Arrow Through the Sun

It Is All Happening Now

2012-01-29T16:24:00.000-08:00

Today's Sabbath observation is of some interesting similarities between the gospel narratives of the Temptation of Jesus, 1 Corinthians 10, and Hebrews 3-4. All refer back to the story of Israel wandering in the wilderness and all are about temptation and time.

First off, all make the point (explicit in the epistles, implicit in the gospels because of the setting in the wilderness) that the story of Israel is repeating itself. What happened to them was for us, Paul writes (1 Cor. 10:6), because their story is our story and their YHWH is our God. Countless sermons have been built on this assertion. But realize what an amazing assertion it is: that this story about the deliverance of a bunch of slaves in the desert over 3000 years ago is still relevant. That's because God is universal and God is the same, and our problem is the same. It's like the past is happening again.

The author of Hebrews makes this explicit in a slightly different way, by emphasizing the entrance to the promised land as the "rest" provided by God. This rest is also the rest that God entered into on the seventh day of creation (4:4) and it's the same rest referred to both by David in Psalm 95 and by Moses when looking toward the promised land. The author's point is that this is ALL the same thing, even though the Scripture references are scattered across thousands of years (and even the writing of that observation is now back two thousand years!). This rest is the salvation offered by Jesus, the gift putting things right, the rightness and peace of "shalom." Temptation attracts us away from this rest. Temptation is anti-peace, anti-wholeness, frenetic and frantic. Sound familiar?

The author of the Hebrews emphasizes that for each of these events -- the 7th day of creation, the words of David, and the wilderness wandering of Israel -- the real choice and real crux of action is Today. Again and again the author repeats the old Psalm, "Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts" and "So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest." The author (of Hebrews and of Psalm 95) says that "Today" is today. All these times are happening for you, for your choice and your direction and your repentance. In this sense, it is all happening now. Look at the present tense in 4:1: "A promise being left us of entering into his rest."*

This is personally convicting. When I look at myself, I don't see the rest I want to see. So many "todays" I have not entered in. I haven't been particularly peaceful lately, although with four small children I hope there's a bit more contingency grace for that. That serenity is not a cliche, it's a goal that Christ can bring me into, it's a land waiting to be entered, with patience. And the temptation is there, just as it was for those wandering in the desert, to turn another way, to another source for energy and life, whether by hoarding manna or begging for quail.

Adam and Eve faced that temptation and turned elsewhere, going so far as to hide from their maker (and their maker played along with the charade they set up that they could hide!). Jesus faced the same temptation, three times explicitly, and stronger than they ever did.

This is where a Christ-centered interpretation of Scripture becomes crystal clear, because what was the nature/event of the Fall? (David Bazan wrote a whole album about this with Curse Your Branches, though I don't agree with his conclusions!*) Was the moment of the Fall definitely the eating of a fruit, teeth ripping into a sugary something-or-other, was that the primary disobedience? If that's the case, why didn't Jesus go to a garden and refuse to eat the fruit? If the historical details of Genesis are of primary importance, then there's a sense that Jesus never fully reversed the fall.

But what if the Fall was something different, this inevitable, selfish turning away that now must be turned away/repented from? If the Fall was reaching out to eat what you shouldn't, then it was reversed by the refusal to turn stones into bread. If the Fall was displaying an unholy reliance in God to catch you when you were doing something wrong (to stop you from eating the fruit), then it was reversed by refusing to jump from the pinnacle of the Temple. And, most generally perhaps, if the Fall was worship of the power of self and bowing down before the wrong thing, a reflection of the self in the skin of the fruit, then it was reversed by refusing to bend a knee on the top of the world before the father of lies. Each of these is greater than refusing to eat a fruit, and yet each of these IS a refusal to eat the fruit. Each of these was reversed and resisted, and each of these is still a temptation, even years after that temple pinnacle itself was razed.

If we believe Jesus actually, truly reversed the Fall with his life, culminating in his resurrected and ascended body, then we have to believe that Easter happened 2000 years ago, not necessarily that a piece of fruit entered one guy's mouth twice that long ago (or more).

It is more important to understand that a historical Jesus fixed the world than that a historical Adam broke it. And it is most important to understand that today, right now, he is here holding out his rest for us to enter. May we actually take him up on it, one of these todays.

* Not sure if this present tense is there in the Greek, but it's there in the King James translation I'm using right now, so "today" that's a present tense verb, which I think is cool!

** Curse Your Branches is a great album for exposing the insufficiency of the Sunday School treatment of the Fall but of course it stops way too soon. The day is yet young ...

Gaiman on Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton

2012-01-26T12:38:00.000-08:00

A 2004 speech by Neil Gaiman about Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton can be found here. Note that it was made to the society that celebrates the three of them, and yet I still found it more positive than I expected. I think I've focused too much on Gaiman's criticisms of Lewis -- it's nice to know those are the criticisms of a friend, and I think, at a level, that I've always known that.

Built With Words

2012-01-25T14:05:00.000-08:00

I just published some thoughts on DNA, words, science, and faith in "Built With Words", an essay for Response, our university magazine. Check it out!

Responding to Barfield, Part 2: Holding On Too Tightly To Science

2012-01-20T13:09:00.000-08:00

(Before reading this, please start here at the beginning of this series.)

I have only seen bits of Brian Cox on the BBC, but I can already tell you he's a great science communicator. He's so clear that he occasionally shows up some of the contradictions of doing science. In particular, I was watching a program in which Cox very early on made it clear that all science is built on mental models that fit the data. But with every other sentence he says it's clear that these models are so close to reality that they can be taken for reality. Every other sentence involved taking the mental models as what Barfield would call idols.

This over-mechanization of the world is not an issue with the typical bogeyman Darwin -- after all, Paley himself likened organisms to a mechanism, to a watch, and God to the watchmaker. This is an issue with doing science itself (Barfield traces it back to Francis Bacon). As a scientist I have to ask, when have I followed my models so far that I have followed them too far, that I forget that they are models? Again, this is what Barfield calls idolatry. (Important to point out that anything, even the church itself -- even theologies, or more particularly, heresies -- can become an idol, but this is just about the scientific breed.)

Barfield, StA, p.39 “… the descriptions may still … be valuable, not as actual descriptions, but as notional ‘models’. What is important is, to remember that that is all they are. … For their nature is of artificial imagery. And when the nature and limitations of artificial images are forgotten, they become idols.”

Barfield, StA, p.62-63 “[The scientific mode of thinking] had temporarily set up the appearances of the familiar world … as things wholly independent of man. It had clothed them with the independence and extrinsicality of the unrepresented itself. But a representation, which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate – ought not to be called a representation. It is an idol. … [Evolution as one of these idols] … I am speaking of course of the form which the theory finally took, not of the concept of evolution itself. That is factual enough. The record of the rocks is a script containing stored memories of the earth’s past. It is only a question of how the script is to be read. … The appearances were idols. They had no ‘within’. Therefore the evolution which had produced them could only be conceived mechanomorphically as a series of impacts of idols on other idols.”

It is worth noting that people used quantitative models to predict what nature would do long before the Scientific Revolution, but for Barfield, those are not idols (the Greeks had idols of a somewhat more concrete variety, come to think of it). Those old idols were for "saving the appearances," and when they fit the data well enough they could predict far in advance with amazing mathematical precision: see the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient computer, which computed dates for religion -- for idols, appropriately enough.

Barfield, StA, p.47 “It was for the science of astronomy … to ‘save’ the ‘appearances,’ that is, the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies, and particularly of the sun, moon, and planets, which were the most difficult to account for, by devising hypothetical patterns of movement, which would account for the appearances without infringing on the fundamental principles.”

Barfield, StA, p.49 “The Greek word theoria meant ‘contemplation’ and is the term used in Aristotle’s psychology to designate the moment of fully conscious participation, in which the soul’s potential knowledge (its ordinary state) becomes actual, so that man can at last claim to be ‘awake.’ … [I]t does emphasize the difference between a proposition which it is hoped may turn out to be true, and a proposition, the truth or untruth of which is irrelevant. The geometrical paths and movements devised for the planets were, in the minds of those who invented them, hypotheses in the latter sense. They were arrangements – devices – for saving the appearances; and the Greek and medieval astronomers were not at all disturbed by the fact that the same appearances could be saved by two or more quite different hypotheses, such as an eccentric or an epicycle or, particularly in the case of Venus and Mercury, by the supposed revolution round the earth or supposed revolution around the sun. All that mattered was, which was the simplest and the most convenient for practical purposes; for neither of them had any essential part in truth or knowledge.”

It is important to remember that these ancient astronomers used math that is easy to translate for purposes that are more difficult to translate, because they involve words that have morphed and changed in meaning over the millenia. They could predict with precision but explained their predictions with words that have shifted in meaning. For instance, most chemistry books credit Democritus as the first chemist because he proposed that there is an indivisible bit of matter called an 'atom'. But ...

Barfield, StA, p.45: “Even the atoms of Democritus were, of course, not atoms, as the word has been understood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were imagined as components of mind no less than of matter.”

One of the main points I get from Barfield is that because words have changed in meaning over time, the change in words and the way in looking at the world caused by the Scientific Revolution is as significant as the change in methods. In other words, it's not all about the scientific method, it's about the scientific way of thinking, and this way of thinking is only one way of thinking among several options. Scientific thinking is a deliberately limited set of spectacles that allows us to do incredible things by limiting ourselves to repeatable and controllable (reducible) phenomena. Stuff smaller than us.

p.81 “If we are present at a church service, where a censer is swinging, we may either attend to the whole representation or we may select for attention the actual movement to and fro of the censer. In the latter case, if we are a Galileo, we may discover the law of the pendulum. It is a good thing to discover the law of the pendulum. It is not such a good thing to lose, for that reason, all interest in, and ultimately even perception of, the incense whose savor it was the whole purpose of the pendulum to release.”

So Galileo changed the way we see and the way we talk as well as the way we experiment. All well and good in the lab, but in the church service it might cause us to miss something. And this leads to one of Barfield's most surprising assertions to me -- that Galileo's problem was not that the model he was putting forward was better, but that he insisted that it was the only possible one:

p.50-51 “When the ordinary man hears that the Church told Galileo that he might teach Copernicanism as a hypothesis which saved all the celestial phenomena satisfactorily, but ‘not as being the truth’, he laughs. But this was really how Ptolemaic astronomy had been taught! … It was not simply a new theory of the nature of the celestial movements that was feared, but a new theory of the nature of theory; namely, that, if a hypothesis saves all the appearances, it is identical with truth. … Our collective representations began when men began to take the models, whether geometrical or mechanical, literally.”

I laugh too ... but is there something to Barfield's statement here? Are we holding on too tightly our hypotheses and hardening them into the only way we can look at the world? I have spent whole class periods extolling the amazing mechanisms of biochemistry, the watch-like efficiency of glycolysis and the like. When does that enjoyment of nature become such a myopic focus on atomic explanations that all else fades into mist?

I would like to find out more about the historical accuracy of Barfield's assumption. If he's right about the meaning of words changing over time, we'll definitely have to watch out for that when interpreting the words of the churchmen who both arrayed themselves against and encouraged Galileo.

The take-home of this strand of Barfield's thought is that it may be possible to hold onto science too tightly. To worship it and say there is nothing else than what I can understand, dissect, and control.

This has implications for reading Genesis and other creation accounts as well. Too often we take the English translations of the Hebrew as obviously accurate, but if the words themselves shift in meaning, we have to wonder what that has done. And this holds out the possibility that it's not "there can be only one" when it comes to models of creation. If we hold onto both science and Genesis a little more lightly, then maybe we can see that these words the Hebrews used in this context are just as good as the English words and math I use in my biochemistry class. If we would be able to "download" the shift in the way people thought over time into our own perception, with different words and different meanings for those words, Barfield says, the stories we tell with those words, the "models" we use to "save" the "appearances" would look very different:

Barfield, StA, p.37: “We should then have to write a different pre-history altogether. And we are not entitled to assume without inquiry that … such an alternative ‘model’ would be any less efficient than the one we have in fact chosen. It might be very much more so.”

In other words, the best way to describe creation may be as a six-day sequence in which YHWH orders the universe and puts all their idols under his feet. This saves not only the appearances (at least the appearances of the ancient Hebrews!) -- it also saves us.

Responding to Barfield, Part 1: Pre-History Never Happened

2012-01-19T11:08:00.000-08:00

(It may be helpful to read my recent review of Saving the Appearances before jumping into this series.)

I'm going to do something a little different with the Owen Barfield quotes from Saving the Appearances. This is promoted by the fact that when I finished with retyping the "best" parts of the book, I had 11 pages of quotes (as opposed to the 4 pages from Poetic Diction). Also, the book builds on itself so much that I think half the quotes are unintelligible without reading the book. Yet I want to remind myself of these quotes and mull them over! So rather than perform a quote dump, I will take a quote or paragraph (entirely out of context, of course) and react to it here. That's probably more appropriate for this electronic context anyway.

Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances, p. 37: "It can do no harm to recall occasionally that the prehistoric evolution of the earth, as it is described for example in the early chapters of H.G. Wells’s Outline of History, was not merely never seen. It never occurred."

In "City of Death", a classic Doctor Who episode, the Doctor and companion travel four billion years into the Earth's past, which of course is a red and brown volcanic mess. This is what would happen, in fact, if we could travel to that point in time. I don't think Barfield argues that. But he does argue, what does it matter because we can't. For something to happen it has to be observed. And if a mind is not there four billion years ago, watching the lava bubble and the molecules organize, we can develop an idea of what it would have looked like, but we didn't see it. And if we don't see it, it didn't happen, Barfield says.

It should be clear what side of the "if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it did it make a noise?" debate Barfield is on.

This seemed extreme to me at first, but Barfield would say that's because my mind's been infected with the mechanical idols of the age that look at everything (man included) as being a mechanism/machine of some sort, when observation and participation is a crucial part of the process, which requires a mind.

All the pictures of the primordial earth, including that of the Doctor Who episode, look and feel fake. That's because they are fake: they are projections and models of what it would look like if we (or someone who thought like us) were there. Not only is that not true for billions of years ago, it's not even true for 500 years ago! People didn't just use different languages long ago, they thought differently and saw differently. (For that matter, most medieval films and stories feel fake too.) This is one of Barfield's main points, and upon reflection, it's a good one.

This is why Barfield insists that matter did not create mind, but that mind must have created matter. The concept of "matter" required a mind to organize it and create it. Whatever happened before that mind was there is a fascinating process but is at the end of the day only a process recreated by the mind studying it. It can reveal some things but is very limited. In this sense, it is a model and projection, and it did not happen.

A lot is made of the vastness of time and space in the universe, and how small man is, how seemingly insignificant. But if there was no observer around for those billions of years to be bored, does it matter that a billion years rolled by, rather than a million, rather than a thousand, or ten? And if there is no method for traveling to the nearest star before dying of old age, much less another galaxy, does it matter that there's so much space out there? We'd never actually be able to go there anyway, so why does it worry us? Or does it only matter as something we can look at, observe, think about for an instant, wonder at, make hypotheses about, and move on to more important things like the family dinner?

Book Review: 11-22-63

2012-01-17T12:55:00.000-08:00

In 11-22-63, Stephen King does counterfactual history. I love counterfactual history and I think Stephen King can be a very good writer when he reins himself in a bit, and this book was as good as those two predilections would predict. There's lots of good surprises in this book but I won't spoil any of them because it's that tension of how does this time travel work? and what is the source of the evil? and was there a conspiracy or not? that propels the narrative here. In fact, the third one was spoiled for me and I think that's why I felt the book dragged a little in the middle with all the endless observation of Lee Harvey Oswald. The first two remained welcome surprises, creative and fitting, even the time travel physics. The most pleasant surprise for me was how, well, romantic the book ends up being. Stephen King's gifts at characterization are in full view. There's a few points of the description of evil which were a little too well-described shall we say. But this was one of the most enjoyable and thrilling 1000-page books I've read, definitely my favorite of King's. It's not perfect, but literary perfection is not the point: the story is the point. And that's what I like about King at his best.

PS: Some interesting theology embedded in King's writing, actually, if anyone dares to suss it out. This book is a strong example of that.

Fragmentation and Complexity: For Proteins as Well as Society and Language

2012-01-17T12:08:00.000-08:00

Need to look at this new Nature article by Joe Thornton more closely, but there's a great quote about the research in Science Daily. Thornton reconstructs old enzymes to see how they developed. His team found out that a particular enzyme increased in complexity as it LOST functions:

"It's counterintuitive but simple: complexity increased because protein functions were lost, not gained," Thornton said. "Just as in society, complexity increases when individuals and institutions forget how to be generalists and come to depend on specialists with increasingly narrow capacities."

And, as Owen Barfield would say, as languages fragment and specialize as well. Proteins, society, and language, all built from splintering words.

The Effects in the Tree of Life

2012-01-12T12:37:00.000-08:00

Here's a nice little blog post with clips and quotes about the effects done in the creation scenes for Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. My favorite quote is about how some natural images look too perfect and they have to mess it up a little to make it look authentic:

“There are images of Saturn where, when you work with the pristine, beautiful, original material, it actually looks so clean, you couldn’t put it on the screen without people thinking it’s just CG,” Mr. Glass said. “And so we had to add in tiny subtle textual details.” They separated out the moons around Saturn and added texture.

Maybe those are like beauty marks they added?

Book Review: Saving the Appearances

2011-12-20T13:50:00.000-08:00

The Owen Barfield Reading Tour continues. Saving the Appearances was a bit more uncomfortable for me to read than Poetic Diction, which had been written by Barfield about a quarter century before. It's a smidgen less pithy than Poetic Diction and lost me in abstract terms a few times -- something that never happened in Poetic Diction -- but if I want to be honest, the reason Saving the Appearances made me uncomfortable is that in it, Barfield goes after science. Well, "goes after" is a little too harsh, because Barfield is not suggesting a return to Medeival non-science -- he's suggesting going forward from what he terms the "idolatry" of materialism and scientism. He does it with the same dense but clear style that was such a revelation to me in Poetic Diction, and my goodness, I used to think some writers made me think but Barfield leaves everyone else in the dust for making you THINK. I spent as much time staring off into space processing what I just read as I did actually reading.

I'm going to have a bunch of quotes coming up to show you exactly what I mean by all this, but for now, my recommendation is to definitely read Poetic Diction first, but then read this one. At the end of the book Barfield finally gets specific about Christianity and he just rattles off fascinating paragraphs about topics I've spent years thinking about -- the creation of Adam, how to take the Eucharist, etc. -- and in each case he says something I've never really heard before (although I hear echoes of these ideas in Tolkien and Lewis).

A few "really?!" moments: the proposal that Galileo was insisting that the church's model of the heavens was wrong and that his was the only one to be right (with Barfield's implicit support of the proposal that BOTH could be right?!); the assertion that evolution and the Christian faith naturally go together (Lewis was never quite that sanguine, although his long quote from the Problem of Pain about human evolution would fit right in with Barfield's ideas); and the quote that I think may go too far, that "Man is the messiah of nature" in interpreting Romans 8.

I'm beginning to understand why Barfield isn't more widely read. He is indeed brilliant and seminal, but while Lewis and Tolkien work to make themselves accessible, Barfield is intent on clarity but not as much accessibility. He is intent on iconoclasm and that's an uncomfortable thing! He and Lewis do not agree on every point, but the importance of his thought is obvious in Lewis's quote that Barfield was "the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers". Your mind may be blown, and the fact that he's a Christian may not be obvious till the end of this book, and you may argue with him on certain points (I think I will!) but I fully recommend taking a "class" from Professor Barfield. (Even though he never was a professor, this was his side work from his day job as a barrister!)

