NOTES FOR THE UNDERGROUND

the consequences of ideas

[notesfortheunderground]

ANKLES, KNEES, TOES, AND OTHER COUNTLESS GIFTS

Are you breathing? Could you just check? You are? Great. Okay. So here’s my proposal for your Thanksgiving day: Thank God you’re alive. Not that you’re happy or healthy or doing well otherwise. Just that you’re actually alive and not, not alive.

I don’t think about this very much and I probably wouldn’t think about it at all if I hadn’t read the great Christian writer G. K. Chesterton. He was big on this. Among my favorite quotes: “When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?”

I hope I’d sense the gift of life, but I’m not sure I’d see it clearly enough to think about it. Life keeps you so busy that you don’t remember that you’re living.

The truth is: We don’t have to be here. As the philosophers put it, we’re all contingent beings in a contingent world. We depend for our life on something else — or rather Someone else. God not only created man because he loves man in general but he created you and me because he loves us, and he keeps us in existence because he loves us. That’s a gift any way you look at it.

We read in old books about men being given keys to the city and what was called “the freedom of the city.” It meant that even when the city was feeling defensive and locked the gates, they could let themselves in and wander about at will and enjoy everything the city had to offer. God gave us the key to the world when he made us.

What I suggest for Thanksgiving is … not that you asked, but if you’ve read this far you must be interested … is to sit down in a quiet place by yourself, some time in the morning before the day gets busy and certainly before the kickoff of the Philadelphia-Detroit game at 12:30. (And go Lions, because another Eagles loss will put them another half game behind the Giants and that is A GOOD THING.) When you’re sitting down, pick maybe three things from the list below and think about each one as systematically as you can. Think of all its aspects and thank God for each of them.

Let’s take “body” for an example. Have you ever realized what an amazing thing the human body is? I’d never thought about it until I came across an essay by the writer Andre Dubus, who’d lost both his legs after being hit by a car.... asked readers to imagine that they’d only have in heaven what they’d thanked God for on earth.

I think he asked if we’d ever thought to thank God for our hands and arms. I hadn’t. Never occurred to me.

I knew to thank God for the obvious things. I remember once, as a barely Christianized teenager, driving down a country road in a snow storm very late at night. I knew what I was doing and was creeping along when the car broke traction and began to spin slowly around as it glided down the road. It finally settled with the softest of landings into a snow bank and I reversed out and went home. I could easily have hit a tree and been badly hurt on a road that few people travelled, and could have laid injured in the wrecked till morning. Or just gotten stuck in the bitter cold for hours. Or I might have been driving on the highway when the car lost traction and been hit by a truck. It may have been the laws of physics or God’s hand that saved me, but I knew to say a prayer of thanks.

But about my hands and arms. Nope. Never thought of thanking God for those. But they are actually really, really useful. And incredibly well designed. If your right arm was a gadget you’d gotten for Christmas, you’d be happy as a clam. (If you’re a guy, and a nerd. Everyone else, think up your own examples.) The right arm is a thing to thank God for, the way you’d thank him for keeping you from hitting at tree on a country road at one in the morning.

So if you choose body, maybe start with your toes and think about what gifts they are and thank God for them. If you’re old enough, they probably look funny, but you’d look funnier without them, and they help you walk and run and get from the couch to the refrigerator and back during time outs. Then think about your foot, and your ankle, and your calf — think how useful it is just in connecting your ankle and your knee and letting you move like a human being — and your knee, and so on all the way up to the bald spot. (If you’re an older male with an unfortunate generic inheritance.) Include the parts  you don’t talk about, because they are fearfully and wondrously made.

Even if, like me, some parts no longer work as well as they did, you’ll still find that God’s given you a greater gift than you ever realized, and you ought to thank him for it. Every part of your body is God’s gift to you.

That’s the idea. Here is the list of subjects. It is incomplete but a start. Start thanking.

Body

Physical and intellectual gifts

Parents

Siblings

Grandparents and other relatives

Ancestors

Childhood friends

Adulthood friends

Husband or Wife

Children and pets

Good influences (pastors, friends, writers, especially writers, etc.)

Strangers who’ve been kind to you

Home

Neighborhood and town, including neighbors, businessmen, police, etc.

