Southern Bread Blog

In much the same way as the 70 AD argument, the Martyr argument relies on the fact that the NT books aren’t in the habit of skipping over tumultuous events in the life of the early church. And saying the authors would have done so to make the books look earlier than they were is highly anachronistic, since an early christian writer couldn’t have foreseen that dating issues would come into play hundreds of years in the future. One type of event that surely wouldn’t have been overlooked in the gospels or Acts was the martyrdom of an apostle.

So with that in mind, here is the argument:

The martyrdom argument is very strong because it relies on the fact that the death of such an important figure like an apostle would have shaken the foundations of the entire christian church each time it happened. The early church fathers also alluded to the martyrdom of the apostles very heavily. To me it’s almost easier to see the destruction of the temple being left out rather than the death of an apostle. A fledgling group such as early christianity can survive many things such as relocation and persecution, but the death of a leader is terribly hard to overcome.

Attacks on the validity of the Bible are nothing new. Every generation has seen it’s set of critics starting with the gnostics of the 1st century. These days the attacks come from the universities and critical forums such as the Jesus Seminar. A common area of attack is to claim that the gospels and many of the epistles were written far after the actual life and death of Christ. Dating the NT books this way would seem to undermine it’s reliability since a first hand account is tremendously more dependable than something written 200 years later. That’s why personal accounts, such as Anne Frank’s diary, are of such great importance to historians. They give that coveted eye-witness account that historians crave.

So how do we date the books of the New Testament? Were they written before 100 AD as Christian apologists claim or were they written as late as 200-300 AD as claimed by the Jesus Seminar and others? First, I’m going to give you Koukl’s argument for an early dating of the NT canon and then I’ll give you another one next time.

Koukl argues like this:

This is significant. If we can date the gospels to sometime in the 50’s AD, that is within 30 years of the death of Christ and still well within the lifetime of most of the apostles. That more than qualifies for eye-witness status as well as genuine apostolic authorship. A shorter version of the argument can just say that since the destruction of the temple is never mentioned in the NT, we can assume that it hadn’t happened by the time the books were written, with the exception of The Revelation of John(who was in exile at the time). That still puts the gospels and epistles as having been written within 37 years of Christ’s death.

I like Koukl’s argument and I think it’s very powerful. The destruction of the temple and the dispersion of the Jews in 70 AD was an absolutely catyclismic event within early Judeo-christianity. Jerusalem was still the center Judaism and Christianity. For such an event not to be present at all in the NT books would be incredible if they had been written later. It would be like the civil war not being mentioned in an American history book written in 1890. Some have tried to argue that Jesus’s prophesy of the temple’s destruction is proof that the books were written later, because after all, nobody knows the future, right?

That argument only works if the authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke and Acts are prone to that type of deception. I think it’s pretty obvious that they aren’t. Let me give a few examples of the way the gospel writers normally handle fulfilled prophesy:

In addition to these you have Mat. 1:22, Mat. 2:15, Mat. 2:17, Mat. 2:23, Mat 4:14, etc. There are too many to enumerate here. Just do a word search in the gospels for the word “fulfilled” and you will see that it is very much the style of the gospel writers to point out any time a prophesy is fulfilled. To pass up an opportunity to point out the fulfillment of the 70 AD prophesy should be just too much for any honest historian to accept. Furthermore, it lends honesty to the gospel accounts to see how many times they point out where a prophesy was fulfilled. It give’s the gospels an air of “please believe me”.

Furthermore, in order to believe that the prophesy of the events of 70 AD were included as a deception, you would have to also assume that it’s fulfillment was left out to make the deception more believable. I would say that this is an anachronism on the part of today’s higher critics. Their is no reason to believe that future dating disputes over the gospels would even be an issue in the mind of a 2nd century christian. Next time I’ll give you a different but still powerful dating argument.

I have a few mod_perl web apps that I maintain for my employer. One of the problems that you run into with any web app is the proper placement of global configuration parameters within the application. I’m talking about things such as database hostname, database login credentials, query timeout parameters, etc. Since a web application is stateless(each reply/request cycle is atomic) you have to make these global variables available from within each of your modules independently, but in a way that still let’s you have only a single point of administration for changing them. Here is the method I use for handling this situation.

