Monthly Archives: January 2019

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 252 My May 15, 1994 letter to Hans Bethe Part A (Featured Artist is Tommy Hartung)

January 31, 2019 – 1:27 am

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Hans Bethe

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hans Bethe
Hans Bethe.jpg
Born Hans Albrecht Bethe
July 2, 1906
Strasbourg, Germany
Died March 6, 2005 (aged 98)
Ithaca, New York, United States
Residence Germany
United States
Nationality German
American
Fields Nuclear physics
Institutions
Alma mater University of Frankfurt
University of Munich
Doctoral advisor Arnold Sommerfeld
Doctoral students
Other notable students Freeman Dyson
Known for
Notable awards
Spouse
Rose Ewald (married in 1939; two children)
Signature

Hans Albrecht Bethe (German: [ˈhans ˈalbʁɛçt ˈbeːtə]; July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005) was a German and American nuclear physicist who, in addition to making important contributions to astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics, won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis.[1][2]

For most of his career, Bethe was a professor at Cornell University.[3] During World War II, he was head of the Theoretical Division at the secret Los Alamos laboratory which developed the first atomic bombs. There he played a key role in calculating the critical mass of the weapons and developing the theory behind the implosion method used in both the Trinity test and the “Fat Man” weapon dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945.

After the war, Bethe also played an important role in the development of the hydrogen bomb, though he had originally joined the project with the hope of proving it could not be made. Bethe later campaigned with Albert Einstein and the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists against nuclear testing and the nuclear arms race. He helped persuade the Kennedy and Nixon administrations to sign, respectively, the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (SALT I).

His scientific research never ceased and he was publishing papers well into his nineties, making him one of the few scientists to have published at least one major paper in his field during every decade of his career – which, in Bethe’s case, spanned nearly seventy years. Freeman Dyson, once one of his students, called him the “supreme problem-solver of the 20th century”.[4]

Early years[edit]

Bethe was born in Strasbourg, which was then part of Germany, on July 2, 1906, the only child of Anna (née Kuhn) and Albrecht Bethe, a privatdozent of physiology at the University of Strasbourg.[5] Although his mother, the daughter of a professor at the University of Strasbourg, was Jewish,[6] he was raised a Protestant like his father.[7] Despite having a religious background,[8] he was not religious in later life, and described himself as an atheist.[9]

Hans Bethe, aged 12, with his parents

His father accepted a position as professor and director of the Institute of Physiology at the University of Kiel in 1912, and the family moved into the director’s apartment at the Institute. He was initially schooled privately by a professional teacher as part of a group of eight girls and boys.[10] The family moved again in 1915 when his father became the head of the new Institute of Physiology at the University of Frankfurt am Main.[7]

Bethe attended the Goethe-Gymnasium in Frankfurt, Germany. His education was interrupted in 1916, when he contracted tuberculosis, and he was sent to Bad Kreuznach to recuperate. By 1917, he had recovered sufficiently to attend the local realschule, and the following year he was sent to the Odenwaldschule, a private, coeducational boarding school.[11] He attended the Goethe-Gymnasium again for his final three years of secondary schooling, from 1922 to 1924.[12]

Having passed his abitur, Bethe entered the University of Frankfurt in 1924. He decided to major in chemistry. The instruction in physics was poor, and while there were distinguished mathematicians in Frankfurt like Carl Ludwig Siegel and Otto Szász, Bethe disliked their approaches, which presented mathematics without reference to the other sciences.[13] Bethe found that he was a poor experimentalist who destroyed his lab coat by spilling sulfuric acid on it, but he found the advanced physics taught by the associate professor, Walter Gerlach, more interesting.[13][14] Gerlach left in 1925, and was replaced by Karl Meissner, who advised Bethe that he should go to a university with a better school of theoretical physics, specifically the University of Munich, where he could study under Arnold Sommerfeld.[15][16]

Bethe entered the University of Munich in April 1926, where Sommerfeld took him on as a student on Meissner’s recommendation.[17] Sommerfeld taught an advanced course on differential equations in physics, which Bethe enjoyed. Because he was such a renowned scholar, Sommerfeld frequently received advance copies of scientific papers, which he put up for discussion at weekly evening seminars. When Bethe arrived, Sommerfeld had just received Erwin Schrödinger‘s papers on wave mechanics.[18]

For his PhD thesis, Sommerfeld suggested that Bethe examine electron diffraction in crystals. As a starting point, Sommerfeld suggested Paul Ewald‘s 1914 paper on X-ray diffraction in crystals. Bethe later recalled that he became too ambitious, and, in pursuit of greater accuracy, his calculations became unnecessarily complicated.[19] When he met Wolfgang Pauli for the first time, Pauli told him: “After Sommerfeld’s tales about you, I had expected much better from you than your thesis.”[20] “I guess from Pauli,” Bethe later recalled, “that was a compliment.”[20]

Early work[edit]

After Bethe received his doctorate, Erwin Madelung offered him an assistantship in Frankfurt, and in September 1928 Bethe moved in with his father, who had recently divorced his mother. His father met Vera Congehl earlier that year, and married her in 1929. They had two children, Doris, born in 1933, and Klaus, born in 1934.[21] Bethe did not find the work in Frankfurt very stimulating, and in 1929 he accepted an offer from Ewald at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart. While there, he wrote what he considered to be his greatest paper,[22] Zur Theorie des Durchgangs schneller Korpuskularstrahlen durch Materie (“The Theory of the Passage of Fast Corpuscular Rays Through Matter”).[23] Starting from Max Born‘s interpretation of the Schrödinger equation, Bethe produced a simplified formula for collision problems using a Fourier transform, which is known today as the Bethe formula. He submitted this paper for his habilitation in 1930.[22][24][25]

Sommerfeld recommended Bethe for a Rockefeller Foundation Travelling Scholarship in 1929. This provided $150 a month (about $2,000 in 2016 dollars[A]) to study abroad. In 1930, Bethe chose to do postdoctoral work at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England, where he worked under the supervision of Ralph Fowler.[26] At the request of Patrick Blackett, who was working with cloud chambers, Bethe created a relativistic version of the Bethe formula.[27] Bethe was also known for his sense of humor, and with Guido Beck and Wolfgang Riezler, two other postdoctoral research fellows, created a hoax paper On the Quantum Theory of the Temperature of Absolute Zero where he calculated the fine structure constant from the absolute zero temperature in Celsius units.[28] The paper poked fun at a certain class of papers in theoretical physics of the day, which were purely speculative and based on spurious numerical arguments such as Arthur Eddington‘s attempts to explain the value of the fine structure constant from fundamental quantities in an earlier paper. They were forced to issue an apology.[29]

For the second half of his scholarship, Bethe chose to go to Enrico Fermi‘s laboratory in Rome in February 1931. He was greatly impressed by Fermi and regretted that he had not gone to Rome first.[30] Bethe developed the Bethe ansatz, a method for finding the exact solutions for the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of certain one-dimensional quantum many-body models.[31] He was influenced by Fermi’s simplicity and Sommerfeld’s rigor in approaching problems, and these qualities influenced his own later research.[32]

The Rockefeller Foundation offered an extension of Bethe’s fellowship, allowing him to return to Italy in 1932.[33] In the meantime, Bethe worked for Sommerfeld in Munich as a privatdozent. Since Bethe was fluent in English, Sommerfeld had Bethe supervise all his English-speaking postdoctoral fellows, including Lloyd P. Smith from Cornell University.[34] Bethe accepted a request from Karl Scheel to write an article for the Handbuch der Physik on the quantum mechanics of hydrogen and helium. Reviewing the article decades later, Robert Bacher and Victor Weisskopf noted that it was unusual in the depth and breadth of its treatment of the subject, yet required very little updating for the 1959 edition. Bethe was then asked by Sommerfeld to help him with the handbuch article on electrons in metals. The article covered the basis of what is now called solid state physics. Bethe took a very new field and provided a clear, coherent and complete coverage of it.[33] His work on the handbuch articles occupied most of his time in Rome, but he also co-wrote a paper with Fermi on another new field, quantum electrodynamics, describing the relativistic interactions of charged particles.[35]

In 1932, Bethe accepted an appointment as an assistant professor at the University of Tübingen, where Hans Geiger was the professor of experimental physics.[36][37] One of the first laws passed by the new National Socialist government was the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Due to his Jewish background, Bethe was dismissed from his job at the University, which was a government post. Geiger refused to help, but Sommerfeld immediately gave Bethe back his fellowship at Munich. Sommerfeld spent much of the summer term of 1933 finding places for Jewish students and colleagues.[38]

Bethe left Germany in 1933, moving to England after receiving an offer for a position as lecturer at the University of Manchester for a year through Sommerfeld’s connection to William Lawrence Bragg.[38] He moved in with his friend Rudolf Peierls and Peierls’ wife Genia. Peierls was a fellow German physicist who had also been barred from academic positions in Germany because his parents were Jewish. This meant that Bethe had someone to speak to in German, and did not have to eat English food.[39] Their relationship was professional as well as personal. Peierls aroused Bethe’s interest in nuclear physics.[40] After James Chadwick and Maurice Goldhaber discovered the photodisintegration of deuterium,[41] Chadwick challenged Bethe and Peierls to come up with a theoretical explanation of this phenomenon. This they did on the four-hour train ride from Cambridge back to Manchester.[42] Bethe would investigate further in the years ahead.[40]

In 1933, the physics department at Cornell was looking for a new theoretical physicist, and Lloyd Smith strongly recommended Bethe. This was supported by Bragg, who was visiting Cornell at the time. In August 1934, Cornell offered Bethe a position as an acting assistant professor. Bethe had already accepted a fellowship for a year to work with Nevill Mott at the University of Bristol for a semester, but Cornell agreed to let him start in the spring of 1935.[43] Before leaving for the United States, he visited the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in September 1934, where he proposed to Hilde Levi, who accepted. However, the match was opposed by Bethe’s mother, who did not want him marrying a Jewish girl, and Bethe broke off their engagement a few days before their wedding date in December.[44]

United States[edit]

Bethe arrived in the United States in February 1935, and joined the faculty at Cornell University on a salary of $3,000.[45] Bethe’s appointment was part of a deliberate effort on the part of the new head of its physics department, Roswell Clifton Gibbs, to move into nuclear physics.[46] Gibbs had hired Stanley Livingston, who had worked with Ernest Lawrence, to build a cyclotron at Cornell.[46] To complete the team, Cornell needed an experimentalist, and, on the advice of Bethe and Livingston, recruited Robert Bacher. Bethe received requests to visit Columbia University from Isidor Isaac Rabi, Princeton University from Edward Condon, University of Rochester from Lee DuBridge, Purdue University from Karl Lark-Horovitz, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from Francis Wheeler Loomis, and Harvard University from John Hasbrouck Van Vleck. Gibbs moved to prevent Bethe from being poached by having him appointed as a regular assistant professor in 1936, with an assurance that promotion to professor would soon follow.[47]

Together with Bacher and Livingston, Bethe published a series of three articles,[48][49][50] which summarized most of what was known on the subject of nuclear physics until that time, an account that became informally known as “Bethe’s Bible”, and remained the standard work on the subject for many years. In this account, he also continued where others left off, filling in gaps in the older literature.[51] Loomis offered Bethe a full professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, but Cornell matched the offer, and the salary of $6,000.[52] He wrote to his mother:

I am about the leading theoretician in America. That does not mean the best. Wigner is certainly better and Oppenheimer and Teller probably just as good. But I do more and talk more and that counts too.[53]

Illustration of the proton–proton chain reaction sequence
Overview of the CNO-I cycle. The helium nucleus is released at the top-left step.

On March 17, 1938, Bethe attended the Carnegie Institute and George Washington University‘s fourth annual Washington Conference of Theoretical Physics. There were only 34 invited attendees, but they included Gregory Breit, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, George Gamow, Donald Menzel, John von Neumann, Bengt Strömgren, Edward Teller and Merle Tuve. Bethe initially declined the invitation to attend, because the conference’s topic, stellar energy generation, did not interest him, but Teller persuaded him to come. At the conference, Strömgren detailed what was known about the temperature, density and chemical composition of the Sun, and challenged the physicists to come up with an explanation. Gamow and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker had proposed in a 1937 paper that the Sun’s energy was the result of a proton–proton chain reaction:[54][55]


p
 +
p
 → 2
1D
 +
e+
 +
ν
e

But this did not account for the observation of elements heavier than helium. By the end of the conference, Bethe, working in collaboration with Charles Critchfield, had come up with a series of subsequent nuclear reactions that explained how the Sun shines:[56]

2
1D
 +
p
 → 3
2He
 +
γ
3
2He
 + 3
2He
 → 4
2He
 + 2 
p
3
2He
 + 4
2He
 → 7
4Be
 +
γ
7
4Be
 +
e−
 → 7
3Li
 +
ν
e
7
3Li
 +
p
 → 2 4
2He

That this did not explain the processes in heavier stars was not overlooked. At the time there were doubts about whether the proton–proton cycle described the processes in the Sun, but more recent measurements of the Sun’s core temperature and luminosity show that it does.[54] When he returned to Cornell, Bethe studied the relevant nuclear reactions and reaction cross sections, leading to his discovery of the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle (CNO cycle):[57]

12
6C
 +
p
 → 13
7N
 +
γ
13
7N
 → 13
6C
 +
e+
 +
ν
e
13
6C
 +
p
 → 14
7N
 +
γ
14
7N
 +
p
 → 15
😯
 +
γ
15
😯
 → 15
7N
 +
e+
 +
ν
e
15
7N
 +
p
 → 12
6C
 + 4
2He

The two papers, one on the proton–proton cycle, co-authored with Critchfield, and the other on the carbon-oxygen-nitrogen (CNO) cycle, were sent to the Physical Review for publication.[58] After Kristallnacht, Bethe’s mother had become afraid to remain in Germany. Taking advantage of her Strasbourg origin, she was able to emigrate to the United States in June 1939 on the French quota, rather than the German one, which was full.[59] Bethe’s graduate student Robert Marshak noted that the New York Academy of Sciences was offering a $500 prize for the best unpublished paper on the topic of solar and stellar energy. So Bethe, in need of $250 to release his mother’s furniture, withdrew the CNO cycle paper and sent it in to the New York Academy of Sciences. It won the prize, and Bethe gave Marshak $50 finder’s fee and used $250 to release his mother’s furniture. The paper was subsequently published in the Physical Review in March. It was a breakthrough in the understanding of the stars, and would win Bethe the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967.[60][58] In 2002, at age 96, Bethe sent a handwritten note to John N. Bahcall congratulating him on the use of solar neutrino observations to show that the CNO cycle accounts for about 7% of the Sun’s energy; the neutrino observations had started with Raymond Davis Jr., whose experiment was based on Bahcall’s calculations and encouragement, and led to Davis’s receiving a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize.[61]

Bethe married Rose Ewald, the daughter of Paul Ewald, on September 13, 1939, in a simple civil ceremony.[62] They had two children, Henry and Monica.[63] (Henry was a contract bridge expert and former husband of Kitty Munson Cooper.)[64] He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in March 1941.[65] Writing to Sommerfeld in 1947, Bethe confided that “I am much more at home in America than I ever was in Germany. As if I was born in Germany only by mistake, and only came to my true homeland at 28.”[66]

Manhattan Project[edit]

Bethe’s Los Alamos Laboratory ID badge

When the Second World War began, Bethe wanted to contribute to the war effort,[67] but was unable to work on classified projects until he became a citizen. Following the advice of the Caltech aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán, Bethe collaborated with his friend Teller on a theory of shock waves which are generated by the passage of a projectile through a gas. Bethe considered it one of their most influential papers. He also worked on a theory of armor penetration, which was immediately classified by the Army, making it inaccessible to Bethe, who was not an American citizen at the time.[68]

After receiving security clearance in December 1941, Bethe joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he invented the Bethe-hole directional coupler, which is used in microwave waveguides such as those used in radar sets.[69] In Chicago in June 1942, and then at the University of California, Berkeley, in July, he participated in a series of meetings at the invitation of Robert Oppenheimer, which discussed the first designs for the atomic bomb. They went over the preliminary calculations by Robert Serber, Stan Frankel, and others, and discussed the possibilities of using uranium-235 and plutonium. Teller then raised the prospect of a thermonuclear device, Teller’s “Super” bomb. At one point Teller asked if the nitrogen in the atmosphere could be set alight. It fell to Bethe and Emil Konopinski to perform the calculations to prove that this could not occur.[70] “The fission bomb had to be done,” he later recalled, “because the Germans were presumably doing it.”[71]

When Oppenheimer was put in charge of forming a secret weapons design laboratory, Los Alamos, he appointed Bethe director of the T (Theoretical) Division, the laboratory’s smallest but most prestigious division. This move irked the equally qualified but more difficult to manage Teller and Felix Bloch, who had coveted the job.[72][73] A series of disagreements between Bethe and Teller between February and June 1944 over the relative priority of Super research led to Teller’s group being removed from T Division and placed directly under Oppenheimer. In September it became part of Fermi’s new F Division.[74]

Bethe’s work at Los Alamos included calculating the critical mass and efficiency of uranium-235 and the multiplication of nuclear fission in an exploding atomic bomb. Along with Richard Feynman, he developed a formula for calculating the bomb’s explosive yield.[75] After August 1944, when the laboratory was reorganized and reoriented to solve the problem of the implosion of the plutonium bomb, Bethe spent much of his time studying the hydrodynamic aspects of implosion, a job which he continued into 1944.[76] In 1945, he worked on the neutron initiator, and later on radiation propagation from an exploding atomic bomb.[77] The Trinity nuclear test validated the accuracy of T Division’s results.[78] When it was detonated in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, Bethe’s immediate concern was for its efficient operation, and not its moral implications. He is reported to have commented: “I am not a philosopher.”[79]

Hydrogen bomb[edit]

After the war, Bethe argued that a crash project for the hydrogen bomb should not be attempted, though after President Harry Truman announced the beginning of such a project, and the outbreak of the Korean War, Bethe signed up and played a key role in the weapon’s development. Though he would see the project through to its end, Bethe hoped that it would be impossible to create the hydrogen bomb.[80] He would later remark in 1968 on the apparent contradiction in his stance, having first opposed the development of the weapon and later helping to create it:

Just a few months before, the Korean war had broken out, and for the first time I saw direct confrontation with the communists. It was too disturbing. The cold war looked as if it were about to get hot. I knew then I had to reverse my earlier position. If I did not work on the bomb, somebody else would — and I had thought if I were around Los Alamos I might still be a force for disarmament. So I agreed to join in developing the H-bomb. It seemed quite logical. But sometimes I wish I were a more consistent idealist.[81]

As for his own role in the project, and its relation to the dispute over who was responsible for the design, Bethe later said that:

After the H-bomb was made, reporters started to call Teller the father of the H-bomb. For the sake of history, I think it is more precise to say that Ulam is the father, because he provided the seed, and Teller is the mother, because he remained with the child. As for me, I guess I am the midwife.[81]

In 1954, Bethe testified on behalf of J. Robert Oppenheimer during the Oppenheimer security hearing. Specifically, Bethe argued that Oppenheimer’s stances against developing the hydrogen bomb in the late 1940s had not hindered its actual development, a topic which was seen as a key motivating factor behind the hearing. Bethe contended that the developments which led to the successful Teller–Ulam design were a matter of serendipity and not a question of manpower or logical development of previously existing ideas. During the hearing, Bethe and his wife also tried hard to convince Edward Teller against testifying. However, Teller did not agree, and his testimony played a major role in the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance. While Bethe and Teller had been on very good terms during the prewar years, the conflict between them during the Manhattan Project, and especially during the Oppenheimer episode, permanently marred their relationship.[82]

Later work[edit]

Lamb shift[edit]

Hans Bethe lecturing at Dalhousie University, 1978. On the day he learnt that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, he still insisted on teaching his regular physics class.[83]

After the war ended, Bethe returned to Cornell. In June 1947, he participated in the Shelter Island Conference. Sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and held at Shelter Island, New York, the conference on the “Foundations of Quantum Mechanics” was the first major physics conference held since the war. It was a chance for American physicists to come to together, pick up where they had left off before the war, and establish the direction of post-war research.[84][85]

A major talking point at the conference was the discovery by Willis Lamb and his graduate student Robert Retherford shortly before the conference began that one of the two possible quantum states of hydrogen atoms had slightly more energy than predicted by the Paul Dirac‘s theory; this became known as the Lamb shift. Oppenheimer and Weisskopf suggested that this was a result of quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. Pre-war quantum electrodynamics (QED) gave absurd, infinite values for this; but the Lamb shift showed that it was both real and finite. Hans Kramers proposed renormalization as a solution, but no one knew how to do the calculation.[86][84]

Bethe managed to work it out on the train from New York to Schenectady. He arrived at a value of 1040 MHz, extremely close to that obtained experimentally by Lamb and Retherford. He did so by realising that it was a non-relativistic process, which greatly simplified the calculations. His paper, published in the Physical Review in August 1947 was only two pages long and contained just 12 mathematical equations, but was enormously influential. Hitherto, it had been assumed that the infinities meant that QED was fundamentally flawed, and that a new, radical theory was required. Bethe demonstrated that this was not necessary.[87]

One of Bethe’s most famous papers is one he never wrote: the 1948 Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper.[88] George Gamow added Bethe’s name (in absentia) without consulting him, knowing that Bethe would not mind, and against Ralph Alpher‘s wishes. This was apparently a reflection of Gamow’s sense of humor, wanting to have a paper title that would sound like the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. As one of the Physical Review’s reviewers, Bethe saw the manuscript and struck out the words “in absentia”.[89]

Astrophysics[edit]

Bethe believed that the atomic nucleus was like a quantum liquid drop. He investigated the nuclear matter problem by considering the work done by Keith Brueckner on perturbation theory. Working with Jeffrey Goldstone, he produced a solution for the case where there was an infinite hard-core potential. Then, working with Baird Brandow and Albert Petschek, he came up with an approximation that converted the scattering equation into an easily solved differential equation. This then led him to the Bethe-Faddeev equation, a generalisation of Ludvig Faddeev‘s approach to three-body scattering. He then used these techniques to examine the neutron stars, which have densities similar to those of nuclei.[90]

Bethe continued to do research on supernovae, neutron stars, black holes, and other problems in theoretical astrophysics into his late nineties. In doing this, he collaborated with Gerald E. Brown of Stony Brook University. In 1978, Brown proposed that they collaborate on supernovae. These were reasonably well understood by this time, but the calculations were still a problem. Using techniques honed from decades of working with nuclear physics, and some experience with calculations involving nuclear explosions, Bethe tackled the problems involved in stellar gravitational collapse, and the way in which various factors affected a supernova explosion. Once again, he was able to reduce the problem to a set of differential equations, and solve them.[91][92]

At age 85, Bethe wrote an important article about the solar neutrino problem, in which he helped establish the conversion mechanism for electron neutrinos into muon neutrinos proposed by Stanislav Mikheyev, Alexei Smirnov and Lincoln Wolfenstein to explain a vexing discrepancy between theory and experiment. Bethe argued that physics beyond the Standard Model was required to understand the solar neutrino problem, because it assumed that neutrinos have no mass, and therefore cannot metamorphosize into each other; whereas the MSW effect required this to occur. Bethe hoped that corroborating evidence would be found by the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Ontario, Canada, by his 90th birthday, but he did not get the call from SNO until June 2001, when he was nearly 95.[93][94]

In 1996, Kip Thorne approached Bethe and Brown about LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, designed to detect the gravitational waves from merging neutron stars and black holes. Since Bethe and Brown were good at calculating things that could not be seen, could they look at the mergers? The 90-year-old Bethe quickly became enthused, and soon began the required calculations. The result was a 1998 paper on the “Evolution of Binary Compact Objects Which Merge”, which Brown regarded as the best that the two produced together.[95][96]

Political stances[edit]

Bethe being interviewed by journalists

In 1968, Bethe, along with IBM physicist Richard Garwin, published an article criticising in detail the anti-ICBM defense system proposed by the Department of Defense. The two physicists described in the article that nearly any measure taken by the US would be easily thwarted with the deployment of relatively simple decoys.[97] Bethe was one of the primary voices in the scientific community behind the signing of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty prohibiting further atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.[98]

During the 1980s and 1990s, Bethe campaigned for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. After the Chernobyl disaster, Bethe was part of a committee of experts that analysed the incident. They concluded that the reactor suffered from a fundamentally faulty design and human error also had significantly contributed to the accident. “My colleagues and I established,” he explained “that the Chernobyl disaster tells us about the deficiencies of the Soviet political and administrative system rather than about problems with nuclear power.”[99] Throughout his life Bethe remained a strong advocate for electricity from nuclear energy, which he described in 1977 as “a necessity, not merely an option.”[100]

In the 1980s he and other physicists opposed the Strategic Defense Initiative missile system conceived by the Ronald Reagan administration.[101] In 1995, at the age of 88, Bethe wrote an open letter calling on all scientists to “cease and desist” from working on any aspect of nuclear weapons development and manufacture.[102] In 2004, he joined 47 other Nobel laureates in signing a letter endorsing John Kerry for President of the United States as someone who would “restore science to its appropriate place in government”.[103]

Historian Gregg Herken wrote:

When Oppenheimer died, Oppie’s long-time friend, Hans Bethe, assumed the mantle of the scientist of conscience in this country. Like Jefferson and Adams, Teller and Bethe would live on into the new century which they and their colleagues had done so much to shape.[104]

Personal life[edit]

Bethe’s hobbies included a passion for stamp-collecting.[105] He loved the outdoors, and was an enthusiastic hiker all his life, exploring the Alps and the Rockies.[106] He died in his home in Ithaca, New York on March 6, 2005 [107] of congestive heart failure.[71] He was survived by his wife Rose and two children.[108] At the time of his death, he was the John Wendell Anderson Emeritus Professor of Physics Emeritus at Cornell University.[109]

Honors and awards[edit]

Bethe received numerous honors and awards in his lifetime and afterwards. He became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1947,[110] and that year was received the National Academy of Sciences‘s Henry Draper Medal.[111] He was awarded the Max Planck Medal in 1955, the Franklin Medal in 1959, the Royal Astronomical Society‘s Eddington Medal and the United States Atomic Energy Commission‘s Enrico Fermi Award in 1961,[112] the Rumford Prize in 1963,[113] the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967,[63]the National Medal of Science in 1975,[114] Oersted Medal in 1993,[115] the Bruce Medal in 2001,[116] and the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences by the American Philosophical Society posthumously in 2005.[117]

Bethe was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1957,[1] and he gave the 1993 Bakerian Lecture at the Royal Society on the Mechanism of Supernovae.[118]

Cornell named the third of five new residential colleges, each of which is named after a distinguished former member of the Cornell faculty, Hans Bethe House after him,[119] as was the Hans Bethe Center, 322 4th St. NE, Washington, DC, home to the Council for a Livable World, where Bethe was a longtime board member,[120] and the Bethe Center for Theoretical Physics at University of Bonn in Germany.[121] He also has an asteroid, 30828 Bethe, that was discovered in 1990 named after him,[122] as was the American Physical Society‘s Hans Bethe Prize.[123]

Selected publications[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. Jump up^ Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Community Development Project. “Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800–”. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Retrieved January 2, 2017.

