Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. (John 4:13-14 KJV)
Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David. (Isaiah 55:1-3 KJV)
For My people have committed a double evil: They have abandoned Me, the fountain of living water, and dug cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that cannot hold water. (Jeremiah 2:13 HCSB)
Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD. (Jeremiah 17:5 KJV)
But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31 KJV)
Those who refused to trust God will have to rely on self. This is an inevitable outcome. They shall have to work very hard, because their strength is limited and their goals are temporal and never satisfy. They study hard to get good results to get a good job to earn a good pay to live well. But at the end of their lives, when they stared at death, they would wonder why they had put in so much for things that cannot satisfy. "Youth is a mistake, manhood a struggle, old age a regret."
Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. (Philippians 4:12 ESV)
Friday, February 28, 2014
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Good Is Determined By Authority
Everybody wants to do good. But what is good? What determines good? Few people realize that good is determined by authority. The higher the authority, the greater the good. The greater good will overrule the smaller good. How do we know? There is a Chinese proverb, "犧牲小我,完成大我". Translated literally, it says "Sacrifice the smaller self for the bigger self". It means sacrificing the good of a smaller group for the good of a bigger group.
My customer ask me to do him a favour (see What Is Good). He wanted to add memory to his server and needed my help. Although this is not my job, but I helped him and put it into my service report to record the change in configuration. When my boss saw the service report, he rejected it. He said that although I meant well by helping the customer and keeping proper record in the service report, but in doing so, I may have invalidated the warranty of the server. By putting it into the service report, his company will hold our company liable for invalidating the warranty. He asked me to remove the memory and change the service report.
I did a good deed on my own authority. But it was nullified by my boss because it harmed a greater authority, that is, my company. And there are greater authorities than my company, such as my country, the world and so on. But the highest authority is the creator of all things, God. God has the highest authority and what He defined as good is the ultimate good.
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:20-21 ESV)
Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, 25 to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. (Jude 1:24-25 ESV)
My customer ask me to do him a favour (see What Is Good). He wanted to add memory to his server and needed my help. Although this is not my job, but I helped him and put it into my service report to record the change in configuration. When my boss saw the service report, he rejected it. He said that although I meant well by helping the customer and keeping proper record in the service report, but in doing so, I may have invalidated the warranty of the server. By putting it into the service report, his company will hold our company liable for invalidating the warranty. He asked me to remove the memory and change the service report.
I did a good deed on my own authority. But it was nullified by my boss because it harmed a greater authority, that is, my company. And there are greater authorities than my company, such as my country, the world and so on. But the highest authority is the creator of all things, God. God has the highest authority and what He defined as good is the ultimate good.
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:20-21 ESV)
Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, 25 to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. (Jude 1:24-25 ESV)
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Imagine
John Lennon once wrote a song "Imagine - Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky."
Why would he want to do that? But let us have another imagination.
Imagine there's only truth, and there is no lies, what kind of world will that be? Isn't that going to be heaven?
Why would he want to do that? But let us have another imagination.
Imagine there's only truth, and there is no lies, what kind of world will that be? Isn't that going to be heaven?
Friday, February 21, 2014
最基本的因果報應
因果報應，不能不信。這是最基本的因果報應，人若拒绝真理與生命的道路，就只能選擇謊言與死亡的绝路。這是天經地義、自然規律！
This is the fundamental karma (因果). If we reject truth (真理) and life (生命), we will get lies (謊言) and death (死亡).
耶穌說我就是道路、真理、生命；若不藉著我，沒有人能到父那裡去。(約翰福音 14:6 CUV)
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. (John 14:6 KJV)
When we refuse to worship the Creator, we will have to worship the creature.
他們將神的真實變為虛謊，去敬拜事奉受造之物，不敬奉那造物的主；主乃是可稱頌的，直到永遠。阿們！(羅馬書 1:25 CUV)
For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. (Romans 1:25 NASB)
This is the fundamental karma (因果). If we reject truth (真理) and life (生命), we will get lies (謊言) and death (死亡).
耶穌說我就是道路、真理、生命；若不藉著我，沒有人能到父那裡去。(約翰福音 14:6 CUV)
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. (John 14:6 KJV)
When we refuse to worship the Creator, we will have to worship the creature.
他們將神的真實變為虛謊，去敬拜事奉受造之物，不敬奉那造物的主；主乃是可稱頌的，直到永遠。阿們！(羅馬書 1:25 CUV)
For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. (Romans 1:25 NASB)
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Truth Is A Tyrant
Truth is a tyrant. It does not believe in democracy. Essentially, it says, "順我者昌 逆我者亡".
