Amazing Beat Box Girl

Advertising & PG Wodehouse

I was talking to one of my former students about advertising a few weeks back. I was shocked to find out he was going to make a career of it; advertising that is. I was shocked because I considered him the salt of the earth, and still do btw, and considered advertising something akin to a mental virus.

But after reconsidering, something I have to do a lot of, I've come to a new perspective thanks to my former student and the humorous P G Wodehouse.

The New Advertising, P G Wodehouse

"In Denmark," said the man of ideas, coming into the smoking room, "I see that they have original ideas on the subject of advertising. According to the usually well-informed Daily Lyre, all 'bombastic' advertising is punished with a fine. The advertiser is expected to describe his wares in restrained, modest language. In case this idea should be introduced into England, I have drawn up a few specimen advertisements which, in my opinion, combine attractiveness with a shrinking modesty at which no censor could cavil."

And in spite of our protests, he began to read us his first effort, descriptive of a patent medicine.

"It runs like this," he said:

Timson's Tonic for Distracted Deadbeats

Has been known to cure

We Hate to Seem to Boast,

but

Many Who have Tried It Are Still

Alive

Take a Dose or Two in Your Spare Time

It's Not Bad Stuff

Read what an outside stockbroker says:

"Sir--After three months' steady absorption of your Tonic

I was no worse."

We do not wish to thrust ourselves forward in any way. If you prefer other medicines, by all means take them. Only we just thought we'd mention it--casually, as it were--that TIMSON'S is PRETTY GOOD.

"How's that?" inquired the man of ideas. "Attractive, I fancy, without being bombastic. Now, one about a new novel. Ready?"

MR. LUCIEN LOGROLLER'S LATEST

The Dyspepsia of the Soul

The Dyspepsia of the Soul

The Dyspepsia of the Soul

Don't buy it if you don't want to, but just listen to a few of the criticisms.

THE DYSPEPSIA OF THE SOUL

"Rather ... rubbish."-- Spectator

"We advise all insomniacs to read Mr. Logroller's soporific

pages."-- Outlook

"Rot."-- Pelican

THE DYSPEPSIA OF THE SOUL

Already in its first edition.

"What do you think of that?" asked the man of ideas.

We told him.

Advertising is one of those things we take for granted and put up with and sometimes appreciate when it's done well. "There are somethings money can't by, for everything else there's Mastercard," is especially insidious because it's so good. There are intangible goods that bring unutterable joy. The insidious part is that you're supposed to go on a spending spree with easy credit to get there.

Can we do advertising in a way that honors the imago Dei in all of us? I hope my student and others prove it is so. I'm sure there are already examples out there, but I just can't think of any right now.

Faith Inspires Hope and Love

Grading and resting have kept me away from the blogosphere for awhile, but this dog has brought me back. She reminds me so much of our last dog Sage. The family of Faith is currently taking her to see injured soldiers from the Iraq war who are learning to cope with their disabilities. Faith does inspire hope and love.

Sacred vs. Secular Education

I've begun reading Wisdom and Eloquence: A Christian Paradigm for Classical Learning by Robert Littlejohn and Charles Evans. They argue that progressive education propounded by John Dewey "vocationalizes" and "secularizes" education. Growing up in America, we assume that the separation of church and state into sacred and secular realms is a practical good for us personally and society. Littlejohn and Evans assert the contrary:

It is a characteristic of un-Christian thinking to separate the sacred and the secular. To the extent that our curriculum structure in our schools do not uphold a consistent, pervasive integration of the sacred into the students academic and social experiences, we have allowed ourselves to become secularized (24).

We must seek to restore the Christian vision of education, which is one of discipleship in all subjects as part of God's creation and redemption in Christ:

Hear, O' Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on your doorposts of your house and on your gates (Deut 6:4-8).

If we are not deliberate about this kind of education and delegating it to those who can train our children in this way, the world will only be too glad to fill the void.

The drive to reform and to be open to reform, together with the inner honing device that should guide such reform, is most easily acquired when we are children.

A Brawl in the Bar of Belief

Last night I watched Collision for the third time. My considered opinion is that it was a great brawl in the bar of belief. Perhaps the most satisfying debate I've ever seen.

The Future of History

The past is the only reliable guide to the future.

Machen is the Man!

Toward a Sure Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Dilemma of Biblical Criticism, 1881-1915 by Terry A. Chrisope


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Well written and insightful account of Machen's struggle with doubt posed by historicism and higher criticism of the Bible. Chrisope deftly tracks Machen's development as a historian and New Testament scholar, showing that Machen resolved his doubt by honest grappling with history and the Bible's truth claims. Machen worked through his questions while teaching at Princeton and founding Westminster Theological Seminary.

Machen came to the conclusion that higher criticism proceeded from the anti-supernatural bias of the Enlightenment. This bias does not arise from the text or its historical context and inevitably warps biblical interpretation. This is because historicism reduces history to naturalistic causes and cannot adequately deal with the historical truth claims of the Bible.

Paul said if Christ is not raised then our faith is in vain. This claim was falsifiable. The fact that the church still exists can only be explained by the fact that no one could disprove the Christians. Machen exposed historicism as a modern idol and clung to the Faith that had called him to faith.

View all my reviews >>

The Bible Story Worldview

One of my college students remarked today that he had been taught Bible stories, but he had never been taught to view the world through those stories.

Review Essay of That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession

That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession by Peter Novick

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Novick gives a fantastic analysis of the changing views on the questions of objectivity and subjectivity in American historiography. How Novick, a European historian, could write so comprehensively and with such depth and for almost 650 pages is amazing.

He is admittedly a historicist, which, he says, "means simply that ... thinking about anything in the past is primarily shaped by my understanding of its role within a particular historical context, and in the stream of history" (7). I was glad to hear him define it that way, because historicism usually means that history is to be explained solely in terms of naturalistic historical causation, which is a sophisticated way of saying that the historian has an anti-supernatural bias. But that doesn't come into play so much on the question of what American historians think about the "objectivity question."

Novick begins with the original objectivity project of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when historians thought they were following Leopold von Ranke's dictum of telling history "wie es eigentlich gewesen" (as it really was). Turns out that Ranke wasn't a pure objectivist who was only trying to be empirically faithful to his sources. Ranke meant telling history not so much as it "really" was but as it "essentially" (eigentlich) was. This meant that through history we access the essences of things, which is more a Romantic than scientific view.

Regardless, the pure objectivist school thought that the purpose of historiography was the scinetific sel-elimination of the historian from the task of researching and presenting history. The historian went into the library the way the scientist enters the laboratory. He collected the facts, which spoke through the historian who was merely a kind of secretary taking dictation. Studies would proceed until all texts and artifacts would have interpreted themselves and historians would have put themselves out of a job. Hard to believe, but Novick painstaking documents it.

