We have had more and more great conversation on my Facebook wall about this topic. Please, if you haven't already read them, go back and read posts one and two in this series to catch up on where we are. In the first post, I proposed a probability calculation that I felt, at the time, showed an impossibility for the main tenants of the Darwinian Hypothesis. After a short conversation on my Facebook wall, my second post attempted to defend the conclusions of my first with a smaller scale calculation, again using probability theory to show the unlikelihood of the very beginnings of Darwinian evolution occurring.
Since then, the Facebook conversation has continued and as part of that conversation I found a very interesting scientific paper by a physicist at MIT named Jeremy England that does a good job of refuting the assumptions my calculations. There is a summary written in mostly layman's terms here. The basic idea is that some molecules, or configurations of molecules, become more likely to assemble under certain circumstances because of their inherent ability to dissipate energy. At a macroscopic level, we can see and example of this in the phenomenon of Rayleigh–Bénard convection. The organized patter of convection cells that are generated when heating some liquids from the bottom are a more efficient way to dissipate heat energy than a more random movement of molecules would be, so the configuration self assembles with a much higher probability than other configurations. Dr. England proposes then that low entropy structures like life coding RNA or DNA strands or certain life supporting proteins might become much more favored than other microstates under certain conditions because of the inherent ability to dissipate heat energy found in living things. Since the math I used in my previous two posts assumed equal probabilities for each microstate, my calculations can no longer be considered valid.
The usefulness of Dr. England's work is not limited to attempting to explain life or evolution. In fact, I will be trying to apply some of the ideas from his paper to my own research in computational chemistry. But it is important to note that Dr. England's work is, by his own admission, not yet complete in its application to the generation of living things from non-living matter and that other highly regarded members of the science community like Eugene Shakhnovich of Harvard University find his application of his ideas to life phenomena "extremely speculative". Even if his work concludes in the way he hopes and expects, Dr. England will only have shown the mathematical possibility of abiogenesis and the early steps of evolution, not their actual occurrence.
The Darwinian Hypothesis has several other mathematical and scientific problems that we will look at in some future blog posts, but for right now, I will be taking a break from Evolutionary topics just because there is a growing list of other things I would like to discuss here related to my other interests like politics, distance running and racing, general theology, etc. I don't want this to become an evolution/creation only blog. There are indeed more important ideas to discuss.
Whether you agree with me or not on this or other topics, if you are finding these posts and discussions interesting, please follow this blog and feel free to join the conversation. I can also be found on the Facebook page I linked above and on a newly created Twitter account, so please follow me on whichever of those you regularly use.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
The Current Condition of Darwin's Hypothesis II
One of my readers generated a very good discussion about my last blog post on my Facebook wall (I encourage all of you to like my page ;-). He had several criticisms, some of which may be valid, about the underlying assumptions in the math that led me to the astronomically small probabilities for Darwin's Hypothesis. While I think that correcting for the assumptions will likely not lead to any less ridiculous probability calculation, he is correct that I can not mathematically prove that for all of them. There are too many variables in a problem that size. So, let's try this from a slightly smaller scale angle, and making all assumptions and approximations on the side of the evolutionary hypothesis. If I leave an unaccounted for assumption without realizing it, please feel free to point it out either in the comments below or on my Facebook page (which I encourage you to like). Throughout the post, and through all my future blog posts, I will place hyperlinks that will bring you to Wikipedia or other article pages that will explain the terms that are highlighted, or show where I get my numbers.
Let’s begin with a very generous estimate. Even if we involve all of the carbon atoms in the world (about 2*10^47) and allow them all to be only involved in DNA, that
would require about 20 carbon atoms per base-pair including the backbones. That means we have enough carbon atoms
available on earth for about 10^46 base-pairs with about one quarter of them
representing each possible coding letter that is used on the genetic code. There are 3.1 billion base-pairs necessary
for the recipe of one correctly formed human being, but again being
conservative, for the sake of argument let’s say that since only two percent of
those are in coding regions and most amino acid codons can be coded in more
than one way that we are looking at only about 30 million that must eventually
be brought to a certain order. Now, having likely grossly overstated the number of
base-pairs available and grossly understated the number of them that must find
a specific order, let’s begin building a human by random, but iterative evolutionary processes.
