Perspectives : The Mechanics of Evolution

It saddens me to see the degree of polarity that has emerged in recent decades over any number of issues, and the debate over our origin is one of them. I wish to put down in writing my current position on the matter. Whether or not it offends one side or the other is not really my concern. Rather, I want to have a record of my own beliefs, that in future I may return and either refine or dispense with them entirely.

Quite commonly, those who do not believe in evolution as the primary driving force for the diversity and complexity of life are quickly lambasted as dunces who do not wish to face up to the evidence. The fossil record, phylogenetics, molecular biology on and on it goes. The conservative Christian is left feeling as though he or she has to grasp at ever more unrealistic straws to say that God created the world in seven days.

That 'alternative' camp is not entirely satisfactory either. To bottle oneself up in a shell and refuse to face the facts rings of a blind faith, divorced from reality and not at all consistent with the degree of reality that God encourages us to pursue.

O veritas, why are you so elusive?

I encourage you not to be tainted by a sense of motivational fallacy as you read what follows. I am not here to address every argument and angle that has been thrown up on the issue, though I have ideas on them nonetheless. My position might best be described as something like theistic microevolution. God gave us these mechanics that species would be able to adapt to various environmental changes.

I have learnt on a superficial level what goes into the complexity of life. An organism made of interrelated systems, composed of organs, made of tissues, constituted of cells. All in highly regulated processes that maintain homeostasis. Life, in its entirety seems so vulnerable to disorder that it is a wonder that it has continued for as long as it has.

A single cell in itself is a wonder to behold. Substances of many kinds diffuse in the cytoplasm or are bound to a tightly organised membrane system; ions, carbohydrates, amino acids, enzymes, proteins colliding and interacting in a flabbergasting chemical symphony.

Information is encoded in an elegant system of four nitrogenous bases, interpreted by a host of enzymes to produce proteins, some of which are enzymes themselves. The interpretation is influenced by another, perhaps more complex, layer of regulation as epigenetic factors silence or promote the expression of certain regions. The enzymes eventually get around to replicating the DNA itself and life goes on.

Then cells interact with other cells; with neurotransmitters, membrane proteins, hormonal factors, interleukins, cytokines, on and on the list goes. Books and books have been written and still we know precious little about the full mechanisms involved.

Tissues and organs work together to balance a hundred factors, pH in the blood, electrical activity of the heart, the transport of potassium in the kidneys, the level of glucose in the blood, calcium levels, oxygenation, blood pressure, temperature, renal output, muscle tone, hormonal levels, growth and development, maintaining immune functions and antibody levels, once again, on and on one can go, enough to exhaust the space on hundreds of pages and barely scratch the surface.

Things extend in the other direction as well. A single enzyme is a carefully arranged sequence of amino acids, folded in a precise way, maintained in the right pH and temperature range to support its function, produced, transported, modified and degraded by a committee of other enzymes. Biological molecules are made of atoms, atoms of quarks and leptons. It is stunning that the simple laws of mathematics at the heart of this reality, the geometry of three dimensions and the strengths of various forces, allow for the functional complexity that is ribosome reductase.

We know more about the human body, about life in general, than at any other time in history, yet we are also more powerfully blinded to the marvel of it all because each successive discovery is gradually integrated into a framework that tells us that we are nothing more than self-conscious stardust, that all the information we have discovered is something that a bunch of monkeys would one day type out given a typewriter and enough ink.

That is my major contention: Information does not arise spontaneously. As a creative and imaginative being, I see already how difficult it is for me to compose in the medium I am most familiar with, the English language. The time that goes into my diction, punctuation and the inspiration for my posts is not insignificant, but I daresay that if I had not written this post, no other individual in the world would string together the exact same words to convey the same sentiments. There is a reason why sites like Turnitin have any success after all. To say that this post would arise from random generation is even more futile. Leave a blank page alone, and perhaps it will acquire a tea stain, inadvertent creases, grow damp with humidity and eventually disintegrate, but it is not going to give you the line 'What a piece of work is man.' We never see information arise in our experience except from intelligence. Intelligence both creates and interprets information.

