i had a thoughtful call from someone who might want research done. he lost a daughter in law a year ago. i need to ask j to find a grief support group. thinking about religion-business-innovation
the curious thing is not just how such ideas dominate groups but how they destroy the very memory that things used to be otherwise.
after all “We have always been at war with Eastasia. Everyone knows that.”
i found this http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/1#
now everyone can take a pill and we really have been at war with eastasia, forever. then change the text stored on our kindles and poof, history really can be rewritten.
” … and be evidence of design. swapping modules is both natural to our imaginations and the way people design things.”
No.
In scientific, evidence is data or findings that either refute or support a falsifiable prediction from a theory. There are no predictions that come from the premise of design that I know of.
the windenmere in sierra vista hosted kim’s wake for the price of the food. very nice. with so many taking advantage of jamie’s grief is was nice to see this kindness.
We would like to offer people a place to share things they feel for Kim and for her family and Jamie. Kim enjoyed writing letters and cards, we see this as an extension of her pleasure in reading and writing..
Since there are 2 distinct groups we will have 2 books, one is for Jamie and one for Jo Ann, Bruce and Kerry, please feel free to write in each.
some simple instructions:
1. Start a new page for you. Justin or Alesha will offer to take your picture and a photo of things you might have brought with you to share. We expect to make a CD to put into the book with photos, video and audio to let the families review today events and people again sometime in the future. Please include your email address.
2. Address Jamie or Jo Ann or Bruce or Kerry or Kim, write as you might talk to them if they were in front of you. Be careful Jamie might be right behind you, reading over your shoulder
3. There are lots of things we don’t know about Kim, you know some of them, share the best, let us in on those jokes, those funny times. Help us through these sadness by reliving the better days you had with our Kim.
4.Take your time, sit down, get comfort at a table, we have the time, you are writing something for years to come.
5. Thank you for coming to see us, we all appreciate the time, concern and love you are showing to us at these difficult time.
build something useful of more permanent value to share with guests at celebration. give Jamie a tool for the condolences over the coming months.
Kim loved to read, it’s easy and pleasant to remember her as we use a nice bookmark, turning the pages, and marking our place as we read
on the front side
KIMBERLY ANN CARUTHERS
29 Oct 1975-3 Feb 2012
Devoted Wife, Daughter, Sister, Aunt, Cat Mother
PHOTO
back side
a loving wife to Jamie C. Williams
a devoted daughter to Bruce & Jo Ann Caruthers
little sister to Kerry
indulgent aunt to Henry and Miranda
Cat Mother to Princess and Precious, her favorite role!
She taught special education in Nogales before medical problems eventually forced her on disability.
Despite this pain she helped with her dad’s care and lavished attention on her nephew and niece. (and her cats)(continually reading)
She left things undone and dreams unfulfilled as she left us, surprised and sorrowful, at her youthful death.
Take a moment today, reflect, and hug your family and loved ones now, for we do not know how long we will share our days together.
we offer this bookmark for a way to remember Kim’s contribution to your life and to remind you that our length of our days is unknown.
Celebration of Remembrance for Kim Caruthers 2pm friends begin to arrive, we will be here from 2-5pm.
Justin and Alesha will circulate with cameras and 2 condolence books, taking pictures of people who attend and what they brought. Please include your email address.
Please introduce yourselves, wall flowers are not accepted at this time. We think Kim would appreciate openness and friendship as we mourn her passing.
People are invited to share photos and memories with the family to create a CD of today’s event. Please tell stories of Kim and what she meant to you, for we haven’t heard all these personal stories of Kim. We want to enjoy them with you. Kim’s sister in law Jen does this professionally so we expect to work on this project in a few months as a tribute to Kim.
If you would like to share a homemade dessert or light snack please bring them. We will have coffee and finger foods to comfort us all there. We have our handmade bookmarks for guests to remember Kim and her love of reading, as they read, please take one for a permanent memory. We can make more if these run out.
This time is offered to our friends to connect with those left behind, to hug each other, to share our surprise and sorrow, just to be together.
3:30pm Close friends and family will sit down for a more structured time to share as a group. More casual friends, neighbors, work related people need not feel obligated to stay.
Her violin will be there, in an empty chair. We will have a slide show of her photos. A time for more intimate sharing of our tears and love for her.
Jamie’s brother Calvin, who was best man at their wedding will help as guide.
Close friends and family are invited to sit and share the best things they remember about Kim so that we all can see Kim through each others eyes.
If you need to write out your feelings, Calvin will be happy to read them outloud, we understand, we’ve paused numerous times this week ourselves.
5pm Expected time for clearing the facility, they have others coming in at 5pm.
family will sit down for sharing a private meal together afterwards.
the engravement on her urn delayed it’s arrival until next week, it is anticipated that her ashes will be interred with her dearly loved grandmother at Evergreen in Tucson in 1 year.
Kim was born in Tucson, Arizona on October 29, 1975 and spent her childhood in Tucson and it’s surrounding deserts, mountains and canyons.
Kim will be ever remembered as
a loving wife to Jamie C. Williams
a caring and devoted daughter to Bruce & Jo Ann Caruthers
little sister to Kerry
Friend, companion and aunt to Henry and Miranda
Cat Mother to Princess and Precious, her favorite role!
Kim died unexpectedly Friday Feb 3 at Sierra Vista’s Regional Medical Center.
Kim graduated with Jamie from Tucson High School in 1994 as did her grandfather before her and went on to earn an Associates Degree from Cochise Community College and a BA in Special Education from New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Kim and Jamie married in the Tucson Botanical Gardens in 2002.
She taught special education in Nogales before medical problems eventually forced her on disability.
Despite her ever present pain she helped with her dad’s care and developed a close bond with her nephew and niece, and her cats, reading daily.
She left things undone and dreams unfulfilled as she departed from us, surprised and sorrowful, at her youthful death.
The families would like to invite her friends to an informal afternoon of remembrance to share memories of Kim at the Windemere in Sierra Vista on Saturday Feb 11 from 2 pm to 5 pm. Please bring photos and your best memories of Kim to share with others who are missing her dearly at this sad time.
We think Kim would rather you donate to the Southern Arizona Humane Society instead of sending flowers.
Take a moment today, reflect, and hug your family and loved ones now, for we do not know how long we will share our days together.
thanks to Jo Ann and Kerry who really made it sing!
you claim that the spirit speaks directly to you, that this is separate from the church, and superior to studying the past things that people have said about the scriptures.
look at the first element.
you claim spirit speaks unmediated except through the words of scripture to you. no church, no history, no theology.
language itself is mediation, you get this idea that not only is it possible but preferable to claim this unmediated spiritual experience from a tradition. people have been making this claim forever, not just in christianity but it is a fundamental religious claim. direct access to religious experience.
you can not choose no tradition, no community, you get your ideas from somewhere, you can however choose to ignore consciously placing yourself in a specific community of interpretation, a church, and claim to be making it on your own. this is the tradition of hermits and monks and individuals of all times and places who thought God speaks clearer to them than he ever has to anyone else.
i see this as egotism and individualism rioting over all the clear passages of scripture pointing us to the essential neediness for community and other people.
idea: network is earning the privilege of people’s time, esp. the busy guy that doesn’t return calls
—
i posted this
this idea of me and my Bible alone is a very modern notion. the phrases “outside the church there is no salvation” and “if you won’t have the church as your mother then you can not have God as your father” have summarized 2000 years of Christianity. until the last few generations no Christian would have made these sort of individualistic claims we read here.
the church created the Scriptures and continues to teach and form people’s minds about them, you just believe in the “church that claims to be no church at all”, the successor to so many not-a-denomination denomination that have risen in the last 50 years, mostly in the US as we are so deeply infected by that nasty virus of individualism.
books, words on paper, have no significance or meaning outside of interpretive communities. how we understand the Scriptures, what we think they mean exist only in our minds, not in the book itself. we are products of various communities and the name of our community that teaches us how to read the Scriptures is our local church. you may claim to read them all by yourself, just as they are, but that is a particular claim made by specific communities who in turn have a history based in a radical individualism from the American frontier experience. google “restorationist movement” for one of the largest influences in church history along these lines. although there is a significant anabaptist influence here as well, taking luther’s priesthood of all believers to it’s logical conclusion.
?” For the Spirit teaches you everything you need to know”
people taught you english.
people taught you how to understand 1 john in this way.
people determined what was in your Bible, and what is not there.
(the problem of the canon)
people determined where the periods went,
people numbered the verses,
people created the form you see the books in today,
then lots of other people translated the greek for you to read 1 john 2:27. lots of people.
you think the Spirit controlled them? all of them? the same way you claim controlled now?
the fact that i learned classical greek as an adult in anticipation of needing it for seminary, makes my point even stronger. for i can remember slaving over _anabasis_ with my professor as i struggled to understand these words the very first time i read them. i know i have people specifically to thank for the fact that i can still struggle sounding out these koinonia greek words. and further struggle to put them together to bring meaningfulness to my mind.
unlike my understanding of english, the memories of learning are long ago lost to me now, my memories of learning greek are rather clear, perhaps because of the difficulty i had with both it and hebrew.
in any case, i am sure i learned from people, not the spirit of God communicating outside of my normal learning channels. i have people to thank that i can read this. i have people to thank that it is in this form, sentences and paragraphs, with capitals and punctuation. none of which occurs in the originals.
the church created, preserved.transmitted, translated and explains this text to me even today. it is my interpretative community.
what does ???? ?????? mean? is it the same as hebrew ??? ?????? how does the LXX confirm this? all these questions and more the church answers for me, if the ???? ?????? speaks to me concerning these answers it does so through the mediation of the church.
if the ???? ?????? speaks to you differently than through the mediation of the church then i don’t have any experience of that and you will have to explain that experience to me.
> The only thing you’re managing to do is to show
> that to you, the Bible is at best a weak source
> of truth; at worst it holds no value. I vehemently
> disagree with that stance.
i’ve said no such thing, i’ve said my interpretative community, my church, has taught me what the Scriptures teach. frankly, i would rather believe that 1000′s of faithful men(mostly) spoke truthfully than rely on my own rather stupid self. to trust and rely on these faithful servants of God rather than to think that God speaks so directly to me without intermediates, without community, without precedence is preferable. why should i think that the Spirit of God speaks any clearer to me by myself, alone, singularly, than He has to my forefathers in the faith?
> the Bible states, in a natural and straight forward
> manner.
this hermeneutical principle has historical precedence in luther’s preference for the literal in opposition to the 4 fold hermeneutic of the medieval roman church. the big problem is that your natural straightforward manner of interpretation has little to do with, very little in common with, the way the Bible’s first readers/listeners read/heard it. you are simply reading your modern ideas into an ancient document that is not written to you, but by God’s grace for you.
i think this is the key criticism of the “just me and my Bible, alone” principle. if everyone who believed it, all agreed, i would be tempted to join them, thinking that the Holy Spirit was at work in such a group. but one they don’t agree, and two even if they did agree completely they wouldn’t form a group because of their principles of individualism, me alone. reminds me of groucho’s “i wouldn’t join any group who would have ME as a member!” quip.
> by putting your eternal destiny in the hands of
> any church.
a Christian’s destiny is in God’s hands, my interest is in how to best understand the Scriptures. by myself or in mutual submission in community.
as a part of an interpretative community or alone, just me and my Bible, justifying it by thinking that the Spirit somehow is clearer to me than he has spoken to so many both in the past and today. as for me, i’ll go with the church, i am far too aware of my sins and conscious that many others help on the path to understanding.
to willing go it alone seems to degrade the normal means of grace and demand the extraordinary voice of God speaking to me outside of His revelation that he works through the church.
the parallel is between adam and jesus. no one is genetic offspring of jesus, why do we need to be genetic offspring of adam for the parallel to hold? we are jesus’ by faith, federal headship is a legal type of argument, an imputation, why, other than augustine, does genetics matter?
i like genealogy research, to me it’s an extraordinary puzzle. i’m also aware that i’m wrong on my ancestry tree. lots of places. does that mean the tree is wrong? or that the whole purpose of doing the tree is wrong? i suspect that any lineage back more than 10 generations or 1800 is more likely to be wrong than it is to be right. i have tons of data, census, handwritten trees etc. the ancients had verbal memory. do you really think the genealogies are right in the Bible, right as in accurate, no gaps, no NPE’s? back 25 generations plus etc. no. the genealogies perform another task, locating people in their place, accuracy is not important, who is in your tree is important. since there wasn’t genetic services no one could show otherwise *grin*
our relationship to history, to the past, to numbers is very cultural. we prize accuracy, we think facts are what is true, is what happened. we think that if the exodus was said to be 1.5M people then if it was 10,000 then the author was lying. our notions are the result of 500 years of printing, of science, of math development. the elimination of mystery in numbers, the destruction of myth in history, our ideas are very culturally dependent and the ANE culture of the hebrew bible do not share these assumptions we find so persuasive and pervasive.
i believe ancient genealogies had an overarching purpose, and that purpose was not our ideas of accuracy of factualness. i believe that they proved placeness, how to locate your people in time and space. they demonstrated belonging-to-ness, they defined a circle of obligation. you owned relations a set of obligations, responsibilities. genealogies defined those communities.for example, adoption put you into those obligations, so did servants, slaves, some kinds of inlaws but not all.
it’s a big topic, but we need to resist reading our modern notions based on genetics back into a world that thought very differently.
take a different culture, chinese. the longest genealogy in the world in the kong family. i’ve stood in the family cemetery in kufu and looked at 87 eldest son’s eldest son’s eldest son…, a graveyard of 250K people. a genealogy of 104+ generations, prizing itself on accuracy. and do you know how it differs from any family tree you’ve ever seen?(i’ll wait awhile for people to think about it)
> The documentary hypothesis was the origination
> of textual criticism.
no. textual criticism has been practiced since the beginning of the text.
when a scribe has several texts in front of him, and he chooses one, that is textual criticism. putting texts into variant families, tracing the various translations is textual criticism. higher criticism is modern, as you point out associated with wellhausen and german universities.
confusing the two distinct fields does no one any good and just muddles the issues. getting a good greek text to study is a task for linguists, for textual transmission experts etc. i am glad to have the ABS Greek text at my elbow and not Erasmus’ Greek NT. why this is so, is a good story of often believers working to produce the best text they could.
this task has nothing to do with higher criticism and i do not understand your motivation to conflate the two.
> Textual criticism, form criticism, higher criticism
> are basically interchangeable they vary from lower
> criticism which is manuscript …study, higher
> criticism is the linguistic analysis
no, higher criticism centers on understanding through LITERARY analysis, not linguistic. you are confusing the discussion, conflating both textual with linguistic in turn with literary analysis. to perform a complete mishmash you need only throw ancient near eastern cultural influence into your big pot and stir vigorously.
why undo the work of generations of faithful Christian scholarship and lump so many usefully distinct things together. textual criticism gives us a good text. linguistic analysis gives us good translations. cultural analysis helps us understand what the first readers of Scripture heard. JEPD gives us nonsense multicolored Torah texts. they are different. why do you push them into one big pot?
> calling scribal practices textual criticism is
> absurd and an ad hoc justification.
go read Geisler on textual criticism http://ivanmonroy.wordpress.com/category/norman-geisler/
for example
quote:
The older reading is to be preferred
The more difficult reading is to be preferred because scribes generally smoothed out difficulties
The shorter reading is to be preferred, because copists were apt to insert new material
The reading that beset explains the other variants is to be preferred
The reading with the widest geographical support is to be preferred
Th reading that is most like the authro’s usually style is to be preferred
The reading that does not reflect a doctrinal bias is to be preferred
end quote
the big point is that the scribal activities are important. textual criticism does indeed start with scribal activities and why handwritten texts vary, then it looks at why texts display specific qualities described as family groupings.
not only is it not ad hoc, it is where most textual criticism texts begin, with the way the texts were transmitted to us, through chains of scribes.
i’ve done a little research into gen 1 and the origin of the 7 day week. i’m curious about time and how we think about it and represent it culturally. i’ve been thinking about gen 1 and how God seems to be involved in distinctions and separation. i’d like to write a little bit, thinking outloud to clarify and help my ideas get better via writing.
God starts with the chaos and undifferentiated darkness moving on the waters of the deep. i dont think gen 1 teaches creation from nothing. the darkness, void, nothingness, the ultimate undifferentiated chaos.
God separates light and darkness, by creating the light, names the light day and the darkness night. this is the fundamental rhythm of human life, one day at a time. then he separates the land from the water. out of the deep, God finds and distinguishes land. then he goes on to light the night with the moon and the day with the sun, unnamed objects since their names are gods in most ANE languages.
why is this discussion interesting?
many yecs propose that the noahic flood has echoes in various other flood stories around the world. it is my contention that if God told adam about the creation of the world in 7 days that the 7 day week would be coupled to, would arrive in tandem with flood stories. calendars are very conservative, how we perceive time is important to us and is a cultural tool. those of us separated from both the sky and agriculture don’t realize how important these rhythms are. we live with clocks and calendars not the stars and planting times.
there isn’t any linkage between the 7 day week and flood stories. the 7 day week is a single point discovery in ancient sumer which by diffusion has become the world’s standard week. it displaced the more logical 5 and 10 day weeks of china and the inkas.
calendars and keeping have been very religious objects from the beginning. why? boundaries, setting the limits of our collective lives is a political-religious task, holidays-holy days- have from the start been invested in the city leadership. when to declare, what to do, whose procession, are all religious tasks.
It’s not just Italy, of course. Eurozone unemployment is at a record. According toEurostat, the EU’s statistical office, 16.3 million people are out of work in the 17 countries that joined the euro. The story of a lost generation is becoming the scandal of a continent. In Spain, 51.4% of those aged 16-24 are jobless. In Greece, the figure is 43%.
it’s really hard for the extremes to play nice. it’s curious that K.Ham and J.Coyne have more in common than either with P.Enns. they both take the Bible exactly the same way, literally, directly. they seem to argue in a similar way, they both are more against the middle than each other.
anyhow, what coyne says about enns really says more about coyne than enns.
1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
—-to depends how the wealthy get rich and how they sustain their position.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
this is not true. where does the wealth from the division of labor come from? organizations can and do create wealth that their members working separately can not. likewise there are many intangibles that govt creates, peace potentially chief among them.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
this is likewise patently false. distribution of land in taiwan created extraordinary wealth as people took care of the land(mcarthur did the same in post war japan, so did sweden and norway after 1930′s). absentee landlords and concentration of wealth often leads to misuse and waste, not just of the wealth but of the talents and time of the people who can not get access to enough capital to survive, the irish potato famine is a good example. what both the swedes and irish did in america following immigration ought to give pause to those who praise concentration of wealth.
these are platitudes that a bit of historical analysis ought to dissipate.
2 interesting ideas:
The evidence that the extremes of both parties have a stranglehold on power in Congress is fairly convincing. The center, for all intents and purposes, is gone. Almost all Democrats are liberals today and all Republicans are conservatives.
It isn’t just polarization that has afflicted Washington. It is ideological extremism that is largely to blame for the inaction of Congress in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — what one scholar who has studied the problem refers to as “asymmetrical polarization.”
mistuned harmonic detection (ability to detect the relationship between different sound frequencies, which is important for separating sounds that are occurring simultaneously in a noisy environment); and speech-in-noise (ability to hear a spoken sentence in the presence of background noise).
one of the problems in discussing the medical system is the lack of clarification concerning goals.
what is the purpose of the medical system?
what are the major goals?
is the medical system’s goals the same as the individuals within it? what are the various parties to the system? do they have similar or competing goals?
it’s a morass into which you could throw several lifetimes, the problem is no one is really looking at it as a system and analyzing it in those terms. most people just push their personal goals onto the system and try to figure out how they can get more for themselves out of it.
Neither am I, not because I refuse to see the light, but because the light of science does not shine with equal brightness in every corner. There is mystery. There is transcendence. By faith I believe that the Christian story has deep access to a reality that materialism cannot provide and cannot be expected to know.
It may be that evolution, and the challenges it presents, will remind us that we are called to trust God, which means we may need to restructure and even abandon the “god” that we have created in our own image. Working through the implications of evolution may remind Christians that trusting God’s goodness is a daily decision, a spiritually fulfilling act of recommitment to surrender to God no matter what.
The strategic benefit is clear: Mohler can–in a sense–”accept” the scientific data while also remaining a biblical literalist. Science only studies what God appeared to have done, and scientists are free to have at it. Scripture, however, tells us, without fear of contradiction, what God actually did.
my take on this series of readings:
one of the striking things about these essays is the difference in the passions of how people hold onto different ideas.
but passionate commitment, like sincerity has nothing to do with the truth value of an idea. it has everything to do with the person holding onto the idea, their emotions, their history.
i took some time to read anti-abortion discussions the last few weeks, mostly because i was surprised by their passionate embrace of what really is a self-limiting idea, like celibacy. it struck me that passion means activity in behalf of, it means visibility, loudness in discussions, it translates into political activity of various sorts.
but by our nature we can’t hold every belief to the same high passionate standard of our most cherish precious and under attack ideals. we seem to have a few very highly invested in, that we can be passionate about.
much of the dialogue i see is not really about convincing someone to believe as i do about a thing, but rather it attempts to presuade others to accept my hierarchy of what to be passionate about.
Not satisfied with the brevity of the Nicene Creed, Mohler adds to it a litany of further proclamations that he insists — in distinctly un-Baptist fashion* — must be affirmed as non-negotiable for all real, true Christians. But unlike the religious affirmations of that creed, the additions Mohler demands include tenets that are demonstrably falsifiable.
The driving force behind neo-fundamentalism, as with historic fundamentalism, is a “remnant mentality.” Neo-fundamentalists believe they alone are remaining true to the fullness of the gospel and orthodox faith while the rest of the evangelical church is in grave, near-apocalyptic danger of theological drift, moral laxity, and compromise with a postmodern culture – a culture which they see as being characterized by a skepticism towards Enlightenment conceptions of “absolute truth,” a pluralistic blending of diverse beliefs, values, and cultures, and a suspicion of hierarchies and traditional sources of authority.[3] Because of this hostility toward postmodern ways of thinking, neo-fundamentalists have little tolerance for diversity of opinions among evangelicals on any issues they perceive as essential doctrines – which are most of them – as opposed to the broader evangelical movement which historically has allowed for a much wider range of disagreement on disputable matters.[4] Neo-fundamentalists thus respond to the challenges of a postmodern culture by narrowing the boundaries of what they consider genuinely evangelical and orthodox Christianity, and rejecting those who maintain a more open stance.
what a reading day! whew.
posted last section to fb group.
set alert for other one.
off to the gym to swim outside and watch venus rise!
re:
I find it very difficult to put Christian, Biblical faith and evolutionary thought together. Frankly, it was easier for me to define lines when I knew I was talking about the godless natural selection of evolutionary theory. But when I am confronted with folks who speak of believing God, and hold this position, frankly my first thought is that they have succumbed to the great science malady. I am very interested in how you put these two things together.
you do not have to put them together-the conciliatory position. but they can not compete as in YEC-the competitive position(haught’s system).
the Scriptures are written wholly within historical time, the Chinese, Sumerian(&descendants) and Egyptian are each several thousand years (100 generations-imagine that) older than anything in our Bibles. all of them thought, as is the common observable pre-scientific way, that the world was small, the earth was the center, the stars nearby-all roughly close together in a sphere or half shell, that creation was recent(even if like the hindu it cycled), that human beings unique in a biological sense.
none could conceive of deep time or deep space anymore than we can. our minds and perceptions are keyed to a vastly smaller local scale, it is only with great not-common sensical education that the leading edge of our brightest can imagine either the great distances or great time our universe is.
ET doesn’t impact theology in more than a few places directly, the historicity of Adam and Eve as the sole progenitors of the human race without antecedents, for one big example. that is why Darwin had very little to do with theology until the massive reaction of fundamentalist to liberal theology at the time of the Scopes trial. and it really isn’t until the publishing of of the _Genesis Flood_ that the issue of a young earth enters into the consciousness of modern conservatives.
now it is much easier for more liberal theology to be in a complementary relationship to ET, to draw analogies and models from science to read Scripture with. i don’t see conservative theology looking much outside its own history for these things, but i do see the need not to put young Christian minds into the position of choosing either or, either atheistic biology/science or YECist theology. it’s a false dichotomy-Scripture or modern science, both Scripture and science are each much bigger than either Dawkins or Ham conceive them to be.
it is a noble goal to learn about the science. you should be commended for your effort. it is a shame that more YECists pastors do not attempt even to look at the science for themselves however briefly. it is unfortunately a dangerous thing to do.
for YECism is brittle, it is so very wrong, (14B/10k 1.4×10^10/1×10^4=6 orders of magnitude), so isolated, so insular, that even a brief excursion outside the protected enclaves of AiG, evolutionnews, ICR can set into motion thoughts that “my interpretation of the Scriptures may not be quite as certain as my peers propose”. it is God’s universe, sadly so for the YEC, because He created it ~14.5Bya and no amount of holy hand waving will obscure that fact if someone is genuinely studying the book of God’s works.
i hope others embarking on the same study do find, like you did, J.McG’s blog here, for it is a decent portal into the study of God’s creations, both the universe and Scripture.
re:
evolutionary geologists
there are no evolutionary geologists. evolution is a biological theory not a geological one. ET requires a particular sort of replicator, it doesn’t exist in geology. there are geologists who understand ET, i’m sure there are good geologists that don’t understand ET, as it is unnecessary to their field. unfortunately people sloppily talk as if evolution occurs outside of a replicator-based field like genetic algorithms or biology, in fields like cosmology or astronomy or geology, however they are wrong(&confusing) to do so.
re:
My thoughts for Sunday will be to establish that God Himself has given the mandate for science to fathom this universe, therefore for young people to reachout and not be afraid of moving into a scientific career. To allow the scientific method applied across the board will bring us into direct contact with the action and character of the Creator God whose fingerprint is found on every particle of this universe. And then make science do good for humanity.
by the grace of God this is true, it did not have to be this way, God could have made the world too complex for us, He could have tricked us like apparent age theory proposes, He could have hidden important pieces, but He choose not to do any of these things but allow us to think His thoughts after Him.
the problem with your approach is that any YECists studying any science to any real depth can not withstand the cognitive dissonance without extreme compartmentalization. i personally have never meet a YEC, lots of OEC, as i was, studying the science, and if you as Ken Ham does, makes the age of the world-universe essentially a salvation issue, then YECists kids with science education will leave this church for another that allows at least OEC thinking. it is better to discourage independent thought if you want your thoughtful kids to stay in your denomination, YECism is completely incompatible with any decent scientific education. you can not learn to read the book of nature if you believe Scripture teaches a 6k year old universe period.
re:
I believe that it is rather a waste of time to apply all the energy of making science gives us answers about origins when appliying the same energy and focus to find answers for Alzhiemer’s, or cancer, or Huntington’s diease if far more improving the human condition.
the answers to all 3-Alzheimer’s, cancer, and Huntington’s will be found by careful evolutionary thinking. they are all significantly genetic diseases where the mechanisms are thoroughly evolutionary in origin. why is Huntington’s fixed in the population? what selection pressures does chemotherapy place on cancer cells? why does disease like Alz strike after reproductive age? only a good knowledge of ET will lead to answers to these important questions about your diseases, and only research into origins will continue to build the structure to create this knowledge.
AiG can fund “creationist science research” (if only they would) and they would never advance medicine’s search of the answers to these 3 diseases one iota. why? because their theory is of no use in creating questions to study these diseases. maybe that is why they make no attempt to fund research, they know their theory is impotent as a research programme.
i’ve read the stuff from AiG years ago. i want to understand what YOU personally believe about radioactive dating. what understanding YOU have. why YOU don’t believe the science.
if i asked you why i should baptize or not baptize my kids would you give me a link to your church’s website or take a few minutes to explain your personal understanding of the issue?
i can read, and have read most of the important YECist material, i can explain why i am not convinced. what i want to know is your depth of understanding of the science of radioactive dating, not AiG’s authors.
why?
because most YECist really don’t have a clue about the science. i’m looking for someone who does to explain to me why with what they know, they do not believe the theory.
actually finding a YECist that was genuinely interested in discussing the science would be sufficient. but i’ve thus far found neither. yet.
re:
an unstated assumption
YECists often have a problem distinguishing between conclusions and assumptions.
take this issue of are humans descended from a common ancestor with the great apes, or more specifically, humans and chimps share a recent common ancestor.
this is a conclusion. it is a hypothesis that is continually being tested. it is also part of a scientific framework for thinking about human biology and genetics. it is this “being a part of a framework” that seems to give YECists and their kin problems, and why they call it an assumption.
yes, i and everyone actually doing biology (i do not, i simply read about it) in an important sense “assume” the scientific framework in order to do their science and their thinking about biology. why isn’t it an assumption then?
well, define assumption. it is something like an axiom, presupposition, required but not able to be proved bit of the puzzle needed to work on the puzzle, it is part of the setup. first, it can not be prove, it must be assumed to be true without evidence. if you have evidence then it is a conclusion. second, it must be necessary in order to do the puzzle, to think about the rest of the situation.
what are some of the assumptions science needs? that there is a real world out there, that it is morally good to investigate it, that we are able to understand it in some substantial way. things that a correspondence theory of epistemology uncovers generally.
are these things true? probably not in the way we assume them. that there is a world out there might not matter if what we are really dealing with is models in our heads. that it is a moral good to investigate the world probably doesn’t matter if it is your job to do it and your food and house payment rely upon you doing it right. as to the question of our ability to understand the world, i don’t know.
tab cleaning, i have several books to finish today.—
when people disagree with us, we tend to think several things. the first is that they don’t understand the issue-the confused, the second is that they are ignorance, third that they are wrong, in error, that we have a genuine disagreement(we both understand, have roughly same information but arrived at different conclusions). the next are the interesting ones, deceived or deluded. apparently most people simply can’t stop at disagree, but need to moralize the situation.
when people disagree with us, we tend to think several things. the first is that they don’t understand the issue-the confused, the second is that they are ignorance, third that they are wrong, in error, that we have a genuine disagreement(we both understand, have roughly same information but arrived at different conclusions). the next are the interesting ones, deceived or deluded. apparently most people simply can’t stop at disagree, but need to moralize the situation.
it is this moralization of knowledge that is so evident in reading those comments on KH’s FB page. people skip straight to: he is deceived by satan, he isn’t (our kind of) Christian. etc.
i see this as an import from private religious belief into the public scientific sphere. KH basically moralizes the knowledge of how old is the earth. it is not a science question anymore but a moral question, if you do not assent to YEC then you are basically evil.
actually it’s a kind of cool way to argue, since discussion with the ignorant requires knowledge giving, with the confused require straight thinking, but with the evil you do not discuss things, you destroy evil you don’t compromise by talking to it.
YECists often have a problem distinguishing between conclusions and assumptions.
take this issue of are humans descended from a common ancestor with the great apes, or more specifically, humans and chimps share a recent common ancestor.
this is a conclusion. it is a hypothesis that is continually being tested. it is also part of a scientific framework for thinking about human biology and genetics. it is this “being a part of a framework” that seems to give YECists and their kin problems, and why they call it an assumption.
yes, i and everyone actually doing biology (i do not, i simply read about it) in an important sense “assume” the scientific framework in order to do their science and their thinking about biology. why isn’t it an assumption then?
well, define assumption. it is something like an axiom, presupposition, required but not able to be proved bit of the puzzle needed to work on the puzzle, it is part of the setup. first, it can not be prove, it must be assumed to be true without evidence. if you have evidence then it is a conclusion. second, it must be necessary in order to do the puzzle, to think about the rest of the situation.
what are some of the assumptions science needs? that there is a real world out there, that it is morally good to investigate it, that we are able to understand it in some substantial way. things that a correspondence theory of epistemology uncovers generally.
are these things true? probably not in the way we assume them. that there is a world out there might not matter if what we are really dealing with is models in our heads. that it is a moral good to investigate the world probably doesn’t matter if it is your job to do it and your food and house payment rely upon you doing it right.
so it is really anti-physics and anti-astronomy first then anti-biology for him. so i guess young earth…creationists is in the right order.
despite his claims for biblical high ground in:
quote:
“I want to make it VERY clear that we don’t want to be known primarily as “young-Earth creationists.” AiG’s main thrust is NOT “young Earth” as such; our emphasis is on Biblical authority.”
he is really defined by what he is against the most. physics.
quote:
“I personally believe that belief in millions of years is the lie of Satan in this present world that is used as one of the greatest attacks on God’s Word. Yet the acceptance of millions of years permeates the church. Really, it is no different than the Israelites who adopted the idols of the pagan cultures and worshiped pagan Gods—often mixed in with what God’s Word instructed them concerning holy days, sacrifices, etc.
The church needs to wake up to the fact that when God’s people accept the pagan religion of millions of years, they are helping the enemies of God attack His Holy Word.”
what i do not understand about KH is why he isn’t just as strongly for the flat geocentric earth that the Scriptures use as completely as it does a recent creation.
to me it is analogous to the anti-abortion movement not being against war and capital punishment, logic would seem to dictate the whole package not a pick and choose which one is right stance. curious discontinuities.
—
personally i think abortion ought to be apolitical, a medical procedure offered like any other.
the interesting thing to me is how the issues overlap. same people mostly. and how illogical it is not to buy the whole package.
prolife ought to mean anti abortion, anti capital punishment, anti war, pro child subsides, pro govt education, etc
biblical world view ought to mean flat geocentric earth of recent creation, no evolution, pro slavery, hierarchical viewpoint of society,
but instead prolife is simply anti-abortion, and truly ANE worldview is recent creation and no evolution.
why???
i guess one of the big problems i have with this adoption of ANE worldview as a requirement to be a Christian,(i think it’s being used not taught as binding) is how KH et al know which elements to discard and which to defend? my ancestors (both theologically and physically) defended slavery and a hierarchical structure of society (and the physical world) as essential to The Christian View of society, yet i don’t nor does KH. he is not a geocentric flat earth neo-confederate and most often they don’t even see how the Bible teaches these things. having through they out of the ANE pile they no longer even see them as once being defended as “in the pile”. this memory hole is another interesting aspect to the whole discussion.
quote:
“Think about it: Bergevin is saying that if the science of evolution is right, then the universe is necessarily a tale told by an idiot, and we may as well just kill each other. Why? Because, for him, evolution is not just a scientific theory, it’s a full-scale worldview. Bergevin gives science full control over his belief system. He seems unable to contextualize it. Put another way, he can’t imagine a world in which science and atheism are decoupled”
he can’t imagine a world in which science and atheism are decoupled!!!
what a nice rememberable way to put the issue.
i am just having too much fun doing genealogy research. up until 4am this morning!! here’s the process. i have samuel f mason, my great grandfather. i found his wife’s maiden name via brute force a month or so ago. searched every fulton in philadelphia 1840-1870, figuring his middle initial, like his brother james fulton was also his mom’s maiden name. so i found her birth family. and a good genealogist on a parallel branch supplied me with her parent’s names william fulton and mary arnel. and it sat on my tree until last night. when a shaking leaf marking new data popped up. someone in new zealand matched these folks. she had a hand written tree from a 1799 family bible and just like that i added 5 more generations. and tapped into a huge tree, a work of art at http://trees.ancestry.co.uk/tree/18533122/family/pedigree it is truly amazing. but the kicker is she is doing all the work because her great great grandmother was the cook for this family! so she has researched several thousand folks, one of two very complete holme/s tree on ancestry. you meet the nicest people doing family research!
i don’t argue theology much anymore, it seems pointless but i got in it today (stepped in it?)
the other person’s words follow the re:, the rest are mine
re:
(The bible does not teach a flat earth, that the sun revolves around the earth or that the moon is an independent light source.)
just to clean up a hanging chad.
matt 4:8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.
only makes sense in a flat earth worldview.
jos 10:13 So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.
only makes sense in a geocentric worldview
gen 1 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.
only makes sense if the sun and moon are sources of light, not that the moon reflects the suns light
there are lots more evidence, whole books were written defending flat earth from pagan spherical and geocentricism as God’s own way to put man in the center. there are no verses even hinting that the true condition is otherwise, than flat geocentric, moon as light source. and that is just the astronomy problems.
—
re:
I am sorry that the Bible does not state up to date scientific terminology and ideas that you want it to say and that you want to treat it as a science book.
i don’t want for it to say any modern science, it’s my desire to listen to what it says, as it spoke to it’s original hearers, not to my time.
re:
I suppose a virgin birth and God coming to Earth to die for those that would accept him and then coming back from the dead would be equally confusing to you?
i’m not particularly confused, except for the part about being awe-struck at times by the immensity of it all. i’m an orthodox Christian who has belonged to a conservative church, testified before the elders and confessed my faith before the congregation for nearly 40 years.
it always surprises me that YECists can not imagine the faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior separated from their most cherished ideals of a young earth, a world wide flood, a tower with the entire world’s population working on it, and nearly always restore to challenging the faith of their opponents. these are adiaphora, yet YECists are so attached to these interpretations of Gen 1-11 to basically use them as the first criteria to separate them from us.
–
re:
For how do you accept Jesus’ words if you don’t accept Moses’ words?
we do not have Jesus’ very words any more than we have Moses’s.
the NT was written long after the events, they are not Jesus’ words but what the writers remembered about events 50 years before. did Jesus believe the first 5 books were written by Moses? i don’t know, what i know is the gospel writer’s believed he did, thus confirming their 1stC hellenized jewish theology about the origin of those books as they read their LXX.
are the Gospels a newspaper man’s reportage of the events, is Genesis like Dragnet “just the facts”. no, the whole genre of modern history is itself modern, dating from the 16thC. like Luther’s preference for the literal, history was analysis and meaning and mythos* mixed up with facts before the rise of modern scholarship and printing.
again you tie your interpretation so closely to the text itself that you can not imagine anyone believing anything differently. yet your ideas are a small part of the breath of interpretation both in time and space. your understanding of church history is like your understanding of science, badly truncated, you don’t know how augustine creates original sin and a physical genetic adam and eve in latin after the eastern orthodox begin to split from the western church and therefore the whole heated discussion of historical adam/eve is irrelevant to them. for example.
the world and the church is much bigger than the few modern american denominations that make YECism, literalness, etc such an important part of their theology.
*see karen armstrong’s distinction of logos and mythos
—
re:
It seems that your faith is in the church’s Bible rather than in God
i think a big problem with evangelicals/fundamentalist/whatever label is that they do not understand that the church creates the Scriptures and supplies the interpretative community to understand it. unlike Islam which has the Quran eternally co-existent with Allah, the Christian Scriptures are written in a specific time and place, collected in a specific time and place , read in a specific time and place. they are the finger pointing at the moon, it is the nature of God they disclose that is important, the moon. but the fundamentalist confuse the finger with the moon, concentrating on the words they seem to miss the bigger picture. sad.
and in tying their anti-science YECism so closely, essentially saying, as we have seen here, that you can not be a true/real/their kind of Christian unless you believe this non-sense. they make it doubly difficult to modern science saturated people to even think that a moon is possible let alone see the finger pointing at it. i think it is an unnecessary stumbling block to faith myself. but that’s just me.