The first thing that will
need to happen is that a set of DNA large enough to be the code for a living
thing will have to be assembled by random processes without the benefit of the
DNA replication or natural selection that goes on in a cell since this will be the first cell. The living thing with the least number of base-pairs in its genome that has been discovered so far is the Carsonella bacterium which has 160,000 base-pairs in its genome, coding for 182 different proteins. The Carsonella bacterium is a very useful case for this discussion in that not only is it the smallest living thing in the world from a genomics perspective, but it is only half the size of the next smallest living thing to be discovered so far. Also, bacteria genomes are 98% coding regions, which leave us a lot less room for error, so to speak, in the ordering of the base-pairs.
So, before we begin assembling a human, let's begin assembling a Carsonella bacterium sized organism for the human to eventually evolve from. There are 10^96329 ways in which 160,000 base-pairs, with four possibilities at each site, can be assembled. Our earth allows us enough carbon for, at most, as stated, about 10^46 base-pairs. That gives us enough base-pairs to assemble about 7*10^40 Carsonella Bacterium length genome possibilities at a time. It is believed by evolutionists that about one billion years passed between the birth of the earth and the first life upon it. The average chemical reaction takes about 200 femtoseconds. If we count the number of 200 femtosecond reaction intervals in the one billion years that allegedly passed between the birth of the earth and the first life upon it, and multiply that 7*10^40 as the top end maximum number of 160,000 base-pair genomes could be brought into existence at one time, that billion years allows for, at most, about 5*10^74 Carsonella Bacterium sized genome combinations attempts, which means that in that time period, it is physically impossible for more than one in 2*10^96254 of the possible assemblies for 160,000 base-pairs to have been attempted.
The question then arises, what fraction of the possible 10^96329 ways in which 160,000 base-pairs can be assembled would lead to a living thing that could code for the necessary proteins to sustain reproducible life and get the natural selection ball rolling? Is the 5*10^74 arrangements we allow time for enough to expect a living Carsonella Bacterium sized living thing to emerge? At this point I am a bit stuck mathematically, because I can not find a spreadsheet program or an online calculator that will calculate a probability using the hypergeometric distribution on numbers this large. I have worked out some of the math as best I could in the picture below.
Where P is the probability of generating a life sustaining combination of 160,000 base-pairs using the time and population parameters above and K is the total number of life sustaining combinations possible. When K is a small number on the order of one, this probability approaches 1 in about 10^96400. As K gets larger, the probability will get more manageable, but considering that only one species of a bacteria with this small a number of base pairs has ever been discovered, and that the next simplest known bacteria is twice as complex, there are likely not a very large number of life sustaining possibilities on bacteria that small. If someone can give us reason to suggest that K might be larger than a few million, and than find a calculating program that can handle numbers this size and plug them in and find a reasonable probability for generating even the smallest life form in the billion years suggested by evolution, please let me know either here or on my Facebook wall. I will also keep looking for online calculators that can handle this workload. If/when we can finish this calculation I will update this blog with a part three of this post. In the meantime, I think this calculation demonstrates the extreme unlikeliness of the evolutionary hypothesis in the light of the amount of genetic information that would have to be generated from complete disorganization.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Thoughts on the Current Condition of Darwin's Evolutionary Hypothesis
Charles Darwin published his most famous work, "On the Origin of the Species" on November 24, 1859. In the decades that followed, it became foundation of evolutionary biology. Though it did not attempt to explain abiogenesis, the origin of the first living thing, this work, and his companion work, "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" has served for over one hundred and fifty years as the basis for the most comprehensive naturalist (without consideration of an outside creator) hypothesis for explaining biodiversity.
As a creationist, I do not have a problem with the way this unfolded. While the naturalist rarely admits to it, they approach observational data with a bias. They seek to fit their findings of the workings of the universe to a model that explains what we see without interference from a god. Creationists are biased as well, and I admit that. We seek to fit the same data to our concept of a universe that is much younger, and which God spoke into existence with biodiversity already as complex as what we see now, if not more so. It is fine for both sides of the debate to approach with their biases as long as we admit those biases, and as long as data drives our conclusions.
That is where the modern naturalist, the subscriber to Darwin's hypotheses, has a significant problem. Darwinism suffered a mortal wound in 1952 when Francis Crick and James Watson published their findings on the structure of the DNA molecule. It was revealed that the complete recipe for a particular human being, or any other living thing, was contained in code made up of a series of base pairs put together in a double helix, the shape of a spiral staircase. The reason that was the mortal wound for the Evolutionary Hypothesis is that soon, it would be known just how many pieces there are to that code. By 2003, findings of the Human Genome Project showed that the number of base pairs in the recipe for one human being is approximately 3.1 billion. Not all of those base pairs code for specific molecules a body will make. Some of them serve other purposes like controlling the shape of the DNA during cell division, but all of it is necessary to the activity of the information needed to generate one human being.
