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.