Let say there is a good man who does a lot of charity and do a lot of good work but he does not believe in the Law of Gravity. One day he decide to prove that the Law of Gravity is false by jumping from a building fifty storeys high. Do you think he will be saved by his good works, or will he hit the ground and die?
If everyone in this world were to vote to repeal the Law of Gravity, do you think it would be repealed?
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. (John 14:6 KJV)
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. (John 8:32 NIV)
And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. (John 17:3 KJV)
Truth is the tyrant that set you free from lies.
Let say there is a good man who does a lot of charity and do a lot of good work but he does not believe in the Law of Gravity. One day he decide to prove that the Law of Gravity is false by jumping from a building fifty storeys high. Do you think he will be saved by his good works, or will he hit the ground and die?
If everyone in this world were to vote to repeal the Law of Gravity, do you think it would be repealed?
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. (John 14:6 KJV)
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. (John 8:32 NIV)
And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. (John 17:3 KJV)
Truth is the tyrant that set you free from lies.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
The LORD Is Good To All
The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works. (Psalm 145:9 KJV)
... for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. (Matthew 5:45 KJV)
... for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. (Matthew 5:45 KJV)
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
The Atheist's Hope - Chance, Luck, Coincidence, Miracle
The paragraphs below are taken from Chapter 6 "Origins and Miracles" of "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins:
QUOTE
Think about what this means. We go to a chemist and say: get out your textbooks and your calculating machine; sharpen your pencil and your wits; fill your head with formulae, and your flasks with methane and ammonia and hydrogen and carbon dioxide and all the other gases that a primeval nonliving planet can be expected to have; cook them all up together; pass strokes of lightning through your simulated atmospheres, and strokes of inspiration through your brain; bring all your clever chemist's methods to bear, and give us your best chemist's estimate of the probability that a typical planet will spontaneously generate a self-replicating molecule. or, to put it another way, how long would we have to wait before random chemical events on the planet, random thermal jostling of atoms and molecules, resulted in a self-replicating molecule?
Chemists don't know the answer to this question. Most modem chemists would probably say that we'd have to wait a long time by the standards of a human lifetime, but perhaps not all that long by the standards of cosmological time. The fossil history. of earth suggests that we have about a billion years - one 'aeon', to use a convenient modern definition - to play with, for this is roughly the time that elapsed between the origin of the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago and the era of the first fossil organisms. But the point of our 'numbers of planets' argument is that, even if the chemist said that we'd have to wait for a 'miracle', have to wait a billion billion years - far longer than the universe has existed, we can still accept this verdict with equanimity. There are probably more than a billion billion available planets in the universe. If each of them lasts as long as Earth, that gives us about a billion billion billion planet-years to play with. That will do nicely! A miracle is translated into practical politics by a multiplication sum.
There is a concealed assumption in this argument. Well, actually there are lots, but there's one in particular that I want to talk about. This is that, once life (i.e. replicators and cumulative selection) originates at all, it always advances to the point where its creatures evolve enough intelligence to speculate about their origins. If this is not so, our estimate of the amount of luck that we are allowed to postulate must be reduced accordingly. To be more precise, the maximum odds against the origin of life on any one planet that our theories are allowed to postulate, is the number of available planets in the universe divided by the odds that life, once started, will evolve sufficient intelligence to speculate about its own origins.
It may seem a little strange that 'sufficient intelligence to speculate about its own origins' is a relevant variable. To understand why it is, consider an alternative assumption. Suppose that the origin of life was quite a probable event, but the subsequent evolution of intelligence was exceedingly improbable, demanding a huge stroke of luck. Suppose the origin of intelligence is so improbable that it has happened on only one planet in the universe, even though life has started on many planets. Then, since we know we are intelligent enough to discuss the question, we know that Earth must be that one planet. Now suppose that the origin of life, and the origin of intelligence given that life is there, are both highly improbable events. Then the probability of any one planet, such as Earth, enjoying both strokes of luck is the product of the two low probabilities, and this is a far smaller probability.
It is as though, in our theory of how we came to exist, we are allowed to postulate a certain ration of luck. This ration has, as its upper limit, the number of eligible planets in the universe. Given our ration of luck, we can then 'spend' it as a limited commodity over the course of our explanation of our own existence. if we use up almost all our ration of luck in our theory of how life gets started on a planet in not by looking at lots of particular theories, but by looking at one as an example of how the basic problem - how cumulative selection got its start - might be solved.
UNQUOTE
This is the answer of the atheist, Richard Dawkins, to the question when and how a bunch of non-living of molecules become a living, self-replicating molecule, how the non-living gives life. It is a statement of faith, not of science. The "how", the "theory of how" and the "prediction of the how theory" is completely absent.
