The Religion of Transformers: Age of Extinction

Transformers IV finally came out on Redbox and I immediately rented it to watch at home. Well worth the wait. I enjoy action movies, for several distinct reasons.

1. They're creatively stimulating. Intricate CGI gives an active mind much to fantasize about.
2. You'll therefore get something out of it even if the plot or dialogue is terrible.
3. Because of the emphasis on aliens, robots, war etc, there's less unnecessary sexual content.
4. Because of dealing with very big themes and archetypes, the sparse dialogue is more significant. It can therefore be amazing (Jurassic Park, Dark Knight), or far off the mark.

In this case, with my senses highly attuned to detecting religious themes, I found several seemingly innocuous scenes which could, depending on a particular person's political/religious passions, be enormously significant, either as a slight or as an affirmation.

These go all across the board. Allow me, briefly, to show you where and what they are, to hopefully dazzle you with content you might not have noticed when you watched it.

Possible Theme: Diversity and Multiculturalism v. Conformity and Tradition

This is not an evenly matched equation, I grant you. But yet this is what gets bandied about in higher academia. Diversity is the golden calf and golden goose egg both, for universities these days. There is an unquestioned assumption that geographic diversity among students means better things for society. This has replaced the archaic notion that diversity of thought improves education by increasing students' exposure to a variety of ideas through lively discourse, that the most persuasive arguments may carry the day.

And why is this set in opposition to "tradition?" Because it's held in these circles that people who are "opposed to diversity" are religious hardliners who are all about following outmoded rules and such.

This is a portion of the cultural message from the left that I've been exposed to via student organizations in my college experience. That's why it stood out to me, when this line of dialogue occurred:

"All this species mixing with species, it upsets the cosmic balance. The Creators, they don't like it. They built you to do what you were told."

This is put in the mouth of the archvillain of the movie, and in one fell swoop, it ties the ideas of racism in with obedience to one's Creator. Subliminal promotion of the belief that the Bible and Christianity are/promote racist ideologies? Or do you disagree?

Next up,

I've Been Here Before...Pivotal Moments in My Journey

This will serve as the hub and first entry for a new series, where anyone who wishes can follow along and encounter the major moments that impacted the way I think about reality, and what is true.

My Testimony: Era of Uncertainty

I took a philosophy class in 2009 and chose to do some independent reading in the book I had had to buy for it, covering two chapters that were not focused on in the course. These concerned Neuroscience and Determinism. Determinism is simply the view that everything that happens is directly attributable to the immediately preceding state of the universe, and so on and so on. Reality is a complex machine that runs on physical laws and that's it. Technically, that's materialistic determinism. Determinism that allows for a supernatural aspect to the universe would hold that spiritual beings control your destiny and so whereas it's not all mechanically produced, you nevertheless do not have much of a choice in how your future unfolds. And neuroscience, from an atheist perspective, is often presented as a scientific argument against the soul, i.e. that all of your thoughts, emotions, desires, will, decisions etc are produced by neurochemical electrical interactions between the cells of your brain.

Take these two thoughts together, and what do you get? The idea that I couldn't trust my thoughts to be accurate, because my beliefs might just be deterministic phenomena, artifacts of physical processes in the brain, with nothing to connect them to truth or to give them meaningful significance. What if I only believed what I did because I was organically predisposed to believe it, and chance life experiences influenced my thoughts to produce that result? That there was no choice involved, and no transcendent truth.

Once the thought was comprehended, I couldn't ignore it. I had to deal with it.

Two Game-Changing Tidbits Behind the Headlines

This won't be a huge post. I'm simply using it to redirect to two important articles, given recent developments.

Have you heard that the Israelis are bombing UN schools in Gaza? Read this to find out more about the "UNRWA," and what it is and what it does, and decide for yourself whether to decry or applaud the Israeli military.

Have you heard about how everyone's jumping on the "Ice Bucket Challenge" bandwagon to raise money for ALS? Who is the organization getting the money, and where is it going? Is the research sponsored by the money raised ethical or not? Read this to find out.

