Universe teeming with life? Not so fast, say physicists

This NASA Hubble Telescope photo shows 10,000 galaxies.

Of them, 9,000 are dead and lifeless, say research astrophysicists.

New study: gamma ray bursts make life impossible in 90% of galaxies

This is a peer-reviewed article from Science, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals. It speaks to the fine-tuning of the galaxy for life.

The article says:

Of the estimated 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, only one in 10 can support complex life like that on Earth, a pair of astrophysicists argues. Everywhere else, stellar explosions known as gamma ray bursts would regularly wipe out any life forms more elaborate than microbes. The detonations also kept the universe lifeless for billions of years after the big bang, the researchers say.

Another relevant discovery: "Invisible shield above the Earth protects us from electron threat."

A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered an invisible shield some 7,200 miles above Earth that blocks so-called “killer electrons,” which whip around the planet at near-light speed and have been known to threaten astronauts, fry satellites and degrade space systems during intense solar storms.

The "shield" is related to the Van Allen Belt, an electromagnetic ring around the earth that was discovered in the mid-1950s. The VAB is the product of the fact that earth's core is made up mostly of iron, the outer layer of which is liquid. The Earth's rotation produces convection about the core that in turn creates a magnetic field around the entire planet. The convection is itself produced by loss of heat from the core, and this heat loss comes from plate tectonics that, over enormous periods of time, churn the earth from the outer core to the near-surface and back again. Without plate tectonics, says Joseph Kirschvink of Cal Tech, there would be no convective "cells" to generate the magnetic field.

"Without our magnetic field," write paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee in Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe,

Earth and its cargo of life would be bombarded by a potentially lethal influx of cosmic radiation, and solar wind "sputtering" (in which particles from the sun hit the upper atmosphere with high energy) might slowly eat away at thew atmosphere, as it has on Mars.

Even in the 10 percent of galaxies that  "can support complex life like that on Earth," the radiation problem remains at the planetary level: does an otherwise-suitable planet have the necessary shields against lethal, non-gamma radiation? Unless the planet is highly ferrous, it won't. Unless is is highly ferrous and rotating fairly rapidly, it won't. Unless it is highly ferrous and rotating fairly rapidly and features plate tectonics, it won't. And none of these features have been found on any extra-solar planet.

Why physicists' heads explode

Phys.org:

One problem is that conventional physics doesn't really account for why the universe is so large, Arkani-Hamed said.

Albert Einstein's theory of relativity showed that a huge amount of energy exists in the vacuum of space, and it should curve space and time. In fact, there should be so much curvature that the universe is a tiny, crumpled ball.

"That should make the universe horrendously different than what it is," Arkani-Hamed said.

But quantum mechanics also poses a problem. The theory is good at describing the very small realm of particle physics, but it breaks down when physicists try to apply it to the universe as a whole.

"Everything that quantum mechanics is, is violated by our universe because we're accelerating (referring to the idea that the universe is expanding) – we don't know what the rules are," Arkani-Hamed said. "When you try to apply quantum mechanics to the entire universe, quantum mechanics cries 'uncle.'"

But fear not! The reason that our universe acts in ways that physicists don't understand is because they are simply living in the wrong universe! There are trillions and trillions of other universes, they claim, and perhaps if Arkani-Hamed lived in one of them it would make perfect sense to him. 

But he doesn't, nor do any others, so they mentally invent them. It's called String Theory, the idea that there are indeed trillions and trillions of other universes, and lucky us! we inhabit this one. As I have written before, advanced cosmologists have started writing science fiction, not science, although they use equations for their fiction rather than prose.

All their equations may work out, but that don't mean they actually know more than before or that reality has been discerned to a greater degree. Hawking admitted that postulating a universe of three or four dimension did not resolve mathematically. In fact, using up to 10 dimensions didn't work. So they tried 11 and presto! X = 0. Or something. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, "These are our equations. If they don’t work, we have others."

But back to the multiverses. Prof. Arkani-Hamed (he teaches at Harvard) and some others insist that there is a real problem with living in a universe that appears so finely tuned to support our lives when such fine tuning has no scientific explanation. So they say that there are, minimally, 10^500 other universes because that is the minimum number to make our universe's fine tuning feasible. Author Donald Johnson explains,

Koonin explains, "In an infinite multi-verse ... emergence of highly complex systems by chance is not just possible but inevitable. That this extremely rare event occurred on earth and gave rise to life as we know it is explained by anthropic selection alone." The anthropic illusion basically says we just lucked-out in that our Universe appears to be designed "toward man" (anthropic). The fallacy is that we're considering the only universe that we know exists (ours), and the fine-tuning that is evident in it. Speculation of innumerable other universes does not explain our Universe's fine-tuning.   

Others note that "String Theory" is not a scientific theory since it cannot be observed, tested, or falsified. "Alternative universes, things we can't see because they are beyond our horizons, are in principle unfalsifiable and therefore metaphysical." "The trouble is, proponents have not produced an iota of empirical evidence for strings. That's why University of Toronto physicist Amanda Peet--a proponent--recently called string theory a faith-based initiative'. "No part of it has been proven and no one knows how tо prove it'.   

