Does This Make Sense?

Its the end of the school year.  Ordinarily this doesn't mean much to grad students, but for the past few years i have been tutoring two of the most amazing high school students in whatever math or physics they were assigned or could imagine.  They were both seniors this year, so i'm dipping back into the pool of sophomores and juniors to cover the gap between stipend and rent.  The place where i work is good at attracting good kids, but i'm struck once again by how infrequently high school students are made to answer the question "Does this answer make sense?".  I know students enter the college physics sequence with the (dis)ability to grind through an algorithm, get a ridiculous answer and circle it without blinking.  They must be picking that up in high school, but it is sufficiently dis-incentivized that it usually doesn't last long.  My previous students learned to anticipate the question long ago, so it caught me off guard last week when a new student wrote down a completely nonsensical answer and then waited calmly for my evaluation of his work.  This amazes me every time i encounter it because the question "Does this make sense?" is at the heart of the process that turns students into scientists.

At first, when intuition is a pretty good guide to reality, the question forces a check on math skills which are too often subpar or merely misguided.  If you calculate the speed of any ball to be in excess of Mach 1, you should realize immediately that you are wrong.  This provides a good opportunity to re-examine your work before submitting it for a grade.  On the flip side, routine reality-checking helps students anchor the numbers and units they are working with onto familiar things.  Humans are 1-2 meters in size and 50-100 kg in weight.  Less obviously, 10 seconds is too long for a ball to be in the air, humans can't fall faster than about 50 m/s (120 mph) and "1 g" of horizontal acceleration would take a car from 0 to 60 (mph) in 2.7 seconds, which is only achievable in a road car if you have quite a lot of money.  These are the sorts of things students can find out by doing simple problems at home and using them to calibrate their reality-checker.  They do what no amount of class time can achieve, pull the world of numbers and formulae down into the real world where they can be used in day-to-day life.  Only then will they get into your head and change who you are.

As some point intuition runs out.  For some students, magnetism is a completely foreign land.  For others, its relativity.  Routine, in-class questioning "Does this answer make sense?" is the only way to build up a feel for subjects with which the students can't possibly have any direct experience.  They go from using intuition to check their math to building a sense of what reality ought to be using math.  This process carries students straight through from the time physics starts to get confusing to the day they ask a question, realize that no one in the world knows the answer and use some combination of intuition, observation and math to push the boundary of knowledge a little bit further.  And not just in physics.  The whole of science education is based around the question "Does this make sense?".

Why is the single most important question needed to create scientists apparently never asked in the high schools of a nation which prides itself on its scientific excellence?  I have to admit i have paid almost no attention to secondary education since i was its recipient.  As much as i love teaching smart, motivated teenagers with supportive families as a side job, teaching mandatory classes every day for a career is something else entirely; and i have great respect for people who can do it well.  That said, it strikes me as odd and mildly alarming that students coming from very good school systems make it into adulthood without ever coupling mathematics to reality.  Maybe there is something about meeting a new tutor which causes students' common sense to shut down, so that i'm seeing a bunch of false negatives?  Maybe my standards for common sense are unreasonably high?  Normally these posts end with some sort of conclusion, but i am honestly stumped here.  Anyone in high school want to comment?

Why Does Your Light Shine?

This post goes out to my Chi Alpha pastor, who a few years ago at the end of a weekend conference said "The difference between a flashlight and a laser is focus.  Right now, i need you to focus."  Although his words had the desired effect, this is strictly speaking not true.  A flashlight focused down to a millimeter spot is still a flashlight, and a laser diffused to a meter spot is still a laser.  But it did get me thinking about modern humanity's various light sources and what kinds of qualities our Light in the world might have.

1. Incandescents: Here i include traditional filament light bulbs and well as other thermally stimulated light sources, such as candles.  The point of an incandescent bulb is to dump so much heat into a small space that the normal infrared emission of all warm objects shifts up into the visible spectrum.  Although they can be made quite intense with the right lenses and reflectors, incandescent bulbs are primarily a heat source.  This model describes every youth group i have ever encountered.  An enormous amount of energy goes in and the atmosphere inside is 'on fire'.  This can sometimes be highly visible in the immediate environment but the effect is essentially random.  Mostly what is apparent is excitement; the emitted light conveys very little about the bulb or the power source.