Seven Christmas Songs Free!

2011-12-15T16:37:00.000-08:00

Seven Christmas Songs

Poetic Diction Quotes Part 4

2011-12-12T19:43:00.000-08:00

p.181: “It is only when we have risen from beholding the creature into beholding creation that our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres.”

p.196: “It is precisely when such a writer starts complaining that his author uses the same word in two different senses that the discerning reader will prick up the ears of his imagination in the hope of acquiring some real knowledge.”

p.210-1: “The Greeks had no such word as ‘principle’: they called what I have been speaking of – with that divine concreteness which makes the mere language a fountain of strength for the exhausted modern intelligence – simply poiein and paschein – Do and Suffer.”

p.222: “It should be noted that Poetic Diction does not simply exalt the Poetic at the expense of the Prosaic, but emphasizes their essential relation, their dependence upon each other, and indeed their interpenetration.”

p.223: “But to take the Poetic really seriously is another matter. It is not to slang the Prosaic, and with it the whole world of science and technology, as the French Symbolists did, and hide yourself away in an ivory tower of ‘art.’ It is to begin to work on the interpenetration of the two by seeking to overcome in a man’s own experience what Coleridge termed the ‘outness’ of the phenomenal world. To say that this involves experiencing that world and his own individual spirit, not as other, but as ‘opposite’ is perhaps to say something. It is indeed to say what Coleridge said.”

p.224: “There is much work still to be done in revealing the part played by that underground stream in the development of modern science. Kepler is an obvious example, but we also need a new and unbiased biography of Isaac Newton and a study, not based on petitio principii, of such matters as the relation between alchemy and chemistry, astrology and astronomy.”

Books Review: Graphic Novel Round-Up, December Version

2011-12-09T23:05:00.001-08:00

Here's a few one-sentence reviews of four recent graphic novels I've checked out from the library:

The Death-Ray by Daniel Clowes: Promising premise and style conveys razor wit and artistic spot-on renditions (see: the bully) at points, but I can't help feeling that the Japanese saga with the similar premise (average boy gains ability to "disappear" people) is better.

Batman: Noel by Lee Bermejo: I'm a sucker for creative renditions of The Christmas Carol, this one with Batman as Scrooge; some nice "fits" with the original story, especially Robin as Marley's Ghost, but feels underactualized, doesn't really convey the story but is a pretty nifty trick.

Hark! A Vagrant, by Kate Beaton: Silly and somewhat erudite, a combination I'm also a sucker for (the whole reason I'm a They Might Be Giants fan perhaps), and if half the strips don't quite work, I still found it diverting; kind of annoying to be reading this at the same time as I'm reading something about how people in different ages actually thought differently from us, because much of her humor comes from assuming they thought exactly the same as us! (PS: It's still funny.)

Nursery Rhyme Comics: Fifty nursery rhymes done by comics artists ranging from famous (Mike Mignola, Craig Thompson, Gene Luen Yang) to not-so-famous but intriguing, this was the most rewarding of the whole lot, and by far the most beautiful, with the bonus that I could give it to my kids without a second thought; there's a clever joke or bonus of artistic expression in each one.

Poetic Diction Quotes Part 3

2011-12-01T20:29:00.001-08:00

p.126: “Yet it serves well enough to show how the man of today, overburdened with self-consciousness, lonely, insulated from Reality by his shadowy, abstract thoughts, and ever on the verge of the awful maelstrom of his own fantastic dreams, has among his other compensations these lovely ancestral words, embalming the souls of many poets dead and gone and the souls of many common men.”

p. 130-1: “When we can experience a change of meaning – a new meaning – there we may really join hands and sing with the morning stars; for there we are in at the birth. There is one of the exact points at which the genius, the originality, of the individual poet has first entered the world.” [like enzyme specificity/activity more than domains joining?]

p. 133: “Unless he has enough imagination, and enough power of detachment from the established meanings or thought-forms of his own civilization, to enable him to grasp the meanings of the fundamental terms – unless, in fact, he has the power not only of thinking, but, of unthinking – he will simply interpret everything they say in terms of subsequent thought.”

p.136-7: “Oscar Wilde’s mot – that men are made by books rather than books by men – was certainly not pure nonsense; there is a very real sense, humiliating as it may seem, in which what we generally venture to call our feelings are really Shakespeare’s ‘meaning’.” [The Shakespearean “explosion" = The Cambrian explosion?]

p.138-9: “Really, there is no distinction between Poetry and Science, as kinds of knowing, at all. There is only a distinction between bad poetry and bad science.”

p.144: “For all meaning flows from the creative principle, to poieion, whether it lives on, as given and remembered, or is re-introduced by the individualized creative faculty, the analogy-perceiving, methaphor-making machinery. In Platonic terms we should say that the rational principle can increase understanding, and it can increase true opinion, but it can never increase knowledge.”

p.167: “We have to but substitute dogma for literature, and we find the same endless antagonism between prophet and priest. How shall the hard rind not hate and detest the unembodied life that is cracking it from within? How shall the mother not feel pain?”

p.168: “For the pure prosaic can apprehend nothing but results. It knows naught of the thing coming into being, only of the thing become. It cannot realize shapes. It sees nature –and would like to see art – as a series of mechanical arrangements of facts. And facts are facta – things done and past.”

p.176: “No genuine lover of poetry and of words can pick up a book on, say, Botany or Metallurgy, and read of spores and capsules and lanceolate leaves, of pearly and adamantine lustres, without feeling poetically enriched by that section of the new vocabulary which actually impinges on his own present consciousness of Nature.” [my own fascination with geology is similar]

p.179: “’Language,’ wrote Emerson, in a flash of insight which covers practically all that has been written in these pages, ‘is fossil poetry.’”

Book Review: Wonderstruck

2011-11-30T09:37:00.001-08:00

Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick is a wonderful little book that's a worthy sequel to The Invention of Hugo Cabret. But I don't expect a movie to ever come out of this one, because the major characters it switches between (one in words, one in pictures) are both deaf (and at one point, the lights go out too!). The medium of the picture/word alternation that Selznick accomplishes is even more suited to this story than to his last one. It helps to read it in a silent room (after the kids go to sleep) and you end up immersed in the characters' world. The contrast between the words (which follow a boy in the 1970's) and the pictures (which follow a girl in the 1920's) is also brings out different elements of each story: we can get inside the boy's head but we can only see the girl's face and expressions. On top of this all, the plot revolves around museums and world's fairs, which would be in my Julie Andrews style Favorite Things song if I had one. (Maybe I do ... I'm not telling!) This book is quieter and sadder than Hugo, and it is perfectly suited to this particular medium. Recommended -- in a different way from Hugo.

Science Projects and Easter Eggs

2011-11-28T15:01:00.001-08:00

It was 1987. All the messages about self-esteem and believing in yourself must have impressed themselves onto my 7th-grade mind, because I had decided that my next science project would change the world. I had just finished a project in which I showed that the random numbers generated by my Commodore 128 computer were not truly random. My idea was to continue this iconoclastic mathematical investigation in an unexpected direction: I thought I would calculate how much time would be required for evolution to take place. I knew from reading my Bible and attending weekend seminars at my friend’s church that evolution couldn’t have happened, and so I knew what the result of my calculation would be before I started: it would be impossible. All I had to do was calculate the rate of random mutations in a species … and factor in interactions of genes … and DNA mutation rates …

Soon it became obvious that despite my quite fervent belief in myself, I didn’t actually know anything about the inner workings of a cell, much less an entire organism. Once I realized that the biochemistry of the world could probably not be represented in a Commodore 128 computer program, I moved on. My eight-grade science project studied the chemicals in the muck at the bottom of the Indian River. I shelved the project disproving evolution for another day.

Since seventh grade some of my views have changed and some have not. I’ve learned about both the inner workings of the cell and the Bible since then. Most important, I’ve stayed connected to a community of faith, listening for the inner workings of the Spirit.

Now I’ve changed my mind on the evolution project, and I think I had some of my “essentials” confused back then. I was looking for something like an “Easter egg” on a DVD menu, where an icon is hidden that you can find by clicking around with the arrow keys on your remote in a certain pattern. When you find the Easter egg some secret knowledge is revealed, usually a short bonus clip or a blooper reel.

I thought that evidence against evolution was like an Easter egg to be found by the self-confident faithful remnant of believers using “true” scientific techniques that were not deceived by the gullible results of atheistic scientists. I thought that by doing science in the right pattern I could find the secret proof that evolution simply could not have occurred, and that all it would take was a few well-placed experiments that would be blows of the axe to take the whole edifice down. I thought those experiments would be so easy and self-evident that even a seventh-grader could do them.

I was wrong. There was no simple disproof of evolution. When I learned about the evidence from the scientists themselves, I found it to be extensive and logical, and that it could not have been faked. I even collected some evidence myself by searching gene sequences. I could not develop an alternative explanation that fit the evidence, even with an open mind to God’s intervention. Not even the apparent compromise of Intelligent Design made sense to me: the metaphors were all wrong and the evidence was scanty. So I swallowed hard and gave up looking for the “Easter egg” in creation’s history that would force all the atheists to allow God into their lives.

Now that I look at it, it doesn’t seem to me that God works by planting “Easter eggs” in nature so that those with ears to hear will know that the thousands of scientists somehow have it wrong when it comes to the science. I was expecting God to intervene in a way that he chooses not to. I was expecting God to do what I wanted; instead, I had to listen hard to hear his still small voice. He was not providing a secret map to a secret trove of evidence. He was presenting Himself, on a cross, that this is His evidence and the way He chooses to work.

After years of fruitless emphasis on forcing Genesis 1 into the shape of science, I realized that I was missing the true “Easter egg” hidden by God in history. Hidden isn’t quite the right word because it’s not hidden, it’s proclaimed: the true “Easter egg” is Easter itself. This is the way God makes himself known, through Jesus and the Gospels.

I’ve learned enough about reading evidence now that I can look at the historical evidence around Easter and see a pattern that persuades me that something very strange happened in physical history. This event changed a group of unlearned disciples into the apostles of a new church. It transformed the Law of the chosen people into a new theology, a branching tree that would welcome all nations. It didn’t rely on repeatable experiments run by impartial observers but on witnesses, many witnesses, who were themselves transformed by what they saw. It founded a new temple built of people, with the cornerstone of a risen King, expanding with a diverse momentum and humble power that in my view can only be explained by the actual, unexpected, very strange resurrection of one man in the center of history. (For more on what I’m talking about, read N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God.)

I can understand those, including many scientists, who don’t see Easter this way. Historical evidence is different from scientific evidence. I think God leaves us with a choice each Easter. He doesn’t force anyone to follow Him, because even He cannot force love. Jesus puts Himself at the center of proof:

“Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.” (John 7:17) and “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.” (John 7:37). What I hear in these is this: don’t spend so much time in Genesis that you never turn to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

So arguing about what “yom” means or whether all of us are great-great-…-great-grandchildren of one biological Adam is a fine intellectual pursuit, but it must at some point take a back seat to seeing the intervention of the Father in the new creation of the historical Risen Christ and seeing the same Spirit that brought his body up from the grave surrounding and flowing through the church, even and especially in her suffering.

Jesus is the focus of the Bible, not Adam. New creation is the power of God as well as original creation. If anything takes precedence over Jesus in our words and thoughts, then we must have something out of order. In this time of advent, I constantly find out-of-order places in my life that must be brought back to Him. Jesus orders all things. He is the truth and the proof we require. He is King of life, of science and history, and of past, present, and future, no matter how deep that past may run.

Genesis Panel

2011-11-21T22:54:00.001-08:00

This is a link to the Genesis panel at my church I was just on, along with my old friend the history of science professor, my new friend the science and faith degree-holder, and my new friend the bioinformaticist. It was unpredictable and a bit unnerving to talk in front of 300 people, only 10% of whom knew me ... but it was also a completely unique event and part of a much larger conversation at the church. We will probably continue through some kind of small group soon. For now, there's the recording for any who missed it!

The True Dominion Theology

2011-11-20T17:15:00.001-08:00

The sermon today on Genesis 1 focused on the charge to Adam and Eve to "have dominion over" the creatures of the earth, which led to another trail of thoughts. (The observation that the object of the verb dominion includes all animals and no plants is not one of them ... don't know what to do with that one ...)

Stop 1 on the tour of "dominion" elsewhere in the Scriptures is Psalm 8, which has a straightforward echo of the Genesis term in the second half of the Psalm, but it can't be missed that to get to this word you have to go through the verse that reminds us that we really don't deserve this "dominion":

"When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?"

This dominion is a gift. And it can be revoked. Hezekiah pridefully shows his "dominion" and treasures to some people who will return with an army to take them by force and destroy the Temple that houses them. That dominion's days were numbered. This dominion isn't a blank check.

Stop 2 on this tour is only a few pages later in Psalm 19. But this mention is even more nuanced. Psalm 19 starts with a glorious descrpition of the "language" with which "The heavens declare the glory of God," then it describes the sun as a jubilant servant of YHWH, and then it jumps to a description of the law that is just as exultant and sweet as any sugar molecule (that's my own interpretation, of course). But the law provokes a shift of perspective from outward discovery and wisdom to inward self-discovery, the beginning of wisdom:

"Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression."

Here the dominion is actually a threat from one's own self! Any so-called dominion theology must include a possibility that dominion will be wrongly assumed -- by ME. Any prideful dominion theology is an exact contradiction of the use of dominion in this Psalm, and is at best an evil deception. (This exact usage recurs in Psalm 119, by the way, and Paul echoes it in his letters with "let not sin have dominion over you".)

The story of Scripture is dominion given, and dominion usurped (from without and within), and, in the prophecies of the Messiah and the fulfillment in Christ, dominion regained through a servant who is God, emptied. A very different type of king, the type who rides a donkey and is enthroned on a cross.

At the end of the book, the word comes back again, applied to Jesus and God simultaneously. The echoes of this usage from Genesis to the kings to the prophecies are all resonant in these mentions:

Ephesians:
"Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come ... "

Read Jude (this may be first use of Jude on this blog?):
"To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever."

And of course Revelation, which fitting returns at last to the fundamental fact that God's nature always shares dominion from the first book to the last:
"And hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen."

So this is why I don't recognize anything of this in what goes by the "Christian dominion" movement, and why "dominion theology" doesn't seem to understand who this God is or who this king is at all. Dominion is found through Christ, which means the Sermon on the Mount and the cross must be front and center to any implementation of the word. At least for people who call themselves Christians.

Poetic Diction Quotes Part 2

2011-11-20T17:11:00.001-08:00

Another page of great quotes from Owen Barfield's book Poetic Diction:

p.86: [Shelley citing Bacon] “’Neither are these only similitudes, as men of narrow observation may conceive them to be, but the same footprints of nature, treading or printing upon several subjects or matters.’”

p.88: “Not an empty ‘root meaning to shine’, but the same definite spiritual reality which was beheld on the one hand in what has since become pure human thinking; and on the other hand, in what has since become physical light; not an abstract conception, but the echoing footsteps of the goddess Natura – not a metaphor but a living Figure.”

p.92: “Mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning. Connections between discrete phenomena, connections which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once perceived as immediate realities. As such the poet strives, by his own efforts, to see them, and to make others see them, again.”

p.100: “Mr Jespersen … builds argument upon argument to prove that the historical development of language is indeed ‘progressive’ and not a kind of falling away from grace, as his predecessors held. These arguments are absolutely convincing and require no comment, as long as we remember that, to the author, ‘progress’ in the history of consciousness does not merely include, but is synonymous with an increasing ability to think abstract thoughts.”

p.102: “These primary ‘meanings’ were given, as it were, by Nature, but the very condition of their being given was that they could not at the same time be apprehended in full consciousness; they could not be known, but only experienced, or lived. At this time, therefore, individuals cannot be said to have been responsible for the production of poetic values. Not man was creating, but the gods – or in psychological jargon, his ‘unconscious.’”

p.107: “Where then does the modern poet find again this poetic principle that is dying out of language? Where? Nowhere but in himself. The same creative activity, once operative in meaning without man’s knowledge or control, and only recognized long afterwards, when he awoke to contemplate, as it were, what he had written in his sleep, this is now to be found within his own consciousness. And it calls him to become the true creator, the maker of meaning itself.”

p.115: “It will, I think, appear that this ‘soul’, latent in words, and waiting only to be discovered, is for the most part a kind of buried survival of the old ‘given’ meaning under later accretions; or, if not of the ‘given’ meaning itself, then of an old ‘created’ meaning which has been buried in the same way. … That words lose their freshness through habit is a more humdrum way of saying the same thing; and it will do well enough, as long as we remember that ‘habit’ itself is only a familiar name for the repetition of the identical, and that the repetition of the identical is the very essence of the rational principle – the very means by which the concrete becomes abstract – the Gorgon’s head itself.”

p.120: “The new meaning must be strange, not incomprehensible; otherwise the poetry of the whole passage is killed, and the fresh meaning itself will be still-born.”

p.124: “Hundreds of dead words might be resuscitated by men like Bishop Percy and Sir Walter Scott; it was the task of even more vital spirits to awaken those that were only sleeping.”

The Invisible Umbrella Made Visible

2011-11-14T23:20:00.001-08:00

Lots of people have posted this amazing time-lapse video taken from the space station. My favorite part, although this is heavily influenced by the fact that it's my favorite color, are the green auroras dancing over the surface of the earth. I talk in a few places about how those auroras show how the sun's radiation is constantly bombarding us, yet we have this magnetic core that rotates deep inside and protects us from the worst of that radiation. One of the effects of all this is the intense beauty of the auroras.

Someday I'll see one with my own eyes. I live far enough north, but there's always these CLOUDS over Seattle. Who knew??

Oh, and the rainbow around God's throne that looks like an emerald in Revelation? I now think I have a faint, faint idea of what it may look like.

Unmaking the Messiah

2011-11-13T20:26:00.001-08:00

As my church goes through a series on Genesis 1-3, there's a danger of becoming "nearsighted" by focusing so much on the first few chapters that we start to miss the message of the rest of the book. I only say that because I'm guilty of doing it myself. But the practice of cross-referencing in the text of Scripture as the preacher preaches paid off again today, because a new connection jumped out.

There are two parts of the Hebrew Bible where the technical word "created" is used again and again, as always with God as the creator: Genesis 1 and Isaiah 40-55. That initial connection is true for other words as well. In particular, the statement that the earth was "without form" in Genesis 1:2 is echoed in this section of Isaiah as well. First in Isaiah 44:2 YHWH states "I formed you from the womb", and the calling of this figure is focused in the later passage:

Just as many were astonished at you,
So His visage was marred more than any man,
And His form more than the sons of men;
So shall He sprinkle many nations.
Kings shall shut their mouths at Him;
For what had not been told them they shall see,
And what they had not heard they shall consider.
Who has believed our report?
And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant,
And as a root out of dry ground.
He has no form or comeliness;
And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
(Isaiah 52:14-53:2)

Here, late in the Isaiah 40-55 poem, the figure of the Servant is emerging as a single person, as the refrain of "creation" with the special Genesis language is repeated again and again. God's promises to bring all nations to Jerusalem are somehow fulfilled in this person, and the shocking thing is that he's beat up and marred. He is "without form" like creation itself in Genesis 1:2. It's like old creation has gone wrong, and this Servant steps forward, takes on the wrongness in literally being unmade, and beyond anything he can do, he is remade into new creation. His "unmaking" is active, and at the hands of his fellow men, but when he is unmade he is remade again, and all the promises of new creation are true in him. The nations come to Jerusalem. The veil of death is taken away.

