Last Sunday evening, I went to a talk on Science and Religion at the Schwenkfelder church nearby. You may recall that I had taught a college course on the subject, so it's special interest of mine. There were lots of astronomy slides, and after the talk someone asked the inevitable question on the existence of extra-terrestrial life. It was all I could do to keep from jumping up and lecturing on Mars and comets. But afterwards, it puzzled me why this particular question always arises. Is there something about the Bible that forbids extra-terrestrial life? Or is there something about Darwin that forbids it? What is the motivation?

It could be that in 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for holding heretical views including the view that there were an infinity of worlds with intelligent life. Or it could be that Darwinism claims Evolution is so inexorable that if life should ever form on another planet, why it had to evolve into Richard Dawkins by now, and if we had another planet full of Dawkins clones, then did Jesus also save them from their sins, or is the Bible just a parochial book in a universe of Bibles? That is, are the universal and unique claims of Christianity undermined by the existence of extraterrestrial life?

I've blogged on this before, arguing that fine protestant theologians like CS Lewis, found nothing unchristian about life on other planets. A colleague of mine asked Alexei, the patriarch of Moscow if ET were impermissible, and he thought not. To my knowledge, the Vatican supports scientists in this branch of Astrobiology. So I don't think there is any contradiction between the Bible and ET. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that the Bible demands belief in ET, since angels, demons, cherubim, seraphim and God himself are not terrestrial.

But this answer doesn't really satisfy the underlying unease that motivates every audience to ask about ET. It would seem that Bible presents a linear view of history: a creation, a fall, a redemption, a consummation. Nowhere in this linear chain is there a place for a meaningless digression into other worlds filled with ET. Somehow ET upsets the cause-effect chain that Aquinas said takes us from our present world of Dow-Jones and taxes back to the Creator of the universe. So like a pebble in the shoe, we are annoyed, we can't get rid of it, it won't fit our worldview. 

This post is intended to address that scruple, and show how time and our universe isn't linear, that our conception of the Bible is too narrow, and that our god is too small.

Linearity

We are accustomed to thinking of life like a car repair manual. "First remove the bolts holding the carburetor, then remove the bracket..." And when you finally have the whole mess apart, and replaced the thingummy that was broken, the manual unhelpfully says "Assembly is the reverse of disassembly."  As if you could reverse the action of the screwdriver that pried the two rusted pieces apart! What am I supposed to do, get out a hammer?

But that is the point. We expect cars to be taken and put back together linearly. And when we find we need three hands to compress the spring while inserting the bolt and holding the wrench, we curse the manuals and GM and whoever invented cars. But what if the world doesn't just need three hands, but a thousand hands and a million prayers? What if what you do today affects who your grandchildren marry and the failure of the Byzantine Empire? Yes, I know there is a subgenre of Sci-Fi literature about time-travel and the logical conundrums this elicits, but this is because Sci-Fi implicitly excludes a God who dwells outside of time.

Let's use a different analogy. Suppose the world and time are like a vast jigsaw puzzle that God is assembling on His dining room table. Does He have to put the pieces together in a row, or can He work on one section at a time before assembling the sections? He has the box-top, He knows what it is all going to look like, but what dictates the order? We, the little puzzle piece, don't know the big picture. Some things make sense and fit together, some don't. And it would be wrong for us to think that because the piece next to us doesn't fit, that somehow the big picture is ruined or changed or forever altered.

Continuing the analogy, the Bible gives us a big picture of the world. 99% of the Bible is about things on this planet, though some extra-planetary material occurs in Gen 1:1-2, Job 1:6-12; 2:1-6, and much of the book of Revelation. So it is not surprising that we tend to think of this book as a Earth-centered story, a jigsaw landscape with a tiny inset in one corner with a throne on a glassy dias. And we think the Bible is mostly concerned with getting the puzzle pieces all lined up to finish the landscape. Then when the astronomer comes with his pictures of the Andromeda galaxy and makes earth an inconsequential dot in a universe without any emerald rainbows, we have a bad case of cognitive dissonance. Something just isn't right.

Non-Linearity

But what if we have a puzzle box-top like those DVD covers for Hannah Montana that show two different pictures depending on the angle you look? What if one angle shows the galaxy, one angle shows the great white throne, and another angle shows the pastoral landscape of Earth. How can this be? Well if you get out a magnifying glass and look at that DVD cover, you will see that it is covered in tiny little ridges which are plastic prisms. A slight change of angle, and you see a different side of the prism, which directs your gaze to a different picture. Using microlithography techniques developed for microchips, those prisms can be made so small that your eye doesn't even see the little lines in the picture. (I know the fellow that made these clear plastic sheets for your computer monitor so you would be able to watch 3-D movies at home, but the company that contracted him went bankrupt in the dot-com crash, and he doesn't hold the patents.)

But the point I'm trying to make, is that by patterning creation down to the microscopic level, the big picture can change abruptly and discontinuously. There is meaning at every level of life, from the big picture culture down to the microscopic number of hairs on your head. And they all interact with each other. The car repair manual assumed that your car is made of sizeable, discrete units that connect to each other in only one way, and therefore repair consisted of a finite number of steps to remove and reattach units. But now imagine that there were a repair manual for surgeons. Would it read the same way? No, because they recognize that life is a unitary whole, and one can't remove the heart without simultaneously keeping the blood circulating and the lungs adding oxygen. Nor would a surgeon's manual say "assembly is the reverse of disassembly" because it manifestly isn't. The scalpel that cuts the flesh can't be reversed, but sutures have to be employed to hold it back together again.

These are spatial examples, but we can also give temporal examples. Does a man's life consist in the abundance of his possessions? Is a man's life the successive collection of accomplishments: adding a boat and a vacation home to the three cars and family dwelling that were added to the wife and two kids that were added to the diploma and first job? What describes the successful trajectory of a man's life through time? Is there a non-linear connection between the past and the future?

Yes, time is invariably linear, and despite many wishes and desires otherwise, it cannot be undone. But even so, one can foresee the potential future, and shape the decisions made now for the future that is to come. In that sense, the future does affect the past, just as much as the past affects the future. If my goal is a mansion with a 3-car garage, then I will chose a profession and lifestyle that will achieve it, and being an indigent Franciscan friar will not be on the list. This is too obvious to need explication.

But now suppose that you are given the jigsaw boxtop, and you can see 1000 years into the future as well as a 1000 years into the past; you can see 100 yards across the fence to your neighbor as well as a million lightyears to the next galaxy. How will that knowledge affect your decisions? You would not merely be concerned with your children's schooling, but with your grandchildren's schooling and your great-great-great-grandchildren's schooling. You would not just want to learn sums and grammar in school, but would want to learn Moses' and Elijah's curricula as well. You would not just worry about the unseasonable weather that affects the price of cornflakes today, but the famines of the Dark Ages and the threat of Global Climate change tomorrow. In other words, you would see yourself from the global and eternal perspective of God and adjust your life accordingly.

Against Determinism

I've tried to show that if the universe in its time and space dimensions is known by God and revealed to us, then we are no longer living in a linear world where effect follows cause from the creation to the final apocalypse, because we can anticipate the future and therefore affect the past. It isn't time travel, but neither is it determinism. It is a tangled web of causation and effect, where everything affects everything else, and the whole is known by God.

Now just because our futures are known, does not mean that our lives are fated, determined, impervious to will, because determination implies a linear chain of cause and effect. Suppose now that you knew that you were going to die if you steered into oncoming traffic, and chose to remain in your lane. In what sense was your choice determined? You anticipated a future that did not exist in your past, and ordered your life accordingly. But there are an infinite number of potential futures, and therefore an infinite number of causes for your behavior. Does it even make sense then to say that our lives are deterministically decided by our past? No one could reproduce your life like some preprogrammed robot because no one could collect all the infinite futures that made up the choices in your life.

And likewise, when we see more of the future, we have even more choices to make. When the Bible shows us even a glimpse of the jigsaw boxtop, it hugely changes the decisions and life we then live.

Against Functionalism

BF Skinner famously said that the brain is a black box that we don't understand, but if we watch what goes in and what comes out, we can accurately predict the behavior. His view is called behaviorism, making the assumption that the brain or person or animal is an autonomous machine whose continuing existence can be described by functions. He would say that just as a computer is predictable such that programs collect data and generate output, so also humans are just biological computers.

In response, I would say that Skinner made two fundamental errors. In the previous section we pointed out that humans can anticipate the future. This means that output, or even potential output can be redirected back into the input. One of the fathers of the modern computer, Von Neumann, showed that when a computer is fed in data that comes from its output, this recursive loop makes the computer completely unpredictable. Thus, Skinner's hypothesis that he can predict outcomes merely from inputs is already falsified. Modern neuroscience refers to this anticipation of the future as the "concept of self", and many books have been written on it without, seemingly, any progress on understanding or describing it.

But the second error Skinner made is equally pernicious. He assumed that the box could be isolated from its surroundings. Suppose the box was inside another box which included Skinner himself. How could he separate his own observations from the input into the box? Suppose Skinner's own surprise at the output became another input, how then could he predict anything? It is a common problem in physics, that to measure a small effect, enormous effort has to go into the design of the measurement apparatus to isolate it from its surroundings. If it cannot be isolated, no useful measurement can be made. Functionalism assumes that pieces can be isolated from the whole, that the total is made up of the sum of its parts, and we have just seen why this cannot be done.

We mentioned above how knowledge of the future ties us into a web of meaning, now I am arguing that knowledge of our surroundings ties us into a web of existence.

Web of Existence

If reality, as Democritus and its modern equivalent of methodological materialism, would want us to believe is made up of discrete particles bouncing around in the void, then there is no web of existence. All interactions are local interactions, all influences come from atoms or photons hitting us or being emitted. And if we were to put our experiment or our baby in a box, then it would be isolated from the rest of the universe, and could be studied as Skinner desired. But if, as quantum mechanics and Michael Faraday both said, there are long-range forces that influence the experiment, if there are astrological signs and invisible fields and ancestral spirits that can make a difference, then the experiment in the box will never be conclusive.

Well, you might argue, we just have to make the box bigger (or smaller) to include or exclude all those extraneous effects. If the position of the planets have an effect on our future, let us make a box that incorporates the Solar System, and then we can be materialists again. Or if the mind and will are hard to incorporate into the model of a baby, let us just shrink the box down to one cell in a baby's brain. Surely by one method or the other, we can find a unit that can be understood in its entirety without invoking extraneous influences.

Let me suggest that it can't be done. At every spatial scale, from the subatomic electron to the universe itself, the web of existence connects each part. The conceit of science, the hypothesis of the Enlightenment, the power of physics fails at the very point where it tries to understand purpose or causality, for no system can be isolated from the whole. This is not to say that physics can't make progress, for we can decide to ignore the effects of this or that influence for the sake of theory, but we must recognize that all theories, as Einstein said of quantum mechanics, are essentially incomplete.

Let me illustrate this point with some examples taken from different spatial scales. But first we need to isolate what it means for something to be influenced.

Information Flow

Newton would have said that influence is a force, Laplace would have said it is an energy. But when I plug in a curling iron or a shaver into the bathroom electrical outlet, they may both use the same amount of electrical energy, yet they produce very different results on my beard. 19th century physicists explored this connection between energy and work, finding many other quantities that were important and distinct, giving them names like "entropy" and "enthalpy". In the 20th century these concepts were extended to new inventions like telephones and computers, and out of this marriage came "information theory".

The idea is that not only do particles have energy or motion, but they also have organization. Ice, water, and steam are all the same particles, but with differing organization. Entropy is a measure of their disorganization, and conversely information is a measure of their organization. Just as energy is conserved, never lost but passed from one particle to another or stored in chemical bonds or other containers, so also entropy is a strangely conserved quantity, never decreasing but either staying the same or increasing.  Since information is the inverse of entropy, it would seem that the world and the universe should be always getting messier and less comprehensible, yet this is not what we observe.  Instead, beginning with the maximally disorganized Big Bang, the universe has become highly organized into galaxies, stars, planets, plants, animals and us. No physicist has been able to explain it yet.

Stephen Hawking, the MS-disabled physicist who wrote A Brief History of Time, found an inkling of the solution when he argued that black holes do not reduce the entropy of the universe, but conserve it by emitting entropy as they swallow matter (Hawking radiation). It would appear then, that the entropy of the universe is constant, and conversely, the information content is also constant. Thus the information found in our bodies, in our world, in our galaxies had to be there from the beginning of creation.

So generalizing Hawking's discovery, there must be a mechanism uniting all the matter of the universe such that destruction of order in one place is offset by creation of order someplace else. This need not be a force, but it does need to be informational, it does need to encode order.

