Bottom up vs Top Down

In the comments, Tom R maintains that the "Catholic view" of the Reformation (as though there is a single one) is that Luther meant well, but going about reform from the bottom up had disastrous consequences, and that doing everything under the authority of the pope goes so much better. This, of course, is aside from the fact that the Council of Trent dogmatized rather than correct any of the abuses enumerated in the Augsburg Confession, so from our standpoint, papally dominated reform was a complete failure.

But what I mean to address is the fallacy of the Catholic "top down" vs the Lutheran "bottom up" reform. When Catholic apologists launch their Internet salvos, they tend to ignore the political situation of the 16th century. The fact is, regardless of where you were in the 16th century or what the program of reform actually was, that reform was enacted by the state. Period. End. The organizational question in the 16th century was not about liberty of conscience vs obedience to hierarchy. If that had been the question, then Luther's movement would have met the same fate many before had met--either eradication or redefinition and quarantine.

Luther's movement was unique in that it was probably the most significant counter-papal theological movement to have massive state backing. Thus the organizational question was not so much about conscience vs authority as it was about what happens when the head of state, the traditional medieval enforcer of Christian religion, no longer considers the pope to be the head of the Christian religion in his territory. Real ideas of freedom of religion couldn't really take shape until the American colonies allowed for the institution of a new kind of society. As I've said many times before, the fragmentation of Christianity isn't the result of the Reformation. It's the result of the state granting religious freedom instead of choosing a religion to enforce.

The Detectability Sphere

A professor of mine mentioned something I hadn't even thought of: Earth's "detectability sphere." It's really quite simple--just take the way we detect stars and planets, and reverse it. Suppose there were some highly advanced alien civilization out there, scanning the stars for life, just as we do. Well, how would they detect intelligent life? If the universe works at all the way we think it does, they're looking at electromagnetic radiation, which includes everything from radio signals to gamma rays. The problem is that if they exist, they're so far away that they wouldn't be able to see cities and farms on Earth through their telescopes. The only really detectable thing Earth emits that shows signs of intelligent life is radio waves--so Earth really only became detectable in the early 20th century. So even if they are out there somewhere, if they're more than ~100 light years away, they have no way of knowing that we exist.

People, anonymous comments aren't allowed. Sometimes one slips through, but as a policy, I don't even read them. I just delete them.

Dear God,

I hate this weather. How many days without rain have we had since November? Maybe six?

Josh

More People Read My Blog Than Listen to Issues, Etc

I have tried to reduce the amount of swearing on my blog, but that is a giant load of horseshit. Article here. Now click the little planet link on the side of my blog. I generally get between 150 and 200 visitors per day. According to the LCMS Minister of Information, Issues, Etc gets less than half that. Thus, given the outcry about Issues, Etc being taken off the airwaves, were my blog to shut down, the entire LCMS would burst into flames.

You read it here first. The health of the LCMS depends on the Fearsome Pirate riding the waves. Y'all had no idea.

Better Late Than Never

So phase two of Ab14z3!!11!!ones!! is now complete. If you're not an LCMSer, the purpose of Ab14z3!11!!LOLZ!! is to get the Gospel out there and reach unreached people. That is why, of course, phase one was to reduce the number of missionaries on the field, and phase two was to cancel a popular radio program on which the Gospel was preached week after week. I suspect phase three will be to board up all our churches.

Trinity

And since the subject came up in the comments, I thought I should mention that I'll be teaching on the Trinity in Sunday School on Sunday. Since we talked about baptism last Sunday, this Sunday is the perfect time to talk about the Trinity. One of my pet biblical theories since coming out of seminary is that NT theology is thoroughly baptismal. The doctrine of the Trinity, of course, is the baptismal doctrine, as seen in Matthew. Without baptism, the Trinity becomes an ideology rather than an identity. Rejecting or accepting the Trinity becomes a matter of to what degree one understands and appropriates a theory. Having a God is understood as subscribing to a certain theory about a deity, thinking about divinity in the right way. But as a baptismal doctrine--which is how Matthew presents it to us--confessing the Trinity and being baptized into Christ, being part of this New Covenant people, become the same thing, as much as having YHWH as your God and being a circumcised member of Israel were the same thing. The confession and the sacrament are inseparable; having God as your God and being sacramentally defined as a member of his people are identical. That's why so much is at stake with the doctrine of the Trinity and why the fights against Arianism were so incredibly bitter; lose the Trinity, and you lose the whole Christian faith.

