Sorry about not posting a radio play last night, I just didn't feel up to it. I'm getting more depressed over the election and the head long pitch into the abyss the world is taking. I'll post something later today. I'd feel less despairing if it would start raining, all over the place where rain is needed and stop raining where they don't need any more.
Yesterday was the feast day of the North American Martyrs, who include St. Charles Garnier who was called "rainmaker" by the inhabitants around Lake Ontario because his arrival coincided with the end of a devastating drought. I wonder if it was as bad as the one this year. We've had fog the last two mornings, that's something that hasn't happened here in a while. It's not enough. I head a loud bang about ten o'clock last night and at first was afraid some idiot was setting off fireworks which would certainly lead to a wildfire. Needless to say, I didn't sleep well, waiting for what didn't come, this time. The damned Republicans legalized them during the LePage regime, it will be hard getting that back into the box. Maybe it will take an enormously expensive fire to do it. Loss of wildlife won't move our politics as amoral and degraded as those are.
Walter Brueggemann is a wonder in another way, he keeps writing books, well-well into his 80s, he's got at least two this year, one about the Covid pandemic Virus As A Summons To Faith and another with the intreguing title - especially for an anti-materialist such as myself - Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements For Moral Action In The Real World. I assume by "materiality" he doesn't mean the ideological position of materialism which cannot, no matter how you twist it, produce any elements of any morality, though I'd have to read the book to find out.
And I wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't written more books this year. Unlike other famously or infamously fecund authors, generally of pop-science, science-fiction, crime-fiction, I have yet to read so much as a paragraph of anything he has written which is not fully worth reading. That would be because he is founded, securely, in the very real as he pointed out the Prophets were, as, in fact, he has pointed out the entirety of the Jewish scriptures are. Listening to the interview above motivated by the publication of Materiality As Resistance, I've thought about how a century ago the secure 19th century materialism of so many scientists and philosophers was beginning to dissolve from assumptions about the materiality of atoms and, as they were theorized, subatomic particles to what either Eddington or Bertrand Russell called "points on a dial" or, rather, vague shadows cast by statistical analysis.
That crisis for the common and even scientific understanding of physics, of matter, of the material universe has been put off the farther down the line from the place in science where the exigencies and vicissitudes of the discoveries of physics can be tabled for future business, that future to be put off indefinitely, perhaps longer than the human species has. I don't feel much of an inclination to ignore those questions, the probabilities of random chance producing this or that result and the enormous powers of ten to one needed to express their impressive improbabilities isn't something I think is worth ignoring, especially in attacking the ideological materialism of the atheists, the anti-monotheistic campaigners who so stupidly bandy about the numbers (real, speculated and entirely made up) to claim those support their case when they far more easily support the opposite.
The consideration of the improbabilities of the theorized "first organism" from which all life after was descended, of its assembly, the incredibly improbable happenstance of all of it just having happened inside an effective and working containing membrane, of its commencing metabolism and the regulation of life, its entirely improbable first and totally successful act of reproduction, all point to it being vanishingly unlikely that it could have happened without it being an act of willful creation. I think a rigorous examination of the problems involved, unless you are impeded by a refusal to consider the possibility that it was an act of conscious creation, will lead most rational people to conclude that it is improbable that it could have just happened by any known physical phenomena within the remarkably limited time-frame that modern physics gives it to have happened. The popular atheist belief that it must have happened more than once in our only known universe makes the improbabilities expand with each time it happened, as far as I can see, the improbabilities of it happening once multiplied by two or three or a jillion times with each subsequent improbable event - either that or the entire edifice of physics which yields both that gargantuan improbability and the atheist-materialist arrogance is just plain wrong to start with. The improbabilities are the creation of our physics, perhaps best considered a demonstration of them and not an entity of pure mathematical reasoning that stands independent of the variables provided.
I was thinking about the loose talk about "random chance mutation" and wondered the extent to which the rates of even temporary viability or immediate death those produce in the organisms built on the basis of those mutations is confidently known. I wonder how that figures into the success of those first acts of reproduction in the Early Earth with whatever producers of molecular mutation that they were subject to and the probabilities of the success of the line of life on Earth. I wonder what rate of fatal mutation they were subject to while having no confidence that what we know about DNA and RNA tells us about that. I wonder how much the very success both of the original form of life and its gradual mutations producing successful lines of mutant life would be expressed in terms of the probability of mutations producing viable organisms with the capacity of successful reproduction and continuation, how many wildly successful lines of life could be matched with the improbabilities calculated on the basis of fatal mutations arising in that random-chance scenario.
I don't know the answer to that and I wouldn't be confident that a non-ideological calculation of that could be made - to start with, we have absolutely no evidence of the mechanism it would operate under in "earliest life" and that evidence will almost certainly never be had. Which has certainly never impeded the ideological claims of scientists and mathematicians and philosophers of science, or which rarely has.
That's what I've been thinking about as the world burns and egalitarian democracy gives way to vulgar materialist gangsterism.
* Which I believe are probably a product of a long period of evolution, I doubt either of them are relevant to the biology of those first organisms. If DNA or RNA were present and working in that first organism, which would have had to have been present on the pre-biotic Earth to get into it, it would have to enormously increase the improbability of that first organism evolving and I think would lead even more rational people to believe it could have never happened without divine intent. If they evolved within that first organism, the improbability of it happening before that first act of reproduction would only more point to it as being a product of intelligent design, the logical speculation, not the ideological industry that goes by the same name.
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