The Worrying State of Medicine

I spent about four hours today at a local Urgent Care facility. Without going into too much detail, the reason I had to do this was because the doctor's appointment I had scheduled for yesterday got canceled because my doctor got sent to cover ER shifts because of labor shortages in the medical industry. The immediate problem I was seeing her for is that my oxygen saturation levels, especially early in the morning, were getting worryingly low, and after starting a new medication I had gained six pounds in a single week, which could be seen as visible swelling in my legs. Since I was measuring my O2 levels with my own pulse/ox, I used the patient portal to say, “This is what I'm measuring. What should I do for the next two weeks before our rescheduled appointment?” Thus, today, I received a call where my doctor informed me I should go to the Urgent Care facility to get examined to make sure there wasn't anything major going on.

Now the fact that my primary doctor wasn't available for a scheduled appointment due to workplace shortages of medical professionals isn't the main focus here. It is certainly worrisome, but I think what might even be more so is the exchange I had with the doctor at the Urgent Care clinic. Since I wasn't getting enough oxygen and had obvious fluid retention from swelling, he ran a litany of tests on me including EKG and a chest X-Ray, even the universal COVID test, all of which came back as “good news” (thank God). But after he got the results back and he was explaining them to me, the doctor mentioned at one point that they'd had a little difficulty with one of the tests because my chest is so large. He then immediately said, “Not that I'm saying there's anything bad about being so large.”

And this is the point I want to bring up. I actually immediately said, “No, I know it's bad. In fact, the increased weight is precisely one of the very things I pointed out to you that had me so concerned.” I immediately saw his demeanor change, as if he was relieved to be able to speak honestly instead of being terrified of offending me, and he said, “Yes, if we could get rid of that weight, it would almost certainly help across the board with everything else here.”

So why did I find this exchange so problematic that I decided to write a blog post about it, especially given that it means I had to divulge (albeit obscurely) some health details I'd rather not talk about? Because I just experienced a doctor telling me something we both knew was a lie because he was afraid that I might be offended had he told me the truth.

There's real danger in this, though. I could have easily come away from that conversation telling everyone, “I went to Urgent Care and the doctor said my weight is fine” when the reality is the exact opposite. If he was so unwilling to state the objective fact that being overweight is detrimental to one's health, then what else are doctors afraid to tell patients? It's extremely worrisome if doctors will lie for the sake of one's ego instead of telling the truth for the sake of one's life.

In the meantime, I still have a case of “We Don't Know”, but at least I know my heart and lungs are sound right now, and I don't have Wuhan Bat Lung either. Prayers would be appreciated that someone in the medical field discovers what the proximate cause is. Or, God could just zap me. I'm fine with that too.

Some Neglected Evidence For The Enfield Voice

This month and next, I want to discuss a couple of unresolved issues in the Enfield case. My post this month, this one, will address a subject I'm more pessimistic about, and next month's post will be about a topic that's more promising. Something the two posts will have in common is that I'm largely ignorant about some aspects of the issues I'll be discussing. Part of what I'm doing in these posts is bringing these issues to a larger audience with the hope that other people will be able to bring about some progress in the contexts involved.

About 20 years ago, Will Storr went to Philadelphia to spend some time with Lou Gentile, a self-described demonologist who was going to take Storr along with him on some cases Gentile was working. Storr was a British journalist and a skeptic of the paranormal. He didn't expect anything supernatural to occur during his time with Gentile. He thought he would be writing a humorous article about the delusions of a demonologist. Instead, he had some unsettling experiences that he considered supernatural, and he went on to spend a year researching the paranormal and writing a book about it, Will Storr Vs. The Supernatural (New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006). You can listen to Storr discussing his experiences with Gentile here, in an interview several years ago.

There was a subject Gentile brought up in his discussions with Storr, and it would be a recurring theme with other individuals Storr came across in the process of doing his research. Gentile mentioned a poltergeist case Storr should look into: "The Enfield case was just insane. One of the biggest, best-documented poltergeist cases in history. A real bad demonic case. Man, you should check that one out." (page 8 in Storr's book) He would check it out, to the point of interviewing Janet Hodgson, often considered the center of the poltergeist, and twice interviewing Maurice Grosse, the chief investigator of the case. Near the end of the second interview, Grosse played a recording of the poltergeist's embodied voice, and it was at that point that Storr recognized a connection between Enfield and the cases he was involved in with Gentile:

Increasing Diversity By Killing It

Veritasium recently highlighted what he calls "The Longest-Running Evolution Experiment" on YouTube. The experiment uses E. Coli bacteria and it's been running for 33 years.  This means that there have been 74,500 generations of bacteria.

