The first Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth Harbor nearly 400 years ago, on December 17, 1620. Things started off promisingly. With a little scouting around Plymouth, they found an area with a good harbor, river, and fields already cleared for planting. But it went quickly downhill from there. They arrived in the winter, and were immediately beset by disease and hunger. They began to die. In those first 3 months, 45 of the 102 immigrants died. Inclement weather greatly slowed down construction of their new homes, and most of them were forced to remain on the Mayflower for some time after their arrival.

After four months, half of the Pilgrims had died, and the Mayflower was ready to set sail back to England. Holding firm in their belief that this was their divine mission, not a single Pilgrim returned with it. They joined together, holding all their property and food in common, to be distributed out according to need by their officials. Together, they began to scratch out an existence in the New World.

In March, a Native American named Samoset strode into the Pilgrim camp, welcomed them, and asked for a beer. He explained that the land they were settled on had previously belonged to the Patuxet, but they had all been wiped out by a plague four years earlier, and there was now nobody who would dispute the Pilgrims' claim of the area. A few days later, he returned to the camp with Squanto, the last surviving Patuxet, who helped teach the Pilgrims how to work the land bequeathed to them by his former tribe.

The first harvest festival occurred that autumn, and although the Pilgrims did not think of it as such, it is now generally regarded as the first Thanksgiving. The first Thanksgiving that they called by that name came in 1623, when they received news of an incoming ship of new colonists and supplies. It consisted of a church service. There was no feast; in fact there was barely any food to feast on at all. When the new colonists arrived, all they could offer them was some fish and water; they did not even have bread to share.

Without a strong link between effort expended in the fields and food taken home, even these dedicated church-goers had neglected their work, and very little food was grown. The system had limped along like this for two and half years, as the colony continued to face potential starvation. Finally, in the spring of 1623, a parcel of land was distributed to each family. They were allowed to keep whatever they grew on it, with the proviso that they were now solely responsible for feeding themselves. And with that, productivity dramatically improved, and the Pilgrims never again faced severe food shortages. By the 1630's, feasts began to be associated with the Thanksgiving day church services.

About ten years into the colony's life, a man named Henry Cobb emigrated from England (perhaps on the second Mayflower) and joined the couple of hundred in Plymouth Colony. He was a devout man, and became a Deacon in a few years. As the colony expanded and developed offshoots, he helped set up the town of Barnstable, where he settled on a plot of 7 acres. Between his two wives, he had 14 children in total.

I mention him because he was an ancestor of mine, and probably the first of them to come to America. It is nice to know that my own blood played a part in the country's earliest days, and even better to know that he was a man of strong religious conviction. What better time than Thanksgiving to commemorate my own Pilgrim heritage?

I hope your Thanksgiving went well. Whether you knew it or not, you were celebrating great bravery, an enterprising spirit, an uncompromising devotion to God, the superiority of capitalism and private property, and the eating of large quantities of food. I can think of nothing more quintessentially American than that.

In honor of today's election, a little blast from the past:



Update: In further honor of the election, NJ's election results by county. 62% of Monmouth voted Republican!

My choice of reading materials provided an unexpected complement to my recent China trip these past two weeks. In Early Latin Theology, I read Tertullian's On Idolatry, which at first was mostly interesting for historical reasons. But then I spent much of the vacation visited different temples and seeing actual idols and genuine idolatry, an experience that is hard to get in America. It made it much more possible for me to imagine the kind of world the early Christians might have lived in, where idols were very much a part of life.

Moving on to the Portable Conservative Reader, I read Edmund Burke talking about the French Revolution:

They have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own. With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one.
...
We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal, that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts, and this cannot prevail long. But if, in the moment of riot, and in a delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembick of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our nakedness, by throwing off the Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and the great source of civilization amongst us, and among many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious and degrading superstition might take place of it.

He could easily have been talking about the events that took place a century and a half later on the other side of the globe. Every site in China makes mention of how many of the artifacts there were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, but they don't generally go into much detail, the Chinese government being reluctant to ever admit fault. I did a little research afterward, though, and was truly appalled. The wholesale destruction of cultural artifacts was the least of their crimes, which included the obliteration of intellectuals, mass killings, and even "human flesh banquets."

The depressing thing is that this sort of thing consistently happens whenever humans take it upon to just wholesale throw off the old ways in the name of Progress or even Reason. Burke saw the Reign of Terror coming, and even though he was speaking from a completely different time and culture, his words correctly predicted the horrors that the Chinese would find when they went down a similar road (and the Russians, and the Cambodians, and the North Koreans, and the Cubans and ...).

Upon my return, I learned that the White House Communications Director has declared Mao to be one of her two favorite philosophers. Sigh.

So, you want to make yourself a nice, new universe capable of sustaining intelligent life? Good for you! It can be a lot of fun, but it's not a simple task. Here are just a few of the things you'll need to get right, or the whole project will come to naught. For now, we'll skip over the details of how to create matter out of nothing, and instead start with some basic things you'll want to make sure to get right in your big bang.

