Here is an interesting term I have been hearing lately... 'atmospheric river'... Our atmosphere can apparently contain huge amounts of water under certain conditions. Which brings me to this passage in scripture.
"In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights." - Genesis 7:11-12 ESV
Before the great flood there was no rain. Mist formed to water the garden. What a different world it must have been. Our first ancestors lived hundreds of years at a time when the world was young. The atmosphere must have been like an ocean not just an occasional river.
But when Noah was 600 years old the bubble burst.
It is always amazing to me how scientific discovery keeps reinforcing the reliability of the scriptures.
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Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Infinity And Humanity - Part 2
"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might." - Deuteronomy 6:4-5 ESV
This passage is an amazing piece of scripture. It is pointed to almost universally as the basis for monotheism (the belief in a singular deity). God uses different names to describe Himself to spectacular effect. The word LORD is Yahweh (Strong's H3068) and it is God's most personal name. Then there is God (Elohim H430) which is plural ('im' is a plural ending that means three or more). This singular God that you (Israel) has Is plural in nature but this LORD is also one (Echad H259) which is the same word used in Genesis 1:5 when the scripture speaks of the first day of creation.
This infinite God is one God who wants all of your heart, soul and might to overlap with who he Is.
That can't happen by our finite effort.
"And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work." - 2 Corinthians 9:8 ESV
The good in 'good work' is agathos (G18) and it means useful or pleasant. Grace bridges God's infinite but singular nature with man's endlessness to produce sufficiency and usefulness.
Grace can fill our moments with sufficiency.
"The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms." - Deuteronomy 33:27a ESV
He is upholding all who have found Him to be a dwelling place. Jesus is the entrance to that shelter. One narrow door into the place where grace in all sufficient.
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This passage is an amazing piece of scripture. It is pointed to almost universally as the basis for monotheism (the belief in a singular deity). God uses different names to describe Himself to spectacular effect. The word LORD is Yahweh (Strong's H3068) and it is God's most personal name. Then there is God (Elohim H430) which is plural ('im' is a plural ending that means three or more). This singular God that you (Israel) has Is plural in nature but this LORD is also one (Echad H259) which is the same word used in Genesis 1:5 when the scripture speaks of the first day of creation.
This infinite God is one God who wants all of your heart, soul and might to overlap with who he Is.
That can't happen by our finite effort.
"And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work." - 2 Corinthians 9:8 ESV
The good in 'good work' is agathos (G18) and it means useful or pleasant. Grace bridges God's infinite but singular nature with man's endlessness to produce sufficiency and usefulness.
Grace can fill our moments with sufficiency.
"The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms." - Deuteronomy 33:27a ESV
He is upholding all who have found Him to be a dwelling place. Jesus is the entrance to that shelter. One narrow door into the place where grace in all sufficient.
--
Monday, August 10, 2015
Infinity And Humanity - Part 1
From a biological viewpoint we are finite creatures. There is a specific number of cells in our body. We don't know what it is but there is a set number. From the moment sperm and egg interacted to form a new set of cells to the second that the last cell in our body dies also has a number. You could say that the human race itself could conceivably have a similar number... a first person and a last person.
The Bible proposes a notion however that the soul is not finite. It has a beginning but no end. It is infinite but infinite in a particular way. It starts but does not stop. It has a progression.
Infinity is one of the concepts that opened mathematics up from being straight addition and multiplication into something else. Infinity was hidden in the math of a circle. It was waiting there right there between zero and one. How many numbers are there between zero and one... .1, .11, .111, .1111
Where do we even start to count? How small is smallest? It is conceptually infinite.
Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter and a symbol must be assigned to it because the decimal places seem to go on forever 3.1415926...
God did make man in His image and we are clever creatures. We took an infinite number like Pi and just assigned it a Greek letter so we could use it in our math and math opened up like a flower. It was no longer something to be used in the market place to buy fruits and vegetables. Math could be used in engineering and architecture to spectacular effect.
There are many directions we could take these ideas in but I want to focus on just a couple of them.
"But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin." - 1 John 1:7 ESV
What does all mean in the light of eternity? All is every one possible. If the Bible deals in infinite things as easily as it deals in finite ones then what does all really mean?
It covers every fraction and every multiplication. It covers every real number and every irrational number that needs a Greek letter to represent it. All stretches out into the vast expanse of the human experience and into the smallness of the tiniest moment.
"And he said to me, 'It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son' ." - Revelation 21:6-7 ESV
Payment would require addition and subtraction. Payment needs no knowledge of the infinite to function. God wants us to enter into His higher math and function in the place where engineering and architecture blossom. He has a love that is without a beginning and without an end.
When Jesus said, 'It is finished.' on the cross He meant it. All of it is finished. Redemption is finished. Time is still ticking away and God is using time in humanity and in the angelic contest but infinity entered time and space in a unique way when Jesus was born and His death also accomplished something very unique and infinitely far reaching.
"Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?' " - John 11:25-26 ESV
Do we believe it? When our biology comes to an end what will happen to our soul?
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The Bible proposes a notion however that the soul is not finite. It has a beginning but no end. It is infinite but infinite in a particular way. It starts but does not stop. It has a progression.
Infinity is one of the concepts that opened mathematics up from being straight addition and multiplication into something else. Infinity was hidden in the math of a circle. It was waiting there right there between zero and one. How many numbers are there between zero and one... .1, .11, .111, .1111
Where do we even start to count? How small is smallest? It is conceptually infinite.
Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter and a symbol must be assigned to it because the decimal places seem to go on forever 3.1415926...
God did make man in His image and we are clever creatures. We took an infinite number like Pi and just assigned it a Greek letter so we could use it in our math and math opened up like a flower. It was no longer something to be used in the market place to buy fruits and vegetables. Math could be used in engineering and architecture to spectacular effect.
There are many directions we could take these ideas in but I want to focus on just a couple of them.
"But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin." - 1 John 1:7 ESV
What does all mean in the light of eternity? All is every one possible. If the Bible deals in infinite things as easily as it deals in finite ones then what does all really mean?
It covers every fraction and every multiplication. It covers every real number and every irrational number that needs a Greek letter to represent it. All stretches out into the vast expanse of the human experience and into the smallness of the tiniest moment.
"And he said to me, 'It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son' ." - Revelation 21:6-7 ESV
Payment would require addition and subtraction. Payment needs no knowledge of the infinite to function. God wants us to enter into His higher math and function in the place where engineering and architecture blossom. He has a love that is without a beginning and without an end.
When Jesus said, 'It is finished.' on the cross He meant it. All of it is finished. Redemption is finished. Time is still ticking away and God is using time in humanity and in the angelic contest but infinity entered time and space in a unique way when Jesus was born and His death also accomplished something very unique and infinitely far reaching.
"Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?' " - John 11:25-26 ESV
Do we believe it? When our biology comes to an end what will happen to our soul?
--
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Grace And The Scientific Method
For a person who doesn't trust myself I tend to make very bold statements about reality. You may have noticed that if you are tuning in to what I'm saying from day to day.
I think all of us have met people who are very confident that what they are saying is true but a good portion of their life is in total disarray. You listen and think, 'Wow, This is crazy talk. What reality is this person living in?' Then there are others that are very stable people who are also sure of what they are saying and their lives are mostly together and ordered in a functional way but you still think, 'I am not on-board with how this person is speaking.' One is an orderly kind of wrongness and the other is a disorderly kind.
My confidence comes from the Bible and my distrust of self also comes from the Bible. Don't get me wrong I could distrust myself without any help at all. I've made enough mistake to have a healthy distrust for my own judgement but the Bible has made me issue a recall on my own thinking. The whole batch can't be trusted.
This morning I woke up thinking about the scientific method. This method has risen to the top as the way way science is carried out by smart people. An observer puts two and two together and forms a hypothesis from their observation. They make a statement about what they saw. After that they devise tests to prove and disprove that statement. If after many exhaustive tests the statement still stands the hypothesis then gets moved into the fact category.
The reason I don't trust myself is that I know that my I am flawed. My thinking is rigged to come to conclusions that benefit me. My own selfishness shows even if my science is right my ability to apply that science isn't.
People speak about God and say He can be trusted. Some have very circular arguments and clearly strange motives. They demanded that people trust God but that never convinced me.
God's grace shows me that He Is trustworthy. Grace has and does convince me.
Sure there are other things like the amazing accuracy and beauty of the world around me. God made all these things that run like clockwork. He is incredibly ordered while still incorporating a beautiful seeming randomness into His work that only a master artist could accomplish. But that artist could have moved on to other things. He might not know about me and my issues. That artist could be impersonal.
Grace says a man came from Heaven to die on a cross for you and I without us asking or wanting Him to come. Grace has opened a way to experience forgiveness and dignity that has nothing to do with our effort. Grace is perfect. Sin can't mess it up. A person can foolishly reject it but they can't fundamentally disprove it... not on a factual level. In one hundred years there will still be more legal proof that Jesus died on a cross and rose from the grave then there will be that you or I were ever born. Nor can it be disproved on a conceptual level. Grace has no ulterior motive. It gains nothing by what it does.
A gracious God can't be impersonal. No one who would go to the lengths of dying for a person would just leave them hanging out to dry.
Grace isn't selfish. A friend who would (and did) give His life for you is someone who you can trust. Anger can be wrong. Justice can be flawed. History can be changed. Motives can be questioned. Good people can make very bad decisions. Conclusions can lack the proper exhaustive experimentation. But grace is right. I can't see anything wrong with it have looked but the more I look the more amazed I am.
