It goes without saying that today is the 486th anniversary of the posting of the 95 Theses on the cathedral door at Wittenburg. Thanks to Project Wittenberg, we can take this opportunity to re-read those 95 seminal questions:

Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg, under the presidency of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and of Sacred Theology, and Lecturer in Ordinary on the same at that place. Wherefore he requests that those who are unable to be present and debate orally with us, may do so by letter.

In the Name our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.

2. This word cannot be understood to mean sacramental penance, i.e., confession and satisfaction, which is administered by the priests.

3. Yet it means not inward repentance only; nay, there is no inward repentance which does not outwardly work divers mortifications of the flesh.

4. The penalty [of sin], therefore, continues so long as hatred of self continues; for this is the true inward repentance, and continues until our entrance into the kingdom of heaven.

5. The pope does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the Canons.

6. The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring that it has been remitted by God and by assenting to God’s remission; though, to be sure, he may grant remission in cases reserved to his judgment. If his right to grant remission in such cases were despised, the guilt would remain entirely unforgiven.

7. God remits guilt to no one whom He does not, at the same time, humble in all things and bring into subjection to His vicar, the priest.

8. The penitential canons are imposed only on the living, and, according to them, nothing should be imposed on the dying.

9. Therefore the Holy Spirit in the pope is kind to us, because in his decrees he always makes exception of the article of death and of necessity.

10. Ignorant and wicked are the doings of those priests who, in the case of the dying, reserve canonical penances for purgatory.

11. This changing of the canonical penalty to the penalty of purgatory is quite evidently one of the tares that were sown while the bishops slept.

12. In former times the canonical penalties were imposed not after, but before absolution, as tests of true contrition.

13. The dying are freed by death from all penalties; they are already dead to canonical rules, and have a right to be released from them.

14. The imperfect health [of soul], that is to say, the imperfect love, of the dying brings with it, of necessity, great fear; and the smaller the love, the greater is the fear.

15. This fear and horror is sufficient of itself alone (to say nothing of other things) to constitute the penalty of purgatory, since it is very near to the horror of despair.

16. Hell, purgatory, and heaven seem to differ as do despair, almost-despair, and the assurance of safety.

17. With souls in purgatory it seems necessary that horror should grow less and love increase.

18. It seems unproved, either by reason or Scripture, that they are outside the state of merit, that is to say, of increasing love.

19. Again, it seems unproved that they, or at least that all of them, are certain or assured of their own blessedness, though we may be quite certain of it.

20. Therefore by “full remission of all penalties” the pope means not actually “of all,” but only of those imposed by himself.

21. Therefore those preachers of indulgences are in error, who say that by the pope’s indulgences a man is freed from every penalty, and saved;

22. Whereas he remits to souls in purgatory no penalty which, according to the canons, they would have had to pay in this life.

23. If it is at all possible to grant to any one the remission of all penalties whatsoever, it is certain that this remission can be granted only to the most perfect, that is, to the very fewest.

24. It must needs be, therefore, that the greater part of the people are deceived by that indiscriminate and highsounding promise of release from penalty.

25. The power which the pope has, in a general way, over purgatory, is just like the power which any bishop or curate has, in a special way, within his own diocese or parish.

26. The pope does well when he grants remission to souls [in purgatory], not by the power of the keys (which he does not possess), but by way of intercession.

27. They preach man who say that so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out [of purgatory].

28. It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone.

29. Who knows whether all the souls in purgatory wish to be bought out of it, as in the legend of Sts. Severinus and Paschal.

30. No one is sure that his own contrition is sincere; much less that he has attained full remission.

31. Rare as is the man that is truly penitent, so rare is also the man who truly buys indulgences, i.e., such men are most rare.

32. They will be condemned eternally, together with their teachers, who believe themselves sure of their salvation because they have letters of pardon.

33. Men must be on their guard against those who say that the pope’s pardons are that inestimable gift of God by which man is reconciled to Him;

34. For these “graces of pardon” concern only the penalties of sacramental satisfaction, and these are appointed by man.

35. They preach no Christian doctrine who teach that contrition is not necessary in those who intend to buy souls out of purgatory or to buy confessionalia.

36. Every truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without letters of pardon.

37. Every true Christian, whether living or dead, has part in all the blessings of Christ and the Church; and this is granted him by God, even without letters of pardon.

38. Nevertheless, the remission and participation [in the blessings of the Church] which are granted by the pope are in no way to be despised, for they are, as I have said, the declaration of divine remission.