There is a marvellous website that may be proposed as a counter to this enshrinement of creativity: The Library of Babel. It even has prose of my own original composition which I have not shown to another human soul. Yet it relies on a system that generates text in the first place. It relies on an even more complex system of a language that has evolved over the millennia to give us odd contradictions like the words 'restful' and 'restive' for the text in the library to have any significance to any of us.

Modern evolutionary theory admits the need for a driver, a creator of information, and we put this down to mutation. Mutation it says, gave us the language of life. Yes, mutation is overwhelmingly detrimental, but occasionally, it gives us something useful it says. The eye is used as a prime example, proceeding from a simple structure into the full organ that gives us the ability to sense wavicles of the electromagnetic force.

To me mutation will only result in the loss or modification of information. To me, a strain of wolf that has been domesticated and gradually selected for meeker and tamer characteristics until it becomes a shitzu has not gained information. The information contained within those genes has been from its original expression, absolutely. The strain of this organism has adapted to a new environment, certainly. The two animals look nothing alike and behave in ways that are not alike, indubitably. But there is no new information. There is only information that has been altered. Both are still Canis lupus. They still have the same enzymes or variations of those enzymes. We see the same phenomenon in human populations. The Hapsburg jaw is just as unnerving a phenotype as the pudgy profile of a bulldog. One only has to look at diversity among Homo sapiens to see how much potential there is for intra-species variation.

Let me use a non-biological example. The Bible is a book that singularly has more translations, copies, versions and languages than any other book in the world. Do I believe that all of them are accurate and absolutely free of error? No, I do not. The Message is quite a different creature from the English Standard Version, and both are in turn different from Jerome's Vulgate. The text in Hebrew and Greek are still the ultimate authority, and we go back to them when there are translational issues. In a way, the versions of the sacred text are all mutations of the original, adapting themselves to different communities so they can be read and understood, appreciated and applied. Some bible translations are more faithful to the original than others, and some are so compromised that they should really not be touted as bibles at all. Translations that are so inaccurate that they fall into the latter category are like organisms with mutations so severe that they are incompatible with life. Can those books still be read? Surely they can, just as a baby with anencephaly can be born.

To say that the information of life, not just DNA, but the complex interactions that occur between other compounds, between cells, between tissues, organs and the environment, in between male and female, organisms and species, ecosystems and climates all come from mutation and not from intelligence, requires a level of faith that I cannot sustain. It is not just a matter of information, but that there should be systems in place to interpret and apply that information at all. A string of DNA is not going to produce anything on its own.

This is becoming quite the disorganised rant. In summary, my point is that, if evolution had been proposed as the driving mechanism for the development and diversification of life in a world that new as much about life's complexity as we do today, it would seem laughable. It was compatible in a world of aqua vitae and widespread belief in spontaneous generation, not so much in a world of phospholipase C and voltage gated potassium channels. It is only because each successive discovery has boarded the sinking Titanic that the Titanic is full while the Noahic Ark seems empty. To continue to propose so is, to me, akin to reading the prolific works of Voltaire and insisting that they were in fact generated by mechanical random letter generators and editors over the entire span of human history instead of a remarkably gifted and incisive mind. This may sound a little irreverent, but: 'Oh look, they have common themes, it must have been 'convergent evolution', definitely not because they were written by the same intelligent individual!'

Let me now move on to what I do believe that modern science has given us. Yes there are genes, yes there are mutations, yes there is variation in a population, yes there are populations that get behaviourally and sexually isolated and diverge in characteristics. Yes the fittest survive and the less well adapted die out in extinction. There are ways that we can construct phylogenetic trees and observe the variations of a single enzyme across multiple populations that gives rise to distinct phenotypes. Yes we can apply the Hardy-Weinberg principle to conceptualise changes in populations. I accept all these things because that is what the evidence demands, to deny these points is to be ignorant and dogmatic. The evidence however, does not demand that I have to buy that mutation is somehow the author of the corpus of information that assaults me in every nature reservation. In fact, I feel it demands quite the opposite.

