Technology and the Environment

Welcome to Episode 67 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be building upon a topic that we started in the previous episode of Axe to the Root, the one on patents. We talked about science and technology and how different worldviews can affect government legislation on patents and protecting property rights in the area of inventions. We saw that in all non-Christian worldviews, there is no real understanding where science and technology come from – not only philosophically, but also in the psychological motive and incentives to do science. What is the reason men even bother to discover new things? No one knows. That is, no non-Christian religion or philosophy knows, people just happen, just out of the blue, to want to discover new things, and spend the time and energy to discover new things, no one knows why. The motivation is clearly there, but what causes that motivation is rather looked upon as some sort of magic or occult. We saw that this is the reason for the chaotic legislation on patents. And we also saw the Biblical interpretation of the factors behind the motivation for discovery and invention: it is the Dominion Mandate. Man is commanded to fill the earth and subdue it, that is, make it productive for an expanding mankind. Based on a Biblical view of science and technology, we don’t need any special new ethical and judicial system for protection of property rights; the Law of God and its protection of property – specific, defined, lawfully acquired or created possessions – is sufficient.

What I want to look at, this week, is the relation of technology to our stewardship of creation, and specifically, our stewardship of the environment. Specifically, pollution. Technology is all fine and dandy and we all like to have fancy gadgets to make our lives easier – cars, smart phones, computers, power tools, new building materials, LED flashlights, etc. The question is: does this technology come at a cost? Well, it comes at the cost of countless hours of research and production management, and billions of dollars invested into capital assets (which billions of dollars is nothing more than countless of hours of work and savings of millions of people). That much we know. But is there other cost as well. Like, what about the cost of the waste left over after the production of all these gadgets? What about the ore mines dug and left open after they have been exhausted? What about the emissions from all these plants in the atmosphere? What about the spilled fluids, acids and bases, that poison the soil and destroy the food production of whole regions; or poison waters used by whole populations for fishing? Shouldn’t this be a cost that we should take in account?

And, the more important question, if this is a cost that we should take in account, shouldn’t we self-consciously slow down our technological progress – and our economic growth, as well, for it depends on the productivity produced by the technological progress – in order to reduce pollution, that important cost? Shouldn’t we give up on some newer and better technologies, given that the more we develop, the more we pollute? Or, even better, shouldn’t we use the government to stop technological progress so that we control the level of pollution? I am an avid reader of science fiction, and science fiction, because of the nature of the genre, has always tried to give predictions about the future and the many possible problems and issues that may arise consecutive to the growth of mankind. And I remember how back in the 1970s and the 1980s, many science fictions writers liked to predict the 21st century being a future period in which the air in the industrialized world would be barely breathable. Some predicted that people won’t even be able to exit their homes without a gas mask (I am not kidding). Shouldn’t we, then, do something about it? Stop technological progress? Slow it down? May be slow down the growth of mankind in general, through population control or birth control?

Secular humanism, of course, gives exactly those answers: Slow down technological progress through government control and regulations. And, also, slow down population growth, through murder and extermination, if necessary. We should expect such answers given that secular humanism has no idea of what the world is, how the world operates, what man is, and what drives man in his quest for technological progress. Secular humanism has no idea of the Dominion Mandate, and since in its ideology, man’s existence just happened by chance, it can’t understand neither the technology, nor pollution and its causes, nor the true solution to the problem of pollution.

But what is the Biblical solution to the problem?

In order to understand it, we need to look at the overall direction of the Dominion Mandate in history: Man was given the Garden as his initial capital, and told to grow his capital base. That Garden was a small patch of available resources in the middle of an earth which was still bare. As large as the Garden may have been, it was not large enough nor resourceful enough for a growing population. Adam’s task under the Dominion Mandate was to export the order and productivity of the Garden to the whole world – after all, without that order and productivity, a constantly expanding mankind will end up starving, and therefore not expanding at all.

