The Book of Works

I post this often on this day, Holy Saturday.

Today is simply Saturday,  the day between. We know very little about what happened on this day, but we can imagine.  We can imagine a man, much like us. A man defeated, alone, miserable and afraid. This man, who was once called a rock, today thinks of himself as simply – Simon. Imagine him sitting in a strange house in a city not his own, staring out the window, seeing nothing but his own failure, and the loss of all of his hopes and dreams. I have felt this way at times, and perhaps you have also.

He thinks of the glorious promise that he has witnessed the past months, the miraculous and wonderful things he has seen and heard. He thinks of the Man who showed so much faith in him, the Man who has now gone, died, left them all alone, without hope or will. But most of all he thinks of his own terrible failure and betrayal. A failure that his leader had predicted, and which he himself would never have imagined possible.

Yesterday, that black day, had proven to the man once called the rock, that he was made of no more than weak, mortal, human clay. Three times he had confirmed his human cowardice, his unworthiness to lead, or even to live. On this Saturday, the man who now once again thinks of himself simply as Simon, is filled with an unimaginable despair at the loss of everything he once valued, most especially his own dignity.

Have you  been there? Have you had to face the fact that you are unworthy because of your actions? No excuses, you simply failed. The time for heroism, for standing tall, for being more than you thought you could be, the time to prove yourself truly a rock of faith, of hope, of goodness, the time had come, and you…you had failed to heed the call. In your weakness or fear, you had simply turned away, waving your hand in dismissal. “No” you said “I don’t know anything about that, Leave me alone”. And not just once, but often. And then it was over, the terrible moment passed, and you were left with only the taste of the ashes of your own personal failure, as the whole glorious edifice you believed in and had worked so hard for, came crashing down in chaos and defeat.

I have been there. That is why I have long been so fascinated by this day without a name, that lies between the day of anguish and the day of triumph. On this day, Simon sits in agony and stares, not yet knowing that tomorrow everything will change again. Today, he is still unaware of tomorrow’s miracle that will change everything in the world forever. Today is the lowest point in his life, but tomorrow he, along with his dispersed friends, will be witness to a breathtaking renewal of hope. The resurrection of tomorrow means not only the resurrection of the living God, not only the rising of the Son of Man, but also the rising of man himself. A man like Simon, weak, afraid, defeated, failed, a man whose despicable actions on the Friday have left him hopeless and full of self-loathing, also rises on Easter Sunday, and once more becomes Peter the Rock.

Like us he is all too human, and yet like us, he is capable of all that he later accomplished. I do not believe he ever forgot his acts of betrayal. But through grace and faith, and his human moral strength, he rose above them, and he fulfilled his destiny as a great fisher of men. So of all the miracles of tomorrow and the days and years that follow, for me the greatest is the miracle of the redemption of the man – the mortal, ordinary fisherman named simply, Simon.  Peace be with you on this day.

When you are afraid of being weak, you learn not to cry. That was me for most of my youth and adult life. I got angry a lot, but I never cried. At many times,  I felt lost, lonely, depressed, bitterly unhappy, but I have no memory of ever crying, except once. I was standing at the bedside of my father, who was in a coma just before he died. I began to cry, and I couldn’t stop. I was bawling; people were staring at me, and I could not control it. It was like a dam that had broken, and the water just flowed on. That was the only time that my sadness burst from me in tears.  I never cried for joy either, and while good things did happen, I never felt the kind of overwhelming joy that can lead to emotional crying.

All of that changed starting from the day that I sat alone in my car having just declared out loud that I believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord. Again, the floodgates opened, and this time it was joy that filled me and poured out of my eyes. Since then, I have become a person who cries often and easily. Perhaps its just a sign of growing old, but I think it’s more than that. I cry at beauty – mostly in music, but also at poetry or beautifully written prose. Stories of heroism, of human goodness and triumph over hardship and trouble bring me to tears.

Even my own writing sometimes chokes me up. I have appeared in videos and podcasts about my testimony on coming to faith, and a few times I had to stop, close my eyes and clear my throat. There are passages in my books that I cannot read aloud. And there are passages in many other books that leave me sobbing.  

It can be annoying, and I often feel like apologizing when it happens. I think back to my early teen years when such behavior would have earned me being called names or worse by my peers. And other times in my long, and not particularly peaceful life, the worst thing I could have done would have been to break down in tears.

But I have no urge anymore to find a way to stop crying so easily. I know (I am a biologist after all) that tears contain traces of hormones, neurotransmitters and signal transducers of various kinds, and that crying does have a physiological benefit on one’s mood. The relief that comes after having a good cry is not an illusion, but a biochemical response, at least partially.

