If you believe in God and it turns out that there really is a God, you win because when you die you get an eternal reward.

If you don’t believe in God and it turns out there really is a God, you lose because when you die you get an eternal punishment.

If you believe in God and it turns out there really is no God, you lose, but the worse that happens is you waste time when you are alive and when you die you are just dead forever.

There’s a lot to say about this whole chain of reasoning, but my basic thought is that it would be foolish to think simply believing in God is enough to get the eternal reward in any case. Accepting Pascal’s reasoning in a simplistic way could lead you to just throw in your lot with the first religion that comes your way — you could end up wasting your time while you are alive and then be dead forever anyway. It’s certainly worth investigating whether there really is a God and then making a diligent search and a reason-based investigation to find out who that God is and what he expects of us — that information is available.

ARK — 22 April 2011

Because geological uniformitarianism and evolutionism so conveniently prop one another up in so many people’s superficial beliefs about science, it’s not surprising that popular media don’t say much about catastrophism — the idea that geological processes can happen very quickly. Better not to complicate matters by revealing too many nuances and complexities.

Unfortunately, then, it often falls to creationist groups to present evidence that geological processes can happen very slowly or very quickly and that it can be hard to tell the difference. As an example, I thought this article from the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) was interesting: “Mt. St. Helens and Catastrophism,” by Steven A. Austin, Ph.D., chair of the geology department at ICR. ICR teams have studied the geological changes that occurred as a result of the Mt. St. Helens eruption. (The photo shown here is linked from the U.S. Forest Service web site about the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.)

Here is an interesting excerpt from Austin’s article:

Up to 400 feet thickness of strata have formed since 1980 at Mount St. Helens. These deposits accumulated from primary air blast, landslide, waves on the lake, pyroclastic flows, mudflows, air fall, and stream water. Perhaps the most surprising accumulations are the pyroclastic flow deposits amassed from ground-hugging, fluidized, turbulent slurries of fine volcanic debris, which moved at high velocities off the flank of the volcano as the eruption plume of debris over the volcano collapsed.

Austin adds that:

Conventionally, sedimentary laminae and beds are assumed to represent longer seasonal variations, or annual changes, as the layers accumulated very slowly. Mount St. Helens teaches us that the stratified layers commonly characterizing geological formations can form very rapidly by flow processes. Such features have been formed quickly underwater in laboratory sedimentation tanks, and it should not surprise us to see that they have formed in a natural catastrophe.

Austin’s article discusses rapid erosion that has occurred as a result of mudflows, including a 140-foot-deep canyon system. He also describes a mat of upright logs that has formed in spirit lake, which offer an alternative interpretation of petrified forests that have been found at other locations. Geological processes have also laid down a rapidly-form peat layer that resembles coal beds found in other locations.

AB — 16 February 2011

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2010. That’s about 29 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 17 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 47 posts. There were 17 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 4mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was September 11th with 154 views. The most popular post that day was ‘Snowflake Method’ Offers Innovative Method for Writing a Novel.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, twitter.com, mail.yahoo.com, mail.live.com, and en.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for pangaea, pangea map, giant archaeological find in greece, pangaea map, and giants found in greece.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

‘Snowflake Method’ Offers Innovative Method for Writing a Novel September 2010
1 comment and 2 Likes on WordPress.com

Have Archaeologists Found Skeletons of Biblical Giants in Greece? May 2010
7 comments

Images of Pangaea October 2009

The Connection Between Halloween and the Great Flood October 2009
1 Like on WordPress.com,

Group Claims New Noah’s Ark Find on Ararat April 2010
1 comment

Considering the Bible account, it seems likely that Hebrew or something like it was the original human language. According to one way of thinking, the worshipers of the true God would not have gotten involved in the rebellious centralization and tower-building project of Nimrod and his cohorts, so presumably their language would not have been confused (see Gen 11:1-9). So the language of Jehovah’s true worshipers would have been preserved, and this would be the one in which the Bible got written.

