The Paradox of Omnipresence and Timelessness

It’s an essential attribute of God that he’s omnipresent, and Thomas Aquinas held that he also stands somehow outside of time and is not bound by temporal considerations. But, Richard La Croix argues,

if God is indeed omnipresent then it would appear that he must have been in the United Nations building yesterday as well as the day before yesterday. And if God was in the United Nations building both yesterday and the day before, then it would appear that he is in time and that temporal predicates do apply to him. So, it would appear that God is not a timeless being if he is omnipresent and that two doctrines crucial to the theology of Thomas Aquinas are logically incompatible.

Omniscience poses further problems: If God knows all things, then he knows what both man and he himself will do. So how is free will possible?

| Religion · Science & Math

“A Poor Man’s Disneyland”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/whatknot/163550580/
Image: Flickr

Jim Bishop’s castle is exactly that — a 160-foot baroque edifice that Bishop has constructed single-handed over the course of 40 years in the forest of southern Colorado.

It already contains a thousand tons of stone and iron, and still Bishop’s not finished. Before he dies he wants to add a moat, a roller coaster, a balcony big enough to accommodate an orchestra — and a second castle for his wife.

| Oddities

Close Call

On Sept. 26, 1983, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces received a warning that the U.S. had launched an ICBM toward the Soviet Union. He dismissed it as a false alarm. Later four additional missiles were detected, and again Petrov decided they were phantoms.

He was right, but he couldn’t have been certain, and if he’d followed protocol he might have started a full-scale nuclear exchange between the superpowers. Bruce Blair of the World Security Institute said, “I think that this is the closest we’ve come to accidental nuclear war.”

| History

Mima Mounds

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mima.jpg

What are these? They appear by the hundreds throughout western North America, but no one knows what produces them. Earthquakes? Glaciers? People? Gophers? The force involved must be considerable — the mounds can reach 8 feet in height and 50 feet in diameter — but for now their origin is a mystery.

01/15/2014 UPDATE: Gophers. (Thanks, Hugh.)

| Oddities

The Wow! Signal

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wow_signal.jpg

On Aug. 15, 1977, a telescope at Ohio State University detected a strong narrowband radio signal in the constellation Sagittarius — one so unusual that astronomer Jerry Ehman marked the printout with an exclamation.

The signal’s intensity rose and then fell as the beam swept past its position in the sky. That’s consistent with an extraterrestrial origin … but in 30 years and more than 100 searches, no one has been able to relocate it.

Without a recurrence, there’s no way to know what Ehman’s telescope heard that night — it’s just a frustrating splash in a large, silent sea.

08/27/2024 UPDATE: It appears there’s a natural explanation. New research suggests that the Wow! signal occurred when an interstellar cloud of cold hydrogen was stimulated by a strong transient radiation source, causing it to brighten momentarily. This phenomenon is rare but recognized, and it matches the described characteristics of the signal. This natural explanation is much preferable to the hypothesis of an alien technology — aliens may be out there, but we don’t need them to explain what Jerry Ehman saw in 1977. Thanks to podcast listener Eugene Chang for the tip.

| Oddities · Science & Math

Hard Times

In 1820, Richard Whatley wrote a facetious elegy for Oxford geologist William Buckland:

Where shall we our great Professor inter,
That in peace he may rest his bones?
If we hew him a rocky sepulchre
He will rise and break the stones,
And examine each stratum that lies around
For he’s quite in his element underground.

Ironically, when Buckland did pass away in 1856, the gravedigger struck an outcrop of limestone just below the surface and had to use gunpowder to put Buckland to rest.

Ambrose Bierce defined geology as “The science of the earth’s crust–to which, doubtless, will be added that of its interior whenever a man shall come up garrulous out of a well.”

| Science & Math

Unquote

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anatole_FranceA.jpg

“If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” — Anatole France

Curiously, when France died in 1924, doctors found that his brain was two-thirds normal size. But, said surgeon Louis Guillaume, “It was the most beautiful brain one could dream of seeing. Its convolutions were marvelous.”

| Literature · Oddities · Quotations