The masters of science fiction

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke

I think I've finally figured out the problem with science. That is to say, I think I know what the real issue is with the public perception of science, and what it is about it that makes the average layman surprisingly loath to trust it. Let's face it; every day we're going to open the newspaper and find another story along the lines of some school board refusing to teach evolution, and the more "enlightened" among us will shake their heads and mumble something along the lines of, "Are we living in the dark ages or something?" Well, I've decided that in the end, the problem surprisingly lies with science itself, and the manner in which science by its very nature generates its own bad press.

I don't remember what it was that was simmering somewhere on the back-burners of my mind the other day as I was perusing some essays by Isaac Asimov, but maybe it will come back to me, as it had become a thought suddenly boiled over when I hit a particular sentence in one of his essays. Just in case you're not familiar with Asimov--and actually, you're probably not as familiar as you think you are even if you do know something about him--he's probably best known as a science fiction writer, but also carried on his resume a number of works of fiction in the genres of mystery and fantasy, as well as a certain amount of writing on science fact, history, and Biblical commentary. Asimov was probably my favorite author as a child, and I'd always wanted to write as well as he did, but never thought it likely. Turns out my wish may have come true: while his storytelling is superb, his essays are pretty crappy. I am in good company after all.

It's probably actually not his essay writing overall, but this particular subset. I picked up a copy of Magic: The final fantasy collection, which is a gathering together of all Asimov's "fantasy stories that have never before appeared in book form." Truth be told, even the fiction is not quite as good as his sci-fi works elsewhere, but the section of essays dissecting the nature of the fantasy genre seem to really fall short. Maybe it's just me. Actually, one of the hard things in evaluating the fiction is that not too much of it falls into the standard sort of format that one thinks of as "fantasy"; one story, a mystery involving Batman, actually has no supernatural element to it at all, so go figure.

What does all of this have to do with science, though? Well, as Asimov works his way through essay after essay of reflection on the subject of magic, faeries, mythical creatures and dashing knights riding off to slay dragons, he ends up--as a firm believer in science, and an author with a strong preference for science fiction over fantasy--taking many of these thematic concepts and relating them back to scientific principles. Science fiction and fantasy both generally involve the use of extraordinary means of meeting the protagonist's ends, but there tends to be a divergence in the nature of the means that is sometimes hard to describe precisely due to the fact that, as Clarke has said, technology can sometimes appear to be magical. Asimov points out that the real difference is that technology is something that always comes with limits, but magic much less so.

An excellent example is to think about the worlds of "Star Trek" vs. "Harry Potter". Both involve fictional means of teleportation, but there are few similarities in the workings of each. In the Trek world, teleportation is made possible through the employment of technology that requires a very large amount of energy and powerful supercomputers. Those attempting to teleport with these devices need to program these powerful computers with the particular coordinates of departure and arrival, the subjects of teleportation cannot be in motion, the teleportation device must be fully-powered and within a certain distance, and (for some unstated reason that has never made much sense to me) the operator of the device needs to know the number of people being teleported. In Potter's world on the other hand, all one needs to teleport is to be a wizard who really wants to go to a location in mind. I'm sure there are Potter fans who would take issue with such a simplification of the process, but really, I've simplified the process from both worlds.

So who is the winner? Maybe it seems like Potter is, as he needs no power source or help from a computer, has no limits on distance of travel, and can disappear at will in mid-stride while running from the hot pursuit of Voldemort. Not so, however. There are, and will always be, people who have a preference for the theoretically possible over the fantastic. After all, what good is Potter-style teleportation to "muggles" like you and me? Computers and technology, on the other hand, make amazing strides daily, and who knows? While physicists haven't yet invented the warp drive, it has been suspected that the principles of relativity actually do allow for travel faster than light speed if we could find a way to manipulate the space-time continuum. Sci-fi has a lot of big "ifs", but they're not the ridiculous imaginings of magic and fantasy, at least.