"Because our Universe is, almost by definition, everything we can observe, there are no apparent measurements that would confirm whether we exist within a cosmic landscape multiple universes, or if ours is the only one. And because we can't falsify the idea, ... it isn't science '. "If ... the landscape turns out to be inconsistent ... as things stand we will be in a very awkward position. Without an explanations of nature's fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics'. It is clear that string theory is not science, but a philosophical belief. (Italics original)

So the physicists' dilemma is either to accept that, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," or find some way, however screwy and fictional, to deny it. 

Kaboom!

Not all wounds have scars . . .

Just because you cannot see any scars does not mean they are not wounded.

I cannot put it any better than Army wife Rachel Latham:

I have stood by and seen my husband off to war three times. Three times I have wondered if he would return home. Three times he has stood, along with others, to offer himself in the name of freedom.

I have felt the presence of God push me to my knees in prayer, only to find out later that the timing matched the exact hour of a firefight. I have seen both beauty and fear in those lonely days and nights.

I have stayed awake through the nights, unable to sleep, the reality of my comfortable secure  bed paid for at the price of those standing on the front lines.

I have calmed the fears of children, spoken words of strength and comfort into their hearts, when I felt so little in my own heart. A mother’s love can do that- offer what isn’t even always there in order to bring peace to a worried little one.

I have felt the joy of the return, knowing how so much has changed, but eternally grateful for the opportunity to learn each other again. Not everyone is allowed this, and I do not take it for granted. 

The war doesn’t leave and I have seen the burden carried by our vets as they recall those moments- the fights, the fears, the victories and the losses. I see them standing at monuments, a vacant look in their eyes as they remember, as their fingers drag along the discovery of a name on the monument. They can’t forget, and neither should we, the price that was paid.

I have seen the veterans in the hospital, seen the camaraderie that spans the generations of war…bonds that only those who have lived through could understand. I could never understand, not really, but that isn’t what I have been called to do. I can, however, be thankful.

I have seen and felt the thrashing in the night, of memories that will remain forever, relived only in nightmares.
 
I remember through this how precious our freedom is, how without those who have chosen to serve, we would have nothing. That freedom we enjoy is paid with this price. It isn’t paid only once though, but repeatedly by those who willingly serve. 

What are the odds of life? Beyond mere astronomical

 Lecompte de Nouy

The French biophysicist and mathematician Lecompte de Nouy was an internationally-regarded scientist whose work on surface tensions and other properties of liquids is still studied today. 

During his work, which started in World War One in trying to mathematically describe the healing of wounds, he examined the laws of probability for a single molecule of high dissymmtery to be formed by chance. De Nouy found that the time needed to form one such molecule worked out to be 10^253 years, or countless trillions of years. (This in a universe that scientists today say is a mere 14.5 billion years old.)

"But," continued de Nouy, "let us admit that no matter how small the chance it could happen, one molecule could be created by such astronomical odds of chance. However, one molecule is of no use. Hundreds of millions of identical ones are necessary. Thus we either admit the miracle or doubt the absolute truth of science." 

I posted before a lecture by James Tour, one of the 10 most cited chemists in the world, whose particular specialty is making molecules from scratch, ab initio, from atoms. 

… I will tell you as a scientist and a synthetic chemist: if anybody should be able to understand evolution, it is me, because I make molecules for a living, and I don’t just buy a kit, and mix this and mix this, and get that. I mean, ab initio, I make molecules. I understand how hard it is to make molecules. I understand that if I take Nature’s tool kit, it could be much easier, because all the tools are already there, and I just mix it in the proportions, and I do it under these conditions, but ab initio is very, very hard.

Think about this: the simplest form of life is the single-cell creature. There is, after all, no such thing as a "half-cell" creature. Of such organisms, prokaryotes "are the earliest and most primitive forms of life on earth." 

As organized in the Three Domain System, prokaryotes include bacteria and archaeans. Prokaryotes are able to live and thrive in various types of environments including extreme habitats such as hydrothermal vents, hot springs, swamps, wetlands, and the guts of animals. Prokaryotic cells are not as complex as eukaryotic cells . They have no true nucleus as the DNA is not contained within a membrane or separated from the rest of the cell, but is coiled up in a region of the cytoplasm called the nucleoid. 

Study that diagram and try to answer Dr. Tour's simple question: 

How do you get DNA without a cell membrane? And how do you get a cell membrane without a DNA? And how does all this come together from this piece of jelly?” We have no idea, we have no idea.

Prokaryotes did not evolve. Taking Dr. Tour's point, the cell's DNA contains the coding for the  formation and structure of the cell wall. But the cell wall could not have come after the DNA because without the cell wall to begin with, the DNA could not have either formed or survived its environment if it had formed. The DNA and cell wall had to have formed simultaneously, but how could that be if forming any organic matter at all is nothing but random chance combinations of atoms that have, in some vital cases, one chance in 10^253 to have formed at all? 

A prokaryote cell cannot have come into existence bit by bit because no bit could have survived without the rest of the cell to support it and give it life. And scientists have neither discovered nor described a potential, simpler pre-prokaryote. No, such a cell not only came into existence all at one time, it had to do so already capable of reproduction through binary fission, else the first would have been the only. 