The first order of business is obviously to get those stars burning. Right now, all you have are helium and hydrogen, and if you want anything more than that (and you do), you're going to have to forge it in stars. Allow to bake for a few billion years. Done? Good, now blow all those stars up (supernovas are also good for making heavier elements). Once you've collected all that stuff together into some new stars, we can finally get started on our life-bearing planet. Or rather, we can start on that planet's solar system.

It takes a solar village

You can't put your solar system just anywhere. It needs to be close enough to the galactic center to have the quantities of heavy elements needed to form rocky planets. But it can't be too close to the center, or it risks being too close to a neighboring supernova, and having the resulting radiation wipe out whatever life had developed (a collision of two neutron stars is even worse, putting at risk biospheres that are thousands of light years away). Even being too close to stable stars can be risky, as the interactions between Oort clouds could send more deadly comets your way.

You can't use just any old star, either. Large stars burn hotter, and faster, often becoming red giants in only a billion years, which isn't nearly enough time to set everything up. They also emit much more ultraviolet radiation, which would ionize the planetary atmosphere. Small red dwarfs have a different problem. Their habitable zone is very narrow, giving your planet's orbit little room for error. The effects of gravity at this range would result in your planet always facing the same side toward the sun, boiling one side and freezing the other. The proximity would also make your planet highly vulnerable to solar flares, which would ionize the atmosphere, among other things. Stick with a G type star (about 9% of the stars in the Milky Way fall under this category).

Now, in its early stages, your solar system is going to be little more than a sun surrounded by a disc of gas and dust. You need to gather up all the debris into planets. Now, even if you're only forming life on a single planet, it's important to make others as well, for a variety of reasons. You want intelligent creatures, after all, and Astronomy is the first of the sciences to form. The motions of the stars and planets are readily apparent to everybody, and follow a clear enough pattern to hint at a greater law undergirding it. At the same time, the motions of nearby planets are strange enough that it will take a good deal of work and thought to discover just what those laws are. Without astronomy, there is no telling how long the discovery of science might take, and the planets will continue to come in useful as your creatures advance their knowledge of physics. Of course, even if you didn't not aim to make an intelligent species, other planets still serve essential functions, such as making sure that all life isn't wiped out by an asteroid.

Got Gas?

In particular, you'll need a gas giant. Put one of those swinging around your solar system and it will either deflect or intercept a lot of the incoming comets. But they can be tricky beasts. While Jupiters may form in the outer parts of your solar system (indeed, this the only place that they can) many have shown a tendency to move in towards their star, becoming "hot Jupiters." If you let them do that, they will eject or destroy your inner planets in the process, so make sure your Jupiter has a very stable, very circular orbit. These are particularly likely to form in a solar system that is too metal-rich, which further constrains the location and type of star you can use.

You would do well to add in another, smaller gas giant to keep your Jupiter's orbit from going too elliptical and moving in towards the Sun. Put it close, but not too close, and make it big, but not too big, or the gravitational tug of war between the two will eject one from the Solar System and destabilize the remaining planet even more.

Homeworld

Anyway, on to Earth. When forming your planet, don't forget to include a lot of metals. Your future intelligent beings will need a lot of those kinds of materials if they're ever to advance technologically. Be careful to collect enough when you make your solar system; such compounds comprise only around 2% of the galaxy (but again, don't collect too much, or a hot Jupiter will ruin everything). Happily, the inner area (about 4 AU) of your solar system is a good place for these high melting point compounds to collect, as the heat is going to vaporize most everything else. Your habitable planet is going to have to sit well within this zone anyway (you'll need to be within about .75 to 1.5 AU), so start building your planet's rocky core.

Now, this does lead to other problems. To bear life, your planet is going to need water, and lots of it, but that's all out beyond the frost line. This is where your gas giant comes in handy again. While it tends to keep extra-solar interlopers away from the inner planets, it does the opposite with the asteroids inside the system. Put your Jupiter in just the right place, and it will, over time, send water-rich asteroids raining down on your Earth. Be careful though; put your Jupiter too far out, and it will scatter all that water in the wrong direction, leaving Earth forever dry and sterile.

Size matters, too. Too small, and your planet is going to have a thin atmosphere, precipitous landscape, and shallow seas. It would probably be a workable climate, but not terribly dynamic, and limited by much lower levels of oxygen. Too large and you'll get a flatter landscape, which will yield an ocean world with little to no land. You really want land for your intelligent species to live on, because they'll need to tap the benefits and energy of fire in order to develop technologically. Besides, land is far more biologically productive, on a per-square-foot basis, than ocean is.

You'll need to set up a system of plate tectonics for a variety of reasons: it builds the dry land you so badly need, it promotes biological productivity by recycling nutrients like nitrates and phosphates, and it helps keep the planetary temperature stable. They're not easy to set up (Earth is the only planet in its solar system with plate tectonics), but large oceans do seem to be an important ingredient, which is just as well, because you also need large oceans to keep the temperature stable (making them nice and salty would also be wise, to prevent them from freezing over). You'll also need a magnetic field in order to prevent solar wind from stripping away your atmosphere.