Then come the new historians: Fredrick Jackson Turner, Carl Becker, and Charles Beard, whose work spanned pre and post WWI. They hit a nerve when they pointed out that WWI exposed the fact that the Enlightenment "victory of Reason" didn't happen. They also revealed that, far from being objective, most historians had been involved in WWI propaganda, pretending that the allies were good little boys on the way to Sunday school when the evil German bullies picked a fight.

Becker and Beard made it impossible for historians to to go back to their pre-war confidence in objectivity. Then came the expansion of professional history, where objectivity was a function of academic Ph.D. programs, whose graduates went on to work for the Allies of World War II. Once again, American historians aligned themselves with their national power, which didn't encourage their critical faculties. Speaking the truth to power only meant providing sobering military intelligence and lessons from the past, not necessarily telling the truth to power about power. In other words, historians knew who buttered their bread. After the war, historians tended to succumb to the temptation to justify Allied actions, which sometimes meant concealing the whole story or unrealistic appraisals of FDR and Churchill. The new objectivity was not about personal detachment but about being on the right side--the side of the West which now included America. This is also when the Western-Civ class was born.

Novick points out that Christian historians like Kenneth Scott Latourette acknowledged their Christian view of history and defended it as superior to naturalistic and relativistic notions from historicism. Novick points out that they were better than most who tried to keep their ideological commitments a secret. This was also the age of purportedly objective journalism, which Novick explodes with admissions from the journalists themselves.

Other historians, like Karl Popper and Richard Hofstader, abandoned old objectivist notions of "detachment" and "self-elimination" for much more honest "self-examination" and "historical complexity." They argued that historiography was objective and scientific in so far as its claims were falsifiable, positing a kind of "normed objectivism."

With the advent of the sixties every group became their own historians, as black and feminist historiography privileged the newly liberated perspectives of those who had suffered as part of their social group. Partisan scholarship proudly dealt objectivity another blow.

Chapter fifteen tells the story of the postmodern resurrection of subjectivity and the demise of almost any meaningful notion of objectivity. Historicism and relativism had taught historians to bracket moral questions and merely be faithful to the sources, but Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) took the issue of subjectivity even further.

Kuhn, following Michael Polanyi, argued that science doesn't take place in the abstract but within a "paradigm." A paradigm is an accepted model that is, by its very nature, freighted with worldview commitments promoted by the current scientific orthodoxy. Polanyi argued that science and dogma are not antithetical, but are, in the experience of the scientist, wed together in a committed relationship. The scientific community enforces the paradigm to control dissent and promote indoctrination. Thus science is no cure for subjectivity (a lesson that the current crop of new atheists, like R. Dawkins, hasn't learned). According to Kuhn, however, scientific revolutions can and do take place suddenly when the old paradigm (like Newtonian physics) is overthrown by a new paradigm (like Einsteinian physics) which accounts for the problems encountered under of previous paradigm.

Michel Foucault expanded the idea of the paradigm to the "episteme" which included relationships between the sciences and between the sciences and the culture at large. Together they enforce an oppressive "regime of truth" in society.

Richard Rorty argued (in unison with the new paradigm) against stable foundations of any kind. With that foundation squarely in place, his antifoundationalism left us only with a common solidarity in an ongoing conversation. Rorty said: "What matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right…. Our glory is in our participation in fallible and transitory human projects, not in our obedience to permanent nonhuman constraints" (541). I wonder if he was attempting to get "things right?" Novick points out that Rorty "urged ... the substitution of 'solidarity' for 'objectivity'" (571). So I guess we have solidarity in our subjectivity by which we may say a fond farewell to our former illusions of objectivity. I guess the rest of us must obey this "permanent nonhuman" constraint.

Jacques Derrida chimed in arguing that the relationship between the sign and the thing signified was arbitrary. This means that words and the concepts they signify are not dictated by the words themselves, but by their authors and the readers who play with words and concepts. Thus, words aren't transparent windows on history but opaque symbols revealing "nothing outside the text." Words also subvert their authors by revealing the power play the author is trying to put over on his readers. Isn't the power play signified by the words in the author and thus outside the text? Maybe I don't understand Derrida, but regardless, this pointed the way to new hermeneutic of "Deconstruction" or reducing texts to power.

For literary critic, Stanley Fish, it is the community that teaches interpretation and the interpreter doesn’t discover but makes “ ‘texts, facts, authors, and intentions’.” Standards of right and wrong exist not in the text but within the community. Fish said this is why we can’t agree on an interp of a Shakespearean sonnet though it’s only fourteen lines. "Rational debate is always possible," he hoped, "not, however, because it is anchored in a reality outside it, but b/c it occurs in a history, a history in the course of which realities and anchors have been established, although … they will have to be est. again" (544). If our debates aren't anchored in reality itself but only in a history of literary study then literary history must transcend reality? But if literary history is part of reality, then he hasn't really helped us, has he? Also, if there's no reality outside the community then what do separate communities appeal to when the debate one another? Other communities, themselves, or what? And how, if right and wrong exists only in communities, does anyone ever change communities?

Novick doesn't critique these guys (like I've been doing) but only concludes that "the center does not hold," adding that: "In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Thank goodness the post-modern community isn't the true Israel. Thank God that the sacred text of the true Israel doesn't end with the book of Judges. The Christian meta-narrative doesn't end in self-defeating despair. It doesn't end in the cynical resignation to power plays and apathy toward meaning.

The relativism of Becker and Beard and the postmodernism of Derrida and Fish have done us a great service by making us more aware of how our preconceptions affect our interpretations and how words get out of our control and reveal our self-centered power plays. Peter Leithart, in Solomon Among the Postmoderns, has argued that Postmodernism reveals that everything under the sun is mere vanity and chasing after the wind, which is the point of Ecclesiastes. But unlike Ecclesiastes, Postmodernism ends in the despair of futility, because it rejects God as the basis of knowledge. It rejects his normative interpretation of the world that is revealed in nature, Scripture, and ultimately in the final judgment.

I would give Novick five stars if he would have taken a sane position on the issue and not written in academia-ese. He once refers to something inconsistent as "problematically consistent." My students choked on this kind of stuff. One student said he tried to understand Novick and another that he tried to slit his wrists with Novick.

Mark Noll's "Christianity and the Possibility of Historical Knowledge," responds well to Novick. Noll argues that only the Christian view of knowledge can restore our confidence in reliable knowledge of any kind. This is because God created the world and us in his image, so that we can know his world. We can trust our senses and our reason because God created them to receive and unlock nature and Scripture. The world can be penetrated by our minds because they are made like God's mind, which knows his world perfectly. The correspondence of our minds to the creation is finite and fallible, especially because of sin, but can also be reliable. The link between the something in my head and the something outside it is established at creation and sustained by God's power upholding his creation.

