Thoughts from the Boonies

Thoughts on Natural Selection

2011-12-28T18:14:00.001+13:00

One of the more irritating tactics of evolutionary apologists is their habit of hand-waving.

An example of this is when people express doubts about the ability of random mutations to produce the features we see in organisms.

"Not to worry," says the evolutionist. "Whilst mutation is random, natural selection is not. Natural selection does the hard work needed to ensure that only those mutations that lead to the favourable outcome are preserved."

Even if we leave aside the fact that educated evolutionists dispute whether mutation and natural selection are able to achieve this end (for example the book "What Darwin Got Wrong") natural selection is not deterministic. Natural selection only favors survival, but the requirements of survival varies with the environment.

To give an analogy, one person rolls a 20 sided dice (D20). This is the survival criteria. He then rolls another D20, this is the rate of environmental change. A second person then rolls another D20. They have a number of tries equal to the second roll to attempt to achieve the first. If they fail to do so then they are eliminated.

Like this analogy the requirements and environmental changes of natural selection are fairly random. Consequently it cannot offer the kind of determination that evolutionary advocates demand.

If

2011-06-04T14:29:00.003+12:00

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling, If

Chesterton on catchphrases

2011-05-25T08:38:00.004+12:00

If I were Grand Inquisitor, I would try to burn out of the world not so much certain beliefs as certain phrases. I would argue with people about creeds; but I would kill them for catchwords.

Chesterton on War and Peace, 132. Illustrated London News, June 5, 1915.

C.S. Lewis on humanity

2011-04-22T09:50:00.002+12:00

"It is a serious thing," says Lewis, "to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whome we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously -- no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment."

C. S. Lewis, From The Weight of Glory.

The Best Things In Life Are Free

2011-04-12T08:51:00.000+12:00

Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good, but what is best in life?
Mongol: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Mongol General: That is good! That is good.

Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Oh happier days.

Debate Review: William Lane Craig and Sam Harris

2011-04-12T08:47:00.000+12:00

Philosopher Glenn Peoples evaluates the Bill Craig versus Sam Harris debate, and finds it to be just as bad as I feared.

Although he is critical of some of Craig's arguments, Dr Peoples had to reserve most of his criticism for Harris who, it seemed, failed to realise the moot of the debate was "Is Good from God?" not, "how many ad hominems and non sequiturs can I get through in an hour and a half?"

It is apparent that the so-called "New Atheists" have this in common. They are full of snark, but lack substance. Whilst the average internet atheist, being equally insubstantial, laps this up, most reasoning people from both sides of the debate find it simply embarrassing.

Atheists, you have the power in your own hands. If you don't want to be coloured with the same brush as these retards, don't buy their books, don't fête them when they turn up in your village, don't repeat their "arguments" and for goodness sake don't invite them to debates.

Are You Asking To Get Killed?

2011-03-23T09:25:00.001+13:00

Delusion Damage has an essay on those who use violence as part of their regular communication, and warns against doing more than instructed when confronted by such a person.

Most people in our society don’t understand violence. We’re taught to feel like it’s a “bad” thing to even think or talk about, and what this leads to is that most of us never learn much anything about it. That’s not a good thing.

Those who are furthest removed from violence in their daily lives are the most vulnerable to it when they suddenly run into it on a dark street precisely because they don’t understand it and therefore act stupidly and end up “asking for it” and getting killed. Most churchgoing taxpayers just have no idea how violent people think. Women, especially. If there are any women you give a shit about, you will make sure they know about this stuff. They probably have no clue about any of this, and it may one day save their lives.

Read it.

Although men generally grow up better acquainted with violence, the scuffles of the playground still leave a person totally unprepared for violence on the streets.

The writer's advice is basically, give the mugger your wallet and get on with your day. Your wallet isn't worth losing your teeth, or your life.

Predestination, Free Will, or both?

2011-03-22T12:50:00.001+13:00

One of the prevailing arguments in Christianity is whether we are predestined to be saved, or whether we choose to be saved.

In my view the answer is "yes."

Let me explain.

The Christian conception of God is one who is eternal. He has neither beginning, nor end, and may have only an intellectual appreciation of the concept of past and future, existing in the eternal "now." He is also all knowing, which I translate as knowing all true propositions.

An illustration I've used proposes that we first imagine a librarian. Now let us imagine that this librarian inhabits a library. This library exists at the end of time. This library also contains nothing but history books, and within those history books are written every decision ever made by a person from the beginning of time. Our imaginary librarian has read every book and hence knows every decision made throughout history.

Does the existence of these history books preclude those who are recorded therein from making free choices? No. The knowledge in these books was obtained passively, from recording observations. Hence the mere fact of such knowledge does not preclude free will.

If we give our librarian a time machine and send him back to the beginning of time with his library, he can live alongside the people who fill his books, even telling them ahead of time things that will happen. He has not caused those things to happen, but he has foreknown or predestined them.

So it is with God. He knows every decision made, because the act of making that decision causes him to know it. Those who choose to accept his authority, he foreknew. Those who choose to rebel he foreordained. The conflict between them arises from our applying our own temporal limitations to an entity who does not possess them.

Predestination and free will are not contrary to each other. In my view they are simply two sides of the same coin.

A Culture Good and Strong

2011-03-20T20:51:00.000+13:00

Orson Scott Card presented an argument of why the culture of the West is in decline.

The greatness of a society does not arise from their monuments or superhighways or empires or the internet. Great nations persist through time and space only when and if they develop patterns of culture that meet the basic needs of the baboon and the chimp that lives inside all human beings and then, beyond that, make people happier than competing cultures.

1. A community has to provide reproductive opportunity for the maximum number of its members. In other words, the sex drive of the individual must have a reasonable chance of being satisfied as long as it persists. Reproductive opportunity requires large numbers of people of mating age made available to each other. Governments ignore this at their peril.

(The abortion practices of China have left them with a 60:40 ratio of males to females. That's one-third of all males with no reasonable prospect of reproduction. Anybody who thinks the inner baboons will stand for that doesn't know human nature. The whole world is in danger from those men whose genetic desperation must somehow be mollified or turned outward if the Chinese government is to survive.)

2. A community has to provide reproductive success to as many of its members as possible. Reproductive success, for a long-lived species like ours, is measured by the grandparent test. You not only have children who thrive to adulthood, but you see those children mate and have children of their own.

Reproductive success requires:

1. Prosperity: plenty to eat, protection from the elements.

2. Safety: protection from physical dangers inside and outside the society.

3. Confirmation: males must have reason to believe that they have actually reproduced -- that their genes have been passed on.

(This is why the argument that abortion is solely the woman's decision is absurd, in practical, society-wide terms: The need to reproduce, and know that one has reproduced, is exactly as strong in males as in females, and a society will not last long that leaves men reproductively helpless.)

In summary, then, Reproductive Success requires a strong economy, public safety, and paternal certainty.

Let's agree that any culture that does these things well (i.e., to the satisfaction of its members) is a Good Culture.

It's in the best reproductive interest of the members of a Good Culture that the culture survive and continue to provide its benefits, generation after generation. So a Good Culture also has to be a Strong Culture -- one that can endure over time.

A Strong Culture must be able to:

1. Defend itself against outside enemies.

2. Propagate itself across generations: The children must be educated in the values of the culture that made it Good and Strong and become believers and participants, so it can continue to be both.

3. Command such strong allegiance from its members that they are willing to sacrifice some of their individual desires or even of their compelling interests in order to promote the survival of the culture as a whole.

4. Know itself -- a Strong Culture must have a community of people that identify themselves as its true believers in and defenders.

There is no perfect society, but America came closer than any other known to history. Yet in the 1960s, we began to dismantle it, piece by piece. And today, we have taken a remarkably Good, Strong culture and so deeply damaged it that its ability to survive or to be worth upholding is in serious doubt.

That a community called "The United States of America" will persist for some time is likely, though not guaranteed. But the Goodness of the culture has already been so damaged that it can barely be said to exist. And the Strength of the Culture is eating itself up from within.

The characteristics of a Good and Strong Culture?

A Strong Culture must have powerful stories explaining why it is a Good Culture -- or it will die. Even the best culture can destroy itself if those who hate the culture are successful in getting its members to believe stories that discourage them from having enough allegiance to make sacrifices for it, like:

1. Paying taxes and other costs in property or service.

2. Obeying laws even when they don't fit in with your desires of the moment.

3. Letting the culture educate your children in its values.

4. Sending your children off to fight in wars to defend the culture from its rivals, or going yourself to fight and risk death and injury.

5. Tolerating people and events that the culture insists its members have to tolerate -- including such obnoxious groups as the rich and powerful, the poor and untidy, the foreign and odd, and all others who deviate from the norm in ways that the culture has determined to allow.

6. Confining your sexual and reproductive actions to the boundaries set by the culture.

7. Making the effort to become educated enough in the culture to participate in its propagation.

8. Conforming with the outward values of the culture even when you disagree with them, in order to help maintain the illusion of unity.

These sacrifices are hard, every one of them. That's why it's essential, for the survival of a Good Culture, that it constantly propagate stories that support the willingness to sacrifice. (Propagate shares its root with propaganda -- propaganda is only evil when it promotes an evil culture; it is essential to promoting a good culture as well.)

That's why there is no such thing as a thriving culture that does not have the story "Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori": "Sweet and proper it is to die for your country." A culture that no one is willing to die for will soon cease to exist, having been supplanted by a culture that does have members willing to die for it.

What has changed to destroy the Culture Good and Strong?

In the 1960s, we started listening to stories that struck at the very heart of our Good, Strong Culture. These destructive stories fall into several groups:

1. The old morality is stupid. You can't stop kids from having sex. Sexual fidelity is old-fashioned and selfish. It will liberate women to let men have sex with them without demanding any kind of commitment from them. Fetuses are not persons and you can kill them without conscience. Men have no right to have opinions about abortion. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Marriage should last only as long as you're enjoying it and it's nobody's fault if it ends. Everybody lies about sex.

2. Amerika isn't really a good culture. We mistreat other countries. We mistreat the poor. When we're in conflict with other countries it's our fault. Of course they hate us -- we deserve their hatred. Their cultures are just as good as our culture -- in fact, they're better. Anybody who wants to be a soldier to fight for Amerika is a crypto-fascist, a violent dangerous person. Good people don't want to be soldiers because soldiers are just killers with permission.

3. God is dead. People who believe in God are ignorant or stupid or, at the very best, deceived. Conservative Jews and Christians who try to promote their values are forcing their religion on other people. Political decisions should all be made without regard to the desires and opinions of religious people.

