Book Review - The Miracles of Exodus
Among scientists, physicists have a peculiar propensity for finding God. Perhaps it is because many deal with the most fundamental things of all that they find room – down there beyond the quarks, strangeness and charm - for a deity whose existence is otherwise looking increasingly improbable in our age of science and reason.
Colin J. Humphreys is one such scientist – a renowned Cambridge physicist who has devoted much of his non-professional energy in recent years to probing the Bible in the light of science.
His magnum opus in this area, "The Miracles of Exodus", takes on a foundation narrative of the West to discover how much can be verified as history rather than myth and then to find a scientific basis for the miracles of this journey.
Books which uncover the historical facts behind figures such as King Arthur, Robin Hood or Cleopatra often make cracking yarns and can also offer valuable contributions to scholarship.
But Humphreys is playing a bigger game. If the events of Exodus – from the flight from Egypt to the handing down of the 10 commandments – can be given a hard historical and scientific foundation then some profound questions are raised.
Humphreys, who is also the Chairman of Christians in Science for the United Kingdom, sets out to answer five key questions about the Exodus narrative: Is the story coherent and consistent; Is it factually accurate; Can we understand the miracles; Has the text been misinterpreted and can we reconstruct the Exodus route and find the true Mount Sinai?
His journey to a resoundingly positive answer to all of these questions is lengthy and argued with close attention to the Biblical text. Yet it is also curiously idiosyncratic and rather folksy. We wander adrift at times in the desert of irrelevancy.
Much of what he offers is still built on shifting sand – secondary sources and leaps of faith - but his key conclusions include a revised date for the events and the conclusion that Mount Bedr in the north of the present state of Saudi Arabia is the real Mount Sinai.
The pillar of cloud (by day) and fire (by night) that led the Israelites on was – he argues – a distant volcanic plume. The ten plagues of Egypt are also quite plausibly explained but he offers an extraordinary argument to explain the crossing of the Red Sea and the inundation of the pursuing Egyptian Army. This was a remarkable combination of wind set down and a bore wave.
How important is it to verify the accuracy of the Exodus story – the escape of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt and the miraculous events that help them to overcome all barriers? On the political level a reliable roadmap for those ancient events would have some obvious contemporary ramifications.
Humphreys believes he has established the historical truth of Exodus, that its miracles can be scientifically explained and that we can therefore take this part of the Bible as literal truth. But what of the divine cause? He concludes: "When a whole sequence of events happens at just the right moment, then it is either incredibly lucky chance or is there is a God who works in, with and through natural events to guide the affairs of destinies and nations…Chance or God? I'm not going to answer that question for you."
But his own answer is pretty clear… that this congeries of miracles is evidence of God as an intelligent designer – working through science.
Why is it necessary to try to find scientific explanations for the behaviour of a God who elsewhere acts in ways that can only be understood if we simply swallow his omnipotence? Believers "know" the Exodus story is true anyway… but I suspect others will remain unpersuaded. Are we meant now to pick and mix history from metaphor, science from myth.There is surely no scientific way to verify Noah's flood, the Adam and Eve story or the transformation of water to wine by Jesus at a wedding feast.
For his next act perhaps Professor Humphreys will present us with scientific evidence for the reality of angels?
"The Miracles of Exodus" by Colin J. Humphreys (Continuum Press ISBN 0-8264-6952-3 (HB)
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Book Review - The Big Game
Review of The Big Game - published TES
How many young people will vote in next month’s general election? In 2001 their turnout was the lowest since 1918 and many politicians and pundits worry it will be worse this time.
But young people DO vote. When it comes to “Reality TV” they’re avid participants. Thousands clamour to appear and millions vote to expel inmates from the Big Brother house, to choose which celebrity to rescue from the jungle or to decide who should become a pop idol.
In the five British series of Big Brother since it launched in 2000, some eighty million votes have been cast – overwhelmingly from people under 30.
Big Brother, now shown in versions globally, is an astonishing financial success and defines the zeitgeist more than any other contemporary television. Why is it so successful?