The "unmaking" happened on another level as well, in Philippians 2:
Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,
who, being in the form of God,
did not consider it robbery to be equal with God,
but made Himself of no reputation,
taking the form of a bondservant,
and coming in the likeness of men.

The "kenosis" of Jesus was creation in reverse, an emptying, a humbling, and an obedience. It was a loss of form, a reversion of God himself to the empty blank slate of creation in Genesis 1:2.

That the "unmade man" would be remade by the literal recreation of a dead man tortured by the state was something no one expected. It was more true than anyone expected, that the Servant would destroy death this way. But in Isaiah 40-55, maybe there's a glimmer of how someone who knew the Scriptures and saw God active in every word could see that all this could come together in a man dead for three days and brought back "according to the Scriptures", replacing and fulfilling Temple and Torah itself. Remaking everything in a new creation, one event in the middle of history anticipating the great event at its end.

This is how prophecy works. This is how God works. Words from different centuries all come together as one stream of living water, from one source, flowing into the future, consistent from Genesis to Isaiah to the Gospels to the Epistles. The only way to describe it is as the Word of God.

Poetic Diction Quotes Part 1

2011-11-09T10:29:00.000-08:00

I have four pages of quotes typed out from Poetic Diction (helps me to remember them to do this!). I'll post them in several parts over the next few weeks because Owen Barfield's words are better than mine.

Poetic Diction quotes, 1973 edition

p.28: “Only by imagination therefore can the world be known. And what is needed is, not only that larger and larger telescopes and more and more sensitive calipers should be constructed, but that the human mind should become increasingly aware of its own creative activity.”

p.32: “… a true, participant knowledge as distinct from the haphazard pull-and-push ignorance which claims in public the name of science and admits in private that it knows nothing; which, when it turns inward to the mind of the Knower, finds there a nothingness within, to match the nothingness without. … Reflection on the poetic activity teaches us that the same imagination which created that kind of habit can both disturb it and create new ones.”

p.35: “Accordingly they have presented us with the human spirit as bewildered observer, or as agonized patient, compassionate in Hardy, humbled or repentant in Eliot, but always the observer, always the patient, helpless to alter anything but his own pin-pointed subjective emotion.”

p.36: “The possibility of man’s avoiding self-destruction depends on his realizing before it is too late that what he let loose over Hiroshima, after fiddling with its exterior for three centuries like a mechanical toy, was the forces of his own unconscious mind.”

p.58: “’In the infancy of society [wrote Shelley] every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is a poetry. … Every original language near to its source is itself the chaos of a cyclic poem.”

p.73: “In other words, although, when he moves backwards through the history of language, he finds it becoming more and more figurative with every step, yet he has no hesitation in assuming a period – still further back – when it was not figurative at all!”

p.75: “The full meanings of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames – ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them. To the Locke-Muller-France way of thinking, on the contrary, they appear as solid chunks with definite boundaries and limits, to which other chunks may be added as occasion arises.”

p.81: “We must, therefore, imagine a time when ‘spiritus’ or pneuma, or older words from which these had descended, meant neither breath, nor wind, nor spirit, nor yet all three of these things, but when they simply had their own old peculiar meaning, which has since, in the course of the evolution of consciousness, crystallized into the three meanings specified – and no doubt into others also, for which separate words had already been found by Greek and Roman times.”

p.82: “… their error merely lay in supposing that life actually created language after the manner in which their logic deconstructed it. They mistook elements for seeds – and called them roots.”

p.85: “… these poetic, and apparently ‘metaphorical’ values were latent in meaning from the beginning.”

Book Review: Habibi

2011-11-06T23:07:00.000-08:00

This is a beautiful book and an ugly book, deliberately. It is a book written by someone brought up Christian but set in a Muslim world (I don't say that casually -- the entire perspective is thoroughly through the Qur'an, and the seamlessness with which he presents it is one of the author's greatest accomplishments). It is a book with lovingly detailed drawings of piles of trash, a book that shows an all-powerful sultanate state from 1000 years ago with motorcycles beside camels (and the best depiction of cholera in comics I've ever seen).

To let you know what book I'm talking about, it's titled Habibi and it's by Craig Thompson, whose last major work was the similarly long (~700 pages) Blankets in 2003. Technically it's far superior to Blankets, but ... I can't help but like Blankets better. Blankets is the one I want to read again and give to others. For all the amazing integration of Islamic art and theology, for all the intricate numbers echoing through the plot and artwork, doing things I've never seen a graphic novel do, no, not even one by Alan Moore -- like most of Alan Moore's work, Habibi seems to be missing its heart. Which is really hard for me to say, this book is such a technical achievement. Upon reaching the summit I just felt cold.

Maybe it's the nagging feeling that, for all the emphasis on the stories of the Qur'an, you don't get the feeling that any of the characters really believes the stories or what they represent. Even motherhood is trumped by circumstance, which is completely unrealistic to me on a character level. Ultimately it's a cold universe without belief, in which power is really what rules, and only the most extreme coincidences allow love to live. That's too harsh, and I recognize it as I type it, because love does find a way to live in a surprising way (avoiding spoilers!) -- but what's a review without an honest reaction? I like it, I don't love it. I honestly wish I did.

The bottom line is that I picked up several copies of Blankets at the Library Book Sale just so I'd have a few to hand out to friends. But this one, if I see the beautiful hardcover edition I'll probably pick it up, but it'll be partly for collection, and partly to go through and see details like how each "number" recurs through the very plot of the chapter. In other words, don't expect one from me for Christmas. Which is really too bad, and it's ultimately just one person's personal reaction. If you liked Blankets it's worth a try because Habibi may be technically the best and biggest graphic novel I've ever seen. I know I'm not making sense, but I don't have to. It's my blog after all!

Book Review: Poetic Diction

2011-11-03T14:37:00.000-07:00

I have pretty positive reactions to most books. A few I even think, when I put them down, that maybe someday I'll read them again. But very rarely have I ever felt like reading a book again as soon as I put it down. Poetic Diction is that book. I found this book by researching J.R.R. Tolkien, who was influenced by Owen Barfield's ideas, especially this book. Then I kept seeing Barfield's name and I found out that lots of people were deeply influenced by his thinking (and not just his close friend and the person to whom this book is dedicated, C.S. Lewis). He's writing about poetry, but he writes about everything, really, up to and including philosophy of science. For all the depth to the book, it is highly readable and succinct. Barfield was a member of the "Inklings," whatever that means, and this book is right up there with Tolkien and Lewis in its own way. Amazing.

Book Review: Green River Killer: A True Detective Story

2011-10-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

If you've been waiting for CSI: Seattle to come out, maybe this book will do the trick. Or maybe not. Because although both this book and CSI are about a complicated case with police work and science, and this book (being a graphic novel) can be read in about an hour like a CSI show, the similarities stop there. This book is realistic to the point of being boring at times. The capture of the killer is not particularly dramatic, and much of the book concerns a long interrogation in which he can't remember anything precisely. But the value of this book is that it is real. It certainly was real for Jeff Jensen, the author, considering his father is Tom Jensen, the detective who at times was solely responsible for the Green River case. This book is about the small joys (and wearing grind) of perseverance. One of the small joys is the way Jonathan Case, the artist, captures the exact aging of the characters as the narrative skips back and forth from the early 80's to the early 00's. That's something you can only get from this medium. On the whole, it is so realistic that you're left to make meta-connections on your own; ultimately, this is a procedural at heart. But it's a good example of what graphic novels can do, and evidence that the genre has really grown up.

Crayola Sculptures

2011-10-17T10:11:00.001-07:00

I want one of these. I mean, how hard can it be to make a crayon sculpture? On second thought, those are really BIG:

http://thisiscolossal.com/2011/10/crayon-fire-sculptures-by-herb-williams/

Evolution is Not Simply Divergent

2011-10-15T22:42:00.000-07:00

So I just wrote about how I enjoyed the little but formidable text Graphs Maps Trees, which applies scientific visualizations to literature. But there's a problems with the science, and once again, the trail for the misconception can be traced to Stephen Jay Gould.

Gould's point, repeated by Moretti, is that Darwin's original tree of life (yes, I know he was too smart to use that specific term, but it's what we call it now) was more to show divergence than simple common descent: in his diagram, only the most extreme branches continued from generation to generation, and he used to to account for species diversity. That's very true. Gould goes on to say (in a block quote in Moretti's essay) that evolution is a story of proliferation (this same branching of extremes), very different from cultural transmission in which an idea can be carried by a single human from one culture branch to another, and so the branches cross and weave and converge instead of just diverging.

The problem is that the real tree of life is indeed both convergent and divergent, like the cultural tree. The worst offender is this quote by a historian of technology, George Basalla:

"Different biological species usually do not interbreed, and on the rare occasions when they do their offspring are infertile. Artifactual types, on the other hand, are routinely combined to produce new and fruitful entities" (p.137). a.) e.g., the internal combustion engine was merged with the bicycle & the horse-drawn carriage to produce the automobile (p.138)

Um, no. As a biochemist looking at the tree of life, I see exactly this same repurposing of old parts and combinations to make new parts everywhere. Even the process of making antibodies is a shuffling of old parts to make something new. Basalla's quote only works for a limited set of macroscopic species, and I think it's the exception rather than the rule. Bacteria trade genes and build new things by combination all the time. Just because a mule is infertile doesn't mean convergence never happens.

This is a major point of the argument, and it actually helps Moretti, because he's arguing that convergence is the normal state of affairs in literature, and I'm happy to say I think it's the normal state of affairs in science as well. Conway Morris and Dawkins agree with me on this. Fascinatingly on p.81 Moretti argues that if divergence is king then randomness is running the show, but in human affairs like literature, convergence is dominant. Since I'm arguing that convergence is the characteristic of all evolution, then am I arguing that the ecosystem is more "human" than we may have thought? A provocative phrase, and I'm content to think about it for now.

True, the branches of the tree of life can never fully converge, but they can functionally converge. Moretti points out on p.85 that the branches of the tree of literature can never fully converge either, but always remain distinct. The more we talk the more I think we're basically talking about the same kind of tree.

In a nice summary of the branching diagram for literature, Moretti concludes that "literature moves forwords and sideways at once; often, more sideways than forwards. Like Shklovsky's great metaphor for art, the knight's move at chess." (p. 91) Do DNA trees of life imply that life makes similar knight's moves?

Book Review: Graphs Maps Trees

2011-10-15T22:23:00.000-07:00

Graphs Maps Trees by Franco Moretti may have the highest thoughts-inspired-per-word ratio of any book I've read recently. Of course, it helps that there's not many words. This is basically three essays (one per word from the title) and an afterword by a geneticist for the scientist's perspective. Moretti argues that we should employ scientific techniques to assess trends and cycles in literature. Before visions of the graph from the first page of that textbook in Dead Poets Society start running through your head, I should point out that Moretti clearly puts this as complementary to traditional analysis oriented on a single text. Rather, this looks at each novel as a leaf on a tree, or a point on a graph, so overall trends may be seen, necessarily simplifying and missing something to see something else.

In Graphs, Moretti shows how genres tend to have a lifespan, and admits he doesn't know exactly why, but it may have something to do with broad patterns of social cohesion often called "generations." (He's puzzled, as am I, by why groups would organize like this when babies are pretty much born constantly, but that's just a tangent).

In Maps, Moretti shows how plotting the events in a series of village novels according to their location shows that the events eventually fragment and dissolve away from the village itself.

In Trees, Moretti shows how the way clues are treated in Sherlock Holmes stories can be sorted into categories that branch off like a tree. I have trouble seeing the real utility of the tree structure in this, it's more an if-then than a tree necessary, but his next tree shows how the person and tense used in different types of novels can change even within a sentence to show certain kinds of branching, and this is very interesting.

I have some bones to pick on the way science is used in the tree chapter, but I think that deserves a post of its own. On the whole, I like Moretti's approach, and I'd like to take some of it myself. The most important thing I learned from him may not be the techniques or ideas, but the sense of humility and openness, that this "scientific" approach is only one possibility while the traditional analysis still holds. Good to remember.

Life's Solution: Specific Notes and Quotes

2011-10-09T11:31:00.000-07:00

Here I'm just going to make a record of my dog-eared pages from Life's Solution for future reference for myself. Feel free to look over my shoulder:

p.120-126 "Play It Again!" section.If anything, the role of convergent paths in evolution of E.Coli has been enhanced since this book same out in 2003. I'd like to do some of this myself ... How is it that Figure 6.3 can separate out adaptation from chance from history?

p.230 "Interstellar Nervous Systems?" section. Sodium pumps are found all over the place. This has been pinned down for the electrical eel recently. I wonder if there's more to see with this particular molecule's convergence.

p.266 Conway Morris directly addresses the point of qualia that Douglas Hofstadter mentions as well. It's worth noting that Hofstadter and Conway Morris (ahem) converge on this point. What do similarities in neural structure say about the question of "the redness of red" for philosophy?

p.288 Oxygen transport proteins convergence: I didn't know hemoglobin/myoglobin was found in so many places. Could that be a convergent structure? How would we know?

p.295 The Molecules Converge: Basically a 2003-era list of what I'm really interested in: convergent proteins. So many references, so little time!

p.297 "If convergent evolution is an 'eternal return' to the 'attractors' of functionality, then we cannot be surprised that history repeats itself." Then the fact that the hammerhead ribozyme is convergent.

p.307 "Yet, when within the animals we see the emergence of larger and more complex brains, sophisticated vocalizations, echolocation, electrical perception, advanced social systems including eusociality, viviparity, warm-bloodedness, and agriculture -- all of which are convergent -- then to me that sounds like progress."

p.313 A GK Chesterton sighting! "Reason and justice grip the remotest and loneliest star." (From Father Brown's first story.) The following description of planets made of gems sounds like a passage from Doctor Who! My "anglophilia" brain area is lighting up.

p.325 Eugenics and the morally ambiguous nature of progress, again in line with GK Chesterton. I'm going to have to keep assigning his book in Biochemistry ...
quotes John Green: "To the very end, [Darwin] failed to appreciate the morally ambiguous character of human progress. He failed because, like many social scientists today, he had no adequate conception of Man." I think Gould and Dawkins are keen to decry "progress" in evolution because they can only accept an unambiguously progressive formulation of progress. If progress is seen as ambiguous, then yes, you can say you see it in the natural world and the evolution of man.

For more on progress and anti-Gould rhetoric I should look up McKinney, Science, vol. 237, p. 575, 1987.

p.329 The six-point outline of "what salient facts of evolution are congruent with a Creation." Let me try my hand at summarizing them:

1.) Biochemical simplicity (building blocks)
2.) A method of navigating the vast possibilities (a mechanism like protein folding)
3.) The sensitivity of the process
4.) How life rearranges and adapts the old rather than building something brand new
5.) Many paths/branches but converging again and again on certain characteristics/structures
6.) The inevitable (and broad occurence) of intelligence, coming from complete sensing of the world.

Book Review: Life's Solution

2011-10-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

Life's Solution is a rarity for me: a book I knew I had to own before I read it. I couldn't wait for it from the Library book sale, and I couldn't just check it out from the library. I've read several articles by Simon Conway Morris in different formats (for example, see the previous review of Real Scientists, Real Faith on this blog), but this is the book in which he takes 332 pages to write about what he sees in evolution as a scientist who discovered big parts of it (the Cambrian explosion) and an Anglican Christian who is friends with Richard Dawkins but doesn't agree with him on the question of God. For one thing, Conway Morris thinks there is a question in the first place! I was about to say this is a big, sprawling book, but in truth, my only quibble is that I wish it would've sprawled a little bit more. The last few chapters in which he tackles theology have nice turns of phrase but don't really seem to fully flesh out the theological implications of the convergent patterns that Conway Morris sees in evolution.

As a catalog of a bewildering array of convergences, this book is entertaining. Again, it left me wanting a little more, especially in the frequently repeated "This feature evolved at least 31 times," because this is such a central thesis of the book I'd like to know how we know that. But honestly, that's what the footnotes are for. Conway Morris focuses on the organism rather than its molecules for the most part.

The fundamental question this raises for me may sound a bit strange, but here it is: If indeed all these features, from bipedality to camera eyes, have evolved repeatedly and in a converging pattern, does this mean sin emerged in multiple ways, but convergently? That it happens in every young life with a different path but it ends up looking the same? I think this point can be a platform on which we can understand a theology of the fall of man in light of this science. But, of course, however we define the origins of sin, the important thing is that we agree on its destiny: summed up and healed by the cross of Christ.

This is what I mean when I say I want more theology at the end! But that's not really the purpose of this book. Even at the end, Conway Morris chooses a subtle turn of phrase when he could be more direct, and I think there's a method to his madness there. Ultimately, I think everyone who's interested in the deep structure of biology should find a way to read this book, it is a fascinating catalogue of a new way to look at the world that fits both science and faith. It's the biologist's counterpart to R.J.P. Williams's The Chemistry of Evolution, and anyone who knows me knows I don't say that lightly!

PS: I know there's tons of arguments out there about "evolution or not" and "what does it mean", and to those who don't have time to parse every argument, I say to just pick up a copy of this book or Williams's and flip through it. Then flip through The Signature of the Cell, the flagship Intelligent Design book. The books are about the same length but even a cursory glance at the content will show that Conway Morris and Williams are interested in looking at the world in truth, in all its glory. That kind of specificity is, I'm sorry to say, absent from Meyer's Signature of the Cell. You don't need to read the whole thing -- you just need to flip through a few pages. If Intelligent Design was a viable theory, this is the kind of book it would produce. I'm still waiting.

Book Review: When You Reach Me

2011-10-06T21:44:00.000-07:00

This is children's literature, which I read aloud to Sam. It's very good children's literature, and all along I was hoping it would be more, but in the end, I have to put it on the children's shelf. There's a lot to like here: a time travel puzzle, a late-70's setting, tons of L'Engle references, the $20,000 Pyramid, and some nice sixth-grade emotional politics. It all has a purpose, even Dick Clark, and comes together in a really nice way. The climactic scene is very well written, for one. And the title character learns important stuff in a subtle way, so there's a moral but you can ignore it easily enough, which is important. Still, for all the intricacies of the plot, it was just a hair on the side of condescending (do children really need to be told how you can be in two places at once with time travel THAT many times?), and as an adult I was able to pick up on what was going on rather early. It was good for Sam to be forced to read through a book that looks at the world the way a girl looks at the world -- he got a little antsy sometimes but the nice plot convergence at the end made it worth it for him. Some people have overrated this book. I still think A Wrinkle in Time was better.

Book Review: Hannah Coulter

2011-10-06T21:38:00.000-07:00

I listened to this book, by Wendell Berry, on my commute (got it as a free audio book through a promotion). It's the life story of a woman born in the 30's who lives on farms through World War II and up through the turn of the century. It sneaks up on you eventually that this isn't just a story: Berry is really saying something here. I've been aware for a while that he is a sort of Christian radical of a sort, as radical as you can get being an intense proponent of the small-farm way of life. His characters are beautifully nuanced, the voice of the narrator is consistent, simple, and profound, and there are lots of implications for science and technology-minded folks like me. I actually considered assigning this for Biochemistry reading but it's just a little too far. But it is as thought-provoking as the G.K. Chesterton I do assign about how to live life. I don't read many novels but this one may change my mind.

HIV as music

2011-10-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

The video at this blog post from the Scientific American site has a sample of the HIV genome translated to music. But instead of just random-sounding four-tone melodies, the composer went a step further and included the amino acids that the genes represent, with a separate scale for those 20. It actually all comes together to sound like music -- sad music, which is appropriate, but definitely music.

