Response to CThomas (on ID)

A reader by the name of CThomas made this request in the comments of yesterday's post. The answer grew to post-size, and so I am placing it here. I advise longtime readers to skip this post, lest they bemoan in a "there he goes again" fashion.

CThomas's request:

[B]ut I was wondering if you could restate why you feel so strongly that "ID" is really about religion, and that denials of that are a sham.

CThomas,

I would agree with what GCT wrote.

The big-bang theory which you bring up is, in fact, a good counterexample. In the past, many scientists would quite openly use it as an example of how science supported their faith. I certainly heard professors make such statements in the classroom. There was no controversy. Why? Because it was understood that they were expressing their personal views, and there was no demand to insert their viewpoint in the curriculum and call it science. It was simply a case of expressing a metaphysical extrapolation: this scientific result is so beautiful, so powerful, so unexpected, and so inexplicable, that I see the hand of God. As I said, this view was fairly common and non controversial. Any assistant professor who made such a statement would not have had it held against him come tenure time.

Now consider fine-tuning. Who believes fine tuning is evidence for a designer? Theists, such as I, do. Although theoretically an alien from another universe might have created our universe, I don't know of a single atheist who is so swayed by fine-tuning that he agrees that the universe must have been designed by a powerful though natural being. Atheists impressed by fine tuning instead look for multiple universe explanations.

Again, in principle there is no controversy here. Before the modern ID movement, one could argue, without fear of retribution, that fine tuning was, in one's personal view, a sign of divine intent. Of course, scientists who thought so also supported cosmological research that might potentially weaken their position—because we are scientists. I, for one, never worry that science will undermine my faith anymore than I worry that archeology will. (In fact, if science or archeology could disprove God, I'd want to know it—might as well eat, drink, and be merry. After all, St. Paul wrote to the effect that, if this is all wrong, then we are the most foolish of men.)

Now if all those theists and fine-tuning proponents joined forces to express their views in text book form (after first replacing every occurrence of creation in early versions of the text with design), wrote secret strategy papers outlining how they would use their political influence to get their views into the schools so as to advance their position in the culture wars, and how they could further their cause through litigation, while at the same time they argued publically that it's all about the scientific merits of their views—even though they made no testable predictions and performed no experiments—you'd start to, I'll speculate, smell a rat.

The ID movement uses what was acceptable—that it is "our private view is that the designer is God," as smokescreen. Behind the curtain what they have done is take all the reasons that scientists/believers have always accepted as science-based support for our beliefs—packaged them in a veneer of flimsy mathematics, and stopped calling it by its real name, apologetics and insisted on calling it what it isn't: science.

Now that that's failed, their strategy is worse yet: it's to ratchet up the culture-war rhetoric. It's not possible, in their minds, to be against their movement on principle—anyone not with them is part of the "materialist conspiracy."

Well, I was a practicing scientist before I was a believer. If there were any meetings where unbelieving scientists plot their strategy to undermine theism, I wasn't invited. The only conspiracy (i.e., a secret agreement and call to action) that has been exposed to the sunshine is the DI's "Wedge Strategy."

The dishonesty of the movement has done incalculable damage. It has not only polarized what was, for the most part, a tolerant community of scientists into believers versus unbelievers—it has caused a second order fracturing as well. Unbelievers are split between militants and moderates, and believers are split between those backing the ID movement and those who are painfully embarrassed, both as scientists and more importantly as believers, by its tactics. In addition to everything else, they made the common mistake of incessant wolf-crying, thereby desensitizing virtually everyone to the merits of any legitimate case of religious discrimination in the scientific community.

By the way, I am convinced that among believing science professors the majority position is that the ID movement is a scientific and ecclesiastical embarrassment. I have no data that is not purely anecdotal. One is that the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) has certainly expressed what could be interpreted as embarrassment with the movement's rhetoric (to the point where this venerable group of scientists/believers is under attack from Dembski and O'Leary (here and here) for being pawns of the materialists. There's an orthodoxy in this movement and one of its dogmas is: no mentioning the unmentionable question of the age of the universe.) The other is that I know, personally, on the order of thirty scientists/believers, and not one is a supporter of the ID movement, although they all are sympathetic toward design (what theist isn't?). While some of the leaders of the ID movement have PhDs, their army is less educated in the sciences, as a perusal of the comment section on Uncommon Descent demonstrates. That is yet another sign that this is a cultural movement, not a scientific one.

