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The website of good reasons for why you can be a Christian |
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How your bump'n car stereo system works(yeah this actually is going to get to God eventually ...) Your CD stereo system creates kicking bass from a tiny silent CD through a number of steps. The laser light reflecting off etchings on your CD are read an converted into a weak electronic signal of digital codes by an optical sensor. Those digital codes are then converted into a weak analog electrical signal. This weak electrical signal from the preamp is then multiplied by your main amplifier and subwoofer amp to create enough watts of power to drive your speakers. Inside your amplifier are either Integrated Circuits, Transistors or Vacuum tubes which do the real work of making your system loud. The graph below shows what happens in a transistor that is wired to act as an amplifier. Look at the straight section of the line. Within the straight (linear) section, for every milivolt you put in you get 10 volts out. So every time you turn up your volume knob 10%, your stereo gets 10% louder. (stereo nerds - just ignore the logarithmic dB relationship to keep this oversimplification understandable). The actual mathematical relationship between voltage in and voltage out over the entire operating range of the transistor is actually quite complicated. But as long as you stay within the straight line part of the graph, a lot of factors drop out or can be ignored because their value is insignificant. Engineers call this the SMALL model and it works very well in normal circumstances. But have you have noticed that in some stereos you turn up the knob and there is nothing, then all of a sudden it jumps to pretty loud. Or more typically, have you noticed if you turn a stereo all the way up (to 10 for most mortals, or 11 if you are in Spinal Tap), the sound gets all distorted ? Especially if you turn the bass up ? When these things happen it is because the amplifier has moved beyond the straight line SMALL model range and moved in to the non-linear range. Things are much more complex here and Engineers have to use what's called the LARGE model which describes the ENTIRE range of the transistor and includes much more complicated calculations. So what does this have to do with God and Philosophy ?This is actually a great metaphor of the end of Modern Science. Science was able to accomplish so much simply by cutting out all but the most basic aspects of reality. A moving rock was reduced to a simple object that had mass, extension and velocity. There is actually a whole lot more to a "simple" rock than that. The view of the universe was reduced to simple billiard ball collisions - all the workings could be explained by simple equations. Even Bertrand Russel (no friend to Christianity) said we use math to describe objects not because we know so much about them, but because we know so little. Newtonian physics worked in the normal scale of things - things not too small or too big or too fast. It was like working in the SMALL model part of the diagram above. People got cocky and thought they had things pretty much figured out. They figured it was a straight line the whole way. But Einstein and Heidelberg and others started looking at what happened at speeds around the speed of light (Theory of relativity) and in particles smaller than atoms (Quantum Mechanics) and things got funky. The old rules no longer applied in these situations. They had to move to the more inclusive BIG model. In fact things acted completely differently then people would have predicted in the Newtonian world of simple billiard balls. It turned out things could not be nailed down as exactly as thought. Currently some things in Quantum Mechanics cannot be known for sure - such as the actual location of an electron - it can only be known statistically, and it appears that this may be it's actual nature. So it turns out that things don't have to be the way they are by LOGICAL NECESSITY. Everything is contingent. They are one way but they could be another. This means we never know things in themselves, we only know them approximately.
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When the claims of Christ are truly understood, there are only two choices: To bend one's knee or take offence ... |