Sometimes A New Name

When I was a child I often longed for a different name. I thought about several possibilities. Perhaps, if I were to name myself, I'd call me Bob or Jim. I was not at the time quite sure what I would want to call me; all I knew for certain was that I wouldn't be Alvin. That was my father's name, not mine. I was searching for my own identity and I wanted to insist that I was not my father. I had to be ME! 

It's interesting how people got their names in the Bible. The answer to that is not always shared. However, in some instances, we know. For instance, when Eve gave birth to her first born, she called him "Brought-forth" or, in her language, Cain. Martin Luther ventures a guess as to why she called him this. He suggests that she believed the promise God made that the woman's offspring would crush the head of the tempting serpent (Genesis 3:15) would now come to pass through Cain. How wrong she was. 

At other times people were given new names by God Himself. Abram (exalted father)  is an example. When the Lord revealed to him that through him all nations on earth would be blessed, he received a new name to remind him and others of God's promise. From that time onward, he was to be called Ab-Raham (Father-of-Multitude). 

In my own case, my name has not changed. However, my appreciation of the name has. Years ago I searched a library, finding a couple books about names. They suggested that my name means wise friend or the beloved one. They further suggested that it is rooted in the Hebrew language. That got me going to the Hebrew name for beloved (David) and I began to tell people that my name is the Saxon version of David. 

What a stretch! And who cares anyway? What is much more significant to me is that my name is my history, my reputation, my relationships. I am the husband of Sylvia, the father of Jeffrey, Nathan and Cheryl Lee. Alvin is the grandfather of Shawn, Patrick, Cassandra, Aric, Caleigh and Kjerstyn. Alvin was once the pastor of Living Word Lutheran Church, Resurrection Lutheran Church, King of Kings Lutheran Church, a graduate of Concordia Seminary, and so forth. 

Alvin is also a man who has a Blog, gets stirred up about corruption in government and the murder of unborn infants. You get the picture.

So it goes on and on, to the point that I do not know how many know who I am or have opinions about me. However, all of it is part of my name. 

Yet I have left out the most significant part of all. Alvin is the baptized son of God, reborn in Jesus Christ, chosen by Him and blessed with His Spirit. And Alvin will live forever, because of that wondrous work performed in him and through him by his Lord. That makes Alvin Jesus' brother and brother to countless others. That makes him a part of the noble and priestly family of the King of kings and the Great High Priest. I shall never be able to exhaust the wonder of all of that. Never! 

One final thought. I recently learned that a better translation of my name is Elf-friend. Elf? Where did that come from? Many, many in the distant past carried this name, some of them members of this or that earthly nobility. But friend of the Elves? Who are the Elves? Who in this scientific, materialist world of the 21st century believes they even exist? A few, I suppose, people like JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis fans. I must admit to being among their number. Perhaps I'm living up to my name after all. 

My Grandsons' Music

I had another of those endless conversations about music with Patrick the other night. He's one of my three wonderful grandsons. And I do mean wonderful. Patrick is a senior at Texas A&M, completing a degree in computer engineering. Shawn, his older brother, is completing a second degree at the University of Texas-Pan American in mechanical engineering. Aric is at the University of Colorado, Boulder, working toward a degree in business. A finer group of young men cannot be found. And I am most proud of them.

But back to that music conversation. It is quite obvious that each generation has a heart music that resonates with them. I still sit at the piano and sing (to myself when no one else is around) the songs of the 40's and 50's--my music. It brings to mind all sorts of memories. I find myself reliving those moments.

So it continues for every generation. Nothing wrong with that. It's just that Patrick's generation's music does not resonate with me. It's so loud, so boisterous. I've never been into Rock of any kind. I miss the soothing tones of Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney and even Frank Sinatra. That's "my music."

Curious fellow that I am, I went to Google and put in "Grandsons." Up pops this current popular band, The Grandsons. Now what kind of music do they play, I'm wondering? They tell us they play an eclectic mix of New Orleans rhythm and blues, rockabilly, swing and country two-step. From the image on their website they look to be about the age of my grandsons. Oh, maybe a little older, but certainly a lot closer than I am. They've been around since the nineties. Old guys!