LUCA Was Complex

2011-10-06T12:32:00.000-07:00

I'm said I'm going to start collecting examples of complex ancient life, and here's another one: a study of particular structures in archaea (a branch of microbes) suggests that the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) was more complex than previously thought.

This is the article, and this is the science news story about it.

If J.R.R. Tolkien's ideas are right (and Owen Barfield's, whom he got them from), then we'll be seeing more and more of this. I'll be collecting them here for my memory and yours.

Lots of implications: from the simple "life is not an easy thing!" to the complex concept of "have we assumed too much about what constitutes 'progress' in biology?".

Great quote from the news article:

"You can't assume that the whole story of life is just building and assembling things," Whitfield said. "Some have argued that the reason that bacteria are so simple is because they have to live in extreme environments and they have to reproduce extremely quickly. So they may actually be reduced versions of what was there originally. According to this view, they've become streamlined genetically and structurally from what they originally were like. We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was."

File this with Brain Proteins Before Brains and the thioredoxin urzyme (coming soon, to a Day of Common Learning Lecture near you).

Historic Photographs in Legos

2011-10-03T10:21:00.000-07:00

Would this be a good way to teach the boys history? Probably not, but they are pretty cool, and most of the photos are instantly recognizable:

http://www.mikestimpson.com/photography/index-classics.html

HT: Paste Magazine

... But Student Research is HARD

2011-09-28T14:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I posted some of my thinking as to why I believe student research is the best way to teach science. But not everyone does it. Why not? Because the students, especially at first, don't like it.

I understand why that may be. Yesterday's lab I tried to implement some of the structure of research in the teaching lab. I proposed a problem, gave some tools, allowed time and space in the experiment for mistakes, and then set the students free on some relatively simple tasks in the lab. But the whole point was they didn't know what would happen, and they had to manage their time and adjust on the fly to make it happen.

Part of the problem was I didn't know how the lab was going to go myself. Of course, it went slightly wrong. I called the class and modified the lab on the fly. The thing is, the students were flustered after that, and even after modifying the lab the students carried over a bit of their flusteredness, which made them much more tentative in their experiments. They pulled back in the face of the unknown even though the lab was designed to allow mistakes. It's possible that lectures in science courses reinforce this idea of perfectionism in "getting the right answer" that just isn't always there in lab. Things go wrong and you have to modify, and keep one eye on the clock.

So I think I learned something myself and the students (hopefully) learned something too. I will try again today with a few modifications. And we'll see if we can teach flexibility in thinking and the ability to make the right kind of mistakes in lab today. Considering that such teaching is my goal, I think we at least approached that goal yesterday, and maybe we can approach it today with less flusteredness.

The bottom line is it is definitely not easy, and I can understand why everything can't be done this way, but I think it's worth it. Ironically, it takes more planning to figure out how to set the students free than it does to teach a cookbook-style lab recipe to them.

Student Research is a Christian Activity

2011-09-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

Today in Opening Convocation our University President referred to a recent lecture N.T. Wright gave at St. Andrew's, which refers to the Christian task in learning as the "Upside-Down University". My church just finished a series on Matthew 5-7 titled "The Upside-Down Kingdom." I think they're copying from the same notes somehow. (Which is a good thing!) It occured to me as I watched my friend, the molecular biologist, give the invocation at the beginning of the ceremony, that entrusting the progress of research to undergraduates is a risky proposition, and somewhat upside-down. Maybe that's what many scientists at a level fear about it -- and possibly justifiably so! Undergrads take a lot more time to teach and to oversee and to interpret and even to present results than grad students or post-docs. Progress is, as a result, slow by the standards of other labs. You can't work on the hottest problem because you'll almost definitely be scooped. But you do it this way because it's best for them. They are the reason you research in this way. And that's the kind of upside-down thinking that is summed up and put forward by Jesus himself, in his teaching on the one mount early on, and in his actions on the other mount on Good Friday. This is a good reminder as I start the busiest time of the year for me teaching-wise. I don't have students complete research for the short-term benefits. I do it for the long-term ones.

Does the Unbalanced Schedule Make Baseball More Boring?

2011-09-07T11:27:00.000-07:00

As of today there are only 1, maybe 2 of the 6 divisions in baseball in which the winner of the division is not already settled, with almost a month of baseball to play. I honestly do not remember a close race in September -- ever. Now, part of that is the fact that I'm a Mariners fan and they haven't been exactly competitive the past decade or so, since I've become a fan (remember, kids, correlation is not causation!).

The thing is, I remember in about the year 2000 that a new "unbalanced" schedule was introduced, in which teams would play the other teams in their divison more often. This was specifically introduced to make September more exciting. It's clearly had the opposite effect. At least I don't have to worry about important baseball games interfering with preparation for the upcoming school year.

That's why I'm skeptical about schemes like adding a second wild-card team or realigning the divisions. I remember the claims made with past innovations (Exhibit A: "This time it counts!"), and I cannot remember one that really worked. Of course, I wasn't around when they introduced the DH, but I always must support that innovation because it gave us St. Edgar of the ALDS Double. I'm not diametrically opposed to so-called innovation, just skeptical.

On the other hand, advanced statistical metrics for understanding baseball? More please.

Book Review: I am a Strange Loop (Part 4)

2011-09-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

(part 4 of 4)

I kept asking as I read, over and over: What is the point really? How should this change actions rather than self-regard? And what is the ethical downside to your philosophy? Typically a scientist should attack his own philosophy to make sure it still stands. This is one of the reasons I read this book myself, to attack my own philosophy with the best absolute materialism has to offer. But at the end of your book I’m hard-pressed to recall a specific ethical prescription. What should we DO, then? Rather, I remember spirited defenses again particular philosophical antagonists and the general concept of qualia. I’m left wondering if your definition of qualia fits with its proponents. Because they don’t seem to match, and that seems to be the whole point of qualia, that they don't match from person to person!

For all your concern with causality, you make a statement on the next-to-last page that upends your argument in another way: these symbols have helped us survive throughout the ages, adding an evolutionary wrinkle to your argument. But why should survival necessarily correlate with truth? I’m not sure, maybe it should deep down, but this concern is never mentioned in the whole book. Does your colleague Dennett’s “universal acid” eat away at your philosophy as well?

While we're at it: why do we live in a universe stable enough to exist for billions of years and give us strange loops? And, most importantly to me, to give ME this particular strange loop that is my only true possession? Isn’t that the strangest thing of all? I'm not satisified with your explanation that this is just what brains do as they grow. Why am I a brain, then, and not a powerful self-regarding computer? To you, it's a meaningless question, but to me, it has the most meaning of all. This viewpoint is ultimately all I have. At root is the question of why I'm not a "Boltzmann Brain" because that would be a simpler solution than the existence of the universe ... but, you know, I really do think the universe exists, it's not just me.

This comes down to a vision of what it means to be human. You say your vision is, well, true, but that it’s also deeper and subtler than the others because it teaches us to hold lightly, life is tenuous at its core, and that we are wildly different from what we seem to be. I worry that we’ve gone so far down the road to abstraction that we’ve succeeded in arguing ourselves out of existence: that nothing matters but it doesn’t matter that nothing matters. I’d like to see your viewpoint in conversation with others, especially those steeped in the strange story of the personality of the Creator seeking us out. Ultimately (and ironically, given your argument about the spread-out nature of consciousness) this is a one-man show and has the weaknesses that come with that. I’d like to see a back-and-forth with Marilynne Robinson on the importance of mind, or with Jeremy Begbie on the connections between the spiritual and physical in the music of Bach. I’d like to see a true dialogue, not one you make with yourself.

So thank you, truly, thank you for a provocative book. I could go so far as to say it was a storm against my own beliefs, washing away some accretions that didn’t really need to be there in the first place. But what stands when the storm has passed is the shape of the cross, and the conviction that we live in a universe of personality, which is therefore a universe of love. You come to a very different conclusion – I am richer for it despite my disagreements. I hope these other things may continue to pass the riches around.

Yours, Ben

Book Review: I am a Strange Loop (Part 3)

2011-09-02T12:25:00.000-07:00

(part 3 of 4)

The biggest problem with this book is the same problem that always happens with Gnostics. No matter how hard Gnostics try, they always, always smuggle in passivity and elitism. Elitism comes before a fall. Once you quantify soul units (Huneckers, right?) you will start down the road in which some people are large-souled and some people are small-souled. The lines get redrawn: vegetarianism is a symptom of this condition, as is, contrastingly, dismissive attitudes toward the fetus. Once you try to enlarge your own consciousness you look around and see that other consciousnesses appear smaller. The section of the book where you hypothesize about switching your character traits with a football-watching, woman-ogling "red state" person is a big red flag. You can't get around the fact that you consider football watchers and right-wingers to have smaller souls than you. Which itself causes you to have a smaller soul: a paradox of the highest order!

Your line for "soulishness" is drawn at the ability to have friends. But you stop too soon here. In your introduction you mention that one of your sisters cannot understand and cannot speak. Throughout the book I was looking for you to talk about this, but she is not mentioned in the text more than fleetingly. I would really like to know how you look at her – I know you must love her – how does she fit into this book? She stands as a silent reminder of what may not be included in your philosophy. (This is one of the reasons I cannot write this as a dialogue. I simply don’t know how DH would respond.) A theological book called Suffering Presence by Stanley Hauerwas comes to mind as a way that these kind of things "fit" better into a philosophy than to yours. I know, there's enough to engage in with the study of the mind that you can't read everything -- but I would suggest that thinkers like Hauerwas offer a different way that stands in stark contrast to your philosophy at this very point.

And then, well, here comes the part where I get personally put off. At the end of the book you get to the point that really gets under my skin, in the section titled “Dig That Profundity!”. You describe how disappointed you are in a vocal group that sang one of your favorite Bach pieces at double tempo with vocal trills and – heaven forbid – SMILING at the audience. Your writing seems to recognize with its many qualifiers that you are elevating personal opinion and taste to universal standards for musical performance here, yet you go ahead and do it, which reinforces the apparent elitism of your position.

Let my strange loop comment to your strange loop on this one, because my strange loop has seen the world from the other side of the stage, and there's several things you aren't seeing. I work with a small ensemble to sing pieces from all musical eras, before and after Bach. For a three-minute piece you must dedicate several hours of rehearsal time. And you have to follow your leader – the conductor wants to go fast, you go fast, and the conductor will ALWAYS tell you to smile more, because most people actually like that, and the musician is always tempted to focus on the making music than the appearance of the body (although I would prefer to focus on the music myself, guilty as charged).

So because the ensemble you saw changed the piece you love away from the version that you had imprinted on your neurons as a teenager (by a biochemical chance, according to your philosophy, because I read a study that the music you hear when you're 14 will be the best music to you for the rest of your life), you jump to conclusions about the interiority of that ensemble, that they are flashy self-obsessed small-souled singers who just want to sell CD’s. Maybe if this was a Bach piece specifically about death or civil war, something inherently slow and melancholy, this critique might make sense, but it is just called “The Great” – it has no referent that I know of, and musically no reason not to change it away from your personal favorite parameters. I don’t know about those musicians, but I do know you can’t judge their motivations from the fact that you musically disagree with them. I’ve had a lot of judging comments just like this come back after we sing (in both directions: smile more! smile less!), which may be appropriate, but the problem is the certainty of the commenter. Ultimately you don’t know and you shouldn’t judge the self-centeredness of other people from a single piece at a concert. It seems pretty small-souled to do so!

It comes down to the act of judging others to be better than yourself, of humility (which you mention, yay) and, even if they're self-centered divas, of forgiveness (which you don't, boo). You know, I admit I'm often a self-centered divo, which probably shows from my own reaction to this. But I volunteer hours of my time every week to make music for God with my friends, and there are lots better ways to get attention and applause, quite frankly. I make the music because once in a while it's a thing of unique beauty that says something on a level that other things can't. Sometimes I even smile.

So I see a lot of similarity between your philosophy and my Christian belief: the Golden Rule, the lion lying down with the lamb, the importance of empathy and internalizing the “other” … but what I don’t see in this 400-page book is anything about forgiveness, which I think is absolutely necessary to life. By negating free will, have you also negated forgiveness? Is this philosophy therefore doomed to be limited to the comfortable or those who want to be comfortable – just like Gnosticism?

(Part 3 of 4 -- for those offended by my offense in the above paragraph please note all the positive comments in parts 1 and 2!)

Brain Proteins Before Brains

2011-09-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

One of the grand unifying themes of recent findings has been that very old organisms contain molecules that are later used for complex purposes. It's the main theme of research into the origins of multicellularity, the immune system, rhodopsin, and now brain chemistry. I'm thinking more and more that this looks like J.R.R. Tolkien's approach to the origins of language, but much more needs to be in before we can say something. Yet my prediction is we will find a lot more molecules like this, the more we look. Let's see if that pans out. I'm writing more on the Tolkien connection to be published some day.

Book Review: I am a Strange Loop (Part 2)

2011-08-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

(Continued: Part two of an anticipated four parts)

Your book really comes together when your own life fell apart, halfway through when you talk about the sudden loss of your wife. Like you say, this is a book with the same focus as the one you wrote in your late 20’s, but older and therefore sadder. The idea of letting your dead wife see her children through your eyes is heartbreaking and yet comforting. I can accept that as a good "echo" of the reality of marriage. And your philosophy lets you put forward a model of marriage with the idea of selves that are intermingled, reflected, and even transferred: truly a “one mind” argument that is very close to the Biblical term “one flesh.” Isn’t it interesting, though, that the Biblical term is that much more physical? At any rate, the soul-merger language you employ (and rightfully so!) about marriage is actually several steps down the road to the Paradox of all Paradoxes: the mystery of the Trinity, three “selves” merged yet distinct. So I have to thank you for your scientific insights enriching my theology!

You know, most science writing tries to (but often fails to) avoid teleology, the end purpose of things, while you dive headlong into it. Really, your model of a soul is all about the goals of the self. When you talk about Carol living in you, the main justification is that her ends live on in you. So I’m going to turn the tables on myself and argue against teleology in this respect. In marriage, the “ends” have merged, and her goals are your goals, but after she’s gone, the copy you have of her in you is faint and, here’s the real nub, it only matters to you (and less so to the others around you). Not to her. According to your philosophy, “she” stopped when her body stopped. Her memories do live on, that is so valuable. But she is only a reflection in your mind, a genetic reflection in your children, and she will never surprise you again. She will never truly know anything, if the ashes stay ashes and the dust stays dust. There’s no gentle way to say it: the consolation of living on in memory is a consolation to the rest of us but not to her. And you SHOULD fight against that, and that IS wrong, that death cuts a young mother off from her children and that she never gets to see them grow. Our insistence that the universe is wrong here is human; there’s no need to defend the universe by developing a complicated scheme for selves and self-awareness.

What I see in this book is an initial strict definition of causality that’s only bottom-up, and it ends up eating itself, or dissolving itself in Dennett’s metaphor of Darwinism (here meaning materialism) as the ultimate acid. You don’t allow top-down causality, then you end up disassembling your own will. I would like you to admit into your philosophy a third level of being and two-way causality. I don’t think anything is inaccurate in your description of the first atomic level, or even the second symbolic level, except you have made the choice by fiat that all reality must be reducible and laboratory-controlled. That explains a lot – but not everything.

It’s funny, as I was reading I said to myself, “I really wish he’d write about teleportation of the body” and then at the end of the book you do! So thanks for anticipating that. You seem to think this causes problems, so I may be missing something, but to me it’s simple. If I am disassembled on Earth and my atoms are reassembled on Mars, I have just been torn apart on Earth. End of story. The reassembly of my atoms means my memories and future actions and everything about me is on Mars, sure, and so to the rest of the universe “I” am still there. But to me, to my only possession of my point of view and my choices, I am gone. The copied me is a different me. Therefore, I will never step into a “teleporter”!

Now, my proposal with the resurrection is that the creator of it all can reconstitute everything down to my point of view and my will, which I believe requires my body to be reassembled, that this interiority can be put together but not by me or by any one of us, no matter how complicated our reassembly apparatus.

(To be continued in Part 3, in which I get a little snippy)

Book Review: I am a Strange Loop (Part 1)

2011-08-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

(To sort out my thoughts in reply to this remarkable book, I was going to try something very much in the book’s spirit and impose a virtual dialogue between myself and its author (or more precisely, the neural representation of the author in my head), but my neural representation must be too thin because I ended up talking too much and drowning out the poor author. I just don’t have a strong enough strange loop of Douglas Hofstadter in my head, so I’ll write a normal-ish review but address it directly to him to see how that plays out.)

Dear neural representation of Douglas Hofstadter in my head (and I do mean “dear”),

Your book got under my skin for a couple of weeks, so I have far more to react to than can fit on a blog, but let’s start out with the overall adjectives and superlatives: although it’s a bit longwinded – you add some obvious “padding” to make the paragraphs fit your aesthetic scheme – it’s everything a book should be, exuberant, poignant, detailed, fun to read. Whereas your previous book Godel, Escher, Bach taught me how computers really work vividly enough to stick with me permanently, this book has an excellent chapter or two on math talking about the same thing from a different perspective, but really you spend most of your time trying to suss out philosophical implications that you feel were in the previous book but not picked up on by most. I picked up on them and am not as sure this book is necessary as you seem to think, but I do have a soft spot for good sequels, and this counts as one. Ultimately, I agree, the different emphasis of this book was necessary, although I wonder if it could have been half the length. Nonetheless, it’s a lot of fun to follow along. I find your emphasis on the developing and ever-changing self to be very helpful: I’m reminded of the one day in middle school that I tried to slick back my hair to try on a new self in imitation of a friend of mine, but by the end of the day it all fell back to where it started. Do you emphasize the mutability of the soul in order to minimize the constant elements to it? Yet aren’t those constant elements the truly distinctive ones?

I actually have no problem with where you start. I just think your universe needs more than you allow on top of what you already allow. I can see your entire philosophical-scientific scheme of what minds are made of as actually compatible with my orthodox Christian belief, because I think historically that the speculation on the soul as a separate substance is more a Medieval imposition on the text (in which they tried to make everything invisible – souls, righteousness, etc. – a kind of fluid or substance) rather than in the original text itself. So I have no theological objection to being built up from atoms, and being tied to my body, because according my theological system, we’re going to get bodies when we’re resurrected, so the body and soul are just as tightly linked for me as they are for you. Actually, being intimately linked to a pattern of atoms lets me see one level of just how God will reconstruct that pattern.

At this fundamental level, I have to ask that beyond your two levels of meaning -- the atomic and the abstract/mental/symbolic -- why can’t there be a third level of meaning beyond that? Now, I don’t think this third level is composed of patterns formed entirely by the first two levels, but I think it can interact with them. How it interacts may be a problem, but one that’s fun to think about rather than one that negates the entire system. And I don’t think this third level has to be some substance like what you derisively call “feelium,” which is as unfair a simplification on your part as Searle’s pop-can analogy, which you detest, is to your own philosophy. Better to call it “personality” than “feelium” and to remember that it is not reducible and not a substance or fluid or any thing like that, so mocking it with a substance-seeming synonym is just as wrong as Searle proposing one pop can can represent thirst. Your problem, as I see it, is that you still have to deal with the fact that a careening mass of atoms somehow gave rise to personalities in what is to you a universe void of personality. In your universe, the fact that I own a bit of personality that really is my only true possession is a problem, while in mine it is an expected and predicted part of the system. I find that amazingly strange in a universe of physics and thermodynamics – not impossible by any means, just weird.

