Quick hits from the news

I don't often put together any commentary on the news, but a few things caught my attention during this morning's browsing.

God was behind Big Bang, Universe No Accident: Pope

Mainly my thoughts were directed here by the comments in the user section. I don't suppose that a majority of practicing scientists would echo their sentiments—at least not in such an uneducated way—but it illustrates one of the serious problems with marrying a philosophy to a process.

One of the issues with the science movement today is that it is essentially philosophical and not practical. By this I mean that its adherents have forgotten that science is a process and not a cathedral. There is an arrogant assumption made (not to excuse arrogance on the side of religion) that science really answers philosophical questions. It does not and cannot.

Let's look at a second article as an example:

Chemical signal in women's tears a turn-off for men

The thrust of the article is that research suggests that women may have evolved crying as a means of fending off unwanted advances from men. This may or may not be true (I suppose men's tears work differently, as all they seem to do is make us men embarrassed).

What has happened here, regardless of the connection, is that a process—natural selection—is insidiously taken as an explanation for an emotion. No one can really tell whether women used to cry to avoid smelly frat-boys in Paleolithic bars, but certainly this is not the (only) reason they cry today. The steady proposal of these kind of news articles is that emotional content is not actually Real in the sense that it has an external, objective meaning. Science itself cannot comment on those kinds of realities—it is in fact precluded from doing so by its very nature—but when wedded to a material evolutionary philosophy, it's nearly plausible to suggest that tears came first and emotions came second.

(One might note that in a system that favors offspring, it seems unlikely that we should find natural selection favoring less offspring in the reportedly non-malthusian world of our ancestors.)

Then, lastly:

Man with golden voice: A great story, but does it help the cause of the homeless?

While not as entertaining, perhaps, as Antoine Dodson's meteoric rise to Youtube fame ("We gon' find you"), this one is a bit nearer and dearer to my heart (and birthplace).

This quote kind of irked me a bit:

While few of the nation’s homeless get the chance or exposure Mr. Williams has garnered, “we care about guys like Ted Williams and the soloist because deep down inside, many of us long to have our own inner greatness discovered by the world,” says Los Angeles author and speaker BJ Gallagher via email.

Why?

Because it suggests in the end that our care for the homeless is ultimately rooted in some sort of Smithian selfishness or narcissism. (Quick, let me find a mirror and see if I can tease my balding pate into something that resembles Ted Williams' shock of awesome froness.)

Obviously we want to root for a guy who can call the Reds game in the rarefied air of Gus Johnson. But it is a far cry to serve your fellow man because he looks like you instead of because he looks like Christ.

Ultimately the respect we owe our fellow human is rooted in his likeness to God, being made in his image. To serve from self-interest seems a bit like idolatry to me.

Christmas

As always, I put together a list of verses for Christmas. I'm pretty sure any of the readers who were going to get them from me have gotten them in the mail or via email already, so sharing them shouldn't spoil anything.

You can read the PDF by clicking the link.

Happy New Year, and Merry Christmas. I hope the advent of Our Lord and Savior has gripped your heart anew.

They Shall Seek Death

I'm nearing completion of my Bible in a Year, reading through Revelation with an eye toward having a week or more off from reading. Recently, Revelation 9:6 has stood out to me:

And in those days shall men seek death, and not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

It has long been a pet idea of mine that all of man's efforts today—or at least most of them—are really efforts at ending the curse. Science is a great process for this, and it has dramatically improved quality of life in many places (although the effects of this progress are not uniform, and we may argue reasonably that progress has actually caused more problems than it's solved). Recently, Harvard scientists reversed ageing in mice by injecting them with telomerase, an enzyme that prevents telomeres from shortening as cells divide. (Telomere shortening is thought to be one of the principle causes of ageing in humans. Telomeres are repetitive pieces of DNA at the end of chromosomes; as cells divide, telomeres contribute this DNA to cells and are eventually used up. When this happens, the original cell can no longer divide. Presumably, telomeres degrade over time, so cells cannot go on reproducing forever. It is thought that cancer cells do not have this problem.)

The verse I have quoted has always puzzled me, because it seems like it should be fairly easy to seek death and find it. Perhaps it is macabre, but I have found myself wondering about the torments of hell a bit lately, and it struck me that in the beginning, God prevents man from living forever precisely because living forever without God is hell. It seems the original design was not to have decaying bodies, ones subject to the shortening of telomeres or other genetic breakdowns, but to have bodies that never die, that don't need repair (hips that don't crack on every kick!). Would it not be hell to prevent death without fixing the other problems?

Eventually it would not surprise me to find that science will eventually succeed in ending at least one part of the curse. The stuff of fiction—reversing ageing, even in mice—is now a reality. It may be that man will eventually succeed in thumbing his nose at God, defying death and thereby concluding there is no need for a resurrection. I don't really know, of course, but I can see it happening this way.

I hate death, but I see it also as a mercy in its way: the effects of sin and our ability to sin both are stopped in death, and it is only through this final door that we are granted access to the presence of God. But of course, death is also the door to eternal loss, and I think mankind will ever strive to stave off eternal torment. What an irony that they could do so and bring upon themselves the consequences that they most desire to avoid!

I can see in this beggarly concept of eternal life an eternal death. It seems almost like Bilbo with the Ring of Power; he does not appear any older, but in a classic Hobbit-phrase, he describes himself as thin, as though he were butter scraped over too much bread.

How shameful it would be to find that all of our efforts to defeat the curse on our terms bring us an immortality of dread and loss, one in which death is preferable to living on, and yet it is impossible to achieve.