What if God, in His wisdom, created species, or as the Bible phrases it, kinds, with the genetic potential for adaptation to all the environments this world would offer? I do not see why an omnipotent God could not have placed genes, dormant, in the equivalents of Adam and Eve for the otter, the gecko, the salmon, the cockroach or even the beloved finch, to allow them to acclimatise themselves to very different conditions. Changes in diet, temperature, humidity, ecosystems and micro-organismal milieu and so on would have been foreseen by a God who foresaw that His Son's executioners would cast lots for His robe. His creation is not so fragile to be upset by such disturbances, but learns, reorganises and modifies itself in a remarkable way to show the degree of compensation that has been incorporated into the design from the very beginning.

To me, all that the mechanics of evolution prove is that our God is a far more ingenious author than we first supposed. There is no artificial system that does what the natural system of genes and enzymes does to any degree of comparison, not without constant new input and maintenance from the intelligent human designers. On the other hand, the game plan for natural life has been tremendously successful and resistant to stresses over thousands of years, without God having to say, 'Oh excuse me, let me send out the latest patch.' On the other hand, the 'bugs' that we observe in the programme of life, the effects of thalassemia, atrial septal defects and cerebral palsy are precisely what mutation and mistakes cause. These conditions were not part of the original design in my worldview.

I would like to end off with another final point. The purely materialistic evolutionary worldview limits the 'function' of an organism to its ability to perpetuate its selfish genes, id est, surviving from conception to reproduction. Many other structures that appear to have no role in this are dismissed as accessory and vestigial. Other aspects of the human body we have no logical reason for. The palmaris longus, the decussation of nerve fibres in the spinal cord, I can go on.

What if our bodies were designed with more in mind? Is it so hard to accept that perhaps our bodies were designed to be beautiful and organised? To go beyond that, that our bodies were designed so that we could investigate them and discover how they work, designed to be comprehensible? What if the spinal column is organised in a way that allows us to test its function and relations to the nerves at each level, that we can draw charts of dematomes and myotomes and predict with accuracy the functional loss that comes from a lesion of a certain vertebral level. Taking this further still, that when God put in the palmaris longus, He knew that He was putting in a structure that would be able to serve as a source of reserve tendon tissue for repair operations without the need to worry for immunological effects? It lends even more credence to the idea that as we study nature, we get glimpses into the mind of the creator that complement the revelation of His character in the bible and in our daily experience. Do you think that God intended for us not to know about our own bodies, or that He did not anticipate every advance and development of modern medical technology?

We are too quick to judge something as significant and another structure as insignificant. We are too quick to pronounce evidence of 'unintelligent design' when we do not even know the purpose of the means by which it is constructed. We flaunt our definitions of purpose, value and utility onto a human body that is intricate beyond belief, and in doing so, discredit its ongoing miracle.

It is almost tragically ironic, that the psalmist, who probably didn't even know that the heart pumps blood, could declare 'I am fearfully and wonderfully made' while our information saturated societies have such discomfort from the implication that there is a Maker.

The Serpent's Curse

The Lord God said to the serpent, 

'Because you have done this, 

cursed are you above all livestock, 

and above all beasts of the field; 

On your belly you shall go, 

and dust you shall eat, 

all the days of your life. 

I will put enmity between you and the woman, 

and between your offspring and her offspring; 

he shall bruise your head, 

and you shall bruise his heel.

Genesis 3:14-15

Within the context of Eldwan, Alero's motivations have always seemed nobler to me than Lucifer's but now I am not so sure. In the course of developing Eldwan, I have made the story not just about human characters struggling through the contradictions they are faced with, but also about the greater powers that be in the subcreation. I claim no knowledge of the nature of angels or spirits in this world, but within Eldwan I am free to define them as I will. 

As I last told it, in the creation of Eldwan, Eleyon sets up the garden of Elin with two chalices in its centre, the chalice of energy and the chalice of ether. As humanity matures, the chalice of energy is made freely open to us, but the chalice of ether remains off limits

Alero's main point of contention with Eleyon is that the prohibition on the chalice of ether is unnecessary, especially for his most capable students. When he encourages his disciples to rebel, he does so because he believes that he is doing so for their best interests.

