Psalm 104 and the Early Chapters of Genesis

Psalm 104 is a creation psalm, but a unique one. It actually reiterates the description of events of creation week step by step; it's essentially the earliest commentary on Genesis 1. This allows us to check our interpretation of Genesis 1 to see if it's in accord with Psalm 104; if it's not, then we should go back and check to see where the misinterpretation lies.

The significance of this is that one of the things that fuels the claim that science and Christianity are at odds with each other is that some Christians insist on interpretations of the Bible which blatantly contradict the discoveries of modern science. If the problem lies in the interpretation rather than what the Bible actually teaches, this would be an important point in the debate. Of course, there are other responses one can give to the science vs. Christianity metanarrative; for example, the Bible was never intended to provide a comprehensive description of the world, nor has it been historically understood to do so. As David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers write, "The notion that any serious Christian thinker would even have attempted to formulate a world view from the Bible alone is ludicrous."

One significant difference between the two texts is that Genesis focuses on what was created and Who did the creating. The Psalm, however, also addresses the why: why did God create this? Its point is to show how God is in charge of his creation, and that each part has a role to play in his overarching purpose.

Here are the main parallels between Psalm 104 and Genesis 1:

1. Ps. 104:2-5/Gen. 1:1 -- Creation of the universe
2. Ps. 104:6-9/Gen. 1:6-10 -- Formation of dry land
3. Ps. 104:14-17/Gen. 1:11-13 -- Creation of plants (for men and animals)
4. Ps. 104:19-23/Gen. 1:14-19 -- Establishment of the heavens as calendar “markers”
5. Ps. 104:24-30/Gen. 1:20-25 -- Creation of animals

Point 2 is interesting. Genesis 1 describes how the early Earth was totally covered with water, and that God brought the land out of it, raising the seabed above sea level in certain places. Psalm 104 describes this same event, but includes another point that Genesis doesn't make: "You set a boundary they [the waters] cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth." So after God created dry land, there was never a time when water completely covered it.

This doesn't conflict with Genesis 1, but it does conflict with how many people understand the flood chapters. It's often thought that Genesis 7-8 is describing a global flood. But Psalm 104 does not allow this interpretation. The flood could not have been global, since after God first formed the dry land, he promised to never again allow it to be completely covered with water. The flood, therefore, must have been a local event, which presumably destroyed the local ecosystem and the human race who hadn't spread out to cover the earth yet.

The only way out of this is to claim that, perhaps, Psalm 104 is not referring to the establishment of dry land during creation week but to the flood itself. In fact, this is how most commentaries that I've read understand it. Part of the motivation for this is that, after the flood, God promised to never destroy the human race by flood again. Thus, the promise in Psalm 104 to never let water cover all the face of the earth is allegedly the same promise God made after the flood.

However, the parallels between Psalm 104 and Genesis 1 confute the idea that these texts are describing the same promise. Essentially, this would require us to believe that Psalm 104 parallels Genesis 1 regarding the creation of the universe; then jumps ahead to describe the flood; then jumps back to Genesis 1 where it left off; then skips over the account of the creation of dry land (which just happens to sound exactly like what Psalm 104 is describing); then continues paralleling Genesis 1 as if the hop, skip, and jump hadn't happened. This is an incredibly ad hoc explanation; you could defend just about any interpretation using such tactics.

Another interesting issue is point 5. This describes God's creation of the animals. Genesis 1 includes the detail that God gave the earliest humans and animals plants to eat. From this, some conclude that they only ate plants. This accords with the idea that carnivorous activity -- where animals kill and eat each other -- is a result of the fall of humankind, and was not a part of God's original creation plan.

Psalm 104, however, includes carnivorous activity as part of his purpose in creation, referring to God's providence in the predator-prey relationship. Verse 21 states, "The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God". Moreover, a few verses later, this and other aspects of God providing for his creation are called "good": "These all look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things" (vv. 27-28). This recalls the repeated statement in Genesis 1 where God, after creating something, calls it "good". This strongly suggests that there wasn't some sort of vegetarian mandate in effect prior to the fall of humankind.