–
re:
so what you are saying is that the God of the bible is not powerful enough to preserve some simple writings about himself? That he allowed them to be corrupted and cause this kind of dividing debate we are having?
you are arguing here, like you argue the science. life must be designed therefore look at the science and see design. no, look at the data, try to leave these big principles like is God powerful enough to create a rock he can’t lift aside for a moment and read the text.
what does the Bible claim about itself? what is the history of the text? what is the history of the various interpretative communities that have read it and those that continue to read it? look at the data, master the history of it, understand the origins of your interpretative community, the history of your ideals. then read the text again.
an infallible, inerrant Scripture is a hypothesis, it has a history. read about it, see how it develops and why. see it’s origin and the battles it’s supporters were involved in. then read the text again.
each time you do these iterations, you should change a little bit, your interpretation should reflect a more nuanced, wider, more inclusive view of the world, of history, of the text. each time you should be more aware that it is a finger pointing to the moon, not the moon itself. it is God, the Creator and sustainer of life that is its focus, not itself. if you concentrate on the finger, thinking it the important part of the equation you are going to miss seeing the moon it is pointing to.
then read the text again. like me, you are probably still wrong in much you believe. it is my awareness of being in error that grows with each iteration more than anything else.
i like the buddhist metaphor of the finger pointing at the moon.
i wonder how much of our theology is borrowed from islam?
certainly christendom from ummah
maybe inerrant infallible from the nature of the quran?
—
it’s a shame when the atheists make the best argument!
i was going to post this:
re:
And then in a couple of thousand years physicists find a new particle, it is both true that I did not have that particle in mind and that my statement holds with regards to that particle.
and then the criticism is rightly “moving the goalposts”.
in all fairness, your example is historically accurate, the a-tom was thought indivisible, then the proton, now quarks. at each stage, each particle is the currently indivisible one.
the problem occurs when someone tries to defend the older bohr model because they have only the books from that era, being ignorant of the subsequent history, they eagerly point out that science says the proton is indivisible. when told about quarks they object that there is no entry in their textbook for “quark” and therefore it can’t exist, having granted that text canonical status.
that is the situation with cdbren. having rolled back geology to 1750, biology to 1825, theology to 1519, he refuses to consult any books written subsequent to those he has in hand from those eras. and gladly points out in their indexes to the lack of the terms we use in the discussion now.
yes, my church justifies inspiration from 2 tim 3:16 because the term Scripture is obviously that book they hold in their hand, the very concrete obviousness of it masking the historical sleight of hand trick that has been performed, authorial intent of 2 tim being compromised, as you accurately pointed out.
i’ve never knowingly voted for a republican. a friend asked me why.
i don’t not like anyone i don’t know personally. i don’t have any feelings for or against people in the news. they just are-out there, away from me. as a general principle republicans are the big business party, most of what they do is for moneyed interests.
since eisenhower republicans have given into the baser instincts and forgot the connection of politics to the common good. enshrining greed as the primary motivating force in people’s lives.
i don’t think that nation state level politics really matters who gets elected. the forces that propel people, that create the candidates, is beyond any real control. i’m interested in the forces, the ideas that motivate people, not so much in the personalities or the electoral fighting.
all things being equal liberals tend to decrease the military, help the poor and rein in the powerful, while conservatives tend to legislate morality, worry about abortion and sex too much, ignore the commonwealth and tend to pander to the rich.
at this point i don’t think anyone can arrest the growing national security state, it’s been unchallenged since before WW2. it’s the biggest federal problem and is unsolvable given the current setup. it is the source of the federal debt, much of the economic troubles and will just get worse.
—
the Scriptures clearly tell us how to treat the strangers in our midst and why.
it makes no legal/illegal distinction. it talks about ethnic aliens, and clearly tells us not to exploit them like other people do, but to be kind.
conservative Christians make an issue of abortion yet there are no verses about it, or an issue about gays when there are a handful of verses about it.
yet how to treat the poor and strangers and widows and orphans have 100′s of verses and forms an important part of the kingdom to come
yet there is silence from the right on the issue.
odd. disproportionate. shows that these are really cultural concerns using Scripture not things that are derived from the Bible by itself.
the match is with JM, it is necessarily through his mother’s side which is recent irish.
the earliest ancestors he has is patrick kelly, b.1835 galway & margaret conneely b.1846 they are from Oughterard, on the shore of Lough Corrib in Co. Galway.
as i’ve been reviewing census documents i’ve gone and read the whole form, looking for names i recognize, that is how i found charles carl with the breuers in 1860. a similar thing happens here, in 1920 my grandmother eleanor’s grand uncle richard e mason, who i believe they named my dad for, lives next door to a john joseph mason b 1873 in ireland and an immigrant in 1893. listed in arrival is brother s/p mason 114 chestnut st. last in ballymoyer, barony of Upper Fews, County of Armagh and province of Ulster, three miles north east of Newtownhamilton.
the curious thing is his wife, a kelly, who hales from the other side of this lake-tuam, galway. fortunately several excellent genealogists are working on her lineage. they met and married in philadelphia, my question is if the families knew each other back in ireland?
the only real opening in my lineage to insert a kelly is wife of richard mason-margaret.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-the key person in this story is Gross Ma Lena Hedrich-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Alena M KLANKA
Your 2nd great grandmother
Birth 22 Feb. 1852 in Maryland
Death 20 Nov 1930 in Baltimore County, Maryland, USA
i believe the pictures are labelled by my grandmother Anna Elizabeth Pierpont Saunders
her parents are john klenka and sophia bruer
her maternal grandparents are peter and elizabeth bruer
her husband is henry hedrick 1848-1931
one of their sons:henry c. heddrick 1877-1960
she had 12 kids,
all listed in the Bible possessed by my Maine Pierpont cousins.
george v pierpont sr marries their daughter:anna hedrick
their son: vernon pierpont jr is writer of the following letter
their daughter:emma is our ancestor, she marries george’s brother jacob wells pierpont
hence double cousins, 2 brothers marry 2 sisters
-=-=-=-the uncle vernon pierpont letter, talked about Henry Heddrick as a good cabinetmaker-=-=-=-
Henry HEDRICH
Your 2nd great grandfather
Birth 17 July 1848 in Dreihausen, Hesse Darmstadt germany
Death about 1931 in Baltimore City, Baltimore, Maryland
i assume he is to the left in the white shirt, but i do not know.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
i’ve been trying to trace them in baltimore directories and occupations listed in the census.
in the letter he-vernon mentions that there are cabinets in an art gallery in baltimore that he-henry made.
there are cabinets in these pictures, it’s nice to think my ancestors built them
but i thought kitchen/household cabinets. i wondered if that was how the higher class Pierpont brothers met the working class, German speaking Lutheran Hedrick girls, through their dad’s work. Emma is born in 1870, she marries Jacob in 1897, in 1870 her maternal aunt is working as a servant to Joseph&Sophia Spilman, also emigrants from Darmstadt, he is listed as a tailor in the census. In 10 years emma will be back with her folks and a dressmaker. This same decade census year her slightly older sister just married Henry the cabinetmaker and they live down the road in Washington DC. Joseph Spilman’s son eventually runs the german bank in baltimore.
first, i had to solve the klanka ancestry going back 2 more generations into germany.
the cabinet maker occupation pops up there.
which is ok because of how the 1840-1850 census data was collected.
so who did he stay with from the time he arrived to when he married sophie?
Johann Fredrich KLANKA
Birth 13 May 1823 in Hunteburg, Hesse-Kassel, Germany
he is gross ma lena hedrich’s father.
he arrives in baltimore with his family in 1835 from Bremen, Germany on boat Meridian to Baltimore, Maryland on Oct 1835.
Friederick Klanke 48 Male
Margarethe Klanke 37 Female
Henriette Klanke 3 Female
Marie Klanke 1 Female
Johan Klanke 12 Male
Friederick Klanke 12 male
Gerhard Klanke 3 male
but he-johann remains in baltimore. the family continues on to cincinatti.
(i’ve written a good genealogist who descends from them, she kept the german names while i used english names on census)
imho, the only way this could happen is if he stayed with relatives or entered into an apprenticeship with housing.the first time i’ve found him is in 1860 census
Household Members:
Name Age
John P Clink 35
Sophia Clink 38
Alena Clink 8Emma Clink 4Henry Clink 3
Bertha Clink 2
i believe the connection is cabinets and wood.
EXPAND HERE:
how i solved my aunt problem the importance of intergenerational families
story of two elizabeths.
-=-=-now in my zeal,i’ve been tracing next door neighbors
in the census,these two families share the same house-=-=-
i found:
Charles Carl sr
Birth Sep 1825 in Hesse-Darmstadt
in 1860,sophia breuer’s parents live in the same housing unit with the carl’s,henry bruer is a carver.peter b is a locksmith. NOTE: he might be stone carver not woodcharles carl is a carpet weaverboth families are from hesse darmstadt so they speak the same dialect of german.i propose charles is elizabeth’s nephew, making elizabeth breuer’s maiden name carlother option is peter’s maternal side cousin.
Brawer Peter 63 abt 1797 Male Hesse-Darmstadt
Brawer Elizabeth 54 abt 1806 Female Hesse-Darmstadt
Brawer Carrie 23 abt 1837 Female Hesse-Darmstadt
Brawer Henry 21 abt 1839 Male Hesse-Darmstadtsophie is already marriedCarl Charles 33 abt 1827 Male Hesse-Darmstadt
Carl Mary 30 abt 1830 Female Hesse-Darmstadt
Carl August 7 abt 1853 Male Maryland
Carl John 5 abt 1855 Male Maryland
Carl Anna 3 abt 1857 Female Marylandso we have gross ma=lena klenka hedrich, her mother sophia bruer klenka, her father john klenka who was left as a 14 year old in baltimore. her uncle henry bruer carves wood and knows charles carl. he’s the first carpenter, lena’s maternal uncle.examine possibility he is a stone carvertheory, john met sophia at charles carl’s shopand henry met alena through the shop.
i found him in 1890 balti dir
76 s schroeder
cabinetmakernow i trace charles and son august to a showcase cabinet making shop in 1880-1890
Occupation
1880 balti dir
home 81 n amity john&charles carl**klenka connection**
charles&august showcase manufacturing co. 27mcclellen
so it is not household cabinets but display cabinets, just as vernon said were in the art gallery.
henry and his son live at 93 n amity and work in the cabinet shop.
so henry seems to learn carpentry from his future wife’s father and his brother.
so now i need to look at 1840-1860 again.i have at least 2 dna matches with hedrich’s deriving from germany but the connection is lost back into germany.henry hedrich’s last appearance in baltimore
1920 census where he is living with daughter’s family.
Hedrick Henry Self (Head) Male White 72 abt 1848 Married Germany Germany Germany 1862
Hedrick Lena Wife Female White 67 abt 1853 Married Maryland Germany Germany add
Kolbe Henry Son-in-Law Male White 30 abt 1890 Married Maryland Maryland Maryland add
Kolbe Louise Daughter Female White 28 abt 1892 Married Maryland Germany Maryland add
Kolbe Anna Granddaughter Female White 5 abt 1915 Single Maryland Maryland Maryland add
Kolbe Beverly Granddaughter Female White 1 abt 1919 Single Maryland Maryland Maryland
and the census further says henry is a cabinetmaker in a car shop and his son in law is a machinist in, i suppose the same car shop.
so 4 generations tied together by wood working occupations.
i started this as a reply to cdbren over at j.mcg’s exploring the matrix but it’s not very good, so i didn’t post it.
re:
In that case, since a motorcycle engine is less advanced than a car engine that you would determine it was invented first and the car after?
thinking using analogies.
how “should” life look? what does it mean to think that life is designed?
i know that my goldwing is designed, likewise the pile of steel in the back next to the welder is not designed, at least according to my wife. the problem is when i begin to look carefully at the fig tree nearby both of them, with the categories of design & not-design as tools to investigate the tree.
why is the steel pile undesigned? because it’s random, unsorted, jumbled, it’s shaped by gravity and me throwing the pieces at it. because we associate order and purpose so strongly we see life’s orderliness as a sign of purpose. just as the goldwing is a orderly pile of steel, it must have been designed by a hand capable of arranging the orderliness.
darwin and adam smith are both using a great analogy. the economy as an undesigned system that appears to have purpose described as an invisible hand. thinking in analogies. life is like a human 19th C british expansionist mercantilist society. survival of the fittest, competition, selection, all economic as well as ET terms.
the problem is that neither life nor the economy are really like what we think they are, or like what we think they should be. life appears to be a great tinkerer that cares only if something works ok, not great, just sufficient enough to get by. actually the economy isn’t even that good,
i’ve had a fun time doing the research.
started with this picture
what i had was a xerox my uncle gordon had mailed to my mom, labelled simply “the pierpont gals”
who where the pierponts i wondered?
so i got a free 2 weeks on ancestry.com and found them.
my mom was a saunders, her mom was a pierpont. these ladies are my maternal grandmother’s only brother-henry wells pierpont’s family. mom and 4 daughter’s.
i had a series of old pictures, here’s the most important one
gross ma is grandmother in german.
double cousins: 2 hedrich sisters marry 2 pierpont brothers.
gross ma, lena klanka hedrich is my 2nd great grandmother.
how i found her maiden name was my first week long problem, my aunt problem.
(it’s a joke since i found and told alma about this she was dealing with little tiny ants near her chair)
1930 census: Household Members: Name Age George V Pierpont 27 Mary Pierpont 24 Elizabeth Klanke 66
elizabeth klanke is described as an aunt.
do you have any idea how ambiguous the term aunt is?
she turns out to be a great aunt, a generation older, she is gross ma lena’s sister.
several interesting things happened with elizabeth. first i posted to the kle/anke/a board and a lady in cincinnati responded with an elizabeth 30 years too old.(mine born ~1860, her’s in 1835), second i found that she was probably named for another elizabeth-gross ma’s grandmother who is living in 1880 with elizabeth as a teenager
Household Members:
Name Age
John P. Klanka 54
Sophia Klanka 57
Emma Klanka 25
Henry Klanka 24
Rebecca Klanka 21
Elizabeth Klanka 17
Elizabeth Bruer 78
so we have elizabeth bruer, her daughter sophia, her daughter alena klanka, her daughter’s marrying brothers-, my grandmother-anna marie elizabeth pierpont saunders, who i never knew, and my mom-anna elizabeth. my sister lynn ann. my daughter alesha elizabeth.
so what’s in a name? my direct maternal line.
1. elizabeth breuer, b 1804 hesse-darmstadt, my 4th great grandmother.
2. sophia breuer klanka, b 1823 hesse-darmstadt, 3rd gmom
3. alena marie klanka hedrich, b 1852 baltimore, 2nd gmom, her sister elizabeth b 1863, we have a photo labelled gross ma hedrick
4. emma marie hedrich pierpont, b 1870 baltimore, ggma, married jacob wells pierpont, her sister anna married george pierpont, double cousins.
5. her daughter anna marie elizabeth pierpont saunders, b 1898 baltimore, grandmother.
6. my mom anna elizabeth saunders williams b 1933 in baltimore.
7. my sister lynn ann.
8. my daughter alesha elizabeth.
maternal haplotype-mitochrondrial dna H6a1b2, all except alesha.
what is interesting is that the email about a elizabeth klanka turned out to connect with the previous generation. it was my elizabeth paternal aunt, who had gone on to cincinnati, leaving the oldest brother as an apprentice in baltimore. i didn’t make the connection for several months because she keep the german names and i used the Anglicized names they used on the census.
I have no clear idea whether Pastor Robert Jeffress is correct in referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more colloquially known as the Mormons, as “a cult.” There do seem to be one or two points of similarity. The Mormons have a supreme leader, known as…
Mexico has become one of the most deadly places for journalists, particularly those committed to digging deeper into the organized crime that is destabilizing parts of Mexico.
A ground-breaking investigation examines the most secret aspect of America’s shadowy drone wars and maps out a world of hidden bases dotting the globe.
October 17, 2011 at 1:39 pm
where is the dedication to the ideal that people’s opinions count?
WASHINGTON/SANTA CLARA, California (Reuters) – When U.S. restrictions on work permits barred Intel from moving nearly 50 Finnish engineers to the United States this year, the microchip maker reluctantly
October 17, 2011 at 1:29 pm
i found a critzer 1st cousin on ancestry. BONIWRIGHT id on ancestry, maybe she will contact us here. she is daughter of EDITH VIRGINIA CRITZER Birth 20 Nov 1918 in Covesville, Albemarle, Virginia, United States Death 1 Dec 1987 in Sterling Heights, Macomb, Michigan, United States
do you know them?
October 17, 2011 at 1:00 pm
did you ever get a chance to review your genealogy over at my ancestry.com tree? http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/26804244/family i ask because i ran into a critzer posting a lot of nice old portraits.
Reproductive arrangements don’t get much stranger than those of the Batura toad of Pakistan. The entire species is the result of two unknown species interbreeding, and each toad carries three sets of genes…which makes passing on its genome extremely tricky. The batura toad is a rare example of a…..
October 16, 2011 at 4:47 pm
i have a problem with slavery as presented in the Scriptures, ever since i first read Dabney.
When Karen Bowersox’s granddaughter was born with Down syndrome, she saw the challenges her mother faced trying to find clothes that fit her properly. After extensive research she still could not find any clothes made specifically for people with Down syndrome and so took matters into her own hands,…
October 15, 2011 at 2:25 pm
looks like today will be the last 100 deg day of the year!
October 15, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Colette WilliamsEwww…so glad we are in san diego where today it got to maybe 80
Demographers are predicting that world population will climb to 10 billion later this century. But with the planet heating up and growing numbers of people putting increasing pressure on water and food supplies and on life-sustaining ecosystems, will this projected population boom turn into a bust? …
Instead of a crack down to tame its unruly drivers, cops in Venezuela’s capital have taken an crack ’em up approach. About 120 mimes were dispatched into the chaotic traffic capital of Caracas to wag their fingers and silently shame lawless drivers, according to the Associated Press. Newly-trained …
Uncurling from a ball, deploying from a vehicle at the touch of a button, dropping beneath the surface of the water – these bridges move in unexpected ways.
Back to the ‘Is the Times liberal?’ debate | Matrimonio all’italiana and the taxman | Do U.S. law and sharia conflict? How? | Ghost in the alleged Iranian spy plot | Could it be … Satan? | Is God a Tigers — er, Rangers — fan? | Faith-free solace after death and loss | Franco, Spain and Cathol…
In my last post we looked at one problem with Mohler’s theory that the cosmos was created to look billions of years old but is really only about 6000 years old (“apparent age”):
October 14, 2011 at 12:45 pm
one of the most interesting quotes i’ve ever seen "Military alliance, balances of power, the League of Nations—all in turn have failed. We have had our last chance. If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically, is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advance in science, art, literature, and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save flesh."
The Do It Yourself community is breaking new ground. Forget learning how to knit, building your own computer, or fixing the molding in your house. DIY is hacking biology. That’s right, genetic engineering, ecology, and neuroscience are all ready for you to dive in…with a little help from your friend…
One skill all educators need to cultivate is the ability to segue from where a conversation may be to where you need it to go. In my Sunday school class last
One of Target’s Daily Deals today is Girls’ Circo Tranci Boots for $20.99 with free shipping. If you buy two pairs, you’ll get the second pair for half price. If you have two daughters or want to split an order with a friend, here’s how to get two pairs of boots for $15.75 shipped: ::Go to S…
Human Origins | archaeology | The ochre paint found in the abalone shellsseems to have been made from a specific recipe.As archaeologists unearth scattered artifacts from the early years of
1st dna paternal line potential match popped up tonight, just 1 str differs. last name is patronymic nilson which doesn’t mean much, sure hopes he emails me to compare details. I2a2b-M423-Isles-B1. it’s really rare in sweden so there is hope as more people get tested and join search sites.
October 13, 2011 at 10:59 pm
the problem is top down thinking from 1st principles without any desire to correct bad thinking with the facts at the bottom of the issue. sad.
Alabama Attorney General, Luther Strange, testifying before Congress. Photo by lutherstrange. As each day passes under Alabama’s new, highly restrictive immigration law (HB56), it is becoming increasingly clear that facts (and numbers) had very little to do with the passage of the law—and that they …
October 13, 2011 at 6:50 pm
Dean Saxton III
Do you want any straw for your garden?
October 13, 2011 at 5:12 pm
Richard Williamsyes, please. we have scott&jens red truck on the road so we can pick it up.
Dennis M. Ritchie, co-creator of UNIX and father of the C programming language, died this past weekend after a long illness. It’s no exaggeration to say that without …
Forced exercise eases symptoms in patients with Parkinson’s disease and is raising intriguing questions about how intense exercise affects the brain in healthy people.
Building Common Ground: Discussions of Community, Civility and Compassion is a collaboration between the American Library Association and the Fetzer Institute. The library programs associated with Building Common Ground are funded by a grant from the Fetzer Institute to the American Library Associat…
Are you a Sodomite? Ezekiel 16:49- New International Reader’s Version (NIRV)
49 "Here is the sin your sister Sodom committed. She and her daughters were proud. They ate too much. They were not concerned about others. They did not help those who were poor and in need." Not exactly what we think of when we think of the sins of Sodom. — Darin Paul Phillips, member of The Christian Left
One of the best alternative fuels on this planet is human energy expended on bicycles. Many major cities are in the process of making their streets and their citizens bike-friendly, or at least bike aware. Most of these movements are led by grassroots groups like Bike SoMi and affect change at a loc…
October 11, 2011 at 8:19 am
augie’s worked for a year in china, i’d love to teach english in kumming when alma retires.
For years, American jobs have been exported overseas, to places like China or India. Now we’re exporting our people there, too. "I just got tired of how the economy was going back home.
For some it’s Columbus Day. But why not also celebrate it as Anti-Flat-Earth Day*. It’s a holiday so I’m going to repost a classic, “Conservapedia: The theory of relativity is a liberal plot.” I’m reposting it in honor of the Flat-Earth anti-scientists of the right wing — starting with Robert Bryce…
October 10, 2011 at 10:29 am
interesting, marketed as too cheap. there really is a bottom sill to prices!
Two-and-a-half years after its glitzy launch, a car that was meant to revolutionize personal transport in India — and perhaps all of Asia — remains stuck in first gear. August was the second-worst sales month ever for the Tata Nano, the world’s cheapest mass-produced car and a flagship product of …
Images via SkyNews video screengrab I thought it was only in cartoons that a place would have a shark-infested lake in a random place like a golf course, but apparently it is reality in Australia. After a flood several
Blake Stough has written an article in the Preserving York blog about "An Act amending the act of June 29, 1953 (P.L.304, No.66), known as the Vital Statistics Law of 1953, further providing for disclosure of records." In layman’s terms, SB-361 will make birth certificates issued by Pennsylvania ope…
October 10, 2011 at 7:57 am
i can follow the swedish genealogy boards with google translate. nice.
Over the past few months I’ve been interviewing dozens of Chinese aged 18-24 for a few articles exploring how the Communist Party is trying to maintain legitimacy among young intellectuals. But t…
Long before whales, the oceans of Earth were roamed by a very different kind of air-breathing leviathan. Snaggle-toothed ichthyosaurs larger than school buses swam at the top of the Triassic Period ocean food chain, or so it seemed before paleontologist Mark McMenamin took a look at some of their re…
October 10, 2011 at 6:29 am
Dean Saxton III
It was good to see you. We have been through some hard times. God bless you.
October 10, 2011 at 6:01 am
10/10 this would be a good day to be in taipei. go to the peace park, listen to the people talk about the old days.
Mrs. Ravioli comes to visit her son, Anthony, for dinner. He lives with a female roommate, Maria. During the course of the meal, his mother couldn’t help but notice how pretty Anthony’s roommate is.
Over the course of the evening, while watching the two interact, she started to wonder if there was more between Anthony and his roommate than met the eye.
Reading his mom’s thoughts, Anthony volunteered, "I know what you must be thinking, but I assure you, Maria and I are just roommates.”
About a week later, Maria came to Anthony saying, "Ever since your mother came to dinner, I’ve been unable to find the silver sugar bowl. You don’t suppose she took it, do you?"
"Well, I doubt it, but I’ll email her, just to be sure." So he sat down and wrote an email:
Dear Mama,
I’m not saying that you "did" take the sugar bowl from my house; I’m not saying that you "did not" take it. But the fact remains that it has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.
Love, Anthony
Several days later, Anthony received a response email from his Mama which read:
Dear Son,
I’m not saying that you "do" sleep with Maria, and I’m not saying that you "do not" sleep with her. But the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her OWN bed, she would have found the sugar bowl by now.
Australia redistributes more to the poorest fifth of the population than virtually any other OECD country, writes Peter Whiteford
October 8, 2011 at 2:53 pm
well argued. quote:"Paul assumes here a three storied view of the universe which includes a concept of heaven above the earth and hades in the bowels of the earth. Needless to say we cannot accept that" i actually met someone who claims hell/paradise/hades in the center of the earth. i was blown away and failed to ask questions.
Yesterday morning I set out to deliver two workshop sessions at a Christian conference in another city. It was a round-trip journey that would have taken months by wagon. But such are the wonders of modern technology that I flew out in the morning and arrived home again late last night. Over the yea…
NASA has confirmed that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins went through customs upon their return to Earth and the United States. They filled out the above form, declaring their travel itinerary and that they had brought back moon rocks, dust, and samples through the US border. They did…
The U.S. Senate has passed a resolution apologizing for passing discriminatory laws targeting Chinese immigrants such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
While a single bat won’t eat over 600 mosquitoes in an hour, building a bat house will encourage bats to nest in your yard and keep your insect population at bay.
October 8, 2011 at 12:41 pm
then i’ll get even fatter eating the peanut butter off them!
Worried that you’ll break down and use your credit cards on a frivolous purchase before you pay off the balance? Make the physical cards difficult to access by placing them in a jar of peanut butter.
October 8, 2011 at 12:35 pm
it’s the same impulse, the same fear, the same beginning. anti-immigrant sentiment in the US and anti-Jewish in Nazi Germany. from the know-nothings to the tea party, from the brown shirts to crystalnacht, the fear of the other, the dehumanization, the legal manipulations, the evil.
At least one utility company in Alabama posted a sign informing its customers that a section of Alabama’s extreme anti-immigrant law prohibits them from providing water service to undocumented immigrants. According to the sign at Allgood Water Works in Blount County, Alabama, customers must have “an…
October 8, 2011 at 12:12 pm
carl a kallstrom and olof ekstrom arrive in philadelphia 1902
Health & Medicine | memory | What’s the News: One of memory’s big jobs is to keep straight what actually happened versus what we imagined: whether we said something out loud or to ourselves
October 7, 2011 at 10:48 am
heh! never helped me find a job, but i loved the years spent there in the libraries.
SAN DIEGO — UC San Diego is the 33rd best university in the world, according to the "World University Rankings" released Thursday by London-based Times Higher Education, in partnership with Thomson Reuters. Thursday, October 6, 2011.
After being a highly successful life form for 250 million years, disruptions in the biological and communication systems of coral reefs have been found to be the underlying cause of the coral bleaching and collapse of reef ecosystems around the…
Researchers have identified genetic markers that may contribute to a man’s risk of low testosterone. The study, which examined the genomes of more than 14,400 men, found specific alterations within a single gene that were associated with low levels of tes
Former pizza executive Herman Cain’s rise to the top of the Republican presidential pack will undoubtedly put smiles on the faces of two Omaha brothers: Charles and David Koch. The Koch Brothers are infamous for using their billions to finance the Tea Party and helping to gut business and environmen…
Seeking to recognize the achievements of its students on state standardized tests, Kennedy High School in La Palma, California, came up with a plan that forced students to carry color-coded identification cards based on their test scores. With the program now in its second year, state officials have…
October 7, 2011 at 8:34 am
certainly the regulators have been captured by the interests they are supposed to regulate, as the article pointed out. but underneath all the smoke is the issue of public health and TB. it’s not a simple question, but the science is being driven by the big money and power involved, which in the long run hurts the public interest.
A Wisconsin judge has decided in a fight over families’ access to milk from cows they own that Americans do not have a fundamental right to consume the milk from their own cow. The ruling comes from Circuit Court Judge Patrick J. Fiedler in a court…
October 6, 2011 at 4:35 pm
70 today with light rain. 68 tomorrow. i thought winter had been scheduled for the first 3 weeks of January this year?
October 6, 2011 at 1:41 pm
Richard Williamsnews said it’s been 141 days since we had a temp under 70…burrrrr
Every year millions of babies worldwide are born too early. Arriving at six months instead of nine, these underdeveloped babies are at high risk for infant death syndrome, deadly infections, respiratory complications, blindness, cerebral palsy, and learning and developmental disabilities. Two compan…
Icelanders have quietly carried out a revolution by toppling a weak government, drafting a new constitution and seeking to jail those responsible for the country’s economic debacle.
October 6, 2011 at 1:32 pm
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.One of thw worst outcomes of the financial collaspe in the U.S. was the fact that NOT ONE of the big financial executives went to jail. There were also some politicians who also deserved to have been jailed over the policies that they pushed upon the financial system.
Click to Enlarge The Yale Project on Climate Change Communications asked Americans “If you had the opportunity to talk to an expert on global warming, which of the following questions would you like to ask?” The top question, as reported in their “Global Warming’s Six Americas in May 2011” report, i…
i do not know the answer to one of the fundamental questions of history: is history the story of great individuals or the understanding of great forces at work? but the death of someone like s.jobs makes me ask the question yet again. along with where do such people come from and how does society make more of them, likewise thinking this with the new nobels awarded.
Do-it-yourself biologists are hunting down genetic disorders and creating synthetic life-forms in garages, closets, and backyards around the world.. Visit Discover Magazine to read this article and other exclusive science and technology news stories.
October 5, 2011 at 5:41 pm
the problem with being in the middle rather than the extreme ends….
Two years ago, ASA member Peter Hess participated in a colloquium on Intelligent Design at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. He argued that science can neither discover nor rule out the existence of God. A few days later, in the online discussion sparked by this event, a fan of the Discov…
Swept up in the craze of preventing widespread voter fraud that doesn’t actually exist, Tennessee Republicans passed a voter identification law this year that they claimed would put an end to fraud and ensure fair elections. Like similar laws in other states, Tennessee’s version has come under scrut…
On the same day that a federal judge upheld most provisions of a strict immigration-enforcement law in Alabama, frightened Hispanics began moving out of Albertville in the northern part of the state.
Welcome, friend! Thanks for visiting Motherhood on a Dime. I’m on a journey to spend wisely, save faithfully, and give freely! If you’d like to stay in touch, please sign up to receive FREE daily email updates or follow via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.
Utilities need money for grid updates and pollution controls, and consumers will foot the bill. By Laura Colarusso.
October 5, 2011 at 11:06 am
we can think in either pragmatic/utilitarian or in ideological terms, we seem incapable of doing both at the same time. is one bottom up and the other top down reasoning?
Like his father, GOP contender Rep. Ron Paul (TX), freshman Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is well known for his beliefs that the government should not be in the business of helping the poor and downtrodden. Now Politico is reporting that Paul is single-handedly holding up $36 million in benefits for elderly…
October 5, 2011 at 11:00 am
i’ve hit a brick wall looking for my ggfather’s swedish name. i have a file with everything i’ve found out in the last 6 months of searching. i could use help rmwilliamsjr@gmail.com and i’ll send you the data and invite you to the research tree at ancestry. i’m at wit’s end. tried 23andme and ftdna for y matches without success.
October 4, 2011 at 10:29 pm
advice from glee—always marry up!
October 4, 2011 at 7:02 pm
someone arguing against ken ham’s "one race" stand, using the old Hamitic shtick popular in the antebellum South.
A FEW ANSWERS TO “ANSWERS IN GENESIS” SERMON NOTES—By Don Elmore The June 11, 2011 Saturday Enquirer had another story about the “Answers in Genesis’” new park in nearby Grant County, Kentucky. The headline was: Ark Work Could Start Soon; with the secondary headline being: Tax rebates pave way fo…
A Senate hearing on hunger among senior citizens laid bare a depressing problem in America–and showcased two radically different views on the role of government.
October 4, 2011 at 6:41 pm
found another 1st cousin, dad’s sister jean’s daughter kimberly. i hope she’ll contact us on facebook.
insightful. i’ve argued that welfare is primarily designed for the bureaucratic workers not the poor. likewise the military is for the civilian defense industrial workforce first and soldiers second.
Loosely in response to Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein, my view is that if you want to understand the extent to which business executives loathe President Obama, you need to understand that the economic policy debate in the United States is in part just another culture war issue. Private sector labor unio…
The inhabitants of the Faroe Islands could become the world’s first population to be offered full genome sequencing for free, researchers announced at a meeting on personal genomes at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory last week. The project, dubbed FarGen, aims to sequence the entire genome of e…
October 4, 2011 at 1:09 pm
watch csi to see how long before this idea reaches the show
Despite how easy they make it look on TV dramas, determining time of death for a body requires a lot of difficult guesswork (unless someone is there when the person passes, of course). A range of environmental factors and other mitigating circumstances make any declaration of time of death an estima…
Over the weekend, Egyptian political parties dropped a threat to boycott upcoming parliamentary elections, the first multi-candidate vote since the ouster longtime president, Hosni Mubarak. The parties agreed to take part in the vote after Egypt’s ruling military council vowed to amend a voting law …
October 4, 2011 at 10:59 am
anyone watch house last night? our machine cut off the last two minutes. did the guy react to the aspirin? HELP!!!!
October 4, 2011 at 10:56 am
Julie Howard LindbergYes, he got a note in solitary from the doctor that said, "You were right."
Do we ignore mistakes, brushing them aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the errors, seeking to learn from the snafus? The latter approach, suggests a series of studies, could make you learn faster.
October 4, 2011 at 10:10 am
Richard Williamsthis really shows up personally when i try to learn a new language. worth reflecting upon article and research
October 4, 2011 at 10:36 am
resurrecting dead languages, keeping languages alive, documenting-recording going extinct ones. neat topic.
There’s this common lore that Cornish died because speakers and readers of the language never had their own Bible. And so said a contributor to the wikipedia entry on "Christianity in Cornwall": …
Exclusive: A money dispute between Fox and ‘The Simpsons’ actors may shut down the hit series. By Lloyd Grove.
October 3, 2011 at 9:53 pm
sitting at carls jrs and getting a few short book reviews done. no desk at home to type on, table here and lots of coffee helps. i really really have got to read excellent reviews then write good reviews, well done, careful analysis and synthetic of all my reading, putting things together and getting ideas lined up satisfactory. but i found the time spend was regretted as it subtracted from the time for reading the next book, am i in too much of a rush here?. perhaps as i wrote better and more the positive values of reflection and recall would be more encouraging. anyhow i did get a few done. now back to the 25+ library books in the tote next to the chair. my life.
The economy in India is growing rapidly, but not fast enough to take care of its millions of poor and hungry children. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on a solution that has resulted in the world’s largest school lunch program.
N.B. is a common abbreviation for the Latin phrase nota bene — “note well”. It’s an old style of annotation that has sadly passed out of common use. David, the man with this tattoo, says of its meaning “that everything is better with footnotes.” This lovely sentiment so totally non-MLA standards com…
Photo: fermion72, redditAwesome: Tune Up Before Going to ClassI stumbled on this image randomly, so I don’t have too much information about it except for what I can see. Based on the stickers, it’s a bike maintenance/repair station at the University
KALONA, Iowa (Reuters) – First come morning prayers, then breakfast, then Bible stories. After that Andrea Farrier’s daughters take out their textbooks. Another school day has begun.As the girls dig
A few months ago, it looked like the economy was on its way to full recovery. Today, things don’t look so rosy, writes Michael D. Yates – and given the current political climate in most societies, there’s little cause for optimism that things will get better.
A recent study found that most people treated with a single high dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychoactive mushrooms, showed a long-lasting change in personality—namely, an increase in openness. This quality is generally defined as openness to new ideas or experiences, awareness of…
No mass extinction on Earth has been so tightly linked to an impact as the Chicxulub Crater which cuts across the northern Yucatan peninsula in Mexico in a mighty arc 170 kilometers (105 miles) across. The crater’s size implies an…
An underwater homeowner decides to walk away from his house, which then goes into foreclosure. The bank takes the house and then sells it. End of story, right?
This Monday evening , Govinda’s of Tucson celebrates the 10th annual Feed the World Day by giving you . . . free food! Enjoy a six-course vegan dinner.
John SherriffThe members of congress (the top public employees) that consistently subsidized housing, subsidized silly college studies (i.e art appreciation, sociology, ethnomusicilogy) and let us stay in Afghanistan for 10 years didn’t do much for us either.
Manx (native name Gaelg or Gailck, pronounced [?ilk] or [?il?][5]), also known as Manx Gaelic, and as the Manks language,[6] is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, historically spoken by the Manx people. Only a small minority of the Island’s population is fluent in the language…
There is an ancient Chinese custom of writing messages on the streets with water. Although it creates a beautiful and natural decoration, there is a little more
by Barry Saxifrage, via the Vancouver Observer “The year 2010 was one the worst years in world history for high-impact floods. But just three weeks into the new year, 2011 has already had an entire year’s worth of mega-floods. “ – Meteorologist Jeff Masters I spend hours a day researching what New Y…
I apologize in advance for putting up an ARKive video that is self-starting (they all are from that site), but thank Ceiling Cat it is relatively silent. And it’s worth the watch. I learned ab…
I found one of my daddy’s family members when I noticed something on PBS. They were telling about the Beheaders of England. Ugh. Well, I only thought ‘Ugh’ until I found out that I had a distant relative named Thomas the Beheader. When he was ‘outsourced’ by the guillotine, he came to America. H…
My wife Lori Dorn, who has breast cancer, tells her story about a TSA agent at JFK on Friday who required her to submit to a pat down due to her breast implants, even though she had an identification card for the implants that is used to prove that the implants are an actual medical device. The TSA …
[Note: An edited version of this column appeared here on 9/13. Even though the president has pivoted "from deficit reduction to job creation," and even though job creation was the theme of the weekly address Obama gave today, I can't...
I remember when I first posted this 3 years ago and the stir it caused. So many people were offended by it. I don’t claim this is the case for all churches. But it certainly is true for some. Been there.
Trees, natural carbon sponges, help keep heat-trapping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But insect and human threats are taking a heavy toll on them.
Believe us when we say, we have read some pretty nasty replies to customer complaints. But this latest example of a manager responding to a shopper's unsatisfactory experience, at a store called GASP in Australia, wins the Consumerist
BASIS Tucson is recognized as a powerhouse in math and science education in U.S. News & World Report's first-ever edition of Best High Schools for Math and Science. The school earned the #2 spot.
By Trevor Grundy Canterbury, England, 30 September (ENInews)--As commodity prices soar, thieves are targeting British churches and other institutions, taking copper lightning rods, lead rain pipes, bronze statues, iron gates, even church bells and entire roofs. "Boom conditions in China,...
Discover and understand the fascinating world of genetic genealogy. Written for everyday people by an experienced personal genomics consumer (not a scientist).
September 30, 2011 at 12:13 pm
what is driving this? appears to be a win-at-all-costs mentality. if a winner takes all, spoils mentality wins in the political system then we will degenerate into the congo where the political system redistributes what little is left after constant war. as the system is corrupted from within from the public service ideal(inherited from the romans) to the spoils of war(inherited from the barbarians who conquered roman), we all lose.
The GOP is pushing restrictive voting legislation unlike anything since the Voting Rights Act of 1965
September 30, 2011 at 12:07 pm
fb sures brings back old memories, you commented on a picture of the howerzyl's, did you know we looked into renting a trailer on their farm before we moved in next to steve on the deyoung dairy? they both have aged well. i guess it's a trip to israel that is pictured.
The history of energy use in human civilisation is generally summarised as follows: from Antiquity until the start of the Industrial Revolution, people made use of the manual labour of both animals and humans, as well as biomass, sun, water and wind. Next, all these renewable energy sources were rep...
Belly buttons, cacti, crayons, projectors, pimples, pillows and highly intricate sculptures are the focus of these 31 highly unusual and artistic ring designs.