One further conclusion also derives from thermodynamics, and that is that the communication of order must be point-by-point. This comes from a proof that in thermodynamic equilibrium, everything must come to the same temperature, independent of what the paint or material it is made of. That is, if my daughter totals my car in an accident, thereby increasing the entropy of my life, it will do me no good if a rural farmer in Szechuan suddenly finds his rusting hulk restored to mint condition. In this example the total information of the universe might stay constant, but there will be a local imbalance which if it were to continue, then someone could make a good living shipping restored cars from China to America, violating the economic principle that "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch".

So point-by-point entropy balance means that small-scale information is communicated at small-scales, large-scale at large-scales, at every point there is continuity and entropic equilibrium.

[All you physicists out there are going to claim I've just proposed perpetual motion, but hold your criticism to the end of the blog.]

What does all this jargon mean? It means that my little Skinner box is permeable to information flow. If I decide to put a flower in my box and vaporize it with a laser, the information in those petals must go somewhere. Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner puzzled over the way in which the observer's knowledge of a quantum experiment affected the result, and argued that personal knowledge was a form of information flow. The late great physicist John Wheeler (and deserving of a Nobel) argued that the information of the Universe could be the result of it observing itself, just as we observe ourselves. Others have argued that the gravitational field of the universe is negative energy and therefore contains negative entropy or the information needed to offset the Big Bang (which makes gravity into some sort of god!) Many Christians see in these paradoxes the need for an external observer which they interpret as God. Thus the information content of the universe is constant because it is all in the mind of God who does not change.

But my interest in this post is not the origin of universal information or even the flow, but in the consequences of information equilibrium. (Information in the temporal realm is treated as information flow or dynamics and is complicated by historic terminology of cause and effects. But from a Einstein 4-D space-time viewpoint, it is no different in principle than spatial ordering.) If we are to argue for a point-by-point equilibrium, then there must be information at every spatial scale.

Now in physics, when something looks the same whether you look at it with a telescope or a microscope, we say it is "scale-invariant" or more succinctly, "fractal". You may be familiar with the famous Mandelbrot fractal which can be displayed on a computer, and no matter how many times you zoom in on it, it looks exactly the same. So my claim is that information permeates creation in exactly the same way, that reality is an information fractal, thick with the purpose of God.

Fractal Reality

To illustrate my point, I will try to use some contemporary findings in the sciences to show the fractal characteristics of nature.

Atoms: are one-trillionth of a meter (~yard), and you would think they are unaffected by those long-range forces that afflict bigger objects: Big Bang, will, self-consciousness. However, in the beginning of the 20th century it was discovered that atoms are fuzzy blotches, that only condense to a point when they hit a detector, but the rest of the time, exist as poorly confined waves. So poorly defined are they, that they can fill the entire box with their probable existence, and in fact, if they haven't been measured recently, fill the entire Solar System or galaxy with their probability, which was Einstein's objection in the afore-mentioned EPR paper. In the case of photons, we can't even be sure how many of them we have in our box, since "photon number" is not a good (conserved) quantum number! Wigner's concern was that just by my interest in them, I've affected their behavior, demonstrating that indeed, atoms interact at long distances with information.

Proteins: are the building blocks of life. They are long chains composed of only 24 or 26 types of amino acids, manufactured by little factories in the cell called ribosomes. If they remained strands of spaghetti they would be pretty useless, but other little "finishing schools" in the cell fold these spaghetti strands into three-dimensional machines with specific functions. Think of the entertainer at the zoo who twists tubular balloons into daschunds or swords, only the proteins would be more like a block long, and the daschund would be complex enough to walk on his own. After decoding the DNA genome, scientists have set their next task as explaining how proteins fold, and found that it is at least a 100 times harder than decoding the string of amino acids that make it up. Not only that, but some proteins can fold up in multiple ways, such that the Mad Cow disease that turned cow brains into swiss cheese, turned out to be a protein that refolded wrong and forced its neighbors to refold the wrong way. Thus the information in a protein is not just the sequence of amino acids determined by the DNA but the manner in which it is folded up, so that information resides at the nanoscale and the microscale and is communicated by not just the nanoscale DNA but the microscale cell.

Cells: range in size from a hundred billionths of a meter all the way up to ostrich eggs, but the typical cells in your body are a millionth of a meter. At the time of Darwin, it was thought that they were little bags of salty water, but the last 30 years of biochemistry have revealed them to be a hive of dedicated nanomachines. If you haven't seen the animation sequence from the Expelled movie, get a biologist friend to narrate and you'll be amazed at what is going on in a cell. The very fact that cells can move like an amoeba is a consequence of a network of proteins that form tubes which attach to the cell walls and then push or contract depending on the direction the cell wants to go. There might be thousands or millions of "tubulin" proteins involved in this job, yet each one of them knows to contract or push based on the overall purpose.

PhD scientists think they are state-of-the art when they can make a robot the size of a fly, using microships and microsensors, but a cell is 10,000 times smaller and a lot smarter,  with many more sensors and flexible responses, not to mention self-replicating. The ability for an entire cell to coordinate its response shows that information is transmitted from the nanoscale to the multi-microscale, and when cells interact with each other, information flows at the milliscale.

Organisms: range from microscopic "water-bears" to blue-whales, and show purpose and information flow over all these scales. When whales hunt together in pods, or migrate from south to north poles, then information flows all the way up to 1000's of miles.

Our Solar system: doesn't appear to have the same internal "purpose" as living things, but it does demonstrate organization. Guillermo Gonzales was booted out of Iowa State University for writing a book on the design of the solar system. Not only does the Earth have to be a certain distance from the Sun for liquid water to exist, but it needs an unusually large moon for stabilizing the day and forming tides, it needs Jupiter to be where it is to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts, it needs the comets out in the Oort cloud to provide the water for the oceans after the initial planet building stage was finished, it needs the Sun to be a G-type star to provide the right mix of heat and light, it needs the solar system to be in a branch of the Milky Way where there aren't too many stars to collide with and steal the planets away. In other words, this is a rare Solar System, one that has a lot of information content. And it stretches from the 12,000 miles of the Earth's diameter to the 2 lightyear diameter of the Oort Cloud.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, we make a big mistake when we think that God acts in discrete miracles at widely spaced moments in history. The "God-of-the-gaps" is not only bad theology, but bad physics, violating the point-by-point equilibrium of information. Rather we live in a web of influences from the very smallest electron to the biggest objects a telescope can see, and in a web of meaning from the dim reflection of creation to the future conflagration of fire. Extra-terrestrial life then, folds into the grand scheme of God, who perhaps used billions of comets with billions of microbes to concentrate the information on our Earth to produce us. The Bible doesn't just tell us that the creation of man is the culmination of the creation of Earth, but the culmination of the creation of the entire galaxy, for from the very beginning it was a universe filled with the information of God.

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

I'm at 1/3 Lent and briefly thought about celebrating, but being American, we only observe fractions that are powers of 2. In case you're wondering, I'm still feeling great after climbing "the wall", and staying hydrated thanks to Aldi's diet lemonade. If I mix it up with hot water, I can also warm my hands on the cup, or add a tea bag for caffeine.

I don't know if is the weather up here in Philly or the fasting, but my skin got very dry and itchy. When I noticed that I was scratching myself raw, I started rubbing on baby oil. Seems to have reduced the problem immensely. But then the Greeks knew this 3000 years ago, but I restrained myself from entitling this post "Eureka!"

Only 23 more days to go! (Another great benefit of Lent, it really makes Easter special.)

The  Christian Science Monitor carried an article by Michael Spencer entitled "The Coming Evangelical Collapse". It is mostly depressing, unless you happen to be a gnostic Christian Science practitioner, oops a "a post-evangelical reformation Christian in search of a Jesus-shaped spirituality." [He eliminated the word "post-evangelical" from his self-description, apparently after the CSM article was published.]

But is it true?

It all depends on your presuppositions. As a famous scientist once said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." Here's how I understand presuppositions of Evangelicals:

A.  Pre-millennial Evangelicals ("it's all going to hell in a handbasket, but I'll be raptured")
B.  A-millennial Evangelicals ("we'll all muddle through, until the Lord returns")
C.  Post-millennial Evangelicals ("it's getting better every day, then the Lord will return")

Let's dispense with "C" first. These are the same people who voted for Obama as the architect of "hope" and "change". 'Nuff said. People who like "A" are generally conservatives of a baptist or pentecostal bent, who usually think that the rapture will rescue them from the worst that will happen to the world, and they tend to withdraw from the cultural mess around them. Those who like "B" tend to see themselves more involved with the world, trying to transform the culture, say, through Christian schools and political engagement.

So where on this scale does Michael stand?

Based on the concluding paragraphs of his depressing post,

"We can rejoice that in the ruins, new forms of Christian vitality and ministry will be born."

then our good friend Michael falls into the "C" category. What makes this an interesting post, is that his title and opening paragraphs fall into the "doom & gloom" category of "A". My guess is that he is one of the new breed of "Obamacons", who was raised "A" but have recently converted to "C", perhaps through the optimistic "emergent church" movement. [See his bio.]

But before we turn to an unreconstructed "A" alternative, let's look more closely at Michael's observations and the conclusions he draws.

0. The world is getting more anti-Christian (true) so millions of Evangelicals will quit (really?). 

If this were true, then the Church would never have survived 2000 years. He's forgetting that the whole reason the Church was successful, was that it provided strength in times of suffering. Only if those millions of evangelicals were "rice Christian" opportunists would this make sense, and frankly, that era passed in the late 60's when church attendance peaked.

1. The political cause failed (really?) so those politically active evangelicals will give up.

This assumes that evangelicalism is primarily a political movement, which it isn't. But neither is it true that the political cause failed (unless you are an Obamaniac). It took Wilberforce some 51 years to abolish slavery by a decree of Parliament, yet the Evangelicals did not give up the fight. Sure, the cause waxes and wanes, but it doesn't hinge on political success.

2. Our children aren't orthodox, and therefore Evangelicalism will die in a generation.

Speak for yourself Michael. And in fact there is growing statistical and abundant anecdotal evidence that the next generation is *more* orthodox than their parent's generation. Once again, if Christianity were a matter of socialization, there might be some merit to your worries, but it is a living faith, mediated by a living God. And God has no grandchildren.

3. Churches are dying.

It is true that mainline churches and whole denominations are in serious decline. But you should look at the statistics, Michael, before making sweeping generalizations. The denominations and churches that are growing are nearly *all* evangelical. So contrary to your conclusion, the future will be dominated by Evangelical faiths (which are also pentecostal and charismatic). Look no further than Nigeria or Latin America to see the future of the Church.

4. Christian education is in decline.

Once again, you are correct if by this you mean the mainline denominational curricula providers. But you obviously haven't been dropping by the homeschooling book fairs. Believe me, Christian education is expanding at an enormous clip. Look at the success of ABeka press, or Bob Jones, not to mention scads of practically homemade mimeograph sheets. There isn't a more entrepreneurial sector of the economy than Christian education right now.

5. The "social gospel" is rapidly dissolving.

Tell me something new Michael. Of course the social gospel can't stand up to the increasing government pressure on non-profits to conform to secular mores. But that isn't the end of Christian social work. On the contrary, even more explicitly evangelical outreach groups are replacing the liberal "do-gooders" even as we speak. Look at the success of Colson's Prison Fellowship. That is the model you should be watching, and it is still expanding.

6. Nope.

7. Nope, and "so what?".

You have managed to describe quite accurately the death of mainline denominations such as Episcopalian or Methodist or Presbyterian. But you completely fail to describe Evangelicals, which was the title of your post. I attribute this either to a fatal misconception or an intentional effort to minimize the real change sweeping through American Christianity, perhaps from envy or hatred of "fundamentalism" analogous to the main stream media's consistent misrepresentation. Since you are being published in CSM, I suspect the latter. Your comments about "Charismatic-Pentecostals" being dominant over Evangelicals makes a false dichotomy between the two which misunderstands the synergy between the two movements. I attended a Charismatic, Evangelical high-church Episcopalian congregation at one point in my career, and perhaps this is the wave of the future.

In any case, your dystopian future of a church crumbling and looking for ways to be relevant does not represent any of the dynamic, growing, Evangelical churches that I have had the privilege to be a member of. And as for morphing into a new religiosity, that is not for you or I to decide, but for the one who is Shepherd and Overseer of souls.

This brings us to the alternative:  David Wilkerson, an unreconstructed Pentecostal pre-millennial, "A" type Evangelical. Wilkerson is famous for starting an outreach to the drug-infested gangs of New York in his best-seller "The Cross and the Switchblade". Great reading, highly recommended.

