What's in a name?

                                  

JEHOVAH" in the NT

A number of anti-Watchtower writers take delight in "exposing" the "fraudulent" use of JEHOVAH in the NT by the NWT translators. They correctly point out that none of the still existing MSS of the NT use the divine name. Therefore, they claim it is a terrible dishonest act to replace that name where it should have been (in NT quotes from the OT which originally used it, for example.)

But, if we know it belongs there. And if we know the MSS we have today were copies of copies, etc., written hundreds of years after the originals, and therefore may well have been changed when the name became a hated "Jewish" name to "Christians" (around 135 A.D.). Why is it considered so terribly wrong to restore, for the sake of clarity if nothing else, the name we know belongs there.

Does the fact that the name is not in the text used today mean that it should not be used in the places where the term "Lord" now is, even if that term produces confusion? ("Lord" can be used for God, Jesus, and men. "JEHOVAH" can be used only for God!)

What about other, trinitarian-respected Bibles? Would they be accused of terrible crimes against God, misuse of God's inspired word, deliberate mistranslation, etc. if they added a personal name to their translation for clarity or to make some other point, when it wasn't actually in the NT text to begin with?

Well, let's look at John 12:41 as an example. The scripture says in the available manuscripts: "Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and he spoke about him."

This could be understood to mean God's glory or Jesus' glory. Whether for clarity or to try to make a trinitarian point here, Some respected trinitarian Bibles replace "he" or "him" with "Jesus"! See, for example, NIV; NJB; and NAB ('70).

We see the same thing, probably just to make it clear to the readers what was probably intended, at Mark 1:41, 45 (as well as other places throughout the NT.)

Mark 1:41 says in the Greek text: "And being moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him". But look what these respected trinitarian Bibles write here instead:

KJV - "Jesus , moved with compassion, put forth his hand"

NKJV – "Jesus, moved with compassion, stretched out His hand"

NIV – "Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand"

NRSV – "Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand"

REB – "Jesus was moved to anger; he stretched out his hand"

NEB – "In warm indignation Jesus stretched out his hand"

JB - "Feeling sorry for him, Jesus stretched out his hand"

NJB – "Feeling sorry for him, Jesus stretched out his hand"

So, have these respected trinitarian translations been accused of terrible crimes against God, misuse of God's inspired word, deliberate mistranslation, etc. because they have added a personal name to their translation which was not in the original Greek text?

Let's do one more that's near by, Mark 1:45 (there are plenty more). The Greek says:

"… the man started to proclaim it … so that he was not able to enter openly into the city".

NASB – "to such an extent that Jesus could no longer publicly enter a city"

KJV – "… insomuch that Jesus could no more openly enter into the city"

NKJV – "So that Jesus could no longer openly enter the city"

NIV – "As a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly"

RSV – "So that Jesus* could no longer openly enter a town"

NRSV – "so that Jesus* could no longer go into a town openly"

REB - "until Jesus could no longer show himself in any town."

NEB - "until Jesus could no longer show himself in any town,"

JB - "so that Jesus could no longer go openly into any town"

NJB - "so that Jesus could no longer go openly into any town"

NAB ('91) – "so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly."

MLB - "so widely that Jesus could no longer enter a town openly"

* "Greek he"

Again, have all these respected trinitarian translations been accused of terrible crimes against God, misuse of God's inspired word, deliberate mistranslation, etc. because they have added a personal name to their translation which was not in the original Greek text? Of course not!

The following is my reply to a letter from a Bible-studying acquaintance: 

Dear Harvey,

You wrote in your 27 May `94 letter [p. 4, HARVEY-H]:

"Since the name `JEHOVAH is never used in the New Testament at any time or in any place in thousands of manuscripts early or late, not by Jesus or any other, I see no evidence -- none whatsoever -- to support the idea that the use of this name is essential. I'm just going by the evidence. This is not to say that the use of the name JEHOVAH is inappropriate because it has Biblical antecedents. ....

"When the theory was first propounded ... that the name `JEHOVAH was originally part of the Greek New Testament—but later expunged—it was before the Egyptian papyrus texts had come to light or been published.

....

"In the late 20^th century because of our increased state of knowledge this 19^th century thesis is no longer tenable; we have early texts, as early as 125 A. D. and we have different text-types. And evidence of systematic tampering of this nature is not there."

I agree that most of the physical evidence found in existing NT manuscripts does not support "JEHOVAH" in the NT, and, ordinarily that would be enough for me. But what makes such a difference to me is the belief that BOTH "Testaments" are the word of God and must not contradict each other in important areas of knowledge.

We can accept both "Testaments" as the inspired word of God and still see understandable differences occurring between the two, but not basic contradictory differences. For example, we know how and why animal sacrifices to God have been done away with. It has been carefully, logically explained in the NT and, therefore, does not contradict the OT teachings where such sacrifices were required (essential). But where is the careful, logical explanation that shows that the necessary knowledge and use of God's name (as clearly acknowledged by word and example throughout the OT) was done away with in the NT? It's not there! How can it be that God reveals his personal name and commands that it be publicly acknowledged and used forever by his servants (and they respectfully do so for over a thousand years) and then, for no scriptural reason, His worshipers suddenly begin refusing to use that name and even hide it?

I see the solution to the issue of God's name in the NT as similar to the solution for the question of Zechariah 12:10 which you acknowledged as a "disputed" text. We may not find the physical evidence in OT manuscripts to prove that Zech 12:10 originally read "They will look upon him whom they have pierced..." (in fact the majority of existing MS evidence for the OT points the other way). But the clear, undisputed (even by the trinitarians' "Majority" Text or the Byzantine, or Received Text, etc.) physical evidence of the NT where this OT scripture is quoted exactly that way (Jn 19:37) is proof for me that that is what was originally written in the OT as well. I don't see how anyone (even a trinitarian) who agrees that both "Testaments" are the inspired word of God could honestly disagree no matter how much he wants to believe the trinitarian interpretation of Zech. 12:10. The undisputed proof of the one testimony makes the other (more doubtful) one certain also!

I hope you agree that the inspired OT writers, at least, considered God's Holy Name (YHWH, "JEHOVAH" in traditional English transliteration or "YAHWEH" in another transliteration) as essential. It was used and praised and revered in the OT to an overwhelming degree. It was reverently used nearly 7000 times, much more than any other name in the entire Bible or any title used for God ("God," "Lord," etc.). It was declared to be of essential importance (not in a magical, superstitious sense, but as an essential ingredient in the knowledge of the only true God and in proper worship of him):

Ex. 3:15 -

"JEHOVAH ... This is my name for ever; this is my title in every generation."-NEB.

"JEHOVAH, .... This is My name forever and by this I am to be remembered through all generations." - MLB.

"JEHOVAH ... This is my eternal name, to be used throughout all generations." -LB.

"JEHOVAH ... this is my name forever." - Byington.

"JEHOVAH, ... this is my name forever" - ASV.

"JEHOVAH ... this is My name forever" - KJIIV and MKJV.

"JEHOVAH, .... This is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations." - Darby.

"YAHWEH .... This has always been my name, and this shall remain my title throughout the ages." - AT.

"YAHWEH .... This is my name for all time, and thus I am to be invoked for all generations to come." - JB & NJB.

"By this name I am to be remembered by all people for all time." - NLV.

"My name will always be YAHWEH." - ETRV.

This scripture alone shows us that His name is essential! Those who worship him, the witnesses of JEHOVAH, are commanded to know and use it. There are many other Scriptures, however. A few of them are:

1 Chron. 16:8 -

"O give thanks unto JEHOVAH, call upon his name; Make known his doings among the peoples." - ASV.

"Give thanks to YAHWEH, call his name aloud, proclaim his deeds to the peoples [`among the nations' - NAB (1991); MLB; GNB; `world' - LB]." - NJB.

"O give thanks to JEHOVAH, call upon His name" - KJIIV.

"Give thanks to JEHOVAH, call in His name" - Young's.

"Invoke him by name" - REB.

"... call upon him by his name" - The Septuagint, Zondervan Publ., 1970.

"Praise [JEHOVAH]; call on His name" – The Tanakh

Is. 12:4 -

"And in that day shall ye say, Give thanks unto JEHOVAH, call upon his name, declare his doings among the peoples, make mention that his name is exalted." - ASV.

"And, that day, you will say, `Praise YAHWEH, invoke his name. Proclaim his deeds to the people [`nations', RSV, NRSV, MLB, NAB (1991), GNB; `world', LB], declare his name sublime.'" - NJB.

