New motto for Ferris, instead of "Imagine More,"

Home of the paratactic and hypotactic asyndeton.

Algorithms in the Cloud

When I came into my study this morning I found Dr. Mehler on the floor, dead. I understand he is the last of his kind, at least that is what he always told me. Since there is no one to say Kaddish, I’ve called in some favors (bots have lots of bots for friends). I arranged for ten iphones (I checked, they all have Jewish aps) to say Kaddish.

It's like angels singing in heaven, except it's bots running algorithms in the Cloud.

Happy Thanksgiving, sorry bout the genocide

Happy Thanksgiving. It’s the Corn Festival, you know. It celebrates the idea that Mother Earth does not belong to us, we are her children and the children must not be disrespectful to mother, or rape her, leave her ravished and scarred, blow the tops of her mountains off to scavenge for coal. Mother will not tolerate abuse from her children. She will bring devastation. It will reign down from heaven and up from hell. I wish there was still time to repent, but alas, that would be a lie. There is only time for one more Thanksgiving dinner and then off to hear Leonard Cohen, hold forth for his usual four hour concert. He is 78 and thinking maybe he can play one more gig, sing one more song, live one more day. And give it everything he's got.

God in a time of suffering

“Living with God in a Time of Suffering,”
Kaufman Interfaith Institute, Grand Valley University, Eberhard Center, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Tuesday October 30, 2012. Featuring Donniel Hartman, Cynthia Campbell and Omid Safi.

Comments by Binyamin ben Haim, Big Rapids, MI (November 5, 2012) 2160 words

“I don’t compose music, I listen very carefully and transcribe what I hear.” - Philip Glass

 My wife, Caryn, has observed that especially among the younger generation, any criticism is viewed as an insult. It’s not just young people, we have a tendency to see criticism as an attack and I have often been criticized for making people feel defensive and thus making it harder for them to hear what I’m saying. So, I want to say, before I begin that I applaud the Kaufman Institute on it’s twentieth year of sponsoring dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims. I am glad I went. If my criticisms do not resonate with anyone, then they are simply irrelevant.

I was looking forward to spending the day with people of faith exploring a question that has been at the center of my thoughts for some time. Caryn and I bought tickets for the whole day including the lunch and dinner. I wanted to maximize our experience and immersion with the group. I try to follow Philip Glass’s advice and listen very carefully and transcribe what I hear. And then Sandy, the superstorm hit, and all our attention was focused on this massively destructive event, an event that was deeply connected to the topic of the conference. Sandy was not a natural catastrophe. It was the result of what we have done to our planet’s atmosphere. I thought the conference would be an exploration of our faith at a time when suffering is increasing exponentially and our collective theodicy is in shambles.

Rabbi Hartman had interesting things to say and I tried to join the room full of appreciative listeners, but I found myself becoming agitated and after Cynthia Campell spoke, I knew I wanted to express my agitation. Something wasn’t right and I didn’t feel in sync with the room. Then, I was standing in front of the audience microphone and the first thing that came out of my mouth was, “looking out over this room full of white people, I am wondering why are there no Mexicans here? If I had been given the opportunity, I would have explained that perhaps the conference organizers should have invited one of the Catholics Priests fighting for the rights of the undocumented in Grand Rapids. Caryn and I attended a rally for the undocumented workers in Grand Rapids. We were reduced to tears listening to a mother explain that her husband had been arrested by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). He had no rights and was shipped off to some private prison a thousand miles away. I heard a father explain that his daughter cries in terror when he leaves the house to go to work, fearing that, like her friends daddy, her daddy will not come home.

It made me think back to the Boston abolitionists led by Frederick Douglas who had to deal with Federal Agents authorized to capture runaway slaves. When Sheriff Batchelder was killed trying to prevent the escape of a runnaway slave, Douglas commented, “when Batchelder took the position of watch dog for the slaveholders, he forfeited his right to life.” I’m not advocating murder, but I do think the moral issues are that serious. At a time when millions are being displaced, one might have thought that the plight of our Mexican Catholics would be worth including in a conference on faith in a time of suffering. After the storm, we immediately began collecting money to help the victims, understanding it is an obligation to reach out to those who are suffering. The undocumented workers in our community are suffering and we have an obligation to respond to them just as we respond to the storm victims.