Thus, I would argue that objectivity is seeing and knowing the world and God as God sees and knows the world and himself. This is humanly possible because we are made in his image, and he has revealed himself in the world but preeminently in the Word made flesh and made text. R.C. Sproul said: "We can grasp the infinite, but we cannot hold the infinite within our grasp." Thus scientific and historical knowledge, as well as personal knowledge of ourselves and each other, can correspond to objective reality or Truth.

But Noll also points out that knowledge is a product of our individual points of view, and thus no two people will ever come to exactly the same perspective. Noll also notes that the Christian view of the fall into sin resonates with relativism. I would argue that what postmoderns call "power" Christians call the sin of ambition and pride. These prejudice our perceptions of the world, but the only response left is not "more power to my power play." The Christian response is: "I repent of my grabbing for power, and I die to self in order to seek God's revelation." In this way, we may, like Noll, steer a course between Scylla of scientific objectivity and the Charybdis of relativism, without falling into the trap of either.

View all my reviews >>

Berlinski on History

In a recent discussion with the Discovery Institute, David Berlinski remarked about the danger of reading history backwards from our present concerns:

It is a mistake to read back into the recent past the political and emotional structure of discussions now current.

Reading things backwards is vulgar as intellectual history and false to the facts – vulgar because it assigns an aspect of permanence to our own obsessions; and false because it distorts the play of forces playing just a few decades ago.

Darren Doane on Collision

I still haven't seen Collision. It's been in the mail since Oct. 26. I guess Amazon is taking its sweet time in getting it to me, since I signed up for free shipping. But click on the title for a great little article by the director of the film.

If Hitchens Is Right

I've been listening to some interviews of Douglas Wilson and Christopher Hitchens concerning the release of their upcoming documentary Collision, which shows them debating whether Christianity is good for the world (click on the title of this post for more info). Hitchens is the global village atheist, and I wonder what would be true if Hitchens is right. I propose the following:

If Hitchens is right there will be no final justice.

If Hitchens is right no one will find out who won the debate.

If Hitchens is right there is no such thing as a debate.

If Hitchens is right there is no standard for distinguishing good and evil.

If Hitchens is right there is no basis for his condemnations of wickedness.

If Hitchens is right there is no such thing as being right.

If Hitchens is right why should anyone care about being wrong?

If Hitchens is right there is no such thing as "good for the world."

Immortality without Eternal Life

Christian bioethicist, Nigel Cameron says:

In the end, taking life made in God's image may not be as bad, in God's eyes, as making life in our own.

Cameron is talking about genetic engineering and the problems it poses to a Christian understanding of humanity. One trans-humanis has said, "We are going to be as gods, we might as well get good at it." He's talking about our ability to isolate certain genes and genetically impart them to our future offspring.

Companies are actually at work patenting genes that will one day be for sale. So if you want your child to be immune to certain diseases in your family, you can buy the right kind of genes to impart that immunity. Great idea, right? But you can also determine eye and hair color as well as select genes for a forty-four inch vertical jump.

The trans-humanists believe that his will eventually lead to the genetic perfection of mankind and even to an immortal body made of synthetic material. Adbusters published the "Cyborg Manifesto" a few years ago in order to alert us to the views of the trans-humanists. As Cameron says, "These are not sci-fi crazies" but people who speak on the National Science Foundation Platforms. Here is part of the Adbusters parody of their views:

Trapped for millions of years in nature's garden with God calling the shots, we have finally discovered an escape hatch. Advances in computer technology, biotech, and nanotech have unlocked the promise of controlling our own evolutionary future, of burning the old DNA blueprint. For the first time in our history we can seize total control. We can declare the human body, its clumsy bones, its tiny brain, its cumbersome systems, a failed experiment. We can transcend our own biological vessels and decide for ourselves what it means to be human. For far too long we followed a genetic script handed down from on high. Now at last we get to direct, to make history, rather than just acting it out (Adbusters, The Cyborg Manifesto, last paragraph, qt. in Mars Hill Audio, vol. 81).

This is our folly: We want immortality without eternal life.

Doubt vs. Trust

When we doubt God, we think we know better or would do better. Given our limited nature, this is the height of arrogance. We need to trust God with his own universe.

God and the Storm

Ran across a good quote in a student's reading journal:

Sometimes you need to stop telling God how big the storm is, and start telling the storm how big God is.

Where Does One Find Happiness after the Industrial Revolution?

If it's generally true that the industrial revolution made work less satisfying, perhaps we responded by trying to make spending more satisfying. Instead of working to find fulfillment, we started working for a paycheck, and we all know what to do with that!

The Comeback Calvin

Timothy George recently wrote a good article in "Christianity Today" on the perseverance of Calvinism. See the link below or click on the title of this post to read.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/september/14.27.html

What's Wrong with a Secular State?

Peter Leithart published an article at the "First Things" website on our deficient understanding of the secular:

And yet, some Christians and many historians and sociologists view secularization as the genius of public Christianity, especially public Protestantism. In contrast to ancient Judaism and Islam, both of which imagine a public space dominated by a single religion, the church separates the sphere of shared life from the sphere of the church, reserving the sphere of the church for believers and regulating it by the demands of the gospel but defending the secular, neutral character of the public square.

John Milbank smells an equivocation in this argument. Western theology, he notes, has always acknowledged the reality of the saeculum, but this is understood in temporal rather than spatial terms. For Augustine, every earthly peace or justice, every political order, is relative to the absolute order, justice and peace of the eschaton. This secular age is a mixed age, during which wheat and tares grow up together. But this temporal secularity, Milbank argues, does not imply a morally neutral, secular public space, in part because, according to the classic view, both church and state partake of the conditions of the saeculum. The secular, Milbank insists, was not a natural order discovered when the veil of sacrality was lifted; the secular had to be created, and then defended, intellectually, politically, and even theologically. Early in the modern period, politicians and theorists formed, with the cooperation of theologians, the secular arena as a public space of amoral power politics, unrestrained economic self-interest, morally neutral social custom and structure. No word from God is permitted within this space, which is a playground where humans are freed to pursue their private happiness without any reference to ultimate ends. (Click on the title for a link to the full article.)

This touches on my earlier discussion of the freedom afforded by a state church. It turns out that Patrick Henry proposed that Christianity be designated as the state religion of Virginia, where he was a four time governor. He wasn't specifying a particular denomination, just Christianity, but he was up against Jefferson and Madison. His proposal did not carry the day though he tried several times. Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom did pass and Madison considered the establishment of Christianity to be a violation of the Roger William's tradition of "offering an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every religion" (qt. Moynahan, The Faith, 592). Patrick Henry's evangelical voice was a minority among our other deistic founders.