"call his name aloud." - JB.

"invoke him by name" - NEB & REB.

"call aloud upon his name" [Boate to onoma autou, literally: "call aloud his name"] - The Septuagint, Zondervan Publ., 1970.

"Praise [JEHOVAH], proclaim His name" - Tanakh.

Zeph. 3:9 -

"For then will I turn to the peoples a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of JEHOVAH, to serve him with one consent." - ASV.

"Yes, then [the last days] I shall purge the lips of the peoples, so that all mayinvoke the name of YAHWEH." - NJB, c.f. JB.

"That they may invoke [JEHOVAH] by name" - NEB & REB.

"call out the name of [JEHOVAH]." - ETRV.

"So that they all invoke [JEHOVAH] by name" – Tanakh.

Joel 2:26, 32 -

"And ye ... shall praise the name of JEHOVAH your God .... And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of JEHOVAH shall be delivered." - ASV.

"You will ... praise the name of YAHWEH your God .... All who call on [`invoke' - REB & NEB] the name of YAHWEH will be saved" - JB & NJB.

"you shall … praise the name of [JEHOVAH] your God …. But everyone who invokes the name of [JEHOVAH] shall escape" – The Tanakh (Joel 2:26; 3:5)

Here, like knowing God (Jn 17:3; 2 Thess. 1:8, 9), calling on (or invoking) JEHOVAH'S name is an essential part of the road that leads to life.

Since it is a requirement to call upon, or invoke the name JEHOVAH, the knowledge and use of that name is essential (as made known in the OT at least)!  And, like knowing God, "calling upon his name, JEHOVAH" includes much more than merely pronouncing his name aloud in prayer. But, nevertheless, it does necessarily include the knowledge of and the respectful use of his personal name, JEHOVAH (or YAHWEH).

For example, Elijah, in his famous demonstration of who the only true God is, told the priests of Baal,

"Call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of JEHOVAH: and the God that answers by fire, let him be God."

So how did the priests of Baal call on the name of their god?

"And they ... called on the name of Baal ... saying `O Baal, hear us.'" [And how did Elijah call on the name of JEHOVAH?] "O Jehovah .... Hear me, O JEHOVAH, hear me, that this people may know that thou, JEHOVAH, art God.... And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said [aloud, uncoded, in plain language], `JEHOVAH, he is God'" - ASV, 1 Ki. 18:24, 26, 36-39.

Obviously, calling on (or invoking) the name of JEHOVAH includes the reverent use of that only personal name of the true God!

Many other scriptures throughout the OT declare the extreme importance (to God and us) of our knowing and declaring and calling upon the name JEHOVAH:

Jer. 16:19, 21 -

"O JEHOVAH ... unto thee shall the nations come from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Our fathers have inherited nought but lies ... and they will know that my name is JEHOVAH." - ASV.

"and they shall know that My name is JEHOVAH." - KJIIV & MKJV.

"and they will be certain that my name is [JEHOVAH]." - BBE.

"and they shall know that my name is JEHOVAH." - Darby.

"and they shall know that my name is JEHOVAH." - Webster.

"and they shall learn that My name is [JEHOVAH]. – Tanakh.

Zech. 13:9 -

"They shall call upon my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people; and they shall say [aloud, uncoded, in plain language], JEHOVAH is my God." - ASV.

"They shall call on My name, and I will answer them. I will say, It is My people, and they shall say, JEHOVAH is my God." - KJIIV.

"They shall call on my name, and I will answer them: I will say, It is my people; and they shall say, JEHOVAH is my God." - Darby.

"They will invoke me by name, … And they will declare, [JEHOVAH] is our God" – Tanakh.

Notice the parallelism: `They shall call upon my name' is paralleled with `JEHOVAH is my God."

Ezek. 39:7 -

"And my holy name will I make known ... and the nations shall know that I am JEHOVAH" - ASV.

"The nations will know that I am YAHWEH" - NJB.

"I will make My holy name known among My people Israel, and never again will I let My holy name be profaned. And the nations shall know that I [JEHOVAH] am holy in Israel." – Tanakh.

Ps. 83:16, 18 -

"Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek thy name, [O JEHOVAH].... that men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth." - KJV.

"Fill their faces with shame, that they may seek Your name .... Let them be ashamed and troubled forever; yea, let them be put to shame, and lost; so that men may know that Your name is JEHOVAH, that You alone are the Most High over all the earth." - MKJV.

"Cover their faces with shame so that they seek Your name, O [JEHOVAH] …. May they know that Your name, Yours alone, is [JEHOVAH], supreme over all the earth." – Tanakh.

Ps. 135:13 -

"Thy name, O JEHOVAH, endureth forever; Thy memorial name, O JEHOVAH, throughout all generations" - ASV.

"Thy name, O JEHOVAH, is for ever; thy memorial, O JEHOVAH, from generation to generation." - Darby.

"O JEHOVAH, your name endures forever" - LB.

"O [JEHOVAH], your name endures forever" – Tanakh.

We are to know and use JEHOVAH'S name, but we must not misunderstand how extremely important it is to Him (and to us). One of God's Ten Commandments, for example commands:

"You shall not misuse the name of YAHWEH your God, for YAHWEH will not leave unpunished anyone who misuses [1] his name." - Ex. 20:7, NJB [also NRSV, NIV, NEB, REB, GNB, CEV, NLV, ETRV].

God certainly didn't say, "Don't ever use my Holy Name"! By direct Bible statements and commands and by the clear, thousand-fold repeated examples of all the prophets of God in the OT we know that God's Holy Name must be known and used by his people - for all generations. Instead, this Scripture shows the extreme importance of that name (would God really punish anyone who deceitfully misuses his name if that name weren't extremely important?) and that it must be used in a manner that shows its great importance.

(Please comment on the undeniable removal of God's personal name by "Christian" translators from thousands of places in the OT where the inspired Bible writers originally placed it! After all, for hundreds of translations - in the last few centuries at least - we can see the actual Hebrew OT manuscripts which the "orthodox" translators used and compare that with their actual translations which have God's name removed!

Honestly, isn't this a terrible misuse of his Memorial Name? Isn't this "Christian" tradition inexcusable? How can it be supported by any Christian? How could it even be quietly condoned? Doesn't it illustrate a basic error that the vast majority of Christendom has embraced for many centuries? The complete elimination of the name of the "Hebrew" God has been a goal of the majority of Christendom for so long that its beginning is all but lost in the shrouded mist of time. But for Christendom to claim that this was the case from the very beginning of Christianity is a terrible thing to do.)

Malachi 2:2; 3:16, 17 -

"Unless you listen to me and pay heed to the honouring of my name, says [JEHOVAH], I shall lay a curse on you .... A record was written before [JEHOVAH] of those who feared him and had respect for his name. They will be mine, says [JEHOVAH] ... and I shall spare them" - REB.

(Doesn't the removal of JEHOVAH’S name from the inspired scriptures display a clear lack of respect for his Holy Name? How could there be a more blatant misuse of his Name?)

I don't understand how anyone can deny the extreme importance of God's eternal, holy name in the OT nor that that name was used respectfully much more than any other name (nearly 7000 times) throughout the OT. Nor that God foretold that it would have to be known worldwide by all the nations. And that name was YHWH in the OT! Nor can I understand anyone honestly refusing to admit that YHWH simply does not translate nor transliterate, by any stretch of the imagination, into "Lord"!

Therefore, if we translate YHWH to its most probable equivalent ("He Who Will Be [With You]") or transliterate it into a possible Hebrew form ("YAHWEH" or "YAHOWAH" - see the PRONOUNCE study) or even its traditional English form ("JEHOVAH" - to match the traditional English form of "Jesus")[2] and leave it where it was actually placed by the inspired OT writers, that is not only good but essential.

............................................

What are we doing if we purposely change the inspired scriptures; if we purposely remove an essentially important word 7000 times from the inspired Scriptures (and add words and meanings not intended in the original)? We are not just interpreting and translating, but we are actually disobeying God's clear commandments concerning his Most Holy Name and disobeying his clear commandments concerning adding to and taking away from his inspired word! How can this possibly be Christian (whether it started in the 2^nd century or the 17^th century)?

And if Jesus (the Hebrew/Aramaic-speaking Palestinian Jew) quotes from the OT to his fellow Hebrew/Aramaic-speaking Jews, he is not going to do it from the Greek Septuagint! He is going to do it from the scrolls found in the temple in Jerusalem (or copies thereof): the Hebrew Scriptures!

