More Katrina and Politics

We depend upon the Levees and Dams of the US to protect us from floods. The Corps of Engineers is responsible construction, inspection and maintenance. The following article was copied out of the Times Picayune and addresses the quality of the Corps inspection efforts.

By Bob Marshall

Times Picayune Staff writer

Before Hurricane Katrina, levee inspections in New Orleans were so superficial that one engineer who used to work for the Army Corps of Engineers said he conducted more diligent inspections on Florida levees that protected cattle. Engineers familiar with proper levee inspection routines across the country said the annual tours of New Orleans’ vital hurricane protection levees—described by critics as cursory drive-bys more about fellowship and lunch than looking for problems—sounded nothing like the serious geotechnical investigations conducted in other places. Further, the hasty approach taken on the 100-mile, five-hour tours by the Corps of Engineers and its local partners, the Orleans Levee Board and the state Department of Transportation and Development, did not come close to meeting federal regulations. “Annual inspections take many forms, but any way you slice it, you couldn’t inspect 100 miles in five hours—not properly, anyway,” said Thomas Wolff, assistant dean of engineering at Michigan State University and a member of the National Science Foundation team that investigated the levee failures in New Orleans. “You certainly couldn’t meet the requirements by looking down those levees with binoculars from a roadway,” Wolff said. Section 208.10 of Title 33 in the Code of Federal Regulations details how the corps and its local partners must maintain levees and floodwalls. The mandate includes regular inspections to look for encroachments on the levee or its right of way such as fences, patios and pools; the growth of shrubs and trees whose root systems could damage the system’s integrity; signs of seepage or sand boils; subsidence; animal burrows; and the accumulation of trash or debris. A long list of possible problems is spelled out, and inspectors are given a grading system to rank the seriousness of any problems found. The regulation calls for the thorough inspections to be made “immediately prior to the beginning of the flood season, immediately following each major water period and otherwise at intervals not exceeding 90 days.” Further, in the corps’ Flood Control Operations and Maintenance Policies, Regulation 1130-2-530 states, “Projects that protect urban areas or ones where failure would be catastrophic and result in loss of life should be inspected annually.” It also tells corps personnel to report nonfederal sponsors who are not complying with the regulations.

Lunch, not levees

Corps and Levee Board officials last month admitted their annual inspections typically were little more than quick driving tours. Inspection of the 17^th Street Canal levee usually took place from a stop on the Old Hammond Highway, rather than a thorough walk or drive of the flood control structure that is 15,000 feet long. Records show the inspections were scheduled to end early enough for a taxpayer-paid lunch, costing as much as $900 for 57 people.The agencies said they conducted more frequent informal inspections, typically when personnel were going to the levees for other purposes. For instance, the Levee Board said it relied on grass cutters to report any problems they might see. But Wolff, who worked for the corps from 1970 to 1985, said inspections of levees in the districts where he worked, from Missouri to California, were much more formal events. They involved crews of as many as eight engineers who drove and walked the levees, and seldom covered more than 10 miles in a day. He said major inspections of the Mississippi River levees were conducted once every five years, and resulted in written reports, which were used as references before the next such inspection. Less rigorous, but still thorough, inspections were done annually. “You pretty much physically inspected the entire levee over two days,” he said. “Normally that might be as long a stretch as 20 miles. We seldom did more than 10 miles in a day. You couldn’t if you were conducting a thorough inspection.” Bob Bea, a University of California-Berkeley engineering professor who was also on the NSF team, said his levee inspections in Florida during a corps career in the 1950s were even more rigorous. “In some cases we actually came back and did soil borings to inspect suspicious sites,” he said. “And those levees were protecting cattle.”