Stanley Fish argues that the First Amendment to the Constitution views religion as a dangerous element when combined with government. No doubt state religions have been coercive in the past, but they have also produced the greatest achievements of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the Reformation. Would the Thomistic synthesis, the Sistine Chapel, the reforms of Luther and Calvin, and the music of Johan Sebastian Bach been possible without Christendom state-religion?

Christendom had its share of abuses but it also testified to the fact that "all things hold together in Christ" (Col. 1:17). We have lost this public testimony in America, while also depriving the government of an absolute basis for law. Our government derives "its just powers from the consent of the governed" (The Declaration of Independence). We are still in middle of this experiment which I suggest is going badly. Without a transcendent basis for moral law, right and wrong is only what the individual thinks it is. With no consensus possible, radical individualism tears at the moral fabric of society. The only healing possible comes through repentance and hope for a more robust public square where the church and the state dialogue until the coming of Christ.

Barach Obama recently disbanded the president's council on bioethics, where Christians had a voice on the dignity of human life made in the image of God. The president said that he needed a policy group not an advisory committee. Yikes! This is a step backward. A state with no thoughtful Christian input on one of the most significant questions of our time is secular in the worst way.

A Lazy Thinker

William James said:

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?

Are they found in James' conclusion to his rhetorical question? A lazy thinker forgets to test his theory by applying it to itself.

Subjective Objectivity

Objectivity is seeing reality as it is. How do you do that?

OK, I've tried to establish that objectivity is not neutrality. We can't achieve objectivity by hanging upside down and shaking out the presuppositions. We have to pour in the right presuppositions by hearing the word of God and studying the world of God. Thus the right presuppositions about reality bestow a subjectivity that serves as the means to objectivity. Our presuppositions become the mental, emotional, interpretive instrument that focuses and expands our perceptions of reality. Our perceptions and interpretations must be constantly fine tuned and readjusted by encounters with the subject over our whole lives on into our sanctified eternity.

When radical post-moderns deny objective reality they confuse reality with our perceptions of it. Objective reality exists though we don't perceive it clearly, but as Paul says, "through a glass darkly." Kant said there are no "uninterpreted facts." But there are uninterpreted facts or we wouldn't be able to test our interpretations. The fact that we can test our knowledge means that there is a reality to test it against. There is a reality to account for and the better our accounting the closer we come to seeing objective reality.

When it comes to studying history, I've also argued that we have to acknowledge our presuppositions and realize how they affect our interpretation. Then we can set them in reserve while we try to enter the worldview of another. In this way, we strive to put the subject in historical perspective. After we have accurately understood, we have earned the right to critique and appreciate. We evaluate through our subjective worldview through which we hopefully perceive objective reality in an accurate way. We may congratulate ourselves on having achieved this whenever somebody pays us the compliment of having understood their point-of-view.

In sum, we can be objective in the sense seeing reality as it is from God's perspective and being fair to our subject's self-understanding. Right?

In other words, we need to be impartial when fairness is called for, and partial whenever the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are at stake.

The Truth About Truth

Allow me to refine my position on objectivity and truth seeking: A person doesn't find the truth through objective detachment, but by loving and passionately seeking the truth whatever it may be. Because of our pride we assume that we already know the truth, and so we find what we set out to seek. We turn history, or whatever it is we are studying, into a mirror that reflects our worldview. A person who loves the truth also likes to learn the truth, which often means admitting he was wrong.

The Freedom of a State Church

Does the disestablishment of religion in America make it harder for the church to influence the state?

Does the state have any absolute basis for law if it is officially separated from the church?

It's instructive to compare England and America on these questions. England has a state church and freedom of religion. We have freedom of religion and no state church. Americans tend to be more nervous about politicians with religious points of view. The British media seems to be more welcoming to religious points of view in the political dialogue. Try to imagine C.S. Lewis reading The Case for Christianity over American radio. He did just that on the BBC during WWII. Why does English Atheist Christopher Hitchens identify more with America than his native land? We have separation of church and state but his fatherland is still in bound to its medieval past. But only about 5% of the British population is in church on Sunday compared to about 35% in America. What's up?

After discussing this in class today a student piped up:
"A state-religion opens the door for the church and state to discuss issues, but it doesn't necessarily make the people of that state more Christian."

Pretty impressive for an eight grader, eh! What do you think? Comments?

A Theistic World

The world is penetrable by mind because it was created by Mind.

Luther Quote

"I was made to ... fight devils."

Imago Dei - Everybody Gets It

Dimesdale Gets Clarity

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Hester Prynne tells Dimmesdale that what we did had "a consecration of its own." Dimmesdale laments his adultery but withholds his confession. He decides to escape his tormentor and Hester's unfaithful husband, Chillingworth, by going to Europe with her and their child Pearl. But he immediately comes under an even more chilling Satanic torment that arises from within. He finally tells Hester that they violated "the sanctity of each others souls" and are suffering for it. The only way of escape is public confession for a very public sin.

The Puritans get a bad wrap for legalism, which is a common temptation for reformers. The problem is that Hawthorne gives an almost one-dimensional portrayal of them. The Puritans discipline Hester without trying to redeem her which is quite un-Puritan. It turns out that one of Hawthorne's ancestors was part of the Salem witch trials. It seems he wants to escape this cloud while retaining the Christian message of "hope through repentance." He called his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson "a denier of all that is and a seeker of he knows not what," and for that I love him.

The humanization of Pearl is particularly touching and powerful. Hester is a proto-feminist of sorts, who is primarily critiqued but might have pointed the way to better relations between men and women. This is a bit confusing, but Dimmesdale is the real hero, and Hawthorne gets most of his character right. I just wonder how he was able to preach while the guilt was eating away at him. Why does it destroy his body but not his mind? Nevertheless, Dimmesdale ends up doing the right thing before the guilt kills him, and he points the way to redemption and release for all involved. The story is ultimately satisfying because Hawthorne beautifully critiques Hester's Romanticism through Dimmesdale and affirms that children need repentant fathers. Bravo

View all my reviews >>

Loving the Truth

We don't discover truth through objective detachment. We discover truth by loving the Truth.

The Truth About History!

History: A Very Short Introduction by John H. Arnold

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Arnold gives a good practical guide with concrete examples, demonstrating the joy of historical discovery and reliable reconstruction of the past. He surveys the history of history, rejecting scientific approach of Leopold von Ranke ("only to say how it really was") while trying to navigate away from the pure relativism of private stories.