39. It is most difficult, even for the very keenest theologians, at one and the same time to commend to the people the abundance of pardons and [the need of] true contrition.

40. True contrition seeks and loves penalties, but liberal pardons only relax penalties and cause them to be hated, or at least, furnish an occasion [for hating them].

41. Apostolic pardons are to be preached with caution, lest the people may falsely think them preferable to other good works of love.

42. Christians are to be taught that the pope does not intend the buying of pardons to be compared in any way to works of mercy.

43. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better work than buying pardons;

44. Because love grows by works of love, and man becomes better; but by pardons man does not grow better, only more free from penalty.

45. Christians are to be taught that he who sees a man in need, and passes him by, and gives [his money] for pardons, purchases not the indulgences of the pope, but the indignation of God.

46. Christians are to be taught that unless they have more than they need, they are bound to keep back what is necessary for their own families, and by no means to squander it on pardons.

47. Christians are to be taught that the buying of pardons is a matter of free will, and not of commandment.

48. Christians are to be taught that the pope, in granting pardons, needs, and therefore desires, their devout prayer for him more than the money they bring.

49. Christians are to be taught that the pope’s pardons are useful, if they do not put their trust in them; but altogether harmful, if through them they lose their fear of God.

50. Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter’s church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep.

51. Christians are to be taught that it would be the pope’s wish, as it is his duty, to give of his own money to very many of those from whom certain hawkers of pardons cajole money, even though the church of St. Peter might have to be sold.

52. The assurance of salvation by letters of pardon is vain, even though the commissary, nay, even though the pope himself, were to stake his soul upon it.

53. They are enemies of Christ and of the pope, who bid the Word of God be altogether silent in some Churches, in order that pardons may be preached in others.

54. Injury is done the Word of God when, in the same sermon, an equal or a longer time is spent on pardons than on this Word.

55. It must be the intention of the pope that if pardons, which are a very small thing, are celebrated with one bell, with single processions and ceremonies, then the Gospel, which is the very greatest thing, should be preached with a hundred bells, a hundred processions, a hundred ceremonies.

56. The “treasures of the Church,” out of which the pope. grants indulgences, are not sufficiently named or known among the people of Christ.

57. That they are not temporal treasures is certainly evident, for many of the vendors do not pour out such treasures so easily, but only gather them.

58. Nor are they the merits of Christ and the Saints, for even without the pope, these always work grace for the inner man, and the cross, death, and hell for the outward man.

59. St. Lawrence said that the treasures of the Church were the Church’s poor, but he spoke according to the usage of the word in his own time.

60. Without rashness we say that the keys of the Church, given by Christ’s merit, are that treasure;

61. For it is clear that for the remission of penalties and of reserved cases, the power of the pope is of itself sufficient.

62. The true treasure of the Church is the Most Holy Gospel of the glory and the grace of God.

63. But this treasure is naturally most odious, for it makes the first to be last.

64. On the other hand, the treasure of indulgences is naturally most acceptable, for it makes the last to be first.

65. Therefore the treasures of the Gospel are nets with which they formerly were wont to fish for men of riches.

66. The treasures of the indulgences are nets with which they now fish for the riches of men.

67. The indulgences which the preachers cry as the “greatest graces” are known to be truly such, in so far as they promote gain.

68. Yet they are in truth the very smallest graces compared with the grace of God and the piety of the Cross.

69. Bishops and curates are bound to admit the commissaries of apostolic pardons, with all reverence.

70. But still more are they bound to strain all their eyes and attend with all their ears, lest these men preach their own dreams instead of the commission of the pope.

71. He who speaks against the truth of apostolic pardons, let him be anathema and accursed!

72. But he who guards against the lust and license of the pardon-preachers, let him be blessed!

73. The pope justly thunders against those who, by any art, contrive the injury of the traffic in pardons.

74. But much more does he intend to thunder against those who use the pretext of pardons to contrive the injury of holy love and truth.

75. To think the papal pardons so great that they could absolve a man even if he had committed an impossible sin and violated the Mother of God — this is madness.

76. We say, on the contrary, that the papal pardons are not able to remove the very least of venial sins, so far as its guilt is concerned.

77. It is said that even St. Peter, if he were now Pope, could not bestow greater graces; this is blasphemy against St. Peter and against the pope.

78. We say, on the contrary, that even the present pope, and any pope at all, has greater graces at his disposal; to wit, the Gospel, powers, gifts of healing, etc., as it is written in I. Corinthians xii.

