Only Human

I don’t think that a site that publishes new material only once in a six month period can still be considered a blog, so I guess I am hoping to re-establish the “blog” status of this site.

When I really think about it, the main reason I have been neglecting this site is a simple insecurity issue. I just have not felt like I have the authority at this point in my life to play the part of scientist, biblical scholar or philosopher. After all, I’m just a 2nd year graduate student who occasionally reads an English translation of the Bible and likes to think about philosophy in the shower.

But in truth, giving into that insecurity is listening to a lie. I have learned so much about life, science, the Bible, my faith and my research over the last two years that a lack of material to discuss on this site is a poor excuse for my 6-month hiatus. I’ve got a lot that I want to share. I just hope that I have the discipline to keep posting at consistent intervals.

So here’s to shorter, more frequent blogs!

Born to Make Mistakes

So there’s this awful 80s song by The Human League called “Human” that popped into my head when I was sitting down to write this post. And since the goal of this blog is not to discuss the dangers of over-using synthesizers, all I’ll say about this song is that the lyrics mention the fact that all humans make mistakes.

Just for kicks though, I've linked the picture to the video of that song for your listening and viewing pleasure (or displeasure). Be warned that the song will be stuck in your head for weeks.

Anyways, if you have never made a mistake in your life, then just go ahead and stop reading now because the rest of this post will not apply to you. But if you agree with me that humans are fallible beings, then I invite you to continue reading.

As fellow mistake-makers, we all should consider the possibility that some of our beliefs just might contain error. No matter how strong or well-reasoned they might be, no matter how long we have held them, no matter how many people in the world share them, chances are that something we believe in is untrue, incorrect or not real in some fashion.

I wrote a post about belief a while back and I’d like to state it more concisely. There are always going to be others who hold beliefs that are different than our own. Therefore, we owe it to ourselves to truly own our beliefs and to learn what they are, what they mean, and where they came from. Only then we can thoughtfully evaluate the ideas of others with a skepticism that is both respectful and open-minded.

In the next couple of weeks and months, I will finally (I promise) provide a summary of the beliefs that are commonly held when interpreting the first chapters of Genesis. My goal is not to persuade people to believe as I do, but to share what I have learned so that the reader can be aware of the different beliefs that are commonly held about the first book of the Bible.

The Devil's in the Details

This blog was a long time coming because I just didn't know where to start.

So I typed in various versions of "science and faith" or "Evolution vs Creation" into Google and quickly found my inspiration.

- In the 1600s, Galileo's claim that the Earth revolves around the Sun resulted in the Catholic Church charging him with heresy and banning several scientific texts.

- In the 1800s, Charles Darwin's book proposing the theory of evolution by Natural Selection was hotly debated (though, it was more warmly received by the Church in Darwin's time than it is today).

- In the 1920s, a lawsuit over the teaching of evolution in a public school made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

- Now it is 2010 and after 500 years of irreconcilable differences, it seems that science and faith have finally given up and filed for a nasty divorce. You all have seen it. Every time science and faith get in the same room there is bitterness, distrust, fighting, and name-calling. Sure, we kids have to deal with spending weekdays with science and weekends at God's house, but everybody is happier now, right?

image courtesy of sciencecartoonsplus.org

Ok, so maybe that was a bit dramatic, but you get my point. Can't we all just get along?

I have a theory (yes, another one) that all of this fighting is not really due to irreconcilable differences after all. I think that science and faith "appear" to be in conflict partly because of ambiguous definitions, misunderstanding, misinformation, and various other forms of confusion. Let's face it, nobody can be an expert in religious studies, anthropology, philosophy AND science. Young-Earth Creationism, Old-Earth Creationism, Neo-Creationism, Intelligent Design, Theistic Evolution, Naturalistic Evolution, Uniformitarianism, Catastrophism, Deism, Agnosticism, Atheism..... AHHH!