Arnold rejects the concept of "Truth" as an illusion of certainty, but clings to "truth" as fidelity to the sources (56). But, I ask, who determines that? Arnold ultimately appeals to consensus: "Truth is therefore a process of consensus, as what operates as 'the truth' (what gets accepted as 'the true story') relies on a general, if not absolute, acceptance by one's fellow human beings" (115). Arnold applies this to Hitler and the Holocaust, "The consensus is rightly so strong on this topic that we know the Holocaust to have been an act of astounding evil" (120). So if this consensus is right, can a consensus be wrong? If so, how do you decide? Go back to the sources? But that can only provide another consensus at best.

Now, what if Hitler would have won? Would the consensus and thus the truth be different? I would say no! And thank God he didn't win. Thus we must appeal to something beyond consensus as even Hitler was operating on a consensus of fellow Germans he had persuaded.

We can only judge Hitler to be evil by appealing to Truth. This resonates with the moral beings we are, and calls for humility, because we don't always see the truth clearly or act in accord with it. It can be abused as a mere grasp for power, as with Hitler. But the Truth has a power of its own that would have defeated him even if he had won the war. Thus we submit our appeals to Truth to the Truth. As a Christian, I acknowledge my point of view, test it against the books of Scripture and nature, and see what comes of it. It's a journey but not an aimless one. We must seek the Truth.

Arnold strikes the post-modern pose of skepticism toward meta-narrative, saying, "In tackling the problems that face us, we have become suspicious of people spinning us great tales, and wish to pay more attention to the details of true stories" (91). This is a false dichotomy. Truth includes but must ultimately transcend mere fidelity to details. Otherwise your just "keeping score."

Arnold does come up with three good reasons for doing history: enjoyment, thinking outside of one's present time, and thinking "differently about oneself" (122). We need to have fun in the past, explore "an alternative world," and make historical arguments that give us the ability to change. But without Truth, whose to say it was for the better?

View all my reviews >>

The Perks of Being an Historian

Cantor/Schneider in How to Study History speak eloquently of the joys of the profession:

History is probably the best field for the student whose main aim in college is a sound liberal [i.e. freeing] education. History is concerned with all that man has thought and done, and a history major combined with inidividual courses in literature, philosophy, art, music, and the social sciences introduces the student to all facets of human culture and experience. Deans of law shcools and schools of journalism believe there is no better undergraduate preparation for postgraduate professional study in their fields than the knowledge and methods acquired by the history major.... The historical profession offers unsurpassed intellectual and emotional satisfactions of the college teaching....

Cantor/Schneider then add:

and attractive remuneration as well [what?!!] (135-36).

The Historical Task

Cantor and Schneider in How to Study History comment on the intersection of historiography and ethics. They quote D. W. Robertson:

Our judgments of value are characteristically dependent upon attitudes peculiar to our own place and time. If we universalize these attitudes, as though they were Platonic realities, and assume that they have a validity for all time, we turn history into a mirror.... And when this happens, history, although it may seem to flatter us with the consoling message "Thou art the fairest of all," becomes merely an instrument for the cultivation of our own prejudices.

The problem with Robertson is that he just made a value judgement "dependent upon attitudes peculiar to our own place and time." Just because our value judgements are historically conditioned does not mean that they are historically determined and therefore relative. Christians believe that God has revealed his value judgments through the books of nature and Scripture, and that we can know them, since we are made in his image.

Do we need to guard against turning history into a mirror of our own ideals and hatreds? Yes! How do we do this? Well, we can start by constantly checking our ideals and hatreds against Scripture which has universal "validity for all time." In this way, we can submit our judgment to God, so that "our' ideals and hatreds are actually God's and not a personal prejudice.

We can also be upfront about our worldview and admit that our interpretation of the universals can be off. Thus we invite others to evaluate our interpretations from their perspective, so that we can learn from each other in all humility. By balancing what is absolute with our finite and fallible understanding, we can also stand for something without being prideful and obnoxious. We can be firm and soft, instead of being squishy and self defeating. Cantor/Schneider go on:

Lord Acton ... took a somewhat different stand: he warned that it is the historians first duty "not to debase the moral currency." By this he meant that the historian must always point out what is good and what is evil in the actions of men in the past. But in order to do this justly, we must first establish what they actually did; and we must also have an understanding of what the men of a particular era in the past considered to be right and wrong (43).

We are moral beings who instinctively evaluate for right and wrong, but we can table our Christian perspective for a moment, while we do the historical task. Once we've understood someone or something on its own terms, then we can bring in the biblical perspective. If we perform the historical task first, we are able to perform the biblical task more faithfully, since it will be based on an accurate understanding. Before we critique we better understand what we're critiquing.

Hitchens vs. Hitchens

I started watching the Christopher Hitchens vs. Peter Hitchens debate on YouTube today. Yes they are brothers and know how to get into a good scrape. It's hard to get the better of Chris, but at one point Peter rebutted his tirade against hell by pointing out that the civilizations that chose not to believe in hell soon created hell on earth. People started clapping and Chris tried to shame them into stopping. (Atheists can be an intellectual bullies, but don't let them get away with it.)

Why is this the case? Could it be that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. fell into this because they purposely forgot that they were creatures and substituted themselves for God? If we don't accept accountability before God, that we could end up in hell, we lose perspective. When we lose perspective, we think we can get away with anything. We assume the divine prerogative, which is something awful for a non-divine person to assume. What is lawful for God because he's God is horrific when usurped by a mere man.

Advise for Students of History

I've been reading How to Study History by Norman Cantor and Richard Schneider and ran across some good advice for the historian in all of us:

If you are a beginner, the reading of one secondary book in history each week should be enough--but just barely enough--to enable you to build up the necessary skills of reading quickly, which include finding the thesis of a book in a few minutes, learning to recognize the devices of various fundamental interpretations, and finally storing in your memory some approximate awareness of the contents and subjects covered in the book so that you can use it later as a reference.... To be sure, once the pressures of graduate work ease and the new pressures of writing, teaching, and having a deeper and closer interest in primary sources take over, the professional scholar's reading of secondary sources will decrease with time. But even so, most good scholars still try to read at least one secondary source each week and to keep up with the periodical literature, and in general try to stay abreast of the literature of their own fields of interest....

The first aim in reading any secondary should be to determine as soon as possible what the main point of the book is--to find the central conclusions the book is trying to prove, and to recogonizethe historiographical point of view represented ... i.e. the assumptions and value judgements upon which the author bases his conclusions....

To find the main point of a book, you should read the introduction, the first chapter, and the last chapter before you read any other part of the book....

With the main point as a central focus, everything else to be discovered by the student as he reads the book will have a frame of reference.

