I've had these tags lying about on my "to post" list for far too long, so please ignore the staleness of the links, I hope the observations are still fresh.

* In the excellent documentary Expelled, PZ Myers is the chubby Minnesota professor who likens Christians to a knitting club, but comes off sounding as if he is the one who is out-of-touch with reality. He even gets himself "expelled" from a pre-showing of the film, and makes it sound as if the filmmaker is afraid of him. But after reading about this stunt he pulled regarding the desecration of the Eucharist, one begins to recognize the type: juvenile.  In CS Lewis' prescient sci-fi thriller, "That Hideous Strength", he has the protagonist, a young PhD named Studdock, convert to Christianity from atheism when he was asked to desecrate some images of Christ. While Studdock is contemplating what was asked of him, the same question occurs to him that has often occurred to me, "If God doesn't exist, why do you hate Him so much?  After all, you also say that Satan doesn't exist, and it would seem he would be an infinitely better object of your nonexistent hatred."  Lewis is making the same point as St Paul, which Myers corroborates, that it is suppression of the truth, rather than a firm conviction, that enervates these men.

But that brings up a second question. If an atheist is so busy suppressing something he knows to be true, then you can't believe what people say they believe. How then do you know what a man's real beliefs are? For example, despite their many protestations of faith, just how devout are the Democratic nominees for President?

I think the answer is found in the introduction to Proverbs (1:7 as well as in the Psalms), that belief begins with fear. An odd concept, and one that Protestants tend to avoid along with much of the Old Testament, but nevertheless a very useful concept in a polytheistic world. We live in a Post-Modern reincarnation of the polytheism of the OT, with many gods vying for our attention if not obedience. Like job ads in the trade journals, we take all the token bows to modern deities: "we are a diverse institution and especially welcome applications by women, disabled, and minority candidates..." But how do we know if they mean it? Find out whom they fear most.

As we, like Studdock, find faith in a PoMo world, the question to ask is "Whom do we fear?"  Myers is doing his best to say that he does not fear God. It is the same hubris as Al Gore's attempt to save the planet from global warming, only to have the coldest weather in a decade envelop the globe. It is the same hubris of Eliot Spitzer, former governor of New York, who wanted to acquire the Catholic hospitals under the pretext of abortion rights, and the same day he scheduled his ultimatum with the bishops was the day the Feds went public with his illegal addiction to hookers. It is the hubris of Herod, who accepted the flattering adoration of his conquered vassals and immediately was struck, "eaten by worms" and died.  The fear of God may not make a follower of God, but it will eliminate the atheist and the agnostic. It is, after all, only the beginning of wisdom.  PZ will have an opportunity to begin. Let us pray he survives his lesson.

* The Olympics have successfully drawn to a close, with only minor loose ends remaining such as appeals to the IOC to examine the age of Chinese gymnasts. But it is clear that the Chinese have made the Olympics their "coming out party", to demonstrate to the world that a communist country can shine like the West. Of course, the coercive methods they chose to assure success are the very reasons that they have failed, but they managed to impress many in the West such as our own Barack Obama. What is not so well known, is how fragile the Chinese economy really is, making the $43bn spent on the Olympic facilities a mere whitewash of an economy teetering over the abyss.

Der Spiegel carried the article before the Olympics, but the key graph is the second one, and doesn't get enough explanation in the text. The growth rate is plotted with the inflation rate below it. Now inflation has many causes, but my simplistic view is as a consequence of the government printing too much money, so that the money in circulation is worth less. Since growth rate is measured in inflated money, the corrected growth rate should have inflation subtracted. So in corrected units, the 2000-2008 growth rate of the Chinese economy was:8.0, 7.8, 9.9, 9.4, 6.2, 9.4, 9.6, (6.7, 3.4) where the last two values are estimates. What is the consequence of this coming economic downturn, is it just a blip of growth pangs or the harbinger of a great crash?

The article suggests it is the latter and not the former.

But China's economic boom, says the executive, is gradually coming to an end. "Don't believe any official numbers, because they're all wrong. Our balance sheet alone tells me that." According to the executive, this year, the year of the Olympics, is the first in which inflation is eating up higher wages. "For the first time, people have less money than they used to," he says, "and you notice it everywhere. If you are accustomed to 20-percent growth in your city, 8 percent sounds like a crisis. And it'll get a lot worse." The continuous, carefree boom is ending. It is the most important part of the deal between the leadership and the people. If the party doesn't continually offer more and more affluence, its work will be called into question. At that point it will no longer be dissatisfied farmers airing their grievances in clumsy protests. Instead, it will be the middle-class elites seeking better, more dangerous ways to vent their grievances.

There are a lot of sins that can be swept under the rug of growing prosperity, even more that are created by it, but when an economy falters, the first to go are the oriental rugs. Many of China's problems are out of its control: abnormally cold winters, earthquakes and floods, but there are equally many of their own making: Tibet, rural poverty, air and water and land pollution, shaky banks, corrupt officials. The next six months will be crucial in seeing whether the Olympics have been a coming out or a comeuppance, a debut or a debacle. And then there are those loose ends like the underage gymnasts...

* You and I have read a lot of chronological snobbery in our day, that talks about attitudes of the 50's as if they were so immature, or medieval religion as if it were so naive. But by far the greatest snobbery is applied to the ancient Greeks and Romans who believed in the pantheon of gods. As if anyone could believe that Romulus and Remus were nursed by a wolf! Indeed

Perhaps then we should take more seriously the other stories of polytheism?

* I blog frequently about QM weirdness as destroying the materialism that undergirds the Modernist century, and it seems no physicist has a good defense. But sometimes the best defense is a good offense, and this article argues that QM doesn't destroy materialism so much as it destroys religion. It seems that having an indeterminate state of an atomic spin says something about free will, of atoms! I'm not sure that Democritus would have liked this development, but perhaps by assigning spiritual qualities to atoms, we can reduce people to atoms again. Or Aristotle. Whatever.

On your blog posting, the clause "Then Darwin's proposed mechanism (descent with modification)," caught my attention. Echoing a point made by Behe in "The Edge of Evolution", I would say that "descent with modification" is a plausible inference (and one which Behe himself accepts without any reservation) but that it is not a mechanism. Darwin's proposed mechanism is that the variation exhibited by offspring relative to their parents, whatever its cause, introduces basic change that can be rejected or selected. Neo-Darwinism would sharpen that by saying that random transcription errors introduced changes that produced successive species. Behe presents biological evidence that in his view shows that while random transcription errors do produce some limited useful changes they cannot produce the kinds of changes that differentiate distinct species.

One part of Behe's book that I found of interest is the discussion after the biology in which he articulates his version of an intelligent design concept for God's way of achieving all of the biological species. That is that God set the initial conditions so that biological changes that are statistically impossible actually took place. He uses the analogy of a pool hall shark lining up a trick shot in which the balls all go into one side pocket in numerical order. That is an alternative to a conceptual model to which I think I would incline wherein God is continually watching over and interacting with quantum mechanical wave functions to influence what happens, but not doing so in a way or in circumstances in which a physicist could "catch" God at it.

On another of your points about the conceptual alternatives that the cosmos manifests either design or chaos, I would have said that the physical laws embody design on their face so that to think of chaos as being the underlying reality of the cosmos would be a form of anti-intellectualism. At the same time, there are phenomena such as Brownian motion that are random from our point of view. In another vein, the now seemingly established fact that time and space had a beginning a finite time ago coupled with our most fundamental concept that every effect has a cause means that to suppose that the physical world is all that there is another form of anti-intellectualism.

What do you think of my way of looking at Genesis 1?

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Regarding Genesis 1 and Evolution, I guess I find the divide between Darwin and Aristotle too great to brush under the rug with some divinely directed snooker. The point that Charles Hodges made about Darwin back in 1862, was that chance removed the direct participation of God, and therefore the very foundations of Darwin's theory were anti-God. You, and many other Christian thinkers in the 20th century, have argued that God could act discretely, in such a way as to divinely direct Evolution without betraying his hand.

