Ursula K. Le Guin: Language of the Night

Susan Wood did a great service to literature by editing a compilation of miscellaneous writing by Ursula K. Le Guin. Her compilation is The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1979). It includes roughly two dozen speeches, introductions to books, and essays. The book doesn't appear to be in print, but used copies are available from standard sources, at reasonable prices. See here, here and here for some previous posts on Le Guin.

This is not the place to describe the importance of Ms. Le Guin in depth. I'll let this source summarize: "Ursula K. Le Guin has won many Nebula and Hugo Awards, as well as a National Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Newbery Honor and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement."

The lady can write. She is a master of prose, using words, and punctuation, and point of view, and the other tools available, carefully and well, without letting them get in the way of what she is trying to say.

These are some of the highlights of The Language of the Night:
1) She ably defends the legitimacy of good fantastic literature as literature, not trash. (She also skewers trashy fantastic literature effectively)
2) She mentions authors of fantastic fiction who have influenced her. These include Cordwainer Smith, Philip K. Dick, and Tolkien. (Smith and Tolkien I have read. I have, probably to my shame, never really read Dick.)
3) She writes about why we read:

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel--or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel--is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. A person who had never known another human being could not be introspective any more than a terrier can, or a horse; he might (improbably) keep himself alive, but he could not know anything about himself, no matter how long he lived with himself. And a person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and
spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human.

For the story--from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace--is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, butthere have been no societies that did not tell stories. p. 31. (published first in "Prophets and Mirrors: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing," in The Living Light, Fall 1970)

4) She writes about how and why she has written as she has.
5) She deals with the problem of evil. (Le Guin is a Taoist, and apparently believes that everyone is a mixture of good and evil. She is certainly sympathetic to Christians, including Tolkien and Cordwainer Smith.)
6) She comments on an important essay by Virginia Woolf, on character in fiction, and concludes that, if fantastic fiction isn't about character, it isn't worth much.
7) She argues that science fiction is not really predictive:

This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. . . . In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future--indeed Schrödinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the "future," on the quantum level, cannot be predicted--but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. p. 156. Originally published in the 1976 edition of The Left Hand of Darkness.

(More on Schrödinger. For more on his perhaps the most famous -- and misinterpreted -- thought-experiment ever, see here. I'm not sure Le Guin interpreted it correctly, either!)
8) She describes first seeing the 3 volumes of The Lord of the Rings in a university library, and seeing them again and again, and, finally, checking the first one out, and reading the entire trilogy in three days! She says that she has re-read them many times.
9) She writes about writer's workshops.

This lady has been a writer's (and reader's) writer, and even the introductions to her books are gems.

Sunspots 25

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Article in Orion arguing that exposing children to computers hurts their education. It may be hurting mine, too . . . Thought-provoking, to say the least. Sample (there's a lot more):

Substituting the excitement of virtual connections for the deep fulfillment of firsthand engagement is like mistaking a map of a country for the land itself, or as biological philosopher Gregory Bateson put it, "eat[ing] the menu instead of your meal." No one prays over a menu. And I've never witnessed a child developing a reverence for nature while using a computer.

National Public Radio has reported on biological exploration of the Arctic, here and here. The first report is in both text and audio form, and includes photos. There are photos of some of the scientists, and of a few of the remarkable creatures found by the expedition, some of which were previously unknown. The second report, in audio format only, describes some of these animals.

Hyperion is perhaps the oddest-looking moon in the Solar System. Here's an image, from the Jet Propulsion lab, from its Cassini satellite fly-by. Here's some information on Hyperion, from the same organization. Four versions of a movie of the fly-by are available here.

Frederica Mathewes-Green believes that earlier marriage might reduce the divorce rate. She's got some other interesting opinions in her editorial in First Things.

Speaking of First Things, the periodical is now offering an RSS feed, not of its magazine articles, which are available as regular HTML files, a month after publication, or earlier, but of tidbits and opinions which aren't going to make the periodical. The first three offerings look interesting.

"Donor Gametes for Assisted Reproduction in Contemporary Jewish Law and Ethics" considers assisted reproduction from a perspective that isn't often heard. The authors touch on Roman Catholic, and even Orthodox beliefs in their discussion.

William Saletan, of Slate, has previously defended Intelligent Design. He now concludes that it is not scientific.

Ken Schenck has wrapped up a series on homosexuality and Christianity. One recurring theme is that, although homosexual practice is sinful, it is not a sin worse than, say, deceit. Schenck sheds considerable light on the culture of Bible times. His posts, as always, are thorough and have obviously required considerable thought.

Joe Carter has re-done the Church Directory, a list of Christian blogs. He also furnishes code for adding a random sample of these to your blogroll.

Gina Burkart has a web page at the CBN site, entitled "Christian Lessons from the Half-Blood Prince." I found it both comprehensive (there were some I had missed) and brief.

Gorillas use tools in the wild (Chimpanzees have been known to do this for many years).

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to two Australians, for their discovery that a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, lives in the harshly acidic environment of the stomach and causes ulcers. One of them proved this dramatically! The Physics Prize has also been awarded, but the work is a little harder to explain.

An introduction to Intelligent Design can be found here. It explains and covers the topic pretty well, although it is clear that the author(s) aren't fans of the movement. Thanks to Brandy!

Joan Wallace, missionary to Zambia, had about $780 in missions funds stolen from her house, and feels obligated to replace it herself.

This week's Christian Carnival is here.

Image source (public domain)

A couple of pictures

Hearts-a-busting is a small bush that grows in the woods in upstate South Carolina and elsewhere. The fruit, although it is small, is spectacular. Here's a picture:



Way back on May 19th, I posted a picture of a small flower that's a member of the Aster or Composite family, to which daisies, thistles, goldenrod, and a great many more flowers belong. Two people, one from the UK, and one from somewhere near Lake Erie, were kind enough to comment, and state that the same flower, colts foot, grew there, too. Well, it grows in Washington state, too, I find, but this picture was taken here in upstate South Carolina, where some of the flowers are starting to mature. The basic function of almost all flowers, after all, is reproduction.



