On the Problem of Evil

Does Evil Exist?

A philosopher, which I am not, would have plenty of ways to argue that evil does not in fact exist.  However, I, and probably you, are not philosophers.  So we can rest assured that evil exists because this is consistent with our human experience.  Bashar al-Assad is probably evil.  Mother Theresa is of course very good.

So we know by experience and intuition that human evil exists.

What is the problem?

Evil is only a problem if we believe in a god that loves us.  If you don't fall into that category, then this blog post is not for you.  But if you suppose that such a god may exist, proceed.

Here is the problem very simply, although it can be worded in different ways:

Premise 1.) God is supposed by most theists to be all good, all knowing, and all powerful.

Premise 2.) Evil exists on Earth.

Premise 3.) If God was as he is supposed to be by theists, then he would not let evil happen.

Conclusion: God is not all good, not all knowing, not all powerful, or does not exist.

Now notice that I have smuggled in a stock conclusion.  Sometimes the Christian replaces the conclusion with a simple question mark... What are we to conclude?  If we accept all the premises, which I think it is hard not to, then the conclusion seems pretty natural.  If God is not what Christians suppose him to be, why believe in him?  And isn't it easier and simpler to just throw out the whole idea of a god and settle on atheism?

Woah.  Ouch.  This is the kind of question that a great many Christians feel uncomfortable approaching, but I think this is because they just don't know how to answer it.  Let me offer my own amateur thoughts on the question.

What are you asking God to do?

Ultimately, when the skeptic brings up the problem of human evil, he fails to consider the award-winning paradox he lands into his own boat.  What, my dear skeptic, are you asking God to do?

First let us consider human will.  You and I, normal people, will agree that we have a will that generally is subject to our desires and allows us to carry out our own personal program.  The direction in which our wills are oriented depends upon our spiritual status, our mood, our digestion, and many other things.  But we will probably agree that our wills are "free" in the sense that no one is flipping the switches in our heads; no one is taking the wheel and making us do things as though we were controlled by a different personality, or our own bodies.  Christians call such people "possessed" by demons or what have you.  Some people, theists and materialists alike, believe in "determinism."  In this doctrine, our wills are not "free" in any sense because our actions were predetermined by physical laws at the creation of the universe, some 14 billion years ago.  In general, people do not accept this doctrine because it is probably insane, so let us proceed without acknowledging it.  So we probably have a "free will."

But we use it toward the wrong ends.  Because we as a race are undisciplined and don't really like listening to the laws written on our hearts, our wills are oriented in all different directions, often in contradiction to one another.  More on this in another blog post.

So what is God to do?

Strike free will?  Somehow annihilate evil without impacting our wills?  What?

God and Possible Worlds

Let us take a page from the philosophical notion of "possible worlds."  Possible worlds are simply imaginary universes where we imagine that different scenarios are playing out and try to guess the logical consequences of these scenarios (this is my own incomplete understanding).  

A hint of what I lay out below is found in book 5, Pro and Contra, of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, in a section in which Ivan is discussing exactly this problem with Alyosha.  It's probably the best treatment of the problem of evil in a fictional work.

If we imagine possible worlds as far as free will and evil, we come up with some startling scenarios.

1.) A universe with free will but no possibility of evil

2.) A universe with free will and the possibility of evil

3.) A universe with no free will and no possibility of evil

4.) A universe with no free will but with the possibility evil

Again, let us suppose that God is good, knows everything, and is powerful.  At the beginning he created the universe, and he could have only chosen one of the four options above.  To do otherwise would be a self-contradiction, which theologians generally agree God cannot do, even if he so chose (he would not).  And if he were good, he would choose to create the most good universe.  That's what he does.  So which is most good?

Well, universe 1 seems contradictory.  How can your will be free if there is no possibility of using it toward the wrong ends?  If God did interventionist miracles every time you freely chose to do something evil, then he would be constantly meddling with the fabric of reality.  A criminal tries to rob a bank, and shoots at the teller; but God stops the bullet so the teller is fine.  Why stop there?  Why not cause the gun to malfunction so it doesn't fire in the first place?  Why not override the criminal's nervous system so that he can't pull the trigger?  Why not strike the thought from his head in the first place, perform a sort of miraculous lobotomy?

Do you see the problem here?  By removing the possibility of human evil, God has also removed free will.  So universe 1 would not be possible anyway.

Universe 2 seems to be the universe we inhabit.

