Pastor Matt has been reading again. This time it’s a book on theology by Australian New Testament historian Michael Bird. In this recent blog post, Pastor Matt explains what people can expect to find after they die.
Excerpt:
Luke 23:39-43 records the following:
39 One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43 And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Is “Paradise” heaven? Michael Bird points out in his new book Evangelical Theology (Zondervan 2013), that while the Greek word translated as “Paradise” is used to describe heaven in 2 Cor. 12:4 and Rev. 2:7 it cannot mean heaven here. Why? According to John 20:17, which records Jesus’ resurrection encounter with Mary Magdalene, He had not yet “ascended to the Father”.
So where is “Paradise”? Most likely it is an intermediate state for the dead known by ancients as Hades (see also Acts 2:27, 31 and 1 Peter 3:19-21). So, during the three days that Jesus’ body lay in the tomb, He joined the dead in Hades. But after his resurrection and ascension, He goes to heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father (see Acts 7:55; Eph. 1:20-23, etc.).
So do people still go to Hades? Christians don’t. The Apostle Paul writes that when we die we go to be with Jesus who is in heaven (2 Cor. 5:1-10; Phil. 1:20-24, etc.) but we will not stay there forever. Jesus will return to create a “new heavens and new earth” (Rev. 21) where we will dwell in eternal physical bodies like Jesus’ resurrected body that cannot decay or die (see 1 Cor. 15 and 1 John 3:2). The idea that we sit on a cloud for eternity while playing a harp and wearing a diaper is from Tom & Jerry cartoons, not the Bible.
What about non-Christians? The Book of Revelation still speaks of the existence of Hades (20:14) and that it will one day be thrown into hell. Thus, it is implies that non-Christians do not go directly to hell but to Hades until the final judgment of all humankind.
The rest of the post has a helpful breakdown that summarizes what the Bible teaches about life after death. Recommended.
Previously, I blogged about a few of the minimum requirements that a planet must satisfy in order to support complex life.
Here they are:
a solar system with a single massive Sun than can serve as a long-lived, stable source of energy
a terrestrial planet (non-gaseous)
the planet must be the right distance from the sun in order to preserve liquid water at the surface – if it’s too close, the water is burnt off in a runaway greenhouse effect, if it’s too far, the water is permanently frozen in a runaway glaciation
the solar system must be placed at the right place in the galaxy – not too near dangerous radiation, but close enough to other stars to be able to absorb heavy elements after neighboring stars die
a moon of sufficient mass to stabilize the tilt of the planet’s rotation
plate tectonics
an oxygen-rich atmosphere
a sweeper planet to deflect comets, etc.
planetary neighbors must have non-eccentric orbits
Now what happens if we disregard all of that, and just classify an Earth-like planet as one which only has to potentially support liquid water at the surface? Well, you get a very high estimate of Earth-like planets.
Science journalist Denyse O’Leary responds to a recent estimate based on this questionable criterion, which placed the number of Earth-like planets at 8.8 billion.
Excerpt: (links removed)
A current official definition of habitable planets is “in the zone around the star where liquid water could exist,” but the ones discovered so far are unsuitable in many other ways.
Then a new cosmology term hit the media, “super-Earths.” It means “bigger than Earth,” but smaller than gas giant Neptune. Super-Earths could be the most numerous type of planet, in tight orbits around their star — which is actually bad news for life.Nonetheless, some insist, they may be more attractive to life than Earth is. Indeed, the Copernican Principle allows us to assume that some are inhabited already.
In reality, even the rocky exoplanets (known as of early 2013) that are Earth-sized are not Earth-like. For example, the Kepler mission’s first rocky planet find is described as follows: “Although similar in size to Earth, its orbit lasts just 0.84 days, making it likely that the planet is a scorched, waterless world with a sea of lava on its starlit side.” As space program physicist Rob Sheldon puts it, Earth is a rocky planet but so is a solid chunk of iron at 1300 degrees orbiting a few solar radii above the star. In any event, a planet may look Earth-like but have a very different internal structure and atmosphere.”