The authors end the first part of the book with these observations:

The one theme that has recurred ... has been the need for the active perception, for creative and imaginative interpretation in the use of all types of historical materials. Neither primary sources nor secondary sources will offer any significantly meaningful insights to a passive reader who seeks merely to recognize their contents. But the student who has acquired the basic principles of anlyzing sources, and who through diligent study learns by practice and by observing the work of other historians to apply such priciples fluently, will find hismelf fully prepared and well informed for the next major step in his development--the wrinting of his own original historical papers.

Don't we all learn by imitation? And then we learn to develop our own voice, point of view, interests, and come up with something ours.

The Unredemption

Grendel by John Champlin Gardner Jr.

My rating: 1 of 5 stars A monster tries his hand at philosophy. He doesn't remember how he learned to speak the language of the Danes, but he also seems to have read Nietzsche and knows some Latin. There's a reference to the "will to power" and he says "nihil ex nihilo." So this is really John Gardner deconstructing Beowulf. Tell it from the monster's perspective and turn the world on its head. "Sympathy for the Devil." The monster is capable of intelligence and admiring the beauty of the queen, but there's nobody to redeem him. He is shunned by humans who fear his ugliness and strength, the dragon gives him a crash course in nihilism, and the only person who cares for him is his drooling mother. So what's a monster to do but amuse himself with slaughter and mock the humans who try to construct meaning out of "copulating dust." Grendel speaks of a wickedness inside him and being born of a cursed race but rejects the gods and ridicules the Shaper's songs for masking reality with a smile. Where does Grendel come up with wickedness and the idea of a curse if there's no such thing as Good and Blessing? The problem with this tale is that Gardner arouses sympathy for Grendel by telling the story from his point of view, but Grendel's actions are objectively evil. The Bible does not encourage us to feel sympathy for evil, but to try to redeem it while also calling out for justice. The original Beowulf story was Christianized by a monk and passed on to us. But those who refuse Christianity rewind the tape and undo the redemption, like with the recent movie. The priests in the story are fools though Grendel spares a sincere one. It is the anti Till We Have Faces. In the end, Grendel calls his death at the hands of Beowulf an accident and wishes an accident on all those "evil" creatures who come out to watch him die. But there's nothing accidental about Gardner's tale. He's out to de-convert the world. View all my reviews >>

History vs. News

C. S. Lewis once said that you didn't need to read the papers. If something really bad happened your neighbor would tell you. One of Twain's characters remarked that newspapers go and fetch everyones' bad news and lay it at your doorstep. Lewis argued that God did not make us big enough to bear the weight of the world. We are not psychologically capable of taking in so much bad news. God designed us to live in small communities, not in global villages. He made us to nourish our souls on permanent things, not the ephemeral news that passes away with the next update. This is why a steady diet of history, especially redemptive history, is better for us than constantly checking the news or watching television, much of which is trivial.

Thoreau: Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.

William Ralph Inge: Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.

C.S. Lewis: If it is not eternal, then it is eternally out of date.

G. K. Chesterton: The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.

Russell Kirk: In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night.

E. F. Schumacher: Small is beautiful.

Isaiah 40:8: The grass withers, the flower fades,

but the word of our God will stand forever.

Weird Al "Craigslist"

What if Napoleon was Napoleon?

Out of the Mouth of Babes

Last night after my six year old Kate and I returned from a bike ride in the park, and she was getting ready for her bedtime story (The Magician's Nephew), she remarked "I love life. Better than being an animal." I smiled, and she added, "I can't believe I'm a person!" Then pointing to her forehead and crossing her eyes at her forefinger rested there she said, "I'm her!" Then getting tickled at herself and giggling madly said, "I can't believe I'm a freak!"

It reminded me that we didn't create ourselves. Life is something we discover. It's a gift meant to be a joy, not a problem to be brooded over or depressed about. I once read this quote:

We try to teach children about life. They try to teach us what life's about.

Ah! They often know, better than we do, the art of living. The Lord speaks to us, sometimes philosophically, "out of the mouth of babes" (Ps. 8:2).

If God Made It, It's Interesting

This is an argument for well-roundedness. If God made it, the appropriate response is not the flip "I don't like it" or "I'm not big on it." But the response doesn't have to be "I like it" either. The most interesting questions are "What is God doing here?" "How can I appreciate it?" "How can this make me more human?"

If it's been warped and perverted by the devil the question might be, even as we turn away, "How can I redeem this?" "What can I learn from this?"

If God made us for this earth and this earth for us and us for him, we don't do ourselves any favors if we look at something He made and then died to redeem, and say "I think I'll be bored."

Dirt Encore!

Who Needs Humanity?

Who's afraid of robots when we can inhabit them, live forever, traverse space, and create biological life in the far flung regions of the multiverse? What did the serpent say? "Ye shall be as gods."

Check out this article posted Facebook by NPR. (Click on my title or copy and paste the address below)

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=121046935896&h=EQzAy&u=FODpl&ref=nf

Dirt Phobia?

Why have so many kids today developed food allergies to such natural edibles as peanuts? When I was a kid I never remember anyone who had to avoid pb & j in the lunch room. Now I know of several children who must live in a nut free environment. I also read countless warnings on food labels indicating that this product was processed on machines which also handle nuts and soy. Why this epidemic?

One theory is that we have quarantined our children away from nature and now they are developing allergies to it. I know it can happen for other reasons, but has anyone else noticed that many parents and kids today seem to have dirt phobia? I was in my backyard with a friend, when his child picked up a stick. He rushed over, grabbed his child's arm, removed the stick, and then looked at me with concern, asking if he should wash his son's hand.

When I was a kid I picked up sticks, laid them straight, and hurled them like javelins. I played in dirt without washing my hands before eating my Snickers. One of my favorite pastimes was filling styrofoam cups with dust and throwing them through the air like bombs which exploded in plumes upon crashing into the ground. The bigger the cup, the more dust, the bigger the mushroom clouds. I would even combine cups to increase the fun. I planted things in the dirt, gardened with my grandmother, repaired divots, laid sod, played terrible lies in sand traps, dug worms, and, like my wife, made mud pies. I also learned to filet fish as a youngster. I am not afraid of dirt, germs, slime, or guts, and I'm proud of it ( in case you couldn't tell :-). I don't get sick very often, neither do my kids, and I never carry hand sanitizer. Living close to nature has served me well. Spending most of their time indoors seems not to have helped our present generation. Lewis writes:

They began producing the damp and smeary parcels of bear-meat which would have been so very unattractive to anyone who had spent the day indoors (Prince Caspian, The Return of the Lion).

Dirt came up once in class last year (you never know what will) and "ew!" started erupting from the girls. "What?" I asked. "Dirt is gross," I heard. "Really!?!" I said, "I dare say that unless you're eating gummy bears for lunch it all came from dirt. When God created us he actually put his hands in the dirt and formed Adam." "Yeah! But I don't want to touch it!" Isn't there something wrong with this, even given the fact that we're talking about teenage girls?