Universe 3 does seem possible.  It's outlined in the interventionist universe described above.  But that universe is probably not the "most good" universe, because we have no free wills.  And you and I can agree that having our own wills is a good thing.  So God, if he is good, would not want to remove from us the possibility of using our own wills, which of course can be directed toward very altruistic and saintly ends.

Universe 4 doesn't sound good at all, and it may also, like universe 1, be self-contradictory.  No free will, but with evil all around?  Who would want to live there?  Certainly a good God would not create it.

So it sounds like universe 2 is the "most good" universe, even though we have abused our free will and now inhabit a universe in which evil is actual, rather than only potential.

Again: What are you asking God to do?

God only had so many options when creating our universe.  Free will, or no free will.  The possibility of evil, or no possibility of evil.  That we have decided to turn our Earth into a battleground where the Devil always seems to be winning, that was our choice, not God's.

This discussion has not proven that God exists, not by a stretch.  But it should shed some light on why all Christians both believe in a good God and also acknowledge that evil really does exist.

Why Does Virtue Hurt?

Why Virtue Hurts

Why does it pain us to do good?  Why do we cringe at doing the right thing, almost to the point that it physically hurts our bodies?  Certainly this must be one of the greatest wonders of the human soul.

Virtue is from the Latin word virtus, which means "excellence."  Any excellent quality can be referred to as a virtue, but usually we use it in the sense of moral excellence.  A virtuous man is one who is brave, honest, kind, and chaste.  A vicious man is one who is a coward, a cheat, a sadist, and a Lothario.

Why does the vicious man experience pain when he tries to be brave, or honest, or kind, or chaste?  Take it from me, a very, very vicious man.

Being really very vicious, sometimes I struggle to make a clear picture of my own problems.  The deeper into the chasm of sin you sink, the less you see your own vice.  It's just like sinking into a real abyss; the nourishing light of the sun fades as you descend.  Why does it hurt to be good?

The Benevolent Architect

I'll take another example from C.S. Lewis to explain this.  (I briefly refer to it in another blog post.)

Imagine that you are a house.  Your siding is stained, and some of your drywall has cracks in it, and one of the inside columns is not bearing the load all that well.  Some of the carpeting is stained and worn, and you have water marks in the ceiling, and your basement floods when it storms and is all musky.  Your roof really needs re-shingling and you're pretty sure that you have rats living in your walls.  It's possible that there are bats in the attic as well.

But all the same, you're a content, happy little house, even though you have one or two little problems here and there.

Image source

Suppose that a gifted architect and interior designer takes a liking to you and decides to live inside.  He starts by replacing the carpets and patching up the drywall.  He reinforces the columns and fixes the basement sump pump so it doesn't flood anymore.  He fumigates the place to get rid of the vermin in the walls and attic.  He even has the roof re-shingled to keep the drywall from spotting.

You're feeling pretty good about things, in fact you feel brand new!  And you really feel content that the architect will stop there.

But now he starts knocking about inside in ways that are really very painful to you.  He starts fixing things that you didn't think needed fixing.  He topples a wall here and installs a fireplace.  He knocks out the south side and puts in a sun room.  He rips out all the plumbing and wiring and starts to replace it with brand new stuff.  He puts in a new bathroom with a big tub.

Now all this hurts you a great deal, and all the while you really wish that he would stop and leave you alone.  You never wanted to be a great house, just a regular decent one.  Why all this fuss?

The architect is not content to make you a "good" house.  He needs you to be a perfect house because he wants to live inside you.  And when he is finally all done, you look at yourself to find that you are so grand and beautiful that you weren't sure how you could have doubted him in the first place.

Image source

How We are Like Houses

This is how God has his way with us.  We are all really very bad, and that badness is the result of a variety of disorders.  But when God calls us and we listen (and even start to do as he has always demanded), he gains a sort of entry into our minds and begins to crush and stamp out the miserly demons in our hearts.  This is painful.  When I find myself deciding to choose a virtuous course of action (all too rare), it- in a perpetually curious way- does me some discomfort.  This is probably much the same for all people, to different degrees and regarding different virtues.

God will not have you as "good enough."  Jesus said himself, "Be ye perfect."  Not "Be ye pretty good."

God wants to live inside you, not visit on Sundays.

God will have the whole thing, or nothing.  He will have all of you, or have no part.  Often a man becomes a Christian to cure a certain vice.  He wants to be brave, or stop lying, or be kind, or stop sleeping around.  And when God cures that vice for him, he says to himself, "Well, that's all good and well.  Now I can get on with my life."  But the true Christian finds that God doesn't seem to think that it's all good and well, and starts acting on him in ways that the convert had not expected.  Sometimes this frightens people and they fall away, and of course, fall back into their old vices.  Always it requires a sort of acquiescence on the part of the Christian, who submits and finds himself much better than he ever imagined.