No wonder we have no idea what anybody else is talking about. Honestly, when are two normal people ever going to agree on the proper definitions of all of those terms? It is this confusion that is the source of the perceived conflict between science and faith. The Devil is in the details, and he is laughing like crazy when we all go into a room on the same team and then fight like enemies.

So, in an effort to spoil the Devil's fun and begin the clarification process, here are some definitions from Dictionary.com:

Science (n): systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.

(Note the conspicuous absence of anything spiritual in the definition.)

Faith (n): Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.

(Did you catch that? Belief, truth, value, and trustworthiness are all non-physical and immaterial things. We cannot examine or measure matters of faith by means of observation and experimentation.)

So let's play God for a minute (I promise it won't be blasphemous). If you were going to create physical beings and place them in a physical world, doesn't it make sense to give them a way to learn and understand who you are through that physical environment?

And if you were going to give those physical beings a sense of spiritual awareness, doesn't it make sense that you would also give them a way to understand who you are in that spiritual sense?

Well that's exactly what God did. God gave us observation and experimentation (i.e. scientific inquiry) as a way to interact with our environment, and through it, to learn how incredibly amazing our Creator is. He also gave us the ability to understand spiritual ideas and then presented us with a field guide (i.e. the Bible) that tells us how to deal with spiritual and non-material concepts as we live out our lives within the aforementioned physical environment.

These are the two "books" that God gave us. When we interpreted each of them correctly, these books give us a complete understanding of our Creator.


Next Time:
Next post, I will dive into what I have learned in the last couple of years about the Bible, science, and anthropology as it relates to the Book of Genesis. If you want to read ahead, you can find more detailed writings about these topics on the links to the right (specifically, Essay 2 from the science and faith link).

It's Not Easy Being Green

Last night, I watched a PBS show that highlited a documentary called "GasLand".

Here's a 15-second clip from the documentary:



Yeah, that's an actual person's kitchen sink.

The documentary follows the filmmaker as he learns about the potential environmental impacts of "fracking", which is a widely-used natural gas mining process. In this process, natural gas is released by injecting a high-pressure mixture of water, chemicals and sand into ground. The chemicals in this mixture are usually toxic, yet the process of fracking is exempt from EPA regulation under the Safe Water Drinking Act.

You can watch the entire NOW on PBS interview that I watched here.

Now that was pretty shocking, but let's take a step back for a second. I realize that about half of the population has a built in distrust towards documentaries like these, and for good reason. After all, documentaries are usually produced as propaganda to push some kind of message onto uniformed individuals. Perhaps this is the case for GasLand also... but I doubt it.

I worked in the environmental consulting industry for four years before going back to grad school. During this time, I visited at many sites that had underground storage tanks contining fuel, dry cleaning chemicals or other hazardous materials. In my experience, the advent of more strict regulations during the later part of the 20th century has caused industries to do better job of keeping their chemicals out of the soil and groundwater than in the past. But better fuel and chemical storage practices today cannot remove the thousands and thousands of gallons of jet fuel that already exist beneath numerous military bases across the country.

It seems like we, as humans, are trying to make quick fixes to real issues without addressing the source of the problem. Centuries of groundwater contamination, air pollution, solid waste accumulation, and deforestation are caused by our desire for convenience, selfishness, laziness and greed. I mean, the first guy who dumped gallons of black industrial sludge into a pond probably had an inkling that it might have some negative effects, but he did it anyways.

I'm sure the same is true for this "fracking" process. Somehow, blasting a mixture of water, sand and industrial chemicals into the ground just seems like a bad idea.

So maybe natural gas burns slightly cleaner than gas and diesel... maybe drilling natural gas in the US will reduce our dependence on foreign oil... maybe a natural gas mining boom will provide new jobs during slow economic times... maybe. But these all seem like temporary benefits that may have a permanent side-effect to our already shrinking drinking water supply.

Now, am I suggesting that we all plug into an Avatar and worship a great big tree? Not exactly, but the film does seem to make a lot more sense to me now....