I have two problems with that: first, that it goes against the God I know from the Bible to behave this way; and second, holiness  recursion) cannot be disguised.

1) Saving the Appearances

Could God disguise himself to look like an Evolutionist?

The nominalist would say "yes", there is nothing that God cannot do. However, this is not philosophically self-consistent; God cannot lie, he cannot steal, he cannot be evil. And should he appear to do any of these things, it would be a judgment on me to say it. David's 18th Psalm, also found in 2 Samuel 22, says (NASB) "With the kind Thou dost show Thyself kind; with the blameless Thou dost show Thyself blameless; with the pure Thou dost show Thyself pure; and with the crooked Thou dost show Thyself astute". ESV has "make yourself seem tortuous", KJV has "with the froward thou wilt shew thyself froward." (God bless the KJV!)

So to say that God "appears" to have done things by chance, is really a judgment upon myself, neither upon God nor reality.

Let me say that one more way. The young earth creationists (YEC) argue that God could have made the fossils that we think are so old, just as he could have made Adam with a belly-button. From a nominalist viewpoint, that is all very possible. Therefore, YEC argue, the world actually is 6000 years old, but many things in it merely appear to look older. Reality is divorced from appearance.

Should this be the case, then why stop at 6000 years? Surely it could have been 1000 years ago? It could have been yesterday, and you were created with all your memories intact. Indeed, Christ need not have died on the Cross in reality, he could have been spared the agony and merely the appearance of suffering would have served. God could have answered Christ's prayer in the Garden, "If it be possible let this cup pass from me!"

But if it were not possible, then neither is it possible for God to have substituted appearances for reality, any more than he could have substituted for his own Son. Reality is Christ, and when we go the "appearance" route, we have accepted an idol instead of the Son of God.

2) Recursive Evolution

When a circuit has feedback, it behaves in a fashion that no feed-forward circuit can. When a computer program has recursion, it becomes indeterminate in a way that no straightforward program can. When a math/philosophy has recursion in it, it reaches conclusions that no axiomatic philosophy can (Goedel's incompleteness theorem). That is, all universal statements must contain themselves. If  evolution-by-chance really is an explanation for life and order and the Internet, then it must also contain itself. The theory of evolution must also be a theory that arose by chance, undergoes modification and mutation, and evolves into a better theory. If the theory of Evolution cannot itself evolve through random processes, say, by schoolboards in the state of Kansas, then it is not itself contained in the set of things explained by Evolution.

But, you may object, very few theories are themselves contained in the theory! True, but if you go through history, you will see that Christianity, Judaism, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas all are theories that contain themselves. When God gave Moses the 10 commandments, which then became the foundation of Judaism, the theology contained itself, since it contained within itself the sacred books, the story of how they became sacred. At WTS we had a first year course called "Theology of the Word" in which we taught that we know the Bible is sacred (without error, etc) because the Bible says so. Precisely.

So there are recursive universalities out there, there are self-consistent theories of the Universe, and Darwin is not one of them. To say then, that God disguises his self-reference by permitting his interference in the laws of nature to go unnoticed, is not possible in a self-referential system. Either the laws of nature are axiomatic, and do not loop back on themselves, or they do. And if they do, then they do not support Darwin's theory, any more than Russell could incorporate Goedel's Incompleteness theorem. Recursion is not disguisable because recursion is self-revealing, self-authenticating, self-determining, all the things that axiomatics is not.

One more stab at saying this the other way. Democritus/Lucretius wanted to get rid of the gods, and therefore forbad them from interfering in the slightest way with atoms. If even the slightest hint of direction were allowed, then Man would have to fear the gods, would have to appease the gods, would reintroduce the brutish behavior of Agamemnon towards his daughter Iphegenia. Democritus demands total independence, nothing less. And slipping in a secretive Deist action here and there, even far away in the mists of time, would nevertheless defeat Democritus' motive. Ditto for Darwin.

It is not Christians who are intolerant of chance, it is Darwinists who are intolerant of meddling.

Let's just suppose that a fraction of a percent of chance mutations are controllable by the parent. Then the parent would have a way to direct his progeny. Directed evolution then would be ever so much more efficient than undirected (think sex-selection), that very rapidly the entire genome would be dominated by directed evolution. Then evolution doesn't evolve, but is directed, and we are right back to Paley, and Aquinas, and Augustine, and Aristotle, and God. 

If the evolutionary biologists have tolerated these small deviations, it is because they have put up numerous "firewalls" to restrict the long-range order. And of course, very little of either the firewalls or the long-range order is amenable to experiment, which has left the field to the mercy of metaphysicians. Which brings us back to William of Ockham and his famous razor. It's time we stopped equivocating and complicating Evolution with all these "apparent" long-range effects, and smelled the coffee. Thomas Kuhn called it a "paradigm shift", and it is happening to Biology as we speak.

3) There is no doubt that the historical record sees a progress over long stretches of time. The oldest fossils date to 3.5 -- 3.8 billion years ago, the oldest rocks to about 4.2 billion years ago. I am happy with using the word "evolution" to designate "change over time". However, we do not know how that change occurred, and in particular, random searches through phase space do not have the power to deliver the order that we find in the archaeological record. Many very bright people have worked very hard to make Darwin's prescription  work, and it just doesn't. Many had hoped that there would be a convergence, a Hegelian dialectic that brought the two sides together, sort of like Calvin College or Wheaton College's "Theistic Evolution". On the contrary, in recent decades many bright people have concluded that Darwin's prescription doesn't just not work, it even destroys previous work, so that the gap between Democritus and Aristotle grows wider every year, and those staking out a middle ground are falling into the abyss.

4) I have been, perhaps, overly terse when I said that chaos and order are the two options. There is no doubt that laws of physics possess order.  Two very fine books on the subject are theoretical physicist Stephen M Barr's "Modern Physics and Ancient Faith" (2003) and  Vern Poythress' (2006) book "Redeeming Science".  Both make the claim that the order of physics is inexplicable without a creator who provides order. Consider that when Michael Faraday introduced electric and magnetic fields, he was shunned by the physics community because they were "spooky action at a distance" and not point-particle interactions. Physics has grudgingly gotten used to fields and coherence, though often theorists talk about them as if they are apparent consequences of the more fundamental virtual particle interactions. (Think about what that last sentence did with the words "apparent" and "virtual".)

So physicists at least have had some practice at seeing long-range order in the Universe, and they are at the forefront of those who reject Democritean materialism (Niels Bohr, David Bohm, Frank Tipler and your own John Wheeler all come to mind.) Nevertheless, the vast majority of physicists do not, and for the sake of their funding, cannot reject materialism as easily as Bohr or Tipler did. Even Francis Collins didn't publish his books on Christianity until after his success with the human genome project. So the fact that physicists cling to a materialist creed despite the evidence to the contrary, supports my contention that it is not an empirical but a metaphysical battle with black-white distinctions: order versus chaos.

And yes, despite the best efforts of Lucretius to found materialism on empirical science, (and you really ought to read his chapter on the curious behavior of certain rocks from the province of Magnesia that stick to each other), there is a deep, anti-intellectualism embedded in his philosophy.  Aristotle would say that the purpose of education, of intellectualism, was to live well, whereas Lucretius would say the purpose (if he allowed the word at all) was merely to live. The one talked about morality, the other about power. Aristotle gave us Nicomachean Ethics, Lucretius gave us Nietzsche.  But really, you should read GK Chesterton's (1911) "Orthodoxy", which says it all so much better than I.

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Where you write "So to say that God "appears" to have done things by chance", I would reply that God 'appears' to have done the exact opposite, namely that in the realm of biology He appears to have been bringing about things that could not possibly happen by chance.