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Romans 1:21 ESV)
QUOTE
Think about what this means. We go to a chemist and say: get out your textbooks and your calculating machine; sharpen your pencil and your wits; fill your head with formulae, and your flasks with methane and ammonia and hydrogen and carbon dioxide and all the other gases that a primeval nonliving planet can be expected to have; cook them all up together; pass strokes of lightning through your simulated atmospheres, and strokes of inspiration through your brain; bring all your clever chemist's methods to bear, and give us your best chemist's estimate of the probability that a typical planet will spontaneously generate a self-replicating molecule. or, to put it another way, how long would we have to wait before random chemical events on the planet, random thermal jostling of atoms and molecules, resulted in a self-replicating molecule?
Chemists don't know the answer to this question. Most modem chemists would probably say that we'd have to wait a long time by the standards of a human lifetime, but perhaps not all that long by the standards of cosmological time. The fossil history. of earth suggests that we have about a billion years - one 'aeon', to use a convenient modern definition - to play with, for this is roughly the time that elapsed between the origin of the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago and the era of the first fossil organisms. But the point of our 'numbers of planets' argument is that, even if the chemist said that we'd have to wait for a 'miracle', have to wait a billion billion years - far longer than the universe has existed, we can still accept this verdict with equanimity. There are probably more than a billion billion available planets in the universe. If each of them lasts as long as Earth, that gives us about a billion billion billion planet-years to play with. That will do nicely! A miracle is translated into practical politics by a multiplication sum.
There is a concealed assumption in this argument. Well, actually there are lots, but there's one in particular that I want to talk about. This is that, once life (i.e. replicators and cumulative selection) originates at all, it always advances to the point where its creatures evolve enough intelligence to speculate about their origins. If this is not so, our estimate of the amount of luck that we are allowed to postulate must be reduced accordingly. To be more precise, the maximum odds against the origin of life on any one planet that our theories are allowed to postulate, is the number of available planets in the universe divided by the odds that life, once started, will evolve sufficient intelligence to speculate about its own origins.
It may seem a little strange that 'sufficient intelligence to speculate about its own origins' is a relevant variable. To understand why it is, consider an alternative assumption. Suppose that the origin of life was quite a probable event, but the subsequent evolution of intelligence was exceedingly improbable, demanding a huge stroke of luck. Suppose the origin of intelligence is so improbable that it has happened on only one planet in the universe, even though life has started on many planets. Then, since we know we are intelligent enough to discuss the question, we know that Earth must be that one planet. Now suppose that the origin of life, and the origin of intelligence given that life is there, are both highly improbable events. Then the probability of any one planet, such as Earth, enjoying both strokes of luck is the product of the two low probabilities, and this is a far smaller probability.
It is as though, in our theory of how we came to exist, we are allowed to postulate a certain ration of luck. This ration has, as its upper limit, the number of eligible planets in the universe. Given our ration of luck, we can then 'spend' it as a limited commodity over the course of our explanation of our own existence. if we use up almost all our ration of luck in our theory of how life gets started on a planet in not by looking at lots of particular theories, but by looking at one as an example of how the basic problem - how cumulative selection got its start - might be solved.
UNQUOTE
This is the answer of the atheist, Richard Dawkins, to the question when and how a bunch of non-living of molecules become a living, self-replicating molecule, how the non-living gives life. It is a statement of faith, not of science. The "how", the "theory of how" and the "prediction of the how theory" is completely absent.
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Romans 1:21 ESV)
Monday, February 10, 2014
God Rejected
I would not have a god come in
To shield me suddenly from sin,
And set my house of life to rights;
Nor angels with bright burning wings
Ordering my earthly thoughts and things;
Rather my own frail guttering lights
Wind blown and nearly beaten out;
Rather the terror of the nights
And long, sick groping after doubt;
Rather be lost than let my soul
Slip vaguely from my own control --
Of my own spirit let me be
In sole though feeble mastery.
Sara Teasdale (08-08-1884 – 29-01-1933)
They cried out again, "Not this man, but Barabbas!" Now Barabbas was a robber. (John 18:40 ESV)
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. (Romans 1:28-32 ESV)
To shield me suddenly from sin,
And set my house of life to rights;
Nor angels with bright burning wings
Ordering my earthly thoughts and things;
Rather my own frail guttering lights
Wind blown and nearly beaten out;
Rather the terror of the nights
And long, sick groping after doubt;
Rather be lost than let my soul
Slip vaguely from my own control --
Of my own spirit let me be
In sole though feeble mastery.