The study is supposed to be a major step forward because of its unprecedented accuracy:
For the first time, scientists calculated — not estimated — what percent of stars that are just like our sun have planets similar to Earth: 22 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 8 percentage points.
Oh! You see, they calculated. They didn’t just estimate.
Because there are probably hundreds of planets missed for every one found, the study did intricate extrapolations to come up with the 22 percent figure — a calculation that outside scientists say is fair.
Oh. They calculated in the sense of “extrapolating” to “come up” with a figure. In other words, they estimated. The figure of “8.8 billion stars with Earth-size planets in the habitable temperature zone” comes down a bit too when you talk about actual planets that have been observed instead of being merely conjectured and “calculated.”
Scientists at a Kepler science conference Monday said they have found 833 new candidate planets with the space telescope, bringing the total of planets they’ve spotted to 3,538, but most aren’t candidates for life.
Kepler has identified only 10 planets that are about Earth’s size circling sun-like stars and are in the habitable zone, including one called Kepler 69-c.
Ah hah. So from the initial, trumpets-blaring figure of 8.8 billion we’re down more realistically to 10. Not 10 billion, just 10. Meanwhile the silence from space continues absolutely unabated.
That’s the way it tends to go with stories like this, the blaring headline and the inevitable letdown.
One part of the AP press release makes the point that the estimate does not include all the minimum requirements for life. For example, you need an atmosphere, as I stated above. Do the estimated 8.8 billion Earth-like planets have an Earth-like atmosphere? How about an oxygen-rich atmosphere, do the 8.8 billion Earth-like planets have that?
NO:
The next step, scientists say, is to look for atmospheres on these planets with powerful space telescopes that have yet to be launched. That would yield further clues to whether any of these planets do, in fact, harbor life.
You know, after the whole global warming hoax, you would think that these headline writers would have learned their lesson about sensationalizing wild-assed guesses in order to scare up more research money. But a lot of true-believing naturalists are just going to read the headline and not the rest of the article, and they will never know that they’ve been had. Again. I love experimental science, but I don’t love the politicization of science.
Probably one of the best health care policy experts writing today is Avik Roy, who writes for Forbes magazine.
Here is his latest column, which I think is useful for helping us all get better at debating health care policy. (H/T Matt from Well Spent Journey)
Excerpt:
It’s one of the most oft-repeated justifications for socialized medicine: Americans spend more money than other developed countries on health care, but don’t live as long. If we would just hop on the European health-care bandwagon, we’d live longer and healthier lives. The only problem is it’s not true.
[…]If you really want to measure health outcomes, the best way to do it is at the point of medical intervention. If you have a heart attack, how long do you live in the U.S. vs. another country? If you’re diagnosed with breast cancer? In 2008, a group of investigators conducted a worldwide study of cancer survival rates, called CONCORD. They looked at 5-year survival rates for breast cancer, colon and rectal cancer, and prostate cancer. I compiled their data for the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, and western Europe. Guess who came out number one?
Here is the raw data:
Health care outcomes by country and type of treatment
Another point worth making is that people die for other reasons than health. For example, people die because of car accidents and violent crime. A few years back, Robert Ohsfeldt of Texas A&M and John Schneider of the University of Iowa asked the obvious question: what happens if you remove deaths from fatal injuries from the life expectancy tables? Among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults from 19th place to…you guessed it…first. Japan, on the same adjustment, drops from first to ninth.
It’s great that the Japanese eat more sushi than we do, and that they settle their arguments more peaceably. But these things don’t have anything to do with socialized medicine.
Finally, U.S. life-expectancy statistics are skewed by the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have one health-care system, but three: Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurance. (A fourth, the Obamacare exchanges, is supposed to go into effect in 2014.) As I have noted in the past, health outcomes for those on government-sponsored insurance are worse than for those on private insurance.
To my knowledge, no one has attempted to segregate U.S. life-expectancy figures by insurance status. But based on the data we have, it’s highly likely that those on private insurance have the best life expectancy, with Medicare patients in the middle, and the uninsured and Medicaid at the bottom.