And of course, this all happened by random chance, right? Which begs the question, What are the odds? 

No wonder that Freeman Dyson, one of the most celebrated scientists of the last 100 years, wrote in his essay, "How We Know," 

The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions [boldface added].

Then we have this observation by GK Philip & SJ Freeland, NASA Astrobiology Institute, University of Hawaii, in considering that of the 80 amino acids that could be used to build genetically encoded protein polymers, nature uses a “standard set” of 20 identified amino acids.

“Specifically, we show that the standard set of 20 amino acids represents the possible spectra of size, charge, and hydrophobicity more broadly and more evenly than can be explained by chance alone.” (emphasis added)

Amino acids, of course, are the building blocks of proteins, without which there is no life. But, "What are the odds of getting a functional protein by chance?" Well, see for yourself:

• BONDING: You need 99 peptide bonds between the 100 amino acids. The odds of getting a peptide bond is 50%. The probability of building a chain of one hundred amino acids in which all linkages involve peptide bonds is roughly (1/2)^99 or 1 chance in 10^30.

• CHIRALITY: You need 100 left-handed amino acids. The odds of getting a left-handed amino acid is 50%. The probability of attaining at random only L–amino acids in a hypothetical peptide chain one hundred amino acids long is (1/2)^100 or again roughly 1 chance in 10^30.

• SEQUENCE: You need to choose the correct amino acid for each of the 100 links. The odds of getting the right one are 1 in 20. Even if you allow for some variation, the odds of getting a functional sequence is (1/20)^100 or 1 in 10^65.

The final probability of getting a functional protein composed of 100 amino acids is 1 in 10^125. Even if you fill the universe with pre-biotic soup, and react amino acids at Planck time (very fast!) for 14 billion years, you are probably not going to get even 1 such protein. And you need at least 100 of them for minimal life functions, plus DNA and RNA.

But the difficulties of "random chance" continue. E.V. Koonin and A.S. Novozhilov, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, wrote:

A real understanding of the [genetic] code origin and evolution is likely to be attainable only in conjunction with a credible scenario for the evolution of the coding principle itself and the translation system.

Which is to say: 

• The origin of the genetic code is unknown
• The code operates according to a coding principle but no one knows how the principle started
• No one understands how the coding principle could have preceded the code itself, or even whether it did so.

But it all started randomly and uncaused, right? It just happened. Lucky us! British cosmologist (and ETI enthusiast) Paul Davies observed that there are just three possibilities of how life started on earth: 

1. A fluke (random chance), 
2. Unknown laws that make life a cosmic imperative, 
3. A miracle (that is, intentional acts by an outside agency)

Of number 1, Davies says this is the "ultimate just-so story." Of number 2, there is no evidence at all and of number 3, well, he doesn't say much. 

I am going with number 3 myself. I do not have enough faith to believe the other two.

Update: See this space.com article from December 2021: "What makes Earth unique? Scientists have found thousands of other worlds, but they're not like Earth."

14 Questions Church Leaders Should Ask about Church Finances

14 Questions Church Leaders Should Ask about Church Finances

A Checklist for Your Consideration

For now, I offer a checklist of questions. As you answer these questions, I hope you will be motivated to think how your church might look at its expenditures and budgets in a different light.

1. If you were to start your church’s budget from scratch, how differently would it look than your present budget?
2. Do you have programs and ministries that, if they were discontinued, would have little negative impact on the church or the community?
3. How much of the church’s expenditures reflect “the way we’ve always done it”?
4. Are there clear lines of accountability for spending at every level?
5. How much of the church’s funds are used to impact the community?
6. Is the church spending its personnel dollars in the most effective ways?
7. Who are the true decision makers on how church funds are spent?
8. Do some of the expenditures reflect preferential treatment toward some of the members?
9. Is debt hindering your church from doing effective ministry?
10. What are the potential unintended consequences of making significant changes in the budget and expenditures?
11. Do you know clearly how church funds given to support missions are being used?
12. Does your church spend too much or too little on physical facilities?
13. Does the church have adequate funds for training and development of staff and laity?
14. Does the church’s budget reflect faith, futility, or foolishness?

An Attitude of Abundance

If we really trust that God will provide for our churches in all areas, including finances, we may realize that we do not have a money problem; we may have a stewardship problem. These fourteen questions can be a starting point to help you move toward a realistic and faith-based approach to church finances.

Reason or superstition?

If this never happened, what did happen on Dec. 25-26, 1776?

From Atheist Professor to Catholic: An Interview with Dr. Holly Ordway

There were many pieces of evidence that all fit together to make a convincing case for the Resurrection [of Jesus]; I’ll mention just a couple here. One of them is the behavior of the disciples before and after the Resurrection. The Gospel accounts do not portray their behavior after the Crucifixion in a particularly flattering light. Even though Jesus had predicted his own resurrection, the disciples gave up and went away, assuming that Jesus was a failed messiah. If the disciples had made up the Resurrection story afterwards, why would they have included details that made them look disloyal and cowardly? My academic studies in literature allowed me to recognize that the Gospels were written as history, not myth or parable, and that there hadn’t been enough time for a legend to form. It began to seem like the best explanation for all these events being recounted this way, was that they really happened.