Thanks for reading, and looking!

Interruptions

The Wiktionary says that "to interrupt" is "to disturb or halt an ongoing process or action by interfering suddenly."

Some people have a lot of interruptions in their daily lives. My wife used to, when she was a fifth grade teacher. I had less when I was a college teacher, but sometimes a student interrupted class, or at least got me away from what I had planned to do, onto something that really concerned them, sometimes about the subject matter, sometimes not. Parents, especially parents of young children, can count on interruptions. Interruptions are often really what our job is all about.

Our Sunday School lesson yesterday was about Philip being interrupted in the middle of an evangelistic campaign in Samaria. The Holy Spirit directed, maybe physically moved him, to go into the desert to talk to an Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8).

Jesus was probably often interrupted, at least in the human sense. Bartimaeus yelled at Him when he was on the road to Jericho. Little children were brought to Him when the twelve thought He had more important business. Nicodemus came to see Him at night, perhaps while He was sleeping, or eating. In all these cases, Jesus responded. He healed Bartimaeus, told the twelve to let little children come to Him, and had a theological discussion with Nicodemus, from which we get John 3, especially verses 16-17: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God sent not the Son into the world to judge the world; but that the world should be saved through him. (ASV)

When I am interrupted, what am I doing that's so important? Usually not much.

May I, like Philip and Christ, see interruptions as opportunities!

The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, pt. 3

In her chapter, "How to Enter In," Hannah W. Smith wrote:

Jesus saves me now. It is He.

Jesus saves me now. It is His work to save.

Jesus saves me now. I am the one to be saved.

Jesus saves me now. He is doing it every moment.

Let us sum this up. In order to enter into this blessed interior life of rest and triumph, you have two steps to take: first, entire abandonment, and second, absolute faith. No matter what the complications of your experience, no matter what your difficulties, or your surroundings, or your "peculiar temperament," these two steps will certainly bring you out into the green pastures and still waters of this life hid with Christ in God. You may be perfectly sure of this. And if you will let every other consideration go, and simply devote your attention to these two points, your progress will be rapid, and your soul will reach its desired haven far sooner than you can now think possible.

In "Difficulties Concerning Faith," she wrote:

Your idea of faith, I suppose, has been something like this. You have looked upon it as in some way a sort of thing, either a religious exercise of soul, or an inward gracious disposition of heart; something tangible, in fact, which, when you have secured it, you can look at and rejoice over, and use as a passport to God's favor, or a coin with which to purchase His gifts. And you have been praying for faith, expecting all the while to get something like this, and never having received any such thing, you are insisting upon it that you have no faith. Now faith, in fact, is not in the least this sort of thing. It is nothing at all tangible. It is simply believing God, and, like sight, it is nothing apart from its object. You might as well shut your eyes and look inside to see whether you have sight, as to look inside to discover whether you have faith. You see something, and thus know that you have sight; you believe something, and thus know that you have faith. For, as sight is only seeing, so faith is only believing. And as the only necessary thing about seeing is, that you see the thing as it is, so the only necessary thing about believing is, at you believe the thing as it is. The virtue does not lie in your believing, but in the thing you believe. If you believe the truth you are saved; if you believe a lie you are lost. The believing in both cases is the same; the things believed in are exactly opposite, and it is this which makes the mighty difference. Your salvation comes, not because your faith saves you, but because it links you to the Saviour who saves; and your believing is really nothing but the link.

. . .

You would not be able to live in this world and go through the customary routine of life a single day, if you could not trust your fellow-men. And it never enters into your head to say you cannot. But yet you do not hesitate to say, continually, that you cannot trust your God! And you excuse yourself by the plea that you are "a poor weak creature" and "have no faith."

This series, excerpting the classic book by Hannah Whitall Smith, began here, and continued here.

Natural law and oocytes

A commenter suggested that there might be objections to the use of human oocytes (unfertilized egg cells) for the production of embryonic stem cells, on the grounds that their natural purpose is human reproduction, not preparation of cell cultures which might make artificially-produced human embryonic stem cells. (See my recent post on Altered Nuclear Transfer-Oocyte Assisted Reprogramming (or ANT-OAR)) I believe that this sort of objection would be an example of moral reasoning based on natural law. Such reasoning has often been used by Roman Catholic theologians, going back to Thomas Aquinas. Natural Law theory can be complex and ambiguous.

As I understand it, natural law reasoning is used to support the official Catholic view that most or all kinds of contraception are wrong, because the purpose of sexual activity is to produce children, so that thwarting that purpose would be wrong. C. S. Lewis, who was not a Roman Catholic, also seemed to hold that view. (The web page the previous link refers to was written by me, but I have been unsuccesful in persuading the publishers to correct the spelling of my name. There are a few other errors, also minor. I am grateful that it is available, however! The section on birth control is near the end.)

So, would natural law reasoning prohibit the use of oocytes for purposes other than "normal" reproduction? It might, indeed, but I am not sure that it would, or should, for three reasons.

First, both my sources for the technique described are significantly influenced by Catholics. The editor of First Things is a Catholic priest. The other periodical, Ethics & Medics, is a publication of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, which says it "derives its message directly from the teachings of the Catholic Church." The articles in neither periodical raised this objection. (This is a link to the article there, in .PDF format)

Second, under one circumstance, I'm guessing that natural law would not prohibit use of oocytes for such a purpose. That circumstance is if the person who wished to be cured provided her own oocytes. It would seem to me that using your own oocytes in an attempt to save your life, or to significantly improve its quality, would be justifiable morally, even if it wasn't their normal purpose. I'm not aware that the use of self-grafts is opposed on moral grounds, even though, say, removing skin from the back, and placing in the nose, changes the natural purpose of such skin. (Not as radically as using oocytes for ANT-OAR, I admit.) Coronary bypass surgery also generally uses self-grafts, I believe.