Scripturally I would bring in Matthew 10:29 "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father" in support of the concept that God's shepherding of the cosmos is not like Behe's 'tuning of the initial conditions and then letting it all unfold as a physical machine' (sort of deistic) but rather one of continuous involvement, but such as not to invalidate Hebrews 11:3 "By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible."

Where you write "Could God disguise himself to look like an Evolutionist?", I would insist that scientifically nature does not look like evolution in the Darwinian or neo-Darwinian sense, and that therefore such a question should not even arise. Nature looks like the work not just of a designer but of a designer and constructor.

I think that YEC is idiotic and morally reprehensible; I liked your citation of Christ's having actually to suffer as a theological incentive for honest science.

Your paragraphs on recursive philosophies did not sit very well with me. I appreciate Gödel's incompleteness along with the particle wave duality in quantum mechanics as evidences that human linguistic thinking can never be brought into isomorphism with reality. ("By faith we understand..."). That correlates with Matthew 13:34 "All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable." Axiomatics exemplified in "At WTS we had a first year course called "Theology of the Word" in which we taught that ee know the Bible is sacred (without error, etc) because the Bible says so. Precisely." strikes me as fatuous. I firmly believe that God stands behind every jot and tittle of the Bible but not because of 2Tim3:16 alone. I think that the Qur'an is not from God and that its claim to be so is false.

You still have not said what you think of my (not original) view of Genesis 1. I think it would be a huge help if more pastors understood Genesis 1 and taught it properly. In my opinion, YEC is due entirely to sincere but unthinking allegiance to a grossly mistaken 16th century way of looking at that chapter.

My outgoing e-mail SMTP service just started refusing to transmit outgoing mail pending my update of my mail account settings to log in to their server. As a result I had to resend my reply to you message. That lead to my glancing at it again whereupon I picked out the sentence "Recursion is not disguisable because recursion is self-revealing, self-authenticating, self-determining, all the things that axiomatics is not" to chew on further. Where you say "axiomatics is not", I am guessing that you mean that the axioms are unable to give any account of the person framing them, in much the way that naturalism is unable to give any account of the intuition and motivation of the scientists who discovered and framed physical laws. But your assertion that "Recursion is ... self-revealing, self-authenticating, self-determining" does not evoke any content for me. Can you flesh that out and give a persuasive example? (When I think of recursion I think of quick sort where to me use of recursion represents laziness and cowardice but I also think of the Queens' tour where recursion is eminently useful relative the amount of code I had to write to compute the tour without recursion. But apart from solving simple delimited computational problems I think recursion is a trap that leads to software that bogs down.)

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Let me address the two questions of your previous post.

1) What do I think of your Genesis 1 "framework" interpretation?

I know you didn't call it framework, but somehow that is the title that has stuck to Meredith Kline's interpretation. It has spawned a large number of similar models, all assuming that the literary framework of the passage is external to the passage itself. For example, a popular one at Wheaton was the Mesopatamian Temple Dedication Ceremony (no, I am not kidding). I believe the former WTS professor Peter Enns had a similar external framework interpretation.  

You may object that yours is not an external framework, but supported by the text itself. I would tend to agree, that yours and Kline's are nearly recursive. However, they do require some natural science in their description. That is, one must know that the sun and moon are bodies external to the earth that exist in a region of space much like animals exist on the earth, and fish in the sea. Maybe this is obvious, but after hearing the "mesopatamian temple dedication" theories on the hard-shell sky and the layered earth, it isn't so clear to me that we aren't projecting our metaphysics into the interpretation.

But more importantly, the framework model is not contained within itself. If it were, then the model itself must be a hierarchical framework, with perhaps its literal meaning at the bottom, and a spiritual meaning on the top, divided into trinities of days. Compare for example the chronological or traditional view of creation, that places all the events of the Bible in the 7th day, the day of rest. There is a "Russian doll" view that sees the Sabbath of Creation becoming the Holy Nation of Israel, becoming the Holy Priesthood, the Son of God, (and then turned inside out) the Priesthood of all believers, the Church Triumphant, and the New Jerusalem. Chronology, not Space seems to be the controlling paradigm.

How does the Trinity fit into a Spatial paradigm? What happens in the collapse of stars (similar to our Sun) when they become black holes? In what way do they inhabit space like animals on earth or fish in the sea? And what do we do with space-time relativity, are these spatial regions causally connected, do they incorporate the known universe, what is their relationship to the Trinity? Those are examples of the science questions, but we haven't even started with the textual ones. Is the framework theory doing justice to the text? Can this interpretation be used as a template for other texts? What is the consequence of putting the Atonement or the Resurrection into a spatial Framework?

Perhaps I am being unfair to a new theory, and expecting it to bear the scrutiny of comparison with a millennially older paradigm. That is one of my goals in attending seminary, to construct the questions or methods for evaluating recursive solutions for validity. Which brings up your last question.

2. A Persuasive Example of Recursion

There is no doubt that recursion is a minefield, and in the hands of amateurs leads to ruin, while in the hands of evil masters, becomes the siren of propaganda. That's why in my blog, I have defined "holy" as valid recursion. So, for example, when you or I are asked who we are, we reply "physicist", or perhaps "father", etc. We are defined by what we do. When we cease to do it, we preface with "retired physicist" or "empty-nester". Which is an even poorer definition by what we don't do. But when God is asked by Moses, "what is your name?", he is told "I AM THE I AM". God defines himself by his own existence. Not by what he made (the God of all the Earth), not by what he did (the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), but by his very being. This is a case of valid recursion. When we say, "Is it right because God said it, or did God say it because it was right?" then valid recursion demands the former and denies the latter. In this sense, the OT is absolutely unique among religions (that I am aware of) in handling recursion accurately.

Likewise the book of Job is a long discussion on recursion and the problem of evil. It too denies the recursively-challenged 3 friends (Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar) as well as the opposite recursively challenged Elihu. The book really is a marvellous study in recursion, and was my introduction to the Biblical concept. The 3 friends took the syllogism "If you are bad==>bad things happen to you" and tried to reverse it "Bad things happen to you ==> you are bad". From logic, we know that the proper inversion should be: "No bad things happen to you ==> you are not bad". Which is not the same thing at all. Elihu makes a different logic error, saying: "God does everything, Bad things happen ==> God did bad things to you." This is akin to "Can God make a rock bigger than he can lift? Yes or No, then there is something God cannot do."

 Well, duh, He doesn't answer every stupid question we can come up with either. Nor does he satisfy our definitions of Good and Bad, or even our longings for Good and Bad. But this is neither because he can't do so (Rabbi Kushner) nor because he doesn't want to (Elihu), but because we do not understand him (Job). Knowledge is personal, it includes itself, it is recursive. Knowledge of the good is only possible when we are good, and likewise appearance of Evil is only possible when we are Evil (Ps 18 again). St Paul says that the fleshly mind cannot see God. Paul says that suppression of Truth leads to blindness to Truth. Job comes to God with his pain and his ignorance and longing, incapable and unwilling to suppress those real feelings, and in the whirlwind is finally answered. The God Job wants is personal not impersonal, recursive not axiomatic, self-revealing not hidden, self-authenticating not justifying, self-determining not dependent on us.

Anything else is the ash Eliphaz and Elihu eat.

When I was still a University professor, we were keen to promote the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's "annus mirabilis" that saw four papers in the space of year, each of which revolutionized a different field of physics. Now mind you, these were short papers, and had not Einstein become famous, they would have been completely unremarkable. But once famous, every paper, nay, every napkin is scrutinized for brilliance. What really was remarkable was that during the time Einstein published these papers, he wasn't employed as a physicist, but as a patent clerk in Berne. Not that he wanted to be a patent clerk, he just didn't have the connections to land a better job as a tutor, so he whiled his hours writing short physics papers. When I left physics at UniBerne, the lobby of which has a bust of Albert, my wife consoled me with the words, "Cheer up, they didn't hire Einstein either." And she was right, the success of those papers led to a much more prestigious position in Berlin, before fleeing to Princeton. Well as they say about success, fame has many fathers, while ignominy is an orphan, so 100 years later physics departments the world around were celebrating his success.