Now, visualize for a moment what it must have been in the Garden. It had all the resources Adam needed to start building a civilization, and he had all the knowledge and the brainpower to do it; and he did have enormous brain power, if he was able to name all the animals. We see that this was the very purpose of the resources in the Bible: to build a civilization out of them. We see at the beginning that there were gold and precious stones in the Garden; we don’t know in what condition, but they must have been scattered around, for the text doesn’t mention if they were build into something. At the end of the Bible, however, we see the same gold and precious stones built into a city, and used for the walls and the streets of that city. Thus, the course of history under the Dominion Mandate is clear: from scattered resources towards an ordered civilization where all these resources are built in. The precious stones and the gold are, of course, only a symbol of everything else, of all the other regular resources: be it wood and cloth made of plants or animals, or chemical elements and substances, or radioactive minerals and substances for nuclear fission or fusion fuels, or sunlight, or wind, or electronic or radio impulses, or anything else. They all need to be built into the city God is building, a civilization that will first conquer itself and its own sinful self, then will conquer the universe, and then, after having exhibited the supremacy of God’s Law and the glory of God’s salvation in history and on earth, will submit in Christ to God. In that final historical stage, mankind will be at its ultimate mastery and control of all of the resources of the universe, subduing it to the glory of God.

Before we get there, however, things need to be built. Things that will allow us to make a better and more efficient use of God’s resources. We may, from time to time, know how to unleash some resources into action, but that doesn’t mean we know how to use them productively. One modern example would be the difference between a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor: unleashing the power of the process of nuclear fission turned out to be relatively easy; channeling it into productive use is still not that easy, and we often suffer the consequences of it (think Chernobyl). It is in the building of these more and more facilities which make it easier and more productive to harness the power of God’s universe, where the Dominion Covenant is most visibly applied in practice.

But building these same facilities means that man needs to learn to harness energy and apply it to productive use. To pick up a precious stone from the ground in the Garden and put it in its place in the wall, man needs to do some work. Work is simply energy applied to effective use.

And the question of the use of energy is a central question to the Dominion Covenant, but also, to the issue of how our work affects the environment around us.

In order for man to be able to apply energy to productive use to do work, he needs to draw energy from the creation around him. Which means, he needs to find a part of the creation around him that is not in a perfect energy equilibrium (also known as “entropy”). There must be some depository of available energy, of electrons, atoms, molecules, fluids, or solid bodies which are found in a higher energy state, and under the right conditions will spontaneously move from one place to another, or from a higher energy state to a lower energy state, creating momentum, which momentum can then be used to move other things. That depository must not be active until man triggers it by applying the right conditions to it – otherwise, if it was active without him, it would just dissipate energy without doing any useful work. It must contain potential energy, energy which is not active until triggered to become active.

Think of a heavy cannonball placed on the top of a mountain in such a way as to be in a perfect balance. There is a lot of potential energy in that cannonball, stored in its sheer mass, but more important, stored in its position, high on the mountain. (That’s the physics formula for potential energy, mass times height times the gravitational acceleration at the surface.) As long as the cannonball is sitting there, it may have all this potential energy but it does no work. That potential energy needs to be transformed into kinetic energy, that is, an energy of motion, that is energy that can be transferred from the cannonball to other objects. Such transformation can happen cheaply and easily: just give the cannonball a little push to the side of the crest.

What we see then is the cannon ball accelerating down the hill. It starts gaining kinetic energy (that is, energy of motion), but only at the expense of losing potential energy (that is, energy of position). As it rolls down the hill, its position is lower and lower, or, we can say, it is moving from a higher energy state to a lower energy state, releasing energy in the process. The only question now is, how can we make this energy do work, instead of just getting dissipated in the environment?

What we need to do is build some devices to take some of that energy of motion and translate it into real motion. Place, for example, several water wheels on the path of the cannonball so that it fall in one after another consecutively on its way downhill. What will happen is that the velocity of the cannonball will decrease with hitting every waterwheel, which means that its kinetic energy will decrease every time. But that energy is not lost. (Well, some of it is lost to productive use, under the Second Law of Thermodynamics.) It goes for rotating the axis of the waterwheel. The waterwheel now has some kinetic energy which can be transferred to other devices. If we build the path of the cannonball with waterwheels, the potential energy of the cannonball won’t be lost, it will be translated into kinetic energy for different technological devices, and then used to productive work.