4. People who don't have the same political beliefs as me are evil or stupid. They should be fired from their jobs. The law should be whatever I want it to be, and laws I don't like should be struck down in any way possible. Speakers, writers, and demonstrators on their side are a public danger and must be stopped, but speakers, writers, and demonstrators on my side are exercising their sacred rights. (Please note -- it's easy to see how this paragraph describes your opponents, but you're not getting the point if you don't also look at the same attitudes when they show up within your own ideological camp.)

5. My side should have complete control of the education of everybody else's children. School is only a meal ticket; all education is vocational training.

6. If you don't give unlimited overtime to the company that hired you, then you're not serious about your career. If you put your family first, you're not a team player. The only law in business is do what works, as long as you can get away with it. The answer to all doubts is: It's business.

7. Forget about the time when the "American dream" was to be independent and self-reliant. Now it's to have all the same stuff other people have and to be guaranteed that you'll have the same rewards as people who are luckier or harder working or smarter than you.

Do these stories sound familiar? They should -- and because so many people believe them, we have the horrible social chaos that surrounds us. Millions of fatherless children, unwed mothers, broken homes, delayed marriages -- in other words: Visible widespread reproductive failure. The inner chimp and the inner baboon are getting frightened and angry, even if they don't understand why.

If you really believe that all the old American stories were evil and worthless (even though they led to America's world dominance, economically, militarily, and culturally), then of course you should try to replace that culture with a better one. But it's a good idea, before striking down the old stories, to be sure you have new stories that will create a culture at least as Good and at least as Strong as the one you're tearing down.

Orson is a writer of science fiction, and he can see how a unifying story holds together a Culture Good and Strong. To remain Good and Strong the Culture needs to either recover its story, or replace it with one that can provide an equally strong culture. No such new story has been presented, so the only real choice is to recover the old stories.

Whose Problem of Evil?

2011-03-15T09:52:00.002+13:00

From a philosophical perspective there are two "arguments from the problem of evil."

The first is the "logical problem of evil."

It can be expressed in the form, "if there is an all powerful good being who hates evil, then evil should not exist." Since it is obvious that evil does exist, the arguer concludes that an all powerful, good being does not.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga has pointed out that the propositions are too absolute. A more nuanced argument would say that, "if there is an all powerful good being who hates evil, then lacking good reason, evil should not exist." The conclusion then may be stated, either there is no all powerful good being, or that such a being has reason to allow evil to exist.

Do we know why evil is allowed to exist? Some people have theorised and hypothesised. They may be correct or not. Is it possible that an all knowing being would have reasons that we wouldn't know? I'd say that was highly likely.

Although this seems like a simple argument, in philosophical circles it was considered dynamite. Even atheist philosophers have conceded that Plantinga robbed the logical problem of evil of any force.

The second is the "emotional problem of evil."

This is our gut reaction to events like the Japanese tsunami. "Why God, why?" It has force because we are human beings and we empathise with other human beings, however it has a flaw that destroys it as an argument.

The atheistic world is one of brute facts. We are not headed for a destination. There is no "ought" to the world, no way that it should be. There just is. It is what it is, to borrow a phrase.

When we describe something as evil we are making a value judgement. We are saying that there is a gap between what is, and what ought to be. The Christian can say, "yes, there is something wrong with the world. Things are not as they should be." What can the atheist say? Remember, there is no "ought" in atheism. "I don't like tsunamis?" I don't like mashed potato. Preferences only describe our reaction to something, they say nothing about whether it is right or wrong.

The atheist is hoisted on his own petard. The very fact of saying that "things ought not to be this way" is an argument against his atheism. What is supposed to be a problem for the theist is turned into a problem for the atheist. It also demonstrates how incoherent atheism is when measured against actual human experience.

Fortunately for atheism rationality isn't a prerequisite.

Link to Vox Day's The Irrational Atheist

2011-03-04T23:06:00.001+13:00

Noticing that Vox Day has let the site housing his book The Irrational Atheist lapse, I uploaded my copy to 4shared where it can be accessed here.

Nerd Test

2011-01-23T16:36:00.000+13:00

I am a High Nerd.

Thoughts on the history of science

2011-01-10T19:20:00.000+13:00

James Hannam, author of God's Philosophers has responded to the claims of certain atheists that Christianity was not responsible for the rise of science in the West. The point James has always made is that while Christianity was not solely responsible, it was a contributing factor. A necessary factor, but not the only one.

James is critical of the rise of "Holy Science" views popularised by writers like Dinesh D'Souza and Rodney Stark, which is the position that science could only rise in a Christian world.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘conflict hypothesis’ that Christianity had held back and opposed scientific endeavour, was widely accepted in academia and by the public at large. The first serious assault on this idea was mounted by the French physicist and historian, Pierre Duhem. Duhem suggested that the flowering of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a direct consequence of developments in medieval Europe. He also showed that the Church had not opposed science, but steered and encouraged it. For a long time, Duhem’s work was ignored and derided. Even in the 1970s, historians felt the need to distance themselves from him. No longer. Duhem is now recognised as a titanic figure in the history of science and the founder of the entire subject of medieval science. Of course, he made plenty of mistakes, but as the pioneer this was hardly surprising. Alfred North Whitehead said that western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.

In a second post James notes in effecting his criticism.

Richard’s rebuttal fails if Christianity was not a sufficient cause for science (even if it was a necessary one). Most people would accept that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was a disaster for learning and culture. It took centuries for population and civilisation to return to the levels they had enjoyed in 300AD. This was not the fault of Christianity, but a direct result of barbarian invasions that continued to the Viking raids in the ninth century. Indeed, historians recognise the important role that Christianity played in preserving literacy and culture, as well as tempering some of the behaviour of the barbarian princes.

Nonetheless, the example of the Byzantine Empire prevents the chaos of the western early middle ages from saving the Holy Science thesis. Byzantium was Christian, lasted a thousand years and preserved much of the civil society of the ancient world. So if the Holy Science thesis is true, modern science would have arisen in Constantinople. It didn’t. That said, the precise status of science under the Byzantines remains something of a mystery. Hints of technological prowess that matched the Antikythera Mechanism and Hero of Alexandria’s finest contrivances can be detected in the sources. Still, modern science did not arise and that is all Richard needs to note to rebut the Holy Science thesis.

That said, as a commentator noted. If Christianity does allow science to arise, it does not follow that Christianity must allow science to arise. There are other contributing factors, and I think James agrees with this.
Whilst James is critical, perhaps even disdainful, of the Holy Science position, he is also critical of people who try to impute to the ancient Greeks more than can honestly be credited to them.

The scholar who comes closest to supporting Richard’s position is probably Lucio Russo in The Forgotten Revolution (Springer, 2003). Russo argues from a deep knowledge of the ancient sources that Greek science reached its peak in about 300BC. He suggests that this was the forgotten scientific revolution when the inverse square law of gravitation was discovered and that Aristarchus of Samos’s heliocentricism was more widespread than currently appreciated. For Russo, the early Roman Empire, the era of Ptolemy and Hero, was one of decadence and stagnation in Greek science.

James looks at those proposed exemplars of Greek progress and is unimpressed.

Richard notes that “Strato of Lampsacus extended… experimental method to machines and physics, by which time many of Aristotle’s physical theories had been altered or abandoned.” Strato was the second head of Aristotle’s Lyceum after the master himself. Little of his work survives, but in antiquity he had such a reputation for science that he was known as The Naturalist. His major achievement that we know of today was to show that air can be compressed from which he correctly deduced that it is made up of tiny particles floating in a vacuum. He also showed that a true vacuum can be created artificially. That’s impressive. But here is the rub. The passage of his work that states this is widely believed to have been incorporated into the introduction to Hero of Alexandria’s Pneumatics written in the first century AD, or three hundred years later. Richard says that “Hero had experimentally refuted Aristotle’s claim that a vacuum was impossible.” But if Hero has done these experiments himself, as Richard claims, why is he using a source that is three centuries old to prove it? OK, Strato was right. But this means that the theory Hero so successfully harnessed for his automata had been around for hundreds of years and had not been enhanced at all in the meantime.

James Hannam has a PhD in the history of science. If he is convinced that Christianity was important to the rise of science, although not to the extent popular writers claim, and unconvinced that the ancient Greeks were on the cusp of a scientific breakthrough that was stifled by the Christians, then that's probably the way to lay your bets.

The Case Against The Case Against The Case For Christ

2011-01-06T19:08:00.003+13:00

Dr Robert Price has written a book against Lee Strobel's The Case For Christ, entitled (imaginatively enough) The Case Against The Case For Christ. As Strobel's self-proclaimed bulldog, apologist JP Holding responds to the arguments put forward by Dr Price.

Remember that Strobel's book is over 12 years old now, so it doesn't represent cutting edge apologetics any more (if that was ever its goal) however it is still significantly better than anything by Josh McDowell so take it as you will.

Unlike what Mike Licona has done with The Resurrection of Jesus, Dr Price has not abided by the normal conventions of historical study, a point Holding makes in his first paragraph.

It will be no surprise that Price doesn’t bother with an epistemology of authorship that resembles anything used by scholars on other ancient documents; instead, invoking his privilege as an alleged “critical historian” Price simply creates rules for determining authorship out of thin air, that is, when he bothers to use any rules at all.

If people do wish to use Dr Price as a source then they should probably be pointed in the direction of Holding's response.

The Undumbing of a Generation

2010-12-12T07:32:00.002+13:00

For a long time the caricature of evangelical Christians in the United States has been that they are a bunch of uneducated hicks. Certain individuals have delighted in trying to rub the lack of educational achievement among middle America in the faces of Christians everywhere.

Now it has to be said that Christianity is not Mensa. There is no intellectual requirement to join, and I'm sure God's graciousness extends even to those unable to discuss the differences between Arminianism and Calvinism. That said, such claims annoy people like myself, who finds intellectual discussion very satisfying.

However, as the song says, the times they are a changing and New Yorks Times commentator Ross Douthat observes that conservative evangelicals are becoming increasing prominent among the educated classes.

In the 1970s, for instance, college-educated Americans overwhelmingly supported liberal divorce laws, while the rest of the country was ambivalent. Likewise, college graduates were much less likely than high school graduates to say that premarital sex was “always wrong.” Flash forward to the 2000s, though, and college graduates have grown more socially conservative on both fronts (50 percent now favor making divorces harder to get, up from 34 percent in the age of key parties), while the least educated Americans have become more permissive. There has been a similar change in religious practice. In the 1970s, college- educated Americans were slightly less likely to attend church than high school graduates. Today, piety increasingly correlates with education: college graduates are America’s most faithful churchgoers, while religious observance has dropped precipitously among the less-educated.

However, as the educational levels of believers has increased, those in the lower classes are not just becoming less religiously observant, they're also forsaking the moral principles that middle America cherishes.

