boss is watching (or a highway patrol car is right behind you on the freeway), or even when dad is watching us play baseball for the first time, so it would be if God were visibly present.

Ask yourself this simple question. Would you rather live in a free country like the United States, or in Nazi Germany being watched by the Gestapo? We believe freedom is a positive good, while totalitarian control is a bad thing. We chafe even when those controlling us are doing it for our benefit, let alone when their motives are questionable. We might all agree that giving money to the Salvation Army Santas at Christmas is a good thing. But do we really want to be forced to do that good thing? Would it be okay to force us to empty our pockets into their buckets whenever we exit a store on threat of incarceration?

Chafing at being told what to do is not a consequence of the Fall, it is not sin, despite some who would like to argue otherwise. It is because God likes freedom and we have that inside us; because freedom is what maximizes, ultimately, God’s control. Totalitarianism is what is actively counter to God’s will and purpose; not freedom. God gave Adam and Eve a choice; God thought it best that they have that choice and that they be free to make the wrong choice. In fact, he thought that their wrong choice and everything that has flowed from that—all of human history—was worth it. He would rather that we be free than that we be good. Freedom was more important than morality, more important than goodness, more important than the life of his Son.

And I think all of this has something to say about the nature of God’s sovereignty versus free will. His sovereignty is free will. The Soviet experiment with controlled economies failed; and yet a free economy does everything that the Soviets would have wished to see happen in their attempts at control. A paradox, in a way, perhaps, but a failure to reckon with what God himself said about control: Jesus said that the “gentiles” try to lord it over those under them. But among believers, it must not be so: he who would be greatest must be servant of all. Submission is mutual, according to Ephesians 5:21. Somehow this all works together. The invisible hand of the free market (to use Adam Smith’s phrase), as it were, perhaps serves as an analogy for how God’s “sovereignty” actually functions in the universe.

And again, to posit God as a conspiracy or control in the sense that some nut jobs posit conspiracies to explain the workings of the world is probably just as loony as those who believe in the Illuminati.

The argument is made that in order for something as complex as a watch to exist, there must be someone who designed it and built it. On the face of it, that seems a reasonable argument, especially when one remembers that watches indeed have designers and builders.

On the other hand, is a central controller, a firm hand, always necessary in order to get a complex design? Chaos theory points out that randomness, oddly enough, results in very beautiful and elaborate designs or patterns.

One of the best illustrations of how randomness results in order is the modern, free-market economy, which boasts elaborate means of production, distribution and communication systems, all lacking utterly any central control. In fact, those nations who have attempted to centrally control even a portion of their economies have suffered horrid disasters as a result (think of cars such as the Yugo or the East German Trabant, both the product of a socialist, centrally planned systems: badly made, unreliable, and hard to get; people in East Germany would wait years to get a Trabant).

But consider this. In the United States, as an example, if you walk into almost any supermarket, you’ll find your favorite candy bar. You’ll discover your brand of ice cream. When you visit a car dealer, you have not just one, but hundreds of cars that you can buy, both new and used, with seemingly infinite varieties of colors and features. And if, for some odd reason, a given store lacks what you seek, chances are that another store just down the street will have precisely what you’re looking for. In every city in America, you’ll be able to find clothing that will fit you, and whose style you’ll like. Worst case scenario: go online and then wait for UPS to deliver it.

And not only does this system work remarkably well for you personally (so well, in fact, that if you go to McDonalds and order a strawberry shake and they have run out, you’re justifiably furious)—it also works for industry as a whole. Somehow there will be enough nuts and bolts and computer chips in just the right places in all the factories all over the country. The infrastructure of the nation is also a marvel of complexity that somehow all works together. The trucks roll, the trains move, the gasoline and oil and natural gas are mostly where and when they need to be. Your email magically appears in your inbox, no matter where in the world it was sent from.

The question then arises, a question that economists through the years have asked. Who designed this marvel of complexity? Who decreed how many boxes of Rice-a-Roni would be on your local grocer’s shelves?

The answer, of course, is that there is no one person in charge of it all. It grew by itself. It is an example of how chaos gives rise to order. No one would ever think to argue that all the components of the Rice-a-Roni distribution system—from rice farmers to little cardboard box makers, the printers that printed Rice-A-Roni on the boxes, the manufacturers of printing presses, the orderers of the various colored inks, the makers of those inks, and the people who designed the look of the packaging—had to be in place at once in order for the San Francisco treat to appear in every grocery store.