Now, not all of us have the same exact order to our 3.1 billion base pairs. A single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is a place along the code where different people within a population might have a different base pair, or step on the spiral staircase, or character in the code, than others in the same population. As of October 16, 2014, just over 100 million SNPs had been found in human beings, leaving almost exactly 3 billion base pairs, that have to be just in place for the recipe of a human to be accurate. Diseases like sickle-cell anemia are caused by having just one of those base-pairs out of place.
If Watson and Crick were the mortal wound for Darwinism, the Human Genome Project was its dying breath. The recipe, the code, for a human being is 3 billion characters long, using an alphabet that has four characters (rather than the 26 in our writing alphabet). But if the human genome was assembled by chance errors in DNA replication over the course of billions of years, we have to ask the question, what is the probability that the necessary order of the 3 billion non-SNP base pairs would be achieved? It is a fairly simple calculation. With four possibilities at each site, and 3 billion sites, the odds are one in four to the 3 billionth power. Since we usually give very small probabilities in terms of exponents of 10, we can convert that number to one in ten to the 1.8 billionth power (10^1,800,000,000).
To put the magnitude of this number in perspective, the number of atoms in a spec of dust is 10^16. There are about 10^25 atoms in a glass of water, and there are 10^80 atoms in the entire universe (exponents scale up quickly). If the universe is 13.8 billion years old as current evolutionary hypotheses state, less than 10^18 seconds have passed since the beginning of the universe. Given all of the atoms in the universe and all of the time that is alleged to have passed, it is still mathematically ridiculous to consider the probabilities necessary for the recipe of a human to assemble, and that is even once the base pairs themselves and the machinery to assemble them are already assumed to be in place.
As I said earlier, I do not fault the atheist and the agnostic for wanting to fit the observable data into a model of the universe that ignores the need for a creator, but if they want to continue to do so, Darwinian Evolution in its current form no longer fits the data available to us, nor does any model that requires 3 billion bits of information to be assembled by random errors.
As a creationist, I do not have a problem with the way this unfolded. While the naturalist rarely admits to it, they approach observational data with a bias. They seek to fit their findings of the workings of the universe to a model that explains what we see without interference from a god. Creationists are biased as well, and I admit that. We seek to fit the same data to our concept of a universe that is much younger, and which God spoke into existence with biodiversity already as complex as what we see now, if not more so. It is fine for both sides of the debate to approach with their biases as long as we admit those biases, and as long as data drives our conclusions.
That is where the modern naturalist, the subscriber to Darwin's hypotheses, has a significant problem. Darwinism suffered a mortal wound in 1952 when Francis Crick and James Watson published their findings on the structure of the DNA molecule. It was revealed that the complete recipe for a particular human being, or any other living thing, was contained in code made up of a series of base pairs put together in a double helix, the shape of a spiral staircase. The reason that was the mortal wound for the Evolutionary Hypothesis is that soon, it would be known just how many pieces there are to that code. By 2003, findings of the Human Genome Project showed that the number of base pairs in the recipe for one human being is approximately 3.1 billion. Not all of those base pairs code for specific molecules a body will make. Some of them serve other purposes like controlling the shape of the DNA during cell division, but all of it is necessary to the activity of the information needed to generate one human being.
Now, not all of us have the same exact order to our 3.1 billion base pairs. A single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is a place along the code where different people within a population might have a different base pair, or step on the spiral staircase, or character in the code, than others in the same population. As of October 16, 2014, just over 100 million SNPs had been found in human beings, leaving almost exactly 3 billion base pairs, that have to be just in place for the recipe of a human to be accurate. Diseases like sickle-cell anemia are caused by having just one of those base-pairs out of place.
If Watson and Crick were the mortal wound for Darwinism, the Human Genome Project was its dying breath. The recipe, the code, for a human being is 3 billion characters long, using an alphabet that has four characters (rather than the 26 in our writing alphabet). But if the human genome was assembled by chance errors in DNA replication over the course of billions of years, we have to ask the question, what is the probability that the necessary order of the 3 billion non-SNP base pairs would be achieved? It is a fairly simple calculation. With four possibilities at each site, and 3 billion sites, the odds are one in four to the 3 billionth power. Since we usually give very small probabilities in terms of exponents of 10, we can convert that number to one in ten to the 1.8 billionth power (10^1,800,000,000).