Your insistence that “I” is an illusion (but an illusion that is real in that it should act real), and that the illusion can be disassembled with the proper scientific insight, seems much like the very old ideas of the Gnostics. Your focus on abstraction is the same as theirs. There is a paradox here, in that you build up your Gnosticism from purely physical bits, but end up with a realm of thought that de-emphasizes the physical bits and even seeks to escape them. In true scientific fashion, you have edited the first person out of your writing.

(To be continued in Part 2)

George Murphy Quote of the Day

2011-08-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

One of the constants of any ASA meeting is that George Murphy will give an excellent, provocative, challenging, and polished talk. His talk at the 2011 meeting ("Kenosis and the Inspiration of Scripture," which I just listened to online, and which can be found here) is no exception. Let me repeat the conclusion:

"The fundamental point in all of this is not one or another statement about the natural sciences or human history. It is rather that the Bible is both fully human writing and the Word of God, just as Jesus is fully human and fully divine. The scientific and historical limitations of Scripture should not be seen as embarrassments which have to be explained away, but as a consequence of the fullness with which God enters into the history of our world."

National Parks from Space

2011-08-24T11:01:00.000-07:00

They put the best ones first in this collection, by the way, so don't feel like you have to click through all of the pics:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/national-parks-from-space/?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Fscience+%28Wired%3A+Science%29

The Planet that Absorbs Light

2011-08-19T14:33:00.000-07:00

Recently found: A planet that absorbs the light that falls on it. It is darker than black paint (by 20% at least).

If nothing else, a science fiction show set on this planet could save a lot of money on the cost of constructing the sets. And lighting. And CGI ...

The Hairs on (and the Neurons in) Your Head

2011-08-19T09:42:00.000-07:00

[Part 3 of what has turned out to be a trilogy on Matthew 5-7]

The claim that God knows the number of hairs on your head is to my mind one of the most striking theological insights that Jesus gave us about God. He actually says this in Matthew 10 and Luke 12, not Matthew 5-7, which is interesting because in both cases he is talking to his closer followers and encouraging them to continue in hard times. Although it is not technically in the Sermon on the Mount it underlies its theology. It makes theological sense that God knows this much because practically all of the Sermon on the Mount depends on God knowing us entirely, down to the innermost thought, and being both Your Father Who Sees in Secret and Your Father Who Will Reward You. But it's so easy to slip out of the practical belief that, oops, just lost a hair, well, God's number just went down by one. It's one of those things that's hard to believe, yet is absolutely crucial.

There's a lot of hairs on a lot of heads in Jesus' day, like the sand on the seashore in the promise to Abraham, an inconceivably large number to human brains. The fact that we can look down orders upon orders of magnitude and see atoms and quarks, then look up orders upon orders of magnitude and see galaxies and superclusters of galaxies, is a difference of degree but not a fundamental difference. Whichever way you look at it, it's beyond you.

It's not too much more of a step to say God knows the numbers of neurons in your brain, and their current state. Come to think of it, maybe that's why we find this hard to believe, because we don't want to believe it. We don't WANT God to know all these random thoughts that run around inside our heads like the Beatles' "Revolution 9". (I heard once that Lennon said that song came closer than anything else to capturing the music he actually heard in his head.) Realizing God knows all that stuff for all of history gives a new perspective on infinite patience and gentleness. Maybe he can stand it because he once experienced it himself.

This comes down to one of the major problems I have with the Intelligent Design argument. If Michael Behe is right and the irreducible complexity of the flagellum required a little divine design the same way as someone might debug a balky program or sketch a blueprint for a car engine, then God stepped in to what Behe would argue is a random, meaningless process and injected a little bit of non-random meaning.

But that means for thousands or millions of years bacteria lived in a random, meaningless universe until God stepped in, played LEGO with the proteins, then stepped out again. If you argue that the flagellum needed a tinkering kind of miracle, then you must argue that the rest of the time the flagellum was non-miraculous. You end up with a universe that is 99.9% non-miraculous with 0.1% of a miracle thrown in. (And, if the percentage of miracles bugs you, it should, because quantifying the miraculous is the logical endpoint of the Intelligent Design philosophy.)

The thing that really gets me is that the 0.1% is constantly shrinking. I've seen it happen, Behe might argue it isn't, but my best professional judgment from decades of study is that it is. If and when we figure out a mechanism for flagellum evolution, then it becomes 0.09%. The mirculous has just been diminished.

The thing is, by focusing so much on the hardest-case scenario and demanding a miracle for it, the ID community inadvertently implies that everything else that is more easily explained is non-miraculous, and therefore random, and therefore meaningless. We end up in a more meaningless universe as a result. You can go with the "Dawkins universe" which 100% lacks meaning or the "ID universe" which 99.9% lacks meaning ... oh wait, I just read another paper explaining another biological mechanism, make that 99.91%.

What can get us out of this dichotomy? Reading closely the words of scripture.

If God knows the very hairs on your head, and by extention the very atoms, neurons, and thoughts in your head, and if in Christ all things hold together (thank you, Paul), then the process that produced thoughts from atoms is not a meaningless mechanism. It is a fascinating interplay of matter, mind, and relationship, held together by its Creator. God is immanent and active -- God is Creator and God is love. He is not absent, but he is patient. Every bond formed, every breath taken, every thought complete is a small miracle.**

Stop before you fall off the cliff of pantheism. God knows all about the hairs on your head but he is not the hairs. I think it's safe to say that God transcends hairs. Also, he is not your thoughts, but you can bring your thoughts in line with his direction, you can bring your thoughts to be "in Christ" as Paul would put it.

Because God knows all these things, you can talk to him, with your vocal cords or without. So what I really want to know of other Christians is not "What do you think about science?" or "How old do you think the earth is?". It's not "What denomination are you?" or "How do you interpet this word or that phrase?". It's a lot closer to the question "Do you pray?" because you gotta talk to God to really see his grace at work, but it's not even that, because I cannot tell when you're really talking to him or when you're mouthing words or dozing off, that's between you and him. What it comes down to is, how well do you love? Loving God is internal, but loving others is external and part of loving God, and it requires daily commitment and dusting yourself off after repeated failure. It requires conformity to the cross found at the heart of creation.

All the stuff about judge not lest ye be judged is part of this. God knows it all, I only know a part. Through a glass darkly, for now. The hope is that the Creator who started it all and who knows every hair therefore loves his creation, and will faithfully see it through from its incomplete, broken state to completion "in Christ." I'm not sure what that means but I'm looking forward to finding out. The path is through the pattern set in his story.

(** I've got more to say that is along the lines of how it is that a BIG disruptive event like the resurrection is a miracle brought about by this God who is closer to you than you are to yourself, but for now it's sufficient to note that, as Stanely Hauerwas pointed out in his Gifford lectures, the resurrection is a miracle that "goes along with the grain of the universe." It is ultimately consistent with the Creator's will and not a violation or suspension of it, and it is necessary.)

Book Review: The Ale Boy's Feast

2011-08-18T09:42:00.001-07:00

Since this is book 4 of 4 in a series, I don't want to give too much away. But a few observations: This series is so unique it needs a new word for it (or we need to recover the original value of the word "unique"!). Most fantasy novels, you pretty much know what you're going to get, thanks to the "Ancestor" Tolkien founding the field and setting the rules that others riff on. Tad Williams has specifically noted that many of his plot points are specifically there to work out issues he had with Tolkien's series, both references and modifications. But the basic shape of the plot and the point of the writing all seems to be the same with carying levels of detail: to tell a story exploring a new world with many things different but most things the same as Tolkien's vision.

Because it's fantasy, and because he too follows a few of Tolkien's conventions, it would be easy to put Jeffrey Overstreet's books in with the rest, and I approached the series with those assumption, but it just doesn't fit. There's something distinctly different about Overstreet's vision. I've noted before how Overstreet writes cinematically: it starts from art, color, and image rather than being a typical campfire-type of story. In particular, in this closing book there's some metaphors about what art does and what it IS that are much deeper than any other fantasy novel, with the possible exception of Tolkien. It has a satisfying narrative conclusion; in fact, it follows the pattern of having multiple "endings" that unfold when the expected ending isn't enough. You see things in the conclusion that Tolkien himself didn't put in his trilogy, things that I always wished Tolkien would do. But the "satisfaction" of the ending, though real, isn't the point. Overstreet leaves just enough threads unfinished that it is not neatly packed up, but rather tantalizingly open, resolved yet still alive. Anyone who complains about a lack of resolution in this book, honestly, hasn't read the earlier books closely enough. (I feel the same way about LOST.)

I think one of the reason most fantasy authors avoid making their novels about "real" things like art and faith is that their writing honestly isn't up to it. Overstreet's writing supports his main point because it is up to the task. It is itself artistic and so the book can be about art. Lapidary phrases are scattered throughout the book like gems on the shore, turning up when you least expect it.

Other things I'm happy to say are in this book: a funny (to me, I've got a bit of a twisted sense of humor, and I thought the most evil characters were kind of darkly funny at first) Thomas Kinkaid reference; some really horrific scenes with the evil characters; a really solid resolution of the central mystery about the ancestor and the houses; a meaningful philosophical exchange between a student and his mentor about what's real and what's not near the end; and a fascinating underground geography that you can only do in a novel like this.

I realized near the end of this: I'm going to have to read it all again. Thanks Jeffrey for a wonderful and unique series.

And a final word: I miss the missing "scarjo." I know, I know it's still there, but the original term just seems more right to me. A matter of taste.

A final final word: are there any openings for imityriologists?

From the Nearby Flowers to the Distant Future

2011-08-16T11:45:00.001-07:00

It should be familiar by now. I've studied it all my life in one way or another and when I saw that the upcoming teaching series was Matthew 5-7, there was a part of me that thought I wouldn't get much out of it. That part of me was wrong. Every week there's something new and, well, the only word for it is convicting. It's not necessarily the eloquence of the teaching: I've seen the different pastors in the series struggle with the words like Jacob wrestling by the river. It's the words. These words are alive and unlike any other words.

As a scientist it amazes me how much of the Sermon on the Mount starts with observation of the natural world (anything that starts with "Consider ... "). Jesus saw God active, close, and immanent in nature, in the lilies of the field and the birds in the air, in the engineering principles of strong house foundations and the growth of trees. He also saw Scripture, and not just the words themselves but God's intentions behind the words, the transcendence of God's purposes. If you enter into the world of the Sermon on the Mount you find a world that is painted with bright colors far and near, one that rewards careful investigation and careful reading, but is more than the focus on the detail, it is the forest and the trees in one.

The fact that the lilies are thrown into the fire is not a problem like the problem of evil is for us comfortable people. Jesus says see how beautiful they are now, and how much more you are than they.

In the Everlasting Man, GK Chesterton sums this up:

“There is perhaps nothing so perfect in all language or literature as the use of these three degrees in the parable of the lilies of the field; in which he first seems to take one small flower in his hand and note its simplicity and even its impotence; then suddenly expands it in flamboyant colours into all the palaces and pavilions full of a great name in national legend and national glory; and then, by yet a third overturn, shrivels it to nothing once more with a gesture as if flinging it away. … Merely in a literary sense it would be more of a masterpiece than most of the masterpieces in libraries; yet it seems to have been uttered almost at random while a man might pull a flower. … There is nothing that really indicates a subtle and in the true sense a superior mind so much as this power of comparing a lower thing with a higher and yet that higher with a higher still; of thinking on three planes at once. … something that can only be called subtle and superior, something that is capable of long views and even of double meanings, …”

Just as Jesus looked at a lily from these angles, I want to pluck out DNA sequences and look at them the same way, looking not just for the relationships but at the Creator's intent behind those relationships, accepting the surprises as they come. And always, to remember, how much more are we? When Jesus looks at a lily and sees so much in it, it's important to remember, this is how God looks at us. We don't do this ourselves; the Spirit is the enabler and the catalyst of this view of the world. But when we step into it and let God work through it, I believe this will fix us.

This is why I believe: because these words are the words of life.

Judgment, Tenure, and the Fall

2011-08-15T14:32:00.000-07:00

Academia is weird. There's the robes and square hats we wear to graduation, the impenetrable papers we write, and the way we constantly use personal eccentricities to disguise the injustices we perpetuate on those who work for us. And it costs a LOT of money to send a student to college to be taught by these weird profs. I get it. It's tempting to look at tenure and chalk it up as just another quirk, even a damaging mark, in academia. I admit I've asked that question myself. Why do we have tenure in this day and age?

This is why.

To sum up: John Schneider, a theologian at Calvin College, presented an article (and apparently is working on a book) about how he interprets the early chapters of Genesis in the light of the information stored in ancient DNA. Basically, the DNA evidence suggests that the community of humans we're all descended from is small, but cannot be from a single person. A cover article in Christianity Today and recent NPR story included Schneider. I just found out from that story that, although he had tenure at Calvin, he chose to step down uder pressure from the board, after 25 years. So the tenure system didn't protect Schneider from his board when he published an article they disagreed with. At the very least, a tenure system is there to protect professors to be able to publish interpretations contrary to their boards. Now, the added element to this mix is Christian orthodoxy: did Schneider violate the terms of Calvin's faith statement? Read his article and I don't think you see a "false prophet," but a Christian with some insightful things to say about the nature of the fall and the power of art. Whatever you see, I think the question is at least open.

Even if there is a disagreement about the nature of the Fall between Schneider and the Board, it should be re-emphasized that the version of the Fall being fought over is younger than the Bible. The person whose word is being reinterpreted is not really Jesus or Moses, but Augustine of Hippo. Augustine's ideas about the Fall were one of many options at the time. The Eastern church has a much different view of the Fall that branched off from different Christian fathers. So Schneider is not being punished for contradicting the Bible, but Augustine. I have to believe that should put the dispute in a different light.

Of all the opinions put forward, this exchange is the one that sticks out to me, from the NPR story:

“This stuff is unavoidable,” says Dan Harlow at Calvin College. “Evangelicals have to either face up to it or they have to stick their head in the sand. And if they do that, they will lose whatever intellectual currency or respectability they have.”

“If so, that’s simply the price we’ll have to pay,” says Southern Baptist seminary’s Albert Mohler. “The moment you say ‘We have to abandon this theology in order to have the respect of the world,’ you end up with neither biblical orthodoxy nor the respect of the
world.”

The problem with Mohler's quote is that it is exactly contradictory to the sermon I just heard on Sunday. That sermon wasn't from Genesis 1. It was from Matthew 7, the Sermon on the Mount, the famously, probably too-often quoted "Judge not, let ye be judged" passage. It's struck me how this passage is in tension with other passages, particularly 1 Corinthians when Paul says "Don't you remember, one day you're going to judge angels!" to the lawsuit-happy Corinthians. One of the things my pastor mentioned was that the judgment of Matthew 7 is one where you think you can tell where someone is at spiritually from external "indicators." It is a judgment of the soul, of intentions, which is exactly what Mohler is doing. Look at that quote: it uses the same words but twists them to make the respect of the world the focus of the statment, when it's actually incidental to Harlow's comment. Mohler is saying that the respect of the world is the primary driver of the scientists who seek to reconcile genes with Genesis. I don't know why Mohler is doing this, but from his words I can see that he is doing it.

Well, if Matthew 7 is Scripture then Mohler has just opened himself up to the exact same judgment, and that's what I'm seeing all over the internet today, with scores of opinionated people trying to determine, descry and declaim Mohler's inner motives. So now we have a rampant speck-vs-mote tournament in the virtual world. Just stop it.

Note that this isn't really about evolution. It's about the Fall. And it's not really about Genesis, it's about Augustine and later interpretations of Genesis. Schneider's writing actually helped me understand some things about the Fall, but I'm not sure we know enough science to speculate entirely on its historical nature yet. I think there's a creative and surprising solution out there that may not be entirely biological! I want to keep learning about it, because I think there's some fascinating ways in which we can understand the Fall and how it broke things apart. I'm sure it happened, but I'm not sure how. And I'd like to hear others who have thought about it without fear of reprisal.

If the Fall that we're fighting about is really Augustine's theology and not Jesus's, then that means Schneider was essentially fired because his writing disagreed with a human construct built on the foundation of scripture. 2000 years ago there was another debate between Jesus and the Pharisees about another human construct built on the foundation of scripture. I remember how that disagreement turned out. It would be a shame for the church to make the same mistake. But then again, isn't that what we all do? After all, we are fallen.

Book Review: Brendan

2011-07-29T10:05:00.000-07:00

Since I named my third son after St. Brendan, and he's now two and a half, I figured I should finally get around to reading the Fredrick Buechner novel about him as well. I may have put it off a while because, while I saw the point of Godric and it had an indelible effect, I can't say I "enjoyed" Godric. Godric was just so dark and inverted that it was difficult for me to see much light in it. I know, I know that's part of the point, and I get that point, but it's just difficult for me toLIKE it. Godric came out before Brendan and was nominated for a Pulitzer, so I was worried Brendan would be the same way.

Well, it is and it isn't. I think Brendan is superior to Godric, on the simplest level because more stuff happens and it's not all darkness and sin. There's still a lot of darkness in there, even perhaps more affecting and intense than Godric's, in fact (some truly horrible characters and events), but there's also the wonder of exploration and as much healing in it as there is hurt. So I'm glad to say I named my kid after the right book three years before I knew it.

Here's a wonderful paragraph when Brendan and Finn (the narrator) enounter a pod of whales:

"It wasn't just the size of the monster froze us. It was knowing he come from another world than our entirely, a shadowy world fathoms beneath us. There's great monsters moving about lazy and soundless as clouds. Wonders are hid down there the eye of no mortal man has ever seen since time began. We all knew the sea belonged rightly to him and we was only trespassers on it. Next to him we was the size of gnats." p. 162

A 2010 Tolkien professor podcast about the role of tragedy in Tolkien's works noted how, when Aragorn is telling the hobbits a story as the Black Riders advance on Weathertop, he tells them not a happy story but a sad one, yet it warms their hearts and encourages them for the coming conflict. Tolkien knew the power of tragedy, and so did Buechner. That's what makes Buechner's "hagiographies" so powerful. The lead monks are so flawed that in a sense their flawed nature makes them holy. That is very powerful, but somewhat overwhelming in Godric. In Brendan it seems richer because there is light with the darkness. I think Godric is like one of Rothko's late paintings, mostly black, whereas Brendan is a true chiaroscuro like Caravaggio. Both are worth reading but I personally prefer the mixture. Just like my little Brendan himself.

Last Lecture on iTunesU

2011-07-21T14:43:00.000-07:00

It's up in video and audio on iTunesU, under the title "The Sounds of New Creation," at this link.

They had to edit out the Beach Boys song at the beginning ("Our Prayer") and the Thomas Tallis "Spem et Alium" at the end. And a glitch removed Aidan's blessing! Here it is preserved:

¨ Aidan Thomas: Like your grandpa, you love numbers and order, and you have a tender heart. I pray that you will know the infinite grace from the God who knows the number of hairs on your head, and like your namesake, that your inner fire will make peace between people.

G.K. Chesterton on Stained Glass

2011-07-13T13:16:00.000-07:00

Once in a while GKC surprises me with his ability to turn a phrase. I'm sure a lot of it is my own unfamiliarity with 100-year old cadences. But once in a while a passage like this just nails it (from The Ball and the Cross):

All the colours were transparent. It seemed like a triumphant prophecy of some perfect world where everything being innocent will be intelligible; a world where even our bodies, so to speak, may be as of burning glass. Such a world is faintly though fiercely figured in the coloured windows of Christian architecture. The sea that lay before them was like a pavement of emerald, bright and almost brittle; the sky against which its strict horizon hung was almost absolutely white, except that close to the sky line, like scarlet braids on the hem of a garment, lay strings of flaky cloud of so gleaming and gorgeous a red that they seemed cut out of some strange blood-red celestial metal, of which the mere gold of this earth is but a drab yellow imitation.

