CalvinDude.com

Since the ████ of █████████, words have held ███████. Now, they are ███████. But have no ██████████████████, because the ██████████████ always knows how ███ to █████ you.

This is why █████████ in unison and support of ████████████!

HT: Patrick Chan

Recently, a local radio DJ played Breaking Benjamin’s song Blow Me Away. One of the phrases in the song is, “Only the strongest will survive.” The song was originally written for the game Halo 2, so that lyric is somewhat fitting.

However, I got to thinking about that lyric a bit, and me being me I also merged those thoughts with a couple of other thoughts I’ve had. See, I enjoy foreign languages even though I would never claim to be fluent in anything other than English (and sometimes, not even that!). Most recently I’ve been brushing up on my Latin and Koine Greek. One of the things that finally “clicked” in my head about languages is how you need to think conceptually instead of trying to map phrases one-to-one. That’s not to say I didn’t know that already, but rather that it finally fully set in my mind that meaning transcends individual words.

In fact, when I recently read through Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, he made a comment about how originally people thought we could make great progress toward mechanical interpretations of texts using computers. Then, as we tried to do that and failed spectacularly, it became obvious that interpretation is more than just a substitution of words.

Just for fun, and to demonstrate my point, I ran the above paragraph through Google’s translate feature, translating it from English to Latin and then back to English again and it gave me this:

For when he recently read through Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter made to the mechanical devices of the people who first how we could make great progress of computers and using the interpretation of the texts. Then, as he could and the efforts of is to do spectacularly, so be it is a clear correlation of interpretation of speeches.

Not only is that mostly gibberish on par with the emails I get from those generous Nigerian princes, but if I try to piece together the meaning from the words presented it seems to me that it actually reverses my original meaning in the last sentence!

Now, some people are very strict with how they define and interpret words. Word X means concepts A, B, or C, period. If I were to make an analogy, I’d imagine these people as viewing the meaning of words similar to islands in the ocean. There is the water of chaos that swirls around, but when you get to the word itself, the definition stands strong and immobile. It is fixed, no matter what the ocean does.

However, I have become more and more convinced, over time, that words are more like clouds in the sky. That is, they are still distinct units, but their edges are a bit fuzzier and a little malleable. Note that I do not maintain that postmodern concepts of deconstructionism are sound, or that words have no actual meaning at all—anymore than I would say that a cloud has no shape or that a cloud could also be a fox. Rather, it’s just that the definitions of words are “fuzzy” at times, as opposed to fixed islands of meaning.

Thus, I realize more and more that translation is at the conceptual level rather than the word level. Some of the most difficult aspects of learning a foreign language is beginning to think like the native speaker. Take just the simple example of word order. In English, word order is critical; but in Latin, it is not important at all. However, Latin does still have some preference for word order, such as having the verb come at the end of the sentence (English is typically subject-verb-object; Latin tends to subject-object-verb).

To give an example of that in English, examine: “Susan goes to the bank.” Here, “Susan” is the subject, “goes” is the verb, and “the bank” is the object (here, a prepositional phrase). Latin word order would typically render it as “Susan, to the bank, goes.” That makes sense in English, but it is awkward. If every sentence was written that way, it would make English difficult to comprehend.

Since the structure of sentences helps to convey the meaning of the sentences in some languages (such as English), and falls into patterns of use in other languages, you can actually look at the structure of languages to see what information cultures think are most relevant. In English, we want to know first who or what is doing the action of the sentence, then we want to know what they are doing, and finally we want to know what they are doing that action to. In Latin, they wanted to know who or what was doing the action, then they wanted to know who or what the action was being done to, and only then did they want to know what action was being done.

Now, of course, this happens very quickly in speech. Nevertheless, there is a preference for the order of information, and adjusting how information comes can cause some amount of mental stress when one is learning a foreign language.

So what does this have to do with Breaking Benjamin then and the line “only the strongest will survive” that I talked about clear at the beginning of this piece? I’m glad you asked! Consider these two sentences side-by-side:

Only the strongest will survive.
Only the strongest will survives.

There is only one letter different between the two sentences, yet that one letter also determines whether or not the word “will” is a noun or a verb. And the best part? The letter that makes the determination is the absolute last letter in the sentence, and it’s not even part of the word that is changed! In the first sentence, “will survive” is the verb, but in the second, “strongest will” is the noun.

Now the question that I find interesting is this. If you were given those two sentences at different times in a conversation, at what point do you know whether “will” is a noun or a verb? Granted, you would typically have a lot more context than just one of those two sentences. Example: “You have to have a strong will to make it in the world. Weak-willed people just cannot cut it. Only the strongest will survives.” Here, the surrounding context would most likely make you think “will” is a noun the instant it comes up.