But we didn't make the freshman class sing songs about poor Albert.

So why does the "new student orientation" at U Penn compose a song  to go along with an entire year's celebration of Darwin's 200th anniversary? Well, I could hazard a guess, but let's ask a related question:  Do any of you know the official song of your alma mater? Can you sing it without beer or blushing? (Can you sing the 2nd and 3rd verses of the National Anthem without blushing? Did you know there were four verses?)

So is this Darwinist paeon the swan song of a dying religion, or the fight song of the new Commintern?

Here's my deeply-embedded, highly-reliable unnamed source on UPenn campus:
And my reply:

Surely you must be joking M_. The liturgical color is most evident in that web page. It is green. The only other color that might be allowed is red, as in, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, but being a presidential year, that color has been already appropriated. Ralph Nader, you may remember, is doing his best to undermine red, but as you can see, we try not to let religion and politics mix in American society.

But even though we pretend there is no mixing, you will note that a mixture of red and green is brown, and that is the unofficial color of our presidential race. You will also note that in the Anglican calendar, green is the color of "ordinary time", which, I am told, was also the theme of the Denver convention. Everyone is so ordinary, so unelitist, so family-like, why, even the chauffeur is green! I mean red. Well, okay, brown. Of course.

That SPIE meeting I attended last week had the usual papers on life on Mars, since there isn't any other forum to talk about it. One of the speakers told me that this conference was like a breath of fresh air, because none of us had funding, none of us were networking, none of us were afraid of getting our grants cancelled. It was science the way it was done before WWII, before science became a branch of the federal government. One scientist talked about the red color of Mars and compared it to the red color of soil. Turns out that this red is the color of clay, and clay is the result of soil processing by bacteria, so that Mars is red for the same reason that an Alabama cotton-field is red, and we've known it practically forever.

That brings up the most recent NASA mission to Mars, the Phoenix lander that landed near enough to the North Pole of Mars to explore the region of permafrost that had been predicted by an earlier Mars Odyssey orbiter in 2002. That mission had used the interesting observation that cosmic rays from the galaxy were hitting the Martian surface (the Earth is shielded by too much atmosphere, but Mars has almost none) and neutrons were splashing back up. Well a neutron is just about the same weight as a proton, so as any billiard buff can tell you, the cue ball just about stops when it hits another ball dead on, and neutrons are no different. So when the splashing neutrons suddenly are very slow they , it is no doubt because of a layer of protons on the surface, otherwise known as water ice. (Nope, can't be frozen CO2, because there aren't any protons in dry ice, because, well, it's dry.) Using this approach, the entire surface of Mars had been mapped out, and the polar ice caps were found to be nearly all water ice, and even the ground around them had a meter or more of buried ice, on Earth we call it permafrost.

Well as I had mentioned before, since 1976 there has been a raging debate on whether life on Mars exists, and somehow this had morphed into a debate whether water on Mars existed. The pictures of this permafrost region showed the ground divided up into "polygons" sort of like a dried lakebed, but very commonly found in Siberia where the ice periodically melts, runs into the cracks, and refreezes. So if Mars is like Siberia, then the permafrost is forming melted water at some point in its past. So to answer this tired debate (which honestly and truly was resolved in the Viking mission), the Phoenix mission landed and scooped up some ice, finally determining that it really was water. The answer was the same as the 1976 mission, "Yup, tastes like water".

Now the obvious question to ask next is "well, is there life?" Unfortunately, the $800M mission carried only two experiments (a wet chemistry+microscope, and an evolved gas analyzer), and looking for life wasn't one of them, which isn't surprising, since they were prohibited from doing so by instruction from NASA itself. So, for example, the optical microscope has a resolution of 4 microns per pixel, or 10 microns per resolved object. Most bacteria are in the 1-2 micron range, so the most common form of life found in the permafrost will be invisible to Phoenix. How difficult is it to resolve bacteria in a microscope? Most elementary school microscopes available for $100 can do this with aplomb. So why would NASA fly a $800M mission with a blurry microscope?

But there's another story here worth retelling. When the Viking landers (two of them) ran an experiment to look for life (the labelled release experiment),  they found the signature of life twice in two separate locations, as well as a negative control after baking the soil. Classic experiment, positive test, negative control, repeated twice for two locations. Science doesn't get any better than that. NASA, however, demanded that the chief scientist on the experiment retract his discovery paper on the off-chance that the soil had "metallo-super-peroxides" which are solid forms of hydrogen peroxide. The argument went that these materials would give the same signature in the controls and samples (they don't) and therefore provide a very eensy-weensy possibility that life wasn't actually detected.

After retracting the initial paper on the discovery of life, these metallo-peroxides went very quiet. No other Mars mission saw the slightest evidence of them, nor did the two rovers. The supposed chemical is highly reactive, and inconsistent with all the other observations returned from Mars, including the much touted observation of methane from the ESA orbiter. (Viking couldn't detect methane because they used that mass channel in their gas analyzer for an internal calibration standard. Why did they pick the most sensitive organic channel for calibration?) So what does the new Phoenix report?  Perchlorates.

What is that? Well, its one of the ingredients in rocket fuel. It is also highly oxidizing, a slightly less esoteric version of metallo-super peroxides, and likewise inconsistent with the methane in the atmosphere and the various soils observed by the rovers. More significantly, it is the cleaning agent used on the surface of the spacecraft to remove organics and fingerprint oils before launch. And it was only seen in the wet chemistry experiment, but completely absent in the evolved gas experiment that should have seen the chlorine like a sore thumb.  Had the labelled release experiment reported such a result it would have never been published. So what does NASA do? Trumpet it to the press.

So we have all these red herrings, that are brandished around like real data, and then quietly disappear into the literature. Are we seeing a trend? If it supports life, suppress it, if it contradicts life, broadcast it.

Here's one that supports life, and has had much less press. Brown University researchers find a spectroscopic signature from the orbiting Mars observer for clay, which on Earth will only form in the presence of liquid water, silicate minerals, and bacterial action. They published in British journal Nature. And funny, Phoenix didn't report any observations of clay, which would be pretty obvious even at 10 micron resolution. Oh, and where did I read this press release? On the BBC.

NASA just spent $800 million to tell us what we already knew--there's ice on Mars--remaining silent about what we want to know--whether there's life--and then telling us another whopper--perchlorates. In the words of Hamlet, there's something fishy in the state of Denmark.

Well I've been goofing off too much in the past week. I attended the SPIE conference on Astrobiology last week, and delivered the paper that I had posted as a rough draft. I was scheduled for the last talk of the last session of the last day of the conference, so perhaps there was some trepidation about the fallout, but the response was generally positive, though lively. Here's the PowerPoint slides, and here's the PDF of the revised talk.

The  bottom line is that there are two and only two ways to view the world: chaotic or coherent. Darwin's theory, like Lucretius before him, and Epicurus before him, and Democritus before him, argues that the world is chaotic. The metaphysics of all these men is greatly inferior to that of Aristotle, or Augustine after him, or Aquinas after him, or Paley after him, because it explains less, and predicts poorly. (After all, how good a prediction can you make if the Universe is essentially chaotic?) There is one reason, and only one reason for preferring a chaotic world, and that is to remove the god(s). Lucretius is particularly clear on this point in his opening argument. Translating this desire into philosophy, it is the desire to remove teleology or purpose. Translating into physics, it is the denial of global coherence. Note that the denial must be absolute, no exceptions allowed, or else the gods do not remain banished.

So working backward from physics, if we find evidence of global coherence, then we have found evidence of teleology, which is evidence of god, and the entire effort fails.

