Follow Up Review: "Violence in the OT"

The Opposite of Critical Thinking is Fear
http://johnwhawthorne.com/2013/02/09/the-opposite-of-critical-thinking-is-fear/

by John w. Hawthorne
February 9, 2013

I’ve always said that biblical scholars have it rough because they know stuff. They know that the context of that verse we like to throw around doesn’t support what we want it to mean. They know that there are many nuances in the original language that our translations and paraphrases don’t capture. They know that there are many interesting theological, psychological, sociological, and political questions raised when we seriously examine texts.

Knowing stuff (and asking the questions that help them do that) opens them up to criticism from those who have more of an apologetic bent. The latter are quick to find fault for even asking the questions or exploring the difficult territory. The challenges of critical thinking have been on my mind over the past week as I read Peter Enns‘ blog. Pete had asked Eric Seibert, Old Testament professor at Messiah College, to guest write three pieces dealing with violence in the Old Testament. Seibert raises some interesting challenges dealing with triumphalism, power, and Jesus. The posts were provocative but dealt carefully with the challenges that faithful believers find in the texts. I have colleagues teaching a course on the theology of war and piece and gladly shared Seibert’s blogs — not because I fully agreed but because I thought he asked fruitful questions for class discussion.

The first response I saw in the blogosphere showed up last weekend in this piece by Owen Strachan of Boyce College. Strachan asked how it was that Messiah could allow Seibert to even teach there, given that Messiah’s statement of faith includes a commitment to the authority of scripture (others have pointed out that other parts of Messiah’s statement celebrate the importance of inquiry). Friday, Christianity Today posted this piece discussing the posts by Seibert and mentioning Strachan. Strachan linked that in another post that says CT sees “controversy” while he uses a somewhat obscure passing remark by Scot McKnight as his title.

Yesterday, Pete posted this amazing link. Apparently a commenter to the previous series had written as if he were Jesus (I’m giving Jesus the benefit of the doubt that it wasn’t really him — the sentence structure and illogical argument do not represent The Lord well). Other commenters suggested that asking such questions would find Peter without faith somewhere in the future. I mentioned last week that Spring Arbor is committed to seeing “Jesus as the perspective for learning”. I’m certain this is NOT what it means.

Pete Enns, Eric Seibert, and I work in schools affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. Owen Strachan teaches at a Bible College (all the BA degrees are in Bible and they have a certificate for seminary wives) affiliated with Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. Boyce is a very different place from Eastern or Messiah or Spring Arbor. CCCU schools run the risk of using critical thinking as a tool of faith. Many Bible colleges (but not all) prefer to deal in tight arguments explaining how things fit together.

It’s not just biblical scholars of course. Biologists have to deal with issues of evolution. Sociologists have to deal with the changing nature of the Modern Family. Nobody worries too much about the economists or the chemists or the music theorists.

When we don’t ask questions it’s because we’re afraid of what happens if we do. If we tug on that particular piece of fabric the whole garment might come unravelled. Much is lost when the fear keeps us from exploring the Truth. And, to stay with my metaphor, we wind up walking around wearing garments with threads dangling all over the place — not very attractive.

Many of Jesus’ encounters with the Pharisees involved matters of interpretation vs. letter of the law (“why do you heal on the sabbath?”). Thomas asks questions we would today see as blasphemous (“you expect me to believe he was raised from the dead?”). Why do we ask such questions? In order to better understand. To not ask them is to hide from difficulty. But asking opens up valuable conversations. It lets us figure out the complexity of the world and keeps faith engaged.

I don’t know if I agree with Seibert’s positions or not. But I certainly appreciate him asking the questions. As I listen to other responses and perspectives, I’m better for it. We would only act to stop his comments if we were afraid of where they’d lead. But if the disciples weren’t supposed to fear a raging storm, why would Christians fear the writings of a college professor in Pennsylvania?

To critics like Strachan, questions are problematic because they could upset the entire apple cart. Liberal Arts institutions know that the apples are only good when you take them down and eat them.

 

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How Should We Interpret OT Violence in the Bible?

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2013/02/how-should-we-interpret-ot-violence-in.html

 

 

 

 

 

Where Does Space and Time Come From?

