Out Walking

Expelled: See It Now

Don't wait.  Run to the theatre to see Expelled, Ben Stein's documentary exposing the reasons why the Academy thought police will not allow scientists to teach about intelligent design.  It's well-produced, entertaining, and informative.  Stein travels all over the world speaking both to the many scientists expelled from teaching for even mentioning "intelligent design," as well as to committed atheists like Richard Dawkins, who essentially believes religious believers are idiots.

Running through this movie is a comparison of what is happening to academic freedom with the Berlin wall, with those who want to wall out free-thinkers who want to follow the evidence where it leads.  This is not some Bible-thumping fundamentalist propaganda piece, nor is it Creation Science, a movement I always had some difficulty with because of its quite literal interpretation of the Genesis account (aka six 24-hour days), meaning it is treated as simply historical narrative with no poetic component, and in its attempt to fit the Bible to science.  These are scientists, some Christian, some not, who simply want to follow the evidence where it leads, and who are quite honest about their biases and presuppositions, something you can't say about many Darwinists.

See it now.  This movie is playing in major theatres, but films like this don't hang around if people don't buy tickets.  Better yet, take a skeptic. Take your kids. Take anyone who simply wants to think.  Find a theatre and time here.

Enjoy the Early Easter: It's Your Last One

While I haven't verified this information, I consider the source trustworthy, so I'm passing it along:

As you may know, Easter is always the 1st Sunday after the 1st full moon after the Spring Equinox (which is March 20). This dating of Easter is based on the lunar calendar that Hebrew people used to identify Passover, which is why it moves around on our Roman calendar.  
Based on the above, Easter can actually be one day earlier (March 22), but that is rare.
This year is the earliest Easter that any of us will ever see in our life time.  And only the oldest among us have ever seen it this early (you have to be 95 years old or more).  And none of us have ever, or will ever, see it a day earlier!

The next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now).  The last time it was this early was 1913. The next time it will be a day earlier, March 22, will be in the year 2285 (277 years from now). The last time it was on March 22 was 1818. 

Bottom line: No one alive today has or will ever see it any earlier than this year!

I suppose some people sit around thinking about such trivia.  I simply wanted to know why this Easter did not match up with my children's Spring Break!

The Matter of Why Space Matters

God loves matter, which is why he made lots of it (God must love space even more.) 

(Cornelius Plantinga, in Engaging God's World)

When Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins were hurtling through space toward the moon in Apollo 11, they had no idea what they were hurtling  through.  We still don't.  At least we don't know much. In fact, my cats may know just as much for all I know.

I think of space as emptiness, as the absence of things, or matter, and yet scientists say that's not really the case.  As I understand them, outer space is not completely empty (that is, a perfect vacuum) but contains a low density of particles, predominantly hydrogen plasma, as well as electromagnetic radiation, dark matter and dark energy --- mostly the latter two "dark" twins, except we really don't know what they are or if they're really there (kind of like imaginary playmates).  For instance, dark matter is said to be a mysterious substance which scientists think accounts for most of the mass in the universe but that is invisible to current instruments.  We don't really know for sure that it's there, and yet this stuff we can't see accounts for 96% of the universe.  But you know scientists; they positively live to postulate.

But enough of that.  I think of space more in the sense of spaciousness, an openness filling the yawning gaps between good solid things like trees, stars, and people.  There's a lot of it around.  God made it, so he must love it (says Plantinga), and given how much of it there is, he must love it a lot.

God does love space --- the sparseness of it, the roominess of it, the solitude of it, the wonder of it, the silence of it, and the noise of it.  And so should we, or so do we, but for sin's curse.  Because of sin, some of us can't abide being alone in the solitude of space. Agoraphobics, those who fear open places, hide in their rooms, undone by the expanse of space and place.  And some of us, like nettling bureaucrats, rush to fill every interstice of human experience with a regulation, rule, or command --- legalists to the core who can't abide the inevitable space in our codifications of appropriate behavior.  And yet it was not to be this way.