Wilkerson's 8000 member church, started in the porn infested Times Square, is staunchly Pentecostal, believing in the direct communication of God with his people. So when he had a vision or "word from the Lord" in July/August of 2001 that NYC would be burning, he had his church stay up for a prayer vigil for the city. And we all know what happened on 9/11. Of the 50,000 workers in the twin towers, only about 4000 lost their lives. Perhaps God does listen to David Wilkerson.

Well, David has had another "word from the Lord". This time, not only NYC but the environs of northern NJ and Connecticut were on fire. David doesn't hesitate to tell us what it means. 

We are under God's wrath. In Psalm 11 it is written, "If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (v. 3). God is judging the raging sins of America and the nations.

Now admittedly, David has a spotty record of successful prophecies, usually regarding the date of fulfillment. But Pentecostal churches are like that. Indeed, you might say when reading Isaiah, God rarely put termination dates on his prophecies, so that David should never have done that either. If you allow that the dates are removable, the remainder of the prophecies appear relatively accurate [despite some major criticisms].

So the question I pose is not, "Is Wilkerson right about the timing?" but "Could what Wilkerson saw come true?" The remainder of this post will be an attempt to say, if anything, Wilkerson may have understated it.

Let's begin with the math. Over 1.5 million Africans were enslaved and shipped to the Americas throughout the period of black slavery. About a million went to Brazil, with 600,000 to the States. When the Civil War ended slavery, the number of war casualties was... wait for it ... 600,000. God is just, as well as merciful, but above all, just.

Since 1973, when the Supreme Court struck down the anti-abortion laws in all 50 states, approximately 54 million unborn babies have been killed. I do not know when God's justice will come, and I pray for his mercy, but I do know the number of casualties in America when it does come: about 54 million.

Well the population of the US is 300 million, could 1/6 of the population really be destroyed?

The four riders of the Apocalypse are Conquest, War, Famine, and Death/Plague. A nuclear bomb would be an example of the first, a civil war the second, the third might be related to Global Warming/Cooling, and the bird flu would be a type of the fourth. Any of these could happen, even in America. But Wilkerson's fixation on fire would fit best with the first.

Is it likely that a nuclear bomb could cause that many casualties?

Yes. Here's the "don't panic" take published in a popular magazine. Here's the sober assessment from some Harvard types. The academics don't quote casualty numbers, but when I run them for Wilkerson's scenario, I get 1-3 million for a bomb in Manhattan, not taking into account the longer acting poisons, lack of clean water, backed-up sewage etc. If I use the rule of thumb that the after-effects double the major effect, then I get 2-6 million casualties. So if God's justice requires the total number to equal the abortion casualties, it would take many bombs, situated in cities. The most populous cities in America are in order: NYC, LA, Chicago, DC, SanFran, Dallas, and my location, Philly.

But simultaneously? Surely only Russia has the ICBM's to deliver such a killing blow, and didn't Hillary make nice to Russia just recently?

Read the sober assessment again--the threat isn't from Russia, but from a terrorist sponsoring state. They suggested a high-rise building as an ideal location for setting off a smuggled nuclear bomb, though another airplane attack isn't as far-fetched as you might think.

Could a terrorist be that organized?

Have you forgotten 9/11? And Al Qaeda has had 8 years of improving its organization in the face of a tremendous counter-attack by the most powerful nation on Earth. The answer is obviously yes.

Why then has it not happened?

George W. Bush, and the mercy of God. But the list of nuclear-capable states is looking worse than ever. Russia has gotten more belligerent since Bush, not less, with a rise in Russian patriotism that put ex-KGB agents in charge of the country. Pakistan has descended into chaos, and appears to be sliding into a Muslim theocracy (as does Turkey). China is showing greater bellicosity. South Africa is restarting its nuclear program. And according to Israel, Iran has more than enough enriched uranium for a bomb, having passed the "point of no return". In addition, Russia built and fueled an Iranian nuclear power plant that can now produce plutonium, a much faster way to build nuclear bombs than enriching uranium. Syria, who had their first nuclear plant obliterated by the Israelis, is now reconstructing it. And need I mention North Korea's bombs and its launch of a long-range ICBM?

The sharing of counter-terrorism information among countries is one of the ways George Bush was able to combat terrorism. But snubbing our allies, and cozying up to our enemies, is not a way to get good intelligence. Politically, says John Bolton, the choices of the Obama administration have resulted in less homeland security.

But the ultimate security of any Christian is God. Can we plead for His mercy? Of course, but what is our standing? Abortion is a terrible affront to His justice, can we claim that such men do not represent us?

We could until Obama became president. Unlike Clinton, who received only 43% (47% 2nd term) of the vote, Obama gathered 52%. And he has chosen to not only to kill unborn babies, but allow scientists free rein to experiment on them. It would appear that that excuse is gone. We are defenceless before God's court.

So to cap this thread; the End of Evangelicalism may come to America, but probably not the way Michael Spencer thought. The good news is not that there will be a new religion to replace it, but that God's purposes will not be thwarted. The heart of a king is in the hands of the Lord, like a river He turns it wherever He will.

We may see a dramatic change in our leadership. Or there may be a dramatic conversion of Muslims around the world, the reports from Christian missionaries in the Middle East are filled with spine-tingling stories of visions. Or Wilkerson may be right and the rapture is right around the corner. In any case, Spencer is wrong, for I do not foresee the end of "old time religion" any time soon. For I believe that below Spencer's radar screen, we are seeing a revival of faith in the next generation of American youth, the seeds of a newly Christianized China, and a re-evangelization of Europe and the West through the coming conversion of Muslims.  It is an exciting time to live in a world where potentially for the very first time since the Garden, most of its population will be Christian.

My energy levels have come up nicely since my body switched over to fat metabolism. It's a relief to be free of the aching tiredness of not having any glycogen reserves. I also splurged and ate two stalks of celery with mexican salad dressing. (I really don't know what the spanish said, something about mojo marinade, but the bottle claimed 0 calories, and had citrus extract, vinegar and garlic.) 

I had gone to Aldi's to pick up some diet sweetener for my black coffee, and discovered that they didn't have any. But they did have diet lemonade, mojo marinade, chicken broth (5 cal/cup) and celery. The lemonade was a grateful respite from the coffee and bouillon I had been drinking. The difficulty of staying hydrated is that I'm not always thirsty, and I know I should be putting more liquid into my body, but one can only drink so much coffee without getting tired of it. I also discovered, that those nasty artificial sweeteners I had so much despised, now actually taste quite good. The 'ole taste buds are affected by fasting too. On the other hand, no matter how long I've fasted, I still can't handle "beef bouillon". I think they render shoe leather.

If the first temptation to quit fasting is weakness and tiredness, the second is boredom. But now I have 3 kinds of tea, instant coffee, diet lemonade, diet punch (the color will knock you over), 2 kinds of chicken broth, and ramen seasoning. I think I'll make it.

Today marks the tenth day since Ash Wednesday, or a quarter of the way through Lent. The 7th and 8th days were a bit rough, but I appear to be now on track for the remainder. The body is amazingly adaptive, and my energy is back to the 3/4 or so that is typical of a fast. (Not much endurance without those glycogen reserves, but I can climb 4 flights of stairs if I take a 10 second pause in the middle.)

My application for transferring into the PhD program was denied on the grounds that I was too scientific to be a serious Bible scholar. The irony is that I lost 3 jobs in Academia for being too religious to be a good scientist.  Kant said he was building a wall between science and religion to foster peace, and now his wall lives on in infamy.

The silver lining is that I will now write a ThM thesis instead of researching 2 more years for a PhD thesis. And ThM theses are less stringently controlled. So I'm planning to write the book my wife sent me to seminary to write. Here's the outline if you care to comment on it:

Science Mirrors Scripture: The Purpose-Driven World
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Introduction
    Scientific Metaphysics
    Biblical Epistemology
    Approach

2. Can Purpose be detected? --Coherence: Purpose in Science and Theology
  Intelligent Design in Nature
     The Characteristics of Randomness
     The Characteristics of Design
     The Bad Design Argument
     The “Miracle is not Science” Argument
  Inspiration in Scripture
     The Characteristics of Randomness
     The Characteristics of Design
     The Bad Design Argument
     The “Miracle is not Theology” Argument
     The Design of Language
The biological sources
     The developmental sources
     The Unity of Design and Inspiration in Language

3. Can Purpose be understood? --Purposeful Purposers: Recursion in Science and Theology
  Recursion in Nature
     Science
     Philosophy
     The necessity of Trinity
  Recursion in Scripture
     The book of Job
     The proverbs of Solomon
     The parables of Jesus
     The necessity of Trinity
 Recursion in Language
     Author, text, reading authority
     The post-modern challenge
     The necessity of Trinity
The Holy things: God, Man and Word

4. Can Purpose be maintained? --The Survival of Purpose: Holiness in Science and Theology
 Maintenance in Nature
     Purpose vs Entropy in Nature
     Genetic Entropy and Biology
 Maintenance in Scripture
     The Holiness of Man's Design: Gen 1-3
     Holiness in Theology
  Maintenance in Language
     Foundations of Language
     Usage in Language
The Purpose of Holy things

5. Conclusions

(The trick was finding an outline to incorporate all the papers I've already written. I hope the chapters can be connected with some filler material.)

The first time I started a long fast, I distinctly remember the day I almost couldn't get out of bed. I lay there feeling more weary than the time I had run (and walked) a marathon. "I think I've hit the wall" I told my wife. I popped two children's vitamins, drank a few black coffees, ate some soup and went to bed early. And the next day I felt fine.

On every fast since then, I've hit the wall about 7 days into a fast. I check my hydration levels. I up my caffeine intake, but nothing seems to prevent it. The 7th day is a day of rest.

(I wonder if this isn't the origin of the 7-day week. Do you suppose God was fasting when He created the world?)

My educated guess is that my body is switching gears from carbohydrate/glycogen metabolism to fat metabolism. And not until it really hits empty will it make the necessary changes. Here's my (not very educated) view on how the body handles fuel.

Sugar is the stuff the body runs on, but not table sugar. Sucrose is made up of two smaller sugar molecules, fructose (fruit sugar) and glucose. It is glucose that is burned by every cell in your body. So first the stomach splits sucrose, and then converts the fructose to glucose. That takes a short amount of time, but within 15 minutes or so, the glucose hits the blood stream, and your pancreas secretes insulin to warn your body that its coming.

When you eat a cracker, there isn't much sucrose, but there is a lot of starch. Starch is a much longer version of sucrose, made up of many glucose molecules all strung together. So your stomach has another bunch of enzymes for splitting up the starch into sugar, and maybe 30 minutes or an hour later, all that glucose hits the bloodstream. Some starches are easier to break up than others, so graham crackers take a bit longer than saltines to digest. This is why health books recommend complex carbohydrates, (the name for all these sugar-based foods), because then the sugar doesn't hit your bloodstream in one tremendous spike.

But suppose you have enough glucose to make all your cells happy, what does your body do with the extra?

It converts it in the liver to a fat-like substance called glycogen. Then at night, or between meals, this gets reconverted into glucose and your cells get a steady supply of energy. And if the glycogen starts to build up, why then it finally gets stored as fat in specialized cells called fat cells.

So when you begin to fast, you first use up all your glycogen, before your body finally starts to take that fat out of long term storage and convert it back into glucose. The enzymes needed for this process haven't exactly been in demand, so your body has to switch gears, make more enzymes, start emptying out the fat cells, moving it to the liver etc. All this takes time to occur, and it is my hypothesis that this is what produces the 7th day lull.

Well, what would happen if instead I ate a meal on that 7th day?

It would disrupt the conversion process. My body would shut down the fat-enzymes, switch back to the carb enzymes and gear up the liver for glycogen storage. Since a meal stays in the gut anywhere from 1-3 days (depending a lot on what sort of meal it was), then the glycogen enzymes might very well last 5-6 days, before switching back to fat-enzymes. Eating once a week, then, would be counter-productive, because I would be "hitting the wall" every week, besides becoming ravenous for the first two days of the week as well.

So what do I think of the Catholic approach to Lent: fast 6 days and take Sunday off?

Absolutely crazy. Neither Jesus, nor Elijah nor Moses had this approach. It reeks of some sort of compromise. Just like the idea that giving up meat (but not fish) is a fast, or the Anglican idea that giving up chocolate is a fast. (Then on Sunday they gorge on more chocolate than I would eat in a month.) Fasting is fasting. The body is not designed for a 7 day cycle. Either go whole hog or don't go at all. But cycling does to your body what freeze-thaw does to Boston streets.

Well, if I'm going to count Sundays, then I would be fasting 45 days in Lent. Am I willing to fast that long?