To put that in perspective, assuming a generation in humans takes about 20 years, it would take humans 1,490,000 years to have this many generations.  For the record, if you ask a Darwinist, they will say that modern humans have only been around for 300,000 to 800,000 years.  Indeed, going back 1.5 million years, our ancestors would be Homo erectus.  The point is, there are huge differences between H. erectus and H. sapiens that supposedly came about in those roughly 75,000 generations.

On the other hand, if you look bacteria after the same 75,000 generations, they are basically unchanged to this day.  Not only that, but E. Coli can be found back well before this 33-year-old experiment began too. And in all that time, no mutant bacteria formed which would be classified as anything other than E. Coli.

But this is a bit aside the point I wanted to make in talking about this bacteria now.  The point raised by the video is that the E. Coli that exists today ought to have evolved to better fit into the environment of the laboratory, and comparing older strains with modern strains show that modern strains of bacteria are, in deed, "more fit."

This is, in fact, how evolution is typically presented. Organisms become "more fit" in their environment.  The problem is that this overlooks one extremely obvious point: becoming more fit for a particular niche environment does not mean that you are more fit as an organism, as a whole.  What I mean can be seen if we hypothesize a bacteria that has 50% capability of survival in a lab and 50% capability of surviving in a kitchen and 50% capability of surviving in a bathroom.  After thousands of generations, we measure that the bacteria now has a 95% capability of surviving in a lab, and that's all we measure. We then declare that the organism is "more fit", despite the fact that for all we know the new organism has a 0% capability of surviving in a kitchen and in a bathroom now.

The point can be even more readily made by considering what happens when a human feeds wildlife.  Birds, for example, may learn that to get food they just eat the seeds from a feeder all winter long. But what happens when the old woman who used to feed them dies and there's no more seeds?  The birds die too, because they have lost the ability to get food on their own.

So the question is, can birds that learn to eat seeds from a feeder be considered "more fit" than birds that know how to search for food on their own?  Only in the extremely specialized context of that specific environment and only assuming that environment never changes could such a bird be considered "more fit."  In all other points of view, it's actually harmful to the bird to make it dependent upon humans.  

E. coli naturally lives in the intestines of a human being.  Would we still consider the E. coli to be "more fit" if we discovered that all these lab grown bacteria would die if placed back into an intestine?  Does the fact that they are the best at living in the lab really mean the organism is "the best" itself, given that without being able to survive in humans, all of these bacteria have no ability to survive the instant there is no more funding for this experiment?

The reason that becomes important is more than just semantics. Evolution is supposed to explain why organisms become more complex over time, yet all these experiments actually show is organisms adapting to a single variable that we have artificially decided is the only thing we should measure for.  In fact, it ought to be predicted that they would become simpler as a result.  After all, if E. coli doesn't need to survive in the stomach because it's environment is now restricted to a laboratory, then the ability to survive in any other environments is wasted effort on the part of the organism.  It's better to streamline the organism and remove that ability.  But, clearly, this is reducing the available functionality, not increasing it.  And in fact, natural selection is a winnowing process by definition.  Death is not a creative function.  You do not increase diversity by killing off something.

So can you really call this an experiment in evolution?  Only in the sense that the bare-bones definition of "evolution" is change through time, and certainly these E. coli have changed through time. But to try to extrapolate from that some grand scheme of Darwinian progression is simply pushing the data way too far from what it actually provides.

Does the Old Testament anticipate two comings of the Messiah?

Here's a good video by Michael Brown on the subject. I'd add that the Christian understanding of two comings makes more sense of the stone that gradually grows to cover the earth in Daniel 2:35, the figure who already has enemies on earth and is waiting with God in heaven for the subjection of those enemies in Psalm 110:1, and the coming of God in power after having been pierced by his people in Zechariah 12:10.

Lest You Forget...

The current President has demonstrated he is not equal to the enormous responsibilities of his office; he cannot rise to meet challenges large or small. Thanks to his disdainful attitude and his failures, our allies no longer trust or respect us, and our enemies no longer fear us.

That's a pretty harsh indictment of Biden.

What?

That was the letter signed by more than 200 retired generals against Trump last year?

Oh.

Well, at least there are no mean tweets anymore. 