"...the Hebrew text, ... was the only authoritative form of the scriptures recognized by the Palestinian Jews." - p. 168, Vol. 2, The Encyclopedia of Religion, Macmillan Publ., 1987. (In any case even the Septuagint at this time in Palestine also used the Divine Name in Hebrew characters.)

When Jesus quotes Ps. 110:1, he will say "JEHOVAH said unto my lord, `Sit thou on my right hand...'." - Matthew 22:44. (Notice the use of "LORD" instead of "Lord" here in the NT in the KJV - what does the code word "LORD" really mean in the KJV?) He would not substitute another entirely different word with an entirely different meaning from what was written by the inspired Bible writers (certainly not if he was quoting the only personal name of God). He continually, fearlessly broke the superstitions and man-made traditions of the Jews in favor of what his Father actually taught and commanded.

So even if the Jewish tradition of substituting "Lord" for "YAHWEH" when reading Scripture aloud had been established in Jerusalem itself at this time (which is highly arguable), Jesus would not have hesitated to ignore it in favor of the truth. Certainly he would not have polluted the holy `Shema' but would have said "JEHOVAH [is] our God; JEHOVAH [is] one" to the admiring Jewish scribe at Mark 12:29! - see NKJV ("LORD"). Also notice Jesus' words at Matt. 4:4, 7, 10; 5:33; 21:42; 22:37, 44. (Likewise, the inspired Jewish Christian writers of the NT when quoting OT scripture where the Name was clearly written would have also written that Name - e.g., Matt. 3:3, etc.)

I cannot believe that the only-begotten Son of God would deliberately and knowingly change any part of the scriptures. I cannot even conceive of him actually changing the very name of God found in those holy Scriptures! (If the very Son of God himself was forced to never say aloud the name of his Father, we would be terribly wrong to presume that it is acceptable for us to pronounce that most holy name - and all the preceding holy prophets of God would have been terribly, tragically wrong to use the name aloud almost incessantly as they did!)

We need to know this important information from Scripture itself, not from what is acknowledged to be a "superstitious tradition" of the later Jews! But there is nothing in the Scriptures to support it, and the entire OT shows conclusively that the name YHWH was used frequently and respectfully by all his people from the beginning.

Therefore, if we are to keep the Scriptures from terribly contradicting themselves in an extremely important area, we must conclude that either the OT scriptures are wrong or the oldest available NT manuscripts and fragments (at least those which actually contain places that quote from the OT where "YHWH" was originally used) are copies that have been changed from the original! Since the name of God being used as YHWH even in everyday life is attested to by archaelogical findings back to the 8^th century B. C. at least, I am forced to conclude that, yes, the existing NT manuscripts are terribly wrong in this particular area.

I don't believe that the very earliest fragments of papyrus of the NT (that date back to the 2^nd century) even have quotations of the OT where God's name would be expected to be found. (For example, the very oldest papyrus manuscript which I believe you refer to - p⁵² ca. 125 A. D. - is only a fragment of parts of John 18 and contains no quotation from the OT, or allusion to it, which uses God's name and, therefore, cannot be honestly used as evidence for the use or non-use of the divine name in NT manuscripts of that time.) But even if they do, they are still copies of the original whose copyists must have changed the Divine Name in much the same way as the Septuagint copyists changed it about the same time period and probably by the same "Christian" scribes.

When did the Jews begin avoiding the pronunciation of the Divine Name and changing the written form (if they did)?

Some claim that it began following the Babylonian exile.... This theory, however, is based on a supposed reduction in the use of the name by the later writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, a view that does not hold up under examination. Malachi, for example, was evidently one of the last books of the Hebrew Scriptures written (in the latter half of the fifth century B.C.E.), and it gives great prominence to the divine name.

Many reference works have suggested that the name ceased to be used [aloud] by about 300 B.C.E. Evidence for this date supposedly was found in the absence of the Tetragrammaton (or a transliteration of it) in the Greek Septuaginttranslation of the Hebrew Scriptures begun about 280 B.C.E. It is true that the most complete manuscript copies of the Septuagint now known do consistently follow the practice of substituting the Greek words Kyrios (Lord) or Theos (God) for the Tetragrammaton. But these major manuscripts date back only as far as the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. [A.D.]. More ancient copies, though in fragmentary form, have been discovered that prove that the earliest copies of the Septuagint did contain the divine name." - p. 5, Vol. 2, Insight on the Scriptures, WBTS, 1988.

[Among others, fragments of a leather scroll (LXX^{VTS 10a}) dated to the end of the first century A.D. found in a cave in the Judean desert used the tetragrammaton in Hebrew letters extensively in 5 of the `minor prophets,' and a fragment of a parchment scroll of Zechariah (LXX^VTS 10b) dated to the middle of the first century C.E. found in the Judean desert used the tetragrammaton in ancient Hebrew characters.]

So, at least in written form, there is no sound evidence of any disappearance or disuse of the divine name in the B. C. E. period. In the first century C. E., there first appears some evidence of a superstitious attitude toward the name. Josephus, a Jewish historian from a priestly family, when recounting God's revelation to Moses at the site of the burning bush, says: `Then God revealed His name, which ere then had not come to men's ears, and of which I am forbidden to speak.' (Jewish Antiquities, II, 276 [xii, 4]) Josephus' statement, however, besides being inaccurate as to knowledge of the divine name prior to Moses, is vague and does not clearly reveal just what the general attitude current in the first century was as to pronouncing or using the divine name.

The Jewish Mishnah, a collection of rabbinic teachings and traditions, is somewhat more explicit. Its compilation is credited to a rabbi known as Judah the Prince, who lived in the second and third centuries C.E. Some of the Mishnaic material clearly relates to circumstances prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 70 C. E. Of the Mishnah, however, one scholar says: `It is a matter of extreme difficulty to decide what historical value we should attach to any tradition recorded in the Mishnah. The lapse of time which may have served to obscure or distort memories of times so different; the political upheavals, changes, and confusions brought about by two rebellions and two Roman conquests; the standards esteemed by the Pharisean party (whose opinions the Mishnah records) which were not those of the Sadducean party ... - these are factors which need to be given due weight in estimating the character of the Mishnah's statements. Moreover there is much in the contents of the Mishnah that moves in an atmosphere of academic discussion pursued for its own sake, with (so it would appear) little pretence at recording historical usage.' (The Mishnah, translated by H. Danby, London, 1954, pp. xiv, xv) Some of the Mishnaic traditions concerning the pronouncing of the divine name are as follows:

In connection with the annual Day of Atonement, Danby's translation of the Mishnah states: "And when the priests and the people which stood in the Temple Court heard the Expressed Name come forth from the mouth of the High Priest, they used to kneel and bow themselves and fall down on their faces and say, `Blessed be the name of the glory of his kingdom for ever and ever!'" (Yoma 6:2) Of the daily priestly blessings, Sotah 7:6 says: "In the Temple they pronounced the Name as it was written, but in the provinces by a substituted word." Sanhedrin 7:5 states that a blasphemer was not guilty `unless he pronounced the Name,' .... Sanhedrin 10:1, in listing those "that have no share in the world to come," states: "Abba Saul says: Also he that pronounces the Name with its proper letters." Yet despite these negative views, one also finds in the first section of the Mishnah the positive injunction that "a man should salute his fellow with [the use of] the Name [of God]," the example of Boaz (Ru 2:4) then being cited. - Berakhot 9:5.

Taken for what they are worth, these traditional views may reveal a superstitious tendency to avoid using [pronouncing aloud] the divine name sometime before Jerusalem's temple was destroyed in 70 C. E. Even then, it is primarily the priests who are explicitly said to have used a substitute name in place of the divine name, and that only in the provinces. Additionally the historical value of the Mishnaic tradition is questionable, as we have seen.

There is, therefore, no genuine basis for assigning any time earlier than the first and second centuries C. E. for the development of the superstitious view calling for discontinuance for the [oral] use of the divine name. The time did come, however, when in reading the Hebrew Scriptures in the original language, the Jewish reader substituted either `Adhonai' Sovereign Lord) or `Elohim' (God) rather than the divine name represented by the Tetragrammaton. This is seen from the fact that when vowel pointing came into  use in the second half of the first millennium C. E. [after 500 C. E.], the Jewish copyists inserted the vowel points for either `Adhonai' or `Elohim' into the Tetragrammaton, evidently to warn the reader to say those words in place of pronouncing the divine name. If using the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures in later copies, the reader, of course, found the Tetragrammaton completely replaced by Kyrios and Theos ....