That is not a scientific question but a theological one. Should we aspire to do greater things than our Lord? It is my humble view, that if 40 days were enough for Moses, Elijah and Christ, it is enough for me. To do more would be prideful.

So what will I do about a 45 day Lent?

Well, I could begin on the first Monday of Lent, but then I'm wasting my Ash Wednesday service with the ashes. So the plan this year (and every year it has been different), is to break the fast on Palm Sunday, and resume it on Maundy Thursday until Easter. Of course, there may be, as there has been in the past, some mealtime that is awkward to miss: a family reunion, a birthday party, so I may not get in 40 contiguous days, but that's the plan anyway.

Have a blessed Lent!

We are now in the season of Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday and ending with Easter. The church traditionally fasted for those 40 days (which are really 45, but we are to subtract the Sundays).  The reason is the unusual occurrence of the number 40 in the Bible.

The account of Noah records that it rained for 40 days, then flooded 40 days, then after a year of floating around, the ark was stranded 40 more.  Peculiar, this number 40.

But that's not all. Moses was 40 years old when he fled Egypt for the wilderness, herded sheep there for 40 more years, and then Israelites for another 40 in the wilderness.  At age 80, he went up to Mt Sinai, a barren peak in the wilderness, where for 40 days he lay prostrate, and received the ten commandments, but on his return, broke them and had to go back for 40 more days of fasting.

Elijah, fleeing the wrath of Queen Jezebel, hiked 40 days through the wilderness without food to Mt Horeb where he met the Lord.

And most important of all, before beginning his ministry, Jesus went into the wilderness where he fasted and prayed for 40 days. Now if the number 40 appeared once or twice in the Bible, we'd give it no further thought, but this is getting downright repetitive. What is its significance?

We have a hint in the gospel account of the transfiguration. Jesus took his three most trusted disciples up on a mountain, where he was changed into a glowing clothes, and two of the ancient prophets appeared, talking with him. It was a sign to the inner circle of disciples, a confirmation of future glory, and a symbol of what was to come. And who were the two prophets? Moses and Elijah, naturally.

The common themes here are 40 days, a change of diet, mountain/wilderness and God's presence. It is as if fasting introduces us to a confraternity of saints while bringing us closer to God. So it should not be surprising that the ancient traditions of the church included this 40 days of fasting before Easter.

What is surprising, however, is the rejection of this tradition by the Reformers.

It is commonly said that the Reformation did not begin with 95 theses nailed to a small-town churchdoor in Wittenburg, but with the eating of a sausage during Lent. Apparently in 1522, a Zurich business owner was concerned that his employees were not operating at peak efficiency during Lent, and so he publicly defied the Pope by having a meal of meat. By 1529, we find Will Farel, the fiery French preacher who compelled Calvin to stay in Geneva, writing in his manifesto:

The fast, which our Lord demands, is to break all the bonds of evil, and all that by which one holds his neighbor cruelly bound, giving food to those who are hungry, lodging to those who have no home, clothing the naked, having pity for those who are like us and who are the same flesh with us, as well as all who are indigent.
  This fast is agreeable to God and most profitable to many, indeed to all (Is 58:5-7; 1Tim 4:1-5). But the other, which is bodily exercise, profits little from the first. For the second is to reduce the flesh in bondage, in mortification through the taking away meats. This fast is not in the hand of anyone to dispose and ordain except those who do it, who (if he has the Spirit of God) knows when he ought to afflict the body and how: not so much the choice and distinction of meats, nor by certain times for eating: but in taking less, and less frequently, according to that which is expedient, without overwhelming nature so that one is able to serve his neighbor.

I have a little bit of sympathy for Farel and Zwingli, objecting to mandated hypocrisy in Zurich. There is no doubt in my mind that the multitude of Mardi Gras revelers in Rio or New Orleans never intend to fast for the next 40 days. Externally imposed restrictions will no doubt lead to rebellion and license. Nevertheless, the result of Zurich's modern experiment of giving drug addicts needles, on the theory that one can't legislate morality but must protect citizens from disease, has filled the station bathrooms in Bern, a 2 hour train ride away, with drug addicts and their smoky spoons. (Yes, it was a looong wait.) If we cannot mandate morality, we can certainly undermine it.

And that, I believe, is what has happened to Lent and fasting. To this day, the Protestant city of Basel, Switzerland, on the border with Catholic France and Germany, celebrates Mardi Gras a full two weeks after Ash Wednesday just to rub it in. I am also of the opinion that the tradition of baking Christmas cookies before Christmas was also a Protestant attempt to undermine the Catholic fast of Advent.

This is a shame, because contra Farel, there are many valuable things learned from the mortification of the body. Remember, it is after or through those 40 days that Elijah and Moses met God. Jesus, though he was God, found immense value in this practice. In my own fasting, I can honestly say that it created a new reality, a special time when heaven seemed much closer than usual. And even if, as Farel would claim, it has no benefit whatever, nevertheless we are commanded by our Lord to fast, for in the sermon on the mount he said "When you fast..."

But can anyone honestly fast 40 days?

The answer is "Yes", because I have, though I would be the first to admit that God has given me a slow metabolism. Before I was married, I ate but once a day. So perhaps my experience is not universal.  Nevertheless, I think with a few precautions, everyone with about 30 lbs of fat can achieve a full Lenten fast. The textbook claims that while fasting the average person loses a pound a day. Obviously this isn't as linear as it sounds, because after a week or two, my body conserved energy and it was more like a half-pound a day. But it does suggest that you will need some reserves of fat to make it through. Fortunately for me, this wasn't a problem.

What was a problem, though, was dehydration. So for the remainder of this blog, I want to tell you what you need to know if you are going to attempt a Lenten fast.

1) Fat
 Don't attempt this if you are skinny.  Recall your weight when you had your growth spurt in highschool or college, and estimate how much more you weigh now. If you aren't 30 lbs heavier than your skinniest at this height, you probably don't have the reserves for this. Not everybody has the genes to be Lance Armstrong, or the genes to make it through a 40 day fast. On the other hand, more of us can afford to do this now than in Zwingli's day. This is the first of many benefits.

2) Hunger
People ask me if I'm dying of hunger. The answer is no. Hunger seems to be related to insulin or some hormone secreted by the stomach. After two or three days, my body goes into fat metabolism mode, and the hunger pangs vanish, providing I don't cheat and eat starch or sugar. This isn't to say that I am not psychologically hungry. Every billboard for Denny's draws my attention, and my children report that I watch them eat with great intensity. But it no longer is a physiological hunger, it becomes like most other temptations in life, a psychological one. This is the second benefit, that it reestablishes mental control over something which had previously been nearly uncontrollable.

3) Dehydration
This is the number one reason for quitting. Because when I am not eating, I'm not drinking. And when I am not drinking, I get dehydrated. And when I'm dehydrated, I get dizziness, headaches, weakness, and in one unforgettably painful case, uric acid kidney stones. The strange thing was that I wasn't thirsty. I suppose it is alot like hunger, and my body couldn't tell me how thirsty it was. So I had to rely on a few other indicators.  Here are some monitors.

 a) The pinch test
I learned this from a nursing book. Spread your fingers out wide, and with your other hand, pinch the skin on the back of the hand. If it stays pinched after you release it, not smoothing out immediately, then you are dehydrated.

 b) Dizziness, weakness, headaches
Dehydration dries out the sinuses and I've had numerous headaches down through the years that I now realize were entirely due to dehydration. The same for bodily weakness and dizziness. If you're thinking how this fasting is really wearing you down, you probably are dehydrated.

c) Uric acid
I don't know whether this applies to Lenten fasts, though I was instructed by my pediatrician to check my babies' wet diaper for dark stains or purplish crystals which would be indication that they were dehydrated. Not until I passed uric acid kidney stones one night did I understand what it meant for my babies. Two shots of morphine, a CAT scan and a bottle of powerful painkillers later, I realized that the cure was free, drinking more water. 

4) Rehydration
Antarctic Exploration draws scientists to that frozen continent every winter. And the old-timers give a lecture on the need for drinking water in that very dry climate. It seems that a common misconception is that coffee will be sufficient. But coffee (and tea) is a diuretic, causing more water to be excreted. I have often become very dehydrated on a coffee diet of 6-8 cups a day.

The problem is that we are in a balance between uptake and outgo. And surprisingly, like shipwrecked sailors, we can die of thirst while surrounded by the ocean. The medical establishment realized a few decades ago, that dysentary kills not by poisoning the body, but by dehydrating the body, causing the lining of the gut to excrete water. The cure is getting water in faster than it comes out. This is harder than you might think, for pure water won't work. The secret is adding the right combination of minerals and a bit of sugar (or even better, rice water). This rehydration formula was commercialized by a Florida company who marketed it as Gatorade.

So when I fast, I drink salty broth, where the salt helps me retain the water. I can tell when my salt level is low, because then I keep adding more salt to the broth. I avoid the sugar, which would make me ravenous again, so I generally use boullion cubes or the little packets that come in those Ramen noodle bags.

However, after reading that the cause of Terri Schiavo's heart attack was a potassium imbalance while she was fasting, I became concerned that I too would have problems. So I read the label on the Gatorade bottle, and found that they have 2/3 sodium chloride (salt) and 1/3 potassium chloride. During a visit to the local Kroger's grocery store (food shopping is so much fun when I'm fasting), I discovered Morton's Lite Salt (sky blue cylinder), which was about 50/50 sodium and potassium chloride. They also had 100% potassium chloride (navy blue cylinder), but then I would have to mix it with regular salt.  So I mix up my boullion with Lite Salt, and drink about 2-3 cups of that every day.

5) Vitamins
 On most of my fasts, (this being the 6th Lenten fast I'm on), I worry a bit about vitamins and other minerals. So every other day or so, I will eat a children's vitamin, though I don't know if that is very necessary.

6) Fiber
As I said to my brother, I'm not giving up eating for lent, just calories. There have been many Lenten fasts when I gorged on cucumbers, celery or carrots. Now carrots have sugar in them, so I don't recommend them, they only made me hungrier. But occasionally I felt the need to put some fiber through my system, and all the diet books say celery has no calories. The medievalists thought that grumpy behavior was caused by an overabundance of bile, and I will warn you that my body never stopped producing bile during the fast. And my wife attests that I did become quite grumpy and hard to live with. Call that the disadvantage of fasting, though perhaps it gives an opportunity to find the separation between our true self from our bilious self. In any case, you may find an application of fiber helpful.

7) Cold feet
Yup, I always got cold feet. A side effect of shutting down your bodies metabolism. After a whole winter of being tough and braving the cold, it is during Lent that I get out the long johns and double socks. It is a small price to pay though, for the warm heart.

8) Breaking a fast
Remember, for however long you were fasting, your body has switched gears. When you put a full meal in the system, it is going to hurt. The secret is to give your body all the things it needs to digest the food. Don't expect your stomach to do all the work, it can't and you will get a monstrous stomach ache. So make your first meal a salty soup, gruel or bit of toast. This will of course, give you a roaring appetite.

Resist the impulse to stuff your face.

I speak from experience. Give your body 3 or 4 hours to assimilate that first meal before you attempt another. Show restraint. Coming off a fast usually takes me 24 hours. Eat sparingly and avoid high sugar content in those first 24 hours. Sugar somehow made me ravenous and gave me cramps at the same time. And don't be surprised if you gain a pound a day that first week.  It is expected, your body is trying to get back to its original weight. If, like me, you would prefer to postpone it, then you will find yourself fighting your appetite for the next four to six weeks. Alas, a second drawback to fasting. (This is why diet books all say that fasting doesn't work.)

9) Prayer
Since fasting clears out the blood, it also has a remarkably clarifying effect on the brain. I find that I think more clearly, pray more clearly, even sleep more efficiently. I also feel things more deeply too, always close to tears when I pray. Use these opportunities to enrich your prayer life, to read spiritual books, to understand the liturgy better. If fasting doesn't also make you closer to God, then it has failed its primary purpose. This is what made it worthwhile for Elijah and Moses and Jesus. I doubt if they did it to shed 30 lbs.

And perhaps one day, we will join them on the mountain, in the brotherhood of saints.

UPDATE: Michael Brooks was a science writer at The New Scientist, but before that, a PhD quantum theorist who lectured at NYU and Cambridge. He quit his job at the New Scientist because he was troubled by what he saw in the scientific field. New ideas are not just ridiculed, but they are persecuted to extinction. After leaving the journal, Brooks wrote a book on 13 of these mysteries which the persecution has not answered. A serious review of his book was given in the Times Higher Education by Robert Matthews, and a less serious review in The Sunday Times, by Christopher Hart.