Holidays

After my big, boring, TLDR post, I should say something more interesting. As I've become more Lutheran over the last few years, I've noticed my appreciation for holidays has completely changed from "times to have fun with friends and family" to "high points of the liturgical year." It's not that time of year, but whenever I hear someone raving, "Put the Christ back in Christmas!" I want to yell back at him, "Put the Mass back in Christmas!" Anyway, part of this is that I no longer resent not having days off work or school for holidays, as long as I have time to go to the service. I don't really care so much about gift-giving on Christmas; celebrating the Eucharist with the church is so much more important than who gave whom what. More and more every year, I feel like the holiday season being celebrated at JC Penny's is a parallel, but completely different season from the one we call "Advent." So when any mention of "Christmas" is banished from the public square, I don't really get offended. I think, "At least you're being honest." Really, should people who don't celebrate the Mass say they're celebrating Christ-Mass?

Race

I had a pretty funny conversations with Dr Ali about the difficulty he has in knowing what box to check for his race. He said his children are going to have a really tough time. He's Egyptian. I'll bet his kids won't be eligible for any African-American scholarships.

Some Initial Responses to Steve

So Steve at SCP has noticed my site, left some comments, and even blogged it himself. I thought, given the length of some of my more recent comments here, that I should collect some ideas and express them rather than get caught up in the back-and-forth banter of comment threads. Unfortunately, setting forth the substance of one's claims requires some sort of tedious prolegomena, so that's really all I have time for today. And before you read further, I would like you to accept that I speak a certain way I am thinking because that's how I actually think. My internal monologue really does sound very much like the following text. I'm not really that haughty; I'm just that dorky.

First of all, Steve, if you still believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus, or even just think you might, I won't say your faith is dead. I may have erred, perhaps conflated you with some of your commenters or things you've linked, so if that's the case, I'll let things lie.

Moving on, there seems to be some underlying belief that groups are intrinsically inauthentic and destructive to the nature of a person. Concomitant with this is the belief that if one holds to something with any outside influence whatsoever, the belief is inauthentic and therefore unjustifiable. You haven't said things in precisely those terms, but thus far, everything you have said has been saturated with a very American "rugged individualism" combined with a sort of existentialism that, were I more philosophically trained, I would probably be able to identify with some significant 20th century authors.

The problem is that you can never escape the group, the social context, and the external norms. You as a being are situated in a time and place, or you wouldn't even exist at all. The context of your existence shapes it, and without context, you simply don't exist. If religion is inauthentic because it is inescapably tied to and shaped by social structures and conventions, then existence itself is inauthentic. Allow me to give a few examples:

1. You probably believe that Earth orbits the sun. But do you believe this because heliocentrism is such a basic part of the fabric of our society, education, and technology, or because you personally have charted the motion of the planets and stars and carefully reasoned out that the best mathematical explanation for the perceived wandering of the planets is elliptical orbits around the sun rather than epicycles around Earth? I suspect it is because of the former, and I suspect you have never challenged this belief, nor have you ever completely removed yourself from Western, scientifically informed community so that you could draw the conclusions on your own without external interference.

2. You quite obviously think that people have the right to free speech and thought simply by virtue of being people, and that punishing someone simply because he has expressed an idea is a great evil--you've expressed this in your thoughts on churches basically not allowing certain questions to be asked by their clergy. But you think that because you're an American in the 21st century, because certain ideas of the Anglicized version of the Enlightenment permeate our existence and, at the very least, have shaped and defined our political and ethical realities almost irreversibly. You don't find those ideas in ancient or medieval societies, so it's pretty obvious that it's not the sort of thing that a person just naturally thinks independently. Your social, geographical, and historical context have shaped you into the sort of person that thinks liberty of thought is an intrinsic good, and you can't escape that context to genuinely tell me that you came to this opinion entirely on your own without the governing influence of the social norms that cause us to villify rather than reason with people who want to regulate our speech and thoughts.