Then, after the Resurrection, there’s a complete turn-around in their behavior, and they become bold proclaimers of the Risen Lord. There were plenty of words that people in ancient times could have used to describe visions or sightings of ghosts, and indeed, such language would have gotten them in much less trouble! But they spoke of a Jesus who was alive, bodily resurrected, and in short order were willing to die for that claim.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence for the Resurrection, though, was the Church itself. If I supposed that the Church had invented the Resurrection to explain its own worship of Jesus, I had to ask, how did that worship arise in the first place? If the Church was not the result of a miracle, it was itself a miracle.

The last point is actually much stronger than people give credit. Skeptics and some self-described atheists (including some I have talked with) dismiss the historical fact of Jesus, claiming Jesus was invented by the Church or was, perhaps, a real man but one who was nothing like the Jesus described in the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament.

The problem is, as Prof. Ordway points out, that none of those alternative theories of Jesus explain the rapid rise of the apostolic missions and the sudden appearance, at a definite time of history and place, of the Church, which has from its inception declared it was founded solely on the life death and resurrection of one Jesus of Nazareth.

So if not those things, which an atheist must deny, then on what was the Church really founded? The Church undeniably began in the middle third of the first century C.E. It did not exist before then. How then to account for its founding apart from Jesus and the apostolic proclamation?

An analogy I have often used is this: The US Marine Corps was founded at Tun Tavern, Philadelphia, on Nov. 10, 1775. On that day, so the story goes, the first USMC recruiter enlisted the first USMC recruits (in a bar, of course, they being Marines after all).

Now to treat the founding of the Marine Corps as do skeptics treat Christianity, a skeptic would say something like this: "The USMC was not founded on Nov. 10, 1775, in Tun Tavern, but much later, perhaps as late as 1840. It probably was still in Philadelphia, though."

But on what basis could he make such a claim? Like the founding of the Church, there is no alternative story of the founding of the USMC that can be imagined to account for all the facts of the Corps' history. There is exactly zero evidence to support the contention that the USMC was founded other than what the histories say, and there is no evidence, either, to support the idea that the Church was founded either (A) at a time or place other than when claimed, or (B) for any reason other than what is claimed, namely, the resurrection of Jesus.

Or another way, if a skeptic were to claim that Washington never actually crossed the Delaware that night to attack the Hessians at Trenton, NJ, then he would have to also provide an historically-grounded  explanation of why and how the Hessians were defeated, killed, captured and plundered that day. Absent such, we will have to continue to adhere that Washington did indeed cross the Delaware as claimed.

My experience with such skeptics (who often call themselves "rationalists") is that as soon as you challenge them to produce actual historical evidence that the Church was not founded on the resurrection and its immediately-following apostolic proclamation, but on something else, and would they explain what that something else was and what is its documented, historical grounding, they change the subject and start talking about who will win the Super Bowl come February.

Dr. Ordway again:

It’s important to say that there was no single, knock-out piece of evidence that convinced me; I was convinced by the cumulative claim, the way it all fit together. Historical events can’t be proved like a math problem or tested like a scientific hypothesis, and there’s always a way to form an alternate explanation. But just because an alternative exists doesn’t mean it’s is equally reasonable or likely. Speaking within my own field of literature, there are people who claim that William Shakespeare didn’t really write his plays. There are even a few legitimately fuzzy areas: for instance, a few of his plays were co-authored, and it seems likely to me that at least one passage in Macbeth (Hecate’s speech) was a later interpolation. Nonetheless, the evidence taken as whole points to Shakespearean authorship!

This is another key point. Frequently (well, almost always), the skeptics or atheists I have talked with have invariably claimed that science rejects the resurrection and indeed, God himself. But they do not seem to grasp that the founding of the Church was an historical event, not a scientific experiment, and the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event, too, not a scientific experiment. Science can't validate or invalidate historical events: you can neither prove nor disprove, scientifically, that Gen. George Washington led his army across the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776, to attack Hessian forces at Trenton, NJ.

Human reason and intellect is much more than mere scientific knowledge. The question is not, I think, is there ironclad, "scientific" proof of God or the Resurrection, but is this: based on the weight of evidence, is Christian belief reasonable? For 2,000 years, reasonable has garnered the votes.

And that is most reasonable, too, as Blaise Pascal explained.

Update: "Why the Ancient Christian Record About Jesus Is the Most Reliable"

How we are committing cultural suicide

 From American Digest. The entire essay is here.

What is the conext? Among other things, this:

Today, though, sexual intercourse is delinked from procreation. Since the invention of the Pill some 40 years ago, human beings have for the first time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward premarital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the past four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that they can't reliably gain men's sexual and emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage.

That's how we committed (and continue to commit) cultural suicide, but it doesn't say why. As for that question, here is one clue:

In particular, sexual sin seems to be the largest single factor driving disbelief in our culture. Brant Hanson calls sex “The Big But” because he so often hears this from unbelievers: “’I like Jesus, BUT…’ and the ‘but’ is usually followed, one way or the other, with an objection about the Bible and… sex. People think something’s deeply messed-up with a belief system that says two consenting, unmarried adults should refrain from sex.” In other words, people simply do not want to follow the Christian teaching that sexual intercourse should take place only between and man and woman who are married, so they throw the whole religion out.