I responded to the Sunday Times review, and to my chagrin, discovered that my objections were to the review, not to the book. Instead the book reaffirms my statement that there is a serious lack of metaphysical instruction in today's education. Science as religion, or Scientism, is taught in the university and deviations from dogma are punished mercilessly. Here is a quote from the THE review by Matthews.

The picture that emerges [of modern science] is one of a quasi-religious sect whose members have renounced intellectual courage in favour of self-perpetuation. Anomalies that may once have been considered potential glimpses of a greater reality are now seen as threats, while those who pursue them are regarded as troublemakers to be ignored, ridiculed or persecuted.

One of Brooks 13 items, and one I have posted on several times, was the discovery of life on Mars and the ridicule that this engendered. I haven't read Brooks book, but he may not know about the persecution that followed that ridicule. So I am now sympathetic to the book, and the book's publication is indication that we are moving toward a paradigm shift. The day of Darwinazi's is coming to a close. Nevertheless, there's still a lot of manure to dig through. This is my response to the ridicule in the Sunday Times (with some confusion as to whether it is Hart or Brooks responsible for it.)

 Now I'm a sucker for mysteries, and easily impressed by science, so this is right up my alley. Except that these "mysteries" are not at all scientific, they're metaphysical. It would be like saying that the fact men don't understand women is a great scientific mystery. Well it would be, if women were supposed to think like men. And that is the problem with Brooks list, he just doesn't get it. So in the name of progress and enlightening mankind, let's have a go at these mysteries.

(1) One of the great discoveries of 20th-century science was that our universe is expanding. The discovery, however, led straight to another puzzle. The puzzle is, there's nowhere near enough matter to prevent the expanding universe from blowing apart completely into a vast, sterile infinity of lifeless interstellar dust. So how come we live in a lumpy universe, one of the lumps being the planet on which we live? There must be more matter than we can see: the famous dark matter and, to go with it, something even more mysterious - dark energy.
To date, however, there's not a shred of evidence for either, even though teams of scientists have been looking for years.

Well Michael, the real "must" is whether we must take Einstein as gospel truth. Maybe he didn't quite get it right. Seems more likely that the theory is wrong, than 50 years of looking for what Einstein predicted missed 90% of the matter in the universe. As for "dark energy", didn't Einstein call that his "greatest mistake"? If we were so happy to ditch Newton for Einstein, why are we not considering ditching Einstein over this?

(2) In his next chapter, however, Brooks considers the curious afterlives of the Pioneer spacecraft, which only seem to cast more doubt on the universal truth of Newton's law. Pioneer 10 and 11 are now 8 billion miles away, “far beyond our solar system, drifting silently out into the void”. In 2m years' time, they will crash and burn in the star Aldebaran. Except that neither of them have quite followed the course they were supposed to - every year they veer 8,000 miles farther away from their intended trajectory. “Nasa explicitly planned to use them as a test of Newton's law,” explains Brooks. “The law failed the test; shouldn't we be taking that failure seriously?”

I believe this one has already been explained as a thermal gradient from the radioisotope thermal generators (RTG). So don't get too excited about new science when the old science works just fine, or even when its a bit rusty. Yeah, I know Nobel Prizes are given out like candy, but let's not get too greedy or we'll all look stupid throwing our scarce money at little green men.

(3) If that weren't enough of a revelation, there's alien intelligence as well. And here we have one of modern science's greatest mysteries: the Wow! signal, so-called because the man who first registered it simply scribbled Wow! on the read-out sheet. It is the only signal ever received from outer space that is utterly inexplicable - unless, as Brooks points out, you grant the existence of alien intelligence...
He also reminds us of William of Ockham's famous razor: given a number of possible explanations, the simplest one is always the best. And the simplest explanation for the Wow! signal is alien intelligence.

Here's a bit more information on the 1977 "Wow!" signal, and frankly, it looks pretty boring. A monochromatic, strong signal picked up on a radio telescope on the ground for 77 seconds. Three minutes later the second telescope scanned the same patch of sky and saw nothing, nor did anyone else for 30 years. "Little green men!" scream the tabloids, forgetting the original 1967 LGM signal turned out to be a pulsar (radio-emitting rotating star).

But are LGM really the "simplest" explanation? Wouldn't that raise all sorts of more questions, such as "do LGM like meat?" so that it becomes far more complicated than, say, explaining it as a Low Earth Orbit satellite 150 miles up broadcasting omnidirectionally, which would pass overhead in just about 77 seconds? Why would that not be "simpler"? It is only inexplicably LGM if we *want* it to be LGM. Metaphysics again.

(4-5)Back on earth, points out Brooks, science still can't define what “living” means, as opposed to inanimate, nor can it explain death. Especially since some species, such as Blanding's turtles of North America, don't age. They die from injury or illness, but not from cell death like us.

Umm, Brooks, this is not so hard to explain, most 3 year olds have mastered it. You're this little machine, see, made by a designer, and when the designer has you stop breathing, you're dead. The only part you apparently are having a problem with, is the designer part. But don't worry, the design works even if you don't believe in it. It isn't very mysterious, though truly awesome.

(6) Sex also gives scientists a terrible headache. Why do we do it? In terms of expenditure of time and energy (not to mention income), having to attract a mate is a ridiculously costly way of self-replicating. Many species simply sub-divide, like amoeba, or practise virgin birth, like the solitary Komodo dragon in London Zoo in 2006. She thus passed on 100% of her genes without having to flirt, diet or splash out on Jimmy Choos. But sexual reproduction reproduces only 50% of you, with no guarantee that it'll be the best 50%.

You know, I'm starting to think the greatest mystery of all is how science writers are still reliving 7th grade. Look, sex isn't something people invented, God did (and improved on it by inventing marriage) and for very good reasons. It was not good for man to be alone. If you doubt me, drop by at your geeky programmer's flat sometime unannounced. You will notice that your question is all about why women need husbands, when the real problem was with men. And very few men will deny it.

(7) While on the subject of sex, Brooks also explains that scientists remain mystified by the process of courtship. It's a myth that females choose the biggest and flashiest males - hence the peacock's tail, the stag's antlers. In reality, naturalists have often observed a couple of alpha stags bashing away at each other during the rut, while the females, getting bored, slope off to mate with some less well-endowed and less aggressive beta male. The evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith named these beta males (and this is official) sneaky f*****s.

There you go again, first you believed all that tommyrot about evolutionary sex-selection in your 7th grade textbook just because Darwin imagined it, and then when no one can find the evidence for it in the 150 years since, you call it a great mystery. The real mystery is why an armchair philosopher is still being touted as a stunningly good experimentalist. Didn't we trash Aristotle in the Enlightenment for that sort of thing? Maybe those stags are just having fun because those antlers aren't going to last forever and they're trying to rack up points to impress the boys? What ever made you think it was about women anyway?

(8) Freewill is the biggest puzzle in this book. As Brooks points out, human civilisation is built on it: law and order, praise and blame, good and evil. Yet most neuroscientists declare it doesn't exist. “Freewill is a fictional construction,” says Steven Pinker. But this is a puzzle in itself. Why isn't Pinker a passionate opponent of any punishment for crime, in that case? You might as well discipline a great white shark for swallowing a surfer. Do Pinker et al really believe war heroes don't deserve medals, or war criminals prosecution? Or are such “experts” just enjoying saying something wildly controversial, without really believing it themselves, let alone putting it into practice?

Okay, I give up. Your gullibility is by far the greatest mystery. If Pinker hasn't got free will, then why is he trying to convince you of it? Maybe he's got plans for you. The guys who run around dissing free will are the same ones who don't pay child support, and say "the devil made me do it". If you know what is good for you, don't you or your wife go near them. Don't say I didn't warn you.

... On freewill, I choose to believe that they're wrong.

Well, the first sense you've written all day. And proof that mysteries of science are really ordinary old metaphysics. Now why don't they teach *that* in 7th grade?

I know I'm late to the Bible Software game, even 10 years ago I was realizing that all those bookshelves in the pastor's study were obsolete, being replaced with a computer and digital books. But back then it still took a pastor's book stipend to purchase the electronic versions of those books. Like most of my electronic wishes, I postponed that purchase until I absolutely needed it, since the rule of the market has been a continually falling price.

Well this week the price dropped into my budget range. It became free.

Oh sure, Linux versions of these expensive software packages have been around a long time, but in an interesting trend, we are seeing the Linux developers porting their software over to Windows so it can reach a wider audience. Seeing how Microsoft made their first ever cut in personnel this year, perhaps the trend toward free Microsoft software will pick up steam as MS tries to renew the brand.

In any case, here is where you can download your free Bible software, with over 100 translations of the Bible as well as ancient Greek and Hebrew, dictionaries, commentaries, devotionals, and just plain fun reading (Chesterton!)

 http://www.xiphos.org/

And don't say that blogs are a complete waste of time ever again.

Sorry for the delay in these postings. School and blogging are oil and water. Some short impromptus as we get back into it.

* Tomorrow is Lincoln's 200th birthday. They've taken away his holiday, and replaced it with "President's Day". Then they proceeded to not celebrate it. But if you don't celebrate MLKJr day, you get your federal moneys withdrawn. I know government employees who are too frightened to show up on MLK day, even on their own time. So we don't celebrate Abraham's birth, but we do celebrate Charles'. He was born on the 12th of February too, same year as Lincoln. Just not in America. When you think about it, the only other non-American whose birthday we celebrate is Jesus. And now Charles. Fitting, you might think, in a post-Christian world.

* Speaking of Charles, this is the website that you gotta read. Ignore all the other links in this post, this is the most important: What were Darwin's failed predictions?

* Our seminary just laid off 10% of its staff. Looks like economics is going to be grim for everyone. The Theology Schools Deans conference was last week, and the dean reports that we are typical for seminaries across america. Two have shut down. Southern laid off 35 employees. Another (Princeton?) just lost $100M of its endowment. (Our endowment was at $18M, and suffered too.) But being small, and being lean, ours is suffering less than some of the other schools. In a way, the last 3 years of fiscal problems here has prepared us for the lean times ahead. I'm thanking God that we have a fiscally conservative president in charge, and not the flashy PR type that proliferate in the years of plenty. I'm not sure if he's thanking God though.

With the applicant pool expanding, suddenly those 5 faculty slots that have to be filled are looking good. A recession is the time when you want to build, because the bricks are both better and cheaper. If we can navigate the shoals, we will emerge a stronger school.

* Finished my paper on PostModernism in theology. At 31 pages, it is only 11 pages over the limit. Here's a link to the paper, before it loses 10 pages of needless fluff. The Holy Grail of Postmodernism. If you are a long-term reader of this blog, it won't say anything new, though the applications to some theologians at the end is a helpful addition. Be the first to suggest the appropriate 10 pages to cut.

* The New Scientist carried an article how children are born with a predisposition to believe in God. Sort of like Chomsky's grammar, where children are born with a predisposition to form a language. Now in the case of Chomsky, this is evidence for design, but somehow the researchers don't think this is a good thing for atheism. But I must say, I love the inadvertent proof that modern science is a big brainwashing exercise in atheism. Now if only children were born with a predisposition toward economic theory...

* An 8th grade classmate of mine (going by the name and profession) is now writing for MIT's Technology Review, and had a fascinating article on the comeback of Lamarck--the dude that predicted everything Darwin did, only 50 years earlier. Darwin had to assassinate him intellectually to claim precedence. The difference between the men, is that Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck, believed in purpose, and with purpose, one can still worship God.

More importantly, with Lamarck one can understand Biblical morality, original sin, and the purpose of man. My essay Viruses, Genes and Sin is looking better all the time. You might also read the last paragraph of that PoMo paper mentioned earlier.

* Lawrence Krauss, the chair of President Bush's Bioethics Panel, read Pope Benedicts XVI's Dignitas Personae and was enraged. Seems the Pope is dead set against IVF and fertility clinics. Flew to the Vatican and told them that theologians need to listen to scientists more than scientists to theologians. Hmmm. Seems to me that eternal destiny might be a tad more important than whether a 45-year old woman wants to have a baby. So I'm guessing that Krauss doesn't put much stock in eternal destiny. But what gets me, is that this was supposed to be one of the good guys, one of the moderates on the bio-ethics panel, holding back the flood of embryonic stem cell research. And the hubris of thinking that he could lecture the Vatican, or that because one can, one should. Pascal's wager operated on the assumption that people recognized hubris and were afraid. Our generation lacks even the sense to be afraid.

Perhaps that's what economic recessions do, humble the proud. But just to help Krauss out of his jam, let's suppose that the Vatican is right, that IVF cause defective babies, maybe even babies that lack a sense of god (see fifth bullet). So we raise a generation of psycho-paths because we don't understand the Lamarckian transmittal of important information in conception. (see previous bullet). Is it still moral? And to whom lies the burden of proof? Maybe, just maybe, you scientists should spend more time listening to theologians.