But as religious conservatives have climbed the educational ladder, American churches seem to be having trouble reaching the people left behind. This is bad news for both Christianity and the country. The reinforcing bonds of strong families and strong religious communities have been crucial to working-class prosperity in America. Yet today, no religious body seems equipped to play the kind of stabilizing role in the lives of the “moderately educated middle” (let alone among high school dropouts) that the early-20th-century Catholic Church played among the ethnic working class. As a result, the long-running culture war arguments about how to structure family life (Should marriage be reserved for heterosexuals? Is abstinence or “safe sex” the most responsible way to navigate the premarital landscape?) look increasingly irrelevant further down the educational ladder, where sex and child-rearing often take place in the absence of any social structures at all.

This is something for Christians to keep in mind. Christianity is not just an intellectual exercise (although it is a very satisfying one) but a complete social structure that has a place even for those poor and ill-educated. That group provides much of the violent crime in society, so reaching them and including them in the societal framework provides a motivation to improve their lot, and see themselves as contributing responsible members of the group.

Thoughts on the Case for the Crusades

2010-10-13T09:42:00.001+13:00

Tim O'Neill, on the blog Armrium Magnum reviews Rodney Stark's book The Case for the Crusades, and is not impressed.
Rodney Stark basically restates what is said in Robert Spencer's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), that Islam was not the haven of tolerance and enlightenment that it's advocates claim, and that the Crusades were wars of defence against Islamic aggression.
Tim points out that although Islamic forces had attacked Europe over a period of years, that was not mentioned in the call to arms by Pope Urban.

Stark Gets It WRONG

Stark's next section attempts to dismiss the idea that the Crusades were "unprovoked" and catalogues the Muslim atrocities and attacks on pilgrims that he claims were the "real" reasons the Crusades were launched. What is notable to any objective observer here is actually how little material he has to work with and how far back he has to go (mostly to the Eighth and Ninth Centuries) to find it. Of course, there were periodic pogroms against Christians in the Islamic world and sometimes Christian pilgrims were harassed. But if we imagine a situation where there were Muslim enclaves in western Europe or large groups of (heavily armed) Islamic pilgrims regularly journeying to, say, central Eleventh Century France, do we really suppose we would not see much the same thing happening?

That aside, these incidents and things like the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009 were the exceptions, not the rule. In addition, they do not feature in the reasons the Crusaders themselves gave for their expeditions in anything but the most peripheral way.

This last point can be extended into a key criticism of Stark's wider thesis as well. If the Crusades were, as he tries to argue, simply a reaction to Muslim encroachment into the European "homeland", why is it we do not see this reflected in any of the vast amount of material we have on the preaching of the First Crusade or any of the material we have on the motivations of the Crusaders? Did Pope Urban and the other instigators of the Crusades forget to mention this? And if this was the "true" motivation of the Crusaders, then launching a vastly expensive and highly dangerous 2500 mile long-distance military strike into Palestine, of all places, was an extremely weird way to carry it out. It is not like Jerusalem was the religious heartland of Islam (that was Arabia) or even its political centre (that was, if anything, Cairo) or even its intellectual centre (which was Baghdad).

If the real objective was to turn back the teeming tides of fanatical Muslim expansion from the gates of Europe, as Stark tries to make out, then the obvious target was far closer to home: in Spain. Stark even mentions, in passing, that one of Urban's papal predecessors, Alexander II, had already tried to stir the knights of Europe into joining the Spanish Christian kingdoms in attacking Muslim states in Spain back in 1063 , but the result was less than spectacular even by Stark's own fumbling admission:
The response was very modest. A small number of Frankish knights seem to have ventured into Spain and their participation may have helped recover more Muslim territory, but no significant battles were fought. (p. 46)
So we are supposed to believe that, in 1063, a Papal call to meet the the supposedly pressing need to defend a beleaguered Europe from Islamic expansion could only muster up "a small number of Frankish knights", despite a promise of remission of sins for those who embarked, yet just 32 years later it sparked a mass movement, armies in the hundreds of thousands and wars that lasted over 200 years in a land 2500 miles from home? This simply makes zero sense.

Stark is clearly wrong. Plenty of solid scholarly work has been done in the last 60 years on the real motivations behind the Crusading ideal - millennial ideas about the coming apocalypse, idealised visions of Jerusalem not as a place but a mystical concept, the increasing alignment of knighthood with religious ideals, the outward expansion of western Europeans in all directions etc - but there is no evidence that they were ever seen as defensive wars against enemies encroaching on Europe, as the Spanish example clearly demonstrates.

The Crusades were fought for a number of reasons, but the most important were religious motivations. As Tim says.

As odd and unpalatable as it may be to modern people, the primary motivation of Crusaders seems to have been religious piety. It was usually a form of piety that modern observers find bizarre and was often one informed by myth and a weird idealism that we find hard to reconcile with modern Christianity or with any modern ideas at all, but the evidence is overwhelming that it was genuine and highly motivating.

The Crusades were not fought to win riches on Earth, nor were they fought to convert Muslims to Christianity. For the most part the Crusaders went to war convinced that it was their spiritual duty to God.

Thoughts from Albert Mohler

2010-10-12T11:59:00.005+13:00

Albert Mohler responds to writing by Jerry Coyne. I respond to the short quote from Coyne.

Because pretending that faith and science are equally valid ways of finding truth not only weakens our concept of truth, it also gives religion an undeserved authority that does the world no good. For it is faith’s certainty that it has a grasp on truth, combined with its inability to actually find it, that produces things such as the oppression of women and gays, opposition to stem cell research and euthanasia, attacks on science, denial of contraception for birth control and AIDS prevention, sexual repression, and of course all those wars, suicide bombings and religious persecutions.

Oppression of women and gays? Women made up a large percentage of early converts to Christianity because in comparison with the culture of the day, they had far greater freedoms inside the Church than outside it.
Opposition to stem cell research? I notice that he left out the qualifier "embryonic". Opposition to embryonic stem cell research arises because the method of producing them destroys a human life. Simply producing stem cell lines from adult stem cells arouses no moral difficulties at all.
Opposition to euthanasia? Yes, I'm opposed to putting down human beings the way we put down animals because I value human life slightly higher than that of animals.
Attacks on science? You know why Galileo gets so much airtime in atheist quarters despite being a loyal son of the Church? Because when all's said and done, that's about the only example of conflict between "science" and "religion" that they can come up with, and the funny thing is, Galileo was wrong. Sure he was less wrong than his critics, but that's only a matter of degree. His best evidence for the rotation of the Earth was the movement of the tides, which we know is the result of the moon's gravitational pull. His models were no better than those of Tycho Brahe.
Denial of contraception? If people actually obeyed the Church's instructions on sexual morality then there would be no AIDS epidemic. They don't do that, so I seriously doubt they obey the Catholic prohibition on contraception. They don't use condoms because they don't want to wear condoms.
Sexual repression? Sexual repression is a real psychological condition that is seldom manifested in a sexual manner. What Coyne refers to is sexual discipline. I find it fascinating that so many atheists are obsessed with sex and indulging their every whim, along with their constant championing of homosexuality. Maybe they're all closet fags? Hey, whatever floats their boat man, I'm not one to judge.
Wars? As Vox Day pointed out in The Irrational Atheist, religion on the whole is responsible for about 7% of historical wars. Suicide bombings? Invented by the Tamil Tigers, a secular group, and far less effective than the high explosive, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons than Coyne and his boyfriends have given us.
Vox has also pointed out that the major religions have been around for collectively 10,000 years, and there has been no risk of world destruction. Science has been around 400 years, and given us weapons capable of wiping all life from the planet. If there's a group that we need to kill to save ourselves, it's the scientists who have to go.

Jerry Coyne is either ignorant or deliberately deceptive. I'll split the difference and say he's both.

Classic "Evidences" for Evolution

2010-09-21T11:47:00.001+12:00

I am taking the opportunity to examine and discuss an older article by Carl Wieland for my own interest.

Niles Eldredge wrote a book called, The Triumph of Evolution, but Carl did not write concerning that book. Rather he looked at a review made by Jerry Coyne.

Coyne's coverage, while praising, expressed his opinion that Eldredge had short-changed his argument by not mentioning three classic and powerful arguments for evolution.

Those three are, according to Coyne.

Sightless Eyes
Yes, once again it seems that the evidence that eyes could arise through chance mutations and natural selection is that chance mutations and natural selection can destroy them.
I'm not sure why anyone (let alone a college professor) thinks that showing that something can be broken can prove that the same process which broke it is the same process that created it. There are, after all, a myriad of ways to break [insert whatever mechanism you like here] but I can guarantee you that none of those ways were used to build it in the first place. Nor can they.

Hairy Embryos
Whilst we were in our mother's womb, we were covered in hair. Lots of it. Embryonic recapitulation has a long and murky history but surely lanugo is a gift from the evolutionary gods to their devoted followers.
Well, not so much.
As Wieland points out, infants and the unborn are no more hairy than adults. We have the same number of follicles, it's just the type of hair that changes. Lanugo gives way to vellus hair on the body, while terminal hair is always found on the head. At puberty in men, vellus hair gives way to terminal hair over much of the body, while women don't experience quite as much change (or at least we hope they don't). Interestingly, baldness isn't the result of losing hair, but the result of follicles switching from terminal hair production to vellus hair.

Island Migrants
Here Coyne attacks a strawman belief that creationists believe that all extant species were created in their present locations, he uses the example of oceanic islands. Short answer. They don't.
As Wieland points out, the post-flood dispersion model does create an expectation that only organisms with a mechanism to reach those islands would be there. The ability to swim or fly would get them there, but those without those skills would have to hop a lift, either with a natural raft or perhaps with human explorers. Natural selection in their island home would allow for the speciation that produces the definitive island kinds.

Three classic and powerful arguments for evolution? If they are, then evolution is in trouble.

I have heard that, while in other countries, "professor" is a title that indicates an advanced degree in a subject, in the United States it merely means one allowed to lecture at a university. That does somewhat cheapen the title.

Smartphones

2010-09-07T17:24:00.002+12:00

This is a test post from my Nokia E70.

Thoughts on Science

2010-06-09T07:28:00.000+12:00

One of the conclusions reached by scholars like Rodney Stark is that the Christian philosophical framework was necessary for the rise of science in the west.

This is often responded to by certain sceptics by references to Greeks, Muslims, Egyptians, Indians etc. It should be noted that these sceptics never describe what science is supposed to be, or how these peoples are supposed to have developed it.

It should first be recognised, as Rodney Stark does, that neither technology nor mathematics are science. Both are necessary for the development of science, but neither is adequate. Technology is necessary because the tools of inquiry used in the scientific fields rely on being able to detect phenomena that may be too small or too distant for the unaided human senses. Mathematics is the language of science and provides the notation that allows us to describe phenomena. The referenced peoples had both technology and mathematics, but they did not develop science.