Side note, but come to think of it, a fruit is a far more potent symbol than an artificial chalice. A fruit is a natural creation, that bears that signature of the masterful creator, that unreplicable complexity that is life. A chalice is something made by human hands, and is not primal. The notion of a fruit of a tree is a fundamental symbol in our world. I feel conflicted about whether I should change the chalices to another object, at least one that is natural, or biological. Though, once I apply those restrictions as well as the sentiment that animals were not given yet as food, there are not really many options left but a fruit of some sort. 

Alero never intended for him and humanity to be at odds. Though the whole of Eldwan's age of light, he works with humanity to help them achieve their apotheosis, through the Luminosa. He is frustrated by the frailty and imperfections that he observes, but he chooses to believe in his obstinacy that humanity is better off without Eleyon and in a space where they can define their own reality. 

At the end of the age of light, Alero's conviction is shaken, because in spite of anything, he cannot find out what they are missing that prevents them from being like Eleyon. Luminosan society has imploded, and Alero finds himself in a state where he is analysing the whole situation, unsure of what went wrong. Eleyon gives him a chance to return to the fold, but Alero still feels that Eleyon must be the one standing in the way of his success, and rejects the invitation. Alero blames Eleyon for the destruction of the Luminosa, but deep within himself he wonders if his original purpose was misguided.

When Alaris is rejuvenated, Alero gets a taste of rejection for himself, and in a selfish anger, he determines that he will be the one to humble the new gods. By the end of the age of water, Alero has decided anew about the nature of humanity. Eleyon has not made them too good, he has made them too flawed, and Alero makes it his new mission to prove to Eleyon that humanity is capable of atrocities so debauched that they are not worth the saving, not worth Eleyon's concern. At the heart of this is an unwillingness to accept the blame for the disharmony he has caused. The culpability Alero throws is not on himself, but on the nature of man, and on Eleyon himself. 

This is the point of resonance between the mythos of Eldwan and the curious statement: 'I will put enmity between you and the woman.' The statement as a punishment seems in a way to imply the converse, that prior to the fall, the serpent had not intended for himself and humanity to be at odds. This point has many areas worth speculating about, such as the extent to which Lucifer understood the effects of sin and the ultimate destruction that would await before he tempted the man and woman, or the kind of relationship that the serpent had with the man and the woman before the fall. At least in my mythos, Alero is unaware. But like Alero, Lucifer is not omniscient.

Before Alero tempts those who will become the fallen, he declares his intentions in the city of the gods, and a third of the wevel agree with him and they are all cast out of the city. Oleri is Michael in this scenario, embodying justice and truth. On that note, Uleva will be linked to the other side of the equation, namely agape and grace. Eleyon watches everything that happens with the quiet knowledge that rebellion must be allowed to run its course. Ilvesu tries to conceal her own guilt for having poisoned the chalice, or perhaps now, the tree of ether.

The first rebellion must have been the subtlest of things, or at least I feel that it should be. Borne out of pride indeed, but pride manifests under many disguises. Yet rebellion is rebellion indeed, stark against the holy perfection of God.

The second part of the curse then comes into play, and in the age of Kings, as Alero revels in his new purpose, he begins to see that Ilvesu, Lady Wisdom, has curiously been assigned to a particular group of people. They do not seem too different, or exceptional, but she is tasked to them for now. Remembering that his destruction will come through the ever contentious nature of humanity,  Alero begins to watch in growing apprehension about what Eleyon is planning through his chosen family, and resolves to try and destroy them in particular. The rest is history. 

I don't really know where this idea will take me, but to incorporate it into the shifting tapestry of Eldwan's history is a way I could give it voice and a canvas without infringing on dictating the nature of this reality.

De Amore

I was recently asked a similar question by two people who are very important to me: 'What is love? In a romantic sense of the word.' It's a question I've struggled with myself for many years, that fuzzy border that can sometimes exist between phileo and eros.