Aside from Marxists, whose theories are demonstrably unworkable, John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University, points out that all other economists believe that “simple economic exchanges that are beneficial to people become entrenched and then gradually modified as they become part of larger systems of exchange, while those that are not beneficial die out. They accept that Adam Smith’s invisible hand brings about the spontaneous order of the modern economy.”

And yet, Paulos wonders why it is then that so many people are reluctant to accept that natural selection and “blind processes” can lead to similar biological order arising spontaneously? Although, he acknowledges that there are significant differences between biological systems and economic systems, he believes we cannot ignore the obvious comparison. Given this reality of economics, Paulos raises a pair of very intriguing questions:

What would you think of someone who studied economic entities and their interactions in a modern free market economy and insisted that they were, despite a perfectly reasonable and empirically supported account of their development, the consequence of some all-powerful, detail-obsessed economic law-giver? You might deem such a person a conspiracy theorist.

And what would you think of someone who studied biological processes and organisms and insisted that they were, despite a perfectly reasonable and empirically supported Darwinian account of their development, the consequence of some all-powerful, detail-obsessed biological law-giver? (ABC News Internet Ventures, 2005)

While this might lead many to decide that there is no God, if we maintain the analogy, or push it just a little, God does not need to vanish in a puff of smoke, with Christians and other monotheists reduced to mad conspiracy theorists on par with those who mutter about the Illuminati. But it does, perhaps, have an impact on our understanding of God and his nature, and his relationship with the world.

The key phrase in Paulos’s second question is “detail-obsessed” if we take it to mean “micro-managing.” Certainly the biblical revelation indicates that God is interested in the details—otherwise why would we want to suggest he pays attention to individual human beings, who are rather minor details in the overall mass of humanity, numbering at present well over 6 billion?

One of the puzzles for theologians of a monotheistic bent has been the question of God’s sovereignty versus human freedom. From this also comes the question of the issue of human suffering, expressed by the question, “if God is good and all powerful, then why is there sin—why do bad things happen to good people?”

Adam Smith argued for the “invisible hand” of the free market. Of course, this is a metaphor, describing the outcome of the free market. What if the very nature of freedom, of the random, is how God is sovereign? What if God gets the Rice-a-Roni he wants by setting up a free market economy? In fact, is there any better way for God to get what he wants? Freedom, paradoxically, maximizes God’s control: may indeed be the means of his control.

Conclusion

God exists. But to point to the unknown and argue, “since I can’t explain it, God must have done it” is never, in the long run, going to work and really is as silly a statement as pointing to that green goo and saying, “I don’t know where it came from so it must be from God.” (and think of how silly you sound if you try to say, “well, although it really came from my sick cat’s gut, ultimately God is responsible.” Um, sure. I’m feeling more enlightened already.)

God’s existence cannot be based on ignorance, anymore than his nonexistence may be based on it. The atheist is no more arguing in a reasonable fashion when he points to mystery and says, “there, you can’t answer that, so that means there is no God.” To not know is simply to not know. It proves nothing. In fact, to argue that the absence of an answer proves something is to be guilty of the old logical falacy of argumentum ad ignorantum, a favorite of conspiracy theorists and crackpots everywhere.

Do you need to prove that your wife, mother, father exists? Do you even think about that sort of question? Well, the authors of the Bible never thought about it either when it came to God. The question was never, does God exist, but rather, far more profoundly: who is he—and what does he want of me?

Worldliness: Rules

Don Patterson on his blog mentioned that I had commented to him that worldliness is not people running amuck, but instead following rules and looking for rules and wanting rules. I wrote an article for Passion Magazine , the newsletter of the High Desert Baptist Association back in November, 2006 on this topic. Here it is:

What is Worldliness?
By R.P. Nettelhorst

When most of us think of what worldliness might be, we immediately think of bad behavior: dressing sleazy, saying bad words, hanging out with unsavory sorts. It will therefore come as a shock to learn that Paul’s understanding of worldliness is different from what we’ve been thinking most of our lives—especially for those of us raised in the church.

In his letter to the Colossians, Paul comments, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.” (Col. 2:8)

Immediately we start thinking he’s criticizing thong underwear or maybe those teenagers chasing the latest fads, or evolution or that evil political party that’s not mine.

So what are these “principles of this world” that Paul is talking about?

It’s not a mystery. He quickly identifies what he thinks worldliness is: “Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.” (Col. 2:20-23).

Rules!