The Grandsons

They have a link to give us a taste. I clicked on it and voila! It sounds like some of the music I often heard when I was their age. What's going on? I guess Listen to this. I kind of like it. It's called "Yodel Your Blues Away!"

Maybe there's hope yet that my Grandsons and I can come together around some of their music. I know they also like country two-step and related stuff. They go dancing at Texas barns. I've even tried a little of that myself. So I'm looking for a way to bridge the gap between us on music.

Go Grandsons!

In The Beginning God?

A number of things came together this week, as they often do if I'm paying attention. It started with my son asking me if I'd read Ray Kurzweil's latest book, The Singularity Is Near. When I said I knew something of Kurzweil's work and views, but had not read the book, he ordered it from Amazon and had it forwarded to me.

Then after worship last Sunday Ryan, a college student, asked my views on creation versus evolution. We discussed the topic briefly and I promised to send him a paper I'd written a few years back about the age of the earth.

Finally, I read in the newspaper that Kurzweil and Apple's co-founder, Steve Wozniak, were among the speakers here at the Houston area's first Up Experience conference in Stafford.

Finally, my copy of God After Darwin:A Theology of Evolution by John F. Haught arrived in the mail and I began to page through it. You might want to read Michael Behe's review of the book.

So what ties all this together? A number of things.

Kurzweil is an out and out materialist. The universe (or multiple universes) is all there is. And it is because it is. How it came to be we may not know, but it is and we know it exists. We can consider God, he writes, to be the universe and this universe is not conscious. Being conscious is the same as being spiritual, which is to say that you or I have an awareness that we are persons. And ultimately, if I read him right, through the process known as evolution the entire universe will move toward greater and greater complexity, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, etc. Thus the universe is on the path to becoming 'God'!

I must say that such thoughts make me weary and very, very lonely.

Oh, one more thing about Kurzweil. He says that the singularity we are approaching is that time when humans will transcend or go beyond biology. That's not to say we won't want bodies, but he claims it will be but one of many options as we move toward reverse engineering the human brain and body, depositing it into our computers. Aha! The day approaches when we'll be able to "Beam me up, Scotty" anywhere we like. Are you a Star Trek fan? We'll also be able to duplicate ourselves as many times as we may wish. Unfortunately, Kurzweil says, each clone will be just a bit different from the other.

Then, along comes Steve Wozniak at the Up Conference, saying that the days of robots that can do entire tasks on their own are far away. "I don't think we're close. I don't think we've gone one step." He was talking about artificial intelligence (AI), something that Kurzweil claims is but a couple decades away.

Well, who's right? And what do we make of all this? Enter John Haught. I've only begun to read his book, but he has some intriguing things to say. Neo-Darwinians don't need God to create life and consciousness. Life comes by chance over millions upon millions of years. Evolutionary time provides room, he says, for an unimaginable number of purely undirected genetic mutations to occur. Out of these many mutations natural selection (survival of the fittest) gradually brought about adaptive living beings. Eventually these beings included those endowed with minds and consciousness.

How's that for a statement of faith? Mind you, Haught is a creationist. He believes in a creator. However, he wants us all to be aware of what we're tackling when we take on neo-evolution. One of his major points is that a universe that evolves from "dumb matter" must be intrinsically pointless. Inanimate matter is the meaningless material under any so-called higher levels of life. So it finally is all meaningless. Like Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes, "All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. I hated all things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me."

Unless, of course, Kurzweil is right. He's been very busy taking care of his poorly evolved body so that in a couple decades he can download the whole thing into some wondrous computer and become eternal. He takes a whole handful of supplements every day to keep it functioning until the singularity arrives. He's hoping that Wozniak is wrong about AI not really even being at the beginning.



On the other hand, what if Kurzweil and his kind are wrong? What if there's more to it than the matter/energy universe? What if there really is a God who made it all and gives it meaning and purpose and directs it toward a goal? What if the human soul survives death and must stand before this God to give an answer to how he or she lived? What if?

