Saturday Night Radio Drama - Philip Davison - Eureka Dunes

Eureka Dunes

Family life is rarely a family show, thank God; yet, within the oddity of the Sparling household, perverseness has the politest table-manners. With a backstairs genealogy that's biblical in its mix of misfits and mountebanks, EUREKA DUNES focuses on a father-son relationship in which it's hard to tell who's the fugitive and who's the refugee. 

With Nick Dunning as Magnus Sparling and Barry McGovern as the paterfamilas Edwin.Cast and Production CreditsNick Dunning (Magnus)
Ingrid Craigie (Stella)
Deirdre Donnelly (Charlotte)
Barry McGovern (Edwin)
Joe Taylor (New/Detective Richie)
Derbhle Crotty (Irene)Sound Supervision and Sound Design: Damian Chennells
Producer: Aidan Mathews

I've had no time to listen to radio drama this month,  I'm going to make sure I have time to pre-hear these next month.  Some good lines, not bad characters, kind of an odd plot line. 

Hate Mail

"It's cruel to give people false hope."

I wonder why people who come up with that atheist cliche never ask themselves if it may not even be crueler to give people false despair.  I could say that the despair of atheist materialism is guaranteed, it's guaranteed if it is believed for a lifetime, it is only guaranteed, perhaps, at the very end if not believed.  

The atheist position is not the default one, the one which is to be assumed to be true as atheists demand, they're a really bossy lot, as bad as the worst fundamentalists.  

Ideologically motivated negation is no more credibly assumed to be right than hope is known with certainty.  

Hate Update:  "bothsiderism" can be valid when both sides are comprised of bossy boots assholes and that's the issue asserted as it was above.   

We Cannot Work Out For Ourselves The Resurrection From the Dead We Can Certainly Not Work It Out For Others

It is precisely in face of death that God's power hidden in the world is revealed. Man cannot work out for himself the resurrection from the dead.  But man may in any case rely on this God who can practically be defined as a God of the living and not of the dead,  he may absolutely trust in his superior power even in the face of inevitable death, may approach his own death with confidence.  The Creator and Conserver of the universe and of man can be trusted, even at death and as we are dying, beyond the limits of all that has hitherto been experienced, to have still one more word to say; to have the last word as well as the first.  Toward this God the only reasonable and realistic attitude is trust and faith.  This passing from death to God cannot be verified empirically or rational.  It is not to be expected,not to be proved, but to be hoped for in faith.  What is impossible for man is only made possible by God.  Anyone who seriously believes in the living God believes therefore also in the raising of the dead to life in God's power which is proved at death.  As Jesus retorted to the doubting Sadducees;  "You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God." 

The Christian faith in the risen Jesus is meaningful only as faith in God the Creator and Conserver of life.  But, on the other hand, the Christian faith in God the Creator is decisively characterized by the fact that he raised Jesus from the dead.  "He also raised Jesus from the dead,"  becomes practically the designation of the Christian God. 

RMJ, yesterday in a piece about an outrageous and disgusting claim about God and the coronoavirus pandemic as "pruning the Church" "cutting off branches that aren't bearing fruit," a statement made in the guise of Christianity, gave something out of his own experience. Up front, I'll say that given what was said, in any such discussion, it is exactly the right thing to bring up. 

Another time, earlier than that, actually, I was asked to do a funeral for an infant, because the family had no church.  I met the mother at the funeral home and she demanded I explain why God had taken her child.  Didn't God do everything for a reason?  Wasn't there a purpose?  What kind of purpose was this?  First, I don't think everything happens as a result of God's direct intervention, nor do I think every moment of our lives has a purpose.  Otherwise we are just pawns in some inscrutable (and cruel) cosmic game.  But would I offer her a platitude or two about the sparrows and maybe throw in "Jesus loves the little children"?

Which made me very glad that I wasn't a minister or priest or rabbi, who would be asked to explain something as terrible as why infants die, why they suffer,why terrible things happen to them and to their mothers and fathers, and I'll add, uncles and aunts and grandparents.  I couldn't answer such a question,  I doubt anyone can answer such a question for anyone.  If there is to be an answer to such a question that would be of any good to the person asking, it would have to be something that they had to decide for themselves and I would never presume to tell someone that their answer about their own pain, their own loss, the terrible witness of the pain and death of a loved one, especially an innocent child was the wrong one.  Such a claim to know what that answer would be would be as useless as it is outrageously presumptuous.  The best that anyone can do is to present ideas such as the ones that are in this passage from Hans Kung but as someone is confronted with the pain of loss, in the full pain of such a thing is certainly not likely to be either a kind or useful time to present such ideas.  

As bad and worse would certainly be to tell such a person in such pain that their child has ceased to exist, that there is no God, that a belief in an afterlife is a delusion, a cowardly refusal to accept death as final.  There is certainly no answer to why children, infants suffer and die in that unevidenced claim of factual finality.  I have heard of but never have witnessed bereaved people having that said to them, especially, in one case, a child told that their beloved grandmother didn't exist anymore and that her body was just going to decay and that was the end of it.  

The only way I can think of for any comfort to be had by a grieving mother or father, aunt, uncle, grandparent, etc.  would be for them to come to an answer that they could accept and there is no guarantee that they will ever find it.  Someone telling them isn't going to do it.  "Man cannot work out for himself the resurrection from the dead."  Nor can we work out life after death or why we die, why we must.  We certainly can't explain to a grieving mother why her infant died, how God would explain why to her.  We can't tell her that she has no right to expect an answer though we certainly can't give one to her.  I would not tell her that it's my experience that only after someone I've loved has died that I came to feel how much I loved them. That took years to happen. It would probably be meaningless to someone who hadn't gone through it. 

On something like that, the best answer I've worked out for myself is that you have to die out of your body in order to surpass it and its limits just as in love you have to give up your self-centered habits of thought and feeling, your egocentricity in order to expand past those limits.  An ego-centered two-year-old has to expand past that in order to become even a tolerable seven-year-old, not to mention a decent adult.  As we see in English language political life, that's hardly guaranteed to happen.  

That phenomenon, which is certainly encouraged by believing that God wants us to love others as we love ourselves, seems to me to be a real life example that leads to my belief in God.  Our own experience is certainly something that should inform our belief, it inevitably must, personally as well as socially.  That's my answer, for now.  I don't know if it will be the answer I find believable as I am dying or if another of my nieces or nephews or brothers or sisters or beloved cousins or friends die.  I would not be surprised that when confronted with that level of fear or pain that I weaken, though I am far more confident in that than I am in any materialistic framing which is so narrow as to negate the possibility that our experience is meaningful. 

There is certainly a lot about this in Hans Kung's On Being A Christian , maybe I should give some of that in the coming days.  Lots of us are going to be asking those questions in this pandemic.  

I Don't Have To Be Agnostic About Agnosticism, It's A Dishonest Ploy

It is asked, demanded really,  what the quote was that shattered my agnosticism, it was this passage from the introduction to Computer Power And Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum.