Third, selfless giving for others is encouraged strongly by the teachings of Jesus, and, I suppose, could trump natural law. Should a competent ovulating woman volunteer to donate a few oocytes for the purpose of producing embryonic stem cells to significantly aid the life or well-being of another person, even for a person or persons unknown to her, it seems to me that her gift should not be refused. I would oppose any exploitation or coercion of women in order to obtain oocytes, and compensating them materially would be questionable, in my view.

Even if Catholics raised no objections to the use of oocytes in this way, others might, and such objections should be seriously considered. Here's an article on the use of donor gametes in relation to Jewish law. It doesn't consider oocyte donation for ANT-OAR.

I appreciate all comments, unless they are automated ones using my blog to try to sell something. The commenter, Bonnie, has posted extensively on moral issues, including those related to human reproduction, and is worth reading on any subject she tackles. She has some recent posts on autoerotism.

ScienceBlog has a post on "Gametes and embryos from mammalian stem cells: religious and ethics perspectives," which doesn't consider ANT-OAR, but does deal with the subject of its title. Warning: there are quite a few ads on this page.

Hydrogen fuel cells

Especially since the recent rise of gas prices in the U. S., we are hearing more about alternative fuel types. Fuel cells are a possibility. President Bush has made a couple of speeches about them.

Is this type of fuel ideal? Maybe. Probably not.

One fact that must be borne in mind is that fuel cells depending on Hydrogen require energy to produce. There is little or no free Hydrogen available. The reactivity of Hydrogen is the reason why it is such an excellent fuel. Because it is so reactive, it's not often found by itself. Because of the laws of thermodynamics, it takes more energy to produce free Hydrogen than you can get from it when it is used. If that's true, why should anyone pursue this type of energy? Well, just because an energy source requires more energy to make than you get out of it isn't necessary a hindrance to using it. Batteries require more energy to make than you can get out of them, but I would hate to do without them. They are convenient. Fuel cells may be, too.

Some energy sources are, in a manner of speaking, there for the taking. These include wood and other biomass, coal, petroleum, natural gas, dams, wind, solar, and nuclear fission. Although it takes some energy to get them, the energy obtained is greater than the amount used to obtain. All of them have advantages and drawbacks, and, of course, there is only so much energy that can be obtained from each. All of them, used on a wide scale, affect the environment negatively in some way, except perhaps biomass. Nuclear fusion may eventually be developed as a reliable energy source. If so, it, too, will have advantages and drawbacks.

It is possible that we may find organisms that release free Hydrogen, or can develop some. If so, this would put Hydrogen fuel cells into the category of energy for the taking, I suppose.

It is true that fuel cells shouldn't directly produce lots of nasty by-products, so that's good, but producing the energy that is used to produce the fuel cells, be it hydroelectric, fossil fuel, nuclear, or some other source, will result in environmental degradation.

* * * *

God willing, I shall eventually post on fantastic literature again. I also plan to return to the matter of Intelligent Design soon.

If it works, it should satisfy stem cell opponents

As is well known, lots of people are strongly opposed to embryonic stem cell research, so strongly that they are not persuaded by the possibility of benefits from this research. Lots of other people think it holds great promise, and that it should be pursued, regardless of the ethical concerns of the first group. (To many from the second group, not exploring possible medical benefits is a serious ethical concern.)

How do we solve this ethical (and political) dilemma? Perhaps we can't satisfy both groups. But, perhaps we can.

In First Things, Maureen Condic writes about "Altered Nuclear Transfer-Oocyte Assisted Reprogramming (or ANT-OAR)," and gives some explanation of this proposed technique. If it works, it would work by using "epigenetic reprogramming to convert an adult cell into an embryonic stem cell." An unfertilized human egg (oocyte) would also be used, in addition to an adult cell, in the process. The cytoplasm (material outside the nucleus) of such an egg can "turn off" the programming of an adult cell. Epigenetic reprogramming has already been done, with the assistance of oocytes, in the cloning of mammals.

At no time during this procedure, as proposed, would there ever be a human embryo, or any entity that would be capable of developing into a baby. No human embryos would be harvested. What would be needed would be unfertilized eggs and adult cells.

Should this procedure work, it might be possible to do what therapeutic cloning is supposed to do, namely produce stem cells with the power of embryonic stem cells, and derived from, and with the characteristics of, a particular adult. One such characteristic is tissue type. If an embryonic stem cell derived from me were to be used, in me, to cure, say, Parkinson's disease, my immune system would not be expected to reject such cells.

Some experiments need to be done to test the feasibility of this procedure.

Condic cites a statement, published in "Ethics and Medics," a publication of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, making this proposal. (The same issue of the publication has an interpretation of what the Pope said concerning the Schiavo case.)

Perhaps I'm a little cynical, but I wonder if some of our politicians (and others, including well-known evangelical figures, TV stars, etc.) would really accept this procedure, if it works. I fear that there would be fears of losing influence and donations (on both sides), and refusal to bury the hatchet. I hope this works, and that the embryonic stem cell political battles end in a friendly truce. I hope one side accepts this procedure, if it works, and that the other side stops calling for the use of human embryos in stem cell research.

Sunspots 24

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Face transplants have been proposed. The ethics of such transplants are considered here and here.

Scientists in the UK will be allowed to experimentally produce early embryos with mitochondrial DNA (which is separate from that in the nucleus) from a third "parent."

Transcript of Sunday, September 25, "Meet the Press," on lots of issues. One quote:
Mr. Russert: Is there the political will for Democrats and Republicans to come together and try to wean ourselves off of foreign oil?
Mr. Friedman: Well, there should be. It's obviously the centerpiece of something that could solve many problems at once. It can deal with the climate change issue. It can deal with our status in the world. It can be an inspiration to get young people to go into math, science and engineering, which we're desperate to do. I'm not saying it's the cure-all of everything . . .

Ken, at Schenck Thoughts, has been evaluating different versions of the Bible. Here's his take on the ESV. Other posts, which you will see listed in the "previous posts" sidebar of his blog, deal with several other versions. (Ken is well qualified to do this, by the way.)