Science is a body of knowledge acquired through application of the scientific method. This method is generally defined as a sequence of observation, hypothesis formation and experimental testing that allows adjustment of the hypothesis.

The Greeks, for example, did not have science in this sense. They produced great observations, formulated hypotheses from those observations, but they didn't then use testing to verify or discount their hypotheses.

It should also be noted that "the rise of science" refers to the proliferation and perseverance of science in that culture. Islam did contribute to the rise, but eventually the growth petered out.

Thoughts on Miracles

2010-04-02T17:04:00.000+13:00

One of the charges levelled at the ancients is that they can't be trusted to report miracles because they were credulous and superstitious.

Glenn Miller discusses such matters and reaches a completely different conclusion.

* "In antiquity miracles were not accepted without question. Graeco-Roman writers were often reluctant to ascribe miraculous events to the gods, and offered alternative explanations. Some writers were openly skeptical about miracles (e.g. Epicurus; Lucretius; Lucian). So it is a mistake to write off the miracles of Jesus as the result of the naivety and gullibility of people in the ancient world." [GAJ, rev 2, p.235, Stanton]

* "This period [Hellenistic] may well have been the least superstitious period of antiquity, even if we have to allow for the continued existence in concealment of an undercurrent of the usual superstitions and belief in miracles. However that may be a change sets in with the beginning of late antiquity. Popular belief in miracles and superstition revived." [MSECT:269, Theissen]

* "On the other hand it must be admitted that in the relatively peaceful and stable period of the first two centuries the irrationalism which first appeared at the beginning of the first century was unable to strike roots. There continued to be rationalist movements alongside it. In his dialogues Lucian mocked his contemporaries' belief in the miraculous. Oenomaus of Gadara mocked the oracles, and Sextus Empiricus once more brought together all the arguments of scepticism. Even where increased irrationalism was notable--for example in Plutarch's development--it remained within bounds, without eccentricity or fanaticism. There was no decisive change before the great social and political crisis of the 3rd century. AD. [MSECT:275, Theissen]

* "Primitive Christian belief in the miraculous thus has a crucial role in the religious development of late antiquity. It stands at the beginning of the 'new' irrationalism of that age. Our brief outline of this development may have done something to correct the widespread picture of an ancient belief in the miraculous which has no history. What we have found here is not a rampant jungle of ancient credulity with regard to miracles, but a process of historical transformation in which forms and patterns of belief in the miraculous succeed one another. If we accept this picture, we must firmly reject assertions that primitive Christian belief in the miraculous represented nothing unusual in the context of its period." [MSECT:276, Theissen]

* "particularly in the Augustan age, when intellectual life was inspired by the example of Alexandrian scholarship, there was a general desire for increasingly exact knowledge, and historians, like poets, were always on the alert to correct their predecessors." [X02:RCH4S:93, Woodman]

* "It is in this light that we must judge the accounts we possess of other miracle-workers in Jesus' period and culture. We have already observed that the list of such occurrences is very much shorter than is often supposed. If we take the period of four hundred years stretching from two hundred years before to two hundred years after the birth of Christ, the number of miracles recorded which are remotely comparable with those of Jesus is astonishingly small. On the pagan side, there is little to report apart from the records of cures at healing shrines, which were certainly quite frequent, but are a rather different phenomenon from cures performed by an individual healer. Indeed it is significant that later Christian fathers, when seeking miracle workers with whom to compare or contrast Jesus, had to have recourse to remote and by now almost legendary figures of the past such as Pythagoras or Empedocles." [X:JATCH:103]

* "In the second century C.E. there is a fair amount of evidence to support the thesis that philosophers were generally inclined to be less critical in assessing extraordinary phenomena than in the centuries immediately preceding and more cordial toward religion generally and mainstream piety and its wonders specifically." [X04:PCCM:104]

* "In the Second-Sophistic period [beginning 2nd century AD] the pagan gods were extraordinarily active. They not only appeared to humankind in person or in dreams. They were also diligent in giving out oracles. The paganism of the High Empire does indeed have a vibrant feel to it." [HI:AREPJC:167]

* "The rituals we studied [exorcism, love rites, alchemy, and deification] all point to the importance of the first three centuries [AD]. Ideas which only appeared in embryonic form before the turn of the millennium undergo tremendous development by the beginning of the fourth century [AD]". [HI:MRW:98]

The easy acceptance of miracles was foreign to that world. The complete opposite of what sceptics claim... no surprises there of course.

Thoughts on Christianity

2010-04-02T08:42:00.000+13:00

As Vox Day detailed in his book The Irrational Atheist most of the “arguments” put forwards by the new atheists are simply logically fallacious.

We see some of the same above, such as the claim that Christianity cannot be true because Christians do bad things. When it is pointed out that atheists have not only done equally bad, but even worse things, the special pleading is made that Christians ought to be better because they have the holy spirit inside them.

Arguments such as Craig’s Kalam formulation are dismissed because Craig would remain faithful even if the evidence was against him. Of course the logical implication of that is that Craig hasn’t found the evidence inadequate yet. Moreover Kalam is a logical argument, P1, P2, and C1, so an attempt to refute it cannot revolve around discrediting the source. That’s ad hominem.

The first proposition is unassailable, simply because if we don’t assume causality then all discussion ceases, it is the second proposition that is the weak point in the argument, because while we currently assume that the universe has a beginning, we cannot prove it. Craig’s arguments against an infinity reached by successive addition doesn’t take into consideration set theory where a set can contain an infinite number of values (for example all real numbers) without achieving that point by cumulative addition. Incidentally the person who introduced me to that criticism was a biblical creationist. However if proposition 1 is true, and we must assume that it is, and proposition 2 is probably true, which at the moment we generally assume it is, then the conclusion, that the universe had a first cause, is also probably true.

We can construct similar arguments based around morality, or teleology, which make it reasonable to infer a moral intelligence behind life.

Whilst showing that it is reasonable to propose a moral intelligence that created the universe, that doesn't automatically lead to Christianity.

What we then have to ask is what religious tradition deals with a creator god and specific historical events?

A creator god is necessary because of the first step. Obviously a god who is the universe cannot logically be the creator of that universe. That leaves out all pantheistic religions like Hinduism, as well as godless religions like Buddhism and atheism. The classical religions like those of the Greeks and Romans must go too. In their mythology the gods were born from Khronus and he in turn came into being at the moment of creation, hence he could not be the first cause.

We're now down to a relatively short list of theistic religions with transcendent deities. Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I will treat Judaism and Christianity as two parts of the same tradition, although I'm sure most Jews would disagree with me.

Specific historical interventions are lacking in what I see of Zoroastrianism, that is Ahura Mazda doesn't seem to do very much. Whilst Zoroaster seems to have had many valuable insights, he doesn't appear to have the same miracle working power as Moses and Jesus.

In Judaism, whilst God doesn't act capriciously, the Biblical writers testify to specific actions and predictions attributed to YHWH. Where we are able to test them (and that is a limitation in any historical work) they seem to hold up well.

Christianity is rooted in the historical evidence of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and the theological interpretations placed on that evidence by Jesus and his apostles. Again within the limitations of historical inquiry the evidence seems to hold up well.

Islam is rooted in the revelation of Allah to Mohammed. However he makes specific claims about Jesus that are contrary to those recorded in the Bible. Since the historical evidence about Jesus goes back to the late first century and early second century, whilst Mohammed was writing in the seventh, this leaves me somewhat sceptical of his claims.

Since Mohammed did not claim to be writing his own recollections, but rather what Allah was dictating, this would lead me to regard his claims of authority as somewhat dubious.

Based on this brief assessment I would have to say that Judeo-Christianity has the best claim to be objectively true. If it is not then another form of theism, possibly one not revealed to humanity, is the next most likely.

Thoughts on atheist clergy

2010-03-22T22:16:00.000+13:00

Dr Albert Mohler comments on Daniel Dennett's study of religious belief among the clergy.

Darryl is a Presbyterian who sees himself as a "progressive-minded" pastor who wants to see his kind of non-doctrinal Christianity "given validity in some way." He acknowledges that he is more a pantheist than a theist, and thinks that many of the more educated members of his church hold to the same liberal beliefs as his own. And those beliefs (or unbeliefs) are stated clearly: "I reject the virgin birth. I reject substitutionary atonement. I reject the divinity of Jesus. I reject heaven and hell in the traditional sense, and I am not alone."

Amazingly, Darryl is candid about the fact that he remains in the ministry largely for financial reasons. It is how he provides for his family. If he openly espoused his beliefs, "I may be burning bridges in terms of my ability to earn a living this way."

John is identified as a Southern Baptist minister who has primarily served as a worship leader. He was attracted to Christianity as a religion of love, but his pursuit of Christianity "brought me to the point of not believing in God." As he explains, "I didn't plan to become an atheist. I didn't even want to become an atheist. It's just I had no choice. If I'm being honest with myself."

He is clearly not being honest with his church members. He rejects all belief in God and all Christian truth claims out of hand. He is a determined atheist. Once again, this unbelieving minister admits that he stays in the ministry because of finances. Amazingly, this minister even names his price: "If someone said, 'Here's $200,000,' I'd be turning my notice in this week, saying, 'A month from now is my last Sunday.' Because then I can pay off everything."

No one should sail under a false flag, especially not in the Christian Church where honesty is seen as a primary virtue. If these men are faking their profession, purely in the pursuit of ungodly Mammon, then please someone give them the money to pay their bills and get them out of our Church.

IQ Test

2010-03-06T09:36:00.002+13:00

Free-IQTest.net - Free I.Q. Test Online

I'm so dumb.

Thoughts on Scientific Philosophy

2010-03-01T20:51:00.000+13:00

Years ago in How to Sink a Battleship Phillip Johnson laid out the transformation of science from a tool of inquiry to a tool of naturalistic indoctrination.

I enjoyed some of his wry observations, highlighting the example of Richard Dickerson.

Richard Dickerson, a professor of molecular biology at UCLA, provides a good example of how the basis of modern science has been articulated. He states as Rule Number One of scientific investigation, "Let us see how far and to what extent we can explain the behavior of the physical and material universe in terms of purely physical and material causes without invoking the supernatural."

That's a rational project, but there's another sentence that has to be added for the rule to make any sense, and that is, "At some point we'll stop to audit the books and see how far we've gone." For example, if your investment advisor suggests plunging wildly in the corn futures market, then at some point you're going to want to know if you have anything left, or whether you've made any money. If he tells you "Let's just always assume that corn futures go up in value," you know you are giving your money to somebody who has lost touch with reality.