Are colleges that jack up tuition simply playing a necessary game to provide a higher-quality learning environment to picky students and professors?
September 28, 2011 at 5:35 pm
John SherriffYou triple the cost of tuition because you can. Plus it means that your professors will get tripple the salary and this will mean that you as the Dean will also get triple the salary. The logic is simple.
September 28, 2011 at 7:14 pm
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.In the State of Washington two or three of the highest paid state employees work for the state's university system. Naturally all are associiated with sports.
US Postal employees and their supporters held rallies in every Congressional district across the country from 4:00 to 5:30 PM yesterday to urge politicians to save the postal service.
September 28, 2011 at 10:34 am
John SherriffWe should sell it off and let the private sector manage it. The last thing we need is our Congress determining prices, delivery days and compensation; Congress is incapable of anything this complex.
September 28, 2011 at 11:09 am
Richard Williamsthere are lots of good reasons for the postal service to be a public monopoly, most having to do with the difference between the cost of delivering mail due to population density. like the anti-vaxxers, the post office is a victim of their own success, people can not imagine life without a postal service so they don't realize what it does. http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/779.html
Protesters around the world have something in common: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over.
September 28, 2011 at 10:06 am
John SherriffThe challenge with these measures of dissatisfaction is that the media never breaks down the two major types of dissatisfaction: 1) those that want the government to do more and 2) those that want the government to do less.
Looking for health information online is often hit-or-miss, with results sometimes too generic. If you want more personalized, yet thorough information about a condition, now there's Medify, which takes millions of medical research studies and lets you filter according to your situation.
Culture | Culture | Knocked Up and Knocked Down: Why America's widening fertility class divide is a problem:You hear about the haves versus the have-nots, but not so much about the
This video from the BBC's "The Real Hustle" show a re-enactment of what is purportedly a real con whereby a fingersmith pretending to be a tourist approaches a mark with a large-lensed SLR around his neck and asks for directions, brandishing a map. While they pore over the map together -- and under ...
Writer and Oberlin English professor Anne Trubek quizzes Victor E. Ferrall, Jr, author of "Liberal Arts on the Brink," about the glum future of the American liberal arts college.
If you're taking a break from work to read this article, I've got one question for you: Are you crazy? I know you think no one will notice, and I know that everyone else does it. Perhaps your boss even approves of your Web surfing; maybe she's one of those new-age managers who believes the studies s...
September 27, 2011 at 3:36 pm
doesn't it say 70% no earned income and 20% no cash income?
As Syria plunges deeper into unrest, the country’s Christian minority fears a change of power could usher in a Sunni Muslim majority, depriving them of the semblance of protection.
JERUSALEM — Two thousand years after they were written and decades after they were found in desert caves, some of the world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls went online for the first time on Monday in a project launched by Israel’s national museum and the web giant Google.
So why have evangelicals been so ready to reject the generally accepted conclusions of the scientific community on climate change? It has nothing to do with climate science per se.
Karl Giberson, Ph.D, is a leading scholar of science & religion, a topic on which he has written several books and hundreds of articles, essays, reviews, and blogs. He is the former President of the BioLogos Foundation (www.biologos.org), founded by Francis Collins to help Christians make peace w...
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
September 26, 2011 at 12:36 pm
Richard Williamsinterestingly the anti vaxxer movement is the result of a generation of good vaccination programs. people no longer have personal knowledge of the destructiveness of these diseases.
Forrest Jessee has recently unveiled his Sleep Suit inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s practice of Dymaxion Sleeping. Fuller believed that two hours of sleep a day was all that a person needed. Dymaxion sleeping involved four thirty-minute naps in a 24-hour period. The Sleepsuit is perfect for Dymaxio...
A forum where top experts explore the big ideas and core skills defining the 21st century Learn More
September 24, 2011 at 9:26 pm
The term "races" in the title refers to varieties or inter-breeding subpopulations within a species, it has nothing to do with human races at all. Like the article in general, this is the logical error of equivocation, confusing terms and attacking strawmen. The phrase "not even wrong" comes to mind. Where does one start trying to understand this rant and the thoughts behind it? Let alone systematically refuting it with the truth. Sad that people sincerely believe such *** stuff. The major error both in the article and in the comments is completely confusing things philosophic and things scientific, a confusion of categories or of levels in the discussion. But try to explain this to such people.....
Committee will recommend measures intended to reduce the financial burden on the middle class, including far-reaching fixes for fundamental economic flaws.
September 9 marks 40 years since the uprising at Attica State Prison, in upstate New York, and the deadly and sadistic retaking of the prison - and mass torture of hundreds of prisoners all the rest of the day and night and beyond - by state police and prison guards on the morning of September 13. W...
September 24, 2011 at 8:08 pm
trying to solve a big problem. nice that he is so forthright about the reasoning.
Tough times call for tough measures. What's a Dalai Lama to do when he knows unfriendly forces may usurp his office after he's gone? Apparently, he could start "emanating" instead of reincarnating (more on what this means later), or he could completely abolish the office of the Dalai Lama. These opt...
September 24, 2011 at 8:04 pm
amazing list. i think i'll just work through each link
A cognitive bias is a pattern of poor judgment, often triggered by a particular situation. Identifying "poor judgment," or more precisely, a "deviation in judgment," requires a standard for comparison, i.e. "good judgment". In scientific investigations of cognitive bias, the source of "good judgment...
September 24, 2011 at 2:57 pm
the problem is sending on war period. when congress cuts the defense budget significantly then i will believe they are serious about the deficit, until then it is all political posturing, full of noise and signifying nothing.
Did you lose your bread machine manual, or bought a used one that didn't come with instructions? Here are some basic guidelines for using your breadmaker.
September 24, 2011 at 2:11 pm
September 24, 2011 at 2:09 pm
externalities. the word doesn't come close to capturing the problems of war. people are still paying the price of nixon's "secret wars".
Liangkham Laphommavong has one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. Her 9-year-old son knows this and protested when, at the start of a recent morning, Laphommavong set off to join a crew of 17 other women who routinely put their lives at risk.
Some interesting reads for Saturday afternoon: • Market Rout Claims New Victim as Investors Dump Gold, Silver to Pay for Losses (WSJ) see also Gold Rush
Nick of Dude Foods has made Oreos even more Oreawesome! He took triple stacked double Oreos and dipped them in chocolate. Then, like any sensible chef, he deep fried them. Because anything can be deep friend and therefore, logically, everything should be deep fried.
Here's what to do for Kindles connected to wifi*Go to our Digital Downloads page: http://pima.lib.overdrive.com If you know what you want, go to the green bar at the top, type in your search, and select "Kindle Book" as a "Media Type." If you want to browse what we have, do an "Advanced Se...
The hype surrounding the whole Missoni for Target phenomenon continues. First, the online demand was apparently so huge that it temporarily crashed Target's website (though some of us are not 100% convinced the
A composite of all the major global temperature records via Skeptical Science The last decade was easily the hottest on record. We’ve known that sulfate aerosols (from volcanoes and/or Chinese coal) and the “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century” masked the rate of warming somewhat. Even so...
ORLANDO, FL — Members of the crowd gathered for the Fox News/YouTube debate booed a video of a gay solider in Iraq who asked if the nine presidential candidates on stage would work to “circumvent” the repeal of Don’t Ask,…
September 22, 2011 at 7:47 pm
to julian---it's worth it. both alma and i learned a lot from our data.
Your whole life you've been taught the importance of coming in first. Whether you're the first to make a great discovery or the first to hit the finish line, it's all a big deal. That's why it's right to point out the phonies....
enlargeCredit: The Economist
The world's largest "job creators" are the U.S. Military, the Chinese Military, and Walmart. No, really.
More at GOOD blog, and hat tip to E'Ville Times.
Open thread below.
Animal behaviour | [zenphotopress album=312 sort=sort_order number=4]During its lifetime, a frog will snap up thousands of insects with its sticky, extendable tongue. But if it tr
Bioinspiration | Tak-Sing Wong from Harvard University has created a synthetic material so slippery that it makes a duck’s back look like a sponge. It is “omniphobic” –
Among the dead and the smoldering ruins, Libyans struggle to escape their country’s twisted history.
September 21, 2011 at 4:21 pm
"nobody gets rich on their own". fighting the individualism of the culture is an uphill battle, but is the right way to argue these issues. people are prosperous not solely from their own efforts but because they have learned how to harvest the energies of thousands.
"This must-watch clip of Elizabeth Warren aggressively rebutting the GOP’s “class warfare” charge is burning up the internet."
September 21, 2011 at 4:13 pm
1 person likes this
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.The Libertarian idea of the rugged individual surviving against all odds is the paradigm of the Right. They just won’t acknowledge the reality of the group of other people upon which they depend.
Thought Experiment: Due to a combination of crises – maybe a volcano explosion, the penetration of Ug99 into the main of the world wheat crop, drought in many of the world’s grain growing regions, zombie invasion etc… (it doesn’t really matter), the Global North experiences a catastrophic failure…
Even more bad economic news from a report released today: Housing prices will remain depressed for years, dropping by an expected 2.5% this year and rising only 1.1% each year through 2015, according… US News Summaries. | Newser
Whether you’re a home cook looking to explore new dishes or a chef looking for a place to store all of the recipes you’re collecting for a cookbook, KeepRecipes is a new web service that gives you a way to enter your own recipe collection, or snip recipes from cooking sites around the web, similar…..
September 21, 2011 at 7:46 am
when i first saw this several months ago, i was simply amazed. tried ups/fedex
Amazon addicts and people who obsessively track packages may know this already, but pasting the tracking number into Google and hitting search will bring up a link to go directly to the package status page on whichever carrier has the package, saving you the hassle of figuring out which carrier has …
Where progressive thought meets common sense. The Provocation is an online newspaper offering a unique yet eminently rational perspective on current events. You want blunt, no-nonsense commentary? Look no further. The Provocation is where you want to be.
Former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was leading peace negotiations with the Taliban, is killed in a suicide bomb attack at his home in Kabul.
September 20, 2011 at 4:25 pm
John SherriffSo I guess America will have to keep the full contingent of troops there for another decade.
Via Inhabitat: If the world comes to an end, model Naomi Campbell and her nearest and dearest will have no trouble surviving in this 25 roomed eco-home. Designed by and a birthday gift from one of our favorite new architects Luis de Garrido, the glass domed house is completely energy and water s…
September 20, 2011 at 4:24 pm
See ya in a few weeks, ma. Uncle Augie and I are hitting the road…
Richard Williamsto uncle augie- which direction is that a way? to young rider- that is the direction of adventure. the way i travel now. uncle augie- did i inherit the viking wanderer genes like you did? to the youngest rider- only time will tell … to be continued.
Normally dyslexia is considered a handicap: a mental deficiency that makes reading, long-division and remembering whether letters and numbers face left or right difficult. Challenging this view, learning disabilities experts Brock and Fernette Eide argue that dyslexia is an alternative way brains ca…
September 20, 2011 at 3:34 pm
Richard Williamsi hope jamie and steve get a chance to read this.
Sometimes it seems that law enforcement is a lot more interested in enforcing the letter of the law than the spirit of the law. Via Radley Balko, we learn that police in Pasadena California showed up at the intersection of Fair Oaks and Huntington…
Heavy lift ships can carry loads of tens of thousands of tons, including oil platforms, other ships and even dry docks. The are often semi-submersible so that they can sink below the water line to let their cargo slide off. The sheer size of their cargo often looks impossible, as these items suggest…
It’s never been easier to compare travel and accommodation prices using sites like Hipmunk, Kayak, or Google Flights, but a little extra legwork can save hundreds on airfare, hotels, and attractions.
Ten years into the war on terror, the U.S. has largely succeeded in its attempts to destabilize Al Qaeda and eliminate its leaders. But the cost has been enormous, and our decisions about how to finance it have profoundly damaged the U.S. economy.Wounded soldiers attend the opening of the Center for…
The importance of what scientists are calling the “dark genome” became apparent in 2001, when the human genome was first published. Scientists expected to find as many as 100,000 genes packed into the 3 billion bases of human DNA; they…
You probably keep quite a few things that require power in drawers, but take them out to plug them in for use or charging purposes. Instead, why not just put an outlet in the drawer itself and save yourself some trouble?
TED Talks Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves. Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture — call them the 6 killer apps — that promote wealth,…
September 19, 2011 at 1:23 pm
how many people have ever lived? why is the calculation so sensitive to life expectancy? so what percentage of total number of human beings ever born are alive today?
Molecular biology | When scientists struggle with a problem for over a decade, few of them think, “I know! I’ll ask computer gamers to help.” That, however, is exactly what F
ShelterBox have begun assessing the need for emergency aid in Thailand following floods and landslides which have already damaged or destroyed over 300,000 homes.
TED Talks Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves. Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture — call them the 6 killer apps — that promote wealth,…
The HPV vaccine has been attracting all the controversy lately, but dozens of states mandate that teens and preteens get other vaccines. California is in the midst of getting 3 million children immunized for whooping cough in an effort to stop an outbreak there.
September 19, 2011 at 11:59 am
be careful augie, remember the first rule: everyone driving a car is aiming it at you! put your tracker ap on for us to ride vicariously through you
Just wanted to let u know we made it home! =) hope to see u all soon!
September 18, 2011 at 6:46 pm
Richard Williamsglad to see you’all, glad you made it home ok.
September 18, 2011 at 6:57 pm
the pierpont gals. the photo that got me doing genealogy, although the photo we had was a xerox gordon sent to mom.
September 18, 2011 at 5:15 pm
henry wells pierpont.-my grand uncle- the husband and father to go with the photo-the pierpont gals brother to anna pierpont saunders, my maternal grandmother
September 18, 2011 at 5:13 pm
yearbook picture from ancestry for my dad’s older brother harry. i’ve been unable to find his kids richard and linda.
September 18, 2011 at 5:07 pm
joan ethel saunders critzer from linda critzer sales.
September 18, 2011 at 4:26 pm
colette and eric popped up here on fb, i suspect due to colette’s boredom being in the car for 7 hours getting home with a smart phone in hand. they should know everyone here except linda critzer sales. linda is my mom’s sister’s Joan daughter, so 1st cousin to steve, lynn and i, therefore 1st cousin once removed(indicating generational difference) to colette and eric.
September 18, 2011 at 4:04 pm
Colette WilliamsVery true! I’m bored in the car and have a smart phone =) thanks uncle richard. It was good seeing you hope to see u for thanksgiving!
September 18, 2011 at 4:18 pm
with the new Family lists this group becomes potentially redundant, but only if everyone uses the list functions and adds the same people.
Middle-Class Americans Often Fall Down Economic Ladder: Study – nearly a third of Americans who were part of the middle class have fallen out of it
September 17, 2011 at 6:42 pm
how to encourage friends with their economic enterprises? my kids sell dashmats and seat covers at tanque verde swapmeet. the miners from church run jeremiah b&b http://www.jeremiahinn.com/, william does wedding photography. i bet there’s more i don’t know about. how to help with their advertising?
Elimination communication claims that parents can mostly if not completely eliminate diapers by instead learning to predict when the baby needs to go and inviting the baby to urinate or defecate by using a cueing sound that the child eventually associates with going to the bathroom as a Pavlovian…
September 17, 2011 at 4:22 pm
curious. everyone is doing the same thing. only from the perspective of their camera.
In 1973 the median male American worker earned just over $49,000 when adjusted for inflation, while in 2010 that worker made about $1,500 less. Experts cite a poorer job market for blue-collar labor, a shift in conventions about cost-of-living wages and lack of educational progress.
For conservatives, Perry victorious would mean nothing less than the South as a phoenix in the form of an eagle, rising from the ashes of a short-lived and fallen nation.
September 17, 2011 at 1:17 am
however bad you think the situation, it’s actually worse.
don’t read the article yet. think about the data. a record of where the bullet holes are in every returning plane. question: where to add armor? after you figure out where you’d add armor, read article.
During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald was asked to help the British decide where to add armor to their bombers. After analyzing the records, he recommended adding more armor to the places where there was no damage!
September 16, 2011 at 7:09 pm
probably the worse economic article i’ve read this month, as in how bad the economy is.
The US workforce shrank by 652,000 in June, one of the sharpest contractions ever. The rate of hourly earnings fell 0.1pc. Wages are flirting with deflation.
During the depths of the Great Depression in the 1930s, Dust Bowl migrants from the Great Plains loaded all their belongings into their cars and jammed Route 66 in hope of finding a better life in California. Nearly 80 years later, Billy Reiser, an unemployed 50-year-old P …
It’s only by reflecting on all the gadgets surrounding us that we appreciate how our collective inventions were once unimaginable — even the wheel.
September 16, 2011 at 11:15 am
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.An equally interesting question is why the Native population of North America never did invent the wheel or writing?
September 17, 2011 at 9:42 pm
Richard Williamsno animals to pull the cart with.
September 18, 2011 at 7:43 am
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.They had each other and they did have dogs. Look at how many wheeled conveyances in Asia and Europe were pulled by humans. The wheel is even useful for some basic construction as in pulleys.
In Michigan, food stamps are worth double at farmers’ markets, which means more healthy food for low-income shoppers and more customers for local farmers.
TUCSON – Here are some of the videos and pictures we’ve collected so far from today’s surprise monsoon storm. Make sure to upload your pictures and video to our Monsoon 2011 gallery here – we may use them on our broadcasts tonight.
By Georges Malbrunot LE FIGARO/Worldcrunch DAMASCUS – “What does the future hold for us, Christians,” Randa Khoury wonders aloud. For the last 6 months, she’s been glued to her television, flipping through channels trying to follow the news about a revolution she both supports, yet fears its eventua…
The art, the shows, the dancing, the fires and fireworks are all wonderful, but personally, my favorite part of Burning Man is visiting the camps and admiring the multitude of styles and designs of shelters.
I’ve often spoken of the enormous income and wealth inequality here in the United States. It follows that our "consumer" society has become more and more dependent on spending by the rich and well-off because they’ve got most of the money. I was surprised to learn there is a term for societies like …
A cache of feathers preserved in amber, dating from around 70 to 85 million years ago, was just found in Canada, showing that border between winged dinosaurs and the earliest avians. The study indicates that these feathers, relatively modern, were already appearing even before the non-avian dinosaur…
September 15, 2011 at 2:48 pm
interesting reading but confuses correlation and causation. think of the evolution of a system that transforms oil into things. then consider what those "things" are: military force, consumer goods, more people for example. how does the mix of things change over time with the raw amount of oil burned? unknown, you could be burning the oil in flares to making solar panels with it and everything in between, what actually happens is a function of the system not the raw amount of oil used. the total
America’s rise to economic and military supremacy was fueled in no small measure by its control over the world’s supply of oil. Oil powered the country’s first giant corporations, ensured success in World War II, and underlay the great economic boom of the postwar period. Even in an era of nuclear…
Texas’ Deputy Attorney General for Criminal Justice, Don Clemmer, later testified that his office didn’t have the resources to investigate allegations of sexual abuse at a TYC facility in Ward County because at the time the local agent was busy investigating charges of voter fraud by a 68-…
Netflix is losing more than it expected from the backlash over its recent price hike. The company is revising its third-quarter projected U.S. subscriber numbers downward from 25 to 24 million, according to a letter to shareholders (here reported by AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka).
Here’s something you don’t see everyday, mugshots of eight Amish guys. Apparently these rebels without a car were arrested for refusing “to pay fines for failing to affix orange safety triangles to their horse-drawn buggies.” Read the full story over at the The Smoking Gun. (via reddit)
September 15, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Dean Saxton III
Thanks for lending your tool it blessed La Vita House, our family, and the Gospel Rescue Mission Women and Children’s Center. God bless you and Alma
September 15, 2011 at 9:41 am
Richard Williamswe are glad to help. you’re welcome. i wish there was a church lending library online to share.
image via Front Yard Coop Urban farming is all the rage these days, and chickens are increasingly chic. Many of us who dream of harvesting fresh eggs every day don’t have the first clue about how to get started,
Anthroplogy | Ancient DNA | Dienekes relays that Ötzi the Iceman carried the G2a4 male haplogroup. He goes on to observe:We now have G2a3 from Neolithic Linearbandkeramik in Derenburg and
Readers of my posts over the last half year will be familiar with the phenomenon of motivated reasoning, in which people’s subconscious emotional impulses lead them to respond, in a biased way, to information that challenges their deeply held beliefs and worldviews. We’ve been focusing on this so mu…
September 14, 2011 at 1:31 pm
things are changing, the problems is how and who make the rules, it’s the rules that govern how we think and act, we really don’t know much about the rules we live by.
Media theorist and author of Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back Douglas Rushkoff ruffled some feathers this week when he dared, at CNN.com of all places, to ask that question. It seemed, perhaps, gloriously insensitive to the plight of unemployed workers, of union…
September 14, 2011 at 10:52 am
looks significant. expect term "enthusiasm gap" to be used more over the next year.
A Bible study I’ve been attending recently decided to go through Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project, for which I will gladly accept your condolesce
To all of those tea-jadist assholes at last night’s GOP debate: I don’t generally care to use profanity, but I fear that English is above your comprehension level, so in terms you might better understand, may God damn your worthless souls to hell for all eternity.
September 13, 2011 at 7:28 pm
my wife chooses to wait there 1+hours for her birthday dinner. i think she’s crazy. long wait. rain, but they had umbrellas. loud noisy full of people impossible to talk. food takes lots of time to…
The hyper-discounts of many online coupon dealers like Groupon have not created loyal customers. Some businesses are finding that smaller numbers of coupons – and smaller discounts – might be more sustainable in the long run.
I am a failure. I have failed at science. Or you could say science has failed me. The reason? One science BSc, one science MSc and one science PhD (chemistry, since you ask), and what am I doing?
They’ve lost a king, but they’re still building Camelot. Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs may be stepping down from his position, but one of his last acts in the office will undoubtedly go down as one of the most amazing as well. Apple Campus 2, nick named “the Mothership”, is set to break ground in 2012 and …
In 2011, graduate school applications from China was up 21 percent compared to 2010, due largely to a booming Chinese economy.
September 13, 2011 at 8:44 am
John SherriffAnd guess what they are not coming here to study History, Psychology, Sociology and Fine Arts. They are coming here to study Science and Engineering, so they can take these skills and knowledge back home.
September 13, 2011 at 8:54 am
Richard Williamsone semester i had 2 chinese TA’s, 1 for a tough engineering class and 1 for chinese, one day i thought that the chinese TA spoke much better english than the engineering TA did, sadly i really needed to understand the engineering one better.
September 13, 2011 at 9:04 am
ouch. without the categories and words needed to think with
A closer look at what was done to cure two patients of chronic lymphocytic leukemia with a novel gene therapy — which may be useful against other cancers.
U.S. News & World Report’s 2012 Best Colleges issue ranks Covenant College among the top ten regional colleges in the South for the 9th consecutive year. Covenant was named 7th in the category.
September 13, 2011 at 7:49 am
in case someone in tucson is interested, justice what’s the right thing to do, by michael sandel, the 3 dvd set is at the pima library (technical at my house, listed in the library). a must watch series.
It’s pretty clear that a lot of the average American’s hostility to “illegal immigration” and “illegal immigrants” is, on a self-conscious level, driven by the “illegal” part. You’ll often hear people say that they love immigration, but they don’t understand why it can’t be done legally, the way gra…
This kitten may have the key to protect humans against HIV, the lentivirus that causes AIDS. He was genetically modified at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
Remember when the United States led the world in industrial technology? The peak of U.S. supremacy was back in the 1960s, when the “military-industrial complex” was in full force. Then in the mid-1970s the Japanese mounted a successful economic challenge to the United States in a range of industries…
September 12, 2011 at 9:29 am
is there a place in tucson to get moon cakes today?
Autumn Harvest Festival Pays Homage to the Moon by Susan Leem, associate producer The egg yolk inside the moon cake evokes the full harvest moon. (photo: Mike Clarke/AFP/Getty Images) For many…
In his work with the dying, a psychiatrist asks patients to write a formal narrative of their life — a document they can pass on to whomever they chose. He’s noticed that the stories people tell about themselves as they face death are often very different than the stories they tell at other points.
September 12, 2011 at 8:26 am
despite too much explicit sex it was a good show, sad to see anyone die at 39.
LOS ANGELES — Andy Whitfield, who played the title role in the hit cable series "Spartacus: Blood and Sand," has died at age 39, according to representatives and family. Whitfield died Sunday in Sydney, Australia, 18 months after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, manager Sam Maydew told t…
September 12, 2011 at 8:23 am
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.The same disease that Marion died of
September 12, 2011 at 1:29 pm
wk pointed this out. i responded: the title "no Christians invited" is only true if the 2 Episcopalians scheduled to speak do not count. there are nearly as many mormons as southern baptists roughly 14m to 16m. i think they have better grounds to complain. and i think that the root of the problem, conservative evangelical sbc-types fundamentalists bible-believers etc etc don’t consider episcopalians (or any other liberal churches) christian, hence the title "no Christians invited". so they(sbc)
A weekend of religious-themed 9/11 memorial observances at Washington National Cathedral will include a Buddhist nun, a rabbi, a Hindu priest, an incarnate lama, and an Imam… but no evangelical Christian ministers have been invited.
September 11, 2011 at 11:38 pm
i’m not a big beer drinker. i like the taste of their beer, $3 seems like a good value.
$25 a bit of everything appetizer was huge. good price to value. tasty, a variety, enough for 3.
they charged me $1.49 for a small cup of coffee. we used to stop there often. i was never before charged for a refill. this time when i asked for a refill they said that would be another $1.49!! i…
Google recently revealed that their data centers and operations around the world consume a whopping 260 million watts, or roughly the equivalent of 200,000 homes in the United States. While that’s an enormous amount of electricity, it pales in comparison to the amount that Google wants to create fro…
He may live a modest life in a one-horse town, but Jimmy Carter, now 86, retains his global vision. In Plains, Georgia, Carole Cadwalladr found the 39th US president full of energy… and determined to make a difference
September 11, 2011 at 10:15 am
Richard Williamswalking your talk
September 11, 2011 at 6:24 pm
brings up the alternative framework-disease, for understanding the circumstances surrounding terror, israeli.
Today is the 45th anniversary of the greatest space opera TV show of all time, and Space.com is celebrating with a cool infographic showing key moments in the first 45 years of Starfleet —
This story is some kind of awesome: For those who don’t want to watch the whole thing, the observation in brief is that color perception is affected by color language. The investigators compare Westerners with our familiar language categories for…
From CNN News comes this bizarre event: Mississippi will hold a referendum to determine whether voters think that "personhood" begins with conception. Voters in Mississippi will be given a chanc…
September 10, 2011 at 9:25 am
huh? lost for 60 years, rediscovered on a traffic median? sounds odd.
Delivery and courier services are some of the cornerstones of our civilization – whether it’s the pony express, snail mail, UPS, or Dominos Pizza, the idea that we, as individuals, can receive physical goods from “out there” is something most of us take for granted. American delivery businesses, for…
During a lunch in the summer of 1950, physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Herbert York, were chatting about a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting aliens abducting trash cans in flying saucers. Suddenly, Fermi suddenly blurted out, “Where is everybody?”
"After your death you will be what you were before your birth." -Arthur Schopenhauer If only every star’s death could be as glorious as a supernova, rocketing anywhere from thousands to millions of Earth-masses out of a star and into…
Years of drought had dried up the ancient water supply networks existing around the Mediterranean Rim. However, with rainfall returning over the past 5 years, the hydraulic heritage has come to life again. The names of the tunnels that carry the revived streams -khettaras in Morocco, foggaras in Alg…
For most animals, we live an approximately 24-hour cycle and synchronize our circadian rhythm to day and night. Even in the deep dark depths of the ocean, fish who cannot see still have bodily reactions to light. However, the Phreatichthys andruzzi is the first creature known to have no sensitivity …
At Bloomberg, Adam Minter explains why many Chinese have come to believe that, in the words of one Weibo poster, “helping a fallen senior is a risky investment and its overall rate of return is usually negative“:
"A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else." -John Burroughs The greatest tool for astronomers of the past 20 years has, without a doubt, been the Hubble Space Telescope. (Image…
After 9/11, al-Qaida was widely denounced as a brutal band of fanatics. But one special operations commander thought its organizational structure was kind of brilliant. He set out to build, in essence, America’s very own al-Qaida.
I’ve been harping on this point for some time here on this blog, but what’s been long predicted about the demographic shift that would ultimately doom the Republican Party as the percentage of Latino-American voters rises, is already pretty much a done deal here in California. The Republican chall…
Whether you have trouble boiling water or you know your way around an immersion circulator, there are some foods that everyone should know how to make, either because they’re delicious, they’re easy, or they require skills that will benefit you as you learn your way around the kitchen.
September 9, 2011 at 10:23 am
martin yan in tucson this weekend. event at chinese cultural center
This week I listened to an excellent discussion between Sheikh Dr. Muhammad Al-Hussaini and Patrick Sookhdeo, a former Muslim. I came away with immense res
September 9, 2011 at 9:23 am
September 9, 2011 at 8:58 am
i think this unwavering certainty is a big deal. brings up the big question of how do we persuade.
Conservatives and Science | With such an amazing guest post on Wednesday, I didn’t get to post my own DeSmogBlog piece (which is actually related to, but far less consequential than, Andre
Forlorn empty nesters in the twilight of their days: shall they be content with long days parked in front of televisions, and long evenings that might include a stroll here or there, to sit on street corners and chatter? Or finding a Chinese chess game to watch, while grasping one hand around anothe…
September 9, 2011 at 8:01 am
more energy into the weather system means more extremes.
Dr. Jeff Masters: An extreme rainfall event unprecedented in recorded history has hit the Binghamton, New York area, where 7.49? fell yesterday. This is the second year in a row Binghamton has recorded a 1-in-100 year rain event; their previous all-time record was set last September, when 4.68? fel…
September 9, 2011 at 7:52 am
even if the death penalty was not extremely class and racial biased, all too often killing innocent people, leaving no chance to repent and rehabilitate, clapping to signify not just an acceptance but righteousness is just plain evil. what are people thinking? a sad quietness is appropriate at a necessary evil. a reversion to public execution as entertainment?? can prisoners as gladiators be far behind? what is wrong with people?
The moment that would have broken my father’s heart was the moment when applause broke out at the mention of more than 200 executions ordered by Rick Perry in Texas. It was stunning and brought tears to my eyes. This is what we’ve come to? That we applaud at executions?" -Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter
John SherriffI am against the death penalty because 1) it is far too expensive to take to fruition with all the appeals and 2) we still execute the wrong person too often. I am not opposed to executing the real killer if we we no absolutely (which in my mind is a standard higher than beyond a reasonable doubt) that the person committed the murder and that we can do it for less than keeping the person in prison for the rest of their lives. But it is an insignificant issue in selecting our next president because at this point in time the law is so established that it is primarily (but not 100% because of the US Supreme Court) an issue left to the states. So when we stack up all the issues on which we will decide whom to vote for I would not put the death penalty matter in the top 20.
September 11, 2011 at 9:26 am
Richard Williamsit is the clapping at the speech, the almost glee that Perry and Bush before him expressed at exercising the governor’s power to kill that bothers me. sadness, regret, deep spiritual sorrow are the appropriate emotions when forced by circumstances to kill, whether a soldier or an executioner. i see in their response a shallowness and lack of depth of empathetic understanding summed by "but for the grace of God go I"
Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
September 8, 2011 at 5:58 pm
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.It is amazingly ignorant of the Right that they don’t see how they are the biggest beneficiaries of government spending programs and therefore the ones who are most influential in government policy setting.
Welcome and congratulations: Getting to the first day of college is a major achievement. You’re to be commended, and not just you, but the parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts who helped get you here.
September 8, 2011 at 5:14 pm
objective criteria as to the effectiveness of our medical system.
At least most can sing that tune about their country’s newborn baby mortality rates. But in the countries for which newborn deaths rates are highest, progress hasn’t been enough. The good news is, according to the authors of a new study, that the newborn baby death rates in these countries can be gr…
College is about exploring, meeting new friends, and growing. But all that exploration and growth comes with a pretty big price tag, so it’s wise to try to make the most of the experience.
Sure, you could rent a U-Haul truck, but those are expensive. And apparently this guy in Toronto hadn’t thought ahead and installed a trailer hitch when he bought his Lamborghini Gallardo. That should be an automatic decision: buy a car, get a hitch.
September 6, 2011 at 5:43 pm
September 6, 2011 at 5:28 pm
quote:"Do not get me wrong. I’m still a firm believer in the Churchillian notion that Americans will do the right thing after exhausting all other options. "
How a stubborn misreading of dead, classical economists — combined with a hyper-partisan Republican Party — haunts the U.S. economy
September 6, 2011 at 4:42 pm
the more economics i read the more it looks like a descriptive discipline not a science like physics. there just seems to be no way to figure out who is more right about what is going on. it is more than a case of too many uncontrollable variables, statistical analysis is one thing, economic policy something entirely different.
GENEVA (Tom Miles) – The pursuit of austerity measures and deficit cuts is pushing the world economy toward disaster in a misguided attempt to please global financial markets, the annual report of the United Nations economic thinktank UNCTAD said on Tuesday.
September 6, 2011 at 3:50 pm
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.This is the very thing that Ben Bernake has been warning about. It is a repeat of the Great Depression all over again. No one seems to learn from history.
The Bible has at least a little to say about how to construct a building, but mostly in Proverbs and mostly not having anything to do actually building a structure (metaphor!). So without rock solid instructions, officials overseeing the Christchurch Cathedral–the one in Christchurch, New Zealand, …
September 6, 2011 at 12:56 pm
look closely, they are now searching for it’s mate, even bigger!
Around 100 villagers in the Philippines worked together Sunday to bind and retrieve a monstrous 6 meter long crocodile that has been terrorizing the community for months. The crocodile is an endangered species, and will be relocated to an ecotourism park.
Meet Christopher Anspach. The Iowa man, 28, was sentenced Wednesday to 10 days in jail for failing to return books and other items he checked out earlier this year from the local library. When Anspac
September 6, 2011 at 9:10 am
His 1920 poem, "The Second Coming" contains some of literature’s most potent images of the twentieth century.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.[85]
William Butler Yeats ( /?je?ts/ yayts); 13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Anglo-Irish[1] poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two t…
The September 11, 2001, terror attacks by Al Qaeda were meant to harm the US, and they did, but in ways that Osama bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W. Bush’s response compromised America’s basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.
It’s easy to get caught up with the sheer amount of work to be done on any given day to stop and take stock of what you’ve already accomplished. We’ve discussed how keeping a work diary can help when your performance review comes around, but it can also help you focus, pay attention to what you’ve…..
Will a college degree that costs $2,500 a year be worth the paper it’s printed on?
September 5, 2011 at 3:06 pm
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.Although I do agree that something must be done to reign in the rising costs of post-secondary education I think that a 4yr. degree for 10,000 is unrealistic. I would prefer a model that is closer to that of the trades, where work and classroom study are interspersed.
The European Union is uniquely placed to solve the problems that have been caused by the tensions and templates of national political solutions in a globalised economy. There exists a positive European reinvention of the Union for all those that are rightly indignant
Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
September 5, 2011 at 12:19 pm
thought you’d be interested in how some on the left see him
As eloquent a summary of the left’s collective raspberry of Obama as I’ve yet heard articulated. No idea who this guy is, if he’s a real person, a real candidate, etc. Nevertheless, few people have said it better in recently memory. Totally worth a listen, but the best points are made during m…
September 5, 2011 at 12:08 pm
i saw but hadn’t finished it. thanks for the encouragement to do so.
The agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress acts to stabilize its finances.
Chinese goods cost more in China because of currency, taxes, transportation,logistics and inflation. Chinese get the jobs, while Americans get the consumer products; Chinese government gets the dollar, but the U.S government gets to spend the dollar! Chinese like to say: the Americans get a better d…
When so much income goes to the top, the middle class doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going without sinking ever more deeply into debt.
September 4, 2011 at 8:26 am
what is going on in israel? what is the cost of living there?
One former military officer’s struggle to abandon the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and fight against it demonstrates the grit and vision of the Libyan revolution.
Babak Dehghanpisheh reports from inside the feared Internal Security compound.
September 3, 2011 at 1:41 pm
"The LA Times, and most people who denounce these spending "inefficiencies," have the causation backwards: fighting Terrorism isn’t the goal that security spending is supposed to fulfill; the security spending (and power vested by surveillance) is the goal itself, and Terrorism is the pretext for it. For that reason, whether the spending efficiently addresses a Terrorism threat is totally irrelevant."-quote
A decade ago, residents thought an old rail line above the city was an eyesore and wanted it torn down. Today, it’s one of Manhattan’s most popular public spaces. A new book gives the inside story of how Joshua David and Robert Hammond saved the abandoned track.
September 3, 2011 at 1:11 pm
just started m.shermer’s the believing brain. 2 good words: agenticity & patternicity
In the June 2009 edition of Scientific American, well-known skeptic Michael Shermer discusses human tendencies to find things and agency where they don’t actually exist: Patternicity [is] the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary …
Apparent Central Intelligence Agency communiques to now-deposed Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Qaddafi obtained by the New York Times and Human Rights Watch (HRW) indicate that the CIA rendered Abdelhakim Belhadj to Libya at the request of Qaddafi’s intelligence agency in 2004. Belhadj, who has a mili…
Guest Blog Post by Joshua W. Anderson (joshuaandersonfuller.edu) What if I told you it’s possible to get a free theological education online? It’s well known that one can get a degree online these days; more and more schools are making their … Continue reading ?
By Ilaria Maria SalaLA STAMPA/Worldcrunch HONG KONG – Whoever has been to perennially pricey Hong Kong on a low budget has spent at least one night there: Chungking Mansions, “the world’s most globalized building,” offers rooms at unbeatable prices at 36-44 Nathan Road, right on the point of Tsim…
Rather than the course in computer systems, policies and scheduling she expected to receive, instead, the training consisted overwhelmingly of how to spot workers who were or might become disaffected:
North Dakota has had the nation’s lowest unemployment ever since the economy tanked. What’s its secret?
September 2, 2011 at 5:26 pm
1 person likes this
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.Good story. Having something that can function somewhat like the Fed, no printing of money allowed, is what is lacking in State finances.
This is a new historical fact. For most of the thousand years or so since it was invented, a university education was thought to be suited only for a tiny group—a ruling class or a subculture of scholars. Since World War II, this country has turned it into not only a mass-market product but also the…
One premise that has been a key element in protecting First Amendment rights in defamation cases is the idea that "truth is an absolute defense against defamation." You can’t defame someone if you tell the truth about them. And yet…
September 2, 2011 at 12:26 pm
hypocrisy. half of war expenses are payments to the already prosperous, the other half is a public works program for soldiers.
Republican spending knows no limits when it comes to going into debt for failed and useless wars. But it’s another story when it comes to providing federal assistance for victims of Hurricane Irene or other catastrophes we may face in the months ahead. – 2011/09/02
In April 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush spelled out America’s pledges to help rebuild a post-Taliban Afghanistan. Some areas, such as infrastructure and medical care, have seen noticeable progress. But in others, such as security, the economy and government, progress has been uneven, at best.
In “Confessions of a Climate Change Convert”, D. R. Tucker explained the change in consciousness that came to a conservative writer after seriously looking at the evidence for anthropogenic…
September 2, 2011 at 10:42 am
"Yes, once again the planet upon which you live has successfully circumnavigated its star while you have remained afixed upon it. Congratulations and happy Alma Existence day."
