Dashing Through the Snow

“The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows, and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong. Now, I don’t know much about the sea, but I do know that that’s the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing the blind, deaf stone alone with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.” -from “Into the Wild”

Me, early in the race

A few weeks ago, I competed in one of my first long-distance races.

Shortly after sunrise

32+ miles on foot, in 8 inches of snow, across the rolling hills of eastern Wisconsin, on what is historically the coldest weekend of the year.

Shortly before sunset

I decided to post a few pictures here as a teaser, but you’ll have to visit my other blog (CLICK HERE) for the full story.

The Great Physician

John 3:16 is probably the most well-recognized verse in the Bible. This is thanks in large part to America’s sports culture (beginning with Rollen Stewart’s signs in the 1970′s), but it shouldn’t be all that surprising, either. The short verse – spoken by Jesus during his interaction with Nicodemus – is a powerfully concise summary of the Christian message.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16, NIV)

I currently meet with a group of fellow medical students for a weekly Bible study. During a recent meeting, one of the guys directed our attention to the verses immediately preceding John 3:16.

Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. (John 3:14-15, NIV)

Okay, so the Son of Man (a.k.a. Jesus) has to be “lifted up”. But what’s this business about Moses and a “snake in the wilderness”? This is where things start to get interesting. It turns out that Jesus is alluding to a story from Numbers 21.

[The Israelites] traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!” Then the LORD sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the LORD and against you. Pray that the LORD will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. The LORD said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived. (Numbers 21:4-9, NIV)

Moses and the Bronze Serpent

So Jesus is telling Nicodemus that he has to be “lifted up”, just like the snake was lifted up. Seems a bit foreshadowing, doesn’t it?

Christ's Crucifixion

It’s really kind of amazing how closely the account from Numbers 21 parallels the over-arching narrative of the Gospels. Just like each of us, the Israelites were rebellious and discontented. The wages of their sin was death (in the form of the venomous snakes), yet God ultimately offered a chance for healing and forgiveness.

Even at the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus is saying that he’s going to be lifted up like the bronze serpent. As a future physician myself, I can’t help but think of this reference when I see the universal symbol of medicine:

Look Familiar?

The Ant Argument

I received some great feedback in response to the article I wrote in December, “The (Unsurprising) Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” (read it here). Thank you everyone! Two comments in particular (one on this blog and another offsite) have prompted me to pursue the topic a little further, if for no other reason than to address their striking similarities. For the sake of clarity, I’ve pasted the relevant excerpts below:

“A bacterium (let’s call him Jim) that lives under my tongue could equally believe that the universe has been constructed precisely for his benefit. He doesn’t need to do any maths, because my saliva is just acidic enough to break down food into protein for Jim to eat, but not so acidic that it will dissolve him…” -Mr. T____

“I am sure the ant, if sentient, thinks the hill and the yard to be exquisitely fine-tuned. Drop him in Antarctica and see how quickly he loses religion. Similarly, move a human being even a few feet up or down and life is impossible (dying in caves, falling from a high perch)…” -Mr. C____

Both of these responses implicitly pose the same question. What’s so special about us? I’ll refer to this as “the ant argument”.

Firstly, the argument is itself somewhat self-defeating. Citing lower organisms like ants and bacteria as a means of challenging our place in the universe is akin to denying a large miracle by pointing to a smaller miracle. Or put another way, we can’t argue that the game of basketball wasn’t invented on the basis that my grandmother plays it less impressively than the L.A. Lakers.

Secondly, the ant argument reveals a misunderstanding of the Christian’s view of man and nature. Christians don’t claim that the universe is finely tuned for humans at the exclusion of other lifeforms. Man was created in God’s image, but the ultimate purpose of Creation is to glorify God…not us.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the ant argument doesn’t actually speak to the issue of our universe being finely tuned. Consider the four fundamental forces of nature (the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity). If any of these forces were stronger or weaker by just a tiny amount, then life would almost certainly be unable to exist.

Or consider the exact amount of dark matter present in the universe. Of all the possible amounts of dark matter that could exist, the actual amount happens to lie in that infinitesimally small range that allows stars to form and life to exist. Just a little less or a little more, and the universe would have either rapidly re-collapsed or accelerated into oblivion.

Dr. Francis Collins, who once spearheaded the Human Genome Project and is currently director of the NIH, speaks to this issue as well:

“To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…You have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.”

Francis Collins

I should stop here to make an important point. The size and age of the universe are irrelevant to the issue of our universe’s fundamental constants being finely tuned. This is the problem with arguments along the lines of, “the universe is so huge and so ancient that life was bound to eventually arise somewhere…therefore, fine tuning is most likely just an illusion.” This kind of reasoning might be applicable to a discussion on our planet’s ability to support life, but it fails to address fine tuning. It doesn’t explain why the fundamental qualities of the universe are the way they are. It’s analogous to claiming that enough hands of poker will eventually result in a royal flush…without actually answering the question of where the rules of poker came from, or what a “royal flush” even means!

This is precisely why so many physicists – unwilling to accept a Designer yet unable to explain the appearance of Design – have embraced the idea of a multiverse. But as I pointed out in my original post, a belief in multiple universes is by no means a more scientifically defensible position. In fact, using Occam’s razor, it can be compellingly argued that belief in a Designer is eminently more scientific. Proponents of a multiverse are, after all, proposing an infinite (or near-infinite) number of unobservable universes just to explain the existence of our own.

Concerning the Problem of Evil

At some point, most Christians have probably encountered questions such as, “Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?” or “If God is perfectly good, then where does evil come from?“ These are challenging questions that don’t necessarily have simple or easy answers. But they do have answers.