A similar passage is in Job where God challenges Job by asking him if he can do everything God does. In 38:39-40 God says, "Do you hunt the prey for the lioness and satisfy the hunger of the lions when they crouch in their dens or lie in wait in a thicket?" Since this comes in a list of things of how God provides for his creation, it means that God is the one who brings other animals to the lion for it to kill and eat as the lion waits in a place hidden from them. This doesn't explicitly tie it to creation week as does Psalm 104, but it still removes the claim that it's contrary to God's providential ordering of the universe.

A potential escape hatch is that Psalm 104 refers to many things that weren't in effect during creation week. The bodies of water, for example, are there so people can build boats and sail on them (v. 26). But this ignores the fact that the Psalm is describing what the various stages in creation are for; he is describing why he created the various things he did, using Genesis 1 as a blueprint. Thus, he reiterates the order of things in Genesis, but then adds how each stage of creation paved the way for future stages, even those stages not a part of creation week itself.

But then couldn't the same thing be said of the lion hunting it's prey? That, after all, is a current phenomenon, and we do not necessarily have to ascribe it to creation week. The problem with this is that, in addition to being a creation psalm, Psalm 104 is a praise psalm. That is, it's describing the good things God has done, not the negative result of sin or the fall. The psalmist praises God for providing the lion with its food (that it kills and eats) and calls this good, just as Genesis 1 calls the various stages of creation good.

Of course, both of these claims open up a can of worms. There are other objections to the claim that animal death was present prior to the fall of humankind; there are other arguments that the formation of land in Psalm 104 is referring to the flood chapters, not Genesis 1. Nevertheless, I think this Psalm is a good starting point. It opens doors that we may not realize are open because of common interpretations of the early chapters of Genesis.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Hypatian Hypotheses

Over at Armarium Magnum Tim O'Neill posted about Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria a year ago, and again more recently. In case that's not enough for you, Michael Flynn has posted a brief afterthought on the subject, "The Mean Streets of Old Alexandria". Here are the links:

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX

Enjoy.

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Duties and Restraints

If you’ve ever followed Tim O’ Neil’s blog at ‘Armarium Magnum’ you’ll know that one of the figures of Ancient Rome that comes up quite regularly is the Flamen Dialis, the pries

t of Jupiter. Aulus Gellius describes his duties and restraints in his Attic nights. The restraints seem a tad silly at first and matters deteriorate from there:

‘A great many ceremonies are imposed upon the Flamen Dialis [the priest of Jupiter], and also many restraints, about which we read in the books On The Public Priesthoods and also in Book I of Fabius Pictor's work.

Among them I recall the following…..He must have no knot in his head gear or in his girdle or in any other part of his attire; 8) If anyone is being led away to be flogged and falls at his feet as a suppliant, it is forbidden to flog him that day; 9) The hair of the Flamen Dialis is not to be cut, except by a freeman; 10) It is

customary for the Flamen neither to touch nor even to name a female goat, or raw meat, ivy, or beans; 11) He must not walk under a trellis for vines; 12) The feet of the bed on which he lies must have a thin coating of clay, and he must not be away from this bed for three successive nights, nor is it lawful for anyone else to sleep in this bed; 13) At the foot of his bed there must be a box containing a little pile of sacrificial cakes; 14) The nail trimmings and hair of the Dialis must be buried in the ground beneath a healthy tree; 15) Every day is a holy day for the Dialis; 16) He must not go outdoors without a head-covering---this is now allowed indoors, but only recently by decree of the pontiffs, as Masurius Sabinus has stated; it is also said that some of the other ceremonies have been remitted and cancelled; 17) It is not lawful for him to touch bread made with yeast; 18) His underwear cannot be taken off except in covered places, lest he appear nude under the open sky, which is the same as under the eye of Jove’

A military career was almost certainly out for the Flamen Dialis as he wasn’t allowed to even cast eyes on the army. Gellius says of his wife that:

‘she observes certain other and different ones, for example, that she wears a dyed gown, and that she has a twig from a fruitful tree tucked in her veil, and that it is forbidden for her to ascend more than three rungs of a ladder.