There is a beautiful hymn that goes like this:

And he will raise you up on eagles wings,

Bear you on the breath of dawn,

Make you to shine like the sun,

And hold you in the palm of his hand.

God wants you to shine like the sun, not glimmer like a sputtering candle flame.  He wants you to be a spotlight, not a candle.  And he will help you to shine; he doesn't expect you to be able to do it on your own.  Remember, he knows the condition of the vehicle you are trying to drive, and it's bad. 

Let him repair you, and later you will wonder why you ever doubted him in the first place.

Morality, Psychoanalysis, and Miley Cyrus

Image Source

An outrageous social depravity like the much overblown Miley Cyrus scandal always gets me thinking about America's collective moral poverty.  Of course, her degrading display should in no way be surprising or considered conclusive evidence that we are socially and morally going down the tubes (there was plenty of evidence of that already).  Indeed, Cyrus was well on the way to weirdness with her hit single "We Can't Stop."  And don't forget that Robin Thicke was there too, and deserves just as much scorn.  But Cyrus and Thicke are by no means the worst people around.

A niggling inconsistency in our consideration of moral behavior has always bothered me: A revulsion at the moral weakness of others and a simpering excuse for our own.

Owning up to the conditions of our own individual depravity hurts because it shrivels our pride.  We love to be proud of ourselves.  "I did such-and-such because I'm such a good person.  Well, I only said so-and-so to him because I was really tired and out of patience, and besides he was being unfair.  I volunteered at such-and-such place because I'm just so charitable.  Well, I didn't say my prayers that morning because I probably would have been late for work."  And so on, and so on.

You see what we do here, don't you?  My good deeds and qualities are entirely and unreservedly my own doing, while my worse moments are caused by some external factor that exonerates me from any guilt.  "I'm a good person" is such a deeply and falsely entrenched personal assertion that we can do no wrong ourselves and see all the wrongs in others.

I say this not as a moralist, but as a great and mighty sinner.  I have some sense of how a mind deeply wounded with sin and pride functions, because that's me in a nutshell.  But a soul scarred by sin turns out to not perceive its own sin very well, just as a myopic man can't see himself all too well in the mirror.  So I'll take a page from C.S. Lewis and explain a few things about psychology and sin.

Sigmund Freud pioneered a sort of therapeutic science called psychoanalysis, in which a trained professional works with a patient to identify what is broken or perverted in his psyche.  The hope is that in fixing the broken part, the patient can get on with his life and make more healthy choices.  The psyche is here seen as the raw material that a person functions upon.  You can't choose to be brave if every fiber of your being is steeped in deep-seated cowardice.  You can't choose chastity if your every sexual impulse is directed at the wrong object, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong frequency, or for the wrong reasons.  We all know this on some level.

A bad man does bad things for one of two reasons: Either his raw material is disordered and orients him- without much consent on his part- toward evil, or his raw material is fine yet he freely chooses himself over another.  This is ultimately the cause of all human evil, but notice that the distinction between the two states above is striking.  The first scenario is a matter of a disordered psyche; the second is a matter of moral choices.

We tend to be judged by others by our external actions.  Notice this.  And note that, as I explained above, a man's external actions result from the interaction between his own choices and his psychological raw material.  But God does not judge a man on his raw material.  God knows the vehicle you are trying to drive.  He knows that the brakes don't work right, and the timing on the cylinders is all off, that the oil hasn't been changed in 12,000 miles, that the steering fluid is almost gone, that the muffler is dangling by a thread.  He knows and is sympathetic.  You didn't ask for the wreck of a vehicle you are trying to drive; you were saddled with it long before you had any choice.  But you have to do what you can with it.

What I mean to point out here is that a man's goodness is not to be judged by the ultimate results of his own disordered decisions; he is judged by what good he does with his raw materials.  The smallest kind action taken by a boy raised to be cruel might be a great act of self-sacrifice, while the grandest and most altruistic act of charity by a saint is simply a matter of doing what he is meant to do in the first place.

This may in a small way be what Jesus meant by "Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort."  (Luke 6:24)  Woe to the man who is nurtured in goodness and has a strong heredity and a good digestion, for much much more is expected from him.  Such a man who obtains anything less than sainthood is to be pitied.  But also, "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God." (Luke 6:20)  Blessed is the man whose soul is tortured and twisted by sin, because of all people he needs God the most.