That sort of thinking is actually the smaller part of the problem of science: it's sort of a killjoy. On page 143 of "Magic", Asimov points out that the old fairy tale staple of "seven-league boots" are something for which science can't really produce an analogue. Seven-league boots are magical pieces of footwear that allow the wearer to move seven leagues (21 miles) in a single step. Asimov points out that such boots would cause the wearer to, at the pace of a brisk walk, achieve escape velocity and therefore be launched into space in a stride or two. Sheesh, Asimov, you're no fun. I'm not personally a big fan of the fantasy genre, but I think it's clear enough that we're meant to understand that magic boots, by the very fact of their being magic, don't have to concern the wearer with mundane factors such as escape velocity and wind resistance (I'm sure someone could give some very good reason why travelling at escape velocity with no protective gear would cause air friction enough to vaporize you, or at least severely chap your skin). Asimov is only trying to point out that science, unlike magic, has limits, but really the depressing thing about science is that really on the whole, science is all about telling us repeatedly that we are limited.

One of the best-known limits in science is the speed of light, but it's odd that it's so well-known. That is to say, it's not that people know what the speed of light is (I can seldom remember it off the top of my head), but they know it exists, and the one thing they really know about relativity theory is that things in the real world can't go faster than light. What does this really do for the layman, though? What possible purpose does it serve the non-physicist to know that the universe has a speed limit, especially since not a one of us will likely ever travel so much as 0.01% of that limit? It only reminds us that we do not have unlimited ability, and while this is true, it adds nothing to the human condition to know it to be so. Science doesn't care, nor should it, as it exists in a world of facts and not fantasy or feelings.

I've written before that science is not in the business of making people feel good or have a sense of self-worth, and that's why it makes for a lousy religion. "But wait," most readers will object, "science isn't a religion!" No, it's not. The bigger part of the problem of science is that despite that fact that it isn't a religion, there are an awful lot of people who treat it like one. Something else that I know I have written about many, many times is the fact that the world is full of skeptics who are more than happy to puff out their chests and declare, "We don't need God and religion to give us the answers, for science has all the answers we need!" But whatever you may feel about religion, the second part of that sentence is dreadfully wrong: science doesn't have answers, it only has theories. Wait! I'm probably not saying what you think I'm saying...

My imagination makes it hard to write this, as I know with almost every sentence I write, there is someone out there who will be reading this and saying, "What an idiot!" Maybe, but can you wait until I've had my say? I know there are a lot of creationists that love the catch phrase, "Evolution is just a theory," and of course, they're missing that in the realm of science, that word tends to mean something deeper than they give it credit. Granted. What I'm saying is that even giving it all the credit it truly deserves, it's still not the end-all and be-all of truth, because science is not a religion in very important ways that are actually its strength, but unfortunately its lesser-known strength.

The Asimov essay that boiled over that thought was one titled "Giants in the Earth", an essay on why he thinks so many cultures (including the Bible) have had myths concerning giants and other fantastic larger-than-life creatures. He gives a number of theories about why people would imagine giants, mainly focusing on people of lesser technology who marveled at achievements of more advanced societies such as the massive walls of Mycenae and the pyramids of Egypt and, not being able to fathom technology that could move such massive stones, imagine the employment of giant men or sorcerers for the purpose. In general, this is not an unreasonable theory, but I do have some issues with it, the main one being the assumption that every single example of stories about giants surely could not have simply been the result of actual, living giants. After all, Goliath was only said to be nine feet tall, and while that sounds pretty fantastical, I fail to see why there could not exist a man of that stature, or at least near that stature helped with a dash of exaggeration or rounding off to the nearest cubit. I think I may have made this exact analogy in a former piece of writing, but if a person who had never been to China or known anything about it ran into Yao Ming, he might be tempted to tell friends that China was a land populated with giants, and he would be sort of right, since there are at least a few of them.

Now, just shortly after denying that tales of mythical giants had anything to do with actual giants, and denying that tales of dragons could have anything to do with actual oversized lizards such as dinosaurs or who knows what, Asimov makes this startling statement:

"The elephant bird, or aepyornis, of Madagascar still survived in medieval times. It weighed half a ton and was the largest bird that ever existed. It must surely have been the inspiration for the flying bird-monster, the 'roc,' that we find in the Sinbad tales of The Arabian Nights."

"Surely"? Maybe Asimov had some backing for this statement, but from what I see here, it seems to be pure speculation. Why does one need to go to Madagascar to find such a large bird when fairly large birds such as ostriches and crowned eagles exist on the African mainland? The apparent assertion of a matter of speculation as bare fact is what disturbed me, and surprised me from Asimov as a supposed man of science.