New Moon

You're going to need a moon. A big moon, perhaps 1/4 the diameter of your planet. This moon is going to perform all sorts of functions. It will stabilize your planet's orbit, helping it stay in that narrow range from the Sun where life is possible, and reducing dramatic climatic changes. It will stabilize the planet's axis of rotation, which also avoids catastrophic climate change. It will also help slow down Earth's rotation. This is important, because if your planet is rotating too fast, it is going to experience far more violent storms, and much more severe wind speeds. Life on land will not go very well on a planet regularly experiencing 200km/hour winds, and we've already covered the importance of land. Plus, the Moon provides an excellent shield against incoming meteors.

(By the way, for the sake of your intelligent beings, it would be nice if you also arranged it so that the moon is just the right size and distance to be able to exactly eclipse the Sun. It will be very useful to astronomers, particularly if they hope to find empirical evidence for theories like general relativity within the same lifetime that theory is made.)

Making such a moon is also tricky. The best move is probably to smash something about the size of Mars into your planet. You'll need to hit it just right, or you may simply merge the two together, send your Earth careening out of orbit, eject the atmosphere, or any number of other devastating scenarios. Of course, you also need to eject some of the atmosphere, or you'll end up with something like Venus. Getting all the debris from the impact to coalesce into a single large body (and far enough from the Earth so that it won't be torn apart) is another issue altogether. Good luck with that! Again, getting sizes just right is important; this impact is also going to add to the mass of your Earth, so don't make it too big in the earlier formation stage.

Climate Change

We'll skip over the rest of the factors you need to get just right, as well as the issue of abiogenesis and assume that you've now achieved photosynthesizing life on your planet. Congratulations! Now sit back for a few billion years. These guys are releasing oxygen, you see. At first, it'll just react with all that iron, but after a while it's going to build up in the atmosphere. This might seem bad at first, since this is a highly corrosive waste product that will basically be acting as poison to your current batch of organisms. But in the future, all that free oxygen is going to provide the fuel for much more efficient metabolisms. Once you get some aerobic organisms, things can really get moving.

You may be tempted to get right to work on that intelligent species now, but don't. They'll be much better off if you wait a few hundred million years and build up ample supplies of fossil fuels. Without a large supply of cheap energy, your sapients are going to be severely technologically stunted.

Next Up: Evolving your sapients into beings of pure energy.


Note: The above information was gleaned from a combination of this book and the internet. The science involved is still highly speculative, and could be entirely wrong. Last I heard, we still don't even have a working model that accounts for the formation of all the planets in our solar system

A short while ago, Jennifer was in a CVS and, snared by the promise of a sale, grabbed a bag of their generic cheese doodles. They turned out to be remarkably good; so good that I remarked on how good they were to Jennifer. She agreed that they were perhaps the best cheese doodles we'd ever had.

It was not long after that we went to another CVS specifically to purchase another bag of "Real Cheese Flavored Puffs." But much to our chagrin, it would appear that CVS's generic cheese puff producers do not place a high premium on consistency in their product. Our next bag was over-salty, even for me. The bag after that one was extremely oily. The bag we are working on right now is okay, but "not rapturous."

Children, treasure your cheese doodles while you still have them! You may never find that perfect bag again.

"We are God's partners in matters of life and death." -President Obama

For a conservative political junkie such as myself, the recent debate over the health care plan has been great fun to watch. Obama's poll numbers have been tumbling, conservatives have been mobilized, and somehow the Democrats are having difficulty passing things through a Congress where they control both houses with filibuster-proof margins. Having failed to rush a thousand page bill through by the original deadline of three weeks ago, it seems desperation has set in. On one side, you've seen a lot of people voicing their concerns about potential consequences. On the other side, you have people declaring that all those people with concerns are liars, or, as Obama recently put it "bearing false witness." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid even coined the term "evil-mongers" to describe protesters (I am not making that up), and the White House has gone so far as to encourage supporters to report anybody who says something "fishy" about health care. (Again, I am not making this up.)

Especially odd is that it is near certain that the people declaring others to be liars have not actually read any of the several bills in question, which you'd think would be an important step when declaring that something is not in there. (House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md) actually laughed at the idea that congressmen should have to read bills, a view shared by at least one of his colleagues). I haven't read them either, but I have followed enough to know that there is sufficient reason for concerns, such that the proper answer should be more than "you're a liar!" What follows is essentially a cheat sheet of reasons why the supposed myths are in fact plausible.

( Death panels, abortion, and aliens, oh my! )

The title of this journal is "figuring it all out for over one quarter of a century," and it's not entirely in jest; I really do aim to figure it all out, even though I'm sure I won't finish that task in this lifetime. To that end, I read a lot of old, philosophical books. In particular, I try to read the texts of all the major religions¹, on the basic principle that anything which has lasted for thousands of years has to have something going for it.

Christianity, of course, gets extra-special attention, and I have managed to get through a lot of the big names. But it's been a very haphazard quest, guided more by what happens to be in the bookstore than by any real plan. So, I've whipped up a timeline of significant Christian thinkers to give me more direction and put things more in context. Just making it has already been helpful to me, because I turned up a whole lot of new names in the process.

