Friday, March 31, 2017

Shadows

Under emptied blue skies the party of eight camels zigzagged onward southeast through the parallel dunes of the vast Bani Mukassar, keeping to the gravelly desert floor and crossing the dunes at shallow gaps that notched the mountains of sand like passes. All four of the travelers preferred to ride during the day, when the sun blotted out the malign stars, but twice when they had had to march for a long distance along a dune to find a crossing place, they made up for the lost time by riding at night -- and though on one of these long, plodding nights there was no moon, the planet Jupiter glowed brightly enough in the sky to cast shadows on the dimply glowing sand, and Hale could see a faint luminosity around his companions and the camels. His party was now very far away from any outposts of men, and when he looked up at the stars of the Southern Cross in the infinite vault overhead, or gauged his course by the position of Antares in Scorpio on the southern horizon, it seemed that the postwar world of London and Paris and Berlin was astronomically distant and that he and his companions were the only human beings seeing these stars.

Tim Powers
Declare

While his mate searched deebies, Bhatterji turned away from the damaged cage. He noticed that he was casting a shadow and, turning to look, saw the smoky opal gleam of Jupiter off the fore starside quarter. It was a minute disk, not even a tenth the size of the Moon over the Bay of Bengal, and for just a moment, Bhatterji wondered what he was doing here, so far from the temples and the forests and the jangly cities. He remembered that Miko came from Amalthea and one of the wranglers from Callisto. They had signed the articles within a day of each other on the previous transit. Yet Circumjovia was the new frontier. Odd, how people fled from heavens that others scrambled to reach.

Michael Flynn
The Wreck of The River of Stars

They passed by the rows of spacecraft until they arrived at a small open space at then end of the port. There, a small spaceship -- a dinghy, really -- sat by itself. Next to it stood a group of people who had apparently been waiting for her. The Milky Way slowly swept by the open side of the port, and its light cast long shadows from the dinghy and those standing next to it, turning the open space into a giant clock, over which the roving shadows acted as hands.

Cixin Liu
Death's End

Saturday, March 25, 2017

Oh no

First Colin McGinn, now John Searle? No! My idols are all turning into golden calves. Is it writing on philosophy of mind that does it?

Friday, March 24, 2017

Abortion

Here's an essay by a nurse and nursing instructor who formerly assisted in performing abortions. She argues the pro-life position. She is not arguing against abortion from a religious perspective but from a medical perspective.

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Flatlined

OK, in light of the fact that Kyrie Irving of the NBA and Shaquille O'Neal formerly of the NBA have come out saying they believe the earth is flat, I thought it would be a good time to revisit my two main posts on the subject:

A Spherical Argument

Yes Virginia, there are flat-earthers

Sunday, March 19, 2017

The Incoherence of Fame

Or maybe I should say the incoherence of the desire for fame. The desire for fame is the desire to be loved writ large. We all want to be loved and appreciated and not to be hated or ignored or unappreciated. But the desire to be loved makes sense: we want people to recognize who we truly are and love us for it. The desire to be loved is the desire to be known and have that knowledge make a positive impact on someone else. But the desire to be famous skips over the "known" part. It's the desire to be loved without being known. And this is incoherent. What exactly would people in this situation be loving? Not you. They'd love their image of you, but the image is superficial and not verisimilitudenous. Their image is not you. And since they'd love their image, it wouldn't be you they love. So the desire to be famous is the desire to be loved without being known. But being loved presupposes being known. The whole desire for fame is simply incoherent. And yet it's part of the human condition.

And the irony is that we are offered love from someone who knows us more deeply than we know ourselves. Perhaps you could say God loves us despite who we are, but he also loves us for who we are. So we have the opportunity for genuine fame -- that is being known by the ground of being itself and loved -- and we reject it in favor of incoherent fame. God save us.

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Happy Pi Day

I just bought a cake. A square cake. Yeah, I'm a rebel.

Monday, March 13, 2017

Quote of the Day

Most of us remember when the grace of God first reached our hearts. We were troubled about our sins which had put us at such a distance from God, and the great questions that exercised us were these: How can our sins be put away? How can we be freed from this sense of guilt? How can we ever feel at home with God when we know we have so grievously trespassed against Him and so wantonly violated His holy law? We shall never forget, many of us, how we were brought to see that what we could never do ourselves, God had done for us through the work of our Lord Jesus on the cross. We remember when we sang with exultation:

"All my iniquities on Him were laid,
All my indebtedness by Him was paid,
All who believe on Him, the Lord hath said,
Have everlasting life."