2. Fluorescents: Fluorescent bulbs contain a vapor (often mercury) which is electrically excited to emit ultraviolet light.  This strikes a phosphorescent compound on the walls of the bulb to produce visible light.  This isn't the most efficient process in the world; the activation current is quite large and the two-step process still generates a lot of heat.  This mostly characterizes my adult, evangelical experience.  The fluorescent understands that it is primarily a light bulb, not a self-heater, but it generally takes a decent kick to get the light going and the flickering can get pretty bad at times.  The emitted light is more a function of what the bulb can make than what the bulb-maker wanted.  Its only because the creator of the bulb knew how to absorb and re-emit that light that the bulb is effective at all.

3. Light-Emitting Diodes: LEDs are made from semiconductors with a gradient of impurities along their length.  Impurities of different charge set up an internal electric field.  When enough current is applied, this field collapses, letting electrons combine with empty electron sites, emitting light.  LEDs are brighter and more consistent than fluorescents.  They can also be switched on and off much faster and with less over-charging.  Simple LEDs emit a single frequency of light; while this frequency is fixed for a given LED, it can be altered in the creation process.  More sophisticated LEDs have a fluorescent material built in which spreads out the emitted spectrum to produce 'white' light.  Many Christians i know strive to be more like LEDs, quick to respond when called, bright, effective and durable.

4. Lasers: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.  To make a laser, place a light-emitting material ('gain medium') between two mirrors and add power.  The gain medium will try to emit light in all sorts of frequencies and directions.  But rather than emit directly to the outside world, this light is bounced around internally.  At first almost all of the emitted light is re-absorbed, feeding back into the power source, but light that is of the right frequency is amplified on each pass.  Over time the light bouncing around the laser cavity becomes more and more what it was designed to emit, all the same wavelength, direction and phase.  One of the mirrors is usually partially transparent, letting the intense beam of coherent light out into the world.  While it is true that lasers are supremely focusable, their defining characteristic is coherence, which is achieved by letting the laser cavity prune away photons that don't match the mission of the laser.  The difference between a flashlight and a laser is not focus, but submission to the power source.

Do You Fear Death or the Dentist?

I recently took a survey aimed at assessing the impact of my personal beliefs about God.  Among other things, it asked about my emotions and attitudes toward death.  Part of the study was trying to see if reminding people about their religion changed those attitudes, but in either case i honestly don't fear death.  I know i will die someday and in the time before then i need to become the person who will joyfully enter Heaven.  I know people who have dodged certain death by God's grace, so it just doesn't scare me.

At the end of the study they explained that they were trying to assess the impact of reminding people about their religion and also of making them work through a difficult emotional problem before being asked a series of 'react to this situation' questions.  They said half of the participants were asked about difficult subjects like death and the other half were asked about a routine experience like going to the dentist...

At the mere mention of the dentist, i immediately started to feel anxious even though the study was over and i wasn't asked to recount any specific experiences.  I don't have a phobia or anything extreme, but the prospect of cavities and fillings makes me nervous.  I fear not being able to understand my research.  I fear having to uproot my family.  And i am always nervous around traffic cops.  But i don't fear death and i don't experience any of the feelings of aimlessness or helplessness that the survey was trying to elicit.  In the moment, that struck me as odd.

There are certain types of knowledge that are easier to apply to big, universal things than small, everyday things.  For example, the principles of mechanics are laughably simple, a few conservation laws and some formalism for counting energy.  Their study reveals some profounds insights into the sorts of thing which can and can't happen in a classical Universe.  And yet, it is very easy for a novice to write a specific classical mechanics problem that an expert finds difficult to solve (e.g. a pendulum hanging from another pendulum, a top-heavy top).  This is a well-known phenomenon in physics, but for some reason it was very strange to encounter it in a spiritual setting.  We don't think of our gut reactions as something we have to "work through".  They are, by definition, instantaneous.  But as i've mentioned before, becoming the kind of person who reacts instantaneously in a godly way is a process we will spend the rest of our lives "working out with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12).  At least for me, its a process that has worked from the top down.  Getting from the existence of an almighty, loving God to enough faith to confront death turned out to be comparatively simple.  Getting to enough peace to confront the dentist has proven somewhat more challenging.