Our distant ancestor, Job, marveled at the emptiness of space, wondering that "he spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing," (Job 26:7) and later concluding that "these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him!" (26:14).  The Psalmist kicks back on the grass outside Jerusalem and wonders aloud: "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?" (Ps. 8:3-4).  Part of what he considers in those heavens is the juxtaposition of visible objects like stars with the vast spaciousness of space, the separation of what is from what is not.  Kant said space is relationship, a way to order our experience of reality; Newton, that it was absolute, a part of reality.  I think it's both.  Sitting in my office, I enjoy space as something real I can move around in and also the sense of space as a juxtaposition of the empty with definite objects like walls and desks and windows.

I love space.  When I open Scripture to the Creation account of Genesis 1-3, I'm thankful for the vast spaciousness of the Word that made it all.  Behind the words "God made" lies a rich and infinite domain of interpretation, of room for human exploration.  And when I hear the reassuring words of "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path," (Ps 119:105), I'm glad the Word is the lamp and not the path, that I have a sure guide but a vast landscape through which to find my way.  That's space. That's the kind of space God gives us.

Leaving the space of outer space and the vastness of the landscape of life, I'm thankful for the simple yet profound space of a poem.  No one better illustrates the fulsome nature of space with poetic verse than the spare poetry of William Carlos Williams:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

(The Red Wheelbarrow).  Writing about the poem in Understanding Poetry, poet Robery Penn Warren said that "[r]eading this poem is like peering at an ordinary object through a pin prick in a piece of cardboard. The fact that the tiny hole arbitrarily frames the object endows it with an exciting freshness that seems to hover on the verge of revelation."  In other words, more is said by what is unsaid than by what is said. 

And consider the short story, the poor stepchild of the literary world.  (Evidence: The Atlantic Monthly, which published short stories by our finest writers for 150 years, abruptly stopped publishing stories in 2005.)  A story like Flannery O'Connor's "The Geranium," which touches in a concrete way on racism, radiates outward into the unknown.  Who was Old Dudley?  What was his early life like?  What will happen to him?  We don't know.  We can imagine.  We can place this snapshot of life in a greater context we supply -- in space.

We may not know if space is matter, but we know it matters.  If we love it, like God does, if we wonder at it and relish its existence, life will open.  We won't be afraid, but free.

Waves can't break without rocks that dissolve into sand
We can't dance without seasons upon which to stand
Eden is a state of rhythm like the sea
Is a timeless change

Turn your eyes to the world where we all sit and dream
Busy dreaming ourselves and each other into being
Dreaming is a state of death, can't you see?
We must live through who we are

If we can sing with the wind song
Chant with thunder
Play upon the lightning
Melodies of wonder
Into wonder life will open

We are children of the river we have named "existence"
Undercurrent and surface pass in the same tense
Nothing is confined except what's in your mind
Every footstep must be true

If we can sing with the wind song
Chant with thunder
Play upon the lightning
Melodies of wonder
Into wonder life will open

(Bruce Cockburn, "Life Will Open," from Sunwheel Dance, 1971)

The Genius of Nature

While I am no scientist nor mathematician, I appreciate the value of both areas and the importance of thinking Christianly about both. Generally I've gotten no farther than the valid point that the universe and its natural laws are worth studying because the Creation tells us of the Creator. Furthermore, the scientific vocation seems to have roots in a specific taxonomical task given to Adam: naming. But beyond these principles, I could say little. That's changed.

Two recently published books are of great help in discerning a Christian view of the scientific task. The first and less readable book is Benjamin Wilker's and Jonathan Witt's A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature. Essentially, the authors make an argument for the meaning-full nature of creation over and against the previaling nihilism of our culture. Where esle can you find Shakespeare and Hamlet alongside Euclidean geometry and the periodic table? It's an ambitious, densely worded book, and while I could not complete it, I read enough to see its value. It's just that for the layman I wish this argument for the design of nature had been made in a few less pages and with less academic language. However, if you are in the sciences, this is a helpful book to read --- one which demonstrates the beauty of mathematics and science, of order over chaos and chance.