Google Earth has a free version. This is a program you install that lets you see the earth, using satellite photos. Takes a fast connection. Note that pictures are not the same resolution in all areas, so you may have to adjust the altitude to see much of anything. We could clearly see autos in some locations. Also, all photos weren't all taken at the same time, so your house may be too new to be shown. Some physical features (e. g., Hayes Bluff) are identified by name.

Duh . . . I just noticed that the Firefox browser has a little red icon in the upper right corner that indicates that critical updates are available.

Paul J. Cella, III, "Technology and the Spirit of Ownership," The New Atlantis, Summer 2005. Sample:
We are told that we must make our decisions on a question like cloning human embryos on the basis of “good science,” leaving “theological” objections to the side. In this context, a critic of Leon Kass once scoffed: “Is [he] really citing the God of the Patriarchs as a guide for contemporary medical regulation?” But it is very important to recognize that, whatever one thinks of the God of the Patriarchs, someone (though he may go unnamed) must be cited as a guide for contemporary medical regulation. Perhaps it will be Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism; perhaps Rousseau and perfectability; perhaps it will simply be the “bioethics” industry and the amoral authority of the stock analyst. The point is that it will emphatically be someone. To follow the compass of “good science” alone usually means doing what is good for the scientists. But what is good for the scientists is not always good for everyone. And a nation that stands idly by as its moral imagination is silently ushered out of the room is an emasculated nation; it is the very opposite of a free people.

Apparently [part of] the leadership of the US House of Representatives continues to believe (or want to believe) that there is no such thing as global warming, and that, as long as they are in charge, there isn't going to be. (Note added 10/4/05 -- the previous link no longer works, and I can't find the article I referred to here, as the periodical has been updated. This link, about the same events, works as of 10/4/05. I added the two words in brackets at the beginning of this paragraph on the same date.)

Laura has posted a story about high school, which is meant to encourage us to encourage others.

For the first time, a giant squid has been photographed in its natural habitat. (The photo isn't that great, but the article is fascinating)

Hebrews 11:3, which, in English, seems to say that we understand by faith how the world came to be, may not exactly mean that. Whoops . . .
Thank you, Google Alerts! (You can sign up, and have Google e-mail you whenever it finds a search item.)

This week's Christian Carnival is here.

Image source (public domain)

Comments to Sept 26 post

(This color and font represents a quote from the comments to my previous post)
My last interview with a real scientist grabbed the attention of some interesting folk ... what say you?

Indeed it did, me being one such, I guess.

Thanks for the offer, but I'm not a "real scientist." I only taught at Christian institutions, and my inclination and work load resulted in me being a teacher, not a researcher, and, besides, I've now retired.

. . . in the course of your studies, did you make any discoveries that ran directly afoul of those assumptions? Many of the most important scientific discoveries in history have been made accidentally, while looking for something else. If your assumptions here were unwarranted, it stands to reason that there should have been some results you found that didn't make sense, or seemed to contradict those foundational assumptions.

You are correct on some important discoveries. Apparently the discovery of X-rays and antibiotics are examples of accidental discoveries. However, almost certainly some discoveries have not been made that might have been, because the scientist just discarded what seemed to be anomalous or unexplainable results. I wasn't really testing the foundational assumptions, and most biologists whose work has anything to do with evolution aren't, either. They're just dealing with the effects of natural selection and studying similarities between different organisms. Kuhn called this "normal science," just filling in blank spaces on the map of knowledge, not looking for new continents.

Kuhn's work was important, but it doesn't look like it actually panned out in real life. Relativity didn't gain acceptance only after those who embraced Newtonian physics had all died, and quantum mechanics didn't wait around for relativity's supporters to die, either.

Einstein resisted quantum mechanics until he died, even though some of his work made it possible. Yes, new theories may be accepted, but Kuhn/Planck are often correct that scientists who are strongly committed to an old theory don't easily give it up, or give it up at all. They just become irrelevant, if the new theory is really worth something. It would be interesting to know what will happen to string theory in 100 years or so.

I don't find change caused by selection and similarities to be terribly controversial ... nor do most creationists, even the young-earth variety. So how do you recommend distinguishing between the little "e" evolution you describe and the kind Richard Dawkins' likes to write about? It basically sounds like you are suggesting that the controversy is due to language -- if so, how do we fix the language so that scientists understand what the real controversy is about?

I wish I knew! So much damage has been done by using the word, evolution, which has multiple meanings, without indicating, or even thinking about, which meaning one is talking about. Too many (I hope) well-meaning Christians are saying "evolution is false!" or the equivalent. Some of them know better. Lots of them don't. Natural selection and similarity aren't false. What they should be saying, instead, is "I believe in a Creator," and let it go at that. Atheists should be honest, and say that they don't, and that disbelieving in a creator isn't any more scientific than believing in one. (Once in a while, an atheist really does this, but not often.) I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for clarity to erupt on a broad scale.

I refer to my three posts (link to last one) "I Believe in Evolution--so do you!" for more of my thoughts on linguistic clarity in discussing origins.

As to the main subject of your comments, namely the validity of Behe's ideas, I'm sure I don't know everything about them, and some of the arguments against them, but will try to deal with that subject in another post, later. I do know that there have been what seem to me to be serious challenges to his ideas. Also, it seems to me that what authorities say shouldn't affect acceptance or rejection of an idea--it should depend on its validity, or lack thereof. But, unfortunately, that's not the way it always works, certainly including in science.

Thanks again for writing.

Michael Behe: will he renounce Intelligent Design?

Bonnie posted a link to "My Conversation With A Cell Biologist About Evolution," and I appreciate it (She also posted a link to a follow-up, on the same blog, The Dawn Treader). The post, on Intelligent Design (ID), is interesting, and so are the comments. The author says he interviewed a professional scientist whose work has been published in academic journals. The blogger is not such a scientist. However, it is clear that he believes in ID, and that the scientist, does, too. Some of the commenters don't. I have comments, pertinent or not, so extensive that I decided to post them on my own blog.

Lest there be any doubt, I believe that there is an omnipotent God, and that He was directly involved in the origin of the universe, of living things, and of humans, and that at least some attributes of the way things are were designed by God. If that makes me an IDer, then I am one.

excerpt:
Blogger: "Is evolution practical in any way to your research?"