But this is precisely what 20th century quantum mechanics (QM) has found, evidence of global coherence. It goes by many names, "collapse of the wavefunction", "entanglement", "non-locality", "quantum weirdness" but it all boils down to a coherence in space-time that is inconsistent with a random worldview, with what I call "the Chaos god". Physicists don't really know what to do with QM, and tend to keep it in a dark room on an optics bench under a black tarp, but every once and a while it escapes the lab and becomes a monster ravaging the town, bringing terror and order. So the Theorists are brought down from their ivory tower, some new principle is discovered that declares the order merely "apparent",  the monster is caged in a virtual jail, chaos is restored, and once again everyone sleeps peacefully at night.

And this is precisely what is happenning in Astrobiology.

Two, rather innocuous, discoveries have combined to create a monster that is threatening not just our town, but our entire galaxy.  The first discovery, reported in PNAS last month, was that most, if not all, the "539,723 genes distributed across 181 sequenced prokaryotic genomes" show evidence of horizontal gene transfer. This means that Darwin's "tree of life" has become a bush, that "descent with modification" has become modification without descent. And of course, it fingers viruses as the culprit for this mess, with their promiscuous tendency to carry DNA indiscriminantly between species.  The other discovery (discussed before also here), was that a special class of crumbly black meteorites, thought to be extinct comets, show microbial fossils that are hundreds of millions of years old.

Combining these two discoveries, then, suggests that if comets have fossil bacteria, then they undoubtedly have fossil viruses. And if viruses live on comets, then they undoubtedly live throughout the solar system, if not the galaxy or wherever comets roam. Therefore all life and its DNA may be ubiquitous throughout our galaxy. This global coherence means that we can no longer assume the evolution of life on Earth is a linear process of increasing innovation, but it may be merely a process of discovery and communication, much as the Europeans colonized the Americas. Even the chronological order of evolution may be simply an accident. Then Darwin's proposed mechanism (descent with modification), the recognized problem (change over time), and his materialist motive (chaotic progress) are rendered irrelevant and non-exclusive, for many paths lead to the stars.

But as Lucretius so compellingly reminds us, the god of Chaos is a jealous god, he will not permit any other flirtation on purpose. It is possible one might remain a materialist even in the face of such discoveries, to believe in Chaos no matter what the coincidence, but Darwin no longer shoulders his share of the burden, but merrily skips beside our plodding steps of stooped despair, whistling his tuneless hymns.

I have spoken at length on the meaning of "holy" as recursive, including itself, divine. I have even tried to define it as the absence of sin. In this post, I want to explore in a little more detail the absence of the holy, how the Enlightenment destroyed holiness, replacing it with a form of gnostic spirituality that like a soul untethered from the flesh, has long departed the body of Christ.

Now the insanity that is Materialism, sees no essential difference between you and a poached egg, which is to say, the difference that makes Man holy has been cooked out. The controlling image, the paradigm picture, is given in the vision Ezekiel had of the Glory departing the temple. It doesn't happen all at once, it happens in potentially reversible steps, until finally the Holy is gone.

How can one lose a defining characteristic of humanity? How can one believe something that is false? Greg Bahnsen's PhD thesis was most enlightening, explaining the process. Suppose most Americans believed they were a poached egg, as in CS Lewis' memorable analogy, would that be evidence that our country had gone crazy? No, because one creeps up on insanity as one creeps up on suicide, in small, nearly sane steps. No single step is so very crazy that it would admit you to the asylum, and of course, the keepers of the asylum might even be a step ahead of you, making you comfortable with your demons. Thus whole populations (not to mention mobs) can be gently led to believe in most anything, including the divinity of presidential candidates.

We have discussed before how a 5th century BC philosophy became dominant in the 20th century (after 25 centuries of Aristotle), but perhaps a quick review will put in context its pervasive penetration in the church today. Now it is my contention that there have only been two religions in all of recorded history: polytheism and monotheism. They are both theism, they both believe in powers and beings external to Man, but they differ in how they handle sin and guilt, reality and truth. The monotheist requires a savior to rescue a rule-breaking sinner, whereas a polytheist changes the rules to eliminate the sin. The first believes in a single reality, the second in multiple realities. Here is Chesterton's inimitable take:

Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

But Science can only exist where there are cats, where there is belief in a single, external reality, and so science can only be done by monotheists. When Democritus and Epicurus developed Materialism, it was to promote science and oppose the polytheist Greek pantheon, but so blunt was their atomic instrument, they also opposed all religions which ascribe meaning to nature. They wanted a single reality, but they didn't want sin and especially guilt, so they opted for the Chaotic god, the Un-god, the Absent god, the god who is dead. In this way they hoped to marry the inheritance of monotheism without the mother-in-law, they wanted the Science without the Ethics.  Nevertheless, their insistence on a single reality made them monotheists, albeit with a heretical view of God.

Now this isn't exactly a bold new approach. Throughout those 6000 years of recorded history, there have been many who attempted the same thing. And the criticism of atheism has always been that it is an attempt to avoid morality, to justify beastly behavior, to sanction evil. If the 20th century wars of Materialism are any judge, this is precisely the result of promoting atheism. Consequently, atheism has always been a transitory religion, usually between monotheism and polytheism. Accordingly it appears that America has gone from monotheist / Deist 18th century, to a monotheist Christian 19th century, to an atheist 20th century, to our present polytheist 21st century.

With a timelag of about a half-century, science discoveries peaked in the Christian era, declined in the atheist era, and are in retreat in the polytheist era, which is precisely what one would expect from their metaphysical foundations. Now this isn't what you read in the textbooks, which claim that science languished in the Christian era, exploded in the atheist era, and has brought the nirvana of our present Post-Modern era. However we should not confuse output with discovery. All the truly great ideas in Physics -- Newton's forces, Maxwell's equations, Einstein's relativity, Bohr's quantum -- were in the Christian era or within the 50 year timelag afterward. Newton and Maxwell were explicit monotheists, Einstein and Bohr implicit ones. Despite thousands of times more physicists and money spent since 1930 we have not made progress on the foundations of QM, on the basic building blocks of nature, on the origins of cosmology.

For example, in the 1930's we had three subatomic particles--the electron, the proton and the neutron--from which all 103 atomic elements could be constructed. It was a great simplification. Today we have more subatomic particles than there are elements in the periodic table, and no simplification in sight, Higgs particle or no. The same is true for QM and for cosmology, so that from the smallest to the biggest, there is no meaning, no coherence to the thoughts of man. Even worse, science recently has been promoting fiction, enabling politics rather than the truth: global warming, multiverses, embryonic stem cells all come to mind. And politics, by definition, is an accommodation to multiple fallible human views, which is polytheism.

But while I have a professional interest in the decline of science, I have a personal interest in the decline of holiness. Science may bring me security, affluence and leisure, but it won't bring me joy, fulfillment and grandchildren. Holiness not only brings great-grandchildren, but one might even argue that it brings science. I may fight the flood of junk science in the schools by  "teaching the debate", I might even try to sand bag the dikes with intelligent design, but there will be no retreat from anti-science polytheism without advancing holiness. But holiness is not the attainment of a substance or an attitude, it is more like health, defined by the absence of a thousand different illnesses. The longevity we enjoy today is the consequence of eliminating most of the infectious diseases that plagued our grandparents generation: tuberculosis, dysentery, typhoid, syphilis, smallpox. There was no magic pill, but the accumulation of small successes until today we inherit the benefits of a nearly benign environment. In the case of smallpox, it has been eradicated but for two, high-security labs in Atlanta, and Koltsovo. So also the holiness we experience today, (low levels of insanity, demon-possession, suicide) is a direct consequence of the spiritual health of our parents and grandparents.