Thanks to Jim West for pointing out that John Mark Harris has made available a pdf with every work in the Greek New Testament, listed in order of frequency. A very useful resource for those learning Koine Greek!
September 2, 2011 at 10:22 am
what do you think about the repub glock raffle? stupid, tunnel thinking or wise use of a gun they had just sitting around in the office?
As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black So…
The first time I dived at the remote Kingman Reef, in 2005, I thought I found paradise. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, almost 2000 km south of Hawaii, lies a pristine coral reef, covered with colorful corals and a carpet of giant clams with unbelievable electric blues and greens. When I returne…
The Limbo Generation, college graduates who entered the job market after the economic downturn, take dead-end jobs while waiting to start their real careers. And waiting. And waiting.
September 1, 2011 at 8:29 am
obviously, anything from scandinavia pops to the top of my reading list
Scandinavian Bronze Age art features a number of motifs having to do with the movement of the sun through the heavens during the day and the underworld during the night.
This is a forum for people with knowledge of the Bible in its original languages to discuss its manuscripts and textual history from the perspective of historic evangelical theology.
Joe Biden’s latest gaffe thrust China’s population policy into the headlines. Let’s seize this opportunity to set a few things straight.
September 1, 2011 at 8:01 am
i wonder what the guy who chopped down the last easter island palm was thinking. or the guy who shot the last thylacine. or the last dodo eater. or the last passenger pigeon hunter……
For nearly 20 years, neuroscientist Jim Fallon has studied the brains of psychopaths. After learning that his ancestry included alleged murderers, he decided to study his own brain. He was shocked at what he discovered.
"We were very fortunate that there wasn’t much damage," Elizabeth Andoh says as she walks me through her small Tokyo apartment, pointing out the traces left behind by the March 11 earthquake—a tiny crack near the ceiling, a floating shelf adrift and knocked off its anchor. In Tokyo, more than…
Where are the jobs? That question is on the minds of millions of Americans who have lost jobs during the Great Recession. During this historically lean jobs creation period, finding a new job often requires thinking outside the box. And you can’t think much further outside the job search box than "w…
For nearly 20 years, neuroscientist Jim Fallon has studied the brains of psychopaths. After learning that his ancestry included alleged murderers, he decided to study his own brain. He was shocked at what he discovered.
Jason Steffen is a particle physicist who works at Fermliab. He’s used his knowledge of complex systems and motion to develop an airplane boarding procedure that is more efficient than those currently in use:
A week after rebels stormed Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s former stronghold, much remained divided into fiefs, each controlled by quasi-independent brigades.
August 30, 2011 at 7:09 pm
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.It took centuries for Europe to develop functional nations. I don’t expect Libya to do it anytime soon, if ever.
August 31, 2011 at 4:58 pm
Richard Williamseurope isn’t even done yet!
August 31, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.Are you referring to the former Soviet satellite countries?
August 31, 2011 at 5:28 pm
Richard Williamsreferring to EU. the natural movement to ever larger trans-national units. these will eventual eclipse and replace the 16thC nation-states, reducing them to something like US counties.
August 31, 2011 at 5:45 pm
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.I don’t think that the E.U. is in a position to do away with Europe’s traditional nations states. Having a United States of Europe will prove to be too problematical. This can be seen now with the problems that are being encountered by the Euro nations. Can’t overlook the fact that many of Europe’s strongest nations are not yet a part of the Euro. Additional problems are also being encountered with migration between Euro member nations. I do think that Europe does have meaningful nation states. The attempt at monetary union does not negate this fact.
August 31, 2011 at 5:52 pm
the economy is all about making something to sell. on several levels, this is just plain ethically wrong. first is distinction between production for comsumption vs for sale. 2nd it only matters making things for those with money. perhaps it is time to rethink the system in an ethical manner. what we have will over time look even worse, as ethics diverges even more from economics.
PLoS Biology is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that features works of exceptional significance in all areas of biological science, from molecules to ecosystems, including works at the interface with other disciplines.
Imagine a post-apocalyptic future, but not the kind of BS “everyone wears eyeliner and leather” post-apocalyptic future of so many (so many) Hollywood movies. Just imagine that the oil dried up, some big war was fought, and all the people who worry about stock algorithms were taken out as collateral…
Traditional bike safety lights mount on the back and look more like brake lights on a car, with variations being those LED lights you can stick on the wheels for Tron-esque side visibility.
For millions, the recession has become permanent, no longer a crisis to endure so much as a reality to accept; and, a record number of people exist on the fringes of the workforce.German Morales filed to open his Centreville cleaning and painting business in December 2007, the month the recession be…
Workers shovel some of the hundreds of pounds of volcanic cinders, which were possibly used as insulation above the ceiling in the Cannon-Douglass House. (Photos by Jeff Harrison/UANews)
Our library card campaign, First Library Card, aims to get 100% of all first-grade students in Pima County a new library card featuring our children’s mascot, Alizandro Lizard.
US surfer Garrett McNamara made history by breaking the world record for largest wave ever surfed in Portugal. McNamara successfully surfed on a monstrous 90-foot wave (27 meters) in Praia do Norte off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal. The previous biggest wave record, 77 feet, was set by another surfi…
November 9, 2011 at 10:44 pm
1 person likes this
John SherriffI don’t know about you Richard – but I refuse to take on any wave over 80 feet high.
One of McDonald’s most divisive products, the McRib, made its return last week. For three decades, the sandwich has come in and out of existence, popping up in certain regional markets for short promotions, then retreating underground to its porky lair—only to be revived once again for reasons never…
November 9, 2011 at 3:17 pm
Greg WatesThanks Richard. I seized on 4 words in the article: "Reconstituted Pork Offall Slurry." Had my first McRib in almost 10 yrs last week. Not nearly as good as I remembered. May be longer before my next one.
November 9, 2011 at 8:00 pm
Richard Williamssounds like how i felt when i learned what scrapple was made from.
Alight, I can’t put this topic to rest. It’s not my fault; Dr. Mohler really enjoys discussing this, with "urgency," and I can’t help responding. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Seminary, host…
Most of us take access to clean water for granted. But for nearly a billion people around the world, clean water is a commodity that’s hard to come by. In places like Sub-Saharan Africa where diarrheal disease is a major killer, access to clean water could save hundreds of thousands of lives. LifeSt…
Nov 9th, 2011 by James F. McGrath, In a discussion with a young-earth creationist here on this blog recently, , it was illustrated once again how those with such a perspective are willing to simply make things up to try to bolster their viewpoint, . One example is the evidence for the age of the earth provided by chalk deposits. Chalk is formed through the death and deposit on the ocean floor of the remains of microorganisms. The rate at which this ooze of dead microorganisms’ remains can turn i…
November 9, 2011 at 9:37 am
i hope J.McG expands this into a blog entry on exploringourmatrix. i do not know how to distinguish willful ignorance from deliberate deception. hence why someone called Poe just a few postings earlier.
Cdbren, I must ask: What persuades you that it is glorifying to God to simply make things up in an effort to argue against the work of scientists in a field that you do not understand? Why is the attempt to combat evolution, which you understand to be an evil for whatever reason, more important to y…
Last week, Suffolk University asked an excellent question about Florida voters’ opinions as to whether Republicans are deliberately harming economic recovery efforts for partisan gain. The results were very interesting: Almost half (49%) of Floridians said yes, the GOP was cynically hampering attemp…
November 8, 2011 at 12:32 pm
1 person likes this
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.I agree. The GOP has nothing to gain by working with President Obama. Their best hope for regaining the White House is to let the economy tank and keep it there. Their goal is to make Obama a one term president, according to McConnel.
Why stop at 19 kids when you’re biologically capable of going for 20? Yep, it’s time once again to offer up a Mazel tov! to Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. The 19 Kids and Counting stars… Celebrity News Summaries. | Newser
November 8, 2011 at 8:54 am
John SherriffThe richer Western countries have a problem with the wealthy and the well-educated not having many kids these days. On the other hand, it is in poor countries and poor neighborhoods (of the West) where birth rates (and births to teenager parents) are quite high. I support families that want and can support more children to do so. The far bigger problem in my mind is the Octamom who does not have the resources financially, and probably emotionally to raise so many children.
WASHINGTON — A record number of Americans – 49.1 million – are poor, based on a new census measure that for the first time takes into account rising medical costs and other expenses. The numbers released Monday are part of a first-ever supplemental poverty measure aimed at providing a f…
The James Dyson Award winners for 2011 have been announced, and the grand prize winner is a piece of clever biomimicry that sits so perfectly in our wheelhouse that we couldn’t resist the urge to write about it. Edward Linacre of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne has tapped the Namib b…
Here is a list of the top 20 resources for tracking the most salient aspects of your life, from sleep and weight to money and sex. Use the data to improve your life.
November 7, 2011 at 11:58 pm
neat. how would you like a marble floor with a fossil in it?
Animals | In July 2002, an Italian man named Mr Francioni found something strange. Francioni owns a marble-cutting company in the Tuscan town of Pietrasanta, and he had j
Republican rhetoric on energy policy doesn’t make much sense if you take it at face value, but it makes perfect sense if you consider the psychological profile of conservatives.
Richard Williamsi believe you mailed it to us after you left escondido. i don’t believe we took it.
November 7, 2011 at 10:37 am
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.I am sure that the time frame was after we left the U.S., because Louise is much older. I just can’t remember the place or the year.
November 7, 2011 at 10:41 am
gould bingham clark with jamie christopher clark williams. jamie is a month old. it’s december 1974, it’s in the house in houlton that gould and ruth rented from her brother allan, he and bev live there now. we drove for 51 hours straight that christmas to be with almas mom, the pontiac lemans died in conn. from a bad transmission and we took the grayhound back home to san antonio. had a potatoe barrel full of christmas and wedding presents, the barrel recently succomed to termites here.
The Blog of Dr. James F. McGrath, Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis
November 6, 2011 at 8:20 pm
November 6, 2011 at 8:17 pm
Justin just told me he was invited to Saqib’s families goat slaughter for Eid al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice). Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Issac and G_d’s provision of a ram to replace him.
San Diego History Center
SAN DIEGO TRIVIA: Archaeological evidence suggests that the Kumeyaay are recent arrivals in the region in relation to other Native groups, arriving here approximately 2,000 years ago. …
November 6, 2011 at 10:47 am
just in case you don’t know me. i’ve never agreed with anything this writer has written. he represents afaik the extreme right wing of reformed thinking
Dr. Timothy J. Keller is one of today’s most influential religious leaders, and one of the most dangerous.
November 5, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Cristina Galiano PalmerReally? Does that include Ministries of Mercy? I guess I don’t know you well enough.
November 5, 2011 at 4:15 pm
Richard Williamsnot keller, the writer Paul M. Elliott. i got on his mailing list and just send the stuff to trash. i really like tim keller.
November 5, 2011 at 6:02 pm
Cristina Galiano PalmerThat makes more sense. LOL
November 5, 2011 at 6:36 pm
Greg WatesElliot drops some big accusatory bombs without much to back them up.He said, essentially was that Keller was a "Norman Vincent Peale" type heretic because Keller allows for intelligent design.
November 5, 2011 at 9:18 pm
the haboobs are coming, the "?????", "strong wind", are coming. the freeway is shut down, cars being lead by state police. winds picking up now. in for a long wet windy nasty night.
Each time someone uses Ancestry.com’s Facebook app to share a story about a military hero in their lives, we will donate $1 to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. Click the following link to see how much has been raised so far, and make sure to share your family hero stories by using the app: http://ancstry.me/w242vL
November 4, 2011 at 2:24 pm
while researching my sister in laws family tree i found this excellent genealogy website. would every surname had such a resource!
Julie Howard LindbergI’m trying to find an interesting graph I found a while ago showing the effect of smallpox vaccination on the increase in polio incidences.
November 4, 2011 at 9:12 am
Julie Howard LindbergAnd I wanted to put this under our original convo from The Great Good link, but I’m not very fb savvy lately.
November 4, 2011 at 10:44 am
Richard Williamsthis works. i read the site when you first posted it a few months back.
November 4, 2011 at 5:05 pm
Julie Howard LindbergI always want to be reading more whenever I talk to you. More of anything. It’s great.
A surfer comes a little too close to comfort to being a menu item for a 45-foot whale.
November 4, 2011 at 8:57 am
Linda Critzer Salesthat was cool,
November 4, 2011 at 8:58 am
anyone else catch the very pregnant BONES last night? i wished they’d can the relationship stuff and get more forensic science going!! chant more bugs, more trace, more dna.
Two days after a tornado tore through Eupora, Mississippi, Cherraye Oats set out with her daughter Courtney to get tarps for their neighbors’ battered homes. Oats’ house was spared, but the mobile home 20-year-old Courtney rented was destroyed. "If my daughter had not spent the night with us, we pro…
November 4, 2011 at 8:38 am
best long read thus far today. but then again, i just started reading!
Pakistan lies. It hosted Osama bin Laden (knowingly or not). Its government is barely functional. It hates the democracy next door. It is home to both radical jihadists and a large and growing nuclear arsenal (which it fears the U.S. will seize). Its intelligence service sponsors terrorists who atta…
Even for those of us who finished high school algebra on a wing and a prayer, there’s something compelled about equations. The world’s complexities and uncertainties are distilled and set in orderly figures, with a handful of characters sufficing to capture the universe itself. For your enjoyment, t…
10 Nifty Google Easter Eggs That Will Amuse You: I know everyone and your mom told you to Google "do a barrel roll" today. Fun, ye…
November 4, 2011 at 7:38 am
alma, justin and i bought a shopping bag of beer in qingdao and sipped it through straws walking down the street. sold by the kilo we never did finish it.
Award-winning travel journalist and author Joseph Rosendo shares his personal perspective on cultural tourism from spots close to home as well as exotic worldwide locales.
MECCA, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) – As Muslims from all over the world congregate for the annual haj pilgrimage, some are defying the edicts of Saudi Arabia’s strict Wahhabi school of Islam by climbing al-Nour
Facecrooks provides information and alerts on social media privacy, safety and scams
November 3, 2011 at 3:49 pm
John SherriffI am out of town in Kentucky – but I have left Butch my rabid bulldog at the house and hired Billy to sit in the kitchen with his shotgun. And Billy’s girlfriend has a dragon tattoo and is armed with her stun gun.
Bill Gates is changing the world again through another cheap technology–vaccines. Having prevented millions of deaths, he’s determined to turn Malthus on his head by solving the global population problem.
“When he walks into a library you can see that he instantly feels more relaxed; it’s just part of who he is at this point in his life,” says photographer Robert Dawson of his son, Walker, who accompanied him on an 11,000-mile road trip last summer while he took pictures of 189 …
The Swedish language originated 1200 years ago as an effect of language change. It has since become heavily influenced by Low German, French, High German and, recently, English.
November 1, 2011 at 11:20 am
funny. house is destroyed, owner continues to pay mortgage, bank forecloses because insurance rates were raised and increase not paid, owner doesn’t receive any notices because THERE ISN’T ANY HOUSE.
Imagine that you’re working overseas when your home is destroyed by a hurricane. Sucks, right? But you keep paying the mortgage on the property because you hope to eventually rebuild. So why is Bank of America foreclosing? This is exactly what happened to a man in Texas, who found out that his prope…
November 1, 2011 at 10:49 am
John SherriffIneptitude at every level. Get the government out of the equation and then allow our court system to allow damages against BofA for their sins.
It’s August 2011. The SEC is asking questions, execs are fleeing, and employees are suing. What happened to the world’s fastest growing startup? Can it come …
November 1, 2011 at 9:32 am
finally used dna data to disambiguate an error in online genealogies. pretty cool. moody (alma’s mom’s maiden name) dna project found an error in mid 1600′s. not a NPE, just a papered over mis identification that has been infinitely repeated on ancestry.com
November 1, 2011 at 12:27 am
julian, have you ever done your genealogy? have it online? have dna data? did you know you can get 23andme free? https://www.23andme.com/roots/
word for the day—whale fall. not related to nightfall. it’s what the bone-eating snot-flower worm eats….
October 31, 2011 at 1:18 pm
is the ancestry.com website down?
October 31, 2011 at 1:04 pm
things have REALLY changed since i was in the army. company fb page for my cousin linda’s son. half the guys i was in basic with couldn’t spell computer…..
OFFICIAL A CO. 1-19 PAGE *******DISCLAIMER******* This site is run by the Alpha Company Cadre. ANY and ALL inappropriate comments on this site are subject to be deleted by our Cadre
October 31, 2011 at 12:54 pm
October 31, 2011 at 12:52 pm
wedding cost per minute of life of marriage. $10M/(72*24*60)=$96/min
A show of hands: How many of you saw this one coming? After 72 days of marriage, Kim Kardashian will today file for divorce, reports TMZ . The soon-to-be former-Mrs. Kris Humphries plans to cite "irreconcilable… Celebrity News Summaries. |…more
October 31, 2011 at 10:51 am
what a cool tactic. gotta admit smart people thought this one up!
Police across the country have been violently cracking down on the Occupy protesters, leading to the serious head injury of Iraq veteran Scott Olsen. As Salon Justin Elliot notes today, New York City police are trying a different tactic to “undermine the credibility of Occupy Wall Street.” A New Yor…
A Hawaii couple was tossed in jail and their child taken by protective services for 18 hours after the mother forgot to pay for her sandwich at Safeway. The pregnant mother she was shopping at Safeway when she felt
The journey towards a completely digitized life takes some very subtle steps, and Google is one of the companies doing most of the walking. Open up any web browser, fire up Google Maps, and you’ll find that the world is at your fingertips. Thanks to Street View, you can visually explore paths that t…
October 31, 2011 at 10:11 am
it is surprising to see the convergence between the anti-vaxxers and the young earth creationists both using the idea of "teach the controversy" to try to discredit fundamentally good but still humanly flawed science. part of the problem is that science is a tough sell in this world. it is hard to explain to people that SV40 probably contaminated a generation of polio vaccines and will cause cancer in untold numbers of people and still ask them to vaccinate THEIR kids. i find myself hoping for a severe outbreak of measles in the anti-vaxxer community to demonstrate their foolishness, sad, all around.
The Greater Good looks behind the fear, hype and politics that have POLARIZED the vaccine debate in America today.
October 31, 2011 at 9:53 am
Julie Howard LindbergI like what you’re saying about the difficulty of choosing a vaccine with a known history of injury. It’s a good example of how this issue is so complex. Whatever people choose for their health in the way of vaccines, they are choosing one risk over another, not safety over danger, or science over foolishness.
In the case of measles, though, I would rather recover from the highly treatable disease than try to recover from an unknown and untreatable vaccine injury. And I would not wish for a severe outbreak of brain damage in those who choose the risks of the vaccine over the risks of the disease.
The comparisons of risk are different for each disease, and hopefully the filmmakers also address the pervasive problem of conflict of interest among vaccine manufacturers, scientists, and policy-makers. I haven’t had a chance to see the movie yet, but I hope that it does encourage conversation that is not polarizing and inflammatory.
November 1, 2011 at 8:04 am
Richard Williamsmeasles is a dangerous disease quote:=" “A 23-cent vaccine,” he says, “and you’ll never get measles,” a disease that “at its peak was killing about a million and a half a year; it’s down below 300,000.” " from http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/02/the-second-coming-of-bill-gates/6/ getting brain infections from measles kills a number(~20) of children each year in the US. San Diego spent $150million because of 1 unimmunized child containing the outbreak.
November 3, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Julie Howard LindbergI don’t know about never getting measles because of the vaccine.
One of my favorite resources is a book by CPM, herbalist, and MD Aviva Jill Romm, Vaccinations: a Thoughtful Parent’s Guide.
"Measles epidemics commonly occur in highly vaccinated populations. Of all reported cases of the measles in the United States in 1984, more than 58% of the school-age children who contracted measles were adequately vaccinated. In an outbreak in 1985, in a reported case group of 1984 people, 80% had been appropriately vaccinated. A review of measles outbreaks in the United States demonstrated that approximately 60% of cases were among school-age children. Canadian studies yield similar results. Again, higher vaccine levels in a community along with anticipated vaccine failures inevitably lead to such statistics. Therefore, the real focus must examine the risk of the disease versus the risk of an adverse reaction from the vaccine, and the likelihood of either occurring."
"With the advent of vaccines, the epidemiology of the disease shifted so that more cases occurred in late adolescence, when the disease is more likely to have devastating effects."
November 4, 2011 at 10:39 am
Julie Howard LindbergBill Gates fits nicely into that whole conflict of interest thing as well.
Web service Bite Hunter aggregates daily deals, lunch specials, coupons, and other discounts from sites like Groupon, LivingSocial, FourSquare, and more, and displays them all on a Google Map so you can see what’s available in your area, or filter based on what you’re interested in and where you’d…..
October 31, 2011 at 9:40 am
i’ve pointed this out to several people, cool to see it in print
With winter around the corner for half the world, it’s time to start thinking about getting your home ready for the colder weather. It turns out bubble wrap is a great insulator, and Instructables user kc8hps has a guide for creating a reusable storm window out of it. He claims this helped him…
October 31, 2011 at 9:35 am
i looked at your great grandmother sally/sarah proffitt this evening. curious about the name. traced her family name to scotland. where it’s prophet or possibly proudfoot. see your email for more. pretty interesting.
October 29, 2011 at 8:57 pm
alma asked me to add a relation of hers to her tree, up pops his obit, he died 12 days ago. hazards of doing genealogies i guess.
With worsening inflation, a slowing economy, and growing concerns about possible social unrest, China’s leaders have a lot on their plates these days. And yet when the Communist Party met at its annual plenum earlier this week, the issue given greatest attention was not economic policy but what it d…
It’s not just the young in the Occupy Movement who fear for their futures. Many older people, who are marching with them, dread retirement, even if they hate their jobs. They fear social isolation, the loss of friends they enjoyed at work and the freedom of too much unstructured time. The good news …
October 29, 2011 at 12:29 am
but it’s no longer news. the retraction won’t get into as many brains as the original story did
The Office of the Inspector General retracted its claim about the Justice Department’s expenditures at a 2009 conference, apologizing for the “significant negative publicity.”
If calling America a middle-class nation means anything, it means that we are a society in which most people live more or less the same kind of life. In 1970 we were that kind of society. Today we are not, and we become less like one with each passing year.
Was this done in conjunction with Consumer Reports? Because mine came yesterday and they did the same sort of investigation.
October 28, 2011 at 2:04 pm
where to draw a line between devotion and mental illness? what does it take to fast for 120 days? a least a bit of crazy. does that make it wrong-morally? read the comments, there are 623 videos at her and husband’s you tube. they appear to be orthodox Jews but i haven’t seen a video on what she learned spiritually yet. still poking around.
Wow, the bullshit people can convince themselves of… These disturbing videos of a woman who did an extreme fast for “spiritual reasons” (and to “help others”???) were posted over at Cynical-C and this lady is truly tweaked. She seems quite, um, “happy,” true, but she looks like the re-animated zom…
October 28, 2011 at 2:03 pm
Richard Williamsis she devout or is she crazy? how can i tell? the comments everywhere are uniformally against her. afaik, i’m the first to comment "go slow i need to learn more" before making this judgment
October 28, 2011 at 3:36 pm
i’ve always been curious about lomaland, it was fun to drive around there on the motorcycle last trip back.
richard w.’s reviews of local businesses in Tucson, Scottsdale and beyond on Yelp.
October 28, 2011 at 8:28 am
1. we had a coupon, waitress knew how to handle it, nice. we’ve had trouble with them other places 2.value to price ratio, my favorite number. despite high end price, $7 for breakfast, it was huge,…
The term muckraker is closely associated with reform-oriented journalists who wrote largely for popular magazines, continued a tradition of investigative journalism reporting, and emerged in the United States after 1900 and continued to be influential until World War I, when through a combination of…
Neuroscientist David Eagleman explores the processes and skills of the subconscious mind, which our conscious selves rarely consider. Visit Discover Magazine to read this article and other exclusive science and technology news stories.
Health & Medicine | DNA sequencing | Insight into long life is one of the new prize’s goals.In 2006, the Genomics X Prize competition was announced: $10 million for sequencing 100 human genomes in
Twenty years ago, astronomers discovered a number of enigmatic radio-emitting filaments concentrated near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. These features initially defied explanation, but a new study of radio images of the Galactic center may point to their…
Communist leaders are proposing some of the tightest limits on media and Internet freedoms in years.
October 27, 2011 at 9:09 am
i found http://www.englishdna.com/members.htm you ought to get dna test through the project to show your english-family lineage back to original mayflower settler thomas english. pretty cool. first time i’ve run into a potential descendant of the 1st journey of the mayflower.
Project focus for the English Surname DNA study is to allow all males with the surname ENGLISH to participate in the English Y-Chromosome project for the purpose of determining if members of ENGLISH surname groups are genetically connected. This Study is extended to include all males with surname E…
Groupon nears its IPO in a down economy. But will the daily deals network be as valuable to merchants when deep discounts are no longer needed to lure repeat business?
October 26, 2011 at 1:52 pm
looks like i’ll be working on swedish church records from the 1880′s today. found a new lead on the ever elusive harry f williams! another potential family to trace through the decade census and church comings and goings records.
October 26, 2011 at 8:31 am
Linda Critzer Salesbless u for having the patience
October 26, 2011 at 8:49 am
Richard Williamsafter 6 months. i have everyone on my family tree but harry f williams traced back to sweden. how FRUSTRATING. and it’s my paternal line!?….did you get the genetic genealogy email i sent to the extended family? forward it to your sons if you want. it would be really interesting to see their genetics from 23andme.com, get the saunders and critzer lineages firmer. i have 1 hit on my paternal line in 19thC Stockholm, no paper trail yet but 10% of Swedish births are illegitimate at turn of 20thC.
A British family with a bizarre speech deficit has led linguists to FOXP2: a gene that begins to explain how our ancestors acquired language. Visit Discover Magazine to read this article and other exclusive science and technology news stories.
October 25, 2011 at 10:22 pm
i find myself wishing i could interact with this, or at least hear the presentation.
A forum for discussing matters of moment, from a curmudgeonly perspective. (The ideas posted here do not necessarily represent those of any organization with which I am a part). Rude and insulting remarks will not be published, but civil disagreement is welcome.
Probably Bad News: Even Canadian Criminals Are Polite
October 25, 2011 at 4:25 pm
quotes: 1.The bombs’ size helped compensate for their lack of accuracy. (yeah!) 2.Since the B53 was made using older technology by engineers who have since retired or died, developing a disassembly process took time. Engineers had to develop complex tools and new procedures to ensure safety.(that’s a problem, don’t want it to blow up when taking it apart)
The last of the most powerful U.S. nuclear bombs — a weapon hundreds of times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — is being disassembled nearly half a century after it was put into service.
I spoke with a thirty-something mother of two residing in suburban New Jersey about the Occupy Wall Street movement. She was disgusted by their antics. “Our business failed,
Sad news coming out of Vietnam today: the Javan rhinoceros subspecies (Rhinoceros sondaicus annamiticus), once endemic to Southeast Asia, has been confirmed as extinct, according to …
October 25, 2011 at 1:20 pm
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.a victime of superstitious native medicine and cultural folktales
Yes, it’s the Four Horsemen, again. The perfect biblical metaphor for today’s bizarre world, where irrational ideologies prey on us, driving America deep into a dark world we’ve seen before: Goethe’s Faust, Dorian Gray, Dante’s Inferno.
October 25, 2011 at 12:47 pm
Richard Williamscarrying capacity of the earth is 5B humans, we hit 7B this months.
From The Christian Post Harold Camping, who predicted Oct. 21 to be the day Christians would be caught up to heaven and that God would judge the world, said on Oct. 16 that he is no longer able to…
Students in South Korea will soon be learning from pixel instead of paper, as the government plans to digitize the country’s entire school curriculum by 2015.
With access to your email inbox, webapp Slice automatically analyzes emails containing order information from your online shopping and organizes all your purchases in one place, giving you quick access to tracking packages, purchase history, and price-drop tracking for everything you buy online.
October 25, 2011 at 10:03 am
everyone knows the story about the blind men and the elephant. i was reading comments somewhere and saw this: "you must be examining what remains after the elephant has left the building" cute. obscure enough not to get deleted for nasty name calling. fraiser echoes in my head as well.
"Science is facts; just as houses are made of stone, so is science made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science." -Jules Henri Poincaré The higher you…
did marianne mague’s ancestry at lunch today, of course i carry my laptop, her and alma are 11th cousins. MRCA Robert Minott Your 11th great grandfather Birth 1492 in Essex, England Death 14 Dec 1559 in Essex, England
Ellen Minott Birth 1528 in Essex, England Death 7 Feb 1595 in Little, Essex, England
so, scorecard so far: alma and marianne are 11th cousins. alma and lynn english, my sister in law-9th cousins. alma and alex churchill are 4th cousins, alma and i are 14/15th cousins.
so, maybe everyone is related
October 23, 2011 at 9:02 pm
i commented on the post. there is a curious-worth exploring parallelness of adam and the sabbath week.
from Counterpunch, October 21-23, 2011 by FRANK GREEN Print media’s decline in the United States can be tracked in microcosm in San Diego, longtime home to one of the country’s most conservative, reactionary dailies. Local progressives have been watching in…
When potato plants bloom, they send up five-lobed flowers that spangle fields like fat purple stars. By some accounts, Marie Antoinette liked the blossoms so much that she put them in her hair. Her husband, Louis XVI, put one in his buttonhole, inspiring a brief vogue in which the French aristocracy…
by Robert Reich Friday, October 21, 2011 Herman Cain’s bizarre 9-9-9 plan would replace much of the current tax code with a 9 percent individual income tax and a 9 percent sales tax. He calls it a “flat tax.” Next…
Climate change deniers thought they had an ally in Richard Muller, a popular physics professor at UC Berkeley and famous anthropogenic global warming skeptic. Now that he’s come around, they’re abandoning him.
There are still some students on university campuses who reminisce about the old days. One of those so-called “eternal students” can be found at Christian Albrecht University in the northern city of Kiel. He registered as a student in medicine
October 22, 2011 at 12:06 am
the greatest twilight zone of all time just started. to serve mankind…….it’s a COOKBOOK!!!
Gordon and Norma Yeager, aged 94 and 90 respectively, were married for 72 years. They were inseparable and deeply in love with each other during those seven decades. They died an hour apart last week in a hospital. There was some confusion when Gordon left because his heart monitor continued to puls…
October 21, 2011 at 8:35 pm
sweden, now why did my ancestors leave? that was before the social democrats took over. 1895-1902. sweden changed because 25% of the population voted with their feet. after norway and ireland the highest emigration in europe. they left because the powerful and rich controlled all the opportunities.
This evening, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) will give a speech at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business about how to address income inequality, likely trying to capitalize on the 99 Percent Movement he once derided as unruly “mobs.” Although exactly what policies Can…
October 21, 2011 at 7:25 pm
andrew, read up at 23andme and consider getting sequenced. there is some interesting connections in the family to see! your mom and alma are distant cousins.
October 21, 2011 at 5:14 pm
genealogy is cool. alma is a 9th cousin to my brother’s wife lynn english. sharing ancestors:
David Phippen Birth 1585 in Weymouth, Dorset, England Death 31 Oct 1650 in Suffolk, England
Sarah Pinckney Birth 1574 in Weymouth, Dorset, England Death Aug 1659 in Fairfield, Fairfield, Connecticut, United States
so my brother’s and my kids are both 1st and 10th cousins.
October 21, 2011 at 5:01 pm
Richard Williamsi don’t know how ancestry does the calculations of relationship David PHIPPEN Relationship to you: 9th great grandfather of wife of brother Sarah PINCKNEY Relationship to you: 9th great grandmother of wife but it calculates paternal to lynn and maternal to alma….
Don’t make any sudden movements around this jack-o-lantern -unless you happen to have a sonic screwdriver on hand that is. Have any of you ever made pumpkins dedicated to your favorite geeky tv show?
‘Like’ Blackjack Pizza on Facebook and enter to win a free iPad2. Enter daily from now through Oct. 31 and earn 3 BONUS ENTRIES for each FB friend who signs up.
Moammar Gadhafi is still missing in action, but Libya’s temporary government isn’t waiting for him to surface before finding a way toward democracy. Rushing to the ballot box might be the biggest mistake there is.
October 20, 2011 at 11:24 am
julian wrote-@"because the Muslim religion has no democratic elements which can serve as a substructure for democratic growth"….and i thought-"how would you go about showing this? it would be an interesting project". i’d start by rereading m. novak’s _spirit of democratic capitalism_http://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Democratic-Capitalism-Michael-Novak/dp/0819178233
I find the approach many students take to the quest for reliable information mirrored in today’s Bizarro comic:The tendency is to go where Google searches direct you, to where the flashy advertising leads:In an age of advertising, it can be difficult to choose between the var
CHICAGO (Ann Saphir) – An unofficial gauge of human misery in the United States rose last month to a 28-year high as Americans struggled with rising inflation and high unemployment. The misery index — which is simply the sum of the country’s inflation and unemployment rates — rose to 13.0, pushed …
Timothy Stevens, UA Dining Services senior supervisor chef, and Meghann Miller, sous chef and co-chairwoman of the Student Nutrition Coalition, highlight a few recipes and nutritional benefits from "Eat Mesquite," a locally published book about sustainable cooking using flour produced from the region’s mesquite beans. (Photos by Patrick McArdle/UANews)
The grim discovery was made during a dig on what is thought to be a ‘witches graveyard’ in Italy’s Tuscany region after another woman’s skeleton was found surrounded by 17 dice.
Experiments with worms show that altering an enzyme can not only lengthen their life spans, but that the longevity effect can be carried across several generations
The University of California, San Diego is the 5th most popular school in the nation for college applicants, according to U.S. News & World Report, which recently released the list of colleges and universities with the highest level of applications for 2010.
October 19, 2011 at 1:40 pm
i sure enjoy doing ancestry.com trees. worked on my brother’s wife’s tree last night. intersects with alma’s in the late 1600′s … might even share the executed witch ancestor!!!
In an earlier post, Global Voices featured some of the online maps which were created to monitor the floods in Thailand. The flood disaster is already the worst that ever hit the country. Here are other useful online maps, twitter reports, and disaster monitoring tools that provide information about…
Several thousand young African children who got three doses of the experimental vaccine had about 55 percent less risk of getting malaria over a year than those who got a control vaccine against rabies or meningitis.
October 18, 2011 at 4:30 pm
1 person likes this
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.It is often forgotten that malaria was a problem in the early colonial and post colonial days of the U.S.
October 18, 2011 at 4:33 pm
John SherriffThe entire anti-vaccine movement is nuts!
The American Academy of Pediatrics says that infants who passively watch videos on any kind of screen may experience problems with language development.
Phat Fiber is a mystery box of awesome samples for the yarn and fiber enthusiast in us all. With a focus on the independant artisan, this box is a super grass-roots treat for the senses. When your box arrives, chock full of samples, expect to be overwhelmed with the sight and feel of artful yarns, b…
October 17, 2011 at 6:30 pm
lest you think that laws are insignificant, they do matter
The fall harvest is in full swing. Get the cream of the crop with this week’s Escape to the Julian Gold Rush Hotel Bed & Breakfast, named Best in the West by Sunset magazine. You’ll get a one-night weekday stay…
In the name of protecting Christianity from a secularism perceived as corrosive to the faith, the creationists are unwittingly driving the best and brightest evangelicals out of the church.
November 30, 2011 at 9:31 am
WK asked a good question sunday afternoon, i told him to ask ND. what % of the church’s young people stay in the church after 25 or so? is there a difference between those who stay home and those who go away? then i read this article, is KG right? do people leave the church over this issue? i don’t know.
In the name of protecting Christianity from a secularism perceived as corrosive to the faith, the creationists are unwittingly driving the best and brightest evangelicals out of the church.
Environment | Antarctic | Hardy Antarctic moss.Ah, Antarctica. A vast expanse of ice, interrupted by mountains, ice… and more ice (with the occasional penguin). But in the East of the
The mortality rate is 100 percent. Everybody dies and in almost every case a preacher is involved in the final ceremony. Some funerals are harder than others. The death of an infant, or a murder resulting from domestic violence or a teen auto accident create such dramatic feelings of loss that the m…
Congressional debates on deficit reduction have highlighted the assertion that large cuts in the military budget would produce negative impacts on jobs in the U.S. economy. The Pentagon itself suggested that military cuts in the range of $1 trillion over the next decade would add one percentage poin…
By Darya Yurshina and Aleksei Golubtsov KOMMERSANT/Worldcrunch ALAUDIN VALLEY – Russia’s relationship with Tajikistan has soured following an incident involving a Russian pilot who was jailed – along with his Estonian co-pilot – after making an emergency landing in the Central Asian nation. Russia r…
“Guess what? It’s getting worse.” Last March, 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley and his producers shot one of the most moving and compelling—and deeply, deeply —stories I have ever seen on television. They took their cameras to central Florida’s Seminole County and looked into the lives of some hom…
Starbucks offers twelve days of Christmas cheer starting December 1, 2011. The idea is that each day something special will be on sale for one day only.
I’m still on my overtone singing kick: here’s Alexander Glenfield demonstrating the seven styles of Tuvan Throat Singing, a method of singing which produces sounds that no human throats should be able to make. It’s like having a flute inside your thr…
November 28, 2011 at 3:50 pm
The graffiti on this Soviet-era WWII monument is nuts! Check out the most controversial monuments of all time–PHOTOS: http://slate.me/uD8g1Y
Tuscon Progressive reports about the case of a brave elderly disabled woman who submitted herself to arrest to protest economic inequality. This past Friday, grandmother Joan Zatorski Puca committed an act of civil disobedience by refusing to remove herself from the Occupy Tuscon encampment and was …
November 28, 2011 at 12:52 pm
persuasion. what does it mean to persuade people? how do you do this? what is evidence and it’s role in persuasion? i’ve been reading climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and YECists the last few weeks and these questions about persuasion haunt me. why are people so sure and so vocal about issues where i think they are so wrong?
November 28, 2011 at 10:44 am
Richard Williamshere’s the line i’ve been mulling over: Can you please first show at least some evidence that you have understood the case for common ancestry? Not acceptance of it, just comprehension of why it is found persuasive.
when people disagree with us, our nature inclinations is to think them ignorant. if you give them the evidence and still don’t change we think them stupid. if after pointing more out evidence, we expect them to be evil and willfully wrong out of a bad motivation.
It’s never been easier to compare travel and accommodation prices using sites like Hipmunk, Kayak, or Google Flights, but a little extra legwork can save hundreds on airfare, hotels, and attractions.
Although the amount of garbage in the "Great Garbage Patch" has been exaggerated, it still remains an environmental travesty.
November 28, 2011 at 9:05 am
a swedish researcher helping me found a 2nd cousin in sweden. i asked her to make FIRST CONTACT, this is the first living swede in my family tree. really curious history. it is my ggmom’s half brother’s lineage. he emigrated to amerika in 1912, lived with my ggparents and moved back to sweden in 1925, there he married a woman who was swedish but born in philadelphia. her profile: b: phila d:sweden just looks wrong. it’s the WRONG DIRECTION!!! i sure hope they want contact and even better have preserved letters from the turn of the 20thC. here’s to hope finding the ever elusive harry f williams.