Kindly check it out. I had to upload it elsewhere, because it uses CSS trickery which livejournal does not support. You may note that neither Philo nor Josephus are Christians, but the former was supposed to have been very influential on Christian thought, and the latter is our main source of information on the world at the time of the New Testament, so he's still important to study. I am also sure that I have missed some names (there is a particularly large gap between Augustine and Anselm), so if you know any that should be added let me know, as that's actually my primary reason for posting. Please note that I'm not really interested in anything younger than 50 years, as it just hasn't had the time to be properly vetted yet, so The Purpose-Driven Life will not be appearing on this list.

One pixel equals one year, and all dates are very much approximations. Items that are grayed out are items I have already read (or at least read significant excerpts of (The Summa Theologica is really long)). I've linked to the writings in question as much as possible, as this will basically be serving as my study guide for the foreseeable future.



¹ I'm not quite there yet, but in my defense, the Koran is boring.

In which the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a train.

"It is not really a banquet but the idea of a banquet," Tamalane said. One clawlike hand described a circle in the air. "The dessert comes, something totally unexpected. The penitent thinks: Ahhh, I have been forgiven at last! You understand?"
Duncan shook his head from side to side. No, he did not understand.
"It is the sweetness of the moment," she said. "You have been through every course of a painful banquet, and come out at the end to something you can savor. But! As you savor it, then comes the most painful moment of all, the recognition, the understanding that this is not pleasure-at-the-end. No, indeed. This is the ultimate pain of the major punishment. It locks in the Bene Gesserit lesson."
-Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune

My father is a prophet. I realize that's hard for many to swallow, but the fact remains that he has on numerous occasions had dreams/visions giving him little glimpses of the future.

My own spiritual giftings are not so extraordinary. However, it was not uncommon for me to gain knowledge about a person that I really should have had no way of knowing. For example (and it is a very strange example), back in my high school days I seemed to have the uncanny ability to pinpoint exactly how far a girl had gone sexually, often after only a minute of interaction. I'm not exactly sure what the purpose of such a spiritual gift was, nor could I tell you how it was that so many girls ended up confessing their histories to me. But they did, and I always turned out to have been correct. Write it off as my simply being a good observer of people if you wish. For what it's worth, I don't think I can do it anymore. Of course, when pretty much everybody you interact with is married, it kind of takes the guesswork out of things.

But I digress. Intuition and the study of humans does not explain the unusual insight granted to me in the next little portion of my life. Here too, I am not sure what the significance of the following is to my narrative, except that it is true. When it became clear to me that my Dark Night was ending, a girl entered my life, which was not so strange. The strange part was that I knew beforehand how my wooing of this girl would go.¹ The major events of the next month were simply Known to me.

It did not feel like it was fated, predestined, or even a really clever plan. It was more like I was looking back on the events after they had already happened. Things did not have to play out as I foresaw, it's just that they did and would play out that way.

I knew exactly what I had to do to set everything in motion: borrow a book from her. This wasn't even a ploy; I really did want to read it. And it was a very good book, so I finished it very quickly. I returned it to her, and we got to talking, as I knew we would. The conversation turned to church friends, as I expected it to, and I mentioned the party mine just happened to be having that evening, and invited her along. To my unsurprise, she said yes. We went, enjoyed ourselves, and spent some more time talking afterward. And that was all it took. After that, she stopped by a lot.
( So far, so good. )

¹ Certain parties to the following events may want to stop reading this (you know who you are).

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I which I learn that you must do what is right, even if it gains you nothing.

"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad." -C. S. Lewis


In evangelical circles, it is (half-)jokingly said that you should never pray for patience. If you do, God tends to answer the prayer by providing you with ample opportunities to practice patience. When I resumed my prayer life, I included the following simple, powerful, and incredibly dangerous prayer: "Lord, do whatever it takes to make me a better person." Asking to be a better person encompasses not only patience, but a whole host of other inconvenient virtues. Tacking on the phrase "do whatever it takes" then multiplies the danger quotient of any prayer; you signify to God that nothing is off-limit in the pursuit of this goal. Hopefully, you do this with the knowledge that what He considers an acceptable loss is usually far greater than what you would. I knew this, and I prayed it anyway. It is possible that this prayer will go down as the most virtuous act of my life. I am convinced that this was what led to me being plunged into my own Dark Night of the Soul.

They don't usually tell you about the dark night of the soul in Sunday School, but it is actually a standard part of the Christian experience. Augustine faced it, Martin Luther suffered through it, St. John of the Cross named it, Mother Theresa spent most of her ministry in it. Jesus himself experienced one while on the cross, and found it more unbearable than the physical torture he was undergoing. The experience is not even limited to Christians; mystics of all stripes typically go through a period of intense emptiness and hopelessness before they break through to the other side. Even in non-spiritual matters the same pattern holds. To get through pregnancy, you must endure childbirth. Before summer break, you must face finals. Every good story builds the tension on higher and higher before finally wiping it away.

The core of the dark night is an overpowering sense of God's absence. It is indescribable, miserable, and more than a little mystical. Very often, this spiritual depression will find a more tangible focus, such as the loss of a loved one, some difficult circumstance, or some unanswered prayer. Mine focused on the major unfulfilled desire of my heart. I was lonely.