The man in the street surely believes such scientific facts to be well-established, as well-proven, as his own existence.  His certitude is an illusion.  Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion.  In his praxis, he must, after all, suspend disbelief in order to do or think anything at all.  He is rather like a theatergoer, who, in order to participate in and understand what is happening on the stage, must for a time pretend to himself that he is witnessing real events.  The scientist must believe his working hypothesis, together with its vast underlying structure of theories and assumptions, even if only for the sake of the argument.  Often the "argument" extends over his entire lifetime.  Gradually he becomes what he at first merely pretended to be; a true believer.  I choose the word "argument" thoughtfully, for scientific demonstrations, even mathematical proofs, are fundamentally acts of persuasion. 

Scientific statements can never be certain;  they can only be more or less credible.  And credibility is a term of individual psychology, i.e., a term that has meaning only with respect to an individual observer.  To say that some proposition is credible is, after all, to say that it is believed by an agent who is free not to believe it,  that is, by an observer who, after exercising judgement and (possibly) intuition, chooses to accept the proposition as worthy of his believing it.  How then can science, which itself surely and ultimately rests on vast arrays of human value judgments, demonstrate that human value judgments are illusory?  It cannot do so without forfeiting its own status as the single legitimate path to understanding man and his world. 

But no merely logical argument, no matter how cogent or eloquent, can undo this reality; that science has become the sole legitimate form of understanding in the common wisdom.  When I say that science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison, I mean that the attribution of certainty to scientific knowledge by the common wisdom, an attribution now made so nearly universally that it has become a commonsense dogma, has virtually delegitimized all other ways of understanding.


The entirety of the book shows why the common wisdom which the ideological pose of agnosticism is fed by is wrong. 

"Agnostic" was a word invented by Darwin's closest ideological supporter, Thomas Huxley in the late 1860s, he said, in 1869, "It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe." 

Note that Huxley's definition is given in the form of a command to be followed, the kind of thing that positivists are always doing, trying to boss people into doing things as they want them done, insisting that any other way of thinking or speaking is not to be done.  Which, to the consternation of positivists, the great unwashed apparently doesn't in many cases give assent, though way too many with college-credentials which seem to have made them lazy cowards are cowed into following for fear of not being seen as part of the in-crowd.  Unfortunately, that is what so much of education seems to be, now.   And, as Weizenbaum notes, that article of faith has become ubiquitous, believed, or probably more felt, even by many who wouldn't understand what a statement of their belief meant.  I doubt those who troll me would get it. 

I knew that etymological history of the word while adopting the pose about a century to the year, later.  Having read Huxley, though being young and stupid, I didn't subject him to his own alleged standard.  As with most "men in the street" and not a few women, I was naive and stupid, really, about the claimed hard line separating knowledge and belief, the alleged involuntary action of belief called "knowledge" and other, in the common wisdom as expressed so arrogantly by Huxley, lesser "mere belief".  As soon as I read that passage from Weizenbaum, I, of course, had to acknowledge that it was true.  I believe I have mentioned before and think I thought soon after I read it about how Bertrand Russell, talking in his autobiography about how as his brother taught him the elements of euclidean geometry, he had heard that you use it to prove things so that when his brother began, as you have to with all mathematics, to state the unproven axioms of geometry, he asked why he should believe them unproven, his brother gave the reason that anyone who goes on with mathematics had to accept them as true or they couldn't go on.  The same is true of every single thing in mathematics, as Russell and his teacher Whitehead found out after they went through a stupendous, years long exercise in some of the hardest thinking done in the history of Western thought to try to found mathematics in logical proof, their work was soon overtaken by even even better thinking that proved that you couldn't provide mathematics with an absolute foundation in logical proof.  

Maybe you had to have accepted what Russell and Whitehead had had to accept before you could see why Thomas Huxley was being dishonest.  His stand certainly, if applied rigorously, would have had to shake his confident, belligerently insistent demand that natural selection was a thing because it is certainly not an idea that stands up to the level of rigor that he demanded be applied to a belief in God.  

Of course,that's something which agnostics uniformly do in declaring themselves agnostic, their lives are full to the top of ideas that are not founded in scientific, mathematical, logical, or evidentirary rigor.  Even their own belief in huge swaths of science which they use in their work wouldn't stand up to Huxley's pretense because no one has ever, not the best scientists, certainly not lesser ones, gone through a. the mathematical proofs of the math they use, b. the previously published science they build on, c.the actual work that that published science is based in.  In going over both On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man rigorously checking Darwin's citations, he certainly didn't always rely on rigorously done science and he was quite capable of distorting and twisting what was said when it served his purpose, something that if Huxley had practiced what he preached, he would have found out if he had done that.  He certainly must have known that the use of the scientifically dodgy stuff he got from animal breeders and similar lore was not science, even loosely speaking.  Nor was stuff like what he got from W. R. Greg which was clearly based on common British prejudice, not science.  If anything it is exactly Huxley's own field of biology that made things much worse in science than it had been when they had more modest goals than to explain what couldn't be established in observational evidence.  They should have stuck with merely supporting that evolution had happened on grounds of geology and the fossil evidence, not trying to give it as firm a foundation as contemporary physics believed Newton had given that area of research, ignoring that Newton's ideas required observational evidence to confirm their soundness. 

No, Huxley's invention is a dishonest ploy when it is made as a demand that, as the finer and more honest scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum pointed out scientists don't follow even in their own work.   On that alone, I'd say the atheist Weizenbaum earned his eternal reward. 

Update:  As to the point I make at "c." that scientists don't go over the actual work of their fellow scientists to check if their reporting of their own work is valid, that was something that was massively confirmed in the standards practiced by evolutionary-psychology in the infamous Marc Hauser scandal in which even the complaints of his own grad students that he was committing scientific fraud didn't make much of a difference to those who reviewed his papers for publication.  I was naive enough to believe that reviewers were more rigorous in their review than to merely take that stuff on the word of the researcher.  A very fine scientist I know who regularly was asked to act as a reviewer set me straight on that, telling me that no one in his experience ever went into it that far when acting as a reviewer for a professional journal.   There are a very few areas of such research that are regularly reviewed to that level or rigor though to my knowledge those are exactly the fields of research subject to the most instantaneous and ideological dismissal, a priori. 

This Is The Theme Song Of My Life - Steve Swallow - Up Too Late

John Abercrombie, guitar
Joe Lovano, sax
Aldo Romano, drums
Steve Swallow, bass, composer

Not Being Satisfied With Non-Belief

Do we need then expressly to insist on the fact that man's new life, involving as it does the ultimate reality, God himself, is a priori a matter of faith?   It is an event of the new creation, which breaks through death as the last frontier and therefore the horizon of our world and thought as a whole.  For it means the definitive breakthrough of one-dimensional man into the truly other dimension;  the evident reality of God and the rule of the Crucified,  calling men to follow him.  Nothing is easier than to raise doubts about this.  Certainly "pure reason" is faced here with an impassible frontier.  At this point we can only agree with Kant.  Nor can the resurrection be proved by historical arguments, traditional apologetics breaks down here.  Since man is here dealing with God and this by definition means with the invisible, impalpable, uncontrollable, only one attitude is appropriate and required  believing trust, trusting faith.  There is no way to the risen Christ and to eternal life which bypasses faith.  The resurrection is not a miracle authenticating faith .  It is itself the object of faith.  