To put the magnitude of this number in perspective, the number of atoms in a spec of dust is 10^16. There are about 10^25 atoms in a glass of water, and there are 10^80 atoms in the entire universe (exponents scale up quickly). If the universe is 13.8 billion years old as current evolutionary hypotheses state, less than 10^18 seconds have passed since the beginning of the universe. Given all of the atoms in the universe and all of the time that is alleged to have passed, it is still mathematically ridiculous to consider the probabilities necessary for the recipe of a human to assemble, and that is even once the base pairs themselves and the machinery to assemble them are already assumed to be in place.
As I said earlier, I do not fault the atheist and the agnostic for wanting to fit the observable data into a model of the universe that ignores the need for a creator, but if they want to continue to do so, Darwinian Evolution in its current form no longer fits the data available to us, nor does any model that requires 3 billion bits of information to be assembled by random errors.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
New England Patriots Didn't Cheat (This Time), Because... SCIENCE!!!
I am not usually much of a football guy and most of my sports related posts here will be either about baseball or running, but this week on social media has been all about football, and became a major topic on my personal Facebook wall. As I alluded to in previous posts, I am a chemistry professor at a mid-sized state university. As a result, I have some friends in the Physics department, one of whom happens to be a big time Patriots fan. I don't hate the Patriots, and on the occasion that I watch football at all, I am a Packers fan, so I really didn't have a horse in this race, but it became more and more fun for me to watch the drama unfold on Facebook, especially from a science perspective.
Because of my initial lack of interest, I stayed out of it for a while, but my Patriot-fan-Physics friend made a post that caught my eye. In his initial post, he corrected an initial media science faux pas wherein a particular media outlet had correctly done their algebra in calculating the pressure drop to be expected from the temperature drop that occurred in going from locker room to field, but had inserted the wrong pressure number into the equation. You see, when it is stated that the pressure to which the football is pumped is 12.5 pounds per square inch, that is not the total pressure inside the ball, that is the pressure difference between the inside of the ball and the outside. Normal atmospheric pressure is about 14.5 pounds per square inch, so to do the calculation correctly, one has to begin with a total pressure of 27 pounds per square inch. My friend worked the calculating this way and found that the total pressure after the temperature drop would be around 24 pounds per square inch, making the gauge reading on the ball 11.5 pounds per square inch, vindicating the New England Patriots.
So, not because I care so much about the football outcome, but because I loved the idea of gas laws being applied to popularly followed news events, I shared my friend's status on Facebook and added a few funny jabs of my own quoting Big Bang Theory and Bernie Mac to get the discussion going. One of my oldest and dearest friends, an ivy league educated engineer, called us out on our physics, claiming that the assumption we made of constant volume would not be true, that the drop in temperature would cause both a volume AND a pressure reduction, each offsetting the other a bit, thus calling into question the significant pressure drop seen in the Patriot footballs. I saw his point, but wasn't sure that the volume change in a ball the consistency of a football would be significant at that pressure, but geekiness took over and we began designing an experiment to conduct in the Physics lab at the university that I would have posted on here had we got it done, but alas, the physicists at Carnegie Melon beat us to it and have already posted their findings which are detailed in another person's blog:
News Cut's Blog on Carnegie Melon's Deflategate Study
Long story short, my Patriots-fan-Physicist friend was correct, the volume change was negligible and the pressure drop due to temperature change was more than 1 PSI. Additionally, the pressure drop due to getting the ball wet was also nearly 1 PSI, making the Patriots appear totally innocent of all charges related to deflategate. As an added bonus, one of Professor Alkahest's greatest foils, Bill Nye the Pseudoscience Guy, came out with his opinions on the matter right at about the same time, but without having verified his opinions with appropriate experiments (as he often does) and got it completely wrong. It is important to note here that Bill Nye was allowing his bias as a Seahawks fan to effect his scientific judgement (as shown by video evidence). If you would like to see Bill Nye embarrassing himself by ignoring the Combined Gas Law and claiming that the only way to change pressure is to change the number of gas molecules in a container please go to this address and prepare to giggle (notice that his experiments use giant orange party balloons instead of actual footballs... OH THE RIGOR ... heeheehee):
Bill Nye being silly on deadspin
Morals of today's stories:
1) Any news item that causes people to learn a little science is an awesome news item.
2) Science beats engineering, always and all ways.
3) We are only having this ridiculous conversation because the NFL is stupid enough to allow the game balls to be prepared and controlled by the participants in the game rather than by the officials. In intelligent sports, the officials have control of the game balls until they come into use. Therefore, baseball beats football, always and all ways.