This isn't "conspiracy" in the sense that the information is covered up at all. It's all out there for anyone with a keyboard and the motivation to find it. But discovering it still gives you a very similar feeling. You've been lied to, and your whole perception changes when you're given the truth.

May these articles be helpful.

~ Rak Chazak

The Fallacy of Approaching Faith from a Purely Philosophical Angle

I'm trying something different with this post. This is a segment of a journal entry I wrote at home. In a short page, I managed to carve out a concise criticism of the "Philosophy Alone" approach to theology. Many modern atheists and other nonChristians tend to say they're open to the idea of a God but can't be sure. There's a reason they can't be sure, and it's because they've decided to keep God in a box--the box of philosophy. Philosophy can be a great tool, but the world is more than abstract concepts. It is a world of material objects, and a world with a history in time. Philosophy is important but an analysis of history and the material realm cannot be ignored if the truth is to be discovered. People are generally unwilling to consider that historical facts and scientific evidence could confirm Biblical Christianity. This is nothing but foolishness.

Did it make you think?

~ Rak Chazak

The Big Education Blame-Game Irony

I’ve recognized this for a long time, and I was gratified to see Ken Ham tackle the issue in almost exactly the same way I’ve “put it” in my own mind when thinking about it. It’s just sheer logic. What is the issue? It is the accusation against Christians, in particular home schoolers and young earth creationists, that these people, by perpetuating their beliefs, are somehow the cause for America’s lackluster showing in educational pursuits, among the general public especially. But the problem with the accusation is that the vast majority of people are not influenced by these teachings—creation, conservative homeschooling, Christian theology. How can minority beliefs be to blame when most people in the country receive 6 hours a day, 5 days a week of government-approved education? Obviously if anything has the most influence, it is this. So if America is poorly represented, wouldn’t the biggest influence in education have the biggest share of the ‘blame’ for whatever the result is? Logic would dictate that to be the case. Anecdotally, the home schooled kids I ran into at college were invariably the best-performing and composed a larger proportion of honors programs and scholarships than anyone else. And then there are fascinating tidbits of information like this: subsequent to the impositionof mandatory public education, literacy rates in Massachusetts dropped and have never recovered. But this is unacceptable to those who want to believe that the government provides for the people, and that Christianity is a net negative force in culture. Why would they want to believe this? It’s simply that having to admit the alternative would suggest the intolerable: that there is a Creator, and if there is a Creator, there is a Lawmaker, who sets the rules of earthly conduct, and if there is a Lawmaker, there is a Judge, who will punish those who break His law, and that means that people have to choose between undesirable punishment and undesirable denial of the things they want to do (sin)—and so the bottom line reason of why anybody refuses to acknowledge that Christian teaching is a good thing, or even that it is not a negative thing, is that they are in rebellion against the Creator. Unsurprising then, that the foundation of the recognition, as I laid out the steps to above, the doctrine of creation, is the most-targeted doctrine of Christianity among academics and pundits who promote government education and secular indoctrination. One such person who recently targeted Creation was dealt with succinctly and wisely by Mr. Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis: through constructive mockery. Here’s the link to the article, followed by an excerpt:

 http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2013/06/07/assistant-manager-at-cincinnati-museum-center-derides-creation-museum/

Ken Ham:

Percy also states, “When we wonder why America is falling behind in science education, it is because places like this are allowed to exist.”

I had to laugh when I read this ridiculous, unfounded outburst. Think about it—the majority of kids in the culture (including 90 percent of kids from church homes) attend the public education system. This system threw out the Bible, prayer, and the teaching of creation years ago. Evolution and millions of years is taught as fact in the public schools. Public school textbooks arbitrarily define science to not allow the supernatural from having anything to do with the universe but insist the universe came about only by natural processes: naturalism is atheism.