The strangest part of this for me is the need to have a box of cakes at the end of the bed, though, looking elsewhere Cato the Elder’s ‘The Harvest Ritual’ follows a similar theme.

Offer a pile of cakes to Janus, saying, "Father Janus, in offering these cakes to you, I humbly pray that you will be propitious and merciful to me and my children, my house and my household." Then make an offering of cake to Jupiter with these words: "In offering you this cake, O Jupiter, I humbly pray that you, pleased with this offering, will be propitious and merciful to me and my children, my house and my household." Then present the wine to Janus, saying: "Father Janus, as I have prayed humbly in offering you the cakes, so may you in the same way be honored by this wine now placed before you." Then pray to Jupiter thus: "Jupiter, may you be honored in accepting this cake; may you be honored in accepting the wine placed before you." Then sacrifice the porca praecidanea. When the entrails have been removed, make an offering of cakes to Janus, and pray in the same way as you have prayed before. Offer a cake to Jupiter, praying just as before. In the same way offer wine to Janus and offer wine to Jupiter, in the same way as before in offering the pile of cakes, and in the consecration of the cake.

This kind of cake bribery certainly works extremely well with my Grandma. I am somewhat sceptical that it would work on bloodthirsty Pagan deities.

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Boyle's List

A couple of months ago a list drawn up by the famous natural philosopher Robert Boyle went on display for the first time. Written in the 1660s, soon after the Royal Society was founded, it set forth the most pressing problems for scientists to tackle. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to see a copy of the full document but I’ve managed to piece together some of it from a photo of the wishlist and a couple of newspaper articles on the subject.

The first item on Boyle’s list is the 'Prolongation of Life'; something we tend to be a lot better at nowadays, unless of course your last name happens to be Kennedy.

Following on from that, Boyle goes on to list 'Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour'd as in youth'. Again if you’ve seen those ‘Just for Men’ ‘no play for Mr Grey’ commercials you’ll know this is still very much a work in progress. Item 3 is ‘A ship to saile with all winds and a ship not to be sunk’. The first has been achieved, the less said about the second the better (I read recently that the Titanic was described to be ‘virtually unsinkable’ but only in an obscure trade publication)

Four is, intriguingly, ‘The attaining of gigantick dimensions’. Being only a modest 5”6 and a half, I for one would like to see this kind of technology come in but sadly the only progress since Boyle’s list has been the so-called ‘elevator shoe’, surely one of the worst inventions in recorded history.

These are followed by ‘the acceleration of the production of things out of seed, ‘the art of flying’, ‘the making of armor light and extremely hard’, ‘the practicable and certain ways of finding longtitudes’ and ‘the cure of diseases at a distance, or at least by transplantation’.

Towards the end it gets rather trippy as Boyle lists the production of ‘potent drugs to alter of exalt imagination, waking, memory and other functions, and appease pain, procure sleep, harmless dreams etc..’ as one of his aspirations.

Some of these functions are fairly practical but one wonders what Boyle really means by ‘alter of exalt imagination’. Perhaps if he had worked a bit harder with his chemistry set he might have become some kind of Restoration era Timothy Leary.

Next up is ‘freedom from necessity of much sleeping exemplify’d by the operation of tea and what happens in mad-men’. He must have written this mere decades before the first authoritative coffee treatise was written in latin by Faustus Nairon and coffee houses began to spread across Europe. Interestingly this movement met with some resistance in Germany where beer was at the height of it’s popularity and where Adam Olearius’s Persian travelogue appeared with the following anecdote:

‘However if you partake to excess of such kahave water, it completely extinguishes all pleasures of the flesh. They write of a king, Sultan Mahmud Kasnin who reigned in Persia before Tamerlane and who became such a habitual drinker of kahave water that he forgot his spouse and developed a repugnance of intercourse which displeased his queen greatly. For on one occasion as she sat in the window and a espied how a stallion was being held down prior to castration, it is said that she inquired what was happening. And upon being told with all due frankness that the intention was to tame the lust of the horse that it would no longer mount another or service a mare she express the view that such steps were unnecessary, all that had to be done was to give him the shameful kahave water and he would soon be like the king.