Warning signs missed

Bea said careful inspection of the levees was critical because the earthen embankments often hide defects until failure occurs. “That’s one of the problems that plagues engineers in this field,” he said. “The levee can look absolutely solid, tall and green and safe. But just below the surface you could have all kind of trouble brewing. “That’s why you have to stay sharp, you can’t be complacent. My basic conclusion, based on my experience, is that you can’t see something that is impugning the integrity of a levee by looking at it through binoculars from a road.” The engineers agreed that the mistake thought to be at the heart of the New Orleans catastrophes—sheet piling too short to prevent seepage—would not have been visible through a walking inspection. And while the use of new, sophisticated ground sonars might have detected weakened soil layers before Katrina, justifying the expense of such a search would have been difficult without evidence, especially in view of recent budget cutbacks. But that’s why these inspections have to be done conscientiously,” Bea said. “You’re talking about a system that is supposed to keep half a million people safe.” In fact, investigators now believe there were warning signs that trouble was brewing below the grassy surface of the levees. Residents living along the 17^th Street Canal levee had reported flooded lawns to the Sewerage & Water Board, a problem the Levee Board and Corps of Engineers said they never heard about. Further, NSF investigators said several residents reported other leaks, sand boils and depressions in the levees near the floodwalls—warning signs that the federal regulations tell the corps to look for in the mandated inspections.

Bob Marshall can be reached at rmarshall@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3539.

I myself have witnessed large amounts of water flowing under the river levees at high water stage and wondered how safe we are from River flooding. The citizens of NOLA have great reason to suspect that all of the levees in th US are similarly neglected.

Katrina, the Corps of Engineers and Politics

The history of the drainage ("outfall") canal system in New Orleans goes back more than a century. The 17th street outfall canal dates to before WWI (at least 1913). The political control was the purvey of the Orleans Levee Board (OLB) who had authority over the land primarily, the Sewer and Water Board who had control over the use of the canal for drainage, and the Corps of Engineers who were charged to protect the city from storm surges. In the 1960's enter the Lake Pontchartrain's wetlands environmental groups who wanted to preserve wildlife, fishing, swimming and boating interests. The Corps was always under the the fiscal control of Congress, but this is mainly a problem of sales and consensus building for the Corps that they are used to and expert at. After hurricane Betsy, in the 1960's the Corps developed a "barrier plan" similar to the Dutch Zuider Zee. It would have controlled the storm surge in Lake Pontchartrain by means of a lock and dam installed in the Rigolettes ). This proposal was delayed and stymied by environmental and economic concerns and was abandoned in the late 1980's for the "high level plan" which involved raising the height of the levees and flood wall along the outfall canals. This decision put NOLA at great risk and transferred the responsibility of the canals to the OLD and SWB. Then the SWB in attempting to improve its ability to drain rainfall from the City requested permission from the Corps to dredge the 17th street canal to improve it drainage efficiency. In spite of warnings, the Corps granted the permit and dredging was completed in the late 1990's. Warnings were ignored that pointed to the exact spot where the levee later failed. All of this can be read in the Legal Brief on the class action suit against the Corps and the U.S.
The Judge dismissed the complaints because citizens can't sue the government but his words are damning to say the least:

This story–fifty years in the making–is heart-wrenching. Millions of dollars were squandered in building a levee system with respect to these outfall canals which was known to be inadequate by the Corps’ own calculations. The byzantine funding and appropriation
methods for this undertaking were in large part a cause of this failure. In addition, the failure of Congress to oversee the building of the LPV and the failure to recognize that it was flawed from practically the outset–using the wrong calculations for storm surge, failing to take into account subsidence, failing to take into account issues of the strength of canal walls at the 17th Street Canal while allowing the scouring out of the canal–rest with those who are charged with oversight. The cruel irony here is that the Corps cast a blind eye, either as a result of executive directives or bureaucratic parsimony, to flooding caused by drainage needs and until therwise directed by Congress, solely focused on flooding caused by storm surge. Nonetheless, damage caused by either type of flooding is ultimately borne by the same public . Such egregious myopia is a caricature of bureaucratic inefficiency. It is not within this Court’s power to address the wrongs committed. It is hopefully within the citizens of the United States’ power to address the failures of our laws and agencies. If not, it is certain that another tragedy such as this will occur again.

STANWOOD R. DUVAL, JR.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT JUDGE

