Our time on this planet...

I have said it many times - the fundamental flaw with democracy is that the average person has no idea what is best for the country as a whole. Perhaps the most tragic result of this reality occurs when the human thirst for violence motivates wars even the moderately intelligent know to be useless. Hundreds of lives, thousands of injuries, millions of dollars of damage - all in the name of public opinion. And in the midst of one nation's rape of a country held hostage by a radical faction, the world ignores the plight of a people who have known violence their entire existence.

Our time on this planet is limited. Which other species kills for pride or dogma? We are approaching a threshold - that at which one person's ideology can bring an end to everything. A terrorist with a bullet can kill one - with a missile, hundreds - with an airplane, thousands. How long then until weapons the darkest corners of our imaginations have yet to envision become the charge of those willing to die for their cause, taking humanity with them? After 5,000 years of recorded history, is there anyone left who believes violence motivates long-term peace? Yes - there are plenty - they are the masses whose opinions form the actions of leaders helpless to act on logic - forced to act on emotion. And so Israel burns the home to kill the cockroach...and the rest of the world watches.

Our time on this planet is limited - and this planet will be better off when we are gone.

Lebanon in the middle

It is rare in the geopolitical sense for there to be a day with an absolute right and and absolute wrong, but the last three days have been clear cut examples. Lebanon has two rival factions - the legitimate government which makes its money off of tourism industry and commerce, and the terrorist Hezbollah which receives its money from the sympathetic governments of Iran and Syria. By systematically destroying the Lebanese infrastructure, Israel is guaranteeing the demise of the legitimate government and the associated solidification of Hezbollah's control of the country. Do they think for a second that explosions and chaos will return their two soldiers? All they are doing is pleasing the Israeli public for a few days until there is nothing left to destroy and they, like the rest of the world, realize how counter productive these actions have been.

Meanwhile, my family waits to be evacuated, hoping the embassy gets to them before the Israeli bombs.

For the record...

Thanks to everyone who has been calling and writing out of concern. To answer the questions which seem to be on many people's minds - yes, I do have quite a bit of family in Lebanon. Thankfully, the vast majority of them live in Northern Lebanon - far away from Israel and the current battlefield. However, my grandparents, aunt, uncle and two cousins who live in the states are on vacation in Beirut right now and the U.S. embassy is working to evacuate them. With the airport closed and the route to Damascus being bombed, nobody knows how or when they will be able to get out, but for the moment at least, they are safe.

So if I seem edgy for the next few days, now you know why. In the meantime, I remain as always hopeful for the prospect of peace, and trying to answer a question the world has wondered since 1948 - how many Arab lives is one Israeli life worth?

Come the Rapture...

Come the Rapture, can I have your car?

...reads the bumper sticker on the back of my car. It is not intended to poke fun at those who believe the second coming of Christ will result in the instant disappearance of all heaven-bound Christians, but rather to poke fun at myself for not being one. In truth, I don't know whether or not there is a heaven, but I imagine that if there is, I will end up there. I say this because if there is a God, I imagine it is the type of God who is more interested in actions than in motivations. I may not believe the Bible, the Quran or the Torah to be the word of said God, but I follow the general theme of the tenants laid out in all three. After all - change the names, the dates and a few details, and these books say the same thing - love one another and make the purpose of your life to leave this world a better place than you found it. I know this not because someone told me this, but because I have read all three of them - myself, in their entirety and formed my own opinions about them.

Now, with this in mind, imagine my surprise and amusement when I found the following note on my car's windshield this morning:

Hello,

Yes, you can have my car if the Rapture comes. I wanted to give you this video I thought you might enjoy.

-Your neighbor on the 4th floor

Attached to the note was a brand new copy of the DVD Lies in the Textbooks narrated by Dr. Kent Hovind (PhD in education) of the Creation Science Evangelism Ministry. I have actually watched this lecture before in which Dr. Hovind ('Dr. Dino' as he likes to be called in reference to his claim that dinosaurs exist in some parts of the world to this day) lays out the case for Creationism. It is an interesting lecture, but ultimately fails in that treats Creationism as a theory.

Evolution is a theory and Creationism is a model. By definition a theory must satisfy two criteria - it must be capable of predicting future outcomes and it must be provable wrong. In fact, it is impossible to prove a theory correct - a theory stands until it is proven wrong at which point it is revised. Creationism is a model - it is an effort to explain a phenomenon (in this case, how the Universe came to be) - but makes no claims about future events and most importantly, cannot be proven wrong.

Creationism claims that God created all - therefore, regardless how convincing the evidence might be for some competing model, Creationism will stand in that one can always say 'God made it so.' Example - dinosaur bones. Some Creationists believe that dinosaur bones are less than six thousand years old and some believe that they were placed by God and made to look 65+ million years old - either way, Creationism explains our observations. Another example - the parallax effect. If we look out at the Universe using our current assumption that light travels at a constant velocity through a vacuum, we can note a star's position in the sky, then note it again six months later (when we are on the opposite side of the sun). Using basic trigonometry, we can calculate the star to be more than 6000 light years away. Therefore, one of three things is happening - light travels at some speed greater than c, the Universe is more than 6000 years old, or God simply placed all star light on a sphere around the Earth less than 6000 light-years in radius when He created the Universe...either way, Creationism stands.

This is why I have always been confused by Creationists' efforts to back up their model with science - the two do not mix. There is a fundamental difference between Creationism and science - Creationism insists that it is right while science insists that it is wrong. No scientist has ever claimed that current scientific theories are absolutely correct. In fact, we do the exact opposite - we state that our theories must be ultimately wrong - they simply work for the set of circumstances which we have seen. Newton's laws work very well for speeds smaller than ~.01c, Einstein's laws work for the range of speeds we have observed (up to c), but nobody is claiming the theory of relativity to be universally correct. We can only state that given the observed circumstances, we have a theory which seems to work.

It is interesting to note that only Creationists will tell you that the Theory of Evolution claims to be a complete description of how life came to be (please note I am not inferring that all Creationists say this). The theory of evolution is a chain of events only some of which we have evidence supporting. Whether or not you choose to believe this evidence is irrelevant - at no point has anyone of knowledge claimed that it is a complete theory. We observe on a daily basis micro-evolution (e.g. bacteria becoming immune to antibiotics) and speciation (e.g. new species of animals forming), but nobody has ever claimed to have observed macro-evolution. The Creationist believes this is because it does not occur, and the evolutionist because we haven't had enough time - but ultimately, neither one of us knows we are right. It is important however to keep in mind that a lack of evidence for evolutionary processes does not bolster the idea of Creationism - a model does not strengthen itself through the demise of competing models but by the conviction of its own hypotheses.

I agree that evolution should not be taught as a complete theory - fortunately for us, no reputable text-book has ever done so. In the classroom, evolution is taught as a theory which has evidence supporting only those processes which have been observed. It goes on to suggest methods by which the unobserved processes could have occurred, but nowhere is this presented as fact. Why then should we take it out of our schools in exchange for a model which not only has no supporting evidence, but teaches our children nothing about the Scientific Method?

Besides - if you are a Creationist, you can always tell your children when they come home that everything they learned is true, but God made it happen :-)