Likewise, among unbelievers, all my personal anecdotal evidence causes me to believe that the militant position is a minority. But the militants, like the famous IDists, though a small subset, make for a better story. Bu we should take comfort that these are the extremes, not the norm. In a way they are peas in a pod. People like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Ken Ham, and Bill Dembski will agree that science is incompatible with theism, each because they hate one or the other. (Dembski and Ham will deny that they hate science, but what they claim is science, which they wholeheartedly support, isn't.)

Yes, if you look only at the slogan "the designer could be an alien" you can stand on the thinnest of crumbling ledges and argue that it is not about promoting theism. However, if you look under the hood it is easy to see that this movement, at this time, with these leaders, is all about promoting theism. Promoting theism is fine by me, but not if it is done via a Trojan Horse, and not if it sets up standard science, which to me has always glorified God, as an atheist, materialist conspiracy designed to obliterate religion.

The fact that all IDists are theists (there may be a few pathological counterexamples—but at least the ones I know about, such as DaveScot on Uncommon Descent, I don't find credible) would indeed be irrelevant if ID was, in fact, science. But given that ID is not science, the universal theism of the IDists emerges as the motive force behind the movement, not just an inconsequential correlation.

To summarize:

• The Wedge Strategy demonstrates, in my opinion conclusively, that the underlying goal of the ID movement was to promote theism in the public schools.
  
• Blatantly redacting Of Pandas and People to replace the word creation with the neutral term design is further (again to me, conclusive) evidence of the movement's true agenda.
  
• While it might be possible to promote design theory scientifically, any scientist looking at the current state of the art would conclude that ID hasn't gotten there yet. The movement's strategy is to redefine science so that ID does fit in the new definition. Unfortunately, so does astrology.
  
• ID, if it were all about science, would not propose a "big tent" inside of which the scientifically meaningful question of the age of the earth was off the table. In that sense (i.e., meaning a "no-fly zone") there are no big tents in science, and questioning anyone who claims to be a scientist on a position which he claims is supported scientifically is fair game. The Big Tent is meant to inflate the base, or to avoid fracturing the base because, once again, it's all about religion (via the culture wars) rather than science.
  
• The ID leaders, if it were about the science, would be doing research instead of constantly bitching, moaning, and whining about atheist, materialist conspiracies.
  

All this could change in a heartbeat if the ID community made one testable, positive prediction. Do this experiment, result A confirms ID, and result B refutes it. Then all the unsavory tactics of the movement would be forgotten, at least by me, as ID became a legitimate science.

What if there was a Culture War, and nobody came?

I hate the culture wars. Despise them, as a matter of fact.

Yes, I am upset that IDist Guillermo Gonzalez did not get tenure at Iowa State. I believe, given all that I know, that he probably deserved it. Gonzalez is the best and the brightest of the IDists. I think that he was held accountable for his private beliefs in a way that others, with different beliefs, would not have been. On the other hand, I detest the ID/Christian response to the Gonzalez case even more. What did they expect? And do they really believe that the correct reaction is to moan and whine and threaten litigation? Do they not care at all that they painted themselves into this unsavory corner? Consider these three facts:

1. The ID leadership insists that ID is not about religion.
   
2. ISU stated that Gonzalez's ID was a factor.
   
3. They (the ID leadership) now want to argue religious discrimination!
   

In virtually everything the ID leaders do, they display gross incompetence. These folks make the Keystone Kops look like those crack CSI teams on the telle. Had they been honest, something of which they seem incapable, and admitted from the start what everyone with at least a half a brain already knows, that ID is about religion—then they could now argue with a straight face that Gonzalez was punished for private religious beliefs. But here comes ISU which says: OK, as you wanted, and since you insisted, we went ahead and treated ID as science—and when we did we found it scientifically lacking based on the good and proper evaluation of Gonzalez's fellow scientists—and so we, as anyone would demand that we do, count this bad science against Gonzalez. Religion has nothing to do with it since ID is, as you keep telling us, not about religion.