The resurrection faith - and this must be said to bring out the contrast with all unbelief and superstition - is not however faith in some kind of unverifiable curiosity, which we ought to believe in addition to all the rest.  Nor is the resurrection faith a faith in the fact of the resurrection or in the risen Christ taken in isolation;  it is fundamentally faith in God with whom the risen Christ is now one.  

The resurrection faith is not an appendage of faith in God, but a radicalizing of faith in God.  It is a faith in God which does not stop halfway, but follows the road consistently to the end.  It is a faith in which man, without strictly rational proof but certainly with completely reasonable trust, relies on the fact that the God of the beginning is also the God of the end, that as he is the Creator of the world and man, so, too, he is their Finisher. 

The resurrection faith therefore is not to be interpreted merely as existential interiorization or social change, but as a radicalizing of faith in God the Creator.  Resurrection means the real conquest of death by God the creator to whom the believer entrusts everything, even the ultimate, even the conquest of death.  The end which is also a new beginning.  Anyone who begins his creed and faith in "God the almighty Creator" can be content to end it with faith in "eternal life."  Since God is the Alpha, he is also the Omega.  The almighty Creator who calls things from nothingness into being can also call men from death into life. 


------------------------------

Since  yesterday I spoke up for the reading of front material that is put before the main contents,  I think it is especially useful after this passage which contains some of the most challenging beliefs which can be said to define Christian belief (in fact, much of it would certainly be challenged by other Christians, the German Council of Bishops condemned parts of Kung's book)  to note that Kung wrote a couple of pages, "Those for whom this book is written."  It starts

This book is written for those who, for any reason at all, honestly and sincerely want to know what Christianity, what being a Christian really means.

It is written also for those who do not believe, but nevertheless seriously inquire;  who did believe, but are not satisfied with their unbelief;  who do believe, but feel insecure in their  faith,  who are at a loss, between belief and unbelief; who are skeptical, both about their convictions and about their doubts.  It is written then for Christians and atheists, Gnostics and agnostics, pietists and positivists, lukewarm and zealous Catholic, Protestants and Orthodox. 

He continued:

Even outside the Churches, are there not many people who are not content to spend a whole lifetime approaching the fundamental questions of human existence with mere feelings, personal prejudices and apparently plausible explanation? 

And are there not today also in all Churches many people who do not want to remain at the childhood stage in their faith,  who expect more than a new exposition of the words of the Bible or a new denominational catechism, who can no longer find any final anchorage in infallible formulas of Scripture (Protestants), of Tradition (Orthodox), of the Magisterium (Catholics)?  

These are all people who will not accept Christianity at a reduced price, who will not adopt outward conformism and a pretense of adaption in place of ecclesiastical traditionalism, but who are seeking a way to the uncurtailed truth of Christianity and Christian existence, unimpressed by ecclesiastical doctrinal constraints on the right or ideological whims on the left. 

If you are not in any of those groups, especially the incurious, contented-college-credentialed would-be people of fashion,  I guess it's not surprising that you aren't getting much out of this.  Especially those who wish to remain at a "childhood stage" of their disbelief or their mealy-mouthed attitude of agnostic indifference.  As a former agnostic, I do have to say that it is something I don't much respect for, even though as an intellectual pose, it is based in a half-truth.  I saw through my own agnosticism, after all. 

For me, reading not only what Hans Kung has to say but reading theologians from the entire period from the time when the Scriptures were written (much of which is theological in its content) through the beginnings of Christian theology, especially, in may case, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and, then current and recent theology has accomplished, for me, some of what Kung said wash his stated intention.  A lot of what I'd learned in the form of catechism or even encyclopedia style abbreviation is far more subtle and far different from what I rejected in the several decades I could have honestly said "I am not a Christian".   The Christianity I rejected - largely out of a. disillusionment with the Vatican and right-wing hierarchs, b. having bought the often untrue or exaggerated slanders about the history of Christianity and curiosity about other religious practices, especially Buddhism - that Christianity was certainly not Christianity as meant by Hans Kung, Walter Brueggemann, you know the list of those I frequently mention.    

Oh, and I should include c. while I was wallowing in agnosticism,  in the cowardly refusal to choose to believe.  Oddly, it was an atheist who, I'm sure, would have been surprised to find that reading what he wrote about the dangerous corruption of instrumental reasoning,  Joseph Weizenbaum, who helped me see the dishonesty that was inherent in agnosticism, or at least the agnosticism I held as a position.  Though it was certainly not a belief, it was a cowardly refusal to believe.   It is the difference between deciding and choosing, certainly, but also facing honestly that even what we call knowledge, scientific knowledge, even mathematical knowledge rests, solidly and inevitably on our early choices to believe.  

How Much Worse This Is - White Night Thoughts

The world-wide catastrophe we are experiencing is certainly different from any which has happened in the lifetime of anyone except the very oldest people and they were probably too young to get it while it was going on.  I think this one may be worse than the one a hundred years ago but that is premature.  I can say that since so much more is known about virology and epidemology and all of the other scientifically knowable parts of this kind of thing is so much better known than it was then, the catastrophic collapse of the federal government under Republican rule is far worse than the bad response then.  You can grasp how much worse when the only responsible people who have appeared with Donald Trump on stage, Fauci, Brix, even his stooge of a doctor Redfield put their jobs and, Trumps fanatical followers being what they are, possibly their lives on the line when they can't tolerate hearing him lie his fat head off getting and people killed.  

I think this one is going to be far worse in its economic impact, the only thing cared about by Trump and the billionaire oligarchs who rule so many of the putative democracies and all of the dictatorships - there is a lot of overlap between the two.  When the stock market crashed, it was the phony con job that were the financial markets, banking, etc. that failed, in this it is The People who are under attack from a virus.  The People of the world are under attack.  This is more like the black death and other plagues of the long ago past in that and the institutions that democracies have allowed to be corrupted and decayed are joining in on that.  And unlike in the great depression of the late 20s and 30s of the last century, the highly touted "service industry" that was created as the billionaires and millionaires shipped production to slave economies such as those in the Marxist dictatorships after the opening of China by Nixon.  The Chinese dictators (ruling gangsters) took the hint and realized they could become a lot richer through Victorian style capitalism on steroids than they could from a nominally socialist Communist Party ruled state.   The resultant destruction of jobs that actually produced things in the United States has left more than a generation of Americans without actual skills.  In many cases, they don't even know how to cook their own food, certainly they know very little about growing it as opposed to the generation of the great depression when so many were one or two generations off the farm, themselves.  

