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I really enjoy the book of Genesis. A theme in the first few chapters that intrigues me has to do with water.
Genesis 1:6-7 explains that on Day #2, God separated the water into two parts: one part "above the expanse," and one part "under the expanse." The next day He gathered the waters "under the expanse" into seas, which allowed other areas "under the expanse" to be dry land.
From what follows, it seems that this water "above the expanse" is not a mere layer of clouds, but some sort of water canopy or layer of ice particles. Why do I think that? Because of a few reasons: first, there didn't seem to have been any rainfall prior to Noah's flood. Rain clouds didn't provide water for the plants, according to Genesis 2:6; instead, "a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground." There was also no record of rainbows until Noah's flood.
And how did Noah's flood come about? Not through mere rain, from mere rain clouds, but from the rupturing of this water canopy and from vast amounts of water stored beneath the dry land. Check out Genesis 7:11-12, which explains that "all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened." So, stuff from the earth is erupted into the atmosphere first, which causes the water "above the expanse" to fall. Either whatever was holding it up was punctured, or there were for the first time particles (volcanic ash?) in the air around which water vapor could now finally condense and fall.
Note that after 40 days, "the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained." For weeks, water had been pouring onto the earth from both below the land and above it. Whew, that's a lot of water!
I find it interesting that Methuselah, who lived 969 years, died the same year as the great flood. I find it interesting that before the flood, most people lived a very long time; after the flood, their lifespans diminished. Moses lived 120 years, but wrote that humans might typically live 70 or 80 years before dying.
Why the change in lifespan? Perhaps the water canopy kept out harmful solar rays and regulated the temperature of the earth; when it collapsed, our environment became less amenable to long life.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph above, I'm intrigued by all this. There seems to be an internal consistency here, an affirmation of scientific principles, and a hint at how our current geological topography has come about.
Burt Rutan is one of the foremost aerospace engineers on the planet. Four of the aircraft that he's designed are on display in the National Air and Space Museum: SpaceShipOne, the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, Voyager, and the VariEze.
Rutan is also "green," and has been for decades. His home was featured in Popular Science as the "World's Most Efficient House" back in 1989. His aircraft factory used solar-heated water back in the 1970s. He drove an all-electric car for seven years, until GM recalled it.
So what's a green scientist have to say about anthropogenic global warming?
I became a cynic; My conclusion -- "if someone is aggressively selling a technical product who's merits are dependent on complex experimental data, he is likely lying." That is true whether the product is an airplane or a Carbon Credit.
Ouch.
Here are some of Rutan's observations:
- Man can measure the past, but cannot code a computer model to predict future global temperatures.
- Man has not demonstrated a reliable ability to himself change global temperatures.
- Warm periods are good, not bad. It would be beneficial to have more warming than present.
- CO2 is not a pollutant.
- Warm periods have been brief and they are not the 'normal' planet state.
- Oil/coal are called 'non-renewable'; but every decade shows an estimated increase in reserves. We will not run out; we will merely slowly switch when costs force a move to cheaper alternatives.
- If Man, in the future, achieves a capability to change global temperatures, he will most certainly use that new technology to warm the planet, not to cool it.
And here are some of his recommendations:
- Drop CCC (Climate Change Crisis) and Cap & Trade legislation. It is naive, non-scientific, irrelevant, hopeless and oxymoronic. Its alarmists can use it to destroy US global competitiveness through Cap and Trade taxes.
- As proposed, most new jobs are for Government regulation/oversight bureaucracies. The process is already ripe with fraud (85% of permits would be free, 15% auctioned).
- As proposed, the huge spending would result in no benefit to the planet.
Rutan is an enigma. He's an world-renown scientist who's been green before being green was cool. And he's not falling for what the the global warming alarmists/profiteers are pushing.
Never thoughts I'd have so much in common with an aerospace engineer.
(Now, the obligatory preemptive qualifier: Yes, as Christians, it is our responsibility to steward creation, to be opposed to inordinate pollution, to encourage restraint in what we consume. That's not what this AGW debate is all about, as I've explained in my Global Warming Primer.)
My column today takes up a survey showing that most scientists don't believe in God. The question is why, and I suggest the answer lies not in science, but in attitudes and worldviews — a sense that belief in God isn't intellectually respectable. I also suggest we need to look into the spiritual aspects — the pride (I use the word "conceit") that very intelligent people can take in their own intelligence and their resistance to the idea that intellect is insufficient to explain the universe.
The first response came quickly. An e-mail asked what Boundless hoped to accomplish by printing this. The writer felt my piece fed a stereotype about the arrogance of scientists and intellectuals, and that it would just promote among our readers the same conceit and close-mindedness I'd complained about among many scientists.
