Course 7: The Signal
Diploma Program · Course 7 · 3 Credits
This course picks up where the previous one left off. The Clock spent its chapters dissolving a manufactured fight: the slogan that science disproved the Bible turned out to be two claims stacked on top of each other, and the second claim, about what the Bible says, did not survive a careful reading of the text. Once that fight goes away, a quieter question comes forward. What is the physical evidence actually saying when nobody is defending a position?
This course tries to answer that question. It looks first at time itself, because most of the public conversation about the age of things assumes that time is one thing that flows the same everywhere, and Einstein showed that this is not true. It then makes a point that surprises most readers: Scripture, in the middle of all this, is the youngest reliable signal in the conversation, not the oldest. And it walks through something most readers have not heard, which is that the human genome carries a record of when something started going wrong in the human line, and the record points to a beginning of decline right around six thousand years ago. The convergence between the genome and the chronology Ussher derived from Genesis is not proof. It is suggestion. But it is the kind of suggestion that, in any other field, would be the beginning of serious investigation.
How this course is structured. Course 7 is built around one textbook and three assignments. You read The Signal first. Then you complete Assignment 1, which asks you to perform the proximity reading the book has been teaching you on a witness whose nearness to the event has been popularly discounted. Assignment 2 asks you to explain what you have been studying to a friend, in the voice a real conversation would take. Assignment 3 asks you to take the same proximity reading outside of Christianity entirely, find a witness in the wild that has been wrongly discounted in favor of a witness further from the event, and walk through it with the diagnostic questions the sheet provides. Three credits. Three assignments. One sustained way of learning to read the youngest reliable signal as the youngest reliable signal.
The Textbook
The Signal
Four chapters, one sustained move: once the fight about origins is over, the physical evidence is doing more interesting work than the public presentation has admitted. The book opens with what changes when the fight ends, walks through relativistic time, makes the case that Scripture is the youngest reliable signal in the conversation rather than the oldest, and closes with the convergence between the human genome's record of decline and the biblical chronology.
The Three Assignments
Each assignment is a complete work package: the reading that precedes it, the structure of the work, and the specification for the paper and videos you produce. The three assignments build on each other. Assignment 1 gives you the move on the page. Assignment 2 gives you the move in conversation. Assignment 3 gives you the move outside of the domain the book worked in.
The Witness You Had Been Discounting
Read the textbook. Choose one of three worked scenarios where Scripture has been treated as the older, more compromised source when in fact it is the younger, more proximate one, and perform the proximity reading the book has been teaching. Produce a paper of roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words and a recorded video of ten minutes. Respond to three challenge questions in a second video.
Telling Your Friend Why the Bible Is the Younger Source
The register changes. You are no longer writing to demonstrate a move to an instructor. You are writing as someone who has learned something and is telling another person what you have learned — a real friend, not a catechumen and not a skeptic. Roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words, a ten-minute video, and a challenge response.
The Transfer: Finding a Discounted Witness in the Wild
The final assignment. Take the proximity reading the book uses across all four of its chapters and apply it somewhere the author did not. Somewhere outside of Christianity entirely. Find a place where a witness close to the event has been popularly discounted in favor of a witness further from it, walk it through the diagnostic questions, and produce the paper, the video, and the response.