Because of my initial lack of interest, I stayed out of it for a while, but my Patriot-fan-Physics friend made a post that caught my eye. In his initial post, he corrected an initial media science faux pas wherein a particular media outlet had correctly done their algebra in calculating the pressure drop to be expected from the temperature drop that occurred in going from locker room to field, but had inserted the wrong pressure number into the equation. You see, when it is stated that the pressure to which the football is pumped is 12.5 pounds per square inch, that is not the total pressure inside the ball, that is the pressure difference between the inside of the ball and the outside. Normal atmospheric pressure is about 14.5 pounds per square inch, so to do the calculation correctly, one has to begin with a total pressure of 27 pounds per square inch. My friend worked the calculating this way and found that the total pressure after the temperature drop would be around 24 pounds per square inch, making the gauge reading on the ball 11.5 pounds per square inch, vindicating the New England Patriots.
So, not because I care so much about the football outcome, but because I loved the idea of gas laws being applied to popularly followed news events, I shared my friend's status on Facebook and added a few funny jabs of my own quoting Big Bang Theory and Bernie Mac to get the discussion going. One of my oldest and dearest friends, an ivy league educated engineer, called us out on our physics, claiming that the assumption we made of constant volume would not be true, that the drop in temperature would cause both a volume AND a pressure reduction, each offsetting the other a bit, thus calling into question the significant pressure drop seen in the Patriot footballs. I saw his point, but wasn't sure that the volume change in a ball the consistency of a football would be significant at that pressure, but geekiness took over and we began designing an experiment to conduct in the Physics lab at the university that I would have posted on here had we got it done, but alas, the physicists at Carnegie Melon beat us to it and have already posted their findings which are detailed in another person's blog:
News Cut's Blog on Carnegie Melon's Deflategate Study
Long story short, my Patriots-fan-Physicist friend was correct, the volume change was negligible and the pressure drop due to temperature change was more than 1 PSI. Additionally, the pressure drop due to getting the ball wet was also nearly 1 PSI, making the Patriots appear totally innocent of all charges related to deflategate. As an added bonus, one of Professor Alkahest's greatest foils, Bill Nye the Pseudoscience Guy, came out with his opinions on the matter right at about the same time, but without having verified his opinions with appropriate experiments (as he often does) and got it completely wrong. It is important to note here that Bill Nye was allowing his bias as a Seahawks fan to effect his scientific judgement (as shown by video evidence). If you would like to see Bill Nye embarrassing himself by ignoring the Combined Gas Law and claiming that the only way to change pressure is to change the number of gas molecules in a container please go to this address and prepare to giggle (notice that his experiments use giant orange party balloons instead of actual footballs... OH THE RIGOR ... heeheehee):
Bill Nye being silly on deadspin
Morals of today's stories:
1) Any news item that causes people to learn a little science is an awesome news item.
2) Science beats engineering, always and all ways.
3) We are only having this ridiculous conversation because the NFL is stupid enough to allow the game balls to be prepared and controlled by the participants in the game rather than by the officials. In intelligent sports, the officials have control of the game balls until they come into use. Therefore, baseball beats football, always and all ways.
Friday, January 23, 2015
Are Libertarianism and Anarchism Compatible, or are they Enemies?
As some of you have probably noticed, this blog is a bit eclectic. Quite often I will be writing about whatever has struck my fancy in my internet news and blog readings. You might expect this week that if I am going to write a political blog, that it might focus on one thing or another that President Obama did or did not say in the State of the Union Address, but the fact is, that is a really boring topic. Everything he said was expected and the arguments that have grown out of it are exactly what was expected. We won't cover any new ground that way. One argument I have seen going on on the Facebook walls of fellow libertarian commentators Austin Petersen, Libertarian Girl and Julie Borowski is where, how and if the anarcho-capitalist fits into the liberty movement.
I don't want to put words into anyone's mouths, but it seems that the anarcho-capitalists often argue, and angrily so, that they are the only "true libertarians" and that asserting the need of a government of any kind makes one a statist pig. The problem is that history has shown that true anarchy, the complete lack of government, leads to tyranny moreso than most forms of government. Now, here me out before you thrust the statist label upon me. The question that keeps being asked of the anarchists is how those in an anarchic society might deal with those who violate the rights of others in a particularly evil fashion (murderers, rapists, child molesters, etc.). Quite often, the answer given by the anarchist is that "I would just kill that person". On the surface, that argument seems to work because in anarchic society there is no law or police to prevent one from handling his own justice and revenge, but there is also no mechanism for due process toward the accused, and no way of preventing retaliation and long, bloody feuds.