What better describes the nature of the world than rules and ever more rules? Every government that has ever existed has delighted in imposing laws and regulations. They tell us how to build buildings, where we can build them, what speed to drive our cars, when we can go fishing and when we cannot. Homeowners associations impose regulations on what color you can paint your house and how often you have to mow your grass. We have bylaws and training manuals. Even our games come with lists of rules, whether it’s Candyland or baseball. We cannot escape rules and regulations. Lawyers infest the planet, threatening to take our last cent if we dare to push a toe across a forbidden line.

Running amok is not at all the essence of worldliness. Worldliness is exactly the opposite: it is following regulations and worrying about them all the time. Worldliness is imagining that if only we make another law that will solve the problem. Most of us are thoroughly infested with such worldly philosophy.

Paul points out that being worldly seems wise, worshipful, and properly religious. But rules do nothing to keep people from sinning. Consider: how much do the posted speed limits actually constrain your driving behavior? Do you really think that posting the Ten Commandments will help cut crime? A thief is going to walk into a bank, see the sign, “do not steal” slap himself on the forehead and go “Oh, yeah! Doh!” and quietly leave to find a job?

In the same chapter in Colossians Paul points out what is not worldliness: “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.” (Col. 2:13-14).

Following rules sounds good, but it is not godliness. Godliness is being transformed through the death of Christ on the cross. Love is the focus of godliness. As Paul points out in Romans (echoing what Jesus said in Matthew 22:36-40), “The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. (Romans 13:9-10; see also Galatians 5:13-14)

Paul spends a lot of time in his letters contrasting grace with law, pointing out time and again that no one was every saved by the law. We tend to over-spiritualize our idea of what he means by law I think. What he’s saying is very simple: no one is saved by following the rules. We’re saved by grace. Grace is not just a theological statement, either, of significance only when we walked the aisle. It’s got real world, life-long implications and consequences—every day.

The world keeps piling on new rules. We’ve got people whose only job is to make lists and new regulations. We’ll elect more of them come November. But true godliness is simply that Jesus died for our sins. Godliness is that the Holy Spirit—God himself—lives inside us.

Think about that. Don’t you suppose that having God living inside us might have some profound impact on our behavior? But worldliness doesn’t believe that. Worldliness doesn’t trust God to actually be God in the lives of Christians. So in order to keep people from running amok, worldliness thinks it’s important to make rules, talk about rules, think about rules and to busy itself making sure everyone follows the rules.

Paul criticized the Galatians for such worldliness: “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? Have you suffered so much for nothing—if it really was for nothing? Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?” (Galatians 3:1-5)

Worldliness or godliness. Law or grace. Pick wisely.

Quote of the Day

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. ....

It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that American troops had been bought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945

Doctor Who Quote of the Day

Another quote from Blink, during the third season of the current Doctor Who:

Billy: Where am I?
The Doctor: 1969. Not bad as it goes: you've got the moon landing to look forward to.
Martha: Oh, the moon landing's brilliant! We went four times. Back when we had transport.
The Doctor: Working on it.
Billy: How did I get here?
The Doctor: Same way we did: Touch of an Angel. Same one probably, since you ended up in the same year. [Billy tries to get up and leave] No, no, no, no, don't get up yet. Time travelling without a capsule, nasty. Catch your breath. Don't go swimming for half an hour.
Billy: [stunned] But I don't- I can't-
The Doctor: Fascinating race, the Weeping Angels. The only psychopaths in the universe to kill you nicely. No mess, no fuss, they just zap you into the past and let you live to death. The rest of your life used up and blown away in the blink of an eye. You die in the past and in the present they consume the energy of all the days you might have had; all your stolen moments. They're creatures of the abstract and live off potential energy.
Billy: What in God's name are you going on about?!
Martha: Trust me, just nod when he stops for breath.
The Doctor: [gets out a small machine] I tracked you down with this. This is my timey-wimey detector. Goes ding when there's stuff. Also it can boil an egg at thirty paces. [Makes a face] Whether you want it to or not, actually, so I've learned to stay away from hens; it's not pretty when they blow....

Doctor Who Quote of the Day

From Blink, an episode in season three of Doctor Who:

The Doctor: People don't understand time. It's not what you think it is.
Sally: Then what is it?
The Doctor: Complicated.
Sally: Tell me.
The Doctor: Very complicated.
Sally: I'm clever, and I'm listening, and don't patronise me because people have died and I'm not happy. Tell me.
The Doctor: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect... but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly.... timey-wimey.... stuff.