* Well, back to the books and Hebrew...

The seminary paper on the Imago Dei has had some favorable reviews, I list a bit of dialogue here to show the kinds of questions people are asking.

"night thoughts of a quantum physicist"

I enjoyed reading your paper over the past 2 nights.  There is a lot of material, but I thought you would welcome some feedback on your paper.  ...There were plenty of pithy observations which I enjoyed, especially at the beginning of the paper.  I mainly remember the things that were new and surprising to me, so I will focus on those in my comments and questions:

First, the identification of the first creation as Cro-Magnon man, and the second creation as modern man with language:
  As a past way of thought, I have been so conditioned to think of Genesis as mainly allegorical, that I don't think in these terms. There is basically the main question of what is allegorical and what is a description of historical fact.  Your perspective seems to be take as much as you can as historical fact, informed by science. As you point out, this is basically what Hugh Ross describes, and I think that is works fairly well.

My overall observation is that one must allow ones mind to go there to have this kind of thesis, and all of theology in the past century or so has strongly gone the other way. I agree that this is a part of the `long decline' in the theology you mention. On the other hand, I was deeply unimpressed with literal creationist arguments, and felt that they denied obvious facts of nature. All this is to say, that I think the kind of work that you are doing is worthwhile, well thought out, and I'm surprised that others in the past have not done a better job along these lines.

Random comments:
About the fruit of the tree, I was surprised to see that you took to be an actual tree – again allegory indoctrination. I am willing to consider this possibility, but the scripture speaks of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If the fruit affects our brain chemistry, returning us to Cro-Magnon-like state, this is then primarily a physical, not a spiritual transformation. But how is this consistent with gaining the knowledge of good and evil?

About racism:
I was surprised to see this listed as a major argument about the creation order of man – this ordering effect would clearly give a higher and a lower creation of man, but I don't see why this is an argument. I don't recall racism listed as a major sin of the old testament – it is more of a modern `sin'. What are you thinking here?

I'm glad that you are familiar with Orthodox thought – I am also a big fan of the Orthodox, and think that they have right way of looking at lots of things. This also bears on your statement that theology is a human endeavor. In Orthodox tradition, theology is not an academic disciple the way it has been seen in the modern West, but as an expression of knowledge gained from closeness to God. In other words, intellect is not primary, relationship and holiness is. I am also on their side about the Trinity, and the distinction of soul and spirit.

You seem to imply that there were many generations of animals (becoming domesticated) before Eve was on the scene, and you also say that Adam's genetic make-up was identical the Cro-Magnon man. Therefore, Adam should not have been long-lived. Isn't this a contradiction? If I were taking this line of thought, I would be tempted to argue that the second creation also make the genetic code of Adam less prone to corruption, thus giving him much longer life – and your toxic fruit somehow corrupted the genetic make-up, giving progressively shorter life spans.

Ok, I had better do some other work now – your paper is great, please send me your reply.

PS. I presume Westminster is a reformed seminary? I didn't detect much presence of reformed theology in your paper, although you mention it quite a bit – you seem more influenced by Catholic and Orthodox thought.

Thank you for your kind words. I'm not sure what to call myself, being unhappy, as you are, with the literalists and also with the TE neo-liberals who seem to run all the Bible departments. I want to take the Bible as literally as I know how, while also recognizing the real data from paleontology. I view it as a puzzle to bring the two into agreement, knowing that just as science is often wrong, so also hermeneutics can be very wrong as well. Not because either side is evil, but because they've never challenged their presuppositions. Like the idea that Gen 1 and 2 have to be talking about the same event. Or that language is a gradual thing from monkeys to apes to humans.

1) You asked about the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Perhaps if you have the patience, you might read something I wrote 5 years ago entitled Viruses, Genes and Sin, where I tried to give a concept of original sin in terms of biological viruses. http://rbsp.info/rbs/RbS/CLONE/VGS/index.html

I'm not sure how successful the effort was, but I tried to address the Tree a bit in that work. And if you really have patience, my first foray into this field (and at the time, I thought a very scary thing to do as an untenured physicist) was a commentary on the Book of Job where the Tree is seen as the solution to Job's theodicy question:   http://rbsp.info/rbs/RbS/JOB/job.html

But to speak more directly to your question. Suppose that an epigenetic change to a "wildness" gene, renders it "domesticatible". Thus breeding dogs from wolves, or cats from bobcats enhances this gene and enables them to live with humans. For the sake of argument, let it be suppressor RNA. Now suppose such an epigenetic change occurs between Cro-Magnon and humans, enabling them to form social communities and talk to God. Now suppose that the Tree destroys that epigenetic change, say by enzymatically destroying the suppressor RNA, and the valuable suppressor RNA can't be expressed until it exists--e.g. a flip-flop chemical circuit.

Thus the fruit of the Tree would leave Adam with a "wildness" tendency that causes him to always rebel. In seminary this is known as "mediate" imputation of Adam's sin, and if thought to be exclusive of "immediate" imputation, is considered un-Reformed.

Why would such a change be "good and evil"? Lot's of possibilities here. Many people take evil to be rebellion against God and His moral law. Thus such an epigenetic change would introduce evil. On the other hand, perhaps such a gene introduces the possibility of suppressing the urge to be evil, of practicing self-restraint, which would lead to good. If I were Roman Catholic, I might even call the epigenetic effect "super-added grace" and the wildness, "concupiscence". The theological language are all first-person accounts of what a scientist might discover in a 3rd person experiment. Which is to say, they are two perspectives on the same truth. Though I'm speculating wildly on the scientific part, as you know well.

2) Racism.
In my VGS paper mentioned above, I tried to point out that the Darwinian narrative has left us with two equally depressing options. Either the differences of IQ and race are all in our DNA and the superior race will prevail, or the differences are all in our upbringing, and the superior education, training will prevail. Either the Athenians will conquer the barbarians through superior breeding, or the Spartans will conquer through superior training. One solution gives us the 3rd Reich, the other gives us the Comintern.
But there is a third option available. That is epigenetic. Once you think about it, it's obvious. Upbringing has a one-generation effect. Heredity has a 100 generation effect. For a slowly changing climate / environment over a 100-year timespan, surely there must be a way for an organism to respond on intermediate timescales. And that timescale is epigenetic. It's also the same timescale as animal breeding.

And it is mentioned in the Bible. Moses says 3 to 4 generations of evil are passed down, but for Ammonites and Moabites it is 10 generations. (That's discussed in VGS.) This enables Christians to talk about heritable characteristics that are not racist. That's what sanctification is all about. Something the Orthodox call theognosis or deification. And it is a multi-generational affair.

3) The Orthodox realize that intellect can become an idol. And this goes back to at least the 7th century and the filioque clause. But on the other hand, tradition can become an idol. And so the East and West have their peculiar idols that afflict them. Only in combining East and West can we see each others faults, and perhaps also see each other's strengths. I love the Orthodox for what they reveal about my parochial theology. But their theology wasn't able to convert the nomads of Arabia, and we have had 1400 years of Islam as a direct result of their neglect of evangelism. There is also a disturbing connection between Russian communism and Russian Orthodoxy that needs a lot of explaining. So I see the West as the hot-headed younger brother who gets things done, whereas the Orthodox are the older brother who stayed at home.

4) Could Adam have lived longer than 930 years? Well, I don't think we can estimate age from the bones. But there is nothing that indicates Cro-Magnon lived 900 years. So Adam did get a longer life span. How much longer it might have been had he not Fallen, I don't know. But it seems just over the edge of likelihood that he would have lived forever. Telomerase and all those built in biological clocks seem to be fundamental to life, not accidental. But I could be mistaken on this. My point about Death being a gift, is that there are many parasites that can't be cured, and the only solution is death and rebirth. (See VGS). Thus Death rids us of some really nasty parasites.

5) Yes, Westminster is a Reformed seminary. And yes, there are Reformed things in that paper, it is just that I don't trumpet them. Because Reformed isn't like Catholic or Orthodox, it doesn't have a creed. (Even the Westminster Standards are only "confessional" for a few very small Reformed denominations.) What it does have is a way of looking at data. That's what I hope comes through.

Thanks for your thoughtful replies. You are right to say that I view most of what you have written as speculation, but what I really like is the attitude: "I want to take the Bible as literally as I know how, while also recognizing the real data from paleontology. I view it as a puzzle to bring the two into agreement..."

I also think that this is the right direction to go, and it is the path less taken. The interesting thing about speculation, is that it is a kind of filling in the gaps of knowledge, and that if one goes far enough, it is possible to reason your way into a concrete prediction about the world, that can be explicitly tested (a little like theoretical physics). The thing that fascinates me about your writing, is the fact that while the ideas are quite foreign, they are familiar in way, and although in many instances wild, not clearly wrong.

Reading your replies, I am also thinking of the presence of "natural evil" in the world, and how this connects to your theory, regarding the fall as primarily a biological change. You touch on this when you say that even in a non-fallen condition, Adam would eventually die a bodily death.

Does evil exist in the world before man arrived and fell into sin? I would say clearly so, and have followed others in theorizing about some role of the fallen angels.

About the Orthodox - there is an element of truth in what you say, but please recall that Russia was a nation of zealous evangelicals, spreading the gospel as far away as Alaska. The fact that the faith was closely tied to the state is not in my opinion a bad thing in the abstract. Of course, this is an anti-American thing to say, but so be it.

A lot of people, myself included, thought that the American public could not be bought. No matter how much glitzy advertising and bumper stickers, your average American could tell the difference between experience and inexperience, between age and youth, between Christianity and cult, between innocence and corruption, between veteran and greenhorn, between Annapolis and Harvard, between reality and hallucination.

We were wrong. We could be bought.

My small consolation comes from considering the price of our apostasy. But it is a small consolation, for like virginity, the next candidate will have the presidency for a song. Nevertheless, it is important to tally up the numbers, lest we believe the lie that this deviation is "the will of the people". For as Plato warned us many ages ago, a Democracy is only as safe as the purity of its people, the morality of the nation. As soon as the unwashed masses begin to sell their birthright, then democracy rapidly devolves into a warring oligarchy and from thence to monarchy just as surely as Rome evolved from Republic to Empire. We are watching the decline of government of the people, by the people and for the people. We live in the twilight of the gods, among the last presidents of this nation, in a world bent on destroying the American experiment.

Samuel Huntington, the Harvard (!) political scientist who almost alone in 1990 predicted the coming Islamic worldwide jihad in his book Clash of Civilizations, died last week, but not before publishing his last book in 2004 on the fate of America. The WSJ carried a fitting review of the man and his books (as well as National Review). His point is that there are three possible choices for America: to become the Bush / Wolfowitz / Cheney transformer of the world; to become transformed by the world into the likeness of the transnational, Davos, UN loving NGO; or to remain American--suspicious of empires and emperors alike. Under President Bush, we had the first, under President Obama the second, but what will become of the19th century isolationist America that Lincoln talked about?

Perhaps even in Lincoln's day it was always a Platonic ideal: perfect in the abstract, impossible in the practice. Certainly Teddy Rooseveldt dominated the Americas with his little empire. Wilson took it over the ocean, and made the first attempt at a world HQ with the League of Nations. FDR first instituted his version of it at home before exporting it to Europe and Japan. America's isolationism has always been a temporary shyness, almost feigned attitude, easily swayed by a Lusitania, a Pearl Harbor, a Gulf of Tonkin, a Twin Towers. Huntington always distrusted such false foreign lovers, as can be seen in the fate of those recent presidents that followed the siren call to conflict: Vietnam, Iran, Lebanon, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq. So the question arises, "if these extra-territorial actions are so politically lethal, why are so many presidents willing to go? Who are these sirens, and what makes their song so attractive?"

And that is the thesis of this post. The sirens are those that Huntington identifies: the transnationalists that so powerfully occupy the educational, journalistic, and political sectors of Western society. It does no good to try and identify a conspiracy because their actions are so blatant, their message so pervasive, their collaboration so intentional that it is more like an invasion than a conspiracy. We are being given an option between the past that fashioned America, and the future that tantalizingly whispers about forbidden cities and exotic fruits.
 