Citations[edit]

    1. ^ Jump up to:a b c Lee, S.; Brown, G. E. (2007). “Hans Albrecht Bethe. 2 July 1906 — 6 March 2005: Elected ForMemRS 1957”. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 53: 1. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2007.0018.
    1. Jump up^ Horgan, John (1992). “Illuminator of the Stars”. Scientific American. 267 (4): 32. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1092-32.
    1. Jump up^ Available at http://www.JamesKeckCollectedWorks.org [1] are the class notes taken by one of his students at Cornell from the graduate courses on Nuclear Physics and on Applications of Quantum Mechanics he taught in the spring of 1947.
    1. Jump up^ Wark, David (11 January 2007). “The Supreme Problem Solver”. Nature. 445 (7124): 149. Bibcode:2007Natur.445..149W. doi:10.1038/445149a.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, p. 7.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, p. 8.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Schweber 2012, pp. 32–34.
    1. Jump up^ “Interview with Hans Bethe by Charles Weiner at Cornell University”. American Institute of Physics. November 17, 1967. Retrieved 25 April 2012. When asked by Charles Weiner if there was religion in his home, Bethe replied: “No. My father was, I think, slightly religious. I was taught to pray in the evening before going to bed, and I attended the Protestant religious instruction, which was given in the schools in Germany. I was also confirmed, and the instruction which I got in this connection got religion out of my system completely. It was never very strong before, and the confirmation had the consequence that I just didn’t believe.”
    1. Jump up^ Brian 2001, p. 117.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 30–31.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 36–40.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, p. 45.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Bernstein 1980, pp. 11–12.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 70–73.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, p. 13.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, p. 93.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 118–119.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, pp. 15–16.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, pp. 20–21.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Schweber 2012, p. 142.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 156–157.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Bernstein 1980, pp. 25–27.
    1. Jump up^ Bethe, Hans (1930). “Zur Theorie des Durchgangs schneller Korpuskularstrahlen durch Materie”. Annalen der Physik (in German). 397 (3): 325–400. Bibcode:1930AnP…397..325B. doi:10.1002/andp.19303970303.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, p. 181.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2006, p. 7.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 182–183.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, p. 187.
    1. Jump up^ Corlin, Axel; Stein, J. S.; Beck, G.; Bethe, H.; Riezler, W. (1931). “Zuschriften”. Die Naturwissenschaften. 19 (2): 37. Bibcode:1931NW…..19…37C. doi:10.1007/BF01523870.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 190–192.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, p. 193.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 199–202.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, p. 195.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Schweber 2012, pp. 202–208.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, p. 32.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 211, 220–221.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, p. 33.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 223–224.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Bernstein 1980, p. 35.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 237–240.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Schweber 2012, p. 244.
    1. Jump up^ Chadwick, J.; Goldhaber, M. (1934). “A ‘Nuclear Photo-effect’: Disintegration of the Diplon by γ-Rays”. Nature. 134 (3381): 237. Bibcode:1934Natur.134..237C. doi:10.1038/134237a0.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2009, p. 9.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 262–263.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 272–275.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2006, p. 136.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Schweber 2012, pp. 296–298.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 305–307.
    1. Jump up^ Bethe, H.; Bacher, R (1936). “Nuclear Physics. A: Stationary States of Nuclei”. Reviews of Modern Physics. 8 (2): 82–229. Bibcode:1936RvMP….8…82B. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.8.82.
    1. Jump up^ Bethe, H. (1937). “Nuclear Physics. B: Nuclear Dynamics, Theoretical”. Reviews of Modern Physics. 9 (2): 69–244. Bibcode:1937RvMP….9…69B. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.9.69.
    1. Jump up^ Bethe, H.; Livingston, M. S. (1937). “Nuclear Physics. C: Nuclear Dynamics, Experimental”. Reviews of Modern Physics. 9 (2): 245–390. Bibcode:1937RvMP….9..245L. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.9.245.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2009, p. 11.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, p. 313.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, p. 370.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Bernstein 1980, pp. 45–47.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 345–347.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, p. 347.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, pp. 348–350.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Schweber 2012, pp. 351–352.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, p. 39.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, pp. 51–52.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2006, p. 149.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, pp. 54–55.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b “Hans Bethe – Biographical”. The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
    1. Jump up^ Truscott, Alan. “Bridge: Son of Nobel Prize Winner Is Famed in His Own Right”. The New York Times. February 24, 1988. Retrieved April 11, 2015.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, p. 382.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2006, p. 143.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, p. 61.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2009, pp. 13–14.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2009, p. 13.
    1. Jump up^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 42–47.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Weil, Martin (March 8, 2005). “Hans Bethe Dies; Nobel Prize Winner Worked on A-Bomb”. The Washington Post. p. B06.
    1. Jump up^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 92–83.
    1. Jump up^ Szasz 1992, pp. 19–20.
    1. Jump up^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 204, 246.
    1. Jump up^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 179–184.
    1. Jump up^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, p. 129.
    1. Jump up^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 308–310.
    1. Jump up^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 344–345.
    1. Jump up^ Peplow, Mark (March 8, 2005). “Hans Bethe – Nuclear physicist dies at 98”. Nature. doi:10.1038/news050307-7.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, pp. 92–96.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Schweber 2000, p. 166.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, pp. 97–99.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2006, p. 166.
    1. ^ Jump up to:a b Brown & Lee 2006, pp. 157–158.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2009, p. 15.
    1. Jump up^ H. Bethe (1947). “The Electromagnetic Shift of Energy Levels”. Physical Review. 72 (4): 339–341. Bibcode:1947PhRv…72..339B. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.72.339.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2006, pp. 158–159.
    1. Jump up^ Alpher, R. A.; Bethe, H.; Gamow, G. (1 April 1948). “The Origin of Chemical Elements” (PDF). Physical Review. 73 (7): 803–804. Bibcode:1948PhRv…73..803A. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.73.803. Retrieved March 10, 2011.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, p. 46.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2006, pp. 165–171.
    1. Jump up^ “Hans A. Bethe Prize winners”. American Physical Society. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2006, pp. 176–180.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2006, pp. 151–153.
    1. Jump up^ Bahcall, J.N.; Bethe, H.A. (1990). “A solution of the solar neutrino problem”. Physical Review Letters. 65 (18): 2233–2235. Bibcode:1990PhRvL..65.2233B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.65.2233.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2006, p. 182.
    1. Jump up^ Bethe, Hans A.; Brown, G. E. (1998). “Evolution of Binary Compact Objects That Merge”. Astrophysical Journal. 506 (2): 780–789. arXiv:astro-ph/9802084 Freely accessible. Bibcode:1998ApJ…506..780B. doi:10.1086/306265.
    1. Jump up^ Garwin, R. L.; Bethe, H.A. (March 1968). “Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems”. Scientific American. 218 (3): 21–31. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0368-21.
    1. Jump up^ Bernstein 1980, pp. 107–112.
    1. Jump up^ Rhodes, Richard. “Chernobyl”. PBS. Retrieved July 6, 2013.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2006, p. 266.
    1. Jump up^ Bethe 1991, pp. 113–131.
    1. Jump up^ “Hans Albrecht Bethe”. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Retrieved July 6, 2013.
    1. Jump up^ “48 Nobel Winning Scientists Endorse Kerry-June 21, 2004”. George Washington University. Retrieved July 6, 2013.
    1. Jump up^ Herken 2002, p. 334.
    1. Jump up^ Schweber 2012, p. 44.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2006, pp. 126–128.
    1. Jump up^ Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe passes away at age of 98, March 7, 2005, Wikinews
    1. Jump up^ Tucker, Anthony (March 8, 2005). “Obituary: Hans Bethe”. The Guardian.
    1. Jump up^ “Hans Bethe”. Array of Contemporary Physicists. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
    1. Jump up^ “Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B” (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved June 24, 2011.
    1. Jump up^ “Henry Draper Medal”. National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on July 22, 2012. Retrieved February 24, 2011.
    1. Jump up^ Brown & Lee 2009, p. 17.
    1. Jump up^ “Past Recipients of the Rumford Prize”. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on September 27, 2012. Retrieved February 24, 2011.
    1. Jump up^ “The President’s national Medal of Science”. National Science Foundation.
    1. Jump up^ “Oersted Medal”. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
    1. Jump up^ “Past Winners of the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal”. Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Retrieved 24 February 2011.
    1. Jump up^ “Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences Recipients”. American Philosophical Society. Retrieved November 26, 2011.
    1. Jump up^ Bethe, Hans A. (1994). “Mechanism of Supernovae”. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London. A 346: 251–258.
    1. Jump up^ “Hans Bethe House”. Cornell University. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
    1. Jump up^ “Council for a Livable World, Our Legacy”. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
    1. Jump up^ “Bethe Center for Theoretical Physics”. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
    1. Jump up^ “JPL Small-Body Database Browser on 30828 Bethe”. NASA. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  1. Jump up^ “Hans A. Bethe Prize Prize for astrophysics, nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics and related fields”. American Physical Society. Retrieved July 7, 2013.

References[edit]

  • Bernstein, Jeremy (1980). Hans Bethe, Prophet of Energy. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02903-7.
  • Bethe, Hans A. (1991). The Road from Los Alamos. New York: American Institute of Physics. ISBN 978-0-88318-707-4.
  • Brian, Denis (2001). The Voice Of Genius: Conversations With Nobel Scientists And Other Luminaries. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Pub. ISBN 978-0-7382-0447-5.
  • Brown, Gerald E.; Lee, Sabine (2009). Hans Albrecht Bethe (PDF). Biographical Memoirs. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences.
  • Brown, Gerald E.; Lee, Chang-Hwan, eds. (2006). Hans Bethe and his Physics. New Jersey: World Scientific Publishing. ISBN 9812566090.
  • Herken, Gregg (2002). Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0-8050-6588-1.
  • Hoddeson, Lillian; Henriksen, Paul W.; Meade, Roger A.; Westfall, Catherine L. (1993). Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44132-3. OCLC 26764320.
  • Schweber, Silvan S. (2000). In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-04989-2.
  • Schweber, Silvan S. (2012). Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-06587-1.
  • Szasz, Ferenc Morton (1992). British Scientists and the Manhattan Project: the Los Alamos Years. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ISBN 978-0-312-06167-8. OCLC 23901666.

External links[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Hans Bethe
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Portion of my 5-15-94 letter to Hans Bethe

On May 15, 1994 on the 10th anniversary of the passing of Francis Schaeffer I attempted to send a letter to almost every living Nobel Prize winner and I believe  Dr.Hans Bethe  was probably among that group and here is a portion of that letter below:

Could you take 3 minutes and attempt to refute the nihilistic message of the song which appears at the beginning of the enclosed tape? Back in 1980 I watched the series COSMOS and on May 5, 1994 I again sat down to watch it again. In this letter today I will tell you of 3 GENTLEMEN who contemplated the world around them. The first one is an evolutionist by the name of Carl Sagan. Mr. Sagan is what I would call a humanist full of optimism.
The second man also sought to contemplate the world around him and this man was King Solomon of Israel. In the Book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon limits himself to the question of human life lived “under the sun” between birth and death and what answers this would give (that is exactly what Mr. Sagan has done in COSMOS).It is this belief that life is only between birth and death that eventually causes Solomon to embrace nihilism. In the first few words of Ecclesiastes he observes the continual cycles of the earth and makes some very interesting conclusions”…to search for understanding about everything in the universe.”
The third man I want to mention is Francis Schaeffer who I believe was the greatest Christian philosopher of the 20th century. However, when he was a young agnostic many years ago he also had an experience similar to King Solomon’s when he contemplated the world and universe around him.
contemplated the world and the universe around him.
CARL SAGAN:”Our contemplations of the Cosmos stir us. There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.”
KING SOLOMON: Ecclesiastes 1:2-11;3:18-19 (Living Bible): 2 In my opinion, nothing is worthwhile; everything is futile. 3-7 For what does a man get for all his hard work?
Generations come and go, but it makes no difference.[b] The sun rises and sets and hurries around to rise again. The wind blows south and north, here and there, twisting back and forth, getting nowhere.* The rivers run into the sea, but the sea is never full, and the water returns again to the rivers and flows again to the sea . .everything is unutterably weary and tiresome. No matter how much we see, we are never satisfied; no matter how much we hear, we are not content. History merely repeats itself…For men and animals both breathe the same air, and both die. So mankind has no real advantage over the beasts; what an absurdity!
—-
What Solomon said ties into this following statement by evolutionist Douglas Futuyma – “Whether people are explicitly religious or not they tend to imagine that humans are in some sense the center of the universe. And what evolution does is to remove humans from the center of the universe. We are just one product of a very long historical process that has given rise to an enormous amount of organisms, and we are just one of them. So in one sense there is nothing special about us.”
———-
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER: There is no doubt in my mind that Solomon had the same experience in his life that I had as a younger man (at the age of 18 in 1930). I remember standing by the sea and the moon arose and it was copper and beauty. Then the moon did not look like a flat dish but a globe or a sphere since it was close to the horizon. One could feel the global shape of the earth too. Then it occurred to me that I could contemplate the interplay of the spheres and I was exalted because I thought I can look upon them with all their power, might, and size, but they could contempt nothing. Then came upon me a horror of great darkness because it suddenly occurred to me that although I could contemplate them and they could contemplate nothing yet they would continue to turn in ongoing cycles when I saw no more forever and I was crushed.
__________________
PAGE 1 B
Solomon died 3000 years ago and Francis Schaeffer passed away on May 15, 1984  exactly 10 years ago.
I firmly believe Solomon was correct when he said in Ecclesiastes 7:2 “It is better to spend your time at funerals than at festivals. For you are going to die, and it is a good thing to think about it while there is time.”
Suppose that you to learn that you only had just one year to live—the number of your days would be 365. What would you do with the precious few days that remained to you? With death stalking you, you would have little interest in trivial subjects and would instead be concerned with essentials. I know that is what I did when I was bed ridden in a hospital in Memphis at age 15. I was told that I may not live. My thoughts turned to spiritual things. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, P.O. Box 23426, Little Rock, AR 72221
TIME MAGAZINE May 28, 1984:
DIED, Francis Schaeffer, 72. Christian theologian and a leading scholar of evangelical Protestantism; of cancer; in Rochester, Minn. Schaeffer, a Philadelphia-born Presbyterian, and his wife in 1955 founded L’Abri (French for ‘the shelter’), a chalet in the Swiss Alps known among students and intellectuals for a reasoned rather than emotional approach to religious counseling. His 23 philosophical books include the bestseller How Should We Then Live? (1976).” (January 30, 1912-May 15, 1985)

Adrian Rogers is pictured below and Francis Schaeffer above.

Watching the film HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? in 1979 impacted my life greatly

Francis Schaeffer in the film WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?

Francis and Edith Schaeffer

 

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Featured artist is Tommy Hartung

Tommy Hartung’s Undergound Movies | “New York Close Up” | Art21

Tommy Hartung

Tommy Hartung was born in 1979 in Akron, Ohio, and lives and works in New York. Growing up on a farm in upstate New York, Hartung spent countless days alone in the woods, building forts and living in a world of his imagination—which he considers the beginning of his artistic practice.

Continuing to build fantastical worlds in his adult work, Hartung combines stop-motion animation and self-produced videos with found footage and cheap consumer technologies; all of his production sets are built in his studio using found objects. Employing sculpture and video, Hartung’s work addresses wide-ranging topics—such as the Bible and the history of colonialism—with a surrealist DIY aesthetic, tackling critical issues through streams of consciousness storytelling.

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RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Part 150 My May 15, 1994 letter to Stephen Jay Gould (Part D) Sean Carroll “Non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) might be the worst idea Stephen Jay Gould ever had” (It appears that atheists and theists do agree with Carroll on NOMA)

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This is the fourth part of the letter to Stephen Jay Gould, but the third part was posted last week on my blog.

The 5 Conclusions of Humanism according to King Solomon of Israel in the Book of Ecclesiastes!!!!!

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The Humanistic world view tells us there is no afterlife and all we have is this life “under the sun.”

Image result for francis schaeffer

SECTION 3 A Study in the Book of Ecclesiastes done by Francis Schaeffer (Christian Philosopher). Solomon limits himself to “under the sun” – In other words the meaning of life on the basis of human life standing alone between birth and death. It is indeed the book of modern man. Solomon is the universal man with unlimited resources who says let us see where I go. Ravi Zacharias –

Image result for ravi zacharias

“The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term ‘under the sun.’ What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system and you are left with only this world of time plus chance plus us (Matter)”

1st Conclusion: Nothing in life truly satisfies and that includes wisdom, great works and pleasure. A) Will wisdom satisfy someone under the sun? We know it is good in its proper place. Take a look at this quote by Mike Malone: “Knowing God is the deepest longing of the human heart. It is knowledge so high and lofty that it transcends language, which can never exhaust the glorious reality of God. The wise man would take you by the hand and lead you to the fountain, where you may drink to your heart’s content, never tasting enough, yet never failing to be satisfied.” But what did Solomon find out about wisdom “under the sun”? Ecclesiastes 1:16-18 (Living Bible): I said to myself, ‘Look, I am better educated than any of the kings before me in Jerusalem. I have greater wisdom and knowledge.’So I worked hard to be wise instead of foolish[c]—but now I realize that even this was like chasing the wind. For the more my wisdom, the more my grief; to increase knowledge only increases distress.”

B) Do great works of men bring satisfaction?Ecclesiastes 2:4-6, 18-20: Then I tried to find fulfillment by inaugurating a great public works program: homes, vineyards, gardens, parks, and orchards for myself, and reservoirs to hold the water to irrigate my plantations.And I am disgusted about this—that I must leave the fruits of all my hard work to others. 19 And who can tell whether my son will be a wise man or a fool? And yet all I have will be given to him—how discouraging! So I turned in despair from hard work as the answer to my search for satisfaction.C) Does pleasure give lasting satisfaction?

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KJV and Living Bible Ecclesiastes 2:1-3, 8, 10, 11: I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity.2 I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it? 3 I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom; and to lay hold on folly,And then there were my many beautiful concubines.10 Anything I wanted I took and did not restrain myself from any joy…11 But as I looked at everything I had tried, it was all so useless, a chasing of the wind, and there was nothing really worthwhile anywhere…
2nd Conclusion: Power reigns in this life and the scales are not balanced!!!!!Ecclesiastes 4:1 (King James Version): So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.
Ecclesiastes 7:15 (King James Version) All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness.If you are a humanist you must admit that men like Hitler will not be punished in the afterlife because you deny there is an afterlife? Right?

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3rd Conclusion – Death is the great equalizer. Just as the beasts will not be remembered so ultimately brilliant men will not be remembered. Ecclesiastes 3:20 “All go unto one place; All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” Here Solomon comes to the same point that Kerry Livgren came to in January of 1978 when he wrote the hit song DUST IN THE WIND. Can you refute the nihilistic claims of this song within the humanistic world view? Solomon couldn’t but maybe you can.

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4th Conclusion – Chance and time plus matter (us) has determined the past and it will determine the future.By the way, what are the ingredients that make evolution work? George Wald – “Time is the Hero.”

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 Jacques Monod – “Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the root of the stupendous edifice of evolution.”

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 I can not think of a better illustration of this in action than the movie ON THE BEACH by Nevil Shute. On May 4, 1994 I watched the movie for the first time and again I thought of the humanist who believes that history is not heading somewhere with a purpose but is guided by pure chance, absolutely free but blind. I thought of the passage Ecclesiastes 9:10-12 Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.11 I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.12 For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

5th Conclusion – Life is just a series ofcontinual and unending cycles and man is stuck in the middle of the cycle. Youth, old age, Death.
Does Solomon at this point embrace nihilism? Yes!!! He exclaims that the hates life (Ecclesiastes 2:17), he longs for death (4:2-3) Yet he stills has a fear of death (2:14-16). How do you want your life to go the next million years? The humanist world view has no answer (see H. J. Blackham earlier quote). Ecclesiastes2:15-16: 15 Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity.16 For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.(Also refer to the lyrics of the song DUST IN THE WIND by the group KANSAS).Can you refute any of the conclusions of Solomon? Will you ridicule this material. In 1988 in the September-October of the HUMANIST MAGAZINE a 3 page article was devoted to cutting Schaeffer down to size, but even in that article which was called FRANCIS SCHAEFFER: A LOOK AT ONE OF THE FOREMOST FIGURES IN THE CRUSADE AGAINST HUMANISM the writer gave Schaeffer his due by saying “Schaeffer’s books are not the typical hodge-podge of newspaper headlines and obscure  Biblical prophecies, as in Hal Lindsey’s books. Schaeffer demonstrates a familiarity with the major theologians and some understanding of philosophy, art and literature. His books are clearly in a different league from the typical evangelical Christian reading matter…:” Why did I write about the meaning of life in this letter addressed to you?????? The answer is very simple: You have a spiritual need that must be met, and only Christ can meet it!!!! In the introduction of the book A SHATTERED VISAGE, Ravi Zacharias said this “The most telling aspect of the afternoon I spoke to a group of scientists at the Bell Lab in Holmdel, NJ was the nature of the questions that were raised following the address. None had to do with the technical or scientific expertise that the audience represented. They all had to do with the heart searching questions of men and women in pursuit of meaning of life. I have found these same questions asked time and time again in a variety of settings. After the intellectual that comes to the fore.” Ecclesiastes 3:11b “God has planted eternity in the hearts of men.” 

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Charles Spurgeon “The soul is insatiable till it finds the savoir.”I want to finish with a prediction: There is coming a time in your life that the most important thing to you will be to get your prayer answered by God. When I was ridden in a hospital many years ago I was told that I may not live. My thoughts turned to spiritual things. Does it take a tragic situation for you to wake up? I will pray that you see the humanistic worldview for what it is, and that you would honestly pursue the Bible. Thank you for your time

Finally I have enclosed a copy of my letter published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Newspaper on April 22, 1994:

A BANKRUPT WORLDVIEW

Brian Bolton, the ordained humanist minister, asserted that humanism deserves out respect in his March 27 article. Does it really?

Humanism is the belief that we are limited to human life standing alone between birth and death. There is no belief in God and the afterlife. Three thousand years ago, Solomon took a look at this humanistic world view in the Book of Ecclesiastes when he limited himself to examining life “under the sun.”

Humanists will tell you that the world evolved, and just as time and chance have determined the human race’s past, it will also determine the human race’s future. Ecclesiastes says, “I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Solomon saw that the humanistic world view was bankrupt because without God in the picture man’s future was left up to time and chance.

When I play with my two children, they constantly are saying, “Daddy, watch me!” Their hearts long for my personal attention just as my heart longs for a daily personal relationship with a God who cares about me.

Why respect a religion like humanism that hands your future over to time and chance instead of a God who created you for a purpose? Humanism tells you that you are just a face in the crowd, and 1 million years from now it will be as though you never existed. Is Bolton a naive humanist who has avoided this conclusion?

Everette Hatcher III



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Daniel Dennett and Stephen Jay Gould pictured together above

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Paul Kurtz who I had the pleasure of corresponding with discusses the life of Stephen Jay Gould below.

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Stephen Jay Gould, 1942-2002

By Paul Kurtz
Chairman, CSICOP

Skeptical inquirers deeply regret the passing of Stephen Jay Gould. He played a unique role in the public square, for he was an eloquent exponent of the scientific outlook. His prolific writings and brilliant lectures at Harvard and universities far and wide on evolutionary paleontology and biology and his forthright criticisms of creationism cast him as a powerful defender of science. At a time when pseudoscientific and fringe claims continue to grow, there are all too few scientists willing to enter into the fray.

Gould’s death leaves a void; and it dramatizes anew how important it is to have popularizers of science. This role was played by Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, CSICOP Fellows of the past. We need to encourage today new and daring defenders of science, gadflies in the name of critical inquiry; interpreters able to extend the public’s understanding of science and its methods. All too few scientists and scholars today are willing to venture beyond their specialties in order to communicate with a wider audience.

Gould offered his own often controversial theories on how evolution occurred—such as his punctuated equilibrium hypothesis—and he suffered criticisms as a result. A veteran polemicist, he stood his ground in many debates with scientific colleagues. Throughout, he demonstrated that science grows by constant questioning, and peer review.

Stephen Jay Gould was a Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and a recipient of its highest “In Praise of Reason” award. He was a frequent speaker at our conferences. He will be sorely missed.