Why did God give us eros? That deadly, heady, emotional cocktail. It sometimes feels like the most basal of all the loves, the most needy, the most selfish. Some worship it, elevating it to a god and obeying its every impulse, others distrust it, and are wary of anything that pulls them into a position of such irrationality.

For many of us, eros is the adolescent gateway to emotions and attitudes of an intensity that we never anticipated. Jealousy, concern, sacrificial generosity, anger, loyalty, forgiveness and many more strike us with a force focused on a particular individual, seemingly chosen at random, and sometimes with little regard for their past or even their present. 

I would like to characterise the experience with a several key words:

1. Hyperawareness: The lover notices everything about the beloved. What is said, done, worn, eaten, requested, expressed, read and watched is all meticulously observed. You feel when he or she is in the room quite acutely, notice where they look, particularly if it is at you. It disturbs you how much you feel like you have a right to whatever you want to know about the beloved's life. 

2. Hypersensitivity: The lover's emotional state is interwoven with the beloved's remarks and responses. The lover is obsessed with that the beloved thinks of him or her. You hope that they will respond with the slightest display of affection, sometimes misinterpreting an innocuous comment for a convoluted appraisal or disapproval of your character or actions. Depending on which way you believe the words point, your whole day turns on a dime, or perhaps in this day and age, turns on a text message. The lover may feel incapacitated, derailed, uncertain about why they lend every small choice of the beloved's such gravitas, frustrated by the vulnerability of caring so deeply about someone.

3. Hyperaltruism: The lover wants to ensure that the beloved lives the optimal life, which may sometimes be at odds with the beloved's own impression of what would be best for themselves. You feel that even if your feelings are unrequited, or how hurt you may have been by how they may have treated you, you cannot help but wish them the best in life. You want them to succeed and fulfil their potential, to be freed from the things that are holding them back, and to realise their dreams. If you had the capacity to provide something that they needed, you would have given it to them immediately. If you lacked that capacity, you would have tried your best anyway.

4. Hyperforgiveness: The lover is willing to overlook all faults and any sordid history in the beloved. The beloved can do no wrong, and the lover assumes an inordinate degree of responsibility for any faux pas in the relationship. It seems like nothing about them could not be justified in some way, rationalised to help them appear as a decent person. Your own propensity to make excuses for your mistakes somehow balloons outward to make excuses for theirs. You tell yourself that you always need to hear their side of the argument in any conflict, and find yourself biased towards believing it.

5. Exclusivity: The lover notices who else the beloved spends time with, shares details and struggles with, or rejoices with, and feels an urge to be the first person that the beloved tells about everything. You feel inexplicably hurt when you find out that he or she has not told you about some essential milestone in life, but has told others. You feel like you have a right to their time that no other person has, and that they should not be more intimate with another than they are with you. You may find it disturbing when you look at it objectively, but your emotions say otherwise. 

6. Longing: The lover grows despondent without interaction with the beloved. When a whole week goes by without so much as a word or a wave, that week feels oddly devoid of purpose. When you are physically separated, you wonder how they are doing on a daily or even hourly basis, sometimes to the neglect of others who you would theoretically have stronger obligations to. You hope that they would sometimes be the one to initiate an interaction, instead of always having to summon the courage to go up to them. The beloved's absence can feel just as tangible as his or her presence. The beloved's silence can be crushing.

7. Commitment: The lover would dedicate the rest of his or her life to the beloved if the beloved consents. The lover desires to make promises and assurances even if he or she knows that not all of them can be fulfilled. The true lover does not easily forsake the beloved, for the lover's ardour is not so easily extinguished. 

Forgive my lackadaisical use of pronouns on the part of the beloved, perhaps I should have used 'ne/nem/nir/nirs', but then most of you would probably not know what I mean. 

Anyway, there are bound to be more little terms that could be used to encapsulate other aspects of eros, but it is about time that this post reveal its thesis. I am no expert on eros, I can claim little experience, but I believe that eros contains within it an image of the the divine. It is what Francis Chan communicates in his book 'Crazy Love': God is deeply in love with you. Allow me to place some qualifiers around this before you disagree too vehemently, if indeed you disagree.