A common Christian prayer goes, "Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, and save us from the fires of Hell; lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in the greatest need of thy mercy."

But God, all the same, is not content with a twisted, wretched soul.  He wants all souls to be with him in Heaven, so this necessitates some intervention on his part.  And his intervention hurts, because, if you ask him, he will help you to kill that self-oriented, hellish part of yourself, and it will kick and scream all the way to the gallows.  More about this in another blog post.

So back to the poor, pitiable Miley Cyrus.  Is what she did scandalous and to be ridiculed?  I think so, yes.  Did she perform this public act of self-degradation because she is intrinsically twisted and evil?  Perhaps.  But in that case she is only to be pitied.  Maybe she even restrained herself from doing something much worse.  Is she really so evil?  I don't think so, not more than the rest of us.

The external actions of Cyrus, resulting from a combination of her own weakness and the pressures of the entertainment industry, should not be used as a tool for moralizers to bask in what they see as their own goodness.

Remember that this was exactly what the Pharisees did, and most of them are probably in Hell.

On Radiometric Dating and the Age of the Earth

We Are Understandably Confused

One scientific analytical technique that seems to thoroughly flummox the non-scientist is radiometric dating.  Being what sometimes appears abstruse and obfuscated in its methods and analysis, biblical creationists on occasion throw their hands up and cite its difficulty as suggesting that evidence of an ancient earth is fabricated.  When working at a summer bible camp in northern Michigan in 2009, I encountered a camp nurse who actually said, "One thing to consider about all this radiometric dating is that the baseline numbers they use in their analysis are arbitrary, made up.  You can't draw any meaningful conclusion from that."  In spite of my insistence, she walked away smugly satisfied that radiometric dating is bunk.

Refer to my first blog post "The Purpose of this Blog" to see how I felt.

You might remember this idea from CHEM 115, but you might not, or maybe you never really understood it.  Here's the skinny on this technique.

Isotopes and the Formation of Carbon-14

Start with carbon dating.  All elements in the universe have what are called isotopes.  An isotope is a version of an element that has the same number of protons, but a different number of neutrons.  Different isotopes have different masses, but they retain the same elemental identity, which is determined by protons.  See the three isotopes of hydrogen below for an example.  The yellow balls are protons (each hydrogen atom only has one), while the orange ones are neutrons (each different isotope has different numbers of neutrons).

Image source

A somewhat rare isotope of carbon is made out of nitrogen in the upper atmosphere.  The stable and most common isotope of carbon is carbon-12: it has 6 protons and 6 neutrons.  Sunlight strikes the common isotope of nitrogen-14, turns one of its protons into a neutron, and now you have a heavier-than-usual carbon atom, with a mass of 14.  Carbon-14 is produced in the atmosphere at a predictable rate, depending on the activity of the sun, which varies somewhat according to the solar cycle.

All living things have the same concentration of C-14 in their bodies as the atmosphere has.  This is because the C-14 is absorbed by plants and algae, which we and other animals consume to constitute the carbon-based materials of our bodies.  When we die, we stop absorbing C-14.

Radioactive Decay and Half-Lives

Follow everything so far?  Because here comes the important part.

Now C-14 is chemically identical to C-12, but it is also slightly radioactive.  That means that a sample of C-14 will radioactively decay (revert back to nitrogen-14 and spit out some electrons and exotic particles called "electron neutrinos" in the process of beta-decay) over a measurable period.  Precisely, exactly half of a sample of C-14 will decay into N-14 over the course of 5730 years.  We know this because when we measure a sample of a known number of C-14 atoms, they emit beta radiation at a measurable rate.  We can extrapolate this measurement of decay rate to find that in 5730 years, said sample will have only 1/2 as many radioactive particles (C-14) as it does today.  Note that C-14 is always radioactively decaying in your body, but it is also be replenished quickly enough that your C-14 levels stay the same throughout your life.

So as soon as an organism dies, it stops replenishing the C-14, and so C-14 concentration drops according to its half-life of 5730 years.  The C-14 decays into nitrogen, which leaves as a gas.

Now we can take a sample and measure how much C-14 is has, either by using a process known as mass spectrometry (which is scary accurate) or simply measuring its radioactivity with a precise Geiger counter (a little less reliable, but still good).

