Is God A Mathematician?

Pure math does not exist. No matter how abstract the concept, there is always some application to the real world, even if it’s not immediately apparent. Knot theory (the science of telling knots apart) started out as nothing more than an intellectual challenge in the late 19th century, and is now used to help understand how DNA combines and splits apart. Mathematical breakthroughs have long anticipated discoveries in the physical world. From the speed of light, to the normal distribution of probabilities and Einstein’s theory of relativity, the universe is built on math. In Is God A Mathematician?, astrophysicist Mario Livio tries to decipher what that means.

Despite the title, the book isn’t about theology. Livio is more interested in math than God. What he wants to figure out is whether math was invented or discovered. In other words, are numbers, and the relationships between them, something humans cooked up out of thin air, or did they always exist, just waiting to be figured out? Math is the universal language among humans, but would the same hold true for alien species? Would intelligent squids who lived on the ocean floor have any knowledge of prime numbers? It may seem like an absurd hypothetical, but looking for an answer is an interesting window into the long and tangled history of math, which is Livio’s real passion.

The greatest mathematicians all united seemingly different fields of study. Descartes combined geometry and algebra with the invention of graphing and the coordinate system. Newton used math and physics together to create calculus. Einstein’s theories found a way to treat space and time as one. The holy grail of modern scientific research is finding a theory of everything, a single unifying framework which reconciles the effects on gravity on incredibly large objects like galaxies (general relativity) and incredibly small ones like electrons (quantum field theory). Neither theory can explain what happens when a huge amount of mass is confined to a microscopic area, like the center of a black hole or the universe in the second after the Big Bang. The progression of mathematical history seems to point towards one underlying series of equations that determine the very nature of our reality.

The people who think math was discovered point to these natural laws as proof. It doesn’t matter whether or not we know about the speed of light, objects still can’t go faster than it. Just because we can’t perceive the platonic world of mathematical forms doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. That’s the idea behind Plato’s famous allegory of The Cave, where the ancient Greek philosopher imagined a group of human beings chained to the floor, unable to move their heads. The only thing they can see is the wall in front of them, and any shadows cast on the wall by the fire behind them. They see the reflections on the wall rather than the objects that are actually being reflected, in the same way that the objects we see in the world are merely shadows of their ideal forms.

The other school of thought thinks the shadows are all that there is, that there is no ideal world. Our perception is what creates reality. One of the most fascinating discoveries in quantum mechanics is the observer effect: the mere act of being observed will change the ways in which objects behave. When scientists shoot an electron at a wall through a piece of paper with two slits cut in it, which slit the electron goes through (or whether it goes through both) depends on whether or not a measuring device is placed in front of the paper to see. If there’s no device, the electron creates an interference pattern on the wall, as if two ripples of water were intersecting over the surface of the lake. However, if there is a device, the electron is forced to choose one of the two slits, and no interference pattern is created. No one knows why this happens.



The debate goes back to the very beginning of math. Euclidean geometry has been around for thousands of years, and it was long seen as proof that mathematical knowledge was based on a solid foundation of universal truth. That changed in the 19th century, when people realized one of its primary axioms could be altered. Axioms are the building blocks of Euclidean geometry, the things assumed to be true without needing to be proven: there’s only one straight line between two points, two parallel lines don’t intersect etc. However, not all of them hold true in every situation. The sum of the angles in a triangle only adds up to 180 degrees on a flat plane. They add up to less than 180 on a curved structure, and more than 180 on a spherical one. Euclidean geometry only works in two-dimensional space. Modifying even one axiom results in dramatically different conclusions about the world.

This became important as mathematicians tried to formalize logic to create a rational framework to analyze the truth of any statement. Here it is as its most basic form: if P or Q, and not P, then Q. What could we prove about the world given these tools? Was math invented or discovered? And if we discovered it, then who invented it? Livio dances around the question throughout the book, but he shows his hand here, when he quotes George Boole, one of the architects of formalized logic:

To show the power of his methods, Boole attempted to use his logical symbols for everything he deemed important. For instance, he even analyzed the arguments of the philosophers Samuel Clarke and Baruch Spinoza for the existence and attributes of God: “It is not possible, I think, to rise from the perusal of arguments of Clarke and Spinoza without a deep conviction of the futility of all endeavors to establish, entirely a priori, the existence of an Infinite Being, His attributes, and His relation to the universe.” In spite of the soundness of Boole’s conclusion, apparently not everybody was convinced of the futility of such endeavors, since updated versions of the ontological arguments for God’s existence continue to emerge today. 