Exploring The Earned Income Credit

Well, its that time of year again.  Time to round up W2s and 1099-everythings.  Someday i hope to fill out a 1040 form by copying the one from last year, but every year as we do more grown-up things it seems there's a new mystery waiting for me.  Last year, after the birth of our son, i was expecting an extra deduction on taxable income.  That was easy.  I calculated our fairly modest bill and was almost at the bottom of the page when i hit this thing called Earned Income Credit.  Apparently, if you have a job that pays you, but doesn't pay very well, the government chips in some extra cash.  I'm thinking, great, we'll save a few hundred bucks.  Well...not exactly.  If you have children, the EIC can give back several thousand dollars.  When i finally found our entry in the lookup table, the EIC returned more than our tax burden.  Now i'm really excited.  I almost skipped the rest of the form and entered -0- in the Tax line.  Good thing i didn't, because the EIC is apparently the one place on the 1040 form where negative numbers don't round up to zero.

That's great and all, but now i'm really confused.  Grad student stipends are low, but they're not that low.  Lots of people make less than my family.  Are they all paying negative taxes?  Apparently they are.  I wrote a quick chart to calculate tax burden for the various family types recognized by the EIC (single/married, 0/1/2/3+ kids). In this, i assume the family takes only standard deductions and the EIC, if applicable.  Here is what i found.  (All data are for 2011).

If there are three or more people in your household, you're making more than $30k before you start paying positive taxes.  That describes 30% of the population!  Medium to large families are making $45k-50k before the credit runs out, a statistic which describes most such families.

Growing up, i always thought the goal of taxation was to raise enough money to run the government without causing undue hardship to any one citizen.  It seems Uncle Sam has taken a more pro-active approach.  The above graph makes a little more sense if converted into units of poverty threshold for each family type.  According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the household poverty threshold in 2011 was ($7070 + $3820/person)/year.

If you exclude childless households (who perhaps are less affected by shortages of food and shelter?), positive taxation cuts in at incomes of 1.5-1.9 times the poverty line.  We shouldn't tax people who are truly living in poverty, but i'm a bit puzzled that the IRS thinks one third of the wealthiest nation on earth is too poor to support their own government.  As someone living near that zero-taxes line i'm doing okay.  I can imagine how an illness in the family or some other catastrophe could put a family like mine over the edge.  But even so, i would think positive taxation should cut in at 1.0 times the poverty line.  Doesn't 'poverty line' mean 'barely able to afford the essentials'?  Once you have the essentials covered, shouldn't you be contributing something to the common good?

As weird as negative taxation is, it doesn't bother me too much at a gut level.  What did bother me was the change in my tax bill check when i declared a small amount of extra tutoring income.  Take a look at the $20k-$50k income range in the first graph.  Once a family starts making enough to support itself, the EIC starts to phase out at a rate of 16% (1 kid) or 21% (>1 kid).  This happens after incomes have reached the 10% or 15% tax bracket.  So even though their average tax rate is fairly low, about 30% of American families with kids have a marginal  tax rate above 30% due to this weird quirk of a disappearing gift.  I understand why the EIC should ramp up at low incomes; we want to encourage earning your own money.  If i can go by the income distribution chart on Wikipedia, only 15% of Americans experience the ramp up, while twice as many experience this bizarre ramp down.  Creating an artificial incentive for the lower middle class to under-report their income seems like a bad idea.  Policing that income bracket must be a nightmare for the IRS; high infraction rate combined with small gains per infraction caught must lead to lots of thankless poring over trivial 1040s.

Maybe i'm missing the point here.  The federal minimum wage in 2011 was $7.25/hr.  A full-time minimum-wage job (40 hrs/wk, 50 wks/yr) would pay $14,500/yr.  At that wage, the EIC is maxed out for everyone except the childless, who are already losing it.  So the part of this law that makes sense is aimed at people who only have a part-time job.  But you can't survive on a single part-time job and you certainly can't raise a family on one.  So the target audience of the EIC is on welfare?  Apparently there are 4.3 million people on welfare in this country and you can make up to $12,000/yr and still receive benefits.  Since welfare pays substantially more than minimum wage in most states, perhaps the EIC is needed to encourage welfare recipients with children to at least get a part-time job?  Again, this seems like a weird incentive structure to me.  If someone can't hold down a full-time job, they should be on disability.  If they can, then they don't need welfare beyond the safety net of unemployment insurance.  As is, we're encouraging companies to offer part-time jobs at low wages in the knowledge that the government will chip in an extra 35-45%.  This leaves otherwise full-time workers in a stable part-time limbo where adding hours results in a pay cut.