Nevertheless, I would wager that if I started an essay with “Only the strongest will survives” and another one with “Only the strongest will survive”, you would read both of those essays and automatically adjust the meaning in your mind, most likely without even noticing you’d done so. Indeed, I suspect that your brain provisionally holds a definition for the word “will” when it first encounters it, and then later on when it gains the rest of the knowledge needed, it “settles” on the grammatically correct interpretation. All without you consciously wondering whether “will” is a noun or verb.

Ultimately, the word “will” as used above must be a fuzzy word as it is being used. Your brain has to hold two potential meanings at the same time, and those meanings are in two different categories of words (noun and verb).

This brings to mind the dictionary argument too. When we are asked, “What does such-and-so word mean?” we go the dictionary. But dictionaries do not create meaning, rather they tell us how words are already being used. And the danger someone can fall into is thinking that the primary definition of a word is how the word must be used in every instance. (This is especially dangerous for first year Greek students who find Strongs’ Concordance.)

I thought of an illustration of the “dictionary fallacy.” Suppose someone pulls up an English text—let’s use Stephen King’s The Stand since it’s got significant length. This person randomly searches through the book and selects, again at random, one letter from one word. This person says, “I will give you $1,000,000 if you guess what letter was randomly selected.” In order to have the best shot at gaining the million dollars, what letter should you select?

By far, the most common letter in English is the letter “e.” Hands down, your choice should be “e.” But what are the odds that you would win the million dollars? According to a study done at Cornell, you would have only a 12.02% chance of winning the million dollars. That means that even though the letter “e” is most frequent, if you pick “e” you will be wrong nearly 88% of the time.

The same thing most certainly happens with definitions too, especially with words like “will.” For instance, look at the use of the word will here: “I will, of my own free will, that the will will be executed by Will.” Indeed, this reminds me of the famous grammatically-correct sentence involving the word “buffalo”: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo (you can click the link to read the article about how it works out).

Translation, therefore, isn’t simply a substitution of the most commonly used definitions. Words have their meaning by use, and people use words very loosely. In the end, while it may serve to set analytical minds at ease if words were islands in the sea, conventionally words will always remain clouds in the sky.

A belief popular amongst some philosophers, especially in the Molinist camp, is the idea of Trans-World Depravity. Put very simplistically, TWD is the idea that if agents have libertarian freedom, then there is no possible world in which there will not be at least one free agent who chooses to sin. This is usually brought forth in theological arguments between Molinists and Calvinists, but is also used a great deal in Arminian theodicies.

I believe that the idea of Trans-World Depravity actually may work very well to help neutralize moral arguments Arminians use against Calvinism, when one couples the existence of TWD with the effects of Total Depravity and study the effects of what it means in terms of God foreordaining evil. Since these are all big subjects, I will take a few moments to unwrap what I am saying here.

(As a side note, I’ve been thinking about some of this for many years—specifically a variation of the concept of TWD—although I only recently was able to sit down and put through my first attempt at a cohesive concept when responding to William Birch on his blog. Sadly, the comments were closed before I could get very deep into it, which is why I’m writing this blog post now.)

First, let’s look a bit more into at least one concept of TWD. I propose, for the sake of argument, that it is impossible for a free agent, who has libertarian free will, to continue in that state indefinitely. For a brief explanation of what that is the case, let us suppose the usual concepts of freedom of the will involved. An agent is presented with a choice to either sin or not sin. And let us presume that the moral agent is upright and righteous, but yet still retains a non-zero chance of choosing evil for all the classical reasons non-Calvinists give (e.g., “It’s not true freedom unless there’s some risk that the agent chooses what you do not wish him to choose”, which is a paraphrase of an argument I read from C.S. Lewis in the notes of an old Study Bible).

So we have a free agent with a non-zero chance of choosing to do evil. Now, this non-zero chance can be very, very low. Let us say that it’s extremely low. Suppose only one chance in a billion. However, the kicker is this: the moral agent is not making just one choice.

Consider the Garden of Eden. Adam was told not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This was a standing order. That means that Adam had to continually follow it. If there was ever a time when Adam broke that command, then he would be a sinner. So this means that each time he’s presented with a choice, he has a one-in-a-billion chance that he will sin, according to how it’s been set up. The longer Adam is in Eden, the more likely it becomes that Adam will actually sin, to the point that given a long enough timeline it becomes a guarantee that Adam will sin.