For me, especially when it happens in church, while singing a hymn with deep meaning for me, or hearing a beautiful sermon, it’s often an expression of joy at the miracle of my conversion to faith. If I could dance, I would. If I could sing, I would. If I could jump and shout, and run around like a happy dog, I would. I cannot do those things, but I can cry, and I can only hope and trust that my God sees and understands that my tears are my words of thanks and praise. And that everyone else can understand that my words are those tears transformed into a more acceptable and communicative form of expression of the joy in my soul at being one with my God.

The book starts out as an idea. It’s vague, incomplete—more texture than substance, more flavor than bulk. Then you start to write. Words appear and form ideas, thoughts connect, a sense of communication develops. Finally, a draft takes shape. A terrible, awful, lousy conglomeration of words, where nothing fits, and nothing meaningful is said. So you fix it, again and again and again. If you’re lucky, somebody else helps you fix it also.

Finally, it seems OK. Maybe even good, or at least good enough. Anyway, by now you hate it, and you never want to see it or think about it again. So off it goes to the publisher. And then the real misery starts. Lots of people start fixing it. Some are kind and gentle; some are merciless and cruel. It is transformed—it undergoes mutilation, amputation, rearrangement. You hold your breath, nod OK, and click “accept, accept, accept” over and over again. And, finally, you are forced to admit—although you don’t want to—that it’s now much better.

Then it’s done. Now you really are through with it. Book? What book? There is no book, just some chapters, some words, some quotes, some sentences. Leave me alone! there is no book, it’s not real. I want to do something else.

And then the real work starts. Getting permissions, checking references, approving galleys, getting endorsements, doing interviews, talking about it, posting about it… You can barely remember what’s in it, and it feels less real than ever. It was never real. It was just an idea, a concept… , just words.

Finally, a big box arrives, so heavy you can’t lift it. You open it, and there they are. Books. Actual objects. Many, many identical copies of THE BOOK!! You pick one up, open it, look at the back, and at the cover, where you see your name. Maybe you even fan the pages and read a few words. Your words (mostly). They seem familiar, but it’s different now. Those are your words, but now they are in an actual book you are holding in your hand. It’s beautiful, this book; it’s yours, it’s real. And it will never die.  

To all my friends and followers, all readers of my first book, “The Works of His Hands”, and all who agree that science is not the enemy but the friend of Christian faith, I invite you to pre-order my new book “Science and Faith in Harmony”. It is a scientific, non-technical, religious, philosophical, personal, metaphysical, and passionate set of 45 vignettes on how science and Christianity play different notes, on different instruments, but are always in beautiful harmony with each other. After all the beauty of harmony depends on different voices playing different melodies.

Learn about how quantum theory, molecular biology, anthropology, biochemistry, and all of science can be viewed from a theistic, Christ centered framework, pointing to the same universal truth about reality. From following the path of Jesus, and the pathways of metabolism to the dual nature of Christ, and the dual nature of electrons, to the worship networks in churches and ;the regulatory networks of gene expression, Christianity and science speak the same language in harmony. 

Each of the short chapters includes a “Going Deeper” section with QR codes to links to books, articles, podcasts, videos and papers on each subject covered. The book, with Foreword by Sean McDowell will be released on Feb 13, but you can order your copy now at rb.gy/b01ds8

Seventy years ago, a woman entered a Woolworths store with her young son. She was there to buy some aspirin and other medications for her daughter who was feeling ill. It was mid-December, the weather was cold and snowy in Brooklyn NY, and the bus ride had been slow and bumpy. The boy was feeling grumpy, but as they entered the store, he felt much better. It was his first time in such a big store, and there was so much to see.

And also to hear. There was music playing, songs his mother had warned him about. “This is Christmas season” she told him on the bus. He had heard of Christmas from his friends on the block, but didn’t really know what it meant, except that kids got presents, and he had seen Christmas trees. His mother told him that he would hear songs about Jesus and God, but “we don’t believe in any of that” and he shouldn’t feel bad about missing any of it, because its all about making people buy things they don’t need.

Like many things his family told him, he only half understood, but the message was clear – ignore what you see and hear, there is nothing good about it. In fact, the music blaring from the speakers in the store was loud and annoying. The words were silly – all about bells and sleighs (an object of unknown nature to him)  and drums, and reindeer, and he tuned it out, while standing online at the cashier with his mother.

