A Theological Objection to Creationism

"And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day."
- Genesis 1-31

"They tell us that
We lost our tails
Evolving up
From little snails
I say it's all
Just wind in sails
Are we not men?"
- From "Jocko Homo", lyrics by Mark Mothersbaugh

Devotees of Charles Darwin have had a lot to celebrate this year. February 12th was the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and November 24 was the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, "On the Origin of Species".

Inevitably, the Darwin Day celebrations have led to yet another round of the old creation-evolution debate. Many of the world's leading scientists have weighed in on the side of evolution, pointing out the scientific flaws in creationism.

I would like to present a side of this debate that gets considerably less coverage: the theological case against creationism. In their attempt to force fit the parables of Genesis into a scientific theory, creationists undermine the book's true meaning.

Genesis actually has two separate creation stories. Chapter 1 and the first three verses of chapter 2 of Genesis present the "seven days" creation story, where God creates the world in six days, then rests on the seventh day. The "Adam and Eve" creation story is presented in the rest of chapter 2 and chapter 3.

In a mere 34 verses, the "seven days" creation story eloquently expresses a deep appreciation of the beauty of our universe. Almost like a musical refrain, this creation story has each day of creation ending with God observing His work and deeming it good. This heartfelt expression of the awe and wonder of nature resonates with many who reject a scientific interpretation of the story.

If you wish to view Genesis as science instead of parable, however, there is a serious problem with the "seven days" story: it contradicts the "Adam and Eve" story. In the "seven days" parable, humans are created on the six day, after all other creatures were created. In the "Adam and Eve" story, man is created before any other creature. This is not a problem if you view both stories as parable, but it clearly is a problem if you want to view these stories as history. Major creationists have a novel way to resolve this contradiction: they posit that God was displeased with his "seven days" creation, and so God destroyed it all and started again with Adam and Eve. In their view, I guess Genesis left out this epilogue to "seven days" story:

On the eight day, God saw His creation and said "Sheesh! What was I thinking last week?" He then buried His previous week's creation in a big hole, and hoped that no one would notice His blunder. He then started afresh to create the universe, hoping that this time, He would get it right.

In their attempt to attempt to defend the literal accuracy of Genesis, these creationists threw out one of it's major themes -- the very message that Genesis 1 is trying to impart to us! This does considerably more damage to Genesis that the position of many Catholics, mainstream protestants and religious liberals that Genesis should be viewed a parable.

In short, creationism is not just bad science. It is also terrible theology.

Dreams of My President

"War is the Health of the State"
- Randolph Bourne

"Even big politicians don't know what to do
Gracie doesn't know either, but neither do you,
So vote for Gracie!"
- "Vote for Gracie" sung by Gracie Allen

Tonight our president gave his long awaited speech on the Afghan war. In the next six months, 30,000 additional American troops will be sent to Afghanistan. Peace activists such as Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, and Tom Hayden have expresses their deep disapproval of this Afghan surge. After all, they supported Obama to end the wars. Wasn't Obama elected on a peace platform?

Well, not quite. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama actually supported the Afghan war. He fervently opposed the war in Iraq, and he may well have won based on his opposition to that conflict. But one of the Barack's most frequent arguments against the Iraq war was that it was diverting our efforts from the conflict we should be concentrating on, the Afghan war. He made his feelings on this issue quite explicit: this point was brought up in his televised debates with both Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

So how could these peace activists not remember the positions president Obama took just last year? It might be that Obama's rise was so fast that he was elected before having much of a track record. In the absence of said record, he became a political Rorschach test: people saw in him what they wanted to see. The peace activists dreamed of a President that opposed both wars, and Obama's anti-Iraq war rhetoric convinced them that Obama was the candidate of their dreams.

My sympathy for these peace activists is rather limited. Obama stated his hawkish position on Afghanistan rather clearly, and everything he said tonight is consistent with his 2008 campaign stand. They ignored what Barack said at their own peril; it is time for these dreamers to wake up.

Backwards Compatibility: Back to the Future!

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Ch-ch-ch-changes
(turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can't trace time"
- "Changes" by David Bowie

My apologies for the relatively few posts I did in November, but that was in part because of some PC problems. My old PC's motherboard was starting to behave funky, so I decided to get a new one, an HP Pavilion with a quad-core Intel processor and Windows 7 Home Premium edition. The new PC must have picked up the hardware curse from the old PC, for the new hard drive was defective and had to be replaced. Finally, I've got the new system up and running with all the documents from the old system.