Somehow the image of God as a powerful, supreme being, above the sallied withertos and whyfores of the human experience, has crept into our understanding of who He is. Yes to be sure, He is Creator, Judge, Saviour and Lord, and it is dangerous to forget that. Nonetheless, we forget that He is a God of emotion as well, and our emotions are little images of His perfect emotion, just as our reason is a little image of His infallible reason, and we in our singularity are images of His triune nature. 

Just as our human reasoning is riddled with fallacies and unexamined contradictions, our human emotions are diseased with selfishness and impure motivations. God's emotions are untainted by such impurities, and in Him we see the true picture of each of the qualities I have listed above.

1. Omniscience: God like it or not, does know everything that we do, say and think. He has a right to know everything about us, created beings as we are. Let us adopt the posture of the psalmist in Psalm 139:1-6. 

2. Hypersensitivity: God notices when we look to Him, after looking at every other object in the room. He holds on to every word you say, every thought you have toward him, about him, or against Him, and He takes it absolutely seriously. Because He loves us so intensely, He feels about us as intensely. To love is to be vulnerable. When someone says, 'God, thank you, thank you for teaching me this principle', He feels so appreciated. When another says, 'God would never love me, I'm too far gone', He feels frustrated by the fact that he or she is not listening to what He is trying to communicate. When the last one says, 'I don't need God in my life, just let me do my own thing', He feels that bitter pang of rejection. Take the words of Ephesians 4:30 seriously.

3. Caritas: God wants us to live the most fulfilling lives He can imagine for us. There ought to be no conflict over who knows best in this relationship; God has the answers to questions we have not even considered. He wants us to be freed from the shackles of sin, to realign our misplaced desires and give us the intimacy, love and acceptance that we have always wanted. No matter how much You have hurt Him, He will only do what is best for you. He has all the resources in the world to provide you with what you will need to see His perfect will done in your life. Romans 12:2

4. Forgiveness: Need I say more? God's mercies are new every morning, and He shows us what true forgiveness means even as He patiently reveals to us how scarlet our sins are. When we come to Him, 1 John 1:5 applies to a fullness that we cannot even yet comprehend. However, He knows soundly where to assign blame, and does not act out of the need to feel like He has to earn His way into our good graces.

5. Exclusivity: Exodus 20:3-6, the second and third of the ten commandments. I must emphasise that God's jealousy is a perfect jealousy, not our petty reflection of the idea. He is justified in being jealous because there is literally no idol that is better for us than the living God is.

6. Longing: God longs for us all to know Him. He does not need us to know Him, He is complete in Himself, but He delights to have us in constant communion with Him. Sin interrupts that communion, but in Luke 15, we see just how much He wants to have us back with Him, and how much He treasures the time we set aside for Him. In this age, He has given us the Spirit that we might always have His presence with us. He doesn't just want us to go to Him when we need something, but to be in touch always.

7. Commitment: In this case, not till death do us apart, but till death bring us together. Deuteronomy 31 shows us a God who is committed to a nation, even when He knows that they will displease Him. We need not fear that we are worshipping a God who would break His alliance with us, I would fear more about our inclinations to break fellowship with Him.

So, to answer my original query, God gave us eros so that we might understand just a fraction of the emotive turbulence that He experiences when He considers every individual of the human race. It is impossible for us to sustain eros to its ideal degree with more than one beloved, but a God of infinite capacity can and does maintain this level of attention and concern for every one. Mind you, as a final disclaimer, I am not saying God has sexual desires towards everyone; He is not Zeus. Those of you who have felt the difference between lust and love know that in the greater sense of eros, overwhelming sexual desire is probably one of the lesser impulses when you think of your beloved. Sexuality is another topic for another time.

Many of us identify with the pain of unrequited love, for one reason or another. Those of us who have been on the active end of such a love tell ourselves, 'If ever someone were to love me in the way that I love my beloved, I think I would just give them a chance.' If a love is ever reciprocated, we feel deeply insecure about whether we can measure up to the ideal of eros. Unlike another human being, He will ultimately never disappoint when we place our trust in Him. In many ways, God is the greatest unrequited lover of them all.