But then another song began to play, a quiet and slow one, without any noisy instrumental music. A soft voice sang, “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright.” He stood stock still listening, trying to grasp the words, and the melody filled him with…something. Something brand new in his young life. Again, he heard the refrain “all is calm” and he sighed with a sense of peace that was also new. He had rarely felt calm, and yet this song seemed to promise him that being calm was possible.

On the bus ride home, he remembered some of the other lyrics of the song and asked his mother “What’s virgin mean?” She shook her head, “Pay no attention to that nonsense. All of this Christmas stuff is just to keep capitalism alive.”  He nodded. He already knew that while Christmas day would bring no presents, he would get his presents a week later on New Years, just like the children in the Soviet Union.

Trudging home from the bus stop he thought about the gaudy, garish lights and the frenetic chaos of the store and was glad to be back in the relatively quiet snow-bound street. And the words again came to him with the melody “All is calm, all is bright.“ And although he could not possibly have known it at the time, the Holy Spirit had in that moment come to his soul.

Seven decades passed in the blink of an eye, and now that same soul is typing these words, listening to the same song, and praying his everlasting thanks and hallelujah to the baby born on Christmas day who brought peace and calm, along with everlasting joy and salvation into the world, and even unto me.

Merry Christmas to all.  

Writing books is hard work, takes lots of time, and involves a great deal of angst and emotional turmoil, for not much financial reward. It does feel good to finally have the finished book in hand and to see it on the shelves. But the real reward, the thing that makes all of it worthwhile, is getting letters like this.  

“Just read your book and attempting to find Christian faith again after a long gap. Did you ever have to get over the feeling with finding Jesus that perhaps it is “too good to be true”? For me, I know that if I were to come to faith it would bring meaning and hope back to my life, but I have a block on this point. I was very moved by your story, and I am hoping to have the same experience.

J.”

Dear J,

Thanks for writing to me. The answer to your question is an emphatic YES!!! In fact, thinking it was all too good to be true was my final stumbling block in coming to faith. I was brought up to believe that reality is harsh (which it most certainly is), and that the famous Dawkins comment on the “pitiless indifference” of the universe is ultimately true. I was also pretty sure that I myself was not someone worthy of any “special treatment” like love or protection. 

But what the Holy Spirit did for me (as you read in Chapter 9) was to convince me I was wrong. After all, I already knew that there were things about me and every other human being that just didn’t fit into the purely “naturalistic” and materialistic concept of universal mediocrity. Why do I cry while listening to music, why do I seek love and not just sex? (The latter is easy – the evolutionary pressure to procreate, but love? where is that from?) What is the source of passion—mine, yours, and everyone’s? Sure, we can explain it all away with just-so stories about brain chemistry, but that isn’t actual science. Actual science has no answers to these questions. 

Frankly, even now I sometimes hear a voice telling me “You’re just fooling yourself. It really cannot be true because it’s too good.” But now I can answer that voice: “I can demonstrate that goodness is real, and you cannot tell me where it comes from, so how do we know how far goodness can go?” And the voice has no answer. 

So I have faith, and I pray, and while I know that doubts will never disappear, I take comfort in the joy I feel when I get a letter like yours, and when I see so much evidence of Jesus’ effects on His people. 

My suggestion (not original) is to try acting as if you do have faith and see what happens. Pray your thanks when something good happens, and when in difficulty, pray for Jesus to stand with you. I believe after you try this for a while, God will answer you, as I was answered. I have no idea what form that answer will take, so be prepared for something unexpected. God is real, and God is good. Blessings, 

Dear Sy,

Thank you so much for your reply! I find it to be very relevant and meaningful and you have given me a lot to think about. 

Thank you again for writing this book and for this response. You have reached me and helped me more than you can know.

Best Regards,

J.

I’ve been doing lots of work around the house now that the weather is finally cooler—replacing rotted wood outdoors (fence, shed, flowerboxes), gluing, measuring, cutting, painting, etc. And just as happens every time I start working with tools or doing anything requiring manual skills, the expert trio shows up. The trio, who among them know all there is to know about doing anything with wood, metal, furniture, machinery, or anything, are my father and my two grandfathers.

And, as usual, they have plenty to say. Grandpa Harry was an upholsterer but had also done an apprenticeship as a carriage painter and builder back in the late 90s (the 1890s, that is). Grandpa Max was a carpenter—specifically, a wood turner, who made table legs and other round items with a lathe. My dad, Max’s son, worked in his father’s shop while attending college. He eventually became a PhD chemist, but he never forgot the joy of craftsmanship and in retirement made stained-glass objects.

