Gerald Everett Jones's Blog: Gerald Everett Jones - Author, page 28
September 13, 2023
Investigators (and Readers) as Close Observers
Connecting Los Angeles and Melbourne, SHAIR.care show host Damian Andrews and I talk across the Pacific Rim about the essential human trait of curiosity and how our experience of the world benefits from being close observers. When we read about spies and detectives, we’re learning how paying careful attention enriches our lives, helps keep us safe, and even promotes healthy and inspiring relationships.
Click here to watch this engaging, full-and-frank exchange of views.
Preacher Evan Wycliff is a close observer.
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Back to School! Back to Biz! Back to Campaigning!
The updated Fourth Edition includes not only corrections but also new chapters on uses and abuses of Big Data, along with 11 ways to create (er, spot) fake news. (Eric Hoffer Award Finalist in the Business category).
But, on the subject of crime,there’s still time left…THE FINE PRINT: The author is not a lawyer but expressly reserves the right to play one on TV. Readers must be cautioned that no relationship between this book and crime fiction is expressed or implied.
This mystery-thriller paperback giveaway from BookSweeps.com has been extended through Wednesday, September 20.
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September 4, 2023
It's the Preacher's Paperback Giveaway!
Enter to win an autographed copy of Preacher Finds a Corpse, award-winning first novel in the Evan Wycliff Mystery series - plus a lot more!
This book giveaway is sponsored by BookSweeps.com (clicking on the link or the graphic will take you to their contest entry page).
Enter here for the prize drawing
BookSweeps will conduct the drawing after giveaway entries close on Wednesday, September 13. If you’re a winner, they will advise you when you will receive your gift.
Thank you for subscribing to Thinking About Thinking @geraldeverettjones on Substack. Opting for a paid subscription here will not improve your chances of winning BookSweeps prizes, but $5 per month or $30 per year will give you access to everything beyond the paywalls on this blog.
And you’ll also be advancing the cause of self-expression for thoughtful people like yourself.
Carry on! Read on! Write on!August 30, 2023
Harry’s First (and Last?) Safari (Part 2 of 2)
{continued from last Wednesday’s post]
Not quite autobiographical.
There followed a predictable period of no action and lethargy. Aldo reached into the ice chest and helped himself to a chilled cocktail in a can. Consuming liquor inside a moving vehicle was prohibited on the public highway, but here in the bush there were no rules. Harry wanted to stay alert and didn’t drink, but he was nevertheless feeling drowsy as the heat of the afternoon peaked.
Harry learned from Joseph, who was narrating to his guest almost nonstop whenever he wasn’t on the phone to his colleagues. There are three types of giraffe. One of them — the Maasai — lives here, identified by their distinctive body markings of jagged spots. Oddly, they eat mainly thorns as their long necks enable them to munch on the tops of acacia trees. Their tongues are tough as shoe leather with a surface rough as sandpaper. Giraffes appear calm as they stride elegantly across the wooded grassland, and, for the most part, they probably are. That’s because predators, including the big cats, are wary of them. An adult giraffe can defend itself and the young ones by swinging its head in a powerful downward arc, dealing a single, lethal body blow to the attacker.
August 27, 2023
Book Review: Life After God
I obtained an advance review copy of Life After God: Finding Faith When You Can’t Believe Anymore by Mark Feldmeir from NetGalley (the book was just released on August 22). I was intrigued by the title and the topic because my fictional Preacher Evan Wycliff might be characterized as an agnostic minister. Perhaps a more accurate description would be a practicing theologian who sometimes has doubts (doesn’t everybody?). In the mystery series that centers on him, Reverend Wycliff is a reluctant amateur sleuth. People in the small farm town he serves come to him with problems no one else seems to have any interest in solving.
Recently released from Westminster John Knox Press.
Life After God is a deeply thoughtful, first-person memoir—and confession, you might say. Like Evan, Feldmeir had serious doubts in divinity school, then as a Protestant pastor has asked himself continually why an omnipotent, loving God would permit evil to run rampant in the world.
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I hope I’m not misrepresenting Feldmeir’s philosophy, but he seems to have concluded that God chooses to be neither omnipotent nor interventionist in earthly matters. God’s love is omnipresent and always forgiving. From the human viewpoint, free will prevails. The order of the universe is not predetermined, and it was designed that way. Each of us is free to seek the truth, according to our own perceptions and sensibilities. Feldmeir claims he concurs with rabbinic scholars when he describes God’s love as a “lure,” a scriptural interpretation attributed to Alfred North Whitehead. (Indeed, as Feldmeir explains in a footnote, much of his outlook is rooted in Whitehead’s process theology.)
The author’s philosophy—which he insists needn’t be yours—seems to be close, but not quite—existentialist. A basic premise of existentialism is that the universe is fundamentally empty of meaning. Meaning is a human invention, having evolved as an extremely effective tool for survival of the species.* Nevertheless, existential humanists would assert that, despite there being no meaning and therefore no rules, you and I are not free to simply do whatever we like. Humanists, like practitioners who swear by the Hippocratic Oath, seek above all to do no harm. Within that context, we’re free to embrace any meaning we can find as long as it helps us help others as well as ourselves.