Surely this isn't evidence that God is upset with people who preach, but do not practice. Who tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and give rules like "don't misgender" and "check your privilege." God's not going to be upset with people who do their good deeds on Twitter for all to see while in secret they grope their interns. These people who cross sea and land to gain a single convert, and once they have that convert they turn them twice as woke as they themselves.

Don't harsh my buzz, and other things Boomers say. God is love. He understands you did your best.

I mean, you didn't, but you would have if it hadn't been for Netflix.  And that's the important part.

The Vastness of Space

Last month, the Pentagon released its report on UFOs. Since then, I've been musing a bit on whether or not extraterrestrial life could exist. In itself, this is probably a pointless excursion, given that God can do whatever He wants and He may or may not have made other life out there somewhere without telling us. But something struck me as I thought about the various arguments put forth.

One argument is that there surely must be life out there since there are so many trillions of stars that there must be countless planets just like ours in solar systems far away, and if evolution can have life form here then surely life can form in these other planets too. Setting aside the fact that evolution already presupposes the existence of life in the first place and therefore can't create it, this argument seems to fly in the face of the “anthropic principal” presented by secularists. That is, the anthropic principal is the claim that the necessary fine tuning of all the variables needed in our local solar system for life to exist on Earth is not evidence of design, but rather is simply the result of the vastness of space. Given how big the universe is and how many “rolls of the dice” individual locations were enabled to have, some place had to have the ideal conditions which resulted in our existence.

The reason these two explanations run counter to each other is easily displayed by a simple question. Which is it? Is life so easy to form that the vastness of the universe is why aliens are probably out there, or is life so difficult to form because it needs such precise values that the vastness of the universe is needed for us to exist in our seemingly designed location?

The sad thing is, I don't think most secularists even realize these two views are at odds with each other.

When Your Breath Shall Grow Cold

"Youth, ordinarily, is a post and ready servant for Satan, to run errands; for it is a nest for lust, cursing, drunkenness, blaspheming of God, lying, pride, and vanity. Oh, that there were such an heart in you as to fear the Lord, and to dedicate your soul and body to His service! When the time cometh that your eye-strings shall break, and your face wax pale, and legs and arms tremble, and your breath shall grow cold, and your poor soul look out at your prison house of clay, to be set at liberty; then a good conscience, and your Lord's favour, shall be worth all the world's glory. Seek it as your garland and crown." (Samuel Rutherford, Letters Of Samuel Rutherford [Carlisle, Pennsylvania: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2012], 287-88)

May The Lamb That Was Slain Receive The Reward Of His Suffering

"The Moravians were not the only missionaries inspired by Revelation 5, but probably the Moravians gave expression to the beauty of the missionary implications of this text better than anybody. And in the middle of the eighteenth century, they would get on their ships in North Germany to disappear forever out of their families' lives to peoples they had no idea whether they'd eat them or not, and as the ships pulled out from shore, they would lift their hands and say, 'May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of his suffering.' That comes straight out of Revelation 5:9. 'May the Lamb that was slain, in my ministry, receive the reward of his suffering. He was slain for them, and I'm going to go be the means by which he gets his reward for his suffering.' I cannot imagine a vision of life more precious than that. I mean, if you could wake up every morning and preach to yourself, 'I am the instrument in the hands of the grace of God by which the Lamb slain will receive the reward of his suffering.'" (John Piper, at 27:20 in the video here)

Support For Christianity From Ancient Non-Christian Sources

A decade ago, I collected some links to many of Triablogue's articles on corroboration of Christianity from ancient non-Christian sources. I recently updated the post. Some links have been added, and some have been changed. I've also revised the text below the links.

Spiritual Fire

"And that thou mayest learn, consider Paul, I pray thee. What is there fearful that he did not suffer, and that he did not submit to? But he bore all nobly. Let us imitate him, for so shall we be able to land in the tranquil havens with much merchandise. Let us then stretch our mind towards Heaven, let us be held fast by that desire, let us clothe ourselves with spiritual fire, let us gird ourselves with its flame. No man who bears flame fears those who meet him; be it wild beast, be it man, be it snares innumerable, so long as he is armed with fire, all things stand out of his way, all things retire. The flame is intolerable, the fire cannot be endured, it consumes all. With this fire let us clothe ourselves, offering up glory to our Lord Jesus Christ, with whom to the Father, together with the Holy Ghost, be glory, might, honor, now and ever and world without end." (John Chrysostom, Homilies On Hebrews, 34:8)

The Use And Abuse Of Typology

Gavin Ortlund recently posted a good video on the subject. It's based on a recent debate on the papacy he participated in, which is also worth watching.