We face the challenge of coping with the growing numbers of homeless refugees, not just those Americans who have lost their homes - and think about that for a moment: After World War II there was a massive building boom in America and people like my dad were buying homes for the first time. Whole subdivisions sprang up overnight. Today, millions of Americans, once securely in the middle class have lost their homes and their pensions. This is thievery on a whole new scale. Millions have been robbed and then the banks that robbed them were given trillions and then the millions were left to fend for themselves.

I never got those remarks out, but I did say that I thought this was a group of like-minded people endulging in self-congradulatory entertainment. I said that this was not really an interfaith conference, the three religions were all part of the “monotheistic enterprise” and that the enterprise was bankrupt. I never got to explain that remark either, but I wanted to say: “if we audit the books, on balance, the monotheistic enterprise of Judaism, Christianity and Islam has yielded far more pain and suffering than it has healed.” Collectively, the monotheistic enterprise, as I like to call it, has harmed more than helped.

Rabbi Hartman took my remarks as an attack on Cynthia Campbell. He pointed out that there was nothing “self-congradulatory” about her presentation, it was deep, it was honest, a searching self-criticism of her faith. It showed how far Christians have come. But, my comments were about the conference itself, not about the last speaker. The presenters and the audience were white liberals. The rabbi told stories about God, the Christian told stories about Jesus and the Moslem told stories about Muhammad and all the stories were the same. Starting with the rabbi and ending with the imam, they all but endorsed Obama with explicit statements about taxes and supporting the poor. It was an Obama rally disguised as an interfaith conference. They couldn’t even deal with one voice of dissent. No one had come to actually be challenged and the laughter and applause annoyed me.

The speakers seemed to me to be expert entertainers and Omid Sami was the best of them all. I actually liked him alot. He spoke of Martin Luther King, Jr. - Brother Martin, as those who loved him called him. He also spoke of social justice more than the others, but on the whole, he was just a better entertainer. The story of his experience passing a kidney stone was very funny and everyone was carried away with him as he suffered and later thanked God for the ability to pee without pain, followed by the story of his friend, whose daughter died. I was in tears with him, but, is that what we mean by faith in a time of suffering? The ability to laugh and cry together while all around us others are suffering?

And he said he could never be a Buddhist since he could never give up sex and meat. Wow, what an ignorant thing to say! He obviously doesn’t know anything about Buddhism. And everyone laughed, proving that no one understood a thing about Buddhists. But the rabbi topped that one with the quip that “there are no atheists in a fox hole.” What an insult to the atheist, Primo Levi, one of the great moralists of the modern world. The refusal to deal seriously with the ongoing atheist critique of modern religion was disturbing.

I just finished reading Christopher Hitchen’s last book, Mortality which is about the last eleven months of his life from the time he learned his esophageal cancer was palpable and had metastasized and he knew he was going to die relatively soon. He had many religious friends, people he had debated in the past few years. Many of them were praying for him, that is, for his soul. He didn’t appreciate it. It was like the Mormons posthumously converting Jews who died in the Holocaust. On the whole, I find atheists far more humane than the droves of psychotic theists who believe God speaks to them.

When our choice was between Hitler, Stalin and FDR, we actually had a choice. I think of those as the good old days, the happy times when we understood that we were fighting for our future because we actually thought we had a future. The idea that it was already too late was being floated in apocalyptic movies that were spawned by our megaton weapons of mass destruction. These were weapons so deadly, that even testing them to make sure they blew up and gave us a yield of 20 megatons of TNT, was so dangerous that in itself, it threatened life on the planet and when the radioactive material showed up in mothers milk, a mass movement of mothers brought an end to the testing. And in the movies we saw various versions of what our apocalyptic end would be. The one I like the most, that I thought was the most prescient, was Waterworld, which described a world where the land was gone because all the ice had melted.