Schools and teachers

Job and co-workers (this may just be “thank you I’ve got one”)

Church (local and national), including pastor(s) and fellow members

The Scriptures

Aid, public and private

Public infrastructure (the sewage system, for example, because just think about life without it)

Technology that makes your life better

Modern medicine

The Detroit Lions (if they win)

- David Mills

[notesfortheunderground]

52 STORIES

NY Magazine:

One in three women has an abortion by the age of 45… Nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended; about half of those—1.2 million—will end in abortion each year.

The article then provides 26 testimonies from women reflecting on their own abortions in an attempt to help destigmatize the issue. Each story is different (and heart-wrenching). The perspectives vary from relief to remorse, from guilt to gladness, from sorrow to complete indifference. It’s really worth taking the time to read the whole article for a fuller picture. But here are a few quotes that grabbed me personally:

Nicole - (My boyfriend) said, “We drove all this way. Stop crying, act like a woman.” I was angry, but I was so sleepy and tired of fighting. When I had the ultrasound, I asked for the picture and a nurse said, “Seriously?” A month later, he said he regretted it too. When I cry about it, I cry alone. He thinks it would make me sad to talk about, but I don’t want our baby to think we forgot.

Red - The picketers met us at the car with disgusting pictures. I was quite emotional, but I was so scared that if I showed any emotions, they wouldn’t let me do it. I told them I already had a baby. The doctor acted like it was assembly-line work.

Heather - My husband and I were having financial problems and were considering separating. I just had to shut my conscience down. The doctor was grotesque. He whistled show tunes. I could hear the vacuum sucking out the fetus alongside his whistling. When I hear show tunes now, I shudder.

Lauren - During the ultrasound, I shouted, “We’re not keeping it!” It was a way of not acknowledging the life-form. When I went to the clinic, there were protesters with awful, very graphic signs.

Anya - On the way, my boyfriend started freaking out, saying, “What if you’re killing my son?” I had him pull over so I could drive. I respect that it was an emotional experience for him. I never think about the abortions. When I tell people, they respond with a panic face, and when I say I’m truly okay with it, they make a second panic face. I end up comforting them.

Ana - They showed me the ultrasound, but I wasn’t falling for that.

Keep reading

[notesfortheunderground]

Impossible Thanks

"Our futile struggle in time is courtesy of God’s excessive giving. Sunset after sunset make it hard to remember and hold just one. Smell after smell. Laugh after laugh. A mind still thinking, a heart still beating. Imagine sticking your fingers on your pulse and thanking God every time He gave you another blood-driving, brain-powering thump. We should. And we shouldn’t, because if we did, we would never do anything else with our living; we wouldn’t have the time to look at or savor any of the other of our impossibillions of gifts." - N. D. Wilson, Death by Living

[notesfortheunderground]

Information Overload & Drowning in the Shallows

“We're drowning in information and starving for knowledge.” - Rutherford D. Rogers "Information is an asset; it is a tool, but it is no more than that. Information is not virtuous; it is not an end in itself. If we are to live virtuous lives in the aftermath of this digital explosion, we must learn to deal with unending sources of information, and how to survive amid its constant flow. As we deal with increasing levels of information, we have to develop skills to distinguish between what is important and what is mundane.

We are becoming a people whose knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep. The Bible seems to tell us that it would be far better to know fewer things, but to know those things on a much deeper level. Virtue is not in the accumulation of facts, in winning a game on Jeopardy, but in living a life marked by wisdom, by the application of knowledge. If we are to live in this way, we must be willing to step outside the torrent of information; we must be willing to understand that information is a great servant but a lousy master. As Christians, it is imperative that we live in ways that are marked with wisdom born of deep knowledge. Our theology tells us that we must live distinctly Christian lives, lives marked by God’s wisdom. And in order to do this, we must have knowledge of who God is and what he requires of us. 

Our experience tells us that we are prone to lose knowledge in the midst of all of the data and information that surrounds us. Our increasing distractions, our growing number of stimuli, keep us from being able to ponder information, to take what we know and have it inform how we live.

And our theory of technology informs us that amid all of the opportunity that comes to us through the many new sources of information, we also bear an associated risk - that the very information we love will overwhelm us.