This post is by no means intended to be a thorough critique of the problem of evil. That would require several books, at least. Instead, by falling back on minds greater than my own, I hope to probe some of the chinks in its armor. More specifically, I want to address the Epicurean Paradox (given below).

“If God is willing to prevent evil, but unable to
Then He is not omnipotent.

If He is able, but not willing
Then He is malevolent.

If He is both able and willing
Then whence cometh evil?

If He is neither able nor willing
Then why call Him God?”

To this day, I occasionally hear friends and acquaintances refer to these few lines as if they were a fatal knockout punch to the Abrahamic religions. There is, however, an obvious element that seems to be missing. What about free will?

Renowned philosopher and apologist Alvin Plantinga tackled this very issue in his free will defense. I won’t bother spelling it out here, but it’s worth reading up on.

Alvin Plantinga

While the Epicurean Paradox seems intimidating, there is clearly some important information that it fails to account for. One might say that God is willing to prevent evil…and able to prevent evil…but unwilling to achieve this state by creating puppets or robots instead of children.

“Then whence cometh evil?” 

Rather than being “the opposite of good”, I sometimes think of evil as being “the absence of God”. It’s what happens when we rebel against our Creator…and most of us intuitively recognize that rebellion involves collateral damage (ask Alderaan). Sometimes terrible things happen to good people. C.S. Lewis probably explained it most eloquently:

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can’t. If a thing is free to be good it’s also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they’ve got to be free. Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk.”

C.S. Lewis

As a final point, I think there is another issue here that people have a tendency to overlook. There are many who view God as a detached, indifferent ruler looking down on human suffering from his comfortable throne up in the clouds. Yet this image stands in direct contradiction to the Christian narrative. I once again give the floor to Dr. Plantinga:

“…as the Christian sees things, God does not stand idly by, coolly observing the suffering of his creatures. He enters into and shares our suffering. He endures the anguish of seeing his Son, the second person of the Trinity, consigned to the bitterly cruel and shameful death of the cross. Some theologians claim that God cannot suffer. I believe they are wrong. God’s capacity for suffering, I believe, is proportional to his greatness; it exceeds our capacity for suffering in the same measure as his capacity for knowledge exceeds ours.”

So although God allows evil to exist, he doesn’t just stand by and watch us suffer from it. Rather, he chooses to share in the suffering with us (and for us).

And to me, that in itself says a lot.

The (Unsurprising) Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

“If nature is really structured with a mathematical language and mathematics invented by man can manage to understand it, this demonstrates something extraordinary. The objective structure of the universe and the intellectual structure of the human being coincide.” – Pope Benedict XVI

In 1960, physicist and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner published a well-known article entitled, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences“. In it, he explored the mind-boggling usefulness of mathematics in describing and further revealing the physical universe. As an example, he questioned why tools such as complex numbers – foreign as they are to our intuition and everyday experiences – are nonetheless a product of human thought necessary for the formulation of the laws of quantum mechanics. Why is it that elements of mathematics can so perfectly describe seemingly unrelated phenomena, such as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (pi) appearing in the Gaussian distribution function used to study population trends? Furthermore, why is it that the human mind is so astonishingly capable of recognizing the language of mathematics and using it to advance our knowledge of the physical world?

Of course, these questions inevitably lead to others. Why is the universe so ordered in the first place? Where did this order come from, if anywhere? This apparent “fine-tuning” of the universe (particularly with respect to the existence of intelligent life) has numerous possible explanations. I’m going to briefly describe three of the most prevalent, but be aware that some of these have sub-variations, and that this isn’t an entirely comprehensive list.

1. Perhaps there are actually multiple universes (or even infinite universes), and we happen to exist in a universe with physical properties that allow us to exist.

2. Perhaps the universe isn’t actually as ordered as it seems.

3. Perhaps the universe “just is”. Maybe some day we’ll know why; maybe we never will.

Of course, the reader will have doubtlessly recognized that all of these explanations avoid what is probably the simplest and most intuitive response: that our seemingly fine-tuned universe was indeed finely tuned by a Fine Tuner. Although many of today’s scientists balk at the notion that the universe may have been designed, it is worth pointing out that this position is no less scientifically defensible than, say, the idea of multiple universes. Neither can be empirically tested. Both can only be accepted on faith. Design is also less problematic, practically speaking, than the idea that the universe’s apparent order is illusory, and it is considerably more satisfying than simply accepting the apparent order as an unknowable brute fact.

All of this brings me back to the Pope Benedict quote that I opened with. If the intellectual structure of the human mind truly does coincide with the objective structure of the universe – as it undoubtedly seems to – then what implications does this carry for the Christian? This is the kind of question that obviously cannot be answered scientifically, but that makes it no less fascinating. I can’t pretend to actually know all the answers, of course, but I do have a few ideas.

Genesis 1:26-28 states that God created mankind in his image, so that man could subdue the earth and rule over its creatures. I think when most people hear the phrase “in God’s image”, they tend to think strictly in terms of physical appearance. They imagine a guy with a flowing white beard breathing life into Adam. But what quality is it, really, that enables man to subdue the earth? Although our physical stature is certainly impressive, it’s clear that we’re NOT the largest, strongest, or fastest creatures on this planet. What makes us unique, rather, is our minds. When we’re told that God created mankind in his image, does it not seem likely that this applies to our intellect as much as it applies to our physical appearance?

Consider what this means. If the God who designed the universe and set in place its mathematical properties also created us in his image, it would be reasonable to expect the human mind to be fluent in the language of mathematics. It would hardly be surprising to learn that we’re inhabiting a finely-tuned universe, or to find that our language of mathematics is so powerfully capable of uncovering the physical laws that govern it. For the Christian, the problems that have so long confounded physicists and philosophers aren’t really problems at all. Man’s intelligence is simply reflecting a small shadow of God’s intelligence.