November 28, 2011 at 8:38 am
i like golds, we never share keys, but given the recent corporate stupidity at netflix, i’d like to offer these thoughts.
today we got our picture taken. thinking about why golds is doing this and whether it will increase revenue or not.
say 2 people are sharing gym membership. there are 2 different ways i see this happening. 1st casual, 2 brothers, 1 pays the bill each month, the other say once per week borrows the key. 2nd, 2 split the cost, both pay $15, one goes to gym in the morning before work, the other goes in the evening after work.
in the first case, the one that loans the key looks at it as another benefit of membership, like having movies while riding the bike, it is a sweetner to keep him going. it’s the 2nd person that gold’s is trying to encourage to buy membership, but he doesn’t go enough to want to buy membership. stopping him from going occasionally is actually contra-productive because now you can’t get him hooked on what is going on, since unlike last month he is not there.
how about the second case, for neither person is full price worth the cost, now you are going to double the cost of going. people are extremely resistant to increasing costs. their best option is to find another gym where they can continue to split the cost bring it down to their desired level.
the best thing golds could do is offer a $1.00 day membership. say up to 10 times per month, $1.00 per entry. you get 2nd person in 1st scenario paying and maybe both in 2nd until they exceed 10 days per month.
it would be increasing to see numbers in january, i’ll bet 5% drop in numbers of people entering gym and 2% drop in revenue and 2nd scenario people quit.
i like golds, we never share keys, but given the recent corporate stupidity at netflix, i’d like to offer these thoughts.
today we got our picture taken. thinking about why golds is doing this and whether it will increase revenue or not.
…
November 27, 2011 at 5:28 pm
gold’s gym is now taking pictures to be sure people don’t share membership. i think this will cause an overall membership loss. i’m going to write my thinking up as a note when i get home. anyone want to contribute their thinking?
November 27, 2011 at 5:17 pm
John SherriffNext will be a retinal scan. The problem is that too many people cheat.
November 27, 2011 at 5:44 pm
Richard Williamswrote 1st pass, posted it on golds fb page as well, you can see it on my notes page, please contribute your thoughts
On Monday or Tuesday, the US Senate will vote on a bill that would give the President the ability to order the military to arrest and imprison American citizens anywhere in the world for an indefinite period of time.
November 26, 2011 at 9:47 pm
we’ve been watching midsomer murder mysteries. 3 deaths in each show, i figure it’s a small English village. why haven’t they run out of people to kill off in 18 seasons?
We are currently discussing this book, and the various topics with it, in Sunday School Class, so I am reading this for the second time. It struck me odd the
Remember Google Body Browser? This used to be a very cool Google Labs project that let you view a 3D map of the human body and learn about it. Well, it’s gone now, such is the way of some Labs projects. The company behind it, Zygote, says that that it will release it as a full product. But that does…
November 25, 2011 at 3:56 pm
neat article. first another book to read! of course. and 2nd-"The pastor, in his sermon, told the audience to text to a particular number if they believed in a six-day, 24-hour creation, and to a different number if they believed in some form of evolution. The results came up on the high-tech screens, with maybe a dozen or so who said they believed in evolution. "
—its not results that amaze me, but using text and polls during the sermon. it almost makes preaching interactive!
There was a college media convention in Orlando at the end of October, and I was one of the people giving a presentation on how college media and college
November 25, 2011 at 10:21 am
somewhere i read 200,000 people had already signed up for them.
mikejuk writes "Stanford University is offering the online world more of its undergraduate level CS courses. These free courses consist of You Tube videos with computer-marked quizzes and programming assignments. The ball had been started rolling by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig’s free online ver…
November 24, 2011 at 10:03 pm
1 person likes this
John SherriffLet’s see – you can take a free computer science course at one of the top universities in the world or you can borrow a lot of money and take an esoteric subject that is not in demand? Which way would you go?
Fewer than 25% of students know how to perform a "reasonably well-executed search" of web information. This inforgraphic shares a few essential Google search tips and tricks.
U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords helped serve a Thanksgiving meal to service members and retirees at a military base in her hometown of Tucson, Ariz. She used only her left hand as she served, a sign that physical damage remains from the injuries she suffered when she was shot in January.
November 24, 2011 at 3:12 pm
we did this. all the kids are clark williams. calvin dropped the williams and uses just clark, the rest use just williams. imho, the best naming practice is to surname daughters with mom’s surname and sons with poppas. thus names would follow y and mitochrondrial dna.
The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerlyseemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, li…
China produces an enormous number of college graduates every year, and after graduation these young people are having a hard time finding their niche in the job market. Many of these under or unemployed recent graduates are forced to join the the ranks of the “ant-tribe,” cramming into impoverished …
Has anyone had success in finding information on relatives who emigrated to Amerika by contacting descendants of those left behind? Someone found my ggmother’s half brother’s grandchildren in Sweden and wonder how hopeful i could be that they preserved letters from Amerika? I have to write a letter since they don’t seem to have email, puzzled about what to ask exactly. Has anyone had this sort of contact back to Sweden?
November 24, 2011 at 12:34 pm
never too early to read and rearrange the furniture.
"Brinicle" is a clever portmanteau for an icy finger of death that forms naturally in the very cold seawater one finds around Earth’s poles. A crust of sea ice can form on top of this water, and that’s the first step to making a brinicle. Here’s how polar oceanographer Mark Brandon explained the pro…
November 23, 2011 at 9:33 pm
what! it’s a zombie tv show with lots of gore and people get upset about abortion!!!
Archaeologists in Jerusalem announced yesterday a new discovery that changes popular thinking about the building of the walls around the Temple Mount. It is not much of a surprise. We already knew …
November 23, 2011 at 1:24 pm
apparently she died this evening. her name will be associated with endosymbiotic theory.
I’m sad to report that Lynn Margulis died this evening. I was lucky enough to take two classes with her when I was an undergraduate at UMass; Environmental Evolution and a Symbiosis seminar. Al…
November 22, 2011 at 11:25 pm
new genealogy problem. in 1920 in philadelphia my gmom’s uncle’s family lives 2 doors down(2110,2114) from another mason family. the father immigrated from ireland in 1892. i can’t find any linkage but suspect they are same masons that richard mason b 1804 immigrated 1849 was from. obviously looking for my namesake.
November 22, 2011 at 11:14 pm
Richard Williamshow would you solve this problem? i’m out of clues.
It has lain hidden for nearly 70 years and looks like a building site. But this insignificant tunnel opening in the soft sand of western Poland represents one of the greatest examples of British wartime heroism.
Mural by El Mac. In the past few years the City of Los Angeles has painted over and buffed into oblivion more than 300 murals effectively destroying the city’s reputation as the mural capitol of the world. Some of the problems started in 1986, when the city was looking for a way to alleviate the …
Greece’s youth is facing staggering unemployment rates—and little prospect for their future. Nick Malkoutzis wonders what their future may hold. (Hint: Not much.)
Today we conclude our look at the recent book by Elaine Howard Ecklund Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think. The earlier installment are here: first, second, third and fourth. The boo…
Half a world away from home, I look into the mirror to see if the spy camera is visible. I am in Beijing, China, and have sewn a pinhole camera into the shoulder strap of my backpack. After catchin…
If your travel plans for Thanksgiving involve sitting behind the wheel for a few hours until you get to your destination, there are still a few things you should do before you leave to make sure that you get to your destination quickly and safely.
If you have guests coming in for the holidays and you don’t have a spare room, the couch and the living room are generally the de facto place to put them.
Burial in the United States is increasingly expensive, so some people have made final plans with thrift in mind. That’s where Minnesota woodworker Randy Schnobrich steps in. He teaches traditional coffin building over a three-day, $700 course. Many of the participants are building coffins for themse…
Alabama’s economy is suffering because of HB 56, the state’s draconian immigration law, as workers flee out of fear. State Sen. Scott Beason (R), who sponsored the anti-immigrant bill in the Alabama legislature, once called it a “jobs bill,” but the state’s immigration law is leaving entire industri…
A record number of Americans have fallen into poverty since the financial crisis sparked a deep recession in 2008, but that hasn’t stopped House and Senate Republicans from targeting the poor on their crusade to slash federal spending. In September, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R) declared that “the poo…
November 21, 2011 at 12:52 pm
November 21, 2011 at 10:07 am
file under oops. note line about using commercial software to analyze communication patterns
Current and former U.S. officials concede that CIA suffered difficult blow; sources say Lebanon informants were compromised by meeting CIA agents at a Beirut Pizza Hut.
On this week’s episode of Lifehacker, we’re getting ready for Thanksgiving. We’re planning out the big meal using Gantt charts, outsourcing the food preparation we can, making the most of our leftovers, and more.
Where we feature people and projects around the world committed to social justice, environmental sustainability, community building, and positive changes.
Culture | Arab | Anthony Shadid has a poignant piece up, … But There’s a Slim Hope in History, on the specter of extinction facing Arab Christianity in the wake of the Arab
Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, leaving law firms fairly resigned to training their hires how to actually practice law.
I think there’s a bit of a leap in your final paragraph. While we know a fair number of alleles that increase the risk substantially of certain diseases, we don’t know enough about the correlations of others with behavioural traits and abilities. People seem to forget that genotype is not phenotype …
Why doesn’t Britain make things any more? – Aditya Chakrabortty via The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/nov/16/why-britain-doesnt-make-things-manufacturing Aditya Chakrabortty…
We’ve previously covered larger rocket stoves designed to heat your home, but now we have a portable version of the highly-efficient wood stove that you can build with 4 soup cans, 1 larger #10 can, tin snips, and a bag of vermiculite thanks to YouTube user LDSPrepper.
If you routinely plan events, you may find that SignUpGenius can help make the execution of your plans easier. Using the webapp’s 5-step wizard you can create a variety of electronic sign-up sheets that you can email to potential attendees.
November 19, 2011 at 4:35 pm
many of the blogs i admire and read regularly are in San Francisco for Society for Biblical Literature. the rest are at http://skepticon.org/ *grin*
The official website for Skepticon IV – the Midwest’s largest skeptic event.
November 19, 2011 at 12:01 pm
i got my annual flu shot this morning. flu is a single negative sense rna virus. that much i remembered so i went reading to learn more about neg strand. found this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-sense, on the table labelled "Example with double-stranded DNA" are the terms i learned 30 years ago- watson and crick strands…. nice to see someone remembered their history *grin*. read carefully there will be a test on this material.
In molecular biology and genetics, sense is a concept used to compare the polarity of nucleic acid molecules, such as DNA or RNA, to other nucleic acid molecules. Depending on the context within molecular biology, sense may have slightly different meanings.
One of the biggest difficulties in understanding and acceptance of evolutionary biology is the eye. It isn’t just detractors who are trying to protect a sectarian viewpoint, it is genuinely curious people, smart people, who don’t get it because
November 18, 2011 at 1:12 pm
a continuing conversation. i’m surprised how important epistemology is, even in a basic discussion like this.
The multimillion dollar campaign features the personal stories of members who defy stereotyping.
November 18, 2011 at 9:09 am
i saw a neat chevy ad the other day, a couple of guys in a truck go out in the countryside. one keeps raising his phone looking for bars. until the end, in the middle of no where he finds NO bars-their intended destination. i can’t find it on youtube…rats. good context switching.
November 17, 2011 at 9:36 pm
small businesses run by our friends deserves our attention. have friends coming into town to ride in el tour? call them!
Okay Facebook…show your stuff! This silly post is intended to gauge what FB can do, and Jeremiah Inn would ask your help in expanding our "LIKES". Thank you for sharing with your friends, everyone! (We love our guests and their friends.)
A father uses the web to share memories with his daughter as she grows up in this video depiction. Music by: Ingrid Michaelson Song: "Sort Of" Album ‘Everybody’
November 17, 2011 at 8:56 pm
wow, can you imagine seeing your ancestor’s library activity like this?
Like many kids who grew up poor in the American hinterlands during the 19th century, Louis Bloom left few public traces. Born in Muncie, Ind. in 1879, he was the oldest child of a widowed mother who took in lodgers. City surveys, census forms, and his death certificate reveal that…
November 17, 2011 at 9:30 am
Richard Williamstoday’s must read essay…
November 17, 2011 at 9:34 am
missing word for the day. last year we were told the term for riding in el tour de tucson without paying the entry fee. now i’ve gone and forgotten it. HELP! it’s a general term like ghosting, google failed me …
There are plenty of ways to plan a trip, but few that offer up a listing of the sights and stores you’ll pass along the way. OnTheWay does just that, giving you not just an overview of the map, but a guide to what you’ll pass.
In air raid shelters and tunnels below Beijing, migrant workers, young graduates, and other workers who can’t afford Beijing’s steep housing costs have fashioned homes for themselves in spaces rented out by innovative entrepreneurs. As has been reported earlier this year, the Beijing government pla…
November 17, 2011 at 12:20 am
Brenda WiersmaReally makes me thankful for the palace I live in.
November 17, 2011 at 8:28 am
i broiled 5 large diced onions to make onion soup. glad we don’t live too close to the neighbors!!!
A blog about search, search skills, teaching search, learning how to search, learning how to use Google effectively, learning how to do research. It also covers a good deal of sensemaking and information foraging.
The Square credit card swiper plugs into the phone jacks of iPads and smart phones, enabling small business owners an affordable way to charge customer credit cards.
The first climate study to focus on variations in daily weather conditions has found that day-to-day weather has grown increasingly erratic and extreme, with significant fluctuations in sunshine and rainfall affecting more than a third of the planet.
Every successful modern e-gadget is a combination of components made by many makers, and it all begins with the story of how the transistor became the building block of modern machines
An ancient bone with a projectile point lodged within it appears to up-end – once and for all – a long-held theory of how the Americas were populated.
November 15, 2011 at 9:09 am
genetic genealogy is starting to pay off. alma had a 11, 4.1, 3.6, 3.3 centimorgan autosomal match at gedmatch and we found 3 lineages that intersected with his. ended up 6th cousins, of course it’s colonial new england genealogies…..’nuff said!
The banana was the first truly modern crop to get shipped all over the world. Today, the fruit’s primary variety is subject to extinction due to a slow-moving but deadly fungus, making it a powerful symbol of a global food supply that giveth and taketh away just as swiftly.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
November 12, 2011 at 6:38 am
a word for the day-you know that song you just can’t get out of your head? it’s an earworm.
November 12, 2011 at 6:11 am
WHAT WAS HE THINKING? like those who chopped down the last tree on Easter island. why!!??
William Temple Hornaday was one of the great conservationists of the 1880s. He had a deep passion for the American buffalo. That makes what he did when he found some of the last remaining buffalo improbable, strange and confusing.
The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, min
November 11, 2011 at 10:42 am
to the long line of Saunders who have served. and to those i recently found: MASON, HARRY J PVT USMC DATE OF BIRTH: 09/01/1899 DATE OF DEATH: 09/23/1966 BURIED AT: SECTION 53 SITE 3250 ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY, and
Henry J. Mason Side: Union Regiment State/Origin: Pennsylvania Regiment Name: 186 Pennsylvania Inf.
To all our military and veterans have a safe and wonderful day you have earned this. We wouldn’t have the freedoms we have without you. To my son Ryan I Love You, and to my father who was in Vietnam, I love You, and Miss you Dad. RIP.
November 11, 2011 at 10:12 am
Linda Critzer Salesthat is so cool, wish i had the patience to do that
But with the number 12, eleven captures an odd spot, linguistically. While all the other numbers (excluding zero to ten) seem to follow a formulaic pattern, these two — at first blush, at least — are outliers. In short, ”11? is not “oneteen” and for that matter, “12? is not “twoteen.” What is goin…
President Obama should negotiate with China to write off American debt held by China in exchange for an end to America’s defense arrangement with Taiwan.
….Today, we could use the term “Petraeusism” to mean “U.S military efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of U.S. military limitations.” Likewise, we could use the name “Naglandia” to describe Afghanistan, a place where, much like Ford had attempted to do in the Amazon, the U.S. has attempted t…
… as the prophet Madonna once sang. Okay, maybe you don’t think of her as exactly a prophet, but it’s true anyway. Life’s beginning is a deep mystery; life’s ongoing existence is a mystery (some…
Going to your local comic book store or bookstore and picking up a new comic book is a tried and true tradition, but if you don’t want to leave the house there are plenty of applications that help you read the latest releases right on your desktop in high resolution.
Over the past two weeks or so, there has been quite a bit of blog discussion over the question of Adam in light of evolution. I have kept up with various websites and other postings—not to mention comments on my own website.
Intriguing evidence of life-like corkscrew structures that form from inorganic substances in space hint at the possibility that life beyond earth may not necessarily use carbon-based molecules as its building blocks. They may also point to a possible new explanation…
<?p>This year has marked, I believe, the beginning of the end of the war between science and religion. Creationism cannot last. The New Atheists are now old (or <?a href="http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/guest_bloggers/5505/where_will_christopher_hitchens_soul_go_/">departed<?/a>). …
Xinhua announced the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in a two-sentence dispatch: Kim Jong Il, top leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of
"There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat."
Anthroplogy | Genghis Khan | Chinese Scientists Announce the First Complete Sequencing of Mongolian Genome:In this study, the DNA sample was from a male adult who belongs to the Mongolian â
We don’t do body counts — General Tommy Franks Last week the long war in Iraq came to an end. I have some things to say about that. The hapless victim of my harangue today will be Gary Kamiya, who wrote a bitter column called What if they ended a war and nobody cared? in Salon on December 16. Before…
December 18, 2011 at 10:02 am
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.American spent nine years and millions of dollars to fight a war with a nation that was not at war with it. 30,000 troops injured and 4500 killed plus 10,000 of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed or injured. All to avenge the death of 3000 Americans killed on 9/11/01.
On top of that America fights another war with another nation that isn’t even a nation. And repeats the same pattern of mistakes as it committed in Iraq.
America’s belief in its own "exceptionalism" has it behaving more like a criminal and a bully. The nation doesn’t pick on nations its own size but prefers to demonstrate its power by picking on nations that are weaker than itself.
The only answer that can save the world from America is for America to be shrunken down in size just as happened with the former Soviet Union.
Published on Friday, December 16, 2011 by CommonDreams.org by John Atcheson If you want to know why the middle class disappeared and where they went, look no further than your local Walmart. People walked in for the low prices, and…
Michael Patton has written a post arguing that inerrancy is not the linchpin of evangelicalism. This post should make me happy, and indeed I am glad that someone is making this claim. Further, Patton makes some very interesting points, including noting that we don’t throw anything else out completel…
December 18, 2011 at 12:40 am
i’ll have to read a book in 10 years to learn the truth…
by Gareth Porter Featured Writer Dandelion Salad crossposted at IPS Dec. 16, 2011 WASHINGTON, Dec 16, 2011 (IPS) – Defence Secretary Leon Panetta’s suggestion that the end of the U.S. troop…
The unemployment rate for veterans aged 20 to 24 has averaged 30 percent this year, in part because managers have difficulty translating military accomplishments to the civilian world.
– by Jeff Masters in a Wunderblog repost “The question is not whether sea ice loss is affecting the large-scale atmospheric circulation…. It’s how can it not?” That was the take-home message from Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, in her talk “Does Arctic Amplification Fuel Extreme Weather …
December 17, 2011 at 12:37 pm
important reading. how do people justify her thinking?
Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society….To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961
It’s a rarity for a religious outfit to make a clear, verifiable prediction, and when they do they always end up looking silly (see Unfulfilled religious predictions). Well, we’ve got a great pr…
Rutenberg, J., Cheng, S.-M. and Levin, M. (2002), Early embryonic expression of ion channels and pumps in chick and Xenopus development. Developmental Dynamics, 225: 469–484. doi: 10.1002/dvdy.10180
The talented bods at Bird Box Studios have made this fun animation, Singing Christmas Hedgehogs, where you can pick and dress a hedgehog to serenade you. How neat is that?
December 16, 2011 at 3:03 pm
cool, is only one permutation actually allowed to sing, i wonder?
The talented bods at Bird Box Studios have made this fun animation, Singing Christmas Hedgehogs, where you can pick and dress a hedgehog to serenade you. How neat is that?
An anonymous airline baggage handler has spilled the beans on just how poorly our luggage gets treated en route. He offers advice for making sure your stuff stays intact and safe, saying the least damaged suitcases tend to be four-wheeled "spinners." This is the explanation for how bags and their…..
A new study from Congress’ Joint Economic Committee (JEC) debunks the prevailing conservative notion that Unemployment Insurance (UI) dissuades people from looking for a job. “On the contrary,” the report finds, “beneficiaries of federal UI benefits have spent more time searching for work than those…
quote: While these big budget plotlines still make it to the screen, at some point in the last decade, people just stopped reading so much science fiction.
Michelle Meyer, the well-known housing analyst for BofA/ML, has some bad news: The housing crisis isn’t over. In fact, in her 2012 outlook piece, she says it’s "far from over" and that prices still…
As everyone in this country keeps blaming everyone else for our high unemployment rate, one assertion gets repeated so often that it is now regarded as fact: Rich people create jobs. Specifically,…
From world affairs to entertainment, business to fashion, crime to society, Vanity Fair is a cultural catalyst that drives the popular dialogue globally.
December 15, 2011 at 10:09 pm
Richard Williams“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are god.”
Richard Williamsquoted by John Sherriff—- About Mother Teresa: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.” Christopher Hitchens
More than 15,000 Czechs follow the faith of the Star Wars movies’ Jedi knights, official census data showed Thursday, while half of the country’s 10.5 million people declined to list any religion.
In an exclusive interview, an engineer working to unlock the secrets of the captured RQ-170 Sentinel says they exploited a known vulnerability and tricked the US drone into landing in Iran.
A few weeks—ok, months—ago I started writing on what I see in general when I look at today’s evangelical church in America. I called the series The Naked
A new study has identified a gene mutation that researchers estimate dates back to 11,600 B.C., making it the second oldest human disease mutation known. The mutation was described in people of Arabic, Turkish and Jewish ancestry. It causes a rare, inherited vitamin B12 deficiency. The mutation orig…
Studying abroad is one of the ten most important things we learned about college, but it can be expensive depending on where you go. Studies, however, say that studying abroad can really pay off for your post-college career and employability.
One night I had a wondrous dream, One set of footprints there was seen, The footprints of my precious Lord, But mine were not along the shore.
But then some strange prints appeared, And I asked the Lord, “What have we here?” Those prints are large and round and neat, “But Lord, they are too big for feet.”
“My child,” He said in somber tones, “For miles I carried you along. I challenged you to walk in faith, But you refused and made me wait.”
“You disobeyed, you would not grow, The walk of faith, you would not know, So I got tired, I got fed up, And there I dropped you on your butt.”
“Because in life, there comes a time, When one must fight, and one must climb, When one must rise and take a stand, Or leave their butt prints in the sand.”
PlanetOddity Choice Of The Day: Loading… var MarketGidDate = new Date(); document.write(”); Video of the day: // Maybe you will find the following articles interesting: Unique Handmade Russian Ring Vipula Athukorale Creates Amazing Butter-Sculptures The Amazing Oasis Of Crescent Lake These rings …
December 15, 2011 at 5:29 am
if you haven’t heard about the long now project, here’s an intro
Alvin Plantinga, who has led a movement of unapologetically Christian philosophers, argues that theism is compatible with science in his new book, “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.”
We are familiar with the way that creationists deny much of scientific reality, and some go so far as to insist that the earth is flat and also the center of the universe and solar system. But there are even some creationists who deny dinosaurs even existed!
It is, fellow conservatives, possible to be too conservative. And moving too far to the Right can be just as destructive as moving too far to the Left.
I am a third of the way through Harvard historian Niall Ferguson’s latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, and thought the principle question posed so interesting that it warrants reproduction below. Of course, we hope the link to Amazon above will induce sufficient click-throughs that P…
December 13, 2011 at 9:27 pm
excellent posting, i had read his initial link earlier, but his take on it is worth reading.
It is, fellow conservatives, possible to be too conservative. And moving too far to the Right can be just as destructive as moving too far to the Left.
December 13, 2011 at 9:15 pm
Aaron PeercyIs it me or did Ken Ham suddenly learn about patheos and realize there is no portal for lying fundamentalists?
A little-noticed tidbit in the ongoing European budget negotiations is Italy plans to ban the use of cash for transactions over 1,000 euros. Italy wants to cut down on tax evasion, but we should hope that other countries start to realize the enormous economic benefit of ditching cash. Already, a…
How’s this for easy money? The right wing talk show host has offered Newt Gingrich a cool $1 million… and all the GOP frontrunner has to do is drop out within three days.
December 13, 2011 at 7:06 am
one paycheck or one serious illness away from homelessness. most of us.
nice analysis, at least part of an answer, a shame that the political culture won’t be able to solve the problems-too divisive, too much pandering to moneyed interests
quote:To that end, there are many high-return investments we can make. Education is a crucial one—a highly educated population is a fundamental driver of economic growth. Support is needed for basic research. Government investment in earlier decades—for instance, to develop the Internet and biotechnology—helped fuel economic growth. Without investment in basic research, what will fuel the next spurt of innovation?
Re-examining the Great Depression, Joseph E. Stiglitz lays out the true economic challenge the U.S. faces now.
December 12, 2011 at 11:30 am
quote:Blackbird’s sail-prop-driven design quickly coalesced in Cavallaro’s mind. Imagining it, he realized that the crosswind-only caveat to sailing faster than the wind didn’t apply to Blackbird. The lift the propellers provided would pull the cart forward, with the wind. That forward motion would feed back into the system through the wheels, which would turn the prop even faster, creating even more lift, or, as it’s usually called vis-é-vis a propeller, thrust. The propeller—on its continuous rotational “tack”—would then simply screw itself through the zero wind.
Conservative columnist David Frum, who was speechwriter for former President George W. Bush, blasted Fox News on Sunday for creating an “alternative knowledge system.”
When we started developing recipes for outdoor cooking nearly everything for the first couple years were for the method called Freezer Bag Cooking or also known as FBC. When asked "What is FBC?" the answer is it is making your own meals, just the way you want.
I’m a 30-year-old writer who works from home and thrives on the neat things you can do with technology. I’ve written books about smartphones and online social networks, and I’m reading things all day. But perhaps the most idea-generating part of my workweek is attending a knitting circle. I’m pretty…
Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch finally got their way in 2011. After their decades of funding the American Legislative Exchange Council, the collaboration between multinational corporations and conservative state legislators, the project began finally to yield the intended result. ? For …
December 11, 2011 at 10:08 am
i’d like a cartoon. scene front of church with immersion baptistry. a labelled box on side of it-for emergency use only, inside are two snorkels, one small labelled presbyterian, one large labelled baptist.
December 10, 2011 at 8:54 pm
The gate is now operating. Just need to do the tree
A young man left $4.85 in his TCF Bank account. TCF assessed him a $9.95 "maintenance fee" for not having enough money in his account. Then they charged him for being overdrawn by $5.10 (ten cents more than he was allowed by their rules). In less than two weeks, they’d assessed so many fees and pena…
Carl Flygare says: Saint Augustine (354 – 430 CE) in "The Literal Meaning of Genesis" (trans John Hammond Taylor) provided excellent advice that author Terry Mortenson recklessly ignored: "Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other…
Richard Williamsi decided if i ever see the name carl flygare reply to a message of mine, i will surrender immediately, i will be severely outclassed. i’m still laughing and reading lines from his comments to alma!!!
December 10, 2011 at 8:23 am
my first genetic genealogy match into ireland, the families live 49km apart in 1820-1840 co. galway, we might be able to solve this one—of course it’s surname kelly!!! nice big 12cM shared segment. don’t you just love mysteries???
December 9, 2011 at 10:45 pm
1 person likes this
Richard Williamsthis has been a good week on the genealogy research front. found matilda fulton and annie fisher-sarah strickler, all maiden names. nice detective work. next week concentrate on genetics. that finishes 5 generations for every pedigree lineage but the ever elusive harry f williams.
December 10, 2011 at 6:43 pm
word for the day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierogi is it right to call they pogies? or is that something else entirely? good for dinner anyway.
Pierogi (Polish pronunciation: [pj??r???i]; also spelled perogi, pierogy, perogy, pierógi, pyrohy, or pyrogy) are dumplings of unleavened dough – first boiled, then they are baked or fried usually in butter with onions – traditionally stuffed with potato filling, sauerkraut, ground meat, cheese, or …
As the economy relegates social issues to the back-burner, Religious Right leaders are baptizing the Tea Party’s agenda of punishing the vulnerable in order to further enrich the wealthiest Americans. Toward this end, Tony Perkins wrote a post on CNN’s Belief Blog this week arguing that "Jesus was …
If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write only for yourself you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minu…
There is a fascinating new study coming out of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Its titled “$29,000,000,000,000: A Detailed Look at the Fed’s
By Yu Huapeng?????E.O/Worldcrunch BEIJING – The Americans are stirring up trouble again. The air quality apparatus they installed at their Embassy before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is showing alarming measurements of Beijing’s air quality. And what is worse is that they are publishing the fi…
Eric Schwitzgebel has a fascinating post about how little influence baby boomers have had in philosophy. He uses a nice objective measure; looking at which philosophers are most cited in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. He finds that of the 25 most cited philosophers, 15 were born between 1…
December 8, 2011 at 5:36 pm
i’m thinking of the pilot of the drone sitting in nevada. how are you going to tell your boss you lost it? that can’t look good on the old resume-1st US drone pilot to get hijacked.
Well, this is awkward. The state-sponsored Iranian news network Press TV reported Thursday that a special “electronic warfare unit” within Iran’s military had gained remote control of a U.S. drone and landed it after it had flown over 100 miles into their airspace. – 2011/12/08
December 8, 2011 at 3:41 pm
some reasons why economic inequality is morally and politically bad
Bruce Judson and I talked about his work before the financial crisis that examined the startling rise of income inequality in the U.S., how it can lead to social unrest and instability, and what course we must take to correct these trends.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that a botched experiment by the good folks from the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters show darn near took out an entire neighborhood in Dublin, California earlier this week. The close call occurred on Tuesday, when the Mythbusters crew fired a homemade cannon towar…
UCSD graduate Bruce Beutler is in Sweden, where he will give his Nobel Prize lecture on Wednesday. He’ll formally receive the Nobel in physiology or medicine on Saturday in Oslo.
December 7, 2011 at 5:36 pm
John SherriffCongrats. I would be embarrassed if it was the Nobel Peace prize or Nobel prize in Economics which are the medal of honor for the far left. But the awards in the sciences tend to be well earned.
SAN ANTONIO — A Texas woman who for months was unable to qualify for food stamps pulled a gun in a state welfare office and staged a seven-hour standoff with police that ended with her shooting her two children before killing herself, officials said Tuesday. The children, a 10-year-old boy and…
"If we had 10 pounds less, the whale would not have sunk," said Eddie Kisfaludy, San Diego-based operations manager for Virgin Oceanic, the organization that coordinated the creature’s burial at sea.
Forget charter schools and grade-by-grade testing. It’s time to look at the best-performing countries and pragmatically adapt their solutions.
December 6, 2011 at 3:13 pm
Julian Ross Hudson Jr.America’s self assured notion that "it" is God’s gift to the world is actually destroying it. When you get so convinced that "you" are special and deserving of certain priviliges then you lose the capacity to examine yourself. What America needs is some humility but that will never be.
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could tri…
Many accidents could be avoided if everyone had their car side and rearview mirrors positioned correctly, eliminating blind spots and making it easier to change lanes quickly.
December 6, 2011 at 10:58 am
Brenda Wiersmavery interesting. I think I have been doing it wrong.
December 7, 2011 at 10:12 am
one of my favorite academic Christian bloggers-James McGrath has come to Ken Ham’s attention for the SECOND time. pretty cool. shame it revolves around AiG’s false distinction between operational and historical science. i’d rather the discussion was more substantive. i wonder how many staff KH has reading things online? i wonder how many of them get bumped up to KH? but he has to be admired for his consistent one race stand. we could have a prominent Christian preaching the Hammatic curse as in the antebellum South. there is progress in theology!
Blog | Politics | Over the past few days the American media as reacted with some consternation at the fact that it seems likely that Islamist political forces will probably contr
I admit to being a soft perspectivalist, but I also admit to being uncomfortable with it. My mind is wired to think rationally, to look at other people who radically disagree with what I see clearly as either ignorant (even if only in the sense of not seeing some evidence I see) or irrational (even …
The Bethlem Royal Hospital in London became infamous in the 1600′s in regards to the inhumane and cruel treatment of its patients as revealed by psychiatri
New York City’s Department of Transportation has taken an artful approach to safety: colorful traffic signs written in haiku. "Poetry has a lot of power," says artist John Morse. "The idea is to bring something to the streetscape that might catch someone’s eye."
December 3, 2011 at 8:11 am
more on the fermi pardox. quote: Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems.
A new paper on the Fermi paradox only adds to the mystery: are we alone?
December 3, 2011 at 6:26 am
in online discussions i see the argument that people aren’t willing to die for lies as an example of why things people believe in strongly are true truth. truth is not dependent upon or is it’s truth value reflective of people’s sincerity or how strongly they defend their beliefs. i’ll use this example in the future, maybe in a few minutes even….;-)
by John Lawrence Greenspan’s Fraud is the title of a book by Dr. Ravi Batra. In light of what’s currently happening in Washington regarding the extension of the payroll tax cut, it is prescient. Greenspan engineered an increase in the…
December 2, 2011 at 5:49 pm
is it true he said they use FS to buy the gas to drive to hawaii?
As GOP contender Newt Gingrich rides an unexpected surge in the polls, he’s drawing a lot of criticism for his comments deriding poor children for not working and suggesting they should take up janitorial positions at their own schools. Attacking poor Americans who need government aid is a favorite …
Institute serves as international investigation agency helping hundreds of young people from the former Soviet Union prove their Jewishness to the rabbinic courts.
December 2, 2011 at 4:31 pm
i always appreciate someone who disagrees being able to so well summarize the others position. that is the case here, he doesn’t like framework for Gen 1 but gives an example summary of it. nice.
If the creation account really was written as a simple poem about God’s power and authority, it would be rather foolish to force historical accuracy on it. But on what basis should it be interpreted as poetry? It is commonly argued that there are many parallels between the first group of three cre…
A small Pike County church has voted not to accept interracial couples as members or let them take part in some worship activities.
November 30, 2011 at 9:43 pm
Caitlin Coberlypuhleeeeeeeeeaaase! How totally archaic of them. I mean, how 1950′s. What, ahven’t they heard? Blacks are people too…….or did they miss the civil war?
On the 28th of November, the Mail Online reported that students in a medical course are boycotting certain parts of the syllabus because the views presented clash with some of the beliefs upheld by the Koran. These classes were teaching Darwinian evolution, a key part in any biology-based study. The…
Inbreeding is where cousins and other close relatives have children together. Most cultures have strong taboos against it, primarily because of the increased risk of birth defects.
November 30, 2011 at 7:32 pm
did you know that the mayans had a zero? this most important math discovered at least twice.
November 30, 2011 at 4:19 pm
university house is damaged and needs to be repaired?
SAN DIEGO — Two ancient skeletons uncovered in 1976 on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, during construction at the home of a University of California
November 30, 2011 at 3:47 pm
Richard Williamsif these are a young man 17-20 and a woman ~40, i heard a lecture soon after they were discovered. the male has inner ear growths common to surfers because of the cold water. that is how they learned he was a driver. can you imagine living on the coast 5Kya?? no freeway traffic or noise
It’s a brazen show of hypocrisy: while low-income families pay up to a 10% sales tax on necessities, wealthy investors who nearly crashed our economy pay ZERO sales tax on their financial purchases.
All technologies have a “good and helpful” aspect and they also have a harmful and debilitating effect. I like chairs, which seem utterly neutral or po…
November 30, 2011 at 12:16 pm
it’s this knid of thoughtful analysis that is needed
The British sociologist TH Marshall famously argued that the three centuries since the enlightenment had seen the respective advance of three levels of rights:
Leading experts explain how human-caused warming exacerbate the drought “With no previous points so dry it’s hard to say exactly what history would say about a summer such as this one. Except that this summer is way beyond the previous envelope of summer temperature and precipitation.” — Texas Stat…
Yesterday, a Deutsche Bank branch in Atlanta had requested the eviction of Vita Lee, a 103-year-old Atlanta woman, and her 83-year-old daughter. Both were terrified of being removed from their home of 53 years, and had no idea where they’d go next. But when the movers hired by the bank and police we…
ancestry.com is continuing work on dna matches at gedmatch.com
M143852 V3 T G G L F A 8.7 8.7 6.6 X 0 0 0 newplanet@
M210004 V3 T G L F A 12.9 7.4 7.1 X 0 0 0 newplanet@
Comparing Kit M191450 (richard williams) and M143852 (*Mom of Pink Plaid)
Chr Start Location End Location Centimorgans (cM) SNPs
21 42,018,817 45,746,864 8.7 1,891
Comparing Kit M191450 (richard williams) and M210004 (*Pink Plaid)
Chr Start Location End Location Centimorgans (cM) SNPs
12 7,332,900 9,981,548 5.5 830
Chr Start Location End Location Centimorgans (cM) SNPs
21 42,012,253 45,087,967 7.4 1,617
they have a cousin lou lou to match at 23andme and then 3 way match with robert alan green
there is a note on ancestry from wil wheeler, robert green’s cousin to address as well.
paper trail connecting the 2 ladies and green is on my ancestry tree. where i fit in is unclear.
i’m a perry mason addict. have been forever.
they are replaying them twice a day on metv. 10 am and 11:30pm, pretty much define my day.
today is they showed his bill $1705.00
case of the laughing lady.
reminds me of the time delia and perry are in a fancy restaurant and perry remarks that no 10 cent cup of coffee is worth a dollar.
there were 9-11 truther protestors on the corner yesterday(9-11) with signs like “explosives found on ground zero” “wtc a govt coverup” etc.
which prompts me to think about exactly how we differ.
there is, in my mind, a class of people included with these: geocentrics, flat earthers, anti-vaccinators, young earth creationists, obama birthers, global warming deniers, the sort of people who i immediately suspect are either ignorant, stupid or evil. if only they were educated on the issues, or were a little bit smarter, or had a change of heart, then they would see the issues as i see them.
but this isn’t the problem at all.
the issue is epistemic, what we believe convincing, persuasive, factual differs.
it isn’t different facts necessarily, or different reasoning ability, or even different consciousness/worldview but rather what comes to us as having authority to command that we accept an issue-including: facts, theory, and conclusions ie the ontology and epistemology as personally persuasive and change our minds as a result.
interesting issue. what does it take for me to change my mind on? what do i find persuasive? why are some people convincing?
quote: Christians need to recognize the inseparable connection between New Atheism and the belief in Darwinian evolutionary theory. It surprises many Christians to understand that it is relatively easy to debunk evolution scientifically. The simple fact is that the data in the natural world fits the literal, historical Genesis account perfectly. The evidence for Biblical special creation (not merely so-called “intelligent design”) abounds.1
We also need to understand that atheistic evolution has a rather poorly-kept secret.
Atheistic evolutionists cannot cite a single genetic example to support their case for molecules-to-man evolution via mutation and natural selection. Scientists — creationist or evolutionist — universally understand that such evolution requires the addition of information to DNA. But they also understand that natural selection and mutations always mean the loss of DNA information, never an increase.
reply:
it is a shame when christians argue such patently false nonsense.
there are a number of genes created from retroviral insertations, syncytin is a good example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERVWE1
then there is gene duplication, the best example is the various hemogloblins or blood factors in clotting cascade.
anyhow.
what garbage.
unbecoming anyone claiming to be a christian period.
i’m sending their newsletter straight to trash, where it has earned it’s place with stuff like this
i’m confused, maybe julian can help
watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJGAs2KwoWk
thinking about just one point.
individual income is increasing.
household income is steady.
one guy says this means wage repression.
the other guy says it is decreasing size of households.
as household size approaches 1, the household income approaches individual income, that much is clear.
but it will have 2 very different kinds of households, those with 1 income earner, and those with more than 1, for simplicity’s sake, say 2.
so look at 2 families both with 1 kid. in 1 the mom works, in the other she doesn’t.
assume everyone working makes $X.
family 1: makes $2x, 2: $1X. average $1.5X
average individual income, in family 1: $2/3X, 2:$1/3X average $1/2X
which agrees with $1.5X/3
now, how to explain individual income rising, but family steady???
family income is (#workers x $income)/#members
the only two ways for $income to be rising and family income steady is for #workers decreasing or #members increasing, not decreasing family size as the speaker says. that would yield a family income growing faster than individual as % of multiple workers in family increases.
i’ll bet the problem lies with the fact that income distribution is not a bell curve but an L-curve.
i should find income by quintile, this would show non-bell curve issues as the top and bottom quintiles would have different changing averages that evened out looking at all the data together.
say there are two types of families.