How can we live in the sweet spot between them?

Get wisdom. In a culture obsessed with information, we have found that more information does not necessarily mean we will have any more knowledge or wisdom. In fact, the very opposite may be true. It may well be that less information will lead to greater wisdom. Without the distraction of dealing with vast amounts of information and without overtaxing our brains with hundreds of sources of information, we will have the time to know more about less. “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight” (Proverbs 4:7). Above all else, know and understand the difference between information, knowledge, and wisdom, and always seek information that can be turned into useful knowledge and wisdom to live by."

- Tim Challies, The Next Story 

[notesfortheunderground]

The Body Human

Intricate engine angels might admire, Material spirit, animated earth, Crafted casket for celestial fire, Doomed to die the day it has its birth. Hands that open, befitting a gracious lord, Able to touch a cheek as soft as mist, To wield a pen, a brush, a harpsichord, But just as apt to freeze into a fist. Godlike image, able to stand erect, Yet by what small and simple things laid low A sneeze, a scratch, a germ, and all is wrecked; A few short years, the time has come to go. Delicate instrument of love, or lust, Admirably compacted... out of dust. - DTW

[notesfortheunderground]

WHEN NOTHING CREATED EVERYTHING

Throughout history people have been awed and thrilled by retellings of their culture’s creation story. Aztecs would tell of the Lady of the Skirt of Snakes, Phoenicians about the Zophashamin, and Jews and Christians about the one true God”Jehovah. But there is one unfortunate group”the children of atheistic materialists”that has no creation myth to call its own. When an inquisitive tyke asks who created the sun, the animals, and mankind, their materialist parents can only tell them to read a book by Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins. But what sort of story are they likely to find? Should they be told, as famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking claims in his recent book The Grand Design that “the universe . . . create[d] itself from nothing”? Since Hawking’s explanation is a bit too drab and nospecific for bedtime reading I’ve decided to take the elements of materialism and shape them into a purportedly accurate, though mythic, narrative. This is what our culture has been missing for far too long”a creation story for young atheistic materialists.

******

In the beginning was Nothing, and Nothing created Everything. When Nothing decided to create Everything, she filled a tiny dot with Time, Chance, and Everything and had it expand. The expansion spread Everything into Everywhere carrying Time and Chance with it to keep it company. The three stretched out together leaving bits of themselves wherever they went. One of those places was the planet Earth. For no particular Reason—for Reason is rarely particular—Time and Chance took a liking to this little, wet, blue rock and decided to stick around to see what adventures they might have. While the pair found the Earth to be intriguing and pretty, they also found it a bit too quiet, too static. They fixed upon an idea to change Everything (just a little) by creating a special Something. Time and Chance roamed the planet, splashing through the oceans and sloshing through the mud, in search of materials. But though they looked Everywhere, there was a missing ingredient that they needed in order to make a Something that could create more of the same Somethings. They called to their friend Everything to help. Since Everything had been Everywhere she would no doubt be able to find the missing ingredient. And indeed she did. Hidden away in a small alcove called Somewhere, Everything found what Time and Chance had needed all along: Information. Everything put Information on a piece of ice and rock that happened to be passing by the former planet Pluto and sent it back to her friends on Earth. Now that they had Information, Time and Chance were finally able to create a self-replicating Something which they called Life. Once they created Life they found that it not only grew into more Somethings, but began to become Otherthings, too! The Somethings and the Otherthings began to fill the Earth—from the bottom of the oceans to the top of the sky. Their creation, which began as a single Something, eventually became millions and billions of Otherthings.