The main logical arguments for God fall under three main categories. There is the cosmological argument, which says that since everything in this world is created by a creator, the universe itself must have been created. The teleological argument says God must exist since the universe itself was not created by accident. Finally, the Cartesian circle says that God must exist because without an ultimate source of truth there is no way to trust in the validity or human reasoning. However, as Livio points out, theists don’t need these arguments to be persuaded in the existence of God while atheists are not persuaded by them.

He is more right than he knows. That’s what the apostle Paul is referring to when he talks about “the mystery of faith”. There’s no way to reason backwards to faith because reason is ultimately built on faith. Every set of logical beliefs about the world is built on first principles. Geometry doesn't work without axioms. You can’t prove anything without assuming something else to be true. Descartes and Newton were devout Christians whose discoveries stemmed from their faith in God. Livio has the search backwards. You can’t reason your way to first principles. You can only judge them by their results:

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. 

- Matthew 7:15-20

Playing Through The Whistle

A city as small as Aliquippa should not have produced so many great football players. Mike Ditka, Tony Dorsett and Darrelle Revis all grew up in the same steel town in Western Pennsylvania, which, even at its peak, never had more than 30,000 residents. Despite its lack of size, the town’s lone high school annually churns out Division I players, many of whom wind up in the NFL. Manufacturing steel and playing football have a lot in common: they are fields were toughness is prized, discipline is essential and the good of the whole trumps that of the individual. It’s probably not a coincidence that the sons of the factory workers who built the American war machine became some of the best football players in the country. These days, the factories are shuttered and the jobs are gone, but the people left behind in dying towns like Aliquippa still have football, the one constant in a world turned upside down.

S.L. Price, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, first visited Aliquippa to report on its football program. He found an even more interesting story instead. Within the span of one lifetime, Aliquippa went from a glittering symbol of the triumph of the New Deal to an urban wasteland that looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off downtown, as one longtime NFL general manager told Price. Its meteoric rise and even more dizzying fall mirrors that of the Rust Belt as a whole. Playing Through The Whistle is primarily about the history of one town and its obsession with football, but it does as good a job as any of explaining how we got to where we are today as a country. The book should be subtitled The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire.

Aliquippa began as a company town at the end of the Gilded Age, a place where the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company could build a private empire. The invention of the Bessemer furnace had changed steel production from being done by hand to a mechanized assembly line that required huge amounts of manual labor. Waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe and black sharecroppers from the South came to work in the massive factories rising up from the ground. Each ethnic group was settled into its own distinct neighborhood in the city, creating divisions within the workforce that still exist to this day. Baseball was king at the time, but the country was changing, and a new sport was emerging that would capture the national imagination:

[Baseball’s] pastoral air, subtle details and gunfighter showdowns between pitcher and batter harked back to an era of artisans and yeomen, its rhythm increasingly at odds with the nerve-racking pace of the machine age. Football channeled frustration, rewarded power. It fed and fed off the ethos of factory, mill and mine. Muddy, bloody and raw, football felt more like the life now unfolding at ground level in Western Pennsylvania: bodies punished in a fight for the slightest edge. 

The Great Depression and the New Deal completed the transformation, and Aliquippa was ground zero. In 1937, a landmark Supreme Court case involving the J&L Steel Corporation effectively ended opposition to FDR’s agenda, expanding the Commerce Clause in the US Constitution to justify almost any intervention by the federal government into private business. Steelworkers were given the freedom to unionize, while World War II created an insatiable demand for their product. After the war, with the rest of the industrialized world in shambles, American manufacturing had no real competition, allowing the newfound wealth to be spread relatively evenly. The unions went on strike every three years like clockwork, and each time they won a new concession, culminating in the thirteen-week vacation that would later become a symbol for bloat and entitlement. It was a golden age, except like all golden ages, it came to a quick end and it wasn’t all that golden either.

The mills provided jobs, but they were brutal jobs that took years off their employees’ lives. And, in some cases, limbs. No one wanted their kids to work there. In that way, the mill is a lot like pro football. Mike Ditka’s dad worked at J&L so that his son could play in the NFL, and Ditka played in the NFL so that his sons could do anything else. He said that he wouldn’t allow them to play the sport knowing what they know now. It’s a blue-collar version of this John Adams quote:

I must study politics and war so that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics, philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. 