Am i missing something here?  Selfishly, raising a family in grad school is difficult and i'm glad to have the money, but this policy seems really strange to me.  What is it trying to accomplish?

Intercessors, Crusaders and Time-of-Flight

This is a random bit of ad hoc theology that came out of a prayer session several years ago.  It was helpful at the time.  Maybe it will be helpful to someone else...

Christ's followers are called to pray in all things.  Usually, prayer requests are immediate and personal.  Help me get through this test, heal my injury, watch over my family, convince my roommate you're real.  Perhaps to balance this tendency, God sometimes calls people to 'intercede' for communities.  If you get asked to join a prayer meeting for a country, school, denomination, etc, you are talking to an intercessor.  As someone who is much more comfortable praying for immediate needs (and preferably face-to-face), i have always thought of intercessors as God's artillery division.  They get a sudden call to pray for some group and they'll dedicate weeks or months to it, single-mindedly pouring prayer onto a recipient they may have never met.  And then all of a sudden the call stops.  If they've organized prayer groups those might continue for a couple weeks, but they tend to peter out pretty quickly, as far as i can tell because the Spirit is suddenly not in it anymore.

I understand waking up in the middle of the night with a sudden urge to pray for a person who is in dire straights.  And i understand prophesying over communities and then immediately praying about that.  But these calls aren't preceded by community-wide difficulty, they go on for a long time and often end without noticeable effect.  I'm pretty sure this is a frequent source of frustration to intercessors.  I've talked to people who are ready to give up on prayer because "I prayed and prayed for [noun] and nothing happened and i'm too tired to pray anymore.  I was so sure God was calling me to pray."  Its all very well to say "Don't give up" but why should they continue if they're tired and all they've done has accomplished nothing?

Here are some things we know about prayer:
1) "The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective." (James 5:16)
2) "The joy of the Lord is your strength." (Nehemiah 8:10, as the people cry out for their wayward nation)
3) "I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing." (John 5:19)
4) "I urge then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people - for kings and all those in authority." (1 Timothy 2:1-2)

It appears that broad-scale intercession is commanded in the Bible, it is expected to be effective, we should expect to receive calls to intercession and it is supposed to be joyful.  So what gives?

When i was a teenager and paid attention to such things, the U.S. Army had a concept artillery unit called the XM2001 Crusader.  It caught my imagination as a budding physicist for two reasons.  First, it had massive gyroscopic stabilizers.  Its body was so forcefully aligned upward that it could fire its 155 mm cannon at targets 40 km away (over the horizon) without taking time to deploy outriggers.  Instead of several minutes for existing artillery, it would take 45 seconds to stop, orient and fire.  The second feature that blew my mind was the Multiple Round Single Impact (MRSI or 'mercy') ability.  By starting at high trajectory and firing quickly, the Crusader could fire up to eight shells in such a pattern that they impacted the target simultaneously.  The first round would be in the air for nearly three minutes; the last just shy of a minute.  The Crusader could move 15 seconds after firing (no outriggers to pack up), so by the time the enemy realized they'd been hit, the fire cite would be vacant.

Almost uniquely among weapons, you don't fire artillery while looking at the target.  In the old days, a siege engineer would receive fire orders and align the gun and then your job was to put ammunition in the air as fast as possible.  Now the engineer is mostly replaced by a computer, but the same principle applies.  You have to trust that your commander knows what he's doing, that he sent you to a place where the enemy aren't and gave you coordinates for a place where they are.  You don't follow your shells to see where they land; by the time they do, you should already be doing something else.

We know from experience that spiritual warfare is bi-directional.  Prayer upsets Satan and often provokes a counterattack.  Intercessors are often so focused on the horizon that they're ill-prepared to pray for themselves.  I've actually seen global ministries take the precaution of having people with a healing anointing regularly check in on their intercessors.  Given that, i think there's a lot of be learned from the Crusader model.