Where Do Space and Time Come From?

New Theory Offers Answers, If Only Physicists Can Figure It Out

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/04/12/where-do-space-and-time-come-from-new-theory-offers-answers-if-only-physicists-can-figure-it-out/

By George Musser | April 12, 2012|  Comments

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SANTA BARBARA—”Maybe we’re just too dumb,” Nobel laureate physicist David Gross mused in a lecture at Caltech two weeks ago. When someone of his level wonders whether the unification of physics will always be beyond mortal minds, it gets you worried. (He went on to explain why he doesn’t think we are too dumb, though.) Since his lecture, I’ve been learning about a theory that seems, at first, to confirm this worry. It is so ridiculously hard that it could be the subject of an Onion parody. But at the same time, I’ve been watching how physicists are trying to power through their intimidation, because the theory promises a new way of understanding what space and time really are, at a deep level.

The theory was put forward in the late 1980s by Russian physicists Mikhail Vasiliev and the late Efin Fradkin of the Lebedev Institute in Moscow, but is so mathematically complex and conceptually opaque that whenever someone brought it up, most theorists started talking about the weather, soccer, reality TV—anything but that theory. It became a subject of polite conversation only in the past couple of years, as math whizzes who take a peculiar pleasure in impossible problems dove in and showed that the theory is not impossible to grasp, merely almost impossible.

Inspired by their bravery, I’m going to take a crack at explaining this strange beast, synthesizing lectures I’ve attended by Steve Shenker of Stanford University, Andy Strominger of Harvard, and Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study, as well as informal chats with Joe Polchinski of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and Joan Simón of the University of Edinburgh. I’m sure they’ll set me straight if I get something wrong, and I’ll edit this blog post to reflect comments I receive.

Vasiliev theory (for sake of a pithy name, physicists drop Fradkin’s name) takes to extremes the basic idea of modern physics: that the world around us consists of fields—the electrical and magnetic fields and a handful of others that represent the known forces of nature and types of matter. Vasiliev theory posits an infinite number of fields. They come in progressively more complicated varieties described by the quantum-mechanical property of spin.

Spin is perhaps best thought of as the degree of rotational symmetry. The electromagnetic field along with its associated particle, the photon, has spin -1. If you rotate it 360 degrees, it looks the same as before. The gravitational field along with its associated particle, the graviton, has spin -2: you need to rotate it only 180 degrees [to find its original image]. The known particles of matter, such as the electron, have spin -1/2: you need to rotate them 720 degrees before they return to their original appearance - a counterintuititive feature that turns out to explain why these particles resist bunching, giving matter its integrity. The Higgs field has spin -0 and looks the same no matter how you rotate it.

Figure 1: Unification of forces and superstring theory It is thought that when the universe was born, there was only one kind of force, which bifurcated into four kinds as the temperature decreased with the expansion of the universe. Superstring theory is expected to provide a unified explaination for the initially bifurcated gravitational forces and the other threee forces, and even to solve the riddle of the birth of the universe.

Figure 2: A moving string as the minimum unit of matter At present, the electron and quark are considered to represent the smallest units of matter. The standard model assumes that a point is the smallest unit, whereas superstring theory assumes a string. The string turns into a quark after entering one mode of vibration and an electron after entering another mode.

In Vasiliev theory, there are also spin -5/2, spin -3, spin -7/2, spin -4, all the way up. Physicists used to assume that was impossible. These higher-spin fields, being more symmetrical, would imply new laws of nature analogous to the conservation of energy, and no two objects could ever interact without breaking one of those laws. The workings of nature would seize up like an overregulated economy. At first glance, string theory, the leading candidate for a fully unified theory of nature, runs afoul of this principle. Like a plucked guitar string, an elementary quantum string has an infinity of higher harmonics, which correspond to higher-spin fields. But those harmonics come with an energy cost, which keeps them inert.

Vasiliev and Frakin showed that the above reasoning applies only when gravity is insignificant and spacetime is not curved. In curved spacetimes, higher-spin fields can exist after all. Maybe overregulation isn’t such a bogeyman after all.