The problem is that a lot more people can earn a living making steel than playing football, and even fewer can make it as artists. For every Aliquippa native who grows up to become a Hollywood composer, like Henry Mancini, a dozen more are struggling to find work in the post-industrial dystopia of the modern Rust Belt. The jobs aren’t coming back, and the only thing that has taken their place is drugs.

Price uses the story of Jeff Baldwin, an Aliquippa High standout who played college football at Pitt before returning home, to illustrate the remaining paths out. One of his sons, Jonathan Baldwin, was a first-round draft pick of the Kansas City Chiefs. The other was Jamie Brown, a drug kingpin who may or may not (depending on who you ask) have ordered the assassination of a cop that shook what was left of the town to its foundation. Given the state of the school system in Aliquippa, even the players who make it to college have a difficult time rising out of poverty, since they are so unprepared academically. It’s only NFL stars like Ty Law, Sean Gilbert and Darrelle Revis who have the financial stability to uproot their lives and leave the town for good. Aliquippa went from a place that pushed people into the middle class to one that kept them out.

On the field, their biggest rival is Hopewell High, the suburban school comprised mainly of people whose parents and grandparents worked in the mills and then left for literal greener pastures. Price’s reporting, which stretches back to the founding of both communities, covers the beginning of white flight in the 1960’s to the final results a half century later. Aliquippa went from an all-white team, to one that gradually accepted black players, to a program with hardly any whites left. In Price’s telling, Aliquippa in the 1970’s was almost like Yugoslavia, with the police helpless as rival gangs of whites and blacks created militias that partitioned the town. There were daily racial brawls at Aliquippa High, and even the bonds forged from football weren’t immune from being broken. The grandson of Carl Aschman, the coach who turned the school into a football powerhouse, was beaten up in its hallways.

There’s no way to read the book and not wonder what could have been done differently. Things are bad in Aliquippa, and they don’t look like they will be getting better anytime soon. There’s just no money left. Even the football team might be gone in five years. But while the people in charge at the steel factory, whether they were in management or labor, were definitely spoiled by their success, could they have resisted the structural changes that doomed American industry? Once automation made the Bessemer furnace obsolete, mass layoffs were inevitable.

America wasn’t going to be the land of opportunity forever. Nothing ever is. The country that greeted the immigrants who helped found Aliquippa is a lot different than the one their grandchildren live in today. Instead of hoping our kids will have better lives than our own, we just hope they won’t be worse. The only thing harder than reaching the middle class is staying there. If history is filled with the sound of wooden shoes going upstairs and silken slippers going down, as Voltaire once said, we are well into the latter stage. Once civilizations reach a high enough level of prosperity, there’s only one direction left for them to go. Make America Great Again? If only it were that easy.

Master Plan of Evangelism

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead

People have wanted to change the world since the beginning of time. Few have actually done it. Countless political ideologies and social movements have had a moment in the sun only to fade with time. Drop a rock in the water and it will make a splash. Only the biggest will avoid being carried away in the current. A charismatic leader can inspire people to flock to their banner, but a cult of personality won’t outlast the person at the center of it. The initial excitement wanes, the thankless work of movement building doesn’t get easier, and the concerns of everyday life crowd out people’s attention. Even the truly committed have trouble passing that dedication on to their kids.

In the aftermath of Jesus Christ’s death, that same process should have destroyed Christianity. After all, that was what had happened many times before:

But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, who was honored by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin [the Jewish Senate] and ordered that [the Christians] be put outside for a little while. Then he addressed the Sanhedrin: “Men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men. Some time ago Theudas appeared, claiming to be somebody, and about four hundred men rallied to him. He was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing. After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too was killed, and all his followers were scattered.”

- Acts 5:34-37 

Jesus did not die at the head of an army that would push his legacy forward, like Moses or Mohammed. He wasn’t the son of a king, like Buddha. He didn’t even have a core following of thousands who rioted at his death, like Joseph Smith. So how did a penniless carpenter from a conquered tribe in a distant corner of the Roman Empire become the most influential person who ever lived? How did his followers, a tiny group of marginal figures led by an uneducated fisherman (the apostle Peter), sustain a movement that would one day take over the Empire? In The Master Plan of Evangelism, Robert Coleman outlines the secret to their success: they did it one person at a time.