79. To say that the cross, emblazoned with the papal arms, which is set up [by the preachers of indulgences], is of equal worth with the Cross of Christ, is blasphemy.

80. The bishops, curates and theologians who allow such talk to be spread among the people, will have an account to render.

81. This unbridled preaching of pardons makes it no easy matter, even for learned men, to rescue the reverence due to the pope from slander, or even from the shrewd questionings of the laity.

82. To wit: — “Why does not the pope empty purgatory, for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are there, if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a Church? The former reasons would be most just; the latter is most trivial.”

83. Again: — “Why are mortuary and anniversary masses for the dead continued, and why does he not return or permit the withdrawal of the endowments founded on their behalf, since it is wrong to pray for the redeemed?”

84. Again: — “What is this new piety of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul’s own need, free it for pure love’s sake?”

85. Again: — “Why are the penitential canons long since in actual fact and through disuse abrogated and dead, now satisfied by the granting of indulgences, as though they were still alive and in force?”

86. Again: — “Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?”

87. Again: — “What is it that the pope remits, and what participation does he grant to those who, by perfect contrition, have a right to full remission and participation?”

88. Again: — “What greater blessing could come to the Church than if the pope were to do a hundred times a day what he now does once, and bestow on every believer these remissions and participations?”

89. “Since the pope, by his pardons, seeks the salvation of souls rather than money, why does he suspend the indulgences and pardons granted heretofore, since these have equal efficacy?”

90. To repress these arguments and scruples of the laity by force alone, and not to resolve them by giving reasons, is to expose the Church and the pope to the ridicule of their enemies, and to make Christians unhappy.

91. If, therefore, pardons were preached according to the spirit and mind of the pope, all these doubts would be readily resolved; nay, they would not exist.

92. Away, then, with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, “Peace, peace,” and there is no peace!

93. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, “Cross, cross,” and there is no cross!

94. Christians are to be exhorted that they be diligent in following Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths, and hell;

95. And thus be confident of entering into heaven rather through many tribulations, than through the assurance of peace.

I am quite sure this is foolish. Suppose subtle and genteel commentators like Raving Atheist and my local blogging buddy World Wide Rant Andy pick up on this? I’ll be drawn into an apologetic flame war, only to have to resolve it in some fashion to avoid the quiet awkwardness of the next Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash, should I have the opportunity to show up and share a cold one or two with my fellow Denverite.

It was WWR Andy who directed me a week or so ago to a post at Pagan Prattle about a scientific study of prayer. I observed that the prattling Pagan (whose domain is “antipope.org”–he’s NOT a Catholic, okay?) likes to refer to God as my “Imaginary Friend.” I do not sense from this a desire for sober discussion of serious issues. Accordingly, I’ll just concentrate on the Telegraph article itself rather than P.P.’s brief analysis of it. (I note that his comment system includes a warning to users not to post any advocacy of theism. I won’t say if this compares favorably or unfavorably to my comment system.)

A quick note of caution: filtering scholarly studies through wire services and mainstream journalism–sometimes even lay science journalism–can be a tricky business. Journalists didn’t major in journalism because they were really good at science and math, so sometimes the facts get a bit confused. If I am overly critical of the actual researchers here due to the Telegraph’s simplification, I apologize.

Now, the study: Cardiologists from Duke University Medical Center conducted a three-year studying involving 750 angioplasty patients. These patients were randomly assigned to one of twelve groups from various religions around the world, which groups then prayed for the recovery of their assigned subjects. Off the cuff, there are three problems with this study, two of which are so obvious that one marvels at why the study was conducted. The third may be less obvious, but it is the most devastating.

First is the assumption of religious pluralism. Fashionable though this may be, it remains formally impossible for many religions simultaneously to obtain in real life. Some would argue that it is impossible that any obtains, but this is of course part of the question at hand. If the twelve prayer groups of the study represent twelve mutually exclusive religions, then at least 92% of the prayers were almost certainly ineffective. A serious study of this kind (granting its other assumptions, which are about to be revoked anyway) would control for the religion of those doing the praying. This would probably require an increase in the sample size of 750 patients, or a reduction in the number of religions included, which would itself imply more testing to ferret out the religion whose prayers actually work.

Of course, the act of praying to Some Deity may in itself be effective, and I suppose this study could at least establish that baseline. The results would not be ultimately useful, though, without a god-specific follow-up study.

Second is the problem Judaism and Christianity have with experiments of this kind. As the Telegraph article points out:

…the experiment…was criticised [sic] as crude by Church leaders. The Bishop of Durham, the Rt. Rev Tom Wright, said: “Prayer is not a penny-in-the-slot machine. You can’t just put in a coin and get out a chocolate.