Prof: "Your average scientist just uses the word evolution. It is not part of the investing process. Here is the bottom line. Three words. Observable. Reproducible. Testable." [note -- surely investing should have been investigating.]

For what it's worth, which may not be a lot, as it's almost four decades old, I have a Ph. D. in genetics and zoology. My doctoral research, which has been justifiably forgotten by everyone except me, was on relationships between pigeon and dove species, as measured by their blood antigens. Evolutionary relationships were assumed by me, and, as far as I know, by all others involved in the work of my laboratory. We didn't try to test the theory of evolution, at least not to disprove it. It was assumed that natural selection works, and had worked, and that similar species were related to each other by common descent. We did study various similarities between species. I believe that the Prof. is right on the mark.

Forget evolution, whatever that means, (see this post, and the two previous ones it refers to) if you can, for a moment. Although Ph. D. stands for Doctor of Philosophy, I have never taken a course in philosophy, and any expertise I have in the subject has been picked up after I received the degree. That is true of most scientists, at least in the U. S., I believe. I was trained well, at a famous institution, and had acquaintance with three or four Nobel prize winners, and some others who could have been given one. At no time do I recall anyone ever considering the philosophical underpinnings of what we were doing. We never heard of reductionism, determinism, or epistemology. Plumbers probably aren't trained in economics, labor relations, ethics, metallurgy, ceramics, hydrology, and the like, but in how to use their equipment, and in what plumbing hardware is made of, and how it's supposed to work. Based on my experience, biologists are usually trained like plumbers. They learn how the hardware of the cell and the organism are supposed to work, and what they are made of, but not the foundational underpinnings of their fields, or in how their field affects society.

What am I saying? I'm trying to say that scientists don't often question the fundamental assumptions of their field. They just work assuming that they are true. That's one reason for resistance to alternatives to evolutionary theory.

The interview goes on to indicate that it might be dangerous to one's career to stand up for ID, at most universities. Probably. Now, back to evolution. If ID is seen as an attack on the idea of evolution, most biologists will not be happy. Why? Well, one reason is that "evolution" means many things. (ID, also, is not a single coherent set of beliefs--there are serious differences among IDers.) One thing evolution may mean is genetic change under the influence of selection. No biologist that I have ever heard of doubts that such change has occurred. For example, insects have become resistant to insecticides within recent history. For another, the different races of humans have all descended from a single small group. These facts support the idea of evolution. New varieties have arisen. (They don't contradict the Bible, either. In fact, the Bible teaches the second fact.) If evolution, in a sense more fundamental than the appearance of new varieties, occurred, and many types of organisms descended from a few, then you would expect similarities between these different types of organisms, with the amount of similarity depending on how close the relationship is. Similarities, with the amount corresponding closely to the supposed degree of relationship, are found. I know of no biologist who questions this. (They may question the reason for it.) These two ideas, change caused by selection, and similarities, are accepted facts. They can be, and almost always are, related to ideas of evolution. When evolution is questioned, it is seen as an attack on fundamental and accepted facts. If a physicist was told that there is no gravity, or are no electrical charges, she would be extremely skeptical of the teller. Similarly, the first reaction of most biologists to ideas that are said to contradict evolution will be to reject them.

It is also true, of course, that there may be opposition to ID for less valid reasons, such as denying the possibility of a supreme being, or rebelling against religious parents.

What am I saying? I'm saying that there may be what seem, to an honest person, to be reasons to question the sanity of someone proposing ID, and there may also be atheism at work.

Lest there be any doubt, I appreciate the post, and the candor of the anonymous professor.

However, I have trouble with something said in response to a comment:
It would especially be helpful to see Behe himself acknowledge that his confidence in gradualism has been restored. Though I don't know Behe personally, I suspect he has enough integrity to admit when his ideas have been soundly reversed. A good scientist should know when to run up the white flag.

So the writer is not willing to give up on ID unless Michael Behe, credentialed biological scientist, (and author of Darwin's Black Box, one of the cornerstones of ID literature) is willing to recant his support for ID? That's asking an awful lot of Behe. I don't know Behe or the person who made the statement quoted immediately above, and I'm not doubting their integrity, but there is a difference between deliberate dishonesty and self-deception. Almost everyone, surely including me, sincerely believes and supports many things in spite of the evidence--our kids should be in the game, not on the bench; our political party is right, etc., when an unbiased observer would disagree. Scientists usually believe in theories they personally have invested in, even if the evidence is against them. That's just the way people work. I would be amazed if Behe wasn't like that--he's a person. A term which applies in this case, as I understand it, is Cognitive Dissonance. Although good scientists, and others, should know when to run up the white flag, we usually don't even know it, let alone do it.

Thomas S. Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a significant work. Part of what he said is summed up in this quote: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (Kuhn's source is said to have been Max Planck.) Scientists, probably even Behe, won't give up their cherished beliefs easily.

We should be willing to accept evidence that Behe's ideas are wrong, should there be any such evidence, regardless of what Behe might do with that evidence.

(I know, this cuts both ways. Even if ID was completely convincing to an unbiased person, it would be expected to take a generation for it to be accepted generally.)

As I understand Behe, and "gradualism," Behe has no problem accepting at least some gradualism.

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Corrections made, and item reposted: I erred, and mistakenly attributed a name to a poster/commenter. This has now been fixed, I hope.

That's It!

That's it! No more! I have just gotten my third spam comment in two weeks, this time, according to the "commenter" for a "Ukrainian Girls" site. Having no wish to serve as an advertising medium for Ukrainian, or any other type of girls, or for anything else, I am activating the Blogger feature that requires commenters to enter random letters in order to post a comment.

As I don't get many comments, this shouldn't be much of a hardship for the Blogosphere.

Prayer Request

I am well aware that there are people suffering a great deal more than the persons I am requesting prayer for. There are small children from the U. S. who have had both parents, and, in some cases, even more than two parents, considering the way families are often structured in our time, sent away on military assignments. There are many spouses who have been separated for long periods of time. There are many in the military who have been sent into grave danger.