There is no personal validation that comes close to romance. When another person commits to you, they are in effect saying that they are so impressed with what you have done with your life that they are willing to dedicate their own life to it. Even if we put that aside, we are still designed even at our most primal level to seek out a mate. Nothing can quite hide the sense of emptiness when you are single. Reasoning cannot paper over it or assuage it, however true the reasons may be. When we are single, we know we are missing out on something, and it is nearly impossible to see why that should be. Who really even cares why? One might as well lecture the starving about economics. We just want it fixed.

I hadn't had a girlfriend for almost two years, which at the tender age of 18 seemed like an eternity. Now, the high school portion of that was not a big deal; I was too sick to date as a Junior, and dating as a Senior seemed pointless, since I was just going to be leaving for college soon. But the time for such excuses was past. I was in college now, I knew lots of girls (Christian girls, even, which I knew to be a requirement), and I was still getting nowhere. More time passed, and I reached the tender age of 19, at which point the male body apparently kicks the hormones into overdrive. Still I was getting nowhere.

I was in college now. What I was doing wasn't working. But there were... other options open to me. A trip to the right party, some minor indiscretions which wouldn't even be viewed as indiscretions by most, and I would be loosed.

Except that would be wrong. And I knew it. I've known plenty of others who could do such things and still legitimately claim to be Christians, but for me to would involve deliberately turning my back on God. We sin in a thousand ways daily even though we should, but even so, there seem to be some lines that we really mustn't cross. If I turned away here and said, "I know it's wrong, but I really don't care," would I still be a follower of Christ? This was clearly my latest test.

But oh, how I resented it. This was not how things were supposed to go. I had held up my end of the bargain, and now God was supposed to be working all things for the good of me. What was taking so long? For some reason, He was holding out on me. In the cosmic staring test between us, I was glowering with all my might, and He was just looking placidly back, not a care in the world. God was again presenting me with the question: was I serving Him because of all the good stuff it brought, or was I serving Him to serve Him? And a new principle began to make itself clear to me: God will give us anything that we are willing to do without.

To gain your life, you must lose it. Everything is within our grasp—if we loosen our grip. God wants to give us the world, but He will not abide us wanting anything more than we want Him. If I was going to achieve my desires, I first had to let them go. I had to be willing to do without what I wanted. And though I suspected that in choosing to do without it, I would very likely get it, I could not depend on that. When they faced the fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego declared, "The God we serve is able to save us from it, and He will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if He does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up." They knew He could, and they were even pretty sure that He would, but as far as they were concerned, all of that was basically prologue. The important thing was whether or not they were obedient.

It was not a revelation I came to quickly. This particularly trial began not long after I started college, and stretched well into my sophomore year. But as I reconciled myself to the idea of doing what was right, whether or not it benefited me, God became visible in the place where He had seemed absent before. And before long, I met a girl.


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	Unemployment rate
Maximum unemployment rate Obama promised if we passed the stimulus:	8%
Unemployment rate he warned we would hit if we "did nothing":	9%
Where we are now:	9.4%

From another angle: the following chart shows the unemployment numbers used in the bank "stress tests" to determine whether they could weather a "more adverse" scenario:

As a side note to my earlier skeptical look at contradictions, logic itself is also an insufficient guide to the Truth. In part, this is because it relies entirely on your axioms being correct in order to get you anywhere correct. If one of those is wrong, your conclusion will be wrong too, as when Lord Kelvin used the logical but incorrect scientific theories of his time to very logically and incorrectly calculate the age of the Earth as 100 million years.

But that doesn't necessarily kill logic. If we could just drum up the right set of axioms, we could then use logic to ferret out all those little bits of Truth that have eluded us all this time. Sadly, Godel threw a wrench into even that plan with his irritating little incompleteness theorem. It turns out that for any logical system, there is going to be something in that system that, while true, can never be proven true in the system. This has been mathematically proven, which is about as absolutely certain as we are capable of being of something.

So, even logic, love it though I do, is not enough if you intend to seek out the Truth. It may be useful, but it can only make up part of your approach. More is needed.

And don't let those Vulcans tell you otherwise; they don't even have a planet anymore.




Everything you know is (Probably) Wrong
Incompleteness | I am large, I contain multitudes | Always Let Your Conscience be Your Guide | Life by the Numbers | Scientific Truth

The Problem of Evil is a bit of an odd-ball. On a basic intellectual level, I actually find it very uninteresting because there are so many intellectually satisfying answers. On a more meta level, it's fascinating, because there no emotionally satisfying answers. Here, at any rate, is very quick run-down of some of the intellectual answers. There's some overlap between some of these, and some mutual incompatibility between others, but I think one could mount a good defense of any of them. This is not an exhaustive list; it's just off the top of my head. Feel free to add your own!

You have Free Will. Sadly, Free Will inherently means the ability to choose evil. Them's just the shakes.