“This is like setting an exam for God to see if God will pass it or not.”

He said both the Old and New Testaments said “very clearly” that you must not put God to the test.

These are prayers offered in such a way as to violate explicitly the revealed will of the God of the Bible. It’s a fair bet that if he is God, he will not generally answer prayers that are prima facie sinful. He might conceivably do this at certain times for certain reasons, but we wouldn’t expect to see a big statistical bump in a controlled study in which all of the prayers were of this kind.

This crazy-talk segues well into the third–and you might say actual–objection.

Now, amateur internet apologists for atheism probably count the paradox of prayer as one of their better proofs of the non-existence of God. How, they might ask, can prayer mean anything if God is omniscient and already knows the outcome of the request? If prayer changes God’s mind, then God is either not omniscient or not immutable and theism is false. If prayer doesn’t change God’s mind, then God is cruel for giving his people false hope by commanding them to engage in a futile practice, and theism is false.

Various streams of Christian theology of varying degrees of orthodoxy deal with this question differently, but I find the answer implied by the Reformed tradition to be the most compelling. In this tradition, God is not waiting in his heaven to hear what his people ask him so he can decide what to do. When an angioplasty patient is sewn up, God does not hold his ear expectantly to the prayer line, listening to hear how many times he hears the patient’s name so he can decide the relative level of morbidity or mortality to assign to the case. This would indeed be a concept of prayer that is logically incompatible with theism.

A sustainable theology of prayer must reconcile the clear command to pray and the biblical view of prayer as a worthwhile practice on the one hand with the doctrines of God’s sovereignty and exhaustive foreknowledge on the other hand. This is not difficult as some would make it, if we consider both God’s ordaining of events and the prayers of the faithful to be two parts of the same whole. Rather than waiting passively to collect autonomously offered requests and vote on them to determine the course he will choose, God works out his will through the prayers of his people. The sovereign causing of effects and the intimate leading of believers to pray for those outcomes are done contemporaneously.

God apparently desires–for no other reason I can think of than that it pleases him–to have us involved with the outworking of his will. The New Testament teaches that the Holy Spirit sometimes directs believers how to pray, tellingly even to the point of “praying for them,” as it were, non-linguistically. Jesus himself acknowledged the conflict of the human and divine wills in prayer, asking the Father to spare him from his terrible death the night before his crucifixion. Subordinating his will to his Father’s–as was his meat and drink–he eventually prayed explicitly for the fulfillment not of his will, but his Father’s. Clearly, prayer is not so neatly separated from God’s eternal decree. Truly conversational dynamics are present.

So is God merely talking to himself here? Hardly. When the faithful pray, they are freely choosing to offer prayers to God according to their desire to do so, thus participating as human persons communing with the personal God in the process of accomplishing what God has determined to accomplish. Prayer is fundamentally a relational activity, with the primary relationship being between believers and God. God doesn’t need us to pray, but graciously chooses to involve us in the process of doing will in the world.

We can draw a corollary from this that will bring us back around to the final objection to the angioplasty study. Having in hand the Divine-human relationship inherent in prayer, we could note that the New Testament exposes a pattern of laying on of hands during prayer, which is inherently more relational than receiving a computer-generated prayer email from software configured by a group of researchers. This is not to say that prayer offered impersonally or at a distance is guaranteed to be ineffective, but it is rather to note the horizontally relational context in which the New Testament considers prayer. You generally know the people for whom you are praying. If you are not actually physically near them–which you are all but assumed to be–you are emotionally near them and have a personal stake in the outcome of their crisis. The act of praying not only involves you in relationship with God in the outworking of his will for them, but it involves you in relationship directly with the subject of your prayer by bringing your passions and emotional commitments in line with their possibly deep, possibly life-changing need of the person for whom you are praying. Through prayer as conceived by the New Testament, you are drawn into closer relationship not just with God, but with other members of Christ’s Body. This isn’t the sine qua non of prayer, but it does seem to be a necessary effect of prayer when it is offered in its expected context.

I don’t expect to have defeated all possible objections to theism that might piggyback on a study like this, but I have proposed an outline of a conceivable, internally consistent theology of prayer that might predict the results that the Duke study has shown. I also wouldn’t expect anyone who rejects theism to be very impressed with this proposal, but I would like it to show that no one should reject any form of theism merely because it commends effective prayer.