In addition, there are people who have lost everything in a tsunami, or an earthquake, or a hurricane, and people who have never heard the gospel. All these, and many others, deserve my prayer and sympathy, and, perhaps, some of my material goods.

All that being said, one of our children has suddenly been given a new military assignment, a few hundred miles from her husband and less than year-old child, probably for a few weeks, in a place not expected to be dangerous, and I am requesting prayer for all three of them.

Thanks.

The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, pt. 2

I continue with excerpts from Hannah Whitall Smith's The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life.

From Smith's chapter "God's Side and Man's Side:"

To state it in brief, I would just say that man's part is to trust and God's
part is to work . . .

From her "The Life Defined:"

The point to be next considered is, as to what this hidden life consists in, and how it differs from every other sort of Christian experience.

Its chief characteristics are an entire surrender to the Lord, and a perfect trust in Him, resulting in victory over sin and inward rest of soul, and it differs from the lower range of Christian experience in that it causes us to let the Lord carry our burdens and manage our affairs for us instead of trying to do it ourselves.

When I speak of burdens, I mean everything that troubles us, whether spiritual or temporal.

I mean, first of all, ourselves. The greatest burden we have to carry in life is self. The most difficult thing we have to manage is self. Our own daily living, our frames and feelings, our especial weaknesses and temptations, and our peculiar temperaments, our inward affairs of every kind, these are the things that perplex and worry us more than anything else, and that bring us oftenest into bondage and darkness. In laying off your burdens, therefore, the first one you must get rid of is yourself. You must hand yourself and all your inward experiences, your temptations, your temperament, your frames and feelings, all over into the care and keeping of your God, and leave them there. He made you, and therefore He understands you and knows how to manage you, and you must trust Him to do it. Say to Him, "Here, Lord, I abandon myself to thee. I have tried in every way I could think of to manage myself, and to make myself what I know I ought to be, but have always failed. Now I give it up to thee. Do thou take entire possession of me. Work in me all the good pleasure of thy will. Mould and fashion me into such a vessel as seemeth good to thee. I leave myself in thy hands, and I believe thou wilt, according to thy promise, make me into a vessel unto thine honor, 'sanctified, and meet for the Master's use, and prepared unto every good work.'" And here you must rest, trusting yourself thus to Him continually and absolutely.

It is generally much less difficult for us to commit the keeping of our future to the Lord than it is to commit our present. We know we are helpless as regards the future, but we feel as if the present was in our own hands, and must be carried on our own shoulders; and most of us have an unconfessed idea that it is a great deal to ask the Lord to carry ourselves, and that we cannot think of asking Him to carry our burdens too.

Who is the best cared for in every household? Is it not the little children? And does not the least of all, the helpless baby, receive the largest share? As a late writer has said, the baby "toils not, neither does he spin" and yet he is fed, and clothed, and loved, and rejoiced in more tenderly than the hardest worker of them all.


See previous post for additional excerpts, and a brief explanation of sources. God willing, I'll post more of this book in a week.

William Edward Payne, 1920-1985

I attended the funeral of W. E. Payne a couple of days ago. He had been a member of my local church for several years, since his retirement as a minister in our denomination.

One of his sons was one of the officiating ministers. The son said a couple of profound things.

1) If Christianity works at all, it works in times like this.

2) When he was in high school, his father got voted out of a church, which surprised the father. The father found out about it, and came to tell the son. The son had his career mapped out, including continuing to attend the local high school, and for that and other reasons, immediately felt resentment. The father asked the son to forgive the people who had voted against him. The son had difficulty. Then the father asked him to do it for his, the father's sake. The son was able to, and the family left the church, and the town, as friends of these people. This, said the son, was the only time any word about a church problem was heard from his parents during their life as a pastoral family. Undoubtedly there were other problems, but the children were shielded from them.

What a Christian example!

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I had this speaker as a student, and recall something, also profound, he said while in a class of mine. It was that the Bible is without error, but that his interpretation of it wasn't. (Nor, of course, is mine!)

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Our senior pastor was another officiating minister. He said, and I saw no evidence to contradict him, as a fellow member, that while Rev. Payne was a member of our church, he never commented on how things should be done, and always did what he could to help the church, teaching a class, praying, or whatever else he could.

What a Christian example!

Basketball: Monarchs, proposals

I know -- the About paragraph at the upper right of this blog page says nothing about basketball, but sometimes I can't resist (or can't think of anything else to efficiently post).


Congratulations to the Sacramento Monarchs, who won the WNBA championship on Tuesday night. I watched almost the entire game. The Connecticut Sun, who narrowly lost, were hampered by injuries to one of their stars, Lindsay Whalen, point guard. I saw Whalen on TV when she was with the University of Minnesota, two years ago. She was an exciting player, but passed the ball out of bounds a little too much. The commentators on this year's finals series said that she had been the best point guard in the WNBA, which is high praise, indeed, so she has evidently matured, and is more under control. The Sun, of course, have a number of other good players. One of their players, not quite as skilled, but good enough, is 7 foot, 2 inch Margo Dydek.

Yolanda Griffith was most valuable player for the championship series. She was also the oldest player on either team, being born March 1, 1970. She has a 16 year old daughter. The Monarch's page on Griffith indicates that she was among the league's best players (between 3rd best and 18th best) in 27 different statistical categories, which is remarkable. I'm too lazy to check, but suspect that no other player in the league compares with that. Obviously a solid player, all-around. Taj McWilliams-Franklin of the Sun was also born in 1970, also was excellent in the championship series, and is among the best players in the league in 23 different statistical categories. Also, obviously a solid player. McWilliams-Franklin has an 11 year old daughter. Both of these women appear to have improved, basketball-wise, at least, with age.


I have some suggestions for those in charge of my favorite game. I don't believe, for a tenth of a second, that anyone who is in charge will even see them, let alone implement them.

For basketball at all levels:
1) Make another line, beyond the 3-point line, and have 4-point shots, with four free throws if a player is fouled in the act of shooting from beyond this line. This should open up the game, make it more exciting, and make it possible to score lots of points in a hurry.

