The Modern Myth of Size

"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the
stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the
son of man that you care for him?" -Psalm 8:3-4

It is an odd and prideful occurence that the more humans know about the universe the less they tend to believe in God. To the depths of knowing our human anatomy to the intricacies of learning the earth's biology to the vastness of knowing the dark recesses of space, it seems that the more we know of these things the more we're confident in our own knowledge.

Darwin postulates the evolution of nothing into a cell, because a cell after all is a simple organism fit with just a lot of blobbing mass. Except that it's not. The more we learn about a cell, the more we learn how mindnumbingly complex it is, fit with thousands of interchangeable parts without which only one of those parts the whole thing falls to shambles. And yet, no one seems to challenge the notion that Darwin could have been wrong. That, indeed, it seems rather unlikely that nothing could have become a complex organism like the cell, no matter how long it took. And still, the more we humans learn, the less we believe in God. One would think that the more we know we'd realize the more we do not know. It's really a matter of disposition more than it is a matter of facts.

And so I came to this article. It's a book review of The Age of Wonder about the rapid scientific discoveries during the Enlightenment. In it, we find another curious oddity of scientific hubris that is one of the most classic logical fallacies of all time: the myth of size.

Herschel went on to pioneer the idea of a vast and unimaginably old
universe. After looking through Herschel's telescope, Byron wrote, "It was the
comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in
competition with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to
imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be ... over-rated."

Notice what Byron did there? The emotions that are sparked because of the vastness of space lead him to an illogical conclusion: that eternal life and the human existence must be irrelevant. But as I type I'm writing by way of a small yet immeasurably important object: the computer chip. Right beside my computer is a big stack of folders, bigger than the computer chip, yet much less significant to my work. Size doesn't matter. It doesn't not matter either. Size and significance are two separate categories. The bigness of space doesn't lead to a logical conclusion that humans and their planet are irrelevant.

The Psalmist knew this. He didn't need a telescope to tell him of the vastness of space or the likely smallness of human existence. He knew it to be true, even before the enlightenment. And yet that's what makes his psalm so beautiful. Despite the smallness of the seeming irrelevance of humans, God still cares for them. They are still important to him.

It's not a matter of fact, it's really a matter of disposition.

Sunday: Even a Dreamer's Biggest Dream

You probably don't like golf. Well, you might like it okay, but you definately don't like to watch it on tv. It's boring, I hear many people say. It's not a sport, I hear often. But I love sports, and I really love to watch college football and golf (not really compatable, I know). I also recognize that sports don't really fit the general tenor of this blog. Yet, if you weren't paying attention, one of the most remarkable victories in sports history (if not the most) almost transpired on Sunday.

Back story: like tennis, golf has 4 premier events in a year called "majors": the Masters, the US Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship. This last weekend the British Open was played in Scotland. The person who's won the most all-time majors is Jack Nicklaus. Number 2 you've probably heard of too: Tiger Woods. Number 6? That's right, Tom Watson.

While Tiger was finding (and sometimes not finding) his ball in thick, grisly grass on Friday on his way to not making the "cut" and so missing his chance to play the final 2 rounds, Tom Watson was keeping his name on the top of the leaderboard. So what's the big deal of a really good golfer being on top of the leaderboard through a few rounds? Tom Watson is 2 months away from being 60, that's what. Big deal, right? Golf isn't a sport.

Yeah, except that nothing remotely close to this has ever happened. The oldest guy to win a major was 48; only 3 guys over 46 have ever done it (one of whom was Jack Nicklaus). Michael Jordan at 38 was a virtual has-been. Yet, there have been other old-people phenoms. We marveled at Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds dominance into their 40's until steroid allegations came to the fore. We marveled all the more when Dara Torres, 41 year old swimmer, won a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics. Lance Armstrong is even giving it a go at this year's Tour de France as a relative oldie.

But Tom Watson was in a different stratosphere this weekend. Even golf requires a powerful repetitive motion that befits a young man and a large swing. It requires the finesse and feel of someone who can have the touch in their hands around the green (which many older golfers admit goes away over time). Power and touch are young man's qualities, and Tom Watson was no young man.