The Republicans in the United States and the lying media that installed them and maintains them are a warning to democracies around the world that the interpretation of "freedom of the press"  "free speech" that led to Americans' first being duped into Republicans and those Republicans, having been so rewarded by lies and other forms of moral degeneracy, in the Newt Gingrich and now Mitch McConnell years that degeneracy and hypocrisy not only knowing no limits but nothing so much as resembling shame.   I have mentioned before that when Bill Clinton, at a Hollywood fundraiser asked the assembled moguls and stars of fantasy and make believe to help him make America's culture "to make a new future" that it sent a chill up my back.  I would have thought people had understood the danger in that from the first Hollywood created president, Reagan who certainly had massive show-biz backing from the start, he himself a creation of the culture of entertainment.  For Bill Clinton to have done that in 1992, as he certainly needed Hollywood money may have been naively innocent, though he was certainly one of the five smartest men to have ever been president.  It makes the fact that the even smarter and far better Hillary Clinton was kept from the presidency by the Electoral College putting our second Hollywood product in the Oval Office far more bitter. 

When Trump is on that stage, it's sheer Hollywood culture, when Fauci and Brix are up there, it's real and if any of you figure those two are secure in their jobs, if they are kept on that will be a Hollywood culture calculation,  when unreality rules, it only matters to the rulers as a matter of casting and even the best actor in a series upstages the star, they are disposable. 

Now that we have our second show-biz, Hollywood culture created president, Trump, it's clear that that is one of the pillars of the oligarchy we are ruled by.   When a majority of Americans are brought up by TV and movies and Facebook, it makes democracy impossible and when democracy is impossible gangster rule comes in and gangsters don't give a second thought to thousands, tens of thousands, millions dying if they can benefit from it.  

Meanwhile, we die because Trump was on TV and radio and in the movies and the Warren Court said the media could lie with impunity. 

People The Republicans And Billionaires Think Are Worth Killing

Senator Elizabeth Warren has just announced that her brother Don Reed died of coronavirus.   I don't know the details of where he died but since he is a veteran, I'm wondering if it was in a VA facility.  

Two Complaints Addressed

I started the practice of putting passages of quoted material in italics at the suggestion of the estimable Echidne of the Snakes when I was her weekend fill-in writer.  I didn't like how it looked in just italics so I put the italics in bold and still think it's an excellent way to differentiate between what is my fault and what isn't the fault of those I quote.

I started putting the initial letters of paragraphs in bold and the first letter in a post in bold large font when I read the book Ogily On Advertising, he said it made it easier for someone to navigate text.   When I decided to go san-serif I found I didn't like the look of it as well but kept it for the initial letter.  I think if several of the idiots who troll me hadn't snarked about me doing it I might have dropped it entirely by now but I figure if they don't like it it at least has the merit of annoying them.  I figure this has to be fun for me, since I don't make any money out of it

Update:  And here's another one, apparently I'm to be faulted for having read the front material of a book I've read and written about.  What's that, like that old rule of faux-etiquette that you weren't supposed to eat the parsley garnish?   Hey, if I paid for the friggin' book, I'm reading every word of it, Bud. 

The State Of Our English Language Untelligentsia 2020

If you had bothered to look at the link I provided, you would find that the article was not an ancient reference to a long-passed item of pop culture (as you no doubt saw it) but to a March 23rd, 2020  New York Times piece ABOUT THE RELEASE OF DOCUMENTS about the attempts by drug companies in the United States to convince judges to force the federal government to allow the sale of Thalidomide in the United States after it had been blocked.  I gave it as an example of the kind of pressure that the implementation of the Pure Food And Drug Act has been under all during its existence, in which those with financial interests have forced the permission of things that are supposed to be prevented by the Act. 

For those who aren't familiar with that sixty-year old story, which I remember as it was happening:

In July 1962, the Food and Drug Administration sent an urgent message to its field offices with an assignment it said was “one of the most important we have had in a long time.”

Overseas, thousands of babies in Germany, England and other countries were being born with severe defects tied to their mothers’ use of thalidomide, a drug widely taken for insomnia, morning sickness and other ailments.

Meanwhile, the federal government sought to figure out what had happened in the United States, and how many babies had been affected.

The drug was not approved in the United States in the 1960s, but as many as 20,000 Americans were given thalidomide in the 1950s and 1960s as part of two clinical trials operated by the American drug makers Richardson-Merrell and Smith, Kline & French.

Here is the story of the F.D.A.’s investigation, told through a sampling of the more than 1,300 pages of documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request.

‘Great public interest’
On Aug. 1, 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued a warning: “Every woman in this country, I think, must be aware that it’s most important that they check their medicine cabinet and that they do not take this drug.”

I also remember that for some of the bigger assholes I went to school with, "Thalidomide babies" was the butt of lunchroom comedy, as were those who were retarded or otherwise disabled.  Which, I am less surprised than I'd have expected to be, apparently survives in assholes of that cohort who survive into their senior years.  I saved myself the trouble of rethinking the point by never thinking those guys were anything but assholes when I heard them in the late 50s and 60s.  They're still assholes. 

The reason I included the link was to prove my point about the possibility of money corrupting even a good law passed to regulate things and as an example of the impossibility of ensuring universal compliance with something that doesn't exist, a "world law" they can't even ensure that level of compliance with national laws. 

A pill treated as casually as aspirin

Federal inspectors uncovered evidence that thalidomide, which was to be sold under the brand name Kevadon, was passed among doctors and family members with seemingly little awareness that it was considered experimental in the United States. In this F.D.A. memo from August 1962, inspectors reported on two cases from North Carolina.

Although the names are redacted, the text is revealing: In one case, a doctor had been using thalidomide himself and prescribing it to his wife. In addition to the wife’s loss of vision, the doctor mentioned peripheral neuritis, nerve pain that is a side effect of thalidomide.

The other report is even more alarming — a nurse had given birth to a baby without arms or legs and, as a registered nurse, “she may have had access to the item.”

And how even those who certainly are aware of the law and the reasons for them can be as apt to violate them as those who would so so out of ignorance. 

The case against Richardson-Merrell intensifies
By September 1962, investigators were beginning to conclude that, even by the laxer standards of the day, Richardson-Merrell had illegally promoted thalidomide before it had been approved. That month, Dr. Ralph W. Weilerstein, an associate medical director at the F.D.A., reported on his impressions after visiting a division of Richardson-Merrell. (The F.D.A. also investigated Smith, Kline & French, which conducted a smaller trial, but concluded that the company had acted legally.)

Richardson-Merrell employed many of the same tactics that modern-day drug companies have used to promote their products, the memos show, including hiring influential doctors to vouch for thalidomide, as well as helping the researchers to write scientific articles, “almost to the extent of ghost writing for them,” Dr. Weilerstein wrote in an internal memo.

In his memo, he referred to the doctors who participated in the clinical trial as investigators.

One word, Oxycontin.  Another word, Sackler. 

The idea that the answer to preventing epidemic and pandemic zoonotic diseases is "regulating the shit" out of animal husbandry, which, as I pointed out, has probably more of a regional-economic means of corrupting the system than even the drug companies do, is, to put it in terms such people as I answered would understand, fucking stupid. 