2) Assess fouls to more than one defensive player, if an offensive shooter is fouled by more than one person while in the act of shooting. Shooters are often clobbered by at least two persons, and only one gets a foul.

3) Cut back on the number of time-outs taken during the last two minutes of a game, or don't allow full time-outs during that period. As any fan knows, the last "few minutes" of a close game can take half an hour.

4) Have more female coaches of men's teams. Men have done very well as women's coaches (so have women--but both the Sun and the Monarchs had male coaches) so why shouldn't the reverse be true? Rick Pitino had a female assistant when he was at Kentucky, and John Thompson had a female academic advisor who sat on the bench at Georgetown. There should be more female coaches of men's teams.

5) Have more female TV commentators on men's basketball. (It's been done at least once, but there are some excellent female commentators--why restrict them to brief interviews at the end of the first half?)

For the NBA:
6) Assess more fouls to players with the ball who shove defenders (like Shaq does.)

7) Have an NBA coaching staff salary cap.

8) Don't draft players until they have finished college in their native country, or are old enough that they could have, if they had remained in college.

I have posted about basketball previously, at least here, here and here, on, respectively, a book about high school coach Bob Hurley; Reggie and Cheryl Miller, arguably basketball's first family; and Kwame Brown, a failure in the NBA who was drafted out of high school.

Sunspots 23

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

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Michele argues that perhaps Professor Trelawney's predictions in the Harry Potter books were not so off-base as they might have seemed.

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A Christian Carnival was posted late on the 14th, or early on the 15th. As it's in table form, it's easy to scan it for items of interest. The two that interested me the most were one on the ethics of using an open wi-fi network and one on science and miracles.

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Bonnie has posted a great quote for this time of year (in the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere, anyway)

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"Is Harry Potter Christian?", a scholarly article by Dan McVeigh, a professor of literature, is not for the faint-hearted, as it is rather long, but it is quite readable. He deals with C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, the Bible, and, of course, Harry Potter. Sample:
Until Frodo drags himself to Mount Doom - no, until poor Gollum and his Precious actually destroy the Dark Lord - there is no guarantee that Sauron will lose. Yet a fantasy that is the inside of real life is not arbitrary. It may bend or break "rules"; it cannot do without them. A Christian cannot believe that the devil can ultimately be victorious, or misunderstood by God. Satan cannot defeat Christ. But until the end of our pilgrimage, he can defeat us. This is the possibility Harry faces. The series' growing darkness disturbs some readers. But by its nature Gethsemane comes near the end, and the apostles' flight.

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James Dobson spoke at an academic convocation at Indiana Wesleyan University. Ken Schenck, reflecting on this event, wonders what a Christian University is supposed to be about.

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Bonnie has written most thoughtfully on "Deontology vs. Consequentialism in Christian argument." Her conclusion is that both are appropriate at times.

Also, in another blog, she has posted on "Sex and the Solitary Person," here and here. The first post received a lot of comments, by my standards, anyway. The second merits them.

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A short essay on how God chooses people for His work. Sample:

Perhaps the most unqualified person from a human point of view is Jesus of Nazareth himself. True, he meets some of the Messianic specs, but as the author of the epistle to the Hebrews reminds us, our eternal High Priest isn't even a Levite. On a more pedestrian level, we know that Jesus' contemporaries viewed him as the illegitimate son of a backwater town in Galilee, and even accused him of being a drunkard. Maybe it's just God's sense of humor, or maybe the theological method to God's madness is that the Lord delights in raising up that which was cast down, and making old things new. In any case, God's method doesn't seem to be purely the stuff of surveys, church meetings, and weekend retreats.

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Lisa Randall, Harvard physicist, on how the public unfortunately confuses and misunderstands words like theory, relativity, and uncertainty.

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Embryonic mouse stem cells improved heart function in sheep that had had heart attacks.

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Article (long) by Dallas Willard, written for the 1998 C. S. Lewis centennial, on Lewis and truth.

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Catez has been blogging for two years!

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This week's Christian Carnival is here.

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

(Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York: W. W. Norton, 1999) This is an important book. It won a Pulitzer Prize, and is one of the few books to have its own entry in the Wikipedia. I should have read it earlier. I am grateful to one of my sons-in-law for letting me borrow it. As a friend of mine who is a history professor recommended that I read it, it must have some credibility with historians.

The book, like most important ones, has engendered some controversy. In a sentence, Diamond's thesis is that the dominance of Eurasian peoples (including Europe, North American, China, India and Japan) in the world is due to accidents of geography and of plant and animal distribution. He denies any racial intelligence advantage or disadvantage. For what it's worth, which isn't much, I mostly agree with him. One thing Diamond doesn't allow for is Divine plan, or intervention, in history. He says very little about religion at all, and most of what he says about it is that it has provided motivation and cohesiveness for aggression against other societies.

The book is mistitled. Diamond had very little to say about steel, and much more to say about domesticated plants and animals than about guns.

On pages 406-7, Diamond summarizes his findings, pointing out what he believes to be the four most important variables which have influenced human history. The first is what wild animals and plants were available for domestication. The second is "rates of diffusion and migration" of ideas, domesticated animals and plants, germs, and people. Having a mainly East-West axis made such rates much more rapid in Eurasia than in Africa or the Americas, because the North-South axis of these continents meant that, say, domesticated animals from the Andes would have had to cross several different types of climate to reach Georgia, whereas that would not be true from, say, ancient Iraq to Spain. The third is diffusion between continents. The Americas and Australia were isolated, but Eurasia and Africa could have things and people diffuse between them. The fourth is total population size. If large enough, this enabled plague germs to develop, and ensured that innovations necessary for survival or success could arise in some part of the population. Larger population sizes also allowed more resources and people to be used in attempts at conquest.