Translations into other languages, such as the Latin Vulgate, followed the example of these later copies of the Greek Septuagint. The Catholic Douay Version (of 1609-1610) in English, based on the Latin Vulgate, therefore does not contain the divine name, while the King James Version (1611) uses LORD or GOD (in capital and small capitals) to represent the Tetragrammaton in the Hebrew scriptures, except in four cases. - pp. 5-7, Vol. 2, Insight.

The fact that all complete manuscripts of the Septuagint in existence today (4^th century A.D. and later) use "Lord" was thought to mean that it had been originally produced that way. But many relatively recent discoveries of fragments of much older Septuagint manuscripts (1^st cent. B.C. to 3^rd cent. A.D.) have been made.[3] When those fragments include places where the divine name is used in the original Hebrew Scriptures, it is either written "YHWH" in Hebrew characters or trans-literated into a corresponding Greek sound, (e.g., IAO) but not "Lord"! It would appear most likely that the original Septuagint translation used the Divine Name properly and reverently.

"Recent textual discoveries cast doubt on the idea that the compilers of the LXX   translated the tetragrammaton YHWH by kyrios ["Lord"]. LXX MSS (fragments) now available to us have the tetragrammaton written in Hebrew characters in the Greek text. This custom was retained by later Jewish translators of the OT in the first centuries A.D. One LXX MS from Qumran [1^st century B.C.] even represents the tetragrammaton by IAO. These instances have given support to the theory that the thorough-going use of kyrios for the tetragrammaton in the text of the LXX was primarily the work of Christianscribes (P. E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, 1959, 222; cf. S. Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study, 1968, 185 f., 271 f.)." - p. 512, Vol. 2, The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Zondervan Publishing House, 1986.

So how does the Watchtower Society explain the lack of Tetragrammata in the existing NT manuscripts? And on what basis have they attempted to restore them to today's NT translation?

The argument long presented [to justify the teaching by Christendom that the original inspired manuscripts of the NT did not contain the Tetragrammaton] was that the inspired writers of the Christian Greek Scriptures made their quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures on the basis of the Septuagint,^[[4]] and that, since this version substituted Kyrios or Theos for the Tetragrammaton, these writers did not use the name JEHOVAH. As has been shown, this argument is no longer valid. Commenting on the fact that the oldest fragments of the Greek Septuagint do contain the divine name in its Hebrew form, Dr. P. Kahle says: `We now know that the Greek Bible text [the Septuagint] as far as it was written by Jews for Jews did not translate the Divine Name by kyrios, but the Tetragrammaton written with Hebrew or Greek letters was retained in such MSS [manuscripts]. It was the Christians [so-called] who replaced the Tetragrammaton by kyrios, when the divine name written in Hebrew letters was not understood any more.' (The Cairo Geniza, Oxford, 1959, p. 222) When did this change in the Greek translations of the Hebrew Scriptures take place?

It evidently took place in the centuries following the death of Jesus and his apostles. In Aquila's Greek version, dating from the second century C. E., the Tetragrammaton still appeared in Hebrew characters. Around 245 C. E., the noted scholar Origen produced his Hexapla, a six-column reproduction of the inspired Hebrew Scriptures: (1) in their original Hebrew and Aramaic, accompanied by (2) a transliteration into Greek, and by the Greek versions of (3) Aquila, (4) Symmachus, (5) the Septuagint, and (6) Theodotion. On the evidence of the fragmentary copies now known, Professor W. G. Waddell says: `In Origen's Hexapla ... the Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and LXX[Septuagint] all represented JHWH by [a representation of the Tetragrammaton in Greek letters]; in the second column of the Hexapla the Tetragrammaton was written in Hebrew characters.' (The Journal of Theological Studies, Oxford, Vol. XLV, 1944, pp. 158, 159) Others believe the original text of Origen's Hexapla used Hebrew characters for the Tetragrammaton in all its columns. Origen himself stated that `in the most accurate manuscripts THE NAME occurs in Hebrew characters, yet not in today's Hebrew [characters], but in the most ancient ones.'

....

The so-called Christians, then, who `replaced the Tetragrammaton by kyrios' in the Septuagint copies, were not the early disciples of Jesus. They were persons of later centuries, when the foretold apostasy was well developed and had corrupted the purity of Christian teachings. - 2 Th 2:3; 1 Ti 4:1." - pp. 9-10, Vol. 2., Insight.

So why is the name absent from existing NT manuscripts and why have some translators (beginning with a 14^th century translation of Matthew, including the Hebrew translations of the NT by the United Bible Societies, 1983 ed., and the Lutheran scholar Delitsch, 1981 ed., and the English translation of the New World Translation) actually used the Tetragrammaton (or its transliterated form) in their NT translations?

[The name is absent from existing NT manuscripts] "Evidently because by the time those extant copies were made (from the third century C.E. onward) the original text of the writings of the apostles and disciples had been altered. Thus later copyists undoubtedly replaced the divine name in Tetragrammaton form with Kyrios and Theos. .... This is precisely what the facts show was done in later copies of the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures ....

"As to the properness of this course [replacing the Divine Name at certain places in NT translations], note the following acknowledgment by R. B. Girdlestone, late principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. The statement was made before manuscript evidence came to light showing that the Greek Septuagint originally contained the name JEHOVAH. [Girdlestone] said: `If [the Septuagint] had retained the word [JEHOVAH], or had even used one Greek word for JEHOVAH and another for Adonai, such usage would doubtless have been retained in the discourses and arguments of the N.T. Thus our Lord, in quoting the 110^th Psalm, instead of saying, "The Lord said unto my Lord," might have said, "JEHOVAH said unto Adoni." ' ^[[5]]

JEHOVAH is King!

  1.Oh sing unto JEHOVAH a new song: Sing unto JEHOVAH, all the earth.

2Sing unto JEHOVAH, bless his name; Show forth his salvation from day to day.

3Declare his glory among the nations, His marvellous works among all the peoples.

4For great is JEHOVAH, and greatly to be praised: He is to be feared above all gods.

5For all the gods of the peoples are idols; But JEHOVAH made the heavens.

6Honor and majesty are before him: Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.

7Ascribe unto JEHOVAH, ye kindreds of the peoples, Ascribe unto Jehovah glory and strength.

8Ascribe unto JEHOVAH the glory due unto his name: Bring an offering, and come into his courts.

9Oh worship JEHOVAH in holy array: Tremble before him, all the earth.

10Say among the nations, JEHOVAH reigneth: The world also is established that it cannot be moved: He will judge the peoples with equity.

11Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof;

12Let the field exult, and all that is therein; Then shall all the trees of the wood sing for joy

13Before JEHOVAH; for he cometh, For he cometh to judge the earth: He will judge the world with righteousness, And the peoples with his truth.

Higher in name only?

 

On starlink's inner workings.

 

The role of the logos in creation.

 Revelation4:11NWTstudy edition"“You are worthy, JEHOVAH* our God, to receive the glory+ and the honor+ and the power,+ because you created all things,+ and because of your will they came into existence and were created.”" 

Acts17:24 KJV"God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;" 

The Lord JEHOVAH is the ultimate source of all the wisdom and power manifest in creation both physical and super-physical  ,and thus is rightful ruler of all that he has created and sustains. But the scriptures clearly show that JEHOVAH uses prior creations as instruments and/ raw materials in producing later creations. 

Acts17:26KJV"And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;" 

Note please that JEHOVAH rightly takes credit for our existence and all that is necessary for its continuance and flourishing despite there being intermediate causes between himself and us. 

Note also that these intermediate causes are all themselves part of his creation. Of course there can't be an infinite regression of such Intermediaries, thus there must be a proto creation, one produced without any intermediate creation serving as instrument. And who can then go on to become the first link in the chain of intermediate causes than led up to us and this world we call home. 

Proverbs8:22 BibLE"“Jehovah framed me first in line,

foremost of his works in the past." 

Proverbs8:30BibLE"I was master-workman at his side

And was taking my pleasure day by day,

playing before him at every time," 

It is to this scripture that scriptures like :

Colossians1:15-17KJV"Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature:

16 For by(Grk en) him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:

17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist." 

And: 

John1:3KJV"All things were made by(Grk.dia) him; and without him was not any thing made that was made." 

Refer ,according to Strong's the prepositions en and dia(from which we get the word diameter) denote instrumentality e.g 

John1:17KJV"For the law was given by(dia) Moses,..." 