I use the cpan module Config::Tiny and create a new module that handles returning the current global configuration data whenever it’s functions are called. Config::Tiny reads an INI style configuration file, and since it reads this file each time it’s called, you don’t have to bounce your apache process just to make a configuration change. Here is a mock example of a file that Config::Tiny might read:

##: Config file

[database]
type=mysql
server=mysql.domain.com
user=username
pass=password
database=mywebapp

[global]
expires=86400
maxusers=5

You could save this file as /etc/mywebapp.conf and that would become the administrative point for any configuration changes to your app. Now here is a look at the module(I’m assuming you are familiar with module creation, if not look here) you would use to retrieve that data from the config file and hand it to your application:

package mywebapp::Conf;

#use 5.008;
use strict;
use warnings;

require Exporter;

our @ISA = qw(Exporter);
our %EXPORT_TAGS = ( ’all’ => [ qw() ] );
our @EXPORT_OK = ( @{ $EXPORT_TAGS{’all’} } );
our @EXPORT = qw(
  get_db_config
);

our $VERSION = ’0.01’;

sub get_db_config {
  use Config::Tiny;

  ##: Hash ref to return
  my $dbase;

  ##: Open the config file
  my $config=Config::Tiny->read(’/etc/mywebapp.conf’);

  ##: Get values
  $dbase->{’type’}=$config->{database}->{type};
  $dbase->{’server’}=$config->{database}->{server};
  $dbase->{’user’}=$config->{database}->{user};
  $dbase->{’pass’}=$config->{database}->{pass};
  $dbase->{’database’}=$config->{database}->{database};

  return($dbase);
}

1;
__END__

So now we have a module who’s subroutines we can call from within our mod_perl modules. But this method is not restricted to only mod_perl. Since we created a generic perl module, we can call it from any perl script. For example sometimes you might have to get access to this same config information if you have a perl script that runs from a cronjob to do cleanup on your database.

If you were going to call it from a mod_perl module you might do something like this:

package mywebapp::UpdateUserInfo;
...
use mywebapp::Conf;

sub handler {
...
my $dbase=get_db_config();
...
}

1;

Now you have a hashref full of all the pertinent info needed to login to your database backend. You could go one step further and add a connect_to_db function to your config module and then you wouldn’t even have to mess with the database info at all. With this setup in place, tasks like changing the database server’s hostname or login credentials are now a trivial task that doesn’t require taking your webapp offline.

*Previous posts in this series

In the last part of this series of posts I looked at the mind as a non-physical object. If there is anything non-physical in the universe then a purely physicalist/materialistic explanation of reality is inadequate. I argued that the mind is the defeater for physicalism. This time around I want to dig deeper into that by looking at an argument made popular by C.S. Lewis. It’s commonly called the “argument from reason”. Victor Reppert has spent much of his career exploring this part of Lewis’s work so I will take a lot of info from his writings.

The basic argument from reason goes like this:

1. No thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.
2. If naturalism is true, then all thoughts can be explained as the result of irrational causes.
3. Therefore, if naturalism is true, then no thought is valid.
4. But, if that is so, then the thought “naturalism is true” is not valid.
5. Therefore, naturalism cannot be both true and validly thought.

Number one depends on the belief that thoughts are rational events. So if they can be fully explained by irrational causes such as electrical impulses or chemical interactions then they are not valid thoughts. Remember Liebniz’s thinking machine? He said you can’t get rational events from a machine built from irrational components. That is the assumption underlying #1. I don’t see a way around this one since thinking that your thoughts are irrational is pretty self-defeating. You might disagree with Liebniz but at your own peril I think. That would require demonstrating a way to produce rational though from non-rational components. That’s going to be a tough one.

Number two just explains the naturalistic understanding of mental events. A naturalist or physicalist will say that mental events are just biological neural net type systems and are fully explainable by a study of the brains chemical interactions or electrical patterns. They will say that when we observe a set of electro-chemical events taking place in the brain, that we are actually seeing the “thought” occur in front of our eyes. This is very hard to swallow though. If that is the case, then thoughts in the human brain are just like logic events inside a computer system. But data in a computer event is meaningless to the computer itself. The data it acts upon “represents” information. It uses the data structurally, not rationally. That was covered last time though. Let’s move on.

Here is the first conclusion. Number 3 is the logical conclusion of #1 and #2. Let’s say it this way: “No thought is really a thought if it can be fully explained biochemically, but if naturalism is true, then all thoughts can be explained biochemically. Therefore, if naturalism is true, then there are no real thoughts.” And this is exactly what physicalists say. Take this quote from Daniel Dennett:

“The first stable conclusion I reached … was that the only thing brains could do was to approximate the responsivity to meanings that we presuppose in our everyday mentalistic discourse. When mechanical push comes to shove, a brain was always going to do what it was caused to do by current, local, mechanical circumstances, whatever it ought to do, whatever a God’s-eye view might reveal about the actual meaning of its current states. But over the long haul, brains could be designed — by evolutionary processes — to do the right thing (from the point of view of meaning) with high reliability. … [B]rains are syntactic engines that can mimic the competence of semantic engines. … The appreciation of meanings — their discrimination and delectation — is central to our vision of consciousness, but this conviction that I, on the inside, deal directly with meanings turns out to be something rather like a benign “user-illusion”.”