80% 1 worker, 2 kids.
20% 2 workers. no kids.
same $X salary for everyone.
what does it do to the numbers above?
family 1: still makes $2x, 2: $1X. apparent average $1.5X
except that it needs to be weighed as to % population in each type of family:
$2X x .2 + 1X x .8=1.2X
so average family income has gone down from 1.5X.
but average individual income, in family 1: $1X, 2:$1/4X
1X*.2+.25X*.8=.4X
so individual income dropped as well.
because 60% of 2-earner families became 1 earner.
so increase wages for 2 earner households.
family 1: each makes $2X, $4X family avg=4X * .2 + 1X * .8=1.6X
individual: 2X*.2+.25X*.8=.6X
so what is the big problem? total wages paid needs to be a constant over all the various societies.
so first example has 4 adults, 2 kids, we kept that constant, but moving one kid.
the second example decreased total wages by firing 30% of working moms.
third example tried to compensate by paying some people more.
so, set total wages to 100. set total people to 60.
first example. 30 out of 60 people working. 20 families. half 2 earners. so each make 3 1/3X.
second example. 16 1-earner, 4-2 earner. 24 workers. 25/6X each
third:25/8X for 1 earner, 25/4X for 2 earners.
first:
family 1: 2 earners. make 6 2/3X.
2: 3 1/3X so avg family is 5, what expected from 100$/20 families
second example:
family 1: $2*25/6 x .2 + 1*25/6 x .8=5
julian sent me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
Your response just further proves my premise that both sides of this issue are coming at this with preconceived ideas. You have chosen to put your faith in the scientific work of fallible human beings over the clear testimony of the Scriptures.
what is interesting about this line of reasoning is the fundamental assumption that we can know Scripture and be confident in our understanding of it in a very different way than the way we know things about the world. It is as if we have unmediated direct without-being-contaminated-by-our-humanness to Scripture (literal truth) and that we have to go through all these intermediaries (unbelieving scientists) in order to see the world.
This appears to be a flawed way of looking at the issues. i’d propose rather that there is a parallel between knowledge of Scripture and knowledge of the world (the old analogy of the two books of God). I understand Scripture through the medium of culture, history, etc. of my interpretative community analogously how i understand the world through the communities of science that investigate it. I am not in direct contact with some knowledge of Scripture and in only indirect contact with the world, i am in indirect mediated contact with both the words of Scripture and the data of the world, neither are brute facts but arrive to my mind embedded in a cultural matrix from the various communities i am a part of.
This demand for literal truth from Scripture unmediated by anything or anyone is an element of the modern fundamentalist american church, i think derived from the frontier experience that results in a modern claim of democracy over elitism. it is so natural for us to claim that scientists are biased and that the common man-me or people like me are closer to the truth because we haven’t studied the issues and therefore are wiser in our natural naiveté.
lhs replied in part with
“You have appealed to me with human reason and I by the infallible God breathed Word.”
i struggle to understand why lhs doesn’t seem to under that he appeals not to some abstract Scripture but rather to his interpretation of what those words mean. he has conflated the words of Scripture with how those words appear to him with meaningfulness inside his consciousness. the meaning of any word, like alone something as complex as any of the books of the Bible, does not exist as some abstraction hovering above the text, ripe to be swallowed by anyone merely glancing at that word. but rather it is embedded in two human communities, the writer’s and the reader’s.
he is not defending the very word of God but his interpretation of those words, or better yet his community of interpretation’s understanding of what those words meaning.
even if the original text is the very words of God, as soon as he reads them, human reasoning, human history, human hermeneutics as intervened between his mind and those words. he is in the exact same place as anyone looking at science is, our reasoning about the things before our eyes.
to do otherwise is to claim that those thoughts inside his head about those words are themselves the very same meanings as are in God’s mind, a much stronger claim than the words are inspired, but that the very meaning arising in his mind when reading is itself inspired and the very word of God. an awkward claim at best, given the divisiveness of the Bible. all who make such claims can’t be right for they say the word means often opposite things.
anyhow, i don’t understand how someone can claim to be arguing the very word of God is not their interpretation but literally the very words in the mind of God without human reasoning.
this unlevel playing field.
they are speaking the very literal truth of the word of God and their opponents, us, are merely relying on the wisdom of man. it might be a good way to win an argument but it really isn’t a way to learn something.
“In other words, Peter Enns is the authority, and this “biblical scholar” has chosen to view evidences through the thoroughly-discredited lens of the Darwinian view of human origins, rather than take the God he claims to serve at His Word. Evolutionists are constantly replacing their theories with “better ones” as Biblical creationists (and even their own evolutionist colleagues) punch gaping holes in existing models. But each iteration takes them stubbornly farther from the truth and deeper into sheer speculation.”
“The question, then, is this: Since we are all looking at the same body of evidence, which interpretation of that evidence, based on which set of presuppositions, truly makes sense of it? We at TeachingtheWord are convinced that the Genesis account, which says that God created a perfect universe, out of nothing, in six literal and contiguous days, is the only one that makes sense of the evidence. It is the only one that explains how the universe and mankind originated, and how they came to be in their present condition.”
excuse me, *waving hand madly*, how can you be so wrong?
look at the position- no death before the fall, for a moment. if it is true, then the promise of a punishment of death to adam for disobedience makes no sense, he didn’t know what death was to be afraid of it. but neither he nor eve died when they ate, so immediate physical death is not the punishment. the position of the tree of life makes no sense as a potential reward for obedience if they all ready would live forever at their creation,. no death before the fall is inconsistent with the rest of gen 1-3. i posted to http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Monergism-Books/15086969948 1. the promise of death as a punishment only makes sense if they knew what death was. otherwise it is not only incoherent but useless as a deterrent. what father would promise to gorf is child without the child knowing anything about gorf? 2. adam and eve did not die that day. hence the workaround of spiritual death, if so then why is no physical death before the fall an idea, if anything it ought to be no spiritual death. or no human spirit to die before adam’s creation. 3.the tree of life only makes sense if adam and eve created mortal and eternal life offered as a reward for obedience.
is death a singular thing?is the death of a human being the same thing as the death of a dog, or the death of a cell? neither adam or eve died the day they sinned, both lived long lives. immediate physical death did not occur, not at the time of disobedience, nor the time of God’s curse upon them, nor when they were cast out of the garden.in both romans and genesis, the death spoken of is human death as the immediate thing and the separation from God as the ultimate meaning of what death is. death is not a singular thing, human death is separation of body and soul, this is the meaning of God’s breathing into adam his spirit which then made a whole man.it has nothing to do with the death of animals or plants or even of adam’s cells, it is death as the breaking of man into his constituent parts, the return of the body to the earth and the return of the soul to God for judgement. re: The idea that physical death can be separated from spiritual death is a Greek (not Hebrew) view of the human person, as if Spirit and Matter were antithetical to each other. The Hebrew (biblical) view of man is a unity of the person. our theological notions are not derived exclusively from an ancient hebraic worldview, but rather are the result of combining the old testament as seen through the eyes of the new. which is an amalgam of 1st C temple Judaism and greek thought. our understanding of the bible is colored/modified further by 20 centuries of history of interpretation of those Scriptures. it is a red herring to argue that only ancient hebraic thought of genesis is allowed to shape “the christian worldview”, for neither you nor i have any access to what moses believed except through the lens of history and our own culture. there simply is no privileged position from which you can argue that this is “The Hebrew View” objectively separated from all that has happened since, as if you could directly observe the mind of moses, even if you spoke ancient hebrew. the best we can do is argue that these are the various ways our tradition up to our time has interpreted such words as death.
arguing with a subculture. we are all part of different communities. the yecists are a subculture within modern american conservative christianity. their arguments are similiar, their logic persuasive only to the choir who already accept a significant amount of their tradition. is their really a way to discuss things with them that will get through this shell???
monergism deleted the discussion.
something is very wrong with such an attitude.
i can still get their pieces from email
“Richard. So then, you are affirming that God created the evil of death as part of the original creation? The last enemy to be destroyed is death…” both physical and spiritual. When people do evil in the Old & New Testament the punishment is physical death ALWAYS, either by sacrifice or their own death. In other words, physical death is part of the punishment for sin. Therefore Physical death is considered an evil, not part of the original creation. Jesus Christ suffered under the wrath of God for us and part of that was ACTUAL physical death. Jesus was the second ADAM… so obviously there is a direct connection here. “we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” I would therefore put forth that your idea may be treading on very dangerous ground theologically.”"
“The idea that physical death can be separated from spiritual death is a Greek (not Hebrew) view of the human person, as if Spirit and Matter were antithetical to each other. The Hebrew (biblical) view of man is a unity of the person. ”
“Death in Adam, Life in Christ
12Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned— 13for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. 14Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.
15But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. 16And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. 17For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.
18Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. 19For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. 20Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, 21so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
i’m glad i usually blog here what i react to other places.
“Pity the man who can spell a word only one way.” “I never met a man so narrow that he can spell a word in only one way.”
i just finished my first pass through, genetic entropy and the mystery of genome, as is my practice with significant reading, i’ll read it again in a few days.
what sticks now in my mind, is how mental models can mislead us. certainly the model of mendel’s library where dna is the letters in a book, the organism is a common and useful one. but it’s commonality hides a real problem, it doesn’t do justice to the system it’s trying to explain.
biological systems are complex, nucleotides, dna sequences, genes, operons, complexes, chromosomes, nucleus, cell, tissue, organ, individual, group, species, ecological niche, world. To boil it down to letters and a book, oversimplify to the point of potential confusion.
look at just the protein coding sequences for a moment. a functional protein can be encoded by any number of sequences, how many variants of alpha hemoglobulin are there? a better analogy is that various words, or even words in various languages code for similar meanings, the meanings being the proteins. it is the usefulness of that nucleotides sequences as a functional protein that really matters, not the exact sequence of letters, several to many alleles exist for every gene. simply put, words are far too constraining a symbol for the dna, it is much more like all the synonyms in many latin alphabet languages, the letters are nucleotides, the words various alleles and the meaning is the protein’s functional shape. the meaning of a sentence is the protein complex with lots of subunits like a ribosome. the cell is a book, written in thousands of different languages but still doing the necessary things to be alive. libraries are organisms, made up of different collections of books.
another problem with the book is that distinction that of selection only at organism level and mutation only at the nucleotide. in fact, the fundamental level of selection is the topic of a big argument in evolutionary theory. there is selection at the level of error correction on the dna backbone(which strand is canonical) at the level of protein analogs, there is competition and selection at the level of both sperm and viability of fertilized egg(most fertilized eggs do not reach gastrulation, some lethal developmental mutation kills them, as a prof once joked, our first and most important exam). selection appears to happen on any number of levels.
mutation happens at several levels(epigenetic) as well, not only the dna backbone, but the only one that matters is at the functional level, ie protein for those sequences that code for it. if the protein works, if the meaning of the word is close, the the mutation is neutral, it is only with a functional change that a mutation is significant, or really can be said to have even occurred. this is why most mutations are silent.
Modern evangelicalism’s doctrine of inerrancy is a recent accommodation to the scientific worldview that began with the Renaissance, it is a combination of Luther’s doctrine of the primacy of the literal and an epistemology of scientism that defacto asserts that the only valid knowledge is achieved by historical and scientific methods. Essentially we believe that mythos can not give us valid knowledge, therefore the Scriptures must be interpreted via logos in order to be true. Genesis can not be true unless it is historically and scientifically accurate, this is the idea at the heart of inerrancy. The problem, more than the fact that it means we interpret Scripture as fundamentally addressed to our culture’s interests and dominant ideology, is how unconsciously and firmly we believe/assume these things without ever examining them.
after reading more from his blog via the links i reread the entry. i was wrong, he is not saying what i at first thought.
he is asking for a hermeneutic (bibliology) re-examination on the part of creationist literalists.
In both the early church and rabbinic Judaism, allegory and other not-literal methods of Biblical interpretation dominated(4-fold way), it wasn’t until Luther that the literal gained even a preference, and not until Newton that most people assumed the superiority of scientific and historical epistemology. and modified their hermeneutics to reflect these assumptions.
Now most modern people will consider this a good and necessary progressive development, the ideology of progress being one of the pillars of our worldview. It maybe that God wants for us to see the Scriptures in a primarily scientific rather than literary(the chief competitor) viewpoint , but to do so as an unconscious default position due to the prevailing assumptions of our age is wrong. It is necessary to chose not to simply assume.
The Creation or Evolution Debate: A Vital Issue for Today’s Church
By Anthony R. Dallison
I appreciate the invitation to be here this evening as one of the two speakers on this important and vital issue regarding the Creation/Evolution debate, a subject which is not only a vital one for the Church in the 21st Century but is coming increasingly to the fore even in scientific circles as more and more ‘honest’ scientists and evolutionists are being faced with the facts of evolution’s inadequacy to explain the origin of the universe and of all animate life within it.
>>>>there is NO scientific debate about the fundamental features of evolutionary theory.
TOE has nothing to do with origin of universe, that is cosmology, or the origin of life, that is abiogenesis.
the toe is not only inadequate it is irrelevant in these fields.
the shame is that he is so very wrong about the science. knowing theology does not make you capable in the exposition of scientific theory. just as dawkins is an incompetent philosopher when he makes pronouncements outside of his field of scientific expertise.
there is an excellent essay at http://www.biologos.org/uploads/projects/Keller_white_paper.pdf where he makes the crucial distinction between evolution as a biological scientific theory and evolution as a philosophic theory of everything.
dallison makes the fatal error of bouncing between the two, as in—-
“the facts of evolution’s inadequacy to explain the origin of the universe and of all animate life within it.”
cosmology explains the origin of the universe, and abiogenesis the origin of life, neither have anything to do with evolution.
Let me begin by reminding you of the well-known words of Genesis 1:1, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. This often memorized opening verse of the Book of Genesis has been the answer, from the beginning of recorded history until recent times, to man’s question ‘How did the cosmos begin?’ But today, in an age of scepticism and unbelief which has inherited the rationalistic criticism of the Bible from way back in the nineteenth century along with the so-called ‘indubitable findings’ of modern science, can we say that statement is still relevant in this computer space-age? Is this a valid and believable account of our origins?
>>>this assumes that it is God’s purpose and desire to present a modern historical and scientific description of cosmic origins in gen 1. if not then we are merely reading our own modern concerns INTO scripture. it is my preference to read scripture as God intended it, for us but not to us, but rather to it’s original hearers. otherwise we deny the perspicuity of the word.
One thing at least can be said about this opening verse of the Bible, even by its enemies and detractors: it relates time, space and matter in a stunning economy of words, all the more remarkable for the fact that these three most basic entities are not mutually exclusive. (That is to say, no one entity can exist without the other two). Taken quite literally, the statement offers the reader a straightforward explanation for the origin of the universe and all that it contains, making no apology for the fact that the account involves supernatural creation ex nihilo, creation of something from nothing.
We are probably all aware that until the beginning of the 19th Century, the mainstream Christian Church had generally accepted the biblical account of creation as literal and historical fact, those who questioned the account being pretty much on the fringes.
>>>>no, up to the reformation the 4-fold path was the way to interpret Scripture. the literal as primary begins with Luther. in fact, the literal was the least significant method of interpretation. all was allegory before luther.
However, with the rapid development of the sciences and scientific enquiry in the nineteenth century, and particularly with the rise to notoriety of men like the geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875) – whose book Principles of Geology espoused the age of the earth being not thousands but millions of years in age – and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) who published his On the Origin of Species in 1859 and his Descent of Man later, in 1871, the climate began rapidly to change. Previously, it had been generally accepted that the fossil record had been laid down rapidly in the sedimentary rock formations as a result of the great universal catastrophic Flood (recorded in Genesis 6-9), that the earth itself was of a relatively young age, and that the creation of the universe, plant and animal life (including man) had taken place as recorded literally in Genesis chapter one. But now, in the light of Lyell’s teaching based on the millions of years required for the fossil record, and following Darwin’s famous sea voyage to the Galapagos Islands (1831-1836) on board HMS Beagle (where he assumed that the micro evolution he observed there, i.e. changes within certain species of animal/plant life to adapt to their own unique environment, could be transferred to the principle of macro evolution, i.e. changes from one actual species into another and higher form of species), things began rapidly to change. Evolutionary theory was about to become respectable and to be embraced almost universally, sadly even in great sections of the professing Christian Church.
>>>and it was christians trying to show a universal flood that discovered that it did not occur.
re:
we have an eye witness to creation. before moses, I AM. should be enough proof for anyone.
as a sinner, i constantly am aware that i wish to justify my a priori beliefs by reading them back into Scripture and hence to justify them. this i often do by assuming God wrote directly to me in my time and with it’s big questions in mind, rather than for me with those first hearers as the Word’s immediate audience.
the scriptures are FOR me, but not addressed TO me, it is not God’s purpose to answer modern scientific or historical questions but rather address spiritual questions in the language and with the worldview of it’s original audience in mind.
as a result, i am cautious of reading genesis 1-3 with my modern science’s questions of how and what foremost in my mind. rather than to see it as a polemic against the neighborhood gods and their cosmogony.
>>>>re:
simply, do you believe in creation or evolution?
what is the difference(if any) between belief and knowledge?
the best definition i am aware of, of knowledge is “justified true belief” which would imply that (just plain) belief is something you have inadequate justification to call knowledge, not that you have evidence that it is not true(thus it ought to be false), but rather insufficient evidence to declare it justified.
in any case, nothing i’ve experienced in studying epistemology has ever claimed the label “simply”.
i believe God created the universe that makes me a supernatural (hence dualistic) creationist.
i know that the theory of evolution is an adequate scientific explanation for the diversity of life we see around us and forms a necessary and sufficient explanatory framework for investigating living creatures, which i guess means i’m an evolutionary supernatural creationist.
>>>>
re:
we have an eye witness to creation. before moses, I AM. should be enough proof for anyone.
as a sinner, i constantly am aware that i wish to justify my a priori beliefs by reading them back into Scripture and hence to justify them. this i often do by assuming God wrote directly to me in my time and with it’s big questions in mind, rather than for me with those first hearers as the Word’s immediate audience and their concerns.
the scriptures are FOR me, but not addressed TO me, it is not God’s purpose to answer modern scientific or historical questions but rather address spiritual questions in the language and with the worldview of it’s original audience in mind.
as a result, i am cautious of reading genesis 1-3 with my modern science’s questions of how and what foremost in my mind.
rather than to see it as a polemic against the neighborhood gods and their cosmogony.
So, we have come ourselves to the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. And, somewhat ironically, as some of you will also be aware here tonight, this year happens to be the 400th anniversary of the birth of the great Genevan Reformer, John Calvin in 1509. John Calvin would have been aghast to see how radically great sections of the Protestant Church have abandoned the biblical teaching on creation and adopted either wholesale, or with supposed modifications, the evolutionary hypothesis with all of its unscientific bases and its undermining of the authority, inspiration and perspicuity of the Scriptures of God’s Word.
>>>Calvin gives us both accommodation and a high view of god’s revelation in nature.
So much by way of introduction this evening. I want to do four things in this paper, time permitting: (1) To briefly outline the teaching and assumptions of the evolutionary hypothesis, pointing out as I do so its inadequacies. (I believe that Alastair Matthews will be dealing more fully here in his treatment), (2) To outline the attempts of Bible-believing Christians to compromise the biblical account of creation with the evolutionary hypothesis, (3) To focus attention on the biblical account of creation in Genesis 1, and (4) finally to summarize the effects of evolution upon certain vital biblical doctrines.
I. TEACHING/ASSUMPTIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONARY HYPOTHESIS
We are all aware, I’m sure, that the teaching of evolution has become the major hypothesis for explaining the origin of all animate life, if not of the origin of the universe itself as we know it today. This teaching has been in vogue for the past 150 years, popularized through Charles Lyell’s work in geology and especially Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. (I refuse to call it the evolutionary theory, because the definition of a “theory” is that it is an explanation of a phenomenon which has been tested and proved to be a workable explanation, whereas evolution is not a theory at all but merely an unproved – and unproveable! – hypothesis). Its basic teaching is that all forms of life have evolved from single cell organisms, over a period of millions of years, to become animate life as we know it today . . . plants, fish, birds, animals and finally man himself. This is ‘macro’ evolution, as opposed to ‘micro’ evolution, i.e. a vertical change of one lower species into a much higher species of life, and not a horizontal variation within a certain species itself. (We see the latter evidenced continually in our world today, e.g. there are over 200 different breeds of domestic dogs, but they are all still dogs!).
>>>it is nice that he knows the difference between hypothesis and theory, many yecists do not. however toe has more evidence then does almost any other scientific theory.
We must say that this whole hypothesis is a highly speculative one, without any foundation in actual fact through empirical evidence, and that it is not even a ‘science’ but rather a bizarre philosophy or even a religion in its own right. This is doubtless why an increasing number of modern biologists, paleontologists, geneticists and scientists of various disciplines are being forced to criticize and even deny the validity of evolution’s claims as to the real origins of life.
The fossil record does not vindicate evolution’s claims. Darwin recognized that this should be able to provide indubitable confirmation, by way of empirical records showing the transitional forms of one species changing into another and higher species of life. He recognized that the records available back in his day were inadequate but he was confident that further developments and research would bring this empirical evidence to light in years to come. For instance, if monkeys gradually changed into men, there should be abundant evidence left in the fossil record. Whereas, there is a complete absence of any transitional forms whatever in the fossil record. This confirms creation, rather than evolution. Moreover, whole massive rock strata are often without any fossils at all. It is claimed that 150 million years are needed for invertebrates to become vertebrates, but no record has been left throughout this ‘assumed’ time-frame! Moreover, all the fossil records show clearly defined species – fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds – many of which are recognizable species today.
>>>there is no clearly defined definition of a species, let alone an example. it is one of those awkward terms that everyone thinks he knows yet is completely slippery when looked at carefully. see ring species.
there is lots of accessible evidence.
nested hierarchical structure of all life.
chimp 2p+2q=human 2
herv’s
pseudogenes like vit c synthesis
Modern research into DNA reveals that while there may be horizontal variations produced, there are never any vertical variations (i.e. producing a higher form of life or change of species).
>>>he is misusing these scientific terms as well as missing extraordinary evidence for both horizontal transfer and vertical transmission over time.
Supposed extinct species are still being discovered today. (E.g. Japanese fishermen off the coast of New Zealand in April 1977 caught a 4,000lb dead creature in their nets identified as a plesiosaur [a sea-dwelling dinosaur], previously only found in fossils and thought to be extinct).
>>>so what? this is not evidence against toe at all.
It is well known that human footprints have been found in the same rock sediments that hold the footprints of extinct dinosaurs, yet evolutionists claim that a vast period of seventy million years separates the age of dinosaurs from the first appearance of mankind.
>>>this is well refuted garbage..even aig admits it’s fraud.
Darwin’s hypothesis requires that mutations are to be beneficial, whereas modern medical research has shown that they are almost always harmful and even dangerous to life, not beneficial, and that they normally revert back to their original forms.
>>>no, toe expects most mutations to be neutral. very very few will be useful. each of us has roughly 150 single point polymorphisms from our folks, seldom do they change anything. the revert point is nonsense. mutations seldom happen, even less often revert (mathematician travelling with his own bomb joke)
In order to account for the absence of fossil evidence in the rocks, a punctuated equilibrium theory has been propounded (i.e. evolution happened in short spurts, followed by long periods of inactivity, hence the absence of fossils). This cannot be observed or proved and there is no evidence for this process empirically. It is subjective and arbitrary, merely yet another attempt by modern secular man to ‘salvage’ Darwin’s increasingly challenged hypothesis.
>>>more nonsense, read sjg, there is no scientific challenge to toe, that i am aware of. i’d welcome any you’all have at hand.
Complexity of the cell structure is another challenge to Darwin’s hypothesis. Modern research has shown the almost unbelievable complexity of the structure of even the simplest cell with one hundred proteins. Tiny machines, amino acids, memory banks, blueprints etc! Yet macro evolution depends on a single cell being formed by accident, some scientists saying this would require a ’10 to the power 20′ chance for it to happen! Surely this points to a supernatural creation being necessary! The more so when you consider the sheer complexity of but a single organ in the human body, e.g. the human eye.
>>>>god of the gaps is really bad theology
humans design via swapped modules, life consistently uses nested hierarchies which reflects the need to use only what is at hand, bricolage.
then there is the bad design of the eye coupled with convergence.
the first replicator is not toe, it is abiogenesis.
Evolution contradicts both the First Law of thermodynamics (the energy level in the universe remains constant) and the Second Law of thermodynamics (that everything is gradually running down).
>>>closed system…sun is part of our system
Various physical phenomena indicate that the earth is comparatively young, and not the millions of years old required by the evolutionary hypothesis.
>>>>now demonstrating a lack of knowledge in physics as well as biology. the earth is ancient not young.
For instance, the salt level in the oceans of the world would be very much higher than they are now; the earth’s magnetic field is known to be decreasing slowly and even secular scientists have come up with an estimated age of the earth of only about 10,000 years at most; 14 million tons of space dust are deposited on the earth’s land masses and oceans annually, which would have left a deposit 220ft thick if the earth were many millions of years old; and earth’s gravitation is slowing down, which would currently be impossible if the world were of an immense age; the moon is also slowly receding from the earth, but it would be much further away if the earth were millions of years old! It is well known that when the first American astronauts landed on the moon’s surface, the legs of the landing craft had been fitted with special pods to prevent it from being completely swallowed up in the deep layer of space dust which scientists supposed covered the surface of the moon because of its immense age, whereas to the astronauts’ surprise the dust was barely half an inch in depth, once more evidencing the young age of the universe.
>>>more well refuted nonsense
“it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show a vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.” –augustine
The supposed ‘missing links’ in human fossil remains have proved to be notoriously unreliable. There have been outright ‘hoaxes’ (such as the famous ‘Piltdown Man’), and other discoveries of supposed ancient human remains have often comprised so few fragments that it has been pure ‘guesswork’ to imagine what the original animal looked like!
The much-vaunted carbon dating methods cannot be relied upon, tests having showed that their accuracy is limited at most to a few thousand years, and even the dating methods based on the decay of uranium are based on certain questionable assumptions (e.g. has the rate of uranium decay remained constant?).
>>>the interesting thing to me is that science corrects itself. theology doesn’t, it splits into competing factions since there is no public access to religious data to use to persuade people.
yes, weak and strong forces are needed to understand the issues. no conflict over these issues either.
Finally, we observe that the supposed long age of the earth’s existence is based on the geologic column, which was supposedly formed over millions of years and which has the most primitive forms of life, therefore, at its base. But we note that the geologic column does not even exist anywhere in the world! It is a pure assumption: that is, the column has been organized according to the preconceived notions of natural evolution, with the ‘oldest’ rock formations being those which have the most primitive life forms as fossils and the youngest rocks the most advanced ones! (If ever there were a case of circular reasoning, it’s surely just here! The rocks are dated by the fossils, and fossils dated by the rocks!) So, if there are contradictions in the rock formations – e.g. older rock sediments overlaying younger ones! – this is simply explained away as an aberration. Or, if fossils are found in rock layers where they should not be, this is explained away as ‘stratigraphic leaks’!
>>>no, geology and deep time precede darwin and were the result of mostly christian scientists work
at the time of darwin the world was thought to be much younger due to lack of knowledge about radioactive decay and heating in earth’s core.
Summary
Macro evolution is indeed a ‘religious’ belief that is not only not based on empirical evidence, but it is contrary to the overwhelming evidence which bears testimony against it, some of which we have just cited. Whereas, the evidence points much more directly and convincingly to creation by an Intelligent Designer, with the explanation for a young age of the earth, the fossil record, etc, arising from creation followed by catastrophism (i.e. the universal Flood in the days of Noah).
So, we need to take just a moment to reflect on why evolution is destructive of the biblical faith:
It is openly antagonistic towards biblical revelation, desiring to deny and undermine biblical authority. It claims to put the supposed findings of ‘science’ above Scripture, thus promoting atheism, secularism and theological liberalism, leading inevitably to the rise of such figures as Karl Marx and Julian Huxley in the secular realm and the promotion of modernism in the ecclesiastical realm.
There is no place for a personal Creator God nor any need for him. Hence, for instance, the rise of the ‘Big Bang’ theory for the origin of the universe, where pure chance (not God) rules.
It denies the Person and authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, who affirmed the doctrine of creation and who quoted or alluded to the Book of Genesis some twenty-five times in the course of his ministry.
Scripture affirms the reality of the 1st Adam and Jesus Christ as the 2nd (or last) Adam. The denial of Adam’s creation by divine fiat as the federal head of the human race undercuts the whole basis and plan of man’s redemption through Christ, the 2nd Adam.
Death is no longer the result of man’s sin as a divine judgment upon him, but merely a natural phenomenon. (We need no reminder that these views resulted in the rise of Nazi-ism and Communism and even in our own culture, the increasing loss of any sense of the sanctity of human life and the seriousness of man’s sinful condition before God).
So, there can be no compromise between evolution and creation. Evolution, in its essence, implies the destruction of evangelical Christianity. There cannot be, and ought not to be, any compromise with it. But we should be thankful, nevertheless, that we are living in days when more and more honest and enquiring scientists are questioning the validity of Darwin’s hypothesis because of many newly discovered factors and who are therefore no longer in agreement with Thomas Huxley’s arrogant assertion that ‘evolution is no longer theory but fact and cannot be questioned any more than that the earth goes around the sun’.
II. ATTEMPTS BY BIBLE-BELIEVING CHRISTIANS TO COMPROMISE
(1) The Gap Theory
A widely held opinion among fundamentalists is that the primeval creation of Genesis 1:1 may have taken place billions of years ago, with all the geological ages inserted in a tremendous time gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. The latter verse is believed by these expositors to describe the condition of the earth after a great cataclysm terminated the geological ages. The cataclysm, which left the earth in darkness and covered with water, is explained as a divine judgment because of the sin of Satan in rebelling against God. Following the cataclysm, God then ‘re-created’ the world in six literal days described in Genesis 1:3-31′. (Henry Morris, The Genesis Record, p.46)
This is most popularly known as the ‘gap theory’ or ‘ruin and reconstruction theory’. Sadly, it was popularized in the mid-nineteenth century by a Scotsman, Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), who was one of the foremost figures in the formation of the Free Church of Scotland at the famous Disruption in 1843, when the Free Church left the Church of Scotland over the issue of patronage. Interestingly, and again sadly, this view has also been popularized by the notes in the Scofield Reference Bible (which bases its view on Isa 45:18, ‘For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; there is none else’). So, this view has been taught in many of the Bible Institutes and fundamentalist seminaries of the United States for the past century and it was also held by A.W. Pink, C.S. Lewis, and Donald Barnhouse.
The real purpose of this ‘gap theory’ is to try to harmonize the biblical chronology of a literal six day creation, with the accepted system of long geological ages which was becoming prominent in the days of Thomas Chalmers. The idea was to get rid of the problem of long evolutionary geological ages by simply pigeonholing them in the ‘gap’ and letting the geologists have all the ages they wanted.
What shall we say of this supposed ‘gap theory’?
Even from an evolutionary perspective, it fails. The evolutionist believes in uniformitarianism (the belief that physical processes have always functioned in the past essentially as they do at the present time), which of course precludes any worldwide cataclysm as required in the ‘gap theory’. Moreover, a cataclysm of such dimensions which would leave the earth in darkness and inundated with waters would have been nothing less than an immense global explosion which would have obliterated the earth’s sedimentary crust and all its (supposed) fossils, thus leaving no evidence whatever of the ‘geological ages’ which the gap theory is attempting to accommodate.
Not only is it impossible to accept scientifically, but it is also destructive theologically. The moment we accept the geological age system, we are also accepting the fossil record by which these ages are said to be identified. However, fossils speak of suffering, disease and death – of a world where often violent, widespread death was a universal reality. So, if that kind of world existed prior to the supposed pre-Adamic cataclysm, then it existed before the sin of Satan (which is supposed to have resulted in the cataclysm). That is, suffering and death existed for a billion years before the sin of Satan and the subsequent sin of Adam.
However, the Bible says explicitly that death came into the world only when Adam brought sin into the world (Rom. 5:12 & 1 Cor. 15:21).
Furthermore, if suffering and death existed then, God himself was responsible for such a state. And it is inconceivable that a God of love and order would create and use a system based on randomness and cruelty in his creation.
Also, the most natural reading of the text (Gen. 1:1 & 1:2) does not in any way indicate a ‘gap’, any more than the other pairs of verses throughout Genesis chapter one indicate any ‘gap’ in time. There is also no biblical foundation for rendering the Hebrew word ‘was’ (‘the earth was without form and void’) as ‘became’.
Conclusion: The natural reading of Genesis 1:1-2 suggests no such idea of a ‘gap theory’, nor is it warranted either scientifically or biblically.
(2) The Day-Age Theory
Another attempt by Bible-believing Christians to reconcile biblical creationism with the evolutionary hypothesis is the so-called ‘Day-Age Theory’. Sadly, again this was popularized by a Scotsman in the mid-nineteenth century, named Hugh Miller. He lived in the little village of Cromarty, near Inverness in NE Scotland, and I actually visited his cottage on a trip to Scotland last year, the cottage being a national heritage building and under the care of the Scottish National Trust. Hugh Miller was a stone-mason for much of his life and this occupation had made him very familiar with the fossil records in the rocks of NE Scotland. Although a staunch Reformed Presbyterian and a leading figure, like Thomas Chalmers, in the formation of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843, Miller was convinced that the fossil record required long aeons of time for its formation, which could not be reconciled with the views of a ‘young’ earth as held by the mainstream Christian Church for centuries previously. [This view was adopted by James Boice, E.J. Young and B.B. Warfield].
So he inaugurated the ‘day-age theory’, maintaining that the six days of creation recorded in Genesis chapter one were not literal 24-hour days at all, but long periods of geological ages. He popularized this view in his book Footprints of the Creator. He also maintained that Noah’s flood could not have been a universal flood as Scripture affirms, because the fossil record indicated such diversity of species that Noah could not possibly have gotten all the living animals and birds into the Ark! Sadly, in spite of Miller’s undoubted orthodoxy in other theological matters and his great usefulness in maintaining the biblical principles of the newly-formed Free Church of Scotland, he was defying the normal accepted interpretation of Genesis 1 & Genesis 6-9, challenging the infallibility of Scripture and denying the obvious implications of the language of Genesis 1 (which speaks clearly of normal solar days . . . ‘evening and morning being the cyclical succession of day time and night time). Moreover, there are several other overwhelming objections . . .
The order of creative events in Genesis 1 is very different from the accepted order of fossils in the rocks representing geological ages. (E.g. the first life developed on land not in oceans; plant life came first, not marine life; the earth was created before the stars, not vice-versa; birds before fish & insects; marine life created instantly; stars created on the 4th day, not still evolving etc.)
The necessity of geological ages is based on the fossil records, and fossils speak unequivocally of suffering and death being present in the world. So, we have the same contradiction of Scripture as in the ‘gap theory’, i.e. that suffering and death are a divine judgment brought into the world because of man’s original sin (Rom. 5:12). In contrast, the ‘day-age’ theory must assume that suffering and death comprises an essential part of God’s work of creating and preparing a world for man, which is inconceivable for the biblical God of love, grace and omnipotence.
As we have said, the biblical record itself makes it plain that the days of creation are literal days, not long indefinite ages. The ‘days’ are literal days and the events described happened in just the way described. Although the Hebrew word for ‘day’ (yom) may refer occasionally in other parts of the Bible to longer periods of time, the most natural and obvious meaning of the word in Genesis 1 is to the literal twenty-four hour day and therefore cannot be ‘stretched’ into millions of years! This is further borne out by the clear rationale given by the Lord when he instituted the Fourth Commandment later at Mt. Sinai, ‘For in six days, the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it’ (Exod. 20:11).
No compromise is possible between evolution and creation! E.g. creation ex nihilo, compared to evolution’s insistence on pre-existing matter; creation in six days, contrasted with billions of years; oceans were created before land not vice versa; profound differences in the areas of the hydrosphere and atmosphere; life originated on land not in the oceans; plant life first, not marine life; fruit trees before fish, not vice versa; stars created on the fourth day, not still evolving; birds created before fish and insects; whales before reptiles, not vice versaa; man created before rain; man created before woman,: light existing before the sun; plants before the sun; marine life created instantly; man’s body created from the dust, not evolving from an animal ancestry; man as a vegetarian; man’s dominion over all creation, from the very first; man’s Fall causing death both spiritual and physical, not therefore something already existing previously for aeons of time.
(3) Theistic Evolution
Even though the first two attempts by Bible-[believing Christians to reconcile the evolutionary hypothesis with the biblical account of creation (the 'gap theory' and the Day-Age theory) are false, misleading and dangerous, nevertheless they had the merit of at least attempting to treat seriously the account of creation in Genesis 1. However, theistic evolution does no such thing. Its essence is to impose the conclusions of atheistic scientific assertions above the Bible and in place of the Bible's clear teaching about divine creation.
It maintains that step by step, God directed the process of macro evolution, changing one species of life into a progressively higher order through aeons of time, so that Genesis chapters 1-11 are pure mythology or allegory and not to be taken as a literal account of man's beginnings. This is the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, and it has been embraced by countless Protestants as well.
It is not my purpose to go into a detailed refutation of this teaching, because of time-constraints, but it is worth noting that this whole position is plainly contrary to the express teaching of Scripture. For instance, Dr. Henry M. Morris in his fine commentary on the Book of Genesis, The Genesis Record points out that (1) There are at least 200 direct references to, or quotations from, the Book of Genesis in the New Testament. (2) All the books of the New Testament except Philemon, II & III John, contain allusions to Genesis. (3) More than half of the 200 New Testament allusions to Genesis are found in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. (4) Sixty -three allusions are to the first three chapters of Genesis. (5) Twenty-five of the references are directly from the lips of Christ himself. (Appendix 4, pp.677-682)
In other words, all the inspired writers of the New Testament scriptures accepted the accounts in the Book of Genesis as literal, historical facts, our Lord Jesus Christ himself referring to the creation events and the great Flood as literal and historical events.
In contrast, to quote Davis Young, 'Theistic evolution is logically and inevitably the death of biblical religion'.
(4) The Framework Hypothesis
This is the most recent attempt to harmonize the creation account with the evolutionary hypothesis, allowing Christians to believe in a process of millions of years. It has been popularized in our day, sadly, by a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Meredith Kline, although the origin goes back to around 1924 in Germany, where a German rationalistic theologian observed a supposed parallelism between the first three days of creation and the second three days in Genesis 1 (i.e. two trios).