The Darwin Day Program 

The Big Bad Wolf, Theism and the Foundations of Intelligent Design – Page 2

No More NOMA

“I do have one thing in common with the creationists. Like me… they will have no truck with NOMA and its separate magisteria.” – Richard Dawkins 18

Dawkins asserts in the Preface of The God Delusion that: “‘the God Hypothesis’ is a scientific hypothesis about the universe, which should be analysed as sceptically as any other” 19 (including, presumably, Darwinian macro-evolution). He later affirms, in broader terms, that:

The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice – or not yet – a decided one… The methods we should use to settle the matter, in the unlikely event that relevant evidence ever became available, would be purely and entirely scientific methods. 20

Dawkins and intelligent design theorists are in full agreement upon this latter point.

Dawkins defines science as simply: “the honest and systematic endeavour to find out the truth about the real world.” 21 As design theorist Jay W. Richards states: “Methodological naturalism… contradicts the true spirit of science, which is to seek the truth about the natural world, no holds barred.” 22 Dawkins appears to use “science” as a term of endearment extending to any critical investigation of the “real world” to which empirical data has relevance, although as a metaphysical naturalist he assumes that the “real world” is describable in exclusively naturalistic terms. While ID theorists are careful not to allow a priori assumptions to pre-determine the conclusions science reaches, and have followed the lead of David Hume in distinguishing between conclusions that scientific arguments can and cannot support without philosophical extension, Dawkins is not so careful. Bearing these qualifications in mind, the design theorist (especially the theistic design theorist) can welcome Dawkins’ affirmation that: “the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other… God’s existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe, discoverable in principle if not in practice.” 23

In claiming that ID is a scientific theory Dawkins flatly contradicts many critics – including physicist Lawrence Krauss, microbiologist Carl Woese and philosopher Robert Pennock – who argue that intelligent design theory is not a scientific hypothesis. In his Kitmiller v. Doveropinion, Judge John E. Jones III wrote of “the inescapable conclusion that ID is an interesting theological argument, but that it is not science.” 24 Dawkins disagrees. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): “Intelligent design… falls outside the realm of science.” 25 Dawkins disagrees. Austin Cline argues that: “Intelligent Design isn’t a part of science.” 26 Dawkins disagrees.

A basic assumption of ID is that an intelligent agent is capable of acting in such a way as to impress empirically detectable evidence of design upon physical reality (this assumption underlies the day-to-day work of many scientists, including archaeologists, cryptographers, forensic scientists, paranormal researchers, conductors of double-blind prayer studies and those engaged in the search for extra-terrestrial life). A world in which God both exists and acts in such an empirically detectable way is therefore empirically distinguishable from a world in which he does not. Dawkins has no truck with: “the erroneous notion that the existence or non-existence of God is an untouchable question, forever beyond the reach of science… Either he exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say something pretty strong about the probability.”27

Dawkins rejects Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “non-overlapping magesteria” (or NOMA) that:

The net, or magisterium of science covers the empirical realm… The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap… To cite the old clichés, science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven. 28

Dawkins considers this an act of “bending over backwards to positively supine lengths” 29 to avoid any possibility of conflict (or dialogue) between science and religion. In order to stand any chance of mounting an attack on religion with the sword of science, Dawkins first has to cut through the shield of NOMA. The dialogue negating suggestion that science is about “how” while religion is about “why” actually contains a grain of truth (religion does deal with questions of meaning with which science does not and cannot deal), but is too simplistic. As Dawkins says of NOMA: “This sounds terrific – right up until you give it a moment’s thought.” 30 He dramatizes the point by imagining:

that forensic archaeologists unearthed DNA evidence to show that Jesus really did lack a biological father. Can you imagine religious apologists shrugging their shoulders and saying anything remotely like the following? “Who cares? Scientific evidence is completely irrelevant to theological questions. Wrong magisterium! We”re concerned only with ultimate questions and with moral values. Neither DNA nor any other scientific evidence could ever have any bearing on the matter, one way or the other.” The very idea is a joke. 31

Real world religions make real world claims that therefore intersect with the fields of inquiry handled by science. 32 As philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer argues:

it’s inherent in the Christian faith to make claims about the real world. According to the Bible, God has revealed himself in time and space, and so Christianity – for good or ill – is going to intersect some of the factual claims of history and science. There’s either going to be conflict or agreement. To make NOMA work, its advocates have to water down science or faith, or both. Certainly Gould did – he said religion was just a matter of ethical teaching, comfort, or metaphysical beliefs about meaning. But Christianity certainly claims to be more than that. 33   

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Lawrence Krauss pictured above and Sean Carroll below

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Lawrence Krauss pictured above with Richard Dawkins and below with Noam Chomsky

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Chomsky, Krauss, and me

Posted on March 15, 2006 by Sean Carroll

Science & Theology News was looking for some famous and charismatic scientists to respond to an interview with Noam Chomsky on various issues touching on science and religion. They were able to get Lawrence Krauss to agree, but then they ran out of ideas and ended up asking me. So you have some of the deepest questions we face about meaning and the universe, addressed by someone recently voted the world’s top intellectual, with responses by the author of The Physics of Star Trek and an assistant professor with a blog. What a great world!

You will notice that most of my answering comments are short and sweet. You can take this as evidence that I know how to pack a tremendous rhetorical punch into just a handful of words, or that I was in a hurry as the deadline was approaching. But sometimes I do go on a bit when a nerve is struck, such as this discussion on whether science and religion ever overlap in their respective spheres of interest.

ON STEVEN JAY GOULD AND “NON-OVERLAPPING MAGISTERIA”

CHOMSKY: Steve Gould [was] a friend. But I don’t quite agree with him [that science-and-religion are “Non-Overlapping Magisteria”]. Science and religion are just incommensurable. I mean, religion tells you, ‘Here’s what you ought to believe.’ Judaism’s a little different, because it’s not really a religion of belief, it’s a religion of practice. If I’d asked my grandfather, who was an ultra-orthodox Jew from Eastern Europe. ‘Do you believe in God?’ he would have looked at me with a blank stare, wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. And what you do is you carry out the practices. Of course, you say ‘I believe in this and that,’ but that’s not the core of the religion. The core of the religion is just the practices you carry out. And yes, there is a system of belief behind it somewhere, but it’s not intended to be a picture of the world. It’s just a framework in which you carry out practices that are supposed to be appropriate.

KRAUSS: Science and religion are incommensurate, and religion is largely about practice rather than explanation. But religion is different than theology, and as the Catholic Church has learned over the years, any sensible theology must be in accord with the results of science.

CARROLL: Non-overlapping magisteria might be the worst idea Stephen Jay Gould ever had. It’s certainly a surprising claim at first glance: religion has many different aspects to it, but one of them is indisputably a set of statements about how the universe works at a deep level, typically featuring the existence of a powerful supernatural Creator. “How the universe works” is something squarely in the domain of science. There is, therefore, quite a bit of overlap: science is quite capable of making judgments about whether our world follows a rigid set of laws or is occasionally influenced by supernatural forces. Gould’s idea only makes sense because what he really means by “religion” is “moral philosophy.” While that’s an important aspect of religion, it’s not the only one; I would argue that the warrant for religion’s ethical claims are based on its view of the universe, without which we wouldn’t recognize it as religion.

I was going to say that these guys might be famous, but do they have their own blogs? No! Except, of course, Lawrence was our very first guest-blogger, so that counts for something. And, I remembered, Noam Chomsky actually does have a blog. A funny one that consists of answers to occasional interview questions asked by someone from Z magazine, but I suppose it counts. Man, everybody has a blog these days.

On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

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(Harry Kroto pictured below)

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Stephen Jay Gould is the scholar I will look at today. In  the third video below in the 147th clip in this series are his words “If I were  a bacteria I would be quite satisfied that I was dominating the planet…I don’t know why consciousness should be seen as any state of higher being especially if you use the evolutionist primary criterion of success measured by duration” and I have responded directly to this quote in any earlier post.

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)

A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)

Related posts:

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 51 THE BEATLES (Part C, List of those on cover of Stg.Pepper’s ) (Feature on artist Raqib Shaw )

March 19, 2015 – 12:21 am

  The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA Uploaded on Nov 29, 2010 The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA. The Beatles:   I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Tagged George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul MacCartney, Raqib Shaw, Ringo Starr | Edit | Comments (0)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 50 THE BEATLES (Part B, The Psychedelic Music of the Beatles) (Feature on artist Peter Blake )

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Atheists Confronted, Francis Schaeffer | Comments (0)

Music Monday My letter to Rod Stewart

January 27, 2019 – 2:30 am

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Ronnie Lane – Ooh la la (live @ BBC 1974)

ROD STEWART & THE FACES – ANGEL

Rod Stewart -The Faces – Stay With Me – Live 1972

I have read over 40 autobiographies by ROCKERS and it seems to me that almost every one of those books can be reduced to 4 points. Once fame hit me then I became hooked on drugs. Next I became an alcoholic (or may have been hooked on both at same time). Thirdly, I chased the skirts and thought happiness would be found through more sex with more women. Finally, in my old age I have found being faithful to my wife and getting over addictions has led to happiness like I never knew before. (Almost every autobiography I have read from rockers has these points in it although Steven Tyler is still chasing the skirts!!).

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Francis August Schaeffer (January 30, 1912 – May 15, 1984[1])

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building of king solomon’s temple

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The Judgment of Solomon, 1617 by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640)

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Steel mezzotint engraving by John Sartain
of the 1863 painting by Christian Schussele

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Adrian Pierce Rogers (September 12, 1931 – November 15, 2005)

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Larry Joe Speaks  (August 20, 1947 to April 7, 2017)

On April 16, 2017 is the day we celebrate Easter which is about Christ’s resurrection from the dead!!!

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April 16, 2017

Rod Stewart

Dear Rod,

I read your book  ROD:THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ROD STEWART  and in that book you said your father’s recipe for contentment in life was a JOB, a sport and a hobby. This letter is about the issue of labor and what a job can mean to a man. Today I want to start off talking about your life’s work and your accomplishments.

Wikipedia notes:

Sir Roderick David Stewart, CBE (born 10 January 1945)[1] is a British rock singer and songwriter. Born and raised in London, he is of Scottish and English ancestry. Stewart is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold over 100 million records worldwide.[2] He has had six consecutive number one albums in the UK and his tally of 62 UK hit singles includes 31 that reached the top ten, six of which gained the #1 position.[3] Stewart has had 16 top ten singles in the US, with four reaching #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. He was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to music and charity.[4]

You have been tremendously blessed in your talents and your life work has brought you much in financial rewards and notoriety in your field. With that in mind in today’s letter I want to compare you to King Solomon and look at what both you and Solomon have accomplished in the area of LABOR (or his life’s work).

As  you know in these series of letters I am looking at  the 6 L words that  Solomon pursued in the Book  of Ecclesiastes and today I am looking at LABOR (Solomon’s life work). Now that we have looked at some of your accomplishments, let us take a look at SOLOMON. I consider you a very successful man in your field and in that sense you are similar to SOLOMON, and by comparing you two I am in no way trying to belittle your accomplishments. However, I do want to point out some of SOLOMON’s own words of analysis concerning his legacy from Ecclesiastes (which is Richard Dawkins favorite book in the Bible).

SOLOMON was remembered for his WISDOM and his success with the LADIES, but he was also remembered for his LABOR (his life work). For Solomon that basically came down to the labor he commissioned in his building campaigns through out his kingdom plus the effort he put forth building his own palace and the temple in Jerusalem.

Below are the comments of Francis Schaeffer on SOLOMON and the Book of Ecclesiastes:

Leonardo da Vinci and Solomon both were universal men searching for the meaning in life. Solomon was searching for a meaning in the midst of the details of life. His struggle was to find the MEANING OF LIFE. Not just plans in life. Anybody can find plans in life. A child can fill up his time with plans of building tomorrow’s sand castle when today’s has been washed away. There is a difference between finding plans in life and purpose in life. Humanism since the Renaissance and onward has never found it. Modern man has not found it and it has always got worse and darker in a very real way.

We have here the declaration of Solomon’s universality:

1 Kings 4:30-34

English Standard Version (ESV)

30 so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt. 31 For he was wiser than all other men…and his fame was in all the surrounding nations. 32 He also spoke 3,000 proverbs, and his songs were 1,005. 33 He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish. 34 And people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the kings of the earth, who had heard of his wisdom.

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Here is the universal man and his genius. Solomon is the universal man with a empire at his disposal. Solomon had it all.

Ecclesiastes 1:3

English Standard Version (ESV)

3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?

Solomon took a look at the meaning of life on the basis of human life standing alone between birth and death “under the sun.”
After wisdom Solomon comes to the great WORKS of men. Ecclesiastes 1:14, “I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is [p]vanity and striving after wind.” Solomon is the man with an empire at this disposal that speaks. This is the man who has the copper refineries in Ezion-geber. This is the man who made the stables across his empire. This is the man who built the temple in Jerusalem. This is the man who stands on the world trade routes. He is not a provincial. He knew what was happening on the Phonetician coast and he knew what was happening in Egypt. There is no doubt he already knew something of building. This is Solomon and he pursues the greatness of his own construction and his conclusion is VANITY AND VEXATION OF SPIRIT.

Ecclesiastes 2:18-20

18 Thus I hated all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun, for I must leave it to the man who will come after me. 19 And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have control over all the fruit of my labor for which I have labored by acting wisely under the sun. This too is vanity. 20 Therefore I completely despaired of all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun.

He looked at the works of his hands, great and multiplied by his wealth and his position and he shrugged his shoulders.

Ecclesiastes 2:22-23

22 For what does a man get in all his labor and in his striving with which he labors under the sun? 23 Because all his days his task is painful and grievous; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is vanity.

Man can not rest and yet he is never done and yet the things which he builds will out live him. If one wants an ironical three phrases these are they. There is a Dutch saying, “The tailor makes many suits but one day he will make a suit that will outlast the tailor.”

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Many have tried sexual exploits just like Solomon did, and many have thrown their efforts into business too. Sadly Solomon also found the pursuit of great works in his LABOR just as empty. In Ecclesiastes 2:11 he asserted, “THEN I CONSIDERED ALL THAT MY HANDS HAD DONE AND THE TOLL I HAD EXPENDED IN DOING IT, AND BEHOLD, ALL WAS VANITY AND A STRIVING AFTER WIND, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”

Many people through history have reminded me of Solomon because they are looking for lasting meaning in their life and they are looking in the same 6 areas that King Solomon did in what I call the 6 big L words. He looked into learning (1:16-18), laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and LABOR (2:4-6, 18-20).

Then in last few words in the Book of Ecclesiastes he looks above the sun and brings God back into the picture: “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: Fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.”

I started writing this series of 7 letters to you concerning Solomon and the meaning of life after the death of my good friend LARRY SPEAKS. During the last 20 years of his life Larry would hand out CD’s of Adrian Rogers’ message WHO IS JESUS? and I wanted to share one of the points that is made in that sermon that particularly applies today since it is EASTER:

Simon Peter gave THREE LINES OF EVIDENCE, three witnesses; and we use these same three witnesses when we share Jesus today. Let’s look at Acts chapter 10:

39 And we are witnesses of all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, 40 but God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, 41 not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. 42 And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead. 43 To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

I THE PERSONAL WITNESS OF THE SAINTS (Acts 10:39)

The apostles were a diverse group, yet they were united in their witness. Among them:
John was young, observant and sensitive.
Peter was a rough, hard-working fisherman.
Simon the Zealot was a political activist.
Nathaniel and Thomas both tended to be skeptical and inquiring.
Matthew was a hardened, political businessman.
Andrew was gentle and compassionate.
Philip was a calculating thinker.
James was a straight shooter.
They were eyewitnesses of the virtuous life of Jesus.
Acts 10:34 & 38
Matthew 17:1-5
They were eyewitnesses of His vicarious death.
Acts 10:39
Deuteronomy 21:23
They were eyewitnesses of His victorious resurrection.
Acts 10:40-41
II THE PROPHETIC WITNESS OF THE SCRIPTURES (Acts 10:43) (We looked at this in a previous letter.)

III THE PERSUASIVE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT (Acts 10:44)

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Today is Easter and I listened to one one my favorite Easter Songs “O Praise the Name.” Let me encourage you to look it up on You Tube.  Christ died NOT for his own sins because he was sinless, but for ours (Romans 10:9) so we could receive the free gift of grace (Ephesians 2:8). Through your LABOR you can NOT earn salvation.

Romans 10:8-13 English Standard Version (ESV)

8 But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); 9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. 11 For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” 12 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. 13 For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, Little Rock, AR 72221

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 251  Rolling Stones  “Rocks Off” (Featured artist is Michael Ray Charles )

January 24, 2019 – 1:49 am

In the 1960’s there was a generation that took drugs because philosophically they thought it was leading to an answer, but then when the violence entered in at the Rolling Stones Altamont concert in 1970 when a person was stabbed to death, the age of innocence ended. What is left at this point? More drugs were used but only to kill the pain. Where do people turn for answers at this point? In the song ROCKS OFF it appears that the Rolling Stones moved to their hopes to the night when they are dreaming. It seems that excessive sex does nothing to satisfy a person (see the song I CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION too).

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Rolling Stones – Rocks Off (1972)

  • Oh yeah
  • I hear you talking when I’m on the street
  • Your mouth don’t move but I can hear you speak
  • What’s the matter with the boy?
  • He don’t come around no more
  • Is he checking out for sure?
  • Is he gonna close the door on me?
  • I’m always hearing voices on the street
  • I want to shout, but I can’t hardly speak
  • I was making love last night
  • To a dancer friend of mine
  • I can’t seem to stay in step
  • ‘Cause she come ev’ry time that she pirouettes over me
  • And I only get my rocks off while I’m dreaming
  • I only get my rocks off while I’m sleeping
  • I’m zipping through the days at lightning speed
  • Plug in, flush out and fire the f@$kin’ feed
  • Heading for the overload
  • Splattered on the dirty road
  • Kick me like you’ve kicked before
  • I can’t even feel the pain no more
  • But I only get my rocks off while I’m dreaming
  • (only get them off)
  • I only get my rocks off while I’m sleeping
  • (only get them off)
  • I feel so hypnotized, can’t describe the scene
  • Its all mesmerized all that inside me
  • The sunshine bores the daylights out of me
  • Chasing shadows moonlight mystery
  • Headed for the overload
  • Splattered on the dirty road
  • Kick me like you’ve kicked before
  • I can’t even feel the pain no more
  • But I only get my rocks off while I’m dreaming
  • (only get them off, get them off)
  • I only get my rocks off while I’m sleeping
  • (only get them off, get them off)
General Comment
To me this song is at once celebratory and miserable & jaded. 

The singer of the song has led a life of such excess that things that were once great fun now just don't do anything for him. In fact he's so jaded that even things that used to cause him pain don't make him feel anything anymore.

His only escape, his only way of getting any kind of 'satisfaction' is to escape into his dreams, into sleep. 

God, what a  horrible thing to have happen to you. And yet, somehow the song, the music, seems so celebratory, maybe ironically so. I dunno, it's a really great song though, pretty mature thinking.
flyingroboton June 17, 2004   Link
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Francis A. Schaeffer  wrote something about the ROLLING STONES:
At about the same time as the Berkeley Free Speech Move- 
ment came a heavy participation in drugs. The beats had not 
been deeply into drugs the way the hippies were. But soon 
after 1964 the drug scene became the hallmark of young 
people.
The philosophic basis for the drug scene came from Aldous 
Huxley's concept that, since, for the rationalist, reason is not 
taking us anywhere, we should look for a final experience, one 
that can be produced "on call," one that we do not need to 
wait for. The drug scene, in other words, was at first an ideol- 
ogy, an ideology that had very practical consequences. Some of 
us at L'Abri have cried over the young people who have blown 
their minds. But many of them thought, like Alan Watts, Gary 
Snyder, Alan Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, that if you could 
simply turn everyone on, there would be an answer to man's 
longings. It wasn't just the far-out freaks who suggested that 
you could put drugs in the drinking water and turn on a whole 
city so that the "pigs" and the kids would all have flowers in 
their hair. In those days it really was an optimistic ideological 
concept. 

So two things have to be said here. FIRST, the young people's 
analysis of culture was right, and, SECOND, they really thought 
they had an answer to the problem. Up through Woodstock 
(1969) the YOUNG PEOPLE WERE OPTIMISTIC CONCERNING DRUGS-- 
BEING THE IDEOLOGICAL ANSWER. The desire for community and 
togetherness that was the impetus for Woodstock was not wrong, of course. God has made us in his own image, and he 
means for us to be in a strong horizontal relationship with each 
other. While Christianity appeals and applies to the individual, 
it is not individualistic. God means for us to have community. 
There are really two orthodoxies: an orthodoxy of doctrine 
and an orthodoxy of community, and both go together. So the 
longing for community in Woodstock was right. But the path 
was wrong. 

AFTER WOODSTOCK TWO EVENTS "ENDED THE AGE OF INNOCENCE," 
to use the expression of Rolling Stone magazine. The FIRST 
occurred at Altamont, California, where the ROLLING STONES put 
on a festival and hired the Hell's Angels (for several barrels of 
beer) to police the grounds. Instead, the Hell's Angels killed 
people without any cause, and it was a bad scene indeed. But 
people thought maybe this was a fluke, maybe it was just 
California! IT TOOK A SECOND EVENT TO BE CONVINCING. 

On the Isle of Wight, 450,000 people assembled, and it was 
totally ugly. A number of people from L'Abri were there, and I 
know a man closely associated with the rock world who knows 
the organizer of this festival. Everyone agrees that the situation 
was just plain hideous. 

THUS, AFTER THESE TWO ROCK FESTIVALS THE PICTURE CHANGED. IT IS  
NOT THAT KIDS HAVE STOPPED TAKING DRUGS, FOR MORE ARE TAKING  
DRUGS ALL THE TIME. And what the eventual outcome will be is 
certainly unpredictable. I know that in many places, California 
for example, drugs are down through the high schools and on 
into the heads of ten- and eleven-year-olds. But drugs are not 
considered a philosophic expression anymore; among the very 
young they are just a peer group thing. It's like permissive 
sexuality. You have to sleep with a certain number of boys or 
you're not in; you have to take a certain kind of drug or you're 
not in. THE OPTIMISTIC IDEOLOGY HAS DIED.

XXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXX

_

Featured artist is Michael Ray Charles

Michael Ray Charles

Michael Ray Charles was born in 1967 in Lafayette, Louisiana, and graduated from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1985. In college, he studied advertising design and illustration, eventually moving to painting, his preferred medium. Charles also received an MFA degree from the University of Houston in 1993. His graphically styled paintings investigate racial stereotypes drawn from a history of American advertising, product packaging, billboards, radio jingles, and television commercials.

Charles draws comparisons between Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel images of an earlier era and contemporary mass-media portrayals of black youths, celebrities, and athletes—images he sees as a constant in the American subconscious. “Stereotypes have evolved,” he notes. “I’m trying to deal with present and past stereotypes in the context of today’s society.” Caricatures of African-American experience, such as Aunt Jemima, are represented in Charles’s work as ordinary depictions of blackness, yet are stripped of the benign aura that lends them an often-unquestioned appearance of truth. Charles says, “Aunt Jemima is just an image, but it almost automatically becomes a real person for many people, in their minds. But there’s a difference between these images and real humans.” In each of his paintings, notions of beauty, ugliness, nostalgia, and violence emerge and converge, reminding us that we cannot divorce ourselves from a past that has led us to where we are, who we have become, and how we are portrayed. Charles lives in Texas and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.

_


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RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Part 150 My May 15, 1994 letter to Stephen Jay Gould (Part C) Includes material on “Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act” (Act 590) and the resulting trial on Creationism in Arkansas in 1981

January 22, 2019 – 1:20 am

_

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This is the third portion of my 5-15-94 letter to Stephen Jay Gould and last week I posted the second portion and next week I will post the fourth portion.

SECTION #2 If there is no Afterlife, how can there be any lasting meaning to our lives? Should people be asking themselves these types of Questions???

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Albert Camus:The fundamental question about life is meaning, anything else is secondary and until that question of meaning is dealt with I really cannot for what the answers are for the other queries.George H. Smith – Religions are successful, not because they provide the correct answers, but because they ask important questions—Questions that concern every human being. What is the nature of the universe? Is there a purpose, or plan, to human existence? …PESSIMISM FROM AGNOSTICS?Nathaniel Brandon: But twentieth-century philosophy has almost totally backed off from the responsibility of offering such a vision or addressing itself to the kind of questions human beings struggle with in the course of their existence. Twentieth-century philosophy typically scorns system building. The problems to which it addresses itself grow smaller and smaller and more and more remote from human experience. At their philosophical conferences and conventions, philosophers explicitly acknowledge that they have nothing of practical value to offer anyone. This is not my accusation; they announce it themselves.During the same period of history, the twentieth century, orthodox religion has lost more and more of its hold over people’s minds and lives. It is perceived as more and more irrelevant. Its demise as a cultural force really began with the Renaissance and has been declining ever since.But the need for answers persists. The need for values by which to guide our lives remains unabated. The hunger for intelligibility is as strong as it ever was. The world around us is more and more confusing, more and more frightening; the need to understand it cries out in anguish.The ENCYCLPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY on page 471 “When Fred Hoyle in his book THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE turns to what he calls ‘the deeper issues’ and remarks that we find ourselves in a ‘dreadful situation’ in which there is ‘scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has ourselves in a ‘dreadful situation’ in which there is ‘scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance.’ He is using the word ‘significance’ in this comic sense.”