Although the Bible writers were able to express ideas of past, present, and future, time as a factor in Hebrew verb expression has a relatively low priority. Rather, Hebrew verbs are expressed in two states, perfect (action completed) and imperfect (incomplete action).

Kyle M. Yates, in The Essentials of Biblical Hebrew, writes:

The time as understood in most modern languages is not the same as that of the Semitic mind. The discernment of the time of an action is not of vital importance to the Hebrew thought pattern. It is necessary for the Indo-germanic thinker only to fit the action into his overemphasized estimation of time. The understanding of the condition of the action as to its completeness or incompleteness was sufficient generally to the Semite and if not, there was some word of temporal or historical significance which would bring time into focus.

So the question is, what does this indicate about the psychology of the original speakers of this language? Did they have a different view of time from modern humans, because they had a longer lifespan (and originally the prospect of living forever)? Interestingly, the Bible encyclopedia Insight on the Scriptures (Vol. 1, Watchtower, 1988) follows this line of thinking:

If, as the Bible indicates, Hebrew was the original tongue used in Eden, this lack of emphasis on verbal time may reflect the outlook of man in his perfection, when the prospect of everlasting life was before Adam and when life had not been reduced to a mere 70 or 80 years.

– ARK, 3 Dec. 2010

The Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) is published by B&H Publishing Group, a division of Lifeway Christian Resources. The organization has an earlier version of the HCSB available for free at MyStudyBible.com. This online version has some great study features. If you hover over key words in the text, you get a rollover displaying things like the word and pronunciation in the original language, definition, and information about how the HCSB renders that word in English throughout the text.

On playing around with the online version, one thing I noticed immediately was that in Gen. 2:4, the first place where the Tetragrammaton (YHWH or JHVH) appears in the Hebrew text, the HCSB disappointingly renders it “LORD,” as you would find in the King James version and its many derivatives. Hovering over “LORD” in that verse reveals that the online HCSB translates the name of God as a real name only 484 times, whereas it use the title “LORD” 5,925 times and “God” twice.

So the HCSB translators know how the original text reads, but they made a conscious decision to stick to the practice of post-Biblical Judaism and Christendom of using a euphemism most of the time and including God’s name fewer than 8 percent of the 6,413 times it appears in the Hebrew scriptures.

This was surprisingly to me, especially in light of the strong message conveyed in the Biblical Archaeology Review ad. So I sent a feedback message on the MyStudyBible Web site asking for their reasoning. I was happy to receive a very nice message from E. Ray Clendenen, associate editor and one of the HCSB translators.

Ray tells me that the online version of the translation is an older one and that the newer version of the translation uses Yahweh over 600 times and that the translation team intends to increase the divine Name’s usage more over time.

Ray says the team used the following guidelines for rendering the Tetragrammaton as Yahweh:

We use it as the rendering of YHWH (which the Hebrew Bible editors first rendered as Adonai, “Lord”) whenever God’s “name” is being given (either explicitly, using the word “name,” or implicitly), when He is being identified (“I am Yahweh”), when He is being contrasted to other gods such as Baal, in certain repeated phrases such as “Yahweh the God of your fathers,” or when YHWH has been rendered by Yahweh in the immediate context.

He admits that the translators have probably been inconsistent in some cases, but provides an interesting insight into why they thought it wiser to continue the practice of substituting “LORD” most of the time:

… our objective is to introduce to the contemporary church what is the most likely pronunciation of the divine name YHWH in the Hebrew Bible. We did not render the majority of occurrences of YHWH as Yahweh because our goal is not only to be accurate but to use an English style that is most familiar to people. Since most Christians today probably do not commonly speak of “Yahweh,” but rather of “the Lord,” we felt it would be insensitive to use Yahweh for YHWH in every case and would make the Bible seem too uncomfortable for most people.

I thought this was a frank and humble admission from someone with extensive credentials as a Biblical scholar, acknowledging the limitations of this fellow believers. He tells me that “We hope that the name will grow on people and that we can expand the uses of Yahweh in future editions.”

At the same time, there is something sad about this confession — that eminent Bible translators feel that they have to hold back the truth because their readers would feel uncomfortable with the name of the true God.