A more approachable book is that of Covenant College Science Professors Tim Morris and Don Petcher, entitled Science and Grace: God's Reign In the Natural Sciences. Here the intent of the authors is to set forth a constructive way for Christians to be involved in the sciences, going beyond the evolution-creation battles and even demonstrating how Christians can find common ground with nonChristians in the sciences. If you are of a Reformed traditon, the book's roots in covenant theology will be familiar, as will many of the thinkers whose thought is sumamrized, men like Charles Hodge, Abraham Kuyper, and Herman Dooyeweerd. Quite apart from the application to the sciences, I benefited simply from the theological perspective provided, a very nice summary of a biblical world and life view. The book would make a good textbook for a philosophy of science course (which I suspect it has been) and a good gift for any high school graduate heading into a scientific field of study. I enjoyed its positive, non-adversarial perspective and its encouragement for Christians to really make a difference in an important field.

Abraham Kuyper once said that "there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human exiatence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'" Perhaps if we rested in this assurance, we wouldn't reagrd our relationship with culture, science or otherwise, as a battle but rather, a war already won but whose victory is not yet fully evident. We could relax, do good work, and love our neighbor --- even the scientist next door.

Faith and Quantum Theory

I am thankful for a physicist like Stephen Barr, who can write about a subject as strange and mysterious as quantum physics and still be understood by a layman. In his "Faith and Quantum Theory," from this March First Things, he summarizes the essence of this branch of physics, updates us on the continuing difficulties with the theory, and ponders its meaning for Christian faith -- for how we view the universe around us. I was enlightened, and while I need go no farther in the esoteric world of quantum physics, I'm glad to know what all the fuss is about.

I knew of the basic puzzle of quantum physics --- something called wave-particle duality --- but I did not realize all its implcations. If you don't know, this duality is the paradoxical conclusion that light acts as both particle and wave. That this conclusion was disturbing to Einstein is comforting, as my much lesser mind really cannot grasp its implcations, but at least I know that something is mighty wierd about it, like saying 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 are both true equations. Barr cites Feynman, who called this duality "the only real mystery in science," noting that we "cannot make the mystery go away by explaining how it works."

The wave-particle dulaity led to something called the Uncertainty Principle, which basically implies that even if one had all the information there is to be had about a physical system, its future behavior could not be predicted exactly, only probabalistically. The standard interpretation of quantum theory says that for these probabilities to have any meaning at all there must be a definite outcome, and only when a person looks at the physical system and comes to a conclusion is there a definite outcome. Thus, the implication here is that we do not live in a strictly deterministic universe (where, say, whether you fell today is the result of whether someone raised their hand 1000 years ago) but one with free will, where the human, the mind, is something different than the rest of reality (even if it too is in basic ways a physical system). Is this the case, or do we simply not know all the hidden factors that might resolve the dilemma? No one realy knows, and no new breakthrough has been made in over 40 years that would put us any closer to knowing how to resolve the paradox.

What I took from all this is, first, an awe at the complex fabric of Creation. We know things about reality. In fact, sometimes we think we know a lot. But the more we know the more it seems that all the basic mysteries at the core of reality are not resolvable. For example, most of space is made of of something unknown to us. Consider just that: Over 95% of the universe is made of an unknown substance. And that's for starters.

Second, the dilemma of the wave-particle duality seems analogous to the dilemmas (if you want to call them that) of very core doctrines of the Christian faith, particularly the dual nature of Christ. Jesus is fully human, and yet fully divine. We can describe the duality and profess its truth, and yet we cannot begin to explain it. Nor can we explain the Trinity, the eternality of God, or the Incarnation. Sometimes, attempts to "explain" such mysteries only violate the basic doctrine as given, much as attempts to explain wave-particle theory may end up violating the basic truth that there is a duality. I'm reminded of the modalists, who attempted to explain the one-in-three nature of the Trinity by postulating one God with three faces, a violation of the doctrine in that it negates the three separate persons of the Trinity, leavning us with simply, one God.

That's not to say that we don't grow in our understanding of physics or of God, or that some paradoxes may ultimately be resolved, but I don't think that this will happen in regard to either the dual nature of Christ or the wave-particle duality. There is an answer. It's just that our finite minds cannot hold it. That in itself is reassuring: we don't have all the answers.