Comments? Email me. I’ll post anything thoughtful and non-flamey, unless you ask me not to.

UPDATE: Raving Atheist parries; I riposte.

MORE: Professor Paul Myers has the effrontery to call me long-winded. I respond in ironically too many words.

Unfortunately, I doubt I’ll have the time today to respond to any of the many Fiskings this article is receiving, but I will strongly recommend reading Naomi Wolf’s critique of our society’s ubiquipr0n.

I read Ellen Goodman faithfully not because I share many sympathies with her feminism, but because maybe 15% of the time she says something that could as well have been written by a Christian apologist. Wolf is doing nearly the same thing here:

But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated–or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.

Of course she pulls the punch where I would really want to start connecting, but her point remains strong:

The reason to turn off the porn might become, to thoughtful people, not a moral one but, in a way, a physical- and emotional-health one; you might want to rethink your constant access to porn in the same way that, if you want to be an athlete, you rethink your smoking. The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity.

Her main point is that ubiquitous pornography hasn’t turned men into raping, pillaging, sex monsters, but has turned them off from real women. Greg Krebiel argued a few years ago (and I doubt he was alone) that pornography would devalue real women by making a cheap alternative available. Wolf seem to be on board with this thesis, and has at least some anecdotal interviews to back it up.

Read the whole thing. This is excellent commentary.

I continue to be amazed at how quickly the buzz of offshoring is spreading. Most people I know are either just beginning to experiment with it, or are in the process of considering whether to experiment with it. The hotness of the topic is undeniable. CNet reproduces a good article from the McKinsey Quarterly:

Widely cited figures predict that by 2015, roughly 3.3 million U.S. business-processing jobs will have moved abroad. As of July 2003, around 400,000 jobs already had.

Other research suggests that the number of U.S. service jobs lost to ‘offshoring’ will accelerate at a rate of 30 percent to 40 percent annually during the next five years. Vast wage differentials are prompting companies to move their labor-intensive service jobs to countries with low labor costs: For instance, software developers, who cost $60 an hour in the United States–the country that does the most offshoring of jobs–cost only $6 an hour in India, the biggest market for offshore services.

The one-two punch dynamic of offshoring can’t be underestimated. Just as we’re recovering from the tech recession and people are starting to hire again, we get this! It seems like tech professionals will never enjoy the write-your-own-ticket status they had just a few painful years ago.

But focusing the offshoring debate on job losses misses the most important point: Offshoring creates value for the U.S. economy by creating value for U.S. companies and freeing U.S. resources for activities with more value added. It creates value in four ways:

Wow, it’s as if the article said that on cue. It goes on to describe positive economic dynamics of cost savings, new revenue, repatriated earnings, and redeployed labor.

It is intuitive to free-market folk that Everything Will Work Out Better if we let labor move to where it is most efficient. We should expect displaced American workers mostly to find new jobs, and American companies to operate more efficiently and to generate more wealth to be spread around to their increasingly democratized investors. I think only fairly hard-core leftists and hard-core protectionist paleoconservatives disagree. The center-left, the center, and almost all of the right are on board here.

The full article explains:

In this way, offshoring, far from being bad for the United States, creates net value for the economy. It directly recaptures 67 cents of every dollar of spending that goes abroad and indirectly might capture an additional 45 to 47 cents–producing a net gain of 12 cents to 14 cents for every dollar of costs moved offshore.

That means offshoring makes us richer, which is good, all things being equal. Naturally, it wouldn’t make me feel a whole lot better if my job got moved offshore and I had a hard time finding a good replacement, which historically has happened to 31% of those displaced:

The total possible wealth creation does not, of course, ease the plight of people who lose their jobs or find lower-wage ones. The statistics showing that 69 percent of those who lost jobs in the nonmanufacturing sector were reemployed also show that 31 percent were not fully reemployed. And while, on average, those who found new jobs secured similar wages (96.2 percent of their previous wage), 55 percent took lower-paid jobs. As many as 25 percent took pay cuts of 30 percent or more.

These issues must be addressed. Training programs and generous severance packages, perhaps accompanied by innovative insurance programs, are among the measures that could mitigate the effects of the transition without great cost to the economy. And while many people will undoubtedly suffer short-term disruption, it should be set against the consequences of resisting change: If U.S. companies can’t move work abroad, they will become less competitive–weakening the economy and endangering more jobs–and miss the chance to raise their productivity by focusing on the creation of jobs with higher value added.