Compared to these three, I am of course a novice in everything. And so they delight in showing up together whenever I take hammer or sickle in hand (a not-so-subtle metaphor, since all three were ardent communists). A few days ago, as I was taping the edges of the door frame prior to painting, Harry chimed in with “Sam [my dad]! Didn’t you teach him how to tape? That is a mess!” Oh, I should mention, they never address me, only each other. And Harry, as when he was alive, does most of the talking.

On another occasion, I was cutting a one-by-four board for a new fence top rail when the power saw kicked a bit at the end of the cut. I knew I was going to hear about that one! Even Max (always the quietest of the bunch) had something to say: “Does he know how dangerous that is?” (I might mention that Max learned his trade before electric lathes existed, and I remember his foot-pedal-driven lathe with the enormous granite flywheel attached.) His son shook his head. “I told him about safety with saws and drills over and over again…”

I practically burst out, “Yes, thanks, Dad! And I have never had an accident, so I must have been listening.” But there was no point. I learned quite some time ago that they couldn’t hear me. It was a private conversation that I could eavesdrop on but not participate in. Probably much like the reality when I was a child.

My father mostly taught me stuff by having me watch him, but Harry took it upon himself to actively teach with prepared lessons. He loved to give me tests, like showing me a chair and asking me what was wrong with it, and how I would fix it. One time he told me a lamp wasn’t working, and he was quite pleased when I pointed out that the cord was not plugged in. “Always check the easy stuff first,” he told me. He couldn’t have known how often that advice came in handy during my career as a laboratory scientist, working with equipment and tools he could never have dreamed of.

He didn’t teach me everything he knew how to do. There was the art of rapid-hammering tacks into a sofa or chair, for example. He would throw a handful of these very sharp, small tacks into his mouth. Then, using only one hand (the other one occupied with holding the material in place), he would bring a magnetized hammer up to his mouth, where one tack would attach to it, then bring the hammer and tack down to the work, and with two strokes of the hammer—one to hold the tack in its place, the second to drive it home—the tack was in, and, almost instantly, the next one was on its way. Using this method, he could drive in a dozen tacks in about a half minute. As a ten-year-old, I of course wanted to try this, but my mother forbade it. I mean, what could possibly go wrong with a ten-year-old boy holding a dozen tacks in his mouth, and bringing a hammer right up to his mouth several times a minute? When she voiced this objection, her father reminded her (probably for the hundredth time) that that was exactly what he had to learn to do at the same age during his apprenticeship in Tzarist Russia, where he worked twelve hours a day for room and board. He would also mention that one of his friends bashed his teeth in with the hammer, and another swallowed several tacks and was lain up for a week (no hospitals for apprentices).

Both Harry and Max had their own shops and were thus technically small businessmen. This might seem ironic, given their devotion to communism, but there was in fact a link between the two. Both had found jobs when they arrived in the Boston area from Russia, but both were eventually fired and blacklisted for trying to organize unions, so they became independent craftsmen. Despite all they had in common, and despite their children marrying each other, I don’t remember them being friends, and I am sure there was some ancient quarrel behind that, but it’s long lost to history.

Of course, they have long since passed on, Harry living into his late 80s, Max departing a bit earlier, as did my dad. But they can still enjoy watching me make a total fool of myself building a bookcase, or birdhouse, or, most recently, a new flowerbox. As Harry said when I held up the four-piece wooden hanging box for their approval, “It will work, but as I have told him many times, the most important part of carpentry is the finish. Otherwise, it just doesn’t look professional.” Both Max and my dad nodded in agreement. Max then pointed out that one of the screws was not well set and could be seen, while my dad mentioned the lack of a flush joint between one of the sides and the back support piece. I knew it was no use saying that once hung, neither of these blemishes would show, because they wouldn’t hear me. And, even if they had, “There is no excuse for shoddy work” was a motto emblazoned in my mind around age five.

Of course, I don’t really mind any of this. I am not bothered by their visits but honored and delighted by them. I am not a young man myself, and I find it a source of happiness and good fortune that I had such honest, hardworking, decent men in my life. And even if I am a complete disappointment when it comes to fine carpentry or making things of beauty and utility, perhaps their wisdom and experience did me some good in my long life. At least it is comforting to think so.

It is time for Christians to stop arguing about evolution. Here is why: A lot of the things people commonly claim about evolution in these arguments are wrong.

For example, evolution has nothing to say about atheism, creationism, Christianity, any other religion, politics, social issues, the origin of the universe, the meaning of life, the origin of life, how can animals give birth to different animals (they can’t and don’t) why people behave the way they do, whether there was a global flood, whether Adam and Eve were a real couple, whether Jesus rose from the dead, or whether the Bible is true.

