The biggest leap forward since the original

Go Apple.  iPhone X.   I'm trying really hard not to be cynical. Apple is a good company, really. They produce good products that do what they claim and last. They're not junk. I will never forget the awesomeness of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 6 designs, the bold "jet black" of the iPhone 7, and the truly revolutionary marketing of iPhone 6 with ginormous marketing photos of their product (not those stupid dumb little teeny photos that most marketers offer). But they're clearly coasting this year. Makes me wonder if they've lost their touch.

Their CEO, Tim Cook, made two claims at their annual product launch last week.  Two dumb little sentences that if they'd left out, I wouldn't be cynical.  But those CEO speeches are written weeks and months in advance, and are very carefully crafted.  With these sentences Apple is going out of their way to (yet again) prove to the world how devoted their fans are, and that the fans will drink any "kool-aid" they serve up (no matter how bad).

The product launch video is at https://www.apple.com/apple-events/september-2017/, and as videos go it's perfectly fine. High quality, clearly good planning of the event, nice new venue. But here we go. At 1 hour 16 minutes in, Mr. Cook says "our teams have been at work for years on something that is important to all of us: the future of the smartphone. The first iPhone revolutionized a decade of technology, and changed the world in the process. Now, 10 years later, it is only fitting... to reveal a product that will set the path for technology for the next decade." At 1:17:50 he continues "This is iPhone X.  It is the biggest leap forward since the original iPhone." You've got to be kidding me. One of my favorite articles I read in my masters class had this excerpt in it:

Here's the thing about innovation: I'm not sure any of us needs a definition. We don't need a journalist to tell us what it is. Or who really gets it. Innovation is like obscenity: We know it when we see it. It's hard to miss when paradigms shift.
-http://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/innovation-is-executive-porn/d/d-id/1111194

If he'd left these exaggerations out of his speech, I'd have nothing to be cynical about.  iPhone X is a decent product. But it's nothing innovative. It's new features are:

• edge to edge screen (something almost every other manufacturer has dabbled in for years)
• wireless charging (something every other manufacturer has had for years)
• facial recognition (Samsung did even better earlier this year)
• super retina display (Samsung has had higher for at least 2 years)

And that's what he calls "the biggest leap forward" since the original device?? Then at 1:21:25 Phil Schiller says removing the home button "is a big step forward in the iPhone user experience." Now instead of pressing the home button we swipe up from the bottom of the screen. He follows by saying "it's incredibly smooth and once you do it for the first time, you'll know there's never been a better way." Really? Last I checked, swiping takes more effort than touching. And let's not get into how old all this is to Android users, especially those who've installed alternate launchers.

And lastly, to add insult to injury, they're charging a whole grand. Yeah right. Sorry Apple fans. The 10th anniversary was supposed to be the year for the iPhone. What a let down. I mean, if you want a thousand dollar phone, and you want it to be an Apple, then great, I'm happy for you, go for it, it is their most impressive yet. But don't try to brag about it's technology. It's not cutting edge. Unlike the original iPhone, there's nothing new here here at all.

God helps those who help themselves?

The title of this blog post is one of those famous Bible quotes that's not really in the Bible.  But could it be?  When does God help lazy people in the Bible?  There's no good quote, but the theme isn't far fetched.  Let's look at some famous people God helped (or carried out His plan through).  Pay close attention to the vocabulary used.

• Noah - Genesis 6:14-15 (make)
• Abram - Genesis 12:1 (go)
• Moses - Exodus 3:10 (go, bring)
• Joshua - Joshua 1:6 (lead)
• Gideon - Judges 6:14 (go)

And it wasn't even limited to the Old Testament:

• Acts 5:18-20 (go)
• Acts 12:7-8 (follow)
• Romans 2:6 (do)
• 1 Timothy 6:18 (deeds)
• James 3:13 (deeds)

When we read the words, we see that God commanded people to do work.  These people are famous for God helping them but it's only our modern, lazy, post scientific revolution paradigm that makes us think God will take care of us so that we will have an easier life.  That's what garage door openers and self closing trunks are for, but isn't why God intervenes in the world.  He intervenes to carry out His plan, which like Noah and the rest, involves a lot of hard work.  While it's tempting to give Gideon a hard time for asking for the wet fleece and the dry fleece, he asked for those demonstrations out of fear, not laziness.

