Copyright 1998-2004 by Donald R. Tveter, commercial use is prohibited. This material cannot be quoted at length or posted elsewhere on the net or included in CD ROM collections. Short quotations are permitted provided proper attribution is given.
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There are multiple interpretations of the Song of Solomon. People who want to avoid the sexual overtones want to interpret it as metaphor for God's love for Israel or God's love for the Church. Besides that there is the highly erotic sex manual interpretation plus other only slightly less hot interpretations. Which is right? Maybe God is more clever than we imagine: maybe they are all right. The Bible is often frustrating for people especially technical people because it is so poetic. If someone gave me the Song of Solomon and said it was generated by a stupid computer program I would just about believe it, it is that hard to interpret. So I collected some web pages with various interpretations by using Northern Light to search on the words: "Song of Solomon Commentary":
I just mean that its difficult to make sense of things when you are confronted with Catholic doctrine and so its a bad place to try and start from. This DOES NOT mean that Catholics can't be just as saved as members of other denominations. If God only accepted people who believe 100% correct doctrine no one would ever be acceptable. (Sadly enough there are indeed Christian sects who figure if you don't believe what they believe you're going to Hell.) If I had to guess I would say that most Catholics and most Protestants are not saved.
On the other hand the terrible thing about a Catholic environment is that individual catholics tend to think that by going through the motions they are covered and qualify for heaven. Its a spiritually dead environment, you get little if anything to live for and little or no encouragement to get better, you simply cope with whatever life gives you. Needless to say Protestant churches can have the same problem.
One example of this viewpoint comes from the web page: WHAT HAPPENS TO PEOPLE WHO HAVE NEVER HEARD THE GOSPEL?
Although God is sovereign and he can deal with individuals in extraordinary ways, He tells us in the Bible that there's no other way to reach Him except through His one provision the Lord Jesus Christ (John 14:6). From this, we can only conclude that those who have never heard of Christ are indeed lost.
A nice version of this comes up in the book Your Wife Is Not Your Momma: How You Can Have Heaven In Your Home by Wellington Boone. The book is designed for men/husbands but Boone's descriptions of how a husband should behave give everyone a clue as to what's going to be happening in Heaven. People are not going to be sitting around on clouds plucking on harps. They are going to be actively engaged in serving each other because by giving they get happiness for themselves. You get a "high" from helping, serving and giving. This parallels what God is doing with us, he is taking great delight in giving to us. And at the moment Jesus is taking great delight in preparing a place for us. Note that this is also an extremely difficult concept for men/husbands to figure out. Its also difficult for church members in general who tend to think that if they go through the motions of church like getting baptised and going to church on Sundays they are OK. Its rather like a black and white existence compared to a full color one.
In checking my log of daily hits it seems I get a lot of people searching on the phrase "how music affects plants" and you people hit that irrelevant page, but here are a couple of URLs I ran into at the time of my rec.gardens incident:
In Genesis 1:26-31 (from The Book) we have:
Then God said, "Let us make a man -- someone like ourselves to be the master of all life upon the earth and in the skies and in the seas"This passage can be rather perplexing to Bible believers (and a way to discredit the Bible among unbelievers) because it looks like here on the sixth day God made LOTS of people whereas just a little further down in Genesis we get to the creation of Adam and then Eve. It is easy to resolve if the above quote shows an overview of all the people who were created, Adam and Eve and their children and their grandchildren and so on out to us, our children and grandchildren all the way out to infinity. Rather a large amount of creation but spread out over a very long period of time. Yet it seems all this was still somehow done on day 6 of creation. One way this could be resolved is if a second dimension of time was involved. Physicists are already taking seriously the idea that the universe has 10 dimensions of space plus one of time. Seven of the 10 spatial dimensions are curved so tightly that we don't see them, we only see the 3 dimensions we are familiar with. And a recent proposal is to add a second dimension of time bringing the total number of dimensions to 12. Here are a some URLs where the idea is described, the last one should be avoided by non-scientists:So God made man like his Maker.And God blessed them and told them, "Multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; you are the masters of the fish and birds and all the animals.
Like God did God make man;
Man and maid did he make them.
So now with a second dimension of time God can take 6 literal 24-hour periods of God's second time dimension to make our world but given the familiar dimension of time we are stuck in things appear in order from the beginning about 15 billion years to the creation of the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, to the creation of the seas, the land, the plants and the animals on into the present and on into the infinite future.
The first of the following references is absolutely wonderful because at the end the writer gives an example of what happens to young adults when churches teach that "science has proved the 6000 year old Earth" doctrine. If young Earth creationists really think that the proper interpretation of a day in Genesis is one 24-hour period of Earth time, I think they should go ahead and say so but they should still be honest enough to state that science has a different result. Young Earth creationists can then go on and hope for a miracle to resolve the contradition in their favor at some future time. But claiming Science has proved the 6000-year old Earth is effectively lying and should be stopped.
This came from the book, Show Me God by Fred Heeren and Fred got it from: Ron Cowen, "Interplanetary Odyssey", Science News, vol 150, Sept. 28, 1996.