Yet Johnson also observes that not every scientist (perhaps not many scientists) would embrace such a dogmatic position. Speaking of Richard Feynman he wrote.

In his famous 1974 Commencement address at Caltech, Richard Feynman provided an inspiring counter-example of how science ought to be practiced. He began by warning against self- deception, the original sin of science, saying that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." To avoid self- deception scientists must bend over backwards to report data that cast doubt on their theories. Feynman applied this principle specifically to scientists who talk to the public:

"I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist. . . . I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen."

That's such a magnificent statement, I wish it could be set to music. Richard Feynman's kind of science has the virtue of humility at its very core. Honesty and humility.

That is indeed a magnificent statement, and I hope that I have tried to act with the same principle in mind. I do note in real life that I tend to qualify many of my statements, trying to be careful not to go beyond what the evidence is able to support.

The Prayer of the Boondock Saints

2010-03-01T20:49:00.000+13:00

And Shepherds we shall be
For thee, my Lord, for thee.
Power hath descended forth from Thy hand
Our feet may swiftly carry out Thy commands.
So we shall flow a river forth to Thee
And teeming with souls shall it ever be.
In Nomeni Patri Et Fili Spiritus Sancti.

Thoughts on Liberal Fecundity

2010-02-28T09:40:00.001+13:00

Don Feder offers a study on the way in which liberals have created disaster scenario after disaster scenario in order to gain power and access to our pocketbooks.

One section that caught my eye was his commentary on hate crimes.

The National Epidemic of Hate Crimes – The late Sen. Edward Kennedy called hate crimes “domestic terrorism” – thereby suggesting that they were just as much a threat to our nation’s security as al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah and every jihad-preaching imam around the world. Neo-Nazis, Ku-Kluxers and freelance haters were roaming our streets looking for victims on which to inflict their vile animus. The alleged epidemic led to the passage last year of The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which added “sexual orientation” to the category of protected classes.

Just how much of a hate-crimes crisis there is may be seen from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. (The FBI is required to compile statistics of so-called bias offenses.)

According to the UCR, in 2007, there were 16,929 murders and over 855,000 cases of aggravated assault in the United States.

There were also a grand total of 7,624 hate crimes of all kinds -- motivated by race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, whatever.

Of that number, 78% involved either intimidation (words alone), or simple assault (no serious injury occurred), which included pushing and shoving. In 2007, 9 murders were classified as hate crimes – which constituted .0005 % of total homicides. Your chances of being the victim of a hate crime – any hate crime – are comparable to being struck by lightening twice while bungee-jumping on Groundhog Day.

So hate-crime legislation was passed to stop 0.05% of homicides in the USA. That doesn't really seem worth it to me. (checking his maths it is 0.05% not 0.0005%)

Thoughts on Relationships

2010-01-30T08:06:00.001+13:00

Vox Day has written some very good advice to a woman asking about how to find a man in her mid-thirties.

I particularly liked his take on how her Christian beliefs could negatively affect her relationship possibilities, not because of the beliefs themselves but because of the nonsense that has infiltrated the Church in regards to the priority that is placed on the relationship with spouse versus relationship with God.

One thing that Christian women often fail to understand is that a single-minded devotion to Jesus will drive away most men almost as effectively as a feminist woman's narcissistic devotion to her education and career. This is true of Christian and non-Christian men alike. It's not that men don't respect your devotion, it's just that they tend to consider you off the market as a sort of Protestant equivalent of a nun. You're basically telling them that they will never be as important to you as they would be to pretty much any other woman, so it should come as little surprise that they tend to pursue those other women in preference to you.

When Paul told his readers that the first concern of the husband is his wife, and that of the wife her husband, he wasn't being negative (at least not excessively so). The first concern of a married person is their spouse. That is God's plan for marriage. Ladies, remember this, and if some pastor tries to tell you to "put Jesus first" hit him with your handbag.

Thoughts on Christmas

2010-01-21T16:57:00.000+13:00

People have claimed that the two accounts of Jesus birth in Matthew and Luke are very different stories. Whilst it is true that they are two accounts from different authors who are focusing on different things I think that is possible to reconstruct the timeline from the available information.

Mary and Joseph were espoused, betrothed but not married fully. At this time they are living in Nazareth.

The angel Gabriel comes to Mary and informs her that Jesus was to be born.

Mary leaves her home and travels to see her cousin Elizabeth who is at this time six months pregnant.

Mary remains with her until John is born.

Mary returns to her home and her condition becomes known to her betrothed. Joseph knows he's not the father and decides to put her aside quietly, rather than make a public disgrace of her.

An angel comes to Joseph in a dream and tells him that the child is not the product of adultery and that taking Mary as bride is not something to be feared. He does so.

A census (Bethyada suggests that "registration" is a better description of the event) is declared by the Roman governors and enforced by their puppet government. Joseph and Mary go to the town of Bethlehem which is the home town of the House of David which both of them belong to.

They do so, and take up residence in the house of another member of their family. Remember that in that culture it is a vile insult to refuse accommodation to a clan member, and equally insulting to reject such an offer. Misunderstanding the word used for Inn, in Luke, has led to the picturesque view of Jesus being born in a stable, but since Bethlehem was probably too small to have an inn and it would have been insulting to sleep in such a place when a family home was available this option is highly unlikely. People lived with their animals in a downstairs family room, and it was probably this room in which Jesus was born because the upstairs guest room is full.

The shepherds come to visit the house this night.

Eight days after this Jesus is circumcised.

After the period of Mary's purification (14 days) Mary and Joseph take him to the temple and offer the two doves that are the sacrifice of the poor.

At a point after this, probably not too much later, the Magi from the East (probably Babylon) came to visit Jesus and give their gifts. (Bethyada also points out that it wasn't necessarily Babylon, Susa is another candidate, and the period that they visited encompasses from shortly after the birth to about 18 months later; we do have the testimony of Herod that he was less than two by the time the king decided to kill the boys)

The Magi leave, not informing Herod of their discovery.

Herod orders his soldiers to kill all males in Bethlehem under the age of two, and at this point Joseph, Mary and Jesus are heading for Egypt.

Herod dies, and the family return to Nazareth.

It may not be a perfect reconstruction, but it seems to place the events in the correct order.

Weird Al Craigslist

2009-06-19T18:47:00.000+12:00

Thoughts on suicide

2009-05-03T07:04:00.000+12:00

Chesterton's thoughts on suicide.

Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self. Grave moderns told us that we must not even say "poor fellow," of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny. In all this I found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man's crime is different from other crimes -- for it makes even crimes impossible.

About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr. Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist.

This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion. And there went with it a peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one. The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern morals. It was not a matter of degree. It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer in sadness just beyond it. The Christian feeling evidently was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far. The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell. One man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence. Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren's.

Thoughts on Parenthood

2008-12-02T19:35:00.000+13:00

On the First Things site Joseph Bottum tells a story of his childhood Thanksgivings. This one, when he was 14, tells of how his Aunt taught him about the cost of being a father.

I can’t remember exactly which unfairness so infuriated me the Thanksgiving I was fourteen. It may have been my parents’ refusal to let me hitchhike to Rapid City over Christmas vacation. Somewhere in those days I had read Nikos Kazantzakis’ Report to Greco—like Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, one of the great books that can be read only at a certain age—and I had become infatuated with Kazantzakis’ description of the time he had gone off to the mountains to isolate himself, taking along only the Bible and Homer to read. My grandparents had a cabin up in the Black Hills where I wanted to spend Christmas by myself in the snow—and my parents wouldn’t allow it, for reasons that now are obvious but then seemed raw oppression.

So I responded the way adolescents always respond: glowering, sniping away in sarcastic comments, affecting exhaustion, being unpleasant (in the way only fourteen-year-olds can be unpleasant) to my sisters, to my parents, and, that Thanksgiving, to everyone in the family. It must have been around two or three in the afternoon, while I was mocking my little sister for wanting me to play a game with her or sneering at the food my mother and grandmother were preparing. With a sudden growl, Aunt Eleanor rose from the living-room couch to glare at me for a moment over her glasses.

“Stop that at once and come with me,” she commanded, picking up her coat and stalking out the door. She was the kind of person who never looked back to see whether her orders were being followed. It may have been something in her face, or the ramrod straight way she held herself, or the absolute confidence she had that no one would refuse her, but everyone obeyed Aunt Eleanor.

I found her in front, with the car running, and she took me in silence down to the river, below the dam, where the Missouri runs in open water all winter between its cold banks. The defroster blew up against the windshield, barely keeping out the cold as the car idled, and I waited and waited, hunched in protest, dreading the lecture I was sure she was about to give. But she sat there for a long while, looking out at the river, minute after minute, until at last she sighed and began:

“You know Waller Johnson, don’t you? The rancher from out toward Philips. Your father has done some work for him, over the years. Lord, I remember Waller when he was young, a big, good-looking boy off the range. Your great-grandfather brought him to Pierre, found him a place to stay during the school year—partly so he could finish high school, but mostly, I think, so he could play baseball and Pierre could beat Yankton. Charlie loved baseball.

“I want to tell you a story about Waller Johnson. Back in the early 1930s, his mother and father died, the mortgage payments stopped, and the Land Bank repossessed the ranch. Waller must have been eighteen or nineteen, in those days. Somehow, he talked the Land Bank into letting him try to bring the herd to market. We gave him what help we could, but those were hard times all over, and no one thought he could do it—not with four younger brothers and sisters to feed at the same time.

“But he was a tough young man. He kept the herd together through the winter, fattened up the cattle, sold them, and reclaimed the ranch. Then he put each of his brothers and sisters through school and saw them settled, here and there. Finally Waller settled down himself, marrying a girl named Nancy Trike from, oh, I don’t know—Spearfish, maybe. I remember she was a pretty thing, but thin and a little sickly.

“One winter—it must have been ’42 or ’43, during the war, anyway—their furnace broke down in the middle of a blizzard, and their baby began running a fever.”

Aunt Eleanor watched the cold water as it murmured past, skinned with ice along the edge. “You’re too young to know what it was like in those days,” she said. “Most of the ranches didn’t have electricity. None of them had plumbing. The roads were bad, and the nearest doctor was at the hospital in Pierre, maybe fifty miles away. The adults could have built a fire, cuddled up for warmth, and outlasted the storm. But the baby was sick, and he had no chance to make it through the cold. So Waller and Nancy loaded up the car with blankets and coats they’d warmed in the oven, and started off through the snow to Pierre.

“It took them three, almost four, hours to make that drive. The blizzard was pounding down from the north, swirling across the prairie, the way it does. If they missed the road or slid off into a gully, they would die—not just the baby, but all three of them, left there frozen until somebody came along and found them.