Book Review: The Ball and the Cross

2011-07-13T12:50:00.001-07:00

G.K. Chesterton's The Ball and the Cross is medium-rare Chesterton: there's enough of a plot and description that you could convince yourself it's a novel, but it's really a philosophical discursion, although in all actuality, it's somewhere in-between. It's not quite as well-formed a story as The Man Who Was Thursday, and I'd still recommend that one above all others, but it's a decent example of his not-quite-novels. I'd put it on the level of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, although I like Napoleon a bit more because its story is more outlandish. (That may just mean, "more happens.") But many of the quotes are quite quotable and good, which is probably the point of GKC.

The basic outline of this "novelish" tale is a conflict between two things: for most of the book, it's a constantly interrupted duel between an atheist writer and a humorless Irish Catholic, although the conflict is illustrated through other less earthbound characters. The conflict is really between the "world" (the ball) and the church (the cross). I'm divided on whether it would be better to read the juicy bits or whether the narrative really adds enough to the story to be worthwhile. But that still would involve reading about half the book, so why not the whole thing?

Book Review: On Fact and Fraud

2011-07-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

Usually books come from the library looking a lot bigger and proving a lot harder to read than I had hoped. On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science by David Goodstein is the exact opposite: it clocks in at just over 100 pages of widely spaced text but covers as much ground as books several times as large. This book is adapted from a course about scientific fraud, and the real value of it is the personal, working connection with the field that Goodstein brings as a physics prof at Caltech. The first section of the book is the expected epistemology, but clearly done pragmatically by a working scientist. One of Goodstein's main points is that Karl Popper's ideal of the disinterested scientist is in practice unachievable because some bias is inherent in the practice of doing science. After the intro chapter, Goodstein runs through several cases of fraud or not-fraud in science: he digs into science history of 100 years ago with Millikan's oil-drop experiment (not guilty); he details two cases of biological science fraud from a couple of decades ago (guilty), mentions cold fusion (guilty (of self-delusion), but with an added scientist whom he knows and respects who just might be seeing something), high-temp superconductivity (not guilty), and semiconductor research (guilty). The superconductivity discussion is especially helpful because it's a case of an unbelievable claim that turned out to be true. The only thing I wish it could have included is pictures of more data, such as the cold fusion "neutron" peak and other bits I've seen. There's a few cases of that but not enough; I think you need to see the fraud with your own eyes. But that's a quibble and probably a restriction of copyright or something. So, accurate, iconoclastic (at least in the case of Popper), efficient and interesting writing on a subject we talk about in class -- my only question is if I should make the students buy this book or if I should just tell them about it. It's a great find, and this is a topic that really gets the students interested and thinking.

Book Review: Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

2011-07-06T11:16:00.001-07:00

This book has been recommended to me for at least a decade now. I finally read it because of an invited book chapter (more on that later), and I am impressed. I'd like to do something like what Brand and Yancey do here, just on a different level. One of the interesting things is to watch closely how and where Brand specifically contradicts naturalism (not science, and not technology or scientific explanation, but reductionism and methodological naturalism). I find that he picks his battles and in general doesn't overstep, so he provides a good model for how to do that. In short, it was everything I had been told to expect -- and I sense a need for more like this. We'll see.

Soda Temperance!

2011-07-06T10:27:00.000-07:00

It's funny to think about it, but if root beer came about in part from the prohibition on real beer, then now we may need a temperance on root beer, due to its sticky, corn syrupy, calorie-adding mass. I don't trust soda every day, it's one of the reasons I switched to green tea for lunch, and I'm not regretting it. (In this case, a Lent giving up of soda turned into a longer-term temperance of soda!)

The quote that reminded me of this was in an article on how soda fountains are coming back:

“Soda should be special,” Mr. Nocito said. “Coke and Pepsi killed it for everyone, in my opinion.”* It seems that if you use fresh fruits and not mass-produced sludge to flavor sodas, you can make unique and even slightly healthy combinations. The problem is you have to go to a counter, you can't just grab a bottle off the shelf. Let me tell you, though, this is a good problem to have. It should be special, and there are benefits from having less of it!

Here is the article about the new-fangled (or should it be old-fangled?) soda shops and some of the flavors. I have a hankering for an egg cream and I've never even had one.

* However, I can attest to the power of a cold Coke on a hot summer day in the South. So we'll just say Pepsi killed it for everyone, OK?

Book Review: Graphic Novel Round-Up

2011-07-05T10:21:00.001-07:00

Read a bunch of graphic novels over the past few months and, well, since I'm trying to put a review of every book I read on here may as well include these! But I'll try to keep these to a few short sentences.

1. Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman. Starts better than it ends. Sets up a bunch of creative, conflicting stories. The resolution, unfortunately, mimicks a particular car commercial. But seeing the characters interact is great, and the idea -- Batman's funeral -- is definitely intriguing.
2. Rasl by Jeff Smith. The same magic as Smith's Bone series in a totally different realm: bleak but inventive present-day sci-fi for adults, rather than semi-fairy tales for children. Does one of the best jobs of talking about Tesla of anyone, and lots of people have tried. You're left with a nice, clear set of mysteries as you wait for the next book.
3. The Eternal Smile: Three Stories by Gene Yang. I like to see more by Yang, and these stories were good examples but not that deep. Maybe if you think about them together. Each has a nice twist.
4. Castle Waiting by Linda Medley. Feminist Chaucer in a comic book. In a good way. One of my favorite things about graphic novels is an artist who can capture a good expression and Medley is excellent at that. Celebrates some quiet, ordinary moments along with the traditional "this is a story" moments. Very, very good, just not a personal favorite.
5. Stumptown Investigations, Portland, Oregon by Greg Rucka. Successfully captures Portland and uses it as a setting for a competent and well-told crime story. I love the first scene and the way it's explained. So much better spending an hour reading this than TV!
6. Life with Mr. Dangerous by Paul Hornschemeier. Story of a young woman making her way through life. Very good at capturing the alienation and distancing of modern life without wallowing in it. I never quite got the TV show angle -- it's always hard to replicate the feeling of a hit TV show if said hit TV show doesn't exist. The inner motivations of the protagonist should be stronger I think, because I didn't quite understand what took her so long or what really changed in her by the end of the book.

Of all these, #2 was best, but #4 and #5 were very very good for their genres, and #1 and #3 were always-enjoyable expressions of their always-enjoyable authors' voices. All were worth the time to read (especially from the library!).

Book Review: Splintered Light

2011-06-29T16:47:00.001-07:00

This is the first edition of Splintered Light by Verlyn Flieger, not the 2002 second edition. The astonishing fact is that I want to read the second edition, even now. This was that much of a revelation. In short, in this book Flieger digs up bits of Tolkien's overall philosophy and shows how that shaped the Silmarillion (and, in one chapter, how The Lord of the Rings fits into the big picture). For an innovative, big-picture analysis type of book Flieger writes well, with pithy comments, well-chosen examples and even a sense of pacing. If all academic books were like this, more people would be academics. Especially in the second half I take issue with some of her points but as a foundation for understanding what Tolkien was up to, this is a fantastic book and I think it's right on. For the first time, I feel like I understand how the different parts of Tolkien's life -- philologist, father, Christian, author, sub-creator of languages -- all relate and feed into each other. I feel fortunate to have a library in which I can find a book like this in its hard-to-find first edition -- but, like I said, I know that some day I'll read it again, and that's rare for a book or even a movie.

Book Review: Real Scientists, Real Faith

2011-06-27T14:12:00.000-07:00

Real Scientists, Real Faith is a collection of essays by Monarch Books that each contain a short personal essay from a scientists who are Christians talking about their science and their faith. The broad spectrum of disciplines is inspiring, and there is a good international mix too, although if anything it's tilted toward British scientists I personally don't get to see that often, so much the better. (Many spoke in the Faraday lectures I listened to recently.) It's actually a bit much to read all at once and I took it in smaller bits. The Simon Conway Morris essay alone is worth the price of admission; I really need to read one of his full-length books one of these days. Another standout to my eyes is Wilson Poon, a physicist from the University of Edinburgh whose essay is titled "The Laboratory of the Cross." Most essays are substantially autobiographical, and if you take that as your expectation, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the deep debates that get touched upon from time to time. But this is more summer reading than deep reading (with the possible exception of the two essays I mention above). I guarantee that any reader going through it will be struck by how prevalent the science-faith so-called dichotomy is in just in the air in the common media. This book shows there's no such dichotomy, sometimes directly, but more effectively indirectly, showing how lives can be lived reading from both "Books" of knowledge with joy. It's just in the air for this book, quite the opposite of what's "in the air" for the way science is usually described. Breathe deep.

Book Review: Academically Adrift

2011-06-08T10:15:00.000-07:00

At least for professors, this book was big news. Once I read it I realized all the media summaries were a bit off, so I'll hold off on summarizing it myself. OK, I have to give you this summary: There's a lot of sociological data here that suggests that colleges aren't doing their job to produce "critical thinkers." By that, they mean people who can sort through lots of info, compare it, and then write about it. On the one hand, my institution took part in the preliminary part of this exact study and scored consistently in the top quartile, so that feels pretty good (though, as a teacher of juniors and seniors, I personally can't take much credit for a sophomore-year test!). On the other hand, there is a problem here, extending into the past (high school) and future (after graduation), and although I can quibble with certain aspects of this work (especially the claim that critical thinking doesn't change after the sophomore year?!), at the heart this is about a cultural problem with a moral aspect. In fact, in their final chapter the authors say basically the same thing. So new-fangled analytical tools suggest a moral change. How about that.

And Now Aidan the Sports Reporter Talks About the Mariners Game

2011-05-22T17:42:00.000-07:00

I told Aidan he could "report" on the M's game today for the blog, so here goes:

"The Mariners won 6 to 1 today against the San Diego Pay-dres. They got a winning five streak today. There was one intentional walk before Felix Hernandez got to go up to bat. Carlos Peguero got a 2-RBI double today. It was amazing how he hit it and how fast the Mariners player on first ran to get to home. There were like about 13 strikeouts from Felix. He pitched really well. Only a couple hits for the Pay-dres."

Watch out ESPN!

Answering to Automatic, Assumed Anglo-Saxon Atheism

2011-05-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

Having finally given in to the wonderful stories of Stephen Moffat and having at long last become the sterotypical, nerdly Doctor Who fan, I now have a new exposure to my favorite (foreign) country, the United Kingdom. In general, I love all angles of that culture. But if one thing bugs me about current British culture it's this underlying assumption of "been there, done that" when it comes to any questions of God or the like. I don't mind the fact of dismissal as much as the casual nature of the dismissal, the "of course I don't believe, I'm British!", the "well-we-don't-have-an-empire-anymore-and-we-don't-have-God-either" blithe, unthinking atheism of the comments. If Christianity is cultural in the American South, then atheism is well on its way to being the unthinking cultural assumption in the British Isles -- or at least their exported culture seems to take it as an assumption past even reflecting on. I hope the actual British people have more, well, hope.

So here, I'd like to give a knee-jerk answer back to two recent British quotes (well, one's last year but I just saw it):

Steven Hawking in the Telegraph: "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. … There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

Funny, the book I reviewed on this site that gives the most evidence of being "afraid of the dark" is Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Afraid Of, a British atheist writing about death. That book is painful to read, fear permeates its pages, and I find it commendable and an effective work of art that Barnes would put his soul out there so clearly. Where is the evidence that fear of death makes people Christians but makes others Julian Barneses? There must be some other variable that controls the result here.

Not to mention, the whole realization that God's faithfulness extends even after death is something that only slowly dawned on the Jews over thousands of years. Fear of death might explain Paul and St. Augustine (well, it doesn't but that requires a longer rebuttal), but it can say nothing about why Israel survived the Exile, or anything before that either. It doesn't explain most of the Old Testament at all, which, last I checked, is more than half the Bible. C.S. Lewis has a quote about this somewhere.

Where is this person who's afraid of the dark? Only a man made of straw.

River Song in Doctor Who at the beginning of The Pandorica Opens (Series 5), speaking to a Roman centurion: unforuntately, I have to paraphrase this because I can only find it in another paraphrased blog, but basically "You've been a soldier too long to believe that there are gods watching over us."

I happen to actually know some soliders and they happen to be Christian. I don't think that's because our military is somehow not used to combat or something -- the complaints I hear tend to be in the other direction from that. There's nothing about being a solider that prevents faith. Maybe there's something about being British and into sci-fi, but that's not quite the same thing! But it should be obvious that this isn't about real people -- it's about making unthinking generalizations, and about most other topics it'd be clear that it's just a trope. For some reason, theological tropes -- that is, anti-theological tropes -- are OK in British culture. Well, I'll just have to live with that, there are other advantages to enjoying said culture.

Not much point to this post, just answering back into the ether and playing with words. Just gotta tell SOMEONE.

How to Know When the World Will End

2011-05-21T10:43:00.000-07:00

The end of the world is all over Facebook today, fodder for jokes and theologizing. My favorite status update is from my friend Matt: "I feel fine." In terms of viral marketing, this message has permeated the culture to be sure. It's the theologizing that I worry about a bit.

It's obvious that the close-reading gymnastics used to reach this particular date as the end of history are incredibly flawed. It's obvious that this precise prediction misuses the Bible and misrepresents God; one of the best ways to point that out is to make fun of it. But in the middle of all the jokes flying back and forth, and the earnest denunciations of flawed exposition, I see a lot of people moving from the specific to the general, and saying that basically, it's silly to believe in the end of the world because it will never end. Is the idea to hold the opposite wrong view so overall it cancels out?

I keep thinking of the line from the O Antiphons service about how we await the Second Advent of Jesus; there is still more to come, and some of the changes will be abrupt, like phase changes of freezing or sublimation, brought about by the new breaking into the old in the same way it did on Easter morning. I'm not ready to say it must be abrupt or it must be gradual, but I know it must break in and it must change.

Read 2 Thessalonians: judgment can, does, and will break in. It did in AD70 when the Romans razed the Temple. It did when Rome fell 400 years later, and when Constantinople fell in the Fourth Crusade, and again, and again, and again. "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair." These falls are all part of a bigger fall, ruins upon ruins. The overall pattern is that falls happen, bubbles burst, and people die. In 2 Thessalonians, Paul tells them that a lot of bad stuff has to happen in terms that don't entirely make sense to us, but the message that bad stuff will happen, lawlessness will set itself above every power and principality, even in the holiest place, but Jesus will set it right. Paul goes so far as to say you can know the judgment has not come yet because it hasn't gotten bad enough yet: a huge falling-away, a ruler without laws that worships self and created things over the Creator, over everything. I'm pretty sure that's not happened yet, but the fascinating thing about Paul's prophecy is that it's general enough that I can't be sure it's not! The major point is not to be able to identify exactly when judgment will come, but to keep the focus of worship on the Creator where it belongs. I'm pretty sure that God maintains the ability to surprise us no matter how smart we think we are.

The general truth of the Thessalonian letters, and Revelation, and all the related things we're trying to think about right now, is that the pattern of history is one of growth instead of stasis. Every day is not the same, and the world is not in a loop. It is a line, and we look forward to God setting right what we cannot change with new creation. The pattern is that death must precede new life, and we are not in control of granting either one. Tearing down must precede building. What Paul says to do is to run from lawlessness, depending on the grace of God and living with love for each other, because love builds and transforms. History doesn't all make sense, everyone knows that (and if history doesn't make sense why should prophecy?). Looking at the canon I modify that slightly: it doesn't make sense ... yet. Some days, patience and perseverance are all we can supply and we wait for the rest from above. We can't let something that's wrong in the specifics dissuade us from the general truth that we await a Second Advent.

Book Review: After You Believe

2011-05-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

I listen to so much N.T. Wright in the form of recorded lectures that I don't always read his books, especially his mid-level books. At first, After You Believe read very similarly to his recent talks on virtue. But the middle third was well worth it. In a sense, I "spoiled" part of this book for myself by listening to every available talk while driving around! But the good thing is it was still worth taking the time to read (especially because I could skim the paragraphs with the examples I already heard). The message is important and worth absorbing through the eyes as well as through the ears. The thread of the role of worship and the Eucharist is subtle but it's there, and that's what I'm paying most attention to these days.

Book Review: The Temple and the Church's Mission

2011-05-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

I found out that I've been a bit of a fan of G.K. Beale's work for a while now without knowing it. G.K. Beale, with D.A. Carson, wrote a commentary of how the New Testament uses the Old Testament, which I have used as a backbone for two classes so far and will again: it's literally a gold mine. Then I heard a reference in an N.T. Wright talk (what's with all the double initials here? Unfortunately I'd have to be B.J. and that sounds like a truck driver!) to this book about what the temple meant in Revelation 21 and I quickly found that this Beale and that Beale are the same people. So The Temple and the Church's Mission feels like a book I should have read long ago.

Actually, Beale put forward a paper at a conference that summarizes his argument fairly well, and if you're pressed for time that paper does a masterful job of summarizing his argument. I read it first, wanted more, then read this 400-pager to follow up. To tell you the truth, I think it could have been about 100 pages shorter, because there's some reiteration and some lines of argument that may be unnecessary, but that's definitely debatable. What's not debatable is Beale's style, which relates themes across authors and takes each piece of Scripture seriously. Many other authors seem to have a "canon within the canon" for their emphasis but Beale truly gets the full scope of Scripture in. The topic is, basically, what did the Temple mean to Old Testament and New Testament authors? I'm convinced this is an important historical "blind spot" because we don't have an equivalent structure and haven't for 2000 years, so we've forgotten what it was. Beale goes a long way toward correcting for this. I would have liked more history and equivalent cultural features and the like but perhaps others have followed up on this? In any case, this is an important book and an important way of thinking. I'm going to have more about exactly what the Temple may have meant in my "Last Lecture" in two weeks (from today ... mild yikes ... ) but for now this was a theological page-turner. What more could you want?

Book Review: What I Saw in America

2011-04-21T21:59:00.000-07:00

This book is available free online, but I don't have a Kindle and I like to mark up my copy with pen, so I put it on my wish list from Amazon and got it. (Thanks, Eric and Deanna!) Found out a couple of things:

1.) G.K. Chesterton makes for good airplane reading.
2.) The book's a slow starter because GKC focuses on the hotels and like that he saw on his trip, and these more immediate kinds of things don't relate as immediately because they've changed in some ways. But when he starts to go after advertising in city lights it gets good. Then when GKC talks history it gets better. GKC's most endearing characteristic is that he was interested in the history of ideas, not of wars or great men or the like. It's one of the things that makes his writing unique. For instance, Abraham Lincoln was a hero because of his stalwart adherence to an idea. I like that.3.) This book was written after the Harding election. (!) Yet it's still worth reading.
4.) One quote is so good I have to put it on here:

"We cannot be certain of being right about the future; but we can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past. The other thing that we can do is to note what ideas necessarily go together by their own nature; what ideas will triumph together or fall together." p. 166

Oh, why stop there?