That is the drawback to anarchy. Due process is out the window and only those mighty enough to take revenge get the appearance of justice while those who are weaker only get justice, peace, and protection if they can convince a mightier person to help them. This is where the slope starts to slide toward tyranny. There is a good chance the weaker persons accept this protection and justice from their stronger counterparts in exchange for some service. This sounds great to the anarcho-capitalist so far; a free market solution to justice and protection. However, this is the exactly how feudalism begins. People in an anarchic society voluntarily put themselves into servitude to an overlord of some sort because of the protection and pseudo-justice he can supply, until after a generation or so, the servitude is no longer voluntary and we have full blown feudalism. A large scale historical example is Europe in the 1000 years after the fall of Rome, a smaller scale, but more detailed example would be reading the history of Corsica during the same period
A powerful, but limited in scope, constitutional government stands to bring the most liberty to the most people because it alleviates the need for weaker persons and their progeny to become subject to a feudal overlord system for protection. This is what the American forefathers, particularly the libertarian leaning ones, envisioned for the United States. Unfortunately, keeping the scope of that governing body as limited as it should be is a difficult and eternal task and it has gotten away from us in the last few generations. That is why revolutions (sometimes peaceable, sometimes not) have been necessary from time to time throughout human history. I am still hopeful that our problems can be solved peaceably, but it will need to be done soon. I am afraid are approaching the tipping point.
I don't want to put words into anyone's mouths, but it seems that the anarcho-capitalists often argue, and angrily so, that they are the only "true libertarians" and that asserting the need of a government of any kind makes one a statist pig. The problem is that history has shown that true anarchy, the complete lack of government, leads to tyranny moreso than most forms of government. Now, here me out before you thrust the statist label upon me. The question that keeps being asked of the anarchists is how those in an anarchic society might deal with those who violate the rights of others in a particularly evil fashion (murderers, rapists, child molesters, etc.). Quite often, the answer given by the anarchist is that "I would just kill that person". On the surface, that argument seems to work because in anarchic society there is no law or police to prevent one from handling his own justice and revenge, but there is also no mechanism for due process toward the accused, and no way of preventing retaliation and long, bloody feuds.
That is the drawback to anarchy. Due process is out the window and only those mighty enough to take revenge get the appearance of justice while those who are weaker only get justice, peace, and protection if they can convince a mightier person to help them. This is where the slope starts to slide toward tyranny. There is a good chance the weaker persons accept this protection and justice from their stronger counterparts in exchange for some service. This sounds great to the anarcho-capitalist so far; a free market solution to justice and protection. However, this is the exactly how feudalism begins. People in an anarchic society voluntarily put themselves into servitude to an overlord of some sort because of the protection and pseudo-justice he can supply, until after a generation or so, the servitude is no longer voluntary and we have full blown feudalism. A large scale historical example is Europe in the 1000 years after the fall of Rome, a smaller scale, but more detailed example would be reading the history of Corsica during the same period
A powerful, but limited in scope, constitutional government stands to bring the most liberty to the most people because it alleviates the need for weaker persons and their progeny to become subject to a feudal overlord system for protection. This is what the American forefathers, particularly the libertarian leaning ones, envisioned for the United States. Unfortunately, keeping the scope of that governing body as limited as it should be is a difficult and eternal task and it has gotten away from us in the last few generations. That is why revolutions (sometimes peaceable, sometimes not) have been necessary from time to time throughout human history. I am still hopeful that our problems can be solved peaceably, but it will need to be done soon. I am afraid are approaching the tipping point.
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Eye for an Eye... Is the Bible a Statist Book?
There are many, both Christians and non-Christians who think of the Bible as being a staunchly pro-government, or "statist" book because of verses like Exodus 21:24 - "eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot" (see also Leviticus 24:20). Agnostic and atheist libertarians see this as a reason to discard the Bible and some Christians see this verse as a reason for endorsing harsh government punishments against certain crimes, but the fact is, they have misunderstood the intent of the verse. What we have to remember is that God was instructing Moses to write to a people that had been living for several hundred years under a VERY authoritarian government in Egypt and who were used to being punished excessively for small crimes by a vengeful dictatorship.
The intent of those Old Testament verses then, which can also be seen by analyzing the normal nuances of the Hebrew words used in the original language, is that punishments should ONLY be an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, etc. The verse was intended to restrain future Hebrew judges and kings from being excessive in their punishments in the way that they were used to seeing in Egypt. This portion of the Hebrew law originally served the same purpose as our Constitution and Bill of Rights, to RESTRAIN the government, not to increase it.