The story sounds too good to be true. People who don’t believe that Jesus was a real person often point to his absence from the historical record. If there was a guy raising people from the dead, turning water into wine, and feeding thousands with a few pieces of bread, surely it would have attracted more attention from contemporary sources. Everything we know about Jesus comes from the gospels, which were written by his disciples and some of their close associates. Jews believe that Moses himself wrote the first five books of the Old Testament, while Muslims claim that the Qur’an is the direct revelation of God to Muhammad. Christians get all their information about Jesus secondhand. The New Testament is not an autobiography. Jesus didn’t write anything down. He let his followers speak for him - that was precisely the point.

The most counter-intuitive aspect of his public ministry is how often he avoided big crowds. The Jews expected the coming Messiah to create a theocratic empire modeled after Rome. He was supposed to be the new Caesar, not render unto the old one. Jesus had his own plan. He hung out with people on the fringes of society, spoke in riddles, and pushed away half-hearted followers. He wasn’t aiming his message at the masses, or the movers and shakers who played the game of thrones. He discipled a small group of followers who would be able to spread his message long after his death. In the gospels, he spends three times as much time explaining the parable of the sower to his disciples in private than he does telling it to the crowd in the first place.

Jesus cared about the crowd; he just didn’t have the time to care for them individually. The only way he could trust his 12 disciples to lead his church was to to get to know them, building the type of deep personal relationships that would allow him to teach, guide, and correct them. He was a spiritual father to his disciples, and a father has to spend time with his family to raise them. Jesus didn't tell people what to do to live a good life; he showed them how to do it. He was a big believer in small class sizes -- his disciples were always at his side.

He spent his time on Earth showing his disciples how to have disciples of their own. Christianity is all about paying it forward. Exponential growth doesn’t require a lot of people in the beginning. If two people each teach two people who teach two more, the numbers add up quickly. It’s the wheat on a chessboard problem in action. Two to the power of four is 16. Two to the power of 16 is 32,768. Two to the power of 32 is well over 4 billion. With the faith of a mustard seed you can move a mountain. The people writing histories in Rome might not have known about Jesus at the time of his death, but their descendants knew who Peter and Paul were, and soon enough, it became impossible to write a history of the Roman Empire without Christianity. Jesus was Obi-Wan Kenobi: strike him down and he became more powerful than you could possibly imagine.



The gospel’s rate of transmission wasn’t going to be perfect, or anything close to it. Even the best disciples will make mistakes when they disciple others. Most will give up before they even try. Pouring yourself into others is a recipe for disappointment. Jesus, after all, was betrayed and sent to his death by one of the 12. People aren’t government bonds - there’s no guarantee of a return on investment. Over a long enough period of time, though, none of that mattered. Only a few needed to be faithful:

A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.  

 - Matthew 13:3-8 

Jesus could see beyond the span of his own life. When he told Peter to cast aside his nets and become a fisher of men 2,000 years ago, he started a chain reaction that is still bearing fruit today. No man is an island. Every Christian has other Christians in their life who hold them accountable and help them grow. If they don’t, they don’t stay Christians for very long. Giving speeches might do wonders for the ego, but speeches don’t change the lives of the people who hear them, at least not in the way that spending time and getting to know them will. The only way to change the world is to change the lives of the people around you. That’s what loving your neighbor is all about.

Every Good Endeavor

Americans define ourselves by what we do. Your job determines your place in society. It’s not just about how much money you make. We expect our careers to fulfill us. Our identities are wrapped up in our jobs, which is why losing them is so painful. Many professional athletes struggle with retirement because they don’t know who they are outside of their sport. Bear Bryant, the legendary Alabama football coach, died less than a year after he stopped coaching. Joe Paterno didn’t even make it that long. Their jobs were keeping them alive. People who lose their jobs are more likely to kill themselves. On a societal level, mass unemployment can have even uglier consequences. Hitler doesn’t come to power without the Great Depression. The rise of artificial intelligence has many thinking a “world without work” is coming. That should terrify us.

The modern-day Luddites may end up being wrong. People have been blaming machines for killing jobs since the Industrial Revolution, and new ones have always sprung up in their place. “Creative destruction” is an essential part of capitalism. The problem are the people who slip through the cracks, and that number may grow in the years ahead. What happens to truck drivers when driverless cars are everywhere? We need to figure out a new way to relate to work, and how we can value people outside of their contribution to GDP. In Every Good Endeavor, Timothy Keller and Katherine Leary Alsdorf provide an answer, one which isn’t new at all. Keller, one of the most popular modern Christian writers, has a gift for showing how the first principles of the gospel can impact our thinking in ways that are not immediately obvious.