Unfortunately, it's at a pretty low level, and dropping fast. I remember a missionary telling me that 10% of the population in 3rd world countries was mentally incapacitated, often kept in a back room, hidden from the public view. I marvelled at the percentage, thinking that America was never like that. But perhaps when the inheritance has been spent, this is the number that will come here too. And how are we spending our capital without investing the returns? By adopting Materialism bit by bit, as in this story about the illusion of free-will. Can you imagine what would happen to a criminal justice system that denied free-will? I actually saw that in Haiti, when a traffic accident was blamed on a hexed driver, and the results were, well, Haiti. Could modern science really turn the US into Haiti? Just as certainly as it can convince a man that he lacks a soul.

What of our churches? What of our seminaries? Won't they defend the Holy from the attacks of Materialism? The short answer is no.

The long answer is that Materialism has permeated not just science and academia, but also our theology and seminaries. This isn't just the liberal ones like Harvard and Princeton, but also the conservative ones. Some would trace it back to academia and the use of secular "higher criticism" in the understanding of the Bible. Others would go further back to the Enlightenment. Still others track it back to the Nominalists and Anselm. Still others back to the "Great Schism" over the filioque clause of the Nicene Creed. I've occasionally blamed it on the pre-Christian Gnostics and traced it back to the Garden. Given all these hindrances and the persistent reintroduction of atheism that leads to polytheism, I would suggest that the real miracle is that we have not lost all truth long ago. That is the real miracle, the the Glory of Israel still hovers over the Earth, and has not abandonned it to the final judgment yet.

Here are some examples of how anti-holiness creeps in on quiet cat feet. Remember, holiness is divine recursion, an irreducible self-reference that ultimately rests in the person of God. So anti-holiness is the desire to remove the recursion, to make the conclusions necessary from the observations, to drive the argument like a 10 d nail with a 2 lb hammer of logic. It is the aspiration of all philosophers, whether Descartes or Spinoza or Russell, they all want that clarity, that necessity, that simplicity. And holiness is like the knots in cured oak, turning the argument every which way but through. Of course Russell hated recursion, and would have banned it had not Goedel proved him wrong. Of course Descartes wanted man to be the measure of all things, elevating his cogito to the sui generis.  Of course Spinoza found a God very much like himself: cold, mathematical, unjudgmental.

So when the Enlightenment bans "miracles" from history, then interprets the Bible as a series of ordinary events elaborated by the Church, it will naturally find a Bible and Church very much like itself: incomprehensible, chaotic, and incoherent. Using the methodology of secular historians is guaranteed to find a secular history. Just as those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, so also those who ignore recursion are doomed to their reflection. Like Narcissus, they will simmer away in their own juices.

What exactly is wrong with the grammatical-historical method? Here's WTS graduate, Peter Leithart explaining that theology must be "participatory", which is to say, recursive, if it is to make any sense of the Bible at all. Leithart's review was the inspiration for the last 2 blogposts on holiness, but it was the recent firing of Peter Enns at Westminster Seminary that provided a perfect example. He taught in the Biblical studies department, which used the academic tools of historical-grammatical analysis to understand the Old Testament. Now traditionally, the Old and New Testament were considered Holy Scripture, which is to say, self-authenticating. But in using the academic standard method without holiness, he began to discover incoherence in the text. Thinking that he had found something new, and failing to recognize his faulty tools, he began a four-year running battle with the Systematic Theology department then ended in his ouster.

While Holy Scripture is particularly sensitive to modernist restrictions on recursion, such restrictions may be faulty in principle, not just in religious applications. Touchstone Magazine, which prides itself in its CS Lewis via media between Protestantism and Catholicism, carried an editorial on the 30th anniversary of Peter Marshall's retelling of US history, The Light and the Glory, subtitled, "The Perils of Providential History". John Fea, a history prof at Mennonite college Messiah, writes:

Marshall and Manuel want us to see the hand of God at work in history. They seem to know when he is working and when he is not, based on what their sources—largely Puritans and Christian patriots—say. In this, they fail to exemplify the historian’s necessary detachment from his subject.
Just because historical actors believed something about the providential purposes behind the events they experienced does not mean they were correct in discerning the divine will. ...
For example, Marshall and Manuel interpret the fog that rose in the East River on the morning of August 30, 1776, as God’s direct intervention to aid George Washington’s midnight retreat from the British assault on the Continental Army’s position on Brooklyn Heights. They describe the fog’s rising as “the most amazing episode of divine intervention in the Revolutionary War.” They believe this because Washington, members of his staff, and many Continental soldiers described this event in terms of God’s special protection of the army.
Was God’s providence evident in this event? American Christians certainly believed that it was, but I doubt whether an English Christian would have thought so. Who had the better insight into God’s purposes?
This is why it is so difficult to write providential history. An appeal to providence in a historical narrative like that of the East River fog of 1776 fails to help us better understand what happened on that day, and to aid our understanding is one of the historian’s primary tasks.

So Fea believes that a "necessary detachment" means that a historian should take non-spiritual statements of his historical sources at face value, but should not believe the spiritual statements. Somehow this subjective selective belief converts the subjective opinions of his sources into objective history. The logic escapes me. Two wrongs don't make a right. No matter how many arbitrary criteria I apply to arbitrary reporting I will not get absolute truth.

But it isn't the faulty logic of Fea that troubles me, it is the concluding sentence of the quote. "An appeal to providence in a historical narrative...fails to help us better understand..." Let me rephrase: Miracles are a hindrance to the facts. Well John Fea, what do you do when miracles are a fact? Did God stop working when Jesus ascended in a cloud? Did Jesus say, "No greater works will you do than I have done"? So why should God have not helped George Washington? And if He did, would not George be the first to tell us? Despite your claim about English observers, why would they not affirm the same miracle that George did? The English admitted that Joan of Arc was doing supernatural things, why would they show greater deference to the French? And just as a historian has to sift his contradictory sources to ascertain the truth, why should univocal miracles be incapable of sifting?

Now to his credit, Fea ends with the vaguely Protestant benediction,

The [Devil's Dictionary] definition may appear harsh when applied to The Light and the Glory, but it also says much about Christians’ ill-conceived propensity for trying to discern with certainty the purposes of a sovereign God in the past and then using such conclusions to serve present-day political or cultural agendas. ...
Christian historians would do better to approach their task with a sense of God’s transcendent mystery, a healthy dose of humility, and a hope that one day soon, but not now, we will all understand the Almighty’s plans for the nations. We should again take comfort in the words of Augustine: “When we arrive at that judgment of God, the time of which in a special sense is called the Day of Judgment . . . it will become apparent that God’s judgments are entirely just.”

I think Fea is cautioning against the Christian practice of assigning scientific certainty to their discernment of God's will. And while I am in complete agreement with Fea, it is for the opposite reason. We are never certain about our science, and it is wrong to think that God's will is only as firm as our science. It is even wrong to think that our Spirit-driven certainty should be as flimsy as our science. We should not fear "if our hearts condemn us", says St John, for "God is greater than our heart, and He knows everything. ....by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us."

We may be wrong about discerning God's will, but we should never be in doubt. For unlike John Fea's knowledge of what can't be known about God, "no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."
To be certain of uncertainty, then, is to certain of the Son's disfavor.

So we see how Enlightenment anti-holiness leaves us neither hot nor cold, neither able to affirm with Washington that this Republic enjoyed the blessings of God, nor repent with Lincoln that

we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom...

Far better to be hot or cold, than to be found tepid on the day of his return. Far better to have faith and invested it, than to have buried it in the ground. In our fear of being found wrong, we have abandoned being found at all.

The Enlightenment has made an idol of Reason, and a fool of Faith. The holy may not be the smartest sheep in the fold, but the one who knows the shepherd's voice. In the words of that great Reformer of the faith: Discern Boldly!

I'm not sure how to describe this economics observation, other than by writing about it. But then, that is always true when dealing with recursion--it only becomes clear when described with recursive methods. Sort of like trying to describe lipstick colors with food, or housepaint colors with flowers, there just isn't clarity until that hardware man gets out his color-matching computer and prints out RGB spectra. Likewise, we can't explain the holy unless we invoke holy things in the explanation: God, man and language. So let's have a go at economics and if we fail, we'll call it just another batty theory.