Time and Chance, though, where the bickering sort and were constantly feuding over which of them was the most powerful. One day they began to argue over who had been more responsible for creating Life. Everything (who was forever eavesdropping) overheard the spat and suggested that they settle by putting their creative skills to work on a new creature called Man. They all thought is was a splendid plan—for Man was a dull, hairy beast who would indeed provide a suitable challenge—and began to boast about who could create an ability, which they called Consciousness, that would allow Man to be aware of Chance, Time, Everything, and Nothing. Chance, always a bit of a dawdler, got off to a slow start, so Time, who never rested, completed the task first. Time rushed around, filling the gooey matter inside each Man’s head with Consciousness. But as he was gloating over his victory he noticed a strange reaction. When Man saw that Everything had been created by Time, Chance, and Nothing, his Consciousness filled with Despair. Chance immediately saw a solution to the problem and took the remaining materials she was using to make Consciousness to create Beliefs. When Chance mixed Beliefs into the gray goo, Man stopped filling with Despair and started creating Illusions. These Illusions took various forms—God, Purpose, Meaning—and were almost always effective in preventing Man from filling up with Despair. Nothing, who tended to be rather forgetful, remembered her creation and decided to take a look around Everything. When she saw what Time and Chance had done on planet Earth she was mildly amused, but forbade them to fill any more creatures with Consciousness or Beliefs (which is why Man is the only Something that has both). But Nothing took a fancy to Man and told Time and Chance that when each one’s Life ran out, she would take him or her and make them into Nothing too. And that is why, children, when Man loses his Life he goes from being a Something created by Time and Chance into becoming like his creator—Nothing.

-- Joe Carter --

[notesfortheunderground]

Losing Our Religion

Russel Moore:

Christianity is dying. At least, that’s what major newspapers are telling us today, culling research from a new Pew Center study on what almost all sociologists are observing these days—the number of Americans who identify as Christians has reached an all-time low, and is falling. I think this is perhaps bad news for America, but it is good news for the church.

The lead editor of the report tells The New York Times that secularization—mainly in terms of those who identify as “nones” or with no specific religious affiliation—isn’t isolated to the progressive Northeast and Pacific Northwest. He notes, “The change is taking place all over, including the Bible Belt.”

This is precisely what several of us have been saying for years. Bible Belt near-Christianity is teetering. I say let it fall. For much of the twentieth century, especially in the South and parts of the Midwest, one had to at least claim to be a Christian to be “normal.” During the Cold War, that meant distinguishing oneself from atheistic Communism. At other times, it has meant seeing churchgoing as a way to be seen as a good parent, a good neighbor, and a regular person. It took courage to be an atheist, because explicit unbelief meant social marginalization. Rising rates of secularization, along with individualism, means that those days are over—and good riddance to them.

Again, this means some bad things for the American social compact. In the Bible Belt of, say, the 1940s, there were people who didn’t, for example, divorce, even though they wanted out of their marriages. In many of these cases, the motive wasn’t obedience to Jesus’ command on marriage but instead because they knew that a divorce would marginalize them from their communities. In that sense, their “traditional family values” were motivated by the same thing that motivated the religious leaders who rejected Jesus—fear of being “put out of the synagogue.” Now, to be sure, that kept some children in intact families. But that’s hardly revival.

Secularization in America means that we have fewer incognito atheists. Those who don’t believe can say so—and still find spouses, get jobs, volunteer with the PTA, and even run for office. This is good news because the kind of “Christianity” that is a means to an end—even if that end is “traditional family values”—is what J. Gresham Machen rightly called “liberalism,” and it is an entirely different religion from the apostolic faith handed down by Jesus Christ.

Now, what some will say is that the decline in self-identified Christians is a sign that the church should jettison its more unpopular teachings. And in our day, these teachings are almost always those dealing with pelvic autonomy. First of all, even if this were the key to success, we couldn’t—and wouldn’t—do it. Christianity isn’t a political party, dependent on crafting ideologies to suit the masses. We received this gospel (Gal. 1:11-12); we didn’t invent it. But, that said, such is not the means to “success”—even the way the sociologists define it.

The Pew report holds that mainline denominations—those who have made their peace with the Sexual Revolution—continue to report heavy losses, while evangelical churches remain remarkably steady—even against some heavy headwinds coming from the other direction. Why?

We learned this answer 100 years ago, and it reminds us of what we learned 2,000 years ago. Two or three generations ago, Christians who held to the Virgin birth of Christ were warned that their children would flee the faith unless the parents redefined Christianity. “If you want to win the next generation,” they were told, “you have to make Christianity relevant, and that means dispending with miracles in favor of modern science.” The churches that followed that path aren’t just dying; they are dead, sustained by endowments and dwindling gatherings of nostalgic senior adults with a smattering of community organizers here and there.