Christianity sees our obsession with work as an idol, something which we have convinced ourselves will bring us contentment. We generally think of idols as figurines and statues, but they can be intangible as well. An idol is anything that gives your life meaning and makes you feel important. Even good things, like work and family, become idols when we build our identity on them. Anything you feel like you can’t live without has control over your life. That’s why Buddhism teaches the importance of detaching yourself from the world and living without desire. For Christians, it’s not just about detachment. It’s about attaching yourself to something else - Jesus. There is a deep yearning in the human soul for significance because we are made for a relationship with the creator of the universe. We will always search for things to fill that void, but nothing else will do. That’s why our secular culture treats work as a sacrament. Productivity has become our attempt at redemption. 

The Christian view is that Jesus paid for our redemption at the cross, and there’s nothing we can do to change that. We cannot save ourselves. All our striving is for nothing because it is all going away one day. We are all going to die, and the sun will eventually go supernova, erasing the Earth as if it never existed. Even if we leave the solar system, we will not outrun entropy. Nihilism is at the center of any materialistic understanding of the universe, because nothing we do matters if this life is all that there is. We are all Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill. However, if there is something more, some true reality underlying our own, than everything we do matters. Not because of what it will accomplish in this life, but because of what it means for eternity.

Christians see work as a reflection of God’s plan for the universe. Genesis tells us God created the world in six days (although what constitutes a day before the sun is left up to our imagination), and that He created us to be stewards of His creation. Work is necessary because the world needs to be cultivated to flourish. We aren’t park rangers who preserve without interfering, or construction workers who pave nature over. We are gardeners, meant to work hand-in-hand with the natural world so that it can mature into God’s design for it. Adam and Eve partnered with God in the Garden of Eden. They weren’t just sitting around all day; they had stuff they had to do.

The problem with work began when humans rebelled from God, and decided they would do what they thought was best.

To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and dust you shall return.” 

- Genesis 3:16-19 

You don’t need to be a Christian to believe the world is a broken place full of evil. All you have to do is look around. Every belief system has to resolve why there is evil in the world, and what can be done about it. There are three parts to any diagnosis: 1) what life should be 2) what happened to make it bad and 3) how to fix it. Modern ideologies that stem from the Enlightenment believe man is fundamentally good, and that human flourishing is only a matter of tweaking some aspect of society. Communists believe the problem is capitalism, and utopia will come when we change our economic superstructure. Libertarians think government is the problem. Feminists point to misogyny and racism. Christianity believe that man is fundamentally bad, and that the solution to our problems cannot come from anything in this world. It’s simultaneously a pessimistic view of humanity and an optimistic view of our situation. Work cannot save us, but we can still do good through it.

When work becomes a way God uses us to serve others, instead of a way to justify our own existence, what we are doing becomes less important. Our self-image isn’t built on what we do but on what was done for us. And since salvation doesn’t come from our work, no one’s work is more important than anyone else’s. A preacher doesn’t have a higher calling than a salesman. A stockbroker isn’t more valuable than a janitor. Mother Teresa wasn’t a better person than you or me. The second you put her on a pedestal and think that she was, you miss the entire point of what she did. If human beings are all made in God’s image, we are all equally important. If we are nothing more than the endpoints of the evolutionary process locked in a Darwinian competition to pass on our genes, we aren’t. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson said we have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness because they were endowed to us by our Creator. You can’t have one without the other.

A Celebration Of Discipline

Americans don’t celebrate discipline. We order take-out instead of cook. Drive instead of walk. Text instead of call. We are always busy, but never get anything done. A nation that once went to the moon can’t even keep our highways from blowing up. Social media and smartphones have made us more connected than ever, yet people have never felt more alone. It’s the paradox of modernity: everything is amazing and nobody is happy. Our society gives us one answer to our problems. Consume more. Climb the ladder. Advance further. Those looking for a different kind of answer will find one in Raymond Foster’s A Celebration of Discipline.

