Mikeypedia

Four score and sixty nine years ago today, our favorite President (and Daniel Day Lewis lookalike) brought forth a memorable speech, conceived in unity, delivered in Gettysburg, and dedicated to the proposition that politicians can say things in public that aren’t truly stupid.

Now we are engaged in a great intellectual crisis, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and dedicated, can long endure the potential extinction of Twinkies. We are met on a great fictional battle-field, on a frozen lake somewhere in northern Canada. We have come to dedicate a portion of ourselves to witness a ragtag bunch of vegetarian vampires, and their lupine compatriots, as they face down the autocratic and oppressive Volturi, so that they might live… and sparkle. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, consecrate, or hallow this frozen lake – partly because it is Canada, which, according to most non-Aggie scholars, is not actually a part of the United States. The world will little note the brave men and women, living and dead, who fought for our freedom, championed the rights of those less fortunate, supported the cause of equality, and courageously won for us the opportunity to inflict Big Macs and venti soy pumpkin spice caramel half-caf macchiatos on the world at large, because we’re too busy debating political faux pas and the pros & cons of a Disneyfied Star Wars. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from this morass of insanity, from this primeval assemblage of persons who are addicted to Pinterest and Donald Trump, fascinated by zombies, allergic to facts, and largely unwilling to admit that Duck Dynasty is the funniest thing to ever happen to mass media, shall arise a new awareness – that this nation, under God, shall have a rebirth of humor – and that laughing at ourselves, and the timeless idea that we, the people, will no longer take ourselves so flippin’ seriously, shall not perish from the earth.

On this date (Oct 22) in 4004 BC something very important happened. According to James Ussher, an Irish theologian in the 17th century, that’s the day God spoke the universe into existence. Pretty big deal!

Obviously, in today’s world, Ussher is considered to be just a wee bit off. He has the creation of the universe happening some 2000 years after the first use of bricks; 1200 years after the development of wine; 1000 years after the domestication of rice, beans, gourds, maize, and water buffalo; 500 years after the development of copper jewelry, the plow, the wheel, and beer; and 238 years after the first date on the Egyptian calendar. But hey, what’s 13 or 14 billion years between friends?

Still, as it turns out, criticisms of Ussher aren’t really fair. Obviously he didn’t have anything that was even close to modern tools at his disposal. But more than that, in his time, there just wasn’t a paradigm that would allow for any kind of non-biblical time calculation.

Given his historical context and the constraints of contemporary knowlege, he did a pretty good job! His scholarship was fairly serious. Along with his biblical knowledge (figuring differences in ancient languages, counting generations enumerated in the Bible, etc.), he brought in several pieces of extra-biblical information – showing a kind of intellectual rigor that wasn’t common in his day (or, in some circles, even in our day!). He researched non-biblical sources to uncover the histories of the Persian, Greek, and Roman empires. He accurately pinpointed the dates for the deaths of Alexander the Great (323 BC) and Julius Caesar (44 BC).

All in all, it was rigorous scholarship, pulling together the best of what he had available and arriving at what was a remarkably reasonable conclusion.

It’s pretty easy to fall prey to the temptation to judge folks in the past by applying present knowledge. In just about every case, that’s not fair… and in this case, it’s not just unfair – it’s negligent. Consider how he’d be received today: a theologian willing to incorporate what we know about the world from extra-biblical sources into his theological worldview? Folks from the Westboro Baptist church would immediately declare him a heretic and ban his books… and that’s a pretty solid recommendation!

Well done, Bishop Ussher!

On this date (Sept 10) in 2008, there was a large gathering of uber-genius-types in Geneva, Switzerland. No, it wasn’t Swiss Comic-con… it was the inaugural powering up of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

CERN is a gigantic complex on the border between Switzerland and France. It’s the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. CERN is also the name of the international organization that operates the lab. CERN originally stood for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire. In 1954, they changed the name to Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire. Eventually, as work at the lab began to delve more into higher energy particle physics, they unofficially changed the name again, this time to Laboratoire Européen pour la Physique des Particules. In order to perpetuate the ‘absent-minded professor’ stereotype, they maintained the CERN acronym even after the name changes…

The most important part of CERN is the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It lives in an underground tunnel that’s more than 17 miles in circumference. It’s a beast – with more than 1600 superconducting magnets, most of which weigh more than 25 tons. And they keep almost 100 tons of liquid helium on hand to cool them – which means that along with its distinction as the largest accelerator, LHC is also the largest cryogenic facility in the world.

Basically, the point of this monster is to hurl protons and other subatomic particles at each other – hoping that the resulting collisions yield information regarding some of the fundamental open questions in the world of physics: the interactions of elementary objects, the structure of space and time, the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity, supersymmetry, etc. Many of the theorists involved predict that the Standard Model will be replaced with a more complete picture once some of this high-energy data is analyzed.

Of course, the biggest buzz surrounding the LHC revolves around the existence of the Higgs boson – a theoretical particle that, if found to exist, would prove the existence of the Higgs field. This field is the favored theoretical means by which particles acquire mass. In other words, yes, this boson does make your butt look fat.

There is a small amount of artifical controversy surrounding this theoretical particle. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist named Leon Lederman wrote a book called The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?. Thanks to him, people started calling the Higgs boson the God particle – specifically because it’s is both vitally important, and incredibly difficult to prove.