Maybe it's a particular problem of Asimov's, being a writer of sci-fi and mystery, that he feels a need to see to it that loose ends are tied up into a neat little bundle. Fiction does that quite often, especially in the mystery genre. We expect when we close the book after reading the last page that even if the ending is not a happy one, we at least will have had everything explained to us, and everything will be understood. Religion (which atheists will gladly relegate to fictional status) also tends toward this sort of resolution. It tends to try to answer as many of the key philosophical questions of life as it can, and then blankets anything that wasn't covered with some panacea such as, "Well, God is working all things to the good, and He will triumph in the end." Everybody likes a happy ending.

Science may like to define limits, but has no end in itself, and never completely ties up all the loose ends. This is the true strength and power of science, but it's not a savory one. Those so-called skeptics who claim that science has all the answers are missing the true point of science: that it has no answers, only a better class of questions. The real problem of science is that people are looking for final answers, and science's disciples are more than happy to claim that they have them, despite the fact that they are (unintentionally, granted) misleading people with such a claim.

It is the nature of science's never-ending quest to question reality that what are today's scientific truths will be tomorrow's scientific misconceptions. We had nine planets, but then we only had eight. We were descended from homo erectus, but then we weren't. The smallest indivisible units in the universe were atoms, but then they were found to be made of protons, neutrons and electrons, which were later found to be made of quarks, which in turn are made of...what? To the average person, all of this sort of stuff looks like indecision: can't science make up its mind? I thought you said science had the answers? To the non-technical mind, the answers that science give look like so much magical hocus-pocus, and when Rowling tells us in book seven that wands only properly work for their true owners, yet book four is full of magicians getting along just fine with borrowed and/or stolen wands, we start to think it may all be a bunch of crap.

Science is suffering from bad press, and it's not bad press from those fools who do things like ban the teaching of evolution in schools, but from those people who say things like, "Science has given us the answer, and the answer is evolution." Such an attitude falls prey to those who object, "What happened to us being evolved from homo erectus?" or "Why do you think it is that Piltdown Man turned out to just be a hoax?" If "evolution is the answer", then like dogmatic religious zealots, the disciples of the religion of science will demand that asking more questions is inappropriate, never realizing that like Pharisees berating Christ for healing on the Sabbath, they're elevating tradition over deeper, more fundamental truths. Yes, science embraces evolutionary theory, among other theories, and as a "theory" it's actually something deeper and more well-established than just an idea of how the world might happen to work, but just as Christianity holds as an underlying tenet that "Love thy neighbor" is more important than any rules about how you run your church, science holds to an underlying tenet that above all, we must keep asking questions of our universe.

Evolutionary theory is a better theory than its detractors give it credit, and I expect it to be a part of science for quite some time, despite the fact that simpler concepts, like the number of planets we have, lasted for much shorter time than evolution has already enjoyed. But it is the nature of science that all theories are potentially only here for today, waiting for the time that they will be replaced by a better theory and discarded. The real failure of our educational system is not a failing to convince everyone that evolution or any other theory is true; after all, the greatest scientists have always been the ones who were willing to be the first to discard the failed theories of the past. No, the real failure is not teaching our children that the real strength of science and greatness of scientists was not in their determined acceptance of the status quo, but in the very willingness to go against it. Mendeleyev wasn't the first person to think of the concept of the periodic table of elements (a crude approach to modern understanding of the behavior of subatomic particles before anyone had even thought of subatomic particles), but he was one of the first people to be willing to keep pushing and questioning until scientists decided to take it seriously.

Yes, the problem with science is that we haughtily insist that people accept it as it is, forgetting that the state of science is always evolving. Religion is the one that often strives to be right without being questioned. Science? It only strives to be a little less wrong than it was yesterday, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The book of exodus

So I got fired. Actually, it was about a week ago, and I considered writing about it. I actually even considered blogging about it fully in a new, separate blog chronicling my experience with unemployment, something I've been lucky enough to go about ten years without having to experience. I'm not sure I really understand the blog concept, though, even after having my own for some time. Really there's no real need that society has to know what goes on in the minutiae of my daily life, despite the fact that that's what technology has allowed us to experience in so many ways lately.