I'm coming to the conclusion that the reason scientific minds have so much trouble with Biblical studies is that scientific minds have been so thoroughly trained in simple logic that they expect everything to come in that form. They want statements to the effect that A is connected to B and B is connected to C and if you input X, out comes Y. Between reading books, papers, user manuals and programs they get so much information in this straightforward, dry and logical form they expect everything to come in this form and can't even conceive of any other way of stating information. Biblical "logic" on the other hand uses poetry and metaphor to produce emotional effects as well as to describe matter of fact points. In many cases you also have to think about statements rather than take them at face value, it actually takes some reasoning. People who have never been trained in this form of information representation simply fall apart when they encounter the format rather like people with the real physical problem of dyslexia who can't handle detailed images like words. Unlike dyslexia I think most highly rational people can overcome this problem if they try hard enough.
No sooner did I put this statement up than someone proposed the universe has another type of energy called "funny energy" that repels ordinary matter and this is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up (the observation that the expansion is accelerating is new too). This is then supposed to account for the stars looking older than the universe. Both the accelerating expansion and funny energy are so new that they are not yet widely believed by the experts and of course in the long run more research may change these ideas. Here's a reference to the accelerating expansion: Particle Adventure News: December 19, 1998
Even though it is a bit off-topic I can't resist mentioning that there is a theory that the microtubules also implement a quantum computer and/or cellular automaton. One reason to think so is that the tubulin molecules can be in two different states, with or without an electron at a certain location so you have a basic requirement for the binary coding of data. The microtubules are also designed around a well-known digital error correcting code. For details see for instance: "Theory of Brain Function, Quantum Mechanics and Superstrings" by Dimitri Nanopoulos available from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Physics preprint archives.
In his book, The Science of God PhD Physicist Gerald Schroeder does a good job of showing not only how Evolution fails but also how the Bible succeeds in producing a condensed version of Creation that agrees with the scientific evidence.
Schroeder's pages on how long each of the 6 days of creation took are located at the following places:
This book is only going to make sense to scientific types who already have some Physics background and even then it will take a long time to get through each example and major idea. Price's thesis is that the future already exists from a certain perspective and conditions in the future influence happenings in the present and the past. Physics results show that photons (the particle of light) know the layout of the future and where they are going to "land" at the time they leave their source. If I am interpreting things correctly then viewed from the right perspective the universe is finished and God can know the future with absolute certainty. He can know where every photon is going to end up as well as the number of hairs on your head. Nothing is left to chance and there is no such thing as a random result. The seemingly random results predicted by quantum mechanical equations are just the result of ignorance of what's going on in the rest of the universe and is not any sort of intrinsic randomness as has been generally believed. This has interesting implications for understanding the human mind as well as the Evolution/Creation debate. Someday soon I hope to do a more extensive page on the theory and its implications. More on this book can be found at: Time's Arrow & Archimedes' Point: Home Page
All right, a LOT of Bible believers do give up on rational thought. They'll quote a famous preacher who said, "God said it, I believe it, that's it". And if you go though some of their books on Evolution vs. Creation you'll find some of the most nonsensical stuff you can find anywhere.
Evolution vs. Creation or the slightly more modest debate, Evolution vs. Intelligent Design are hot topics. They reflect a cultural war raging throughout the world and you've probably heard that the first victim of a war is the truth. Hot topics encourage people to use dishonest examples and even just plain lie about their opponents' ideas. So it is not easy to get to the bottom of anything related to this debate.
Since I've been a victim of these tactics myself when I was writing my textbook on Artificial Intelligence (AI), something that has no religious connections whatsoever, I thought I might as well tell you the story so you know the kind of things to expect. It went like this. The traditional approach to AI was something called "Symbol Processing" and I was writing a book that included a lot of a new approach called "Neural Networking". Maybe if I included only a little Neural Networking and segregated it in a tiny chapter at the back of the book I would not have had a problem however I put lots of neural networking up front because I knew this was the best structure for the book even though such a structure was radical. First I went through the process of submitting the manuscript to a number of publishers just to try and get a contract, this gave me some reviews. Then with a contract from Computer Science Press I went through a great many more reviews (after Barbara Friedman, God bless her, the founder of the company had left). Finally I gave up on them ever doing their job and got another publisher where I went through many more reviews. Thus, all in all I had plenty of reviews. What happened in reviews astonished me. Reviewers (not all of course) would simply lie about what was there and condemn the book on the basis of the lies. For example I had two reviewers claim that an exercise that was to write a program that would come out to be much less than 100 lines long was too long for the target group of students. The target group was juniors, seniors and graduate students but freshman in their first programming course routinely do programs that long and longer. Another reviewer claimed that an exercise that required maybe 30 seconds to do was much too hard, it would take students much too long to do it even if I had given them more background on the problem. Another admitted die-hard symbol processing believer read up to a certain point in the book where he encountered a claim of mine that in a later chapter I would show how frames and scripts could be implemented using neural networks. He blustered that he refused to believe that this symbol processing technique could possibly be done with networks and stopped the review shortly thereafter. He had the answer right there in his hand but he refused to even look ahead and see how it was done! I guess he was scared! There were other examples too but these are the ones that really stood out. The catch-all criticisms are something to the effect that "the author doesn't seem to really understand the subject" and "the organization of the material is confusing".