Anyways, it's not easy being green, but it will make it a lot more difficult for humanity in the future if we continue with our toxic ways.

Belief is a powerful thing

Recently, I stumbled across an article with this little pie chart:



This is from a poll of Texans and you can read the writeup here. To me, these charts are a wonderful explanation of why discussions about science and faith can become quite heated. Usually, these arguments begin because the people are not focused on who has the "correct" answer. Instead, they are arguing over whose beliefs are "correct".

So let's examine this thing we call "belief" and where it comes from.

As humans, we absorb knowledge, beliefs and ideals from all kinds of information sources, but certain influences carry more weight than others. So how do we decide whether or not to believe new information when it is presented?

I have a one-word answer to that question: Trust.

Advertisers will tell you that repetition forms beliefs, and while that may be true to a degree, our core beliefs are born from trust. If you trust a source, you will be more likely to accept it and incorporate it into your beliefs. If you question the source, you will be more likely to look to other sources for confirmation. Essentially, whether or not you believe your parents, your religious leaders, your professors, Wikipedia, CNN, NBC, FOX, Obama, Bush, OJ Simpson, Bono from U2, or even yourself is all based on who you trust. It makes little difference if the source is "correct".

This is why humans find it so difficult to change their core beliefs. Changing your core beliefs requires you to acknowledge that previously trusted sources may have been incorrect. Then, you must do something that seems extremely unnatural... you must remove any previous feelings of trust and examine the information on your own, free of outside influences. Not easy to do.

To prove my point, let's do a little exercise:

If you know me, then you know that I'm a graduate student studying earthquakes. So if I was to write a blog telling you that large earthquakes are becoming more and more frequent, you would probably believe me and not question the source, right?

This is because (1) you trust me and (2) a theory about increasing earthquake activity would be supported by what you heard about earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, right?

Well, the truth is that earthquakes are not becoming more and more frequent. If you trust the USGS, you can read this FAQ, which explains why earthquake activity is not increasing and what causes this common misconception.

If you don't trust the USGS, I just spent 10 minutes downloading data and plotting it in Excel:



Regardless of who you believe, I hope I've made the point that belief does not necessarily equal truth.

This blog was kind of a preface, and I hope it will prepare you to be challenged in future posts. As I move forward, I hope you will be able to look beyond your beliefs and seek the truth. But don't believe something is true just because you read it on the Internet. Believe it because you have examined it on your own and accepted its truth free of outside influence.

Thoughts on the History of Geology

My wife got me a book called The Bible, Rocks and Time for Christmas, and I have never been more excited to receive a book as a gift. If you know me, then you know that I end up finishing about 2% of books that I begin, so the fact that I'm cruising right through this 500 pager says something. The book was written by two Geology professors from Calvin College, and it is an honest and academic-minded walkthrough of key issues related to the age of the Earth from historical, biblical and scientific perspectives.

The first part of the book details historical perspectives on the age of the Earth from antiquity to present day. While reading, it was interesting to note that the majority of early geologists (the "founding fathers" of Geology if you will) were of the Christian faith. Some of the names I even remembered from my Geology 101 text book: Nicolas Steno, Georges Cuvier, William Buckland, William Smith and others. It is reasonable to assume that these guys all had a firm grasp on the Bible, yet when they observed the world around them, each one came to the conclusion that six literal 24-hour days could not account for the diversity they observed in rocks and fossils. Even as far back as the 3rd and 4th Century, Christian theologians like Origen and Augustine had thoughts that the six-day creation in Genesis may not consist of six literal 24-hour periods.

Another interesting thing I noted was that even if some early geologists were not "Christians", they were all at the very least deists who believed that a God created the universe but abandoned it with no supernatural intervention. Famous geologists like James Hutton, Charles Lyell and many others were in this group.

So in light of all of this new information, I began to wonder... Why is it that so many people in our society believe that a scientist must reject the existence of a God? I mean, this certainly was not the case during the development of the Geological Sciences, and I don't believe it to be the case now.