I hope not. That's why I refuted the idea that religion and science "are inherently mortal enemies" in the first paragraph, and did so again near the end, though with a distinction. ("Religion isn't the enemy of science, but it is the enemy to scientists who have no sense of their own limits" — those who think science can explain everything.) That's why I talked about the forces besides conceit that could pull a scientist toward naturalism, and marveled that despite all that, many scientists (one in three) still do avow belief in God.
Did I do enough? You be the judge. What did I hope to accomplish? A couple of things.
First, I wanted to help Christians who suffer from intellectual intimidation. (You know: "If all the smart people think we're just products of evolution, who am I to challenge them?") It's important to realize that just because naturalists invoke the name of science, that doesn't mean their attitudes have been produced by pure science; their attitudes are shaped by forces outside science, and may have been absorbed long before they actually were scientists. Christians need to realize we're hearing from fellow sinful, fallible human beings, not from the collective embodiment of raw intelligence.
Second, I wanted to warn against the temptations that all of us (not just scientists) face when we develop a high regard for our own intelligence. I speak from experience. I grew up going to school with a lot of smart kids (professors' kids, many of them). I was a smart kid (sixth-grade spelling champ of Leal Elementary School, thank you very much, and you bet, I felt cocky about it). I know how it can go to your/my head. Hence, the column's conclusion: "The smarter the men the devil's tempting — or the smarter they think they are — the more raw material he has to work with. It's humility that gives him problems."
Our correspondent says he wishes I'd been clearer about that, helping readers understand that it's a danger we all face. I thought readers would take it that way, but maybe he's right. In any case, read the column for yourself. Did you find this a valuable piece? I'd love to hear your feedback.
Lots of people saw the story when the American Psychological Association (APA) declared last week that gays can't change their orientation.
OK, no surprise there. The APA has been moving for years against "reparative therapists" and others who help people wanting to come out of homosexuality. The task force that pushed this declaration is dominated by gay activists, and adopted the premise that homosexual "orientations" per se are "normal and positive variants of human sexuality."
If anything, the APA's actions could have been worse. They stopped short of labeling reparative therapists unethical, as some gay activists in their ranks wanted. And they conceded that religious clients are free to steward their sexuality in alignment with their religious values and ethics.
But the pity is that few people will have noticed the story buried deep within the Associated Press's long report: There's evidence to contradict the APA. Gays can change, researchers Stanton L. Jones and Mark A. Yarhouse found. At least many of them can.
The people Jones and Yarhouse studied worked with programs connected to Exodus International, which combines Christianity with a knowledgeable approach to therapy. The results can't be summed up simply, partly because the measures of success varied: moving into heterosexuality, diminishing homosexual attractions, living in chastity.
The upshot, though, is that just over half of the long-term participants made major progress away from homosexuality.
Jones and Yarhouse state their findings with proper scholarly caution. They make no claim that everyone can change -- or, for that matter, that not everyone can. They simply go with the evidence that they've got, from a very thorough study.
And they certainly do present enough evidence to challenge APA's broad claim that efforts to change homosexual identity don't work and shouldn't be tried.
It's just too bad many media consumers won't look far beyond the headlines. They'll imagine that people who come out of homosexuality are mythological creatures whose existence has been disproven by modern science. The truth is, their existence has really been found inconvenient to modern culture.
Matt recently blogged about the appointment of Dr. Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health. There was grumbling among some that an outspoken evangelical Christian such as Dr. Collins should be appointed to this position, since he might let his faith "interfere" with his scientific judgments.
Okay, some went beyond grumbling. PZ Myers, an obnoxiously outspoken hater of all things Christian, called Collins an "idjit" and a clown. And professional atheist Sam Harris recently penned an op-ed in The New York Times questioning the choice of Dr. Collins. (This would be the same Sam Harris who warns about the dangers and illogic of the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but himself is intrigued by psychic phenomena, reincarnation and Eastern mysticism.)
But I'm wondering why there's virtual silence about another appointment by President Obama, his Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the so-called "science czar." Except for a few sources, you'd never know that John Holdren once considered compulsory abortion and sterilization to control a supposed population bomb that would destroy mankind. (Coincidentally, Candice blogged about a similar topic yesterday.)
Holdren coauthored a 1977 book called Ecoscience with Malthusian "scientists" Paul and Anne Ehrlich. They considered, among other things, putting "sterilants" in a population’s water supply to render all the females infertile. The authors eventually reject this proposal, not on any moral or legal grounds, but because it would ultimately be impractical. Holdren also declared the traditional family of mother, father and children to be "obsolete" and decries our culture's "pro-natalist" beliefs. Holdren denies advocating these things, but his denial doesn’t pass the smell test.