When people hear the word discipline, they think of their own will and the power of hard work. That’s not what Foster is talking about. The book is about spiritual discipline. He divides the disciplines into three groups: inner (how we relate to ourselves), outer (how we relate to others) and corporate (how the church body relates to itself). Each group builds on the one that precedes it. The inner disciplines — meditation, prayer, fasting and study — are the foundation. Prayer is how we partner with God, while meditation, fasting and study are how we quiet ourselves to hear Him. The fruits of those disciplines allow us to lead lives of simplicity, submission, service and occasionally, solitude. When we do those things, we can form healthy communities where we confess our struggles to each other, guide each other and worship and celebrate together. It sounds like a lot, and even thinking about how to integrate 12 different spiritual disciplines into life can be intimidating.

You don’t have to be religious to see the benefits of doing it. Even those who don’t believe in prayer are helped by taking time out of their day to unplug. Fasting has health benefits that have nothing to do with its spiritual dimensions. And who doesn’t want to live a simpler life? The ten steps Foster took to minimize his consumption will resonate with anyone who has ever taken on too much debt, or found themselves getting rid of stuff they don’t need or simply been overwhelmed with all the demands on their time. The problem is the gap between knowing what we should do and the discipline to actually do it. As the apostle Paul said, I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. I find myself thinking this every time I go through a drive-thru.

People prefer to rely on themselves. If that doesn’t work, they look to those around them. God is the last resort in our secular age. It’s no wonder life feels so difficult. We are trying to carry the weight of our lives, dreams and expectations on our shoulders with one hand tied behind our back. Foster uses the analogy of the farmer to explain:

A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain. 

Inner disciplines like meditation and fasting only create the conditions necessary for spiritual growth. They are a means to an end, not an end to themselves. Without God at the center, they become empty, simulating the appearance of holiness without the substance. In Foster’s telling, we perform the rituals without understanding the heart behind them. We have become a nation of cargo cultists.

The original cargo cultists were tribesman in remote Pacific Islands in the late 19th and early 20th century. They saw the air strips built on their islands by modern militaries, but not the global infrastructure that supplied them. When the supplies stopped coming, they began building their own air strips, thinking the gods would bless them with cargo of their own. We don’t think of ourselves as being a less advanced culture, but progress doesn’t just go in one direction. The vast majority of people who ever lived would find our materialistic view of the universe insane. Maybe they were wrong. But maybe they weren’t.

It’s hard to learn anything without humility. Americans think we already know everything. Every four years, our politicians tell us we are the greatest country in the history of mankind. The United States were founded as “a city on the hill”; American exceptionalism is one of the bedrock ideas of our foreign policy. Humbling ourselves to study things written thousands of years ago, and learning from people who didn’t have running water, much less wi-fi, seems ridiculous on its face. In the American mind, we stand at the pinnacle of societal evolution. Now that the US is on top of the world, history is over. A country only a few hundred years old has a hard time grasping the sheer scale of human history. Western Civilization is a few thousand years old, which is less time than the Pharaohs ruled Egypt. In ten thousands years, the US will be a footnote in the history books, if it’s there at all.

We think our society will last forever because we can’t imagine a world without ourselves. Social media has created a world where everyone is at the center of their own lives. The race to get ahead is constant, and even those at the top feel like they have to run as fast as they can just to stay in place. Living for yourself never feels like enough. Robin Williams was one of the most successful actors of the last generation and he ended his own life. Wilt Chamberlain slept with 10,000 women and died alone. Psychologists coined the term the “hedonic treadmill” to describe the tendency of humans to quickly return to their previous levels of happiness after major life changes. God has put eternity in our hearts, and nothing in this world can satisfy our longing for it. The only lasting mark we can make on the world is when we commune with the eternal.

Practicing the spiritual disciplines are how we grow closer to God. However, if we are not careful, they become nothing more than a long list of rules to follow. The Pharisees rigidly followed every religious law in the Old Testament, but they missed the heart behind them. They were more concerned with appearing righteous than living righteous lives. The reality is that living righteously is beyond our power. It’s only when we trust our salvation to someone else that we are freed from the burden of doing everything ourselves. That’s what Jesus meant when he said that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. We don’t have the strength to be disciplined on our own, but we have access to the one who does.

Power Broker

Robert Moses never held political office, and he never had a lot of money. He was a career bureaucrat without many of the trappings of power, with a reputation around New York City for being a selfless civil servant. Few knew he was the power behind the throne for almost 40 years. He didn’t serve at the pleasure of the Mayor; The Mayor served at his. He was above the law, and there was nothing the people could do to remove him. Not even FDR, who tried to orchestrate a coup against Moses at the height of the Great Depression, could unseat him. The whole point of a democracy is to prevent situations like that from happening. In The Power Broker, Robert Caro tells the story of how it did.