What happens at the end? The cannonball will eventually get to the foot of the mountain, on flat ground, where there is no more downward slope. It is not in its lowest energy state, where there is no more potential energy to spend. Which means, in its downward path, its potential energy was all transformed into kinetic energy to move the cannonball itself, or to move the axes of the multiple waterwheels on the way. When all this energy was spent, and the cannonball is at its lowest energy position (at the foot of the mountain) no more kinetic energy can be extracted from the cannonball. There is no way now to make the cannonball produce more energy to spend . . . except, of course, if we moved it again to the top of the mountain. But guess what: moving it back to the top will require, in the ideal case, just as much energy as it gave away on the way down. In reality, however, the ideal case doesn’t exist; under the Second Law of Thermodynamics, some of that energy was dissipated in the form of heat. So even if we decide to spend energy to move it back up, we will be in the red. It makes more sense to leave the cannonball resting at the foot of the mountain and try to find another cannonball. And in fact, that’s the essence of the work of the energy industry: to find “cannonballs” that are rested in a state of unstable balance at the top of the mountain, build them a downward path of waterwheels, and push them down the hill.

Cannonballs, of course, are not used for energy generation, but our example is a very good illustration of how energy works. All energy sources are in reality like that cannonball: stored potential energy in a state of unstable equilibrium – unstable because a small push can unleash that potential energy into kinetic energy. Think of the gasoline you put in your car. It’s just a liquid, right? A vaporous liquid, to be precise, but even as a vaporous liquid it is in an equilibrium. It doesn’t spontaneously change its composition from one state to another, and it doesn’t spontaneously release energy. But give it a little push, light a match next to it, and you will experience the power of the energy stored in it. But it’s not limited to fire or motion, the universe God created is replete with countless such storages of energy waiting to be discovered and used by man. Think of the trees in the forest and the grass in the fields; they are all a vast accumulator of the energy coming from the sun, waiting to be applied to different uses. Trees can be used for burning, of course. In fact, in its formative years, America had such thick woods that the railroads used firewood instead of coal for their engines; it was not unusual for the crews that ran the trains over the long transcontinental distances to stop at some place for several hours, cut as many trees as they could and store them as fuel. Vegetation has been an important storage of energy in another way, too: for thousands of years men used domesticated animals for transportation or work. And animals are nothing more than biological machines for transforming the chemical energy of plants into energy of motion. (Well, human bodies are also such biological machines but much less efficient than the animals.) A storage of energy are the clouds over our heads: the water falling down and running down mountains in creeks and rivers is just another version of the cannonball rolling down the hill, and mankind has used it to run waterwheels for centuries. But wait, this is not all, energy is stored in ways you may have not even imagined. It is stored in chemicals used to do certain work. Your soap and shampoo are stored chemical energy used to disintegrate grease and bacteria. Acids and bases are stored chemical energy used for the production of different substances. The individual atoms and ions of elements can be stored energy: take, for example, the two atomic ingredient of table salt, sodium and chlorine. In their pure state – metallic crystal for sodium and gas for chlorine – they are highly reactive. Sodium reacts with water so violently that when thrown in water, it explodes; chlorine has been used as a poison gas in wars because of its high reactivity. While they are not used in direct energy applications, their high energy level is used in chemical applications. Even table salt, in which they are combined and reduced to their lowest energy level, is still quite active and has the function of a catalyst for many reactions in human and animal metabolism, as well as for maintaining the balance in nerve reactions. This is still transforming energy from one form into another, even if it doesn’t look like a power plant. Some chemical elements have energy stored on a nuclear level, like uranium-235. In its natural state, uranium-235 is in an almost perfect equilibrium: it has a half-life of 704 million years! And yet, just put together a critical mass of it (a little over 50 kilograms) and add just a couple of fast neutrons, and see what happens within the next few microseconds. (One microsecond lasts for one millionth of a second.) All these are examples of a cannonball sitting on the top of the mountain, waiting to be pushed down the hill to transform its potential energy into an energy of motion, and then transfer momentum to a chain of waterwheels, which can then be used for work. And technology is simply the waterwheels used to absorb that energy and put it to work. The higher the technology, the better it will be able to capture every single unit of that energy and put it to work. Yes, you got it right; technology is not magic, it has a simple principle behind it: how do we find the metaphorical cannonballs sitting on top of mountains, how do we push them down the hill, and how do we build the best waterwheels to capture the released energy. That’s all about technology.