First, intercession should be aligned upward.  Rather than trying to maintain focus on big prayers by hugging the ground and using the weight of your own piety for support, stability should come by remembering Who you're praying to.  Even a gyroscope takes time to spin up.  Before praying, take some time to align, but don't bother to dig in.

Second, fire orders are at the discretion of your Commander.  Most intercessors are good at starting on command, not so good at stopping.  They want to pray their way to victory, pummeling the target until salvation occurs.  But prayers are powerless outside of God's will.  When the call to pray stops, its time to either switch targets or scoot.  If this call has displaced some of your personal prayer time and small group activity, its probably time to run back to the safety of the Church.  Hopefully by the time your prayers take effect you'll be in a completely different mental place and less susceptible to retaliation.

Finally, don't worry so much about the outcomes of your prayers.  Your prayers are powerful and effective and the Laws of Heaven are as immutable as the laws of physics.  If they don't come back down immediately, that just means they'll be back later going quite fast.  A scattered battalion of Crusaders might all fire in different sequences at different times to drop hundreds of shells simultaneously onto an enemy stronghold just as the ground forces arrive.  This is made possible because Command&Control now has real-time knowledge similar to our Commander's.  You have no idea who else is being called to pray and who is being readied to move in when all those prayers come back to Earth.

The SAT Is Unfair, And Why We Should Keep It

This is a record of my thoughts after helping a friend entering the SAT-prep business.  While there are all sorts of tricks, ultimately students get better at taking the SAT by taking SATs.  Typically when i was doing this free-lance, i would have an initial meeting to check the student's overall preparedness and send them home with a practice SAT and instructions to take it under test conditions.  They would send it back to me and i would grade it and make comments.  Then we'd spend the next two weekly sessions going over their answers.  At the end of Session 3, i'd send them home with another test.  Repeat for three to six tests.  For a typical, committed student getting a 500 on each section at the beginning, i can raise their score to a 650-700 on math over the course of ten 90-minute sessions.  Maybe i'm overqualified as a math tutor, but my wife can achieve similar results on reading and writing in ten two-hour sessions.  In my eyes, she's very, very good at reading, writing and teaching, but her credentials are as an engineer-turned-mother.

On the face of it, the existence of private tutors says bad things about the SAT.  The SAT is supposed to test your preparedness in math, writing and reading.  However, if your parents can afford 30-50 hours of some professional's time, you can increase your score by 450-600 points in one academic quarter.  That's not just new learning in math, reading and writing; that's learning the SAT.  For reference, 600 points takes you from Ohio State (inner-quartile range 1185-2096) to Harvard (2100-2380).  The rest of your application would come into play, but if the SAT can be swayed so much by spending money, isn't it a bit of a charade?

It was this thinking that made me seriously consider not taking SAT-prep students, even though they're a very reliable source of income.  After some reflection, i think there's a lot of hubris in the above argument.  To get that 150 point improvement, the student has to really engage with the learning process. They have to take multiple four-hour tests on their own time and carefully follow my instructions to take the tests in a way that may feel very uncomfortable.  I haven't done a controlled study, but i'll bet students would gain 80-100 points per section just by taking five tests over ten weeks and going over the answers themselves.  My involvement might make this more palatable and effective, but the student's willingness to work is at least as important as the money spent on their effort.

I can't speak about the English sections, but the math section of the SAT is a pretty good summary of the math you ought to know before going to college.  I find practice tests very helpful to diagnose gaps in a student's learning and re-teach as needed.  Speaking as a future professor, i want to assume complete SAT math proficiency on day one of my class.  (Actually, i want to assume more than that, but i'll settle.)  Making students go through a remedial diagnostic with a dedicated tutor before college is a good thing.  It saves having to do it as a remedial college course that will permanently delay the student's academic track.

Having a standardized measure of proficiency is helpful to admission departments.  High school GPAs are almost meaningless unless the department happens to know the school.  Since anything that affects college admissions is treated as high-stakes, of course parents will learn to game the system.  That's not a fault of the SAT, its a fault of the culture surrounding college admissions.  (That's a separate rantpost.)  I really like the SAT as a measure of potential success, but i want to abandon the idea that it is purely a measure of math, reading and writing.  It is also a measure of the student's willingness to work and the support structure they can rely on to help them through difficult and unpleasant tasks.  Yes, i want students to arrive in my classes with basic math proficiency.  But when my midterm turns out unexpectedly hard, i also want someone those students can run to who will tell them "Its okay, you're still smart.  Yes he's a mean professor.  Now go back to class."  And i want them to be willing to work.  If they can get through the class without working, they're in the wrong class.  In fact, i want Admissions to populate my classes with students who have all the qualities measured by the SAT, even if its not supposed to measure them.  So as game-able and maligned as it is, i vote we keep it.