Of the media outlets, television was the first to insinuate its morality and violence and distorted history into the living room, so we threw out the TV with the birth of our first child. Then as our kids grew older, we realized how insidious the schooling was that first destroyed their love of learning, and then replaced it with sociological indoctrination, so we began to homeschool. In elementary school, we saw how watered down the math curricula had become and bought exclusively Saxon math books. And after the kids got to junior high, we realized how distorted the history books had become, and insisted either on primary sources, or textbooks written before 1950. When the kids got to high school, we realized how empty of content the geography/social studies were, and insisted on macro-economics and large doses of Friedrick Hayek. (Or to be more truthful, I realized how little I knew on the subject, and wanted to understand why the Carter administration of Keynesian economics had failed so utterly, and the Reagan revolution had succeeded.) And during this time period, the bias on radio news was getting so bad, I not only swore never to listen to NPR again, but also CBS and most syndicated news. The same thing happened with the newspapers, when it published an article blaming the Pope for AIDS and I found out my little local paper was a subsidiary of the garangutan New York Times. Fortunately, the internet began to burgeon at this time, and I began to get my news exclusively from the internet. (For three years, I was the only one optimistic about the war in Iraq, a propaganda victory now being billed as a miracle.)

For as I educated the children and myself, the stark contrast between what was taught in the schools, played on the TV, or crooned on the Senate floor and the facts I was learning from history, from science, from economics made me realize just how high the stakes had become. It was no longer differences of opinion that separated Americans, but differences of history, differences of math, differences of science, differences of economics. Either one lived in a fuzzy post-modern world where opinion and fact were interchangeable, or one lived in a world with real history and real heroes. Democracy can handle differences of opinion, it cannot handle differences of worldview. And as our Congress became a war zone over worldviews, it became increasingly dysfunctional and irrelevant.

But in a Post-Modern world, something has to sway the public to lean one direction or another. Somebody has to make a persuasive argument. How can that be done if logic and facts mean nothing?

Easily. With money.

The Federal Election Commission has documented the cost of this most expensive presidential campaign in history, both in absolute and relative terms (1996=$448.9M, 2000=$649.5M, 2004=$1.01bn) Never before has so much been spent on so little. Here is the breakdown:

(millions of dollars)		% total
All Candidates	1666.2
Democrats	1066.7	64%
Obama (D)	741.7	44.5%
Republicans	599.5	36%
McCain (R)	345.6	20.7%
Clinton (D)	221.6	13.2%
Romney (R)	105.1	6.3%
Giuliani (R)	58.7	3.5%
Edwards (D)	48.2	2.9%
Paul (R)	34.5	2.1%

So right away, we can see that not only did Democrats dominate the funding by a 2:1 margin, but Obama raised more money than all the Republican candidates put together, outspending McCain by more than 2:1.

But can a even a 2:1 ratio make such a difference? Would you sell your grandmother on the strength of that ratio? Even accounting for the weak morality of America, somehow this wouldn't explain it alone.

That's because the real number is closer to 100:1.

As many have noted, the mainstream press, the newspapers, the radio news, the TV news, the TV soaps, the TV comedies, the check-out tabloids, were all sold out for Obama. Having been educated on the Iraq war, it didn't surprise me that so much bias was blatantly displayed, but what surprised me was the complete shutdown of opposing views. If you wanted to know the real polling results, you couldn't rely on what the newspapers published. If you wanted the text of a speech by McCain or Palin, you had to download it yourself. All that free advertising is of almost inestimable value. The NYT may charge $128,000 for a full page ad, but you can't run an ad on the front page above the fold for any amount of money. But day after day, week after week, the NYT did exactly that. And not only the NYT, but the Washington Post, the  LATimes, the Chicago Trib, the Miami Herald, and every mainstream newspaper in America. And not only did they publish propaganda for their candidate, but smeared McCain and especially Palin. One can't even run smear campaigns effectively today, without falling afoul of lawyers and bad press, but the press can, and can get away with it.

But for all the cost of getting favorable newspaper coverage, even more expensive are TV ads--one minute superbowl ads are notorious for costing millions. Yet in interview after interview, in long half-hour blocks and 5 minutes spreads on evening news, Obama was treated with softball questions and outright adoration ("a tingle up my leg"), whereas McCain and Palin were trashed mercilessly. (Evidently it is a habit hard to break, for even this week AP news carried this announcement of the birth of Palin's grandson, "The teenage daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whose quest for the vice presidency began to go downhill the day she announced the pregnancy, has given birth to a son, a magazine reported Monday.")

Can we estimate the cost of such non-stop favorable campaigning by newspapers and TV? We'd quickly be in the hundreds of millions if not in the billions. And in fact, there isn't a way to put a price on it, because the commodity becomes devalued when it is so relentlessly flogged. For if a newspaper runs too many ads (say by reducing the price of an ad), then customers become unhappy with the product, and the value of the paper as a whole suffers. So one way to evaluate the actual cost to the newspapers of this 18 month spree of free campaign contributions, is to read their bottom line. What happened to the value of the NYT, the WashPo, the LAT?

Media company EW Scripps (of spelling bee fame) operates 10 TV affiliate stations, and 15 newspapers, the biggest is Rocky Mtn News in Denver, is down $100M from last year, not including another $50M writeoff, they announced 3 days after the election.  And that was a small operation.  A slightly bigger operation was the Tribune Corp, that owns the Chicago Trib and bought the failing LA Times for $315M. After declaring their losses at $13bn, the Trib declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Dec 9.  Why? The owner has a complicated explanation, which boils down to falling subscriptions and hence falling advertising.

The New York Times announced that its ad revenues are down 13%, total revenues down 20% and didn't announce that its stock price is down to 28% of what it was trading in June 2007. What does that come out to in real dollars? It's present market cap is a tad over $1bn, so it has lost $3bn during this campaign. It is now below Gannet (USA Today at $2bn) and WashPo ($4bn). While all the newspapers pushed for Obama, none more assiduously than NYT, and it cost it $3bn.

Well what of WashPo, did it survive the election without losing money? It's stock held remarkably steady up until Feb 2008, when it proceeded to lose about half its value, or about $4bn lost. And Gannet? Like NYT its been a big shill for Obama, and like NYT had its peak in June 2007 when it traded 7x its present value. That's close to a $12bn loss, if I've calculated it correctly.

Those are just the top players, and I haven't even tried to explore what CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN lost, but they give a general trend. By the law of fat tails, we can sort of double their losses and that pretty much covers all the smaller players. So what do we have?

13 + 3 + 4 + 12 = $32bn x 2 = $64bn in losses in the media industry over this election cycle.  But can we attribute all of this to the election? Hugh Hewitt does, and he's a media insider. But even if only half is due to changing tastes of the populace (and why do they change?), we would still have $32bn or about the size of the Detroit bailout.

America did sell it's soul, but it didn't come cheap. Considering there were some 69M votes for Obama, (versus nearly 60M for McCain) that comes out to about $478 per vote. Of course, not all those 69M votes were in play, and given previous Democratic party votes, perhaps 20M at most were in doubt, making that $1650 per deciding vote. Not that the next election will the voters be anywhere near this expensive. In the words of the famous joke,

"...We've already ascertained what you are, now we are merely haggling over the price"

In CS Lewis' delightful book, "Prince Caspian", (which according to my children, was an absolute disaster on the silver screen), he has the four Pevensey children returning to Narnia one year after their first trip through the wardrobe (an absolute must-see. The difference? Director lost his faith between movies, caused by box-office receipts.) On their return, they discover that many centuries have passed in Narnia, and there's this Scottish dwarf (whom Lewis models after his atheist mentor), who doesn't believe in the supernatural, nor in myths like Aslan. When they insist, he calls them condescendingly "My dear little friends." They respond by christening him the DLF. While he is explaining this theory to the children, something about a myth only requiring belief, not actuality or some such tommyrot, Aslan comes up behind him and tosses him in the air.

This is to inform you dear readers, I've been tossed.

I was driving a Pennsylvania state road 401 (aka Conestoga Rd) through rolling countryside between Philly and Lancaster. It was on Saturday, about 5 days ago, and the weather had been wet and windy. The road was still wet, and most of the leaves were off the trees. "I told you to enjoy it last week" I said to my twins, "because these beautiful fall leaves just don't last." I was talking while driving my usual 5 miles over the speed limit. The road had "sharp turn" signs ahead, though I don't remember if they posted any suggested speed limits. [Yes, 35mph]

But it was roads like this that made me glad to be alive. The Chrysler PT I bought at an auto-auction had looked like it was a product of "pirnp-my-ride" program. I took the garish pinstripes off, the orange "PT Cruiser" logos off the back. The owner had already removed the neon lights from the twin tailpipes, but he left the chrome sidepipes in place. With the front and back spoilers and a smoked-plexi bug deflector, it looked like something straight out of the 1930's. Alas, the sidepipes kept getting dragged over curbs and developing holes, and after two trips to the exhaust shop to fix the holes I had them remove them entirely. The bug deflector went the way of the pinstriping, and still the machine was only getting 18 mpg. I really didn't mind until this summer, when the gas pump prices went through the roof. Suddenly a car that got "only" 18mpg was shameful, an embarrassment, an example of American hubris. "You little pig", I scolded it every time I had to fill the 14 gallon tank which was every week, and it seemed to cringe in shame.

But it was still fun to drive. And drive it I did. One of Philly's best kept secrets is the Grand Prix racecourse down the length of Fairmont Park. Two narrow lanes, beautiful scenery, little alcoves with cement fountains and stone angels lining the road, a stream and big autumn trees on the other side, and numerous high stone arch bridges carrying the traffic of the city far overhead. But what it really has is a 25 mph speed limit and twisty turns for 4 miles where everyone does 40mph. I can do 50 on a Sunday morning. As I pull up at the light at Rittenhouse avenue there's this warm feeling that the stands are going wild, that my little PT has earned the right to get 18mpg. I call my wife on the cell phone and casually mention I'm driving down Lincoln Drive (ahh, if only Walther Mitty had a cell phone!) She hung up on me.

But today I'm doing Pa 401 and discussing either religion or politics with the twins. The turn was sharper than I anticipated, or perhaps I wasn't paying as much attention to the road as to my insightful analysis on the Obama campaign. I started to brake and could feel the back end slipping out on me. It wasn't the first time this had happened to me. That was when I was 17 and barely 3 months into my first license. Chloe Creek was a two-lane road frequented by coal trucks on the way from the strip mines to the railroad depot in Pikeville KY. They were paid by the number of loads they could deliver, and from dawn to dusk those dump trucks took their half of the road from the middle. They also spread lumps of coal on the outside of the turns. And my tail end found the "marbles" as they say on the Indy tour. Young and inexperienced, I did everything wrong. Cranking the wheel as fast as my 17-yr reflexes could go, I did one donut to the left, and another to the right before hitting the mountain and breaking the windshield with my head. I don't remember if AMC Gremlins had shoulder belts in those days, but it was a good thing the window broke, or otherwise it would have been the bridge of my nose on the steering wheel, you know, the karate move that can kill a man? My brothers weren't very understanding. "So how exactly did that mountain jump out in front of you again?" they asked in wide-eyed deadpan, and then split their sides laughing at their own humor.

But today I knew what to do, steer into the direction of the skid. As I began to do that a car came speeding from the other direction. I had milliseconds to choose. Do I steer out of the skid, hold course, brake, or pray?

People say that the whole world stops when these sorts of split second decisions hit you. Maybe they were younger than I am, I had no time to pray, I vaguely remember braking lightly and steering away from the oncoming car, when two things happened at once. The car passed me, and the whole world began to rotate. I had gone into an uncontrollable spin at 50mph on a narrow 2 lane road, a steep embankment on one side, trees and telephone poles on the other, and literally 2 inches of shoulder on each side.

The twins stopped in mid sentence, and I was far too old to even think about reacting. I just froze at the wheel and gave a silent prayer. "Lord God, is this how I'm coming home?"

That was the same prayer, though without as much zeal, as I prayed 29 years ago in a hurricane in Haiti. That time I had been on the back of a 2 ton flatbed truck, since there were already 3 older men in the cab, and we had just delivered a load of cinder block to a house whose roof was threatening to blow off. I was up on the roof, a block in each hand, doubled over from the 120 mph winds, laying block with my bare hands. The rain and wet lime had sanded off my fingertips, and they burned as we raced back to the mission compound for another load. My poncho was snapping in the wind, the rain stinging my face like needles, the wind roaring in the Antilles pines that bordered the hilltop road. And I was screaming Lear back at the wind, "Blow winds blow, crack your cheeks, rage, blow!" When there was a sound like a rifle shot, and one of the 100ft pines snapped about 20 feet up and began to fall across the road. The driver had the windshield wipers on max, but couldn't keep up with the rain. He didn't see the tree as he raced toward it at 35 mph. This time the world did slow down, or perhaps the wind held the tree up. For it fell exceedingly slowly, and as we raced under its 2-foot diameter trunk, I could have slapped the bark as it passed inches over my head and inches behind the bumper. "Good Lord, I'm coming home!" was my only thought then.