It's funny, although it's not so much a coincidence as an end result of my earlier rantings about Darwin that I ended up buying a copy of Marx & Engels' Communist Manifesto yesterday. (These are the names that one doesn't tend to bring up in church, but I do at times.) See, I was looking for a copy of Origin of Species but couldn't find one (to buy, they probably had one at the library to check out, but I was perusing the bargain books in the bin at the front of the library) and ended up settling for what was probably nearly as embarrassing a book as the other would be, at least were I to be seen reading it by a fellow evangelical fundamentalist. I'd always wanted to read Marx in his own words, so to speak.

I've gotten about halfway through it, and so far the only surprise has been the double-takes at how modern the concepts seem to be. This book was written 160 years ago, but you could pop into the text and make a minor change like substituting "Internet" for "telegraph" and it would read like it was written yesterday. The world hasn't changed so much from the time of Marx after all it seems, even with the rise and fall of Soviet-style Communism. Perhaps he's even still right, as I suspect he's on track in saying that the number-one product created by the bourgeoisie is their own gravediggers.

Getting back to my original point of being fired--which I was planning on writing about anyway long before the Manifesto crossed my path--I was actually quite happy with it, to my slight surprise. I think it may come down to my being in many ways a communist at heart. I'm not likely to be the sort of person to rise up and start a revolution to destroy those who create in me an unhappiness with my lot in life, so it's actually quite nice to have them simply toss me out.

The fact is that there are concepts that have come from Marx and the like that are surprisingly very Christian, albeit the Christian response to the situation is different in so many ways. So often I hear nonbelievers rail on and on about how awful it is that the Bible doesn't come right out and condemn slavery. There's an interesting thing about slavery that so many Christians accept as a fact of life that's not often stated, however. No, I'm not talking about the party line that I also often take that "Biblical slavery [is] very different from our modern understanding of the practice." What I'm talking about is that "slavery" and "employment" are just different words for something that is in many ways the same at its heart.

We are fortunate in this day and age in a way that looks different but is surprisingly similar to the ancient Israelite culture. Slavery in ancient Israel was a matter of personal choice: if you had no way to support yourself independently, you could choose to sell yourself into servitude to your neighbor. Really, this was like taking a job with a six-year contract, as you would be paid, and you would be released in the seventh year. In our society, we really aren't that different, besides the fact that we don't get six-year contracts. (Most of us get something more like a six-month contract, twice a year coming together with your master boss to decide whether you continue to be happy with the arrangement you have.) We get to choose who we're going to be slaves to, and our servitude is not spent bound in chains of iron, but in chains of dollars.

Sure, so few of us would actually willingly sit at our desks doing what we do day in and day out if there was not a paycheck tying us to our employer. There are exceptions, but it seems that 99% of us would drop what we're doing at a moment's notice for a chance at more money, and also we dream of the day when we'll be free of our wage slavery and get to RETIRE! Free at last, free at last!!!!

So anyway, I've escaped from slavery, and come to the promised land of freedom, but I know it's temporary, and I dream daily of finding a new master with larger, stronger chains to bind me to a new desk: it's the American way of life. Higher income doesn't make for more freedom, but less. How many opportunities do I have to potentially walk away from an $8/hour job flipping burgers, vs. say a $50k/year job sitting at a desk processing pointless paperwork? Believe me, I'd rather be flipping burgers or washing dishes; it's tangible and feels meaningful to feed people and protect people from food-borne pathogens than shuffle a pile of papers designed to tell some CEO that their pointless business could profit greatly from joining forces with our pointless business for more efficient pointlessness!

But we all end up this way, don't we? And the Christian belief is this: we're all slaves, some of us just have more obvious chains. The question is, all of us have a certain amount of control over who we choose to be our master. I assure you that while I have worked for many companies that do things I consider meaningful on different levels, and I always strive for a job that will make me feel that I'm making a difference in the world, the only way to consistently find meaning is to not let my job be master over me, not let the almighty dollar be my god and my chains of oppression.

Communists suggest the way to be free is to cast off the chains that bind you from the outside, and there's wisdom to that to some degree. For the Christian however, (and we are not the only idealists to feel this way--it's part of why I always say I admire Buddhism that they take this concept even farther) the solution is to cast off the chains from within. Whether I truly may be a slave with literal chains on my body or a symbolic slave with monetary chains lashing me to my desk in an office, in my heart, I know who I really serve as master. Yes, I look for financial prosperity, but I don't seek money for money's sake, nor even for my sake. Yes, even though I have a wife and kids, and financial responsibility to them that society and God smiles upon when I fulfill that responsibility, I don't even serve that master at heart. No, as a Christian, my master is, and must always be, Christ Himself. I choose freely to subjugate myself to the "easy yoke" of a Master who I believe will protect me and love me in a way that no other master will, or even possibly can.