In fact, it may be a positive good. Higher-spin fields promise to flesh out the holographic principle, which is a way to explain the origin of space and gravity. Suppose you have a hypothetical three-dimensional spacetime (two space dimensions, one time dimension) filled with particles that interact solely by a souped-up version of the strong nuclear force; there is no gravity. In such a setting, objects can behave in a very structured way. Objects of a given size can interact only with objects of comparable size, just as objects can interact only if they are spatially adjacent. Size plays exactly the same role as spatial position; you can think of size as a new dimension of space, materializing from particle interactions like a figure in a pop-up book. The original three-dimensional spacetime becomes the boundary of a four-dimensional spacetime, with the new dimension representing the distance from this boundary. Not only does a spatial dimension emerge, but so does the force of gravity. In the jargon, the strong nuclear force in 3-D spacetime (the boundary) is “dual” to gravity in 4-D spacetime (the bulk).

As formulated by Maldacena in the late 1990s, the holographic principle describes a bulk where dark energy has a negative density, warping spacetime into a so-called anti-de Sitter geometry. But this is just a theorist’s playground. In the real universe, dark energy has a positive density, for a de Sitter geometry or some approximation thereof. Extending the holographic principle to such a geometry is fraught. The boundary of 4-D de Sitter spacetime is a 3-D space lying in the infinite future. The emergent dimension in this case would not be of space but of time, which is hard even for theoretical physicists to wrap their minds around. But if they succeed in formulating a version of the holographic principle for a de Sitter geometry, it would not only apply to the real universe, but would also explain what time really is. A lack of understanding of time is at the root of almost every deep problem in fundamental physics today.

That is where Vasiliev theory comes in. It works in either an anti-de Sitter or a de Sitter geometry. In the former [anti-de Sitter] case, the corresponding 3-D boundary is governed by a simplified version of the strong nuclear force rather than the souped-up one [(no space, no gravity)]. By biting the bullet and accepting the borderline-incomprehensible Vasiliev theory, physicists actually end up easing their task. In the de Sitter case, the corresponding 3-D boundary is governed by a type of field theory in which time does not operate; it is static. The structure of this theory gives rise to the dimension of time. What is more, time arises in an inherently asymmetric way, which might account for the arrow of time—its unidirectionality.

It gets even better. Normally the holographic principle [(cf. Wikipedia - Holographic principle)] can account for the emergence of one dimension, leaving the others unexplained. But Vasiliev theory might give you the whole kit and kaboodle. The higher-spin fields possess an even higher degree of symmetry than the gravitational field does, which is a lot. Higher symmetry means less structure. The theory of gravity, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, says that spacetime is like Silly Putty. Vasiliev theory says it is Sillier Putty, possessing too little structure to fulfill even its most basic functions, such as defining consistent cause-effect relations or keeping distant objects isolated from one another.

To put it differently, Vasiliev theory is even more nonlinear than general relativity. Matter and spacetime geometry are so thoroughly entwined that it becomes impossible to tease them apart, and our usual picture of matter as residing in spacetime becomes completely untenable. In the primordial universe, where Vasiliev theory reigned, the universe was an amorphous blob. As the higher-spin symmetries broke—for instance, as the higher harmonics of quantum strings become too costly to set into motion—spacetime emerged in its entirety.

Perhaps it is not so surprising that Vasiliev theory is so complicated. Any explanation of the nature of space and time is bound to be intimidating. If physicists ever do figure it out, I predict that they’ll forget how hard it used to be and start giving it to their students for homework.

About the Author: is a contributing editor at Scientific American. He focuses on space science and fundamental physics, ranging from particles to planets to parallel universes. He is the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory. Musser has won numerous awards in his career, including the 2011 American Institute of Physics's Science Writing Award. Follow on Twitter @gmusser.

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Index to past articles on "Particle Physics, Quantum Science, and the Universe"

More Resources:

Wikipedia - SpaceTime

Wikipedia - The Philosophy of Space and Time

Scientific American (5/17/11) - Space Is An Elaborate Illusion

Scientific American / res - The Paradox of Time: Why It Can't Stop, But Must

The Origin of Space and Time by John Gowan - http://www.johnagowan.org/convert.html

Mapping the History of Space & Time

Holography, Unfolding and Higher-Spin Theory, Mikhail Vasiliev