Happy Earth Day

13th Annual
Index of Leading Environmental Indicators
Report Released for Earth Day 2008

Summary from the Pacific Research Institute:

• The latest UN report on global forest trends shows that Asia has reversed deforestation over the last decade and is now experiencing net forest growth -- even in China.
• Forestland in the U.S. has been expanding at a rate of nearly 1 million acres a year over the last generation
• Air pollution will be eliminated entirely in the U.S. within about 20 years. Levels of air pollution have fallen between 25 and 99 percent (depending on which pollutant examined), with the nation's worst areas showing the most progress. For example, Los Angeles has gone from having nearly 200 high ozone days in the 1970s to less than 25 days a year today. Many areas of the Los Angeles basin are now smog-free year round. The number of Stage 1 smog alerts has gone from several hundred annually in the 1970s to none at all in the 21st century.
• Water pollution is more stubborn and harder to measure, but here too there have been major improvements since the first Earth Day in 1970. The Great Lakes have been cleaned up, with many previously endangered species of birds now thriving. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland doesn't catch fire any more.
• The amount of toxic chemicals used in American industry has fallen by 61 percent over the last 20 years, even as industrial output has grown.

The Full 100 page report (PDF) is available from The Pacific Research Institute

Quote of the Day

"A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing."

Emo Philips

Regrowing Body Parts

William Saletan in Slate writes:

The regeneration of lost body parts has just moved from science fiction to U.S. military policy.

Read the whole article, Rearming America: The Military's Plan to Regrow Body Parts

Logos Bible Software

On Saturday, March 29 I was invited, together with my colleagues at Quartz Hill School of Theology, to be guests of Logos Bible Software at the Glendale Hilton. In exchange for listening to a six hour seminar on how to use their latest Bible software, they not only fed us a wonderful lunch of stuffed chicken in white sauce, followed by a strawberry cream cake dessert, they also gave us a free copy of their Scholar’s Library Bible software, a 630 dollar value.

I have now been using this program for about a month and I am very happy with it. In fact, I have deleted their competitor’s product from my hard drive, a product I had been using for the last ten years or so. I really enjoy Logos’ Scholar’s Library Bible program. I use it every day. And I am very impressed, both in its ease of use and its depth. In addition to giving me numerous English translations, it of course comes with the Hebrew and Greek texts, all morphologically tagged and linked to dictionaries. Beyond that, it also links dynamically to an enormous library of additional reference works: grammars, histories and commentaries. Do a search, bring up a passage, and in a separate window, you’ll find links to the hundreds of books in your electronic library that also speak to that topic. Additional books are being added to the library at the rate of a thousand or more per month (available for additional charges). If you’re in the market for a high-end, academically oriented Bible program, it would be difficult to beat this product.

Visit their website for more details on their product and what it has to offer:

Logos Bible Software

Quote of the Day

"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."

Jeremy S. Anderson

Lockheed Tests New Space Vehicle

Lockheed recently tested a one fifth scale version of a reusable orbital space vehicle. You can watch a news report about it from KRQE in Albuquerque.

Science Fiction Quote of the Day

If you look out into the long-term future and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong. But if it doesn't look like science fiction, it's definitely wrong.

Christine Peterson, Vice President of Foresight Nanotech Institute in Menlo Park, California

Science Fiction Author Quote of the Day

Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.

Robert A. Heinlein

Alzheimer's Cure?

By way of Jerry Pournelle's website, a report in the Belfast Telegraph:

An injection that dramatically relieved the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease within minutes would qualify as the discovery of the decade. That is exactly what was claimed yesterday for an experimental treatment being tested in America.

Scientists at the Institute for Neurological Research at the University of California have treated around 50 patients at a private clinic by injecting an anti-arthritic drug, etanercept, into the spinal column in the neck and then tilting the patients to encourage the drug to flow to the brain.

They claim 90 per cent respond to the treatment, usually within minutes, and have released videos of patients to prove it.

Read the entire article, Discovery of the decade? Injection 'could cure Alzheimer's in minutes'

Video Report:

Today's Quote

"Life's tough. It's tougher if you're stupid."

John Wayne

Quote for the Day

Frank O'Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall--and then they had no choice but to follow them. This Nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it. Whatever the difficulties, they will be overcome. Whatever the hazards, they must be guarded against.

John F. Kennedy, November 21, 1963

Science Fiction Author Quote of the Day

It's a good idea for diplomats to keep their word in small matters. It makes the later complete betrayals more of a surprise.

John Barnes, Earth Made of Glass

2001: A Space Odyssey

The movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, had its world premiere 40 years ago today, on April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C.

Space travel of the 21st century does not quite resemble the grand vision of that movie:



It looks like this instead:

Science Fiction Author Quote of the Day

You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

Robert A. Heinlein