And so the remarkable events transpired. He walked to the last hole of the tournament with a one-shot lead. A par and he wins. His drive: flush down the fairway. His approach shot to the green: executed flawlessly. Except for the club selection. You see, on a windy day it was sometimes hard to determine what club to hit and Watson hit one club too many. His ball sailed to the back of the green where he had a long putt. But still, 2 putts and he wins. And sadly, to the dismay of the entire golf world, he 3-putted. He then went into a 4-hole playoff where he lost to Stewart Cink (he himself an all-around good golfer and good guy). But Tom almost did it. Indeed, no one his age had ever even come close. And Tom was in the playoff. And now we get to the point: why am I typing this when you could read it on any sports website?

Because we all wanted to believe Tom could win. We, in the golf world, got so wrapped up in the improbable that we became obsessed with a story larger than ourselves. We forgot about our own lives and pulled so strongly for a guy that's a really old person by pop-American standards.

You see, because whether you are in the golf world or any other sphere of life, you want to believe in the improbable and wrap yourself in a story larger than yourself. We are all dreamers, and Tom Watson gave us the chance to dream that something improbable could actually happen. It is a universal human impulse.

2000 years ago, something improbable did happen. God became a man. He died and came back to life 3 days later to prove his victory over darkness and death so that all humans might have real, true life. That is a huge story larger than ourselves and, indeed, the whole universe. Tom Watson was just pointing us to that gaping impulse inside us all.

Up to Speed on Hate Crimes

Since the country is always expanding it's definition of civil rights, the federal government senses its responsibility to act on behalf of some group that needs a boost. Of course, gay rights are the new frontier of civil rights, and the natural corrolary under democratic leadership is to expand hate crimes to include "offenses involving actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability." Injuring someone is almost always subject to penalty under law, but in this legislation you can punish somebody also for what he/she was thinking while she committed the crime. Section 6 of HR 1913 states that a hate crime is committed if it is done "because of the actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of any person." This bill, HR 1913, passed the house a little over 2 months ago and is pending in the Senate.

It seems ironic to me that the very same party who, by and large, supports a women's right to choose for privacy reasons with respect to abortion will violate that very privacy when it comes to this type of legislation. What is more private than a person's thoughts, after all? Aren't the democrats supposed to be 1st amendment people?

No, the logic of the pro-choice movement has never really been logical. Neither is the logic for hate crimes legislation, but for different reasons. The taking of innocent human life without just cause is always wrong. Therefore, abortion is wrong. Therefore, killing a gay person unjustly is wrong. Killing anyone unjustly is wrong (qualifier words such as "unjustly" are needed to presume the rare instances when killing is just, such as combatants in a just war). We don't need extra legislation to punish more extremely those who hate a certain type of person. We do need legislation that makes it illegal to kill someone in the womb.

But if this bill passes in the Senate and is signed by the President, I'd be curious to see if we can begin to prosecute abortion doctors for killing babies. After all, I think all babies in the womb constitute a disabled person (unable to defend themselves, can't walk, talk, or feed themselves), and the fetus is unwanted (and therefore hated). That's right, almost all abortion is a hate crime. This is the real frontier in civil rights- the right to exist.

Somehow I don't think the illogical Senators on the Hill will agree with me.

Week of Quotes Part 5

The Christian worldview is likely the only worldview that shows God initiating and solving the human problem Himself. If the human problem is fundamental brokenness and sin and a resulting separation from God, and the answer to overcome that isn't a rigorous human following of laws or rules, then the answer must lie in God overcoming that sin barrier. This concept is called justification: where God declares a sinful person righteous despite their guilt. The guilt is still paid for, and a human response is still required. The guilt is paid for on the cross of Jesus, and the human response is faith. Justification by faith in the grace of God is a distinctly Christian idea. With that in mind, consider Dietrich Bonhoeffer's quote below:

It is the struggle of the natural man for self-justification. He finds it only in comparing himself with others, in condemning and judging others. Self-justification and judging others go together, as justification by grace and serving others go together.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Week of Quotes Part 4

Today begins the official national debate over the healthcare system and whether to nationalize much of the industry. One may hear a certain refrain about many political issues, but this particular refrain is used often in our healthcare discussions. It goes like this: "Look at Europe! They've got it figured out. Let's socialize our medicine because it works for them. And they are so much more refined than we are, anyhow." While I find the comment mildly amusing for many reasons (Europe's population is declining, they have little international relevance anymore, and their economy is worse off than ours), I think an appropriate historical response should come from the book Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville. De Tocqueville was a Frenchmen who visited America in the 1830s, and much of the book describes how the American form of civil government far surpasses that of Europe. The following quote is relatively unrelated to socialized medicine, but consider it anyhow. Do these truths remains almost 200 years later?