I told my students of the hard choices the Iroquois and Ottawa had to make in the 1760s. Should they ally themselves with the British or the French and it turned out that neither decision made one whit of difference. They were doomed. And the 500 other tribes all made every possible choice you could imagine. Absolutely nothing worked. Elect Obama or Romney and the result will be the same... because the weather patterns that have sustained us for the past 30,000 years are about to end and they are going to end quickly. The seasons are changing rapidly and this change is destroying our crops. Michigan has lost it’s cherries because the trees blossomed and then the freeze destroyed the blossoms. That’s it, no blossoms, no cherries. This cycle of disruption of natural systems will continue. It will grow worse and specie extinction will continue to accelerate. We are loosing our bats which control our insects and we are experiencing a massive global extinction of amphibians - our canaries. Katrina, Fukashima, Sandy - see a pattern here. Sandy was not a big storm. The big storms are yet to come. As the atmosphere gains more moisture and heat, the storms become larger. What we call superstorms are just the first of the superstorms. And a superstorm much larger than this one might cause supermassive destruction, millions dying.

The planet is now warming of it’s own accord there is a natural feedback system which will increase this warming trend regardless of our carbon policies. The more the planet warms the more water is in the atmosphere, the more water is in the atmosphere the more it warms. The more it warms, the more quickly the ice melts and with less sunlight reflected back out into space, the more our planet warms. Now toss in recklessly huge amounts of fossil fuels and the planet warms even faster. And even at this late date, there are politicians arguing that global warming is a myth.

The oil companies like the banks are apparently too big to fail. Humanity, however, is not too big to fail. Our hubris and capacity for self-delusion in the face of the apocalypse is understandable. It is like what happens to the mind when you see a twenty foot wave coming at you like a steam engine. As we stand before the relentless tsunami facing us, how shall we maintain our faith? It took twenty years for theologians to begin to attempt to come to terms with the Holocaust, it’s no wonder we haven’t begun to come to terms with the impending disaster.

After the Holocaust, a few brave Christians and Jews began to look at the massive catastrophe that was the Holocaust and ask how it would be possible to speak again of a just and compassionate God. I remember Harry James Cargas, one of the early Catholics to recognize the significance of the Holocaust, which he characterized as “the single greatest Christian tragedy since the crucifixion of Christ.” Yet, the vast majority of churches of all denominations have still failed to come to grips with the fact that every Jew murdered was murdered by someone who had been born or baptised a Christian. And the blood of those innocent people who died was enough to make Jesus, Himself, cry to His Father, “erase my name from human memory. I cannot bear the legacy which I have left upon the earth. They who worship Me as God are killing my people.” But God was unmoved and the killing continued. This was not just a challenge for Christians, as the flood of atheist critiques make clear, the destruction is woven into our theology as is the self-delusion that religious people are somehow better than atheists and that all the centuries of religiously driven persecution as well as the current rise of fudamentalism, does not fall on our shoulders. The blood of our collective victims, not just the Christian ones, but all of the victims of the Jews, Muslims and Christians cry out from the earth declaring our prayers and our faith, blasphemy.

That is what I thought the conference was going to be about.

Morning Again II

I usually awake between 4:30 and 5:00 am. The first thing I do in the morning is to sit on my heels with my palms cupped in my lap, close my eyes. The first thing I notice is my body, it's aches and complaints. Soon enough I let go of my body and focus on my breathing, not controlling it but just paying attention to the breath as it flows. Soon I let go of that as well and turn my attention to my thoughts. And as with my breath, I try not to control my thoughts or follow a thought, rather I let them pass like clouds overhead. If my meditations have been successful, I end up nowhere doing nothing, and it is in this place that I find the space to think.

Physicist now confidently tell us that the universe is 13.75 billion years old. I haven’t done the math myself but I’m impressed that they finally have it nailed down. I used to tell my students the universe was between 12 and 14 billion years old. And with equal confidence they now say that 25% of the universe if dark matter and a whopping 71% is dark energy. No wonder the dark side is so powerful! That leaves a scant 4% of the universe visible to us even with our most sensitive instruments, yet somehow this dark stuff has a profound impact on the shape and destiny of the universe. The more we uncover the mysteries of the universe, the more mysterious it all seems. Modern physics, we now understand is about only the 4% of the universe we can see. We still don't understand dark matter and energy.

And then I wonder where do I begin and where do I end? What actually separates “me” from everything else? With the help of some hallucinogens, the answer is nothing. I’m no longer sure who I am or where I am, where I begin and where I end. Fortunately, my body always reminds me, for the longer I sit in suspended animation, the more I ache.