I believe this second option is truly worth considering. Dr. Bert Thompson wrote "Creation—Will It Stand the “Test of Science?." You might want to read his article. He quotes Dr. Henry Morris: “The Second Law of thermodynamics requires the universe to have had a beginning.” That is to say that while quantity remains the same (First Law), the quality of matter/energy deteriorates gradually over time. How so? Usable energy is inevitably used for productivity, growth and repair. In the process, usable energy is converted into unusable energy. Thus, usable energy is irretrievably lost in the form of unusable energy. It's all winding down and it all had to have had a beginning. Nothing comes from nothing. What IS absolutely requires a Creator!

Well, there you have it. I'm winding down too--for today. Enough of this stuff. My energy is winding down. I need to eat something in order to keep going. And all of it depends upon the goodness of my Creator. Oh give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good and His mercy endures forever!

Is The Book Dead?

I was fascinated by a comment (below) by Mark Booth, publishing director of Century, an imprint of Random House. He has a new book out called The Secret History of the World: As Laid Down by the Secret Societies. He presents his book as an alternate history of the cosmos and humankind, with the early chapters relating the creation of the world and later chapters devoted to all of crankdom's usual suspects: "Egyptian" hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, the Knights Templar, the pineal gland, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry -- you name it. I totally agree with Laura Miller's review of his book: "It is a mess of a book, disjointed and rambling, rife with puzzling non sequiturs that are obviously meant to be suggestive or evocative but that more often read like the symptoms of an advanced case of Attention Deficit Disorder."

As much as I found Booth's book about secret societies a bunch of drivel, I was still challenged by another comment he recently made. He says that the book is dead.:

"The evidence in 2008 ... suggests that book reading is in decline. I have worked in publishing for some 25 years and have also recently published a book of my own, conscious that it may be one of the last books. I think some people in the business don't want to admit that it's happening. To them it seems a betrayal of skills and standards that generations worked hard to maintain. They see apathy, short attention spans, illiteracy – what Auberon Waugh called the "proletarianisation" of Britain. . .

"Now the work of the novel is finished, and a new form of consciousness is emerging. It's easy to misread the signs of the times. What we're dealing with here is not a decline in reading, but a decline in reading printed books. I am fascinated to learn in The New Yorker that a recent survey in the States shows that a TV in a child's bedroom lowers academic grades, but a parallel survey shows that time spent on the internet encourages better grades!"

"Clearly interactivity is the key. Perhaps the creative things my children do on the net are less passive than reading books? If Caxton's was a revolution in reading, what we are seeing now is a revolution in reading and writing combined.

"The great new literary form that will replace the novel will, I believe, arise on the net and will take on its wild frontier spirit, its intellectual risk-taking, its two fingers at academic control-freakery. But it will also help forge a new form of consciousness in a much more fundamental way that has to do with the form of the internet.

"Because we are all plugging ourselves into one great electronic mind, we will gradually lose the sense of each being shut off in a private mental space, as esoteric philosophy has long predicted. Our mental space will be out there and, as with Facebook, everyone else will have access to it. I don't know what this new literary form will be, but I suspect it will be co-operative and as slinkily responsive to whoever is looking at it as Schroedinger's cat. I can't wait."

So much for Booth. Sorry for the extended quote. The problem is that I lean in his direction. Note the links I inserted above as examples. I found the comment by Booth by Googling. I knew nothing about the man until I stumbled (is that a good word?) upon his Blog. And then with further Googling I learned what Laura Miller had to say and I agree with her. Add to that Booth's reference to William Caxton, the 15th century British historian and printer who incredibly advanced the publishing of books. I didn't know that. Guess how I found out. The same thing is true with Schroedinger's cat. I read about that some time ago, but had forgotten about it until Booth lifted it up in his book. But now I can refer you to it with a yet another link.

And so it goes. Wonder upon wonder. We have all this immediately available to us on the Net. And add to that the email I got this morning from my granddaughter, writing from Facebook. Yup. Something is happening. Perhaps the book, as we know it, is indeed dead and is being replaced by--well--this very medium you and I are using to communicate with one another.

Manga Bible

In the days when the larger part of the population was illiterate, the Christian church did have to resort to images as well as spoken and written words. Now we have this new attempt to communicate: The Manga Bible.

News - Current News On Beliefnet




It is far, far too premature to endorse and embrace this so-called Bible. However, the concern remains. How do we communicate the Gospel to an unbelieving world? What instruments of current culture are available? Which of these must be rejected?