“I want you to picture this—really see it, as clearly as you can: the blinding snow, that old car creeping along the icy road, the sick child wrapped up between them, Waller and Nancy straining to see, rubbing their breath off the windows—knowing they were probably going to be killed, but knowing they had to try.”

“Why didn’t they stay at the ranch?” I asked, growing colder and more confused every minute we sat there in Aunt Eleanor’s car by the river. “I mean, that way, at least two of them would survive. If they really thought they weren’t going to make it, then they were just throwing themselves away.”

“They did really think they weren’t going to make it,” she answered. “But they had to do it anyway. It wasn’t a choice. It wasn’t something to be calculated, weighing their lives against their baby’s. They couldn’t choose their own survival against a chance, however small, of his.”

Aunt Eleanor turned to look at me directly, and her face was hard with something I couldn’t quite understand. “And do you see why? It’s because they were parents. And that’s what it means to be a parent. They had already given up their lives for their child’s, from the first moment he existed.”

She sighed again and looked back out at the river. “In that blizzard, the bill finally came due, and they knew they had to pay it—the way you will pay it, when your time comes. The way your mother and father will pay it, when they have to. That’s what I want you to remember the next time you’re angry with them, the next time you want to scream because they won’t let you do something, the next time you feel as though nobody understands how grown up you’ve become.”

She glanced over at me and smiled, pulling her cloth sleeve up over her hand to wipe the windshield. “Come,” she said, “it’s time to get back home.”

Years later, I came to see my great-aunt’s story as the answer to utilitarianism and the ethics of calculation, the solution to those “lifeboat cases” we were supposed to ponder in freshman philosophy courses. But at the time I knew only that she was trying, in her way, to let me in on the secret, the mystery of adulthood. We turned away from the cold, gurgling river and drove back up the hill to the house on Elizabeth Street. Dinner was just beginning, and the arguments were already starting to swirl around the quarrelsome table. But my father winked at me across the half-carved turkey. And just as I realized how hungry I was, my mother set before me a plate filled with bright orange yams, green beans, the dark drumstick meat I loved, cranberry sauce, sage dressing—the kind of meal a fourteen-year-old boy imagines every meal should be. My parents were happy that Thanksgiving, I think, and why not? They had each other, they had their children, and they had their family, however much it squabbled and fought, gathered around them.

I am not a father, but this seems to be a piece of wisdom.

Thoughts on Taxation

2008-10-29T16:15:00.000+13:00

Stolen from Parchment and Pen.

Our Tax System Explained: Bar Stool Economics

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.’ Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free.

But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,’ but he got $10!’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too.

It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I got’ ‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’

‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

How did you die?

2008-10-27T11:52:00.000+13:00

From Thoughts From a Treasured Wretch.

Edmund Vance Cooke (1866-1932)
How Did You Die?

Did you tackle that trouble that came your way
With a resolute heart and cheerful?
Or hide your face from the light of day
With a craven soul and fearful?
Oh, a trouble's a ton, or a trouble's an ounce,
Or a trouble is what you make it,
And it isn't the fact that you're hurt that counts,
But only how did you take it?

You are beaten to earth? Well, well, what's that?
Come up with a smiling face.
It's nothing against you to fall down flat,
But to lie there -- that's disgrace.
The harder you're thrown, why the higher you bounce;
Be proud of your blackened eye!
It isn't the fact that you're licked that counts,
It's how did you fight -- and why?

And though you be done to the death, what then?
If you battled the best you could,
If you played your part in the world of men,
Why, the Critic will call it good.
Death comes with a crawl, or comes with a pounce,
And whether he's slow or spry,
It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts,
But only how did you die?

Other poems from Edmund Cooke here.

America: You can do magic

2008-10-18T07:48:00.001+13:00

Thoughts on the First Cause.

2008-09-21T17:02:00.001+12:00

If we accept the position that the universe began to exist then there are two possibilities.

1. That the universe was brought into existence by another.

2. That the universe brought itself into existence.

Option 2. leads us to a violation of the law of non-contradiction as for an object to bring itself into existence requires it to exist (in order to be the bringer) and not exist (in order to be brought) at the same time.

Option 1. does not automatically fail the logical test and so we proceed further.

3. The bringer possesses volition.

4. The bringer possesses no volition but acts as a result of natural processes.

I have difficulties with Option 4. because natural processes themselves arise within the universe. I don't see them leading to the universe. If that is the case then we are in the same boat as option 2.

Option 3. allows for there to be a point at which the universe doesn't exist, before an act of volition brings it into existence.

If the bringer of the universe into existence possesses volition then the bringer probably possesses a degree of consciousness in order to "choose" to bring the universe into existence. If the bringer possesses consciousness then it is likely to be a "being" of some description.

That might need some cleaning up, but I think I have shown that it's reasonable to assume that the cause of the universe is itself a conscious being.

Thoughts on New Clothes

2008-07-24T11:19:00.000+12:00

Perusing the Internet it is common to find atheists who argue like 15 year old heroin addicts. One such is the provider of an argument that works along the following lines.

The Emperor walks naked among his courtiers. They each comment on the surpassing fineness of his imaginary garments until the insightful wise man finally points out that the Emperor is in fact naked. The courtiers then refuse to listen, redoubling their efforts to praise the magnificence of the imaginary clothing.

The imagery is obvious. God is supposed to be like the Emperor's new clothes, completely imaginary, and the efforts of His followers to praise him simply the actions of the willfully self deluded.

However the philosophically competent will instantly see the flaw in this story.

It is begging the question. The storyteller has already decided that the Emperor is naked and therefore the courtiers are delusional but let's look at the story from the theist's perspective.

The Emperor walks among his courtiers. His robe trails behind him, a waterfall of velvet and ermine. The polished leather of his boots reflects the faces of his admiring subjects. Each member of his court seeks to outdo the next in heaping superlatives upon his dress. An interruption occurs. An individual clad in the crimson tights of the jester leaps from the audience. "The Emperor is naked" he cries. The court, used to his madness, just smile politely and continue in their praise. "Can you not see?" Says the fool, "the Emperor is quite bare. He wears no clothes to cover his royal nakedness." The people continue to praise but the Emperor's brow becomes a little furrowed. He points a perfectly manicured finger at the capering jester. "Remove him." He commands his guards. With relish the burly men seize the prancing fool and drag him to the tower. "A joke is one thing," the Emperor remarks, "but enough is enough."

Simply telling a story is not enough. Anyone (even an atheist) can write a story that conforms to his beliefs. However that does not in any way impact reality. Saying the Emperor is naked does not make him naked. Similarly saying that God does not exist does not make Him non-existent.

Thoughts on Entropy

2008-07-24T11:12:00.000+12:00

It was recently brought to my attention that a present atheistic argument against the use of entropy to show that the universe has a beginning and hence a beginner runs something like this.

Areas of low entropy can clump together resulting in a temporary localized inversion of the general trend of the universe towards a point of low energy (high entropy).

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but even if this is true it says nothing about how these areas of low entropy come to exist at all.

The point of the argument from entropy is that in a eternally old universe all available energy would be exhausted. There would be no clumps of low entropy because there would be no low entropy.

Only a finite universe with an actual beginning would have these areas of low entropy able to clump.

The Stranger, Rudyard Kipling

2008-06-19T21:24:00.000+12:00

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk--
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wanted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control--
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf--
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

Kipling was a man who believed peoples could be distinguished between and he let that flow into his poetry as seen here.

A little ditty about Roger and Elaine

2008-05-11T08:07:00.000+12:00

From Parchment and Pen we find a humorous essay on the difference between men and women.

Let’s say a guy named Roger is attracted to a woman named Elaine. He asks her out to a movie; she accepts; they have a pretty good time. A few nights later he asks her out to dinner, and again they enjoy themselves. They continue to see each other regularly, and after a while neither one of them is seeing anybody else.

And then, one evening when they’re driving home, a thought occurs to Elaine, and, without really thinking, she says it aloud: “Do you realize that, as of tonight, we’ve been seeing each other for exactly six months?”

And then there is silence in the car. To Elaine, it seems like a very loud silence. She thinks to herself: Geez, I wonder if it bothers him that I said that. Maybe he’s been feeling confined by our relationship; maybe he thinks I’m trying to push him into some kind of obligation that he doesn’t want, or isn’t sure of.

And Roger is thinking: Gosh. Six months.

And Elaine is thinking: But, hey, I’m not so sure I want this kind of relationship, either. Sometimes I wish I had a little more space, so I’d have time to think about whether I really want us to keep going the way we are, moving steadily toward … I mean, where are we
going? Are we just going to keep seeing each other at this level of intimacy? Are we heading toward marriage? Toward children? Toward a lifetime together? Am I ready for that level of commitment? Do I really even know this person?

And Roger is thinking: … so that means it was… let’s see…. February when we started going out, which was right after I had the car at the dealer’s, which means … lemme check the odometer … Whoa! I am way overdue for an oil change here.

And Elaine is thinking: He’s upset. I can see it on his face. Maybe I’m reading this completely wrong. Maybe he wants more from our relationship, more intimacy, more commitment; maybe he has sensed- even before I sensed it-that I was feeling some reservations. Yes, I bet that’s it. That’s why he’s so reluctant to say anything about his own feelings. He’s afraid of being rejected.

And Roger is thinking: And I’m gonna have them look at the transmission again. I don’t care what those morons say, it’s still not shifting right. And they better not try to blame it on the cold weather this time. What cold weather? It’s 87 degrees out, and this thing is shifting like a darn garbage truck, and I paid those incompetent thieves $600.

And Elaine is thinking: He’s angry. And I don’t blame him. I’d be angry, too. I feel so guilty, putting him through this, but I can’t help the way I feel. I’m just not sure.

And Roger is thinking: They’ll probably say it’s only a 90-day warranty. That’s exactly
what they’re gonna say, the scumballs.

And Elaine is thinking: Maybe I’m just too idealistic, waiting for a knight to come riding up on his white horse, when I’m sitting right next to a perfectly good person, a person I enjoy being with, a person I truly do care about, a person who seems to truly care about me. A person who is in pain because of my self-centered, schoolgirl romantic fantasy.

And Roger is thinking: Warranty? They want a warranty? I’ll give them a darn warranty. I’ll take their warranty and stick it right up their

“Roger,” Elaine says aloud.

“What?” says Roger, startled.

“Please don’t torture yourself like this,” she says, her eyes beginning to brim with tears. “Maybe I should never have … Oh my, I feel so …” (She breaks down, sobbing.)

“What?” says Roger.

“I’m such a fool,” Elaine sobs. “I mean, I know there’s no knight. I really know that. It’s silly. There’s no knight, and there’s no horse.”

“There’s no horse?” says Roger.

“You think I’m a fool, don’t you?” Elaine says.

“No!” says Roger, glad to finally know the correct answer.