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On Sunday April 11, 1920 in Chicago there was a debate on this question: Has life any meaning? The following 3 quotes were taken from that meeting:Percy Ward -How can life have any meaning at all, when all living things, along with the world on which they live, are doomed to destruction? What meaning can there be to life, when its dominant law is age-long and world-wide struggle for existence? What possible meaning can there be to life, when the chief experience of living things is suffering and pain? Percy Ward – “To what end is comic evolution moving? All this life which rises, step by step, from moneron to main is impotent effort; the road to nowhere. Imagine an artist devoting his entire life to the painting of a wonderful picture; and then, when his picture is completed, tearing it to ribbons, what could be the meaning of such a painter’s behavior? Arthur J. Balfour – “Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, history a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets…Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish, the uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a long space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. Imperishable monuments and immortal deeds, death itself, will be as though they had never been.”SHOULD TRUE HUMANISTS BE OPTIMISTS OR NIHILISTS?????????Paul Kurtz –

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“The universe is neutral, indifferent to man’s existential yearnings. But we instinctively discover life, experience its throb, its excitement, its attraction. Life is here to be lived, enjoyed, suffered, and endured…Again–one cannot ‘prove’ this normative principle to everyone’s satisfaction. Living beings tend instinctively to maintain themselves and to reproduce beyond ultimate justification. It is a brute fact of our contingent natures; It is an instinctive desire to live.”

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J.P. Moreland – “2 Objections to optimistic humanism: #1 There is no rational justification for choosing it over nihilism. As far as rationality is concerned, it has nothing to offer over nihilism. Therefore, optimistic humanism suffers from some of the same objections we raised against nihilism. Kurtz himself admits that the ultimate values of humanism are incapable of rational justification!!!!!!  #2 Optimistic Humanism really answers the question of the meaning of life in the negative, just as nihilism does. For the optimistic humanist life has no objective value or purpose; It offers only subjective satisfaction, one should think long and hard before embracing such a horrible view. If there is a decent case that life has objective value and purpose, then such a case should be given as good a hearing as possible.  

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R.C. Sproul:Nihilism has two traditional enemies–Theism and Naive Humanism. The theist contradicts the nihilist because the existence of God guarantees that ultimate meaning and significance of personal life and history. Naive Humanism is considered naive by the nihilist because it rhapsodizes–with no rational foundation–the dignity and significance of human life. The humanist declares that man is a cosmic accident whose origin was fortuitous and entrenched in meaningless insignificance. Yet in between the humanist mindlessly crusades for, defends, and celebrates the chimera of human dignity…Herein is the dilemma: Nihilism declares that nothing really matters ultimately…In my judgment, no philosophical treatise has ever surpassed or equaled the penetrating analysis of the ultimate question of meaning versus vanity that is found in the Book of Ecclesiastes

PAGE 4

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J. Kerby Anderson– “The cynicism and skepticism in the arts, politics, commerce, and the media all testify to the futility of trying to find wisdom and meaning in a world without wisdom based on ‘the Fear of the Lord’ is folly.

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Ravi Zacharias – “Having killed God, the atheist is left with no reason for being, no morality to espouse, no meaning to life and no hope beyond the grave.”Arthur Ashe – (born in 1943, won U.S.Open in 1968, and Wimbledon in 1975) “If I am just remembered as an exceptional tennis player then my life really was not much.”The next two quotes by Kai Nielson and the next quote by J.P. Moreland were taken from a debate held at Ole Miss on March 24, 1988. This debate was later published by Prometheus Books by the title DOES GOD EXIST?
Does death ultimately take away the love we feel for others?Kai Nielson – “If you love someone, whether there is a God or not, that love can go on. It remains intact. It might even be more intact, because if death ends it all, the love relationships between people in life are all the more precious because that is all there is in that respect. So that’s perfectly intact, God or no God. Indeed, as I have just argued, it may even become more important.”

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Clarence Darrow – “I love my friends, but they all must come to a tragic end. Death is more terrible the more one is attached to things in the world.” Do we need a lasting purpose to our lives?Kai Nielson – “There are all those intentions, purposes, goals, and the like that you can figure out and can have. They are what John Rawls called life plans. You can have all these purposes in life even though there is no purpose to life. So life doesn’t become meaningless and pointless if you were not made for a purpose.”

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Francis Schaeffer – “The struggle for modern man is to begin with himself and find a meaning in life. Not just plans in life. It is nothing to have plans in life. Anybody can find plans in life. A child can fill up his time with plans of building tomorrow’s sand castle when today’s have been washed away. There is a difference between finding plans in life and purpose.”J.P.Moreland – “James Rachels says that we don’t need purpose in the sense of an over arching objective purpose to life, but we can have purpose in life, as Nielson says. And he means by that ‘subjective satisfaction,’ things that we find worthwhile to us. Now if this is true, what’s the difference, let’s say between becoming a doctor and feeding the poor and sitting around pinching heads off rats or being a Sisyphus and pushing a rock up and down a hill, or giving your time to flipping tiddlywinks? There is no difference since each of these options could be satisfying and worthwhile to someone.”Marvin Kohl – (Taken from an article in FREE INQUIRY, Spring 81 issue, article entitled, “The Meaning of Life and belief in God” ) “….Belief in beneficent providence is untrue. It is untrue because there is no evidence to warrant the claim that there is a benevolent force behind nature. Not only does the secular humanist deny that we have knowledge about a friend behind the universe; He also denies that we have knowledge about divine or cosmic purpose. The argument in its essential form is simple and, I believe, decisive. Purposes can only be correctly assigned to sentient beings; And since man does not have knowledge that God or other sentient beings govern the universe, He cannot on a cognitive level maintain that the universe has any purpose…The facts also indicate that many, like lady Katharine (Bertrand Russell’s Christian daughter who was quoted earlier in the article), are given insight about the meaning of life, about  the chief end of human living, when they believe God makes a disclosure about his own nature and purpose and gently embraces them in his absolute love. In short, it appears to be true that belief in God has had and still has the power to give comfort and consolation to millions of devout believers. Largely because of this, two important claims cannot be easily, if at all, dismissed. They are: (1) that in addition to other basic human needs, there is a need for psychological security, which includes the need to believe in God, or at least believe that the cosmos is guided by a loving purpose; and (2) that this need is often successfully met if a man genuinely recognizes that his goal for living is in, and given to him by, God.”Aldous Huxley – “Science does not retain the sovereignty over metaphysical pronouncements…Science does not have the right to give to me my reason for being and my definition for existence, but I am going to take science’s view because I want this world not to have meaning because it frees me to my own erotic and political desires.”

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He fought every ‘ism’ in the book

One of the most important cultural figures of our time never wrote about anything without showing his deep moral concerns

By Michael Ruse,
The Globe and Mail
Thursday, May 23, 2002; Page R9

In 1980, the then-governor of the State of Arkansas, one Bill Clinton, was thrown out of office after just one term. Chastened, Mr. Clinton mended his fences and regained office in 1982, a position he held until 10 years later when he was elected President of the United States of America. The governor during the interregnum was a man whose unsuitability for office was equalled only by his surprise at gaining it. He had no hesitation in signing into law a bill that demanded that the children of the state be taught, in their biology classes, what its supporters referred to by the oxymoron “Scientific Creationism,” and what is better known to the rest of us as the unfiltered, early chapters of the book of Genesis—six days of creation, 6,000 years ago, Adam and Eve miraculously up from the mud, and a worldwide flood a few years later when God grew disappointed with the product.

At once the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sprang into action, challenging the validity of this law. It would be hard to imagine a more direct and blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state. Genesis had to be shown to be religion and not science.

At the same time, the alternative world picture—the world picture that claims that organisms including humans are the end products of a long slow process of evolution—had to be shown to be science. But, who could speak for science at this time? One person above all stood out on everybody’s list: Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University.

Prof. Gould was a provocative and much-regarded paleontologist. At the same time, he was one of the best-known science writers in America. Every month, a whole generation of readers eagerly took up the magazine Natural History, turning to Prof. Gould’s column “This view of life,” ready to be amazed, amused, annoyed, and above all appreciative of his fascinating disquisitions on the world of organisms around us.

There was no one better able to explain evolutionary thinking and to defend the scientific approach. Thus it was that, at the end of 1981, Prof. Gould flew south to Arkansas to testify for the ACLU. And thus it was that I forged a friendship with one of the most remarkable people I have ever been privileged to know, for I too was a witness in Arkansas against the Creationist law, for the ACLU. At the time I was a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ont., and, like Prof. Gould, I also had been called to testify on behalf of the science that we both loved.

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Steve Gould died earlier this week of cancer at his home in Manhattan. His last book, a collection of essays, was published at the beginning of this month. I Have Landed uses as its title a comment made in the diary of Prof. Gould’s immigrant grandfather, on arriving in 1904 at Ellis Island. Now, it refers poignantly to Stephen Jay Gould’s own life as his pen is laid down for the very last time. More precisely, as his manual typewriter, on which he composed everything, falls silent.

But what a flight. As a scientist, Prof. Gould is best known for the theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” formulated by him and his student Niles Eldredge. The theory is based on the claim that the history of life is not one of smooth unbroken change, progressing always in an orderly and controlled matter, but is rather one of continency and sharp breaks, as life moves in jumps from one form to another.

With this, Prof. Gould also mounted a decades-long attack on the dominant evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, that supposes that natural selection is the main cause of change and that the result is the highly adapted nature of all organisms. Again and again Prof. Gould challenged this view, arguing in his most notorious essay that much of life has no function, no purpose, and is at best a by-product of other forces, as are the functionless areas at the tops of columns in medieval churches—”spandrels” that simply are, without intent or end.

Earlier this year, Prof. Gould published his magnum opus The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, in which he gave a full and detailed defence of his thinking. Moving from history to science, from science to literature, from literature to religion, and then back from religion to history, he laid out his vision of the history of life and of its causal processes. Whether or not this vision endures, no one can deny the synthetic grasp of the author and the greatness of his imagination and intent.

But there are many good and even great scientists. For me, what made Stephen Jay Gould a man above the ordinary was his ability to take science and to explain it to regular people. In person, he could be difficult and at times uncomfortably arrogant. Too often, he lost patience with questioners. But when writing, he was a man transformed. Never a hint of condescension. Never a hint of triviality. Never a hint of false modesty or trying to impress because he was an important man, more talented than most.

Prof. Gould would take an object or an idea and draw it out, turn it over, cut it into parts, rebuild it, and all the time explain and connect and instruct. Why is the zebra striped, and is it a white animal with black stripes or a black animal with white stripes—and who cares and why? How do animals (and plants, for that matter) go from A to B? Flying, walking, swimming, floating on air, slithering on the ground, swinging through the trees, and more. But why did they never invent the most efficient mode of transport of all, the wheel? (Or did they?) What was the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin up to at the time of the Piltdown Hoax? Could it be that one of the most revered figures of the 20th century was himself involved in the greatest fraud of the century? (You can imagine the squawks that that particular column brought on!) And so the ideas flowed forth and excited all who turned to his pages.

What made Prof. Gould one of the most important cultural figures of our time was that he never wrote on anything—starting with the snails on which he wrote his doctoral dissertation—without showing his deep moral concerns. For him, there was no sterile distinction between fact and value. The practice of science for Steve Gould was a truly moral enterprise—using our talents to make out the nature of reality—and the product of science was likewise a force for good or ill. Throughout his life, he fought against racism and sexism and every other vile “ism” in the book.

Born into a totally secular Jewish family, he had no formal faith, but for me he was the epitome of the truly religious man. He would appreciate the irony—he knew more of the New Testament than most Christians—if I (a fellow non-believer) say that Stephen Jay Gould was the servant who used his talents wisely and found favour with his Lord.

I do not want to end on a pompous or formal or sad manner, for above all else Steve Gould was fun. By the end of the third day of the Arkansas Creation Trial, it was clear that the ACLU and its evolutionists were on the way to a smashing victory. We started to relax, and that night at dinner we dined well and not particularly wisely.

An angelic junior member of the law firm that was advising us broke into the beautiful hymn, Amazing Grace. Prof. Gould was a keen singer of oratorio and no voice was louder than his. We came to the line that speaks of worshipping God for 10,000 years. An idea a little too close for comfort. We drew to embarrassed silence, looking at each other. Then we started to laugh. It was a good moment.

Michael Ruse is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. Previously, he was professor of history and philosophy of science at Ontario’s Guelph University.

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Gould grumbles about creationist ‘hijacking’

by Don Batten

‘Eminent biologist hits back at the creationists who “hijacked” his theory for their own ends’.

So says the headline of an article by Steve Connor, Science Editor in The Independent(UK), April 9, 2002, referring to the imminent release of Professor Stephen Jay Gould’s new book, a 1,400 page treatise called The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.1 Gould is a high-profile professor of zoology from Harvard University, well-known for promoting the controversial view that the fossil record contradicts the slow-and-gradual transformation idea of classical Darwinism. More recently, he has become more famous for revealing Darwin’s Real Message, but at the same time trying to pacify ‘religious’ people by asserting that religion and science have ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ (NOMA).2 The following quotes are from Connor’s article.

‘Professor Gould accuses creationists of having exploited the sometimes bitter dispute between him and his fellow Darwinists …’

I guess we’re ‘guilty as charged’ on this one. It seems that Gould would have it that only evolutionists be permitted to use the arguments of evolutionists. Only those ‘in the club’ can legitimately discuss these things, it would appear.

Ever since Darwin, evolutionists have almost universally maintained that the supposed change from one basic type of organism to another occurred slowly, gradually, in tiny steps. The fossils did not support this idea, and Darwin blamed incompleteness of the record. Others repeated this excuse, right up to the present day, including Richard Dawkins, the ‘archbishop of atheism’ at Oxford University in the UK.3

Gould and Niles Eldredge, a former student of Gould, actually faced up to the fossil record and decided it did not support the gradualist dogma.4 They argued strongly against some of the classical claims of gradual transformation. In doing this they were inadvertently agreeing with creationists. Naturally, creationists used their admissions.

In 1977 Gould wrote,

‘The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. … to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.’5

In 1980 Gould said,

‘The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.’6

It would be difficult to find franker admissions to the lack of evidence for gradual transitions in the fossil record.

Now it is a powerful and legitimate debating tactic, employed by all, to use the admissions of ‘hostile witnesses’. Clearly, Gould is not a creationist and has no sympathies whatsoever with us. He appeared on behalf of the evolutionary thought police, the ACLU (which incongruously contains the word ‘liberties’ in its title), at the 1981 trial over the teaching of origins in schools in Arkansas. Both he and Eldredge have used quite intemperate, insulting language in referring to creationists, especially since 1981. See a refutation of Eldredge’s latest anti-creationist foray.

We make no apology for using the admissions of evolutionists about the true nature of the fossil record. Other evolutionists have also admitted the problems. See, for example, Are there any Transitional Fossils?

‘Professor Gould says creationists have unwittingly misinterpreted or deliberately misquoted his work…’

Recognizing the non-gradualist nature of the fossil record, in 1972 Gould and Eldredge published a radical new theory of evolution that supposedly fitted the observations of the fossil record. They described the fossil record as representing long periods of equilibriumor stasis (things staying much the same), which are punctuated by the relatively sudden appearance of new forms. Hence they dubbed their new theory ‘punctuated equilibrium’ (PE). Fossils showing transitions from one form to another are missing, and to establish the need for the new theory of evolution, Gould and Eldredge argued very forcibly against supposed examples of gradual change in the fossils. For example, Eldredge had studied trilobites at length, looking for the classical gradual transformations, but without success—one of the many dead ends that evolutionary thinking has led to. (Nor did he solve the problem of how possibly the most sophisticated eye of all time could have evolved supposedly right at the beginning of complex animal life—see Trilobite Technology.)

Of course Gould and Eldredge are wedded to materialist philosophy (and self-servingly make this a defining characteristic of ‘science’—see The rules of the game), so the data cannot for them mean that evolution did not occur. It’s ‘a fact’.

They reasoned that evolution must have happened in such a way that transitional fossils are absent or very rare. They proposed that the changes must have occurred in small populations and relatively rapidly. The latter has to be understood in terms of the supposed mega-years of the evolutionary view—that is, the changes occurred over thousands of years, which, compared to the hundreds of millions of years of the fossil record, is a ‘rapid’ change. This new theory supposedly accounted for the origin of new species; it was claimed to not be about the origin of radically different body plans (such as phyla). Nevertheless, if PE and its proposed mechanisms are an accurate description of the basic mode of operation of evolution, as Eldredge and Gould originally argued, then it must also account for the origin of basic body plans, because evolution supposedly accounts for all the variation in living things. However, on several occasions Gould has suggested that some basically different mechanism must operate to account for fundamentally different body plans.

In this regard Gould spoke favourably of the ideas of Richard Goldschmidt,7 a German palaeontologist from the mid-1900s who also faced up to the lack of transitional fossils, and listed a number of complex structures that couldn’t have been built by small advantageous steps. Goldschmidt agonized over the big picture of the fossil record—where the major categories of living things, the phyla, appear fully formed, without any evidence of a graded series of transitions from some common ancestor of all. Goldschmidt proposed a ‘hopeful monster’ theory, where the major body plans were seen as arising suddenly, by some sort of macromutation. This was popularly portrayed as being like a bird emerging out of a reptile egg—a ‘hopeful monster’ theory.

Undoubtedly some creationists have misconstrued Gould’s work, conflating Gould’s writings on speciation and macroevolution, and then characterizing PE as a ‘hopeful monster’ theory. But some evolutionists have ‘misunderstood’ Gould too. Maybe this is not surprising, since Gould’s article had the term in its title, and he said:

‘I do, however, predict that during the next decade Goldschmidt will be largely vindicated in the world of evolutionary biology.’

However, I know of no mainstream creationists deliberately misquoting his work; that is something else. Evolutionists often make these sweeping claims, without substantiation.

For a detailed review of Gould and Eldredge’s PE, and how it has fared, see ‘Punctuated Equilibrium: Come of Age?’, originally published in TJ (the in-depth journal of Creation). This will demonstrate to any fair-minded reader that we have not misconstrued or deliberately misquoted Gould’s work.

‘”I had no premonition about the hubbub that punctuated equilibrium would generate,” Professor Gould said. Some “absurdly-hyped popular accounts” proclaimed the death of Darwinism, with punctuated equilibrium as the primary assassin, he says.

‘“Our theory became the public symbol and stalking horse for all debate within evolutionary theory. Moreover, since popular impression now falsely linked the supposed ‘trouble’ within evolutionary theory to the rise of creationism, some intemperate colleagues began to blame Eldredge and me for the growing strength of creationism.”

“Thus, we stood falsely accused by some colleagues both for dishonestly exaggerating our theory to proclaim the death of Darwin (presumably for our own cynical quest for fame), and for unwittingly fostering the scourge of creationism as well,” he said.

‘Not every scientist, however, would agree that Professor Gould was innocent in the dispute…’

Perhaps this explains the vitriolic denunciations of creationists since the 1981 Arkansas trial—Gould endeavouring to close ranks with other materialists, to repair the breach, to prove that he is just as caustic in his criticism of creationists as any of his colleagues in a competition to be ‘more anti-creationist than thou’. There is nothing like a common enemy to bring solidarity.

Gould protests about popular accounts that used PE to proclaim the death of Darwinism, but these accounts often simply reflected the enthusiasm Gould portrayed for his ideas on PE as an alternative to standard Darwinism. He was indeed proclaiming the death of orthodox (neo-) Darwinism. In recent years Gould and Eldredge have moderated their claims from PE being a new theory to replace gradualism to being an additional concept to be added to the grab bag of evolutionary tools used to ‘explain’ all and sundry observations. Evolutionist Levinton recognized this change, saying in response to Gould and Eldredge’s review of PE8 published in 1993:

‘Gould and Eldredge have devolved their claims of punctuation from an “alternative” to being “complementary” [to gradualism].’9

Also, Ernst Mayr, whom Gould critiqued as a representative of gradualism, dismissed Gould’s ideas as merely a variant of his own theory of allopatric speciation (i.e. geographical isolation leading to reproductive isolation).

The addition of PE to the evolutionist’s tool kit makes evolution even more untestable than ever as a pretender to be a scientific theory. Darwin predicted gradualism in the fossils. After 110 years of pretending that the fossils would be found, evolutionists were forced by Gould and Eldredge (mainly) to face up to the evidence. The transitional fossils had not been found. This contradicted the most basic prediction of Darwinism. It should have meant the death of the idea, if it were truly a scientific theory. However, Darwinism is part of the atheist / materialist worldview. Richard Dawkins, a vigorous critic of Gould, said that Darwinism made atheism intellectually respectable.10 On this point they undoubtedly agree. Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, said, ‘Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical [i.e., religious] research programme…’.11 As a well-known current philosopher of science, Michael Ruse, said,

‘Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. … Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.… Evolution therefore came into being as a kind of secular ideology, an explicit substitute for Christianity.’12

This is especially significant because Ruse had also testified with the ACLU in the same trial as Gould, and at that time dismissed the idea that evolution was religion.

Consequently, Darwinism will not die while ever there are atheists wanting to be ‘intellectually respectable’. Darwinism / evolution has come to mean simply ‘naturalistic (that is, Creator-less) origins theory’. Since in the minds of Dawkins, Gould and co. there is no Creator in the real world, then ‘evolution’ (naturalism) is a fact.

Gould and Eldredge provided an escape route from the evidence against the normal gradualist concept of evolution—PE. As they said in their 1993 review, they gave ‘theoretical space’ to stasis and abrupt appearance. Long argued by creationists as evidence against evolution, stasis and abrupt appearance now became the evidence forevolution by PE! So how can evolution be refuted in the minds of its proponents? It can’t. If a series of fossils showing transformation can be found,13then this is claimed as evidence for ‘evolution’ (gradualism), but if such cannot be found, then this is also claimed as evidence for ‘evolution’ (PE). ‘Heads we [evolutionists] win; tails you [creationists] lose’!

Gould’s writings have encouraged many creationists. It’s nice that stasis and abrupt appearance, the actual data of the fossils, have been given ‘theoretical space’ by a prominent evolutionist. If it were not for the growth of the modern creation movement, many other evolutionists might have joined with Gould and Eldredge in facing up to the data. Initially some did, such as Vrba and Stanley. That’s much less likely since 1981. Darwinian fundamentalists like Dawkins (a non-paleontologist) continue to refuse to allow the fossil evidence to speak. As a biologist, Dawkins made his reputation on just-so story-telling for the slow-and-gradual neo-Darwinian myth. He probably also realizes that the information problem in living things is difficult enough to solve in neo-Darwinism, but it would be impossible with PE, so he fights the fossil experts such as Gould who would rock the boat (see also this critique of Dawkins’ attempt to solve the information problem).

It seems that the real data of the fossils has once again been pushed into the background. It just fits the Creation / Flood teaching of the Bible too well.

References

  1. Connor, S., Eminent biologist hits back at the creationists who ‘hijacked’ his theory for their own ends, The Independent, 9 April 2002; Web version last accessed 18 April 2002. Return to text.
  2. Gould provides nothing original in this idea—18th century ‘Enlightenment’ philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that religion and science were two separate domains that must be kept apart. Return to text.
  3. Dawkins actually occupies the Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science, but he uses his position not to promote understanding of real operational science at all, such as physics or chemistry, but instead to flagrantly promote atheism. See also critiques of Dawkins at Countering critics’ attacks on creationist ‘design’ arguments. Return to text.
  4. Eldredge, N. and Gould, S.J., Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism. In: Models in Paleobiology, T.J.M. Schopf (ed.), Freeman, Cooper and Co., San Francisco, pp. 82–115, 1972. Return to text.
  5. Gould, S.J., Evolution’ erratic pace. Natural History 86(5):14, 1977. Return to text.
  6. Gould, S.J., Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging? Paleobiology 6:119–130 (p.127), 1980. Return to text.
  7. For example, Gould, S.J., The return of hopeful monsters. Natural History 86(6):22–30, 1977. Return to text.
  8. Gould, S.J., and Eldredge, N., Punctuated equilibrium comes of age. Nature 366:223–227, 1993. Return to text.
  9. Levinton, J., Scientific correspondence. Nature 368:407, 1994. Return to text.
  10. On this point alone it is strange indeed that various bishops in the Anglican Church in England have sided with the atheist Dawkins in advocating the teaching of evolution only to children in schools in the U.K. Do these bishops want the education system to turn out atheists? Return to text.
  11. Popper, K., Unended Quest p.151, 1976 (Fontana, Collins, Glasgow). Return to text.
  12. Michael Ruse, professor of philosophy and zoology at the University of Guelph, Canada (National Post, May 13, 2000, pp. B1,B3,B7). Return to text.
  13. Some transitional series of fossils are expected in creationist thinking, as animals and plants adapt to different environments in the post-Flood world, but the transformations seen will be limited to within the created kind, or ‘baramin’, e.g. horses. Transformations between major categories in design will not be found. Return to text.

McLean v. Arkansas

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McLean v. Arkansas
United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas
Full case nameMcLean v. Arkansas Board of Education
Date decidedJanuary 5, 1982
Citations529 F. Supp. 1255
TranscriptsMcLean v. Ark
Judge sittingWilliam Overton
Case holding
The Arkansas Balanced Treatment Act of 1981 requiring schools balance the teaching of evolution with the teaching of creation science violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution

McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 529 F. Supp. 1255 (E.D. Ark. 1982), was a 1981 legal case in the US state of Arkansas.[1]

A lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas by various parents, religious groups and organizations, biologists, and others who argued that the Arkansas state law known as the Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act (Act 590), which mandated the teaching of “creation science” in Arkansas public schools, was unconstitutionalbecause it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Judge William Overton handed down a decision on January 5, 1982, giving a clear, specific definition of science as a basis for ruling that creation science is religion and is simply not science.[1] The ruling was not binding on schools outside the Eastern District of Arkansas but had considerable influence on subsequent rulings on the teaching of creationism.[2]

Arkansas did not appeal the decision and it was not until the 1987 case of Edwards v. Aguillard,[3]which dealt with a similar law passed by the State of Louisiana, that teaching “creation science” was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, making that determination applicable nationwide.[4]

Act 590 had been put forward by a Christian fundamentalist on the basis of a request from the Greater Little Rock Evangelical Fellowship for the introduction of legislation based on a “model act” prepared using material from the Institute for Creation Research. It was opposed by many religious organizations and other groups.