The man who brought the show to Britain, Peter Bazalgette, chairman of Endemol UK, offers some answers in a fascinating book detailing the business story behind the show and examining its wider cultural implications.
A couple of years ago UK academics studied its success to see what lessons it offered to lure a “lost” generation back into politics. They found it most popular among young women from poorer socio-economic groups who felt empowered by seeing a swift and direct result from voting - in marked contrast to real democracy,
Stephen Coleman, Professor of e-democracy at Oxford, says “authenticity” was the overriding message with fans contrasting the honesty of the “housemates” with politicians who they considered “unreal, opaque and devious.”
But empowerment doesn’t automatically spring to mind when considering the impact of Big Brother. It makes millions for its Dutch creators Endemol –from global sales and from young viewers who telephone premium lines to vote.
But isn’t such voting really a form of virtual reality giving the illusion of influence? And the programme participants, so avidly tracked by millions while “housemates” generally vanish into obscurity after a transient twilight of temporary celebrity.
Critics are almost universal in condemning the show. Former US President Bill Clinton said: “These people (the participants) are prostituting themselves to media conglomerates.” Novelist Salman Rushdie wrote: “Who needs talent when the unashamed self-display of the talentless is on offer” and professional critics dismissed it variously as “gross, ghastly, inane, cynical, sad, dissipated, desperate, seedy, voyeuristic, creepy, phony”
Bazalgette says these ”ritual denunciations” come from: ”Mostly middle aged men who has been brought up to abhor displays of emotion and who didn’t understand this new, media savvy generation.”
Big Brother has made its creator John de Mol one of Europe’s wealthiest men and rich rewards may also have helped quell Bazalgette’s earlier doubts about the show. In 1998 after his company merged with Endemol he warned Big Brother was: “Far too cruel, and wilfully so, for the British market.”
Now Big Brother is in the cultural mainstream and the wisdom is that, if you’re under 30 – and especially female – then you may well love it. But if you’re a middle-aged male then you may hate it and probably don’t get it - just like Bob Dylan’s Mr Jones who never had a chance of understanding the youth revolution of the 1960s.
Bazalgette often draws cultural parallels with this youth culture. Older critics denounced Elvis Presley in the 1950s and, “from that point on successful innovations in entertainment went through a cycle, appealing to the emerging generation and appalling their elders. The disgust of the latter ensured success with the former”
Tim Gardam, the Channel Four executive who first commissioned Big Brother says: “In all it’s raunchiness, it revealed the truth of a generation… which was a fundamentally different from generations before. They had no sense of propriety, no sense of modesty, they were open, honest and candid with each other.”
Big Brother is the most vivid example of an increasingly irreverent genre focusing on what Bazalgette’s calls “painfully ordinary people.” It also draws inspiration from internet phenomena such as voyeuristic webcams by merging the desire to watch with a passion to be observed.
But is it the latest manifestation of an on-going youth revolt or merely a cynical commodification of this youthful impulse to rebel against an older order?
Appraising forerunners of reality TV formats Bazalgette revealingly says: “Television was moving towards being less of an art form and more of a commodity. Producers were now having to make programmes less for themselves and more for the audience.”
But those who defined earlier visions for broadcasting, always argued that they too made programmes for audiences though with loftier ideas about who their viewers were.
Bazalgette relates a parallel tale of another even more globally successful format “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, devised by the British producer Paul Smith. It reveals money to the true motor behind all of this. The defining art at the heart of this new era of television is the deal.
Both shows have helped further homogenise global popular culture with its ongoing obsession with youth. From Rochdale to Rio its rap, trainers and now, reality TV.
Only recently have the convergence of the internet, television and telephony enabled Big Brother’s creators to come up with its unique multi-platform format and to offer this” uniquely media savvy generation” the ability to achieve brief fame. But why do so many young people seek to be so exposed, warts and all?
The contemporary cult of the celebrity says fame without substance is enough. It reflects a new generation’s disenchantment with both the radical idealism and the materialistic obsessions of previous generations and an degree of anxiety about its own longer term prospects.
More prosaically Big Brother may also reflect a de-mystification of the medium for a generation used to domestic digital media, filming and editing and beaming pictures to each other via mobile phones or the web.