So now I can do everything I used to do on the old system, right? Well, not quite. The operating system on the old PC was Windows XP Media Center edition. Windows XP was the last Microsoft operating system to support programs written for the previous MS operating systems, including DOS and 16-bit windows. My version Windows 7 does not support some of these older programs so for now I can no longer run some of my older games, screen savers and desktop themes.

I am not along in my interest in old software. You can find plenty of sites that offer abandonware, i.e. software considered so obsolete that the original creators have abandoned the copyright. But why would anyone still be interested in these offerings from ancient floppy disks? Some of these programs are collected for historical interest; for example this history of windows. The vast majority abandonware collectors, however, are interested in the old games. Just as many great films were created before innovations such as color, sound and CGI, many a great game was created in the DOS and early Windows days. The 16 bit pirate game series Tales of Monkey Island was popular enough to inspire a slew of YouTube videos and new game. And thanks to a new generation of retro PC games, there is now a new entry to the Sierra Gobliiins series.

I know several options for playing my old stuff. DOSBox is a freeware application that can run any DOS application I've seen. Some PC game collectors have even successfully installed Windows 3.11 under DOXBox. You can certainly install Windows 3.11 on a Virtual PC, i.e. an emulation of a complete classic PC system. Another solution I could use would be to upgrade the version of Windows 7, which has more old windows support. So undoubtedly there are ways to run my old games on the new system. We have the pleasant situation where we can enjoy the advantages of 64-bit processing without giving up the gems from the days when home PC's were new.

Are You or Have You Ever Been a Klingon?

"Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilized is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business."
- Gertrude Stein

"All for freedom and for pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world"
- "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" lyrics by Tears for Fears

I found a hilarious animated short on cartoon historian Jerry Beck's excellent blog, Cartoon Brew. The short purports to be an intercepted TV broadcast from Qo'noS, the Klingon home planet. As every SF geek knows, the Klingons are the warrior race that served as recurring villains of the original Star Trek series. The short shows that the Qo'noS broadcast day starts with a Klingon Propaganda Film. To give it that extra air of authenticity the creators of this short did it in the Klingon language. What? You don't know how to speak Klingon? Sheesh, how do expect to get a good job in this economy without knowing Klingon? Oh, OK, here's the Klingon Propaganda Translated.

In my attempts to see issues from both sides, I've looked up propaganda films from places such as North Korea and Cuba. The film is a spot-on parody of the propaganda films I've seen. Like so many of these films, it starts with a cute girl singing. Then in keeping with the genre, it praises the local culture, and then lionizes the military's great victories. Replace the Klingons with Koreans, and this film would look like it came from Pyongyang.

Once you look past the message that these films are trying to foist upon you, propaganda films reveal some surprising details about the country that produced them. The agitprop from communist countries, for example, show how profoundly conservative Marxist societies often are. The North Korean propaganda I've seen is cornier than 90% of the films in the Prelinger Collection. Sure, the Marxist revolutions are celebrated in these films, but they also project a strong sense of conformity. Check out Killer Chic and Gorki Aguila to get an idea as to how opposed these societies are to change.

And for more Klingon silliness, see a Klingon Board Game, the Klingon homeless, and the essential Klingon PC accessory.

The Difference Between High Culture and Low Culture is Measured in Dexter's Laboratory

"Classic: a book which people praise and don't read."
-Mark Twain

In a college course I took back in the 1970's, the professor asked the class "What is the difference between high culture and low culture?" After a long pause while the other students pondered this question, I broke the silence by saying "About 12 feet". That got a laugh, but hopefully it also made the point that this distinction between high culture, (i.e. the art worthy of serious academic study), and low culture (the popular trash that academics should scorn) is taken way too seriously. As is often pointed out, much of what we now consider "high culture" (the plays of Shakespeare, the Viennese operas) were the popular culture of their times. Many revered artists have worked in supposedly "low brow" arts. Lyonel Feininger, a leading figure in the modern art movement, once did a newspaper comic, The Kin-Der-Kids.

For that reason, I particularly enjoyed this YouTube video, Requiem for a Dexter. This video looks at Requiem for a Dream, a highly revered film that tells the story of four young people's experiences with illegal drugs. The point of this short is that many of the innovations of this independent feature film actually appeared two years earlier in a Dexter's Laboratory cartoon, "Topped Off", where Dexter and his sister Dee-Dee experiment with this mysterious substance that seems so important to their parents: coffee.

