A Sound Perpective

14

May,2017

Grounds for Shaking

It was December 3rd 1990, and my friend Mark found himself on an excursion for his 19th birthday, sitting in a Chicago hotel room watching mayhem unfold on his television screen.  Freshly united Germany was devastated by a cataclysmic nuclear meltdown, sending deadly radiation cascading throughout Europe.  Islamic terrorists had seized stolen nuclear weapons and threatened California in retaliation for the US invasion of Iraq.  And closest to home, at least for Missouri boys like us, the New Madrid fault line had unleashed a debilitating earthquake, exactly according to the uncanny prediction of climatologist Dr. Iben Browning, leveling St. Louis, and leaving untold destruction throughout the Midwest.

Perhaps you don’t remember these events.  There would be good cause for that, because it was actually September 14th 1990 that he dreamed of calamitous events taking place weeks later.  When he relayed this nightmarish vision to me, it rattled me enough to document it in my journal.  For the next two and a half months, we watched and wondered if our world was about to shake itself apart.  Thankfully, none of these catastrophes played out, and Dr. Browning died a disgraced doomsayer not long afterwards.

As it happened, it would be another 10 years before I had a personal encounter with plate tectonics – and not along the New Madrid fault line.  As I mention in the May 15th broadcast of Spotlight on the Sound, my first experience with an earthquake was the Nisqually quake of February 28th 2001.  I was on the top floor of a five-story business complex when it struck, and my first thought was that a construction crew had begun an unannounced demolition project. Irritation swiftly turned to panic when it dawned on me what was actually happening.  I remember coworkers bracing themselves against walls, and looking out as buildings swayed.  Seconds drew on, and I frantically prayed for protection, still mulling my incredulity that something this significant hadn’t been known in advance.  The quaking soon died down, and amazingly, only one casualty is known from that 6.8 quake – a man who suffered a fatal heart-attack, though there was widespread structural damage and hundreds were injured.  As momentous as this was, only seven months later, an even more historic shaking would come, this time with epicenters at both the capital of our nation, and the heart of international commerce.  September 11th 2001 flooded the American people with a sense of helplessness and incredulity, rocking our country to its core.

Shakings of such magnitude come in many forms – from natural disasters, to human evil, to unpredictable accidents and tragedies of all kinds; any violent, unannounced intrusion into our seemingly stable little areas of the world.  When all the things you trust in and take for granted experience upheaval, your only safe conclusion is that nothing in this world is unshakeable.  Nevertheless, we’ve all known people who stood firm in the midst of a crisis, even when everyone and everything else was falling apart.  What’s different about such people?  Perhaps it’s that they’ve built their foundations on another world – one which cannot be shaken.  

Consider this passage in the epistle to the Hebrews:

“… but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of what is shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain.” (Heb 12:26-27 NIV)

One of the points suggested here is that a shaking is coming which will separate the permanent from the temporary – the unintegrated from the infinitely integrated.  It’s that very lack of integration  – or integrity – that makes material things susceptible to disintegration when subjected to powerful forces.  People of integrity, who have allowed temporal things to be removed from their hearts, and remain true to transcendent principles, have unshakeable reserves in a time of crisis.

Yes, it is important to be prepared to whatever degree humanly possible for the emergent contingencies we know to prepare for, especially as we consider everything from ominous rumblings in Bremerton, to the boisterous threats from North Korea’s nuclear tyrant.  But when you’ve done all you can do, invest time seeking a world which can’t be rocked – because sometimes even terra firma falls apart.

06

May,2017

The Wacked Reckoning of Worlds Beyond

In the May 6th broadcast of Spotlight on the Sound, Michelle Mendoza interviews David Klinghoffer with Seattle’s Discovery Institute, and contributor to Evolution News concerning the recent discovery of the Trappist 1 planetary system.  

This discovery made a rather disproportionate media splash – which is not unusual.  A rather unseemly hyperventilation generally accompanies exoplanetary discovery;  ecstatic musings that betray a desperate hope of intelligent (or even dumb-as-a-box-of-rotifers) life out there… somewhere… please, maybe?  The announcement regarding the Trappist 1 planetary system so stirred the media-sphere as to prompt  a Google doodle animation featuring an inquisitive Earth telescopically probing the stars, when suddenly discovering a happy cadre of earth-like planetary neighbors frantically greeting him from light years away (never mind of course the laws of nature, which effectively render these red dwarf off-cast rocks a series of sterile, hellish, tidally-locked orbs of ice and fire-  because after all, they’re planets… and Earth’s a planet… thus we have inhabitable neighbors! (and one very ill-conceived syllogism).

In his Cosmos series, Carl Sagan gave a synopsis of the Drake Equation– a mathematical tool for estimating the planets in our galaxy which may contain advanced civilizations – a number Sagan theorized could be in the millions.  But like most ‘sciencey’ fictions, the numbers he plugs into the variables are founded on speculative ignorance about what is actually required to thread the unfathomably fragile complex of life – much less intelligent life – through the mind-bendingly hostile needle of space.   Sadly, the steady cultural ingestion of sci-fi fairy tales has altered our collective perception of reality to the degree that an honest estimation of feasibility plays no actual role in reckoning the ascent of alien civilizations.  

In his book, Improbable Planet, astrophysicist Hugh Ross makes the compelling case that planet Earth is no accident – but the carefully crafted end-product of an extra-cosmic intelligence, finely tuned throughout every aspect of existence – from the explosive birth of matter and energy, to galactic expansion, to the development and dynamics of the solar system, to the preparations of geological ages and careful distribution of essential elements, to produce one glimmering blue orb in the Milky Way backwaters as the home of beings created in His image.

That contention, however, is unacceptable to the vast majority of journalists weighing in on scientific discoveries today.  Their bias heavily rests on the authority of researchers with a superhuman capacity to deny the obvious.  As British scientist Francis Crick, put it, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”  Sadly, some delusions are created and preserved in the heart – and no amount of evidence to the contrary will touch them.  So be looking for more planets out there to add to our veritable neighborhood of inhabitable worlds, because, you know, Star Trek… I mean… science.

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