This stuff is far scarier and far more radical than anything Dr. Collins has ever said, but I don’t see the same coverage or any grumbling by the usual suspects worried about someone out of the "scientific mainstream" holding such an important position.
Just wonderin' why.
Almost three years ago, I blogged about hands-free phone devices:
I understand the value in hands-free communication, but I'm still not tracking with the need to keep them clamped on your ear all the time. As someone is walking around donning the cyborg look, I wonder if they are in the middle of a conversation. Like someone with iPod earbuds in, I think they are trying to tune out -- not wanting to engage with those around them. Am I the only one who thinks that?
At the time, I suspected it was an innovation we were all just going to have to get used to -- another step in the technological march. But I've noticed that such devices have been on the wane and now Wired magazine is encouraging folks to ditch what they call an "ear mullet."
Wired especially takes to task anyone who was using a hands-free device specifically as a status symbol:
The whole notion of electronic gadgets conferring status applies only within the small tribe that is geekdom. If you're out among normals, flaunting your tech doesn't make you look like the King of Coolsville, it makes you look like Count Clueless of Dorkylvania.
Ouch. Thoughts?
According to a new study by British researchers, using obscene words can actually help reduce pain.
Time reports that psychologists from Keele University performed an experiment where college students were asked to stick their hands into buckets of ice water and endure the pain for several minutes. One group was allowed to repeat a curse word of their choice. The other group had to repeat a control word -- "such as that which might be used to describe a table."
The result?
"... swearing not only allowed students to withstand the discomfort longer, but also reduced their perception of pain intensity. Curse words, the study found, help you cope."
The scientists suggest that perhaps swearing triggers the body's fight-or-flight response and that it results from a "very primitive reflex that evolved in animals" (like a dog's yelp when his tail is stepped on).
Interesting. I get the dog-yelp analogy (though, admittedly, I don't get why they automatically assume the yelps "evolved"). When I stub a toe or knock my hip on a table, I certainly have an immediate urge to let out a yell. But "Oooowwwwwww, that really, really, really hurt" seems to work just fine.
I've birthed two children without anesthetic. Not a superhuman feat, I grant you, but I will put it up there with putting your hand in an ice bucket. And while being forced to repeat descriptive words about a table while laboring would have probably highly annoyed me, I don't recall feeling a primordial need to swear.
But let's just say, for argument's sake, that it did help. That swearing did absolutely and definitively reduce pain. Even then, should believers do it?
The Bible is full of directives and principles about our speech. We're to honor the name of our Lord. James reminds us that a believer should "keep a tight rein on his tongue." And praising God and cursing men with the same tongue? "My brothers, this should not be!" We're told not to let unwholesome talk come out of our mouths.
So, can cussing ever qualify as wholesome talk? Because "cuss" words differ from country to country, does that mean that they are "only words"?
In the Time article, Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, recommends that we not overuse swear words in our speech or writing. "That's not because I'm a prude, but because it blunts [swear words] of their power when you do need them. You should save them for just the right occasions."
For believers, are there any right occasions?
The answer should be obvious: Of course they can. But not everyone seems so convinced, according to a story in The New York Times.
President Obama has nominated Francis Collins, a big-league geneticist who led the Human Genome Project, to head the National Institutes of Health. Not everyone is happy about that, the Times reports, due in part to Collins' "very public embrace of religion."
He wrote a book called The Language of God, and he has given many talks and interviews in which he described his conversion to Christianity as a 27-year-old medical student. Religion and genetic research have long had a fraught relationship, and some in the field complain about what they see as Dr. Collins's evangelism.
If you're wondering whether this is all about evolution, it's not -- not directly, anyway. Collin believes in theistic evolution, the view which amounts to "evolution happened, but God made it happen." Plenty of Christians would challenge that position, but Christians aren't the ones complaining about Collins. Scientists are -- just because he sees God at work in the physical universe at all.
His critics aren't willing to be quoted by name in the Times story, which refers only to people who "privately expressed unease." There's little doubt, though, that they reflect a real body of opinion. A lot of scientists (in certain fields, anyway) insist that the material world can only be explained through materialistic explanations. There's no room for God in their worldview. And, apparently, not much room for the likes of Collins, especially in the upper echelons of science or government.
How widespread are these attitudes? Let's hear especially from those of you with training in the natural sciences. What have you seen, from the classroom to today? Are Christians -- or religious believers of any sort -- getting any respect?
Copyright 2009 Focus on the Family. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. The Line and Boundless Line are trademarks of Focus on the Family.
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