“It’s just that … It’s that I … I need some time,” Elaine says.

(There is a 15-second pause while Roger, thinking as fast as he can, tries to come up with a safe response. Finally he comes up with one that he thinks might work.)

“Yes,” he says. (Elaine, deeply moved, touches his hand.)

“Oh, Roger, do you really feel that way?” she says.

“What way?” says Roger.

“That way about time,” says Elaine.

“Oh,” says Roger. “Yes.” (Elaine turns to face him and gazes deeply into his eyes, causing him to become very nervous about what she might say next, especially if it involves a horse. At last she speaks.)

“Thank you, Roger,” she says.

“Thank you,” says Roger.

Then he takes her home, and she lies on her bed, a conflicted, tortured soul, and weeps until dawn, whereas when Roger gets back to his place, he opens a bag of Doritos, turns on the TV, and immediately becomes deeply involved in a rerun of a tennis match between two
Czechoslovakians he never heard of. A tiny voice in the far recesses of his mind tells him that something major was going on back there in the car, but he is pretty sure there is no way he would ever understand what, and so he figures it’s better if he doesn’t think
about it. (This is also Roger’s policy regarding world hunger.)

The next day Elaine will call her closest friend, or perhaps two of them, and they will talk about this situation for six straight hours.

In painstaking detail, they will analyze everything she said and everything he said, going over it time and time again, exploring every word, expression, and gesture for nuances of meaning, considering every possible ramification. They will continue to discuss this subject, off and on, for weeks, maybe months, never reaching any definite conclusions, but never getting bored with it, either.

Meanwhile, Roger, while playing racquetball one day with a mutual friend of his and Elaine’s, will pause just before serving, frown, and say: “Norm, did Elaine ever own a horse?”

ATC: Around The World

2008-04-22T23:31:00.000+12:00

Ahh, nostalgia.

Dire Straits: Brothers in Arms

2008-04-12T12:23:00.000+12:00

Wierd Al Yankovic: It's all about the pentiums

2008-04-06T15:42:00.001+12:00

Wierd Al Yankovic: White and Nerdy

2008-04-06T09:24:00.000+12:00

It's in LEGO

No belief in prison

2008-04-04T16:17:00.000+13:00

Vox Day, writer of the excellent book The Irrational Atheist demonstrated that the atheistic claim that atheists are more law abiding than the religious was pure hokum. He acknowledged that whilst self identified atheists were not common in prison, those professing no religion, the numbers that the atheists rely on to bulk up their numbers in the face of religious out-numbering, were in fact far more numerous than they should be as a proportion of the population.

To test this myself I contacted the New Zealand corrections department and asked if they kept records of inmate's religious beliefs. I found that they did indeed and the statistics made interesting reading.

The statistics I received showed that out of a prison population of 8073 in June 2007, 3852 professed no religion and another 1984 gave no answer.

Even if only the smaller number is used almost 48% of the prison population could be described as atheists. In a country where the majority identify as Christian that is a disproportionate number.

According to Statistics New Zealand as of 2006 about 35% of New Zealanders identified themselves as having no religion.

Religion: No. of Prisoners
ADVENTIST (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 3
ANANDA MARGA: 2
ANGLICAN: 167
APOSTOLIC CHURCH OF NEW ZEALAND: 8
ASSEMBLIES OF GOD: 12
ASSOCIATED CHURCHES OF CHRIST: 3
ASSYRIAN ORTHODOX: 1
BAHA'I: 2
BAPTIST (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 33
BIBLE BAPTIST: 2
BRAHMA KUMARIS: 1
BRETHREN (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 3
BUDDHIST (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 42
CATHOLIC (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 331
CHINESE CHRISTIAN (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 2
CHRISTIAN (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 575
CHRISTIAN AND MISSIONARY ALLIANCE: 2
CHRISTIAN OUTREACH: 2
CHRISTIAN REVIVAL CRUSADE: 1
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE: 2
CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF THE LATTER DAY SAINTS: 164
CHURCHES OF CHRIST (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 10
CONGREGATIONAL: 27
DRUSE: 2
ELIM: 1
EVANGELICAL (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 5
GREEK ORTHODOX: 1
HARE KRISHNA: 1
HINDU (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 21
ISLAM (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 70
JAPANESE BUDDHIST: 3
JAPANESE RELIGION (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 1
JEHOVAH'S WITNESS: 39
JUDAISM (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 8
KOREAN CHRISTIAN (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 1
LODGE: 1
LUTHERAN: 2
MAHIKARI: 1
MAORI CHRISTIAN (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 24
MAORI RELIGION (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 17
MARONITE CATHOLIC: 1
METHODIST: 64
NEW LIFE CENTRES: 1
NO RELIGION: 3852
NOT SPECIFIED: 274
NULL (no response entered): 1984
ORTHODOX: 1
OTHER INDIGENOUS CHRISTIAN: 7
OTHER NEW AGE RELIGIONS (NOT ELSEWHERE CLASSIFIED): 1
OTHER RELIGIONS (NOT ELSEWHERE CLASSIFIED): 8
PENTECOSTAL (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 15
PRESBYTERIAN: 94
PROTESTANT (NOT FURTHER DEFINED): 6
RASTAFARIANISM: 3
RATANA: 217
REC CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST - LATTER DAY SAINTS: 4
RELIGION NOT KNOWN: 4
RELIGION UNIDENTIFIABLE: 9
RINGATU: 31
ROMAN CATHOLIC (LATIN RITE): 171
SALVATION ARMY: 17
SEVENTH DAY ADVENTIST: 30
SHIA: 5
SIKH: 3
SPIRITUALISM: 1
SUFI: 2
SUNI: 9
SWEDENBORGIAN (NEW JERUSALEM CHURCH): 1
THERAVADA BUDDHIST: 2
UNITED PENTECOSTAL: 4
ZEN BUDDHIST: 5
TOTAL: 8419
Muster as at report date (4 June 2007): 8073
Number of prisoners who named more than one religion: 346

Weird Al Yankovic: You don't love me anymore

2008-04-01T22:21:00.000+13:00

Johnny Cash: God's gonna cut you down

2008-04-01T20:56:00.000+13:00

Thoughts on Zeitgeist

2008-03-19T22:45:00.002+13:00

One of the fascinating things I find is the way certain skeptics of the Biblical claims about Jesus make uncritical use of sources that are best described as laughable. One such source is the movie Zeitgeist, found on YouTube. It is the source of such claims as there being a dozen Middle Eastern writers who didn't mention Jesus, or the claim that the Flavianum Testimonium was known to be a fraud for hundreds of years. (Scholars who study Josephus generally regard the text as partially authentic, partly the result of Christian interpolation)

JB in his blog JB-Fedei Defensor has taken the time to answer many of the extraordinary claims this movie makes. His full discussion can be found here.

Can we rely on skeptics to stop using such discredited sources? I hope so... but I'm of the attitude that all hope ultimately disappoints.

Since JB has taken down his blog, I'm linking to the Webskeptic site which has links to numerous responses to the Zeitgeist movie. Also a link to Faith Interface for another view.

The Boondock Saints

2008-03-19T22:37:00.000+13:00

Thoughts on Ann and the ADL

2007-10-23T22:21:00.000+13:00

In the wake of Ann Coulter's confrontation with the Anti-Defamation League it is interesting to read the comments of David Klinghoffer here at the Discovery Institute.

Being a Jew himself David disagrees with Ann that a Jew must accept the authority of Jesus as Messiah, but he acknowledges that from her perspective her statement was entirely correct.

He goes on the argue that there are two ways of being a Jew, the first being merely a matter of biology. That is, merely an accident of birth. The second, which he advocates himself, sees Jewishness being related to Torah which he sees as being of cosmic significance.

I can subscribe to this position, although as a Christian I would agree with Ann that a Jew should embrace Jesus to be perfected. David deserves credit for a nuanced and reasonable position that seems quite foreign to the Anti Defamation League.

Thoughts on Tabloid Theology

2007-10-22T10:26:00.000+13:00

Michael Patton has some interesting thoughts to share on the subject of Tabloid Theology here.

In his words tabloid theology emphasizes sensationalist claims without criticism. This results in a theology that is very prone to being disrupted by encounters with cold hard reality.

In agreement with him I advocate a form of critical theology, where every claim is subjected to a high degree of scrutiny. Unlike Michael I am not a cessationalist, believing that the gifts of God's Holy Spirit are available to achieve His purposes today, but because of that we should be even more vigilant to ensure no false reports be included among our testimony.

Thoughts on Quirinius

2007-03-21T22:10:00.000+12:00

The Census of Quirinius and the birth of Jesus of Nazereth

As I have said in an earlier post the internal evidence suggests that Jesus was born between 6 and 4BC during the closing years of the reign of Herod the Great and during a census ordered by Augustus. The problem with this dating is that, according to Josephus, Quirinius whom Luke places as Governer of Syria at the time of the census did not ascend to that rank until about 6AD, a 10 to 12 year difference.

There have been a variety of suggested solutions to the problem and the referenced article mentions two. The first being that the passage in Luke can be translated:

‘This census happened before Quirinius was in charge of Syria’

While this is possible answer the writer of the article points out that such a translation is inconsistant with normal Greek practise.

A second answer is to suggest that Quirinius was governor of Syria at an earlier stage but as the writer points out again; although there is evidence that someone was legate for a second time in Syria, that person is not identified and the gaps that could be filled by Quirinius are before 10BC and from 4-1BC. Neither of these frame the time period that Jesus' birth embraced.

The writer's conclusion is that Luke's information is faulty and perhaps it is; even a careful historian may preserve incorrect information. However let us see if there are other possible options available to us.

Could Josephus be at fault? The gospel of Luke is the precursor to the book of Acts which internal evidence suggests was composed about 60AD. It is therefore closer to the events than Josephus' own writings. As careful a historian as Luke was demonstrated to be by Sir William Ramsay should perhaps be given the benefit of the doubt. Nonetheless I do not favour this answer. Josephus too has been shown to be a careful historian.

Perhaps the simplest answer is to acknowledge that a combination of distance and the techniques available to the ancients did not fasciliatate rapid compilation and assessment of data. The census begun prior to the birth of Jesus was not completed until Quirinius took over the governership of Syria. This attempted harmonisation does seem to answer the point without requiring any of the recorders to be in error.

Ultimately we cannot know for sure what happened 2000 years ago. There are difficulties in understanding certain parts of the Bible. However claiming that we need 100% certainty in every aspect of the Bible erects a standard that few, if any, documents could meet. The basics of Christianity can be fairly well established by normal historical criteria. The evidence is sufficient; it is not exhaustive.