This is the truth of the trespass offering, in which sin assumes the aspect of a debt needing to be discharged.

But as we went on we began to get a little higher view of the work of the cross. We saw that sin was not only a debt requiring settlement, but that it was something which in itself was defiling and unclean, something that rendered us utterly unfit for companionship with God, the infinitely Holy One. And little by little the Spirit of God opened up another aspect of the atonement and we say that our blessed Lord not only made expiation for all our guiltiness but for all our defilement too. "For God hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." It was a wondrous moment in the history of our souls when we saw that we were saved eternally, and made fit for God's presence because the Holy One had become the great sin offering, was made sin for us on Calvary's cross.

But there were other lessons we had to learn. We soon saw that because of their sins men are at enmity with God, that there could be no communion with God until a righteous basis for fellowship was procured. Something had to take place before God and man could meet together in perfect enjoyment and happy complacency. And thus we began to enter into the peace offering aspect of the work of Christ. We saw that it was God's desire to bring us into fellowship with Himself, and this could only be as redeemed sinners who had been reconciled to God through the death of our Lord Jesus.

As we learned to value more the work the Saviour did, we found ourselves increasingly occupied with the Person who did that work. In the beginning it was the value of the blood that gave us peace in regard to our sin, but after we went on we learned to enjoy Him for what He is in Himself. And this is the meal offering; for it is here that we see Christ in all His perfection, God and Man in one glorious Person, and our hearts become ravished with His beauty and we feed with delight upon Himself.

We can understand now what the poetess meant when she sang:

"They speak to me of music rare,
Of anthems soft and low,
Of harps, and viols, and angel-choirs,
All these I can forego;

But the music of the Shepherd's voice
That won my wayward heart
Is the only strain I ever heard
With which I cannot part."

"For, ah, the Master is so fair,
His smile's so sweet to banished men
That they who meet Him unaware
Can never rest on Earth again.

And they who see Him risen afar
At God's right hand, to welcome them,
Forgetful are of home and land,
Desiring fair Jerusalem."

To the cold formalist all this seems mystical and extravagant, but to the true lover of Christ it is the soberest reality.

And now there remains one other aspect of the Person and work of our Lord to be considered, and it is this which is set forth in the burnt offering. As the years went on some of us began to apprehend, feebly at first, and then perhaps in more glorious fulness, something that in the beginning had never even dawned upon our souls, through the work of Christ upon the cross there was something in that work of tremendous importance which meant even more to God than the salvation of sinners.

He created man for His own glory. The catechism is right when it tells us that "the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." But, alas, nowhere had any man been found who had not dishonored God in some way. The charge that Daniel brought against Belshazzar, the Babylonian king, was true of us all: "The God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified." God must find a man in this world who would fully glorify Him in all things. He had been so terribly dishonored down here; He had been so continually misrepresented by the first man to whom He had committed lordship over the earth, and by all his descendants, that it was necessary that some man should be found who would live in this scene wholly to His glory. God's character must be vindicated; and the Lord Jesus Christ, the Second Man, the Lord from heaven, was the only one who could do that. And in His perfect obedience unto death we see that which fully meets all the requirements of the divine nature and glorifies God completely in the scene where He had been so sadly misrepresented. This is the burnt offering aspect of the Cross. By means of that cross more glory accrued to God than He had ever lost by the fall. So that we may say that even if not one sinner had ever been saved through the sacrifice of our Lord upon the tree, yet God had been fully glorified in respect of sin, and no stain could be imputed to His character, nor could any question ever be raised through all eternity as to His abhorrence of sin and His delight in holiness.

So in the book of Leviticus the burnt offering comes first, for it is that which is more precious to God and should therefore be most precious to us.

H.A. Ironside
Lectures on the Levitical Offerings

Jim's comments: This book is interesting, although some of the attempts to read Jesus back into the Levitical offerings seem pretty contrived to me. But this larger summary really spoke to me. I've always struggled with the parts of the Old Testament that detail sacrifices or genealogies -- I suspect many people do -- and this troubles me because we are told to reflect upon them, and that this will be a rewarding experience. This book goes a long way towards helping me in this regard.