Sara Teasdale (08-08-1884 – 29-01-1933)
They cried out again, "Not this man, but Barabbas!" Now Barabbas was a robber. (John 18:40 ESV)
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. (Romans 1:28-32 ESV)
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Molecule to Man Evolution
David Christian in a TED talk video titled "The History of the World in 18 minutes", narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, a presentation of how a "Molecule to Man Evolution" may occur in a naturalistic way, without divine intervention., in 17 minutes 37 seconds.
He said that in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, complexity can created but with great difficulty. He then listed about ten threshold moments called "Goldilocks conditions" (not too hot, not too cold, just right) for the creation of complexity.
I will be satisfied that a "Molecule to Man Evolution" may occur in a naturalistic way if someone can show me convincingly how the following four thresholds are overcome. Two of which relates to the overall infrastructure (particles to universe) and two relating to life (molecules to cells):
Threshold 1: Something from Nothing (Origin)
In the beginning, there was absolutely nothing. No time, no space, no laws of the universe. Can we prove this? Then the big bang occurred. How?
Threshold 2: Formation of Structure (Structure)
From the initial big bang, how is the current structure of the universe formed, from the elementary particles of the quantum field theory to atoms to molecules to planets and stars. I know astronomers have been scanning the skies and looking at stars, galaxies and other structures in what they believed to be various states of their formation, but how sure are they of these theories?
Threshold 3: Living Things From Non-living Things (Origin)
Now we bring our focus from the skies around us to our earth. Where did life come from? How did the non-living things produce the living things? How did molecules form DNA in a natural (read: without God) way? How did random chemical events on earth resulted in a self-replicating molecule? Do we know the conditions and process that give rise to life? Can we reproduce them in a laboratory? Do the scientist expect us to accept what we are told by faith, like what God expect us to do?
Threshold 4: Single cell to multi-cellular living things (Structure)
How did unicellular organisms became multi-cellular organisms via the natural process?
He said that in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, complexity can created but with great difficulty. He then listed about ten threshold moments called "Goldilocks conditions" (not too hot, not too cold, just right) for the creation of complexity.
I will be satisfied that a "Molecule to Man Evolution" may occur in a naturalistic way if someone can show me convincingly how the following four thresholds are overcome. Two of which relates to the overall infrastructure (particles to universe) and two relating to life (molecules to cells):
Threshold 1: Something from Nothing (Origin)
In the beginning, there was absolutely nothing. No time, no space, no laws of the universe. Can we prove this? Then the big bang occurred. How?
Threshold 2: Formation of Structure (Structure)
From the initial big bang, how is the current structure of the universe formed, from the elementary particles of the quantum field theory to atoms to molecules to planets and stars. I know astronomers have been scanning the skies and looking at stars, galaxies and other structures in what they believed to be various states of their formation, but how sure are they of these theories?
Threshold 3: Living Things From Non-living Things (Origin)
Now we bring our focus from the skies around us to our earth. Where did life come from? How did the non-living things produce the living things? How did molecules form DNA in a natural (read: without God) way? How did random chemical events on earth resulted in a self-replicating molecule? Do we know the conditions and process that give rise to life? Can we reproduce them in a laboratory? Do the scientist expect us to accept what we are told by faith, like what God expect us to do?
Threshold 4: Single cell to multi-cellular living things (Structure)
How did unicellular organisms became multi-cellular organisms via the natural process?
Saturday, February 8, 2014
The Descent of Man
This picture is taken from the Bill Nye Ken Ham debate. It is from Ken Ham, showing a summary of the Bible from creation to consummation.
Creation
Genesis 1:1 - 2:3
Corruption
Genesis 3:1-24
Catastrophe
Genesis 7:11-12
Confusion
Genesis 11:1-9
Christ
Genesis 3:15
Micah 5:2
Daniel 9:24-26
Cross
Psalm 22
Consummation
Revelation 21:1
Creation
Genesis 1:1 - 2:3
Corruption
Genesis 3:1-24
Catastrophe
Genesis 7:11-12
Confusion
Genesis 11:1-9
Christ
Genesis 3:15
Micah 5:2
Daniel 9:24-26
Cross
Psalm 22
Consummation
Revelation 21:1
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Death And Judgement
For the wages of sin is death; (Romans 6:23 KJV)
And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: (Hebrews 9:27 KJV)
EXCEPTIONS
Those who die twice
1. The son of Zarephath's widow (1 Kings 17:17-24)
2. The son of the Shunammite woman (2 Kings 4:35)
3. Dead man came back to life when he touches Elisha's bones (Kings 13:21)
4. The son of the widow at Nain (Luke 7:13-15)
5. The daughter of Jairus (Matthew 9:25)
6. Lazarus (John 11:43-44)
7. Tabitha / Dorcas (Acts 9:36-42)
8. Eutychus (Acts 20:9-12)
Those who by-pass death straight to eternal life
And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him (Genesis 5:24 KJV).