Harmless as an enemy, treacherous as a friend

As we plod through the second year of "14 days to flatten the curve", I see that the relativity of time raises it's head once again.  "It will be three months before the Taliban can occupy Kabul" turned out to be closer to three days.  1975 is a bit before my time, but the pictures from Saigon and the pictures from Kabul bear a striking resemblance to each other.  Almost as though there is nothing new under the sun (I think I read that someplace).

The whole situation reminds me of a quote Mark Steyn attributes to Bernard Lewis sometime around the year 2010 or so: "The danger here is that America risks being seen as harmless as an enemy, and treacherous as a friend."  Well, I think America has gotten the "treacherous as a friend" part down pat, and has been that way for years.

This is why Christians should never put faith in governments, which are composed of sinners after all. Ours has been more interested in flying rainbow flags and keeping the military woke than it has been in planning how to exit a battlefield. Living your life as if God isn't watching is all fun and games until you find out He was watching.  Woe to you if God should find you not only harmless as an enemy, but treacherous as a friend too.

The Overlap Between The Synoptics And John

Critics make much of the alleged differences between the Synoptic gospels and John. The amount of overlap between them is often underestimated, including by conservative Christians. I want to gather some links to posts we've written on the subject over the years. These examples are far from exhaustive. You can search our archives for more.

On how much overlap we should expect, see here.

Jesus' family.

His childhood.

His career.

His viewing himself as the figure of Isaiah 9:1-7 and how he interpreted the passage.

The "I am" statements.

How he referred to Peter.

And here's one on some agreements about unusual terminology used by Jesus.

Regarding his nonverbal characteristics, see here and here.

His use of mountains.

Double healing.

How he raised the dead.

His use of object lessons.

Soteriology.

The prominence of love.

The character of the apostles.

The events surrounding Jesus' death and resurrection.

Undesigned coincidences among various passages.

You can find many other examples of agreements between the Synoptics and John in Lydia McGrew's Hidden In Plain View (Chillicothe, Ohio: DeWard, 2017) and The Eye Of The Beholder (Tampa, Florida: DeWard, 2021).

The Goods Of The Throne And The Goods Of The Footstool

"O my heart, my haughty heart! Dost thou well to be discontent, when God has given thee the whole tree, with all the clusters of comfort growing on it, because he suffers the wind to blow down a few leaves? Christians have two kinds of goods; the goods of the throne and the goods of the footstool; immoveables and moveables. If God has secured those, never let my heart be troubled at the loss of these: indeed, if he had cut off his love, or discovenanted my soul, I had reason to be cast down; but this he hath not done, nor can he do it." (John Flavel, Keeping The Heart [Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 2019], 42)

A High View Of Fiction And A Low View Of Life

If you're so moved by fictional characters accomplishing things that are supposed to be great in fictional books and movies, what are you trying to accomplish in your life?

The Widespread Absence Of A Papacy

One of the reasons for rejecting the papacy is the lack of justification for it. There are apparent contradictions of the concept of the papacy in some New Testament documents and other early sources, but the lack of evidence for the office would be enough reason to not accept it, even if such contradictions didn't exist.

However, Protestants often focus on too narrow a range of contexts in which the papacy is absent in the early sources. A lot of attention is given to passages about Peter in the gospels and Acts and material about church government in the early sources, for example, but we ought to think more broadly about where a papacy could have been mentioned if it existed. A papacy wouldn't have to be mentioned at every conceivable opportunity. But the larger the number and variety of contexts in which a papacy could have been mentioned, but wasn't, the more likely it is that the office didn't exist. What I want to do in this post is provide a few examples of contexts that are often neglected.

The apostles sometimes discussed their upcoming death, what was being done to preserve their teachings, and how Christians should conduct themselves going forward (e.g., Acts 20:17-38, 2 Timothy 3:10-4:8, 2 Peter 1:12-21). If the papacy was considered the foundation of the church, the infallible center of Christian unity throughout church history, the absence of any mention of such a resource in passages like these is significant.

Another group of relevant contexts is the imagery used to refer to relevant entities, such as what imagery is used to refer to the apostles or the church. We get twelve thrones without Peter's throne being differentiated (Matthew 19:28), three pillars without Peter's being differentiated (Galatians 2:9), twelve foundation stones without Peter's being differentiated (Ephesians 2:20, Revelation 21:14), etc.