The penultimate paragraph is also interesting because it has some relevance to the "O Felix Culpa" defense of the problem of evil, which Alvin Plantinga has stated is his favorite resolution. The idea here is that the best possible worlds would be those which include incarnation and atonement, that is, God entering into his creation and atoning for the sins of the world. These would be the best worlds because those worlds would reveal more of the depth of God's love. Possible worlds in which no one ever sinned could certainly display God's love, but not on the level that a world including incarnation and atonement would.

But of course a world with incarnation and atonement requires sin and evil, otherwise there would be nothing to atone for. In fact, the greater the sin and evil, the greater that world will reveal the depth of God's love in atoning for it. So the greatest possible worlds would be those with a great deal of sin and evil. Ironside goes further and says that even if no one ever accepts God's atonement, God would still do it because his nature requires sin to be atoned for.

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Wow

I'm sorry, "Wow" is not strong enough. I think I'll go with "Wowie kazowie":

The light from A2744_YD4, as it is known, has been on its way to us for 13.2 billion years, since the universe was only 600 million years old. 
Where the galaxy is “now” is only a mathematical extrapolation — about 30 billion light-years from here, according to the standard cosmological math. An international team led by Nicolas Laporte of University College London, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, a radio telescope in Chile, was able to see this galaxy only because its light had been amplified by the gravity of a massive cluster of galaxies lying right in front of it.

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Recent acquisitions

Alfred Bester, Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester
James Blaylock, The Last Coin
James Blish, The Devil's Day
Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon
A. Bertram Chandler, Into the Alternate Universe and Contraband from Otherspace
A. Bertram Chandler, The Commodore at Sea and Spartan Planet
Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction, 4th Annual Collection
C.S. Friedman, This Alien Shore
Damon Knight, The Best of Damon Knight
Jonathan Lethem, As She Climbed Across the Table
Larry Niven, Flatlander
Larry Niven and Gregory Benford, Bowl of Heaven
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Escape from Hell
Frederik Pohl, Gateway
John Scalzi, Zoe's Tale
Dan Simmons, Ilium
Dan Simmons, Olympos
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
George Zebrowski, Macrolife
Roger Zelazny, The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth

Comments:

1. I got all of them for about seventy bucks. That's my saving grace with my book-hoarding: I love getting good deals.

2. Dozois's 4th annual Year's Best Science Fiction is the earliest one I have (1986). However, I'm looking for annual collections from different editors. Dozois is great, but I find he includes a lot of stories that do nothing for me. I have little appreciation for cyberpunk, and none whatsoever for transhumanism. So if anyone out there knows an editor who compiles an annual "best of" science-fiction, let me know, I'll check it out.

3. Several of the books are in omnibuses. (That sounds weird: "omnibus" is a plural word already.) Obviously the two Chandler books have two novels each -- in fact, I got both of those books for $1.95, total $3.90. That's 97½¢ per novel. I haven't read anything by Chandler yet, but I've heard good things about the realistic military writing, so I'm looking forward to them. Niven's Flatlander consists of The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton and The Patchwork Girl. And Blish's Devil's Day consists of Black Easter and The Day After Judgment. This is the third in his After Such Knowledge trilogy, which starts with A Case for Conscience (which I have) and Doctor Mirabilis (which I don't). A Catholic friend of mind read Case for Conscience and loathed it: he thought it misunderstood those elements of Christianity that are always misunderstood in the same way. I don't know, I liked it, but I'd have to read it again.

4. Escape from Hell by Niven and Pournelle is a sequel to their Inferno. That's the one I immediately started reading. I'm about halfway through it. Love it.

5. I've been wanting Pohl's Gateway for a long time. Ditto for Scalzi's Zoe's Tale, Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Zebrowski's Macrolife. Scalzi just has a natural gift, he reads like Heinlein. I'm loving just about everything I read from Dan Simmons, so I'm excited about his two-book series (is there a word for that?) Ilium and Olympos. And I read Zelazny's Doors of His Face, Lamps of His Mouth a few years ago and thought several of the stories (including the titular one) were just amazing.

6. I swear I didn't plan this, but two of these books deal with satanic issues, and incredibly, both are dedicated to C.S. Lewis: Devil's Day and Escape from Hell. (Actually, Blaylock's Last Coin might be seen as falling into the first category too.)