Messrs Dembski and Wells: Can you say hoisted with our own petards?

On the reverse side we have a rather loathsome and in some ways pitiable creature by the name of Hector Avalos. Avalos was just promoted to full professor at the same university, Iowa State. Avalos is a cliché: an atheist professor of religion. They're a dime a dozen. I have met more than a few in my day, and they share a common trait. They believe the strange juxtaposition of their position and their beliefs proves just how amazingly clever they are. Like the others I have encountered, Avalos appears to represent the most hideous aspects of the academy: a pseudo-intellectual with nothing substantive to add either to his own field or the unrelated fields, such as astronomy, into which he injects his nose.

Avalos, a non-scientist, was, two years ago, an instrumental force behind a petition of 120 ISU professors denouncing ID. At that time, he said "We certainly don't want to give the impression to the public that intelligent design is what we do." No, authoring vindictive, mean-spirited petitions, one might conclude, is scholarly activity of choice for ISU professors.

Avalos has denied the obvious: that this petition, aimed directly at Gonzalez, was designed, in part or in full, to derail Gonzalez's tenure application. Yeah, right. Like the ID leaders claiming ID is not about theism, Avalos's denial is a bald-faced lie that displays a garden-variety pseudo-intellectual's arrogance. He assumes, like the ID leadership, that the rest of the world is too stupid to see the true agenda through an obfuscation of rationalizations and half (or less) truths.

Aghast that anyone should criticize his lofty intentions and capabilities, Avalos posted a sanctimonious slew of self-aggrandizement on PZ Myers's blog.

At least it gave us a glimpse of the quality of his scholarship. He wrote, in response to a criticism that he blames the Jews for the holocaust:

I explicitly (Fighting Words, pp, 195-96) say that Hitler's plan is an updating of Martin Luther's famous seven-point plan for the Jews

Which is both a) wrong† and b) an argument so profound and original that I first heard from a classmate in my eight grade Comparative Political Systems class. Avalos also displayed a Clintonian mastery of the half-truth, writing:

While I have never called for Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez to be fired, or even to be denied tenure,

And what was the purpose of the petition, coming as it did at a time when Gonzalez was preparing to submit his application? Oh yes—it was just to assure the public that ISU did not have a Department of Intelligent Design.

Now the Full Professor of Petty Petitions is at it again. Avalos is besotted with the prospect of rescuing the little people from a grave ill, the unspeakable crime that the ISU football coach wants to hire, with private funds, a team chaplain. With the hard-hitting analysis you'd expect from a scholar awarded the prestigious rank of full professor, and with his mighty intellect focused on this threat to the Republic, Avalos said:

Are you going to have counseling for Jewish students? Muslim students? There's no such thing as one religion or one version of Christianity

A veritable Ph.D. thesis compressed into twenty three words.

Really now, what is it with these Midwestern atheist religion professors—why do they write and speak like sixth graders? I'm thinking now of Avalos Part Deux: Kansas professor and martyr wannabe Paul Mirecki who wrote about slapping fundies in their "big fat faces" and signs himself the "evil Dr. P."

---

† Avalos cannot, it would appear, understand the concept of the Nazis co-opting Luther's words for political expediency. One cannot make a truly convincing case that Christianity, either via a route connecting Luther to Hitler, or any other pathway, is responsible for Nazism. For if you do, you'll have to explain why the Nazi's had a plan to persecute the Church.

Go Nuclear on Me

Once I was attending a class taught by Dirk Walecka, a fairly famous nuclear physicist, renowned also for his pedagogical skill. At one point he was describing the difference between the nuclear force, which holds protons and neutrons together in a nucleus, and the electromagnetic force, which holds electrons in their orbits about the nucleus. He argued that the most profound difference is this:

• When nuclei get bigger, they get bigger
  
• When atoms get bigger, they get smaller
  

His point was that as you increase in atomic number, nuclei just get bigger while atoms (until a shell is completed) will get smaller as the electrons get pulled in more by the increased positive charge coming from the additional protons in the nucleus. From this fact one can conclude two important features of the nuclear force:

1. Since the protons in the nucleus should strongly repel each other from the electromagnetic force (like charges repel) the nuclear force must be much stronger than the electromagnetic force.
   