As a Christian, that's the closest to complete freedom (a mythological concept) that one can ever get, and I am content in that alone.

The Third-Party Guru

So yesterday was our so-called "Super Tuesday" here in America, the day that most of the country has its preliminary round of voting before the official election. Often, it's a day that campaigns make final decisions as to how far they are going to be run, and candidates can either make a definitive statement that they fully expect to be the official candidate for their party, or they drop out and declare their work to be done. I suppose sometimes a losing candidate can be happy to simply have made it through a lengthy campaign without any major scandals. Although you may have not heard it on the news in the midst of talk about, there was another campaign afoot that had a major contender who dropped out of the race yesterday. I am of course talking about the death of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

It's a fascinating thing to me that to a great extent, religion and politics have a lot in common. Despite the efforts of various interest groups here in the U.S. such as the so-called "Moral Majority" (I say "so-called" as some have pointed out that this is a phrase like "Christian Science" in which two words are used to describe something in which neither word describes it at all.) there is not an easy mix between religion and political ideology, the now-defunct Natural Law Party notwithstanding. Even in ancient societies, we see struggle between religious movements and political movements: In the New Testament, Jesus, the Pharisees and the Sadducees represented differing religious viewpoints, but struggled not just against one another, but against political powers such as the Romans and the Herodians. Today, even in a country that supposedly supports freedom of religion, we argue about whether a Mormon or a (falsely-rumored) Muslim is fit to hold national office. Many have chided the silliness of the notion that somehow putting one's hand on a Bible while taking a vow makes that vow somehow more unbreakable. While the Bible is of supreme importance to a Christian, physically, it's just a pile of paper, and the moral law within a politician's heart is infinitely more important than the moral law under his or her hand.

But what of the Maharishi? Why do I bring him up, other than the fact that he has recently passed the way of all humanity? Well, although I don't really know so very much about the man, there was a comment made about him in the news report of his death I heard this morning that struck me as fascinating. It is very rare among either politicians or religious leaders to go through their entire career without being plagued by scandals, but the Maharishi is one of those rare individuals who seems to have done it. Other than an alleged sexual advance on Mia Farrow that seems to be unproven (and considerably less of a scandal than it would be for a Christian political leader, as Hindu sexual standards are somewhat different), his life and the Transcendental Meditation movement he founded seem to have a pretty clean record.

I remember that there was a TM center near the place where I grew up, and there was a teacher I had in junior high school who often passed on rumors to her students that these weirdos were somehow dragging off young impressionable souls and brainwashing them. I always found the stories rather improbable, myself, and whereas another Christian teacher I had in high school later was definitely part of what inspired me to look into Christianity, this particular Christian teacher was the sort that made me say, "If that's what Christians are like, I don't think I need to have anything to do with it, thank you." There's no doubt to me that as a Christian, there is a certain disdain one must have for all that is not of Christ, but choosing to see the deepest evil in any religious activity outside of your own narrow views isn't so much Christianity as paranoia. Later in high school, I had a friend who had a part-time job as a janitor at the TM center. His view on these people was that they were a bit odd, but mostly friendly and honest, and they never tried to push their views on him, an atheist.

I think that honesty and good-natured kindness that seems to have always been very present in the Maharishi and his followers is admirable. Sure, we may disagree with their spiritual beliefs, but when we look at their aims as a group, I can't find anything to criticize. The Maharishi believed that his methods brought not just peace to the practitioner, but also to the world around the practitioner. The Maharishi and his followers, although surprisingly influential for such a small group, don't seem to have been self-seeking, living modestly and quietly.

As a Christian, I suppose I am obligated to call the Maharishi a "cultist" or an "infidel", and technically, either or both descriptions fit. Still, on a personal level, as someone who tries to look at the world both from within and without my religious belief system, I'd have to say that if all cultists and infidels--and even many Christians--were more like the Maharishi, this world would be a much better place for it.