And while the world spun around me on that winding country road, I knew the same feeling, imagining myself impaled on a two-foot maple or telephone pole.

There were two loud thumps, and the car gently eased off the road and stopped, facing the right direction. Amazingly on the other side of the embankment, the road widened and there was a ditch. The car listed over to one side and I absently turned off the key. We sat in silence.

Finally I sighed and said. "Looks like a flat, I'll go out and see." I pulled the door latch and it opened, but being a little too shaken up, I gave no thanks, and just walked around the car.

It wasn't a flat, it was just a ditch. And there wasn't a scratch on the car. Not a dent.

Someone stopped their SUV across the road and anxiously asked if I was alright. "Yes, I shouted back. It must have been angels." "What?" he shouted in reply. "I'm fine", I said, "Angels." and got in the car. The car started up and we drove the rest of the way to my parents, at 35mph.

The girls started talking at once, as if they had not been interrupted. "I can't talk right now", I replied, "Give me a minute to catch my breath. I was going too fast."  "You never say that!" they replied, "Even when you get speeding tickets!" "Well I was", I said, "I was going too fast."

After we arrived  I looked at the car more carefully. There was a bit of mud on the front bumper. That was it. I had steered into the bank and bounced my way around the curve. But I should have bounced into the opposing lane, I thought, there had been two thumps, not one. "Do you know what we hit?" I asked my twins. "No," they said, "but we heard two thumps too."

"Maybe you hit an angel?" my dad proffered.

"No, an angel hit me." I said.

Victor Davis Hanson co-wrote a book ten years back called "Who Killed Homer?" Our library had it in the "new book" section right beside an overstuffed couch, so I took a break from theology and read Hanson for 4 hours. (No, theology never suffered from over-rapid advance.)

Hanson makes the point that Classics (study of Greek and Latin) is a dying field:

At the two institutions where we each created Classics programs ex nihilo in the mid-1980s, Classics is now essentially comatose. At Rollins College, where just six years ago there was one tenured and one tenure-track Classicist, there are no longer any tenure-track positions at all. The endowed chair once earmarked for Classics has been diverted from Greek and Latin instruction. At California State University at Fresno the newly arrived president, faced with budget cuts, in 1992 targeted the entire Classics and Humanities program for elimination and laid off its tenured faculty, suspending instruction itself.

The purpose of the book was to carry out a post-mortem and discover the culprit(s). Three major reasons were given, and were so similar to my own musings about Space Plasma Physics. Now that I've been at seminary for a semester, after a 25 year hiatus, I can see similar traits in theology. So if disparate fields of classics, theology and space physics are all suffering the malaise, I wondered if there wasn't a general principle at work.For if we can find the cause, perhaps we can find a cure.

Here is Honora Chapman reviewing WKH? and listing the reasons given for this decline in the humanities

So they composed their incisive and at times very funny screed that pointed the finger not at university presidents or deans but at classicists themselves, chiding them for their faddish bandwagon-hopping (that ironically reduced their objects of study to irrelevance or unintelligibility), sycophancy, wasteful conference attendance, laziness in the form of reduced course loads leading to the abuse of part-timers and grad students, and even simple stupidity. Truth be told, every academic field in the humanities is guilty of all of the above sins, as David Lodge so brilliantly attests in his novels Changing Places and Small World.

Let's boil this down to the three chapters of Hanson's book: (1) neglect of the next generation in favor of "research" or otherwise self-advancement; (2) overpublishing faddish, highly specialized studies undercutting tradition, in order to advance; (3) careerism. But I think you will agree that (3) is what drives (2) which is what drives (1). If there were no career in Classics, then there would not be the overpublishing and the neglect of students.

But if there wasn't a career in the classics, then why should people be taking it anyway?

Good question. Why did they take the classics 100 years ago? Why did they do this 200 years ago? Could it possibly be that classics actually had a purpose beyond self-promotion? Once upon a time, a medical doctor needed to be fluent in Latin, a lawyer needed his Latin desperately, a theologian couldn't even attend a conference without being fluent in Latin.

"Yes", I can see you shaking your head, "good old Galen was the best advice a medical doctor could have...in the dark ages!  It's a good thing we live in a modern world where they don't stick blood-sucking leeches to you to make you better!"

Yes, I would reply, it is good to live in the modern world. But it comes at a price. The price of not knowing anything about economics and bailouts, of not knowing anything about the ethics of euthanasia, of not knowing the burden of malaria in Africa, or of the noises under the hood of your late-model car, or how your watch tells time. We have abandoned the past and with it, an integrated view of the world. There was a time when farmers could debate the value of a gold standard, when teachers could all do sums, when plantation owners could write treatises on government. And today we vote for a man whose platform is "Change we can believe in." What if we don't believe? Who will listen?

John Dewey's pragmatism has finally overtaken us. We have relegated classics to the dustbin of history. I have heard distinguished scientists, former heads of national laboratories, say the same for Space Physics. "When it is no longer useful, we discard it, like yesterday's newspaper. The value of education lies in the magnitude of its monetary return." Yet strangely, that wasn't the reason this gray-haired guru went into Space Physics some 50 years ago. Satellites hadn't even been invented, when he entered space physics. Surely in his youthful idealism, he had seen something more than a secure future in space?

I am sad to report that when I was a physics teacher, I too spewed the sewage of pragmatism to my students. The American Physical Society kept publishing statistics. This is how much you can make with a bachelor in physics, they proclaimed, and the most lucrative field is medical physics. We sheepishly passed these vital statistics on to our students, enticing them to a career that none of us found the slightest bit enticing when we were their age.

But physics student enrollment kept dropping and dropping, both relatively and absolutely since the peak in 1959.

"Get them involved in your research" the APS yelled at us, "a student needs to get attached to the field!" So we dutifully put these green undergraduates in our labs with $100,000 equipment at their disposal. But when the student returned, week after week without results, we began to get anxious. We tempted them with travel funds to exotic locations if they would just finish the paper. We began to do some of the research for them, putting their names on the papers that they had submitted without doing the work. And still the students trickled out of our labs across campus to the post-modern courses on body-piercing..

Searching around for someone, anyone to do the work, we discovered foreign graduate students. And rapidly the labs filled up with Indian engineers, Chinese post-docs. We made no effort to entice them with rewards. We didn't wave the APS statistics at them. We hardly understood a word they said. But they did what they were told. They finished their papers. Our names were splashed across conference proceedings. Our citation index soared. And we gradually forgot that we were ever concerned with propagating our field.

Careerism is a deadly poison. It destroys all enjoyment, drains all idealism, turns us all into cogs in a great economic machine. But surely, I thought, surely theology will be different. Why no one in their right mind would go to seminary when job prospects mean a poverty-line existence in a 30-member church in South Dakota! And so one day I turned in my office and lab keys with access card to the government official in charge of such things, and piled my 25-year old textbooks in the back of Chrysler PT, and drove back 850 miles to my old seminary.

Like most seminaries around the country, it was booming. Three times as many students as when I attended 25 years ago. But fully half of the students were foreign. It was a bit of a jolt, as if I had been transported back into Physics. I spoke with the foreign students and was amazed at their dedication, their perseverance. Many had left everything behind to come to America and get a seminary education. Many were struggling not just with the arcane and obtuse vocabulary of theologians, but with the simple difficulty of learning another country's language. It was usually their third or fourth, of course, but no less difficult for coming simultaneously with Greek, Hebrew and sometimes Aramaic.

But it was us Americans that shocked me most. We had the books and the lingo down pat. We knew which professors taught at which seminaries. We knew the latest scuttlebutt on theological controversies in the denomination. We could roll our eschatological and Christological concerns like the pros we admired. The professionals who spoke at the big conventions, who wrote the latest cutting edge commentaries, who employed the highest tech Bible parsing software.

Now admittedly, I'm in the "academic track", not the "preaching track", but it is astounding that one can make a living being an academic theologian. When I was growing up, we would go to a favorite professor's house and sit on his sagging sofa sipping hot chocolate and discussing the weightier matters of life. If the professor wore a jacket, it had leather patches on the elbows. But we don't do that anymore. We have office hours and conference engagements. We have secretaries and assistants like business professionals. We worry about things like tenure tracks and endowments. And we fly to alumni dinners where we talk about vision statements and enrollments.

Pragmatism has eroded even here, even the very roots of American protestantism. We live in a sheltered cocoon where we write papers of turgid prose for a specialized audience that may never cross the threshold of a church. We footnote and annotate, we cite Greek grammar and Hebrew syntax, but we never speak of Obama or the Taliban. We talk of the eschaton but not of global warming. We bandy apologetics, but we neglect Islam. I wonder if this was the condition of the North African church in that fateful 7th century when a bunch of camel breeders swept up out of the blinding sands. I wonder if this was the condition of the European church when the Mongols came thundering out of the steppes. I wonder if this was the condition of the French church when Robespierre began his rant. I wonder if this was the condition of the German church when a midget in a mustache waved his funny flag.

For pragmatism cannot save. It cannot survive. It cannot even propagate.

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison.

I've been slowly posting the papers that I've turned in for class credit, and now I have my next 30-page installment: The Bimodal Parables & Miracles of Jesus and his use of Recursion. Yup, still too long to post here, so this time we'll save you the grief and publish the conclusions. The theme was Jesus' miracle of changing water into wine. Or maybe I should call that the pretense. I knew what the conclusion was going to say, but took 29 pages to broach the subject. Here it is:

We see in plain view here, the bimodality of the miracles. We cannot find a way to make them the inobservant stories of a gullible culture. We cannot find a way to make them the over-spiritualized product of a semiliterate church. Either they happened, or they were a fraud from the beginning. Bayes theorem would say the probability of a fraud given this story is no less than the probability of this story given a fraud times the ratio of probable frauds to probable stories. Neither term is very large, for who would tell a story if it were suspected of fraud? And surely there are far more stories than there are frauds in this world. One has to have a deep suspicion of mankind, or this particular story to assume it is fraudulent. There are those who see it and shake their head in disbelief, while others say “My Lord and my God.” There are no other options. He did not intend there to be.

 

Bultmann may feel fine talking of the mythic meaning and symbolism of the miracle, but what he cannot stomach is that it might actually have occurred. In the words of GK Chesterton, “The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.” It is this incredibility that we examine, because this is the δοξα, this is the manifestation of Christ, this is what made men believe. St Paul calls it “the offense of the gospel”, and this is indeed, what offends most about this Gospel. It is not the symbolism, it is not the bold claims to be equal with God, it is not the Jewishness of the presentation, but 6 stone jars and a dipperful of wine. This is the rock that causes men to stumble.

Yet even among the faithful, there is some sort of waffling, some sort of weaseling against the offense of miracle. Augustine calls it an acceleration of a natural process, something like Aaron’s rod that budded. For every year, Augustine argues, God takes the rain that showers the earth and produces the sap of the vine. Only in this instance he does it without the vine. Lewis calls it a miracle of the old creation, because he uses the means lying latent in it. Walking on the water, says Lewis, was a new creation miracle because it violated the laws of the old creation. Some have gone so far as to say that these types of miracles can’t occur today because we must wait for the parousia to experience that new creation. Others would suggest that there have never been “new creation” miracles, but Jesus through divine knowledge, broke no laws of nature, only laws of probability. A miracle, says Augustine, is only a violation of our knowledge of nature.

I would argue that these are distinctions without a difference. All our knowledge is probabilistic. All knowledge is power. If Jesus has divine foreknowledge then He has power. When the contents of six waterpots became wine, then atoms of hydrogen and oxygen were miraculously transformed into atoms of carbon and nitrogen. These kinds of transformation can occur, but only in the heart of the Sun at millions of degrees and enormous pressures, or for a few brief milliseconds in the flash of a thermonuclear bomb. If a vine can accomplish this in the garden, it is not because it transforms water, but because it absorbs carbon from the air and nitrogen from the earth to mingle it with the water. That alone is miracle enough, but the waterpots did not have the machinery of chlorophyll and root hairs to do it. If there were a miracle, it was as bold or bolder a miracle as the walking on water. And this is the recursion, the positive feedback, for the more science we know, the bigger the miracle becomes.

For like the parables, the miracles do not get more palatable with time. No amount of scholarly research can make them less miraculous. They remain a stark reminder that the Truth is bimodally received. This is the defining mark of both. If Jesus can take the atoms of our universe, the atoms of our food and drink and transform them into the blood of the grape, He can also transform our bodies to be like His glorious body. Every miracle is evidence of that power. Every miracle confronts us with the barely contained fury of a nuclear warhead. Every miracle demands that we decide.