Katrina the Corps and Science

The story of the flooding of New Orleans is now full of Urban Myths mostly perpetrated by the Corps of Engineers. It was NOT A NATURAL DISASTER. It was an ENGINEERING FAILURE comparable to CHERNOBYL. The design of the levees was fatally flawed and the Corps is busily trying to hide that fact from the public. They have hired a public relations firm and lobbied to have a Geologist critic fired from LSU and have accused him of spreading miss information because he is not an engineer. The partial story is at NY Times If you want the full story, go to: http://levees.org/index. The short story is that Katrina, although a large and dangerous storm, was down graded to category three before landfall. The storm surge, although high, was not a record breaker and was LOWER THAN THE DESIGNED MAXIMUM storm surge height. The flaw in their design was a simple one in my theory. Civil Engineers are used to designing buildings and structures that sit vertically and are subject to gravitational forces. The Levees most of their life time just sit there and do the same. The exception came when the storm surge raised the level of water to a considerable height. The shape of the stress ellipsoid was changed suddenly as a significant horizontal force perpendicular to the Levee was introduced by the hydrostatic component from the filled canal. The design engineers had used the compressional strength of the soils and now suddenly the SHEAR STRENGTH of the soils became a critical factor. The result was classic slumping of the levee, i.e., the horizontal thrusting of the levee until it completely breached. The post mortem on the levee showed that the cement T-wall was not over topped and back eroded as the Corps now contends. Rather, the entire levee was thrust more than 45 feet to the side and then the wall fell over(See the Independent Engineering Report fig 2.3b) . This was a predictable response to the forces involved if one took the time to model the levee as it was subjected to the forces of the surge and if one used the appropriate physical constants. We in the Earth Sciences have encountered Engineers
who have a limited concept of stress and strain relationships in the presence of anisotropy (almost certainly a factor in the soils), abnormal fluid pressure (certainly a factor), and significant stresses that are not vertical. The storm surge raised the water level (hydrostatic head) by about 10 feet . This increased (abnormal) fluid pressure was transmitted via the porous canal bottoms into the soils that supported the levee. The increased pressure caused a decrease in the soil strength (both compressional and shearing). As a result, a predictable failure of the levee occurred. A structural Geologist would look at this from the standpoint of M. King Hubbert's classic paper, "THE ROLE OF FLUID PRESSURE IN MECHANICS OF OVER THRUST FAULTING ", and would draw similarities to the Thrust Faults of the Canadian and Montana Rockies. The Corps explanation was that the levees were over topped and eroded from behind and that this was a 500 year event. So now we are faced with a Corps that has ignored Geologic and Geophysical advice for decades and has hired a PR firm with Tax Payer money to fight the bad press. We are also faced with a professional society, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ACSE) that has taken $2MM from the Corps to study the failures and has come up with a rosy picture of the Corps and tried to make Katrina out to be a storm of all storms which will never happen again (see link conflict of interest) . A Geologist activist at LSU has been fired for speaking out and the Corps has continued to shed the blame(Geologist(s) Slandered). Some Corps members have resorted to childish name calling (reference). I call on the members of the Geo Science community to take heed and even join the fight if you will. Katrina was only one example of the Corps failures. Many years ago when I was a Grad Student, I took a Graduate level course in Ground Water Hydrology. Most of the course was a diatribe against the Corps and all of its screw-ups. The USGS has been ignored while the Corps has gotten the go ahead to screw-up again and again. Join the Fight!
This is an ongoing problem. The Corps has obviously had some revised modeling done and it must have caused some panic because they started a new testing program on the repaired flood walls (Reference). This is a point of critical importance to the City and its future because if the repaired flood wall cannot stand up to several feet of water, then the rainfall in the City cannot effectively and promptly be pumped out to the lake. This will mean that the City will flood every time it rains hard. We have already had newly rebuilt and refurbished homes in Lake View flooded by rain because the Corps hadn't gotten the pumps working right - but that's a different Corps screw-up with the pumps that didn't work. How long do the Citizens of NOLA have to endure this incompetence and the attempts to cover it up?

THE REAL MIRACLE

This marvelous thought is from my wonderful wife, Diana. Consider the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000. Most discussions that I have heard involve a magical increase of the amount of food to the point that 5,000 were fed and satisfied. This may be the explanation, but a more logical and much more meaningful explanation is that the people that were there had heard Jesus speak of loving their neighbor and taken it to heart. Thus, Diana envisions people sharing food that they at first had hid, or passing the loaves and fishes on so that there would be food for their neighbors, and etc. The miracle becomes one of divine inspiration rather than magic. We think the latter is a more modern explanation.