But I maintain that after 50 years of this "liberation," it is empirically provable that this is the way that leads to death.

Left Behind gets left behind

Thankfully, American movie goers seem to have enough sense not to waste their time or money with religious escapism nonsense. Left Behind, the new thriller based on the best-selling books of the same name, and starring Nic Cage, basically bombed at the box office by pulling in less than $7 million its opening weekend, ranking it the sixth in box office gross.

The Rapture is not biblical and was not taught by the apostles or their successors. The whole thing was simply made up whole cloth by members of a small sect called the Plymouth Brethren in the 1820s. (The Plymouth Brethren are still around, btw.)

Here's a short video to get up to speed on how it came to be: Where Did Rapture Theology Come From? by leading Bible scholar Ben Witherington.

 

Topics too tough to preach

I call the list below by that name because they usually not suitable for a Sunday sermon because they have one or more of these characteristics:

• They are too complex to cover well in 15-20 minutes
• They are topics for which faithful answers can be found on multiple sides
• They press to close emotionally to some people
• They may be important and faith related, but they are not necessarily “worshipful” for inclusion in a worship service.
• They may have political overtones.

For these reasons, I think a sermon delivery is too one-way and non-interactive to effectively address them.

With that said, here is my list of such topics. Please feel free to add your own in a comment. 

·        Sexuality, cohabitation, weddings, marriage and the Church in the age of the Pill

·        Immigration, compassion and justice

·        Divorce

·        Homosexuality and same-sex marriage

·        Terminal care and end of life for parents or other loved ones

·        The death penalty

·        Violence done to or by Christians

·        What does the Bible really say happens when you die?

·        The Rapture and being "Left Behind"

·        Islam

·        Just War Theory and the new war against ISIS

·        Others? 

Wish fulfillment or the smart bet?

Blaise Pascal was one of the most important mathematicians of the modern era and a devout Christian. In the 17th century he wrote,

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Compare with the 20th-century's Aldous Huxley, author of the classic work on dystopia, Brave New World, who explained in "Ends and Means" (1937) that his reasons for rejecting Christian teachings were neither rationalistic nor philosophical. They were purely selfish.

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.

Here's the whole Pascal quote:

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. 

Sure, Christianity would be great if only it was true. But it isn't. What a shame!

But what happens when a Harvard-educated atheist confronts the dilemmas of her own belief and starts to examine not whether Christian faith is provably true or provably untrue, but whether it makes sense to profess?

By Valentine's Day, I began to believe in God. There was no intellectual shame in being a deist, after all, as I joined the respectable ranks of Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers.

I wouldn't stay a deist for long. A Catholic friend gave me J. Budziszewski's book Ask Me Anything, which included the Christian teaching that "love is a commitment of the will to the true good of the other person." This theme—of love as sacrifice for true good—struck me. The Cross no longer seemed a grotesque symbol of divine sadism, but a remarkable act of love. And Christianity began to look less strangely mythical and more cosmically beautiful.

At the same time, I had begun to read through the Bible and was confronted by my sin. I was painfully arrogant and prone to fits of rage. I was unforgiving and unwaveringly selfish. I passed sexual boundaries that I'd promised I wouldn't. The fact that I had failed to adhere to my own ethical standards filled me with deep regret. Yet I could do nothing to right these wrongs. The Cross no longer looked merely like a symbol of love, but like the answer to an incurable need. When I read the Crucifixion scene in the Book of John for the first time, I wept.

(The Atheist's Dilemma)

I keep coming back to Pascal again, here to his famous wager. Many people, including philosophers or theologians, mischaracterize Pascal's Wager as one of the weakest philosophical arguments in favor of God existence. In fact it is not really much of an argument for God's existence at all but an assessment of the rationality of believing in God.

Suppose you hear reports that your house is on fire and your children are inside. You do not know whether the reports are true or false. What is the reasonable thing to do—to ignore them or to take the time to run home or at least phone home just in case the reports are true?

Suppose a winning sweepstakes ticket is worth a million dollars, and there are only two tickets left. You know that one of them is the winning ticket, while the other is worth nothing, and you are allowed to buy only one of the two tickets, at random. Would it be a good investment to spend a dollar on the good chance of winning a million?

No reasonable person can be or ever is in doubt in such cases. But deciding whether to believe in God is a case like these, argues Pascal. It is therefore the height of folly not to "bet" on God, even if you have no certainty, no proof, no guarantee that your bet will win.

Life, says Pascal, is a coin toss in which all bets are called in at death. One bet is atheism and the other is Christian faith. At death the coin falls over - heads is God and tails is atheism. Reason alone, says Pascal, cannot decide which is true. So which way to bet is smarter? That is what Pascal is getting at, the smart move.

Agnosticism, he says, is actually impossible. An agnostic simply thinks he declines to bet. But you can't decline to bet because you can't decline to die. Agnosticism when the coin falls over is indistinguishable from atheism. So everyone is wagering whether he likes it or not, whether he even realizes it or not.