A nice example of this in the Evolution/Creation conflict comes from a book on the subject that had no Biblical quotes at all, it was written to show what an unbiased interpretation of the scientific results points to. A critic of evolution named Phillip E. Johnson wrote the book called Darwin on Trial that was subsequently reviewed by a true believer in Evolution named Stephen Jay Gould, the review appeared in the July 1992 issue of Scientific American. In the epilogue of the paperback version of the book Johnson tells it like this:
The review was an undisguised hatchet job, aimed at giving the impression that my skepticism about Darwinism must be due to an ignorance of the basic facts of biology. To that end Gould listed a string of objections about matters that had nothing to do with the main line of the argument, and even invoked his own third grade teacher as an authority on how to write chapter transitions. None of this would have impressed anyone who read the book, but most readers of Scientific American would not have done so and would be likely to assume that Gould was describing it accurately. They were not likely to hear anything to the contrary, because the editors refused to print my response or any letters from readers, although I know they received many.
My first book publisher was Computer Science Press which was bought from Barbara Friedman by W. H. Freeman, which in turn is the book publishing arm of Scientific American. Add to this the incident where Scientific American declined to hire Forrest Mims to do a do it yourself science projects column because Mims did not believe in Evolution and to me it looks like Scientific American is a good company to try and avoid.
I also don't recommend material from individuals whose background is primarily Biblical, these people typically manage to make a mess of science. One of the really bad ideas going around is that the Laws of Thermodynamics make Evolution impossible or highly unlikely. This objection is sheer nonsense. The kind of "disorder" addressed in these laws is a very technical kind of disorder and it does NOT make evolution impossible or even highly unlikely, it has no relevance whatsoever. If this argument showed up in the first edition of a book I might be able to grant that the author included it out of stupidity however in later editions I would expect the claim to be corrected. One book on the subject, The Collapse of Evolution by Scott Huse has it in the third edition and therefore I can only conclude that the author is dishonest.
USENET posts on a topic are often pure junk, web pages are usually somewhat better thought out but people who put in enough time and effort to produce a whole book are maybe the best source for ideas on a topic however in debates on hot topics expect the opposition to distort and even flat out lie if some idea challenges their cherished beliefs. The safeguard in any case is to try and find the best material you can from each side, read it for yourself and think for yourself.
Articles by Johnson on the subject can be found at the Access Research Network.
Articles by Behe explaining his position can be found at the Access Research Network. Some particularly worthwhile files are:
This book is really stunning in that you find out that cells are miniature factories filled with miniature machines, once you realize that it is hard to believe that any process could have evolved the machinery and the factories, they had to be designed.
First a page from NASA: Pioneer Home Page: Describes the missions of Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and Pioneers 6 through 9 Another online source I've found comes from Science Frontiers: THE FORCE IS WITH THEM. That article lists the following other sources:
As a genuine AI person who hangs out in the USENET comp.ai newsgroups its come to my attention that some people at supposedly reputable schools are teaching a different definition for AI than the one I give here, they claim that human-level AI was NEVER the original main goal of AI. Its pretty convenient for AI researchers to make this claim because then they don't have a failure on their hands, they only have to talk about the the successes of their small, specialized programs. So I felt I had to document that the original main goal of AI was human-level AI, so see the file: What Should the Definition of AI be?.
On page 11 of the Spring 1995 AI Magazine the authors Pat Hayes and Ken Ford give this description of Simon Newcomb:
Simon Newcomb (1835-1909) was a celebrated astronomer and thinker of his day who argued passionately, in articles published shortly before the Wright brothers took off, that manned flight was impossible. He combined a solid confidence in his own reasoning with a disdain for practical experiments.What's really amusing is how GOFAI experts think they know it all and automatically reject any new ideas that don't conform to their cherished beliefs. So who really deserves a Simon Newcomb award?
I'm expecting heaven to work like this. You should be able to go off and spend an unlimited amount of time with anyone and still have an unlimited amount of time for everyone else and never be late for anything. I think its pretty much required if heaven is to be heavenly, rushing any meeting with anyone just isn't right.
OK, I am going to have to confess that I often have a similar attitude. I am not perfect. My worst frustration is that the Clintons keep getting away with crime after crime.
The following are some instances where "worldwide" does not mean worldwide in the modern sense, it only means all the neighboring nations. I took these from: a page by Steve Amato, a page that also tries to reconcile science with the Biblical account of creation. Steve makes a still more liberal interpretation of the flood account by assuming that not all of humanity was flooded out. That's too liberal for me at this point in time because then the rainbow covenant with its promise of no more floods would be meaningless. I think you can only salvage that by assuming that the local flood affected all of "the Lord's people".
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