Even with odds such as one in a billion, since Adam would not die and since the command would presumably never be revoked, then the mere existence of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil guarantees man will fall into sin, even on Molinist/Arminian grounds.

Let us now couple that with the effects of Total Depravity. As Classical Arminians, such as William Birch, are quick to point out, Arminians also believe in Total Depravity of the same kind that Calvinists do. Once Adam sinned, all men are born depraved as a result of Original Sin. However, Arminians usually posit some form of prevenient grace, whereas Calvinists speak of common grace. The idea is that God’s grace must be granted toward the sinner—even to sinners who do not turn to Christ—in order to keep the sinner from being as evil as he or she would have been without that grace.

So let us stick with this concept of depravity—as I said, one that both Arminians and Calvinists can agree on since we’re not talking about how one becomes saved. The result is this: we are depraved and corrupted in all our ways, but God’s grace keeps us from being as evil as we otherwise would be. God’s grace serves as a buffer to keep us more righteous than we otherwise would be, even for the non-believer.

Under this view, what is hardening (such as when God hardens Pharaoh’s heart)? It is the removal of that grace, such that the depravity shows all the more obviously. Again, Arminians and Calvinists will agree that God did not make Pharaoh sin when God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Rather, Pharaoh did not deserve the grace of God and God chose to remove that grace, and the result was that Pharaoh’s true evil nature was unrestrained and ran rampant. The same thing can be seen in passages such as Romans 1, where Paul writes that God gives over sinful men to the lusts of their flesh. That is, He removes the restraining grace and allows them to fall deeper into sin.

Now, if both of these concepts are true—if it is the case that it is impossible for a moral agent who has a non-zero chance of sinning in any given choice meaning the necessity of Trans-World Depravity; and if the penalty for sin is that one’s offspring are born depraved such that they need the grace of God to be less evil than they would have been—then at this point, there is no longer any basis to say that God is committing evil when He foreordains sin in the world.

Consider the following example. Let us stipulate an arbitrary scale, that 100 is the maximum amount of evil that any given person could do. Let us further suppose that, given depravity, we would all be sinners at 100 Evil on the scale. That would be absolutely ruinous—in fact, that is where sinners end up in hell when God removes all His grace completely from them.

Now given the depths of evil that 100 would be, it’s quite likely that the absolute worst person on Earth was really only something like a 10 on the Evil scale, but let’s make it a bit more drastic. Let’s put Hitler at 75 on the scale. Finally, let us stipulate that God foreordained that Hitler would be a 75 on the Evil scale.

What are the ramifications of that? Arminians are quick to say that Calvinism has God forcing Hitler to commit sin to be at that 75. But that is to ignore the reality of depravity. God is not forcing Hitler up to 75 Evil; He is forcing Hitler DOWN to 75 Evil from 100 Evil. In other words, God is actively ensuring that His will be done, yes, but He is doing so in a way that is preventing more evil from occurring. In other words, by God foreordaining that Hitler would be a 75 Evil, He is keeping Hitler from being a 100 Evil. Yet, because most of us are higher on the scale, and because we assume that where we’re at is the status quo, it is easy for us to say that God is forcing Hitler to be more evil than Hitler would have been. The reality is the opposite. God is forcing us to be less evil than we would have been, and He is not forcing Hitler as much.

TWD and Depravity combine to take away any reasonable argument that Arminians have that the Calvinist God is forcing anyone to do evil, even when God foreordains sin. Because we would be maximally evil if we could be, and because it is necessary that morally free agents will sin, then any act we do less than 100 Evil has been tempered by undeserved grace.

To consider an analogy, look at the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is a necessary feature of physics. In closed systems, entropy will necessarily increase. I maintain that it is not only possible, but certain that this type of thing is true of righteousness too. That is, without God actively and constantly exerting His own power to grant grace, any agent will necessarily fall. Therefore, just as it is impossible for God to make a square circle, I maintain that it is impossible for God to make any moral being who could stand righteously on his or her own power. Therefore, God could allow Adam to make any decision within Adam’s power, and the determined result would still be sin, and this would be no more unrighteous for God than it is for God to now withhold grace and harden sinners, as we know He does in Scripture.

According to this article, Steve Jobs was “a skeptic all his life.” Furthermore:

The book delves into Jobs’ decision to delay surgery for nine months after learning in October 2003 that he had a neuroendocrine tumor — a relatively rare type of pancreatic cancer that normally grows more slowly and is therefore more treatable.

Instead, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic. He also was influenced by a doctor who ran a clinic that advised juice fasts, bowel cleansings and other unproven approaches, the book says, before finally having surgery in July 2004.

What a rather odd definition of “skeptic.”