Not everyone who doesn't act is lazy.  Some of us honestly believe that praying hard and often is good enough.  Now I get it that Jesus was big on prayer.  But the only time Jesus ever came close to saying "just pray" was in a specific case of direct, toe to toe spiritual warfare.  This example was so specific it's dangerous to ever use this as an excuse that we should ever "just pray".  Certainly prayer is important, and just so you don't think I'm anti-prayer or that I think nothing of prayer, here are some of Jesus's positions:

• Matthew 6:5-13
• Mark 1:35
• Mark 9:29
• Luke 5:16
• Luke 6:12

I'm just so tired of hearing people (over my lifetime) saying something like "we just need to pray."  Granted, that's important, and granted when we are out of options then maybe all we can do is pray.  But we are on the verge of sinning if we have the capacity to act and yet we choose only to pray.  As if to ask God to step in and do our job for us.  If you are a parent, and you just asked your teenager to wash their own dinner plate off, and they responded "mom/dad, I sure wish that you would wash this plate so I can watch TV", how well do you think you'd like hearing that, and do you think you'd actually grant your teenagers request?  Not many of us would.  If you're going to pray, fine, but don't kid yourself that praying gets you out of working.  Prayer is the "air cover," or the administrative overhead, to the actual work.

We so want life to be black and white but it's more complicated than that.  It's important to pray.  Just like it's important to have a Biblical worldview.  (Remember, Biblical worldview only comes from actually reading your Bible and remembering what it says, then taking it seriously.)  But neither (nor even both of these together) are enough.  We must do good work too.

• James 2:14-26
• Romans 12:9-13
• Matthew 7:21

Thomas Edison (the guy who invented both the light bulb and the municipal power grid) said something cool.  "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." What opportunities does God have planned for us today?

Genesis 1 & 2

I've heard it claimed that the order of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 are contradictory.  My initial response was that Genesis 1 is the account of all of creation, whereas Genesis 2 is retelling the story from Adam's perspective, even though it's written in the third person.  I am working on making my own translation of Genesis 1-11 for publication on Kindle, and I came across a detail that is more plausible to interpret as a contradiction.  It's still not a contradiction, but it's "more plausible," and for those of us who are just looking for contradictions, it's close enough.  But close enough isn't good enough.  Let's review together.  Here's the important text from Genesis 1:24-27.  (This copy of the text below is from the Amplified translation, which is an extremely literal translation, more so than NIV, KJV, etc., and not necessarily the translation I prefer to read from but is in many ways the closest to the original. I have added the "[1]" and "[2]" for reasons you'll see below, and I've removed parenthetical text that is found in the Amplified translation, for simplicity sake of this article.)

Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kind: [1] livestock, crawling things, and wild animals of the earth according to their kinds”; and it was so. So God made the wild animals of the earth according to their kind, and the cattle according to their kind, and everything that creeps and crawls on the earth according to its kind; and God saw that it was good and He affirmed and sustained it.  Then God said, “Let Us make [2] man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them have complete authority over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, and over the entire earth, and over everything that creeps and crawls on the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image and likeness of God He created him; male and female He created them.

If we accept Ussher's calculations with genealogies in the Bible, these events happened about 6,000 years ago.  But this text is not 6,000 years old.  It is attributed to Moses, as revealed to him by God.  Moses was born about 1,500 years before Jesus was.  Paper wasn't invented until after Jesus was born, there certainly weren't any printing presses back then, and tablets were made of stone or clay, not silicon & glass.  Limited hard copies would have been created, making each extraordinarily expensive.  This is why it was such a big deal in 2 Kings 22:8 that they found a scroll (full story is 2 Kings 22-23).  So God told Moses, who wrote it down (discussed at length in my other blog post), which was eventually copied by others, and the oldest surviving copy is probably in the Dead Sea Scrolls (http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/featured-scrolls) which are dated to around the century before Jesus was born.  In Genesis 2:18-19, we see:

Now the Lord God said, “It is not good for the [1] man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable and complementary for him.”  So the Lord God formed out of the ground every [2] animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.

Since I added the [1] and [2] you've probably already noticed the seeming contradiction.  In Genesis 1 we read about the animals first, then man, and in Genesis 2 we read about man first, then animals.  But if we're going to get nit picky and claim to point out technicalities, then we need to be professional about this and put on our scientist hat and be thorough.  Because we don't want to leave ourselves open for a counter attack, air tight arguments work much better.