Hebrews1:1KJV"God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by(en) the prophets," 

Hence such terms are NEVER  used to describe JEHOVAH'S role in the origin of the creation. He is the ultimate source of ALL the energy and information found in his creation. And thus it is to him and not any instrumentality he may choose to employ ,that full credit should be given. 

1Corinthians8:6KJV"But to us there is but one God, the Father, of(ex) whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by(dia) whom are all things, and we by him." 

On the roots of monogenes

 

A glimpse at the cyberworld's wild west

 

Drink deep from or taste not of this cup.

 

On spacex multibillion dollar gambit.

 

On the myth of the gay gene.

 No ‘gay gene’: Massive study homes in on genetic basis of human sexuality

Scientific American 

Massive Study Finds No Single Genetic Cause of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior

Analysis of half a million people suggests genetics may have a limited contribution to sexual orientation

By Sara Reardon on August 29, 2019

Few aspects of human biology are as complex—or politically fraught—as sexual orientation. A clear genetic link would suggest that gay people are “born this way,” as opposed to having made a lifestyle choice. Yet some fear that such a finding could be misused “cure” homosexuality, and most research teams have shied away from tackling the topic.

Now, a new study claims to dispel the notion that a single gene or handful of genes make a person prone to same-sex behavior. The analysis, which examined the genomes of nearly half a million men and women, found that although genetics are certainly involved in who people choose to have sex with, there are no specific genetic predictors. Yet some researchers question whether the analysis, which looked at genes associated with sexual activity rather than attraction, can draw any real conclusions about sexual orientation.

“The message should remain the same that this is a complex behavior that genetics definitely plays a part in,” said study co-author Fah Sathirapongsasuti, a computational biologist at genetic testing company andMe in Mountain View, Calif., during a press conference. The handful of genetic studies conducted in the past few decades have looked at only a few hundred individuals at most—and almost exclusively men. Other studies have linked sexual orientation with environmental factors such as hormone exposure before birth and having older brothers.

             In the new study, a team led by Brendan Zietsch of the University of Queensland, Australia, mined several massive genome data banks, including that of 23andMe and the UK Biobank (23andMe did not fund the research). They asked more than 477,000 participants whether they had ever had sex with someone of the same sex, and also questions about sexual fantasies and the degree to which they identified as gay or straight.

The researchers found five single points in the genome that seemed to be common among people who had had at least one same-sex experience. Two of these genetic markers sit close to genes linked to sex hormones and to smell—both factors that may play a role in sexual attraction. But taken together, these five markers explained less than 1 percent of the differences in sexual activity among people in the study. When the researchers looked at the overall genetic similarity of individuals who had had a same-sex experience, genetics seemed to account for between 8 and 25 percent of the behavior. The rest was presumably a result of environmental or other biological influences. The findings were published Thursday in Science.

                  Despite the associations, the authors say that the genetic similarities still cannot show whether a given individual is gay. “It’s the end of the ’gay gene,’” says Eric Vilain, a geneticist at Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study.

              The research has limitations: almost all of the participants were from the U.S. or Europe, and the individuals also tended to be older—51 years old on average in the 23andMe sample and at least 40 in the UK Biobank sample.

Still, researchers welcome the data. “A lot of people want to understand the biology of homosexuality, and science has lagged behind that human interest,” says William Rice, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who also was not involved in the work. “It’s been a taboo topic, and now that we’re getting information I think it’s going to blossom.”

                  The study will not be the last word on the vexing question of what causes homosexuality, however. In 1993 geneticist Dean Hamer of the U.S. National Cancer Institute and his colleagues published a paper suggesting that an area on the X chromosome called Xq28 could contain a “gay gene.” But other studies, including the new paper, found no such link, and Sathirapongsasuti says that the new study is the final nail in the coffin for Xq28 as a cause of same-sex attraction.

But Hamer, now retired, disagrees. His study, which analysed the genomes of 40 pairs of gay brothers, looked exclusively at people who identified as homosexual. He sees the new paper as an analysis of risky behavior or openness to experience, noting that participants who engaged in at least one same-sex experience were also more likely to report having smoked marijuana and having more sexual partners overall. Hamer says that the findings do not reveal any biological pathways for sexual orientation. “I’m glad they did it and did a big study, but it doesn’t point us where to look.”

           Rice and Vilain agree that the conclusion is unclear. A more detailed questionnaire that looks at more aspects of sexuality and environmental influences would allow the researchers to better pinpoint the roots of attraction.

                        The authors say that they did see links between sexual orientation and sexual activity, but concede that the genetic links do not predict orientation. “I think it’s true we’re capturing part of that risk-taking behavior,” Sathirapongsasuti says, but the genetic links still suggested that same-sex behavior is related to attraction.

Nevertheless, Hamer and others praise the new contribution to a field that suffers from a dearth of good studies. “I hope it will be the first of many to come.”

A little science tends to lead us away from design but a lot of science tends to lead us right back?

 As Science Observes, Talk of Evolution Fades

David Coppedge

Here is something that emerges from stories that have appeared recently in journals and at science sites, including news that updates some of my previous articles. We find that the more detail that scientists observe, the less talk there is about evolution. Why would that be? Another point worthy of note: the more sophistication that is found in biological engineering, the more scientists want to imitate it. 

Jumping Robot Success

One of the most fascinating animal stories I have reported was about springtails (here). These miniature gymnasts, ranging from 2 to 6 mm long, perform Olympic-grade leaps, accelerating up to 80g, rotating at a phenomenal rate of 290 revolutions per second. Harvard reported success at mimicking the springtail with small robots that can jump 1.4 m, 23 times their length, using a rapidly unfolding furcula resembling the device the springtail uses to launch. 

Robert J. Wood’s lab had earlier reported mimicking the mantis shrimp’s club, a device that I described here. Both the springtail and mantis shrimp use “latch-mediated spring actuation, in which potential energy is stored in an elastic element … that can be deployed in milliseconds like a catapult.” Does he believe it evolved? Hard to say. The news release only says that the inspiring springtail is ubiquitous “both spatially and temporally across evolutionary scales.” That could be interpreted as stasis

Our Bubble-Wrap Noses

Feel your nose. New Scientist announced a new fact about that monument on our facial map: “Your ears and nose are made from tissue that looks like bubble wrap.” It’s a different form of cartilage from that found in other parts of the body. Maksim Plikus at UC Irvine found this by accident when studying mouse ears, lending support to Young’s Law of Science: “All great scientific discoveries are made by mistake.”

Our bubble wrap cartilage, which the UCI team calls lipocartilage due to its fat content, does not pop when squeezed, nor does it make good shipping material, but the UCI team believes that “harnessing it could make facial surgery, like nose reshaping, easier.” One item of ethical concern appeared in the article: “The team also found lipocartilage in human ear and nose samples collected from medically aborted fetuses.”

Magnetic Navigators

A sea turtle hatchling disappears into the waves. How does it know where to go? And how does it know the way back years or decades later? These questions were explored ten years ago in Illustra Media’s film Living Waters: Intelligent Design in the Oceans of the Earth. It suggested that the turtles follow magnetic waypoints in an inherited map. Now, scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have filled “an important gap in our knowledge” by confirming that the turtles can memorize magnetic signatures. “Through controlled experiments, the research team demonstrated that loggerhead turtles can indeed learn and remember the magnetic fields of areas where they receive food.” Incidentally, it was good to hear from Deakin University that the endangered turtles are making a comeback thanks to conservation efforts.

UNC’s discovery adds understanding about animal migration in general. “More broadly, these findings could apply to a wide range of migratory animals that rely on magnetic cues for navigation,” they said. Indeed, earlier news from the University of Oldenburg found that desert ants memorize their nest location when out on learning walks by paying attention to the polarity of the earth’s magnetic field. Changing the inclination of artificial magnetic fields had no effect, they found, but changing the azimuth made the ants aim in the wrong direction. All is not lost, however; a recent paper in Current Biology reports that desert ants use a “variety of navigational tools” in their learning walks, including path integration: “Once the learning walks are completed the ants can reach the nest from any direction.” For more on the remarkable abilities of animals to navigate by the earth’s magnetic field, see Eric Cassell’s excellent book Animal Algorithms published by Discovery Institute Press.

Zooming in on the Flagellar Stator

Calling the iconic bacterial flagella “amazing natural machines!”, news from the Nagoya Institute of Technology announced new details in the stator at unprecedented resolution. Using CryoEM (see my article here about super-resolution microscopy), Japanese scientists peered into sodium ion channels that are arranged in a ring around the stator. They determined that these channels contain “key molecular cavities for sodium ions” that “act as size-based filters that allow the intake of sodium ions — but not other ions — into the identified cavities.” This is remarkable given that some flagellar motors operate on protons, which are smaller.

