1. GOD said, “Let there be light.” We know, today, that this occurred just about 13.8 billion years ago.

2. GOD tells us, in the Psalms, to view His wonders and majesty in the skies. We’ve gone there, and a) discovered that billions-of-years age, plus the fact that when the Word made everything that was made, He made so many stars that it takes at least a 24-digit number to express their total, and that Dark Matter / Dark Energy qualify as the “and unseen” part.

3. In I Kings 19:12 (or nearby) we hear “the still small voice of GOD” when Elijah emerges from the mountain cave, after the wind and earthquake and fire have passed by, GOD not being in any of them. I (yes, this is a reach) choose to view the 3.4 degree Kelvin background microwave radiation that comes from all points of the sky as that “still small voice,” even though the original Hebrew in I Kings used “silence.”

4. Quibbling with GOD over time spans and methods? JOB did that, too.

5. Genesis is in fact an “origin story.” What separates it from all other origin stories, and each ancient culture has at least one, is that it is crammed with GOD’s love, patience, forgiveness, authority, and mercy. No other origin story even comes close.

6. Quibbling with GOD over when and how He reveals Himself to us is the act of a child. Yes, we are to come unto Him after the manner of a child! But when that childishness wishes to hogtie GOD’s self-revelation to an origin story, and rejects dealing with what our minds have found, including the MOST AWESOME version of grandeur and lavish creation? That could never have been dealt with by Abraham and his contemporaries. So try not to quibble!!

7. Insisting on simplistic faith is good; insisting on simplistic facts is not good. It is in reality a tool Satan employs to make your testimony to the unchurched neither “stumbing block” nor “folly” but instead a granite wall. Deal with your unwitting refusal to share GOD’s truth by trying to pack it into something that violates His command that we learn about His Glories.

I’ll stop here. If this doesn’t provide an adequate explanation of how to read GOD’s word with a child’s heart but at the same time an adult’s knowledge of His VAST awesomeness, at least I have made the effort. The rest is up to you.

Peace and love, Joel

Disruptive changes challenge all disrupted species; most of them flounder or go extinct.

We are not relying on a fallacy, and announcing that “unnatural = bad” is one doesn’t beg for proof, it grovels.

As to climate modeling, its challenges are in the weeds; it just isn’t perfect. But in large, it is spot on. Offering off-hand insult to the folks who have spent careers shaping and refining climate models is beneath any respectable human being.

We get hard-shelled to some of it. Thirty thousand lives destroyed each year in car crashes, for instance. How many deaths come from nationally publicized gun violence? (a)Local gun violence, pretty low-level relative to car deaths, isn’t reported on nationally. (b) Splashy events do make network news; and for every such death, hundreds die in car crashes.

Where is the math in that? What are your odds of dying either way? 320 million people, life expectancy 75 years, over 4 million deaths annually==seven point five per thousand deaths are in car wrecks. Do you fear for your life on the highway?

The real answer, in my quiet opinion, is that because we no longer need a quiet refuge of faith to buoy us up in real hard times, he have no refuge of faith for those times when we do feel down. The cell phone, blessed wonderful device, and PC/MAC stations at home where we wallow in face-book (etc.) and “two million supermarkets can’t be wrong” sites like this one (smiley) separate us from the interpersonal web of support that people used to enjoy.

Three generations ago families interacted in the evening; then radio and later TV came along and we rolled down a marvelous slippery slope, away from each other and into the arms of the electron.

Electrifying isn’t elevating.

For wholly other reasons I believe that GOD created this universe and gives it all the purpose we need. If you’re on-your-own here, then yes modern life is loaded with burdens and vacant of the interrelationships that help us endure them.

Fun? “Either illegal, fattening, or immoral.” I sense it’s the immoral part that gets to most of us; sex is of the body, not the heart. Finding a life partner who is above all a confidant and friend, good for conversation at all times of day or night, someone to whom and for whom we are willing to make great sacrifices, THAT is the blessing we need as human to human. Wife, buddy, boss, child, all of the above. We need to be in relation. GOD puts us there.

Pick up a newspaper from one-hundred years ago and try to imagine your current fave newscaster reading the op-ed to you. See what I mean?

RECENT HISTORY

Fifth to Ninth Centuries more or less – – legends of King Arthur written down at the tail end, mostly remaining oral lore. (Our versions of them are half a millennium out of date.) Beowulf written around AD 800, give or take. It’s been called the first great literary work in the English language. That is, Early English. Nobody can read it any more except the typical PhD candidate at studying English Literature.

When the Norsemen rowed up the Seine in the Ninth Century they tok over, but learned to speak what the locals were speaking. At that point the locals spoke Old French, a bastardized, morphed version of Latin. Ditto Spain, Italy – – Romania is where the language changed least.

Middle Eleventh Century: the Latin-ish language of William the Conqueror from Normandy (Norse – Normandy – ring a bell?) succeeds in routing the current ruler of a large part of the center of England. He sweeps in and unifies the whole island, UP TO THE NECK between Britain and Scotland. Getting those feisty folk to switch over the the Germanic tongue in favor south of them and now being put into a blender with Old French? That took quite a while.