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Of course, i'm opening myself up to a charge of elitism here.  My parents were very supportive of my education and a high SAT score got me into a very good school.  What about the kids who can't afford SAT-prep?  Since anyone likely to level such a charge is already offended, i might as well address it here.

What help do we want to provide?  The baseline in the field is Kaplan's 18-hour onsite classes, which will set you back $600.  Its a classroom setting so they can't tailor the instruction to you specifically, but they provide proctoring for exams and their lecture series hits all the fundamentals.  Not a bad deal; they almost always see modest point improvement.  The next level up is local firms who tailor classes to the school system and provide more advanced study strategies.  The company down the street from us is so good they have actually driven the local Kaplan out of business even though they are charging $1000.  Beyond that, you can dump almost limitless money into private tutoring, but a typical bill is $2000-3000.

For college admission to be a useful opportunity, the admitted student must have a decent secondary education.  Sometimes this is provided by the local school district, sometimes not; and there are many wonderful organizations out there trying to fill in the gaps.  Private tutoring is usually overkill if the student is highly motivated, so we're really looking to provide a $600-1000 service to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.  But that money is really buying 20-30 hours of somebody's time, usually at $30-40/hour.  If a disadvantaged student (is the PC term still 'under-served'?) has reached the point where SAT-prep is an issue, someone has already invested hundreds of hours in their education.  An extra 30 hours of volunteer time per student shouldn't be a big deal.  Besides, SAT-prep is a good exercise in its own right.  Before sending kids off to expensive colleges, we should make sure they have the fundamentals down pat.

(Aside: I'm really impressed with efforts i've seen locally to bring good education to communities who can't afford it.  If you are a volunteer who wants help doing SAT-prep, i'd love to talk about that.)

 Okay, i couldn't resist the separate rant: If you're going to push a kid into college, please don't abandon them at the door.  I don't care if you're a parent or an organization, if you provided the support for them to excel, get good grades, build up their resume, etc., i'm going to assume you're still around when its my turn to teach them.  I don't want to be a mean prof, but i have to assume they are as resourceful and resilient as they appear on their applications.  And part of their bank of resources is you.  That's not to encourage helicoptering, but moral support and life guidance is very important for the first couple years.  The SAT, indeed much of the admission process, is partly a measure of support structure.  You do everyone a disservice if your child gets into a good school with your support and then fails out without it.

Taking Care With Creation

Although it is not of direct practical significance, every culture seems to invest significant time deciding for itself where everything came from.  Usually this goes some way toward explaining how things are organized now.  Indeed, it has been claimed that your entire world-view can be derived from your creation myth.  That seems a bit of a stretch to me, but it is prevalent in our culture and has fueled (or at least been used to justify) a particularly divisive culture war.

There are at present two popular stories floating around our culture about how the world and its inhabitants came to be.  The first, largely extracted from the first two chapters of Genesis, is that one day the Creator said "Let there be light" and there was Light, and also Darkness.  In the subsequent five 24-hour periods, He created Sky and Sea; separated Land from Sea and created plants; made Sun, Moon and stars (emphatically lower case); populated the sky and sea with birds and fish; and populated the land with animals.  At the end of the sixth day He scooped up some dust, breathed His own breath into it and made Adam (lit. 'the Man').  He placed Adam in a garden paradise and gave him dominion over all the animals He had created.  Having established holy community and free will, on the seventh day God rested.  (Spoiler alert: Mayhem ensues.)