As hydrated sodium ions flow through the cavities, an accompanying video explains, they generate conformational changes, “transferring the mechanical energy to the rotor to make the motor spin.” The team identified numerous specific amino acid residues in the channel involved in size filtering. Even so, “the mechanism of how the ion flux drives the rotation is still unknown,” their paper in PNAS says. As scientists around the world continue collecting detailed clues about this molecular outboard motor, it’s exciting to see them approach the secret of torque generation. And so far, as this evolution-free paper illustrates, the irreducible complexity has been growing ever since Michael Behe brought this iconic motor to our attention in 1996.

Machine Recycling

Some eukaryotes alternate between amoeboid and flagellated forms. Swiss scientists publishing in EMBO Reportsexamined one shape-shifter: “The early branching eukaryote Naegleria gruberi can transform transiently from an amoeboid life form lacking centrioles and flagella to a flagellate life form where these elements are present, followed by reversion to the amoeboid state.” When it comes time to recycle the eukaryotic flagellum (different in design from bacterial flagellum), the axonemes “fold onto the cell surface and fuse within milliseconds with the plasma membrane” (emphasis added). That’s radically fast recycling! Then, a molecular machine called spastin cuts up the axonemes into similarly sized chunks and sends them to the lysosome, where the molecules are disassembled for reuse. 

The researchers also found that the centrioles, parts of the basal bodies of the flagella on the inside, get recycled by lysosomes or proteasomes too. Some centrioles, though, are shed to the outside of the cell. “Remarkably, we discovered that externalized centrioles can be taken up by another cell,” they noted. What they found is probably not unique. “Collectively, these findings reveal fundamental mechanisms governing the elimination of essential cellular constituents in Naegleria that may operate broadly in eukaryotic systems.” Evolution made only a cameo appearance in the paper but was not essential to the science.

Cable Bacteria Update

Finally, new research on cable bacteria (see here) was published in PNAS in January. A study from the Naval Research Laboratory “presents the direct measurement of proton transport along filamentous Desulfobulbaceae, or cable bacteria. So it’s not just electrons that can travel on these miniature wires, but protons, too. And they go long distances. (Well, that is, if you consider 100 micrometers a long distance.) Why is this significant? “The observation of protonic conductivity in cable bacteria,” they say, “presents possibilities for investigating the importance of long-distance proton transport in microbial ecosystems and to potentially build biotic or biomimetic scaffolds to interface with materials via proton-mediated gateways or channels.” Proton transfer, they believe, may play essential roles in the ecology at the micro level. And as they point out, the imitation of nature in biomimetics remains a hot pursuit. Has Darwinism helped? “However, despite these hypotheses, the evolutionary benefit of this phenomenon, its role in environmental settings, and its role in microbial interaction remain unknown.” Let engineers figure it out.

Thank Darwinism for free will?

 Did Evolution Give Us Free Will?

Daniel Witt

If you pick up a book up about free will by a materialist neuroscientist, you are generally safe to assume that the point of it will be to explain that free will is merely an illusion — that we are actually at the whim of the blind forces of Nature, and are therefore not responsible for our actions. So it’s surprising and somewhat refreshing to see a self-proclaimed naturalist defend free will. That’s what Trinity College Dublin neurobiologist Kevin Mitchell sets out to do in Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. 

As Denyse O’Leary has noted about the book, the scientific debate over free will seems to be reviving a bit, with another book by another prominent scientist arguing the opposite position released the same year (Determined by Robert Sapolsky). So after reading Mitchell’s book, I thought it would be worth digging into the details of his argument a bit for Evolutions News readers.

Does the book succeed? By my assessment, no and yes and no. There are really several different questions at play here: Do we have a will? Is it free? Did evolution give it to us? And if so, how? Each of these subjects has its own set of scientific and philosophical difficulties, and the book is not equally persuasive on every point. To keep the various strands of the argument straight, let’s go in order, following the subtitle. We’ll start with “how evolution gave us”…  

“How Evolution Gave Us…”

Anyone expecting a defense of the claim that Darwinian processes can or did create complex neurological systems will be disappointed. That’s not the point of the book. With a very few exceptions1, Dr. Mitchell works from the tacit assumption that (a) there is no real limit to what Darwinian processes can achieve, and (b) that anything that exists in biology must have arisen through Darwinian processes. That means the book is largely concerned with describing what exists in nature, with “evolved” acting as a synonym for “is.” 

Thus, phrases like “mechanisms evolved” prevail throughout the book. Complex systems are simply “built” or “invented” or even “designed,” without much concern given to the concrete details or the relevant engineering problems. The following passage is typical:

More complex creatures emerged, colonizing and creating new niches, with expanded repertoires of possible actions. A system was then required to coordinate the movement of all the organism’s constituent parts and select among actions. Muscles evolved, along with neurons to coordinate them, initially distributed in simple nerve nets. As evolution proceeded, the nervous system became more complex, linking sensory structures to muscles via intervening layers of interneurons. The meaning of signals became disconnected from immediate action, giving rise to internal representations…   

In all fairness, Mitchell presumably did not set out to defend Darwinian evolution against other possible explanations. The heart of Free Agents is not really in explaining how we evolved to be what we are, but rather in simply describingwhat we are, according to the cutting edge of neurobiology. That’s where the book shines.

“Free”

One view of free will, called “compatibilism,” maintains that materialistic determinism and free will are really compatible. This position is apparently quite popular in philosophy of mind circles, and has been argued by Daniel Dennett and other famous philosophers. The argument says, first, that it doesn’t matter if an organism “could have done otherwise” — what matters is that the organism is the source of the action. That is, we can reasonably be said to have free will if we are able to do what we want, even if we are not able to want what we want. Second, compatibilists point out that organisms and their environments are so complex that there is no way, even theoretically, to predict what an organism will do in a future situation. So for all practical purposes, we are free. 

Mitchell finds these arguments unconvincing. They seem to be saying that if we just change our perspective, or our definitions, the problem will go away. “But I cannot escape feeling that some sleight of hand is part of this line of argument,” he writes. “It feels as if some (presumably unwitting) misdirection is going on — as if the primary problem has been circumvented or even denied, rather than confronted.” Instead, there ought to be some genuine indeterminacy in the system, or else “no matter how complex, the agent will be pushed around deterministically by its own components.” 

I think the “sleight of hand” Mitchell senses is the confusing of epistemology with ontology: confusing what can be known with what is. Regardless — Mitchell argues that the fuss is unnecessary. There is really no reason that free will needs to be compatible with strict determinism, he says, because physics, as it turns out, is not strictly deterministic. That requirement is a relic from a bygone era, when everything seemed to move inexorably according to simple Newtonian laws. Most modern quantum physicists, in contrast, agree that particles seem to actually have a degree of freedom or true randomness to their movement. So, Mitchell says, “there is nothing in the laws physics that rules out the possibility of agency or free will, a priori.” 

In fact, various studies seem to show organisms acting in a non-deterministic way. In one fascinating experiment, an electrical probe was attached directly to a leech’s central nervous system, allowing the experimenters to bypass the complexities of environment altogether and administer the exact same stimulus, repeatedly. Even under such perfectly controlled conditions, there seemed to be no way to predict how a leech (like the one pictured above) would respond to the stimulus each time. 

This apparent indeterminacy scales all the way up to more complex behaviors and situations, resulting in what is known as the Harvard Law of Animal Behavior: “Under carefully controlled experimental circumstances, an animal will behave as it damn well pleases.” 

So Far, So Good

But what about the experiments that seem to show the opposite, that free will is a mere illusion?

There are quite a few famous experiments of this kind, but in Mitchell’s professional opinion, they show nothing of the sort.

For example, Benjamin Libet’s now-famous 1983 experiment showed a signal called a “readiness potential” in the brain a fraction of a second before the subject was conscious of choosing to move his hand. Many have taken this to be definitive proof that free will is only an illusion: at the moment we think we are freely choosing, the brain has actually decided beforehand. 