There are plenty of people that speak boldly about the Bible that I heartily disagree with because grace is missing. I look for grace not just knowledge. Grace is reliable.
Because I distrust myself I often take another glance at things. It is kind of like rechecking that you have locked the door when you leave the house. What I look for now is grace. I don't run more experiments. I look to see if grace is in the mix of what I am thinking and doing. If it is I have peace because I know that God will direct and correct me.
Grace and truth go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other.
--
I think all of us have met people who are very confident that what they are saying is true but a good portion of their life is in total disarray. You listen and think, 'Wow, This is crazy talk. What reality is this person living in?' Then there are others that are very stable people who are also sure of what they are saying and their lives are mostly together and ordered in a functional way but you still think, 'I am not on-board with how this person is speaking.' One is an orderly kind of wrongness and the other is a disorderly kind.
My confidence comes from the Bible and my distrust of self also comes from the Bible. Don't get me wrong I could distrust myself without any help at all. I've made enough mistake to have a healthy distrust for my own judgement but the Bible has made me issue a recall on my own thinking. The whole batch can't be trusted.
This morning I woke up thinking about the scientific method. This method has risen to the top as the way way science is carried out by smart people. An observer puts two and two together and forms a hypothesis from their observation. They make a statement about what they saw. After that they devise tests to prove and disprove that statement. If after many exhaustive tests the statement still stands the hypothesis then gets moved into the fact category.
The reason I don't trust myself is that I know that my I am flawed. My thinking is rigged to come to conclusions that benefit me. My own selfishness shows even if my science is right my ability to apply that science isn't.
People speak about God and say He can be trusted. Some have very circular arguments and clearly strange motives. They demanded that people trust God but that never convinced me.
God's grace shows me that He Is trustworthy. Grace has and does convince me.
Sure there are other things like the amazing accuracy and beauty of the world around me. God made all these things that run like clockwork. He is incredibly ordered while still incorporating a beautiful seeming randomness into His work that only a master artist could accomplish. But that artist could have moved on to other things. He might not know about me and my issues. That artist could be impersonal.
Grace says a man came from Heaven to die on a cross for you and I without us asking or wanting Him to come. Grace has opened a way to experience forgiveness and dignity that has nothing to do with our effort. Grace is perfect. Sin can't mess it up. A person can foolishly reject it but they can't fundamentally disprove it... not on a factual level. In one hundred years there will still be more legal proof that Jesus died on a cross and rose from the grave then there will be that you or I were ever born. Nor can it be disproved on a conceptual level. Grace has no ulterior motive. It gains nothing by what it does.
A gracious God can't be impersonal. No one who would go to the lengths of dying for a person would just leave them hanging out to dry.
Grace isn't selfish. A friend who would (and did) give His life for you is someone who you can trust. Anger can be wrong. Justice can be flawed. History can be changed. Motives can be questioned. Good people can make very bad decisions. Conclusions can lack the proper exhaustive experimentation. But grace is right. I can't see anything wrong with it have looked but the more I look the more amazed I am.
There are plenty of people that speak boldly about the Bible that I heartily disagree with because grace is missing. I look for grace not just knowledge. Grace is reliable.
Because I distrust myself I often take another glance at things. It is kind of like rechecking that you have locked the door when you leave the house. What I look for now is grace. I don't run more experiments. I look to see if grace is in the mix of what I am thinking and doing. If it is I have peace because I know that God will direct and correct me.
Grace and truth go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other.
--
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Uses for Old Roman Lead
Thinking this morning about old and new things and the value of memory and discovery.
I read an article yesterday while waiting to have coffee with someone who was running late. It was essentially about the overlap of Physics and Archaeology. It was discussing 'old lead' and it's value and uses. Lead is very useful in shielding from radiation. That makes it a vital material for many types of equipment... especially for sensitive measurement equipment. Newly smelted lead however has a degree of radioactivity that fades over time but it takes a long time. The Romans used lead for a variety of things. Lead smelted 2,000 ago has approximately 100,000 times lower radioactive level than lead smelted last week if it was in a place shielded from other radiation like being deep under water. A sunken Roman vessel loaded with lead would be a great scientific find for an archaeologist and for the physics community.
The question then arises, 'Do you preserve history at the expense of scientific advancement?'. This is a rare man made material. It will always have archaeological significance but will have to be changed, modified or moved in some way to have it's other shielding properties utilized. The scientific communities have their own ways of dealing with these issues and they have not always handled them well but in the article I read it seemed like a good compromise was made. The physics community funded the recovery of a Roman vessel and removed the lead for scientific use while scrupulously documenting as much as they could using proper archaeological methods. An expensive undertaking was funded but part of the find was destroyed.
It made me think of the importance of finding a balance between preservation and discovery.