Britain enjoying a brief reputation for producing the best television in the world, but now broadcasting is international and Reality TV is at its heart.
s Germaine Greer said before her own brief encounter with Big Brother: “Reality television is not the end of civilisation as we know it. It is civilisation as we know it.”
“Billion Dollar Game” by Peter Bazalgette is published by Time Warner Books at £12.99
How many young people will vote in next month’s general election? In 2001 their turnout was the lowest since 1918 and many politicians and pundits worry it will be worse this time.
But young people DO vote. When it comes to “Reality TV” they’re avid participants. Thousands clamour to appear and millions vote to expel inmates from the Big Brother house, to choose which celebrity to rescue from the jungle or to decide who should become a pop idol.
In the five British series of Big Brother since it launched in 2000, some eighty million votes have been cast – overwhelmingly from people under 30.
Big Brother, now shown in versions globally, is an astonishing financial success and defines the zeitgeist more than any other contemporary television. Why is it so successful?
The man who brought the show to Britain, Peter Bazalgette, chairman of Endemol UK, offers some answers in a fascinating book detailing the business story behind the show and examining its wider cultural implications.
A couple of years ago UK academics studied its success to see what lessons it offered to lure a “lost” generation back into politics. They found it most popular among young women from poorer socio-economic groups who felt empowered by seeing a swift and direct result from voting - in marked contrast to real democracy,
Stephen Coleman, Professor of e-democracy at Oxford, says “authenticity” was the overriding message with fans contrasting the honesty of the “housemates” with politicians who they considered “unreal, opaque and devious.”
But empowerment doesn’t automatically spring to mind when considering the impact of Big Brother. It makes millions for its Dutch creators Endemol –from global sales and from young viewers who telephone premium lines to vote.
But isn’t such voting really a form of virtual reality giving the illusion of influence? And the programme participants, so avidly tracked by millions while “housemates” generally vanish into obscurity after a transient twilight of temporary celebrity.
Critics are almost universal in condemning the show. Former US President Bill Clinton said: “These people (the participants) are prostituting themselves to media conglomerates.” Novelist Salman Rushdie wrote: “Who needs talent when the unashamed self-display of the talentless is on offer” and professional critics dismissed it variously as “gross, ghastly, inane, cynical, sad, dissipated, desperate, seedy, voyeuristic, creepy, phony”
Bazalgette says these ”ritual denunciations” come from: ”Mostly middle aged men who has been brought up to abhor displays of emotion and who didn’t understand this new, media savvy generation.”
Big Brother has made its creator John de Mol one of Europe’s wealthiest men and rich rewards may also have helped quell Bazalgette’s earlier doubts about the show. In 1998 after his company merged with Endemol he warned Big Brother was: “Far too cruel, and wilfully so, for the British market.”
Now Big Brother is in the cultural mainstream and the wisdom is that, if you’re under 30 – and especially female – then you may well love it. But if you’re a middle-aged male then you may hate it and probably don’t get it - just like Bob Dylan’s Mr Jones who never had a chance of understanding the youth revolution of the 1960s.
Bazalgette often draws cultural parallels with this youth culture. Older critics denounced Elvis Presley in the 1950s and, “from that point on successful innovations in entertainment went through a cycle, appealing to the emerging generation and appalling their elders. The disgust of the latter ensured success with the former”
Tim Gardam, the Channel Four executive who first commissioned Big Brother says: “In all it’s raunchiness, it revealed the truth of a generation… which was a fundamentally different from generations before. They had no sense of propriety, no sense of modesty, they were open, honest and candid with each other.”
Big Brother is the most vivid example of an increasingly irreverent genre focusing on what Bazalgette’s calls “painfully ordinary people.” It also draws inspiration from internet phenomena such as voyeuristic webcams by merging the desire to watch with a passion to be observed.
But is it the latest manifestation of an on-going youth revolt or merely a cynical commodification of this youthful impulse to rebel against an older order?
Appraising forerunners of reality TV formats Bazalgette revealingly says: “Television was moving towards being less of an art form and more of a commodity. Producers were now having to make programmes less for themselves and more for the audience.”