It's even more fucking stupid for unversities and colleges to graduate people who don't even bother to look at citations and who then lie about what was said when they didn't read them.   But such is the state of the American and, as we are increasingly finding, the Brit untelligentsia.

My point isn't expecting that the human population is going to give up eating meat,  I said that was not going to happen.  My point is that is the terrible reality we face in trying to deal with this pandemic and others, almost certainly even worse, that will arise due to the eating of meat.  The best anyone can expect they could do about it is to not share in the blame for it when it happens, though they can't expect to escape the consequences.  In the meanwhile,  yeah, I do blame meat eaters for their part in this. 

I did it again, I posted the below before I went through it more.  The "publish" button is right next to the "save" button on blogger.  I'm leaving it up for now because people have already read it and I've fixed a few things - if I'm a bad writer, I'm a far worse editor,  I don't generally type out sentences that lack a predicate, those disappear in editing. 

The Central Core of Christian Belief Was In The Earliest Yet Identified Stratum Of The Texts

From this negative and positive definition it follows that death and resurrection form a differentiated unity.  If we want to interpret the New Testament testimonies in a way that does not run counter to their intentions, we may not simply make the resurrection into an interpretative device, a means by which faith expresses the meaning of the cross. 

That is one of the more popular means of explaining things, today, for Christians who find the central claim of Christianity embarrassing, the belief that Jesus rose from death, as his closest followers and Paul said they experienced.  As John Dominic Crossan has, somewhat more modestly said than his critics will sometimes attribute to him, he doesn't believe in "bodily resurrection" though, when confronted with the testimony in the New Testament of those who knew him in life who claimed he appeared to them, he rather truthfully but weakly said, “The honest answer must be, I do not have the faintest idea, nor does anyone else.”  Which can be said about any ancient text or even a text that makes a claim about something for which there is no other evidence.  

He claims that the author of Mark's Gospel made up the story of the empty tomb and that later authors took up the story.  Though I think the countering argument is that if Mark wanted to make up something for people to believe he could have chosen something more easy for them to believe.  As Hans Kung pointed out, Mark's Gospel doesn't contain the story of the raising from the dead of Lazarus.  It does contain the story of Jesus raising the daughter of Jarius but the text of Mark has Jesus, himself, denying that she was dead, that she was "sleeping".  You would think that if she were dead, Mark would certainly not have said Jesus denied it - it would be rather odd for someone making it up to make him a liar.  Given that,  I think attributing the story of the empty tomb to Mark is a rather thin reed that, itself, which would need support, especially considering Paul's earliest claims about having encountered the risen Jesus.  

As to believing that the tomb was empty, I don't have any reason to doubt it, though I find the exposition in Kung's book that points out that the glorified Jesus was in a form which was fully physical in any sense we would know that but far more than just that to be believable. It certainly matches the descriptions of his encounters with his friends and others, certainly the encounters with Paul as given in the texts.  Though I think Crossan is an excellent scholar - a few estimated dating of books which look suspiciously convenient to his case, perhaps aside - I think he's too apt to be under the influence of old-fashioned materialism, the world of the university and academics of our time.  The claims of the monotheism that comes out of the Hebrew scriptures are not compatible with that 18th-19th century form of materialism, though, I would point out, neither is modern science, strictly speaking.*

Resurrection means dying into God:  Death and resurrection are most closely connected.  Resurrection occurs with death, in death, from death.  This is brought out most clearly in early pre-Pauline hymns in which Jesus' exaltation seems to follow immediately on the crucifixion.  And in John's Gospel especially Jesus' "exaltation" means both his crucifixion and his "glorification" and both form the one return to the Father.  But in the rest of the New Testament the exaltation comes after the humiliation of the cross.

Note:  Here are a few of many sites that deal with the pre-Pauline hymns which are rather fascinating to consider.  I would guess that like most of the scholarship into the period before we have explicitly written texts, there is some variance of opinion [the Reddit site complains of an abundance of fringe theories online] but I think it's entirely reasonable, considering what Paul, the earliest source we have, as of now, says about his reliance on what he was taught, it is certain that some of his material, certainly the ideas he transmits, must have been in existence before his conversion. 

"Dying into God" is not something to be taken for granted, not a natural development, not a desideratum of human nature to be fulfilled at all costs.  Death and resurrection must be seen as distinct, not necessarily in time but objectively.  This is also emphasized by the ancient, presumably less historical than theological reference: "on the third day he rose again,"  "third" being not a date in the calendar but a salvation date for a day of salvation.  Death is man's affair, resurrection can only be God's.  Man is taken up, called, brought home, and therefore finally accepted, saved, by God into himself as the incomprehensible, comprehensive ultimate reality.  He is taken up in death or - better - from death as an event in itself, rooted in God's act and fidelity.  It is the hidden, unimaginable, new act of the Creator, of him who calls into existence the things that are not.  And therefore - thought not a supernatural "intervention" contrary to the laws of nature - it is a genuine gift and a true miracle. 

The belief in this, the central claim to the authority of Jesus, the mainstay of the reliability of his moral teaching and claims about the nature of reality relies on the statements of experience of the risen Jesus by his followers and, as in Paul, by his enemies who later became his followers.  That that testimony is not given in forms that are entirely congenial with modern standards does not change the fact that that is the form that they are in,  hardly anything from the classical or earlier or even later human history would match modern standards of courtroom or, ideally, scientific or modern-historical evidence.    That fact has been used by the enemies of Christianity to attack it, one of those facts that Hans Kung noted in a passage posted here last week, has to be dealt with squarely by someone who does believe it.  They have to, themselves, consider it squarely and honestly if their own belief is to be maintained against self-doubts and external attacks.  I especially value Kung's handling of the facts because it is rigorously honest about the state of the evidence and his treatment of it, noting where it can withstand modern methods and were its case is weaker and, as well, where modern methods can be anything from unhelpful to deceptive.  I have, of course, been emphasizing the ways in which such modern methods of testing are not applied in science and other areas of modern thought, comparing those to the demand that religion stand up to them. 

I should say that I'm kind of feeling some regrets that I'm not including Hans Kung's many, detailed footnotes and links to texts that you would get from the book, On Being Christian.  Of course a lot of what he cites are in books that you'd have to go to a really good library to find, something which I have to admit I haven't done.  Every source he cites which I have been able to trace has proven that his representation of it is entirely reliable.  

Also note, in answer to someone who is complaining,  I could type out the umlauts, I've got a program that would do that,  I have not because they wouldn't be helpful to most English speakers.  I think it was the estimable Garrison Keillor who said an umlaut to an English speaker means  "you can't pronounce this vowel." 

* I have noticed that there are atheist-materialist-scientistic online sources that make something out of Hans Kung's stated choice that he wouldn't deal with the, then emerging, literature about near death experience and claims of mediumship, aparitions, etc. in his book Eternal Life?   claiming that he "rejected" those claims. I don't find anywhere he explicitly rejects them.  I think, ever honest and ever careful about his language, they should have looked at the subtitle of his book,  "Life After Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem.  I think that, at that time, 1982, there hadn't been much in the way of academic study or extensive medical reporting on the phenomenon of resuscitated patients reporting such experiences.  Since the book is based on a series of lectures Kung gave at Tubingen University.   I would certainly think that there was every reason for him to take that position at that time and in that setting for entirely honest reasons and also to maintain the academic credibility among contemporary academics. 