And guess what: the more technology develops to capture more of that momentum, the cheaper things become. Or the better quality we have for the same price. Take gasoline, for example. Its price today is the same relative to the average income as it was in 1960; but because we have better cars, the same quantity of gas can take you much farther today than it could in 1960. Or the cars: The average family car is the same price relative to income as it was in 1960; but if you compare a modern family car to a family car of 1960, our modern cars would be beyond the imagination of even the science fiction writers back in those days. And cars are only a very small pixel of the whole picture. The more developed out technology is, the better we capture the momentum, the cheaper each individual unit of captured energy becomes, and the more productive our society becomes. And look around us: the poorest among us today are richer than the kings of 500 years ago.

OK, stop here. This sounds so great, so convincing, and indeed, we see that our productivity has exceeded everything the world has known, and as a result we have conquered so many previously unimagined frontiers . . . but what about the environment? What about pollution? What about the side effects of all this technological development, namely, the destruction of our nature? In this apt illustration of the cannonball rolling down the hill, where is pollution included, and how can it be explained?

The answer should be simple: pollution is energy that our current technologies are still not capable of capturing.

Let me repeat this again: pollution is simply energy that our current technologies are still not capable of capturing.

See, by its very definition, pollution can’t come from substances or objects that are at their lowest energy status. In order for something to become a pollutant, it must have some residual stored active energy in it; things that are at their lowest energy state do not pollute. Take, for example, helium and all the other noble gases (neon, argon, krypton, xenon). Because of their nuclear structure and electron combination, their structure is the lowest energy level for all chemical elements. All these gases can absorb huge quantities of energy but they never give it back. (Helium and argon are used as so-called “shielding gases” in highly dangerous processes like tungsten welding, because of their ability to absorb energy.) And guess what: these gases never pollute. You can breathe them and they will never affect you. (Although, breathing in helium will make you voice funny.) You won’t even smell them – they have no smell. They won’t react in any possible way with anything in the nature around you, or in your body, or in your food. They produce ZERO pollution. Why? Because they are at the lowest possible energy level. They can give away no energy.

Returning to our simplistic illustration of the cannonball rolling down the hill, helium is like the cannonball at the bottom of the valley. Unless you do something to move it up the hill, it won’t move spontaneously. It can’t produce anymore kinetic energy for your waterwheels, but neither can it affect or destroy anything in its way. It’s just not moving, and it can’t move, even if you give it a push. It has become part of the environment.

Only those things pollute that still have some potential energy left in them, think of the cannonball rolling down the hill, but think of it after the last waterwheel, but before it reaches the bottom of the valley. It still has some energy in it, it is still moving, but its energy is not spent on anything productive, because there are no more waterwheels. Suppose that in this last section of its path there are houses instead of waterwheels. The cannonball still has some potential energy left, that potential energy is transformed into kinetic energy, but because there are no more waterwheels in its path, it hits the houses. The kinetic energy now serves not for creating a productive momentum but the opposite: it serves to destroy? Why? Because there are no more waterwheels. The technology was not develop to the point where the last drops of energy could be sucked out of the cannonball and put to productive use.

And that’s what pollution is: remaining drops of energy not harnessed to productive use. Since they are still active, they affect the environment. Since they are not harnessed, they affect it in ways unfavorable to man. (Remember, after the Curse, nature spontaneously opposes man and his efforts; it takes self-conscious effort by man to make nature serve man.) Pollution is not some magical power out there. It is simply unharnessed energy. It is simply what the cannonball would do while rolling down the hill, if we haven’t built enough water wheels, or if we have built them in such a lousy way that it hops out of their path and continues on a path different from we have predicted. Where there is no active energy remaining, there is no pollution. Which means, where our technology has captured all the energy available in an energy source and has put it to productive use, there is no pollution.

Now stop and think about it. This changes everything, right? It turns the current environmentalist narrative on its head. The current narrative is that pollution is just some magical entity out there which grows bigger and bigger the more we apply technology to the world around us. But when we analyze the nature of pollution and its relation to energy, we discover that pollution is always around us, ready to happen in a spontaneous way, for there are so many different energy sources – physical, chemical, nuclear – around us. What if we didn’t have any technology? Would we be free of pollution? Landslides and avalanches bury whole villages, volcanoes erupt and bring ice ages to the whole planet, hurricanes and tornadoes bring destruction to living things in their paths. Ever been to the Black Sea? You know that its water is anoxic (that is, has no oxygen dissolved in it) below 200 meters deep, and this made it possible for certain bacteria to thrive that produce hydrogen sulfide. That means, 90% of its water is replete with hydrogen sulfide, one of the most reactive, flammable, and toxic gases in nature, buried under a 200-meter-thin layer of salt water. (200 meters is only half the height of the Empire State Building.) Scientific modeling shows that if just a medium-size meteorite hits the water, it will release so much of that gas in the air that the area may easily become uninhabitable for a while. No matter where we look, there are natural sources of energy that with or without us produce pollution and can potentially kill and devastate at an enormous scale. Pollution is simply  energy in an uncaptured state, unharnessed for man’s purposes. Where there is no available energy, where all things are in their lowest energy state, there is no pollution.