The last item on the list is perhaps the most intriguing, ‘the emulating of fish without engines by custome and education only’.

I’m afraid I’m at a loss to see how this could advance civilisation.






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A Rather Obvious Point

Often when someone brings up Islamic terrorism, one of the responses given is that other religions and ideologies have their kooks as well, and we shouldn't judge Islam because it has its own share. Obviously this response is at least half true: no matter where you go in life, no matter what group you associate with, there's always going to be what I call an assh*le element. Any and every group will have people who join it for the wrong reasons, so to single out one group because of this is inappropriate.

As I say, this response is certainly half true. However, it's no more than that, because it misses something important, something very important, and in fact, blindingly obvious: Ideas have consequences. Just because every group is going to have its assh*le element doesn't mean that every group is equal in all moral respects. Some groups are going to encourage violence, others will allow it in pursuit of a higher cause, etc. Ideas have consequences, and different ideas have different consequences.

An ideology which rejects the intrinsic value of human beings -- perhaps all people or perhaps just members of other groups -- will obviously have significantly different results than one which upholds the intrinsic value of all human beings, including those who belong to people groups that are usually held in contempt. And this remains true even though the latter ideology has members who obviously don't act accordingly. For example, at the end of the film To End All Wars, the lead character narrates an aspect of the Bushido code which had been introduced earlier in the movie (I'm paraphrasing): "The individual life weighs less than a feather." The narrator responds, "What is the result of believing the individual life weighs less than a feather?" The preceding two hours of the film answer that question.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Gizmotron

An archivist at the Schenectady Museum and Suits-Bueche Planetarium in New York state was curious about some vaguely-labeled film canisters in the basement. The films inside had been recorded on a pallophotophone and, oddly, there aren't any more around on which to play the recordings. He managed to get two engineers interested in figuring them out. One of them managed to build -- from scratch, over two years -- a working pallophotophone.

That by itself is extremely cool. What is even cooler is that when they listened to them, they heard a speech delivered by Thomas Edison. It was broadcast live in 1929 when Edison was 82 years old, he shared the stage with President Hoover and Henry Ford, and you can listen to it here. There were other gems as well, but the fact that we can hear Edison's voice over 80 years later makes me feel like a time-traveler.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Trust, but verify

As a follow-up to James' article in the Spectator several months ago, Beyond Necessity has a blogpost up on the pro-Islam bias at Wikipedia, with a particular focus on Avicenna. Via Bill Vallicella.

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"The alien who lives among you", part 1

Update (Oct. 17, 2014): I temporarily removed the content of this post because it has some similarities with an article I wrote that was published in an academic journal about a year ago. Even though a blogpost probably doesn't count as having previously published the material, I took the content of this post offline in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety, with the intention of restoring it after a year had passed. Since it's been a year, the original post is below.
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There have been some interesting recent reports that two moons of the outer planets may have some form of life. Titan, which orbits Saturn, is often cited as a potential life-site because it meets one of the necessary conditions for life (high nitrogen content). The recent claims are that acetylene is rare on Titan's surface, and that hydrogen may be flowing down to the surface and disappearing. Both hydrogen and acetylene could theoretically be "consumed" by some primitive form of life on the surface, so their absence may be indicative of such processes actually taking place. More interesting (to me at least) is the unusual suggestion that Io may have some form of life, despite its proximity to Jupiter and its magnetosphere. The suggestion is that it might live deep under the surface, although it seems purely speculative to me.

Some say (and many more think) that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would essentially refute Christianity, since it would show that we don't need to appeal to God to explain our origins, or because it would contradict certain Christian doctrines about humanity's importance to God. Unfortunately it can be difficult to refute because it's difficult to find out what the actual argument is. Any attempt to address it, therefore, runs the distinct possibility of attacking a strawman. Nevertheless, I shall soldier on.