2. Since atoms get smaller when they get bigger, the electromagnetic force extends over large distances, while the nuclear force does not.
   

Another amazing fact about the nuclear force is that it is just strong enough that the deuteron (a nucleus consisting of one proton and one neutron (that makes it a hydrogen isotope) is barely bound, while the diproton—a two proton nucleus (a helium isotope) is not bound.

If the strong nuclear force were just 4 percent stronger, the diproton would form, which would cause stars to so rapidly exhaust their nuclear fuel as to make complex life impossible. On the other hand, if the strong nuclear force were just 10 percent weaker, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen would be radioactive and again life would be impossible.

Pretty darn cool, the nuclear force.

Thar Be Giants!

A very interesting passage of scripture occurs in Genesis, chapter the sixth:

¹ When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, ² the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. ³ Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years."  ⁴The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. (Genesis 6:1-4)

Who are these Nephalim (or, as some translations use, giants?)

Well, there is the sexy explanation, which is almost certainly incorrect. And that is: the Nephilim are the result of interspecies sexual congress between angels (sons of God) and human women (daughters of men). Among angels, as with humans, it would appear that the males of the species are licentious pigs. This explanation even makes a connection with the New Testament where we read, in Paul's rather enigmatic explanation of why women should wear head coverings in church:

For this reason, and because of the angels, the woman ought to have a sign of authority on her head. (1 Cor. 11:10)

The idea being, according to this reasoning, that angels are in attendance, and to help them keep their mind on worship instead of wandering into the gutter women should hide their beauty.

I can only say that I agree with John Calvin who wrote, concerning this explanation:

That ancient figment, concerning the intercourse of angels with women, is abundantly refuted by its own absurdity; and it is surprising that learned men should formerly have been fascinated by ravings so gross and prodigious. (From his commentary on Genesis.)

What is the more plausible and less fanciful explanation? Well, for starters you need to read Genesis chapters 4 and 5 and see the genealogies of Cain and Seth, his brother who was born after the murder of Abel.

Seth's family tree includes the righteous Enoch who walked with God and apparently did not suffer physical death but instead had a sort of personal rapture. Enoch was the father of Methuselah, the longest lived man, who made it to age 969. And Methuselah 's grandson was a "righteous" man by the name of Noah.

Cain's descendents are, by comparison, a rogues gallery. They include Lamech who is credited with introducing the world to polygamy and who wrote poetry that boasted of his murderous exploits. (Genesis 4:19-24).

Add to this the realization that "son" in the bible does not always refer to a biological offspring, but rather one who is worthy to be a descendent, regardless of bloodline. For example the Pharisees were warned not to count on the fact that they were blood sons of Abraham. God, they were told by John the Baptist, could raise sons of Abraham from the stones. And Jesus likewise told them that, in spite of the blood that flowed in their veins, they were not the sons of Abraham but the sons of the devil.

So here we find the probable explanation: The sons of God were the "good" bloodline that descended from Seth. The "daughters of men" were exotic beauties in the "bad" bloodline of Cain. The progeny of the ill advised union between the two groups was worse yet, including a group of giants who it appears was something like a gang of thugs. (Brutes is perhaps a better word than giants.) Calvin blames Jerome for a faulty translation, pointing out (among other things) the Moses never actually comments on their size. And Matthew Henry writes, in his commentary on Genesis:

[We] read of a nation that was multiplied, not to the increase of their joy, (Isa. 9:3.) Numerous families need to be well-governed, lest they become wicked families. Mixed marriages (v. 2): The sons of God (that is, the professors of religion, who were called by the name of the Lord, and called upon that name), married the daughters of men, that is, those that were profane, and strangers to God and godliness. The posterity of Seth did not keep by themselves, as they ought to have done, both for the preservation of their own purity and in detestation of the apostasy. They intermingled themselves with the excommunicated race of Cain: They took them wives of all that they chose. But what was amiss in these marriages? 1.) They chose only by the eye: They saw that they were fair, which was all they looked at. 2.) They followed the choice which their own corrupt affections made: they took all that they chose, without advice and consideration. But, 3.) That which proved of such bad consequence to them was that they married strange wives, were unequally yoked with unbelievers, (2 Cor. 6:14).