ARK — 23 Nov. 2010

That’s the premise of After the Flood: The Early Post-Flood History of Europe Traced Back to Noah, by Bill Cooper (Chichester, England: New Wine Press, 1995). Cooper uses ancient sources to reconstruct the royal lineages of the early Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, and Irish Celts back to their descent from Japheth.

Among Cooper’s sources are documents that are much-reviled by mainstream scholars because they contain some accounts that appear to be based on myths and legends, because they have their origins in stigmatized Welsh sources, but most of all because they take the Bible’s account seriously. Anything that connects to Bible chronology and historical accounts is deemed to be a ‘pious fiction’ made up by Christian monks. Although some of the complaints against these sources might have some substance, Cooper makes some good arguments in defense of these sources, which include Brut Tysillo, Nennuis’ Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons), and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (Histories of the Kings of Britain).

One very useful step Cooper takes (page 40) is to correlate the various Indo-European branches that recognize a (usually deified) Japheth as an early ancestor. This includes Iapetos of the Greeks, Pra-Japati (Father Japheth) of the Sanskrit Vedas, Jupiter (or Iu-Pater, Father Jove) of the Romans, and Sceaf (pronounced sheaf or shaif) of the Saxons.

Cooper does some interesting analysis to show that the relevant documents should be given more credence than does mainstream scholarship. One important result of his work is to demonstrate that the ancient Celts were literate and had a highly-sophisticated civilization long before the Roman conquest of Britain. Bibliophobic scholars don’t like to admit this, as I mentioned before, because an advanced culture among the Celts would lend support to the original documents collected and transcribed by Nennius, Geoffrey, and Tysillo.

The ancient sources analyzed by Cooper extend British history back to the 12th century BCE. According to these sources, the Britons take their name from Brutus, a royal of Trojan extraction who, at that time, traveled from the Mediterranean and colonized Britain. Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Welsh chronicles give a detailed genealogy of the early British kings, which Cooper summarizes in pages 69-82, showing that there is no reason why British history has to be a blank page before 55 BCE. These chronicles correlate with other sources at several points.

As is the case with many historical sources, the documents Cooper consults are rendered more plausible by their apparent contradictions. Certainly in many cases, such contradictions can be resolved by understanding the points of view of the original authors. The important point, though, is that when two different historical accounts are at variance, it shows that their authors did not collaborate or base their accounts on each other’s.

In spite of Cooper’s fundamentalist leanings, his reader has to endure very little soap-boxing. His analysis is affected by young-earth creationism, and he does diverge into some speculation about ancient accounts of dinosaurs and the possible historicity of Beowulf. Not that these aren’t interesting topics — it’s just that his best work is his extraction of genealogies from the various ancient Indo-European sources, and their connection back to Noah’s son Japheth.

Especially intriguing to me is Cooper’s Appendix 12 (page 243) about the descent of the Miautso (a.k.a. Miao) people of China, a group apparently related to the better-known Hmong. Cooper constructs a chart showing the descent of the Miautso from Jah-phu, son of Nuah, to their ancestor, Go-men. (See also “Genesis According to the Miao People,” by Edgar A. Truax.)

Following is just one example of many of the useful and fascinating genealogical charts Cooper includes in his book, in this case showing the connection and correlation of the descent from Japheth to Brutus according to Nennius, Geoffrey, and Virgil’s Aeneid.

I highly recommended Bill Cooper’s After the Flood for the serious student of history who is not afraid to give credence to the Bible’s historical account of the history of humankind.