Some time back Richard Lynn, a great admirer of Raymond B. Cattell, who serves on the board of the Pioneer Fund, sent me xeroxed reprint of a short review of his new book, The Chosen People. On the xerox, he scribbled his personal note and his private email. So, I ordered the book and sent him an email from my personal email to his personal email. I thanked him for bringing my attention to his book and apologized for taking so long to respond. And since my personal email is binyaminbenhaim, i.e. Binyamin ben Haim, my Hebrew name, I quipped to him, “now you know my secret name.” He just wrote back confused asking if I had changed my name, wondering if I had left Ferris and asking, “where are you?” The very question I had been contemplating. I was surprised he hadn’t understood me, thinking that after writing a book about the Jews, he might have learned something about Jewish culture.

 In his review of Cattell’s 1972 book, Beyondism: Religion from Science, Lynn wrote:

 If the evolutionary process is to bring its benefits, it has to be allowed to operate effectively. This means that incompetent societies have to be allowed to go to the wall. This is something we in advanced societies do not at present face up to and the reason for this, according to Cattell, is that we have become too soft-hearted. For instance, the foreign aid which we give to the under-developed world is a mistake, akin to keeping going incompetent species like the dinosaurs which are not fit for the competitive struggle for existence. What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of "phasing out" of such peoples. If the world is to evolve more better humans, then obviously someone has to make way for them otherwise we shall all be overcrowded. After all, ninety-eight per cent of the of the species known to zoologists are extinct. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.

 It occurs to me that we all have a tin ear for something. I can’t make sense out sports that involve varied size balls passing some boundary or another. And just as I have a tin ear for some things, it is very common to find among scientists a tin ear for religion. In his delightful new book, A Universe from Nothing: Why is there something rather than noting." Lawrence Kraus, a particle physicist turned cosmologist, synthesizes the new view of the universe that has emerged over the past decade of exploration and analyses. His conclusion is that God had nothing to do with creating the universe. It's similar to reading a modern work of linguistic analysis explaining the origins of language which concludes that the Tower of Babel had nothing to do with linguistic diversity.

He is like an Idiot Savant. He thinks religion is the belief that the universe if 5,000 years old. He obviously has never heard of Robert Alter or Giorgio Agamben and has no idea what is going on across campus, where scholars are probing sacred texts and finding all sorts of revealing information, not about God, but about ourselves. And this led me to the thought that Europeans were incapable of understanding the Native American peoples because their civilization and cultures were constructed on different premises. When Abraham desired to bury Sarah, he went to Hittites and negotiated with Ephron for the purchase of land. He and Ephron settled on a price, Abraham paid in silver and acquired title to the land. We have no idea when or where or when this notion that land is a commodity that can be bought and sold originated, but it’s presence in Genesis makes it clear that it was understood by both Hebrews and Hittites and was probably and widespread conviction.

The Torah opens famously with, “In the beginning God created...” and in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Torah written by rabbis in Alexandria in the third century BCE, that opening sentence is translated, “En arche” The word arche, beginning, is also the Greek word for command - for the Greeks and the ancient Israelites, the beginning commands. Thus our modern field of archeology - digging for beginnings to understand our origins. Giorgio Agamben speculates that a society based on this notion that our beginnings command, control, direct us, is the reason history and archeology are so important to us.

A civilization that was not based on this conjunction between beginning and commanding, would be less concerned with history and origins.

In the beginning of Native American culture, there was no such conjunction. Native Americans had a different original idea. They believed the earth was their sacred mother and they belonged to the land, the land did not belong to them. As one of the standard American history texts (Nash) points out, this led to a society with far less stratification than European society where a small number of individuals “owned” large tracts of land and the common peasants owned nothing. So, in Europe you have abject poverty alongside immense wealth. You also had the fundamental notion of capitalism, that everything is a commodity and that the earth and all its fruit belong to man to exploit. The societies that developed out of these Western notions created social orders, laws, literature and philosophy aimed at upholding and increasing that disparity. In the world of the Native American, however, the earth was not a commodity, she was our sacred mother who nurtured us and commanded us to be generous as she was generous to us. The Europeans typically thought the Indians without religion, culture or science. When Lewis Cass, Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of War wrote to justify the brutality of Indian removal, he said in our defense that we were spreading “religion, science, freedom and industry.” By religion, he meant Christianity, by freedom he meant our political system of democracy, from which Indians were excluded, and by industry he meant our exploitation and commodification of the land.