And there you have it. It’s painful, it’s scary, and it comes at the worst possible time, but the piper will collect his bill. Labor practices that are inefficient on a global scale will not last forever. Electrons in high-energy orbitals simply do not stay there forever. We can be nimble and move jobs around now, or we can let our tech industry become decadent and slide slowly into global irrelevance.

Maybe I’ll start a small consulting firm specializing in architecting and managing mid-size projects for which the bulk of the development labor is offshored. See?

…God created the physical universe beginning at 9:00 a.m. GMT. The date is according to the chronology of Anglican Bishop James Ussher, although the time is attributable to his contemporary John Lightfoot.

I don’t know of any evangelicals today who are firmly committed to either number, although a fair number of us (not including me) think Bishop Usser was in the ballpark. For another, hopefully more durable perspective, check out these guys.

Thanks to reader Adeodatus for the reminder of this special occasion. There should be greeting cards.

This is a highly unscientific poll of a highly nonrepresentative sample of the internet-using public, but it’s still good news for Mozilla.

The browser war is back. It’s as simple as that.

Josh Clayborn has posted some good thoughts on “neurotheology”. I’d like to continue the discussion. (It occurs to me that “discussions” are hard to have when you don’t have a comment system. Anyway…)

Christianity fairly consistently holds that humans are both spiritual and material beings, and that well worked-out doctrines of the Incarnation and Resurrection suggest that we ought to allow for our physical bodies to be fairly significant to our overall functioning as persons. After all, we have these bodies, and they’re ours, and God seems to be pretty happy with the situation.

I see neurophysiology as a tidal wave that is just now beginning to crest. I predict that the next fifty years will bring a deluge of naturalistic explanations for every facet of human behavior you can imagine, including spiritual experience. We shouldn’t find it prima facie troubling that God, who enabled us to interact with him to begin with, should equip our bodies to support that interaction in some way. (The pluralistic implications of physiologically similar phenomena across the experiences different of religions will have to be dealt with separately. We can cross that bridge once the stream gets too high to ford.)

Neurophysiology (or whatever you want to call it) is going to have to grow up a lot before the fun really starts. Right now it’s just giddy with all of the legitimate observations an inferences it’s able to make, and all of the insight into human behavior that it’s able to provide. It holds huge promise for the treatment of all kinds of real suffering, so I say we should cheer it on and even jump in for a swim as our young people have ambition and ability. But I’m guessing that fifty years down the road it will start to run out of gas. It will do a wonderful job explaining all kinds of things up till then, but eventually little problems will emerge that defy facile naturalistic explanation. This will look from the outside like the rate of change of discovery finally starting to taper off, but it will really be another indicator of the end of the usefulness of the dominant paradigm. Time to subvert it, baby!

A good parallel would be the current state of origin-of-life research, wherein leading researchers are looking for space rocks to introduce life to the early earth, since the broadly agreed-upon conditions of the early earth are unsuitable for a successful outcome of the Stanley Miller primordial soup experiment, performed fifty years ago this year. Almost nobody is really conceding the defeat of the naturalistic paradigm and falling on their knees in submission to Christ as a result of this (although, hey, they should), and nobody probably will when I am an old man and the neurophysiological tidal wave has rearranged the beachfront the way I think it will. But naturalism will still only deliver so much explanation and no more–which makes sense, if only that much is actually “natural.”

In the end, far from being explained out of his creation, God’s work will again be visible to those who have eyes to see.

Normally in the Denver area we enjoy cool weather at this time of year. Not this:

(Image courtesy of 9 News.)

In keeping with the title’s keen observation of what month it is right now, I’d like to give you a few equally keen fall pictures. You saw the back of the house earlier in the week, so here’s the front in all its autumnal glory:

That nice, big maple drops its leaves in a hurry. (Is it a maple? I don’t know my trees at all.) The picture is two days old, and already the tree is a lot more sparse. This, of course, means that a fresh, crinkly, autumn-smelling pile of leaves forms in a hurry, to the delight of my children and others who walk past the house on the way to school. More than once my wife and I have caught a neighborhood boy walking past the pile at 7:50 in the morning, looking furtively around to see if he’s being watched, and taking a running jump into it. Don’t tell my homeowner’s carrier.

The upside of this is that I don’t have to do a lot of raking for this tree. (The back yard and the neighbor’s sickly aspens are another matter.) Here are the girls hard at work:

Finally, here’s a shot my wife took of the kids in the front yard. (It’s composed better than my pictures.)

Forgive the banality of the post, but like I said, it’s October! Best show some proof of it, since locals sure wouldn’t know from the weather.