By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God (Hebrews 11:5 KJV)
And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven (2 Kings 2:11 KJV)
Those who by-pass death straight to eternal death
And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshiped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone (Revelations 19:20 KJV).
And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: (Hebrews 9:27 KJV)
EXCEPTIONS
Those who die twice
1. The son of Zarephath's widow (1 Kings 17:17-24)
2. The son of the Shunammite woman (2 Kings 4:35)
3. Dead man came back to life when he touches Elisha's bones (Kings 13:21)
4. The son of the widow at Nain (Luke 7:13-15)
5. The daughter of Jairus (Matthew 9:25)
6. Lazarus (John 11:43-44)
7. Tabitha / Dorcas (Acts 9:36-42)
8. Eutychus (Acts 20:9-12)
Those who by-pass death straight to eternal life
And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him (Genesis 5:24 KJV).
By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God (Hebrews 11:5 KJV)
And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven (2 Kings 2:11 KJV)
Those who by-pass death straight to eternal death
And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshiped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone (Revelations 19:20 KJV).
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Be Proactive
Stephen F. Covey's book "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" listed "Be Proactive" as the first habit.
God is proactive. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8 NIV) All we that need is supplied by God. But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:19 KJV) But we choose to procrastinate. We refuse to believe in a God that had already proactively found a solution for us. Instead we prefer to seek our own salvation.
But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. (Galatians 4:4-5 NASB)
He again fixes a certain day, "Today," saying through David after so long a time just as has been said before, "TODAY IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, DO NOT HARDEN YOUR HEARTS." (Hebrews 4:7 NASB)
God is proactive. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8 NIV) All we that need is supplied by God. But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:19 KJV) But we choose to procrastinate. We refuse to believe in a God that had already proactively found a solution for us. Instead we prefer to seek our own salvation.
But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. (Galatians 4:4-5 NASB)
He again fixes a certain day, "Today," saying through David after so long a time just as has been said before, "TODAY IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, DO NOT HARDEN YOUR HEARTS." (Hebrews 4:7 NASB)
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Goldilocks Moments in the History of the Universe
In a TED talk titled "The History of the World in 18 minutes", David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a 18 minutes.
Here is a summary of the "Goldilocks conditions" from this talk.
Below is the transcript of his speech.
QUOTE
First, a video. (Video) Yes, it is a scrambled egg. But as you look at it, I hope you'll begin to feel just slightly uneasy. Because you may notice that what's actually happening is that the egg is unscrambling itself. And you'll now see the yolk and the white have separated. And now they're going to be poured back into the egg. And we all know in our heart of hearts that this is not the way the universe works. A scrambled egg is mush -- tasty mush -- but it's mush. An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens. And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity. In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy. What that says basically is that the general tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to lack of order, lack of structure -- in fact, to mush. And that's why that video feels a bit strange.
And yet, look around us. What we see around us is staggering complexity. Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone, there are some 10 billion SKUs, or distinct commodities, being traded. That's hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth. And they're being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals, who are linked by trade, travel, and the Internet into a global system of stupendous complexity.
So here's a great puzzle: in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity I've described, the sort of complexity represented by you and me and the convention center? Well, the answer seems to be, the universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty. In pockets, there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier, calls "Goldilocks conditions" -- not too hot, not too cold, just right for the creation of complexity. And slightly more complex things appear. And where you have slightly more complex things, you can get slightly more complex things. And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage. Each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe. We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments. And at each threshold, the going gets tougher. The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable; the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent, and it's more difficult to create complexity.
Now, we, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity despite the second law, and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility. And that's the story that we tell in big history. But to do it, you have do something that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible. You have to survey the whole history of the universe. So let's do it. (Laughter) Let's begin by winding the timeline back 13.7 billion years, to the beginning of time.
Around us, there's nothing. There's not even time or space. Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can and cube it a gazillion times and that's where we are. And then suddenly, bang! A universe appears, an entire universe. And we've crossed our first threshold. The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom. It's incredibly hot. It contains everything that's in today's universe, so you can imagine, it's busting. And it's expanding at incredible speed. And at first, it's just a blur, but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur. Within the first second, energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity. And energy does something else quite magical: it congeals to form matter -- quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons. And all of that happens in the first second.
Now we move forward 380,000 years. That's twice as long as humans have been on this planet. And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium. Now I want to pause for a moment, 380,000 years after the origins of the universe, because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage. We know above all that it was extremely simple. It consisted of huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms, and they have no structure. They're really a sort of cosmic mush. But that's not completely true. Recent studies by satellites such as the WMAP satellite have shown that, in fact, there are just tiny differences in that background. What you see here, the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler than the red areas. These are tiny differences, but it was enough for the universe to move on to the next stage of building complexity.