A criticism of Randerson

2007-01-15T15:36:00.000+13:00

Professor Richard Dawkins, a zoologist from Oxford, has written a book called The God Delusion, in which he attempts to offer cogent argument against religious belief in general and Christian belief in particular. Leaving aside the ludicrous idea of a zoologist and atheist writing about religion, we turn our eyes closer to home and another Richard, Richard Randerson by name, who holds a position of some significance within the Anglican Church of New Zealand.

According to Deputy Bishop Randerson the appropriate response to Professor Dawkins’ fulminations is to roll on ones back and play dead. More specifically; to say that the response to Dawkins’ criticisms of Christianity is that some in the Christian church don’t believe in such concepts as God as supreme being anyway. Such a position is not Christian.

To argue that science cannot prove the existence of God as Randerson does is to say nothing. The scientific process is based on an individual observing a phenomena, constructing a hypothetical mechanism to explain that phenomena, testing the hypothesis and if it stands declaring it a theory and casting it into the trash if it does not. Few if any “theories” are proven; they are merely in a state of pre-falsification. Science does provide us with inferences such as the argument from first cause, or the design argument, which suggest the existence of deity but such general revelation does not lead us automatically to the God of the Bible.

The specific means by which we can know about God is through the Bible. This book records a history of the relationship between God and the human race through the eyes of Moses and the people of Israel. However Randerson rejects much of this book as well, in favour of his “god is a warm fuzzy feeling” heresy. He rejects the existence of the first man and woman, despite the fact that even atheists recognize that without a literal Adam and Eve and a literal rebellion against God, there is no need for Jesus, a divine settling of debts (atonement) or a literal resurrection. Interestingly enough Randerson accepts some form of resurrection despite it being unnecessary from his perspective and impossible for his warm fuzzy god to achieve.

The gospels that we have were determined by Dr. John A.T. Robinson to have been written prior to 64AD, within forty years of the Crucifixion and within the lifetime of many observers including Mary, Jesus’ mother. The gospels of Mark and Luke were not written by eyewitnesses but by researchers who were extremely careful in their work. It makes no sense for Randerson to reject the accounts of the Virgin Birth because Matthew and Luke could not have experienced it personally, if they could get the information from others. Those sources could have been friends of Joseph for Matthew, and Mary for Luke.

Christianity is based on events whose historical accounts at least rival the accuracy of other ancient sources. The doctrines derived from the accounts are logical and rational. In place of them Richard Randerson would substitute a tyranny of feelings and post-modern illogic. Ironically on this point Professor Dawkins and I agree. Dawkins despises Christians, but he has no use for those who profess some watered down beliefs. The beliefs of liberal Churchmen like Richard Randerson are indistinguishable from those of atheists on any point that matter and hence I have no use for them either.

I may have been a little hard on Richard Randerson, based on later comments he seems to adhere to a fairly orthodox position on the nature of God and Jesus. However the main thrust of my argument, that the Christian should not compromise their position because of the latest nonsense from atheists, is undisturbed.

An argument for the reasonableness of belief

2006-11-14T15:35:00.000+13:00

The argument for the reasonableness of theistic and Christian belief can be framed in many terms. Here I choose to focus on samples from the fields of philosophy, history and science.

From philosophy I choose the kalam, or cosmological, argument because as an engineer it appeals to my mechanistic mind.

The argument is framed thusly.

1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause

2) The universe began to exist

3) Therefore the universe has a cause

The first proposition cannot be proven, but it is also indisputable. Even David Hume, renowned Scottish philosopher, who raised an objection to the proposition, also acknowledged that any suggestion that something could happen without a cause was complete nonsense.

The second proposition agrees with everything we know about physics. From the first and second laws of thermodynamics it is possible to deduce that if energy cannot be created or destroyed by any process we know of, and that all energy in the universe is tending towards a low order "heat death" state of maximum entropy, there was a point of minimum entropy in the past. Before this point there would have been no energy exchange and hence essentially nothing could exist as we define existence.

Flowing from these propositions we conclude that the universe has a cause that cannot itself be part of the four dimensional universe.

Further information can be found at:

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/

From history we have the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was an individual born about 6-4BC during the reign of Herod the Great, in the town of Bethlehem of Judea. He lived for most of his life in the town of Nazareth in Galilee where he worked as a builder/carpenter.

He began a ministry as an itinerant teacher about 27-30AD and while relatively conventional in his beliefs (in the details he wasn't that far from Pharisaic Judaism) he made some astounding claims about himself. He claimed that ultimately everyone on Earth would be judged by him, and based on their allegiance to him. He claimed also that he would be betrayed, executed, and he would rise again on the third day.

At the culmination of his ministry Jesus was betrayed by one of his followers, the infamous Judas Iscariot, handed over to the temple authorities and put on trial for his life. He did not speak in his own defence but the lying witnesses that were brought against him contradicted each other to such an extent that finally the High Priest put him under oath and asked him if he was the Son of God. When Jesus said that it was as they said; which was an honourable way of responding in the affirmative in a world where just saying "yes" would have been considered shameful, they concluded that he was guilty of blasphemy which was traditionally a capital crime. However at this point Judea was a vassal state and only the Roman governor could authorise an execution.

Bringing him before the Procurator Pontius Pilate they sought to have him sentenced to death as a rabble-rouser. Pilate however resisted because he didn't care much for the Jewish leaders, and perhaps also because he believed Jesus to be innocent of the crime. Finally they threatened Pilate with a complaint to Caesar and he gave in to their demands. His soldiers took Jesus, flogged him, and then led him to the place of execution and crucified him.

Over the next few hours Jesus committed the care of his mother to one of his disciples and forgave his killers. Finally he gave up the ghost and died. He was placed in a tomb borrowed from Joseph of Arimethea, a member of the Sanhedrin (the Jewish court) but not an accomplice in Jesus' death.

On the third day after, the first day of the week which for the Jews was the Sunday, a party of women including Mary Magdalene and Salome came to see Jesus' body. It must be said that they probably weren't thinking too clearly because they had no idea how to remove the stone that had been placed in front of the tomb. However that proved to be an unnecessary concern as the stone had been removed. To their greater concern so had Jesus' body although his grave clothes had been left behind. However as Mary hung around the tomb and the other women ran to tell the apostles they each had an encounter with Jesus alive, well, but subtly different. He appeared able to conceal his identity and to move about undetected. He also had the injuries of his crucifixion but they didn't impair him at all. When his apostles encountered him he ate with them. This indicated that he was not a spirit which would have been the first assumption that the apostles would have made.

After a short period of time Jesus departed from his apostles, his exit being described as ascension into the clouds, leaving them with a commission to preach the message of the coming of the kingdom of God to the ends of the Earth. A couple of years after this Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee and fierce persecutor of the Jesus people, now called Christians, claimed to have experienced a meeting with the risen Jesus. This encounter changed his motivation from that of persecutor to ally and he became perhaps the foremost theologian in the early Church. As a symbol of this he changed his name to Paul.

It is from Paul's writing that we have our earliest formulation of the resurrection appearance. That is in 1 Corinthians chapter 5 verses 3-8. For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures, and that He was seen by Cephas (Peter), then by the twelve (a colloquialism that indicates the Apostles). After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep (died). It is universally agreed by Biblical scholars that this is a tradition that can be traced right back to the beginning of the Jesus movement, that is within 5 years of the crucifixion and resurrection.

By the standards of historical research the gap between the events and the record is so infinitesimal that we can be sure that it accurately records what was believed by the very first Christians. Although I do not call this "proof" the evidence does make it reasonable to believe that the resurrection of Jesus is a historical fact.

Further information can be found at:

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/

http://answering-islam.org/Gilchrist/crucifixion.html

http://members.tripod.com/enoch2112/ByronBurial.htm

http://www.tektonics.org/index.html

From the fields of science I choose the problem of the origin of life. The thorny question of "where did we come from?"

There are at present two players on the field. The evolutionary, "it just happened through chance acting on natural chemical processes", or the creationary, "a power beyond our own brought us into existence", alternatives.

It should be noted that some evolutionists claim that the origin of life is not part of evolutionary teaching because the evolutionary process only acts on existing organisms. While this is partly true the fact remains that evolutionists like Dr Gerald A. Kerkut defined evolution as "the theory that all living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which in turn arose from an inorganic form." That he could do this 40 years ago whilst the modern evolutionist attempts to avoid such statements suggests that the origin of life from non-life has provided little or no joy to the naturalists. The other problem with this evasion is that logically if a process cannot start it cannot continue which concedes the entire field to the creationist.

At its most basic level cells are constructed from non-living components that work together to produce a living organism. Organization, rather than chemical processes, is the basis of life. You can test this yourself. Squash a mosquito, it still possesses the chemicals it had before but it is now dead. Its organization is gone and so is its life.

The information used to produce and organise these components comes from the genetic code stored on DNA. DNA is the most efficient information storage mechanism in the world, a pinheads volume of DNA holding enough information to fill a 40 gigabyte hard drive 100 million times. Like any program capable of duplicating itself the DNA in the cell requires a mechanism for reading it, a mechanism for writing it and a further mechanism for utilizing it. This causes it to fulfill Dr Micheal Behe's definition of irreducible complexity. Each part of this tiny factory must be in place or there can be no living cell.

The basis of life is information; a bacterium has a certain quantity of information sufficient to produce more bacteria, a horse has a quantity of information sufficient to produce more horses. It is obvious that if the horse were descended from bacteria it would require the bacteria to somehow gain the information necessary for multi-cellular organisation, bones and hair and the information for gender. Dr Lee Spetner observes that no change recorded in the scientific literature demonstrates an increase in the information within the genome. Rather changes display either reshuffling or loss of information.

The only observed source of information is intelligence. It is reasonable to infer therefore that the source of the information within living organisms is also intelligence. Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA concurred. However because of his atheistic belief system he rejected the idea that we could be the product of divine creation and instead professed a belief that extra-terrestrial aliens somehow seeded Earth with life. This idea, called panspermia, suffers from the aforementioned problem. If aliens created us then what created the aliens? Either they somehow evolved which we have already seen to be unlikely, or another group of aliens created them. If another group of aliens created them then what created that group? This is the problem of infinite regression and is the most obvious reason why panspermia was rejected as an explanation of life.

In the complete absence of any naturalistic mechanism to explain the origin of the living cell, or the accumulation of information necessary for a single celled bacteria to become a multi-cellular organism like a horse, it is reasonable to propose an uncreated (therefore eternal) intelligence responsible for the creation of life on this planet.

Further information can be found at:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/

http://www.creationontheweb.com/

http://www.discovery.org/

http://www.trueorigin.org/

I do not claim that these arguments provided absolute proof of the existence of deity; however I propose that the cumulative force of these arguments is sufficient to provide a reasonable basis for a belief in theism in general and in Christian theism in particular.