The Europeans could no more understand how Indians thought than they could understand how bears think. Wittgenstein explained this in his Cambridge lecture - to image a language is to imagine what their world is like and Europeans could not imagine what the world was like for Native peoples.

They completely missed the extraordinary fact that Indian societies had no prisons, judges and police.

The Europeans were sure that their religion and culture was superior. In a generic sense most of us understand that we are superior and they are inferior. If you have any doubts watch the Youtube videos of Walmart shoppers. I am teaching a small seminar on the history of racism and everyone agreed that, take away race or gender, human beings can be divided between superior and inferior. So, I explained to them that according to the Talmud and deeply embedded in the Jewish soul is the idea that humans are images of God, each one completely unique. Jerry Hirsch, a man of science with a very tin ear for religion summed up this Talmudic view by calculating the odds that any two human beings would be genetically identical at some astronomical number greater than the estimated number stars in the universe. He concluded that each one of us is completely unique. Our genetic code is one of a kind and it will never be repeated.

The Talmud puts it this way, every human being, no matter how stupid and ugly, in a word, inferior, is an image of God, completely unique and of infinite value. Two times infinity is only infinity. An infinity of Einstein is no more valuable than an infinity of a crack addict. In the realm of the sacred they are equal, but for those who have no sense of the sacred, there is usually only the commodity. And if you look at people as commodities, there are really valuable people and people who are of little or no value.  And that was the calculation Cattell made. He concluded that the majority of the human population was pretty much worthless and some means had to be found to make way in the future for superior people. Thus, he coined the term, “genthanasia” to characterize programs that would assist “moribund” societies in preventing the incompetent from being born.

Chris Hedges, author of such books as Empire of Illusion and War is a Force that Gives us Meaning has just published, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. Hedges writes: “We stand on the verge of one of the bleakest periods in human history, when the bright lights of civilization blink out and we will descend for decades centuries into barbarity. Revolt is all we have. It is our only hope.... We don’t have a lot of time left.” My view is that our time ran out long ago, long before we were even aware that it was running out. Still, I agree that revolt is all we have. We need to rise up against capitalism and by extension the whole idea that the earth is ours and we are in charge. Agamben points out that for the ancient Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek grammarians, one cannot command oneself. The commander and the commanded must be separate. Democracy is a sham, it is an oxymoron. We do not command ourselves. As John Jay, our first Supreme Court Chief Justice and friend of Alexander Hamilton, said: "Those who own the country, should rule it." And that is the way it has always been. Those who own the country, rule it. I would prefer the Iroquois matriarchy in which the nation is ruled by old women.

We have been warned lest we turn our hearts aside and worship other gods that the heavens will close and the rains will cease and the earth will no longer produce sustenance and we shall surely perish off the face of the good earth that God has so graciously given us.

Our death was decreed before our birth. It is inevitable, but surely there is time to repent, if not collectively, at least individually. We need to be as passionately committed as the suicide bombers, people willing to self-destruct in order to stop the machine that has turned our sacred mother into a commodity. Of course, not by blowing themselves up and killing innocent people. We can’t change our destiny, but we can, at least, descend into the next century of mass species extinction with dignity, defending the sacred nature of human dignity.

It is time for me to put on my tefillin not because God actually exists and rescued my ancestors from the land of Egypt, but because it was commanded in the beginning. Who commanded I cannot say. That it was commanded I can say with utter confidence. The parchment with the command is sealed in the box I wrap around my arm and place upon my head. And while the text is hidden from my view, still, I have no choice but to obey.

Genesis, Part I

Shabbos Bereishis, The Sabbath of Genesis, when we begin reading the scroll again from Genesis, the creation. We begin anew.

Law emerges from religion and magic, not science. Science deals with questions that can be either true or false. The earth is the center of the universe and man is the culmination of creation is either true or false. But showing that the earth moves around the sun and is a speck of dust at the outer edge of an insignificant galaxy among 400 billion galaxies is also either true or false. One thing only we know with perfect clarity, everything we ever thought we knew has been proven false. That is how we got here. Scientific knowledge is always tentative.