Contents

Parties[edit]

The plaintiffs in the suit, who opposed the “balanced treatment” statute, were led by the Reverend William McLean, a United Methodist minister.[5][6]

The other plaintiffs were:

The defendants were the Arkansas Board of Education and its members, in their official capacity, the director of the Department of Education, in his official capacity, and the State Textbooks and Instructional materials Selecting Committee. The Pulaski County Special School District and its directors and superintendent were named in the original complaint but were voluntarily dismissed by plaintiffs at the pre-trial conference on October 1, 1981.

Background[edit]

Various state laws prohibiting teaching of evolution had been introduced in the 1920s. They were challenged in 1968 at Epperson v. Arkansas which ruled that “The law’s effort was confined to an attempt to blot out a particular theory because of its supposed conflict with the Biblical account, literally read. Plainly, the law is contrary to the mandate of the First, and in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.”[7] The creationist movement turned to promoting teaching creationism in school science classes as equal to evolutionary theory.

Arkansas Act 590[edit]

Arkansas Act 590 of 1981, entitled the “Balanced Treatment for Creation Science and Evolution Science Act,” mandated that “creation science” be given equal time in public schools with evolution.

Creation science was defined as follows: “Creation science means the scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those evidences. Creation science includes the scientific evidences and related inferences that indicate:

  1. Sudden creation of the universe, energy and life from nothing;
  2. The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds from a single organism;
  3. Changes only with fixed limits of originally created kinds of plants and animals;
  4. Separate ancestry for man and apes;
  5. Explanation of the earth’s geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of worldwide flood;
  6. A relatively recent inception of the earth and living.

Evolution science was defined as follows: “Evolution-science” means the scientific evidences for evolution and inferences from those scientific evidences. Evolution-science includes the scientific evidences and related inferences that indicate:

  1. Emergence by naturalistic processes of the universe from disordered matter and emergence of life from nonlife;
  2. The sufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of present living kinds from simple earlier kinds;
  3. Emergency [sic] by mutation and natural selection of present living kinds from simple earlier kinds;
  4. Emergence of man from a common ancestor with apes;
  5. Explanation of the earth’s geology and the evolutionary sequence by uniformitarianism; and
  6. An inception several billion years ago of the earth and somewhat later of life.

The Act was signed into law by Governor Frank D. White on March 19, 1981.

McLean v. Arkansas ruling[edit]

Judge William Overton‘s ruling handed down on January 5, 1982, concluded that “creation-science” as defined in Arkansas Act 590 “is simply not science”. The judgment defined the essential characteristics of science as being:

  1. It is guided by natural law;
  2. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law;
  3. It is testable against the empirical world;
  4. Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and
  5. It is falsifiable.

Overton found that “creation science” failed to meet these essential characteristics for these reasons:

  1. Sudden creation “from nothing” is not science because it depends upon a supernatural intervention which is not guided by natural law, is not explanatory by reference to natural law, is not testable and is not falsifiable;
  2. “insufficiency of mutation and natural selection” is an incomplete negative generalization;
  3. “changes only within fixed limits of originally created kinds” fails as there is no scientific definition of “kinds”, the assertion appears to be an effort to establish outer limits of changes within species but there is no scientific explanation for these limits which is guided by natural law and the limitations, whatever they are, cannot be explained by natural law;
  4. “separate ancestry of man and apes” is a bald assertion which explains nothing and refers to no scientific fact or theory;
  5. Catastrophism and any kind of Genesis Flood depend upon supernatural intervention, and cannot be explained by natural law;
  6. “Relatively recent inception” has no scientific meaning, is not the product of natural law; not explainable by natural law; nor is it tentative;
  7. No recognized scientific journal has published an article espousing the creation science theory as described in the Act, and though some witnesses suggested that the scientific community was “close-minded” and so had not accepted the arguments, no witness produced a scientific article for which publication has been refused, and suggestions of censorship were not credible;
  8. A scientific theory must be tentative and always subject to revision or abandonment in light of facts that are inconsistent with, or falsify, the theory. A theory that is by its own terms dogmatic, absolutist, and never subject to revision is not a scientific theory;
  9. While anybody is free to approach a scientific inquiry in any fashion they choose, they cannot properly describe the methodology as scientific, if they start with the conclusion and refuse to change it regardless of the evidence developed during the course of the investigation.

The creationists’ methods do not take data, weigh it against the opposing scientific data, and thereafter reach the conclusions stated in [the Act] Instead, they take the literal wording of the Book of Genesis and attempt to find scientific support for it. The Act took a two-model approach to teaching identical to the approach put forward by the Institute for Creation Research, which assumes only two explanations for the origins of life and existence of man, plants and animals: it was either the work of a creator or it was not. Creationists take this to mean that all scientific evidence which fails to support the theory of evolution is necessarily scientific evidence in support of creationism. The judgment found this to be simply a contrived dualism which has no scientific factual basis or legitimate educational purpose.

The judge concluded that “the Act was passed with the specific purpose by the General Assembly of advancing religion,” and that it violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

The test that Overton developed on the basis of Michael Ruse‘s testimony was later criticized by the philosopher of science Larry Laudan who argued that rather than call Creation Science “non-science” it would have been more cogent to show that it was “bad science”.[8] Chandra Wickramasinghe was the single scientist testifying for the defense of creationism.[9] He hypothesized on panspermia and on “the possibility of high intelligence in the Universe and of many increasing levels of intelligence converging toward a God as an ideal limit.” [10]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b McLean v. Arkansas, 529 F. Supp. 1255 (E.D Ark. 1982).
  2. ^ Understanding the Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals. Archived May 19, 2011, at the Wayback Machine. (pdf) A Position Paper from the Center for Inquiry, Office of Public Policy Barbara Forrest. May 2007.
  3. ^ Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987).
  4. ^ Creationism/ID, A Short Legal History Archived August 23, 2014, at the Wayback Machine. By Lenny Flank, Talk Reason
  5. ^ Scott, Eugenie (June 30, 2004). Evolution vs. Creationism. Greenwood Press. pp. 1590–1628 Kindle ed. ISBN 978-0-313-32122-1.
  6. ^ Frank Spencer, ed. (1996). History of Physical Anthropology: An Encyclopedia (Garland Reference Library of Social Science) (illustrated ed.). Routledge. p. 297. ISBN 978-0-8153-0490-6.
  7. ^ Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968).
  8. ^ Laudan, L. (1982). “Commentary: Science at the Bar-Causes for Concern”. Science, Technology and Human Values. 7 (41): 16–19.
  9. ^ Phy-Olsen, Allene. Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design
  10. ^ Fry, Iris. Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview, Rutgers University Press, February 1, 2000

Further reading[edit]

  • Overton, W. R. (1982). “Creationism in Schools: The Decision in McLean vs. the Arkansas Board of Education”. Science. 215 (4535): 934–943. doi:10.1126/science.215.4535.934. PMID 17821352.
  • Overton, W. R. (1985). “Memorandum opinion of United States District judge William R. Overton in McLean v. Arkansas, 5 January 1982″. In Gilkey, L. Creationism on trial. New York: Harper & Row.

External links[edit]

showvteCreation science / Intelligent design vs. evolution
showvteCreation science

Categories: 

On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

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(Harry Kroto pictured below)

Image result for harry kroto

Stephen Jay Gould is the scholar I will look at today. In  the third video below in the 147th clip in this series are his words “If I were  a bacteria I would be quite satisfied that I was dominating the planet…I don’t know why consciousness should be seen as any state of higher being especially if you use the evolutionist primary criterion of success measured by duration” and I have responded directly to this quote in any earlier post.

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)

A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)

This is the third part of the letter to Stephen Jay Gould, but the second part was posted last week on my blog and the fourth will posted next week.

_

Related posts:

Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part F “Carl Sagan’s views on how God should try and contact us” includes film “The Basis for Human Dignity”

April 8, 2013 – 7:07 am

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 51 THE BEATLES (Part C, List of those on cover of Stg.Pepper’s ) (Feature on artist Raqib Shaw )

March 19, 2015 – 12:21 am

  The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA Uploaded on Nov 29, 2010 The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA. The Beatles:   I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Tagged George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul MacCartney, Raqib Shaw, Ringo Starr | Edit | Comments (0)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 50 THE BEATLES (Part B, The Psychedelic Music of the Beatles) (Feature on artist Peter Blake )

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Music Monday My Letter to Paul Stanley of KISS

January 20, 2019 – 1:28 am

_I have read over 40 autobiographies by ROCKERS and it seems to me that almost every one of those books can be reduced to 4 points. Once fame hit me then I became hooked on drugs. Next I became an alcoholic (or may have been hooked on both at same time). Thirdly, I chased the skirts and thought happiness would be found through more sex with more women. Finally, in my old age I have found being faithful to my wife and getting over addictions has led to happiness like I never knew before. (Almost every autobiography I have read from rockers has these points in it although Steven Tyler is still chasing the skirts!!).

January  1, 2018

Paul Stanley

Dear Paul

I really enjoyed reading your autobiography recently, FACE THE MUSIC and it caused me to get on the internet and look some more about your life and I ran across this picture of you and Andy Warhol at the  famous Studio 54 nightclub.

I live in Arkansas and I just can’t get enough of the CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM in Bentonville.  In 1981 I visited 20 European countries on a college trip and I was hooked on art.

Francis Schaeffer is one of my favorite writers and he was constantly talking about modern culture and art in his books and that really got me interested in finding out what it was all about.  Actually on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I devote my blog every Thursday to the series called FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE  and I examine the work of a modern day artist.

Here is an alphabetical list of those I have featured so far:

Marina Abramovic, Ida Applebroog,Matthew Barney, Aubrey Beardsley, Larry Bell, Wallace Berman, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, Brenda Bury,  Allora & Calzadilla,   Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Heinz Edelmann,  Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin, Jan Fabre, Makoto Fujimura, Hamish Fulton, Ellen Gallaugher, Ryan Gander, Francoise Gilot,  John Giorno, Rodney Graham,  Cai Guo-Qiang, Brion Gysin, Jann Haworth, Arturo Herrera, Oliver Herring, David Hockney, David Hooker,  Nancy Holt, Roni Horn, Peter Howson, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Martin Karplus, Margaret Keane, Mike Kelley, Peter Kien, Jeff Koons,  Annie Leibovitz, John Lennon, Richard Linder, Sally Mann, Kerry James Marshall, Trey McCarley, Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney, Paul McCarthy, Josiah McElheny, Barry McGee, Richard Merkin, Nicholas Monro, Yoko Ono, Tony Oursler,John Outterbridge, Nam June Paik, Eduardo Paolozzi, George Petty, William Pope L., Gerhard Richter, Anna Margaret Rose,  James Rosenquist, Susan Rothenberg, Georges Rouault, Richard Serra, Shahzia Sikander, Raqub Shaw, Thomas Shutte, Saul Steinberg, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Stuart Sutcliffe, Mika Tajima,Richard Tuttle, Luc Tuymans, Alberto Vargas,  Banks Violett, H.C. Westermann,  Fred Wilson, Krzysztof Wodiczko,Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, Bill Wyman, David Wynne, Andrea Zittel,

Since you  knew Andy Warhol. Let me share with you some of what Francis Schaeffer wrote about Andy Warhol’s art and interviews:

The Observer June 12, 1966 does a big spread on Warhol. Andy is a mass communicator. Someone has described pop art as Dada plus Madison Avenue or commercialism and I think that is a good definition. Dada was started in Zurich and came along in modern art. Dada means nothing. The word “Dada” means rocking horse, but it was chosen by chance. The whole concept Dada is everything means nothing. Pop Art has been said to be the Dada concept put forth in modern commercialization.

Everything in his work is being leveled down to an universal monotony which he can always sell for $8000.00.

Andy Warhol says, “It stops you thinking about things. I wish I were a machine. I don’t want to be heard. I don’t want human emotions. I have never been touched by a painting. I don’t want to think. The world would be easier to live  in if we all were machines. It is nothing in the end anyway.”

Notice Andy Warhol’s words very closely concerning the time he takes to make his movies:

“It stops you thinking about things. I wish I were a machine. I don’t want to be heard. I don’t want human emotions. I have never been touched by a painting. I don’t want to think. The world would be easier to live  in if we all were machines. It is nothing in the end anyway.”

Francis Schaeffer said that modern man may say that we all are the results of chance plus time and there is no life beyond the grave but then people can’t live that way because of the “mannishness of man.” We all have significance and the ability to love and be loved and we have the ability of rational thought that distinguishes us from machines and animals and that indicates that we were man in the image of God.

YOU HAVE LOVED AND DEEP DOWN YOU KNOW THAT GOD PUT YOU ON THIS EARTH FOR A PURPOSE AND THAT IS WHY WE HAVE ART TO BEGIN WITH BECAUSE OF MAN’S CREATIVITY!!

In your autobiography you point out what types of music have influenced yours. A lot of the great groups of the 1960’s came from Memphis and of course the blues did!!!!!

Your music reminds me a lot about the Memphis Blues. I thought of your music when I heard the news a while back, “In 2 days, Mississippi River has risen 10 feet north of St. Louis.”

Everybody is now educating themselves on the great flood of 1927. The 1927 Great Mississippi Flood was the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States, causing over $400million in damages and killing 246 people in seven states and displaced 700,000 people.

My grandfather moved to Memphis in 1927 and he told me about this flood. There was a lady named Memphis Minnie and she wrote about this flood. I always heard that there was lots of great blues music that had come out of Memphis, but I always thought that was overstated and that the Blues was not a significant form of music. (Live and learn, the Blues music out of Memphis had a GREAT AFFECT ON MUSIC WORLDWIDE!!!)

However, at the same time I was listening to groups like Led Zeppelin and the ROLLING STONES, I had no idea that many of their songs were based on old Blues songs out of Memphis.

One of my favorite Led Zeppelin songs was “When the Levee breaks.” It was based on a song by Memphis Minnie.

There are many paths that people can take to deal with the Blues but the one found by many people in this area is to repent of their sins and embrace the gospel. Actually the answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

When I examine the Blues they are really an expression of one’s desperation to deal with the hard realities we face in life. Some seek escapism through alcohol or drugs. In fact, many famous Blues musicians have died from from addictions to drugs or alcohol!!

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, cell phone 501-920-5733, everettehatcher@gmail.com

MJ, artist Andy Warhol and Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler at the famous Studio 54 nightclub

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(Francis Schaeffer pictured below)

Francis Schaeffer

Victims of the Mississippi River flood of 1927 camping on a levee, Arkansas City,

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Francis Schaeffer impacted the lives of Bailey Smith and Adrian Rogers and they helped turn the Southern Baptist Convention back to a belief in the Scriptures!!!

January 17, 2019 – 5:51 pm

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I remember the first time I went to a Operation Mobilization (OM) conference in 1979. We first drove from Memphis to Toronto with Rev. Earl Stevens and his wife of First Evangelical Church for the North American OM Conference.

Then we attended the European conference in Belgium  and we first flew to Paris and rode in the back of a truck across France to Belgium. My good David Rogers and I were the only ones from the Bellevue Baptist youth group to go with OM that summer to go on missions in Europe. David went to Austria and I went to Manchester, England. David later served several years with OM.

Also during our trip David’s father was elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention. I was sitting next to David when he took the call from his father that he had decided to place his name into the election.

It was a key time in the Southern Baptist Convention. When Dr. Rogers decided not to run for a second term in the summer of 1980 it was Bailey Smith who answered the call.

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Bailey and Sandy Smith

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Sandy’s brother Tom Elliff pastored First Baptist Church in Dell City after Bailey did.

Ron with Tom Elliff, pastor of First Baptist Church Dell City, OK, three weeks before Ron’s homegoing

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Sandy’s brother Bill Elliff is pastor at Summit Church in North Little Rock, Arkansas

(L-R) Bill Elliff, Tom Elliff, Michael Catt, Ken Jenkins, Mark Bearden, Tally Wilgis

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Son Steven Smith pastor of Immanuel Baptist in Little Rock, Arkansas

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Josh Smith pastor in Texas

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Ron with the late Dr. Adrian Rogers, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, TN

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Francis and Edith Schaeffer pictured below:

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Milton and Rose Friedman pictured with Ronald Reagan:

My heroes in 1980 were the economist Milton Friedman, the doctor C. Everett Koop, the politician Ronald Reagan, the Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer, the evangelist Billy Graham, and my pastor Adrian Rogers. I have been amazed at how many of these men knew each other.

I only had once chance to correspond with Milton Friedman and he quickly answered my letter. It was a question concerning my favorite christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer. I had read  inthe 1981 printing of The Tapestry: the Life and Times of Francis and Edith Schaeffer on page 644 that Edith mentioned “that the KUP SHOW (ran byIrv Kupcinet ) in Chicago, a talk show Francis was on twice, once with the economist Milton Friedman, whith whom he still has a good correspondence.”  I asked in a letter in the late 1990’s  if Friedman remembered the content of any of that correspondence and he said he did not.  Although I had an immense appreciation for Milton Friedman’s economic views sadly he took his agnostic views with him till his death in 2004.

JUDY GARLAND IRV KUPCINET Kup’s Show 1967

Published on Dec 3, 2013

1969 edit of Judy Garland’s 1967 appearance on Chicago based “Kup’s Show.”

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The closest connection I have had to Francis Schaeffer personally was that my mother once met his good friend Audrey W. Johnson (1907-84) who was the founder of BIBLE STUDY FELLOWSHIP. My mother worked for Maryann Frazier who was the longtime Bible Study Fellowship teacher in Memphis.

Miss Johnson showed Mrs Frazier a picture of her hugging Francis and Edith Schaeffer and since she was taller than both of them she called them “my two small friends.”

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Dr. C. Everett Koop was picked by Ronald Reagan to be Surgeon General (pictured below)

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After being elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, Adrian Rogers met with Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

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This was the average sanctuary crowd when I was growing up at Bellevue Baptist in Memphis.  Now take what you see and multiply it by three, because they had three morning services.  This photo was taken sometime in the early 1980’s

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On 3-16-15 I found the first link between my spiritual heroes: Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer!!!!! In this article below I read these words:

“If Schaeffer had still been alive, we would have had him come,” Richard Land said. He noted that Schaeffer was “close” to Adrian Rogers and “admired” by Bailey Smith, two conservative SBC presidents. Edith Schaeffer and Patterson’s wife Dorothy were close friends and travelled together in the early 1980s speaking on the importance of the home.

My family joined Bellevue Baptist in 1975 and every summer our pastor Adrian Rogers would come back from the annual Southern Baptist Convention meeting in June and he would share on the following Wednesday night about some of the troubling things that were happening in the Southern Baptist Seminaries because of the leftward swing in the theology. I knew that this was a big issue with him and I knew that Francis Schaeffer had fought the same battle in his seminary days 40 years earlier. HOWEVER, I DID NOT KNOW THAT THEY KNEW IT EACH OTHER AT THIS TIME IN THE 1970’S!!!!!!!

The same time in the 1970’s and 1980’s that I was a member of Bellevue Baptist in Memphis where Adrian Rogers was pastor, I also was a student at Evangelical Christian School from the 5th grade to the 12th grade where I was introduced to the books and films of Francis Schaeffer. At ECS my favorite teacher was Mark Brink who actually played both film series to us (WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? and HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?) during our senior year and believe it or not after I graduated I would come back and join some of his future classes when the film was playing again because I couldn’t get enough of Schaeffer’s film series!!!!

During this time I was amazed at how many prominent figures in the world found their way into the works of both Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer and I wondered what it would be like if these individuals were exposed to the Bible and the gospel. Therefore, over 20 years ago I began sending the messages of Adrian Rogers and portions of the works of Francis Schaeffer to many of the secular figures that they mentioned in their works. Let me give you some examples and tell you about some lessons that I have learned.

I have learned several things about atheists in the last 20 years while I have been corresponding with them. FIRST, they know in their hearts that God exists and they can’t live as if God doesn’t exist, but they will still search in some way in their life for a greater meaning. SECOND, many atheists will take time out of their busy lives to examine the evidence that I present to them. THIRD, there is hope that they will change their views.

Let’s go over again a few points I made at the first of this post. My FIRST point is backed up by Romans 1:18-19 (Amplified Bible) ” For God’s wrath and indignation are revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who in their wickedness REPRESS and HINDER the truth and make it inoperative. For that which is KNOWN about God is EVIDENT to them and MADE PLAIN IN THEIR INNER CONSCIOUSNESS, because God has SHOWN IT TO THEM,”(emphasis mine). I have discussed this many times on my blog and even have interacted with many atheists from CSICOP in the past. (I first heard this from my pastor Adrian Rogers back in the 1980’s.)

My SECOND point is that many atheists will take the time to consider the evidence that I have presented to them and will respond. The late Adrian Rogers was my pastor at Bellevue Baptist when I grew up and I sent his sermon on evolution and another on the accuracy of the Bible to many atheists to listen to and many of them did. I also sent many of the arguments from Francis Schaeffer also.

Many of these scholars have taken the time to respond back to me in the last 20 years and some of the names included are Ernest Mayr (1904-2005), George Wald (1906-1997), Carl Sagan (1934-1996), Robert Shapiro (1935-2011), Nicolaas Bloembergen (1920-), Brian Charlesworth (1945-), Francisco J. Ayala (1934-) Elliott Sober (1948-), Kevin Padian (1951-), Matt Cartmill (1943-) , Milton Fingerman (1928-), John J. Shea (1969-), , Michael A. Crawford (1938-), (Paul Kurtz (1925-2012), Sol Gordon (1923-2008), Albert Ellis (1913-2007), Barbara Marie Tabler (1915-1996), Renate Vambery (1916-2005), Archie J. Bahm (1907-1996), Aron S “Gil” Martin ( 1910-1997), Matthew I. Spetter (1921-2012), H. J. Eysenck (1916-1997), Robert L. Erdmann (1929-2006), Mary Morain (1911-1999), Lloyd Morain (1917-2010), Warren Allen Smith (1921-), Bette Chambers (1930-), Gordon Stein (1941-1996) , Milton Friedman (1912-2006), John Hospers (1918-2011), and Michael Martin (1932-).

THIRD, there is hope that an atheist will reconsider his or her position after examining more evidence. Twenty years I had the opportunity to correspond with two individuals that were regarded as two of the most famous atheists of the 20th Century, Antony Flew and Carl Sagan. I had read the books and seen the films of the Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer and he had discussed the works of both of these men. I sent both of these gentlemen philosophical arguments from Schaeffer in these letters and in the first letter I sent a cassette tape of my pastor’s sermon IS THE BIBLE TRUE? You may have noticed in the news a few years that Antony Flew actually became a theist in 2004 and remained one until his death in 2010. Carl Sagan remained a skeptic until his dying day in 1996.Antony Flew wrote me back several times and in the June 1, 1994 letter he commented, “Thank you for sending me the IS THE BIBLE TRUE? tape to which I have just listened with great interest and, I trust, profit.” I later sent him Adrian Rogers’ sermon on evolution too.
The ironic thing is back in 2008 I visited the Bellevue Baptist Book Store and bought the book There Is A God – How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by Antony Flew, and it is in this same store that I bought the message by Adrian Rogers in 1994 that I sent to Antony Flew. Although Antony Flew did not make a public profession of faith he did admit that the evidence for God’s existence was overwhelming to him in the last decade of his life. His experience has been used in a powerful way to tell others about Christ. Let me point out that while on airplane when I was reading this book a gentleman asked me about the book. I was glad to tell him the whole story about Adrian Rogers’ two messages that I sent to Dr. Flew and I gave him CD’s of the messages which I carry with me always. Then at McDonald’s at the Airport, a worker at McDonald’s asked me about the book and I gave him the same two messages from Adrian Rogers too.

Francis Schaeffer’s words would be quoted in many of these letters that I would send to famous skeptics and I would always include audio messages from Adrian Rogers. Perhaps Schaeffer’s most effective argument was concerning Romans 1 and how a person could say that he didn’t believe that the world had a purpose or meaning but he could not live that way in the world that God created and with the conscience that every person is born with.

Google “Adrian Rogers Francis Schaeffer” and the first 8 things that come up will be my blog posts concerning effort to reach these atheists. These two great men proved that the scriptures Hebrews 4:12 and Isaiah 55:11 are true, “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” and “so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”

I noticed from audio tapes in the 1960’s that Francis Schaeffer was a close friends with former Southern Baptist Seminary Professor Clark Pinnock from New Orleans. My friend Sherwood Haisty actually got to hear Clark Pinnock speak in 1999 although Dr. Pinnock did take a liberal shift later in his life.

Francis Schaeffer ‘indispensable’ to SBC

by David Roach, posted Thursday, October 30, 2014 (4 months ago)

NASHVILLE (BP) — The late Francis Schaeffer was known to pick up the phone during the early years of the Southern Baptist Convention’s conservative resurgence. Paige Patterson knew to expect a call from Schaeffer around Christmas with the question, “You’re not growing weary in well-doing are you?”

Francis Schaeffer & the SBC 

Patterson, a leader in the movement to return the SBC to a high view of Scripture, would reply, “No, Dr. Schaeffer. I’m under fire, but I’m doing fine. And I’m trusting the Lord and proceeding on.”

To some it may seem strange that an international Presbyterian apologist and analyst of pop culture would take such interest in a Baptist controversy over biblical inerrancy.

But to Schaeffer it made perfect sense.

He believed churches were acquiescing to the world, abandoning their belief that the Bible is without error in everything it said. A watered-down theology left the SBC with decreased power to battle cultural evils. To Schaeffer the convention was the last major American denomination with hope for reversing this “great evangelical disaster,” as he put it.

Thirty years after Schaeffer’s death, Baptist leaders still remember how he took time from his speaking, writing and filmmaking schedule to quietly encourage Patterson; Paul Pressler, a judge from Texas with whom Patterson worked closely during the conservative resurgence; Adrian Rogers, a Memphis pastor who served three terms SBC president; and others.

By the early 1990s, conservatives had elected an unbroken string of convention presidents and moved in position to shift the balance of power on all convention boards and committees from the theologically moderate establishment. But at the time of Schaeffer’s annual calls, the outcome of the controversy was still in doubt.