A few months ago I sent an email at work.  Someone had asked me a question on a topic I had some experience with.  I sent them a link to a presentation I'd made.  I told them in the email, which I sent in July, that I had made the presentation back in January.  In the presentation there is a title slide, which also has a date.  The date is not the date the presentation was created, it's the date it was last updated.  The date on the title slide said May.  But it doesn't say it was last updated in May, it just says "May."  So if the recipients of my email wanted to be nit picky, they could have written back to me and been critical and distrustful and pointed out a contradiction in my understanding and representation of reality.  Fortunately they weren't so, but if they had been I could have easily explained away what they could have perceived as contradiction.  That's the case here with Genesis 1 and 2.

In Genesis 1:24, God tells us on day 6 He started off creating the land animals.  It specifically says in Genesis 1:26, "then" He talked about making man.  This wording implies a sequence, an order of events.  One started before the other.  Genesis 1:25 indicates that all the land animals (at least all the various kinds of land animals) were created before God talked about making man.  Back in Genesis 1:11​ we read about God creating plants on day 3, and even earlier in the chapter it says when God made the Earth, the land, and the waters.

In Genesis 2:7, God tells us how he made Adam.  It says he made Adam after making the Earth, the ground, and water.  This is aligned with the order of creation in Genesis 1.  In Genesis 2:5-6 it said there were no plants, but it doesn't say Adam was created before the plants, the story just moves from Genesis 2:6 to Genesis 2:7 without explaining what happened in between.  It had no obligation to.  Remember when we consider Genesis 2 as a whole, it's clearly explaining the dawn of time from Adam's perspective.  Adam didn't necessarily care on what day the plants were created, or that the plants were created before the Sun and stars were, or that the Earth was at first all water.  Why would he care?  Therefore why would it be in Genesis 2?  There's no contradiction here.

In Genesis 2:8, there's a sentence that, if we're being critical (as in negative) then we could shout out "wait!"  It almost sounds like God made Adam before he made the Garden of Eden.  But if we keep reading Genesis 2:9-15​, we see that whoever wrote this text was using the literary technique of a flashback.  Genesis 2:5-8 is one line of thought, then the author recalibrates, and sort of starts over and gives another line of thought in Genesis 2:9-18.  Notice in Genesis 2:19, that the author doesn't say "then," he says "now."  This is significant, because it means he is yet again doing another recalibration/flashback.  Genesis 2:19-25 is a third line of thought.  So even though the text of Genesis 2 structurally mentions the creation of Adam before it mentions the creation of the other land animals, it's not implying nor explicitly saying that Adam was created before any of the others.  There's no contradiction here.

Remember, the whole Bible was written before the printing press.  This means it was written before publishing companies, and had no editor.  The whole Bible is written more in the style we today recognize as blogs than as books.  A great example of this is Luke 3:18-22, where the author, who was a doctor (a.k.a. a scientist), writes about John the Baptist being put in prison right before Jesus was baptized.  However Matthew 14:3-11 says John was executed in prison and Matthew 3:13-17 clearly explains that John was the one who baptized Jesus.  There's no contradiction here when we recognize the fact that this wasn't reviewed by an editor first.  And we know that it would be hypocritical to say a writing can't be accurate if it's not reviewed by an editor.  These were letters, little different than blogs, and amateur blogs at that, not professional blogs where people make a living crafting well articulated messages.  Luke could have even very well wrote his letter while traveling (Colossians 4:14, 2 Timothy 4:11, Philemon 1:24).  And lastly, the whole Old Testament was first written on scrolls.  They weren't written on lined paper bought in a package of 500 sheets using a number 2 pencil with a new eraser.  They weren't typed on a laptop where non-linear editing is standard.  They were written on a scroll with a pen, and once they wrote something they couldn't go back and insert an extra sentence they'd accidentally left out.  They just had to keep writing and try to make their story cohesive.  And they probably didn't know what they were writing would be scrutinized by a hostile audience 2+ millennia later.  They were just writing what they knew in hopes of passing it along.

This article was written as an expansion of a main feature I call my Creation versus Evolution FAQ.  I hope they can be of help to your understanding of our Creator, and how easy it is to take Him seriously (believe His word, the Bible) if we are only willing.