This version of events is commonly referred to as the 'Genesis' or 'Christian' version for obvious reasons.  It is contrasted to the 'Scientific' or 'Secular' version, which goes something like this:

In the Beginning there was nothing.  And then there was something.  The Big Bang brought time and space into being along with enough energy to make a Universe, but it was completely without form.  Not just chaotic, but Entropy = Zero.  However, the early Universe was quite hot and thermodynamics set in rather quickly.  It took a few millennia to get the fundamental forces sorted out and dispose of some extra anti-matter, but then most of the energy settled out into a large number of protons and electrons bouncing about in a truly enormous pressurized bath of photons.  ("Let there be light" indeed)  At some point, the photon bath cooled enough to let the protons and electrons combine into neutral hydrogen.  Within a couple minutes, the once-charged Universe suddenly became transparent.  The photon bath depressurized and became what we now observe as the Cosmic Microwave Background.  At this point gravity took over, gently intensifying slight over-densities of hydrogen into structures of all sizes: super-clusters, galaxies, stars, but not planets because you can't make a very interesting planet with just hydrogen.  As stars collapsed, gravity eventually tested the 'point-like' nature of atoms to extreme limits and ignited nuclear fusion.  By turning hydrogen to helium, stars can hold gravity at bay for billions of years.  But the Universe is very old.  Eventually the hydrogen supply gave out.  For a while, the dying stars burned helium to make heavier elements, but that process is much hotter and goes much faster.  In their death throes, stars collapsed inward until atomic nuclei were pressed into a solid mass.  The spring force from the rebounding gluons blew the stars apart, scattering heavy elements throughout the galaxy.  When the second generation of stars formed they were orbited by little balls of rock called planets.  On the surface of a planet named Earth, long carbon chains formed shells around tiny droplets of a polarized atom called water.  Because carbon has so many bonding sites, carbon-based molecules can make and break bonds with water with relatively little energy, making these droplets especially chemically active.  In time, these bubbles grew in complexity and formed rudimentary cells.  Once the cells started reproducing, the oceans quickly (in geological terms) became populated by those cells that reproduced and sustained themselves best.  Eventually, interactions between cells created communities that started to function like an organism.  These survived because they were more robust than single cells, although complexity comes at a price.  Once whole organisms could reproduce they continued the natural selection process, filling the Earth with every form of life that could be sustained.  The history of organisms in this planet is a long and winding one, but about 65 million years ago, an asteroid impact wiped out most of the large species and opened new niches for the small, furry animals called mammals.  A few million years ago, natural selection favored a group of mammals with opposeable thumbs, upright stance and large brains. Descendents of these first hominids became, among other things, the species Homo sapiens which has the rather unusual ability to ask questions like "Where did i come from?"

It is unlikely that anyone reading this is unaware of the battle between fervent defenders of these two creation stories.  Any scientist who is also Christian has to think carefully about this because he will have to defend his conclusion to one camp or the other.  After much debate from both sides, i have concluded the following:


1) Genesis is primarily a book about the origin of the Jewish people.  Probably first committed to text during the Babylonian exile, its opening chapters take much of the form of the Babylonian creation myth while turning the content on its head.  The Babylonian version has the Earth created by the god Marduk from the body of his grandmother Tiamat after defeating her army of monsters in battle.  Most of the text is devoted to the battle and subsequent creation of astronomical bodies as homes for various gods.  Regrettably, the Earth was not maintenance-free, so the gods created men to do the tasks none of them wanted to do.  Thus the purpose of man is toil and it is important to bring your sacrifices and taxes to the temple of Marduk situated for your convenience in downtown Babylon.

In a time when the best and brightest of Israel were being selectively re-educated by the conquering Gentiles, the writer of Genesis had to set the record straight before getting to the real business of introducing Abraham and family.  The Pentateuch is very clear that labor is a gift.  Toil is a result of the Fall and much of the promise of the Promised Land revolved around labor becoming a community-building experience and not being toil.  Since the Babylonian creation myth is highly stylized, we should expect Genesis 1-2 to be similarly poetic.  In fact, the Biblical creation story isn't much longer than my extreme summary of the secular account.  If the purpose of Genesis 1 was to provide a mechanistic account with any detail, we should expect it to be longer.


2) There is an overwhelming library of precise technical evidence to support the events reported in the 'Scientific' version, but absolutely no discussion of intent or agency.  To say the Scientific version proves that the universe has no intent or agency is extremely poor logic.  In fact, the Scientific version is much more elegant than the Genesis version from a technical perspective.  Rather than a proliferation of rules established ad hoc to make everything run properly, it has a handful of rules and mechanisms that automatically populate the various structures required.  The Maker who orchestrated such a 14-billion-year project deserves even more praise than one who slapped everything together in six days.