As far as I can tell, the argument is something along these lines:

a) If life or the remains of life are found beyond the earth,
b) then life would be a common phenomenon.
c) Therefore, it would be the product of natural processes.
d) Therefore, life would not be the product of supernatural process(es) or agent(s).

Two other conclusions are often drawn, although it's not clear whether they are drawn from b), c), or d). They are:

e) Therefore, the Christian claim that human beings are especially important to God is highly implausible.
f) Therefore, the Christian claim that God was incarnated as a human being (as opposed to one of the other myriad forms of life) is likewise highly implausible.

Now the philosophically minded will notice that this is a spectacularly poor argument. f) does not follow from a), b), c), d), e), or their conjunction; e), likewise, does not follow from a) through d); d) does not follow from c); c) does not follow from b); and b) does not follow from a). I'll go over each of these alleged inferences in turn, with the first below. For now I'll just point to how this charge fits into the metanarrative that science and Christianity are at odds with each other, and this because science is slowly but surely refuting Christianity. This is the conflict thesis -- James calls it the conflict myth -- and it is almost entirely rejected by historians of science.

So, first, does a) lead to b)? If we find life elsewhere in the universe, will it imply that life is a common phenomenon? Well, if we're talking about our solar system, the answer is no. Take Mars for example. Finding life or the remains of life on Mars would not indicate that life is common, for the simple reason that over the last few billion years, at least a hundred million tons of Earth has been dumped on Mars, most (not all) due to meteor collisions sending Earth material out into the solar system. The odds that none of it contained any biological material is remote in the extreme, although much of it would probably have been broken down by radiation. Hugh Ross has been predicting since at least the late 1980s that the remains of life will inevitably be discovered on Mars simply due to this cross-contamination. And this is true for virtually all possible life-sites in the solar system, including the moons around the outer planets: any biological material we find would be better explained as having its origin on Earth.

Moreover, the Anthropic Principle places severe limitations on what conditions must be met in order for life to exist on a planetary body. It must have a particular axial tilt, magnetic field, a moon of a particular size and distance, must orbit a particular type of star of a particular age at a particular distance, etc. There are several dozen such conditions. The only body that meets these conditions in the solar system is the Earth. There are sometimes sensationalistic claims that Mars might have had liquid water on its surface at some point in the past and so might have harbored life (since the presence of liquid water is one of the necessary preconditions). But this ignores the multiple other conditions that are not met by Mars or any other potential life sites in the solar system.

But what about beyond the solar system? What if we find life on planets orbiting other stars? Wouldn't that prove that life is ubiquitous in the universe? Again, the Anthropic Principle puts severe limitations on how many places in the universe could naturally support life. So, for example, the planet has to be in a spiral galaxy (not a common type of galaxy), and be between spiral arms. In any other place within any other type of galaxy there would be too much stellar radiation to allow life. Additionally, it has to exist in a very particular stellar neighborhood: nearby white dwarf binary stars which have lost some of their stellar material to interstellar space (this is the only natural source of fluorine, which is necessary for life); near enough to past supernovae to obtain the necessary heavy elements produced, but not so near as to receive too much radiation from them; etc. The point being that, even if we do find life elsewhere in the universe, it wouldn't contradict the Anthropic Principle's claim (which is recognized by all the relevant scientists) that most places are hostile to life, and so there are relatively few potential life sites in the universe. Indeed, when factoring all of the necessary preconditions into the equation, the odds of another planet anywhere in the universe being naturally capable of supporting advanced life is zero. Part of the problem here is whether we're talking about simple life forms or complex, perhaps complex enough to be intelligent and have a civilization. The more complex the life form, the more anthropic coincidences must be met in order for it to exist. Conversely, simple forms of life do not have to meet as many requirements, but it's still no walk in the park. The most popular book addressing this issue is Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, by geologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee. They argue that while simple forms of life may be common in the universe, advanced life almost certainly is not.