It’s now been over a decade since 9/11. And to some extent, as a nation, we’ve all “moved on” from that and are living pretty much the way we always used to live before. Then, every once in a while, something will happen that might remind us that we’re living post 9/11.

That happened to me today. Where I work, we will be having a conference in January, so we had to book flights to that. The conference is in Florida, and this will be the fourth one I’ve gone to since I started work. It’s pretty much impossible to get a direct flight there from Colorado Springs, but there’s always been a wide variety of cities we could go to. For instance, the first year I went to Chicago, then to Florida. The next one, just to Denver. Then the last conference I got the connecting flight through Atlanta.

I enjoy being able to pick a new city, just to say I’ve been there. And on the return trip this time, I had it going through Houston. But on the trip out there, I had the option of picking a different city to land in first.

Washington, D.C.

And my first thought was, “While the likelihood of any terror attack is going to be very small, it will be highest on a flight to Washington.”

So it sank in. I realized that I’m really, truly living in a post 9/11 world after all.

I just read an article called Hollywood’s 5 Saddest Attempts a Feminism.

I typically like Cracked.com, although they can be somewhat risque at times. However, since there are a bunch of different people who post columns there, there’s also a bit of inconsistency in the standards. This is an example of one of their lower-quality works.

The author of this piece (Jennifer Liang) complains that Hollywood tries to make female heroes in movies but still falls back to typical gender roles. She gives “examples” of this throughout the post. But in the end, the post is just a screed about how women aren’t treated like they are “empowered” or whatever PC term you want to include there.

All of this leads me to point out the simple fact that it seems to me that Jennifer Liang wants her feminism to be when a woman acts like a man…. Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here and actually use this thing called logic. Isn’t the view that a woman isn’t worthwhile unless she can be a man–isn’t THAT anti-feminism? All the examples of failure to promote “feminism” that are listed in this article are examples of women failing to act like men.

It seems to me that feminism is the most sexist anti-women position one can take.

As an aside, Liang also writes this sentence: “Her and her one true love, Will (Orlando Bloom), endure many obstacles in their relationship and are rewarded when they are finally united in a thirty second Easter egg after the closing credits of the final movie.” I think if she had paid more attention to grammar than to social engineering, the world would have been improved.

After having watched the documentary on the Heaven’s Gate cult yesterday, this morning I was reading a bit of Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter is, I believe, what I’ll call a non-reductionistic materialist. That is, he believes that immaterial thought arises from the actions of material objects. Which is a fancy way of saying that he doesn’t believe in the existence of souls, but instead believes that all which we would quantify as a “soul”—such as the presence of our mind—is just the outworking of several complex levels of physical objects obeying concrete rules. His argument is that the level where the rules take place is far beneath the level where thoughts occur, such that it is impossible for the person who is experiencing the thought to be able to focus on the foundational level where the physics reactions take place. One of his concepts presented in G.E.B. is that an ant colony has a rudimentary level of consciousness—that is, the colony as a whole, and not any individual ants. He likens this to the brain as a whole having consciousness, while individual neurons are mechanical objects obeying set rules.

So, this is about as far away as you can get from the likes of the Heaven’s Gate folks, who believed (very similarly to the ancient Gnostic cults) that the physical world was bad and the spiritual realm was good, and therefore we ought to be freed from our bodies—our “vehicles” in their lingo—to become who we truly are, in the spiritual realm. I myself fall somewhere in the middle, but probably much closer to Douglas Hofstadter’s view in the end.

Why? Because God made our bodies for a reason. And while I do not believe that mechanical explanations are sufficient to explain everything about immaterial thought, nor would I conclude that an ant colony has even a rudimentary intelligence, I also believe that God built human beings to be both body and spirit together. We are supposed to be a linked unit, and that’s part of why the resurrection is such an important concept in Christian theology.

See, if we were whole as spirits, then there would be no need for our bodies to be resurrected, for us to live on the new Earth (or “renewed” Earth). The very fact that there is a resurrection at all seems to imply that God believes our bodies are also important. And in the end, I believe that we are not truly “us” unless we are in our physical bodies.

Now, the actual make up of that body is not very important. By which I mean, our bodies are composed of individual atoms that can be replaced and re-arranged, etc. This is why we eat food that replaces certain chemicals in our bodies, and we also have waste products, and it even extends to our breathing (oxygen in, carbon dioxide out, etc.). Every single one of our atoms could be taken out and substituted in with another atom of the same type. That is, if every single atom of carbon in your body was suddenly removed and replaced with atoms of carbon from, say, some distant star, and they were put back in the same configuration, you would not know any different. It is the organization of the atoms that are important, not the individual atoms. And I believe that that corresponds more to the view of an ant colony having replaceable ants and still function as an ant colony.