The point is, if America is falling behind in science education, how could it be the result of a place like the Creation Museum, the only major such museum of its kind in the world (though there are a few small creationist museums)? The majority of kids are educated by the public education system, and there are numerous secular museums across the country that teach evolution and millions of years as fact. Most science programs and documentaries on secular television (e.g., Discovery Channel, History Channel, PBS, etc.) present evolution as fact over and over again. And Percy thinks biblical Christians are responsible for the nation falling behind in science education? His statement is laughable.

Afterthought:

“Be very sure of this–people never reject the Bible because they cannot understand it. They understand it too well; they understand that it condemns their own behavior; they understand that it witnesses against their own sins, and summons them to judgment. They try to believe it is false and useless, because they don’t like to believe it is true. An evil lifestyle must always raise an objection to this book. Men question the truth of Christianity because they hate the practice of it.” – J. C. Ryle


~ Rak Chazak

Possible Explanations for Distant Starlight in Creationist Cosmology

 There are two relativistic problems in explaining why observations in the universe are the way they are. One is for the evolutionary model of cosmology, resting on the Big Bang hypothesis, which is called The Horizon Problem. The other is for the main opposing view, which, due to its affirmation of a young age to the entire cosmos needs to somehow explain why light from sources billions of light-years away can be seen on earth if only c. 6,000 years have passed since the beginning. This is called the Distant Starlight Problem. There are various solutions proposed for each problem, by the proponents of each view of the universe: the evolutionary model and the 'creationist' model. Below are short quotations from scientific articles in Creation literature to introduce you to the main proposed solutions and give enough of an explanation of each to give you the big idea of how they deal with the issue. Links to the articles themselves are included for your convenience and to give you the opportunity for further in-depth study.

*     *     *     *     *

"...the speed of light may have been much greater in the past (Norman and Setterfield 1987), that Einstein’s general relativity with appropriate boundary conditions (Humphreys 1994, 1998, 2007, 2008) or with appropriate extensions (Hartnett 2007) can accommodate a young Universe, and that the problem itself assumes an arbitrary choice of convention for synchronizing clocks (Lisle 2010; Newton 2001)."
source

"The idea that time may have run at different rates in different places in the universe (“time dilation”) is a central feature of some recent creationist cosmological models (Hartnett 2007; Humphreys 1994, 1998, 2007, 2008). This is used to solve the distant starlight problem, and further investigation into these models may conceivably lead to explanations for some of the phenomena described above. For example, many of the observations relating to galaxies and their stellar populations could be explained by a model that has billions of years passing within those galaxies before the light that we see was emitted."
source

Humphreys explaining his model:

"Again, let’s imagine that God sets the values of the three factors in eq. (24) to give a contraction speed of –c. As each galaxy emerges from the receding timeless zone, it resumes emitting light. Some of the emitted light will be going inward toward the centre. Because the timeless sphere is moving inward at the speed of light, the inbound light will follow right behind the sphere as it shrinks. When the sphere reaches zero radius and disappears, the Earth emerges, and immediately the light that has been following the sphere will reach earth, even light that started billions of light years away. The stretching of the fabric of space has been occurring continuously all along the light trajectory, thus red-shifting the light wavelengths according to eq. (21).

On Earth, it is still only the fourth day. An observer on the night side of the earth would see a black sky one instant, and a sky filled with stars the next instant. With a telescope he would be able to see distant galaxies having suitably red-shifted spectra."
source

"The new metric I derived in 2007 has yielded several interesting results. One is a straightforward explanation of the Pioneer anomaly. In this paper, it has revealed a new type of time dilation, achronicity. The fundamental cause of achronicity appears to be that gravitational potential becomes so negative that the total energy density of the fabric of space becomes negative. That stops the propagation of light, all physical processes, and all physical clocks, thus stopping time itself."
source

The Pioneer Anomaly:

"A broad class of creationist cosmologies offer an explanation for the ‘Pioneer effect’, an apparent small Sunward anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. If a large volume of empty space surrounds the matter of the cosmos, so that the cosmos can have a centre of mass, then the matter is in a deep gravitational potential ‘well’. If space is expanding and spreading the matter outward, then the depth of the well is decreasing. According to general relativity, especially a new solution of Einstein’s equations derived in the Appendix (which also deals with Birkhoff’s theorem), the decreasing depth continuously shortens ‘radar’ distances within the well, causing the observed apparent acceleration. The magnitude of the anomalous acceleration implies the bottom of the potential well has not yet risen very far above the critical depth for gravitational time dilation. Thus the Pioneer effect supports the essentials of several creationist cosmologies: a centre of mass, expansion of space and recent time dilation. Big bang theorists, whose cosmology does not have a centre of mass, cannot use this explanation. As yet, they have no alternative theory upon which they agree." [emphasis added]
source

Discussion of Light Speed. Excerpt is about measuring the speed experimentally.

"We try another experiment. This time we will have a clock at both ends of the hallway. We will send the light pulse when the clock at our end reads exactly 12:00. The clock at the end of the hallway is designed to stop when the light hits it. We then read the time. This experiment avoids a return trip altogether, and so should give us the oneway propagation speed. But there is a problem. Before we start this experiment, we must make certain the clocks are synchronized. But how do we do this? We can ‘see’ the time on the other clock, but that is because light has travelled from there to here. How long did it take to do that? There is no way to determine whether or not the clock at the end of the hallway is synchronized with the one at our end without assuming how light propagates. So this experiment must assume the answer to the question being asked and so is of no use to us."
source

Riemannian Space-Time implies light could take shortcuts through space.

"This is difficult to illustrate, but suffice it to say that there are two concepts of the "shape" of outer space. One is that it is straight-line (Euclidean), and the other is that it is curved (Riemannian). Based on observations of 27 binary star systems, it appears that light in deep space travels in curved paths on Riemannian surfaces. 2

The formula for converting straight-line to curved space is:

where r is the Euclidean or straight-line distance, and R is the radius of curvature of Riemannian space. Using this formula, and a radius of curvature of 5 light-years for Riemannian space, the time for light to reach us from points in our own solar system is practically the same for either Euclidean or Riemannian distances, and there is not much of a change even out to the nearest star (4 1/2 light-years). But if we insert an infinite Euclidean distance for the farthest conceivable star, it would take only 15.71 years for light to reach us from that distance!"
source

These are 3 fundamentally different categories of explanations for how distant light could get to earth within a short time-frame (as measured on earth). 

~ Rak Chazak

Treatise: What Made the Red Planet Red? A Theory of Planetary Colonization and What Could Have Been

I have an idea about the possible explanation for how distant, habitable, yet lifeless planets fit into a Biblically Christian framework of cosmic history. It’s based on the three points I mentioned already—the distance, the habitability, and the lack of any evidence of other sentient life among them. I’ll unpack them. First, why should there be any planets that could be habitable by humans, other than Earth, if humans were only planted on Earth initially? It seems like a simple conclusion that, given enough time, we were expected to live on them as well. Otherwise there would be no point in them being habitable, from a purposeful-universe-by-design perspective. But why should they be so far away? Well, the universe itself is vast, so if there were no habitable planets in distant reaches of the universe, then large parts of it would by definition be uninhabitable. And how then could mankind fulfill its role of exercising dominion over all creation?—assuming, with reason, that the Dominion Mandate would be extended from just the Earth to encompassing all of the universe, at some point. It does appear to be the intention that humanity would have,upon fully developing the Earth, have been given dominion over the stars as well, and told to spread out to distant planets so as to govern the entire universe that God created. But something prevented this from happening.