Getting to know Your Neighbors

Woah, now.  Sorry.  I didn't mean to scare you.  This may look like one of those bad, bad grasshoppers that scared all the little kids in Disney's It's a Bug's Life but, nope, this is the face of a cicada.  Cute, isn't he (or she)?

It's mid-November here in North Carolina and, amazingly enough, I have the window open this evening, and these cicadas are making a constant sound, one that is such a part of the landscape (or is that soundscape?) that we don't even think about them any longer.  So, I'm just sitting here wondering what cicadas look like and what good are they, so I googled "cicada" and would you believe it I landed right smack on a blog of cicada advocates -- Cicada Maniacs, that is.  There are frequently asked questions, like How Can I Tell a Male From a Female? or Do Cicadas Pee and, If So, Why? and even Is It Safe for My Kids to Eat Cicadas?  I worry about some people.  Don't go too deep here.  They did dispossess me of one notion:  katydids are most emphatically not cicadas.  (No, they are not June bugs, either.)  What's the big deal?  Well, consider how you feel when someone (usually from north of the Mason-Dixon line) asks if you are from "Carolina," as if North and South Carolina are quite the same.  We know better.  Well, cicadas and katydids know better too.

I promise not to get too legal on you here, but given the existence of the cicada lobby, I could not help but think of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas's famous dissenting opinion in the 1972 decision of Sierra Club v. Morton, where Justice Douglas argued (against the majority) that the Sierra Club should have standing to sue, even though it suffered no injury, because the inanimate objects which were at issue -- trees, rivers, wildlife -- had standing.  Well, if trees, why not cicadas?

I'm making fun of all this, but really, tonight I'm just enjoying the sound of these katydids. . . I mean, cicadas (old habits die hard).  I just don't want to look at them.  And I don't want to know if they pee.

Good night, good neighbors.

Dethroning Naturalism?

An article in today's News and Observer, "Scientist sees room for belief," profiles Christian doctor-researcher Francis Collins, the man who led the drive to unlock the human genome, and his new book, The Language of God.  In it, Collins champions the view that science and evolution can co-exist, that, as Francis Schaeffer once said, there is "No Final Conflict" (his essay on the topic) between science and faith.

Mind you, Collins is not a proponent of intelligent design or creationism, per se, but a believer that the evidence points to evolution, albeit a theistic evolution.   Heavily influenced by C.S. Lewis, Collins sees evidence for God in the human propensity to believe in a moral law and in a human compulsion to worship, tendencies which cut across civilizations, times, and social strata, much as Lewis argued in Mere Christianity ("[H]uman beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it.")

I can bear a Christian who believes in a God-ordained evolution, even though I do not regard the evidence for evolution as compelling.  Even Francis Schaeffer himself, though not a believer in theistic evolution, believed "that there is a certain possible range of freedom for discussion in the area of cosmogony while bowing to what God has affirmed" (No Final Conflict).  What I cannot abide is the naturalist, or materialist, the one who believes that science explains all or, more specifically, that a certain discipline (like neurobiology) explains all human behavior.  That's what you have in Greg Graffin.

Graffin is the creative force behind a punk band called Bad Religion.  He also has a doctorate in zoology from Cornell.  He believes that the "religion" of naturalism is far superior to theology for understanding the world, that, in fact, all truth is knowable only by empirical investigation.

Preston Jones, a Christian and history professor at John Brown University, engages Graffin in a long discussion via email over the nature of truth.  He doesn't make a convert, but in the process Jones demonstrates the grace and charity in which such a discussion should occur.  He has an openness to learning and changing belief that, oddly or tellingly, Graffin does not demonstrate, at least not much.  The discussion, reproduced in the book, Is Belief In God Good, Bad or Irrelevant?; A Professor and a Punk Rocker Discuss Science, Religion, Naturalism & Christianity, is an interesting one in that we have so few opportunities to actually eavesdrop on such a conversation.  Often, a committed atheist as Graffin will simply not engage.  It's a testimony to Jones's humility that he warms to conversation and that they have a civil discussion, one in which real discussion occurs and not just a staking out of positions.  I recommend the book to anyone interested in the topic but, more than that, for an example of how to have such a discussion.