The early Christians often interact with the objections of their opponents. The gospels respond to the charge that Jesus performed miracles by the power of Satan, Paul responds to his critics in his letters, Justin Martyr wrote a response to Jewish arguments against Christianity, Origen wrote a response to Celsus' anti-Christian treatise, and so on. See here regarding the lack of reference to a papacy in such contexts.

It's important for Protestants (and other opponents of the papacy) to bring up considerations like these, since the absence of early references to a papacy becomes more significant when the absence occurs across a broader range of contexts. If only two pages of early Christian literature were extant, the absence of a papacy (or whatever other concept) would be much less significant than its absence across two million pages. The number of pages matters (assuming the usual diversity of topics you'd get with an increase in such a page number).

One of the reasons why it's become so popular for Catholics to argue for the papacy by an appeal to something like typology or Old Testament precedent is that there's such a lack of evidence in the New Testament and the early patristic literature. So, there's a turn to other sources to try to find what isn't present where we'd most expect to see it.

How can Jesus see seed in Isaiah 53:10?

Michael Brown just posted a good video on the subject. He's responding to Tovia Singer, and one of the points Brown makes is that Singer not only neglects some points Christians have made about the passage, but also neglects what other Jewish sources have said on these issues. I made the same point in an exchange I had with Singer in one of his YouTube threads last year. (You can find other responses to Singer in our archives.)

For more about the Suffering Servant prophecy and the Servant Songs in general, see here.

The Historicity Of Jesus' Burial And Empty Tomb

Mike Winger recently posted a video that makes some good points about the historicity of the account of Jesus' burial in Mark's gospel.

Though the empty tomb is a different issue than the burial of Jesus, some of the information we have about the former has implications for the latter. Regarding the evidence outside the gospels and Acts, see here. On the letters of Peter in particular, see here. And here's something I wrote on Justin Martyr a few years ago, including his citation of a first-century Jewish source acknowledging the empty tomb. In another post, I discussed some of the cumulative effects of the evidence.

The Impossible Achievement

U.S. Women's Soccer has accomplished the impossible. They have made the majority of red-blooded Americans cheer for a women's soccer team.

It was the Canadian soccer team, but still...

Come Thursday, when the US Women's Soccer team goes to play for the Bronze, Americans will proudly cheer on the Australian team.

One cannot diminish the massive impact of what U.S. Women's Soccer has done.  Virtually any sports team representing their country would have the support of the majority of their country, so the fact that they got nearly everyone to cheer their failure truly is an achievement.

Then again, one can hardly say this was a "sports team representing their country".  That's why I can't just say, "When the US goes to play for the Bronze." Because they do not represent our country. They represent themselves.  

Perhaps that's why the country didn't support them in return.

Rapinoe famously went on a crusade a mere four years ago to eject Jaelene Hinkle from the team because Hinkle is an evangelical who refused to play in a scrimmage after U.S. Soccer required players to wear a rainbow jersey in it. That makes it all the more delightful that Rapinoe just lost to a Canadian team that has a transgender player on it.

Megan Rapinoe once famously yelled, "I deserve this!"

Yes.  Yes you do.

Was the Enfield case faked for money?

The recent release of The Conjuring 3 has brought up issues about the Warrens and their financial interests in the paranormal cases they investigated. I discussed the subject in a post about the latest Conjuring movie several weeks ago. I want to address a related issue concerning the subject of the second movie in the series, the Enfield Poltergeist. What financial motives might the people involved in that case have had? One of the most common motives proposed for any sort of fraud is a desire to make money. That's relevant not just to the Warrens, but also to the rest of the people involved in the Enfield case.

Movies can, and often do, make people wealthy. But The Conjuring 2 came along too late to be a good candidate for motivating anybody to fabricate the Enfield case. The same can be said of the television series on Enfield that came out in 2015. Nobody in 1977 was expecting that sort of television series or movie, much less would anybody have been expecting it to make a lot of money. Something like a movie that comes out nearly four decades after a poltergeist case started offers a poor explanation for why the case originated. What critics of the Enfield case need to be more focused on is the opportunities for making money early on, such as by means of media coverage or the publishing of books.

In the process of discussing these issues, I'll be making reference to Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes. I'm going to use "MG" to refer to tapes from Grosse's collection. "GP" will refer to those from Playfair's. MG64B is tape 64B in Grosse's collection, GP3A is Playfair's tape 3A, and so on.