THE THREE LEGGED STOOL
by Bob Wickizer
Scripture: Proverbs 1:20-33, Psalm 19, James 3:1-12, Mark 8:27-38
The Three Legged Stool
Bob Wickizer
Proverbs 1:20-33; Psalm 19; James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38
Above all, keep your servant from presumptuous sins;
let them not get dominion over me; *
then shall I be whole and sound,
and innocent of a great offense.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my
heart be acceptable in your sight, *
O LORD, my strength and my redeemer.
I want to talk about brains today. The human brain contains about 1015 neurons (a million billion) which is about the same amount of bytes of memory you can find today at a Google server farm. The similarity stops there however. Computer memories are addressed by a relatively simple X-Y frame and while the number of neurons and bytes may be similar, the connections are vastly different. Each little neuron in your brain connects to around 100,000 other neurons in a tangled web that will take us another century to unravel.
In the 1990s Caltech scientist Carver Mead remarked that the best of our computational abilities at the time were equivalent to the brain of a honeybee. We have been doubling the memory and computational sizes of computers every 18 months for fifty years so I figure by now we are probably up the evolutionary ladder to the level of an armadillo.
But brains are important. They differentiate humans from all other animals. From the Garden of Eden we were given self-awareness and free will the twin devils of our nature. Most importantly Genesis tells us that God made us in God's image. Each one of us carries around a bit of the divine spark and I imagine that a large part of that spark is wisdom.
The Book of Proverbs personifies Wisdom as a woman. ''The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,'' she says (Proverbs 8:22). Wisdom was present during creation when God made the heavens, the sea and the earth. The book almost seems to imply that God needed a woman's imagination to help with creation, a woman's eye to tell him if the plants and animals were create ...
Bob Wickizer
Proverbs 1:20-33; Psalm 19; James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38
Above all, keep your servant from presumptuous sins;
let them not get dominion over me; *
then shall I be whole and sound,
and innocent of a great offense.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my
heart be acceptable in your sight, *
O LORD, my strength and my redeemer.
I want to talk about brains today. The human brain contains about 1015 neurons (a million billion) which is about the same amount of bytes of memory you can find today at a Google server farm. The similarity stops there however. Computer memories are addressed by a relatively simple X-Y frame and while the number of neurons and bytes may be similar, the connections are vastly different. Each little neuron in your brain connects to around 100,000 other neurons in a tangled web that will take us another century to unravel.
In the 1990s Caltech scientist Carver Mead remarked that the best of our computational abilities at the time were equivalent to the brain of a honeybee. We have been doubling the memory and computational sizes of computers every 18 months for fifty years so I figure by now we are probably up the evolutionary ladder to the level of an armadillo.
But brains are important. They differentiate humans from all other animals. From the Garden of Eden we were given self-awareness and free will the twin devils of our nature. Most importantly Genesis tells us that God made us in God's image. Each one of us carries around a bit of the divine spark and I imagine that a large part of that spark is wisdom.
The Book of Proverbs personifies Wisdom as a woman. ''The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,'' she says (Proverbs 8:22). Wisdom was present during creation when God made the heavens, the sea and the earth. The book almost seems to imply that God needed a woman's imagination to help with creation, a woman's eye to tell him if the plants and animals were create ...
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