Some quotes:
A mere dozen species account for over 80 percent of the modern world's annual tonnage of all crops. Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, ice, barley, and sorghum; the pulse soybean; the roots or tubers potato, manioc, and sweet potato; the sugar sources sugarcane and sugar beet; and the fruit banana. Cereal crops alone account for more than half of the calories consumed by the world's human populations. . . . Our failure to domesticate even a single major new food plant in modern times suggests that ancient peoples really may have explored virtually all useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating. pp. 132-3

. . . an entire field of science, termed ethnobiology, studies people's knowledge of the wild plants and animals in their environment. . . . The studies generally show that such peoples are walking encyclopedias of natural history, with individual names (in their local language) for as many as a thousand or more plant or animal species, and with detailed knowledge of those species' biological characteristics, distribution, and potential uses. p. 143

Domesticable animals are all alike; every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way. If you think you've already read something like that before, you're right. Just make a few changes, and you have the famous first sentence of Tolstoy's great novel Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." . . . The Anna Karenina principle explains a feature of animal domestication that had heavy consequences for human history--namely, that so many seemingly suitable big wild mammal species, such as zebras and peccaries, have never been domesticated and that the successful domesticates were almost exclusively Eurasian. p. 157

The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history--smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera--are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans. pp. 196-7

The book is a synthesis of history, geography, and biology, and not really suitable as a text in any of these fields, because it is so broad. That shouldn't deter people interested in any of those fields from reading Diamond's book. In fact, they should be required to do so.

More on Harry Potter and Rowling

I have now finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. There's a lot to chew on and digest in that thick book. A few thoughts (I'll refrain from predicting what comes next, and from giving away the plot.)

The author's achievement is impressive, if only because of its size. Whether J. K. Rowling had all this in her head from the beginning, or made much of it up as she went along, there's a lot of material in the six books published so far.

Harry, Hermione, and Ron, and their peers, are growing up. There is less juvenile rule-breaking, and more interest in courtship and love, as there should be, than in the earlier books. There's still a lot of deceit, by nearly everybody, except maybe Hagrid.

Loyalty, and the capacity to love, seem to be the principal virtues at Hogwarts, as they have been in the previous works.

There are some clear moral choices in these works. Probably the clearest in this book is this one:
". . . I can help you, Draco." "No, you can't," said Malfoy, his wand hand shaking very badly indeed. "Nobody can. He told me to do it or he'll kill me. I've got no choice." "He cannot kill you if you are already dead. Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. . . . Come over to the right side, Draco . . . you are not a killer. . . ." Malfoy stared at Dumbledore. "But I got this far, didn't I?" he said slowly. . . . "No, Draco," said Dumbledore quietly. "It is my mercy, and not yours, that matters now." Malfoy did not speak. His mouth was open, his wand hand still trembling. Harry thought he saw it drop by a fraction. ( pp. 591-2, J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, New York, Scholastic, 2005).

This exchange parallels the moral choice given to Saruman by Gandalf in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, including the similar result--Draco Malfoy, like Saruman, is tempted, but rejects the opportunity to be on the good side.

I have previously posted on the Potter series here, here, and here.

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Added later in the day:

There seems to be less about the animals (familiars?) that accompany the scholars at Hogwarts in this book.

Why is there so little evidence of marriage, or courting, among the Professors at Hogwarts? Hagrid was attracted to a female earlier in the series, but I don't recall any other such attractions to any of the professors.

Thanks for reading.

Beauty: Some Thoughts (by others)

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." - John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

What is it about nature that lets this happen, that it is possible to guess from one part what the rest is going to do? That is an unscientific question: I do not know how to answer it, and therefore I am going to give an unscientific answer. I think it is because nature has a simplicity and therefore a great beauty. Richard Feynman, "Seeking New Laws," pp. 143-167, in Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, New York: Modern Library, 1994. Quote is from p. 167.

The world, you might argue, does not need yet another subatomic particle. But even particle physics has not been about particles for a long time, physicists say. Rather it is about the relationships between particles, the symmetries that nature seems to respect, in short, about the beauty that physical laws seem to embody. Dennis Overbye, "After Triumph and Disillusionment, Wonder Re-enters the Story," New York Times, July 27, 2004

It is, indeed, an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realization in external nature. S. Chandrasekar, "Beauty and the quest for beauty in science," Physics Today, July, 1979, pp. 25-30, p. 28.

Thus, the perception of the world's beauty as a reflection of God's glory is incomplete without the awareness that underlying the beauty and wonder of earthly nature is the omnipresent, restless operation of electromagnetic phenomena. These phenomena can be seen as a reflection, an analogue, of God's indwelling. This very thought, in itself, possesses an inherent aesthetic value.

Moreover, the appreciation of the beauty that the EMI [Electromagnetic Interaction] contributes to nature is wanting without the realization that the mathematical equations that describe the EMI have a timeless beauty. The elegant symmetry of Maxwell's equations and the inspired simplicity of Dirac's equation bestow an abiding aesthetic flavor to the texture of the microscopic underworld. Dirac and Heisenberg among many other theoretical physicists have throughout their careers expressed how they have been guided by the criteria of beauty and simplicity in their work. - Lawrence W. Fagg, Electromagnetism and the Sacred: At the Frontier of Spirit and Matter (New York: Continuum, 1999) p. 120.

Beauty slips through the scientist's net. You could take a performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor and Fourier analyze the pattern of sound . . . but by those means you would never come to appreciate what it is all about. An exhaustive chemical analysis of the pigments of a Rembrandt self-portrait would miss the point of the picture. . . . It seems to me that the recognition and experience of beauty is as real and primary an experience as any we encounter. (J. C. Polkinghorne, The Particle Play, Freeman, Oxford, England, 1979, p.17)

Then the great giant raised a horn to his mouth. They could see this by the change of the black shape he made against the stars. After that - quite a bit later, because sound travels so slowly - they heard the sound of the horn: high and terrible, yet of a strange, deadly beauty. The Last Battle, 1956, by C. S. Lewis. Quoted by "The Window in the Garden Wall--a C.S. Lewis blog."

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master's, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo's side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King: Being the Third Part of The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963, p. 199.

Isaiah 53:2 For he grew up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. (American Standard Version)