God created us as part of nature and commanded us to rule over it:

God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground" (Gen. 1:28).

We thrive in an organic world, and we get messed up apart from it. Nature is the standard that we must live by, and is not something to escape or transcend. If we try to do the latter we do so to our detriment don't we? Let's hear it for dirt!

The Domestic Office

Chesterton ended his words on Domesticity with the following:

Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for the desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well....

The Dignity of Domesticity or Wouldn't It Be Great To Be a Mom!

Feminism was just beginning its meteoric rise in Chesterton's day. He showed how it was possible and necessary to believe in and honor the feminine without being a feminist:

It is not difficult to see ... why the female became the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior.... The same natural operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment ... is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colourless and of small import to the soul, then, as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell to other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness (What's Wrong with the World, 1910).

Spiritual Machines Meet Mr. Bultitude

We just returned from vacationing in Florida, and on the way down I heard renowned physicist Michio Kaku interview of Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is an inventor and futurist who believes he can live long enough to live forever. This is immortality via technology as opposed to theology. Seriously!?! Yes, he's serious (click on the title if you doubt).

Kurzweil's name can be seen in huge letters across the front of the synthesizer's in your church, and he is the guy responsible for voice recognition systems now available to consumers. To support his wild extrapolations, he points to nanotechnology and its capacity to merge with biological systems in the human body and control such things as spasms and seizures. He believes that there is no limit to this merger, and that he'll be able to download his consciousness into a computer before his body wears out (He just turned 61). Kurzweil believes he will then be able to control an everlasting synthetic body and soon models will be available to us all. So, in the very near future, instead of pulling up google on your laptop you will be able to pull it up in your mind's eye and thus command knowledge beyond that of Spock. Thus Homo-laptopicus, our present evolutionary model, will evolve into something along the lines of Data.

"What about the soul," you ask? Well the soul is nothing more than a word for the complex computing of our brains that seemed to point to a mystical, spiritual side that we could not fully comprehend. But now that we have taken the reductionist step of reducing the mind to the brain, we realize that we can and soon will transcend our brains with computer brains. In other words, what we call spirituality will soon be possible in the machines that will eventually replace our bodies. Kurzweil believes in what he calls the "age of spiritual machines," when the organic world is replaced by chips and plastic and heaven and earth passes away and becomes a computer. We will communicate inaudibly, mind-to-mind, via something like omnipresent wi-fi. Sound scary? Well not for Kurzweil. He can't wait and neither can Kaku it seems.

This is exactly the path predicted by Lewis in The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength. Kurzeil's humanoid-of-the-future does not live off the land but in space, where he has solved the problem of space travel and can traverse the universe and the multiverse and date extra-terrestrials. He is literally trillions of times smarter. His is a synthetic world where man no longer eats, grows, or reproduces through sex. I guess the orgasm is purely intellectual.

I've seen Kurzweil on TV too and his mannerisms eerily resemble the scientists in That Hideous Strength. Perhaps I don't know him well enough, but he seems to have already merged and the soul was left holding the door. I pray that he'll soon run into Mr. Bultitude, who might scare it back into him. Lord save us from our vain technological imaginations.

Confronting an Obamanation

The Pope just met with President Obama and challenged him on his abortion and stem-cell research positions. Obama promised to read the Vatican's statement on bioethics. Click on the title to see an article. Please join me in praying that Obama would rethink his views on abortion and stem cell research, repent, and that we would follow him in that repentance. A Damascus Road experience wouldn't hurt either Lord.

The Strangeness & Familiarity of History

John Arnold, in his History: A very Short Introduction, writes:

It has been suggested (by the writer L. P. Hartley) that "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there". Douglas Adams, the science-fiction author, posits an opposite case: the past is truly a foreign country, they do things just like us. Somewhere between these two is the elusive element that attracts us to the past, and prompts us to study history.

Since they do things differently, we learn to question why we do things the way we do. Because they act nobly and mess up just like us, we can learn from them. Arnold also quotes Jean Bodin's Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1566):

Although history has many eulogists ... yet among them no one has commended her more truthfully and appropriately than the man who called her the "master of life."

Mattress Gravity and the Multiverse

Physicist Michio Kaku explains black holes as the vacuum cleaners of the universe. Like dark matter and dark energy, we cannot see them but we can see them sucking things into the void, even light, and throwing nearby planets and stars off course.

Theoretical physics views the space-time continuum like a fabric stretched over space. The heavy things in space rest on this fabric and sink into it, like I sink into my mattress. Now imagine that a golf goes rolling by while I'm sitting on my mattress. The dent in the mattress created by my weight makes the golf ball roll in or change its course as it goes by. That's gravity. OK, so my mattress gravity wouldn't allow the golfball to escape.

Now a black hole is a rip right through the mattress or in this case the space-time fabric of our universe. Black hole gravity is so strong that it spaghettifies everything that passes through the it. Kaku speculates that if you could survive a black hole, you might come out the other side into a parallel universe . This leads me to discuss the recent theory that our universe is only one universe of many that make up the multiverse.

Steven P. Meyer, author of the newly released Signature in the Cell (click on my blog title), writes that cosmologists have posited the multiverse in order to overcome the odds against evolution. Many Christians do not realize that the big bang has made atheists more than a little uncomfortable. This is because the big bang implies that our universe had a beginning. Atheists realized that something has to be eternal in order for us to exist, since nothing could only produce nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit). They correctly reasoned that if they reject God, then matter itself has to be eternal and thus uncreated. So they came up with the steady state theory of the universe, which says that matter and the universe are steady and timeless. But alas, the evidence for the big bang blew the steady state theory away! This is because the big bang did not explode in space and time, it was the explosion of space and time, and the stuff that would condense into atoms and form matter after 300,000 years. Thus matter too had a beginning at the moment of the bang and could not be timeless. That leaves God as the only other option.

Now if the universe had a beginning, like Scripture teaches, it is also going to have an end, like Scripture teaches. The big bang is either going to go on expanding and die of heat loss, as entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics teaches, or it is going to collapse and implode. So we had a beginning and we will have an end. This presents a second difficulty for atheists. Probability calculations say the chances for the exact alignment of raw materials (like amino acids) required for the evolution of life in our universe are insurmountable. But that's only true, say some physicists, if you only have one universe. Say there is an infinite number of universes like the bubbles in a bubble bath. These bubble universes are eternally bumping into each other and exploding, merging, and splitting into new universes. It's only a matter of time (pun not intended) before one of these universes overcomes the odds and life evolves.