Even in your new journey, you say you've put your roots into nothing, but have you really? You appear to me to have chosen to listen to voices shaped by different communities and different societies than the one with which you were most recently associated. For example, do you think any scientist is a free thinker, the captain of his own soul? You don't get to be a scientist without to some extent buying into the group, without allowing yourself to be shaped by the norms and conventions. There are assumptions of what science is, how it works, how to think, how to write, how to communicate, and so on. The same goes for any field, from philosophy to art to mathematics. There are groups, there are norms, and they shape the way knowledge is pursued, expressed, and validated. It is inescapable, because by listening to the voices of other communities, you are allowing yourself to be shaped by the same forces that shaped those voices. What's even worse is that the burgeoning field of linguistics has shown that the very language we use to communicate--and nothing is more social than language--shapes the way we think! Now how do we pursue truth without learning a language first?

Thus, I don't think it's useful at all to say "The Lutheran church is a social group, Saddleback is a social group, therefore they are basically the same and suffer from the same problem of rendering people inauthentic," because you've basically defined human existence itself as the problem and thus made it impossible to find the authentic place where you can really be you and find The Truth without all that pesky pressure of social context.

An Old Preacher

We have this retired pastor at our congregation who's is I think 86 years old. He's been filling in the preaching duties fairly regularly in the absence of a full-time pastor. Pr Meyer has become easily one of my all-time favorite preachers. He's pretty slow, and his voice is pretty shaky, but he somehow manages to say things right about 99% of the time. One thing I've noticed is that he hits the general resurrection pretty hard. A lot of preachers preach heaven, or just justification in the abstract, but Pr Meyer preaches the resurrection. Thus, this fairly ordinary pastor (you'll not find his name in any LCMS Who's Who list from any decade) does more justice to the Gospel than even a few seminary profs. His Maundy Thursday sermon was excellent as well. He reminded us that neglecting the Sacrament is also neglecting the Church as a community, again not a theme you hear much from preachers who focus entirely on the personal consolation of the forgiveness of sins. The thing I appreciate most of him is his sincerity. It's hard to express, but I think a lot of preachers say things because they're supposed to, because that's what they've been taught, that's what the book says, or whatever. It's not that they're insincere or dishonest, but what they say doesn't always have such strength of convictions. When Pr Meyer preaches, you can tell he believes all these things at a core level that goes much, much deeper than "I learned it at seminary" or "I read it in a book somewhere." The things he says move him as he says them, and that's something you can't learn in a book. More preachers should strive to be like him.

A Major Argument Against God

To me, the most plausible argument against the existence of God is this. No, that is not a parody site. And I'm serious. My moods when I am most tempted to disbelieve in God occur when I come across crushing stupidity in Christianity. I start thinking of Christians as "them" instead of "us."

I found the link at the site, Stupid Church People. It is the blog of two pastors who started off making fun of all the silly crap in evangelicalism, eventually despaired of the silliness, fakeness, and hypocrisy of evangelicalism, left the church environment entirely to find more authentic spirituality, and ended up renouncing the faith altogether. Read this post and realize that the very things this pastor is talking about eventually killed his faith. I find this stuff fascinating because in my opinion, evangelicalism is deadly. Yes, millions grow up in it just fine, learn to know Christ there, etc. But there are many who get caught in the eddies of everything wrong with it, and it is in those vortices that anything and everything that would incline them to pay attention to anything called "Christianity" is sucked right out of them.

I see Lutherans flirting with this stuff, and it scares me. Yes, the American Lutheranism has its problems, problems with discipleship, problems with missions, and problems with keeping the kids around when they grow up. But looking to evangelicalism, the church growth movement, and all that stuff for the answer is like trying to solve your emotional problems by doing drugs. It's not worth it. It doesn't have the answers. I'm not sure it has any answers. We don't want to create that same kind of culture in the LCMS for any reason.

On the Radio...

On the radio this morning, one of the talk show hosts spoke sneeringly of some other fellow for "having a fetish for unsafe sex." I about ran off the road. So wait, having sex without mechanical intervention is now a fetish? Doing it the way every living thing except Western man in the last few decades has done is now abnormal? That's how far off the rails we've gone. "Normal" and "healthy" sex is actively and continually suppressing fundamental parts of your nature as a sexual being. How much longer until we classify pregnancy as a disease?

The Point I Was Making

Some people really didn't understand the point of the last post, so I'll explain.

First of all, it's my non-expert opinion that climatologists by and large do not understand the mathematics of the system they wish to characterize. And, in my limited experience, when you move on the spectrum from "folks who look at glacers" to "folks who write and simulate the actual dynamics of climate," you move from the people shouting "IMMINENT CATASTROPHE" to much more non-committal type answers like "Yes, humanity affects the climate in some way, but, really, there's a lot we don't know." And, unsurprisingly, those additional "rogue voices" saying that climate change may be due more to some factor other than CO2 come almost exclusively from the dynamicists.