The reason that other planets don’t have life is very simple. It’s not just that we haven’t found it, or that it’s sparse throughout the universe, but that it isn’t there. There are very good reasons for believing that no intelligent aliens exist, or life of any kind beyond the Earth for that matter. Here are a few:

* Sentient aliens would either have spirits or not. If they did not, they would have no hope of life after death. Why would God create self-reflective beings like humans but make them otherwise just like an animal, denying them eternity? And if they did have a spirit, then are they perfectly sinless or sinful? If they are sinless, then they suffer from the Curse which is over all creation, which is unjust to them—what did they have to do with Adam’s sin? And if they are sinful, then they are also fallen, and according to the developed concept of a kinsman-redeemer, needed God the Son to be born as one of them, live a perfect life on their behalf, and die in their place for their sin. So Jesus would suffer and die an untold amount of times for an untold amount of aliens. But the Bible said He died once for all. Is this reasonable? Alternatively, if the Bible doesn’t only restrict the Atonement to humans, (though none of the language implies this to be true), then how would aliens learn about it so as to believe and be saved? And why should humanity have been the one place where Jesus came to be incarnated, and not one of the multitudes of other alien races? These are all important questions to consider before accepting that alien life can coexist, even as a concept, with orthodox Biblical Christianity.

* The Bible strongly implies that everything that was created is for the benefit of mankind. If there were unknown lifeforms on other planets, what good would these do for Man if he couldn’t even know that they were there, much less utilize them? If this doesn’t sound convincing, then what do you make of the utter lack of any mention of other planets or life forms in the creation account in Genesis? The Earth is the only place described where plant, animal and sentient life were created, and at the end, the record concludes with the declaration that ‘thus was (the heavens and the earth, that is, everything) created, in all its vast arry,’ which means that no other life was created elsewhere afterwards. The circumstantial evidence is strong that there are no aliens anywhere. And it is such a strong implicit case, like the Trinity is also, that a scientific test to prove or disprove Scripture would come down to the question of whether alien life will be found outside of earth. If our faith can’t be disproven, it isn’t meaningful. A faithful Christian can with confidence say that the discovery of sentient alien life, such as that in Star Wars, Halo, Star Trek, etc, would invalidate the Bible. And that same Christian would have no fear because of his confidence that that will never happen, because of the strong Scriptural case against it, and his preeminent trust in the Bible as the word of God.

So what prevented mankind from being given the commandment to spread out among the stars and have dominion over them? It’s the same reason Mars is red. Key to the understanding of the universe as it is today, is the knowledge that “all creation groans and travails in birth pangs together,” and the knowledge that that is happening because of Adam’s sin as recorded in Genesis 3. The entire universe is wearing down and breaking to pieces. There is some aspect in which this has to do with the second law of thermodynamics, since it concerns the increase in entropy, that is, disorder, which means that energy tends from more usable forms to less usable forms over time. Stars become dust. Buildings become rubble. It takes energy to maintain things in a specific condition. It takes no energy at all for things to fall apart. It happens on its own. There is one form for a wineglass when its molecules are all ordered together, but an infinity of ways for those molecules to be arranged if the glass is destroyed. Pure statistical probability, then, guarantees that, given the opportunity, things will randomly break down rather than remain in “high energy conformations.” But please note that the second law of thermodynamics describes things like friction and the release of energy due to food digestion. It would be incorrect to say that the law was not in effect at all in the initial creation that God made. But there appears to be some aspect of the universe now—a general trend of decay—that wouldn’t have been the case before.

What’s my point in saying this? Fairly simple. Mars is red because it is rusted. The whole planet is rusted, which means that the whole planet at some point was covered in water. It is an amusing irony that astronomers are willing to posit a global flood on Mars, a planet with nearly no surface water, and none in liquid form, but unwilling to accept the claim of a global flood on Earth, a planet 75% covered in water, to depths of several miles in places. Mars has almost no atmosphere, and it’s posited that it was blown away by solar winds that were undeterred by the planet’s weak magnetic field. Earth’s field reflects charged particles from the sun all the time, which “keeps the atmosphere safe,” and intact. Water evaporates and becomes part of the atmosphere, given temperatures above freezing point. The Red Planet’s water would then have blown away also, and any water that now remains would be the amount that had not yet evaporated when the temperature permanently plunged below zero degrees Celsius.