“I strongly suspect that he was afraid I would not hold strong,” Patterson, now president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas, told Baptist Press. “He had seen so many people fold up under pressure that he assumed we probably would too. So he would call and ask for a report.”

A worldwide ministry

Schaeffer was born in 1912 in Germantown, Pa., and was saved at age 18 through a combination of personal Bible reading and attending a tent revival meeting. Within months of his conversion he felt called to vocational ministry and eventually enrolled at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he studied New Testament under J. Gresham Machen and apologetics under Cornelius Val Til.

Schaeffer withdrew from Westminster before he graduated to attend the more fundamentalist-leaning Faith Theological Seminary in Wilmington, Del. In keeping with early 20th-century fundamentalism, Schaeffer emphasized separation from the world and personal holiness. Among the practices he opposed were theater attendance and dancing. Schaeffer retained his fundamentalist commitments through 10 years of pastoring in the U.S. and then service as a Presbyterian missionary in Europe.

In the early 1950s, however, a crisis of faith led Schaeffer and his wife Edith to begin engaging culture with the Gospel rather than shunning it. They founded a retreat center in Switzerland called L’Abri — French for “the shelter” — where he studied culture from a Christian perspective and engaged young people with the claims of Christ.

L’Abri grew and was featured in TIME magazine in 1960. Soon Schaeffer emerged as a popular author and speaker, explaining how western civilization had departed from a Judeo-Christian worldview and setting forth Christianity as the only solution to societal ills.

Schaeffer “wakened the cultural consciousness of the evangelical community,” Bruce Little, director of the Francis Schaeffer Collection at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, told BP. The Schaeffer Collection includes all of the apologist’s personal papers and has been digitized by the North Carolina seminary.

“He thought that man’s dilemma was that man was fighting against the evil of the day, but he wasn’t winning,” Little, who also serves as senior professor of philosophy at Southeastern, said. “Schaeffer thought the answer to this is found in the Scriptures.”

From a Christian worldview perspective, Schaeffer wrote and spoke about such topics as the environment, abortion, art, literature, music, intellectual history and denominational decline. In the 1970s and 1980s, audiences packed auditoriums across America to hear him speak. He died of cancer in 1984.

Southern Baptist connections

Schaeffer’s interest in engaging culture made him particularly appealing to Southern Baptist conservatives. He helped provide them with a “battle plan” to fight cultural evils and what they perceived as theological drift in their denomination, Richard Land, president of Southern Evangelical Seminary, told BP.

“The one thing I heard growing up in Southern Baptist churches that was just plain wrong went something like this,” Land, former president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said. “We’re Southern Baptist. That means we don’t get involved in anything controversial. We just preach the Gospel.”

As a corrective to that notion, Schaeffer “made it very clear to us that the Bible is true seven days a week, 24 hours a day and its truth is to be applied to every area of life,” Land said.

Along with theologian Carl F.H. Henry, Schaeffer was the key intellectual influence on leaders of the conservative resurgence, Land said. When conservatives started to be elected as the executives of Baptist institutions, Henry spoke at Land’s inauguration at the Christian Life Commission (the ERLC’s precursor), R. Albert Mohler Jr.’s at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky and Timothy George’s at Beeson Divinity School in Alabama.

“If Schaeffer had still been alive, we would have had him come,” Land said. He noted that Schaeffer was “close” to Rogers and “admired” by Bailey Smith, two conservative SBC presidents. Edith Schaeffer and Patterson’s wife Dorothy were close friends and travelled together in the early 1980s speaking on the importance of the home.

Clark Pinnock, a former New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary professor who mentored conservative resurgence leaders before taking a leftward theological turn in his own thinking, served on Schaeffer’s staff at L’Abri.

Another Southern Baptist to feel Schaeffer’s personal influence was James Parker, professor of worldview and culture at Southern Seminary. After reading works by Schaeffer and spending two months at L’Abri during his doctoral studies at Basel University in Switzerland, Parker decided he wanted to open a center for evangelism and discipleship like Schaeffer’s.

In 1992 Parker founded the Trinity Institute, a nonprofit study and retreat center near Waco, Texas, where he tutors individuals in the Christian faith and hosts conferences exploring the integration of Christianity to all areas of life.

Schaeffer was “a paradigm for the engagement of the mind for the faith, and so that was quite inspirational and encouraging to me,” Parker told BP.

Pro-life issues

The pro-life cause was one area in which Schaeffer strongly influenced evangelicals, including Southern Baptists. With his book and accompanying film series “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” — coauthored with C. Everett Koop, who went on to become U.S. surgeon general — Schaeffer helped convince Southern Baptists that they had to protest abortion.

In a 1979 interview with BP editor Art Toalston, then-religion editor of the Jackson Daily News in Mississippi, Schaeffer said the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion was “completely arbitrary medically” in its assumption that “a human being is a person at one moment and not another.”

He added that the ruling “doesn’t conform to past rulings at all. It invalidated the abortion laws of almost every state in the union. In all these states, the people as a whole felt that abortion was wrong. But the Supreme Court says it’s right.

“Not having a Christian absolute that says the Supreme Court’s ruling is wrong because it breaks the ethic God has revealed, people took what the law says to be right,” Schaeffer said.

Prominent Southern Baptist conservatives, including W.A. Criswell of First Baptist Church in Dallas and Carl Henry, were not always pro-life, Land explained, but shifted their views as they saw the massive loss of life caused by abortion — a tragedy that Schaeffer highlighted.

Whatever Happened to the Human Race? was and is “devastating” to the abortion movement, Land said. “How anybody can read that book and not be motivated to take part in pro-life marches is beyond me.”

Finishing well

Little of Southeastern Seminary understands firsthand why Schaeffer was so influential. He remembers listening to him speak at Liberty University in April 1984, the month before he died. By that time Schaeffer was so weak that he was living on milkshakes and sometimes had to be carried to speaking engagements on a stretcher.

During a question-and-answer session, one student “stood to his feet and said, ‘Dr. Schaeffer, it seems to me that the church is in the 10th round. It’s bloody. It’s beaten. It’s on its knees. Is there any hope we can win?'” Little recounted.

“I can see Schaeffer now,” Little continued. “He leaned forward, brought the mic to his mouth and said, ‘Son, if you do it to win, you’ve lost already.'” Whether they win or lose, Christians fight the culture wars, Schaeffer said, “because our risen Lord has commanded us.”David Roach is chief national correspondent for Baptist Press, the Southern Baptist Convention’s news service.Get Baptist Press headlines and breaking news on Twitter (@BaptistPress), Facebook (Facebook.com/BaptistPress) and in your email (baptistpress.com/SubscribeBP).__________Pictured below Dr. C. Everett Koop and Billy Graham

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Ronald Reagan with Billy Graham:

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The Bible and Archaeology – Is the Bible from God? (Kyle Butt 42 min)

Adrian Rogers on Darwinism

How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (2 hrs)

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

Francis Schaeffer Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Episode 1) ABORTION

Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro)

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September 10, 2014 – 9:16 am

___________ What a blessing to be a member of Bellevue Baptist from 1975 to 1983 and participate in many of those years in the Bellevue Baptist Singing Christmas Tree. Jim Whitmire always did a great job of planning and directing and Adrian Rogers always did a super job with the short concise presentation of the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Tagged Adrian Rogers, Jim Whitmire | Edit | Comments (0)

Examples of Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer Confronting Modern Culture With The Bible! Part 2 Evolutionist William Provine

October 27, 2014 – 7:44 am

_______________________________ Adrian Rogers pictured below: __________________ I sent William Provine a letter several months ago with a CD of the following message by Adrian Rogers and in the letter were several arguments from Schaeffer. Adrian Rogers – How you can be certain the Bible is the word of God Today I am sending out another […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Tagged (Paul Kurtz (1925-2012), Albert Ellis (1913-2007), and Michael Martin (1932-)., Archie J. Bahm (1907-1996), Aron S “Gil” Martin ( 1910-1997), Barbara Marie Tabler (1915-1996), Bette Chambers (1930-), Brian Charlesworth (1945-), Carl Sagan (1934-1996), Ernest Mayr (1904-2005), Francisco J. Ayala (1934-) Elliott Sober (1948-), George Wald (1906-1997), Gordon Stein (1941-1996), H. J. Eysenck (1916-1997), John Hospers (1918-2011),John J. Shea (1969-), Kevin Padian (1951-), Lloyd Morain (1917-2010), Mary Morain (1911-1999), Matt Cartmill (1943-), Matthew I. Spetter (1921-2012), Michael A. Crawford (1938-), Milton Fingerman (1928-), Milton Friedman (1912-2006), Nicolaas Bloembergen (1920-), Renate Vambery (1916-2005),Robert L. Erdmann (1929-2006), Robert Shapiro (1935-2011), Sol Gordon (1923-2008), Warren Allen Smith (1921-) | Edit | Comments (0)

Examples of Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer Confronting Modern Culture With The Bible! Part 1 (Atheists Abandon Atheism)

October 16, 2014 – 8:11 am

__________ Adrian Rogers – How you can be certain the Bible is the word of God   In the 1970’s and 1980’s I was a member of Bellevue Baptist in Memphis where Adrian Rogers was pastor and was a student at ECS from the 5th grade to the 12th grade where I was introduced to […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Tagged (Paul Kurtz (1925-2012), Albert Ellis (1913-2007), Antony Flew, Archie J. Bahm (1907-1996), Aron S “Gil” Martin ( 1910-1997), Barbara Marie Tabler (1915-1996), Bette Chambers (1930-), Brian Charlesworth (1945-), Carl Sagan (1934-1996), Ernest Mayr (1904-2005), Francisco J. Ayala (1934-) Elliott Sober (1948-), George Wald (1906-1997), Gordon Stein (1941-1996), H. J. Eysenck (1916-1997), John Hospers (1918-2011),John J. Shea (1969-), Kevin Padian (1951-), Lloyd Morain (1917-2010), Mary Morain (1911-1999), Matt Cartmill (1943-), Matthew I. Spetter (1921-2012), Michael A. Crawford (1938-), Michael Martin (1932-).,Milton Fingerman (1928-), Milton Friedman (1912-2006), Nicolaas Bloembergen (1920-), Renate Vambery (1916-2005), Robert L. Erdmann (1929-2006), Robert Shapiro (1935-2011), Sol Gordon (1923-2008), Warren Allen Smith (1921-) | Edit | Comments (0)

Norman Geisler on Francis Schaeffer’s view that humans must be willing to live consistently with what they believe!!!!

December 23, 2014 – 11:53 am

Atheists confronted: How I confronted Carl Sagan the year before he died jh47

May 19, 2011 – 10:30 am

In today’s news you will read about Kirk Cameron taking on the atheist Stephen Hawking over some recent assertions he made concerning the existence of heaven. Back in December of 1995 I had the opportunity to correspond with Carl Sagan about a year before his untimely death. Sarah Anne Hughes in her article,”Kirk Cameron criticizes […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted | Edit | Comments (2)

My correspondence with George Wald and Antony Flew!!!

May 12, 2014 – 1:14 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 41 Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (Featured artist is Marina Abramović)

January 8, 2015 – 5:23 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 40 Timothy Leary (Featured artist is Margaret Keane)

January 1, 2015 – 4:14 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 39 Tom Wolfe (Featured artist is Richard Serra)

December 25, 2014 – 5:04 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 38 Woody Allen and Albert Camus “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide” (Feature on artist Hamish Fulton Photographer )

December 18, 2014 – 4:30 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 37 Mahatma Gandhi and “Relieving the Tension in the East” (Feature on artist Luc Tuymans)

December 11, 2014 – 4:19 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 36 Julian Huxley:”God does not in fact exist, but act as if He does!” (Feature on artist Barry McGee)

December 4, 2014 – 4:10 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 35 Robert M. Pirsig (Feature on artist Kerry James Marshall)

November 27, 2014 – 4:43 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 34 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Feature on artist Shahzia Sikander)

November 20, 2014 – 4:28 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 33 Aldous Huxley (Feature on artist Matthew Barney )

November 13, 2014 – 4:39 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 32 Steven Weinberg and Woody Allen and “The Meaningless of All Things” (Feature on photographer Martin Karplus )

November 6, 2014 – 4:42 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 31 David Hume and “How do we know we know?” (Feature on artist William Pope L. )

October 30, 2014 – 5:34 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 30 Rene Descartes and “How do we know we know?” (Feature on artist Olafur Eliasson)

October 23, 2014 – 5:01 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 29 W.H. Thorpe and “The Search for an Adequate World-View: A Question of Method” (Feature on artist Jeff Koons)

October 16, 2014 – 5:06 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 28 Woody Allen and “The Mannishness of Man” (Feature on artist Ryan Gander)

October 9, 2014 – 5:10 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 27 Jurgen Habermas (Featured artist is Hiroshi Sugimoto)

September 25, 2014 – 1:01 pm

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 26 Bettina Aptheker (Featured artist is Krzysztof Wodiczko)

September 25, 2014 – 4:00 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 25 BOB DYLAN (Part C) Francis Schaeffer comments on Bob Dylan’s song “Ballad of a Thin Man” and the disconnect between the young generation of the 60’s and their parents’ generation (Feature on artist Fred Wilson)

September 18, 2014 – 3:57 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 24 BOB DYLAN (Part B) Francis Schaeffer comments on Bob Dylan’s words from HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED!! (Feature on artist Susan Rothenberg)

September 11, 2014 – 4:18 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 23 BOB DYLAN (Part A) (Feature on artist Josiah McElheny)Francis Schaeffer on the proper place of rebellion with comments by Bob Dylan and Samuel Rutherford

September 2, 2014 – 8:42 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 22 “The School of Athens by Raphael” (Feature on the artist Sally Mann)

August 11, 2014 – 2:19 pm

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 21 William B. Provine (Feature on artist Andrea Zittel)

June 12, 2014 – 2:52 pm

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 20 Woody Allen and Materialistic Humanism: The World-View of Our Era (Feature on artist Ida Applebroog)

May 12, 2014 – 4:35 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 19 Movie Director Luis Bunuel (Feature on artist Oliver Herring)

May 1, 2014 – 11:53 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 18 “Michelangelo’s DAVID is the statement of what humanistic man saw himself as being tomorrow” (Feature on artist Paul McCarthy)

April 25, 2014 – 8:26 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 17 Francis Schaeffer discusses quotes of Andy Warhol from “The Observer June 12, 1966″ Part C (Feature on artist David Hockney plus many pictures of Warhol with famous friends)

April 18, 2014 – 7:37 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 16 Francis Schaeffer discusses quotes of Andy Warhol from “The Observer June 12, 1966″ Part B (Feature on artist James Rosenquist plus many pictures of Warhol with famous friends)

April 11, 2014 – 6:14 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 15 Francis Schaeffer discusses quotes of Andy Warhol from “The Observer June 12, 1966″ Part A (Feature on artist Robert Indiana plus many pictures of Warhol with famous friends)

April 4, 2014 – 5:58 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 14 David Friedrich Strauss (Feature on artist Roni Horn )

March 28, 2014 – 2:50 pm

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 13 Jacob Bronowski and Materialistic Humanism: The World-View of Our Era (Feature on artist Ellen Gallagher )

March 21, 2014 – 7:18 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 12 H.J.Blackham and Materialistic Humanism: The World-View of Our Era (Feature on artist Arturo Herrera)

March 14, 2014 – 9:07 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 11 Thomas Aquinas and his Effect on Art and HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Episode 2: THE MIDDLES AGES (Feature on artist Tony Oursler )

March 4, 2014 – 9:04 pm

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 10 David Douglas Duncan (Feature on artist Georges Rouault )

February 28, 2014 – 5:16 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 9 Jasper Johns (Feature on artist Cai Guo-Qiang )

February 21, 2014 – 6:51 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 8 “The Last Year at Marienbad” by Alain Resnais (Feature on artist Richard Tuttle and his return to the faith of his youth)

February 13, 2014 – 7:59 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 7 Jean Paul Sartre (Feature on artist David Hooker )

February 4, 2014 – 2:00 pm

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 6 The Adoration of the Lamb by Jan Van Eyck which was saved by MONUMENT MEN IN WW2 (Feature on artist Makoto Fujimura)

January 31, 2014 – 5:43 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 5 John Cage (Feature on artist Gerhard Richter)

January 21, 2014 – 8:07 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 4 ( Schaeffer and H.R. Rookmaaker worked together well!!! (Feature on artist Mike Kelley Part B )

January 14, 2014 – 8:52 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 3 PAUL GAUGUIN’S 3 QUESTIONS: “Where do we come from? What art we? Where are we going? and his conclusion was a suicide attempt” (Feature on artist Mike Kelley Part A)

January 7, 2014 – 11:06 pm

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 2 “A look at how modern art was born by discussing Monet, Renoir, Pissaro, Sisley, Degas,Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and Picasso” (Feature on artist Peter Howson)

January 1, 2014 – 4:27 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 1 HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? “The Roman Age” (Feature on artist Tracey Emin)

December 10, 2013 – 2:38 pm

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 250 THE BEATLES and James Joyce Featured artist is Jethro Tull guitarist Jeffrey Hammond

January 17, 2019 – 1:25 am

____________

“Goo goo ga joob” Where did this phrase in the song I AM THE WALRUS come from?  In the blog post, “I Am the Walrus,” I read these words, “Some people speculate that Lennon got these lines from James Joyce’s long poem, Finnegans Wake.”

 

Like Edgar Allan Poe,  James Joyce was in the grips of alcoholism for most of his life and in this same song Lennon sang, “Seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.” Poe died in 1949 as a drunk. As a drunk he probably got kicked around the street as others tried to rob him of whatever belongings he had. Alcoholism and being addicted to drugs are very similar and in the song I AM THE WALRUS we have many references to drugs. When I think of both James Joyce and Edgar Allan Poe the Bible passage that comes to mind is Proverbs 23:29-35.

29 Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath babbling? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes?

30 They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine.

31 Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright.

32 At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.

33 Thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thine heart shall utter perverse things.

34 Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast.

35 They have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick; they have beaten me, and I felt it not: when shall I awake? I will seek it yet again.

“I am the Walrus”

The Beatles

Produced By: George Martin
Written By: John Lennon & Paul McCartney

[Verse 1]
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly
I’m crying

[Verse 2]
Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come
Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday
Man, you’ve been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long

[Chorus]
I am the egg man, they are the egg men
I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob

[Verse 3]
Mister City, policeman sitting
Pretty little policemen in a row
See how they fly like Lucy in the Sky, see how they run
I’m crying, I’m crying
I’m crying, I’m crying

[Verse 4]
Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess
Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl you let your knickers down

[Chorus]

[Verse 5]
Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun
If the sun don’t come, you get a tan
From standing in the English rain

[Chorus]

[Verse 6]
Expert textpert choking smokers
Don’t you think the joker laughs at you?
See how they smile like pigs in a sty
See how they snide
I’m crying

[Verse 7]
Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower
Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe

[Outro]
I am the egg man, they are the egg men
I am the walrus, goo goo good job g’goo goo good job
Goo goo g’joob g’goo goo g’joob g’goo

Everybody’s got one, everybody’s got one (Repeat until end)

I Am the Walrus

by The Beatles

“See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly / I’m crying”

Quick ThoughtIn an interview with Playboy magazine, John Lennon said that this line and the one before it were inspired by two different acid trips.

Deep Thought“The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko.” Just as The Beatles were the defining music group of the 1960s, acid (LCD) was the defining drug. The drug induces an altered state of perception in its users, causing distortions in physical, sensory, visual, audio, and thought processes. People sometimes feel colors and hear shapes, becoming almost synesthetic. Fixed objects seem to move or ripple, looking around causes sights to blur or leave a trail (tracers), and dull objects sparkle and shine. Some users claim to have intense religious experiences while tripping on acid. Others say that they enter other dimensions or relive their own birth.

LSD was invented accidentally by a Swedish chemist looking for a blood stimulant. It has since been used experimentally in psychotherapy to bring out repressed memories. The drug has also been used by doctors to elevate patients to a new level of self-awareness, allowing them to recognize problems that they previously denied, such as alcoholism. Although LSD was at first legal for use, it has now been banned in the US and other countries. Of course, that didn’t stop The Beatles and many other young people in the sixties and seventies from experimenting with the drug for recreational purposes. The Beatles openly admit that many of their songs were written at least in part while under the influence of LSD.

“Goo goo ga joob”

Quick ThoughtSome people speculate that Lennon got these lines from James Joyce’s long poem, Finnegans Wake, while others see them as pure gibberish.

Deep Thought James Joyce was a modernist Irish writer who was famous for his works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, andDubliners. Some Joyce/Beatles fans have suggested (rather dubiously in our view) that “goo goo ga job” comes from part 557.7 of Finnegans Wake:
Here’s the excerpt from Finnegans Wake… watch out for that famous “googoo goosth” or you’ll miss it:

cramp for Hemself and Co, Esquara, or them four hoarsemen on
their apolkaloops, Norreys, Soothbys, Yates and Welks, and,
galorybit of the sanes in hevel, there was a crick up the stirkiss
and when she ruz the cankle to see, galohery, downand she went
on her knees to blessersef that were knogging together like milk-
juggles as if it was the wrake of the hapspurus or old Kong
Gander O’Toole of the Mountains or his googoo goosth she
seein, sliving off over the sawdust lobby out ofthe backroom, wan
ter, that was everywans in turruns, in his honeymoon trim, holding
up his fingerhals, with the clookey in his fisstball, tocher of davy’s,
tocher of ivileagh, for her to whisht, you sowbelly, and the
whites of his pious eyebulbs swering her to silence and coort;

In our view, the odds that John Lennon actually intended his line as a shout-out to these two obscure words in the middle of this one very long sentence in the middle of a very long and challenging experimental novel are somewhere between slim and none. But it would be kinda cool, if true!

“See how they fly like Lucy in the Sky”

Quick ThoughtThis is, of course, a nod to another Beatles hit, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” from the groundbreaking album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released a few months before “I Am the Walrus” in 1967.

Deep Thought“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is among the most famous of all Beatles songs. Although many fans claim that it is a song about acid (the initials spell out LSD), Lennon told an interviewer that the song is actually inspired by a drawing his son Julian brought home from grammar school:

LENNON: “My son Julian came in one day with a picture he painted about a school friend of his named Lucy. He had sketched in some stars in the sky and called it ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’ Simple.”

INTERVIEWER: “The other images in the song weren’t drug-inspired?”

LENNON: “The images were from ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualizing that. There was also the image of the female who would someday come save me—a ‘girl with kaleidoscope eyes’ who would come out of the sky. It turned out to be Yoko, though I hadn’t met Yoko yet. So maybe it should be ‘Yoko in the Sky with Diamonds.'”

The two Lewis Carroll classics (Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) were John Lennon’s favorite books of all time. It’s really not surprising that imagery from both books pops up constantly in his songs. Both “I Am the Walrus” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” draw heavily from Carroll’s writings. Even more interesting is that Lennon repeats the Humpty Dumpty/Eggman imagery in both songs. Drug-inspired or not, it certainly seems that Lewis Carroll was very much on Lennon’s mind when he penned these lyrics.

The real Lucy who inspired the song, Lucy Richardson, came out to the press 40 years after the song was written explaining that she was, in fact, the girl behind the immortal ballad. Evidently, Julian Lennon had a crush on her in grammar school and actually dedicated several art pieces to her, including the famous picture of the girl surrounded by a starry sky.

“Semolina Pilchard”

Quick ThoughtThis is a reference to Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher, head of the Scotland Yard Drugs Unit. He was the most-feared drug agent in Britain in the 1960s and had an obsessive craving for the spotlight. Arresting a Beatle on pot charges is a quick way to get your name in many, many newspapers.

Deep ThoughtSergeant Norman Pilcher was the head of one of Britain’s police drug squads in the late sixties. Pilcher wanted to be famous, so he hatched a plan to go after the members of the Beatles one by one. He started with the man he suspected did the most drugs, John Lennon. Lennon and Yoko Ono were tipped off that John was on Pilcher’s hit list, but it was too late. Their flat was stormed by officer/canine units. They were arrested for possession of cannabis resin and obstructing the search warrant. John was told that Yoko, who was pregnant, would be let off the hook if he pleaded guilty. So he did so and they were released. Tragically, Yoko had to be immediately rushed to the hospital, where she had a miscarriage. John later told the press that the whole thing was set up by Pilcher as a media ploy for good photo ops. The news stations were at the flat before the police even got there! When John pleaded guilty, Pilcher told him, ”Well, we’ve got it now. So it’s nothing personal …” The picture on the back of the jacket of the album Unfinished Music No. 2 — Life with the Lions is of John and Yoko as they were being dragged out of the police station. Lennon also explained that Jimi Hendrix, who’d owned the same flat before them, had left piles of drugs when he moved out. John had tried to clean up the drugs when he found out about the raid. Apparently, he wasn’t quite thorough enough, hence the incriminating resin.

“Seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe”

Quick ThoughtEdgar Allan Poe was a very famous American writer of short stories and poetry who lived during the 1800s. He was well-known for his dark, penetratingly creepy tales.

Deep ThoughtPoe was a brilliant, if dark, guy. His stories and poems—including“The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”—are short yet incredibly powerful, probing universal human flaws like insecurity, fear, and pride.

(Adrian Rogers pictured below)

Adrian Rogers in his sermon THE BATTLE OF THE BOTTLE notes the following:

There is the sorrow factor. There’s also the contention factor. Verse 29 says, “Who has contention?” Now, the word contention means warfare, disagreement, strife, enmity. Anybody who has done any counseling, or anybody who has lived in this world of ours, knows that voice that comes out of the mouth of the bottle. Strife comes from the bottle.  Arguments come from the bottle. Violence comes from the bottle. Murder comes from the bottle. As a matter of fact, Time Magazine reported that one-half of all murders are alcohol related, one half of all murders are alcohol related. Eighty percent according to statisticians, eighty percent of all crime is alcohol involved, eighty percent of all crime.