But those who defined earlier visions for broadcasting, always argued that they too made programmes for audiences though with loftier ideas about who their viewers were.
Bazalgette relates a parallel tale of another even more globally successful format “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, devised by the British producer Paul Smith. It reveals money to the true motor behind all of this. The defining art at the heart of this new era of television is the deal.
Both shows have helped further homogenise global popular culture with its ongoing obsession with youth. From Rochdale to Rio its rap, trainers and now, reality TV.
Only recently have the convergence of the internet, television and telephony enabled Big Brother’s creators to come up with its unique multi-platform format and to offer this” uniquely media savvy generation” the ability to achieve brief fame. But why do so many young people seek to be so exposed, warts and all?
The contemporary cult of the celebrity says fame without substance is enough. It reflects a new generation’s disenchantment with both the radical idealism and the materialistic obsessions of previous generations and an degree of anxiety about its own longer term prospects.
More prosaically Big Brother may also reflect a de-mystification of the medium for a generation used to domestic digital media, filming and editing and beaming pictures to each other via mobile phones or the web.
Britain enjoying a brief reputation for producing the best television in the world, but now broadcasting is international and Reality TV is at its heart.
s Germaine Greer said before her own brief encounter with Big Brother: “Reality television is not the end of civilisation as we know it. It is civilisation as we know it.”
“Billion Dollar Game” by Peter Bazalgette is published by Time Warner Books at £12.99
The Electric Universe
THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE - REVIEW FOR THE TES
This review is being written on a computer in a warm and well lit room. A coffee machine keeps me fuelled, a CD plays some music and, shortly, I will e-mail this to a TES editor. My telephone and mobile are to hand should she have any queries.
Imagine a world without any of this - with no understanding of electricity.
There would be almost none of the multitude of machines we take for granted, no mass entertainment or long range communications, no aircraft, nor weapons of mass destruction but also medical science would be virtually medieval.
And most noticeably perhaps, our nights would be dark. Until modern times we lived largely in a world lit only by fire.
Before gas lamps began to glimmer in major Western cities in the early 19th century, all humanity lived under curfew. Only the rich could afford to light their homes with any regularity - even candles were costly - and the night-time domain beyond the shuttered windows and doors was dangerous and, in Shakespeare's phrase, full of "the deeds of darkness."
But the discovery and development of electricity changed all that. The painter James McNeil Whistler captured the wonder of this transformed world when he wrote: "The warehouses are palaces in the night and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairyland is before us."
American socilologist Marray Melbin likened the transformation wrought bt public lighting to the colonisation of a new world - with humanity now beginning to live fully around the clock and Lenin characterised Communism as "Soviet Government plus the electrification of the whole country."
The profound revoution sparked by by the unlocking of electrical power is detailed in "Electric Universe - How electricity switched on the modern world." by David Bodanis, the writer whose last book, the best selling “E=MC2" offered one of the most accessible routes into understanding Einstein's ideas.
Here he recounts how we came to understand and harness electrcity and begins with two shockingly dark visions. The first is to consider what would happened to our wired world in the event of a global power failure? A rapid descent into chaos. And what would a universe without electricity be like? Simple. It would not exist. Electricity is fundamental to the fabric of reality.
He writes: " The force of electricity is very powerful and has been operating non-stop for more than 15 billion years. But it's also utterly hidden, crammed deep within all rocks and stars and atoms. The force is like two Olympian arm-wrestlers whose struggle is unnoticed because their straining hands barely move. There are almost always equal amounts of positive and negative charges within everything around us - so well balanced that although their effects are everywhere, their existence remains unseen."
There are many genres in popular scientific writing. Some have urgent messages to impart - for example Jared Diamond's recent book "Collapse"; others present new and hugely complicated ideas in accessible ways such as Michio Kaku's forthcoming "Parallel Worlds" and then there are those that take something utterly familiar like salt, cod, the nutmeg or water and reveal the fascinating hidden history and science behind the seemingly mundane.