The reasoning is very involved, but as I understand it, it amounts to this: the 'six days' are in essence merely a 'framework' for the real emphasis on the 7th Day (when God rested from all his work of creation). So they are merely a device to give us only general information, not to be taken as literal days, but just two triads. So the six days are designed to teach us, not how long God took to create, but the emphasis instead is upon the three spheres (heavenly , earthly, and marine). So that Genesis 1 is merely describing some heavenly truth, which we can only understand in earthly and inadequate language.
The effect, of course, is to eliminate a literal understanding of Genesis 1, because Genesis 1 is unconcerned about chronology & time, and to replace it with merely a poetical and metaphorical description of creation. What are we to say of this extraordinary position? It must be rejected, because:
No other Scripture is safe from similar treatment! (i.e. artistic structure/poetic form). E.g. Christ's resurrection!
This was never espoused earlier than the 20th Century. It is, after all, an assault upon the perspicuity of Scripture (cf. WCF I:VII). The Bible becomes a meaningless book.
Once more, this bizarre explanation assumes that death and destruction were present in the world prior to man's Fall.
It denies and overlooks the plain fact that there is a climax in the six days of creation, leading up to the emphasis upon the 7th Day as the culmination of all of God's creative work.
This whole position is contradicted by the Lord's words in the institution of the 4th Commandment (Exod. 20:11, 'For in six days, the Lord made the heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day and hallowed it').
III. THE BIBLICAL ACCOUNT OF CREATION (GENESIS 1)
(1) Some General Comments
It's worth recalling the magnificent language of the Westminster Confession of Faith (Chapter IV) dealing with Creation:
I. It pleased God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost for the manifestation of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning to create, or make of nothing the world and all things therein whether visible or invisible in the space of six days and all very good.
II. After God had made all other creatures, he created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, endued with knowledge, righteousness and true holiness, after his own image, having the law of God written in their hearts, and power to fulfill it; and yet under a possibility of transgressing . . .
Once more, we must admire the amazing skill of the Westminster divines to set out the doctrine of biblical creation with such conciseness and economy of words, merely two short paragraphs amounting to only 150 words in length! Indeed, it summarizes the short, terse statements of God's creative acts in Genesis 1-2, in six literal days, namely, the beginning of time/space/matter . . . the creation of light, the separation of the firmament, the gathering of the oceans, creation of plant life, the sun/moon/stars, animal life and finally man himself.
But, did you know? The first chapter of Genesis is one of the most God-centred chapters in the whole Bible! He is mentioned by name some 32 times in 31 verses . . . and, adding personal pronouns, some 43 times! So that, in the Bible's opening chapter, the Holy Spirit brings us into the presence of GOD and keeps us there! No wonder, therefore, that Genesis 1 is a main focus of Satan's assault, because abandonment of the God-centred truths of this chapter inevitably leads to Satan's triumph. Moreover, if the Holy Spirit's inspiration of Scripture cannot be trusted in the matter of God's work of creation, how can he be trusted later in Scripture when he deals with the vital matter of man's need for salvation? If he cannot be trusted in the first chapter of the Bible, can he be (for example) in the great salvation text of John 3:16? And if what he says about the earth in Genesis 1 can be questioned, what confidence can we have of his description of heaven in Revelation 22?
The magnificent opening verse of Genesis 1 is a sublime statement which sweeps away atheism (by asserting God's existence),polytheism (by declaring he is one) and pantheism (by separating him from matter). Similarly, since we have every reason to believe that Moses was the human author of the book of Genesis, it is striking and instructive that he did not write the account of creation according the theories of his own day and age! That is to say, even though he was 'learned in all the Egyptian wisdom' (Acts 7:22), he did not reflect any of these erroneous and absurd views in Genesis chapter one, viz. that there was once a primeval ocean, out of which appeared an egg and from which emerged the sun God, who in turn had four children (GEB, SHU, TEFNUT & NUT), and their rivalry among themselves led to the creation as we know it! What a blessing that the account of Genesis is not at all like that, but instead like a snow-capped Himalayan peak rising majestically towards heaven. Moses wrote contrary to all the accepted learning of his day . . . he must therefore have written by divine revelation. (Take just one instance as example: the record states that on the third day of creation, all the waters were gathered into one place to form the world's oceans. How could Moses possibly have known that all the oceans of the world form one interconnected body of water, when all that he could possibly have been acquainted with was a limited access to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea? It must therefore have been shown to him by divine revelation!)
N.B. Peter Stoner, a modern mathematician, has noted that the thirteen steps of creation recorded in Genesis 1:1-26 have all been correctly listed and named by Moses in their proper order . . . and he calculates that Moses' chances of being able to do this were one in thirty-one sextillion (i.e. 31 followed by 21 zeroes)! Yet secular humanism today would rather believe Charles Darwin's unsubstantiated evolutionary hypothesis, which completely lacks empirical evidence, than Moses' divinely inspired account of creation! Whereas, apart from any other consideration about the falsity of Darwin's hypothesis, there is one expression, used no less than ten times in Genesis 1, which spells the death-knell to Darwin's claims - namely, the basic command of God for all living things to reproduce 'after their own kind' (vv.11, 12, 21, 24, 25). This alone is surely the rock on which the evolutionary doctrine founders!
(2) Some Specific Observations
The Westminster Confession of Faith is undoubtedly correct when it states, so succinctly, the reason for God's performing the work of creation, viz. 'It pleased God . . . for the manifestation of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning to create or make of nothing the world', etc. As John Calvin aptly put it, the world is designed to be 'the theatre of God's glory'. This is a constant theme throughout the Bible, often used as the motive for men to worship and honour the true God (e.g. Psa. 33:6 - By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth'; Psalms 95, 100 & 136 similarly call for the Creator to be worshipped; Psa. 33:5 reminds us that 'the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord'; Jer. 10:12 that 'he made the earth by his power'; and in the New Testament, Paul reminds us that 'the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are dearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead so that (men) are without excuse', etc. (Rom. 1:20f). Moreover, a number of prayers begin with references to God's work of creation (e.g. Neh. 9:6, Jer. 32:17, Acts 4:20. And we need to remember that even the last book of the Bible recognizes God's work of original creation, and ascribes all honour and power to him because he created all things - Revelation 4:11: 'Thou art worthy, O Lord to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created'. In other words, the creation account is woven into the texture of the whole Bible OT & NT alike!
We surely need no reminder, too, that the Bible asserts that the work of creation involved each Person of the Trinity - the Father (Gen. 1:1 & Psa. 8); the Son (Heb. 1:2, John 1:2, Col. 1:15-16); and the Holy Spirit (Gen. 1:2) - and that it was indeed creation ex nihilo (i.e. not from pro-existing materials, even though in the later stages of creation the Creator did use pre-existing materials, e,g. in the creation of man); and that it was fiat creation (he spoke the universe into existence); and that there was nothing else outside of God himself which he did not create. Surely, too, the repeated expression 'and the evening and the morning' - at the close of each act of creation - most naturally and logically implies six literal twenty-four days of creation, and not long ages of millions of years (vv. 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31)! And all was 'very good'.
We need no reminder, too, that the creation of man had a distinct place in God's purpose, as evidenced for instance by his being created after everything else (in a world prepared and amply furnished for him), and by deliberation ('Let us make man in our own image'), as the image-bearer of God in knowledge, righteousness and holiness, and therefore distinct from the other animal creation entirely, with God's law written upon his heart and with a reasonable and immortal soul. Moreover, the record clearly states that mankind's origin was from one human pair, confirmed again in Genesis 10 (the genealogy of the nations) and in the apostle Paul's address to the men of Athens in Acts 17:26. This is fundamental to the biblical doctrine of original sin and the doctrine of the resurrection, as stated clearly in Romans 5:12-19 and 1 Corinthians 15:21f).
Dr. Henry Morris, in his fine commentary The Genesis Record states the fundamental importance of the biblical creation account as follows (pp.18-20):
Origin of the universe. The Book of Genesis stands alone in accounting for the actual creation of the basic space-mass-time continuum which constitutes our physical universe. Genesis 1:1 is unique in all literature, science, and philosophy. Every other system of cosmogony, whether in ancient religious myths or modern scientific models, starts with eternal matter or energy in some form, from which other entities were supposedly gradually derived by some process. Only the Book of Genesis even attempts to account for the ultimate origin of matter, space, and time; and it does so uniquely in terms of special creation.
Origin of order and complexity. Man's universal observation, both in his personal experience and in his formal study of physical and biological systems, is that orderly and complex things tend naturally to decay into disorder and simplicity. Order and complexity never arise spontaneously — they are always generated by a prior cause programmed to produce such order. The Primeval Programmer and his programmed purposes are found only in Genesis.
Origin of the solar system. The earth, as well as the sun and moon, and even the planets and all the stars of heaven, were likewise brought into existence by the Creator, as told in Genesis. It is small wonder that modern scientific cosmogonists have been so notably unsuccessful in attempting to devise naturalistic theories of the origin of the universe and the solar system.
Origin of the atmosphere and hydrosphere. The earth is uniquely equipped with a great body of liquid water and an extensive blanket of an oxygen-nitrogen gaseous mixture, both of which are necessary for life. These have never 'developed' on other planets, and are accounted for only by special creation.
Origin of life. How living systems could have come into being from non-living chemicals is, and will undoubtedly continue to be, a total mystery to materialistic philosophers. The marvels of the reproductive process, and the almost-infinite complexity programmed into the genetic systems of plants and animals, are inexplicable except by special creation, at least if the laws of thermodynamics and probability mean anything at all. The account of the creation of 'living creatures' in Genesis is the only rational explanation.
Origin of man. Man is the most highly organized and complex entity in the universe, so far as we know, possessing not only innumerable intricate physico-chemical structures, and the marvellous capacities of life and reproduction, but also a nature which contemplates the abstract entities of beauty and love and worship, and which is capable of philosophizing about its own meaning. Man's imaginary evolutionary descent from animal ancestors is altogether illusory. The true record of his origin is given only in Genesis.
Origin of marriage. The remarkably universal and stable institution of marriage and the home, in a monogamous, patriarchal social culture, is likewise described in Genesis as having been ordained by the Creator. Polygamy, infanticide, matriarchy, promiscuity, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, and other corruptions all developed later.
Origin of evil. Cause-and-effect reasoning accounts for the origin of the concepts of goodness, truth, beauty, love, and such things as fundamental attributes of the Creator himself. The origin of physical and moral evils in the universe is explained in Genesis as a temporary intrusion into God's perfect world, allowed by him as a temporary concession to the principle of human freedom and responsibility, and also to manifest himself as Redeemer as well as Creator.
IV. EVOLUTION'S EFFECTS ON VITAL BIBLICAL DOCTRINES
I have alluded to these effects throughout this paper this evening and there is therefore the need only for a brief summary, as follows:
Denial of the Inspiration and Authority of Scripture
If we cannot trust the creation account in the early chapters of Genesis, doubt is cast upon the inspiration and veracity of the rest of Scripture as well. Moreover, we have seen that all the books of the New Testament, except for Philemon and II & III John , contain allusions to Genesis, and that more than half of the 200 NT allusions to Genesis are found in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Sixty-three of the allusions are to the first three chapters of Genesis. Twenty-five of the references are directly from the lips of Jesus himself (including his referencing chapters 1-3 of Genesis).
Denial of the Person and Authority of the Lord Jesus Christ>
He was involved in the work of creation (John 1:1-4 & 10, Col. 1:15-16, & Heb. 1:2); he affirmed the divine creation of Adam & Eve (Mark 10:6-7), their being 'one flesh' (Mark 10:8), and he referred to 'the creation which God created' (Mark 13:19). It was the Son of God himself who taught his followers to accept the historical accuracy of the Old Testament in general and the Book of Genesis in particular (Matt. 19:4, 23:35, 24:37-39, Luke 17:19,32).
Denial of the Need for the Doctrine of Redemption
Sin, suffering and death, according to evolution's teaching, are natural phenomena and not the result of divine judgment upon mankind through its federal head, Adam. Mankind is therefore in no need of divine redemption, in contradiction to the Bible's plain teaching that sin was introduced by Adam's disobedience and can only be remedied by the work of the 'second' (or last) Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:19f).
As Morris & Whitcomb say (in The Genesis Flood),
Uniformitarian paleontology dates the formation of the major fossiliferous strata many scores and hundreds of millions of years before the appearance of human beings on the earth. It assumes that uncounted billions of animals had experienced natural or violent death before the Fall of Adam: that many important kinds of animals had long since become extinct by the time God created Adam to have dominion over every living creature: and that long ages before the Edenic curse giant flesh-eating monsters like Tyrannosaurus Rex roamed the earth, slashing their victims with ferocious dagger-like teeth and claws . . . But how can such a description of the history of the animal kingdom be reconciled with the early chapters of Genesis? Does the Book of Genesis, honestly studied in the light of the New Testament, allow for a reign of tooth and claw and death and destruction before the fall of Adam? If not, we have further compelling reasons for questioning the uniformitarian scheme of reading (the fossil record in) the rocks and . . . strong encouragement for finding in the great Genesis Flood the true explanation for fossil formations in the crust of our planet (pp.454f).
Moreover, such clear-cut passages as Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:21-22 indicate that Adam's sin and fall introduced spiritual and physical death into the human race. In the Romans passage we learn that
through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin: and so death passed upon all men, for that all sinned; . . . by the trespass of the one many died . . . the judgment came of one unto condemnation . . . by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one . . . through one trespas the judgment came unto all men to condemnation . . . through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners . . .
Likewise, we are told also in the Corinthian passage that 'by man came death' and 'in Adam all die'.
The Bible further teaches that all human beings have descended from one human pair (Gen. 3:20 'Eve . . . was the mother of all living'; confirmed by Acts 17:26 'He made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth') and that these first human beings were created directly by God wholly apart from any evolutionary development of man's body from animal forms.
The Lord Jesus Christ stated that 'he who made them from the beginning made them male and female' (Matt. 19:4)
Genesis 2:21-23 clearly indicates that Eve came out of Adam and not from the animal kingdom by some evolutionary process! This is confirmed by the apostle Paul: 'the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man' (1 Cor. 11;8) So, if Eve received her body in this purely supernatural way out of Adam's side, why should anyone postulate an evolutionary development for Adam's body?
The Bible teaches that Adam's body was formed from 'the dust of the ground' (Gen. 2:7), not of evolved animal forms.
Therefore, in the light of this biblical revelation regarding the origin of Adam and Eve, Christians must insist on the essential unity and the supernatural, non-evolutionary creation of the human race. Otherwise there could be no such thing as human sin or eternal salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:23, Heb. 2:9, 14, 1 John 1:5-2:2)
Denial of the Future State of Perfection and Glory in Heaven
If there has been no Fall of man and no need of his redemption, there is no place for a future state of man's full restoration. Whereas, the Genesis account is not only important as a history of man's origin, but also as a prophecy of man's future. The Book of Revelation makes this clear, where Paradise lost, in Genesis, becomes Paradise regained, in Revelation. For example, note the following comparisons between the original world and the final world:
Probationary World (Genesis) Eternal World (Revelation)
Division of light & darkness (1:4) No night there (21:25)
Division of land and sea (1:10) No more sea (21:21)
Rule of sun and moon (1:16) No need of sun and moon) (21:23)
Man in a prepared garden (2:8-9) Man in a prepared city (21:2)
River flowing out of Eden (2:10) River flowing from god's throne (22:1)
Gold in the land (2:12) Gold in the city (21:21)
Tree of life in midst of garden (2:9) Tree of life throughout the city (22:2)
God walking in the garden (3:8) God dwelling with His people (21:3)
(Even more striking is the contrast between the world under God's curse and the eternal world renewed, e.g. Cursed ground/no more curse, . . . daily sorrow/no more sorrow . . . thorns and thistles/no more pain . . . sweat of the face/tears wiped away . . . eating herbs of the field/twelve manner of fruits . . . returning to dust/no more death . . . evil continually/nothing that defileth . . . coats of skins/fine linen, white & clean . . . Satan opposing/Satan banished . . . Kept from tree of life/access to Tree of life . . . banished from the garden/free entry to the City . . . Redeemer promised/redemption accomplished.)
For these and many other reasons, it becomes evident that an understanding of the early chapters of Genesis is vital to an understanding of the eternal purposes of God. The Creation or Evolution debate is a vital issue in today’s church.
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The Creation or Evolution Debate: A Vital Issue for Today's ChurchBy Anthony R. Dallison I appreciate the invitation to be here this evening as one of the two speakers on this important and vital issue regarding the Creation/Evolution debate, a subject which is not only a vital one for the Church in the 21st Century but is coming increasingly to the fore even in scientific circles as more and more 'honest' scientists and evolutionists are being faced with the facts of evolution's inadequacy to explain the origin of the universe and of all animate life within it. Let me begin by reminding you of the well-known words of Genesis 1:1, 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth'. This often memorized opening verse of the Book of Genesis has been the answer, from the beginning of recorded history until recent times, to man's question 'How did the cosmos begin?' But today, in an age of scepticism and unbelief which has inherited the rationalistic criticism of the Bible from way back in the nineteenth century along with the so-called 'indubitable findings' of modern science, can we say that statement is still relevant in this computer space-age? Is this a valid and believable account of our origins? One thing at least can be said about this opening verse of the Bible, even by its enemies and detractors: it relates time, space and matter in a stunning economy of words, all the more remarkable for the fact that these three most basic entities are not mutually exclusive. (That is to say, no one entity can exist without the other two). Taken quite literally, the statement offers the reader a straightforward explanation for the origin of the universe and all that it contains, making no apology for the fact that the account involves supernatural creation ex nihilo, creation of something from nothing. We are probably all aware that until the beginning of the 19th Century, the mainstream Christian Church had generally accepted the biblical account of creation as literal and historical fact, those who questioned the account being pretty much on the fringes. However, with the rapid development of the sciences and scientific enquiry in the nineteenth century, and particularly with the rise to notoriety of men like the geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875) - whose book Principles of Geology espoused the age of the earth being not thousands but millions of years in age - and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) who published his On the Origin of Species in 1859 and his Descent of Man later, in 1871, the climate began rapidly to change. Previously, it had been generally accepted that the fossil record had been laid down rapidly in the sedimentary rock formations as a result of the great universal catastrophic Flood (recorded in Genesis 6-9), that the earth itself was of a relatively young age, and that the creation of the universe, plant and animal life (including man) had taken place as recorded literally in Genesis chapter one. But now, in the light of Lyell's teaching based on the millions of years required for the fossil record, and following Darwin's famous sea voyage to the Galapagos Islands (1831-1836) on board HMS Beagle (where he assumed that the micro evolution he observed there, i.e. changes within certain species of animal/plant life to adapt to their own unique environment, could be transferred to the principle of macro evolution, i.e. changes from one actual species into another and higher form of species), things began rapidly to change. Evolutionary theory was about to become respectable and to be embraced almost universally, sadly even in great sections of the professing Christian Church. So, we have come ourselves to the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. And, somewhat ironically, as some of you will also be aware here tonight, this year happens to be the 400th anniversary of the birth of the great Genevan Reformer, John Calvin in 1509. John Calvin would have been aghast to see how radically great sections of the Protestant Church have abandoned the biblical teaching on creation and adopted either wholesale, or with supposed modifications, the evolutionary hypothesis with all of its unscientific bases and its undermining of the authority, inspiration and perspicuity of the Scriptures of God's Word. So much by way of introduction this evening. I want to do four things in this paper, time permitting: (1) To briefly outline the teaching and assumptions of the evolutionary hypothesis, pointing out as I do so its inadequacies. (I believe that Alastair Matthews will be dealing more fully here in his treatment), (2) To outline the attempts of Bible-believing Christians to compromise the biblical account of creation with the evolutionary hypothesis, (3) To focus attention on the biblical account of creation in Genesis 1, and (4) finally to summarize the effects of evolution upon certain vital biblical doctrines. I. TEACHING/ASSUMPTIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONARY HYPOTHESIS We are all aware, I'm sure, that the teaching of evolution has become the major hypothesis for explaining the origin of all animate life, if not of the origin of the universe itself as we know it today. This teaching has been in vogue for the past 150 years, popularized through Charles Lyell's work in geology and especially Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. (I refuse to call it the evolutionary theory, because the definition of a "theory" is that it is an explanation of a phenomenon which has been tested and proved to be a workable explanation, whereas evolution is not a theory at all but merely an unproved - and unproveable! - hypothesis). Its basic teaching is that all forms of life have evolved from single cell organisms, over a period of millions of years, to become animate life as we know it today . . . plants, fish, birds, animals and finally man himself. This is 'macro' evolution, as opposed to 'micro' evolution, i.e. a vertical change of one lower species into a much higher species of life, and not ahorizontal variation within a certain species itself. (We see the latter evidenced continually in our world today, e.g. there are over 200 different breeds of domestic dogs, but they are all still dogs!). We must say that this whole hypothesis is a highly speculative one, without any foundation in actual fact through empirical evidence, and that it is not even a 'science' but rather a bizarre philosophy or even a religion in its own right. This is doubtless why an increasing number of modern biologists, paleontologists, geneticists and scientists of various disciplines are being forced to criticize and even deny the validity of evolution's claims as to the real origins of life. The fossil record does not vindicate evolution's claims. Darwin recognized that this should be able to provide indubitable confirmation, by way of empirical records showing the transitional forms of one species changing into another and higher species of life. He recognized that the records available back in his day were inadequate but he was confident that further developments and research would bring this empirical evidence to light in years to come. For instance, if monkeys gradually changed into men, there should be abundant evidence left in the fossil record. Whereas, there is a complete absence of any transitional forms whatever in the fossil record. This confirms creation, rather than evolution. Moreover, whole massive rock strata are often without any fossils at all. It is claimed that 150 million years are needed for invertebrates to become vertebrates, but no record has been left throughout this 'assumed' time-frame! Moreover, all the fossil records show clearly defined species - fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds - many of which are recognizable species today. Modern research into DNA reveals that while there may be horizontal variations produced, there are never any vertical variations (i.e. producing a higher form of life or change of species). Supposed extinct species are still being discovered today. (E.g. Japanese fishermen off the coast of New Zealand in April 1977 caught a 4,000lb dead creature in their nets identified as a plesiosaur [a sea-dwelling dinosaur], previously only found in fossils and thought to be extinct). It is well known that human footprints have been found in the same rock sediments that hold the footprints of extinct dinosaurs, yet evolutionists claim that a vast period of seventy million years separates the age of dinosaurs from the first appearance of mankind. Darwin’s hypothesis requires that mutations are to be beneficial, whereas modern medical research has shown that they are almost always harmful and even dangerous to life, not beneficial, and that they normally revert back to their original forms. In order to account for the absence of fossil evidence in the rocks, a punctuated equilibrium theory has been propounded (i.e. evolution happened in short spurts, followed by long periods of inactivity, hence the absence of fossils). This cannot be observed or proved and there is no evidence for this process empirically. It is subjective and arbitrary, merely yet another attempt by modern secular man to ‘salvage’ Darwin’s increasingly challenged hypothesis. Complexity of the cell structure is another challenge to Darwin’s hypothesis. Modern research has shown the almost unbelievable complexity of the structure of even the simplest cell with one hundred proteins. Tiny machines, amino acids, memory banks, blueprints etc! Yet macro evolution depends on a single cell being formed by accident, some scientists saying this would require a ’10 to the power 20′ chance for it to happen! Surely this points to a supernatural creation being necessary! The more so when you consider the sheer complexity of but a single organ in the human body, e.g. the human eye. Evolution contradicts both the First Law of thermodynamics (the energy level in the universe remains constant) and the Second Law of thermodynamics (that everything is gradually running down). Various physical phenomena indicate that the earth is comparatively young, and not the millions of years old required by the evolutionary hypothesis. For instance, the salt level in the oceans of the world would be very much higher than they are now; the earth’s magnetic field is known to be decreasing slowly and even secular scientists have come up with an estimated age of the earth of only about 10,000 years at most; 14 million tons of space dust are deposited on the earth’s land masses and oceans annually, which would have left a deposit 220ft thick if the earth were many millions of years old; and earth’s gravitation is slowing down, which would currently be impossible if the world were of an immense age; the moon is also slowly receding from the earth, but it would be much further away if the earth were millions of years old! It is well known that when the first American astronauts landed on the moon’s surface, the legs of the landing craft had been fitted with special pods to prevent it from being completely swallowed up in the deep layer of space dust which scientists supposed covered the surface of the moon because of its immense age, whereas to the astronauts’ surprise the dust was barely half an inch in depth, once more evidencing the young age of the universe. The supposed ‘missing links’ in human fossil remains have proved to be notoriously unreliable. There have been outright ‘hoaxes’ (such as the famous ‘Piltdown Man’), and other discoveries of supposed ancient human remains have often comprised so few fragments that it has been pure ‘guesswork’ to imagine what the original animal looked like! The much-vaunted carbon dating methods cannot be relied upon, tests having showed that their accuracy is limited at most to a few thousand years, and even the dating methods based on the decay of uranium are based on certain questionable assumptions (e.g. has the rate of uranium decay remained constant?). Finally, we observe that the supposed long age of the earth’s existence is based on the geologic column, which was supposedly formed over millions of years and which has the most primitive forms of life, therefore, at its base. But we note that the geologic column does not even exist anywhere in the world! It is a pure assumption: that is, the column has been organized according to the preconceived notions of natural evolution, with the ‘oldest’ rock formations being those which have the most primitive life forms as fossils and the youngest rocks the most advanced ones! (If ever there were a case of circular reasoning, it’s surely just here! The rocks are dated by the fossils, and fossils dated by the rocks!) So, if there are contradictions in the rock formations – e.g. older rock sediments overlaying younger ones! – this is simply explained away as an aberration. Or, if fossils are found in rock layers where they should not be, this is explained away as ‘stratigraphic leaks’!Summary Macro evolution is indeed a ‘religious’ belief that is not only not based on empirical evidence, but it is contrary to the overwhelming evidence which bears testimony against it, some of which we have just cited. Whereas, the evidence points much more directly and convincingly to creation by an Intelligent Designer, with the explanation for a young age of the earth, the fossil record, etc, arising from creation followed by catastrophism (i.e. the universal Flood in the days of Noah). So, we need to take just a moment to reflect on why evolution is destructive of the biblical faith: It is openly antagonistic towards biblical revelation, desiring to deny and undermine biblical authority. It claims to put the supposed findings of ‘science’ above Scripture, thus promoting atheism, secularism and theological liberalism, leading inevitably to the rise of such figures as Karl Marx and Julian Huxley in the secular realm and the promotion of modernism in the ecclesiastical realm. There is no place for a personal Creator God nor any need for him. Hence, for instance, the rise of the ‘Big Bang’ theory for the origin of the universe, where pure chance (not God) rules. It denies the Person and authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, who affirmed the doctrine of creation and who quoted or alluded to the Book of Genesis some twenty-five times in the course of his ministry. Scripture affirms the reality of the 1st Adam and Jesus Christ as the 2nd (or last) Adam. The denial of Adam’s creation by divine fiat as the federal head of the human race undercuts the whole basis and plan of man’s redemption through Christ, the 2nd Adam. Death is no longer the result of man’s sin as a divine judgment upon him, but merely a natural phenomenon. (We need no reminder that these views resulted in the rise of Nazi-ism and Communism and even in our own culture, the increasing loss of any sense of the sanctity of human life and the seriousness of man’s sinful condition before God).So, there can be no compromise between evolution and creation. Evolution, in its essence, implies the destruction of evangelical Christianity. There cannot be, and ought not to be, any compromise with it. But we should be thankful, nevertheless, that we are living in days when more and more honest and enquiring scientists are questioning the validity of Darwin’s hypothesis because of many newly discovered factors and who are therefore no longer in agreement with Thomas Huxley’s arrogant assertion that ‘evolution is no longer theory but fact and cannot be questioned any more than that the earth goes around the sun’. II. ATTEMPTS BY BIBLE-BELIEVING CHRISTIANS TO COMPROMISE (1) The Gap Theory A widely held opinion among fundamentalists is that the primeval creation of Genesis 1:1 may have taken place billions of years ago, with all the geological ages inserted in a tremendous time gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. The latter verse is believed by these expositors to describe the condition of the earth after a great cataclysm terminated the geological ages. The cataclysm, which left the earth in darkness and covered with water, is explained as a divine judgment because of the sin of Satan in rebelling against God. Following the cataclysm, God then ‘re-created’ the world in six literal days described in Genesis 1:3-31′. (Henry Morris, The Genesis Record, p.46)This is most popularly known as the ‘gap theory’ or ‘ruin and reconstruction theory’. Sadly, it was popularized in the mid-nineteenth century by a Scotsman, Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), who was one of the foremost figures in the formation of the Free Church of Scotland at the famous Disruption in 1843, when the Free Church left the Church of Scotland over the issue of patronage. Interestingly, and again sadly, this view has also been popularized by the notes in the Scofield Reference Bible (which bases its view on Isa 45:18, ‘For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; there is none else’). So, this view has been taught in many of the Bible Institutes and fundamentalist seminaries of the United States for the past century and it was also held by A.W. Pink, C.S. Lewis, and Donald Barnhouse. The real purpose of this ‘gap theory’ is to try to harmonize the biblical chronology of a literal six day creation, with the accepted system of long geological ages which was becoming prominent in the days of Thomas Chalmers. The idea was to get rid of the problem of long evolutionary geological ages by simply pigeonholing them in the ‘gap’ and letting the geologists have all the ages they wanted. What shall we say of this supposed ‘gap theory’? Even from an evolutionary perspective, it fails. The evolutionist believes in uniformitarianism (the belief that physical processes have always functioned in the past essentially as they do at the present time), which of course precludes any worldwide cataclysm as required in the ‘gap theory’. Moreover, a cataclysm of such dimensions which would leave the earth in darkness and inundated with waters would have been nothing less than an immense global explosion which would have obliterated the earth’s sedimentary crust and all its (supposed) fossils, thus leaving no evidence whatever of the ‘geological ages’ which the gap theory is attempting to accommodate. Not only is it impossible to accept scientifically, but it is also destructive theologically. The moment we accept the geological age system, we are also accepting the fossil record by which these ages are said to be identified. However, fossils speak of suffering, disease and death – of a world where often violent, widespread death was a universal reality. So, if that kind of world existed prior to the supposed pre-Adamic cataclysm, then it existed before the sin of Satan (which is supposed to have resulted in the cataclysm). That is, suffering and death existed for a billion years before the sin of Satan and the subsequent sin of Adam. However, the Bible says explicitly that death came into the world only when Adam brought sin into the world (Rom. 5:12 & 1 Cor. 15:21). Furthermore, if suffering and death existed then, God himself was responsible for such a state. And it is inconceivable that a God of love and order would create and use a system based on randomness and cruelty in his creation. Also, the most natural reading of the text (Gen. 1:1 & 1:2) does not in any way indicate a ‘gap’, any more than the other pairs of verses throughout Genesis chapter one indicate any ‘gap’ in time. There is also no biblical foundation for rendering the Hebrew word ‘was’ (‘the earth was without form and void’) as ‘became’.Conclusion: The natural reading of Genesis 1:1-2 suggests no such idea of a ‘gap theory’, nor is it warranted either scientifically or biblically. (2) The Day-Age Theory Another attempt by Bible-believing Christians to reconcile biblical creationism with the evolutionary hypothesis is the so-called ‘Day-Age Theory’. Sadly, again this was popularized by a Scotsman in the mid-nineteenth century, named Hugh Miller. He lived in the little village of Cromarty, near Inverness in NE Scotland, and I actually visited his cottage on a trip to Scotland last year, the cottage being a national heritage building and under the care of the Scottish National Trust. Hugh Miller was a stone-mason for much of his life and this occupation had made him very familiar with the fossil records in the rocks of NE Scotland. Although a staunch Reformed Presbyterian and a leading figure, like Thomas Chalmers, in the formation of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843, Miller was convinced that the fossil record required long aeons of time for its formation, which could not be reconciled with the views of a ‘young’ earth as held by the mainstream Christian Church for centuries previously. [This view was adopted by James Boice, E.J. Young and B.B. Warfield]. So he inaugurated the ‘day-age theory’, maintaining that the six days of creation recorded in Genesis chapter one were not literal 24-hour days at all, but long periods of geological ages. He popularized this view in his book Footprints of the Creator. He also maintained that Noah’s flood could not have been a universal flood as Scripture affirms, because the fossil record indicated such diversity of species that Noah could not possibly have gotten all the living animals and birds into the Ark! Sadly, in spite of Miller’s undoubted orthodoxy in other theological matters and his great usefulness in maintaining the biblical principles of the newly-formed Free Church of Scotland, he was defying the normal accepted interpretation of Genesis 1 & Genesis 6-9, challenging the infallibility of Scripture and denying the obvious implications of the language of Genesis 1 (which speaks clearly of normal solar days . . . ‘evening and morning being the cyclical succession of day time and night time). Moreover, there are several other overwhelming objections . . . The order of creative events in Genesis 1 is very different from the accepted order of fossils in the rocks representing geological ages. (E.g. the first life developed on land not in oceans; plant life came first, not marine life; the earth was created before the stars, not vice-versa; birds before fish & insects; marine life created instantly; stars created on the 4th day, not still evolving etc.) The necessity of geological ages is based on the fossil records, and fossils speak unequivocally of suffering and death being present in the world. So, we have the same contradiction of Scripture as in the ‘gap theory’, i.e. that suffering and death are a divine judgment brought into the world because of man’s original sin (Rom. 5:12). In contrast, the ‘day-age’ theory must assume that suffering and death comprises an essential part of God’s work of creating and preparing a world for man, which is inconceivable for the biblical God of love, grace and omnipotence. As we have said, the biblical record itself makes it plain that the days of creation are literal days, not long indefinite ages. The ‘days’ are literal days and the events described happened in just the way described. Although the Hebrew word for ‘day’ (yom) may refer occasionally in other parts of the Bible to longer periods of time, the most natural and obvious meaning of the word in Genesis 1 is to the literal twenty-four hour day and therefore cannot be ‘stretched’ into millions of years! This is further borne out by the clear rationale given by the Lord when he instituted the Fourth Commandment later at Mt. Sinai, ‘For in six days, the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it’ (Exod. 20:11).No compromise is possible between evolution and creation! E.g. creation ex nihilo, compared to evolution’s insistence on pre-existing matter; creation in six days, contrasted with billions of years; oceans were created before land not vice versa; profound differences in the areas of the hydrosphere and atmosphere; life originated on land not in the oceans; plant life first, not marine life; fruit trees before fish, not vice versa; stars created on the fourth day, not still evolving; birds created before fish and insects; whales before reptiles, not vice versaa; man created before rain; man created before woman,: light existing before the sun; plants before the sun; marine life created instantly; man’s body created from the dust, not evolving from an animal ancestry; man as a vegetarian; man’s dominion over all creation, from the very first; man’s Fall causing death both spiritual and physical, not therefore something already existing previously for aeons of time. (3) Theistic Evolution Even though the first two attempts by Bible-[believing Christians to reconcile the evolutionary hypothesis with the biblical account of creation (the ‘gap theory’ and the Day-Age theory) are false, misleading and dangerous, nevertheless they had the merit of at least attempting to treat seriously the account of creation in Genesis 1. However, theistic evolution does no such thing. Its essence is to impose the conclusions of atheistic scientific assertions above the Bible and in place of the Bible’s clear teaching about divine creation. It maintains that step by step, God directed the process of macro evolution, changing one species of life into a progressively higher order through aeons of time, so that Genesis chapters 1-11 are pure mythology or allegory and not to be taken as a literal account of man’s beginnings. This is the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, and it has been embraced by countless Protestants as well. It is not my purpose to go into a detailed refutation of this teaching, because of time-constraints, but it is worth noting that this whole position is plainly contrary to the express teaching of Scripture. For instance, Dr. Henry M. Morris in his fine commentary on the Book of Genesis, The Genesis Record points out that (1) There are at least 200 direct references to, or quotations from, the Book of Genesis in the New Testament. (2) All the books of the New Testament except Philemon, II & III John, contain allusions to Genesis. (3) More than half of the 200 New Testament allusions to Genesis are found in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. (4) Sixty -three allusions are to the first three chapters of Genesis. (5) Twenty-five of the references are directly from the lips of Christ himself. (Appendix 4, pp.677-682) In other words, all the inspired writers of the New Testament scriptures accepted the accounts in the Book of Genesis as literal, historical facts, our Lord Jesus Christ himself referring to the creation events and the great Flood as literal and historical events. In contrast, to quote Davis Young, ‘Theistic evolution is logically and inevitably the death of biblical religion’. (4) The Framework Hypothesis This is the most recent attempt to harmonize the creation account with the evolutionary hypothesis, allowing Christians to believe in a process of millions of years. It has been popularized in our day, sadly, by a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Meredith Kline, although the origin goes back to around 1924 in Germany, where a German rationalistic theologian observed a supposed parallelism between the first three days of creation and the second three days in Genesis 1 (i.e. two trios). The reasoning is very involved, but as I understand it, it amounts to this: the ‘six days’ are in essence merely a ‘framework’ for the real emphasis on the 7th Day (when God rested from all his work of creation). So they are merely a device to give us only general information, not to be taken as literal days, but just two triads. So the six days are designed to teach us, not how long God took to create, but the emphasis instead is upon the three spheres (heavenly , earthly, and marine). So that Genesis 1 is merely describing some heavenly truth, which we can only understand in earthly and inadequate language. The effect, of course, is to eliminate a literal understanding of Genesis 1, because Genesis 1 is unconcerned about chronology & time, and to replace it with merely a poetical and metaphorical description of creation. What are we to say of this extraordinary position? It must be rejected, because: No other Scripture is safe from similar treatment! (i.e. artistic structure/poetic form). E.g. Christ’s resurrection! This was never espoused earlier than the 20th Century. It is, after all, an assault upon the perspicuity of Scripture (cf. WCF I:VII). The Bible becomes a meaningless book. Once more, this bizarre explanation assumes that death and destruction were present in the world prior to man’s Fall. It denies and overlooks the plain fact that there is a climax in the six days of creation, leading up to the emphasis upon the 7th Day as the culmination of all of God’s creative work. This whole position is contradicted by the Lord’s words in the institution of the 4th Commandment (Exod. 20:11, ‘For in six days, the Lord made the heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day and hallowed it’). III. THE BIBLICAL ACCOUNT OF CREATION (GENESIS 1) (1) Some General Comments It’s worth recalling the magnificent language of the Westminster Confession of Faith (Chapter IV) dealing with Creation:I. It pleased God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost for the manifestation of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning to create, or make of nothing the world and all things therein whether visible or invisible in the space of six days and all very good. II. After God had made all other creatures, he created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, endued with knowledge, righteousness and true holiness, after his own image, having the law of God written in their hearts, and power to fulfill it; and yet under a possibility of transgressing . . .Once more, we must admire the amazing skill of the Westminster divines to set out the doctrine of biblical creation with such conciseness and economy of words, merely two short paragraphs amounting to only 150 words in length! Indeed, it summarizes the short, terse statements of God’s creative acts in Genesis 1-2, in six literal days, namely, the beginning of time/space/matter . . . the creation of light, the separation of the firmament, the gathering of the oceans, creation of plant life, the sun/moon/stars, animal life and finally man himself. But, did you know? The first chapter of Genesis is one of the most God-centred chapters in the whole Bible! He is mentioned by name some 32 times in 31 verses . . . and, adding personal pronouns, some 43 times! So that, in the Bible’s opening chapter, the Holy Spirit brings us into the presence of GOD and keeps us there! No wonder, therefore, that Genesis 1 is a main focus of Satan’s assault, because abandonment of the God-centred truths of this chapter inevitably leads to Satan’s triumph. Moreover, if the Holy Spirit’s inspiration of Scripture cannot be trusted in the matter of God’s work of creation, how can he be trusted later in Scripture when he deals with the vital matter of man’s need for salvation? If he cannot be trusted in the first chapter of the Bible, can he be (for example) in the great salvation text of John 3:16? And if what he says about the earth in Genesis 1 can be questioned, what confidence can we have of his description of heaven in Revelation 22? The magnificent opening verse of Genesis 1 is a sublime statement which sweeps away atheism (by asserting God’s existence),polytheism (by declaring he is one) and pantheism (by separating him from matter). Similarly, since we have every reason to believe that Moses was the human author of the book of Genesis, it is striking and instructive that he did not write the account of creation according the theories of his own day and age! That is to say, even though he was ‘learned in all the Egyptian wisdom’ (Acts 7:22), he did not reflect any of these erroneous and absurd views in Genesis chapter one, viz. that there was once a primeval ocean, out of which appeared an egg and from which emerged the sun God, who in turn had four children (GEB, SHU, TEFNUT & NUT), and their rivalry among themselves led to the creation as we know it! What a blessing that the account of Genesis is not at all like that, but instead like a snow-capped Himalayan peak rising majestically towards heaven. Moses wrote contrary to all the accepted learning of his day . . . he must therefore have written by divine revelation. (Take just one instance as example: the record states that on the third day of creation, all the waters were gathered into one place to form the world’s oceans. How could Moses possibly have known that all the oceans of the world form one interconnected body of water, when all that he could possibly have been acquainted with was a limited access to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea? It must therefore have been shown to him by divine revelation!) N.B. Peter Stoner, a modern mathematician, has noted that the thirteen steps of creation recorded in Genesis 1:1-26 have all been correctly listed and named by Moses in their proper order . . . and he calculates that Moses’ chances of being able to do this were one in thirty-one sextillion (i.e. 31 followed by 21 zeroes)! Yet secular humanism today would rather believe Charles Darwin’s unsubstantiated evolutionary hypothesis, which completely lacks empirical evidence, than Moses’ divinely inspired account of creation! Whereas, apart from any other consideration about the falsity of Darwin’s hypothesis, there is one expression, used no less than ten times in Genesis 1, which spells the death-knell to Darwin’s claims – namely, the basic command of God for all living things to reproduce ‘after their own kind’ (vv.11, 12, 21, 24, 25). This alone is surely the rock on which the evolutionary doctrine founders! (2) Some Specific Observations The Westminster Confession of Faith is undoubtedly correct when it states, so succinctly, the reason for God’s performing the work of creation, viz. ‘It pleased God . . . for the manifestation of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning to create or make of nothing the world’, etc. As John Calvin aptly put it, the world is designed to be ‘the theatre of God’s glory’. This is a constant theme throughout the Bible, often used as the motive for men to worship and honour the true God (e.g. Psa. 33:6 – By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth’; Psalms 95, 100 & 136 similarly call for the Creator to be worshipped; Psa. 33:5 reminds us that ‘the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord’; Jer. 10:12 that ‘he made the earth by his power’; and in the New Testament, Paul reminds us that ‘the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are dearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead so that (men) are without excuse’, etc. (Rom. 1:20f). Moreover, a number of prayers begin with references to God’s work of creation (e.g. Neh. 9:6, Jer. 32:17, Acts 4:20. And we need to remember that even the last book of the Bible recognizes God’s work of original creation, and ascribes all honour and power to him because he created all things – Revelation 4:11: ‘Thou art worthy, O Lord to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created’. In other words, the creation account is woven into the texture of the whole Bible OT & NT alike! We surely need no reminder, too, that the Bible asserts that the work of creation involved each Person of the Trinity – the Father (Gen. 1:1 & Psa. 8); the Son (Heb. 1:2, John 1:2, Col. 1:15-16); and the Holy Spirit (Gen. 1:2) – and that it was indeed creation ex nihilo (i.e. not from pro-existing materials, even though in the later stages of creation the Creator did use pre-existing materials, e,g. in the creation of man); and that it was fiat creation (he spoke the universe into existence); and that there was nothing else outside of God himself which he did not create. Surely, too, the repeated expression ‘and the evening and the morning’ – at the close of each act of creation – most naturally and logically implies six literal twenty-four days of creation, and not long ages of millions of years (vv. 