When this debate comes up in lab, which happens periodically, i like to hold up a sample mount sitting on my desk and ask how it came to be.  The correct 'technical' answer would be something like

A 3/16" copper plate was cut with a band saw to slightly larger than  6" x 3 1/2".  Two edges were made parallel using a vise carefully squared by running an edge-finder down its inner face and a 1/2" end-mill spinning at 4000 rpm.  The parallel edges were then set in the vise and the end-mill used to square the other two edges so that the final plate was 6.000" x 3.500" with 1 mil tolerance.  A #30 drill bit was then used to make 4-40 clearance holes centered 0.250" x 0.250" from the corners.  A #43 drill bit made pilot holes at the other positions indicated in the drawing which were finished with a 4-40 tap and light counter-sink.  The edges were then de-burred by hand with a 150/inch file and the plate washed in isopropyl alcohol to remove the machine oil.

The answer i almost always get is "You drew up what you wanted and [machinist] made it for you."  Both answers are correct, but they convey different information.  If i wanted to tell a non-techie how good our machinists are, i wouldn't go into tolerances and cutting techniques.  I would just make a pile of all the complicated things they've made for me and let the work speak for itself.  Similarly, if i wanted to teach the next generation of civil servants about the greatness of the Creator God, i wouldn't start by teaching them astrophysics.  I would enumerate the observable things that God has made and assert that they all reflect His glory.  If i could do it in a repeating poetic framework so they didn't forget large sections of Creation, even better.


3) There is a God who is active in modern times and who claims in no uncertain terms to be the Creator and the God of the Bible.  He is quite well known by many people and, frankly, the Scientific version of events sounds more like His MO.  For example, consider the problem of sin.  Adam and Eve are exiled from the Garden on page 3 of my Bible.  After messing about with various societal structures and lots of water as ways to address the brokenness of mankind, God makes a covenant with a man named Abram.  He promises Abra(ha)m that he will be the father of many nations and that through him all nations will be blessed. (Gen. 18:18)  That happens on page 13.  Abraham's family is then relocated, enslaved, multiplied, rescued and returned to the Promised Land.  They rebel, are rebuked and saved (repeatedly), demand a kingdom, try to rule without God (repeatedly), fall into politics for 200+ years, lose their kingdom(s), are captured, exiled, redeemed, re-instituted and conquered again.  878 pages and three millennia later, we get to "An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham." (Matt 1:1)  God's approach to making the Church is recorded in the entire Old Testament.  Do we really believe He made the Universe by fiat in six days?

Modern instances of divine creation fall broadly into two categories (based on my observations in healing ministries; i have no training in theology).  Either a created thing is broken and needs restoration or the Kingdom is advancing into new territory and there is an original creation.  Restorative miracles can happen very quickly.  People walk away from prayer sessions pushing their wheelchairs.  But whenever someone says "the Lord gave me a new [job, ministry, family, etc]" they can almost always point to a long list of things that didn't make sense at the time to see how this thing was woven together over a period of time.  Original creations generally take place in the framework of normal causality.  God doesn't seem to be phased by long-term processes; He just starts them earlier so the thing He wants to happen happens when He wants.  So i tend to believe the story about an Original Creation that brought causality into being and proceeded at its own pace according to the rules set forth at the Beginning.


4) If this blog had any readers, someone would say "Don't you believe the Bible is the Word of God?"  Yes, i do.  I also observe that God frequently speaks to us through song.  Hence, i feel no need to physically locate the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23:4).  Powerful imagery, not a real place.  Now, the Psalms are explicitly a hymnbook, but the Bible is littered with songs interspersed into otherwise historical accounts.  A quick search on biblegateway turns up Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32, Judges 5, 2 Samuel 22 and Hosea 2.  Isaiah seems to spend half his time giving detailed warnings, naming cities and times, and the other half singing prophesies that are useless as historical predictions but carry timeless truths.  Guess which half gets quoted more.  Is it unreasonable to believe that this list includes Genesis 1?  Again, the Creation of the Universe is not the central story of the Bible, so it doesn't get much press time.  For a one page summary, it says more powerfully than any technical account that the Earth and the Heavens belong to the Lord, who is still resting (read: located) at the seventh day, the completion or head of Creation.  Compared to that knowledge, the technical details just don't matter.