Think of it this way... Science is based on observation. Faith is based on what is unseen. These early geologists had the same faith as others before them, they just began to make new observations and develop new explanations for what they observed in rocks and fossils.

I suppose the purpose of this post is to show that science is not out to disprove God. In fact, history says that quite the opposite is true. The Geological Sciences were pioneered and developed by people who believed in God and were dedicated to learning more about Creation.

So then, I would like to reiterate to the reader that a career in the academic community does not require an atheistic worldview. Similarly, Biblical Christianity does not require the belief in a 6,000 year old Creation.

To take it a step further, I'd say that the practice of science can be improved when the universe is considered in context as the Creation of a divine author. Likewise, Christianity can be improved by closely studying the beauty and complexity of Creation.

These were just some quick thoughts I had after reading. I hope to start digging a bit deeper into the Bible and Genesis 1 in the near future... that is, if I can squeeze it between school, being a TA, and research.

God and Time

I was thinking a bit about my last post, and would like to point out that not all scientists are of the opinion that the universe has a definite beginning. Some think that our universe was formed by the collapse of another previous universe, while others think that the universe is part of some sort of infinite repeating loop.

However, as a general rule, it appears that most in the scientific community accept the "Big Bang" as the best model for the origin of our universe, and any discussions regarding what happened prior to the Big Bang are more based on speculation and guesswork than actual science.

So of course, I will also deviate slightly from the realm of science and speculate on the concept of time as it relates to the God of the Bible.

I mentioned in my previous post that I believe God is infinite, but I'm starting to understand that "infinite" may not be the correct word. We exist within a universe that is completely subject to time. We are born at a certain time, live our lives according to a 24-hour clock, and die at a certain time. Our awareness of time permeates all that we do.

On the other hand, the Bible says that a day is like a thousand years to God [Psalm 90:4; 2 Peter 3:8]. These passages seem to imply that God is beyond our human awareness of time, but in what way? Early Christian scholars took this idea literally and applied it to their interpretation of Genesis. They reasoned that the seven-day creation week in Genesis was actually 7,000 years, which allowed them to estimate dates for the beginning and end of the world. But were these passages intended to be taken literally, or were the authors of the Bible simply trying to state that God does not share our human concept of time?

I have recently been reading a bit about cosmology, which has helped me to come at this topic from a different angle.

Let us assume that God used the Big Bang during the creation of the universe. But more than that, let us also assume that God created time, space, matter, energy and all of the physical laws that govern them as part of the Big Bang. This means that we cannot consider what occurred "prior to" the Big Bang because there was no time, matter, energy, physics, or anything. There was only God and the spiritual realm in which He exists.

If these assumptions are correct, then time is simply a property of the universe that God created along with matter, energy, space, etc. A day is as a thousand years to God because He is not bound by time. As the creator, God is transcendent to the creation and the laws that govern it. I think that Exodus 3:14 describes this idea best when God refers to Himself as simply "I Am".

The idea that God exists outside of time and the laws of our universe leads me to another interesting idea. The Bible says that God set humans apart from the rest of creation, and He created them in "His own image" . Perhaps it is our awareness of this unobservable spiritual realm that sets us apart. Perhaps it is also this same awareness that causes each human, regardless of background or upbringing, to ask themselves the question I posed in my previous post: "Does God exist?"

But I digress...

God In Science

Before I dive head first into the foggy waters of science and faith, I would like to begin by discussing the most basic of theological questions: "Is there a god?"

This is a question we all are faced with at one point or another. Even though I was taught from birth that God existed and loved me, I eventually had to consider this question and decide for myself.

For me, there are many reasons why I believe in God. Some of these reasons are based on personal experience and faith, and although they are valid reasons to me, they may not be considered reliable in the scientific sense. Therefore, in this post, I will focus on the most convincing ways in which science has confirmed my belief in an infinite, transcendent and unchangeable God.