You don't have Free Will. Is it wrong that we take some wood and turn it into a Shakespeare play and take other wood and turn it into toilet paper, then flush it down the toilet (after all, it isn't the paper's fault that it's got poop on it now)? No, it's morally neutral and entirely up to us what purposes and ends we put the wood pulp to. Without free will, you're just another mass of molecules not significantly different from the wood pulp. Puppets don't get to choose what parts they act, and there's nothing wrong with that. See also Isaiah 45:9.

Between those two we've pretty much got everything covered already, but let's go on.

It's worth it, because the existence of evil enables even greater goods. It is clearly true that certain goods (triumph in the face of adversity, perseverance, justice, forgiveness, etc) require the presence of evil to exist. Whether they're worth it is a harder question, because we don't really have enough information. Of course, that's exactly the kind of thing God would know, and apparently He thinks it is.

To be a truly good world, you must have the Incarnation. To have the Incarnation, you must have sinners to save. This is similar to the previous point. The important thing to keep in mind is that under this view good is worth overpoweringly more than evil. In the standard "there is evil, therefore there is no good God" argument, you must take the view that the existence of any evil is so overpowering as to cancel out and obliterate all of the good. Here, we're comparing good and evil not like matter and anti-matter, but more like solid gold ingots and pocket lint. The Incarnation and subsequent redemption of mankind are so totally worth it that we'll take the million gold ingots untroubled by the fact that we may need to dust them off.

This is the best possible world. This one instinctively seems wrong to most of us. On the other hand, Liebniz thought it was true, and he invented Calculus, which makes him demonstrably smarter than all of you. Combined. On brain pills.

An all-good God isn't obligated to create the best possible world. If anything, He is obligated to create all worlds containing good. I'm partial to this belief myself, because wouldn't an all-good being want to manifest all Good? In fact when you think about it, the idea that God is obligated to create only the best possible world seems downright wrong, since it amounts to a claim that even if there were a perfect man in this world, he should be wiped from existence if some other guy in China 100 years ago shoplifted once. You could modify this to say that God is only obligated to create worlds where the good outweighs the bad, but the evidence is that God is willing to tolerate a lot of bad for the sake of even a little good. We happen to be in one of the worlds with evil in the mix.

The existence of evil actually proves the existence of a good God, because the very concept of evil is unintelligible without one. Also known as Lewis's Riposte, it's basically a rephrasing of the idea that you can't build a real moral system without a good God to undergird it. It's a philosophical argument that deserves a lot more explanation than I'm going to give you, but here's a segment in his own words.

You just don't understand. This doesn't really seem to be much of answer, but it does need to be kept in mind, since we clearly don't understand everything. Plus, that's pretty much the gist of God's own answer to Job. Buck up, because we also have Paul's addendum: you just don't understand, but one day you will.

Well, I've recently finished going through the story of Krishna and a bunch of the Upanishads, so I guess I'm a bit more informed on Hinduism now. My favorite verse comes from the Taittiriya Upanishad, Chapter 3:7-9:

One should not belittle food-that is the rule. The lifebreath is food, and the body is the food-eater. ...
One should not reject food-that is the rule. ...
One should prepare a lot of food-that is the rule.

It's possible that I've indiscriminately snipped out the boring portions, butchering the text, though probably a lot less than you think.Other highlights include paeans to how much better members of the Brahmin caste are than everybody else.

In addition, I must say that I've never seen a religious text that talks about semen nearly as much as these did. In fairness to the text, it does make sense and fit in pretty well.

I still think that Hinduism is the religion with the most going for it after Christianity.

Marriage : lust ::
Capitalism : greed ::
Government : violence


No comment, just wanted to get that down somewhere for future perusal.

Tiny the chinchilla, father of four, died yesterday at the age of twelve, most likely from a stroke. In high school he helped me through Lyme Disease. When I went off to college, he accompanied me, and performed the valuable service of luring women into my room. His last days were spent in the spacious estate of Narnia, a wardrobe that had been repurposed into a multi-level chinchilla paradise.

Surviving are fellow chinchillas Pinky and Delilah. Pinky gave birth to his 4 children, but the two later had a falling out. Delilah shared the Narnia estate, but says that the two of them were "just friends," describing Tiny as a "nice guy."

Tiny loved raisins, dust baths, and getting scratched under the chin. He disliked hot peppers, and cats that stuck their paws through the cage bars. He was a great chinchilla and he will be missed.

About 80 years ago, the general scientific consensus was that the universe was eternal, having no starting point. This pleased many, because they could look with disdain on those silly people who took seriously ancient religious texts claiming that God had created the universe in a flash of light at some instant in the past.

Around the 1930s, a rabble-rouser named Georges Lemaitres made some waves with a theory that would later become known as the Big Bang. He proposed that the universe came into being from a single point at a single moment of creation. The atheists hated this idea, and attacked it as being a clear attempt to infect science with religion. A rather brazen one, in fact, given that Lemaitres was a Roman Catholic priest. British physicist William Bonner declared that, "The underlying motive is, of course, to bring in God as creator. It seems like the opportunity Christian theology has been waiting for ever since science began to depose religion from the minds of rational men in the seventeenth century." Soviets, ever the proponents of scientific atheism, branded Big Bang promoters "falsifiers of science who want to revive the fairy tale of the origin of the world from nothing," and sent several of them to labor camps.