ARK — 8 Oct. 2010

Reading Andrew Robinson’s fascinating book Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts (2002, McGraw-Hill), I recently learned the amazing story of the decipherment of the Linear B script by amateur philologist Michael Ventris in the 1950s. The story brings home some important lessons about innovation: Be willing and eager to collaborate Take advantage of cross-fertilization by bringing in perspectives and skills from diverse d … Read More

via A Thinking Person

A BBC article today (3 August 2010) highlights the discovery of a small box of bones reputed to be the remains of John the Baptizer, who announced Jesus’ appearance as Messiah and baptized him, and who was later executed by Herod Antipas — see “Remains of St John the Baptist ‘found’.” I’m always intrigued by archaeological discoveries that relate to Biblical accounts. The article includes a video showing the find, and it’s interesting to watch ( … Read More

via A Thinking Person

One interesting account based on Roman and Greek mythology comes from the Roman poet Ovid. There appear to be many online texts of Ovid’s Deluge account, but one can be found at Mythology.us. Following are some excerpts that might be of interest to students of the Bible.

From Book I:274-292, “The Flood”:

Neptune himself strikes the ground with his trident, so that it trembles, and with that blow opens up channels for the waters. Overflowing, the rivers rush across the open plains, sweeping away at the same time not just orchards, flocks, houses and human beings, but sacred temples and their contents. Any building that has stood firm, surviving the great disaster undamaged, still has its roof drowned by the highest waves, and its towers buried below the flood. And now the land and sea are not distinct, all is the sea, the sea without a shore.

From Book I:313-347, “Deucalion [the Greek equivalent of Noah] and his wife Pyrrha”:

Phocis, a fertile country when it was still land, separates Aonia from Oeta, though at that time it was part of the sea, a wide expanse of suddenly created water. There Mount Parnassus lifts its twin steep summits to the stars, its peaks above the clouds. When Deucalion and his wife landed here in their small boat, everywhere else being drowned by the waters, they worshipped the Corycian nymphs, the mountain gods, and the goddess of the oracles, prophetic Themis. No one was more virtuous or fonder of justice than he was, and no woman showed greater reverence for the gods. When Jupiter saw the earth covered with the clear waters, and that only one man was left of all those thousands of men, only one woman left of all those thousands of women, both innocent and both worshippers of the gods, he scattered the clouds and mist, with the north wind, and revealed the heavens to the earth and the earth to the sky.

ARK — 12 September 2010

Since encountering the Snowflake Method, I’ve been using it on my current fiction project, and I find that it’s interesting and fun and is helping me to focus in on the story in a marvelous way. It has already helped me to identify some fundamental issues with the structure of the story and should help me to avoid a whole lot of re-writing later on.

In a way, the Snowflake Method reminds me of the concept of idea mapping, or Mind Mapping, in that it is radial in concept rather than linear. Ingermanson has you start small and unfold each little element of the novel simultaneously, in kind of a fractal pattern. He uses a snowflake as a metaphor, because the story starts as a simple set of points, each of which is expanded into its own set of points, each of which is in turn expanded into its own set of points, until eventually the first draft “crystallizes.”

Each step in the process is hard work, but at the same time no step is hard to understand — Ingermanson basically has you walk through a set of processes, almost like the exercises you might find in a Writer’s Digest manual on novel-writing or a university fiction-writing course — only you’re actually working on a real novel, instead of just an academic exercise.

The basic steps are:

1. Write a one-sentence summary of the novel.
2. Expand that summary into a paragraph.
3. Write a one-sentence summary of each character’s storyline, then each character’s motivation and other key elements of that character’s role in the story.
4. Expand each character summary into one paragraph.
5. Expand the summary of the novel into a full page.
6. Expand each character summary into a full page.
7. Expand the one-page summary of the novel into four pages. As you do these various expansions, you are taking single sentences and expanding them to paragraphs at each step.
8. Take each character description and expand it into a full character chart. At each step, Ingermanson encourages you to go back and revise the previous steps, as you learn new things about your story and its characters.
9. Take the four-page synopsis and develop a list or spreadsheet of each scene you will need for the story, perhaps 100 scenes.
10. The next step, which Ingermanson describes as optional, is to create a multi-paragraph summary of each scene — thereby building a narrative description of the whole story.
11. Start writing the first draft of the novel, working out the “small-scale logic problems” as you go along.
12. As you go along, continue to go back and fix problems with the earlier design documents.

I can see that this method saves a tremendous amount of work and useless material that will inevitably result from seat-of-the-pants writing.

ARK — 11 Sept. 2010