Cause and Effect
In Physics 101 I learned about Newton's laws of motion and the laws of conservation of mass and energy. When I think about it, these laws are basically describing cause and effect relationships that we can observe throughout nature. With this in mind, I can consider all of the mass and energy in my world and begin to trace them backwards. The energy I am using to type these words came from my body, which produces energy from food. The energy to produce the food is traced back to plants, to the sun, to atoms.... BANG!

Eventually, all matter and energy can be traced back to the Big Bang (Fear not. I will discuss scientific evidence for the Big Bang in a later post). Scientists agree that an infinitely small bundle of infinite density, temperature and pressure began to expand approximately 13.7 billion years ago. According to the laws of physics, all of the mass and energy in today's universe must have been contained within that pre-bang bundle.

But is the Big Bang the true beginning of the universe? Stephen Hawking and George Ellis close their book entitled The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time [1973] by stating that "the actual point of creation, the singularity, is outside the scope of presently known laws of physics". In other words, science cannot explain the origin of the Big Bang's source material because the generation of something from nothing is a direct violation of the laws of conservation of mass/energy. If we use science to follow matter and energy back to the very beginning of the known universe, we will inevitably become stuck with an effect that has no cause.

To me, it is this single and most undeniable proof for the existence of a creator. You cannot trace conservation of mass and energy to a point and then stop. All matter and energy must eventually have a source or "cause". In the case of the Big Bang, the source of our universe is required to have existed beyond the limitations of time, space, and the laws of physics... logically, beyond our universe. This source is best described by an infinite, transcendent, and unchanging creator. A creator that shaped not only the universe, but also the physical laws that govern it.

It's All In Order
This leads me to another way in which science points towards the authorship of a creator. When I first learned calculus, I was in awe of the beauty and elegance of math. When I learned that the equations of points, circles and spheres or the equations for location, velocity and acceleration were all related by calculus, it confirmed a sense of order in the universe.

I recently watched a PBS special on fractals. Since I will fail to explain it properly, Wikipedia defines a fractal as "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole". These fractals are seen throughout nature in everything from clouds, to snowflakes, to tree branches, to blood vessels, to mountain ranges. Once again, a sense of order and design was confirmed.

As a geologist, I can pick up any rock from anywhere on the earth and it will have a history. A small piece of lava hardens, breaks from parent rock, rolls down a river, is deposited and buried on a beach, hardens as part of a new rock, is uplifted as part of a new mountain, and erodes away again. All according to the laws of nature, and all before the first human spoke a word... but for what purpose?

If there is no God, then the order we observe in nature is a mere chance occurrence. In this case, we simply exist as a grain of sand on the beach, here today and washed away tomorrow. If we are lucky we may make some contribution that is passed down a few generations, or we may become a science experiment for future species to discover, but eventually our lives will end and we will be forgotten.

With God of the Bible there is a design and a purpose to the order we observe in the world around us. But of course, the purpose described within the Bible is beyond the scope of scientific inquiry...

I am... or am I?
Since ancient times, humans have been worshiping some form of divine being. Why is it that we all must decide for ourselves whether or not some form of a god exists? Even the person who denies the existence of a god must first be aware of an idea of what that "god" might or might not be.

As humans, we are all faced with the fact that our knowledge and awareness of the world around us is limited. Even the most knowledgeable, enlightened, and aware human that ever existed did not know all there is to know about the universe. The the more we learn about nature and science, the more we find that there is more to discover. If this is the case, then there must exist some source of ultimate knowledge beyond that of human understanding.

Now, I know this final point is not really a question of science. It is more a question of philosophy. Nevertheless, the fact all humans eventually consider the existence or non-existence of a supreme being seems to imply to me that such a being must exist.

Conclusion
I understand that different people may make different conclusions from the same observations. It may be true that while these evidences are supportive to my belief in the God of the Bible, they may also support another person's belief that there is no supreme being or creator.

I simply hope that the reading of this post and others to follow will help you to reconsider your own place in this world, no matter what your belief or background may be.