Once it is decided that we must wager; once it is decided that there are only two options, theism and atheism, not three, theism, atheism, and agnosticism; then the rest of the argument is simple. Atheism is a terrible bet. It gives you no chance of winning the red prize. Pascal states the argument this way:

You have two things to lose: the true and the good; and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to avoid: error and wretchedness. Since you must necessarily choose, your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other. That is one point cleared up. But your happiness? Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us assess the two cases: if you win, you win everything: if you lose, you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then: wager that he does exist.

If God does not exist, it does not matter how you wager, for there is nothing to win after death and nothing to lose after death. But if God does exist, your only chance of winning eternal happiness is to believe, and your only chance of losing it is to refuse to believe. As Pascal says, "I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then finding out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true." If you believe too much, you neither win nor lose eternal happiness. But if you believe too little, you risk losing everything.

But there is a more practical side, too. I live my life (imperfectly) according to my deep conviction that "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again." Suppose I am wrong, that the entire of Christian faith is nothing but wind, that at my death the coin will fall to tails, but I won't even know it because there is no heaven, no hell, no nothing after life.

Is what way have I been deprived? How might I have lived my life better? How might I have better found meaning, purpose, mission and worth? Put simply, in what way was I worse off believing than I would have been not believing? And how can any of that compare with the incomparable payoff if the coin had fallen heads, and I could not know for sure in advance?

You have already made the bet. The coin is now spinning. What is your bet?

Cops are not soldiers

And should neither be equipped nor uniformed to look like them. Law Prof. Glenn Reynolds hit the nail so precisely:

CHANGE: Congress under pressure from left and right to ‘demilitarize’ police. If you want to do that, you need not only to get rid of the Defense Department’s surplus weapons program, but also the HHS and Justice Department grants that let police buy military type weapons. A simple rule would be to provide that police can have only weapons that a civilian could lawfully possess, since they’re civilians themselves.

Absolutely. Then there's this from the WaPo: "The Pentagon gave nearly half a billion dollars of military gear to local law enforcement last year"

The events in Ferguson, Missouri this week are an uncomfortable reminder of the militarization of America's small town law enforcement agencies. The photos coming out of the town--of heavily armed officers in full combat gear squaring off against unarmed protesters--look like images we're used to seeing from places like Gaza, Turkey, or Egypt, not from a midwestern suburb of 21,000 people.

One of the ways police departments have armed themselves in recent years is through the Defense Department's excess property program, known as the 1033 Program. It "permits the Secretary of Defense to transfer, without charge, excess U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) personal property (supplies and equipment) to state and local law enforcement agencies (LEAs)," according to the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center.

The 1033 program has transferred more than $4.3 billion in equipment since its inception in 1997. In 2013 alone it gave nearly half a billion dollars worth of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies, according to the program's website.

We are adopting the Middle East Model, and it's not Islam

The Nile could not be managed by independent satrapies

In his book, Cannibals and Kings, anthropologist Marvin Harris explains the difference in the development of nation-state governments in the "hydraulic kingdoms" of the Middle East and the "rainfall economies" of northern Europe. In both cases the issue affecting formation of government was water and the creation of wealth. These were agricultural economies, with agricultural production being the foundation of all wealth. In the Middle East, water meant rivers since there was little rainfall, and management of rivers required a strong central-planning agency.

In the case of Egypt's Nile, that led to an all-powerful pharoahite government, a pattern mostly duplicated elsewhere in the ancient Middle East. Therefore, wealth became concentrated in the central government because the rulers controlled the means of production and the water resources production required.

In northern Europe, rivers were hardly necessary to agriculture because of reliable, year-round precipitation. Because wealth creation was therefore dispersed, so was political power. Nowhere in the hydraulic kingdoms was there the equivalent of European systems of kings, dukes, barons, counts or marquis, all of whom did not depend on the king or the king's government to till the land and grow its wealth. They therefore had the means to resist the near-total centralization of power found in the Middle East. When such centralization did occur, it was an aberration and short-lived.

When the means to create wealth is dispersed, political power is dispersed along with it. Wealth gains political power, but political power is not needed just to create wealth. In the Middle East, however, wealth came from political power because there was no means to create wealth of significance apart of political power. So for centuries, nay millennia, the way to become wealthy there was first to gain political power.

This pattern survives to this day. Saddam Hussein, for example, was a nobody of limited material means until he literally murdered his way into power in Iraq in 1979. It was after gaining control of Iraq's government that Saddam became wealthy beyond all avarice.

Now the point of this little history lesson is this: In the United States, the means to create wealth and the exercise of political power in public office are being steadily unified. We are already well along to adopting a Middle East model. Since the Obama administration came into being, the wealthiest counties of America and the most politically-powerful counties of America have for the first time become the one and same - all concentrated in and around Washington, D.C. Through minute regulation of economic activity, America's political class is deliberately suppressing wealth creation over the broad expanse of the country, while funneling tax dollars to favored cronies. Remember, for example, Solyndra?

At the same time, the political figures are using their offices to gain personal wealth. Consider Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader and hence one of the most powerful figures in Washington. He was born into poverty, growing up in a home that had no running hot water or indoor toilet. His first job in D.C. was working the night shift as one of the Capitol Hill Police. Yet after entering national office, his personal wealth has arisen to as much as $10 million.