What we have, in effect, is the first of many warnings in the bible against syncretism. So important is this to God that later he will later instruct Joshua to commit genocide and engage in ethnic cleansing (showing no concern that 21^st century atheists will use those commands to label God a sadist and a mass murderer) to eliminate sources of religious pollution from the peoples of Canaan.

We have, in the proper way of looking these events leading up to the flood, a very familiar theme: the world is divided into two groups, call them Seth's line and Cain's line, (Old Testament) Jews and Gentiles, elect and unelect, vessels of mercy and vessels of destruction, believers and unbelievers. Whatever you call them, God will justly give the one group the punishment due to all men. To the other group he will demonstrate his mercy and glory by sparing them by grace and by the redemptive power of Christ's blood.

Just how expensive are batteries?

Here is an interesting little physics calculation. How does the cost of batteries compare to the cost of "wall" electricity?

Well, the cost you pay your electric company will be around 15 cents per kilowatt-hour. (The non-dimensionally challenged will note that you don't pay for power, which would be in kilowatts, but energy, which is in kilowatt hours.)

For a battery, let's take:

• Voltage, V = 1.5 volts
  
• Average Current, I = 2/3 amps
  
• Lifetime, T = 5 hours
  
• Cost, C = 1 dollar = 100 cents
  

These numbers are representative of a D cell battery.

Let's get the correct formula by dimensional analysis—this means if we arrange the parameters to give us the correct dimensions then, we have be close to the correct formula.(That is, there is a unique arrangement of the relevant parameters that produce the correct units.)

Our answer should be in cents per kilowatt hour, which means cents/kilowatt-hour

To get watts we need volts × amps, or V × I. To get kilowatts, we need V × I / 1000. Thus to get cents per kilowatt hour we need

(C × 1000) / ( V × I × T)

To be sure, dimensional analysis only tells us the answer is "like" this. There could be a factor of 2 or π that we missed. This, however, turns out to be the correct formula, one that we would have arrived at by more traditional reasoning.

So what do we get? Plug in the numbers:

(100 cents × 1000) / (1.5 volts × 2/3 amps × 5 hours) = 20,000 cents per kilowatt-hour! (or 200 dollars per kilowatt-hour)

Thus a battery is ~1300 times more expensive that wall electricity.

For more "back of the envelope" calculations like this one, see Back of the Envelope Physics, by Clifford Swartz.

Oh Brother...

This, I believe, is not a parody.

The unpardonable sin? Heliocentrism.

I like this blurb:

However, for both moral and theological reasons, we should always bear in mind that the Earth does not move. If it moved, we would feel it moving.

This article is so bad, it even quote-mines Answers in Genesis! That's not easy to do. It quotes (seemingly in support of geocenticism) a paragraph from an AiG document in which the AiG is actually attempting to distance itself from those embarrassing geocentrists.

Madness.

Something that makes me sad—expressed mathematically

Consider the set S, where

S = {homosexuals, Jews, atheists, Moslems, African Americans, Hispanics, Wiccans, illegal immigrants, white men, conservatives, liberals, Christians…}

What do elements of the set S have in common?

Let e be an element of S. We find:

1. e is also a set.
   
2. There exists a subset m of e consisting of people who have stated: "The only group which it's still considered okay to discriminate against are members of the set e."
   

I'm sad the Christians are a member of the set S. We have embraced the great American pastime of proclaiming victimhood. We have become a religion of whiners, with entire publications more or less devoted to honing our whining skills.

The Law

A tough question we face as Christians concerns the law. Did it end? What did Christ mean when he said:

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. (Matthew 5:17-18)

Oh, if only the lesson stopped there! We could convince ourselves that everything was accomplished on the cross (it is finished) and so the law died with Jesus. End of story. But Jesus adds:

Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:19)

Now it is not easy to shoe-horn that into something that is about to end. So we trudge on—and Jesus teaches, in the rest of the chapter, that the laws are in a certain sense “harder.” It’s not just adultery that’s adultery, but simple lust is elevated to adultery.