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31)! And all was ‘very good’. We need no reminder, too, that the creation of man had a distinct place in God’s purpose, as evidenced for instance by his being created after everything else (in a world prepared and amply furnished for him), and by deliberation (‘Let us make man in our own image’), as the image-bearer of God in knowledge, righteousness and holiness, and therefore distinct from the other animal creation entirely, with God’s law written upon his heart and with a reasonable and immortal soul. Moreover, the record clearly states that mankind’s origin was from one human pair, confirmed again in Genesis 10 (the genealogy of the nations) and in the apostle Paul’s address to the men of Athens in Acts 17:26. This is fundamental to the biblical doctrine of original sin and the doctrine of the resurrection, as stated clearly in Romans 5:12-19 and 1 Corinthians 15:21f). Dr. Henry Morris, in his fine commentary The Genesis Record states the fundamental importance of the biblical creation account as follows (pp.18-20): Origin of the universe. The Book of Genesis stands alone in accounting for the actual creation of the basic space-mass-time continuum which constitutes our physical universe. Genesis 1:1 is unique in all literature, science, and philosophy. Every other system of cosmogony, whether in ancient religious myths or modern scientific models, starts with eternal matter or energy in some form, from which other entities were supposedly gradually derived by some process. Only the Book of Genesis even attempts to account for the ultimate origin of matter, space, and time; and it does so uniquely in terms of special creation. Origin of order and complexity. Man’s universal observation, both in his personal experience and in his formal study of physical and biological systems, is that orderly and complex things tend naturally to decay into disorder and simplicity. Order and complexity never arise spontaneously — they are always generated by a prior cause programmed to produce such order. The Primeval Programmer and his programmed purposes are found only in Genesis. Origin of the solar system. The earth, as well as the sun and moon, and even the planets and all the stars of heaven, were likewise brought into existence by the Creator, as told in Genesis. It is small wonder that modern scientific cosmogonists have been so notably unsuccessful in attempting to devise naturalistic theories of the origin of the universe and the solar system. Origin of the atmosphere and hydrosphere. The earth is uniquely equipped with a great body of liquid water and an extensive blanket of an oxygen-nitrogen gaseous mixture, both of which are necessary for life. These have never ‘developed’ on other planets, and are accounted for only by special creation. Origin of life. How living systems could have come into being from non-living chemicals is, and will undoubtedly continue to be, a total mystery to materialistic philosophers. The marvels of the reproductive process, and the almost-infinite complexity programmed into the genetic systems of plants and animals, are inexplicable except by special creation, at least if the laws of thermodynamics and probability mean anything at all. The account of the creation of ‘living creatures’ in Genesis is the only rational explanation. Origin of man. Man is the most highly organized and complex entity in the universe, so far as we know, possessing not only innumerable intricate physico-chemical structures, and the marvellous capacities of life and reproduction, but also a nature which contemplates the abstract entities of beauty and love and worship, and which is capable of philosophizing about its own meaning. Man’s imaginary evolutionary descent from animal ancestors is altogether illusory. The true record of his origin is given only in Genesis. Origin of marriage. The remarkably universal and stable institution of marriage and the home, in a monogamous, patriarchal social culture, is likewise described in Genesis as having been ordained by the Creator. Polygamy, infanticide, matriarchy, promiscuity, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, and other corruptions all developed later. Origin of evil. Cause-and-effect reasoning accounts for the origin of the concepts of goodness, truth, beauty, love, and such things as fundamental attributes of the Creator himself. The origin of physical and moral evils in the universe is explained in Genesis as a temporary intrusion into God’s perfect world, allowed by him as a temporary concession to the principle of human freedom and responsibility, and also to manifest himself as Redeemer as well as Creator. IV. EVOLUTION’S EFFECTS ON VITAL BIBLICAL DOCTRINES I have alluded to these effects throughout this paper this evening and there is therefore the need only for a brief summary, as follows: Denial of the Inspiration and Authority of ScriptureIf we cannot trust the creation account in the early chapters of Genesis, doubt is cast upon the inspiration and veracity of the rest of Scripture as well. Moreover, we have seen that all the books of the New Testament, except for Philemon and II & III John , contain allusions to Genesis, and that more than half of the 200 NT allusions to Genesis are found in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Sixty-three of the allusions are to the first three chapters of Genesis. Twenty-five of the references are directly from the lips of Jesus himself (including his referencing chapters 1-3 of Genesis). Denial of the Person and Authority of the Lord Jesus Christ>He was involved in the work of creation (John 1:1-4 & 10, Col. 1:15-16, & Heb. 1:2); he affirmed the divine creation of Adam & Eve (Mark 10:6-7), their being ‘one flesh’ (Mark 10:8), and he referred to ‘the creation which God created’ (Mark 13:19). It was the Son of God himself who taught his followers to accept the historical accuracy of the Old Testament in general and the Book of Genesis in particular (Matt. 19:4, 23:35, 24:37-39, Luke 17:19,32). Denial of the Need for the Doctrine of RedemptionSin, suffering and death, according to evolution’s teaching, are natural phenomena and not the result of divine judgment upon mankind through its federal head, Adam. Mankind is therefore in no need of divine redemption, in contradiction to the Bible’s plain teaching that sin was introduced by Adam’s disobedience and can only be remedied by the work of the ‘second’ (or last) Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:19f). As Morris & Whitcomb say (in The Genesis Flood),Uniformitarian paleontology dates the formation of the major fossiliferous strata many scores and hundreds of millions of years before the appearance of human beings on the earth. It assumes that uncounted billions of animals had experienced natural or violent death before the Fall of Adam: that many important kinds of animals had long since become extinct by the time God created Adam to have dominion over every living creature: and that long ages before the Edenic curse giant flesh-eating monsters like Tyrannosaurus Rex roamed the earth, slashing their victims with ferocious dagger-like teeth and claws . . . But how can such a description of the history of the animal kingdom be reconciled with the early chapters of Genesis? Does the Book of Genesis, honestly studied in the light of the New Testament, allow for a reign of tooth and claw and death and destruction before the fall of Adam? If not, we have further compelling reasons for questioning the uniformitarian scheme of reading (the fossil record in) the rocks and . . . strong encouragement for finding in the great Genesis Flood the true explanation for fossil formations in the crust of our planet (pp.454f).Moreover, such clear-cut passages as Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:21-22 indicate that Adam’s sin and fall introduced spiritual and physical death into the human race. In the Romans passage we learn thatthrough one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin: and so death passed upon all men, for that all sinned; . . . by the trespass of the one many died . . . the judgment came of one unto condemnation . . . by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one . . . through one trespas the judgment came unto all men to condemnation . . . through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners . . .Likewise, we are told also in the Corinthian passage that ‘by man came death’ and ‘in Adam all die’. The Bible further teaches that all human beings have descended from one human pair (Gen. 3:20 ‘Eve . . . was the mother of all living’; confirmed by Acts 17:26 ‘He made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth’) and that these first human beings were created directly by God wholly apart from any evolutionary development of man’s body from animal forms. The Lord Jesus Christ stated that ‘he who made them from the beginning made them male and female’ (Matt. 19:4) Genesis 2:21-23 clearly indicates that Eve came out of Adam and not from the animal kingdom by some evolutionary process! This is confirmed by the apostle Paul: ‘the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man’ (1 Cor. 11;8) So, if Eve received her body in this purely supernatural way out of Adam’s side, why should anyone postulate an evolutionary development for Adam’s body? The Bible teaches that Adam’s body was formed from ‘the dust of the ground’ (Gen. 2:7), not of evolved animal forms.Therefore, in the light of this biblical revelation regarding the origin of Adam and Eve, Christians must insist on the essential unity and the supernatural, non-evolutionary creation of the human race. Otherwise there could be no such thing as human sin or eternal salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:23, Heb. 2:9, 14, 1 John 1:5-2:2) Denial of the Future State of Perfection and Glory in HeavenIf there has been no Fall of man and no need of his redemption, there is no place for a future state of man’s full restoration. Whereas, the Genesis account is not only important as a history of man’s origin, but also as a prophecy of man’s future. The Book of Revelation makes this clear, where Paradise lost, in Genesis, becomes Paradise regained, in Revelation. For example, note the following comparisons between the original world and the final world: Probationary World (Genesis) Eternal World (Revelation)Division of light & darkness (1:4) No night there (21:25)Division of land and sea (1:10) No more sea (21:21)Rule of sun and moon (1:16) No need of sun and moon) (21:23)Man in a prepared garden (2:8-9) Man in a prepared city (21:2)River flowing out of Eden (2:10) River flowing from god’s throne (22:1)Gold in the land (2:12) Gold in the city (21:21)Tree of life in midst of garden (2:9) Tree of life throughout the city (22:2)God walking in the garden (3:8) God dwelling with His people (21:3) (Even more striking is the contrast between the world under God’s curse and the eternal world renewed, e.g. Cursed ground/no more curse, . . . daily sorrow/no more sorrow . . . thorns and thistles/no more pain . . . sweat of the face/tears wiped away . . . eating herbs of the field/twelve manner of fruits . . . returning to dust/no more death . . . evil continually/nothing that defileth . . . coats of skins/fine linen, white & clean . . . Satan opposing/Satan banished . . . Kept from tree of life/access to Tree of life . . . banished from the garden/free entry to the City . . . Redeemer promised/redemption accomplished.)For these and many other reasons, it becomes evident that an understanding of the early chapters of Genesis is vital to an understanding of the eternal purposes of God. The Creation or Evolution debate is a vital issue in today’s church. It should not be assumed that any statements of fact or of opinion appearing on this website have been approved by or represent the views of the Trust, its Trustees or employees.
every since i was a teenager i remember being haunted by questions others thought unimportant.
why there is something rather than nothing.
what is true, good, beautiful and just.
why bother getting up in the morning? is there really a good reason to live?
as i approach the end, aware of being past my pull by date, i returned to such questions.
long ago i understood that i was not smart enough to answer them myself. but i really hoped that with study and enough reading i would find someone who was smart enough and who had a good answer for them that i could have confidence in.
a few years back i, in one of those midnight dark places, realized that i probably wouldn’t understand the answers if/when i encountered them. it was a great disappointment but it was still a worthwhile endeavor, looking. even if they were un-understandable
well, i am beginning to doubt my ability to even recognize the truth should i be lucky enough to find it. the fact is that i am more likely to misidentify the false as truthful then i am to recognize the truth. so perhaps the task is a fool’s errand.
i read.
curious about many things around me.
apparently unemployable, content simply to try to understand.
knowing i’m not smart enough to answer the questions that really bug me, conscious that death will reach me before wisdom does.
rats. i had hoped for more.
it bugs me that i don’t have a way to keep the programs in my vista install up to date.
installed software informer to try it
does anyone use an update service????
shame “sudo apt-get upgrade” doesn’t work….*grin*
December 2009 Archives – Jesus Creed
December 2009 Archive for Jesus Creed: Scot McKnight on the significance of Jesus and orthodox faith in the 21st century.
blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2009/12/index.html – Cached
Tim Keller on Adam and Eve (RJS) – Jesus Creed
Dec 30, 2009 … The white paper written by Tim Keller for the November workshop “In Search of a Theology of Celebration” is posted on the BioLogos web site: Creation, …
blog.beliefnet.com › Jesus Creed – Cached
Reformissionary: Tim Keller
Steve McCoy: a missional church pastor in the suburbs of Chicago, arts, writing, photography, music, theology, etc.
www.stevekmccoy.com/reformissionary/tim_keller/ – Cached – Similar
An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution
This is a guest-post by Terry Gray and is the fourth installment in the series “Evangelicals, Evolution, and the Church”. Terry is the webmaster for the ASA …
evanevodialogue.blogspot.com/ – Cached – Similar
“Creation, Evolution, and Christian Laypeople” | The BioLogos …
“Creation, Evolution, and Christian Laypeople”. December 17, 2009. The fifth of seven white papers from BioLogos’ November workshop “In Search of a Theology …
biologos.org › BioLogos News – Cached
The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog: December 2009
Dec 3, 2009 … To posterity [the novel A Separate Peace] offers up a minor curiosity: its portrait of Brinker Hadley, a cunning verbal torturer based on [author John] …
jamesjchoi.blogspot.com/2009_12_01_archive.html – Cached
How do we know who to trust?Why or when would you suspect a conspiracy?
t. keller’s distinction between evolution as a theory of everything and as a biological theory of common descent is important, easier formulation than philosophic vs methodological. i like the underlying poetry of the distinction.
“Think about this, for example: if the TOE was true, the world should be full of creatures in the process of evolving. In reality, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE ONE! Believe me, if there was, we would all know about it.”
individuals do not evolve, populations do.
all populations of living creations are evolving over time.
much of the problems from this debate stem from a serious misunderstanding of the science of evolutionary theory, whether is is deliberate lies or just ignorance, there is no way of telling, but it is nonsense like the above that permeate the discussion from the YEC viewpoint.
re:
“To claim that such creatures do not currently exist because evolution is a very slow process that takes place over many millions of years is not a legitimate defense, for if evolution was actually true there should ALWAYS be creatures, a great many of them, in fact, that are in the process of evolving, both at any time in the past and in the present. The fact that there are not ANY is a very serious blow to the entire theory.”
assuming you are interested in the science of the issues, the most accessible book that i am aware of, that answers these questions is about Darwin’s Finches (The beak of the finch: a story of evolution in our time By Jonathan Weiner). What you can see from their data is a multi-year adaptation of various bird populations on different islands to the change in average seed size, which is itself a change brought about by rainfall differences over time.
The change in the various alleles for beak size(for example) and in average seed size, in different populations is exactly what evolution is. the populations of finches and the plants they feed upon are evolving, we can see it over a 20 year period.
I looked for an important distinction in Pastor Keller’s essay and was unable to find it. This is the difference between Scripture using an element of the Israelite proto-science worldview and God teaching this element as binding on subsequent believers.
I believe that the human author of Genesis 1-3 believed that the world was flat, that the sky was a solid crystal, that the sun traveled around the world and was perhaps extinguished in the seas at night, and that Adam and Eve were his actual physical genetic ancestors. The question in my mind is whether God wishes for me to believe each and every element of his man’s worldview, in short, is God teaching these elements or using them?
I do not see any knowledge of the physical world in Genesis 1-3 that was not present in the cultures surrounding Israel at the time these words were written, simply put, God did not see fit to put any easter eggs(in the sense of hidden treasures in software) in Scripture, there is no modern knowledge of what the universe is and how it operates in Genesis. Now what can we do with this? Are we to believe as the author of Genesis 1-3 did that Adam/Eve were his actual genetic ancestors or are we to believe the author-Creator of the world, the writer of the book of Nature, that such a couple could not have the necessary genetic variation to give birth to the human race without deadly founder’s effects?
re:
“Questions of what scientific knowledge the author of Genesis had are red herrings: what matters is what he wants to communicate to us.”
the first level of the communication of the Scriptures is from the author to it’s first hearers, who shared this early Israelite cultural context. The problem is that in order for communication to occur, pieces of this matrix are being used along with the words. To a subsequent reader, such as us, on a second level, not sharing these cultural matrix elements, it becomes difficult to understand which elements are being used simply to communicate and which elements are being taught by God as corrective to our erroneous cultural analogs.
That is that problem here. The author believes Adam and Eve to be his direct ancestor, he also believes that all the earth is watered from 4 rivers flowing out of Eden, this is deeply embedded in the idea of a flat earth with those rivers flowing to the 4 corners. Now i know from looking at google maps that the earth is not flat and that it is physically impossible to water it with four rivers flowing from a single spot. Now the issue is how Scripture is to correct my worldview, am i to believe that Gen 2 requires me to believe as did it’s author that the world is flat? In order to be faithful to Scripture, to demonstrate my love for God and His word, must i correct my idea of the shape of the earth?
Ditto with Adam and Eve as actual physical human beings who are the sole founders of the human race. If God is teaching this as binding on all subsequent readers of Scripture as an actual description of reality then i ought to, but if God is using this element of the human author’s worldview in order to communicate at all, then it is not designed, nor must i take it to be, a corrective to my current worldview corresponding elements.
??central to this philosophy are the assertions of Darwinian evolutionary theory. By keeping the details of creation’s story completely inside “the box,” evolution effectively rules out the existence of God.
essentially the truth project is deeply confusing science and philosophy, method and goals.
evolutionary theory is a scientific theory which proposes that life can be partly explained with a method that assumes naturalist and materialistic explanations. methodological naturalism, it doesn’t make any sufficiency claims. after all black swans may exist, induction doesn’t prove things it offers explanation to the most reasonable level, not certainty but confidence.
furthermore the truth project asserts that science can be judge truth or false on philosophic grounds. bs. use the right level, judge scientific theories on scientific grounds. judge scientism on philosophical grounds, this is the carrying forward of method into Truth, science into values and meaning, it is not science, it is philosophy.
since scientists are using evolution to justify their philosophic positions this does not argue against the science only the misuse of it. TTP is attacking at the wrong level, biological science demonstrates the truthfulness of evolutionary theory, but that doesn’t justify social darwinianism any more than it justifies darwkin’s philosophic positions.
Do we know for certain, that science does or can give us complete knowledge of reality? Or is this merely an assumption? If it is an assumption then, obviously, there is no guarantee that it is true. And if it is claimed that it is not an assumption, then it must be knowable by scientific means since ontological scientism entails epistemic scientism. Unfortunately, for proponents of ontological scientism, it does not seem possible to determine through scientific experiment that the scientific method can give us complete knowledge of reality.
for the sake of argument assume that christianity and young earth creationism are necessarily linked together. that is you can not be a consistent christian and accept any form of evolutionary theory.
if a person dies as an inconsistent christian can he be saved? that is, god does not change an evolutionists heart in such a way that he sees the truth of yecism, does this mean that he is a false believer or just an unfortunately mislead christian?
are we really saved by believing a certain set of propositions?
can i believe that the pope is god’s vicar on earth and be saved?
how to determine the exact set of beliefs that are required and the set that can not be believed as well.
odd.
wrong.
———————-
i’m listening to this week’s speaking of faith
Mr. Davies: You have to understand how science emerged in Western culture. Under the twin influences of Greek philosophy, which taught that human beings can come to understand their world through rational reasoning. And then the second tradition began with Judaism, the notion of a creative world order, that there is a supreme lawgiver who brought the universe into existence at a finite time in the past and orders the universe according to a rational plan. So both Christianity and Islam adopted this linear time and a creative world order, and the scientists had that tradition. They said, `Well, there’s an order in nature, but it’s hidden from us.’ We don’t see it in daily life. We have to use arcane procedures of experiment and mathematics to uncover this, what I like to call, mathematical code which underpins the nature. We now call that the laws of physics. But this notion that human beings could come to understand it, could read the mind of God, because the application of human reasoning and human inquiry was a tremendous thing. And the birth of science can be identified with this step.
one big thing about yecism is that it fundamentally distrusts science and scientists, preferring either to think that they are lying about these things or so deceived by evil that they are blind to the real truth. interestingly this strikes at the heart of the universe as belonging to and created by a rational and orderly god. when the experts are wrong and the uneducated ignorant are right, then there isn’t a rational universe out there, only inside those with exactly the right faith to see it rightly. curious.
If Susan Boyle has a break down then she only has herself to blame. Simon did not her to enter the contest and he has not forced her to persue a singing career. He has only treated her like any other talented constestant would be treated.
If he hadn’t given her the same opportunity to have a career as he would have given to a person who didn’t have a mental problem then he would have been vilified by society for discrimination.
If anyone is to blame for her subsequent problems it would be best to look to her family members. Where have they been all of this time? Shouldn’t they have spoken up if they thought that Susan couldn’t handle being in the pressure cooker of the public eye?
i replied:
it is a version of the age old, probably unanswerable question “am i my brother’s keeper?”
in a society bound only by proximity what responsibilities are due from the strong to the weak, from the rich to the poor, from the wise to the foolish? if any.
those in the “entertainment industry” like s. cowell know it’s demands and stresses, do they have any obligations to people like s. boyle who are ill equipped to function even in “normal society” let alone the ultra-competitive destructive industry of music-making?
i think it a good question, one that the article illuminates.
what does it mean to do justice, to love mercy in this world? are those values human ones or just Christian?
it is a version of the age old, probably unanswerable question “am i my brother’s keeper?”
in a society bound only by proximity what responsibilities are due from the strong to the weak, from the rich to the poor, from the wise to the foolish? if any.
those in the “entertainment industry” like s. cowell know it’s demands and stresses, do they have any obligations to people like s. boyle who are ill equipped to function even in “normal society” let alone the ultra-competitive destructive industry of music-making? i think it a good question, one that the article illuminates.
what does it mean to do justice, to love mercy in this world? are those values human ones or just Christian?
In humans and chimps, which have about 22,000 genes each, the group found 1,418 duplicates that one or the other does not possess. For example, humans have 15 members of a family of brain genes linked to autism, called the centaurin-gamma family, whereas chimps have six, for a difference of nine gene copies.
The group estimated that humans have acquired 689 new gene duplicates and lost 86 since diverging from our common ancestor with chimps six million years ago. Similarly, they reckoned that chimps have lost 729 gene copies that humans still have.
they’ve decided that evolution is evil and any falsehood or outright lie is holy in the pursue of persuading people.
what ever happened to truth? or commitment to understand?
One of the reasons i appreciate jeff short’s blog is the passion it is evidently written with. Not the misplaced confidence, but the commitment and desire to please God. These are admirable qualities, i only find them misplaced in yecism, not wrong.
Second, theistic evolution teaches a God who speaks only to himself but is silent in public. Genesis 1:3, 6, 9.” And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so.” The phrase, “and God said,” is repeated over and over again during the account of Creation. Now, according to the theory of evolution, nature itself can explain itself, can explain all of life in its different forms, can explain how every living thing came to be without any reference to a supernatural Creator. But the Creation account of the Bible describes a supernatural Creator speaking forth the Creation. God says, “Let there be . . .” and it came to be.
is this a description or an anthropomorphic metaphor? is it a literal scientific historical who dun it or a condension to our creaturehood? how do we tell, how do we parse things like this in the bible? this is much more complex that the usual over simplistic literal/figurative divide, it goes to the heart of how God communicates to us.
Now we could approach the issue from as freshman physics text. Sound is vibration in the molecules of a medium. Or as a chapter from a neurology textbook, speech is human sounds attached to our nervous system and it’s ability to hear and create a symbolic system. Or do we look at what sounds and names and speech meant to the ancient Hebrew, to see how speech fit into their mental structures, into their society and it’s explanation of their role in the universe?
Yecists have already compromised the clear literal teaching of Scripture with science. First is the movement from flat earth to spherical, second is the geocentric to heliocentric and the third is illness is physical not demonic in origin. The only consistent literalist believes wholeheartedly that demons cause all illness, the earth is flat, heaven is above our heads, hell beneath our feet, the earth is the center of the cosmos and that creation occurred 6k years ago. Yecists are modern, they wish to see Scripture read in modern scientific terms because they have assumed the major elements of a scientific worldview. It is not because they are anti-scientific that they make such stupid claims, but rather because they wish to find modern science in an ancient text where it is both illegitimate and bad theology/hermeneutics.
There is no modern science in Genesis. There is nothing scientific or historical in our use of the terms, the authors of Genesis believed that the world was flat, they understood the cosmos in much the same way as those around them, it is essentially Babylonian cosmology. God choose to cloth revelation in the coin of the realm, the common sense, man in the street understanding of those ancient times, he didn’t reveal anything to the writers of Scripture concerning the nature of the physical world that was not known in the world around them. there are no 21st century easter eggs hidden in the bible(nor 18th, or 7th). Not our cosmology, Scripture is written for us, but it is not written to us. It is not our world that is in view in Genesis but theirs. Yecists are not only inconsistent in their application of which science to read back into Scripture but they claim that they are not even doing such, claiming only TE or CE modify their interpretation to fit modern science. nonsense.
When i meet a real literalist, wearing skins, seeing his physical and mental problems as demonic possession, worried about falling off the edge of the earth or falling into hell through a hole in the ground, i will be looking at a truly consistent and quite insane man.
enough rant, what about the issues in the essay?
Because evolution is most certainly not compatible with an authentic, biblical Christian faith. How can one read the Bible from start to finish and come up with an evolutionary understanding of God and creation?
why should i read Scripture looking for modern biological science at all? i don’t look in it to learn about microelectronics, why would i look their for evidence or explanation of genetics? Scripture is clothed in the science of it’s day. This science is being used by God to teach us spiritual truths, not the origin of a toothache(a demon in me) or the reason the sun comes up in the morning(the sun circles the earth). These are the incidentals, the outer layer, the medium for the message, the husk not the kernel, not the point of Scripture. But to a modern person, truth is truth, period. If the Scriptures teach a flat earth, versus use a flat earth cosmology then this is what we must believe to honor God and his revelation. It’s just that the evidence for spherical earth, geocentric solar system, the bacterial and viral origin of disease has been around so long that it has been incorporated into Scriptural interpretations in a unconscious way so that they can’t even see that Christians fought these radically new scientific ideas in the same way they now fight evolutionary biological theory. Their common sense has been so shaped so to make the issues invisible to them, for their theology has compromised on the clear literal teaching of Scripture to fit these elements long ago.
But again, i read a biology text if i wish to learn about rna viruses not Genesis.
According to evolution no Creator is needed because life can be explained in purely naturalistic terms. But more importantly, a natural explanation of life, the evolution of all life from simple life to the most complex form of life is clearly not what the biblical creation account is describing.
Beware anytime an interpreter of Scripture uses terms such as clear or obvious, for what you will hear next will be from his common sense, in whatever age and epoch he is a part of, it will be his cultural norms speaking, not the bible. Science doesn’t make sufficiency claims, people and their worldviews do, philosophers do, the average man in the street does. but science doesn’t claim to have solved the issues, it claims induction as a major tool, and as such is always provisional, always tentative, for there maybe black swans lurking about somewhere. Science as a human enterprise is methodologically naturalistic not philosophically. It is agnostic about whether naturalistic forces can explain the origin of life completely, sufficiently.
First, theistic evolution teaches a diminished God who doesn’t create directly.
Diminished? See Howard Vantil’s fully gifted creation theory. TE doesn’t propose an incompetent God who needs to tinker and readjust his creation at intervals (although if God creates all new species it is a rather continuous process). He is so not thoughtless that he needs to fix not just living things, but needs to build trapdoors into the laws he has created so that he can keep creation on track with periodic maintenance and magically adjustments. I don’t really think that magic replaces good planning at the beginning, i don’t really think that tinkering with life to make new species is really better for God’s image. but that is just me.
In other words, if all of life can be explained solely through natural processes, who needs a supernatural god to account for anything?
This is a good question and it shows that YECists are modern in their thinking, not really ancient as they claim to be. If the world is explainable in naturalistic terms then there is no room for God. It surprises me how often the new atheists and YECists agree on a very fundamental level about the truthfulness of the science in the Bible. the only thing they disagree about is whether it is true or false science, not whether it is being taught there. God of the gaps is a tempting solution, essentially that is YECisms relationship to science, likewise ID. Signature in the Cell is basically a god of the gaps argument that the cell is too complex to have evolved(abiogenesis) therefore evolution didn’t happen. The only difference between YEC and geocentrics and flatearthers and demons cause all disease is which gaps they mind.
Science doesn’t make sufficiency claims, philosophers do.
the god of the gaps is a lousy god.
That’s why atheists consider the Darwinian theory of evolution as their strongest argument against God — it essentially eliminates any need to bring God into the explanation of reality.
again it surprises me how often yecists and atheists agree on a very fundamental level, disagreeing only if the truth value of the proposition is t or f. I don’t look to science for my need of God, i don’t look to biology for my explanation of my sinfulness and need for redemption, i look to the Scriptures. Yecism wants to find God in biology. If they knew a bit more about the issues, they would not be looking there at all. life evolved, messy, wasteful, always tinkering with what is to try to get more done with the same stuff, not the kind of place you would look to find the Biblical God. collins as a geneticist knows that viruses comprise 50% of our dna, that crucial proteins are made from retroviral genes misread, that life is messy, hapzard, junky and really hard to explain without the evolutionary framework to organize things. perhaps he really doesn’t want God associated with biological structures for good reasons.
One would think a Christian, someone like Francis Collins, would be happy that traces of a Creator, of God, could be seen in the natural order. But no. Collins opposes such thinking. According to his theistic evolution belief, God keeps himself so far hidden that even carefully observing nature, no trace of God can be found. Evolution so explains everything in purely natural terms that any supposed trace of design or any inference back to a Designer from nature is bogus science.
yes, because he knows life is stupid, nothing like human design at all, for we swap modules, move things around, get ideas from where ever, life doesn’t. it only uses what it has at hand, it modifies with descent, creating nested hierarchical structure, not designs. perhaps the reason collins doesn’t look to science to show God is that biology doesn’t show the Biblical God, kind of why special revelation was needed, since the creation doesn’t reveal God in the way yecists wish.
anyhow it’s late and this exercise is one of futility, yecists are scientific in their orientation but lack in the particulars needed to see that this is not a good thing to import into hermenuetics.
life evolved, get over it
besides, lots of people think better than do i……read them
he’s a clear writer, working on preaching through genesis.
today he wrote:
The simple answer to the question of how we should interpret the Bible is – we should interpret it the way the authors, or should I say, Author, intends for it to be interpreted in any given instance.
i looked at this a couple of times and wondered, is this right?
do we really claim to have access to the mind of God? authorial intention vs. original audience’s interpretation.
one leads naturally to the idea:
the Scriptures are written for but not to us.
the other doesn’t, but rather assumes we and our world are the targets of the message, in a direct way, like the first hearers.
Knowing I will get old, I breathe in.
Knowing I cannot escape old age, I breathe out.
Knowing I will get sick, I breathe in.
Knowing I cannot escape sickness, I breathe out.
Knowing I will die, I breathe in.
Knowing I cannot escape death, I breathe out.
Knowing that one day I will have to abandon all that I cherish today, I breathe in,
Knowing I cannot escape having to abandon all that I cherish today, I breathe out.
Knowing that my actions are my only belongings, I breathe in.
Knowing that I cannot escape the consequences of my actions, I breathe out.
Determined to live my days deeply in mindfulness, I breathe in.
Seeing the joy and the benefit of living mindfully, I breathe out.
Vowing to offer joy each day to my loved ones, I breathe in.
Vowing to ease the pain of my loved ones,I breathe out.
We’ve paid a lot of attention to Wall Street over the last two years, but the unemployment rate in the financial services industry is only 6.6 percent (up from 6 percent a year ago). If we want to understand American joblessness, we need to look at other sectors, like the construction industry, which has a 24.7 percent unemployment rate that leads the nation (up from 18.7 percent a year ago).
That unemployment rate almost seems low given that Americans built 60 percent fewer homes in 2009 than we did in 2006. The travails of the building industry illustrates why unemployment remains so high, and why there are no easy fixes.
In the last 18 months, we have experienced a building bust that is the natural consequence of the building boom that preceded it.
From 2002 to 2006, Americans built 9.1 million units. Over approximately the same five-year period (from March 2002 to March 2007), the number of American households grew by only 6.7 million. Perhaps a million of those units replaced older homes that were destroyed or abandoned, but that means that we entered this recession with an excess of about 1.4 million housing units.
The construction industry will recover to normal levels, which will be far more modest than its recent heights, when the market works through those extra units.
The only way to get through the excess is if households form at a faster rate than houses are built. We completed 800,000 units last year, and if the rate of household formation had continued at its past rate of 1.34 million new households a year, then we would have absorbed 700,000 excess homes (assuming a depreciation rate of 200,000 units a year). But the rate of household formation was not anywhere near 1.34 million.
According to the Current Population Survey, only 400,000 new households formed from March 2008 and March 2009. While there were about a million new families, the number of non-family households dropped by almost 600,000. The number of 18- to 24-year-olds living at home increased by 300,000.
This recession has been particularly hard on younger workers. The number of jobs held by 20- to 24-year-olds declined 4.5 percent in 2009, while the number of jobs held by people over the age of 25 dropped 1.8 percent. Staying at home is an understandable response from younger workers to the labor market woes. The rate of household formation also fell during the 1982 recession and the Great Depression.
But while the decisions by younger workers to live at home are all individually sensible, it has caused a ripple through the construction industry.
Because the rate of household formation fell so far, we may have done almost nothing to work through our excess inventory, despite the fact that Americans built 700,000 fewer homes in 2009 than we did in 2007. We shouldn’t expect a construction recovery until we experience a couple of years where the rate of household formation dramatically outpaces new building.
The problem is dire and the sensible solutions are few. One time-worn strategy is to spur prospective home buyers through devices like the Homebuyer’s Tax Credit. This credit does prod young people to move out and buy their own homes, but hasn’t America done enough to subsidize home-buying? After all, Fannie and Freddie and the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction deserve some of the blame for encouraging all that over-buying during the boom.
Public spending also seems unlikely to achieve much because of the mismatch between the skills needed to build high-tech infrastructure and the skills of the unemployed.
The New Dealers came up with a lot of projects that required close to no specialized skills (think the Civilian Conservation Corps), seventy-five years ago. But today, good investments in technologically advanced infrastructure will depend on highly skilled workers, and they aren’t the ones that are disproportionately unemployed. Moreover, politics will demand that federal spending is spread evenly across states and districts, yet unemployed construction workers are highly concentrated in those places that were doing the most building.
My own preferred intervention is the temporary reduction of taxes that hit younger and lower wage workers, like the payroll tax. Temporarily reducing the taxes for Social Security and Medicare, which are paid by both employers and employees, should increase both employment and earnings. This reduction could even be made budget-neutral if it was offered primarily to younger people in exchange for accepting delayed eligibility for these programs’ benefits.
But the best case for this type of intervention is that its social costs will be modest, not that it will be a panacea for construction workers.
The problems facing vast numbers of unemployed workers reflect the fact that the last 30 years have been tough on people with less schooling, and the recession has been particularly cruel to them. The construction boom took up some of the slack and employed many, but it provided no permanent fix. The world rewards America’s educated far more than its manual laborers. The only good response to that fact is to educate more Americans.
“It is simply not true that there are credible scientific alternatives to evolution, nor that evolutionary theory has ‘weaknesses’ that make it unlikely to be true, nor that scientific work has been done that casts doubt upon it. Students should be left in no doubt on this score.”
science, not a movie about how someone felt visiting the Galapagos.
what good scientific evidence is there for design?
not bad design but good design, i know lots of badly designed things already
design, at least human design implies mixing up threads, using what other people found useful.
in biology these are chimeras, they don’t exist. but rather everything has precursors, in it’s genetic line, not the neighbors.
if God actively designed life, it isn’t anything like the way people do it.
so how can we recognize it?
what evidence to support denying:
“It is simply not true that there are credible scientific alternatives to evolution, nor that evolutionary theory has ‘weaknesses’ that make it unlikely to be true, nor that scientific work has been done that casts doubt upon it. Students should be left in no doubt on this score.”
science, not a movie about how someone felt visiting the Galapagos.what good scientific evidence is there for design?not bad design but good design, i know lots of badly designed things already
design, at least human design implies mixing up threads, using what other people found useful.
in biology these are chimeras, they don’t exist. but rather everything has precursors, in it’s genetic line, not the neighbors.
if God actively designed life, it isn’t anything like the way people do it.
so how can we recognize it?
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