That doesn't mean that what people have claimed about their experiences is valueless, especially in light of the many atheist-"skeptic" counter-claims to dispose of them being shown to be either invalid or utterly preposterous and unevidenced.   They can be believed by rational people who find such evidence convincing, the question, then, is of the legitimacy of their belief OR THEIR NON-BELIEF.  The matter of non-belief certainly needs to be distinguished from a refusal to consider the possibility that someone reporting their experience is credible.  The modus operandi of post-WWII atheist materialism, especially since the rise of the pseudo-skeptical group CSICIOP, is to a priori declare that any statments or accounts or evidence which does not fit within their ideological framing is, by fiat, declared to be illegitimate.  In that they follow on the already discredited methods of the logical positivists.  It is a demand to a priori adopt their framing as the only allowed one in all things.  That they have to declare their sole expertise in things they couldn't possibly know about, peoples' internal experience, in this case, their experience in all cases that are not to the atheists' liking has not been something that has had universal agreement, which enrages them when they encounter it.  

Ideological refusal to consider the possibility of the sole witness talking about things they have witnessed is accurately depicting reality because they don't like it is no more intellectually credible than someone who credulously believes any claim ever made because they like it.  Negation doesn't protect someone from error and it certainly doesn't add a jot to the likelihood that they are being honest, which is one of the more stupid of basic stands of modern, atheist-materialist-scientistic orthodoxy. 

My approach has been that individuals are the only real experts on the contents of their experience, especially when those experiences have no manifestation that an external observer could witness.  There are some claims of near death experiences I find to be not credible and some, for which, the one and only expert witness seem credible to me.  Sometimes the difference might be merely the language they express it it, but that's true of everything we hear.  What is especially credible, for me, is when their experience is strong enough to have reportedly changed their life to make them a better person.  That is not unrelated to why I find Paul and Peter and James credible, because of the reported changes in their behavior attributed to their experience of the risen Jesus.  I think the first years in which the "Church" arose among those who had known Jesus is some of the most powerful evidence there is in favor of the Resurrection.  

I would point to the rather harsh treatment of those early reports of near death experience in Edwin Quinn's Translator's Preface to Eternal Life?  as what you could typically expect in the treatment of those accounts in 1983, the year the translation was published.  I do think it's rather unfairly harsh, especially considering the further consideration of the often ridiculous explanations that the "skeptics" mounted to discredit such accounts.  His comparison of what they experienced to "the banal descriptions by the characters in Max Frisch's Triptychon, What Feuerbach and Frued have described as projections and illusions,"  is uncalled for and rather snobbish.  Yeah, Freud has just tons of credibility on that count, doesn't he.  Even then Freud had already been rather more credibly discredited than the people who reported their experiences while "clinically dead".  

That he does so in what he certainly thought was a higher purpose, to support the theological position that what the New Testament addresses in the resurrection is not life like what we experience but I think modern theology might go overboard in separating it from what we experience.  I suspect they do so to maintain their academic credibility and in that they no less than those near death experiencers are speaking out of their own experience,  had in, possibly, but definitely reported in terms understandable in this life.   

I do think that 20th century Catholic and much Protestant theology has been too eager to adopt skeptical attitudes that will make them more accepted in the academy.  Skepticism that is open to possibilities is one thing, skepticism that shuts off and derides is no more intellectually creditable than insult comedy.   I have to say that the text that Edwin Quinn translated doesn't support his attitude.   Kung, takes a far less harsh a view of things, I think it's more plausible to attribute it to  Karl Rahner but I find Kung to be quite open minded and more carefully honest than that. 

Yeah . . . Yeah, That's How To Solve The Problem, Keep Farm Animals From Shitting

It's rather hilarious, the idiot is still proposing that the solution to viral pandemics arising from the eating of animals is, and I quote, to "REGULATE THE SHIT OUT OF THE INDUSTRY"  

Clearly I was right, he never saw a farm operation because if there is one thing obvious about even the best kept farm, animals shit, animals kept in large numbers produce a lot of shit and no amount of government regulation is going to change that because,  you know, animals shit.  And, well, look at that list of problems with the idea that regulation was going to prevent epidemic and pandemic diseases that are guaranteed to rise up because people eat meat.   Starting out that it would involve something almost as ludicrous, that such regulation would have to be universal, not by one or a group of countries and it would have to be more effective than any government regulation ever has been. 

I never said I thought people were going to stop eating meat, I pointed out the other day there is no prospect of that happening, even as I said that it was within the realm of possibility that the carnivores were going to get many tens of millions if not the entire human species killed.   I think the only prospect of that happening if the experiments with test tube meat or meat substitutes replaces the factory farming of meat, though I certainly wouldn't eat it, even if it involves no cruelty.  

I did warn him the day was coming, several years back.  

I only posted this because the proposal to take the shit out of raising millions of chickens, ducks, pigs, cows, etc. is absolutely hilarious.  What a friggin' idiot of a city boy he is. 

William Bolcom - Symphony No. 4

1. Soundscape

2. The Rose

Joan Morris, Soprano
St. Lous Symphony 
Leonard Slatkin, conductor 

Text:  "The Rose" by Theodore Roethke

One of the greatest symphonies composed in the 20th century.   The incredible beauty of the writing, the incredible clarity of the presentation of the text by Joan Morris is one of the finest examples of singing of the English language I've ever heard. 

People Republicans Think Are Disposable - Alone Together - Just Read That Lee Konitz Died Of Complications Of Coronavirus

Lee Konitz, sax
Brad Mehldau, piano
Charlie Haden, bass

All That "Thank You For Your Service" Stuff Was Insincere Bullshit

Virus Don't Care What You Like And Who Has Cooties -Meat Heads Are Going To Get Us All Killed

One, though not the stupidest but of sufficient stupidity to get nowhere with, college-credentialed members of a certain self-defined "brain trust" has excoriated my mention of not only science reporting but actual scientific papers which show the most inmate link between the eating of meat, wild and raised for slaughter in captivity, and viral epidemic and pandemic diseases.   No doubt he'd make the same objection if it were mentioned there is also a proven causal connection to bacterial infections, in the unlikely event that the big-brain of the "brain trust" could understand there is a difference.  So many don't seem to, no matter if they've been to college or not. 

I am told that that would be taken care of by a rigorous program of governmental regulation, problem solved, clean as a whistle, the bees knees.  I suspect that the "brain truster" has never actually seen animal husbandry for the production of meat and eggs, I grew up around it, such a rigorous program as would prevent what happens in even the best run of such operations wouldn't prevent viral diseases from infecting a flock or herd and would not prevent such viruses mutating into forms which develop forms which spread like wildfire among animals kept in the high concentrations that economy of scale force under even the best practices.  And, since such animal husbandry is done by human workers, some of those diseases will develop forms which will infect human beings through contact with the animals and once that happens, some of them will mutate into forms which will pass easily from human to human.  That is guaranteed to happen no matter what level of government regulation is applied.  There is no such a thing as virus free meat and eggs.  