"Why are not times of judgment kept by the Almighty, and why do those who know him never see his days? Some move landmarks; they seize flocks and pasture them. They drive away the donkey of the fatherless; they take the widow's ox for a pledge. They thrust the poor off the road; the poor of the earth all hide themselves." - Job 24:1-4 ESV
"You shall not move your neighbor's landmark, which the men of old have set, in the inheritance that you will hold in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess." - Deuteronomy 19:14 ESV
"Do not move an ancient landmark or enter the fields of the fatherless" - Proverbs 23:10 ESV
There are old landmarks in life. Some take up expensive real estate but there are landmarks of the soul also... things we want to keep as they are so they can be remembered. Once the property line has been removed it becomes a free for all and in the end something is lost.
The question is what do you keep and how much. Some folks make everything a landmark and there is no room for anything new. Not everything old is an antique.
"He will shake off his unripe grape like the vine, and cast off his blossom like the olive tree." - Job 15:33 ESV
"Shake yourself from the dust and arise; be seated, O Jerusalem; loose the bonds from your neck, O captive daughter of Zion." - Isaiah 52:2 ESV
"See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, 'Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.' This phrase, "Yet once more," indicates the removal of things that are shaken - that is, things that have been made - in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe," - Hebrews 12:25-28 ESV
God has a plan to shake what He is able to shake. Eternal things are durable things. I don't want to discard those things.
The shaking away of the natural leaves room for the eternal.
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation." - 2 Corinthians 5:17-19 ESV
A soul is an eternal thing. It is durable and it is also a fertile place of discovery.
"For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" - Matthew 16:26 KJV
"The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life, And he who wins souls is wise." - Proverbs 11:30 NKJV
Old lead has value to the archaeologist and the physicist. Eternal relationships preserve what should be preserved and propel us into the future.
"Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." - Luke 12:33-34 ESV
--
I read an article yesterday while waiting to have coffee with someone who was running late. It was essentially about the overlap of Physics and Archaeology. It was discussing 'old lead' and it's value and uses. Lead is very useful in shielding from radiation. That makes it a vital material for many types of equipment... especially for sensitive measurement equipment. Newly smelted lead however has a degree of radioactivity that fades over time but it takes a long time. The Romans used lead for a variety of things. Lead smelted 2,000 ago has approximately 100,000 times lower radioactive level than lead smelted last week if it was in a place shielded from other radiation like being deep under water. A sunken Roman vessel loaded with lead would be a great scientific find for an archaeologist and for the physics community.
The question then arises, 'Do you preserve history at the expense of scientific advancement?'. This is a rare man made material. It will always have archaeological significance but will have to be changed, modified or moved in some way to have it's other shielding properties utilized. The scientific communities have their own ways of dealing with these issues and they have not always handled them well but in the article I read it seemed like a good compromise was made. The physics community funded the recovery of a Roman vessel and removed the lead for scientific use while scrupulously documenting as much as they could using proper archaeological methods. An expensive undertaking was funded but part of the find was destroyed.
It made me think of the importance of finding a balance between preservation and discovery.
"Why are not times of judgment kept by the Almighty, and why do those who know him never see his days? Some move landmarks; they seize flocks and pasture them. They drive away the donkey of the fatherless; they take the widow's ox for a pledge. They thrust the poor off the road; the poor of the earth all hide themselves." - Job 24:1-4 ESV
"You shall not move your neighbor's landmark, which the men of old have set, in the inheritance that you will hold in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess." - Deuteronomy 19:14 ESV
"Do not move an ancient landmark or enter the fields of the fatherless" - Proverbs 23:10 ESV
There are old landmarks in life. Some take up expensive real estate but there are landmarks of the soul also... things we want to keep as they are so they can be remembered. Once the property line has been removed it becomes a free for all and in the end something is lost.
The question is what do you keep and how much. Some folks make everything a landmark and there is no room for anything new. Not everything old is an antique.
"He will shake off his unripe grape like the vine, and cast off his blossom like the olive tree." - Job 15:33 ESV
"Shake yourself from the dust and arise; be seated, O Jerusalem; loose the bonds from your neck, O captive daughter of Zion." - Isaiah 52:2 ESV
"See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, 'Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.' This phrase, "Yet once more," indicates the removal of things that are shaken - that is, things that have been made - in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe," - Hebrews 12:25-28 ESV
God has a plan to shake what He is able to shake. Eternal things are durable things. I don't want to discard those things.
The shaking away of the natural leaves room for the eternal.
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation." - 2 Corinthians 5:17-19 ESV
A soul is an eternal thing. It is durable and it is also a fertile place of discovery.
"For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" - Matthew 16:26 KJV
"The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life, And he who wins souls is wise." - Proverbs 11:30 NKJV
Old lead has value to the archaeologist and the physicist. Eternal relationships preserve what should be preserved and propel us into the future.
"Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." - Luke 12:33-34 ESV
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