Mostly, they did so because they wanted to believe in an eternal universe, but they did have a little evidence, too. According to the calculations undergirding the Big Bang Theory, the universe was 1.8 billion years old. Radioactive dating had proved the Earth to be over 3.6 billions years old. This was a clear contradiction. Obviously, the Big Bang is wrong.

Later, it turned out that Edwin Hubble's observations had been off, allowing the universe's birth date to be pushed back far beyond Earth's. As it turned out, a reader of Genesis 1 was better informed about the start of the universe than the highest scientific experts, and eventually the Big Bang became the new scientific consensus. So, even something as simple as basic logic and pointing out an apparent contradiction will not necessarily lead you to the truth.

Many religions, in fact, are built on apparent contradictions, powered by the tension between the two extremes. Taoism particularly stands out in this regard. In the Tao Te Ching, you'll find the statement "He who humbles himself shall be preserved entire. He who bends shall be made straight. He who is empty shall be filled. He who is worn out shall be renewed." Westerners will note that this sounds remarkably like Christianity's Sermon on the Mount. Christianity may not be as centered around such things as Taoism, but it still has its own set of paradoxes that it puts forth.

But I digress. Though many self-styled skeptics like to point to contradictions like this as disproofs of a given religion, it is apparent to most of us that these are of a different nature from flat-out logical contradictions. Unfortunately, it turns out that even clear logical contradictions do not provide us with a fool-proof truth-finding mechanism. What seems like a contradiction may in fact only be due to your own faulty understanding, or a simple data error.

Physicists have apparently taken the lesson to heart, because they now preach both Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics, even though the two are known to be mutually incompatible. Both can explain phenomena that the other cannot, and neither can seem to incorporate the other (quantum physics most notably can't explain gravity). If you believe in modern physics, you too believe in something even though it contradicts itself.


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I am large, I contain multitudes | Always Let Your Conscience be Your Guide | Life by the Numbers | Scientific Truth

"It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right." -Aristotle

The ancients had a lot of moral blind spots. Slavery is one we are particularly aware of, in part because we only ended it very recently, but there are plenty of others things we could list. Our forefathers treated women like cattle, ditched their unwanted babies in the woods to die, and were rather fond of sex with little boys. Your own grandparents probably held a number of moral views that you would find embarrassing or even repugnant. In a few decades, your grandkids will feel the same about your views.

All of these people had consciences, just like we do; that little voice guiding them through right and wrong. And in many notable cases, it failed. Sometimes it was silent in the face of wrongdoing; sometimes it actively sanctioned the wrong.

If we think about it a bit, we ourselves have experience with the fallibility of our own consciences. At some time in our life, we have each done something that seemed fine at the time, but we afterward felt terrible about. Inversely, our conscience can be made silent about wrongdoings through repeated exposure to them, even if they at first horrified it. No surprise then, that whenever somebody works out their own morality, they discover that all the things they find most tempting are perfectly okay.

So, we can't fully trust our conscience, which is probably not that surprising to most of us. But I wonder if we fully grasp the implications of this. Some of the things that we feel are right are actually wrong. Some of the things we think are wrong are actually right. So, if we were to encounter the perfect moral system, parts of it (perhaps very large parts) would seem wrong to us. The perfect religion should grate on you.


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I enjoy giving atheists a good ribbing on this blog, so I suppose it's only fair to give a little credit where credit is due. The numbers, as it happens, don't all tilt against them. While church attendence correlates with all kinds of good stuff, people who simply call themselves Christians cannot make the same claim. In fact, when you compare self-proclaimed atheists with self-proclaimed "born-again Christians," the atheists tend to come out on top. In IQ tests, they average 17 points higher, and on the old SAT, their scores were about 200 points higher. In America, atheists make 2/3 more than Christians. In the world at large, the higher the percentage of Christians in a country, the poorer it tends to be; the more atheists, the richer it is.

"Born-again" Christians are far more likely to get arrested, and are in fact four times as likely to end up in jail. And despite all the talk of family values, we are slightly more likely to get divorced, and significantly more likely to have children out of wedlock.
( And it gets worse )

Really, is there anything better than a good used book sale?¹ They sell actual knowledge and wisdom at deep discounts, nicely combining my thirst for learning with my inborn cheapness. Recently, I got to go to the Bryn Mawr Book Sale. Jennifer and I emerged with about 20 books for about $30, and now I've got to work through them.

Last week, I finished up the writings up Mencius, one of the premier Confucians. I was rather impressed with him, actually. Many of his views were downright Christian, such as the idea that rulers exist for the sake of the people, rather than vice versa. He even lays down a positive formulation of the Golden Rule, though in most systems the negative formulation is more common ("do good unto others" as opposed to "don't do bad things to others"). Of course, he also tempers that with the view that everyone should stay in their place, and is at least as concerned that people observe The Rites. Still, he was way ahead of his time, and deserves some credit for that.