The Wall Street Journal carried an article by Bjorn Lomberg, the contrarian economist, who has argued that if one is really concerned with global quality-of-life, malaria countermeasures are many times more effective than CO2 reduction, and in fact, global warming is at the very bottom of the list of effective things we can do for our children's inheritance. However, today's article lumps counter-terrorism in the global warming camp, arguing that it is totally ineffective in preventing the mere 470 transnational terrorist deaths. No definition is given for "transnational", so I would have to assume that it excludes terrorists who get transnational funding (eg., Sri Lanka's LTTE), have camps in adjacent nations (eg., Colombia's FARC), receive training in foreign lands (eg., Al Qaeda in Somalia), or are inspired / provoked by international events (eg., Danish cartoons), for if all of these terrorist deaths were designated "transnational", we would be looking at casualty rates in the 10's of thousands. Even if we did not include them, it would still be true that "transnational" events are the tip of a vast iceberg of "intra-national" terrorism, and one cannot eliminate trans without intra.

So why then does Bjorn imply that George W. Bush's "War on Terror" is a squandering of resources? Does he not think that to eliminate malaria one must kill mosquitoes, not just provide better patient care?  It would appear to be a case of selective blindness, not just to terrorism or the success of Bush's policies, but to the condition of the human heart. Terrorists breed like malarial parasites, and treating the symptoms will never conquer the disease, so that to ignore the terrorist disease, is to deny the Christian view of sin, to deny the fallenness of humanity, and of course, to deny the possibility of redemption. In the end, an optimistic and materialist view of man is bound for disillusionment and despair, and so Bjorn resolutely refuses to look at the general carnage as he calculates his costs.

Therefore our first lesson in holy economics, is that we must be brave enough to include everything, not just the parts that fit our theory. Qualifiers on the data sets are evidence that we are holding fast to some cherished conclusion. Like it or not, we are all transnational today. There are no places on this planet completely unaffected by the price of oil, the shortage of grain, or the advances of pharmacology. Just as global warming is by definition "global", so also are global economics, global terrorism, and global righteousness. Holiness derives its significance by being general, by being universal, by being global. [Which is why to Bin Laden, jihad is "holy war", and to Bush, defending democracy is "holy war".]

Coincidently, City Journal carried an article today on the global lessons of economics, with further insight into holiness. Entitled Economics Does Not Lie, it listed 10 universal economic lessons from history. The first, was the insight attributed to Adam Smith and applied to socialism by Friedrich Hayek:

The market economy is the most efficient of all economic systems. Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century take on market efficiency was metaphorical, nearly metaphysical: he said that it seemed to be guided by an “invisible hand” that produced outcomes beneficial to society. In the mid-twentieth century, Friedrich Hayek observed that no central-planning institution could possibly manage the huge quantity of information that the market organized automatically and spontaneously by pricing resources.

Just as it was commonplace in the late 19th and early 20th century to say that capitalism was finished, that it no longer worked, that it degenerated into monopolies and class warfare, today it is commonplace to blame capitalism for pollution, the tragedy of the commons, the hyperpower of the US, and the inability to conquer malaria or AIDS.  In contrast to economists, one senses widespread bewilderment explaining capitalism's inordinant success, "how can unconstrained greed lead to anything good?" To say with the deist Smith, that it is an "invisible hand", or to say with atheist Hayek that it is "the most efficient", still has only answered the material or efficient cause, but not the final cause. They may have answered "how?" brilliantly, but not "why?", and the appeal of Marx then or Greenpeace today is an appeal to "why". Jonah Goldberg points out in "Liberal Fascism" that the attraction of Hitler's Youth or the Commintern has always rested on an idealism of the left, a desire to formulate a "why". Whether Smith or Hayek want to admit it or not, economics needs final causes, and without them, founders on the idealism of youth.

So the second lesson of holy economics, is that it must address final causes. Fascism, Communism, Progressivism, and many other movements that appeal to the youth, have all made abundant use of final causes. Even the Materialism rampant on college campuses today, finds a final cause in its aggressive denial of final causes (along with guilt, morality, and the responsibility to raise children.) Yet this is the one area that Smith and Hayek refuse to address, with Smith calling the hand "invisible", and Hayek appealing to evolutionary development of tradition (including property rights and morality). Why are they so afraid to answer why?

Perhaps there is a fear that final causes are dogmatic leading to excesses of ideology, which are unable to adapt to changing circumstances. There is a common myth that the Enlightenment achieved all its advances when it finally rejected final causes in favor of material and formal causes, and perhaps they fear that economic science will stagnate if it becomes dogmatic. Or perhaps, like libertarians, they want to preserve their moral freedom, and therefore carefully wall off their morality from their pragmatism. Or perhaps like Kant, they find that a schizophrenic view of the world accommodates science and gnosticism without conflict. But all of these solutions abandon the high ground of truth to the demagogues, and consequently fate them to forever fight uphill battles.

Must one always be correcting the errors of youth, without appealing to their zeal and idealism? Surely there is a better way to become a Conservative than by cynically converting at maturity from a Liberal?

The task is grim, for not only must we find a final cause that appeals to youth, but it must compete with all the other idealistic propaganda of youth, and yet still satisfy the experience of the aged. Hayek argues that Tradition is a good guide simply because it has survived such a selection, and yet in our progressive world, no tradition stays constant, no culture remains static in the face of internet, cell-phones, satellites, airplanes and cosmetic surgery. Even a healthy respect for tradition gives no guidance for how to handle Iran's Uranium enrichment, or China's space program, or Africa's AIDS epidemic. How does one know whether, say, an Islamic approach to law is inferior or superior to a Western approach to law? Both have similar pedigrees, both have numerous advocates. How do we decide among multiple answers to "why", where does our decision lead, and what does a valid final cause look like?

In other words, final causes must be consistent with the other three. Therefore the third characteristic of holy economics is valid recursion. The ultimate why of economics must itself be economically defensible. Holy economics must include itself in its description of the world.

For example, it seems evident that private property is a requirement for modern economics, so final causes must include the right to private property. Lo-and-behold, the eighth of the ten commandments is "Thou shalt not steal.", it doesn't get any plainer than that. But what of the dangers of unequal wealth? How is this religious economic theory consistent with the value and equality of men before God? The 10th commandment addresses that "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house", seemingly undercutting the profit motive for capitalism. Property is protected, but not greed, one can possess material things, but not immaterial things of immoral nature. Economics is an immaterial thing, but it cannot be possessed. The knowledge of the truth is an immaterial thing but must be shared. The body is personal but the mind is not. And so we begin the journey of recursion into the field of holy economics.

It is not an easy journey, since recursion means that every discovery potentially comments on our entire previous endeavors. Like a day hiker who must come back along the same trail, we are wise to continually look backward, lest our afternoon return appear completely different than our morning advance. For example, over the past two millennia, the Roman Catholic Church has adopted numerous positions on economics, changing its view of insurance, usury, banking, and capitalism. So it seems odd that over the past four centuries, many of the European advances in economics took place in Protestant countries, despite being invented in Catholic ones, and that predominantly Catholic countries appear to be economically backward today, or that the Pope continues to support discredited economic policies that attempt to regulate private property or real wages. Is it merely a coincidence that in countries that deregulate religion, there is a corresponding deregulation of economics? As the City Journal argues,

There are cases of capitalism without democracy—such as China—but none of democracy without market capitalism.

I would hesitate to say which is cause and which effect, but it does seem to me that a system that survives will have to be recursive, will have to apply its theology to economics, and its economics to theology. This doesn't mean that a Church with a hierarchical structure and single head will be incapable of supporting a deregulated economy, but it does mean that the role of the Pope will have to change to remain recursively consistent with a modern world.