Which brings us to Christian existentialism (and, again, I hope I’m not mischaracterizing): Even though the universe may be meaningless (mortals can’t know), Christian ethics can work—by humanist standards—rather like Winston Churchill’s assertion that democracy is the worst form of government—except for all the others that have been tried.
If you are looking for spiritual guidance, you might or might not find it in Life After God. For example, I found Feldmeir’s notions of eternity and the afterlife baffling—as if to say, “Try to do as Jesus advised, and we’ll both find out.”
A minor criticism I have is the layout of the book’s pages. The prose in both print and ebook editions is set with line breaks as though it were poetry. I don’t know enough about free verse to say whether it succeeds as such. As for me, the odd method of presentation was mildly annoying.
I found a nugget I’d never encountered before. Feldmeir quotes Whitehead’s speculation that Caesar’s royal legal advisors must have edited the gospels to make God the Father seem more authoritarian, as well as to obscure subtleties of Jesus’s teachings that might have encouraged independent thought. The objective was presumably to make future generations of Christians more subservient as citizens of Rome.
Perhaps it’s a quibble to question Whitehead’s reference to “Caesar,” which as a name used by itself typically means Julius Caesar (dead in 44 BC) or his son Caesar Augustus (dead in 14 A.D., presumably years before there existed any gospels to edit). Constantine (circa 300 A.D.) is thought to be the first Christian emperor, although his allegiance may have been political and pragmatic. Certainly, around the time of Theodosius (380 A.D.), Christian doctrine, if not text, was being extensively debated and reworked. At this time as well, Hermetic teachings, which form much of today’s New Age philosophy and are not so distant from Feldmeir’s, were suppressed. And the Christlike deity of Serapis (patron of Alexandria), who was reputed above all to be a miraculous healer, was all but erased.
Empty of meaning? Then why is force consistently equal to mass times acceleration? Rocket engineers would insist that it is and does, but then this quirky guy Einstein said, “It depends.”
Agnostic or just obsessively curious?
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August 23, 2023
Harry’s First (and Last?) Safari (Part 1 of 2)
Harry traveled to East Africa expecting luxury resorts, hookups, and parties.
The lessons of life in its raw natural state were incremental and enduring for Harry. Less than an hour after they’d checked in at Satao Camp inside Tsavo East National Wildlife Reserve, Aldo and his party were navigating the tracks of the park, guided by Joseph, looking for telltale signs of the Big Five.
It didn’t take long for Harry to understand that going on safari could feel much like visiting a movie set, which he’d done a few times before in Los Angeles. There’s an unreality about it. This is real life, but some happenings are so unusual you doubt the evidence of your senses. Most of the time, you watch, and you wait. Nothing and no one around you seem to be moving. They are waiting, too, but few (except the director, perhaps not even the tour guide) know what to expect. Suddenly, at the periphery of your vision, people (or animals) come together and cluster around something that happens very rapidly. If you’re not on the lookout, paying close attention, you will miss it. Then the scene goes back to stasis.
You soon realize that much of the day will be downright boring. You live for the delight of anticipation, then the rare thrills.
August 19, 2023
Reading from 'Preacher Stalls the Second Coming'
Hosted by the Independent Writers of Southern California (IWOSC). Introduced by Ruth Frechman.
The fourth book in the series will be released later this year in ebook and trade paperback. The Kindle / EPUB ebook editions of the first book are available for free from most distributors, including Amazon, Apple, and Kobo.
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August 13, 2023
Preacher Stalls the Second Coming
Follow this blog for excerpts and release date and…Prepare.Read all three prequels - available in ebook and paper from booksellers worldwide.
Preacher Finds a Corpse, the first ebook in the award-winning series is free from most distributors.
Kindle on Amazon. EPUB Apple Books, Kobo, and others
Thinking About Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
August 9, 2023
Unimaginably big does not begin to describe...
A new episode of The Unknown documentary series on Netflix describes the technical challenge of, and the stunning results from, the James Webb Telescope. Besides its significance in the history of science, perhaps the most breathtaking takeaway is at the level of society and geopolitics. The NASA Next-Generation Space Telescope (NGST, a joint mega-project with Europe and Canada) is the most complex space mission ever attempted, many times more complex than the Moon landings. The work effort took more than 30 years and employed more than 10,000 team members. In the film, project scientist Thomas Zurbuchen comments that not only did he have panics of doubt during the project, it was fraught (as human efforts will be) with team disagreements, personnel issues, never-attempted and just unlucky engineering challenges, and interruptions of its $10B funding. His point being—not just what a wonderful technical achievement it is—but that if a [government-sponsored] effort of this difficulty can succeed (as it has), we [people acting in groups] should be able to solve anything.
The telescope is now “parked” a million miles from Earth at a stable LaGrange point. That’s a place where the gravitational pull from surrounding bodies is relatively balanced. The satellite therefore should be able to remain there with minimal fuel expenditure for repositioning. Duration of the mission is expected to be at least 5-10 years.
Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine (Netflix) link to the episode
Webb’s infrared image of the galaxy cluster El Gordo (“the Fat One”) reveals hundreds of galaxies, some never before seen at this level of detail. El Gordo acts as a gravitational lens, distorting and magnifying the light from distant background galaxies. Two of the most prominent features in the image include the Thin One, located just below and left of the image center, and the Fishhook, a red swoosh at upper right. Both are lensed background galaxies. (NASA STSci)
Stunning to me, as much as I’ve studied astronomy as a layman, “beyond imagining” doesn’t begin to describe the size of the universe. In one of the film’s insider scenes, NASA officials are looking at a poster-sized print of an early deep-space photo from the telescope. NASA Director Bill Nelson is preparing to present it to President Biden, who will show the image to a national audience. Nelson wants to know how he should describe the picture to the President. A project scientist answers that most of the bright specks on the black field aren’t stars—they’re entire galaxies. In that shot, there were about 7,000 of them. Then he adds—the relative size of that image compared to the whole sky is a grain of sand!
I have serious, educated friends who are nevertheless literalist Bible scholars. They insist Earth is the only place where God’s creatures exist. I doubt whether that belief will survive the next generation, among any of us.
I have my grandmother’s set of The Standard American Encyclopedia, copyright 1937. Turning to the entry “Universe” in Volume 13 TER-UZH, I read that “the diameter of the known universe is 600 million light years,” containing 75 million galaxies. I was actually surprised that a book of this vintage would describe a cosmos that large. When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, our teachers talked about the solar system and a few stars beyond.
In the generation of Webb, the size of the universe is estimated at 28 billion light years with 2 trillion galaxies.
The age of the universe has been calculated at 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang. The Webb telescope should be able to “see” the formation of stars at 13+ billion light-years away—baby snapshots, you might say.
Past that distance, presumably no device will ever be able to see anything. That’s the event horizon.
The light from objects out there has not had time to reach us yet!
Until August 14 from ebook distributors worldwide, Kindle and EPUB.
August 6, 2023
No Such Thing As Eternity?
Here’s my book review of Until the End of Time by astrophysicist Brian Greene. Until now, I thought eternity was a thing.
If there’s no superintelligence to think, how could it start over?
It’s the best survey of current theories in cosmology that I’ve read. But it’s also the most unsettling to someone like me who tries continually to reconcile science and theology.
Fans of my Evan Wycliff Mystery series know that Evan is similarly conflicted. A farm boy from southern Missouri from a devout Baptist family, he thought he’d go into the ministry. But then he studied at Harvard Divinity, where learning more about the history of Christianity and its hypocrisies shook his faith. Then, seeking answers to the big questions instead in science, he enrolled in postgrad astrophysics at MIT. He dropped out of that program, too. Discouraged and heartbroken for other personal reasons, Evan returned to farmland roots, where he got occasional work as a guest preacher and a credit investigator for the local car dealer.
Evan is a preacher who some days is an agnostic. And he’s an amateur sleuth because he has investigative skills. People in his community come to him with problems that no one else has any interest in solving.
So – no surprise – from the standpoint of intellectual curiosity, Evan and I are a lot alike.
Two conclusions in Greene’s book would startle us both. First, there can be no such thing as eternity. The universe is about 14 billion years old and has more than double that time before it expires. But, according to Greene, expire it will – expanding and disintegrating into cosmic dust, then expanding more until particles are so far apart they can’t form any solid mass – no galaxies, no stars, no planets.
Now, from the viewpoint of the philosopher or mystic, eternity is not simply a long, long time. Or even a timeline that has no end. It’s a state of being. Time-less – an incomprehensible notion for the human mind.
But more disturbing still is Greene’s assertion that – long before the universe expires – thought itself won’t be possible. Thought in humans is biochemically supported electrical activity in the brain. When the cosmos becomes diffuse, no such complex structures will exist.
Now, unaddressed in Greene’s survey is the question of whether consciousness and thought are aspects of the same physical process. Some scientists, including Christoph Koch, have tried to explain consciousness as super-complex electrical activity in the brain. Koch has found no such explanation. He theorizes that computers, no matter how complex, can never be conscious. In his book The Feeling of Life Itself, at the conclusion he can only guess that consciousness is some as yet unmeasurable, fundamental property of the universe, a feeling shared by all living things, in various degrees depending on the complexity of their brains. For rigorous scientist Koch, it’s little more than a guess.
Where is God in all this? Our religious traditions hold that God is pervasive consciousness and eternal. Another hypothesis of Greene and his colleagues is the so-called godless universe. That is, the dual processes of entropy (diffusion) and evolution (ever-increasing complexity) are sufficient to explain everything that exists.
Which brings us to the most elusive question of all, one that philosophers have debated for centuries, which also has the scientists stumped:
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Did you get the memo? First ebook in the series free, the other two 99c until August 14. (Kindle or EPUB)
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