People who don’t want Christianity, don’t want almost-Christianity. Almost-Christianity looks in the mainline like something from Nelson Rockefeller to Che Guevara at prayer. Almost Christianity, in the Bible Belt, looks like a God-and-Country civil religion that prizes cultural conservatism more than theological fidelity. Either way, a Christianity that reflects its culture, whether that culture is Smith College or NASCAR, only lasts as long as it is useful to its host. That’s because it’s, at root, idolatry, and people turn from their idols when they stop sending rain.

Christianity isn’t normal anymore, and that’s good news. The Book of Acts, like the Gospels before it, shows us that the Christianity thrives when it is, as Kierkegaard put it, a sign of contradiction. Only a strange gospel can differentiate itself from the worlds we construct. But the strange, freakish, foolish old gospel is what God uses to save people and to resurrect churches (1 Cor. 1:20-22).

We do not have more atheists in America. We have more honest atheists in America. Again, that’s good news. The gospel comes to sinners, not to the righteous. It is easier to speak a gospel to the lost than it is to speak a gospel to the kind-of-saved. And what those honest atheists grapple with, is what every sinner grapples with, burdened consciences that point to judgment. Our calling is to bear witness.

We don’t have Mayberry anymore, if we ever did. Good. Mayberry leads to hell just as surely as Gomorrah does. But Christianity didn’t come from Mayberry in the first place, but from a Roman Empire hostile to the core to the idea of a crucified and resurrected Messiah. We’ve been on the wrong side of history since Rome, and it was enough to turn the world upside down.

The future of Christianity is bright. I don’t know that from surveys and polls, but from a word Someone spoke one day back at Caesarea Philippi. The gates of hell haven’t gotten any stronger, and the Light that drives out the darkness is enough to counter every rival gospel, even those gospels that describe themselves as “none.”

[notesfortheunderground]

WOUNDS CAN SPEAK

The heavens frighten us; they are too calm; In all the universe we have no place. Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm? Lord Jesus, by thy scars we know thy grace. The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; They rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.

– Edward Shillito

[notesfortheunderground]

PERFECTLY NEARLY PERFECT

“Total eclipses of the Sun as seen from the surface of the earth may be described as both 'useful' and ‘exceptional.’  Apart from the deep awe they inspire in every people group from remote tribes to astrophysicists, these eclipses allow us to study the Sun’s corona, test general relativity, and calculate the slowdown of the earth’s rotation. They are exceptional in that they are nearly ‘perfect;’ that is, the earth and Moon are similar in size, the solar and lunar profiles on the sky are nearly perfect circles, and the Sun appears to be larger when it is viewed from Earth than when it is viewed from any other planet with moons. The likelihood of finding this combination of features is remote. Of the roughly 65 natural satellites (moons) in the solar system, none even comes close to producing such clear and spectacular eclipses.

What’s more, humans live at a special time with respect to the observability of total solar eclipses. Since the Moon is spiraling away from Earth and the Sun is swelling due to its changing internal structure, such eclipses are possible only for a relatively brief time span. They will continue only for about 250 million years. That may seem like a long time, but it constitutes only approximately 5% of Earth’s history.” ~ Guillermo Gonzalez, The Measurability of the Universe––a Record of the Creator’s Design

[notesfortheunderground]

MORAL, JUST DIFFERENT

Utilitarian Atheists Aren’t "Just as Moral," They’re "Differently Moral"  

Christopher Hitchens used to insist that atheists were as moral as Christians, challenging, “Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever.” But as I said long ago, the claim that “atheists are as moral as Christians” is meaningless if we’re operating under different systems of morality.

This week, Richard Dawkins was a perfect example of this as he set off a firestorm with his tweets about Down syndrome children. Here’s the interaction that set it off:

He said even more than that as he continued to defend his original tweet (including the regrettably true statement, “Apparently I'm a horrid monster for recommending what actually happens to the great majority of Down Syndrome foetuses. They are aborted”), but you get the idea.

Within Dawkins’s moral system, it is actually immoral not to abort a Down syndrome child. In his eventual apology for creating a controversy, he explained why:

If your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child's own welfare….