I doubt that the creators of "Requiem for a Dream", consciously stole anything from "Dexter's Laboratory". Most likely, Darren Aronofsky (the director of "Requiem for a Dream") and Genndy Tartakovsky (the creator of "Dexter's Laboratory" and director of "Topped Off") independently devised the same innovations for the stories they told. But why does Aronofsky earn so much more accolades than Tartakovsky for basically the same ideas, especially since Tartakovsky came up with these ideas first?

Dexter's Laboratory makes me think that my initial estimate of difference between high culture and low culture (12 feet) may be a bit on the high side.

Sympathy for the Devil, Part 2

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it conscientiously."
- Blaise Pascal

"I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing
Till they got a hold of me"
- Alice Cooper, from "No More Mr. Nice Guy"

The topic of "Wicked" got me thinking about how often I have been pleasantly surprized by people who once seemed to have no redeeming qualities. For example, I have been revolted by almost everything I've read or seen about 1930's evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. She preached a hard-line fundamentalist faith that held that every syllable of the Bible was true. Her revival meetings made frequent use of faith healing, a practice that degrades both medicine and religion. And shades of Jimmy Swaggart, she was involved in a sex scandal. I had totally written off McPherson when I looked up something on the anti-lynching movement, and discovered that for all her faults, she had one strong virtue: she was a fierce opponent of racism. Her revivals preached against racism and the Klan, and often did so in the heart of Klan country. She attacked lynching at a time when most other media outlets were reluctant to admit that the practice existed.

Back when the Patriot Act was first passed, I was disappointed with how many conservatives backed it. I knew that there would be at least one major conservative leader who would denounce this law as a violation of the conservative principle of limited government, but I was really surprised that the most prominent conservative leader to denounce the Patriot Act when it was first proposed was Phyllis Schlafly. As much as I've disagreed with her in the past, I've got to give her credit: she spoke up at a time when very few were brave enough to combat the mad rush to pass this monstrosity.

The left gets a lot of flak for the political correctness movement that has significantly stifled speech, especially on college campuses. But one should keep in mind that the leading organization for promoting free speech on campuses, F.I.R.E., was founded by a liberal: Harvey A. Silverglate.

I even have an example on the cultural front. For most of his career, Pat Boone has been singing bland Gospel music, mixed with his fundamentalist rantings. Nothing he did had any great appeal for me until 1997, when he showed a side of him I've never seen before: his sense of humor. Playing against his well-known squeaky-clean image, he announced that he had developed an interest in heavy metal music. He showed off his new musical interest with the release of the album "Pat Boone in a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy", where he perform big band arrangements of the songs of Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper and Metalica.

Needless to say, some of Boone's old fans were horrified. Apparently, they did not get the gag, and that is a shame. Boone was parodying both heavy metal and his own public image. And as musical parodies go, "No More Mr. Nice Guy" is brilliant. His big band arrangements skewer the often forced "Strum und Drang" of metal. I'm especially fond of his cover of Ozbourne's "Crazy Train", which almost morphs into the Chattanooga Cho-Cho.

Sympathy for the Devil, Part 1

"We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents."
- Mark Twain

"Devil or angel, I can't make up my mind
Which one you are I'd like to wake up and find"
- "Devil or Angel", words and music by Blanche Carter

A recent sermon given at the First Parish in Waltham was based on the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. This alternative narrative of the familiar Wizard of Oz storyline presents the story from the point of view of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. In Maguire's retelling, Elphaba and her sister Nessarose really are not nearly as wicked as we were led to believe from the original story. Sure, the witches of the East and the West do have their moral lapses, but in this version of the story, so do the Wizard of Oz and Glinda. Moreover, as we learn more about Elphaba and Nessa, we find that even their worst behavior resulted from understandable motives. Elphaba had fought many injustices and suffered many heartaches before, in sheer desperation, she resorted to the wicked acts that she is now known primarily for.

"Wicked" is part of a growing genre: stories that center around a common popular culture villain, and present him or her in a more sympathetic light.