I know that my readers who like to dig deep into economics and policy will love the links at the bottom of the article:
For further reading on the topic of life expectancy, here are some recommendations. Harvard economist Greg Mankiw discusses some of the confounding factors with life expectancy statistics, citing this NBER study by June and Dave O’Neill comparing the U.S. and Canada. (Mankiw calls the misuse of U.S. life expectancy stats “schlocky.”) Chicago economist Gary Becker makes note of the CONCORD study in this blog post. In 2009, Sam Preston and Jessica Ho of the University of Pennsylvania published a lengthy analysis of life expectancy statistics, concluding that “the low longevity ranking of the United States is not likely to be a result of a poorly functioning health care system.”
The funniest thing I have found when talking to people from countries with socialized health care systems, like Canada and the UK, is that they are woefully uninformed about American health care. They literally do not know about free emergency room care, which is free for anyone regardless of insurance – including illegal aliens. They do not know about our expensive Medicaid program, which helps people who cannot afford health insurance. And our very very expensive Medicare program, which provides health care to the elderly – including prescription drugs. I get the feeling that foreign critics of American health care are getting their views from amateur documentaries produced by uneducated Hollywood propagandists, or maybe from TV shows on the Comedy Channel. They certainly are not getting their information from peer-reviewed studies by credentialed scholars from top universities, like the ones cited above.
I have literally spoken to Canadians who think that people in the USA without insurance do not get treatment and just die in the streets from stab wounds. They don’t know about the emergency room rule, or about charity care, or about Medicaid and Medicare. There is a lot of ignorance up there – wilful ignorance, in some cases. And keep in mind that the average Canadian household is paying over $11,000 a year for this substandard health care! They are paying more for less, and that’s not surprising since a large chunk of the taxes that are collected for health care go to overpaid unionized bureaucrats. Naturally, when their left-wing politicians need treatment, the first place they go is to the United States, where they pay out of pocket for the better health care. But that doesn’t stop them from denouncing American health care when they are talking to voters.
Higher infant mortality rates?
One of the other common arguments you hear from uninformed people outside the USA is the higher infant mortality rates argument.
Here’s an article by Stanford University professor Scott Atlas to explain why the argument fails.
Excerpt:
Virtually every national and international agency involved in statistical assessments of health status, health care, and economic development uses the infant-mortality rate — the number of infants per 1,000 live births who die before reaching the age of one — as a fundamental indicator. America’s high infant-mortality rate has been repeatedly put forth as evidence “proving” the substandard performance of the U.S. health-care system.
[…]n a 2008 study, Joy Lawn estimated that a full three-fourths of the world’s neonatal deaths are counted only through highly unreliable five-yearly retrospective household surveys, instead of being reported at the time by hospitals and health-care professionals, as in the United States. Moreover, the most premature babies — those with the highest likelihood of dying — are the least likely to be recorded in infant and neonatal mortality statistics in other countries. Compounding that difficulty, in other countries the underreporting is greatest for deaths that occur very soon after birth.
[…]The United States strictly adheres to the WHO definition of live birth (any infant “irrespective of the duration of the pregnancy, which . . . breathes or shows any other evidence of life . . . whether or not the umbilical cord has been cut or the placenta is attached”) and uses a strictly implemented linked birth and infant-death data set. On the contrary, many other nations, including highly developed countries in Western Europe, use far less strict definitions, all of which underreport the live births of more fragile infants who soon die. As a consequence, they falsely report more favorable neonatal- and infant-mortality rates.
[…]Neonatal deaths are mainly associated with prematurity and low birth weight. Therefore the fact that the percentage of preterm births in the U.S. is far higher than that in all other OECD countries — 65 percent higher than in Britain, and more than double the rate in Ireland, Finland, and Greece — further undermines the validity of neonatal-mortality comparisons.
You can listen to a podcast with Dr. Atlas here, from the Library of Economics web site.
WINTERY KNIGHT 