But there are other areas of knowledge which are neither true or false. They just are. That I cannot buy alcohol on Sunday, here in Big Rapids, is a fact. The law forbids it. It just is. We can change the law but the new law is no more accurate a description of reality than the old one was. The law is based on a commandment thought to come from God. The command exists whether it is obeyed or not. The drill sergeant commands because he was commanded to command by the General, who in turn is only following the commands of the decider who in turn is only following the commands of God, or at least that is what he says. Everyone is serving a higher authority.

Antiochus Epiphanes, the Syrian Greek emperor who was the villain of the Hanukah story, - his name meant Antiochus, the Visible manifestation of God. The Jews called him Antiochus Epimanes – Antiochus, the madman. He could force men to obey his commands, but he could not force them to believe he had the right to command. He wasn’t God. He was a jerk. Thus we learn that all authority to command, rests on the willingness to submit.

Every civilization has its own commands which define behavior and manifest in law and social custom. When the Pilgrims and Wampanoag’s celebrated the first Thanksgiving, the first time these Englishmen and women celebrated the ancient Corn ceremony, the Harvest Thanksgiving that had been celebrated by the Wampanoag and all the tribes about since the beginning of time – when the Indians arrived for the party, and Massasoit brought deer and all sorts of other food as gifts for the party which last all week, the young Indian girls came provocatively without covering their beautiful young breasts. We devoured them with our eyes allowing Satan to enter our garden. And we won and they lost and that is why you can’t go around in the summer, the way the boys all do, with your little titties proudly displayed for the lecherous old men to drool over. If you’re interested, by the way, I would be willing to sponsor Prop 1 for next election to change our law and have it based on Indian magic. The first thing we need to do is disenfranchise all men. Let’s run the Republic on the Iroquois model and let the Elder women rule. It can’t be worse, believe me.

If we understand that law rests on magic and we don’t believe in magic, then we recognize no law. We may obey, but only out of fear. I obey our of a desire to surrender to the commands of God but only the commands of my God and my God commands us to smoke and drink on Sunday.

And thou shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart. Beware lest you serve other Gods who tell you not to smoke, for then you shall surely die.

Once the Ugarites accepted the Gods of Persia they perished and became Persians. What kept Israel alive was the stubborn devotion to the God of their ancestors. And here I am still obedient. Faith is the willingness to obey. Blessed is the servant who obeys out of love.

Genesis, Part II

Genesis, Part I is on my Facebook page.

I'm proud of my son, TJ. When he started chewing tobacco, I had my doubts, but he won me over on that score. I come from a world where it is much better to smoke Camels and stink up the whole room. Children, it is definitely better to chew than smoke, but I'm still advocating smoking. What really matters is that we not stop consuming tobacco just because it is unhealthy. What is life for? You decide and chew or smoke whatever you desire. That is called freedom. The land of the free is occupied by criminals. They are the only ones who are free of the constraints of the law.

In the beginning... in Greek is En arche, from which we derive, archeology, the search for beginnings. And this week we begin reading Genesis again. I return to it year after year and it never disappoints. With regard to J, P, and E, Robert Alter comments, "One need not claim that Genesis is a unitary artwork, like say, a novel by Henry James, in order to grant it integrity as a book. ... It is quite apparent that a composite artistry, of literary composition through a collage of textual materials, was generally to be assumed to be normal procedure in ancient Israelite culture."

Genesis is about the history of Israels relationship with God, but it also explains the origins of the universe and life, the becoming human and the origins of language. As many of you, no doubt know, the theory that modern languages developed after God destroyed the tower of Babel has been refuted by modern linguists. Still, I like the Tower of Babel theory.

And here is Robert Alter's brilliant new translation of the most famous first sentence in all of literature:

When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters, God said, "Let there be light."

Thank God for the brilliant young particle physicist turned cosmologist, Lawrence Kraus for his new little book, A Universe from Nothing: Why is there something rather than noting." Kraus explains how the universe really came into being and God had nothing to do with it. Just as the explanation of the origin of language is wrong, the explanation of the origin of the universe if wrong as well. It turns out the universe if 13.72 billion years old. And that is how we know there is no God, because there is no more room for God in explaining anything. We have it all explained now and the Biblical explanation - that God created the universe is clearly wrong.

It's a wonderful little book explaining where cosmology is just now but he feels compelled to take on the ancillary task of arguing that there is no more room for God because he just explained almost everything without needing God. As if God exists to explain anything. He is like an Idiot Savant. - Part I... will follow.