Because of this unfortunate naming association, some people have been protesting these experiments, calling them sacriligious, labeling the scientists as heretics – despite the fact that that this particle actually has no mystical associations attached to it.

This strikes me as amusing – since these same people have done so much to show how a zero-strength field can generate mass from empty space… call it the Kardashian Effect.

This past July, a previously unknown boson was discovered. Further study and analysis is taking place even now, but if it does prove the Higgs field, we’ll be hearing much more about it in coming months.

For now, let’s just say Happy Anniversary, LHC. And I’d like to nominate this song as its official theme song: Will It Go ‘Round in Circles… enjoy!

On this date (Aug 28), in 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech to more than 200,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

The speech was a masterpiece. He referenced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address, the hymn America, Shakespeare’s Richard III, and the books of Psalms and Isaiah from the Bible… and no one with a brain would dream of accusing him of plagiarism!

And although there were several early drafts and versions, the most memorable section of the speech happens near the end, when Dr. King left his prepared speech and started preaching.

Mahalia Jackson, a very popular gospel singer, shouted at him from the crowd: “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” At that point, he did.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

I realize that I might be stepping on a toe or two here, but just take a moment and compare Dr. King’s preaching with some of the improvised preaching we’ve heard just in the last few years.

Rocket scientist Mark Driscoll said that there wasn’t even one good Bible teacher in Great Britain. “You don’t have one – that’s the problem. There are a bunch of cowards who aren’t telling the truth.”

Brain surgeon Jesse Lee Peterson said that it was a mistake to allow women to vote. “…these women are voting in the wrong people.”

Curtis Knapp and Charles Worley say that the government should kill gay people.

Sean Harris says that parents should punch kids who don’t seem manly enough.

Don’t forget our old buddy Pat Robertson, who said that if Manning gets injured, the Broncos would deserve it because they traded Tim Tebow. He advised a man whose wife was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease to “divorce her and start all over again.” Of course, he also called for the legalization of marijuana, which means he does have layers…

And of course, there’s anything that’s ever come out of the mouth of Fred Phelps – the space monkey of preachers that leads the Westboro Baptist Church.

Clearly, there’s preaching – and then there’s preaching!

Anyway, rock on, Dr. King! Thanks for having that dream – and for doing your part to move us ever closer to it!

We interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming to… well… to be honest, I’m doing it because I’ve been curious about something for more than 30 years, and I think it’s time that I ask the question.

Here it is:

When folks argue that we should teach creationism instead of evolution, why do they only want to teach the Christian version?

There’s some really good ones out there!

One of my favorites is the old Babylonian story from the Enûma Eliš (there’s nothing quite like the original Akkadian Cuneiform!) from roughly the time of our old buddy Hammurabi – around 1775-ish BC. It’s a rousing tale of Marduk’s defeat of Tiamat. He rips her dead body in half, and uses one half to create the earth, and the other half to create the skies – and then, as an afterthought, whips up time, the calendar, the stars and other planets, and the behavior of the sun, moon, and weather. Pretty cool!

There’s a Mayan story about two gods, Kukulkán and Tepeu, the Makers. One day they decided to preserve their legacy by creating beings on Earth that looked like them. First, they made folks out of mud, but the mud crumbled into dust. Then they tried wood. Unfortunately, the wooden men had no souls, and they weren’t loyal to the Makers, so the gods destroyed them in a flood (hmmm… where have I heard that before?). Finally, they made us out of maize. I don’t think that’s corny at all!

What about the story of Pangu from China? As it turns out, in the beginning there was nothing except formless chaos (again, hmmm… ). Eventually this chaos coalesced into a great cosmic egg, which contained the essence of yin and yang. When the egg hatched, Pangu was born. He took a swing with his giant axe, separating Yin from Yang, thus creating the earth and the sky. To keep them apart, Pangu himself pushed up the sky. When the sky was high enough, Pangu allowed himself to die – his breath became the wind; his voice became thunder; his left eye the sun, and right eye the moon; his body became mountains, his blood the rivers; his beard became the stars; his fur became the forests; and the fleas on his fur became the animals of the earth. His brain became the goddess, Nüwa. She used mud to create humans. Since they were crafted individually, they were awesome – smart, creative, compassionate, etc. These, of course, were the Chinese people. Eventually Nüwa got bored of making them individually, so she started mass-producing people. They weren’t as smart as the first batch – thus the non-Chinese people were created.

Notice how often mud/dirt is used to create us? In Cherokee stories, Dâyuni’sï (Beaver’s Grandchild) dove to the bottom of the water and brought up some mud. When the mud came out of the water, it expanded in every direction and became the earth and all animals and people.

The Yorùbá of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo tell of how Obatala crafted us out of handfuls of earth.

For the Mongols, a Lama named Udan made us out of clay.

Obviously I could go on and on… there are a lot of great creation stories out there, and I haven’t even mentioned Scientology’s fascination with the Galactic Confederacy, ruled for 80 trillion years by the space tyrant Xenu.

The question again: why do creationists only want to teach the Judeo-Christian version in schools?

Once upon a time, I would have said that this is a rhetorical question. But now I’m not so sure.

Clearly that isn’t a fair position – but fairness rarely has anything to do with most theological views. Obviously that position doesn’t take the full First Amendment into account…

The answer that keeps coming to my mind is a bit provocative, so I don’t really want to put it out there until I’ve had a chance to read some other answers… so let’s see what kind of responses I get.

Do you have any thoughts? I’d love to read them!