In Hayek's last work, The Fatal Conceit, he addresses the apparent change of society and economics versus the stability of Tradition. He argues that just as puppy develops into a dog, so a society develops its Tradition without losing it. He identifies two spheres of change, that of "normal development" and that of "radical change", and says that Tradition necessitates the first while rejecting the second. However the paradigm Hayek uses is from Evolution, which disturbingly implies that normal development will eventually lead to radical change. If this be true, then how does one resist the claim of Progressives that they are merely bringing about accelerated normal development?

[Note: Ilya Somin argues that Hayek solved this problem by adopting a libertarian hatred for "discretionary actions of the state", while criticizing Burkean conservatives for being simultaneously reactionary and neo-con. My response is that Hayek's prohibitions have left him no assertive ground to stand on. Like the skeptic, he no longer can say what he believes except for a  firm conviction of unbelief.]

It is my argument that Evolution's claim is both inconsistent and illusory. There is absolutely no evidence that speciation occurred or is occurring through normal development. Not only is the science illusory, but the metaphysics is just plain wrong, and basing any theory on that paradigm is a recipe for disaster. It would have been better to stick to the puppy analogy, and discuss change as a natural development that both fulfills the purpose for puppies as well as creates them. The same mistake can be made for US government, if one thinks of our Constitution as an evolutionary development from Monarchy. But if democracy is merely the "government of the people, by the people, for the people", then when the people decide to vote in a dictator or a demagogue (as both Mussolini and Hitler declared themselves), they have voted themselves out of existence. In the 21st century, the difficulty with both African and Middle Eastern democracies is captured in the phrase "one man, one vote, one time". Unless the authority of democracy rests in a higher sphere than the people themselves, unless it exists independent of Evolutionary progress, it is a system that does not contain itself. Nor can a Republic that is founded on the rule of Law, depend on Progressive judges to maintain that Law. There must be a Law that contains itself. There must be a government that explains itself. There must be an economics that includes itself.

For recursion transcends the ancient pre-Socratic dilemma of the one and the many, it transcends both the unifying ideologies of Communism, Fascism, or Materialism and the fragmenting ideologies of multiculturalism and democracy. It avoids the gnostic dualism between the material and spiritual that leads to an evolutionary dialectic, forever tossed between guilt and appeasement, between denial and despair. For the holy is connected to all that is virtuous and true, to all that is valuable about Tradition and the West, to both the material and the mind that masters it.

For the holy partakes in the Trinity.

I had a call from Emily's dad on Tuesday. Seems that she is ready to be moved to a "rehab hospital", but based on the July 12  diagnosis of the neurologist ("all hopeless, she's just a vegetable") Moss Rehab turned her down. What about all those indications of awareness I (and the nurses and sister and parents) saw? "All dumb reflexes", says the esteemed doctor, "nothing personal." Here's my heated rejoinder (addressed to Emily's sister).

But lest you think I'm just some sort of delusional Christian who believes when all the evidence is otherwise, let me say a few things in my scientific defense.

a) Nurses who deal with comatose patients know the difference between "unconscious" and "paralyzed". The nurses told me Emily was not unconscious. I talked to Emily, you talked to her, she's not a vegetable, and her responses are not mere "reflexes". So why is Dr Mengele saying this stuff? Because a lot of doctors deal with life-and-death decisions everyday, and while they don't start out becoming Materialist Utilitarians, the realities of Medical Insurance and weeping relatives force them into it. In the end, they smother their guilty consciences with liberal doses of "well, it wasn't a life worth living anyway" sort of nonsense. For his sake, I hope the Dr is Catholic so he can go to confession and avoid a very hot purgatory.

b) There are 4 ways to communicate with paralyzed people that I know of:
1) The Stephen Hawking approach using eye movements. Emily isn't there yet, but because of the circle of willis and the way the nerves leave the brain stem, the eyes are usually the last to go in cases of ALS, neck trauma and progressive brain malfunctions. Unfortunately, Em's brain damage was from the inside out, so her eyes don't seem to be under voluntary control right now. So we can't do the Stephen Hawking thing with her.
2) MRI brain scans. The article I linked to in my blog page, talks about two research scientists in England who estimate that 40% of the diagnoses of "persistent vegatative states" are wrong. They monitored the brain with MRI while talking to the patients and discovered that when they said "imagine you are playing tennis", the parts of the brain that direct the muscles was lighting up. With a bit of training, the patient could easily respond to yes/no questions. The MRI that Dr Mengele performed did none of these things. Since this is old news, he could have done it if he wanted to. But MRI requires a $10M instrument, so this isn't a practical solution.
3) EEG brain waves. This puts little electrodes (and lots of gooey gel) on the head and measures the electrical signals. Imagine that you put the same wires on the outside of your computer and tried to figure out what was going on. You can imagine that besides "awake" "asleep" and "meditating", there isn't a whole lot of information that comes from this. Personally, the equipment is about $100, so I'd like to plug the output into a computer and see if we can use some modern data processing software to get a few more bits of information out of the system. Dr Mengele didn't even try to do this with Emily...
4) Polygraph. This is monitoring things like breath rate (or chest muscle tone), blood pressure, heart rate, pupil dilation etc. These are indirect measures of excitement / fear etc, which aren't part of the conscious or voluntary nervous system. They are the principle components of a "lie detector". And Em had at least three of them hooked up to her in the ICU. So when I spoke to her, I could see the heart and pressure jump. When Bekah sang to her, they dropped and Em went to sleep. (The real reason for BBN.) This is the information that Dr Mengele calls "reflexes". But he's wrong, as every polygraph specialist can tell you, because there's a whole lot of information in this test. The only problem is that it isn't very good for communication, since none of us have any practice raising and lowering our heart rate.

What about Dr Mengele's comment about brain shrivelling? Well duh, her brain swelled up with the damage. Of course it shrank afterwards... And Dr Mengele didn't have a "before the lightning" MRI to compare to, so he doesn't really know how severe the shrinkage is. Tell him to stick his head in a pickle jar and see what happens...

Okay, Em has had #4, and a crude form of #2. I'd like to set her up with #3, and perhaps if she keeps healing, #1 would work too. So I called my electronics genius friend, and talked about Em. He was in a hurry, and spent only 9 minutes on the phone with me, but it sounded like he thought converting #3 to a communication tool wouldn't be too difficult. That is, if Em can hear us talking to her, then all I have to do is hook up this equipment with a speaker, and she can practice saying "no" and "yes" by thinking the right thoughts, until she gets the hang of it. After that, we can add words to her "EEG vocabulary" and we will have duplicated the Stephen Hawking computerized voice equipment.

An engineer in town has said that this technology can perhaps be used by the Army to control equipment without using hands or voice (say, you're a special forces operator in a vulnerable location). So he is willing to finance my research into this area, perhaps with $10k or so of equipment. (I'm supposed to research this and make him a proposal.)

Is it worth it? What if we can't get it to work? What if it works, then what?

I don't know about you, but if the gift of speech isn't worth a whole lot more than this, I don't know what is. After all, that was what God breathed into Adam to make him Man; it was the reason of the "Therefore" that defined marriage three paragraphs later; it was the partial denial that punished Babel and all mankind; and it was the divine word that rescued Man once again.

The real shame, is silence.

My apologies for minimal posting over the past 2 weeks. The usual NASA proposal deadline consumed a week, another week was spent at the annual family reunion picnic on July 5, and visiting Emily.

Emily is my 19 year old niece who is a sophomore at Houghton College, majoring in biology/pre-med. Her father is a Methodist minister, and like many Methodist ministers, was moving to a new church on the first week of June. Despite being long anticipated, it was difficult, it is always difficult to move, especially after 20 years. Little Goodwill Methodist church of Elverson had been a good church to them, though in its 150 years of existence, had had some 76 ministers living in the old farmhouse parsonage. Emily's father set the record for the longest tenure of