Now let's talk mathematics. From the time you first learn algebra in middle school to the very end of your college career, your whole math education is governed by the assumption of linearity. Unless you actually get a degree in math. It's sort of like how unless you're an actual physicist, your whole engineering approach to physics will probably be Newtonian. That's because just like how Newtonian physics works for 99% of the situations most engineers will ever encounter (the exception being people who design microchips), the linearity assumption works for 99% of the mathematics most people will ever encounter.

The assumption of linearity is, in layman's terms, the assumption that every mathematical function behaves in a smooth manner if you look at it on a small enough scale. It's the governing assumption of calculus and engineering differential equations. One way this shows up in the sciences is regression correlation, which looks for "best fit" curves correlating the different variables and treats everything not lying on the curve as unpredictable "noise." Allow me to illustrate with the previous data, edited by me. This is what a lot of scientists see:
Your typical scientist looks at the above system and sees this black line as the "predictable part" and the red wiggly stuff as the "noise." His goal is to come up with an adequate model that will predict the black trend line without having to really even deal with all that crazy noise. The current wisdom is to say that black line is governed mostly by human-produced CO2.

The purpose of my little random walk example was to illustrate how it is possible (quite easy, really) to construct a mathematical system in which the the "noise" itself is the cause of the observed trend--it has both predictable and unpredictable statistical properties (with a random walk, one can predict the average fluctuation and establish an approximate bound on the growth; one simply can't predict the average value of the walk itself or any kind of growth trend). That's the only thing you should take from it. As I said before, climate isn't random. However, the reason I chose a random walk as my illustrative example is that my average reader is probably not mathematically sophisticated enough to be able to understand the concept of a dynamical system with sensitive dependence on initial conditions and a multifractal system of attractors, which would have much more direct relevance on the mathematics of climate. But like our random walk, such a dynamical system has some unpredictable stochastic properties governed by the small fluctuations themselves that will always defy our attempts to predict them due to the fundamental mathematics governing the system, not due to the inadequacy of our understanding of said mathematics.

Contrary to the beliefs of many, scientists and mathematicians don't do a lot of talking. There's lots and lots and lots of bad mathematics out there in even the best science journals. I partly blame mathematicians for being too aloof to concern themselves with trivial things like the "physical world," and partly blame scientists for (mostly) thinking that they don't really need to know any more more math than some statistics and ODEs. But with my background, and knowing what I do about the dynamics of the PDEs governing the climate, I look at data like the above and don't see a black trend line separate from the red noise. I say to myself, "Hey, I've seen similar dynamical systems do this sort of behavior before, and it definitely wasn't the sort of thing climatologists say that this behavior is."

Does it mean I'm right and they're wrong? No, of course not. I'm not even a full naysayer; I'm simply on the end of the spectrum responding to the doomsayers, "I don't think you can conclude as much as you wish to conclude," and the goal of my random walk experiment was to give the rest of you some idea of why using ideas you're familiar with instead of writing a 17-post series on chaos, fractals, and strange attractors.

Math, Science, Climate

As I mentioned before, the average global temperature is cooler than it's been in a long, long time. Furthermore, last year's drop is the biggest drop we've seen of any kind since we started measuring data. Now I'm not going to talk about climatology specifics; I'm not a climatologist. I'm a mathematician by original training, and it seems to me that scientists often balk at mathematics. The "softer" the science, the fuzzier the math. From what I've learned at grad school so far, climatology is very much more toward the "soft" end where the biologists and geologists hang out as opposed to the "hard" end where physicists and (some) engineers live. Let's cut to the chase: here's the land-ocean January temperature since 1900.


Now, I'm not just a "generic" mathematician, I'm a numerical analyst. I've seen this sort of characteristic data before. Now, I know a think or two about computer-type numbers, so I thought, "I bet I could generate a similar-looking set of data with a super secret math algorithm." Here are my results (please excuse highly compressed .png fuzziness).

Great Scott! There it hums along down near negative one, but there is an unmistakable upward trend at the end, just like our doomed climate! I ran my detailed, scientific simulation further, and here's what I observed:
After another 80 years of hot temperatures, our boiling climate is going to experience another ice age! We're double-doomed! Sure, there are fluctuations, but the downward trend is unmistakable. Having accurately and scientifically simulated every possible factor that could influence our climate, my results should not be questioned. Temperatures are going to get hot, but eventually, they're going to get so cold that they'll kill us all.