Moses was a builder. He built every major bridge in the city, as well as most of the highways that carve it up, and his name is plastered on dams, thoroughfares and parks across the state. Building massive public works is usually a collaborative process, involving balancing the competing interests of millions of people. Moses made it a dictatorship. The way NYC is laid out today is a direct reflection of his vision, and that vision shaped countless other cities around the world. Generations of architects and city planners learned at his feet, and his highways became the model for the interstate highway system. He came of age in the era of the automobile, and he is as responsible as anyone for the way it came to define the country.

The book delves into his projects, and the way they impacted the lives of millions, but at its heart is a more intimate story. A young man has a dream of making the world a better place. He goes out into the world and discovers that powerful people are standing in the way of his dream, and that his idealism is no match for their power. After trying and failing to fight the system, he becomes tempted by the idea of power, and of using power for his own ends. Once acquired, the power becomes an end to itself, and he slowly becomes the very thing he vowed to destroy. The corruption of Robert Moses is straight out of Lord of the Rings, and JRR Tolkien couldn’t have written it better.

The reason Caro can tell the story so well is because of how well he understands it. Caro is an obsessive researcher who leaves no stone unturned, literally in the case of the first highways that Moses built, and he talked to anyone and everyone who was even remotely connected to Moses. The fruit of that diligence is a book that clocks in at more than 1,100 pages. It’s a difficult read, but it’s not an intimidating one. Caro is the rare author who is a great reporter and and a great writer. The first draft was well over 3,000 pages, and what remains tells the story relatively concisely. It’s biography the way it should be done. One man’s life becomes a window into the world, making the past come alive and illustrating all that has changed in the time since, and all that has stayed the same.

People were flocking to New York City by the millions in the 1910’s and 1920’s, and there was nowhere to put them all. The land was filling up rapidly. What Moses understood was all these people needed somewhere to go, and something to do. His dream was to open up the great beaches of Long Island, and he refused to back down from the wealthy barons who controlled all of the great real estate. Part of his enduring popularity was the way he broke the backs of the 1% in the fight, using every trick in the book (including many he wrote himself) to get his parks, and the highways to those parks, built.

That fight taught him lessons he would use for the rest of his career. Manipulate the press. Control the money. Start building and dare people to stop you. Moses was a master of legislative maneuvering. He understood the law better than the people writing it, and he knew how to insert clauses no one would notice until it was too late. His personal fiefdoms were the public authorities, the temporary corporations created to manage tolls until a project had been paid off. He issued bonds on the revenues they generated, getting banks to front the money and then paying them off over time, and then issued bonds on those bonds, so that he could service them indefinitely without ever handing control back to the state. With hundreds of millions under his control, Moses vacuumed up all the best talent in the city, and he crushed anyone who tried to stand in his way. Moses was the only game in town, so if you wanted to build anything, you had to go through him.

The problem with giving one man that much power is that no one, no matter how smart and no matter how visionary, can see past their own experiences. Moses was shaped by growing up in the 1920’s, when cars were more luxury than necessity. He didn’t understand traffic patterns, and his only solution to congestion was to build more highways. Moses never learned that highways are like the Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come. Highways through cities don’t ease congestion. They make it worse. They are a fundamentally inefficient way of moving large groups of people from Point A to Point B. Moses had a keen grasp on the importance of time in his life, but his highways consigned untold millions to wasting huge portions of theirs in traffic.

Moses was a man defined by his contradictions. He was the architect of the highway system, yet he never learned how to drive a car. He devoted his life to improving the lives of millions, but he didn’t even really like people. He built monument upon monument in his desire for immortality, and he is mostly remembered for a book written about him. The Power Broker was published in 1974, and it’s still being sold in stores more than 40 years later. The pen really is mightier than the sword, or in this case, the bulldozer and the jackhammer.

Jesus The King

The story of Jesus Christ is so interesting many think it couldn’t be real, that the gospels are a collection of myths that never happened, and that he is a personification rather than a person who lived, died (and possibly) rose again. The question is when (and where) these myths could have started. Was Paul a real person? Was Peter? How far back does the story go? We know there were Christians throughout the Near East by the end of the first century. Who were they praying to? Could they conjure a person out of thin air whose life occurred within historical memory? And why would anyone believe them if they did?