Insufficient Grace

I had been meaning to post something under this heading for quite awhile but never really got around to it. Perhaps my thoughts were not ripe. The basic germ of the original post was that God's grace is sufficient for all, but we choose to make it insufficient. Let me explain before someone brands this as 'heretical garbage'.

My pastor recently spoke on the temptation of Adam and Eve and unpacked seven verses with wonderful clarity. 

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate, and she gave also to her husband with her and he ate.

Genesis 3:6

Three points were raised about how the woman decided to take the fruit. 

1. The tree was good for food.

2. It was a delight to the eyes.

3. The tree was desirable to make one wise.

Those three points reflect the three fronts on which we are tempted even today, by the ancient serpent, who, disempowered as he is, still revels in our failure to transcend these minefields. 

On the first point, the tree was good for food, the temptation is physical. The perceived benefit is a physical one, to meet a bodily need. The second front is emotional, appealing to our sense of poetic beauty and wonder in the world. The third is intellectual, appealing to the desire to be wiser, more mature, to know more.

It occurred to me that sins could be classified into these categories to some limited degree. A sin may not always be so purely motivated by weakness one of these fronts, often there is a blend, but perhaps in examples, this will be demonstrated more effectively.

Physical temptation is based around bodily need. It may be hunger, thirst, sexual appetite, feeling ill, and tired, or the need to be relieved from pain. The thing is, those who are engaging in sin for purely physical reasons are often ashamed of themselves, and prudish society tells them that they ought to be ashamed. The man or woman who cannot control their sexual appetite and engages in promiscuous activity is called a slut. One who cannot control their desire for alcohol is called a drunk, and the one who cannot control hunger for food is called a glutton. To admit to such addictions and to be controlled by such basal impulses is still, to some degree, regarded as the most embarrassing. In fact they are probably the least dangerous, once we look at the other two categories. Of course, alcoholism and liaisons are seldom solely physical, there is often an emotional tug to them as well.

The emotional temptations are based around what we feel is right, what we believe is good in a poetic sense. It appeals to that sense of poetic justice that comes when we hear a good story. Maybe it is a pair of star-crossed lovers who are separated by their warring families, and their deaths for romance's sake cause their houses to consider reconciliation. Robespierre being executed with the guillotine. Reading that the clan of Cao Cao, the Han usurper, is itself usurped by the Sima clan in short order. It is hard to pin down, that sense of artistic 'righteousness', going beyond what a general penal code can offer. Sometimes these impulses are less 'noble' in guise. It may manifest primarily in sins like envy, greed and wrath, to go with that catholic septet a little further. The mechanism of this front follows that of the lyrics: If loving you is wrong, I don't want to be right.

The last category of intellectual sins is based around our desire for control and power, mastery and achievement. It appeals to our desire to be important, significant and celebrated. By far the one sin that stands out in this regard is pride.

It seems to me that society 'respects' the sins in one order, and God treats them in just the opposite. For society, the physical sins are the most serious, the most indicative of character flaws, the most shameful, followed by 'emotional sins' which we have pretty much accepted, while intellectual sins are almost lifted up as examples to be followed. Wise philosophers and progressive scientists we call them, and give them a place of honour in our academic circles. 

When Jesus was on earth, He spent time with those who were caught up in physical sin; the tax-collectors and prostitutes, loving them tenderly, and he was at his harshest with the intellectual sins of the Pharisees. Why might this be the case?

As a generalisation, those who have physical sin are often aware of their inability to justify their actions. Their posture is more along the lines of hopelessness, and they are filled with a sense of imperfection both from comparing themselves to societal expectations and to the moral law. When confronted by the perfection of God they tell themselves that they cannot hold a candle, they acknowledge their brokenness readily.

Those who have emotionally rooted sins are a little harder to reach with the morality of God. They appeal to plurality, saying that what is right for you may not be right for me. They acknowledge that to some people their actions may appear wrong, but they don't let it affect them because they are right in their own eyes. 