Towards an Sensible Energy Policy

So far the Obama administration's energy policy has been a mishmash of silly to dangerous radical left ideas which were fostered by lobbyists for Wind, Ethanol, Nuclear, Solar, and Karma. These ideas are all far less than half baked (.001%). Their problem is that they generally have absolutely no concept of the size and cost of the Energy Infrastructure that they hope to replace with their little hope-child. Don't get me wrong, I really believe in hopes and aspirations - that is what America is all about. It is just that Obama, as inspiring as he is, just cannot do it for them. It also cannot be done in a short time. It took decades for the current energy infrastructure to be developed and tens of trillions of $. Most of Obama's stated policy and unstated policy will only make energy more expensive and less available thereby lowering our standard of living to that of his beloved Kenya.

Some Sensible and Do-able policys that Obama could enact tomorrow and have a positive effect on the Energy problem and the general economy

1. Put a $20-40 tariff on all imported oil. This will have a number of beneficial effects immediately.
a It will raise petroleum energy costs and therefore cut usage which will improve all types of pollution including CO2. It will also create a significant revenue stream for the Government.
b. The price increase will carry over to domestic production which will stimulate investment in exploration and production of American oil. This will produce many new jobs and new tax income for Governments.
c. The increased price of energy will provide the economic conditions for Alternative Energy to develop as a lower cost competitor to petroleum based energy.

2. Open all of the US outer continental shelf to petroleum exploration and production. This will immediately produce tens of thousands of high paying jobs and the sale of leases will produce a large yearly windfall of revenue for the government . As oil is produced, it will produce both new jobs and a significant revenue stream for the Government.

3. If a billionaire can create economic space travel that can compete well with NASA by simply offering a $10 Mil prize, why can't the Obama or the Gorical use similar carrot techniques to produce new and better energy generation technology. I know the answer. The Obama's and the Gore's of the world get their kicks from blaming others for the situation and want to punish those whose success has made them both jealous and guilty. GET OVER IT.

4. If wind and solar are being held back by insufficient power line infrastructure then this is truly a job for BIG GOVERNMENT. Does anyone remember the REA (rural electrification association?). When we wanted to get electricity to the Farms and Ranches, it took a big effort, but we got it to them eventually. Now we have the problem in reverse. The Farms and Ranches could produce huge amounts of electricity for our cities but the infrastructure is not there. Warren Buffet has said that alternative power generation will be the salvation of our languishing rural communities and put them in the forefront of job generation and income production once again. HOORAY

5. Isn't it time that the Snail Darter Minnow took a back seat to Hydroelectric power and water control by means of dams. We have let the interests of a few loud lobbyists for obscure animals hold up the development of much needed water and power resources. California and some other states are running out of water because we aren't capturing it and controlling its use as we should. Aquifers are being destroyed by over-pumping of wells. aquifer recharge through a system of Dams is a do-able remediation for overworked aquifers. Our population has grown to the point that wild life protection is not feasible in many areas. Anyone who has visited China understands that our land use must be engineered.

6. You've hired a Nobel Physicist as Science Advisor. Why not let him work on the problems of Nuclear Power Generation and Nuclear Waste Disposal instead of letting him embarrass himself with naive and half baked statements about the Global Warming controversy. For one thing this would allow him to be PROACTIVE rather than REACTIVE and second, it would be an excellent use of his talents. As he well knows, Nuclear is the long term answer to our energy needs. Nuclear can provide infinitely expandable energy and can be as safe as we want to engineer it to be. He also knows that the answer to nuclear waste disposal lies in the development of the technology to use it in the generation of even more power. LET THE MAN WORK!

7. Since the Obama regime is so big on new taxes, how about using a little economic common sense in designing the tax code. Accountants and Tax Lawyers are necessary but the current tax code is way too complex making it necessary to spend too much of the GDP on non income producing activities such as tax a$$ covering. How about simplifying the code so that ordinary people can fill out their business and personal tax forms with confidence.

* MR. Obama, if you really want to end this recession then start talking to Business Leaders as equals and stop using the press to fry them in public. Business has to lead us out of the recession and your choices are: LEAD, FOLLOW OR GET OUT OF THE WAY. It is time to stop the anti capitalist demagoguery.