The claim that government regulation - he says I'd make Upton Sinclair turn over in his grave -would do the trick ignores several known facts about such regulation.

A.  Such government regulation would have to be universal because the human population covers the Earth, there is no such scheme of universal government regulation.  If anything the possibility of constructing such institutions is, today, far less plausibly achieved than it would have been in the 1950s when, by the way, it didn't happen, either.  We can't even get a World Court going. 

B. Such regulation would have to not only be consistently applied, universally, it would have to be matched with flawless surveillance of possible novel viral outbreaks which may or may not be sufficiently understood to mitigate their spread.  

C. Such regulation would have to endure the changing fashions in politics, the attacks from financially and ideologically interested opponents, the corruption of politicians, judges, "justices" bureaucrats, and, most corruptible and influential, the media.   

D. The fragility of depending on even modestly good governmental regulation is proven by its history in the United States.   It has failed here, so often and increasingly as Republican-fascism and libertarianism and the malignant form of populism (most of that actually not populist but a mania created by the mass media) have attacked and weakened it.  Regional agricultural interests have prevented effective regulation in many cases and have weakened, destroyed or caused the violation of them with the kind of impunity that money and media influence (money applied) insures.   

The Food And Drug Act, the adoption of which is credited to Upton Sinclair's book,  The Jungle, has hardly been a success as all of those forces of corruption I mentioned have influenced its implementation, from the start.   Even the relatively simple matter of testing drugs for their safety and efficacy has been spotty, at best.  This recent story about and around the attempt to get Thalidomide approved for sale in the United States (it was largely the work of one doctor who prevented its approval to begin with) is a good illustration as to the vulnerabilities of regulation where there were few of the regional interests which any regulation of agriculture would certainly be vulnerable to.   

No, there is no regulating us out of the hard fact that as long as people eat wild animals and animals kept by small-holders and factory farms to be eaten, the human population is going to be vulnerable to epidemic and pandemic diseases of the kind that Covid-19-20,  SARS, H1N1, Lassar Fever,  very likely Ebola and HIV, etc. have been.   There are certainly other means of transmission of serious viral diseases from animals, the CDC and other analyses of Lassar Fever mentions rats urinating on grain that is badly stored even when the rats are not caught and eaten, as they are.  

I recall reading that one of the suspected means of introduction was through the cultural habit of peasants, while they were practicing slash and burn cultivation, to catch the rats that fled the fires to eat them and that when they were caught the rats urinated on the people catching them.  There is no guarantee that some big game trophy hunter like the international twit of the decade, Donald Trump jr. won't introduce a terrible disease into the human population by a similar means.   That he is one of the major assholes of the world and the peasants in that story are certainly not assholes makes no difference to viruses.  Preventing Lassar Fever will, certainly, require that such rat to human transmission is stopped and one of the means of doing that is by them not being eaten.  

If this were not important I would not be answering it. 

------------- 

I will add, just for fun, that Upton Sinclair was not only a firm believer in telepathy, he carried out some interesting experiments in it with his wife that he published in his book Mental Radio, which got some positive attention, even from his friend Einstein.  I looked it up at Wikipedia, which article carries some clear lies about the book, though I'm not interested in going into that except to dope slap the "brain truster".   Martin Gardner also lied about the book, as he lied about so much.  

Update:  Proving that the "brain-trusters" are the same species of asshole as Donald Trump jr.  and Trump himself, the ass who made this necessary is now making Thalidomide jokes. 

Education fell to pieces in the 1960s, apparently.  TV was the main cause, it makes people stupid and callous.   And those are the "lefties" who are supposed to be better than that. 

I've Got No Problem With Pointing That Out

You'd think the evangelicals would have noticed that this kind of thing happens as a punishment for injustice, especially to the least among us, the very goal of the Republican-fascists of the Trump type.   But, no.  I am beginning to wonder how they could have read those books they thump without  noticing that stuff, it's pretty much what the entire historical and prophetic literature is all about.  

We Can't Conceive Of What The Resurrection Means Since "eternity is not characterized by "before" and "after"

The Crucified lives.  What does "lives" mean here?  What is concealed behind the diverse time-conditioned ideal types and narrative forms which the New Testament uses to describe it?  We shall attempt to convey the meaning of this new life with two negative definitions and one positive.

No return to this life in space and time.  Death is not canceled but definitively conquered.  In Friedrich Durrenmantt's play* Meteor a corpse (faked, naturally) is revived and returns to a completely unchanged earthly life - the very opposite of what the New Testament means by resurrection.  Jesus' resurrection must not be confused with the raisings of the dead scattered about in the ancient literature of miracle workers (even confirmed with doctors' attestations) and reported in three instances of Jesus (daughter of Jarius, young man of Nain, Lazarus).  Quite apart from the historical credibility of such legendary accounts (Mark, for instance, has nothing about the sensational raising of Lazarus from the dead), what is meant by the raising of Jesus is not just the revival of a corpse.  Even in Luke's account Jesus did not simply return to biological earthly life, in order - like those raised from the dead -to die again.  No, according to the New Testament conception, he has the final frontier of death definitively behind him.  He has entered into a wholly different, imperishable, eternal, "heavenly" life:  into the life of God for which - as we have seen - very diverse formulas and ideas were used in the New Testament. 

Not a continuation of life in space and time:  Even to speak of life "after" death is misleading;  eternity is not characterized by "before" and "after."  It means a new life which escapes the dimensions of space and time, a life within God's invisible, imperishable, incomprehensible domain.  It is not simply and endless "further", "further life," "carrying on further,"  "going on further."  But it is something definitively "new"' new creation, new birth, new man and new world.  That which finally breaks through the return of the eternal sameness of "dying and coming to be."'  What is meant is to be definitively with God and so have definitive life. 

Assumption into ultimate reality.  If we are not to talk in metaphors, raising (resurrection) and exaltation (taking up, ascension, glorification) must be seen as one identical, single happening.  And indeed as a happening in connection with death in the impenetrable hiddenness of God.  The Easter message in all its different variations means simply one thing;  Jesus did not die into nothingness.  In death and from death he died into and was taken up by the incomprehensible and comprehensive ultimate reality which we designate by the name of God.  When man reaches his eschaton, the absolutely final point in his life, what awaits him?  Not nothing, as even believers in nirvana would say.  But that All which for Jews, Christians and Muslims is God.  Death is transition to God, as retreat into God's hiddenness, is assumption into his glory.  Strictly speaking, only an atheist can say that death is the end of everything. 