So basically, thoughts as traditionally defined do not exist. They are just illusions. What’s really going on are biochemical and electromechanical events in the brain that are responses to environmental inputs. We just see them as thoughts because they reside internally and are approximately semantic in nature. Maybe it’s just me, but I always question a philosophy that relies upon all of humanity being somehow delusional. It’s the same way with Frued and Bertrand Russell. I am skeptical of there theories that nobody understands what is really going on except them. The rest of us are just “wanting” so bad for something else to be true that we trick ourselves into believing it.

Number four turns the argument to address it’s self-refutation. This is the achilles heel of all non-rational explanations for rationality. You just can’t explain things that way without undermining your own argument. If there are no such things as real(a.k.a rational) thoughts then the the thought that “naturalism is true” is not rational. Pretty straight-forward.

The conclusion(#5) is obviously that naturalism can’t be both true in reality and valid in theory. A philosophy that is in that predicament is in trouble. Evidently Lewis modified this argument somewhat after his debate with Elizabeth Anscombe(a catholic philosopher). Reppert says that the argument was modified as such:

“Lewis’s revised argument begins much the same as the previous argument, distinguishes between connection via cause and effect and connection by ground and consequent. The key passage, to me, is on page 16 of my edition:

“But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event, it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief’s occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it?”

What Lewis claims is that if there are reasons to believe something, if naturalism is true, they would have to be irrelevant to the actual production of beliefs. No one could ever believe in naturalism because there are good arguments for naturalism.”

This is similar to what I explained in the description of #2 above. It’s more of a refinement than a change, and Anscombe later commended this change as a sign that Lewis was an honest philosopher and wanted to be sure he got things right. Next time I want to delve into Alvin Plantinga’s “evolutionary argument against naturalism”. It might be the most powerful argument against naturalism in the modern era.

If you know much about pipes you will know that a good “carbon cake” is essential to a good smoking pipe. That “cake” is formed over time by the carbon being deposited on the inside walls of the bowl as the tobacco burns. With a new pipe, you have to go through a break-in process because there is no carbon at all in the bowl. You hear all kind of recommendations about using stuff like water, sugar water, honey, etc. to speed up the break-in process but the guy at the pipe shop told me to just smoke half-bowls until you get a good cake on the bottom. The cake on the bottom is the most critical part but it’s often the part that never gets a good buildup. He said it should take about 2-3 weeks.

Here is a link to The Briary’s site.

We got a nice surprise tonight. The water problem we had in our basement 2 years ago came back with a vengeance. We had a real bad rainstorm here and when I went downstairs to get something I saw water pouring in through the walls. At it’s worst their was about 2.5 inches of water on the floor. I don’t know what will happen now. Our builder supplied us with a home warranty but this is a pre-existing problem that first flooded 2 days after we moved in. Maybe I was starting to get a little too comfortable with things and God decided to shake me up a little bit. I don’t know; but I do know that it could have been a lot worse. We are in the middle of getting ready for a garage sale but luckily most of the stuff was on tables up off the floor. Here’s a few pics:

My dad and brother-in-law came over and helped us get it all cleaned up. Thank God for family. I guess Wednesday will be the day for calling and getting some answers about who is going to fix it and how much it’s going to cost me, or the warranty people, or the builder. I guess we’ll see. Like I said though, it could have been a lot worse.

Well it looks like Sci-Fi is finally pulling the plug on Stargate SG-1. I have to admit to never being a big SG-1 fan. I think it’s because I loved the original Stargate movie so much that I was automatically against any portrayal of the characters by any other actors. To me, Daniel is James Spader. It was on Showtime when it first came out anyway, so I was not able to see the first few seasons and I have this thing about picking up a TV series in mid-stream. I have to go back and watch all the previous episodes first. All that being said, I’m amazed at how long the show has lasted. 10 years is a long time for any show. Especially a sci-fi series. I hate that I missed it. I’ll have to go and get the season DVD’s and watch them all some day.