I hope you already understand where this all is going. If all pollution is simply unharnessed active energy, then the only solution to pollution must be obvious: find a way to harness it. Find a way to put it to productive use. You can’t stop active energy from affecting the world around us; it will continue to pollute until the source of energy is depleted. So instead of waiting for it to be depleted on its own and do damage, work to find a way to deplete it ourselves and use it for our purposes. If there is still potential energy in that cannonball rolling down the hill, don’t try to stop it. Just build more waterwheels in its path, until it gets to the bottom of the valley. That’s the only logical answer to the problem of pollution.

Think of the most obvious example we have in front of our eyes today: internal combustion engines. 60 years ago, cars had to have large engines in order to have enough power to move. These large engines were a source of serious pollution. If back in those days we had as many cars as we have today, our levels of pollution would have been much higher. But why did those cars pollute so much? Because the technology of the times didn’t allow for capturing all of the active energy in the fuel and for transforming it into motion. The efficiency of those engines was low and therefore the spilled active energy was high. Over the years, however, advances in technology made it possible to build smaller engines who captured more of the active energy of the fuels, and thus decrease the level of pollution. The more energy our technologies were able to convert into motion, the lower the pollution. And, also – which is the main purpose of technology – the cheaper the use of fuel. By capturing more of that spilled energy, we have been able to lower the cost for using fuels, and, as a consequences of that, we have been able to reduce pollution. In short, our own drive to cheaper and more productive use of energy is what naturally led to lowering pollution. Eventually, more and more, we will be able to make engines that will convert all of the available energy in the fuels to water and carbon dioxide – and both water and carbon dioxide are the lowest energy level for carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, thus producing no pollution.

I can give another example I picked up in the course of my own professional career. The production of copper and many other non-ferrous metals (lead, nickel, tin, to mention a few) produces great quantities of sulfur dioxide as a waste product. Sulfur dioxide is a toxic gas – not as toxic as hydrogen sulfide we mentioned earlier, but toxic nevertheless. That’s because the molecule contains high levels of stored energy in the bonding between oxygen and sulfur; it’s a long story to explain why, so I won’t go into that. Sulfur dioxide has some limited use in food preservation, winemaking, and cleaning, but certainly not in the large quantities produced by the metallurgic plants.

The original solution was to oxidize sulfur dioxide to sulfur trioxide (an even more dangerous pollutant) and then dissolve it in water. The result is what we all know as “sulfuric acid”: one of the most potent inorganic acids known to man. It has more and greater applications than sulfur dioxide, but not enough to take all the quantities produced. And it is still a high energy level, and it can do a lot of damage – the only difference being that it is liquid, not gaseous. Still, the solution for its deposit was to build special containers and bury them underground – except that, eventually the acid would dissolve the containers and contaminate the soil.

The problem was solved in an area that no one expected to offer any solution: the production of chemical fertilizers. The new agricultural technologies required the application of three elements to the soil: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash. Of these, phosphorus proved to be the most difficult to obtain. In nature, it can be found in great quantities in the deserts, where it exists in the form of a rock called “rock phosphate.” Chemically, it is calcium phosphate, a very stable compound which takes a lot of chemical energy to break up. But guess what: sulfuric acid breaks it relatively easy, producing as a result phosphoric acid, which is the active basis for the production of many phosphate-based products, from fertilizers to plastics and polymers to cleaning agents to food preservatives etc. Since phosphoric acid is so valuable, the process can take all of the produced sulfuring acid by the metallurgic plants, and ask for more. The other product from the production of phosphoric acid is calcium sulphate. Is it a pollutant? No. Calcium sulphate is the formula for gypsum – the same gypsum used as plaster in construction. (Well, to be precise, there are still remnant phosphate elements in it, which make it a bit more reactive, but new technologies will take care of it, I am sure.) So, from the highly toxic sulfur dioxide, technology can take us all the way to producing useful compounds for agriculture and the home and food production, and the only waste product is low energy enough to not be a pollutant. That’s the only way of dealing with pollution: use up all available energy.