In death man is taken out of the conditions that surround and control him.  Seen from the standpoint of the world - from outside, as it were - death means complete unrelatedness.  But, seen from God's standpoint - from within, as it were - death means a totally new relationship ;  to him as the ultimate reality.  In death a new and eternal future is offered to man, to man - that is - in his wholeness and undividedness.  It is a life different from all that can be experienced ; within God's imperishable dimensions.  It is therefore not in our space and our time, not "here" and "now" "on this side."  But neither is it simply in another space and another time;  a "beyond," an "up there," an "outside"or "above" "on the other side."  Man's last, decisive, quite different road does not lead out into the universe or beyond it.  It leads - if we ant to speak metaphorically - as it were into the innermost primal ground, primal support, primal meaning of world and man;  from death to life, from the visible to the invisible, from mortal darkness to God's eternal light.  Jesus died into God, he has reached God;  he is assumed into that domain which surpasses all imagination, which no human eye has ever seen, eluding our grasp, comprehension, reflection or fantasy.  The believer knows only that what awaits him is not nothing, but his Father. 

The clause I took out of this to include in the title, "eternity is not characterized by "before" and "after" and the point that to even talk about those in relation to what is talked about in the New Testament is misleading might be something that those inclined to scoff would scoff at but I can point out that the very same concepts confound cosmologists who try to conceive of what happened "before the big bang" when not only matter and space came into being but, according to the very relativistic physics that forced the concept of the Big Bang as a necessity, time started, as an aspect of the same event in which the universe came into being.  The speculations into that would seem to be as many as the cosmologists want to create, oddly they seem to create such scenarios as match their own preferences, to order, as it were.  One of the most popular is to claim that there has been an infinite number of universes that either exist simultaneously, some creating universes continually to express each and every possible variation in activity within our universe.  Where the energy to create these stupendously many and stupendously detailed universes comes from is apparently unconsidered in such acts of continual and entirely unparsimonious creation.  It is, in terms of known physics and reality, absurd, yet there it has been considered a legitimate part of science in all its absurdity, not even being considered a scandalous invention of ideology imposed as science, which it is, since that ideology is atheism. 

Another of the current scenarios to avoid an absolute beginning of our one and only known universe is to invent an infinity of incarnations for our universe which oscillate between existence and non-existence - atheists are prepared to invent an infinity of entities with which to try to destroy the idea that God created the universe.   George Ellis, prehaps the most eminent living cosmologist has noted that such stuff is based in a violation of the rules and methods of science. Science cannot see even to to the origin of this universe and,presuming current physics is valid, the beginning of time,space and matter. 

Horgan: Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, claims that physics has basically solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. Do you agree?

Ellis: Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.** 

In another article (behind a paywall, alas) he has pointed out that it is entirely likely that the oscillating form of infinite multiverses, in a series, would likely need not only the incredibly improbable level of fine tuning that our universe requires for us to exist but that an infinite regress in the past and into the future would require infinitely fine tuning, I presume of a level of improbability that reaches into infinity, in order for the cycle to be sustained and to overcome such things as quantum fluctuations that would arise in such an infinite series of fluctuations - there would already have had to have been an infinity of them before ours and an infinity of them after ours for it to be infinite.  I don't recall if it was Ellis or someone else commenting on his article who said that such a scenario would mean that there was never an initial creation event during which those infinitely precise fine tuning would have been set in which is extremely odd, unless you are going to maintain they are an attribute of a substitute for a divine creator, which seems to rather defeat the purpose that the largely atheist cosmologists, their motive in coming up with centuries of such stuff.  

And that also doesn't account for the persistence of that fine tuning during what would have to be the intervals in which, I assume, time, space and matter would not exist between the epochs of existence.  What could such a non-time-non-space-non-matter be?   Assuming that "fine tuning" would have to exist as what gets talked about so casually and undefined as "information" where does it reside in such perfect form as to be able to sustain this infinity of incarnations of our universe through its infinitude of incarnations without one going wrong and so ending that series.  If it happened even once the entire scheme breaks down because there would be no recovery and if that is a possibility it would have had to already have happened in one of that infinity of incarnations in the series before it had reached the one we experience now. 

It's fun to think of the problems the atheists have laid for themselves as they scoff over the Christian account of the Resurrection and its implications for us and our experience though the Christian accounts have something that the modern cosmologists do not have, they have testimonial evidence from people who claimed to have encountered the risen Jesus whose own lives were changed, credibly by that experience. Even the most insanely insistent atheist cosmologist would not claim to have any experience of their schemes which rest on the most abstuse of abstract mathematical speculation which their fellow cosmologists capable of grasping their tenuous equations widely disbelieve, though many of them have their own pet schemes to get by the inconvenient problem of the origin of our experienced universe. 

So the language which, no doubt, the detractor of Christianity would use in an attack is no more outrageous than that demanded by ideological atheists within science, only I think theologians, good ones, being typically better at doing philosophy than ideological atheist cosmologists are less likely to get trapped in a maze of their own construction.  It is quite possible for a theologian confronted with them to point out that an infinite God is more than capable of creating an infinite number of universes and the infinite fine tuning that such a system is theorized to require to keep going.  It's when you try to fit such ideas into physics that you are likely to work yourself into a corner you can't get out of except by recourse to dishonesty or defeat. 


*  Durrenmatt wrote a number of plays for radio,  some of which have been done in English but which I can't locate a recording of. I would certainly give a link to this one if I could find it, though it isn't on the list.  There are a few of them on Youtube, in German, Spanish and other languages.

**  I found this passage in the interview with Ellis to be especially satisfying because it's something I concluded about the demands Stephen Hawking made which I've noted here a number of times, that he wanted to bring back science to the standards of pre-Copernican era. 

Horgan: Physicist Sean Carroll has argued that falsifiability is overrated as a criterion for judging whether theories should be taken seriously. Do you agree?

Ellis: This is a major step backwards to before the evidence-based scientific revolution initiated by Galileo and Newton. The basic idea is that our speculative theories, extrapolating into the unknown and into untestable areas from well-tested areas of physics, are so good they have to be true. History proves that is the path to delusion: just because you have a good theory does not prove it is true. The other defence is that there is no other game in town. But there may not be any such game.


Scientists should strongly resist such an attack on the very foundations of its own success. Luckily it is a very small subset of scientists who are making this proposal.

Sean Carroll, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss have been obviously doing their science out of ideological reasons, to support their preferences, that seems to happen quite often when it's a committed atheist who is doing the science. When they can operate outside of the requirement of actual, demonstrable observation the sky and infinitely beyond are the non-limit.  In the necessarily more modest but unbounded limits of the life sciences, that has also been the case among those who practice Evolutionary Psychology and its predecessor, Sociobiology as well as others.  The impossibility of actually observing the actual facts of the evolution of life, the lives and deaths of individuals, communities, entire species, which of the offspring of them survived and reproduced successfully in larger numbers than their fellows, THE REASONS FOR THE VARIATIONS IN REPRODUCTION RATES, all of those are forever-lost in the undocumented past but that very unknowable nature of the problem has been a happy hunting ground in which ideologues of all sorts have claimed science for whatever purpose, malignant or benign, they want to harness it for.  

Indeed, George Ellis was right when he warned of the danger of science that insists on breaking the rules of science, something that has seemed to be a danger whenever they are released from the requirements of observation, measurement, logical analysis and a rigorous modesty in making claims for their statements.