By now, you've probably guessed that I didn't really write a detailed climate situation. What I wrote is called a random walk. Basically, I take random steps that vary between -0.5 and 0.5. The magnitude and direction of the fluctuation is completely, totally random, with an average fluctuation close to zero, yet the it still produces trends. See, while my random numbers average to very close to zero, they don't sum to zero. They just need to sum to something proportionally much less than 140 for the average to work out.

What's the moral of the story? Well, climate isn't a random walk. There's a lot more going behind the mathematics of climate (technically, it is a chaotic dynamical system), yet it produces things that look pretty random, like the global climate from year to year, how much rain Indiana gets in the summer, or the intensity of hurricane season. That means you shouldn't make too many big, bold declarations and breathless predictions based on a trendline or two, just like with our random walk.

Haha (Click the Picture)

Congregationalism

When it comes to church government, I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only Lutheran who really does not think God has endorsed a specific polity. I mean, I'm mostly okay with our quasi-congregational ideals of polity, but when someone starts talking about the voters' assembly as God's appointed way of doing this or that, or explaining how the Holy Spirit is expressing his thoughts through what is most obviously a bureaucratic construct invented in the last century or so, I get the heebie-jeebies. Folks, that just plain isn't in Scripture. No, breathlessly repeating the slogan, "God works through means," does not demonstrate that God has particularly sanctified our way of doing things. I don't see voters' meetings even mentioned in the Bible, let alone commanded by Christ. I definitely don't see anywhere that the validity of the Office is established by a letter signed by the congregational president on behalf of the Holy Sacrament of the Voters' Assembly.

I don't see why we can't just do things. We can't just do stuff and say, "Well, that's the way we do it." No, see, we're religious people, so we have go bananas over-spiritualizing everything. Whatever we do, that's the way God wants it done. Our way of doing things isn't just our way, it's God's way. It's divine. It's holy. We can't just do it. We have to be really, really, really annoying about it, too, or we wouldn't be as Christian.

College in Central America

So I was poking around the websites of some Central American colleges today. Not terribly surprisingly, they tend not to have large faculties for degree programs that do little but prepare students to go to graduate school and then get a job on a university faculty somewhere. There are lots of programs in things like business administration, architecture, education, medicine, law, government, and engineering, though. This hearkens back to earlier discussions we've had around these parts about the economics of education. While certain people believe that large sums should be doled from the public coffers to them so that they can simply enrich their minds, and that anything less is based on capitalist greed, this would suggest otherwise. My basic thought is that this model of "education for personal enrichment" is based on higher education being for the wealthy, and these Latin American colleges seem to validate that. When there's not much money to go around, degrees that prepare you for little more than graduate school aren't in high demand.

Some Environmental Thoughts

No one seems particularly interested in the fact that we experienced the largest single-year global cooling on record last year. Of course, if you're revised your gloom-and-doom label from "global warming" to "global climate change," you can still fit this into the paradigm of "Toyota is going to kill us all with their damn dirty Tundras." Now of course, over the next ten years, we could experience enough average warming to bring us back to the brink the Day After Tomorrow nightmare world we'd been always just on the brink of experiencing, but we don't really know.

From my own perspective, I have two governing thoughts:

1. The climate has always been in a state of flux. A static view of the world--even of its general statistical properties--is simply wrong.

2. Humans are part of nature, not external to it, and the elements of an ecosystem are always changing it. "Man" is not the antithesis to "nature."

That doesn't mean we can't change things in a way that's really, really harmful. Mercury in the rivers and cadmium in the soil are really, really bad things. I would suggest that we should leave the mountains where they are, too. Hunting animals to extinction just because we can is probably unnecessary. However, one of the facts of our world is that humans build cities and farms, and they burn things to get energy (combustion just isn't going away, folks). Sure, we can build and burn smarter, but we're not going to somehow do it so brilliantly that the world is going to to turn into a static system, or that its continual change will somehow have nothing to do with us. We are facts of nature just as much as volcanoes, hurricanes, and predator migration are.

So I guess all I really want to say is that I see no moral imperative to eliminate man's effect upon the environment, because it's simply impossible. I do think we should be smart about how we do things, but that doesn't mean frenetically searching for the world's "pause" button.