Two more centuries go by. A German-ish language, i.e. Early German, a.k.a Early Dutch, Early Norse, Early Danish, and Early English, each having many confusing dialects of its own, was spoken over all of north-central Europe, Scandinavia, and much of England. (Need a foot note here about Gaelic, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland – they all still spoke versions of that.) Latinate roots become the basis of upper class speech.

Thirteenth Century – the two major language families merged, at the expense of having to abandon using word endings to signify gender, case, verb tense, etc. We come to Middle English via Chaucer. Ever try to read him? You can, but it’s a real chore and lots of footnotes are necessary. By the way, in Chaucer’s day “Middle English” was like a “horse designed by a committee.” Several hundred slightly different versions.

Late Sixteenth Century – Shakespeare. Turn the corner and in 1603, start of the Seventeenth Century, the King James Bible. These two items put the brakes on change between then and now, because they continued to be read in the original.

For review: fairly stable state up until the Danes began to raid Britain, at which point their version and the local version of Old English disagreed enough that people began to speak a patois, a simplified version. First step was to cut away word endings, because it was simpler to say the root word and add some other helper word to make your point.

GO FORWARD two and one-half centuries: Old French becomes the only way for the nobility to communicate. Thanks, William.

GO FORWARD two centuries: Middle English has evolved with one major spokesmodel, Chaucer, whose version became our idea of “Middle English.”

GO FORWARD three centuries: Early Modern English, via Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible. The Renaissance has encouraged the scholarly types to adopt large numbers of Greek and Latin word roots to fill in the semantic gaps.

GO FORWARD four centuries: Us. The language is still morphing, but not as fast as before. Recall the jibe in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, rewritten as the Broadway play My Fair Lady: Professor Dolittle tells us this: “Why, in America they haven’t spoken it for years,” referring of course to the English language.

BOTTOM LINE: since it takes nation-level forces to slow a language down to the point its rate of change is a solemn plod, the rules are different now. Before, little groups gallopped away to speak new languages in the span of a few millennia. Given that we’re looking back fifty to seventy-five millennia, the enormous development into tonal languages (China, some Amerindians, many more) vs. highly inflected languages (Latin, Russian) vs. languages which rely on helper words (English and Chinese, – – ) the slow evolution of grammar and diction is slow only relative to the span of written history. Add in fifty-odd other millennia and the corners that languages have gone around (tonal vs not, inflected vs not) are no surprise.

DATAPOINT: in the seas south of Asia there is an island archipelago that extends two thousand miles. One language is spoken along the entire length of that island chain, but folks at the far ends can’t make heads or tails out of what they might say to each other. They have to use a separate, widely known language to converse. Why? Neighboring islands each have tiny differences in grammar, vocabulary, idiom and so forth. They have not problem conversing. “How they talk one island over is a little different, but we get along fine.” Extend that across two thousand miles, and it would be astonishing if folks at one end could converse with folks at the other end.

Think of this as an analogy: The game of “telephone” – ten people line up, and the one on the end whispers some gossip into the next one’s ear, then second to third, etc. Whatever the tenth player thinks the message was, IT AIN’T THE SAME.

Languages are like that.

The much tinier population, given that genetic exchange between the two sets was made utterly impossible, would also drift and evolve. Perhaps (not guaranteed!) they would solve the same problems that the majority solved, but without the same kind of brakes on. That population would tend to change a little faster.

BUT if you gave a neanderthal a modern garb and a haircut, (s)he could pass as “an odd sort of guy or gal,” and that’s with a starting population way smaller than 250,000. In other words, we spent perhaps one hundred seventy-five of the last hundred thousand years diverging from neanderthals, and they from us, then we out-bred them.

((One interestjng theory: their Y chromosome failed in some way during cross-breeding, hence their male line had that little drag on it while our male line may have done fine when the cross-breed went the other way. Two-hundred-thousand year walk off the end of a one-hundred-seventy-five thousand year pier, if you will.))

In sum, yes a new species would diverge from H sapiens. But it would likely take at least many hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. Why so slow? That would depend on whether or not we can stave off climate change. THAT kind of challenge should drive changes at a more rapid pace.

COMPARISON: Over the last two million years there were about ten successive waves of major climate change which required significant readjustments in how a member of any genus (just considering homo for now) found food and shelter. Different species of plants, prey, and predator, not to mention new problems in staying cool or warm. Our ancestors had the tools (hands, binocular vision, and I’m sure a lot more) to make brain growth a good answer to the need to adapt. Ten cycles of that, and we went from early homo whatsis to modern homo sapiens. Populations away from Africa diverged into neanderthal, denisovan, etc. The survival funnel which narrowed the Y chromosome lineage to one line, i.e. “Adam,” took place 70 to 75 thousand years ago, after which point modern H. sapiens spread into Europe, Asia and, 50 to 55K years ago, Australia.

Climate change hit us ten good licks; number eleven looms.