And this is how it works. Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff. So where you get slightly denser areas, gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms. So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds. And each cloud is compacted, gravity gets more powerful as density increases, the temperature begins to rise at the center of each cloud, and then, at the center of each cloud, the temperature crosses the threshold temperature of 10 million degrees, protons start to fuse, there's a huge release of energy, and, bam! We have our first stars. From about 200 million years after the Big Bang, stars begin to appear all through the universe, billions of them. And the universe is now significantly more interesting and more complex.
Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions for crossing two new thresholds. When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion. So now the universe is chemically more complex. And in a chemically more complex universe, it's possible to make more things. And what starts happening is that, around young suns, young stars, all these elements combine, they swirl around, the energy of the star stirs them around, they form particles, they form snowflakes, they form little dust motes, they form rocks, they form asteroids, and eventually, they form planets and moons. And that is how our solar system was formed, four and a half billion years ago. Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars because they contain a much greater diversity of materials. So we've crossed a fourth threshold of complexity.
Now, the going gets tougher. The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile, significantly more vulnerable, but they're also much more creative and much more capable of generating further complexity. I'm talking, of course, about living organisms. Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals. So, chemistry is dominated by the electromagnetic force. That operates over smaller scales than gravity, which explains why you and I are smaller than stars or planets. Now, what are the ideal conditions for chemistry? What are the Goldilocks conditions? Well, first, you need energy, but not too much. In the center of a star, there's so much energy that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again. But not too little. In intergalactic space, there's so little energy that atoms can't combine. What you want is just the right amount, and planets, it turns out, are just right, because they're close to stars, but not too close.
You also need a great diversity of chemical elements, and you need liquid such as water. Why? Well, in gasses, atoms move past each other so fast that they can't hitch up. In solids, atoms are stuck together, they can't move. In liquids, they can cruise and cuddle and link up to form molecules. Now, where do you find such Goldilocks conditions? Well, planets are great, and our early Earth was almost perfect. It was just the right distance from its star to contain huge oceans of open water. And deep beneath those oceans, at cracks in the Earth's crust, you've got heat seeping up from inside the Earth, and you've got a great diversity of elements. So at those deep oceanic vents, fantastic chemistry began to happen, and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations.
But of course, life is more than just exotic chemistry. How do you stabilize those huge molecules that seem to be viable? Well, it's here that life introduces an entirely new trick. You don't stabilize the individual; you stabilize the template, the thing that carries information, and you allow the template to copy itself. And DNA, of course, is the beautiful molecule that contains that information. You'll be familiar with the double helix of DNA. Each rung contains information. So, DNA contains information about how to make living organisms. And DNA also copies itself. So, it copies itself and scatters the templates through the ocean. So the information spreads. Notice that information has become part of our story. The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections. As it copies itself, once in every billion rungs, there tends to be an error. And what that means is that DNA is, in effect, learning. It's accumulating new ways of making living organisms because some of those errors work. So DNA's learning and it's building greater diversity and greater complexity. And we can see this happening over the last four billion years.
For most of that time of life on Earth, living organisms have been relatively simple -- single cells. But they had great diversity, and, inside, great complexity. Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appear. You get fungi, you get fish, you get plants, you get amphibia, you get reptiles, and then, of course, you get the dinosaurs. And occasionally, there are disasters. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid landed on Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war, and the dinosaurs were wiped out. Terrible news for the dinosaurs, but great news for our mammalian ancestors, who flourished in the niches left empty by the dinosaurs. And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid.
Humans appeared about 200,000 years ago. And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story. Let me explain why. We've seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information. But it is so slow. DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work. But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning: it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time. They accumulate information, they learn. The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them. Now what makes humans different is human language. We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we've learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory. And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation. And that's why, as a species, we're so creative and so powerful, and that's why we have a history. We seem to be the only species in four billion years to have this gift.
I call this ability collective learning. It's what makes us different. We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history. We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa, but then you see humans migrating into new environments, into desert lands, into jungles, into the ice age tundra of Siberia -- tough, tough environment -- into the Americas, into Australasia. Each migration involved learning -- learning new ways of exploiting the environment, new ways of dealing with their surroundings.
Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, humans learned to farm. Farming was an energy bonanza. And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied. Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected. And then from about 500 years ago, humans began to link up globally through shipping, through trains, through telegraph, through the Internet, until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals. And that brain is learning at warp speed. And in the last 200 years, something else has happened. We've stumbled on another energy bonanza in fossil fuels. So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us.