Of course, some may continue to ask, what if we find that other forms of life are everywhere in the universe? Wouldn't that refute the claims being made here? Well, the discovery that life is ubiquitous in the universe would certainly refute the claim that life is not ubiquitous. In the same way, the discovery that E does not equal mc² would refute the claim that it does, and the discovery that earth is at the center of the universe would refute the claims that it's not. So it's not a very interesting line of argument. But, ignoring that, if we find other forms of life out there, the anthropic coincidences should certainly be looked at again to see if they merely represented a failure of imagination. Perhaps our conception of "life" was too narrow. But if, after looking at them, they still hold, then the occurrence of advanced life would have to be fit into the claim that the odds of there being a planet capable of supporting advanced life anywhere in the universe is too remote to be considered a realistic possibility. But that will be the subject of the next post.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

The Destruction of the Temple of Artemis

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World but almost nothing is left of it today. So, the question of who destroyed it is an interesting one. Luckily, we have an explicit historical source that tells us the answer. It is in Jordanes’ History of the Goths composed around 550AD. He tells us (20:107), that in about 259AD, “Respa, Veduc and Thuruar, leaders of the Goths, took ship and sailed across the strait of the Hellespont to Asia. There they laid waste many populous cities and set fire to the renowned temple of Diana at Ephesus, which, as we said before, the Amazons built.” Jordanes’ work comes with a health warning because the beginning is pure legend (not to mention his claim that the Amazons built the Temple). However, it is generally felt to be reliable when it deals with encounters between the Goths and Romans from the third century AD.

After the Goths destroyed the Temple of Artemis, it was quarried by the local inhabitants for its valuable marble and very little is left today. Bits of it have been found in local buildings and Justinian took much of the statuary that survived to his time back to Constantinople.

So why is the destruction of this Temple blamed on Christians? John Romer said as much in his television series in 1994 on the Seven Wonders and Charles Freeman continues to peddle the myth today. Let’s look at where it comes from.

The source of this legend is the Acts of John. This is a very late and inauthentic apocryphal book that claims to tell the life story of St John the Apostle after the end of the New Testament. Among many fantastic episodes is one in chapters 22 to 24 where St John converts the people of Ephesus to Christianity and they march off to tear down the Temple of Artemis. The Acts of John is normally dated to the third century and the inclusion of this episode in all likelihood means that it was written after the Temple had actually been burnt down by the Goths (who were, at this stage, still pagans). But the Acts do provide further evidence that the Temple really was destroyed during the third century. We can be absolutely certain it was not pulled down on the orders of St John around 100AD as the Acts pretends.

But there is another snippet in the sources that might illuminate how Christians got the blame. In his twentieth Oration, delivered in the early fifth century, Proclus of Constantinople is busy praising St John Chrysostom. Proclus, listing his achievements, says “In Ephesus, he despoiled the art of Midas.” This might be a reference to the cult objects of Artemis (the Temple was originally founded by the Lydian kings of which Midas was one) since even after the Temple was razed you would expect the cult to have soldiered on. Then again, it might not. That this was not a large scale operation is confirmed by Book 14 of Palladius’s Life of Chrysostom that covers his visit to Ephesus but makes no mention of the Temple.

Christians certainly destroyed several pagan temples and converted many others into churches. But not, it appears, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

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Gödel and Lucas

For those of you interested in this sort of thing, J. R. Lucas wrote "Minds, Machines and Gödel" and The Freedom of the Will several decades ago, in which he argued that Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems would apply to any physical deterministic system. Any such system should have a Gödel sentence, which is basically the proposition, "This proposition is not provable within this system", which is true but not provable (if it were provable, then it would be false; and if it were false, it would be provable). Mechanistic systems cannot recognize their Gödel sentence as true, because they can only "comprehend" truth as a matter of provability. This is not the case for human beings: we can see that Gödel-type sentences would be true, even though they are inherently unprovable (within their respective systems). Therefore, human beings cannot be explained in purely physical, deterministic terms. Nor can any mere physical system, i.e. computers, be able to duplicate the functions of the human mind -- since they would not be able to recognize their Gödel sentences as true.

At his website, Lucas has most of his contributions to this debate, and the online journal Etica e Politica published several of the more important essays by both Lucas and his detractors. Interesting stuff.

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