My true intention was, as stated at length above, simply to say what I personally would do, based upon my own assessment of the pragmatics of the case, and my own moral philosophy which in turn is based on a desire to increase happiness and reduce suffering.

So you see? Dawkins’s recommendation to “abort it and try again” was perfectly moral within his own system of morality. If nothing else, this incident has brought some clarification:

A system that adds up potential happiness, weighs it against potential suffering, and chooses to “increase the sum of happiness” (at least, according the reckoning of the person doing the adding and the weighing) kills Down syndrome children before they can be born.

A system that upholds the value and dignity of every human being regardless of his or her abilities or characteristics because we’re all made in the image of God protects, cherishes, and loves them.

There is no “just as moral" here; we’re differently moral. And as long as God gives me the ability, I will fight to convince people that the moral system built on our being made in the image of God is the true one.

STR

[notesfortheunderground]

WHENCE ARISES ALL THAT ORDER AND BEAUTY?

"Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain; and whence arises all that Order and Beauty which we see in the World? To what end are Comets, and whence is it that Planets move all one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, while Comets move all manner of ways in Orbs very excentrick; and what hinders the fix’d Stars from falling upon one another? How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art, and for what ends were their several Parts? Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds? How do the Motions of the Body follow from the Will, and whence is the instinct in Animals? Is not the Sensory of Animals that place to which the sensitive Substance is present, and into which the sensible Species of Things are carried through the Nerves and Brain, that there they may be perceived by their immediate presence to that Substance? And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phaenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite Space, as it were in his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself: Of which things the Images only carried through the Organs of Sense into our little Sensoriums, are there seen and beheld by that which in us perceives and thinks. And though every true Step made in this Philosophy brings us not immediately to the Knowledge of the first Cause, yet it brings us nearer to it, and on that account is to be highly valued."

- Isaac Newton

[notesfortheunderground]

WHY LOVE IS MORE ABSURD THAN CRUELTY

Sam Kee:

Albert Camus wrote a book in 1942 called The Stranger. He mainly wanted to show how absurd life was—how the little things in life turn out to be big things. Through a series of thoughtless events, the main character, Meursault, finds himself awaiting execution for killing a man.

At the end of the book, Meursault is ranting about his fate, unable to comprehend the absurdity of it all. He looks at his looming execution, which he rightly recognizes as an “ultimate” sort of thing. To decide whether one lives or dies, and to carry out that sentence, is a mammoth matter. The thing he couldn’t get over was this, that his execution would be performed by a guy “who changed his underwear.”

In other words, it’s absurd to realize that such an ultimate act could be performed by a finite mortal, a bumbling human, a creature who is no better than any other creature—a man who has to get dressed every morning. Perhaps Meursault preferred his executioner to be someone who was above changing his underwear? At least then his death would have a bit more dignity?

Whether or not to grant life or take life seems to be a profound decision, one that should not be left to mere mortals. Yet every day, every hour, human beings are administering their power over life as only God should be allowed to do. It’s absurd to think that guys who change their underwear would walk into a building in Paris and blow up people at work. It’s absurd to think that mere mortals would sneak into a school and kill children. And yet we hear other people who voice their disgust over the authorities—also people who change their underwear—who execute the same sort of judgment over the lives of the culprits. Everyone cries incongruence. But this is just the echoing voice of Camus, who pointed out the absurdity of mortals operating in ultimate ways.

Lurking in the shadows of humanity is another Stranger. Though he came from another world, his life embraced human absurdity and incongruence to the max. This Stranger did not take any lives; he did not blow up anything; and he did not perform any executions. He did not commit any crimes, kept no record of right or wrong, and did not seek vengeance. Yet he was a Stranger who changed his underwear, grew tired and hungry, and had an appetite for tears.

He came into this tragic world from a perfectly good world, heaven, in order to subject himself to our cruelty. Our redemption came through his condemnation, and our rescue came through his abandonment. He did not take life but gave it away in absurd amounts. He gave second chances, he opened his heart, and he brought restoration. His “reward” for all of this was trial, torture, and death.