If only 1/2 of the C-14 remains that ought to, then we know that one "half-life" has elapsed, so 5730 years has gone by since the organism died.  If 1/4 remains, then two half-lives, or 11,460 years, have passed.  If 1/8 remains, then three half-lives, or 17,190 years have elapsed, and so on as seen in this chart.  There are some calculations we can do with exponents that allow us to calculate other fractions.  To the right is an excellent little animation that visualizes radioactive decay.  Note that C-14 dating is only good for organic samples that are less than 60,000 years old, otherwise too little C-14 remains to make an accurate measurement.

Use in Rocks

So what if the sample you are testing is from a non-living substance, like a rock?  This gets much, much more complex, but the basic radiometric foundations are the same as those described above.  We can't use C-14 anymore, because it's not found in rocks.  So we have to use a different set of radioactive isotopes.

                                                                                 Image source

The isotopes we use for rock dating come in sets of pairs.  The first of the pair is found in greatest abundance in fresh igneous (volcanic) rocks, the next is found in increasing abundance as the first isotope radioactively decays.  When rocks are brought to what is called closure temperature and melted in the lab, the ratios of these pairs reset in a predictable fashion and the radiometric clock goes back to zero.  This shows that fresh magma will always have a predictable ratio of isotopes.  It also means that rocks can only be dated to the last time they were melted.

If we can compare how much of each isotope there is, we can use the same calculations outlined above to identify how old the rock must be.  Different measurements, if done carefully, usually end up agreeing within about 2% to 5%.  This means that the method is reliable and precise.  The isotope pairs (and a triplet) include, but are not limited to:

• rubidium-strontium (Rb-Sr)
• uranium-lead (U-Pb)
• samarium-neodynium (Sm-Nd)
• argon-argon (Ar-Ar)
• uranium-thorium (U-Th)
• iodine-xenon (I-Xe)
• lanthanum-barium (La-Ba)
• potassium-argon (K-Ar)
• lead-lead (Pb-Pb)
• lutetium-hafnium (Lu-Hf)
• neon-neon (Ne-Ne)
• rhenium-osmium (Re-Os)
• uranium-lead-helium (U-Pb-He)
• uranium-uranium (U-U)

(Note: The pairs that are named the same are different isotopes of the same element; in this case neutrons or photons undergo a decay, so the mass or energy changes, but the number of protons stays the same.  Sometimes, in the other cases, the decay changes a proton, so the identity of the element changes.)

There is a broad list of preconditions that must be considered when trying to precisely peg the age of rocks with this method.  It includes the physical and chemical conditions under which the rock was formed, and it helps scientists choose which of the pairs above they should use for analysis.  Some pairs are better to use on very, very old rocks; while others are more reliable for younger rocks.  Unfortunately, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks can't be reliably radio-dated because of the physical and chemical changes that have taken place in the rock.  Ages of these rocks are usually determined by relation to nearby igneous rocks that can be dated.

How Old are the Oldest Rocks?

The oldest material ever dated by chemists in the lab was a zircon crystal estimated to be 4.404 billion years old, plus or minus 8 million years.  

Image Source

The oldest rocks dated are 4.031 billion years old, plus or minus 3 million.  They're up in the Canadian greenstone belts and some other ancient exposed areas.  This coincides pretty nicely with the age that astrophysicists and geologists estimate Earth to be, around 4.5 billion years.  

The broad acceptance and agreement of these results by the scientific community speaks for itself.  Earth is very, very ancient.

What is the Color of Water?

The Question

The answer to the question I just poised has, I know, extreme political and cultural ramifications.  It is so sensitive and controversial of a subject, that I take great personal and professional risk by broaching it here.  I'm edgy.  But it's too late now.  If you really want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, take the red pill and let's go.

Author's photograph

Wrong Answers

1. Water is blue because the sky is blue.
2. Water is colorless.  Just look at a glass of it.
3. The blue of oceans and lakes is an illusion; they aren't colored at all.
4. Water must be some bizarre sort of white or grey.  Look at a cloud.

False, false, false, false.

You may cherish one of the misconceptions above (probably numbers 1 or 2, and even 4 might seem intuitive).  But I am afraid you are mistaken.  What is left?

Let's consider each of these to their proper necessity, and we'll be left with the true answer.

Why the Answers Above are Wrong

Number 1 is a stock answer, and it is the most fantastically wrong.  It does, however, have the simple appeal that the sky color "explains" the color of bodies of water.  To disprove this, you need only to go out to a lake on a cloudy day.  Or at sunset, when the sky is no longer blue but yellow, orange, and pink.  You can also go out at night and shine a powerful light into the water.  You can even look at the oceans from outer space, and in spite of the fact that they are seen through the sky, they are still blue (if blue is reflected back toward the water by the sky, how does it then slip out toward space through the same atmosphere).  In all cases, we find that the water is still blue.