And therein lays the seed of an explanation. Jesus is not warning us that all the laws of Israel are still in effect. He telling us, as Paul will tell us in great detail later, that grace is not a license to sin. Christ fulfills the law—so the law no longer condemns us, but the law is not abolished, it is still a rule of life that will convict us, and in fact it’s “worse than ever”—to him who much has been given, much is expected.

But Jesus’ examples are all of the “moral” variety--murder, adultery, etc. So we arrive at the common understanding of most Christians—that something has been abrogated and yet something is still in effect. We call the first something the ceremonial law and the second something the moral law. But how do we make a distinction? There seems to be a certain arbitrariness.

Yet it is an important point. For example, in the Old Testament we have all those laws concerning stoning adulterers, executing blasphemers, killing Sabbath violators, handling lepers, women having their periods, treatment of slaves (which then presupposes that Jews having slaves was permissible). We cavalierly state that “those are ceremonial laws and have been abrogated.” Our detractors, who want to show how inconsistent we are, correctly point out that Jesus never said those laws are null and void—and so Christianity does not they argue, as an example, inherently condemn slavery.

A fair point indeed.

Another fair point is that if all those laws from Leviticus are null and void, then why do we like to quote Leviticus that homosexuality is an abomination? It seems to me that the answer is: we probably shouldn’t, unless we are prepared to argue that everything in Leviticus is still applicable. (However, homosexuality is still condemned by Paul’s teaching.)

The problem is in this ceremonial law versus moral law distinction. I think that is probably the wrong way to look at it. The real distinction should be: the laws of the nation of Israel as opposed to the commandments Christ gives for Christians.

In the Old Testament, God dictated laws for day to day life in Israel. Why? Multiple reasons, I suspect. For one, they were to demonstrate the need for a savior. The Jews were the chosen people. They were given uncountable blessings and witnessed unimaginable miracles. Yet they would fail by the measure of the law. If they, in spite of God’s blessing, couldn’t save themselves by keeping the law, what chance did the gentiles have? None, is the clear answer. But another reason, it always seemed to me, was that we have a people who were enslaved for 400 years, They had no idea how to run a country, especially one that first needed martial law while it conquered many peoples. God gave them what amounted to a constitution.

So it is not that the ceremonial law that was abolished, it was the laws governing a nation. A nation, by the way, that effectively ceased to exist when Christ initiated the kingdom of heaven, and literally ceased to exist in AD 70.

How do we know that it is not sinful to violate Israel’s national law? After all, as we already mentioned, our critics are correct to point out that there is no definitive statement in the New Testament stating that we could stop observing it.

Well, the result of the lack of a definitive statement was predictable: the first century Jewish Christians were confused about it, and the gentile Christians protested that those Jewish national laws should not apply to them. Hence then need for the teaching of Paul and the Jerusalem council to make a decision: the gentiles were right.

Why didn’t Jesus make a definitive statement? I have no clue. So maybe we are mistaken? Not a chance, because what Jesus didn’t say explicitly (leaving it for Paul to state) he demonstrated by violating the national law of Israel—a nation of which neither he nor his followers were any longer citizens. If violating or disregarding the national laws of Israel is sinful, then Jesus sinned, and not only can his death not save us, he couldn’t even save himself.

So how did Jesus violate the national law of Israel? Some examples, off the top of my head:

• He did not demand the death of the Pharisees who committed blasphemy. And they didn’t commit just your garden-variety blasphemy, but the mother of all blasphemies, the Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. In fact, they may be the only people in history to have committed that sin. (Mark 3:22-30)
  
• He worked on the Sabbath. (Luke 6:1-2, Matthew 12:10; Mark 3:2, John 9:14–16)
  
• He operated as a priest, forgiving sins, both in violation of how priests were to atone for sins, and in violation of the fact that he was not a Levite. (Mark 2:5-10)
  
• He excused the woman caught in adultery. (Yes, I’m aware that that particular story might not actually belong in the bible.^†)
• He mishandled lepers. (Leviticus 13)

(Do you know of any other examples?)