“Exactly what gives its real dignity to the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking a primitive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up the tables of an ancient law, against the trend of the nineteenth century; repeating, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, etc.,' to a generation that was more and more disposed to say somethinglike this: 'We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,' and so on. I do not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have founded a state; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself, it would never have overthrown a slave state.” [Pg 302]

"And we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests." p.7

Delighting in the color of the NYC advterisement lights: "Therefore it was that I desired the peasant to walk down that grove of fiery trees, under all that golden foliage, and fruits like monstrous jewels, as innocent as Adam before the Fall. He would see sights almost as fine as the flaming sword or the purple and peacock plumage of the seraphim; so long as he did not go near the Tree of Knowledge. … If a child saw these coloured lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any other coloured toys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to dance in respectful imitation of the child.” (p.22-24)

"This tradition is truly to be called life; for life alone can link the past and the future. It merely means that as what was done yesterday makes some difference to-day, so what is done to-day will make some difference to-morrow. In New York it is difficult to feel that any day will make any difference. ... Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive." (p.40-41)

"It is customary to condemn the American as a materialist because of his worship of success. But indeed this very worship, like any worship, even devil-worship, proves him rather a mystic than a materialist." (p.63)

"We are perpetually being told in the papers that what is wanted is a strong man who will do things. What is wanted is a strong man who will undo things; and that will be a real test of strength." (p.74)

Definition of psychoanalysis: "Confession without absolution."

"The nineteenth century prided itself on having lost its faith in myths, and proceeded to put all its faith in metaphors. It dismissed the old doctrines about the way of life and the light of the world; and then it[Pg 196] proceeded to talk as if the light of truth were really and literally a light, that could be absorbed by merely opening our eyes; or as if the path of progress were really and truly a path, to be found by merely following our noses. Thus the purpose of God is an idea, true or false; but the purpose of Nature is merely a metaphor; for obviously if there is no God there is no purpose. Yet while men, by an imaginative instinct, spoke of the purpose of God with a grand agnosticism, as something too large to be seen, something reaching out to worlds and to eternities, they speak of the purpose of Nature in particular and practical problems of curing babies or cutting up rabbits." (p. 109)

"But in the conflict between the Republic and the Church, the point often made against the Church seems to me much more of a point against the Republic. It is emphatically the Republic and not the Church that I venerate as something beautiful but belonging to the past. In fact I feel exactly the same sort of sad respect for the republican ideal that many mid-Victorian free-thinkers felt for the religious ideal." (p.114)

"[H.G. Wells] tells us that our national dignities and differences must be melted into the huge mould of a World State, or else (and I think these are almost his own words) we shall be destroyed by the instruments and machinery we have ourselves made. In effect, men must abandon patriotism or they will be murdered by science. After this, surely no one can accuse Mr. Wells of an undue tenderness for scientific over other types of training. Greek may be a good thing or no; but nobody says that if Greek scholarship is carried past a certain point, everybody will be torn in pieces like Orpheus, or burned up like Semele, or poisoned like Socrates. Philosophy, theology and logic may or may not be idle academic studies; but nobody supposes that the study of philosophy, or even of theology, ultimately forces its students to manufacture racks and thumb-screws against their will; or that even logicians need be so alarmingly logical as all that. Science seems to be the only branch of study in which people have to be waved back from perfection as from a pestilence." (p.133)

"It is often said that we learn to love the characters in romances as if they were characters in real life. I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story." (p. 143)

“The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, 'The kingdom of heaven is within you.' That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a little child. What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit; but the[Pg 280] childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it somewhere else.” (p.155)

"Generally speaking, men are never so mean and false and hypocritical as when they are occupied in being impartial. They are performing the first and most typical of all the actions of the devil; they are claiming the throne of God."

Book Review: Special Exits

2011-04-20T09:54:00.001-07:00

I've been in journal-reading mode lately, but I did find time to read this graphic novel from the library about a woman taking care of her two aging, independent but dying parents. It's told with enough versimilitude that I thought it was autobiographical, yet I can't find any confirmation that it was. Whatever its state of fiction, it's a powerfully realistic tale about death, not sentimental or really anything other than a straightforward account of what it's like to go through nursing homes and hospice and home care. The characters are vivid -- the older couple is immediately likable and shows distinct personality that alone is worth the read. The other nice thing about graphic novels is they only take an hour or two to read, so I recommend this in place of a movie -- it's probably a richer experience and shows something most everyone's going to have to live through multiple ways: first as the daughter caretaker, second as the older couple. Dona nobis pacem.

Northern Lights

2011-04-04T10:24:00.001-07:00

Even though I'm far enough north to see the Northern Lights, I've never seen them with my own eyes (pesky clouds). But this video has got to be the closest I've come to actually seeing them. Amazing!: http://vimeo.com/21419634

Book Reviews: Harry Potter 1 and 4

2011-03-21T22:34:00.000-07:00

Not only is it a new experience to read the Harry Potter books aloud to a child, it adds a new dimension to be reading two of them at the same time. I read Sam book 4 (Goblet of Fire) as I was reading Aidan book 1 (The Philosopher's Stone, because we get the British versions). Of course, the length of the books is vastly different, and the vocabulary much more advanced for the later book. Side by side it becomes apparent that not much happens at Hogwarts itself in book 1, because it takes half the book just to get there. It may take as long in book 4, but there's still 3/4 of the book left by that point. Book 4 has some annoying padding that repeats stuff from previous books and feels like an editor asked to have that in, you know, for kids. But underneath it all is the same amazingly (and at times needlessly) intricate plot, there in nascent form in book 1 but fully realized in book 4. Another funny thing about book 4 is the tweenage romance stuff just flies on past Sam (he's as dense as Ron), but one thing made him tear up: when Mrs. Weasley sends Hermione a tiny candy egg for Easter because of the nasty and untrue articles circulating about her in the wizard's press. Apparently Sam has a deep sense of candy justice. At last, the books have several elements of quite subtle foreshadowing that make rereading them that much more valuable.

Book Review: The Hemlock Cup

2011-03-18T17:04:00.000-07:00

Once again the quest for vivid historical scholarship turns up a good book. The Hemlock Cup by Bettany Hughes is about the life and death of Socrates and the democratic Athenians he walked among. Hughes has researched the latest artifacts dug up from the ground and has traveled to most of the sites in the book -- she'll often tell you what a battlefield or ancient town is like today. Her portrait of Socrates is illuminating, especially for the big question of how could a city like Athens kill a man like Socrates? I didn't think I could understand why but after reading this book I can finally see how it happened. This book is even more useful for its portrait of Athens than of Socrates: Socrates stands out from history so much that most people have some idea of what he was like, but Hughes is able to detail some of what must have been going on in the average Athenian's mind, which is harder to do. The detail of why and how they believed in the gods that they believed in is fascinating and certainly colors any wrongly over-rationalized pictures of the Golden Age of Greece one might have. In fact, if a person was walking around Athens 500 years later the first thing he'd probably notice was how many statues to how many gods they had scattered around (see Acts 17 for more). This was a very theistic city, and also very troubled by war with Sparta and the inherent insecurity of democracy. If I was a student of history and had time for it, I could write a whole book comparing and constrasting Jesus and Socrates, and this would be the main source for Socrates. It's that good.

Book Review: Darwinian Fairytales

2011-02-24T14:57:00.000-08:00

David Stove is an Australian philosopher who wrote a highly entertaining attack on Darwin, Malthus, Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, and company in Darwinian Fairytales. The fact that he is Australian may be somehow reflected in the delight he takes in contrarian positions. The fact that his is a philosopher is evident from the way he makes his arguments. About half of his arguments hinge on statements made by Darwin or Malthus that include the term "all species" and he finds it sufficient to show that man doesn't fit the proposed pattern and therefore all species do not. This works for philosophers but to a biologist it just seems pedantic. About half of his arguments are more substantive and interesting to think about. Some of them attack evolutionary topics like "kin selection" that are no longer held, precisely because of the problems he points out, but it's still kind of fun to watch him poke at the theories and point out the problems.

"[Selfish theorists] think of people as though they were molecules of a confined gas, which have no mutal sympathy, or any other influence, except by way of collisions with one another. This is the selfish theory to a T, as long as you impute to each molecule a ceaseless and exclusive regard to its own interests. The only thing wrong with this idea is that there is nothing whatever in reality which corresponds to it." -- p. 159

The fact that there is more to man is a constant element in the arguments of G.K. Chesterton against materialism as well, and they have the additional strength of being true. The best essays come from Stove's observation that the new sociobiologists like Dawkins and co. are polytheists of a new stripe, and that Dawkins, Darwin and Calvin have a similar streak of proposing that humans are just puppets of irresistable invisible forces.

"[P]uppetry theories ... always display a strong tendency to expand. The man who has dreamed up a set of demons or puppet masters behind one field of phenomena is quite the likeliest man to dream up, later on, another set of demons behind another field of phenomena; or to come up with a single, but far wider set of demons, comprehending the set which he had happened to stumble upon first. The people who suffer from delusions of being conspired against are always being obliged to conclude that this conspiracy is more widespread than they had previously realized." -- p.187

This answers a question I've always had about Gnosticism. Why does it start with a bad material/good spiritual creation dualism and end up with an extensive angelology? It's because Gnostics are puppetry theorists, and once they find one puppetmaster they are compelled to find another. Dawkins and the Gnostics ... who'd have thought?

"A person is certainly a believer in some religion if he thinks, for example, that there are on earth millions of invisible and immortal non-human beings which are far more intelligent and capable than we are. But that is exactly why sociobiologists do think, about genes. Sociobiology, then, is a religion: one which has genes as its gods." -- p.248

As a believer myself I interpret this in the light of the injuctions against idolatry. Stove is adept at puncturing idolatry. But there's the rub -- he is so good at it that he ends up puncturing himself.

"The trouble is, though, that every religion (or at any rate every one I know of) is incomprehensible when it is not obviously false. Of course, something which is incomprehensible to us might nevertheless be true, and religious people often remind the non-religious of this fact. But, though it is a fact, it is no help, because there are always many competing incomprehensibilities, from religious and other sources, vying for our acceptance. Tertullian said that he believed the Christian religion because of its absurdity. But alas, every other religion possesses the same claim on our belief (if absurdity really is a claim on our belief)." -- p. 254.

This is where Stove and Chesterton (and I) part company. Stove cannot accept anything he cannot fully comprehend, or that he believes he can fully comprehend. I see a reason to adopt the absurdities of Christianity, in which the great inversion of the weak and the strong is accomplished by the tragedy and blood of the cross. That's a good absurdity that one can sink one's teeth into (literally so in the case of the Eucharist). Commitment to some form of absurdity is a necessity, because even Stove's agnosticism is an absurdity -- why should a free-thinking man expect the universe to fit in his head, after all? -- and Christ is indeed the absurdity on which I stand.

Book Review: Over Sea, Under Stone

2011-02-20T15:04:00.000-08:00

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper is the first book in a five-book series that should by no means be read first. As a quest story involving three children searching for the holy grail (yes, THAT holy grail), it's diverting enough on its own in a mid-20th-century adventures in caves for youth sort of way, but nowhere near as powerful as the second book, The Dark is Rising. Almost all of the magic is kept offstage and some major plot points such as disappearances of important characters are never explained. The pace is slow and there is little tension. There's certainly cleverness in the "treasure map" area and the sense of place is vivid, with Cornwall as a backdrop, but there's too much that Cooper was obviously learning as she went. One of the surprising revelations at the end about a character that was also in the second book is actually unmentioned in the second book, so you still get the reward of that if you read this second. So although I'm usually an adherent of the "published order" philosophy, I say it's better to read this second and to sort of steel yourself to slog through it with the reward of the third through fifth books in the series. Sam liked it fine, and I'm not going to let onto him that it's in my opinion surprisingly weak -- I'll let him figure that out for himself.

Animated Baseball Standings as 2010 Played Itself Out

2011-02-08T11:31:00.000-08:00

In the series of "useless but interesting baseball graphs," check out this large picture file, which animates each AL division race from last year from April through October, which each division side by side with the others. When the ball gets a little trail to it there's a trend up or down in the winning or losing (in the case of the Mariners last year, mostly losing). Also, when two teams switch places in the standings a little line forms between the symbols. Sitting through the losing was painful, but now that it's over watching that little Mariners ball plummet throughout the season is kind of soothing in a fishtank at-least-2010-is-over kind of way.

In Defense of Fishing Expeditions

2011-02-08T11:16:00.001-08:00

I agree with the end of this interview with Janet Rowley, an eminent cancer geneticist who discovered that some forms of leukemia come from broken chromosomes; not in the sense of "every bit of research needs to be like this" but "there is a place for this kind of research in the academy":

Q. Do you think that the type of career you’ve had would be possible today?

A. No. I was doing observationally driven research. That’s the kiss of death if you’re looking for funding today. We’re so fixated now on hypothesis-driven research that if you do what I did, it would be called a “fishing expedition,” a bad thing.

O.K., we knew about the Philadelphia chromosome, and after banding we had the technology to discover gains and losses among the different chromosomes. But once you knew that, what were the implications of the gains and losses? That’s the “fishing,” because there wasn’t a hypothesis.

Well, if you don’t know anything, you can’t have a sensible hypothesis.

I keep saying that fishing is good. You’re fishing because you want to know what’s there.

The Value of an Elite School: Not That Much

2011-02-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

A recent study of an elite school vs. a non-elite school's graduates finds that the elite diploma can get you a job in the first place but staying there and prospering there is not really affected by the name on the diploma. The thing that promotes you is the skill and learning on the job that you bring to it, not some elite intangible aura. Of course, I find this fact very encouraging for several reasons!

Book Review: The Thousand

2011-02-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

This book is sold as a replacement for Michael Crichton, or maybe Dan Brown, although I've read everything by the former and nothing by the latter so I'll stick with Crichton. It has a promising premise: on the one hand, a brain-box implant that lets a person notice and remember everything in detail (very handy in Vegas, of course), and on the other hand, a secret society of Pythagoreans who have the ability to basically make computers do anything they want because of their deep understanding of math and the theory of unification. Although how the quantum behavior of black holes could be used to make airplanes crash (much less how Pythagoras could've figured it out), I'm not so sure, but I like thrillers enough to go along for the ride.

Unfortunately, after a promising start and some fun stuff in the middle this novel peters out into a confusing climax that is almost literally a barn-burner. The musical connection should be stronger -- as it is, there's a finished copy of an unfinished Bach Requiem floating around which I find fascinating -- but whereas Crichton would find or make up some interesting connections between math and music, Guilfoile just lets the secret be the secret and treats it as a given that such a requiem could be completed. It needs another step, what does it mean, what other cases are like it, and you don't have to spell everything out but you have to give us a reason to think it's not just deus ex machina superpowers that these Pythagereans have. Crichton would come up with something involving Pythagoreans' obsession with waves and numbers, but nothing along those lines is mentioned. My verdict is that Guilfoile simply isn't curious enough to make up intellectual connections (however spurious), and it's those connections that I found truly thrilling about Crichton.

It's a shame, too, because it's a decent premise and Guilfoile's characters are far better drawn and in general more interesting than Crichton (of course, the stock character of the Crichton know-it-all played by Jeff Goldblum is not present, because Guilfoile doesn't have enough for that know-it-all to say). Maybe there's a sequel that will be more fully realized, but much of this novel is really an extended meditation on how to get from Vegas to Chicago when the government is alerted against you, and again, that's just too typical of a subject for a thriller that purports to be an intellectual thriller.

Book Review: The Fellowship of the Ring

2011-01-31T21:01:00.000-08:00

Books don't change, but readers do. I just read Fellowship of the Ring to Sam out loud. The last time through it was also out loud, to Laurie before the movies came out. A few observations this time around:

-- Tolkien's poems make much more sense when read aloud. (Look! An internal rhyme!)

-- I am no longer disappointed by the "lack" of magic. Instead, I realize that the magic is more tangible and immanent than I knew -- and it extends into our world. Elf-magic is the magic of Richmond Beach park or Mount Rainier in the sunset. Sauron-magic is the magic of smog and combustion. Of course the elves must leave.

-- Never realized before, but Tolkien spends much of his book describing the scenery with loving care. Enjoy the scenery indeed!

Compared to other fantasy novels, Tolkien's writing is stilted. His non-hobbit dialogue is the worst at this. Yet the salient details that drive the story -- Aragorn's indecision, Boromir's subtle truculence, the sadness of the elves -- are ultimately more powerful and relevant to my own choices than the choices of the characters in most fantasy novels. By "most" I mean the ones read, enjoyed, and catalogued on this blog. No one writes souls like Tolkien.

The end result is that Tolkien has unmatched depth and texture. I was excited to read it again. Other authors have their points, too, but Tolkien's world improves with age. Even if a seventh grader might not see it, a thirty-six-year-old father of four might get an idea eventually.

Book Review: Duncan the Wonder Dog

2011-01-27T22:34:00.000-08:00

This is the most oblique, frustrating, rich, timely, and ultimately absorbing graphic novel about a world with talking animals so far in existence. It doesn't come all together at the end so much as spin apart, but it spins apart satisfyingly and narratively somehow. The basic question is, what if animals could talk? Of course, I want to know how it happened and why, because everything else seems pretty much the same with talking animals, with butchers, hunting, terrorism, pets, etc., but this isn't about the origins so much as the consequences. The key is that it's told sumptuously and with feeling. Just don't expect it all to come together, but there are beautiful and beautifully horrible moments to be had through this looking glass. Confusing, sometimes disturbing, sure, and not for the person who had to know why every plot detail in LOST happened the way it did. But for someone who could enjoy the ride, maybe this will work. And it's beautifully drawn -- the best use of "specific murkiness" I've seen (for lack of a better term). After 400 large pages of this I still feel only the surface has been scratched.

Book Review: Roverandom

2011-01-26T09:51:00.001-08:00

J.R.R. Tolkien got his start telling stories to his children. This is an early example of how that worked and what his stories must have been like. I read it aloud to Aidan -- sometimes slow going and some big words that I had to look up ("autothalassic" for one; Tolkien, like Lewis, did not believe in talking down to kids!). But then you get this burst of imagination and description that just captures you like nothing else. The book is the story of a dog that was enchanted to become a toy, and the toy is lost on the beach by a little boy (Tolkien's second son, whom he calls "Little Boy Two"), and then the toy meets a sand-sorcerer, flies to the moon, goes under the sea, and ultimately meets a happy ending. Obviously only one of those clauses actually happened! The moon's a little barren in the description, but the under the sea scenes are vivid and lush. As a Tolkien fan I knew I had to read this, and even though it's by no means his best work, I feel like I know him a little better for having done it. A university professor with several small boys can do some surprising things in his spare time ... just another reason he's a hero of mine.

LEGO Model of 2000-Year-Old Computer

2011-01-17T10:06:00.000-08:00

This is ... amazing and instructive, well worth your time.

More at this link.

What If We are Effectively Unique?

2011-01-16T19:51:00.000-08:00

Anytime you see something by Brian Greene, consider reading it. For example, this column that appeared in today's New York Times about the dark energy speeding the expansion of the universe. His gift for vivid example may be unparalleled. If I have a complaint about Greene's writing, it's that he doesn't expand his horizons sufficiently to "what it all means" quite often enough. However, in this column he does, a bit: he points out that it looks like the universe is not just unimaginably vast, it's speeding apart at an increasing rate. He asks what it would be like to be a few billion years later in the history of the universe, looking up into a dark sky with a few stars left and having to trust the records of previous scientists to know what the stars used to say about the origin and composition of the universe.

(As a side note, I'd like to point out, then we are alive at a very special point at which we've been allowed to observe the history -- something to be grateful for at least!)

I want to take that and ask, what does the expansion of the universe mean for the exploration of the universe? We already know it would take decades, traveling at near-light speeds, to reach the nearest star, and there appears to be no way to reach another galaxy constrained as we are by metabolism to the time scale of years. Reading the lights in the sky is one thing, but setting foot on another planet outside our system is quite another. Greene's point about dark energy expands this loneliness: even if we could develop something unimaginably fast, the universe may soon be expanding so fast we can't outrun it!