But that is not to say that we are reducible to organization of atoms, or neurons, or any other materialistic aspect. The Bible clearly tells us that there is a spiritual existence beyond just the physical aspects that make up our bodies. Yet, this is not to minimize the importance of our bodies, and sadly I think most religious people go far closer to the route of the Heaven’s Gate or gnostic concepts. This is why you will commonly hear such phrases, even in Christian circles, as: “We have a body, but we are a spirit.” I maintain that the truth is: “We are a fusion of both body and soul, and if we are missing either one, we are not completely us.”

All of this is actually background to the point I wanted to make (which was to examine the question of whether or not a human will can be said to be “free” if every component of the will has been created and put together by someone else—i.e., God), but that will now have to wait for a future blog post.

EDITED: My post first said that I believed Hofstadter was what I called “a reductionistic materialist” but this was a typo on my part. It should have read “a non-reductionistic materialist” so I corrected the post above.

Last night, I watched a documentary on the Heaven’s Gate cult. This was the group that believed that the Hale-Bopp comet was a sign that there was a UFO ready to take their souls to a higher level of human evolution, so they killed themselves in March of 1997.

The group was headed by a guy named Marshall Applewhite. Apparently, he had begun as a typical music teacher, and was a rather gifted choir director. According to the documentary, he was able to take a group of average students and turn them into a great choir.

Applewhite grew up in the Presbyterian church, and several of his writings would later make reference to many Biblical passages. In fact, that background is probably one of the reasons why he would later believe that he had the mind of Jesus Christ and was, therefore, the second coming of Christ. The difference, he said, was this time his father had come with him, in the form of a woman named Bonnie Nettles.

Applewhite had been married when he was a music teacher, but after he had several homosexual affairs, his wife divorced him and he lost at least two jobs. He would later go on, with some of the other male members of his group, to voluntarily castrate himself. The idea was that when they evolved to a higher level, they wouldn’t be in any sexual relationships and there would be no gender. This struggle he had with his homosexuality seems to have greatly influenced his ideas concerning the nature of the “aliens” who he was trying to contact.

In any case, Applewhite and Nettles took on different names. Originally they called themselves Bo and Peep (while the documentary didn’t specify which was which, given the fact that Nettles’ name was usually mentioned first, and her original name was Bonnie, my guess is that she was Bo and Applewhite was Peep). Originally, they claimed to be the two witnesses from the book of Revelation, and also that they were extra-terrestrials who had come to visit Earth. Later, however, they would change their names again to Ti and Do (Applewhite was Do–pronounced “doe”). At this point, Do claimed to be the second coming of Jesus and said that Ti was his father.

What struck me this morning was something not mentioned in the documentary, but it appears to be pretty obvious so I doubt I’m the first person to have noticed this: both Do and Ti are musical terms, specifically from the scale sung by a choir. You may remember the song in The Sound of Music that went through the scale: do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do. It makes sense that the names Applewhite chose came about from his musician’s background.

More interesting, however, is the fact that the specific names chosen are the “ends” of the scale. That is, the first note is do and the last note is ti. I believe that in choosing these names, Applewhite was once again making an allusion to Biblical terminology, where Christ is called the Alpha and the Omega: the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. In this instance, it appears that Applewhite merged this concept (first and last) into the choir’s scale so that “Ti and Do” (which is how they were nearly always referenced by the cult members) were, in essance, the first and last.

It has now been 14 years since the Heaven’s Gate cult members killed themselves. In some ways, it’s interesting to look at what has changed since then and what is still the same. The most obvious changes are cosmetic. For instance, the Heaven’s Gate website still exists at www.heavensgate.com. If you click on the link, you’ll be reminded of what was state of the art in 1997, back when “This site is best viewed with Netscape” meant something. But if you read the text involved, you’ll see that while names and places differ and while technology changes, the ideas could have been written at any time between when the true Jesus Christ was on Earth 2000 years ago and present. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

I don’t often remember my dreams, but I remember last night’s dream. I dreamt that for some reason I was walking from Woodland Park toward Divide (both town in Colorado, about 7 miles apart), and for some reason I had decided to call the White House to complain about the housing market. And who would answer the phone, but President Obama himself! So we talked back and forth about the housing market until we said our amicable goodbyes and I checked my cell phone timer and 13:08 had passed on the phone call.

This brings to mind two important points. 1) I know nothing about the housing market; 2) Thank God I don’t often remember my dreams, because it was far more boring than the above description might lead one to think….