So, here we are, back at the convention center. We've been on a journey, a return journey, of 13.7 billion years. I hope you agree that this is a powerful story. And it's a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role. But it also contains warnings. Collective learning is a very, very powerful force, and it's not clear that we humans are in charge of it. I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they are still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us. We're burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we seem to be undermining the Goldilocks conditions that made it possible for human civilizations to flourish over the last 10,000 years. So what big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power with collective learning.
And now, finally, this is what I want. I want my grandson, Daniel, and his friends and his generation, throughout the world, to know the story of big history, and to know it so well that they understand both the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us. And that's why a group of us are building a free, online syllabus in big history for high school students throughout the world. We believe that big history will be a vital intellectual tool for them, as Daniel and his generation face the huge challenges and also the huge opportunities ahead of them at this threshold moment in the history of our beautiful planet.
I thank you for your attention.
UNQUOTE
Here is a summary of the "Goldilocks conditions" from this talk.
- 13.7 billion years where there is nothing - no space, no time and nothing to hold the rules of science. Then in an unknown Goldilocks conditions, there was a Big Bang!
- 380,000 years later, first stars appeared.
- Death of large stars create elements other than hydrogen and helium.
- Four and a half billion years ago, planets and satellites formed.
- Goldilocks conditions on earth created DNA.
- 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appeared.
- 200,000 years ago, humans appeared.
- 10,000 years ago, humans learned to farm.
- 500 years ago, humans linked up globally.
- 200 years, fossil fuels discovered.
Below is the transcript of his speech.
QUOTE
First, a video. (Video) Yes, it is a scrambled egg. But as you look at it, I hope you'll begin to feel just slightly uneasy. Because you may notice that what's actually happening is that the egg is unscrambling itself. And you'll now see the yolk and the white have separated. And now they're going to be poured back into the egg. And we all know in our heart of hearts that this is not the way the universe works. A scrambled egg is mush -- tasty mush -- but it's mush. An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens. And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity. In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy. What that says basically is that the general tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to lack of order, lack of structure -- in fact, to mush. And that's why that video feels a bit strange.
And yet, look around us. What we see around us is staggering complexity. Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone, there are some 10 billion SKUs, or distinct commodities, being traded. That's hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth. And they're being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals, who are linked by trade, travel, and the Internet into a global system of stupendous complexity.
So here's a great puzzle: in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity I've described, the sort of complexity represented by you and me and the convention center? Well, the answer seems to be, the universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty. In pockets, there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier, calls "Goldilocks conditions" -- not too hot, not too cold, just right for the creation of complexity. And slightly more complex things appear. And where you have slightly more complex things, you can get slightly more complex things. And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage. Each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe. We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments. And at each threshold, the going gets tougher. The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable; the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent, and it's more difficult to create complexity.
Now, we, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity despite the second law, and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility. And that's the story that we tell in big history. But to do it, you have do something that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible. You have to survey the whole history of the universe. So let's do it. (Laughter) Let's begin by winding the timeline back 13.7 billion years, to the beginning of time.
Around us, there's nothing. There's not even time or space. Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can and cube it a gazillion times and that's where we are. And then suddenly, bang! A universe appears, an entire universe. And we've crossed our first threshold. The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom. It's incredibly hot. It contains everything that's in today's universe, so you can imagine, it's busting. And it's expanding at incredible speed. And at first, it's just a blur, but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur. Within the first second, energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity. And energy does something else quite magical: it congeals to form matter -- quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons. And all of that happens in the first second.
Now we move forward 380,000 years. That's twice as long as humans have been on this planet. And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium. Now I want to pause for a moment, 380,000 years after the origins of the universe, because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage. We know above all that it was extremely simple. It consisted of huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms, and they have no structure. They're really a sort of cosmic mush. But that's not completely true. Recent studies by satellites such as the WMAP satellite have shown that, in fact, there are just tiny differences in that background. What you see here, the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler than the red areas. These are tiny differences, but it was enough for the universe to move on to the next stage of building complexity.
And this is how it works. Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff. So where you get slightly denser areas, gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms. So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds. And each cloud is compacted, gravity gets more powerful as density increases, the temperature begins to rise at the center of each cloud, and then, at the center of each cloud, the temperature crosses the threshold temperature of 10 million degrees, protons start to fuse, there's a huge release of energy, and, bam! We have our first stars. From about 200 million years after the Big Bang, stars begin to appear all through the universe, billions of them. And the universe is now significantly more interesting and more complex.
Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions for crossing two new thresholds. When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion. So now the universe is chemically more complex. And in a chemically more complex universe, it's possible to make more things. And what starts happening is that, around young suns, young stars, all these elements combine, they swirl around, the energy of the star stirs them around, they form particles, they form snowflakes, they form little dust motes, they form rocks, they form asteroids, and eventually, they form planets and moons. And that is how our solar system was formed, four and a half billion years ago. Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars because they contain a much greater diversity of materials. So we've crossed a fourth threshold of complexity.
Now, the going gets tougher. The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile, significantly more vulnerable, but they're also much more creative and much more capable of generating further complexity. I'm talking, of course, about living organisms. Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals. So, chemistry is dominated by the electromagnetic force. That operates over smaller scales than gravity, which explains why you and I are smaller than stars or planets. Now, what are the ideal conditions for chemistry? What are the Goldilocks conditions? Well, first, you need energy, but not too much. In the center of a star, there's so much energy that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again. But not too little. In intergalactic space, there's so little energy that atoms can't combine. What you want is just the right amount, and planets, it turns out, are just right, because they're close to stars, but not too close.
You also need a great diversity of chemical elements, and you need liquid such as water. Why? Well, in gasses, atoms move past each other so fast that they can't hitch up. In solids, atoms are stuck together, they can't move. In liquids, they can cruise and cuddle and link up to form molecules. Now, where do you find such Goldilocks conditions? Well, planets are great, and our early Earth was almost perfect. It was just the right distance from its star to contain huge oceans of open water. And deep beneath those oceans, at cracks in the Earth's crust, you've got heat seeping up from inside the Earth, and you've got a great diversity of elements. So at those deep oceanic vents, fantastic chemistry began to happen, and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations.
But of course, life is more than just exotic chemistry. How do you stabilize those huge molecules that seem to be viable? Well, it's here that life introduces an entirely new trick. You don't stabilize the individual; you stabilize the template, the thing that carries information, and you allow the template to copy itself. And DNA, of course, is the beautiful molecule that contains that information. You'll be familiar with the double helix of DNA. Each rung contains information. So, DNA contains information about how to make living organisms. And DNA also copies itself. So, it copies itself and scatters the templates through the ocean. So the information spreads. Notice that information has become part of our story. The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections. As it copies itself, once in every billion rungs, there tends to be an error. And what that means is that DNA is, in effect, learning. It's accumulating new ways of making living organisms because some of those errors work. So DNA's learning and it's building greater diversity and greater complexity. And we can see this happening over the last four billion years.
For most of that time of life on Earth, living organisms have been relatively simple -- single cells. But they had great diversity, and, inside, great complexity. Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appear. You get fungi, you get fish, you get plants, you get amphibia, you get reptiles, and then, of course, you get the dinosaurs. And occasionally, there are disasters. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid landed on Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war, and the dinosaurs were wiped out. Terrible news for the dinosaurs, but great news for our mammalian ancestors, who flourished in the niches left empty by the dinosaurs. And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid.
Humans appeared about 200,000 years ago. And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story. Let me explain why. We've seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information. But it is so slow. DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work. But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning: it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time. They accumulate information, they learn. The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them. Now what makes humans different is human language. We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we've learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory. And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation. And that's why, as a species, we're so creative and so powerful, and that's why we have a history. We seem to be the only species in four billion years to have this gift.
I call this ability collective learning. It's what makes us different. We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history. We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa, but then you see humans migrating into new environments, into desert lands, into jungles, into the ice age tundra of Siberia -- tough, tough environment -- into the Americas, into Australasia. Each migration involved learning -- learning new ways of exploiting the environment, new ways of dealing with their surroundings.
Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, humans learned to farm. Farming was an energy bonanza. And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied. Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected. And then from about 500 years ago, humans began to link up globally through shipping, through trains, through telegraph, through the Internet, until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals. And that brain is learning at warp speed. And in the last 200 years, something else has happened. We've stumbled on another energy bonanza in fossil fuels. So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us.
So, here we are, back at the convention center. We've been on a journey, a return journey, of 13.7 billion years. I hope you agree that this is a powerful story. And it's a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role. But it also contains warnings. Collective learning is a very, very powerful force, and it's not clear that we humans are in charge of it. I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they are still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us. We're burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we seem to be undermining the Goldilocks conditions that made it possible for human civilizations to flourish over the last 10,000 years. So what big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power with collective learning.
And now, finally, this is what I want. I want my grandson, Daniel, and his friends and his generation, throughout the world, to know the story of big history, and to know it so well that they understand both the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us. And that's why a group of us are building a free, online syllabus in big history for high school students throughout the world. We believe that big history will be a vital intellectual tool for them, as Daniel and his generation face the huge challenges and also the huge opportunities ahead of them at this threshold moment in the history of our beautiful planet.
I thank you for your attention.
UNQUOTE
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