"Electric Universe" together with Bodanis's earlier books such as his Secret House trilogy, and “E=MC2“ fall into this last group - and he does it better than most. His greatest gift is telling stories with a passion and vibrant energy that makes you thirst to investigate more once his books are done. He used to be a teacher.
If the start of "Electric Universe" is dark, the rest is full of light - even allowing for diversions into the story about the role electricity played in Bomber Harris's "bombing of ethics" in the words of Canon Collins.
The narrative whisks us through a panoply of personalities whose passions and perceptiveness first uncovered the true nature of electricity, saw its potential and went about harnessing it.
Many gave their names to the stuff. The Italian Alessandro Volta for instance whose party trick of putting metal in his mouth to produce a tingling on the tongue was a first portal into understanding the work of electric batteries.
Or the German Heinrich Hertz who, in his tragically brief life, carried out research which paved the way for the discovery of radiowaves.
The achievement of this book is to illuminate an important but surprisingly difficult subject via engaging human stories. Bodanis locates the genesis of some of the greatest discoveries in very basic human emotions - love, grief and greed.
It was the love of a young teacher of the deaf in Boston for one of his students in the 1870s that led to the development of the telephone for example.
Alexander Graham Bell had been intrigued with the mechanics of the human voice since childhood. As a teenager he and his brother carried out various experiments on voice generation, even coaxing the family's long-suffering dog to produce word-like sounds by manipulating its larynx and rewarding it with biscuits.
But then he met Mabel, the love of his life. It was her parents' objections to the match that sent him into overdrive to win their approval. This moving story intertwining intellectual and emotional pursuit led to a scientific breakthrough.
Grief helped shape the creativity of another pioneer, Alan Turing, the English father of computers. At 17 he fell in love with an older boy at school, Christopher Morcom. A shared passion was science. But then Morcom died of TB.
Bodanis writes that Morcom's death seemed to have bred a rage at religion in Turing. "That anger, that belief in cold materialism, was indispensable for the great electrical device that Turing imagined just a few years later. It is hard to conceive of creating an artificial device that duplicates human thinking, if you believe in an immortal soul."
But Turing's grief and later his isolation in an era where his sexuality was still a crime finally led him to suicide. It came on the very brink of the development, in the USA, of the transistor, a device that would have enabled his dream to be realised.
Greed is another engine of discovery. Bodanis offers the wonderful but salutary tale of the first bungled attempts to connect Europe to America by telegraph cables beneath the Atlantic. To this day thousands of miles of useless cabling lie fathoms deep beneath the ocean, lost and useless.
He offers a plethora of other stories about the people who helped bring about the modern electric world. But this book goes further too - for it also has chapters reminding us that it isn't just gadgets and technology that electricity drives.
This strange invisible stuff is also at the heart of how the human machine works - and how the fabric of reality is built.
"Electric Universe' by David Bodanis published by Little, Brown at £14.99 ISBN 0 31686182 0
This review is being written on a computer in a warm and well lit room. A coffee machine keeps me fuelled, a CD plays some music and, shortly, I will e-mail this to a TES editor. My telephone and mobile are to hand should she have any queries.
Imagine a world without any of this - with no understanding of electricity.
There would be almost none of the multitude of machines we take for granted, no mass entertainment or long range communications, no aircraft, nor weapons of mass destruction but also medical science would be virtually medieval.
And most noticeably perhaps, our nights would be dark. Until modern times we lived largely in a world lit only by fire.
Before gas lamps began to glimmer in major Western cities in the early 19th century, all humanity lived under curfew. Only the rich could afford to light their homes with any regularity - even candles were costly - and the night-time domain beyond the shuttered windows and doors was dangerous and, in Shakespeare's phrase, full of "the deeds of darkness."
But the discovery and development of electricity changed all that. The painter James McNeil Whistler captured the wonder of this transformed world when he wrote: "The warehouses are palaces in the night and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairyland is before us."
American socilologist Marray Melbin likened the transformation wrought bt public lighting to the colonisation of a new world - with humanity now beginning to live fully around the clock and Lenin characterised Communism as "Soviet Government plus the electrification of the whole country."