A former ambassador and congressman, Claire Booth Luce, writing on crime in U.S. News and World Report said this, “Assuming that the present growth rate of crime, alcoholism, drug taking, and commercial sex persist in 1996, America by then will be the most drunken, drug-soaked, sex-ridden, and criminal society on earth.” And yet we’re spending $600 million a year telling people, “Just drink it, drink it, drink it.”

There is the contention factor, then there’s the foolishness factor. Look again in verse 29. “Who hath babbling?” What does this babbling refer to?  Have you ever listened to a drunk talk? Wouldn’t it be good if you could just video tape people and make them watch themselves later on? Wouldn’t they be ashamed of their babbling?  Shakespeare said, “What fools men are to put that in their mouths that which will steal their brains away.” The foolishness factor, nothing else, just the sheer foolishness of it.

But there’s the mutilation and death factor. Look in verse 29. “Who hath wounds without a cause?” Now, pay attention. This year in America, 200,000 Americans will die as the direct result of beverage alcohol.  Did that register? Did that register? Two hundred thousand will have wounds without a cause, 200,000.  Now you think for a moment. We talk about the atomic bomb, and we have those people who are trying to ban the bomb and the anti-nuclear movement and so forth.  We dropped those bombs on Nagasaki. We dropped those bombs or that bomb on Hiroshima. In Hiroshima, 80,000 died; 80,000 Japanese died in Hiroshima. Nagasaki, 35,000 died. Well, I want to tell you, we have the equivalent of two Hiroshimas and one Nagasaki every year in America, every year. I mean, we’re still talking about what that bomb did. I’m telling you every year in America and the bomb that’s dropped on us, we still promote it. We still laugh about it. We still drink it. It’s still featured on television.

Now, listen, people demonstrate against the Vietnam War. They said, “Well, we lost so many American boys.”  In 9 years, do you know how many boys we lost? Fifty seven thousand boys, tragic indeed, in nine years, and every one of them precious to God and precious to us. But I want to tell you at the same period of time when 57,000 lost their lives in Vietnam, 2 million lost their lives here at home from King Alcohol. Where is Jane Fonda when we really need her? Huh?  Where is Ralph Nader? I’d love to see Ralph Nader get on the alcohol kick, wouldn’t you? Huh? Where are these people? I mean, I’m talking about 2 million people in nine years whose lives are snuffed out. Who has wounds without cause? This year 50,000 will die in traffic-related automobile accidents, about fifty thousand fatalities.  One-half of those will be alcohol-related.

Now, dear friend, if there was something else that were doing this, there’d be telethons and talkathons and radiothons and there would be societies against it. Politicians would run on a platform to do something against it, but we don’t do anything about it, no. Because we’re deceived thereby. “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” Did you know that this week, as in every week, 400 Americans will die, 400 Americans will die because of alcohol, this week.  Now, that’s about as many as can fly on a 747, a great big airplane. Suppose every week in America a 747 went down with four hundred people on it. Do you think somebody would organize to do something about it? I mean, every week a 747, there goes another one, and 400 more, 400 more killed. We don’t do a thing about it.  We don’t do a thing about it. I mean, I want to tell you, the liquor people have sold us a bill of goods, haven’t they?

I want to tell you, the breweries, they are racking it in; they are bringing it in. There is the destruction factor, rules without a cause. I’ll tell you there’s another factor when we’re talking about the misery of the bottle, it’s the mental anguish factor. Verse 29 speaks of redness of eyes. He’s talking there about weeping. He’s talking there about anguish. He’s talking there about sorrow – unmitigated horror and sorrow come. These people are doing this to have a good time. Friend, when I have a good time I want to know about it the next day. I don’t want to have red eyes. The Bible says, “The blessing of the Lord, it maketh full and bringeth no sorrow with it.” May I give you a loose translation? I can have a good time being a Christian without a hangover. “The blessing of the Lord, it maketh full and addeth no sorrow with it.” Red eyes, white liver, dark brown breath, a yellow streak, a blue outlook.

There is the sorrow factor, the mental anguish factor, then there’s the health factor.  Look again if you will in verses 31 and 32 of this chapter. “Look not thou upon the wine; when it is red it giveth its color in the cup, when it moves itself aright.” Look in verse 32, “At the last it biteth like a serpent and stings like an adder.” Now, what’s so bad about the serpent’s bite? He’s just got little teeth. What’s so bad about it? It’s what’s in the serpent’s bite, which is what? Poison, poison. Have you ever thought about the word intoxicated? Have you ever thought about that word?  Do you know what toxic is? Do you know what toxic means? What? What is toxic? Poison!  So if a man is intoxicated, he is what? Poisoned.  You see, what people are doing is poisoning themselves. When a man is drunk he is poisoning himself. Have you ever thought why a man throws up when he gets drunk?

Because it’s poison, he’s got more sense in his stomach than he has in his head.  His stomach says, “Hey, that’s poison, that’s poison.” He’s poisoning himself. I mean, we’re selling poison. It’s a narcotic. It affects the liver. It affects the heart. It affects the mind. It affects the muscles.  It affects the digestion. People are literally poisoning themselves, and it is a major health factor in the United States.

Now, there are people who tell us alcoholism is a disease. No, it’s a sickness, not a disease. So, what’s the difference? Friend, we’re not in the habit of putting diseases in the bottles and advertising them and selling them across the counter and so forth.  No, man, he’s sick, he is very sick, but dear friend, don’t call it a disease. It’s not like diphtheria.  It’s not like polio. It’s not like some other kind of a disease. No, no, no, no, it is a sickness but it is a self-inflicted sickness that a person has poisoned himself, he has poisoned himself.  “It bites like a serpent, it stings like an adder” – there’s the misery factor and yet, we’re told to drink it.

There’s the health factor. There’s the immorality factor. Look if you will in verse 33. “Thine eyes shall behold strange women.” Now, what does he mean by strange women?  Does it mean she’s funny looking?  No, no, no, no, look in verse 27. “For a whore is a deep ditch and a strange women is a narrow pit.” He’s talking about immorality. When a person drinks, restraint is taken away. Somebody made this little couplet, this little poem, Audrey Nash, I believe: Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker. Do you know what he meant by that? If you want to seduce a woman, use liquor. We all know that liquor removes restraint. Do you know what the brewer will say? The brewer and the beer barren and the distiller will say, “Now look, we don’t cause people to steal. We don’t cause people to kill. We don’t cause people to be reckless. We don’t cause people to commit immorality.  We don’t cause that, alcohol doesn’t cause that, that was already in them.” I couldn’t agree more.

But you see, God has given something called restraint that is built into us. It is the alcohol that removes that restraint. It is the alcohol that removes and blurs the distinction between that which is right and that which is wrong and numbs that part of the brain and the conscience so that people will do that.  But they ought to have restraints against them, to not do it, so they will kill and rape and maim and murder and steal and lie. The immorality factor. God only knows the homes that have been broken because of the immorality that has been brought about by someone whose inhibitions have been broken down through this thing called liquor.

(Francis Schaeffer below)

Francis Schaeffer while discussing THE BOOK OF ECCLESIASTES and Solomon’s view of life UNDER THE SUN noted that alcohol does not bring satisfaction to people and he uses Ernest Hemingway as an example:

In Ecclesiastes 1:8 he drives this home when he states, “All things are wearisome; Man is not able to tell it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Nor is the ear filled with hearing.” Solomon is stating here the fact that there is no final satisfaction because you don’t get to the end of the thing. THERE IS NO FINAL SATISFACTION. This is related to Leonardo da Vinci’s similar search for universals and then meaning in life. 

In Ecclesiastes 5:11 Solomon again pursues this theme, “When good things increase, those who consume them increase. So what is the advantage to their owners except to look on?”  Doesn’t that sound modern? It is as modern as this evening. Solomon here is stating the fact there is no reaching completion in anything and this is the reason there is no final satisfaction. There is simply no place to stop. It is impossible when laying up wealth for oneself when to stop. It is impossible to have the satisfaction of completion. What do you do and the answer is to get drunk and this was not thought of in the RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KAHAYYAM:

Ecclesiastes 2:1-3

I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure. So enjoy yourself.” And behold, it too was futility. 2 I said of laughter, “It is madness,” and of pleasure, “What does it accomplish?” 3 I explored with my mind how to stimulate my body with wine while my mind was guiding me wisely, and how to take hold of folly, until I could see what good there is for the sons of men to do under heaven the few years of their lives.

The Daughter of the Vine:

You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse
I made a Second Marriage in my house;
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Translation by Edward Fitzgerald)

A perfectly good philosophy coming out of Islam, but Solomon is not the first man that thought of it nor the last. In light of what has been presented by Solomon is the solution just to get intoxicated and black the think out? So many people have taken to alcohol and the dope which so often follows in our day. This approach is incomplete, temporary and immature. Papa Hemingway can find the champagne of Paris sufficient for a time, but one he left his youth he never found it sufficient again. He had a lifetime spent looking back to Paris and that champagne and never finding it enough. It is no solution and Solomon says so too.

(Francis Schaeffer below)

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APRIL 14, 2010

James Joyce in Sgt Pepper Album Cover

James Joyce is hiding in the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album cover!

Whose is the face hiding below Bob Dylan?

It’s James Joyce! Apparently, in the original test photos for the shoot captured the images at different angles, and you can see his whole face (bottom right).

Thanks to The Lennon Prophecy and The Sgt Pepper Album Cover Shoot Dissected for the images and the discovery.

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The Beatles – In my Life

Published on Feb 25, 2011

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Here Comes The Sun – The Beatles Tribute

Not sung by George but good nonetheless!!

Francis Schaeffer’s favorite album was SGT. PEPPER”S and he said of the album “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.”  (at the 14 minute point in episode 7 of HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? ) 

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How Should We Then Live – Episode Seven – 07 – Portuguese Subtitles

Francis Schaeffer

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The Beatles – Revolution

Published on Oct 20, 2015

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Featured artist is Jeffrey Hammond

Jethro Tull – Nothing is Easy – Berkeley 1971

How Much Is That Doggy In The Window? – Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond (Jethro Till)

JETHRO TULL: “THICK AS A BRICK INTERVIEW” with Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, Jeffrey Hammond, (2004)

Jethro Tull guitarist Jeffrey Hammond

PUBLISHED: 00:00 17 October 2017

PHOTOGRAPHY: GLYNN WARD

Jeffrey with his picture of the front at Looe in Cornwall

Jeffrey with his picture of the front at Looe in Cornwall

Lancashire rock star Jeffrey Hammond is back home and about to reveal his hidden talent for art. But first, he spoke exclusively to Barbara Waite

Pleasure Beach Ramp is titled Shellfish Jeans: Evolution in RevolutionPleasure Beach Ramp is titled Shellfish Jeans: Evolution in Revolution

For a man who has played the world’s biggest venues as bass guitarist with 1970s prog rock giants Jethro Tull, Jeffrey Hammond is a surprisingly private man. In his second career as an artist he has studiously avoided the limelight and only close friends and relatives have ever seen his paintings – until now.

Lancashire Life was given an exclusive interview and the chance to see his works ahead of his first ever exhibition, to be held on the Fylde this month. It fulfils a promise to his late partner Tess who wanted him to share his distinctive paintings with a wider audience.

It is another important milestone in Jeffrey’s life. Born is Blackpool, he has come back to Lancashire where he grew up in a boarding house run by his parents in the shadow of the famous Tower.

He lived the rock star life from 1971-1975 and it all started with a chance encounter at Blackpool Grammar School. A fellow student, Ian Anderson, who had never spoken to him before said: ‘You look like a musician? What do you play?’ It was the start of a friendship that survives to this day.

The Lowry Centre is titled The bridge across communitiesThe Lowry Centre is titled The bridge across communities

Ian and another student John Evans wanted to form a group and invited Jeffrey to go with them to see Johnny Breeze and the Atlantics at their local youth club. Watching as the bass player was being mobbed by girls, Jeffrey agreed to be the be group’s bass guitarist despite having no musical training. So it was music, not art, that became the consuming passion during his last years at school.

The group – then known as The Blades – practised in the front room of at John’s mother’s home. ‘We made a horrible racket but in time we progressed from the youth club to doing gigs at workingmen’s clubs in Fleetwood and throughout the Fylde eventually going further afield to Nottingham, Newcastle and Manchester,’ said Jeffrey.

With the repetition of the repertoire the early excitement waned for Jeffrey and he re-took Art A level and joined an art foundation course at Blackpool Tech while his friends kept playing and moved to London.

His tutor suggested he do a painting course, so to apply for college he had to produce a work as part of his portfolio. His picture of a midwife holding a newly-born baby was, in his words, ‘not good’ and, even after it was improved a bit by his tutor, it was still rejected. That meant he could stay in Blackpool. ‘I was thrilled to bits that I would be able stay.’

This view of Bowness is actually titled Queuing for relaxationThis view of Bowness is actually titled Queuing for relaxation

From an early age, Jeffrey knew he wanted to express himself but had no real idea how to go about it. Luck was on his side and he took up a place at Central St Martins College in London when one of the students dropped out.

Still feeling unsure about the move, he was persuaded by his tutor to go but ‘felt like a fish out of water’ for almost all of the three-year course. ‘The other 19 student already felt themselves to be artists, but I had no sense of direction and learned mostly from a fellow student who is still a good friend to this day.

‘It was not an auspicious start to a career, but during the last six months I felt I was getting somewhere – had found the “something” I was looking for. But what to do next?’

Fate intervened again. After failing an interview to get on a Royal Academy course and with Ian and John’s band – now called Jethro Tull – started taking off, they asked him to house-sit and do some decorating – painting of a different kind – while they toured in America.

On their return he was told: ‘You’re joining the band.’ So within a couple of months he found himself working on the hit album Aqualung and touring Scandinavia. ‘I thought I might last a month, but they were all good musicians and helped me through.’

Adopting the name Hammond-Hammond as a joke – adding in his mother’s surname before she married – he started wearing a black and white striped suit and played a matching guitar – his trademark look and a feature of staged performances of the album, Thick as a Brick.

‘It was fabulously exciting touring the world and I enjoyed it for five years, but inside I knew I wanted to paint – to learn to paint.And that’s what I have been doing all these years. Learning.

‘That stage of my life ended abruptly. I just blurted it out at a business meeting that I was leaving with no previous intention of saying it. It wasn’t the best way to handle it, but the band accepted my decision and moved on.’

By this time Jeffrey had married Mahmaz, an Iranian princess distantly related to the Shah of Persia, and the best friend of Ian Anderson’s wife. Together they set up home in Gloucestershire in a beautiful house with land which Jeffrey developed over the happy years they spent there.

He started painting, though his first attempt at a watercolour of the local view was abandoned. Initially, 90 per cent of his time was spent on the 11 acres of gardens but gradually art took the lion’s share of his time.

The couple travelled extensively, to Iran, Europe and America all documented in Jeffrey’s detailed paintings to give a narrative to their trips.

‘It took me a long while to get used to the slower pace of life after the hectic days of the band. Getting close to nature helped, but I wanted to centre myself and I knew I had to begin the long struggle to learn to paint something meaningful.

‘I started with still life where you have absolute control over everything. I was in the very fortunate position of not having to sell my works so I could develop my ideas exactly how I wanted to. I was very privileged.

‘I had to work hard to achieve the painting style I now have. I didn’t have natural talent and I wanted – still want – each painting to be a challenge, to seize a special moment, to tell a story.

Mahmaz, who came to this country to study at boarding school, was interested in the arts, but more theatre and literature and from their base they were ideally place to visit the RSC in Stratford, theatre in Malvern and Bristol, and Welsh National Opera in Cardiff.

Her untimely death and their son’s decision to move to London forced Jeffrey into another big decision. The house they’d both loved was too big for one – it was time to uproot and start again. ‘It was a huge wrench to leave, but I knew I had to do it.’

He had missed living by the seaside, so travelled from Bognor Regis around the coast right up to Anglesey to try and find a home that felt right, but without success. That is until he returned to the Fylde coast he had loved as a boy, setting up home near to his mother.

Painting in his studio, Jeffrey uses photographs of subjects he has taken which suggest a storyline to him. ‘The photographs are essentially an aide-memoire being unable to paint on the spot for the months it takes me to complete each painting.

‘At a certain point the real painting takes over and I no longer look at the photographs, as the picture is well on the way to becoming an autonomous entity and happily has a life of its own.

‘Each picture I paint demands a fresh approach. It is a matter of instinct and feeling to try to achieve what I want, technical aspects being subservient to that. I don’t take myself too seriously, but I do take painting seriously and hope some of the intended humour is seen.’ A good example of that is the fact he often paints himself in the crowd. Look closely and you might spot him.

‘To use a musical analogy I have been trying to write symphonies or operas rather than three-minute songs; a desire to have the space and time to give to a full narrative,’ he added.

While the painting has been an ever-present in his life there have been reminders of the rock stars days. Seven years ago group leader Ian Anderson travelled to Blackpool to unveil a plaque presented by the Performing Rights Society for Music, commemorating the debut gig of his first band The Blades.

Jeffrey, joined by early fans, attended the ceremony as the plaque was unveiled at Holy Family Church Hall, Links Road, North Shore – life coming full circle.

It was a poignant evening for Jeffrey who had found happiness with a new partner Tess, and his assured paintings show an impressive mastery that he would have hardly imagined during those early music days.

She pressed Jeffrey to organise a public showing of his work as she felt people should see his paintings, but unfortunately she died before the exhibition was organised.

It is her legacy that a small selection of his work is now going on show at the Fylde Gallery in Lytham Booths from November 3 for four weeks. He’s called it ‘All the world’s a stage’ a quote from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. He is certainly a man who has played many parts in his time.

Tull factfile

Ian Anderson, flautist and songwriter, lives in the south of England and is still recording and touring under his own name.

John Evan (correct), keyboards, had his own construction company after he left the band and now lives in Australia.

Barrie Barlow, drummer, worked with Robert Plant and Jimmy page after the band broke up and is still involved in music.

Jeffrey played on Aqualung (1971),Thick as a Brick and Living in the Past (1972), A Passion Play (1973), War Child (1974), Minstrel in the Gallery (1975)

Jeffrey Hammond

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For those of a similar name, see Jeffery Hammond and Jeff Hammond (disambiguation).
Jeffrey Hammond Hammond
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Jeffrey Hammond in concert with Jethro Tull, 1973
Background information
Birth name Jeffrey Hammond
Born 30 July 1946 (age 71)
Blackpool, Lancashire, England
Origin Blackpool, England
Genres Progressive rock, Folk rock, Hard rock
Occupation(s) Musician
Instruments Bass guitar
Years active 1971–75, 1987–88, 1994
Associated acts Jethro Tull

Jeffrey Hammond (born 30 July 1946) sometimes credited as Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond, is an artist, musician, and former bass guitar player for the progressive rock band Jethro Tull.[1]

Hammond adopted the name “Hammond-Hammond” as a joke, since both his father’s name and mother’s maiden name were the same.[2] He also joked in interviews that his mother defiantly chose to keep her maiden name, just like Eleanor Roosevelt.

Musician with Jethro Tull[edit]

One of several band members from Blackpool, England, he met band leader Ian Anderson in school when he was 17 years old, eventually joining a band with Anderson and future Jethro Tull members John Evan and Barriemore Barlow. After leaving Grammar School, he opted to study painting rather than continue with music, but he was convinced to join Jethro Tull in January 1971. Before joining the band as a performer, Hammond appears to have spent much time with the band in the background. Ian Anderson wrote songs about his friend’s idiosyncrasies, of which the best known are “A Song for Jeffrey” (This Was), “Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square” (Stand Up) and “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me” (Benefit). Introducing the first song, in the days before Hammond joined the band, Anderson would portray him in slightly condescending terms as someone with emotional problems who lost his way easily, as described in the first line of the song. His eventual appearance as a band member, therefore, was something of a surprise.[citation needed] Hammond is also namechecked in the lyrics of the Benefit track, “Inside”.

Hammond is credited with creating the “claghorn”, a hybrid instrument. He took the mouthpiece and bell from a toy saxophone and attached them to the body of a flute. The result can be heard on the track “Dharma for One” on the album This Was.

During the time of Tull’s dramatic stage costumes, Jeffrey started wearing a black and white striped suit and played a matching bass guitar, and this became his trademark and a feature of Tull’s Thick as a Brick stage performance. Hammond narrated the surreal piece “The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles” on the album A Passion Play, and the related short film. He also received credit, along with Anderson and John Evan, for writing the piece.

Hammond burned the suit in December 1975 upon his departure from the band.[3] According to Ian Anderson’s sleevenotes for the 2002 reissue of Tull’s Minstrel in the Gallery, Hammond “returned to his first love, painting, and put down his bass guitar, never to play again.”[4] Hammond’s replacement as bass player was John Glascock, a professional musician.

Later appearances[edit]

He made one last attempt to re-join Jethro Tull in the mid-80’s, as told by Ian Anderson during Alan Freeman’s Friday Rock Show in March 1988, while providing comments for the broadcast of Tull’s show at Hammersmith Odeon which Capital Radio was airing. According to Anderson, “Jeffrey was almost about to re-join the band”, but despite one audition being made with the band, the bass player declared himself unable to play the rather difficult music of Jethro Tull and decided to give up.

Hammond attended Jethro Tull’s 25th anniversary reunion party in 1994. He participated in an interview, along with Ian Anderson and Martin Barre, that was featured as a bonus track on the 1997 reissue of Thick as a Brick.

Discography[edit]

References[edit]

    1. Jump up^ Nollen, Scott Allen (2002). Jethro Tull: A history of the band, 1968–2001. McFarland. pp. 82–. ISBN 978-0-7864-1101-6. Retrieved 18 June 2011.
    1. Jump up^ Rees, David. Minstrels in the Gallery, 1998, ISBN 0-946719-22-5, p. 40.
    1. Jump up^ Rees, p. 70.
  1. Jump up^ Official biography of Jeffrey Hammond on Jethro Tull website: JethroTull.com

External links[edit]

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Part 150 My May 15, 1994 letter to Stephen Jay Gould (Part B)

January 15, 2019 – 1:00 am

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Dr. Stephen Jay Gould  testified in Arkansas Creationism trial in 1982!!!

This is the second portion of my 5-15-94 letter to Stephen Jay Gould and last week I posted the first portion and next week I will post the third portion.

SECTION #1 Evolution is discussed by these scholars: H.G.Wells, Antony Flew, Neal Gillespie, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Joseph McCabe, Louis Russell, Leo Hickey, Francis Crick, Michael Ruse, Norman D. Newell, Robert C. Cowen, Jeremy Rifkin, Francis Schaeffer, H.J.Blackham, Paul Churchland, J.W.Burrow, Douglas Futuyma, William Provine, and Bertrand Russell!!!!____________________

__ I am trying in this letter to show that the following statements are true and can not be refuted logically.

.1. Theistic evolution is not rational

.2. Evolution has been considered a fact by the vast majority of leading scholars worldwide for many years now.

3. There  has been a drift from belief to agnosticism caused by science in recent years

..4. The vast majority of leading scientists today do not consider creationism scientific.

5. There are philosophical implications of Darwinism.——————


1. Theistic evolution is not rational.http://creation.mobi/hg-wells-evolution-and-the-gospelH G Wells

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‘If all the animals and man had been evolved in this ascendant manner, then there had been no first parents, no Eden, and no Fall. And if there had been no fall, then the entire historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin and the reason for an atonement, upon which the current teaching based Christian emotion and morality, collapsed like a house of cards.’—

–Antony Flew pictured below:

Antony Flew

Antony FlewRegister

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Antony Flew ”It is obviously impossible to square any evolutionary account of the origin of the species with a substantially literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis.”


2.Evolution has been considered a fact by the vast majority of leading scholars worldwide for many years now.—-


Humanist Manifesto II (1973): Science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces.— (Paul Kurtz [below] put the Humanist Manifesto II together and I had the opportunity to read his book FORBIDDEN FRUIT and to correspond with him.)

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Neal Gillespie “Darwin’s rejection of special creation was part of the transformation of biology into a positive science, one committed to thoroughly naturalistic explanations based on material causes and the uniformity of nature.”

(Carl Sagan pictured below was quoted in Francis Schaeffer’s first book in 1968 and many times by Adrian Rogers and I result I began reading his books myself out of a curiosity.)

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Carl Sagan asserts: ”Evolution is fact, not a theory.”

Lee Dembart of the Los Angeles Times commenting on the book by Richard Dawkins called “The Blind Watchmaker”:The book cuts through the nonsense about the origin of life and leaves it for dead….He demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that evolution is the only possible explanation for the world we see around us. In this work Dawkins refutes the argument that the complexity of life cannot be random, this implying a designer or creator.—-

The Blind Watchmaker

Richard Dawkins in 1976, around the time he published his first best-selling book. Credit: Terry Smith/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty



Joseph McCabe in a debate with George Mccready Price:
Something over 50 years ago a great man of science launched the doctrine of evolution upon the world. Generation by generation , decade by decade, scientific men have fought out that issue. I say that there is not an university professor in the world today who does not emphatically endorse the doctrine of evolution ….100 years ago, in the days of Lamarck and Darwin, men looked across that broad river and there was nothing between (man and ape)….Now we men of the Stone Age carrying us nearer to the ape; the pilot down man, and one or two others, going as far again in the direction of the ape.—-Louis S Russell, director, Royal Ontario Museum, It’s completely false to say that there’s a lacking of transitional forms. We have plenty of them —-more than sometimes we can deal with.—-Leo Hickey, former director, Yale Peabody Museum, There are myriad transitional forms. There’s really no problem finding them.—-

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Francis Crick: The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is, in fact, to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.—-


3. There has been a drift from belief to agnosticism caused by science in recent years———————-
Dr Huston Smith: One reason education undoes belief (in God) is it’s teaching of evolution; Darwin’s own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic.—-

Asa Gray

Asa Gray

(Darwin’s longest running and most significant exchange of correspondence dealing with the subjects of design in nature and religious belief was with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray..The entire extant correspondence, consisting of about 300 letters written between 1854 and 1881.)