But what sent me into writing this post was today's report that the champion rent seekers of all time, Bill and Hillary Clinton, "turned the State Department into a racket to line their own pockets" while she was secretary of state.

“These documents are a bombshell and show how the Clintons turned the State Department into a racket to line their own pockets,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. Judicial Watch and the Washington Examiner teamed to seek and publish those documents today. “How the Obama State Department waived hundreds of ethical conflicts that allowed the Clintons and their businesses to accept money from foreign entities and corporations seeking influence boggles the mind,” said Fitton, adding, “That former President Clinton trotted the globe collecting huge speaking fees while his wife presided over U.S. foreign policy is an outrage." The Examiner reported that the former president gave 215 speeches and earned $48 million while Hillary Clinton was at State.

Welcome to the potentate kingdom of the United States.

Update, Dec. 2017: And the beat goes on: "Census Bureau: 5 Richest Counties Are D.C. Suburbs"

Update, April 2025: 

The Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency has turned its eyes on just how have so many members of Congress become very or even fabulously wealthy while drawing a salary that is not particularly high, considering D.C.'s cost of living and having to maintain as well a residence in their home states. 

Members of Congress may currently purchase and trade stocks and cryptocurrency, provided they report all transactions. The base salary for Senators and Representatives is $174,000 per year. Some exceptions include the Speaker of the House ($223,500), the President pro tempore of the Senate, and the majority and minority leaders in the House and Senate ($193,400). 

Yet some members of Congress have net worths that put them in elite standing—well over $100-$200 million.

Consider these charts:

SPY is an S&P 500 index fund, tracking the performance of the S&P 500. The vast majority of equity funds underperform the S&P 500. That is why Warren Buffet has said for many years that ordinary Americans saving for retirement should just buy S&P 500 index funds (there are others than SPY) and that's it. So note how investments of members of Congress have done relative to the S&P 500 in the left chart, released by the investment firm Unusual Whales.

The second chart shows the return comparison of two of Unusual Whales' ETFs. NANC duplicates the investments of Democrat members and GOP that of Republican members. Until the recent market downturns, NANC was doing so well that I invested in it for quite some time. (Just try to imagine why the fund is called NANC.)

Both Democrats and Republicans have long been invested - literally - in the Middle East model, that the way to wealth is gaining political office and using it for self aggrandizement and advantage. And that is the reason DOGE is being so strongly opposed, because it is also exposing how the Ruling Class has used tax dollars to line their own pockets.

Source: ZeroHedge

Remember: when our politicians denounce "wealth inequality," it means only that ordinary Americans have too much money and the Ruling Class does not have enough.

Christian clergy's fantasy theology

Quick Thoughts On Today’s Non-Violent Witness:

July 31, 2014

We are safe. We are healthy. All is well.

Today’s action went incredibly well, any way you choose to look at it. More than 100 faith leaders (Many clergy. Even Bishops) chose to be arrested at the White House, as a witness against our nation’s treatment of immigrants, calling the President and Congress to act.

The DC Park Police treated us with the utmost respect and dignity. They treated us fairly and, dare I say: kindly.

The witness was peaceful and powerful. At a certain point, the police backed away all other bystanders and media from a very large perimeter…about half a football field. That was a sobering moment…to realize that we had been separated out, and were now standing alone, in front of the White House itself.

After three “warnings,” they then moved in and, one by one, took us into custody.

What you have to understand is that being arrested was the entire point of the exercise. In an FB post about the day, the author wrote, "Our non-violent witness at the White House Thursday was a powerful experience."

Powerful for whom? Not for Obama nor for any of his administration. It was powerful for him. And that in fact was the entire point.

This "Arrest me!" drill is a perfect example of what Lee Harris called "fantasy theology," though he wrote of it in a different context.

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with this particular kind of fantasy occurred when I was in college in the late sixties. A friend of mine and I got into a heated argument. Although we were both opposed to the Vietnam War, we discovered that we differed considerably on what counted as permissible forms of anti-war protest. To me the point of such protest was simple — to turn people against the war. Hence anything that was counterproductive to this purpose was politically irresponsible and should be severely censured. My friend thought otherwise; in fact, he was planning to join what by all accounts was to be a massively disruptive demonstration in Washington, and which in fact became one.

My friend did not disagree with me as to the likely counterproductive effects of such a demonstration. Instead, he argued that this simply did not matter. His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason — because it was, in his words, good for his soul.

What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him.

And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view — for that would still have been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability. Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy.

It was not your garden-variety fantasy of life as a sexual athlete or a racecar driver, but in it, he nonetheless made himself out as a hero — a hero of the revolutionary struggle. ...

 For want of a better term, call the phenomenon in question a fantasy ideology — by which I mean, political and ideological symbols and tropes used not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy. 

And that is the preferred theology of the ordained Left in America: purely symbolic acts by which they prove to one another that they are on the side of the angels. That nothing actually changes concerning the protested situations is entirely beside the point.

It's equations all the way down.