• The musical "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" deals with a super hero (Captain Hammer) battling an evil mad scientist (Dr. Horrible), but this time we see the battle through the mad scientist's eyes. We see Captain Hammer as a conceited jerk who motivation is not really justice; it is his insatiable need for fame and adulation. Dr. Horrible (he really is a doctor, he has a PhD in Horribleness) is much easier to empathize with.
• In recent decades, fictional works depict vampires as more than just blood-crazed killers; they are shown to more complex and nuanced characters whose misdeeds are driven more by need than by malice. The sympathetic vampire first appeared in the 1960's day time drama "Dark Shadows", and continues to the day in the "Twilight" series of romantic novels and movies.
• It seems that western bad men appear as heroes almost as frequently as they do a villains: Butch Cassidy, Jesse James, and Belle Starr have all gotten favorable treatments in books, movies, and TV series.

A lot of popular culture utilizes irredeemably evil villains. So why is there so much desire to see the more lovable side of characters originally created to be objects of our hate? In some cases, the "villain-as-hero" story variant is an elegant way of satirizing the original story. This form of role reversal also provides a novel twist to an otherwise familiar story. But most of all, I think these revisionist looks at our fictional antiheroes are motivated by a certain sense of realism: nobody is either purely evil or purely virtuous, hence any tale with such black and white characterizations is not telling you the whole story.

In fact, the need to look beyond black and white characterizations of people was actually the point of the sermon on "Wicked". All too often we base our moral decision making on a highly simplistic stereotypes. Conservative commentators often dismiss their opponents as "unpatriotic Birkenstock-wearing socialistic weasels". Some liberal media figures are no better, characterizing those who disagree with them as "puritanical gap-toothed cave-dwelling rednecks". Far too many religious leaders say that all non-believers are amoral. New atheist writers such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have responded to this outrage with equally broad (and unfair) portraits of religious communities. Not even religious liberals are immune from this problem: how often do we fall back on a comforting but inaccurate vision of the fundamentalists?

Let us end the agony causes by an exaggerated perception of the evil of others. If we can get past clear cut heroes and villains in our fiction, why can't we do it in real life? Gregory Maguire provides us with a valuable lession: if you want to be good, you have to understand "Wicked".

25 Will Get You 35

"Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception."
- Søren Kierkegaard

"That ain't working, that's the way you do it
Money for nothing and your chicks for free"
- Mark Knopfler, from "Money for Nothing"

Way back in the 1970's, there was an odd coin operated device advertised in a mail order catalog (I think it was Spencer gifts). When you put a quarter into this device, it would return a quarter and a dime. How can 25 cents get you 35 cents? Simple, you have to load the machine with dimes ahead of time for this machine to work. The idea is to use the device to cheer yourself up: when you've had a bad day where nothing is going right, you can depend on your trusty coin machine to give back a little more than you put in.

When I first saw this device advertised, I could not understand how it could possibly work. Of course I understood how it could spit out a quarter and a previously loaded dime; what I didn't understanding is how it could cheer someone up. Is this device anything more than just a way to scam yourself? And given your active participation in setting this device up, isn't the scam a bit too transparent to be effective? I mean, can melancholy really be cured by playing Lou Costello to a sock puppet Bud Abbott?

Well, that was what I thought when I was a naive young lad. Since then I've seen this coin operated device work quite effectively in many different guises. Take, for example, the euphoria earlier this week over the latest Gross Domestic Product figures. The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the GDP grew 3.5% in the third quarter. Wall Street responded with a big jump in the Dow Jones Average. Isn't this proof that all that stimulus spending is finally having the desired effect of reviving the economy?

Not quite, and to understand why, you have to look at how the Bureau of Labor Statistics computes the GDP. The Bureau includes government spending in the GDP, and does so with the rather optimistic assumption that every dollar spent by the government creates one dollar of economic value. So if the government spends 1.5 billion dollars on a bridge to nowhere that will be used by virtually no one, the BLS would count the building of that bridge as adding 1.5 billion to the GDP. So a lot the 3.5% increase in GDP is simply the tremendous boom in government deficit spending, including those hideously expensive bailouts and stimulus programs. The GDP figures are the Spencer gift coin device all over again: we are cheered by seeing dimes mixed in with the quarters, temporarily forgetting that all those dimes came from us. Or I should say those dimes will come from us, since the stimulus program was financed by borrowing.

Check out this candid, illusion-busting analysis of the latest GDP figures by French economist Veronique de Rugy here.

Well, the euphoria over the GDP turned out to be short lived. The stock market gave up those impressive gains today. The reality of our current economic environment interfered with our dreams of spending ourselves rich. This crisis crisis will eventually pass, but not until we abandon the deceptions and work on creating real wealth.