There is no more absurd character than Jesus, the Stranger of strangers, whose love compelled him to face the onslaught of punishment that our sins deserved—bravely, calmly, and controlled. Yes, one sinner who takes the life of another sinner is absurd; but infinitely more absurd is one sinless Person who gives his life for sinners. Jesus was not one finite person making an ultimate decision, he was one Ultimate Person making the decision to be finite.

In other words, love is more absurd than cruelty. It’s fairly easy to complain about the absurdity of suffering, but it’s another thing to have the wits to complain about the absurdity of God’s love for us. God’s love for us is far more absurd than the suffering that you or I could ever endure. Perhaps you don’t like me using the word “absurd” to describe God’s love, but until we first see it at this level, we’ll never realize how deep it is. It simply does not make sense that God would love sinners the way he does. Skeptics like to foist the so-called “problem of evil” in the faces of Christians, demanding that we solve it. But the thinking person realizes that there’s an even greater problem: the problem of love. Even more shocking than God’s allowance of evil in this world is his unrelenting, immutable, gracious, prodigious promotion of love for sinners.

[notesfortheunderground]

THE DARK SIDE OF CHRISTMAS

The child born in the night among beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts. And nothing is ever the same again.

Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant's child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully. For those of us who believe in God, it means, this birth, that God himself is never safe from us, and maybe that is the dark side of Christmas, the terror of the silence. He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down, as we could crack the baby's skull like an eggshell or nail him up when he gets too big for that.

- Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark

[notesfortheunderground]

TECHNOLOGY IS NOT ENOUGH

Freeman Dyson:

The great question for our time is, how to make sure that the continuing scientific revolution brings benefits to everybody rather than widening the gap between rich and poor. To lift up poor countries, and poor people in rich countries, from poverty, to give them a chance of a decent life, technology is not enough. Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.

[notesfortheunderground]

THE GOLDEN COSMOS

EnV:

Writing recently about the Golden Ratio, we described how spiral shells grow according to that special ratio, designated by the Greek letter phi (φ = 1.618...), based on the Fibonacci series, that the human eye finds pleasing. Since hurricanes and spiral galaxies also follow the same proportions, it seems that natural laws can explain how non-living spirals in hurricanes and galaxies will grow, but living things like ammonite shells require genetic instructions. This is evidence of intelligent design, because no natural law pulls silicon out of seawater and fashions it into exquisite spirals without being directed by a code. The ubiquity of φ in so many unrelated phenomena, both living and nonliving, suggests a deeper level of design in the universe.

Now two scientists from South Africa say that φ is the key to unifying all of science. A news item from the University of Witwatersrand ("Wits" for short) in Johannesburg summarizes an article of scientific correspondence by Jan Boeyens, a former Wits University Professor and now at the Centre for Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and Professor Francis Thackeray, a paleontologist at Wits University's Evolutionary Studies Institute. Writing in the South African Journal of Science, "Number Theory and the Unity of Science," Boeyens and Thackeray relate an astonishing list of apparently unrelated phenomena that follow the Golden Ratio:

The curl of an elephant tusk

The shape of a kudu's horn

Hurricane spirals

The distribution of planets in the solar system

A biological species constant, T

The spiral structure of the cochlea ear-bone in a fossil hominin

The logarithmic spirals of galaxies

The structure of DNA

The growth of many plants (phyllotaxis)

The Periodic Table of the Elements

Spiral shells of certain mollusks, like snails

Spiral shells of living and extinct ammonites

Stress patterns in nanomaterials

The stability of atomic nuclides

The topology of space-time

To Boeyens and Thackeray, this evidence suggests a deep relationship in the fabric of space-time that includes biology:

We suggest that there is a strong case that this so-called 'Golden Ratio' (1.61803...) can be related not only to aspects of mathematics but also to physics, chemistry,biology and the topology of space-time....

Apart from the Golden Ratio, a second common factor among this variety of structures is that they all represent spontaneous growth patterns. The argumentthat this amazing consilience ('self-similarity') arises from a response to acommon environmental constraint, which can only be an intrinsic feature of curved space-time, is compelling. (Emphasis added.)

In concluding, they argue for the unification of all the sciences around the Golden Ratio:

The time has come to recognise that relativity and quantum theories can be integrated, and linked numerically to the value of a mathematical constant -- whether in the context of space-time or biology.