Comrade Obama

Well, now we know what Obama's plans for us are. It is back to the back breaking and spirit breaking taxes for those of us that work. The promise of taxing the rich is now defined for us at the level of $75,000 joint income. His stated goals are to spread the wealth to all of those poor folks who never finished high school, never went to trade school, never learned to read or write and wasted their lives on drugs and alcohol. Those poor dears will swamp our medical facilities when universal health care gets implemented and those of us that have paid for our own health insurance will see our available health care greatly diminished. It will be like England and Canada where long waits for service end up with a Dr. x?.";*7% who was educated offshore and is barely able to speak English.
THE OBAMA PLAN:
1. He will try to break the back of the hard working middle class by taxing them to death. He is jealous of anyone who is successful and hard working
2. He will spend the tax money on the lazy class. He will pore funds into school systems that are totally uninterested in education of children. Teachers Unions will see to it that very little of the $ gets to the children. The winners are the Union power structure and the Principles and Administrators who inflate their salaries and self importance while the children languish.
3. He will pore money into the transportation infrastructure to pay off his debts to the construction, auto, and truckers unions.
4. He will pore money into alternative energy projects that will enrich certain political lobbyists. Alternative energy expenditures will not make energy crisis go away and it will cost a fortune and return a dime's worth of energy. Alternative energy will produce new and serious pollution problems as well. Efficient Solar requires rare metals that we will have to import and are a problem to dispose of after the solar cell is discarded.
3. He will pass laws that make dissent impossible (fairness doctirne). Obama can't seem to stand up and fight in a fair fight. The police state is already forming up in the name of equal rights (for the "right " people).
4. He will pass laws that force every worker to pay dues to and vote with the unions. Goon squads will enforce the rule that you vote the union way or else. This is the way it has been done in Chicago for over a century and this is the politics Obama knows and intends to use.
5. He will use front men to scare the public into compliance with his every scheme. Look at the radical statements about global warming f0r the model of 21st centure fear mongering. Thousands of eminent scientists have publically expressed their doubts about the degree of human impact on the climate. The Obama-Gore axis power dismisses them without any thought. of The use of the BIG LIE was developed by Stalin and used very effectively to control his unrully peoples in the Soviet Union. We should all be reading Alexsander Solzenitzen books (The Gulag Archepeligo, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,....) now to get a good understanding of what Gulags are and how OBAMA intends to use them.

OBAMA has the strong support of the Eastern Financial Intelligentsia. It is they who have benefited from the BAIL OUT. It is curious that BUSH (an ivy leager) and OBAMA (an ivy leager) should see eye to eye on bailing out their buddies at the big wall street firms. They keep trying to make us believe that if the wall street banks go down, then the world economy goes with it. Out here in the middle west our banks have money to lend and are still doing so. How can this be if wall street is bankrupt? The answer is that certain groups are being protected by the gorernment and as such are insiders. Our tax payer money is being stolen from us right under our noses by the very elected officials who have promised transparency.

Discovering God by Professor Rodney Stark

Discovering God

The Great Revelations of the 6^th Century B.C.E.

Rodney Stark

• Rodney Stark is an American sociologist of religion. He grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota in a Lutheran family. He spent time in the U.S. Army and as a journalist before pursuing graduate studies at The University of California, Berkeley. After teaching at the University of Washington for 32 years, Stark moved to Baylor University in 2004. He is an advocate of the application of Rational Choice Theory in the sociology of religion. One of Stark's hallmarks is writing with respect about the religions he studies.

Discovering God (review)

• Discovering God is a monumental history of the origins of the great religions from the Stone Age to the Modern Age. Sociologist Rodney Stark surveys the birth and growth of religions around the world—from the prehistoric era of primal beliefs; the history of the pyramids found in Iraq, Egypt, Mexico, and Cambodia; and the great "Axial Age" of Plato, Zoroaster, Confucius, and the Buddha, to the modern Christian missions and the global spread of Islam.

How do we know what the Ancients Believed?

• Ceremonial Burials with “stuff” needed in the afterlife

• Altars, Implements, and Inscriptions

• The Bible, and other ancient religious books and traditions

• The Tel’s or mounds of cuneiform tablets from Sumer that contain detailed instructions on religions ceremony.

