Once again, the office is in FL.  We pray a tsunami will not make GA the southern border of the US.

A new year without encountering the specter of EMP–otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.  To celebrate we’re having a special temporary sale of the epub or mobi electronic versions of EARTH IS NOT ALONE for $2.69, but only here. “Fire” up your new Kindle and check out the beautiful color cover.  (Noted artist Dominic Catalano’s timeless pen-and-pencil illustrations remain the same–as they should be.)

(Thirty cents?  Three dimes for three worlds?  Wow…)

Join us in moving EARTH IS NOT ALONE along in its eBook format!  In just minutes get your $2.99 copy–complete with illustrations by Dominic Catalano–for a great gray, winter weekend in front of the fire.  Or read a chapter a day, in a private corner, for the next 50 days and open up to a truly unique romance with life and death consequences involving 2–make that 3–planets.

Very, very readable–even out loud.  Your bringing a touch of nerdy-ness in science and/or Bible is not a handicap. . .

A great holiday gift to lift you into the New Year.

My essay “Can a Rational Person Take the Bible Seriously Today?” is the feature article at the website www.torahclass.com as I write these words.  (Later it can be found in their archives.)  The recent book EVIDENCE FOR GOD: 50 ARGUMENTS FOR FAITH FROM THE BIBLE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE edited by William Dembski and Michael Licona is exciting for those interested in understanding and defending Christian faith in a modern, post-Christian world.  Thirty-six scholars from some of the best schools in the world (who aren’t just some untrained and poorly informed fundamentalists in the choir who hand out honorary doctorates to each other) present 50 responses to, or arguments for, the real Christian faith today.  I provide 25 chapter titles to bait the hook in my Torah Class article cited above.

May I suggest your buying an ebook version of this and devoting–say–2 days to each brief and very readable chapter for a daily challenge to awaken your thinking?  (And address some nagging questions you may have about certain issues–the historicity of the resurrection?  the nature of the Bible?  the effect of science?  the problem of evil? for example.)  This is great opportunity to try electronicaly underlining, writing notes, and searching back and forth, etc.  And you can carry everything in your pocket!

The book is very readable to most of you out there, and though some articles may pass you by, you’ll nonetheless be impressed about how the authors identify and address troubling problems.

And if I’m “poorly informed” on this, let me know where and how.  We live in a world that hungers for answers…and trying to fill in the blanks is no guarantee I’ll get everything right…

We’re now at the top of the Tower (3rd floor) at 46 Knappian Way on the shore of Heart Lake in Montrose PA.  (What the flood from Hurricane Lee did can be viewed on Utube.  Who shot this sequence, I’ve no idea.  But you can catch a glimpse of me to the left in a paddleboat along a dock as I cruised the shore, helping “to bail and carry.”  (My son in Israel saw this first and informed me…) The silence is over.  More comments forthcoming.  Response welcome.

simply google “john knapp2 and earth is not alone,” linking author and title that way. That’s the quick way to gather info these days on any classic or fly-by-night (ephemeral?) product.  Consider who says what and why.  Google will give you, in this case, several pages to think about…

EARTH IS NOT ALONE became an eBook just recently for Barnes and Noble, joining Amazon and the iBookstore–and now at all places, selling for only $2.99

Florida is getting a bit too warm.  The Susquehanna Territory is beckoning…

On Jan. 27, 2011, Amazon reported that for the first time e-books outsold paperbacks!  For every 100 paperbacks sold this year, 115 e-books were sold.  This, says Amazon, occurred sooner than expected, eclipsing the sales of less-popular hardcovers that occurred last July.

The world is changing–though the feel of paper and that dusty slide of favorite volumes off and on the shelves will still be with us.

Earth Is Not Alone has been part of this.  Beautifully modified, retaining most of its special art, and available for only $3.99, it can be on the Kindle (or other e-reader) where you sit in only minutes.

For more see money.cnn.com/2011/01/27/technology/amazon-earnings/index.htm

Or EINA at Amazon…

The advantage?

Among other things, you can carry it with other favorites neatly in your pocket, and run down reviews, and word-search characters and other details, highlighting favorite parts–for writing a paper, but better yet, for reading in bursts in that predictable wait for your significant other to return to the car with those “3 things only” that she (or he) set out to purchase.

Especially if you have a predilection for stories that are aware of Christian faith.  Look to www.titletrakk.com (that’s with 2 k’s and no c) for what’s happening in new books.  Of the dozens of reviews of my Earth Is Not Alone one the most patient, insightful, and thorough ones is found here…and all the way from New Zealand.   (For EINA go to book archives, and hit “K.”)

Who’s who in science and Christian faith were there: William Dembski, Dinesh D’Sousa, Hugh Ross, Fuz Rana, Walt Kaiser, Deborah Haarsma, C. John “Jack Collins, Allister McGrath, myself (of course) and others.  Three jam-packed days discussing how science and Christianity go together, theistic evolution vs intelligent design–which better explains the new discoveries in genetic research on the human genome?  And much more.

Which will come later…

A warm-up: Imagine a hotel with a finite number of rooms.  Suppose all rooms are filled.  As a new guest arrives, the Proprietor (P) says “Sorry, all rooms are full.”  End of story.

Now suppose that there is an infinite number of rooms [#1, #2, #3 . . .] instead, and all rooms are occupied–not a single vacant room.  Now another guest arrives and asks for a room. “But of course!” says P, and immediately he shifts the person in #1 into Room #2, the person in #2 into #3 and so on out to infinity.  Now Room #1 is vacant and the newcomer is housed, even though before all rooms were occupied!

Suppose, however, an infinity of new guests shows up at the desk, each person asking for a room.  “Of course, of course!” says P, and he shifts the person (p) in Room #1 into Room #2, the p in Room #2 into Room #4 , the p in Rm #3 into Rm#6, etc. out to infinity, always putting each former occupant into a rm with number twice his own. Because a number multiplied by 2 always equals an even number, all guests end up in even numbered rooms!  As a result all the odd-numbered rooms become vacant, so these can accommodate the infinity of new guests, despite the fact that the hotel was already full!  For the record, P could repeat this process an infinite number of times.

But now suppose that guests in rooms #1, #3, #5 . . . check out.  Now an infinite number of guests have left and half the rooms are empty.  But a half empty hotel looks bad for business.  No matter.  By shifting occupants as before, but in reverse order, P transforms his half-vacant hotel into one jammed to the gills!  Thus you might think that P could always keep this strange hotel fully occupied.  But you would be wrong.

Because if guests in Rooms #4, #5, #6 . . . checked out, at a single stroke the hotel would be virtually emptied, leaving only 3 registered guests, and infinitude would be converted to finitude.  And yet it would remain that the same number of guests checked out this time as when guests in Rooms #1, #3, #5 . . . checked out!

In both cases we subtracted the identical number of guests from the identical number of guests and yet did not arrive at an identical result.

In short, a suitable sign for Hilbert’s Hotel would be “NO VACANCY, GUESTS WELCOME.”  As far as dealing with real, tangible things, Hilbert’s Hotel is absurd.

This illustration is a small, small part of William Lane Craig’s argument from philosophy (in Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics–an eBook for $7.99, that has much, much more, including arguments from up-to-date science) in his case that an infinite number of things cannot exist, which implies a Beginning, and that something or someone outside the physical universe had to start things off.