The likeliest explanation is the simplest. Jesus was a man who preached a few years in ancient Israel before being executed by the Roman authorities. The contemporary critics of Christianity disputed his resurrection, not his existence. We know his followers grew from a few dozen at the time of his death to a movement spreading throughout the Roman Empire within a generation. We know they eventually conquered the empire from the inside out, with Christianity becoming the most influential religion in world history. Jesus is the most famous person who ever lived, and there’s no way to tell the story of humanity without talking about an itinerant preacher from Bethlehem who died without a penny to his name. We are, after all, living in the year 2016 AD.

How was he able to change the world? The gospels, collected from eye witness testimony and used for nearly two millennia, are the best place to learn. The problem is he was was preaching to a very different society in a very different world than our own, and it’s easy to come away from them with nothing more than a vague sense of the need to treat others kindly. “Jesus the King” is Timothy Keller’s attempt to bridge the gap, a reader’s guide to the Gospel of Mark that gives the societal context to what is happening. Keller is one of the most popular authors in evangelical America, and this book is a good example of why. It features simple and powerful writing, accessible to believers and non-believers alike. If you want to know what it means to be a Christian, “Jesus the King” is a good a place to start.

Keller divides the book (and Mark’s gospel) into two sections - “The King” and “The Cross”. The first half is who Jesus is, the second is explaining why he has to die. Everyone knows the basics of the story - Jesus is the son of God who died as a substitution for our sins. What gets missed is the connection between two. In a market economy, things are valued by the price someone will pay for them. If the price of our salvation was the death of God, how much must each of us be worth? Christianity starts with basing your self-worth not on what you have done, but on what God has done for you.

Everyone is searching for an identity, for something to justify our existence and some way to put our stamp on the world. Humans have been searching for immortality since the beginning of time. We all want to do something with our lives, and we all look to something to make us feel better about ourselves. Who am I as a person? And why am I important? The answer to those questions controls us. That’s at the core of identity, and the struggle for identity is at the core of the human condition. 

For some, it’s their career. They get identity from their professional lives, and what they do defines who they are. Others are driven by money. The more money they have, the more they feel like they matter. Sex is a big one, and the desire to be validated is what drives the hook-up culture, as much, if not more, than hedonism. Many feel worthwhile when other people are investing in their lives, and they look to family, friends and romantic relationships for meaning. Fame is that same principle on a bigger level. It doesn’t matter what you are famous for, as long as people are talking about you. 

In a narcissistic society, what we think of ourselves is determined by what others think of us. The root of anxiety in the modern world is the difference between who we are and who we portray ourselves to be. Social media exists to erase the distinction between our image and our identity. If a tree falls in the forest and no one can hear it, did it make a sound? What if you do something and don’t share it? Do we do anything for its own sake or so that other people can see we are doing it?

What no one can answer is what happens when you get what you are searching for. How much career success do any of us need? How much money? What number of likes will make us content? Or do those things only leave us wanting more? Keller talks about the hedonic treadmill, and how people return to their previous levels of happiness after a dramatic life change. Winning the lottery leaves most people worse off than when they started. Famous people are some of the most miserable in the world.

People often turn to religion when they realize how empty a life dedicated to the pursuit of selfish goals becomes. They try to become a better person, rather than a more important one. Many religious people end up defining themselves by their good deeds and the purity of their beliefs, and any ideology can become a religion if people base their worldview on it. Liberalism is a religion. Conservatism is too. They can't fail. They can only be failed. The problem is that mindset leads to the true believers feeling like they are part of the elect. The world divides into Us and Them, and their identity comes from being more righteous than everyone else.

True freedom comes from basing your identity on a gift you received, not what you did to earn it. When that happens, the things you do, and those that happen to you, don’t have the power to change who you are. When you don't need the approval of others, they can't control you. If your self-worth doesn’t come from your career, losing a job isn’t a life-shattering event. If money doesn’t define you, then not having any doesn’t make you a failure. The biggest reason people can’t pick themselves up from setbacks is because they lose the source of their identity in the process. Our generation was raised on the importance of self-esteem, but self-confidence is a lot less resilient than confidence in something bigger than yourself.

The key is basing your identity on something you can’t lose. Your life is built on a foundation. The only question is what that foundation is going to be.

Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.  

- Matthew 7:24