On the flip-side of that, it looks like they will be renewing Stargate Atlantis for another season. That is a show that I definitely have watched and I have to say it is probably the best sci-fi show going right now. I know a lot of people like Battlestar Galactica but it’s a little too “out there” for me. I like my sci-fi really simple. A good sci-fi show will walk the line between the fantastic and the cheesy. It will get perilously close to cheese sometimes but without crossing that line. I think that only comes from having a good cast with good chemistry. The last time I saw such good chemistry on a cast was when TNG was on the air. If you haven’t seen it then give it a try. New episodes air on Sci-Fi channel on Friday nights.

Okay, this is getting crazy. Three food posts in one week. That demands a new “food” category on the blog so here it is. This is going to mess up my permalinks. I guess I’ll 304 ’em tonight. Anyway, my sister evidently lives in a mysterious fertile crescent region of central alabama because her sweet pepper plants keep growing peppers at sick rate. They get so many that the plant is sagging under the weight of them. She gives us a batch every so often and I like to pickle them for use on salads and such.

I don’t know if this is really what goes into pickling peppers or not but they sure do taste good:

These are delicious on a salad or a sandwich. Enjoy!

*Previous posts in this series

In the first part of this series of posts I became convinced of some form of supernaturalism based on 5 arguments. Four of the five arguments have to do with the mind and so that’s what I want to explore this time. The idea of a non-corporeal mind linked somehow with a physical body has been the dominant understanding of human personhood for millenia. A strict physicalist view of the world is really a very recent development. When I say “strict physicalist” I am speaking of people like Daniel Dennet. Christian “monists” also refute a mind-body dualism but they should not properly be called physicalists.

The main obstacle for physicalism is that aspect of the mind that is intentionality, or aboutness. This is that peculiar property that minds have but nothing else that exists has. For example, when you ponder a word problem you are thinking about what the answer might be. You daydream about going on vacation. You set off to the store with the intention to buy some curtains for your house. It is this quality of your thoughts to be intent upon, or about something that requires your mind to be non-physical. This problem is explained by Leibniz in his following example:

“One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the
same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception.”

–Leibniz(zle), Monadology (1714)

Physicalists will refute Leibniz by saying that it’s simply a matter of not knowing how the brain works yet. They will contend that many things in the past were thought to be spiritual or magical but were later explained by science and seen for what they were. This isn’t the case here though, because the mind-body problem is primarily a logic problem, not a scientific one. We can’t even conceive of a possible world in which physical objects are about other things. It’s logically incoherant to think of a baseball bat being about something. However, it’s not impossible to envision a baseball bat thinking about something if it had a mind. Silly maybe, but not impossible. The mind is the only thing that makes any logical sense as a purveyor of intentionality.

In his example, Leibniz is trying to get across that it’s not simply a matter of not being able to see inside the mental machine that makes it impossible to understand. Even if we could get inside the machine, which we routinely do with modern neurology, we would still have no idea of how it’s doing what it’s doing, because the qualities we are looking for are in the “substance” of the machine instead of being produced by any physical workings of the machine. This notion is commonly referred to as substance dualism. In other words, minds are mental because they are minds.

According to Nolan and Whipple, Descartes believed that it is easy to mistake the workings of the mind for physical processes since being embodied obscures or confuses the two. You could say that we are too close to ourselves to see the distinction. This is primarily a function of the causal relationship between the physical and mental substances such that hitting your finger with a hammer causes a mental state of pain to ensue. We would routinely attribute the pain to a physical state, but pain is a subjective mental state. Where is the pain? The nerves in your finger are firing but the pain is not in your finger because pain isn’t the type of thing that can be in a finger. There is a reason that their is no such thing as a pain meter. It’s not the type of thing that can be measured physically.

This all leads me to a belief that if there is a supernatural mind at work in each of us, then if there is anything else supernatural out there, there is a pretty good chance it’s rational. I hope to refine this further next time by exploring Lewis’s Argument from Reason.

I enjoy smoking a pipe as often as I can. Maybe I’m not a big time pipe snob, but usually about once a week is all I can manage. Now that my pipe is broken in (it’s about 3.5 years old), smoking it infrequently is not a problem. It takes a while to get one broken in though and at first it’s a good idea to smoke your pipe as much as possible. This helps build up the carbon “cake” on the inner walls of the pipe bowl and that “cake” is what makes a really good smoking pipe. It absorbs most of the bitter oils and moisture that can make the smoke taste foul. The only downside to smoking your pipe that much though, is that you will need to give it a good deep cleaning about once a month. Here’s how:

You should only go through this cleaning process about once a month at the most. Don’t do it too often or you will inhibit the carbon cake formation. I found this technique originally on the internet a few years ago and I can’t remember where I saw it, so kudo’s to anonymous guy for coming up with it.