The partisans of centralization in Europe are wont to maintain that the
government can administer the affairs of each locality better than the citizens
could do it for themselves: this may be true, when the central power is
enlightened, and the local authorities are ignorant; when it is alert, and they
are slow; when it is accustomed to act, and they to obey. Indeed, it is
evident that this double tendency must augment with the increase of
centralization, and that the readiness of the one and incapacity of the others
must become more and more prominent. But I deny that it is so, when the
peolpe are as enlightenened, as awake to their interests, and as accustomed to
reflect on them, as the Americans are. I am persuaded, on the contrary,
that, in this case, the collective strength of the citizens will always conduce
more efficaciously to the public welfare than the authority of the
government.

De Tocqueville, Democracy in America

So, those for centralization distrust the people to adjudicate problems for themselves. Those for centralization of power today are liberals. Liberals thus distrust the populace. According to De Tocqueville, the enlightened public should get to decide for itself.

Isn't it ironic, then, that those who want the government to stay out of people's private lives (read: abortion) when it comes to issues of life and death, completely reverse their opinion when it comes to issues about life quality. Those same people actually want the government to intrude egregiously into our lives (read: socialized medicine).

Week of Quotes Part 3

Ideas are powerful. Even old ideas can remain influential for years. While Obama would like to say his ideas are new and that his government spending necessary and revolutionary, he's really just practicing old economic ideas, namely Keynesian economics and LBJ-type government spending. It's yet to be seen whether Obama will outspend and out-liberal FDR and LBJ, but BHO is giving them a run for our money.

In that vein, then, I give you Lord John Maynard Keynes. It is the liberal establishment that's always appreciated Keynes, but Obama's consistent insistence that he's bringing a new era of governing to Washington has always been misleading. Keynes responds decades ago:

The ideas of economists and political philospohers, both when they are right
and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.
Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe
themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the
slave of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in
the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years
back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated
compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

From The Worldy Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner

Week of Quotes Part 2

In the spirit of yesterday's post, I provide you today with G.K. Chesterton. With simple and logical thought, Chesterton challenges the philosophy of naturalism. Ultimately, naturalism is a philosophy more than it is a science. No one has proven how life began or evolved across species, they have only postulated it's likelihood (or lack thereof). And with that lack of proof, Darwinism is buttressed more by philosophical presuppositions than proof. Chesterton takes aim at those presuppositions:

"Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical to start by saying 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth' even if you only mean 'In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process.' For God is by its nature a name of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than he could create one. But evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under the sort of illusion that they have read the Origin of Species."

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Week of Quotes Part 1

Being done with school for the foreseeable future, I finally get to read what I choose. My desires have outrun me, as I've started so many books that will take me a while to finish. As a result of the varied readings I'm doing, I've come across many good thoughts I'd like to pass along. Without further adieu, I give you Aristotle.

...[T]hings that are true and things that are better are, by their nature, practically always easier to prove and easier to believe in.

Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book 1 Chapter 1

Saying So Doesn't Make it So

Somehow in our postmodern epoch it has lurked into the collective conscious that it's okay to think whatever one wants about God or ultimate reality. Any kind of thoughts and worldviews are permissible, or so many would have us think. But this is a ridiculous assertion. Consider the following statement I encountered in a recent online discussion:

"I believe an absolute truth exists that is beyond our ability to understand."

Huh? How is thought suicide like this allowed to be thought at all? There are many problems with this statement. One: if there is an absolute truth that is unknowable, then how did the person saying this know that it's unknowable? Two: this very statement is a claim of absolute certainty. Third: this statement is also an assertion of absolute truth.

The person in this conversation told me that "to know something truly" is a rather vague concept. Pardon the pun, but nothing could be further from the truth. I am sitting in a chair right now. I am typing on a computer. My wife's name is Laura. All of these are true, absolutely. I know that.