Image source

So Number 1 is right out.

Number 2 is consistent with our common close-up experience of water, and if you were a curious enough child, it might have even caused you some cognitive dissonance to contrast the obvious colorlessness of a glass of water with the striking blue of Lake Michigan or Lake Huron.  I propose you try a demonstration.  Fill a tall white bucket with clean tap water, and stay inside the house.  Go into the basement if you really want.  Flip on the lights (fluorescent work best), and stare down into the bucket.  Are you surprised?

I accidentally found this out last summer at work when I filled a tall, white bucket with water and looked down at it.  I showed it to my coworker Emily, who first said, "You put dye in it, didn't you?"

                                                                        Image source

So we can show by demonstration that Number 2 turns out to be untrue.

Number 3 is not worth talking about.  It's false.

Number 4 is maybe a reasonable answer, until you show how an atomized version of just about anything can make a whitish or grey cloud.  Take a can of black or blue spray paint outside on a sunny day and spray it (just for a second) straight up.  You'll notice that it looks light grey, with some color influence of the paint itself.  A dense cloud of any particle tends to have a high reflectance.  Water's visible spectrum reflectance as a thick mist runs from 70% to 95%, giving them their characteristic white hue.  Just think of the last really thick fog you had to drive through.  But when the fog droplets strike your windshield, they are colorless, like a glass of water.  (While on the subject, note that a cloud is a mist of water droplets, not water vapor.  Water vapor is truly transparent and colorless because it is a gas.  Clouds are made of liquid.)

Image source

So Number 4 is out.

So what the hell color is water?

The answer may shock you.  You may be surprised.  You might even be a little pissed off.

Water is blue.

Now calm down, there's no need for that kind of language.  Our expectations are always being challenged, and sometimes it feels uncomfortable.  But our demonstration to disprove answer Number 2 was unequivocal.  Look into that bucket and you'll see a faint aquamarine.  Look into an indoor pool, even if its walls are painted white, and the effect stands out even more.  These observations speak for themselves: No matter what our close-up and personal experience with water, we must own up to the observation that it is, quite simply and uncompromisingly, blue.

So why does it appear clear in a glass, but blue on a large scale?  For the same reason that a single drop of green tea appears colorless, but a whole cup is a dark yellowish-green.  It's simply a matter of proportions.

Water, when struck with light, tends to absorb at below-visible and above-visible wavelengths.  It absorbs the least in the visible spectrum, which is why most visible light passes through unchanged.  It's also part of the reason why it takes so much heat to boil water; it absorbs tons of heat before a phase change.  Now water does not absorb equally.  It absorbs more than 10 times more red, orange, and yellow than it does green, blue, indigo, and violet.  So when light passes through water, the frequencies on the red side are preferentially absorbed, and the frequencies on the blue side are absorbed the least.  Look at the graph below.

Image source

The intrinsic molecular mechanics of this are really complex, but we will simply say that water reflects light at a vibrational level, and the harmonics of the vibrations of its three atoms yield an optimized reflected wavelength of 698 nanometers.  Guess what color 698 nanometers corresponds to in the visible spectrum?  It's a bluish-violet, and even this is just barely still within the visible range.  This can actually be seen above.  Notice that there is some green reflected as well, which explains why water is aquamarine instead of a deep violet blue.

Yes, water is still transparent, meaning it can be seen through.  But so is a Jolly Rancher.  It's just not quite colorless.

Thus concludes my incredibly abusive and derogatory treatise on the color of water.  I hope you are offended.  Please refrain from sending horse heads, bags of flaming dog poop, or setting up burning crosses in my front yard.

The Purpose of this Blog

Image source

I get frustrated by witnessing idiocy.  It seems that I have been freshly and consistently assaulted by it with special vigor in the last few years, and sometimes I want to grab hold of my interlocutor by the shoulders and shake him while screaming "Can't you hear how stupid that sounds?"

This unwholesome desire strikes me so frequently today that I have finally broken down and decided to give ventilation to my mind, because- to put it bluntly- sometimes my mind just feels flatulent.  An intellectual breeze will give my cobwebby, stale brain a good freshening.

I suppose I am doing this for myself and don't really mind too much whether anyone reads it.  But if you happen to be one of those much-too-kind people who likes to humor the puerile intellectual wanderings of dull children, you are in the right place.

Let the madness begin.