In the end, however, what is so troublesome is that Graffin cannot acknowledge that his naturalism is based on presuppositions held in faith, much as the Christian's beliefs are rooted in empirically unprovable presuppositions.  There's a certain attitude that comes across -- one of superiority or, being more generous, of simple naivety.  Even though Jones reminds him that just about every new discipline that has come along has proclaimed itself the queen of the sciences (my own, sociology, did just that) and were all ultimately dethroned, he cannot believe that science ultimately does not explain all phenomena.  That's not education but presumptuousness.

Collins is much more interesting.  Is it possible to accept theistic evolution?  Can a designer-God so create that the very complexity of the design makes it appear as if it evolved through natural selection?  Of course.  Does science really lead us there yet?  I think not.

Tick, Tick, Tick (Part VII): Trippin' With Hugh Ross

"God's invisibility and untouchability keep our yearnings focused right where they rightly belong, on the supernatural realm that awaits us.  His written Word combines with evidences in this spectacular but limited physical realm to communicate that His desire and plan involve transporting us, at some future point along our time line, across our dimensional barriers into His super-dimensional realm."  (Hugh Ross, in Beyond the Cosmos: The Extradimensionality of God: What Recent Discoveries in Astronomy and Physics Reveal About the Nature of God)

I've met my Timothy Leary, and his name is Hugh Ross.  Reading this Christian physicist's book, Beyond the Cosmos, is mind-altering, even mind-expanding, sans psychotropic drugs.  While I'm only about halfway through the book, already I'm fascinated by Ross's ability to help us imagine what is really unimaginable -- the existence of more than four dimensions and how such an understanding (if you can call our imaginings, "understanding"), helps us begin to appreciate the paradoxes of scripture, like the Trinity, the omnipresence of God, the nature of Heaven, predestination and free will, and so on.

While reading about this, a question came to me that I don't think Ross directly addresses, that is, if we are made in the image of God, in what sense, if any, do we image (using the word as a verb) the super-dimensionality of God?  For example, as God is not bound by our space and time dimension, is there some faint way in which we participate in such transcendence by virtue of having been made in God's image?  I think maybe so.

Perhaps some of the odd sensations we have are a result of this imaging.  For example, most people have experienced deja vu, a sense of having been in a place before.  Well, perhaps in some sense we have.  Perhaps this is a very, very faint reflection of God's super-dimensionality, his omnipresence.  Or, as I have mentioned before, I feel at times the sense of being very close to my childhood.  Perhaps this propinquity is a pale reflection of God's being outside of our plane of time.  And then there are the really odd coincidences.  For example, a few years ago I was in Tucson, Arizona at a restaurant, nearly 3000 miles from home, when, getting up to excuse myself I passed in front of a waiter.  He stopped me and said "Aren't you. . ." and said my full name.  I said yes.  He said "I was in your 5th grade.  You haven't changed a bit."  Well, given that it had been 32 years, that was amazing.  I did not recognize his name or his face.  So why do things like that happen?

These odd happenings can be nothing, of course, or they can be as I have mentioned -- God's image-bearers experiencing in just the slightest way a touch of God's super-dimensionality.  For me it's just a reminder, a message from beyond, that we were built for glory, for something indescribable.  Like Ross says, it keeps our yearnings focused right where they belong, on that place called Heaven.

Read Hugh Ross.  It's quite a trip.

Tick, Tick, Tick (Part IV): Velocity

Velocity
(A Poem About Chronos Time)

At night
I know her passing,
a train of images
and melancholy dreams.
Sometimes slow:
     waiting for release from loss
     for a child to be born
     suffering to pass
     even love.
But these days
what I feel,
dizzying and divine,
is
her
velocity.

Remember
that time
we drank deeply
of each
liquid word,
savoring their
rich and potent
taste, warming
our souls-grown-cold, until
drunk on this new wine
I danced
my laughing audience
into the New Year?, or

That other time,
lethargic and
dazed, when we
shuffled quietly
hopefully
thankfully
into that (please God)
New Year come?