Allow me to expand: if I didn't call this thing I was sitting on a chair, it would still be a chair. If I didn't recognize it's chairlike properties, it would still be a chair. If I refused to acknowledge the fact that something like a chair exists and that one could interact with it, I would still be sitting in a chair. But as it is, I am sitting in a chair, and I know this truly. How is that, even in the slightest, a vague notion?

No, what is vague is the previous phrase: "I believe an absolute truth exists that is beyond our ability to understand." This is obfuscation at the highest level of thought, because it doesn't distinguish between 2 unrelated ideas. I can know that this chair is comfortable and it adjusts to my level of height. But I do not know how this chair was engineered. I do not know how this chair uses its hydraulic functions. I don't even really know if it uses hydraulics- it just sounds right. What's the difference in my level of knowledge? I know the chair truly, but I do not know it exhaustively. This is a necessary distinction. The chair is comfortable, but I do not know everything about it's engineering. The same can be said of anything, especially matters of truth.

Saying that anything is "beyong our ability to understand," then, confuses the distinction. God is beyond our ability to understand exhaustively, but he is not beyond our ability to understand truly. Indeed, the very fact that I said the word "beyond" is even a little misleading as it relates to truth.

God evidences himself everywhere. He reveals himself in nature, in Jesus Christ's own person, in history, in visions, in dreams, and a myriad of other ways. To refuse this type of revelation is to refuse the knowledge of absolute truth. I do not think that one can, with any sense of internal consistency, believe the obfuscating phrase above and still have a relationship with God. And yet, many in our epoch are trying to their own self-misery.

Pragmatism is an Idealogy

Obama, the mass media, and many others are perpetuating this asinine idea that one can be a pragmatist, but not an idealogue. The implications are that it's bad to have a guiding philosophy of how the world works (an "ideology"), but it's very good to do whatever it takes to "get it right." Nevermind that "getting it right" is a value statement, and hence rigorously ideological. As a subscriber to Time Magazine, I must acknowledge that their writers fall prey to this fallacy of logic on a weekly basis. Time's cover suggests the subtitle: "What Barack Obama can learn from FDR." In that vein, consider the following example:

Roosevelt promised Americans a New Deal, though he was vague about what it
would look like. At heart, he was a pragmatist, not an ideologue. During the
campaign, he vowed to respond to the Depression with "bold, persistent
experimentation." He was open to any ideas that might work.

While not explicit here, the implications are that pragmatism was and is good, and ideology is bad. Some may argue that that isn't what the author is saying, but when you have read as much by this author and Time's political commentators as I have, you would know that they are most definately saying this. Bush is bad, Obama is good. Bush was an ideologue, so Obama must be a "pragmatist." This sort of verbal parrying is useless, though. Pragmatism is an ideology.

Let's just take FDR for example. I quote, "he was open to any ideas that might work." Did that include non-governmental, free-market actions? Does the author mean that FDR would have considered doing very little as an option? To these last two questions, of course not. FDR exemplified the pinnacle of activist government. He wasn't a "pragmatist," he was a statist. FDR believed that the state could remedy most or all social ills, economic ills, foreign aggression, and many other problems. FDR acted as if the state were the final arbiter between humans and their culture.

Now I am not a historian, and so I will not argue whether his policies were right or wrong in light of his day. And truly, FDR may not have really believed that the state was the final arbiter. His policies, however, do reflect that bent. In any case, I am merely arguing that FDR, whatever he was, was not a pragmatist, insofar as we understand the word. Essentially, no one is a pragmatist. We all allow our worldview to shape how we view facts. For instance, two very different men could help someone they love in poverty: one man could directly give the man a hand up in the world and the other could take him to social services so that the government could bail him out. Both are pragmatic in the sense that they expect something to "get done," but they have very different worldviews.

So, beware, reader. "Pragmatism" is now a euphemism for overly-activist government. It's a euphemism for statism (the idea that the state can solve all human problems- which is, at its core, violently opposed to Christianity. For proof: see communist China, communist Russia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under Pot, Uganda under Amin, and North Korea). And finally, pragmatism is a euphemism for plain, old liberalism. Ultimately, there's no overturning politics as usual. And veiling as pragmatism isn't new. Obama is just a charismatic face on very old ideas. There's nothing new or pragmatic about Obama.

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, 'Look! This is something new'? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time." Ecclesiastes 1:9-10