We get an even further understanding of what God meant here when we look at Jesus's response to that law in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:38-39 - "You have heard that it was said, 'AN EYE FOR AN EYE, AND A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH.' But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also". In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus looked at several Old Testament laws, corrected historically inaccurate impressions of those laws, and extended their meaning for the then future time of grace after His sacrifice. If Exodus was meant to restrain government from using too much force in retaliation for crimes against one another, Jesus suggested not to involve government led retaliation for personal crimes at all. The idea here is that if we respond to our enemies with kindness rather than retribution, they are much more likely to see reason to believe the gospel when we share it. Paul extended this idea of leaving the government out of disputes in his first letter to the Corinthians in chapter six when he commanded that Christians not take their disagreements with one another to the courts. One reason he gives is that we can not trust a heathen court system to intercede correctly for us. What could be more libertarian, or more applicable for today?
That pattern of leaving the government out of disputes is maintained throughout the New Testament. Although the government is often hostile to Christians, we are never advised to lobby the government to change in any way. Paul only ever uses his special advantages as a citizen in the Roman governmental system to increase his freedom of expression in sharing the gospel, never to try to lobby the government to control the sinful behaviors of others.
As Christians, we are never advancing the gospel or the will of God when we use the violent arm of the government to punish people's sins. That is not what Christ did; it is not what Paul did; it is not what we are commanded to do. Our job as Christians is to share God's word with as many people as we can get to listen, to disciple those who believe, to pray for those who do not, and to love ALL of them and treat them kindly regardless of how they treat us.
Monday, January 12, 2015
A Scientific Approach to Training
Two of the topics I promised for this blog are running and science. Today, you get a twofer as I will be talking about the overlap between them. If you are a serious competition runner or coach, and you haven't heard of GO Athletics or their "System Based Training" method, please take a look at their webpages and see what you think:
https://goathleticsblog.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/goathleticssbt/info?tab=page_info
The idea here is that not all athletes are the same. There is no one training schedule or workout program that will bring all athletes to their maximum abilities. If you want to get the best races out of yourself or the athletes you coach, you have to find out what your (or their) body responds best to. The best way to find this out is through physiological testing during a workout. When an expert physiologist administers and analyzes the results of this test, she can find the strengths and weaknesses of each energy system for a particular athlete, and then tailor a workout, condition and nutrition program for that athlete, allowing him or her to reach their maximum potential as a runner and racer.
I wish this had been around in my competitive racing days. Professor Alkahest is an old man in the running world at this point, but I am definitely recommending this for my younger and more active in the sport counterparts and am very tempted to give it a shot myself even at my advanced stage of decrepitness.
At this point, I think GO Athletics is only available to do testing in the Philadelphia area. I am not sure if there are similar companies in other areas or if they plan to expand to other areas. If you have worked with a program like this before or have any input or opinions, please feel free to express them in the comments section.
https://goathleticsblog.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/goathleticssbt/info?tab=page_info
The idea here is that not all athletes are the same. There is no one training schedule or workout program that will bring all athletes to their maximum abilities. If you want to get the best races out of yourself or the athletes you coach, you have to find out what your (or their) body responds best to. The best way to find this out is through physiological testing during a workout. When an expert physiologist administers and analyzes the results of this test, she can find the strengths and weaknesses of each energy system for a particular athlete, and then tailor a workout, condition and nutrition program for that athlete, allowing him or her to reach their maximum potential as a runner and racer.
I wish this had been around in my competitive racing days. Professor Alkahest is an old man in the running world at this point, but I am definitely recommending this for my younger and more active in the sport counterparts and am very tempted to give it a shot myself even at my advanced stage of decrepitness.
At this point, I think GO Athletics is only available to do testing in the Philadelphia area. I am not sure if there are similar companies in other areas or if they plan to expand to other areas. If you have worked with a program like this before or have any input or opinions, please feel free to express them in the comments section.
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Who Does Religion Really Insult?
Like I said earlier, this blog will deal with all sorts of contemporary issues including politics, theology, science, baseball, etc. Quite often I will chose our topic for the day based on whatever struck my interest when looking through Facebook posts from my friends. For that reason, today's topic will be theology. I noticed the picture below on a friend's Facebook page yesterday and decided that this was deserving of a discussion. What this picture says is certainly true of most religions. Religions the world over are a list of dos and don'ts that the adherent hopes will ingratiate themselves to God in a way that will bring blessing and maybe even allow them into whatever their concept of Heaven (Nirvana, etc.) is. The Muslims have their sharia law, the Hindus have their Karma, Catholics have their rites and sacraments, Cain of the Bible had his vegetable sacrifices, etc. etc.