A couple of car-fulls of us went to see the movie, "God's Not Dead" last Sunday. The main plot line follows a college freshman Christian who is bullied by his atheist philosophy professor into debating him in class on the existence of God. At one point, Prof. Radisson cites with great emphasis what physicist Stephen Hawking wrote in his latest book, The Grand Design, in which Hawking asserts that the laws of physics make God unnecessary to explain the beginning of the universe. So a few thoughts on what Hawking and co-author (and actual main writer) Leonard Mlodinow said in the book. 

Stephen Hawking is probably the best-known physicist of our day. He is the author of a number of mass-media books about science, including A Brief History of Time, which begins this way:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

The premise of Hawking's latest book, The Grand Design, co-authored with physicist Leonard Mlodinow, strikes me as not much of an improvement of the turtles thesis. Instead of turtles, Hawking has equations.

When the Marquis de Laplace presented his work,Mecanique celeste, to Napoleon, the conqueror complained that LaPlace had not mentioned of God in the text. Laplace replied,"Emperor, I have no need for that hypothesis."

That is the specific premise - nay, the very objective - of The Grand Design, in which Hawking claims that God is not needed to explain the beginning of the universe. "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," writes Hawking. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

It's striking how much this kind of science is coming to resemble science fiction with its own religious overtones. As Mlodinow is quoted:

We don't have a laboratory where we can control what's going on. We can't repeat the experiment and take the data. Also, the universe — since we believe in quantum theory now — is a quantum system.

What Hawking et al have done is written a form of science fiction using equations rather than prose. All their equations may work out, but that doesn't mean they actually know more than before or that reality has been discerned to a greater degree. Hawking admitted that postulating a universe of three or four dimension did not resolve mathematically. In fact, using up to 10 dimensions didn't work. So they tried 11 and presto! X = 0. Or something. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, "These are our equations. If they don’t work, we have others."

It's equations all the way down.

In a sense, of course, all mathematical constructs are fictional, that is, creations of the mind. However, some math is purely theoretical in ways that other math is not. Negative numbers for example, have no real-world referent like positive numbers do. You cannot point to a fruit basket and say meaningfully, "That basket contains minus four apples." Mathematicians themselves even refer to "imaginary numbers."

"All text has intention" is the basic premise of post-modern, linguistic deconstructionism (that basically, there is no such thing as objective truth, that all statements are only opinions). And so it is with Hawking's work. I've no doubt that he is impelled by a childlike curiosity about the universe that is so crucial to scientific work. But Hawking has been trying for years to establish in the popular mind his world view, which is not really a scientific one, but scientistic, a non-confirmable belief that science describes reality exhaustively and absolutely. But the scientific method cannot even demonstrate this, much less subject it to empirical verification. Scientism is a religious-type belief in science. As Mlodinow says, "We believe in quantum theory."

This is really a work of fiction, using numbers rather than prose.

And so Hawking now claims that the universe simply popped into existence from nothing whatsoever, resting his claim purely upon mathematical constructs that are no less fictional than seventh-grade quadratic equations.

Yet Hawking may have shored up Genesis’ account as much as attacked it. Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss says, "Empirically, we can actually have evidence that the universe came from nothing. One of the key things is that the total energy of the universe is zero, which is only possible if the universe came from nothing. It could have been otherwise. It could have been not zero."

So it would seem that science has confirmed what the Church has claimed since earliest days, creatio ex nihilo, the idea that the universe’s antecedent was nothing at all. (One professor told me that the only reason the Jews didn't write creatio ex nihilo was that they didn't speak Latin.) That being so, a cynic might ask why a fiction of physicists’ equations should be preferred to the  fiction of ancient priests' prose, since they both claim basically the same thing. Or perhaps the two accounts are not so separate as we think. Richard Feynman, after all, said that calculus, the basic math of physics, was, "the language God talks."

I prefer the priestly account of creation to Hawking's, since, as Mlodinow pretty much admitted, Hawking's and his concept of the universe's "grand design" is at bottom conjecture. Scientists may be able to describe how I got here, but not why. They can say what we can do, but not what we should do. Mlodinow said that there is no laboratory to research the universe’s beginning. But we live in a real-world lab with certain consequences. So we are better off heeding the wisdom of the prose than the conjecture of equations, even if they are equally false, or true.

Closing thought: Why is Hawking so willing to assume that the universe simply "big banged" itself into existence when we deny that anything else does so? And if the universe simply appeared, just popped into being, why do other such appearances not happen routinely? Why, for example, don't spherical balls (or whatever) just pop up in my front yard or yours from time to time?

But they don't. In fact, the entire universe itself consists only of contingent events that bring forth only contingent entities. But somehow, Hawking is nonetheless willing to say that the universe as a whole is a self-existing, self-created entity, but none of its components are. Ah, how creative is the atheist mind!

See also, "Stephen Hawking Should Stick to Physics" at RealClearScience.

Dr. Hawking essentially believes that the laws of physics can replace God. Apparently, in his mind, it is somehow more scientific to believe in "spontaneous creation" rather than divine creation. However, his statement is nothing more than philosophy masquerading as science. Because his hypothesis is just as untestable as any religious belief, it is well beyond the scope of science.

Indeed.

See also "Why God must exist."