So the point is, there may be other planets out there, and other humanoids. But does it matter if we can never know them? Does it matter if we can't communicate, and can never, ever meet? Is this the Creator's intent, if He made myriads of worlds but keeps them each separate so they cannot touch? And does this moot all the questions about E.T. and alien salvation and other late-night dorm-room excursions?

Are we effectively unique? And if so, what does that mean to a science that seems to want to diminish the uniqueness of man with all its conclusions? To me, the accelerating universe means that, perhaps, in this limited sense, Copernicus was wrong: we are at the center of our universe after all.

There may be exceptions to this, and stranger things than we can imagine beyond the speed of light, but if we know what there is to know, this is what Greene's argument brings me to. Man is the measure, a little lower than the angels. Thus sayeth the Greene.

Book Review: Where Good Ideas Come From

2011-01-04T15:57:00.001-08:00

[piclink]

This is the book that gave me a reason to buy a Mac. But it's still not my favorite by the author -- I'll have to reserve that honor for The Ghost Map, which has a paradoxically broader impact by focusing more on a historical narrative, by, for example, including the contribution of the local parson and the conservative intransigence of the scientific establishment, both aspects missing from Where Good Ideas Come From's larger-view but also more selective history. Still, it's better than The Invention of Air, reviewed previously on this blog, because the lessons are more coherent and the take-home message is simple and solid.

The main thing I take away from this book is not so much the ideas contained in it -- as Steven Johnson admits in the final paragraph, the ideas are simple (although he doesn't connect them to the religious values of wonder and humility as I would!) -- but rather I take away a few pages in which Johnson described in glowing terms Devonthink, the writer's database that he uses to find hidden associations among his notes. Devonthink uses a very cool AI system to suggest relatedness among quotes that don't share words, but do share underlying concepts.

Unfortunately, Devonthink is ONLY available for the Mac. All I have is an old iPhone, and there's Devonthink To Go for that, except ... the AI search is not included in that. I'm going to have to hope someone makes a cool search tool for OneNote, which I have, that would do something similar. I'm not holding my breath. I'm going to have to recreate the 19th-century "commonplace book" using the 21st-century tools at hand! Proprietary walls of the sort that Johnson decries ironically keep me from adapting his favored program to my writing. Alas.

The book is haunted by Malcolm Gladwell, and to Johnson's credit he cites Gladwell when appropriate. It's practical, extremely easy to read, and includes stories about innovation that are novel and useful. It's just not quite the sum of its parts. One thing that bothers me about all these innovation books is, where's the theology? Where's the innovation in theology caused by Gutenberg's innovation? What role does that have to play in things? Johnson's approach is deliberately bottom-up, from nature to innovation, but I have a hunch that the other direction may be somehow fruitful too. It seem omitted from the entire genre. This isn't really Johnson's fault, it's more a cultural blind spot.

Useful quotes that are going in my OneNote database soon to be started:

"The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table." (After a nice reference to the best scene in Apollo 13) p.42

"If you looked at the map of idea formation that Dunbar created, the ground zero of innovation was not the microscope. It was the conference table." p. 61

No Team is an Island ... Except the 2010 Mariners

2011-01-04T13:59:00.000-08:00

At least on this graph the Mariners are similar to Houston, but if you break it down by league, the Mariners are, as the author of part one of this series put it, "an island." It can only get better!

Final Version of Molecular Immunology Paper

2011-01-04T12:57:00.000-08:00

And here is the final version of the Molecular Immunology paper, officially published in 2011. Congratulations to David, Mike, and Andrew, the three student co-authors of this!

State of the Blog Address 2010

2011-01-04T11:56:00.000-08:00

Again, with the data provided by this blog with 2009 numbers compared in parenthesis.

Books read: 45 (Exactly the same as 2009!?)

Posts written: 116 (140)

Peer-reviewed papers published/in press: 2 (1) (Geometric expansion here we come!)

Baby boys born: 1 (1) (Do not expect this trend to continue!)

Eulogies written: 2 (1) (Sigh.)

Books written: 0 (No place to go but up!)

Excellent Essay on Solitude and Leadership

2010-12-28T12:46:00.001-08:00

I'll have to thank David Brooks for his "Sidney Awards" in the New York Times for this essay and the previously posted one. This is a speech given to West Point cadets on leadership and the importance of solitude. Important for teachers and learners of all stripes. I'm reminded of Jesus going away early to pray -- that's a piece I fit into the silences in this article.

Excellent Essay on Churchill

2010-12-28T12:04:00.000-08:00

I got more out of this essay on Churchill than from a biography I read about 10 years ago that was hundreds of times as long.

One of my favorite paragraphs:

Churchill’s real legacy lies elsewhere. He is, with de Gaulle, the greatest instance in modern times of the romantic-conservative temperament in power. The curious thing is that this temperament can at moments be more practical than its liberal opposite, or than its pragmatic-conservative twin, since it rightly concedes the primacy of ideas and passions, rather than interests and practicalities, in men’s minds. Churchill was a student of history, but one whose reading allowed him to grasp when a new thing in history happened.

Is that why the "What's Wrong with Kansas" crowd are mistaken -- that ideas and passions more primary than interests and practicalities?

The Van Gogh Island

2010-12-27T14:24:00.001-08:00

This picture, from Nature's Images of the Year, reminds me of a song about a starry, starry night:

EARTH AS ART Greenish phytoplankton swirl in the water around Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. Originally taken in 2005 by the Landsat 7 satellite, this picture was recoloured by the US Geological Survey for its ‘Earth as art’ online exhibition this year.

Book Review: Shadowheart

2010-12-27T13:07:00.000-08:00

I love it when a four-book series comes together.

Of course, with Tad Williams, there's rarely any doubt that it will come together in the end, just like there shouldn't be any doubt that the "third and final" book will grow so huge it'll spawn a fourth book. Williams always seems to have a good germ of an idea driving each of his big series that you don't really expect. He's matured in his craft with this series, although I still feel like many plot points are made just to tweak the legacy of Tolkien in certain areas: for example, all families are dysfunctional in some way so let's make the central family dysfunctional in some 21st-century way. In many cases it's a nice chance of pace but sometimes it just seems gratuitous, change for change's sake. But really, every author in this genre is forced to keep some orthdoxies while choosing certain heterodoxies, and which should be which is ultimately a matter of taste.

The one thing that bugs me about the series is its theology. It's a polytheistic universe with at least three major cultures. In fact, one of the most confusing things about the series is that the gods all have three different names and the myths are all slightly different, so it's very hard to keep track of when all you have are fragments in the first place. I like the concept and find it an interesting take on our three faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Unfortunately, the underlying reality of it all reads as poorly thought out. Williams seems interested only in the question of whether the gods are, or are not. Not to spoil too much, but it turns out the gods are (in a 21st-century kind of way, but really, they are). And pretty much this is the extent at which you're left at the end of the book (with some hints as to how gods, ahem, resolve conflicts, that is, fight). Only one god really speaks, although there are hints of others, and those hints may be my favorite part of the series, especially near the end. You know, if you're gonna be polytheistic, go and be polytheistic and show us what it's like and how it works. In this sense American Gods by Neil Gaiman still wins my award for "excellence in polytheology." Williams just isn't interested in that aspect of his universe, although it drives everything else, or maybe it got edited out.

Despite this, Williams puts on a writing clinic showing how to juggle at least a dozen different major characters and plotlines, and how to shift scenes and (mostly) keep the story moving. He introduces some good ambuguity and true tragedy into a genre that desperately needs it. This is undoubtedly the best-written of all his books, and it's as well-plotted as any.

I suppose it ends up a bit like LOST for me: excellent at juggling multiple lines and telling a story, but what story is being told ends up not being fleshed out as much as you want. Regardless, I'll happily take it.

Book Review: The Ghosts of Cannae

2010-12-14T11:19:00.000-08:00

Military history always seems like it will be much more interesting than it turns out to be. This book by Robert L. O'Connell is better than average on those counts in that is was very interesting throughout. The topic is Hannibal and the battle of Cannae two centuries BC, and how it fits into the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage. Cannae itself is roughly at the center of the narrative and the author does a good job of covering most topics succinctly and going back far enough to show where the wars came from. (I had previously only read about the darkness of the Carthaginian religion from G.K. Chesterton, and I assumed he was exaggerating a bit, but no, he was spot on, maybe even a little understated given the recent evidence of infant sacrifice ... yikes.) Cannae itself is described excellently -- you can see not only why Hannibal was so smart but also why the Romans walked right into his trap, it's not just that they were stupid! The drawbacks are common to much popular history: there's a few sections where the history gets so complicated that it reads more like a list than a narrative; as a non-specialist I need either more storytelling or less detail. Also, the epilogue at the end about the future impact of Cannae is way too short. I'd like something along the lines of the ending to The Ghost Map in which the lessons are made immediate and relevant, but instead we just have six pages, most of which tell us how Cannae does not apply when people have said it does! Overall it's a good example of the genre and an excellent reminder of how history is done. I can't help but think there's a few more details about characters like Hannibal and Scipio Africanus that would tell the story that much better, details like Malcolm Gladwell might ferret out, but that's just saying it's a good book not a great one. Well worth the time.

In Memory of Herb Haugo: Math is Not Linear

2010-12-14T11:12:00.001-08:00

Since my father-in-law (who recently passed on) was a math teacher, I thought of him when I saw this great presentation. I don't think he'd agree with everything in it, but it would definitely interest him, and it makes good use of the Prezi presentation platform for zooming in and out.

Eulogy for Herb Haugo

2010-12-13T11:59:00.000-08:00

My father-in-law passed away on the first of the month. At his service I gave a short eulogy based on this text here:

Lilly Ann asked me to comment on Psalms 121 to 134, which were important to her and Herb in the last weeks of his life. These are the “Psalms of Ascent,” short poems that the Judaeans would sing as they took the long, hard pilgrimage to worship at the Temple on Mount Moriah. The first Psalm of Ascent begins by looking at the countryside that Herb loves so much and calling on the creator of the hills to be our personal help: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence comes my help. My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” (Psalms 121:1-2)

Herb was not walking to mount Moriah, but he was ascending to heaven. One of the main points of the book of Hebrews is that an earthly temple is no longer our destination; instead, God has better things waiting in heaven for us. This was Herb’s ascent. In Hebrews, our pilgrimage is to “a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made of hands … “ (Hebrews 9:11). The earthly Temple, the most beautiful building in the world, was but a “shadow of heavenly things” (Hebrews 8:5) and “a shadow of good things to come. “ (Hebrews 10:1) Herb had the faith to know he was on the road to the heavenly temple and his new heavenly body. Herb knows that the God of creation is the God of his help, the God of the new creation to come.

Paul also knew this. In 2 Corinthians, he encouraged a group of confused, sad, and imperfect Christians, reminding them that the power that created the world and raised Jesus from the dead is at work even in suffering, even as bodies and minds fall apart:

“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of the darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; … Knowing that he which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise UP US also by Jesus, and shall present us with you.” (2 Cor 4:6-8)

“For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. … For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality may be swallowed up of life.” (2 Cor 4:17-18; 5:1, 4)

Herb’s body in his casket was a shadow of his former self, but that is not him. Herb’s resurrection body will be so vivid and real that we will say Herb in his earthly prime was just a shadow of his true self. Herb knew this and I have to think that’s why the Psalms of Ascent spoke so clearly, describing the mountains and valleys of life, from the joy of family to the pain and fear of a broken world.

(We saw this combination of joy and sadness at work when, just a week ago Friday, we were able to bring Herb’s 12^th grandchild and 7^th grandson, Benjamin Arthur McFarland, just three days old, to spend a few short minutes in Herb’s arms before Herb continued upward.)

After surveying all of life, The Psalms of Ascent end with worship in Psalm 134: “Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the Lord.” (134:2) After 45 years worshiping with the choir here, Herb has climbed the mountain to the better tabernacle not made with hands, and now he is worshiping in a light that will never fade, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Let us persevere as he did until we meet again.

Two Stories I Don't Want to Forget

2010-12-06T15:20:00.000-08:00

1.) I had a student tell me that a biochem homework question -- about why emulsifiers are required to make mayonnaise that doesn't separate out -- actually helped him reason through why a peanut sauce he had made was separated out, and then he solved it by using biochemistry to add a little egg yolk as an emulsifier. Biochemistry is useful! (For peanut sauces at least.)

2.) The same student told me his dad was sitting on a plane next to a medical student from a big state university in the midwest, and they started talking about how his son was taking biochemistry, and the med student mentioned he was listening to some biochem lectures from iTunesU ... and turns out the med student was listening to my lectures! A good reminder that I have no idea what work the iTunesU lectures are doing while I'm otherwise occupied.

Now, I don't think this particular student who told me these stories was angling for a better grade on the final that I'm going to start grading any minute now ... but you gotta admit these are some good stories!

Book Review: The Best of Star Trek (Graphic Novel)

2010-12-06T15:10:00.000-08:00

You know, this wasn't half bad. Since I don't have time to read entire Star Trek novels anymore, why not read the best of Star Trek comic books? (It helps that many of the same writers write for both.) The plot of a 2- or 3-book series is similar to the plot of a TV episode or novel, and sometimes just as creative. This graphic novel was as worth the time as a TV episode would have been, so I'd have to say it's all right. The thing is, only one of the stories was able to be read by my son who's been asking me for Star Trek stories, because the others were either too self-referential or too theological, perhaps better to say anti-theological, building too much on Arthur C. Clarke's "sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic" dictum/hokum. (Is that materialist holy scripture then?) In any case, it was diverting enough. High praise indeed.

Book Review: Christians Are Hate-filled Hypocrites-- and Other Lies You've Been Told

2010-12-06T15:02:00.001-08:00

(You can tell my ambivalence from the frequency of "however"s below!)

The title of the book says it all. The thing is, the first chapter quotes Rodney Stark extensively and I kept thinking throughout that Stark would've done it better. However, I welcome actual data applied to actual problems however I can get it. I'm glad it's out there because many of the things the author discusses are cases where the media has distorted some sociological data. However, it just doesn't do enough to avoid being a disappointment. My favorite part of the book was actually a chart from a blog that shows conversion rates from one denomination to another, which tells me that 75% of evangelical youth remain evangelical when they grow up. If that stat surprises you (because many people who have youth-group seminars to sell trumpet stats that are much lower than that, probably to sell tickets to their seminars) then you may want to check out this book.

It also doesn't help that, you know, everyone's a hypocrite in one way or another, so the accusation that Christians are hypocrites doesn't surprise or shock me, or even strike me as needing defending. However, some of the other assertions -- like that church doesn't affect divore rate -- are rightly put to rest in this book. I just wish there had been more of a focus on that, rather than measuring "warmth of feeling" toward other groups in the last half, which I don't find particularly helpful. Oh well.

Book Review: Towers of Midnight

2010-12-06T14:45:00.000-08:00

Robert Jordan started writing a gargantuan fantasy epic when I was in high school. Throughout college, graduate school, and academia, Jordan gave me 11 1000-page books taking place in his world. He promised he'd finish it all up with a twelth, and then he died. Humph.

However, Jordan prepared for this possibility by keeping copious notes and eventually his estate gave the project to another fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson, who promptly promised that there was no way all that plot could be fit into 1 book and that he would instead write 3 books to finish the series. Towers of Midnight is the second of the jointly authored trilogy, meaning there better actually be just one book left. The good news is all the threads seem to be weaving together and there very well may be an end to the story in sight.

Towers of Midnight moves along at a positively sprightly pace relative to some of the mid-to-late Jordan-written titles, although even so the beginning of the book felt a little padded. Many times character progressions are told to the reader rather than shown, and I have to think Jordan wouldn't have been quite so forthcoming -- it reads more like Jordan's notes than Jordan's writing sometime. However, my major reaction is a sigh of relief that this saga is finally wrapping up and Jordan's plans are being revealed. Sanderson is competent and that's all I need from this series right now.

In fact, there are a few scenes that are beyond competent and are some of my favorites of the series. For one, there's a place about two-thirds of the way through where three or four conflicts come to climactic fights all at once, and actually overlap and intersect. This is brilliant and one of the things that only a series of this complexity could do. There's another scene in which a magical artifact is used to look forward in time rather than backward, and it shows some very unhappy endings, with some of the most poignant and affecting writing in the series, even presented in a creative narrative fashion. Finally, there's a climactic scene that you know is coming through the whole book because it's on the cover (and it's been coming for about six books now, fer-petes-sake), and it is pretty much what I hoped for, with a very clever twist at the very end that everyone should have seen but no one did (kind of like LOST Season 6). Overall, as a fan but not a super-fan of the series, I'm glad it's continuing the way it is and am looking forward to more of this in book fourteen. Including the words "The End" at the end -- right?

Book Reviews: Best Gospel of John Commentaries

2010-12-06T14:30:00.000-08:00

I have a pattern for teaching Sunday School classes now:
1.) Check out about 7 or 8 commentaries from the SPU library.
2.) Read/skim the first section of the most recent ones.
3.) Keep using the ones I find useful; don't use the ones I don't.

In this manner the 7 or 8 become 3 pretty fast, and that's usually more than enough information for each Sunday class. I taught a Gospel of John class from September to November this year and the winning commentaries were (in order in which I'd read them):

1.) N.T. Wright's John for Everyone (200something)
2.) G.K. Beale and D.A. Carson's Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (2007)
3.) Craig S. Keener's The Gospel of John: A Commentary (2003)
4.) D.A. Carsons's The Gospel According to John (1990)

With the exception being that often Keener would quote Carson and put him into context, so often I could stop with Keener, while agreeing with much of Carson's work.

I especially want to point out how great Keener's work was. Its deliberate focus was on the social and historical context of the Gospel of John, which means he would talk about how that language or official position or whatever was used in Greek and Roman contexts, as well as Second-Temple Jewish contexts, and even the post-biblical Rabbinic literature. For the historical perspective alone this was far and away the most comprehensive, and Keener had welcome pastoral and theological insights as well. I am thinking I may move on to the Gospel of Matthew just because Keener has written a commentary for that too!

The Abandoned Blog No Longer Abandoned

2010-12-06T14:26:00.000-08:00

Sorry I've been gone so long. First it was the class on the Gospel of John I taught that took up all my reading time, then it was the birth of my 4th son, Benjamin Arthur McFarland, on November 23, and then the death of Benjamin's grandfather (my father-in-law) on December 1. All events that take precedence over blog maintenance. However, I just gave my biochem final today and that means the schedule has cleared up considerably. I'm going to post some quick book reviews and soon we should be back to regularly intermittent posting.

The Abandoned Subway Stop

2010-11-12T09:36:00.000-08:00

Deep under New York there is a beautifully preserved, abandoned subway stop for City Hall. I can't believe the pictures found here. (I think I'll have to have a category for "Modern Ruins" soon ... )

The Gamma-Ray Bubbles at the Center of the Galaxy

2010-11-09T20:57:00.000-08:00

[piclink and article]

The universe is a surprising place. A new gamma-ray observatory has found these sharply defined bubbles of gamma rays to appear to be blown out from each end of the center of the galaxy. We're pretty sure what they're NOT -- dark matter -- but we don't really know what they ARE. Is this part of the reason why the rest of the galaxy might not be so habitable? Too many gamma rays? And we KNOW gamma rays turn mild-mannered Bruce Banner into the Hulk.

At the very least, it's a beautiful picture, and a reminder that even with the best observatories we only see through a glass darkly -- even if what we see is dark matter!