Steven Meyer points out however, that the cell itself presents further problems for atheists. Darwin thought the cell was about as complex as a piece of jelly, but molecular biologists have discovered that its more complex that a Saturn Five rocket. In other words, it requires an engineering degree to comprehend the genetic information and processes within a cell . Since you have to be a rocket scientist to understand what's going on in a cell, it was probably designed by a higher intelligence.

It's amazing that we are only just know approaching an understanding of the cell by using models from complex technology systems. If it takes one to know one, and we like to think of ourselves as intelligent beings, then perhaps the cell had an intelligent designer. But wait! If there's an eternal multiverse then it could happen by chance, right? But Meyer argues that we have no no evidence that a multiverse exists, so our theories must operate within the known limits of the known universe. (Anyone want a shave with Ockham's razor?) This means that the design and information that we find in a cell still requires an intelligent designer. Even if all of the amino acids and raw materials beat the odds and align, they do not produce life by themselves. The law of biogenesis says that life cannot come from non-living matter.

Now on an imaginative level, I kind of like the idea of the multiverse, like C. S. Lewis' wood between the worlds in The Magician's Newphew. Just don't try to use the multiverse to make the impossible possible. God must live from all eternity in order for biological life to exist in this temporal universe or anywhere else. Only Life can beget life. With that established, I find it fascinating that there might be worlds within worlds or parallel universes that we could travel to via black-holes, worm-holes, teleporting, light speed, ridiculous speed, or ludicrous speed (Space Balls anyone?). But I guess the speed of my imagination will have to do for now. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it were something like Lewis' "wood between the worlds?"

Through a Glass Really Darkly!

I recently saw a documentary about the universe with physicist Michio Kaku (his day job is string theory). It turns out that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. Cosmologists know this because the universe is cooling down. Through satellite technology they have mapped the microwaves of the universe and if they crank up the contrast they can see what it looked like when it was a baby. By mapping the cooling microwaves, they can calculate that 13.7 billion years ago time and space erupted in the big bang.

How do they know this? Well they know that the universe is expanding because Hubble looked through his telescope in the 1920s and discovered that galaxies are moving away from us and we are moving away from them. Well if everything is expanding, then it must have been much closer together at one time. That original density was more compact than an atom because an atom is mostly space. Imagine an atom where the electrons aren't orbiting a nucleus but are packed into it, and we have an idea of how dense we once were. Since I find this difficult to understand, I must still be pretty dense! Hee, hee, hee! Anyway, this density, called the singularity, suddenly expanded or banged, and space has been getting spacier ever since. Now that's definitely true, especially for blondes (Wow, my first blonde joke!).

Moving on, our solar system began when a star exploded in what they call a supernova. How do they know that? Evidently, a supernova is the only thing that's hot enough to cook the elements that make up our bodies. So our universe began with a big bang and our solar system began in a supernova.

Another interesting fact about our universe is that galaxies aren't behaving according to the laws of gravity. There is not enough known mass in the galaxies of our universe to hold them together in a gravitational field. It also turns out that the distant parts are orbiting at the same speeds as the nearer planets and stars. If Newton's laws are correct they should be orbiting slower and spinning out of the gravitational pull. Either we chuck gravity and falling apples or we come up with something else that's holding things together.

Ever since John Mayer's latest album, we don't want to question "Gravity," so there must be some mass that astronomers can't see. This mass has been nicknamed "dark matter." Evidently atoms make up only about 5% of the universe, so how much dark matter is there? According to calculations based on observations, they can only come up with a little over 20% dark matter. So 75% of the universe was still missing and that was a problem. But there's no problem that can't be solved by bringing in another problem.

Curiously, the universe isn't slowing down as expected but expanding faster and faster. Now if the gravity brakes aren't working, maybe its time to question gravity. But alas, John Mayer is too entrenched in popular culture, and we can't discredit Newton's falling apple (much less his work on figs), so there has to be an energy we can see that's causing the universe to accelerate. Enter dark energy and presto, there's the other 75% of universe!

The only remaining problem is that we cannot detect dark matter or energy, but we are trying. There's an underground lab in England trying to pick up the matter as it passes through the earth. Now that's a good use of someone's taxpayer dollars or science funding! And people think theology is an esoteric waste of time. There was a time, I think it was called the Enlightenment, when if you brought up theories about invisible things you got laughed out of universities, but now you can make a career out it! The Lord has a sense of humor, doesn't he?

Proverbs 25:2

It is the glory of God to conceal things,
but the glory of kings is to search things out.

Psalm 59:7-9

⁷There they are, bellowing with their mouths
with swords in their lips—
for "Who," they think, "will hear us?"

⁸But you, O LORD, laugh at them;
you hold all the nations in derision.

⁹O my Strength, I will watch for you,
for you, O God, are my fortress.

Hebrews 1:3

³He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.

Colossians 1:16-18

¹⁶For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.¹⁷And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.

God is not Male but Masculine

Lewis rebukes feminism, not the feminine, in That Hideous Strength. The Director is counseling Jane, who resents her husbands' invasion of her being.

"Yes," said the director. "There is no escape. If it were a virginal rejection of the male, He would allow it. Such souls can bypass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine, higher up, to which they must make yet deeper surrender. But your trouble has been what the old poets call Daugnier. We call it pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing--the gold lion, the bearded bull--which breaks through hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. You had better agree with your adversary quickly."

"You mean I shall have to become a Christian?" said Jane.

"It looks like it," said the Director.

This is why the church is called the "bride of Christ." We are all feminine in relation to Him. This is also why men were given the unenviable office of headship in all spheres: the family, the church, and should we even say the state?

The White Flag

In That Hideous Strength Lewis writes:

Yet, the very first moment you tried to be good, the universe let you down. It revealed gaps you had never dreamed of. It invented new laws for the express purpose of letting you down. That was what you got for your pains.

The cynics, then, were right. But at this thought, he stopped sharply. Some flavor that came with it had given him pause. Was this the other mood beginning again? Oh not that, at any price. He clenched his hands. No, no, no. He could not stand this much longer. He wanted Jane; he wanted Mrs. Dimble; he wanted Denniston. He wanted somebody or something. "Oh don't don't let me go back into it," he said; and then louder, "don't, don't." All that could in any sense be called himself went into that cry.... Tired like a child after weeping. A dim consciousness that the night must be nearly ended stole over him, and he fell asleep.

If we believe in the Good, the will universe will begin to disappoint and disenchant us. So do we give up like the cynics? No! This is why Jesus said we must become like children, if we are to enter the kingdom of God. We must be humble enough to live by faith and not by sight. We must exercise a simple faith that admits that we can't figure it all out. We can't live by reason alone. We have to put our faith in a God whom we cannot even begin to figure out. We must simply wave the white flag before the Hound of Heaven.