And that takes higher and higher technologies. Not lower. Not stagnation in technological development. Not refraining from technological development even if we had it. Not refraining from higher productivity, or from mass production, or from lower prices, or from industrialization. Not a return to more primitive levels of social organization. (New York City, before the advent of the automobile, had to dispose of 2.5 million pounds of horse manure every day. Google “the great horse manure crisis of 1894” to learn more about it.) If pollution is unused, unharnessed energy, there is only one way of reducing it: develop the technologies that will be capable of harnessing of all available energy for productive use. Once you have them, you will have zero pollution, and at the same time, a highly developed and prosperous society.

Of course, that ultimate level of technological development can’t be reached directly from a primitive condition of no technology at all. We can’t just continue living in the old times when supposedly we had perfectly clean environment and organic foods and natural life (and the life expectancy was 40 years, of course), and expect that suddenly we will wake up one day having all the clean modern technologies. Each level of development builds the capital base for the next level. The steam engine couldn’t be build if it wasn’t for the effective use of animal power and wind power to build the capital base. The internal combustion engine couldn’t come around if it wasn’t for the steam engine to prepare the way for it. Nuclear technologies and electronics and turbines and the new materials that made them possible could only appear because the combustion engine helped the world become a more productive place. And our modern attempts at extracting clean energy out of sunlight and wind couldn’t happen unless we had more primitive chemical technologies to prepare the materials and the alloys needed for them. At every step, mankind, driven by the Dominion Mandate, has been trying to lower its costs of production, and in the process, has been building the base for newer and cleaner energies. Cleaner environment, therefore, came as the product of the Dominion Mandate. The more dominion man exercises, the less pollution he will produce.

The conclusion to our modern policies should be obvious. Ever since environmentalism became a fashionable ideology in the West, its impulse has been to lobby politicians to stop this or that technological development, because it would produce more pollution. This has been based on the erroneous assumption that better productivity leads to more pollution. But given the scientific facts, such a proposition is nonsensical; no one builds a better vessel to spill more water out of it. In the same way, no one builds a better technology to leave more unused energy out of it. Government intervention, then, to continue blocking the development of newer technologies, has been not in favor of less pollution but in favor of more pollution. And guess what: where the government controls the economy to block any private initiative, and any possibility for inventors to profit from their own inventions, the pollution levels have been unimaginable. The Soviet Union and the whole Eastern bloc were among the most polluted places on earth; the air in some cities was barely breathable, while at the same time their economy was barely producing, and their GDP per capita was 1/10 to 1/20 of that of the Western countries,. Pollution doesn’t come from less production; it comes from less efficient production,. When you lack the technology to produce more efficiently, you pollute more.

The Biblical solution to the problem of environmental cleanness should be then obvious: Free the way for individuals to fulfill the Dominion Mandate. Create the conditions for full market freedom for innovators to create better technologies and profit from them. Get the government out of the economy, and shut down all environmental organizations. Make it possible for the entrepreneurs to reap every single benefit of their increased productivity and efficiency. Remove any government protection and corporate welfare from any industry and make it compete on the basis entirely of price and quality; this will force them to seek ways to utilize every bit of energy available in nature to achieve their goals in a more efficient way.

The final result will be that the cannonball will roll its way downhill producing the maximum useful effect: it will rotate the maximum water wheels it can hit, and it will do it in the most efficient manner, with the maximum energy transformed into work. And it will never hit any other object and destroy it. It will be pure work.

And that’s the only way to prevent pollution. Anything else will only create more pollution, and finally, destruction.

The book I will recommend today is Abundance, by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. In it, you will find the facts and the logic of a new and bright future, where the scarcity of older times – through which many of us have lived – will be replaced by abundance. The authors don’t connect that abundance to a spiritual cause, but we as Christian Reconstructionists know how to see through the material veneer to the spiritual causes. The book may be your most important extra-Biblical confirmation for what your postmillennial faith has already taught you.

And again, in your prayers and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission effort for creating the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe, through translating the best Christian books and materials for giving a comprehensive Gospel, covering all areas of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all.