They never explain, though, why this should be so. Is it a requirement of any universe in a multiverse that it must follow the Golden Ratio? That idea would seem hard to defend; advocates of a multiverse typically agree that physical parameters could take on any values, because they wish to avoid the conclusion that our universe's fine-tuned values were chosen by design. We live in a fine-tuned universe, they say, by luck: we won the Cosmic Lottery. A higher-level principle of natural selection dictates that complex life can only appear in a universe like ours.

Multiverse speculations might account for a finite set of lucky draws, but could it explain an all-pervasive ratio like φ? Could you have a universe with constants of gravity, electrical charges, and cosmological constant like ours, but with its space-time fabric following some other proportion? Why not? φ is an irrational number derived from a mathematical series, the Fibonacci series. There are plenty of other numerical series around. Why is a consistent mathematical form even necessary for a universe?

These are deep questions that can only be tested philosophically, because we only have one universe to observe. But it must strike any reasonable person as uncanny that so many phenomena are unified by a certain number, 1.618..., derived from a mathematical series, that permits the existence of "endless forms most beautiful." The idea that nature can be unified in this manner is consistent with intelligent design in two ways: (1) Most contingent values of fundamental constants would preclude observers, and (2) the Golden Ratio gives the universe a beautiful form that aesthetically minded observers can appreciate.

Albert Einstein

The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

...and beautiful.

Some more examples.

[notesfortheunderground]

Why Philosophy?

Luc Ferry:

Philosophy is the best training for living, better even than history and the human sciences. Why? Quite simply because virtually all of our thoughts, convictions and values exist and have meaning – whether or not we are conscious of it – within models of the world that have been developed over the course of intellectual history. We must understand these models in order to grasp their reach, their logic and their consequences...

...one does not philosophise to amuse oneself, nor even to better understand the world and one’s own place in it, but sometimes literally to ‘save one’s skin’.

[notesfortheunderground]

THE ONLY APPROPRIATE RESPONSE

Douglas Wilson:

God knew that we were going to need to pick up dimes, and so He gave us fingernails. He knew that twilights displayed in blue, apricot, and battle gray would be entirely astonishing and beyond us, and so He gave us eyes that can see in color. He could have made all food quite nourishing, but which tasted like wadded up newspaper soaked in machine oil. Instead He gave us the tastes of watermelon, pecans, oatmeal stout, buttered corn, apples, fresh bread, grilled sirloin, and 25-year-old scotch. And He of course knew that we were going to need to thank Him and so He gave us hearts and minds.

The issue of thanksgiving is really central to the whole debate about the existence of God. On the one hand, if there is no God, there is no need to thank anyone. We are here as the result of a long chain of impersonal processes, grinding their way down to our brief moment in time. If there is a God, then every breath, every moment, every sight and sound, is a sheer unadulterated gift. And, as our mothers taught us, when someone gives you presents like this, the only appropriate response is to thank them.

Keith Shields:

Anyone who has read a few postings on this blog site will likely know me well enough to know that I don’t think these words by Douglas Wilson are the final word on the existence of God. It is an awesome way of describing the fitness of humans for this planet on which we live; but of course my atheist friends will readily point out that there are other explanations. One can argue that the nature of this planet defined that the fittest beings for existence on this planet would have to develop colour vision that could distinguish bushes from predators crouched in the bushes. Therefore, those with colour vision survived. You could argue that we evolved a set of taste-buds on which food that is good for our bodies and good energy for storing up fat, tastes good to us. Bad food that is poisonous or unhealthy could taste like "wadded up newspaper soaked in machine oil." (Or perhaps there is) God who simply loves his creation and wants to give good gifts to human and beast. And the explanation that God allowed us to evolve this way, and indeed, saw that we would evolve this way, also leaves room for a mechanism of fitness to guide the process of how we became what we became... Oh sure, you could thank your forefathers and foremothers for outrunning the predators so that they survived long enough to reproduce and ultimately brought you into this world. But that seems rather hollow when really the only thing we can say about our ancestors is that they were the previous sac of bio-chemicals that managed to achieve rational thought. I am glad to have a God whom I can praise and thank. It is an appropriate response for this amazing planet on which we live.