The profound revoution sparked by by the unlocking of electrical power is detailed in "Electric Universe - How electricity switched on the modern world." by David Bodanis, the writer whose last book, the best selling “E=MC2" offered one of the most accessible routes into understanding Einstein's ideas.
Here he recounts how we came to understand and harness electrcity and begins with two shockingly dark visions. The first is to consider what would happened to our wired world in the event of a global power failure? A rapid descent into chaos. And what would a universe without electricity be like? Simple. It would not exist. Electricity is fundamental to the fabric of reality.
He writes: " The force of electricity is very powerful and has been operating non-stop for more than 15 billion years. But it's also utterly hidden, crammed deep within all rocks and stars and atoms. The force is like two Olympian arm-wrestlers whose struggle is unnoticed because their straining hands barely move. There are almost always equal amounts of positive and negative charges within everything around us - so well balanced that although their effects are everywhere, their existence remains unseen."
There are many genres in popular scientific writing. Some have urgent messages to impart - for example Jared Diamond's recent book "Collapse"; others present new and hugely complicated ideas in accessible ways such as Michio Kaku's forthcoming "Parallel Worlds" and then there are those that take something utterly familiar like salt, cod, the nutmeg or water and reveal the fascinating hidden history and science behind the seemingly mundane.
"Electric Universe" together with Bodanis's earlier books such as his Secret House trilogy, and “E=MC2“ fall into this last group - and he does it better than most. His greatest gift is telling stories with a passion and vibrant energy that makes you thirst to investigate more once his books are done. He used to be a teacher.
If the start of "Electric Universe" is dark, the rest is full of light - even allowing for diversions into the story about the role electricity played in Bomber Harris's "bombing of ethics" in the words of Canon Collins.
The narrative whisks us through a panoply of personalities whose passions and perceptiveness first uncovered the true nature of electricity, saw its potential and went about harnessing it.
Many gave their names to the stuff. The Italian Alessandro Volta for instance whose party trick of putting metal in his mouth to produce a tingling on the tongue was a first portal into understanding the work of electric batteries.
Or the German Heinrich Hertz who, in his tragically brief life, carried out research which paved the way for the discovery of radiowaves.
The achievement of this book is to illuminate an important but surprisingly difficult subject via engaging human stories. Bodanis locates the genesis of some of the greatest discoveries in very basic human emotions - love, grief and greed.
It was the love of a young teacher of the deaf in Boston for one of his students in the 1870s that led to the development of the telephone for example.
Alexander Graham Bell had been intrigued with the mechanics of the human voice since childhood. As a teenager he and his brother carried out various experiments on voice generation, even coaxing the family's long-suffering dog to produce word-like sounds by manipulating its larynx and rewarding it with biscuits.
But then he met Mabel, the love of his life. It was her parents' objections to the match that sent him into overdrive to win their approval. This moving story intertwining intellectual and emotional pursuit led to a scientific breakthrough.
Grief helped shape the creativity of another pioneer, Alan Turing, the English father of computers. At 17 he fell in love with an older boy at school, Christopher Morcom. A shared passion was science. But then Morcom died of TB.
Bodanis writes that Morcom's death seemed to have bred a rage at religion in Turing. "That anger, that belief in cold materialism, was indispensable for the great electrical device that Turing imagined just a few years later. It is hard to conceive of creating an artificial device that duplicates human thinking, if you believe in an immortal soul."
But Turing's grief and later his isolation in an era where his sexuality was still a crime finally led him to suicide. It came on the very brink of the development, in the USA, of the transistor, a device that would have enabled his dream to be realised.
Greed is another engine of discovery. Bodanis offers the wonderful but salutary tale of the first bungled attempts to connect Europe to America by telegraph cables beneath the Atlantic. To this day thousands of miles of useless cabling lie fathoms deep beneath the ocean, lost and useless.
He offers a plethora of other stories about the people who helped bring about the modern electric world. But this book goes further too - for it also has chapters reminding us that it isn't just gadgets and technology that electricity drives.
This strange invisible stuff is also at the heart of how the human machine works - and how the fabric of reality is built.
"Electric Universe' by David Bodanis published by Little, Brown at £14.99 ISBN 0 31686182 0
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