The law Jesus did give us is clear enough. The Ten Commandments are repeated, except for the law concerning the Sabbath. There are more commandments, including the greatest and the second greatest. (Matthew 22:36-40). In fact, these two, Jesus tells us, supercede the laws of the prophets. And from these two, we can deduce truths (even if it takes a while) such as slavery is contrary to the teaching of Christ. ^††

---

^† Calvin wrote of the passage in question, John 7:53-8:11: “It seems that this passage was unknown anciently to the Greek Churches; and some conjecture that it has been brought from some other place and inserted here. But as it has always been received by the Latin Churches, and is found in many old Greek manuscripts, and contains nothing unworthy of an Apostolic Spirit, there is no reason why we should refuse to apply it to our advantage.” That works for me.

^†† Why then didn’t Paul explicitly condemn slavery? That’s a long story, but here is a thumbnail sketch. Preaching the gospel is paramount, and proper treatment of other humans will follow from that. Paul did not put the cart before the horse. Better for Onesimus to be sent back, even if meant a return to slavery, because Onesimus was now a Christian and his walk was more important than his circumstances. Why not command his master Philemon, a Christian, to free him? Paul went very close to doing that but didn’t quite cross the line. Why? For the same reasons we are no longer commanded to tithe but rather to give joyfully. Under grace, our motivations are more important than reluctant obedience. Paul’s absolutely crystal clear hope is that Philemon will realize that it is right to grant Onesimus his freedom.

A Random Walk

Back in graduate school, someone borrowed and never returned my copy of A Random Walk in Science. May he rot and burn in hell. (Just kidding. Really.)

I just picked up a copy real cheap from eBay. Man I love that book! It a compendium of short, humorous anecdotes from mathematics and science (physics mostly—but then again, what else is there?) One interesting feature is that a fair number of them come from the Soviet Union in the height of the cold war. Many also come from the beloved Journal of Irreproducible Results.

I remember reading it in grad school and thinking that smart people are often really funny, too. Well what was true then is true now: smart people often are very funny. And since, in general, scientists are smart people, scientists are often very funny, even if just to other scientists.

What strikes me now, having reread it, is that the anecdotes it contains also depict scientists as gracious. I never considered that as a grad student. The reason, I think, is that was so obvious as to be unremarkable.

That, it seems to me, has changed. But it might be just the company I keep here on the inter-webs. A lot of the scientists you meet here are nasty and strident and anything but gracious.

Anyway, here is a flavor of A Random Walk in Science. A survey first published in Physicists continue to laugh, MIR publishing, Moscow, 1968. In appears in A Random Walk in Science on page 37.

What do Physicists Do?

In keeping with the spirits of the times the Editors of the wall newspaper 'Impulse' of the Physical Institute of the Academy of Science of the USSR have formed a Department of Sociological Investigations. Members of this department conducted a survey of the Moscow populace on the theme 'What do Physicists do?'

Population Group	Answers
Writer-Realists	They argue until hoarse in smoke-filled rooms. It is not known why they set up unintelligible dangerous experiments using huge apparatus.
Writer-Visionaries	They work on enormous electronic machines called electronic brains. They work mostly in the cosmos.
First year college students	They speculate a lot. They make discoveries no less than once a month.
Graduate students	They solder circuits. They ask the older ones to find the leak. They write articles.
Young scientific staff members—experimenters	They run to the equipment department. They scrub rotary vacuum pumps. They flap their ears at seminars.
Young scientific staff members—theoreticians	They converse in corridors helping to make great discoveries. They write formulae, mostly incorrect.
Older scientific staff members	They attend meetings. They help younger staff members find the leak.
Members of the personnel department	Experimenters must arrive at 8:25 so that at 8:30 they can sit silently next to apparatus that is running. Theoreticians do not work at all.
Members of the guard force	They walk back and forth. They present passes upside down.
Representatives of the Ministry of Finance	They spend money to no purpose

 

 

NASCAR and Predestination

As I mentioned in this NASCAR post, the sport's biggest name is now a free agent. There is a good chance that he'll end up at Richard Childress Racing and become a teammate of my favorite driver, Kevin Harvick. Commenting to the effect that he will not get involved in "lobbying" Dale Jr. to move to RCR, Harvick said:

"I'm here to race, man. I'm not going to get in the middle of the politics of anything like that. I'm just going to do my job and however it plays out, it was meant to be and that's the way it will be.

That's why I like him! He's a Calvinist!