Asa Gray (1810-1888), a Harvard professor of botony was a supporter of theistic evolution. He tried to persuade Darwin to adopt the  position of  theistic evolution. Darwin quickly struck down Gray’s  argument, “The view that each variation has been providentially arranged seems to me to make natural selection entirely superfluous, and indeed takes the whole case of the appearance of new species out of the range of science. — (Charles Darwin below)

Charles DarwinCharles Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809–1882)

—Michael Denton “ today it is perhaps the Darwinian view of nature more than any other that is responsible for the agnostic and sceptical outlook of the twentieth century…(It is) a theory that literally changed the world.”

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Vincent Matthew Sarich

Vincent Sarich in a debate with Mr Gish said, “As far as I am concerned it was not God that created man, but quite clearly and obviously man that in ultimate example of his overwhelming pride created an omnipotent God in his own idealized image of himself and in doing so thought to make himself all powerful and independent of any laws but those of his own making.”—

(Michael Ruse who testified in Arkansas Creationism trial in 1982 pictured below)

–4. Leading scientists worldwide today do not believe creationism is scientific.

Michael Ruse – “And, I learnt what a hollow sham modern day creationism really is : crude, dogmatic, biblical literal-ism masquerading as  genuine science.”

Norman D. Newell

American Museum of Natural History

January 27, 1909 – April 18, 2005

Norman D. Newell – “Finally I should like to define the word science, and explain why scientific creationism cannot be included in its definition. Science is characterized by the willingness of an investigator to follow evidence wherever it leads.”

Robert C. Cowen – It is this many-faceted on-going science story that should be told in public school biology courses. Creationists want those courses to include the possibility of – and the “scientific” evidence for – a creator as well. There is no such “scientific” evidence. The concept of a supernatural creator is inherently religious. It has no place in a science class.

(Jeremy Rifkin below)

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Jeremy Rifkin – “Evolutionary theory has been enshrined as the centerpiece of our educational system, and elaborate walls have been erected around it to protect it from unnecessary abuse.”

5. There are philosophical implications of Darwinism.Francis Schaeffer in his book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? co-authored by C. Everett Koop in 1979 said this, “Humanism: 1. Rejects the doctrine of creation. 2. Therefore rejects the idea that there is anything stable or ‘given’ about human nature. 3. Sees human nature as part of a long, unfolding process of development in which everything is changing. 4. Casts around for some solution to the problem of despair that this determinist-evolutionist vision induces…

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The humanist H. J. Blackham has expressed this with a dramatic illustration: “On humanist assumptions, life leads to nothing, and every pretense that it does not is a deceit. If there is a bridge over a gorge which spans only half the distance and ends in mid-air, and if the bridge is crowded with human beings pressing on, one after the other they fall into the abyss. The bridge leads nowhere, and those who are pressing forward to cross it are going nowhere….It does not matter where they think they are going, what preparations for the journey they may have made, how much they may be enjoying it all. The objection merely points out objectively that such a situation is a model of futility“( H. J. Blackham, et al., Objections to Humanism (Riverside, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1967). Mr. Schaeffer comments, “One does not have to be highly educated to understand this. It follows directly from the starting point of the humanists’ position, namely, that everything is just matter. That is, that which has exited forever and in ever is only some form of matter or energy, and everything in our world now is this and only this in a more or less complex form.”

Photo of Paul M. Churchland

“Paul Churchland – “The important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process. If this is the correct account of our origin, then there seems neither need nor room to fit any nonphysical substances or properties into our theoretical accounts of ourselves. We are creatures of matter.”

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J.W.Burrow – “Nature, according to Darwin, was the product of blind chance and a blind struggle, and man a lonely, intelligent mutation, scrambling with the brutes for his sustenance. To some the sense of loss was irrevocable; It was as if an umbilical cord had been cut, and men found themselves part of a cold passionless universe.”

Douglas J. Futuyma
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Douglas Futuyma –  “Whether people are explicitly religious or not they tend to imagine that humans are in some sense the center of the universe. And what evolution does is to remove humans from the center of the universe. We are just one product of a very long historical process that has given rise to an enormous amount of organisms, and we are just one of them. So in one sense there is nothing special about us.”

William B. Provine

William B. Provine (Photo by Donald Dewsbury).

William B. Provine in “The End of Ethics?” article in HARD CHOICES (a magazine companion to the television series HARD CHOICES) wrote:Even though it is often asserted that science is fully compatible with our Judeo-Christian tradition, in fact it is not… To be sure, even in antiquity, the mechanistic view of life–that chance was responsible for the shape of the world– had a few adherents. But belief in overarching order was dominant; it can be seen as easily in such scientists as Newton, Harvey, and Einstein as in the theologians Augustine, Luther, and Tillich. But beginning with Darwin, biology has undermined that tradition. Darwin in effect asserted that all living organisms had been created by a combination of chance and necessity–natural selection.In the twentieth century, this view of life has been reinforced by a whole series of discoveries…Mind is the only remaining frontier, but it would be shortsighted to doubt that it can, one day, be duplicated in the form of thinking robots or analyzed in terms of the chemistry and electricity of the brain. The extreme mechanic view of life, which every new discovery in biology tends to confirm, has certain implications. First, God has no role in the physical world…Second, except for the laws of probability and cause and effect, there is no organizing principle in the world, and no purpose. 

AMS Prizes, Awards, and Fellowships
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Bertrand Russell – “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”(Bertrand Russell, Free Man’s Worship)

Debate: Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy? Phillip Johnson v…

Stephen Jay Gould

World-renowned, popularising palaeontologist who, controversially, revised Darwin’s theories and took a political stand on science

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Profesor Stephen Jay Gould, who has died of cancer aged 60, was an unlikely figure to have been canonised in his lifetime by the US Congress, which named him as one of America’s “living legends”.

A palaeontologist, he was based for most of his life at the museum of comparative zoology (MCZ) at Harvard, where, since 1982, he had been Alexander Agassiz professor of zoology. But he was best known to the public through his unbroken sequence of 300 monthly essays in Natural History magazine, which began in 1974 and ended only last year; they were republished in a seemingly unending stream of books, translated into dozens of languages and bought by their hundreds of thousands.

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A stylish writer, Gould characterised each essay by deriving a seemingly abstruse point in natural history or palaeontology via a sideways look at a novel, a building, or, often, a reference to his lifelong enthusiasm for baseball. He once illuminated the peculiar evolutionary phenomenon in which more recently evolved species within a family group steadily decrease in size by comparing it to how the manufacturers of Hershey bars avoided price rises by making the bars smaller while keeping the costs the same.

As a scientific essayist, Gould’s only peers were “Darwin’s bulldog”, Thomas Huxley, in the 19th century and JBS Haldane in the 1930s and 40s. The comparison with Haldane is apt in two further ways; both made fundamental contributions to evolutionary theory, and both were politically engaged both within science and in the broader political arena. Gould’s critique of the pseudoscience of claims concerning the inheritance of intelligence, developed in one of his best-known books, The Mismeasure Of Man (1981), became a major source for anti-racist campaigners.

But Gould was no mere word-spinner; as a major public intellectual and powerful public speaker, he could be seen at demonstrations and on picket lines, especially during the 1960s and 70s. This was the birth of what became known as the radical science movement (Science for the People), initially in response to the Vietnam war. The movement, and Gould along with it, later became embroiled in the cultural fights that raged around the publication, in 1975, of EO Wilson’s Sociobiology, the forerunner to today’s evolutionary psychology, and seen by many as offering a scientific validation for social inequalities in class, gender and race.

Some saw this as a specifically Harvard-based battle, as Gould occupied the MCZ basement and his colleague, and sometimes co-author, Richard Lewontin, the first floor – with Wilson sandwiched between them on the ground floor. Wilson became distinctly uneasy when entering the elevator in case he might have to confront Gould, Lewontin or any of their student supporters.

However, for Gould the issues were never just about politics, but also about a different view of the mechanisms and processes of evolution, a view that reached its clearest expression in his last and greatest book, The Structure Of Evolutionary Theory – at more than 1,400 pages, the greatest in every sense – which was published only last month.

This is the most comprehensive statement of Gould’s Darwinian revisionism, a revisionism that began in graduate school when he and fellow student Niles Eldredge developed their critique of one of Darwin’s central theses, that of gradual evolutionary change. To the concern of his many friends and supporters, who had argued that speciation was likely to occur by abrupt transitions, Darwin had insisted that “nature does not make leaps”.

Gould and Eldredge re-addressed this question, pointing out that the fossil record was one of millions of years of stasis, punctuated by relatively brief periods of rapid change – hence punctuated equilibrium. To Gould’s fury, as a loyal child of Darwin, the theory was misappropriated by creationists, whom he attacked with characteristic vigour. However, in one of his most recent books, Rocks Of Ages (1999), he attempted to come to terms with a religion more reconciled to science, reversing the proposition of rendering unto Caesar by allowing religion its independent domain.

But punctuated equilibrium made many traditional evolutionists unhappy too; they saw it as evidence of Gould’s alleged Marxism – revolution rather than evolution.

Orthodox biologists also tended to resent the insouciance with which Gould upstaged them. Lecturing at the Royal Society, in London in the 1970s, he treated the assembled grandees to an account of the architecture of the San Marco cathedral, in Venice, in order to make the point that many seemingly adaptive features of an organism are, in fact, the byproducts of more fundamental structural constraints. The mosaic-filled spaces (spandrels) between the arches on which the dome stands may look as if they were planned, but they are merely space-fillers, albeit ones put to artistic and religious use.

Many features of an organism (its phenotype) may also be structural spandrels, others may be “exaptations” – another term coined by Gould, with Elizabeth Vrba, to describe features arising in one context but subsequently put to a different use. Feathers, originally evolved as a heat regulatory device among the reptilian ancestors of today’s birds, are a good example. But to evolutionists, who believed every feature of an organism was honed by what Darwin called “nature’s continuous scrutiny”, this claim, and the style in which it was delivered, was heretical.

The intellectual’s development from radical young Turk to mature senior academic is traditionally that from iconoclasm to conventional wisdom. Not so Steve Gould. The Structure Of Evolutionary Theory is a robust and formidable defence of his key contributions to Darwinian revisionism. Evolution is not a la carte, but structurally constrained; not all phenotypic features are adaptive, but may instead be spandrels or exaptations – or even contingent accidents, like the asteroid collision believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs, thus making space for mammals and ultimately humans.

Wind the tape of history back, Gould insists, allow it to free-run forward again, and it is, in the highest degree, unlikely that the same species will evolve. Chance is crucial, and there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution – no drive to perfection, complexity or intelligent life.

Above all, he argues, natural selection works at many levels. Because genetics has come to dominate much of the life sciences, for many biologists organisms have become almost irrelevant, save as instruments serving the purposes of their genes – splendidly encapsulated in Richard Dawkins’ famous description of humans as “lumbering robots” – the gene’s way of making copies of itself. Evolution itself has come to be defined as a change in gene frequency in a population.

By contrast, Gould argues for a hierarchical view; that evolution works on genes, genomes, cell lineages and, especially, on species. Ignoring speciation, he says, is like playing Hamlet without the prince. This is the central theoretical issue underlying all the polemics that characterise what have come to be known as the “Darwin wars”, pitting Gould against Dawkins as his principal adversary, although in reality – and to the chagrin of creationists – both are children of Darwin, and agree on far more than they disagree.

Cutting-edge researchers are often ignorant of their own science’s history. Perhaps it was because he was a palaeontologist that Gould returned so often in his writing to the history of his own subject. His was not the sort of whiggish, anecdotal approach by which senior scientists tend to ossify the progression from past obscurity to present clarity, but a deeper attempt to understand the twists and turns of theory and evidence, which ensure that even our present-day knowledge is provisional, and like life itself, historically constrained.

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Born in Queens, New York, and educated through the city’s superb public school system, Gould trained as a geologist at Antioch College, Ohio, took a doctorate in palaeontology at Columbia University, New York, in 1967, and spent a brief period at Leeds University before moving to Harvard.

In 1982, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, rumoured to have been precipitated by the asbestos lining of the specimen cabinets in the MCZ basement. The disease has a median survival time of eight months; as Gould later wrote, he was committed to being one of those who survived long enough to help show that statistic medians are not means, after all. The 20 years before cancer finally caught up with him were packed with more than most public intellectuals and scientists can hope to achieve in a lifetime, and a small galaxy of prizes.

He was married twice, and is survived by his former wife Deborah, their sons Jesse and Ethan, his second wife Rhonda, and his stepchildren, Jade and London.

Steve Jones writes: The world of snail genetics has lost its leading light. Not, perhaps, how most obituarists will celebrate him, but true nevertheless. Gould was, like Darwin, a working scientist; an accumulator of facts, in his case about the snails, live or fossilised, of the Bahamas. However, and again like Darwin, he became most celebrated not for his own research, but for his interpretation of the facts gathered by others.

Evolutionists have the bitter feeling that theirs is the only science left in which it is possible to become famous just for having an opinion. Their field (or at least the public’s image of it) is filled with people with strongly-held views who have never done an honest day’s work in their lives, whether in a rainforest or a laboratory. Gould was not like that. He may not have spent five years on the Beagle, but he passed many uncomfortable summers kicking through bushes or scraping away at lumps of rock.

Whatever its merits, his famous theory of punctuated equilibrium – evolution by jerks, as its critics called it; Gould responded with taunts about evolution by creeps – gave the then slothful post-Darwinian giant a kick, just when and where it needed it. Biology was forced to remind itself that many evolutionary questions had been forgotten, and entered an era of intense debate.

In the view of most (but not all) in the field, the answer was refreshingly conventional: Darwin was, in the end, right, and the problems raised by Gould could be solved without toppling the great Victorian from his ped- estal. Gould, needless to say, did not agree.

Scientifically, he was – in the eyes of us “creeps” at least – a failure, but a heroic one, in the sense that Columbus failed to find India. In science, failures can be heroes, too – think of Newton after relativity; and to the public, Gould was the hero. He fought the creationists, joked about baseball, and wrote some of the finest of all science essays. Although sometimes visited by the curse of orotundity, he kept it up to the end.

The last time I met him, we talked snails, and now that the chance to do so again has gone, it is time to summarise his life. To most people, he was punctuationist, populariser or polemicist; to biologists, he earned that most rare and coveted title, that of his great predecessor, Darwin: naturalist.

· Stephen Jay Gould, palaeontologist, born September 10 1941; died May 20 2002

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On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

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(Harry Kroto pictured below)

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Stephen Jay Gould is the scholar I will look at today. In  the third video below in the 147th clip in this series are his words “If I were  a bacteria I would be quite satisfied that I was dominating the planet…I don’t know why consciousness should be seen as any state of higher being especially if you use the evolutionist primary criterion of success measured by duration” and I have responded directly to this quote in any earlier post.

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)

A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 52 THE BEATLES (Part D, There is evidence that the Beatles may have been exposed to Francis Schaeffer!!!) (Feature on artist Anna Margaret Rose Freeman )

March 22, 2015 – 12:30 am

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 51 THE BEATLES (Part C, List of those on cover of Stg.Pepper’s ) (Feature on artist Raqib Shaw )

March 19, 2015 – 12:21 am

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 50 THE BEATLES (Part B, The Psychedelic Music of the Beatles) (Feature on artist Peter Blake )

March 12, 2015 – 12:16 am

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 49 THE BEATLES (Part A, The Meaning of Stg. Pepper’s Cover) (Feature on artist Mika Tajima)

March 5, 2015 – 4:47 am

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 48 “BLOW UP” by Michelangelo Antonioni makes Philosophic Statement (Feature on artist Nancy Holt)

February 26, 2015 – 4:57 am

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February 19, 2015 – 5:33 am

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February 12, 2015 – 5:00 am

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Atheists Confronted, Francis Schaeffer | Comments (0)

Music Monday My Letter to Mick Fleetwood

January 13, 2019 – 2:40 am

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Francis Schaeffer pictured below

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Dan Jarrell Change Point Church (seen below)

DAN JARRELL
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Kerry Livgren

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Kansas

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Letters to Mick Fleetwood

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-I have read over 40 autobiographies by ROCKERS and it seems to me that almost every one of those books can be reduced to 4 points. Once fame hit me then I became hooked on drugs. Next I became an alcoholic (or may have been hooked on both at same time). Thirdly, I chased the skirts and thought happiness would be found through more sex with more women. Finally, in my old age I have found being faithful to my wife and getting over addictions has led to happiness like I never knew before. (Almost every autobiography I have read from rockers has these points in it although Steven Tyler is still chasing the skirts!!).

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April 30, 2018

Mick Fleetwood

Dear Mick,

I read your autobiography PLAY ON and I came across the passage that I found very interesting:

Living on the road help keep me from facing the cold hard facts of life, I was dire straights financially, I wasn’t doing my job as a father to my daughters and the band that bore my name was in flux. I didn’t worry if no one showed up for the Zoo shows because in my mind if I was playing I HAD A PURPOSE. My band however was embarrassed for me.

I know that you have been searching your whole life for the meaning of life and the secret of satisfaction and with the help of King Solomon and Kerry Livgren of the rock group KANSAS I wanted to pass along their conclusions.

I thought of you recently when I listened to a cassette tape of a sermon by Dan Jarrell of FELLOWSHIP BIBLE CHURCH in Little Rock entitled THE PLEASURE IS MINE on ECCLESIASTES 2:1-26 (4-21-96). It was hard for me to obtain a cassette tape player but I searched through my attic and found one hidden away.

As you know the Book of Ecclesiastes was written by King Solomon at the end of his life and he was discussing LIFE UNDER THE SUN. I think it is easy to compare your life to Solomon since you both are pursuing satisfaction in this life UNDER THE SUN without God in the picture. 

Francis Schaeffer noted that Solomon took a look at the meaning of life on the basis of human life standing alone between birth and death “under the sun.” This phrase UNDER THE SUN appears over and over in Ecclesiastes. The Christian Scholar Ravi Zacharias noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term UNDER THE SUN — What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system and you are left with only this world of Time plus Chance plus matter.”

Here is a portion of the sermon by Dan Jarrell below:

You and I grew up with Mick Jagger singing “I CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION.” You think of the lyrics of that song and what Jagger and the ROLLING STONES did. They summarized this philosophy that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I seek it, no matter what I attempt to do, no matter which avenue I go down, there is no personal satisfaction in it for me. Personal satisfaction eludes me because I try and I try and I try but I can’t get no, no, no, no, hey, hey , hey. I just can’t get no satisfaction.

That is the idea  Mick Jagger and the rest of the ROLLING STONES and an entire generation that cut it’s teeth on rock and roll never got past the frustration of that song. We tried, and we tried and we tried. We tried DRUGS, and ALCOHOL. We tried SEX in a permissive moral society. We tried EDUCATION. We tried CORPORATE ACHIEVEMENT. We tried MATERIAL DECADENCE. We tried EMPIRE BUILDING. We have even tried HUMANISTIC SPIRITUALITY. We tried anything that would move us toward satisfaction, but the result of it all is no lasting satisfaction. Even our greatest pleasures lose their luster. Life is a vapor!!!! GONE WITH THE WIND!!!

I suppose the wisdom of ECCLESIASTES could have been the inspiration for the ROLLING STONES song that marked our generation if it were not for one significant detail. You see Solomon tried and he tried and he tried but the conclusion of his song was I FOUND THE KEY TO SATISFACTION. All the things he tried didn’t get him there but those experiences led him full circle to a conclusion that he began his reign with and apparently he ended with as well.

I really believe if MICK JAGGER or if any of us for that matter would listen to Solomon’s wisdom he will teach us a different song to sing, a new chorus that will mark a new generation.  Solomon will show us the key to satisfaction and he warns us of counterfeits. This is the way to go but beware of this that the vapors of life are there and pursue that and you will be CHASING THE WIND.

WHAT WAS SOLOMON’S ANSWER?  Ecclesiastes chapter 2 gives us that answer. This chapter is a discussion of life’s frustrations. Let me start with the conclusion of chapter 2 and then we will go back and look at life’s frustrating moves toward that conclusion. 

Ecclesiastes 2:24-25 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

24 There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and tell himself that his labor is good. This also I have seen that it is from the hand of God. 25 For who can eat and who can have enjoyment without Him?

There is some disagreement on the translation of this particular phrase “There is nothing better for a man” The NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE translates it as a comparison. The idea is if you think of all the good things that a man could enjoy there is nothing better for a man or a woman than to eat or to drink and tell themselves their labor is good. In other words, it is good for us. 

The Hebrew seems to indicate we may want to translate it this way. “There is nothing in a man to eat and drink and tell himself his labor is good.” In other words, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR US, FOR THAT IS FROM THE HAND OF GOD. In other words, it is either a comparison or a simple statement. Either way this is the sense of the passage. 

Either way you translate it, it says nothing is so good for us other than a satisfied life but nothing is as impossible for us because it is not in us to be satisfied for who can eat and enjoy life without him?  The answer is NOBODY CAN!!!! So you come down to the idea that if one seeks satisfaction they will never find it. In fact, every pleasure will be fleeting and can not be sustained, BUT IF ONE SEEKS GOD THEN ONE FINDS SATISFACTION. That is my sermon in a nutshell. That is the conclusion. 

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Just like Dan Jarrell I also loved the song I CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION by the Rolling Stones.  Then in  1978 I heard the song “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas when it rose to #6 on the charts. That song told me that Kerry Livgren the writer of that song and a member of Kansas had come to the same conclusion that both Solomon and the ROLLING STONES had. I remember mentioning to my friends at church that we may soon see some members of Kansas become Christians because their search for the meaning of life had obviously come up empty even though they had risen from being an unknown band to the top of the music business and had all the wealth and fame that came with that. Furthermore, Solomon realized death comes to everyone and there must be something more.

Livgren wrote:

“All we do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see, Dust in the Wind, All we are is dust in the wind, Don’t hang on, Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and Sky, It slips away, And all your money won’t another minute buy.”

Take a minute and compare Kerry Livgren’s words to that of the late British humanist H.J. Blackham:

“On humanist assumptions, life leads to nothing, and every pretense that it does not is a deceit. If there is a bridge over a gorge which spans only half the distance and ends in mid-air, and if the bridge is crowded with human beings pressing on, one after the other they fall into the abyss. The bridge leads nowhere, and those who are pressing forward to cross it are going nowhere….It does not matter where they think they are going, what preparations for the journey they may have made, how much they may be enjoying it all. The objection merely points out objectively that such a situation is a model of futility“( H. J. Blackham, et al., Objections to Humanism (Riverside, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1967).

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Both Kerry Livgren and the bass player DAVE HOPE of Kansas became Christians eventually. Kerry Livgren first tried Eastern Religions and DAVE HOPE had to come out of a heavy drug addiction. I was shocked and elated to see their personal testimony on The 700 Club in 1981 and that same  interview can be seen on youtube today. Livgren lives in Topeka, Kansas today where he teaches “Diggers,” a Sunday school class at Topeka Bible Church. DAVE HOPE is the head of Worship, Evangelism and Outreach at Immanuel Anglican Church in Destin, Florida.

Those who reject God must accept three realities of their life UNDER THE SUN according to Solomon.  FIRST, death is the end and SECOND, chance and time are the only guiding forces in this life.  FINALLY, power reigns in this life and the scales are never balanced. In contrast, Dave Hope and Kerry Livgren believe death is not the end and the Christian can  face death and also confront the world knowing that it is not determined by chance and time alone and finally there is a judge who will balance the scales.

Solomon’s experiment was a search for meaning to life “UNDER THE SUN.” Then in last few words in the Book of Ecclesiastes he looks above the sun and brings God back into the picture: “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: Fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.”

Actually the answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221

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May 23, 2016 – 12:13 am

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MUSIC MONDAY Christian Rock Pioneer Larry Norman’s Songs Part 14

April 25, 2016 – 12:57 am

Christian Rock Pioneer Larry Norman’s Songs Part 14 I posted a lot in the past about my favorite Christian musicians such as Keith Green (I enjoyed reading Green’s monthly publications too), and 2nd Chapter of Acts and others. Today I wanted to talk about one of Larry Norman’s songs. David Rogers introduced me to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

MUSIC MONDAY Christian Rock Pioneer Larry Norman’s Songs Part 13

April 18, 2016 – 12:56 am

Christian Rock Pioneer Larry Norman’s Songs Part 13 I posted a lot in the past about my favorite Christian musicians such as Keith Green (I enjoyed reading Green’s monthly publications too), and 2nd Chapter of Acts and others. Today I wanted to talk about one of Larry Norman’s songs. David Rogers introduced me to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

MUSIC MONDAY Christian Rock Pioneer Larry Norman’s Songs Part 12

April 11, 2016 – 1:30 am

Christian Rock Pioneer Larry Norman’s Songs Part 12 I posted a lot in the past about my favorite Christian musicians such as Keith Green (I enjoyed reading Green’s monthly publications too), and 2nd Chapter of Acts and others. Today I wanted to talk about one of Larry Norman’s songs. David Rogers introduced me to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

MUSIC MONDAY Christian Rock Pioneer Larry Norman’s Songs Part 11

April 4, 2016 – 1:23 am

Christian Rock Pioneer Larry Norman’s Songs Part 11 I posted a lot in the past about my favorite Christian musicians such as Keith Green (I enjoyed reading Green’s monthly publications too), and 2nd Chapter of Acts and others. Today I wanted to talk about one of Larry Norman’s songs. David Rogers introduced me to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

MUSIC MONDAY Christian Rock Pioneer Larry Norman’s Songs Part 10 more on Album “Only Visiting This Planet”

March 28, 2016 – 1:22 am

Christian Rock Pioneer Larry Norman’s Songs Part 10 more on Album “Only Visiting This Planet” I posted a lot in the past about my favorite Christian musicians such as Keith Green (I enjoyed reading Green’s monthly publications too), and 2nd Chapter of Acts and others. Today I wanted to talk about one of Larry Norman’s […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

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