I'm now moving on to Calvin's Institutes, or at least a slightly abridged version. It's with a great deal of shame that I must admit that until now, I haven't read any Calvin. but, better late than never, and once I'm through with this, I think I'll have at least touched on each of the most significant Christian thinkers. It's a big list, though, and there are certainly plenty more important ones I have yet to read.

The trouble is that there's just far, far more out there to know than I could ever hope to assimilate. I don't know whether that fact excites or depresses me.


¹ Answer: Yes. This girl.

The Earth lies at the center of the universe. Around it rotate the Moon, the Sun, and the planets. Encompassing all of this is the great celestial sphere, into which each of the stars are set. You'd think things would be good for Earth here at the center, but it turns out it's pretty rough. Everything from the Moon down is subject to decay. The heavens, though, are pristine and pure, and never change.

Such was the wisdom handed down by Aristotle well over two thousand years ago, and such was the scientific consensus up until a mere few hundred years ago. It deserved to be the scientific consensus too, because it aligned very well with the observed world. Oh sure, that Copernicus came up with a heliocentric model in the mid-1500s, but there just wasn't anything to support it. Put aside for the moment the rather clear observational evidence that the Moon, Sun and stars revolve around us. Try even to put out of your mind the little detail that if Earth were doing all this spinning and orbiting then by all rights we should be flung from its surface.

The stars alone provide the evidence. If the Earth were not at the center of the celestial sphere, then when we compared them to each other throughout the year, we would notice what is called "parallax," whereby the apparent positions of the stars would shift as we changed locations. But there is no stellar parallax, which puts us pretty clearly at the center of these many rotating spheres. Now, of course you could get around this by theorizing that the stars are so infinitely far away from us that the parallax is unmeasurable, but we invented Occam's Razor specifically to deal with troublemakers like you.

As for the immutability of the heavens, that is confirmed by simple observational evidence. We have been watching them for thousands of years, and they have remained the same. What more evidence could you want?

All of it fit the best observational evidence available, and all of it was quite wrong. In 1572, Tycho Brahe noticed a new star in the sky, and called it a "nova" after the Latin word for "new." This disproved Aristotle's view of the immutable heavens, and inspired Tycho to take up astronomy, where he gathered volumes of the most accurate astronomical data yet. Kepler¹ in turn took this data and used it to ferret out the three laws of planetary motion, placing the sun at the center and helping to spark the scientific revolution while he was at it.

Ah, science. Science has shown us marvelous things, and unearthed countless immutable natural laws that govern the world we live in. What's that? How do we know they're immutable? Why, we've been watching them for hundreds of years and they have remained the same. What more evidence could you want?

Actually, science does not show us that the world is governed by immutable, repeatable laws, so much as it assumes it. The naive will tell you that a single contradictory observation is enough to disprove a scientific theory, but in truth, science has built up a number of mechanisms specifically for the purpose of ignoring any instances where he physical laws might vary, or where observations might be outside of what the theory expects.

In fact, the field of statistics is basically there in order to smooth out or discard observations that don't seem to fit the scientific law. In a large enough sample, we actually expect to find outliers. But, because we assume that nature is consistent, we have made methods to fit them into the bulk of compliant data, ignoring this rather consistent reminder that perhaps nature is not consistent. If a particular outlier is troublesome enough, we may even exclude it from our dataset altogether.

The fact that we demand repeatability is actually a tacit admission of the fact that the universe isn't as consistent as we like. If one group of researchers conducts an experiment and gets a given result, but nobody else can duplicate it, the conclusion is that they made a mistake somewhere (or were lying). It's never that the laws of nature might apply themselves inconsistently, even though this explains the situation just as well.

Our faith in immutable laws is so strong that we actually discard and ignore our own observations that they are not so. And here, I use to term "we" to literally mean both myself and you dear readers. For me, the most memorable instance was a chemistry lab I carried out in college. I don't recall the details of the experiment, but I do recall that according to the measurements we had taken, my lab partner and I had apparently created mass. Naturally, we concluded that we had made a mistake. But why did we conclude that? We concluded it because ultimately, we had more faith in what some book told us than we did in our own clear observations of the world.

All of you do, too. I am confident that every one of us has had numerous occasions where our measurements in the school laboratory did not match up to what the theory said they should have been. Odds are good that you nudged them a bit in the right direction, because otherwise your teacher would mark you down. Odds are also good that it never even occurred to you to think "maybe the theory is wrong."

I'm afraid I'm not leading to any glorious demonstration of why we should believe that the universe is rational and consistent. Even though I could probably come up with a few theological underpinnings, it still boils down to certain leaps of faith. I still do believe that the universe is lawful and that my own experiences to the contrary were due to mistakes on my part, but it's not something I can come up with a good justification for.

Once you've learned how the sausage is made, it's so much more difficult to feel confident about the final product.



¹ It should be mentioned, by the way, that both Kepler and Tycho were devout Lutherans. Kepler was so dedicated to his faith that chose to leave his home and all his belongings rather than convert to Catholicism. Don't judge the Catholics too harshly for this; Kepler's exile was what forced him and Tycho together in the first place.



Everything you know is (Probably) Wrong
I am large, I contain multitudes | Always Let Your Conscience be Your Guide | Life by the Numbers | Scientific Truth