TIME LINE

• -200,000 B.C.E Ceremonial burials

• -10,000 B.C.E. Altars and Idols

• -4000 B.C.E Sumer, professional priests

• -1400 B.C.E. Akhenaton, monotheism

• -1300 B.C.E The Exodus from Egypt

• -1000 B.C.E Kings David and Solomon, the first Temple in Jerusalem

• -900 B.C.E Elijah

• -800 B.C.E. Isaiah (1st), Founding of Rome

THE GREAT AXIAL AGE -600 TO -501 B.C.E

• Zoroaster in Persia founds monotheistic religion

• Pythagoras and Orpheus sects founded in Greece

• Upanishads in India Revolutionize Hinduism

• Jainism perfected in India

• Buddha founds a new faith in India

• Lao Tzu founds Taoism in China

• Confucius founds a new Religion in China

THE GREAT AXIAL AGE -600 TO -501 B.C.E

• Jews taken in captivity to exile in Babylon

• The first Temple Destroyed

• The Jews return from exile and build the second Temple in Jerusalem

• Isaiah (2^nd), Jeremiah, and Ezekiel

• The Roman Republic is established

• Mayan Civilization and Religion arises

THE GREAT AXIAL AGE -600 TO -501 B.C.E

• Early Religion demanded sacrifice to the Gods to propitiate their anger and obtain their favor. Worship was a foreign concept.

• The Gods were previously viewed as immortal beings but not Omniscient, Omnipotent, nor especially nice.

• No link existed between religion and moral conduct.

• The revolutionary religious outlook that appeared in the Axial Age was that religion was rendered ethical . God was now seen as demanding that we live a moral life.

THE GREAT AXIAL AGE -600 TO -501 B.C.E

• During the Great Axial Age the idea rapidly spread the we earn our fates by our behavior, thus the connected concepts of sin and salvation had been discovered.

• Hinduism, Greek Orphic and Pythagorean Mysteries – the “good” are reborn to higher social status and vice versa

• Buddha – A moral code of conduct for followers.

• Jews and Zoroastrians developed strongly held views of Sin and Salvation at this time

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPT OF SIN

• If God and his Creation are Perfect, how do we explain the existence of evil?

• All of the major religions are dualistic. They assume the existence of lesser spiritual beings such as Satan, Angels, Demons, Cherubim and Seraphim, and etc. who exist and operate only within God’s authority.

• Satan is not God’s equal but he is stronger than any Man.

Divine Accommodation

• God’s Revelations are always limited to the current capacity of humans to comprehend

• God is forced to resort to “baby talk”

• Jesus put it this way “This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand”.

Divine Accommodation

• Origen wrote: “ We teach about God both what is true and what the multitude can understand. The written revelation in inspired scripture is a veil that must be penetrated. It is an accommodation to our present capacities that will one day be superseded”.

• Augustine wrote: “since God is incapable of either error or falsehood, if the Bible seems to contradict knowledge, that is because of a lack of understanding on the part of the servant who recorded God’s words”.

Divine Accommodation

• Stark: “Hence it can be argued that if religions have much in common, that is to be expected because each is based on revelations, variously accommodated and interpreted, from the One True God.”

Stark’s Criteria for Divine Revelation

• God must “reveal himself” as opposed to discovery during deep meditation or drug induced trance.

• God’s revelation must have consistency over time and distance

• Revelations must show increasing complexity over time as dictated by man’s increased intellectual abilities

Christianity and Science

• “Christianity epitomizes revealed religion and offers a substantially more nuanced vision of God --- and presents a more comprehensive doctrine of salvation.”

• “Real Science arose only once: in Europe, not in China, Islam, India Ancient Greece or Rome. All these societies developed elaborate systems of alchemy, but only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry.

Science and Christianity

• By the same token, many societies developed elaborate systems of astrology based on excellent observations of the stars, but only in Europe did astrology lead to scientific astronomy. Why?

• Most non-Christian religions do not posit a Creation at all: the universe is eternal and while it may pursue cycles, it is without beginning or purpose, and most important of all, having never been created, has no Creator. Consequently the universe is thought to be a supreme mystery, inconsistent, unpredictable, and arbitrary”.

Christianity and Science

• “In contrast, based on their commitment to Judeo-Christian theology, Europeans assumed, not only, that the universe was created, but that its workings are logical and consistent, thereby being susceptible to reason and inquiry.”

• “Consequently, science arose only in Christian Europe primarily because only Europeans believed it could be done and should be done.”

Science and Theology

• Stark: “I find it more rational to regard the Universe itself as the Ultimate Revelation of God and to agree with Kepler that in the most fundamental sense, Science is Theology and thereby serves as another method for the discovery of God”.

• Tulane Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, Frank Tipler, agrees. (The Physics of Immortality)