What’s the point, you ask again? Simple—Mars is red because its magnetic field decayed and its atmosphere was blown away by the intense radiation given off by the sun. And why should the field have decayed rather than maintained at its primeval initial state? May I suggest that God is the one who ‘holds all things together,’ and that while He keeps everything material in existence to this day, has as one consequence of Adam’s sin chosen to remove, partially, His activity of maintaining the creation in pristine conditions? Mars used to have more water than it does today. How much, we can’t be sure, but the channels on its surface are considered evidence of gouging by large amounts of fast-moving surface water. We could have eventually settled on that planet, but even if we can now, it seems like it’s going to be much more difficult on a frozen rock with nearly no atmosphere.

Because of the Fall, the universe is in decay. Because of the Fall, we no longer have the opportunity to settle the universe this side of eternity. We could try, but the end of history as described in Revelation will come long before we get very far at all. What remains is the evidence of the planets that could have been colonized if we had been obedient to God. What remains is a faded picture of what could have been, and what one day may be the reality yet again, for those who repent of their sin (since sin is, after all, why our universe is so uninhabitable and generally messed up) and put their faith in Christ—they will one day live in a new universe, one that won’t see decay. Maybe we can have fun playing a game of galactic colonization with the other saints. Who knows what God has in store for us. But make sure you don’t miss the boat. The Ark was the ‘door of salvation’ to those who survived Earth’s global flood. Now it is Jesus who says, “I am the door…” and will save you from the second and final time that God destroys the Earth. Mars is red, because we sinned. Who would have thought?

~ Rak Chazak

Related reading:

Is the Bible Falsifiable? And Would a Real Live ET do it?
Did God Create Life on Other Planets?
Will We Have Any Work to do in Heaven?
What is a Kinsman-Redeemer? - GotQuestions
The Creation of Planetary Magnetic Fields - CRSQ
. 

The Simplest Scriptural Case for a Young Earth

Exodus 20:8-11

⁸ “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. ⁹ Six days you shall labor and do all your work, ¹⁰ but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. ¹¹ For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.

This is one of two prooftexts I would use to prove that the days of Genesis 1 are 24-hour days. Here it clearly states that the length of the days that God created are the same length of the days of our week. 

"That's why," said Ken Ham in this video of a speech he gave entitled The Key to Reclaiming the Culture, "we have a seven-million-year week."

Said as obvious sarcasm. Since our week is not millions of years long, but seven times 24 hours, then that is how long Creation Week also was. To believe otherwise is to assert that Exodus 20 -- you know, the part where Moses gets the 10 Commandments -- is not inspired Scripture, and can't be relied upon to be true.

Beliefs have consequences, you know.

That's really the only prooftext you need. But there is another one that I find poignant as well:

Genesis 1:14
¹⁴ Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; 

If "day" means "billions of years," or rather "an undefined long period of time," then what on earth do "seasons" and "years" mean? These are longer than days. Are we supposed to postulate that there are two types of 'undefined long periods of time,' one which is longer than the other, but neither one of a certain duration? This is silliness.

Consequently, verse 14 proves that the days in the rest of the passage must refer to calendar days, since otherwise it would be a meaningless passage.

These passages should be enough to convince anyone who holds to Biblical inerrancy. If they reject the conclusion that Genesis 1 is describing a one-week period of time of the same length that our week is, Sunday to Sunday, then they must abandon their belief in Biblical inerrancy. It's always interesting to see which way people go when confronted with such a decision. It is my hope that they would be more willing to change their mind to believe God's word than to reinterpret God's word to make it fit with man's word.

Perhaps this has convinced you, Scripturally, but you're uncertain/worried about the scientific arguments--whether what the Bible says is borne out by the facts. Do not worry. I assure you that they do. Here are a few good links to get started investigating the issue further, if you want to.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers/topics-alphabetical
http://creation.com/age-of-the-earth

~ Rak Chazak