Yet this is not the worst, for intellectual pride goes a step further. The proud humanistic intellectual is faced with the moral perfection of God and denies its applicability entirely. By his own reasoning he or she may even deny the very existence and relevance of God, seeking to push Him out of the picture. The intellectual claims to formulate their own moral standard or lack thereof and extends those ideas to the entirety of the human race. They are unhappy when they hear the moral standards of God being 'imposed' on others to the effect of remorse and guilt. (This is another issue entirely that is beyond the scope of this post, but the proper relationship between law and grace is detailed in Romans and guilt should not be part of the equation any longer.) The intellectual is blinded by his or her own reasoning in a crusade of their own construction.

In this day and age, with the voice of human wisdom bolder and more vocal then ever, God still whispers that His grace is enough. We are the ones who tell Him that it is not when we reject it in our pride and independence. What will we do when the torturous, humiliating crucifixion of the Son of God on the cross and His glorious triumph of a resurrection is not enough to move our hard hearts? When we convince ourselves that the wonder of the mystery of Christ is not worth examining, there can be no wonder left in anything else, and emptiness will infuse itself into our intellectual sterility.

Vignette: Disillusionment

Is it fruitless to search out what is truth and falsehood? To piece together the world into a coherent picture that accommodates the collective experiences of humanity into a comprehensible whole? No sooner does one come to terms with one conundrum that another appears. In the tiresome quest for understanding, each worldview iteration encompasses more and thus when each comes crashing down, even more purpose and motivation is taken with it, all bound together, all removed to be built anew. But building is expensive, time-consuming and tiring.

To believe in nothing is my negation. To be paralysed by doubt is still to be paralysed. But what can a finite mind do against an infinite universe, with more knowledge and revelation coming day by day to revolutionise? Growing tired of revolution, reassessment and longing for stability in this world, stability to security, security to comfort. Is all comfort an illusion? The product of an idle, unchallenged mind?

De Gloria Mundi

It's not often that games provoke reflection on a wider scale than the role of entertainment as a diversion in our lives, but Europa Universalis IV has provided quite a lot of munch on. 'All's fair in love and war', and now I am somewhat more acquainted with histories and causes the latter than I have been.

Of course, one cannot possibly hope to encapsulate all the intricacies of nations on anything processable by a domestic computer, even if Moore's law continues to push our limitations. EUIV however, does a much better job than most other games, notably the Civilisation series. Bringing in religion, geopolitics, dynastic struggles and colonisation, and revelling in the sheer inequality of it all.

When one begins a campaign, plans for aggrandisement and expansion help to drive the first hundred years or so of gameplay. You are put in the shoes of a ruler, and that drive to build something that will last, achieve domination and preeminence, becomes something relatable. 

Halfway through, if one plays aggressively, it is easy to become a virtual world power, maybe controlling the most trade, being a dominant land power, or unifying the lands of one culture group. The game suddenly loses steam, that drive to be the first gives way to a strange purposelessness. The player begins to wonder what was so appealing about achieving to begin with.

This sentiment of nihilistic disenchantment is exacerbated, when after thirty to forty hours of campaign time, everything ends abruptly in 1821. The game gives you a little pat on the back, and shows you the door. The sandbox gameplay has revealed how countries define their own goals based on their self interest, but in the end, when one considers all the circumstances, the entire exercise seems so futile, even detrimental. 

Thousands of lives were given to the service of the nationalistic dream, whether than dream was centred around the Valois or the Ming. Alliances are forged and broken when convenient with a perfunctory swiftness. Then as we know from history, European hegemony came crashing down, in a great destructive debacle where the flags of many empires flew for the last time over people who could no longer naively endorse the casus belli of their rulers. 

In that age is was easy to believe in the power and vision of a king, but events have conspired to deconstruct that lie. In its wake we came up with new reasons to fight, new causes to champion, new ideas to die for. The modern world has saturated itself with glories even more transient and fleeting than the legacy of the Habsburgs or Pax Britannia, and we buy into them because we need something to buy into, but Empire is so last century. I suppose it's time we turn to more eternal goals to strive for.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, Sed Non Transit Gloria Dei