Here is what evolution does say—this and only this: Certain environmental conditions can lead to a change in allele frequencies in populations over many generations. If that sounds sciency, it is. Evolution by natural selection is a well-grounded scientific theory, with no theological, social, or other implications. It is equivalent to saying objects attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of their distance—the definition of Newton’s theory of gravity. We might as well argue about gravity as about evolution.

Another reason to stop arguing is because everyone agrees that evolution is real, even Answers in Genesis and The Discovery Institute, and all other scientists, religious or not. The AiG model for adaptive radiation after the flood includes evolution by natural selection. Everyone now agrees that “microevolution” is real (thank God, since it has important medical implications). So all the arguments are about the details, as well as some of the consequences of evolutionary dynamics, such as the common ancestry of all extant life starting with LUCA (the Last (i.e. most recent) Universal Common Ancestor—which was not the first living cell).

A third reason is that unless you are a graduate student in biology, it really doesn’t matter if you believe the diversity of species got here by evolution or direct creation—it has no effect on your life, or your faith in Jesus. It only becomes a problem if it leads to a generalized distrust in science, which is then extrapolated to other matters, such as the efficacy of vaccines, the reality of climate change, or the fact that all human populations are members of one human race (which is also in accord with Jesus’s ministry). So, believe as you wish, and stop fighting with those who disagree with you.

And finally, a scientific reason to forget about the evolution debate: Evolution is not the ultimate bedrock of biological science that many think it is. In fact, evolution relies entirely on something else, and follows automatically from it. That something else will be discussed in my next post.

My son told me he thinks the people living in ancient times were really ignorant. I told him that they didn’t know any better, since their science was very rudimentary. They did the best they could with the little they could understand about the world they lived in.

“Yeah, I know that” he told me. “But still, so much of what they believed was just so far off. I mean who could seriously believe that the weather was some kind of magic, and they were always getting stuck in storms or earthquakes?”

“Well, again, they didn’t know what we know, and they couldn’t do what we can do”.

“I am so glad I wasn’t born in those days. I can’t imagine trying to live without my holoscopiter, and having to type words on some kind of device whenever I want to tell you something”.

“I know. The age of devices was pretty brutal. People barely lived for a hundred years and had to spend most of their time doing something called ‘work’. We still can’t figure out what that meant”.

“Right, and they had to get on a device that flew through the air and took hours to go from one place to another, never mind being stuck on one silly little planet”.

“Well, they knew nothing about the 5^th law of gravitational entropy or the theory of peribolenism, so they couldn’t imagine interplanetary telepathy or galactic teleportation”.

“And they thought the speed of light was constant. What idiots”.

“No son, they just didn’t know any better. They even thought that what they considered to be science was the last word, and that it disproved God”.

He laughed. “You mean they didn’t know about Rogerton’s proof”?

“No, that was published only a few centuries ago. I heard Rogerton speak once, when I was about your age. Brilliant man. I saw recently that he is quite close to God these days and is still publishing his ideas in the Journal of Heavenly Truth”.

Did you ever think that the aggressive, deceptive, and philosophically and scientifically erroneous form of modern atheism, called “New Atheism” could be instrumental in bringing atheists to faith? The proponents of this cult (Dawkins, Harris, Coyne, Krauss, etc.) that denies not only God, but free will, the soul, human exceptionalism, and any shred of  purpose or meaning to anything, have apparently dealt a severe blow to the cause of Christ by their rhetoric. But it turns out that sometimes this stream of hostile negativity has had the opposite effect, that of making people think that these arguments for atheism are so weak and devoid of truth, that maybe God is actually real.

A new book titled Coming To Faith through Dawkins will be released by Kregel Publications at the end of August, this year. The book is edited by British scientist Denis Alexander and theologian  Alister McGrath It  includes twelve testimonies in chapters by an international variety of former atheists, whose reaction to the venomous rhetoric of  New Atheism was to consider and then accept Christianity. I am the author of one (the first)  of those chapters, as is my wife, Aniko Albert, who was raised in communist, atheistic Hungary, and m so is my friend Ashley Lande, an author who writes about her conversion to faith after being immersed in the psychodelic drug culture.

My chapter describes how The God Delusion and other books by the original New Atheists, actually helped to buttress my new found faith, rather than derail it. The absurdity of the scientific and philosophical arguments of these proponents of a pitiless, meaningless existence, left me both horrified at the distortions of reality in their arguments, and thankful that the Holy Spirit had saved me from such a hellish worldview.

The book is already listed on Amazon, and is available for pre-order.