Mitchell writes that this interpretation is “to put it mildly, a drastic overinterpretation”: 

That is because the design of the experiment makes it effectively irrelevant for the question of free will. The participants made an active and deliberate decision when they agreed to take part in the study and to follow the instructions of the researchers. Those instructions explicitly told them to act on a whim: “to let the urge to act appear on its own at any time without any preplanning or concentration on when to act.” They had no reason to want to move their hand more at one point than another because nothing was at stake. And so, it seems they did indeed act on a whim: they (decided to) let subconscious processes in their brains decide, by drawing on inherent random fluctuations in neural activity. 

This is what a different group of neuroscientists, led by Aaron Schurger, concluded from analyzing the data from the original experiment — that the test subjects had (instinctively, of course) set a certain potential level of neuronal activity, deciding that when random fluctuations in the brain reach that level, they would take the proscribed action. 

So now you have two plausible interpretations of the data. 

But Which One Is True? 

Another experiment, led by Uri Maoz and Liad Mudrik, sought to distinguish between the two possibilities. The researchers gave half the test subjects a decision with no serious consequences, and half a decision with consequences that they cared about. Sure enough, when the subjects were given inconsequential decision, a readiness potential preceded the decision, as in Libet’s experiments. But when the decision mattered, no readiness potential was detected. 

“Overall then,” Mitchell writes, “Libet’s experiments have very little relevance for the question of free will. They do not relate to deliberative decisions at all, where readiness potential is not observed. Instead, they confirm, first, that neural activity in the brain is not completely deterministic and, second, that organisms can choose to harness the inherent randomness to make arbitrary decisions in a timely fashion.”

So much for “free.” We’ll examine what Mitchell has to say about “will” tomorrow.

Notes

1.E.g., Mitchell mentions that the now-classic view that symbiosis might have been necessary to make the switch from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life.

Still no little green men?

 Hope for Mars Life Is Dashed Again

David Coppedge

Fifty years ago this August, the twin Viking spacecraft were launched toward Mars. They landed during the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976 at separate locations with three experiment packages designed to detect life if it existed. Two of the three yielded negative results on both landers, but one result was ambiguous. The labeled-release experiment detected unusual activity that the researchers could not explain when radioactively labeled nutrients were added to the soil. The activity gave rise to speculations that something alive in the soil was metabolizing the nutrients — speculations that, while remote, have lingered to the present day. 

Subsequent landers, beginning with Phoenix in 2008, discovered a high concentration of perchlorates in the soil. Perchlorates are chlorinated salts, often used in fireworks. These reactive salts were found to be almost ubiquitous on Mars. Now, in the journal Icarus, NASA astrobiologist Christopher McKay and two colleagues have determined that the reactions in the Viking landers can now be explained: “Perchlorate, plus abiotic oxidants, explains the Viking results and there is no requirement to postulate life on Mars.”

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Beyond the mechanistic?

 Biologist Michael Levin: A Farewell to Physicalism

Daniel Witt

There’s a pattern you notice in science writing. Whenever a scientist is positing something he thinks is really far-out or paradigm-shaking, there will come a place in his writing when he stops and clarifies that he is not, of course, trying to cross The Line. He is not (of course!) saying that anything exists outside the material world. 

That may be the biggest sacred cow in modern science: materialism, the idea that matter is all that exists. Or, to be more accurate, physicalism, the idea that the “physical world” is all that exists. (This newer term was coined after it had become glaringly obvious in physics that “matter” is not all that exists. Since “the physical world” has proven a wonderfully flexible concept, physicalism is easier to hold on to than materialism is.) 

It’s fine to believe in all sorts of wild and daring things. You can believe in the mind, you can believe in free will, you can believe in teleology and purposiveness, you can even talk about a “vital force” — but at the end of the day, you have to pay your materialist dues and clarify that you are not invoking anything… ahem… spooky.1 You understand that the physical world is all there is, was or, ever will be.2

Michael Levin, however, is done with all that. 

Levin is a professor of biology with appointments at Tufts University (the former academic home of none other than atheist Daniel Dennett) and at Harvard, so one wouldn’t necessarily expect him to be in the vanguard of rebellion against materialism. But that’s where he has positioned himself, with a new article (“Ingressing Minds: Casual Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments,” currently in preprint) that explicitly and vehemently rejects the materialist paradigm.  

Non-Mechanistic Phenomena in Biology

Levin begins his case by pointing to emerging evidence in biology that organisms do not, as is commonly thought, develop according to a mechanistic unfolding of the blueprint coded in their DNA. There is important information in the DNA, of course. But organisms seem to develop with a goal in mind, so to speak, and are able reach that goal in spite of shifting and inherently unpredictable circumstances. This is significant, because if the circumstances and the developmental pathways necessary to adapt to them are unpredictable, then those pathways cannot have been programmed into the organism in advance. They have to be invented on-the-fly.

Some examples: If you cut a salamander’s limb off, it regenerates an identical new limb — regardless of where you made the cut. Tadpoles’ heads can be “scrambled,” but they will rearrange themselves and develop into normal frogs. Developing embryos can adapt to significant changes in the very number of cells comprising them. (In some circumstance, when only one cell is available to form an embryonic structure, the cell will wrap around itself to form the desired structure! The entire mechanism of development is changed, in order to solve an engineering problem.) A developing organism can even work around genetic problems — which is pretty astounding if you think that genes alone are guiding the development. In fact, planarian flatworms can be manipulated to grow the heads of other species of flatworms — without any genetic changes. 

Levin writes:

This illustrates the ability to creatively use genetic affordances as needed, to implement a high-level anatomical specification. In other words, an incipient newt coming into the world not only cannot predict the vagaries of the external environment, but worse yet, even its own parts are unreliable. It can’t count on having the correct copy number of genes, or the correct number or size of its cells. It must get the job done using the tools at its disposal in novel circumstances. What can it count on? It can count on the relentless competency of its agential material, honed over eons of evolution, that builds problem-solving agents (not fixed solutions to environments), and the pole star that guides its activity — the attractor in morphospace to which it must find a path.

The Platonic Paradigm

Instead of searching for a purely physical explanation, Levin argues that this evidence points to something else entirely. He proposes a “radical Platonist view in which some of the causal input into mind and life originates outside the physical world.”

Platonism, as far as philosophies go, is about as far from materialism as you can get. It departs from the materialist paradigm at the very root, in maintaining that, not only is not everything physical, but not everything is even particular — universal “ideals” are just as real (and indeed, more foundational in reality) than are particular things in the world. For example: in a Platonist perspective, capital-B Blue exists, by itself, apart from any particular blue object that might be out there. 

Although this idea is not necessarily intuitive, the argument for why it must be so is easy to understand: in order for a particular “blue” thing to exist, “being blue” has to be an option in the first place.3

Levin points out that respected physicists have been Platonists (e.g. Werner Heisenberg, Max Tegmark, David Deutsch, George F. R. Ellis, Roger Penrose), as well as plenty of computer scientists and mathematicians. In other words, it’s not that quack-ish of an opinion at all. (Although Levin doesn’t mention it, a number of contemporary biologists have come out as Platonists as well: University of Zürich evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner, Discovery Institute’s Richard Sternberg, the recently departed paleontologist Gunter Bechly.)

It’s not the color blue that has seduced most of these scientists away from the firm dogma of materialism, however. The most common Platonic seductress seems to be mathematics: it’s hard to deny that the world operates according to mathematical principles, and it’s hard to explain how these principles can be physical. Levin argues out that once you invoke non-physical mathematical realities as explanations, you have already left the physicalist paradigm; and yet, it is impossible to explain much in biology without such invocations. Organisms develop into exquisite patterns and structures, and these patterns and structures do not come from the physical world at all — they are mathematical. 

Levin is very taken with the fact that these beautiful structures seem to exist on their own in the mathematical world, and much of his argument rests on the fact that unshakeable mathematical rules have explanatory value for physical patterns. It’s not just that a fractal pattern (for example) might be found in a living organism — it’s that you can’t explain why that organism developed the way it did in any meaningful way without getting into the mathematical nature of the fractal. And the nature of fractals is inherently non-physical. 

This point is important for Levin’s case, because many scientists do not care much for complex metaphysical arguments, and prefer a heuristic approach where whatever does the job is used, and whatever doesn’t is thrown out. As my first organic chemistry professor told us, “Science isn’t about what’s true. It’s about what works.” This mindset favors a materialist paradigm, since most of what science “works” for is manipulating the material world. (And if you start manipulating the immaterial world, you are classified as a mathematician or a philosopher, not a scientist.) But Levin makes a strong case that even on the basis of sheer pragmaticism, Platonic ideals have a lot going for them. Scientists use them all the time, even if they don’t think about it. And Levin contends that there are worlds of biological discoveries ahead if we stop treating the incursions of the metaphysical world as an embarrassment, and instead study the physical and the non-physical together in an integrated way.