It was your
mother who said that
"travel is broadening,"
(and she knew), but
I know too that
"travel is deepening"
as we run
these grace-laid
tracks.

I rewind
replay
those word-
pictures now,
the happy-sad
soundtrack, loud
enough to wake the
living, to awaken
me.  I grasp
treasures in
her train while I
temeriously

Pretend I can
thrust my hand
into her passing,
catch the hem of her
cloak, slowing her
onward rush, only to
pull back, awed and
hushed by her
luminosity.

So I wait,
silent,
clock tick-tocking
on my right,
life breathing
on my left,
watching
listening
smelling the
holy smoke
certain fire
and clamor of her

l o  c   o    m     o      t       i        o         n. . . .

[The poetry is my creation, but I am thankful for the use of the paintings of Mark Dahle.  The paintings with hands seemd to fit the lines "Pretend I can/ thrust my hand/ into her passing. . .," which suggests the possibility that we can sometimes slow down Time's velocity by holding on to some moment, at least for a time.  (Actually the two hands paintings were inspired by Mother Teresa, says Mark.) The last painting seemd to suggest the last passage in the poem, the part about "smoke. . . fire. . .clamor." (And for Mark, it's about Creation.)  You can see more of and purchase prints of Mark's work here.  And if you're wondering why the poem is strung out like it is, it's a device to suggest movement, or velocity, the passage of Time.]

The Colors Green and Blue

Lying on my back today in my back yard, looking up at the pleasing green of the pines against the blue sky, a question popped into my head:  Why does the juxtaposition of the colors green and blue, or more broadly, the colors in the natural world around me -- mostly brown, green, and blue -- create such a pleasurable feeling?  I have to think that a red sky and orange trees would not create the same sensation.

I can put what I know about color and our perception of it in a thimble, but I know a few things. Newton observed that color is not inherent in an object but, rather, the surface of an object absorbs some colors in the spectrum and reflects others.  Thus, what we perceive is largely a result of the composition of an object.  So, color is inherent in the way things were created.  It need not have been.  But it is.  Why?

It's also well-known that color influences mood and feeling in common experience.  Though human emotions are unstable and variable, it is also accepted that there are a number of general and universal reactions to color, that is, some things are true at substantially all times, in all places, and among all people.  Those are things we might even call natural laws or creation ordinances, things inherent in the way God made the world (though I am not sure if theologians have ever used these words in this way).

But back to the trees and the sky.  Psychologists know that, broadly speaking, the "cool" colors --  blue and green, for example -- tend to evoke a calming effect, while "warm" colors -- red and orange, for example -- tend to excite.  (One researcher notes that people will gamble more and place riskier bets if seated under red lights as opposed to blue ones.  Thus, Las Vegas is full of red neon lights.)  Thus the green of the pine needles and the blue of the sky have a calming effect on me, a pleasing, soothing effect.  No doubt you know what I mean.  It's a universal feeling.

Then I thought of Psalm 19.  The Psalmist says "The heavens declare the glory of God;/ the skies proclaim the work of his hands./ Day after day they pour forth speech;/ night after night they display knowledge./ There is no speech or language/ where their voice is not heard./ Their voice goes out into all the earth,/ their words to the end of the world."  The Creation is pouring forth speech.

At that thought I sat up and asked my wife what she thought God was trying to tell us by making the sky blue and the leaves and pine needles green.  She said I had too much time on my hands.  Maybe so, but I think what He is saying is something like this: "Do not be troubled.  Fear not. Peace be with you."

The late Rich Mullins said it best in a song called "The Color Green," from his album entitled A Liturgy, A Legacy & A Ragamuffin Band:  "Look down upon this winter wheat/ and be glad that you have made/ Blue for the sky and the color/ green that fills Your fields/ with praise."  He has to be glad, but I'm glad too.

There are no accidents in nature.  The sky is blue for a reason.  The leaves and pine needles are green for a purpose.  And the feeling they evoke is no accident either.

Peace be with you, they say.