But the fact is, it is not really an insult to humanity to think this way. If anything, it is false flattery. The idea that there is something that human beings, who can hardly get through an hour without doing, saying or thinking something regrettable, can do something, or even a list of somethings, to fix the gap between them and a perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful Being is the height of absurd pride. Why do we think that attempting to follow a rule book will make up for all of the ways in which we hurt people and cause a perfect God to allow us into His perfect Place? The real insult in human religion is not to the humanity, it is to God and to Heaven.
That is where Biblical Christianity is different. The list of dos and don'ts in the Bible are not there to show us how to place God in our debt or to make up for our sin or even to get us into Heaven. They are there to show us that we can never do any of that by our own work, that we can never measure up to Him, that we are forever in His debt. "Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith" (Galatians 3:24 NASB). Our ticket to Heaven is not through obedience to the law. Our ticket to Heaven is given as a gift when we realize we can't earn it. The only way a human can appear to God to be good enough to get into Heaven is to look like Jesus Christ. We look to God the Father like Jesus Christ when we trust in His sacrifice on the cross to pay for our sin, not in our own abilities to make up for our sins. Any human being that is saved is saved just like the thief on the cross next to Jesus who said "And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong. Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!" And Jesus said to him, "Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise."
Salvation comes only to the one who trusts only in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ to pay for his sin. Many find that even much more insulting than the list of dos and don'ts discussed in the meme below, but that is the truth of the human condition.
But the fact is, it is not really an insult to humanity to think this way. If anything, it is false flattery. The idea that there is something that human beings, who can hardly get through an hour without doing, saying or thinking something regrettable, can do something, or even a list of somethings, to fix the gap between them and a perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful Being is the height of absurd pride. Why do we think that attempting to follow a rule book will make up for all of the ways in which we hurt people and cause a perfect God to allow us into His perfect Place? The real insult in human religion is not to the humanity, it is to God and to Heaven.
That is where Biblical Christianity is different. The list of dos and don'ts in the Bible are not there to show us how to place God in our debt or to make up for our sin or even to get us into Heaven. They are there to show us that we can never do any of that by our own work, that we can never measure up to Him, that we are forever in His debt. "Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith" (Galatians 3:24 NASB). Our ticket to Heaven is not through obedience to the law. Our ticket to Heaven is given as a gift when we realize we can't earn it. The only way a human can appear to God to be good enough to get into Heaven is to look like Jesus Christ. We look to God the Father like Jesus Christ when we trust in His sacrifice on the cross to pay for our sin, not in our own abilities to make up for our sins. Any human being that is saved is saved just like the thief on the cross next to Jesus who said "And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong. Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!" And Jesus said to him, "Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise."
Salvation comes only to the one who trusts only in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ to pay for his sin. Many find that even much more insulting than the list of dos and don'ts discussed in the meme below, but that is the truth of the human condition.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Introduction to Professor Alkahest and His Blog
As the world continues to grow and change, and as more and more people add their thoughts and ideas to the conversations being carried on throughout the world, I become more and more inclined to add my thoughts to the mix. I don't do this because my thoughts are always correct, but because putting them out there sharpens me, and I am hoping will sharpen other thinkers who converse with me. So, please feel free as I post my thoughts each day to comment in agreement or disagreement with anything I have said. All opinions are welcome provided that they are expressed without vulgarity or threat of violence to anyone.
My posts will deal mostly with my interests. These include theology (I am Christian), politics (I am libertarian leaning but not affiliated with any organized party), science (I am a professor of chemistry at a mid-sized university), and sports (mostly running and baseball). If any of these topics interest you, hopefully you will find some though provoking conversations on this page.
I call myself Professor Alkahest rather than using my real name because some of what I will post here will be controversial. People with opinions like mine sometimes draw threats and I will seek to avoid that if possible. That being said, there may already be enough information in these paragraphs for some of you to figure out who I am, and I won't panic if word gets out.
If you are wondering about the word Alkahest, it is an ancient word associated with the art/science of alchemy, the grandfather art to modern chemistry. It was thought of as "the power from above" to distill any substance down to its essence particles, the "universal solvent". At its best, I hope this blog will serve in that capacity for ideas, distilling them down to their essence, and examining them for their value and merit in today's society.
I will try to get something new up here at least a few times each week. Please keep stopping back :-) and like me on facebook. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Professor-Alkahest/576163565847894
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