Not Mere “Emergence”

Despite his emphasis on “what works,” Levin does care about “what’s true.” And he has metaphysical principles. Specifically, he is adamant that his Platonic forms cannot be reduced to mere “emergent phenomena” of the material world. 

First, he points out that invoking “emergence” can sometimes be a hand-wave to get off the hook of actually explaining a phenomenon; in his words, it is “a mysterian approach that limits progress.” This is a clever rhetorical move, since emergentists often deride non-physicalist explanations as “mystical.” Mysticism is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Beyond that, Levin contends that emergence falls short in biology. It describes some things, of course, but many complex features of life do not simply emerge naturally from their basic physical parts. 

Levin writes:  

              crucial aspect of biological patterns is that they are often not simply results of a process that rolls onward in a mechanical fashion. The parts may well be describable by various aspects of mechanics, but biological wholes have the ability to achieve specific patterns despite novel conditions, interventions, changes of environment and of their own parts, etc. In effect, these patterns serve as goals for intelligent (context-sensitive, creative, problem-solving) navigation in anatomical, transcriptional, physiological, metabolic, and other spaces in the same way that creatures navigate 3D space in traditional examples of adaptive behavior. This is distinct from the complexity/emergence paradigm, dominant today, which focuses on the ability of simple rules to drive complex outcomes. Such “emergence” certainly happens in biology, but by itself it is not sufficient to explain the most interesting aspects of morphogenesis.

According to Levin, the remarkable complex structures that exist in biology are not merely the inevitable result of natural selection. They are not even the inevitable results of physics. Instead, they are based on logical and mathematical realities that can only be described as non-physical: “All of these are specific facts about a world which do not depend on facts from physics — they can be linked to other aspects of mathematics but they form a set of findings that do not reduce to any facts of physics.” Even if you changed all the constants and initial conditions of the Big Bang, Levin points out, these Platonic structures would be untouched: “There is nothing in the physical world that can be used as a control knob to alter them.”

An Immaterial Mind? 

If all this seems radical to anyone, Levin is only getting started. He argues that there is no a priori reason why Platonic space would only contain static abstract objects. Indeed, some Platonic realities (such as the ever-changing “this statement is false” paradox) seem to be constantly shifting, in their very natures. And if Platonic space can include objects that move and shift, why can’t it include… minds? 

“Why couldn’t Platonic space contain patterns that are intelligent and active to some degree…?” Levin asks. “What if some of the Platonic patterns that matter for biology are, themselves, intelligent to a degree?”

This is an intriguing concept. Unfortunately, Levin does not explain how complexity or being able to move should allow something to experience subjective awareness. In this respect, his theory is no different from physicalist theories of the mind, which tend to make the same leap.

    

But How Does It Work? 

At this point, after all this explanation, you may feel like a piece is missing. 

Okay, sure, biological life operates according to abstract principles. 

And okay, sure, maybe these principles really exist, and are really not reducible to the physical world. 

And, great, the laws of physics and chemistry and biology aren’t enough to explain why life reaches for these abstract goals.

But then why does life follow these principles? What causes organisms to grow and develop towards an immaterial “pole star”? 

To his credit, Levin is aware that he hasn’t answered this question. Also to his credit, he doesn’t pretend to be able to. 

“Is there a ‘force’, beyond the ‘if you build it, they will come’ model of physical objects pulling patterns from the space?” he asks. “Are the contents of the Platonic space under ‘positive pressure’, somehow encouraging their appearance in the world as intrusive thoughts, archetypes, works of art? Is there a symmetrical dynamic through which they push outward — inherently driven to ‘haunt’ matter as much as matter calls to the patterns that animate it, projecting outward through interfaces made to that space[?]”

Levin doesn’t know. But he thinks that scientists need to get serious about finding out. I can’t say I disagree.

What to Make of This? 

Levin’s theory is certainly exciting, but I don’t want to get carried away. Personally (and not without doubts) I’m inclined to believe that Levin is overstating his case concerning the richness of the mathematical realm.

For instance, consider a basic mathematical truth, “2+2=4.” Humans clearly did not invent that truth, so you might say that it was “discovered,” that it is an unshakably real “structure” in Platonic reality. However, if you look at it a different way, you see that this structure is an artifact of language, a side-effect of our ways of talking about numbers: “two” really means “one and one,” and “plus” really means “and,” so “two plus two” really just means “one and one and one and one,” which happens to also be the definition of “four.” Thus, the apparent “Platonic structure” amounts to the fact that “one and one and one and one is one and one and one and one,” which is trivial. My suspicion is that all of the more complex mathematical structures that Levin is so taken by can also be broken down in this way. 

But that doesn’t negate Levin’s deeper point. Even if we deconstruct these Platonic structures and find that each amounts to something very simple, a Platonic structure is still there. In the above example, after all our attempts at deflation and explaining-away, we are still left with one (non-physical!) reality: “numerosity,” or the quality of “having a quantity.” That isn’t so easy to get rid of. Likewise, all the Platonic structures in geometry might be deflated into mere “spatiality,” and we would still be left with the reality of spatiality itself to contend with. 

In other words, if you want to say that the universe is just matter sitting around in a simple grid of empty Cartesian space, you still have to explain where the grid comes from. Before one lump of cold, dead matter can sit next to another lump of cold, dead matter, “next to” has to mean something.

And once you upon the door to one immaterial quality, you can no longer exclude other qualities on mere principle. You have to take them seriously. You have to take them one at a time, and decide if they exist Platonically, or if they amount to mere words. If Numericity and Spatiality can be real — and Levin is right, the heuristic value of these two qualities makes them very difficult to dismiss as unreal — then why not other intangible qualities? Why not, say, Awareness, the quality of something experiencing something else — in other words, Mind? For that matter, why not Pain? Why not Love?

The camel’s nose is under the tent. 

And that’s probably why most scientists in the 21st century are not comfortable taking the bold, small step that Levin has taken. “Spooky” things are… well, spooky

Notes

1.The term “spooky” tends to come up when naturalists are trying to explain exactly which category of entity is excluded by their philosophy. For example, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines ontological naturalism as the view “that reality has no place for ‘supernatural’ or other ‘spooky’ kinds of entity.” 

2.Except for the other worlds in the multiverse, of course. And the quantum structure that the multiverse presumably arises from. 

3.And if you argue that blue is just an emergent property of some other things, such as the wavelength of light, that just pushes back the question to those other things. If those prior things have qualities — and you can’t really talk about something without any qualities (though Aristotle tried) — then those qualities must first exist as possibilities or “settings” in the universe. What is it about the universe that makes things like light waves have “length”? What is “length”? That’s the fundamental argument of Platonism. 

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On the evolution of the design debate.

 Michael Kent: “12 Discoveries That Have Changed the Debate about Design”

Granville Sewell

Michael Kent is a Fellow with the Center for Science and Culture and a recently retired bio-scientist from Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. He has been interested in intelligent design for many years. Since 2005 he has organized quarterly meetings on intelligent design in or near the University of New Mexico campus. Over this twenty-year period, he has developed slide presentations on “12 recent discoveries that have changed the debate about design in the universe,” and now he is turning those presentations into videos. 

The 12 discoveries are: 

The universe (space-time, matter, energy) had a beginning.

The laws of physics, the fundamental constants, and the initial conditions of the universe are fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life.

Protein sequence space is far too large to be searched and highly functional sequences (i.e., enzymes) are incredibly rare (~ 1 in 1077).

The number of genes in the simplest free-living organism is about 450.

Life is based on a digital information processing system.

Molecular machines and sophisticated software algorithms are essential to all life-forms.

Random mutation + natural selection has severe limitations as a creative mechanism that are now well understood.

So many highly improbable factors make Earth habitable that it is VERY unlikely that another truly “Earth-like” planet exists in our galaxy.

The “junk DNA” paradigm has been shown to be false. Most, if not all, non-coding DNA has function.

The Cambrian (and other) explosions in the fossil record are not consistent with the Darwinian model of gradual evolution.

Extensive post-translational processing (editing) of genes occurs in eukaryotes: the spliceosome and the splicing code.

Genes extensively overlap in the same or opposite directions within a stretch of DNA (overlapping codes).

The first six plus an introductory video are now viewable here. Though these seven may still undergo further editing, the videos are very much worth watching already. The last six in the list will be converted into videos later but slide presentations for all 12 are viewable here.

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