Fireproof

A couple months ago, my boss was having me research info on fire safes. As with a number of businesses, we back up the information on our servers to a tape drive, and put the tapes in a small safe to protect them from fire and/or theft. If you're not familiar (which I'm guessing most people are not), fire safes are typically given ratings of one-hour, two-hour or three-hour, which is more or less considered the amount of time a given safe can sit in a typical building fire without the contents being damaged. My boss wasn't happy when I gave him the particulars of what these ratings mean on a more technical level, expressing that he wanted a safe that would offer complete protection and be truly fire-proof. I explained to him as it says on this website:

Remember, provided there is enough heat, NOTHING IS ACTUALLY FIREPROOF and everything WILL BURN.

As you likely have heard in the news, a large portion of Southern California is burning this week. Over thirty fires have consumed half a million acres of land (about half the size of Rhode Island), taken the lives of at least six people, injured over fifty firefighters, destroyed over 1,500 homes, and are still going at this time.

Like pretty much everything that happens around me, the fires caused some introspection and reflection. Even in areas like the one where I live that are not actually on fire, ashes fall continually, and the sky has been a brownish-orange for six days and probably will continue to be for some time even if the fires are extinguished soon. Everywhere is being effected.

But it did get a bit personal on Monday morning when I drove to work and found the street my office is on blocked off by police. I was a block away from work, and though I couldn't see the fire itself, I could tell from the smoke that it was just a block away again on the far side of my office. I was allowed through the roadblock and arrived at work where my boss informed me that we were not yet told to evacuate, but we knew there was a high likelihood of it as indeed, the fire was just a block away. He himself had gone to the roof of our building and taken pictures of the flames rising through the trees on a neighboring ridge earlier that morning.

I sat at my desk and took some time to survey the junk that usually litters it. Once the call came to evacuate, which was pretty much a sure thing, I wouldn't have time to grab more than one or two things off of my desk, so I decided to be preemptive and grab everything that was irreplaceable, put it in a bag, and take it to my car that moment. It stuck me as I was gathering up my belongings that there were some things that I brought to work with me because I thought they would be safer sitting in a drawer in my work desk than sitting in a drawer in a desk in my home. "What if something happened to my house?" I'd often thought in the past. "Better to bring this to work for safekeeping." Nothing of monetary value, just personal sentimental value. Now I had come to realize that work was not a safe place after all. About an hour later, in fact, my boss would be having me load office equipment into my car to take home for safekeeping, ironically including our fire safe.

I started to think about it all. I already knew that home was not safe. I don't have a safe, so important documents are kept in a cardboard box. Put the box on the floor, and it will be destroyed in a flood. Put the box on a high shelf and it will be destroyed in a fire. Put the box in my car and it will be destroyed in a car crash. Put it anywhere at all and it could be stolen.

Is buying a safe the answer, though? Testing safes for effectiveness is a very lengthy process, and few safes that are not priced at hundreds of dollars make it. They put them in furnaces to simulate fire conditions; then while still hot, they drop them from a certain height to simulate a collapsing building; then they submerge them in water to see if they keep watertight because no doubt the firefighters will dump hundreds of gallons of water into your office building to stop the burning. If you didn't choose a safe that was good enough for the sort of fire that hit your building (which of course, you can't predict), then your stored materials will be melted, charred, smashed and soaked.

But how much is enough to spend on a safe? As the quote above indicates, despite the fact that you can be very dedicated to finding a way to protect yourself from fire, there is a chance that some sort of catastrophe will come that will burn not just your documents, but the safe itself! Sure, it's not likely, but it is possible.

The point of all of this is that in the midst of worrying throughout the rest of the day about the thousands of dollars of office equipment and confidential information of clients that were loaded into my car, I realized I could guarantee no safety. Everything that I own, and everything that my employer had put me in charge of, all of it had potential to be lost, damaged, stolen or destroyed. What's a person to do?

There is a principle that Jesus taught, and I think it's one of a handful of principles that have practical application for all people, not just those who believe in Christ's deity. Yet it is not such an obvious one like, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," or "Thou shalt not kill." In Matthew 6, Jesus said,

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

I think most people think of this as a spiritual thing, and if you are a Christian, you definitely should, but there is a completely mundane and practical application to this. Buy yourself some fancy clothes, and eventually, they will rot away and go out of style. Buy yourself a cool car, and eventually it will break down and become a pile of scrap metal. Put your money in the bank and the bank will go under due to bad business decisions or embezzlement, the bottom will fall out of the value of the dollar, the stock market crashes and the real estate bubble bursts. Every worldly possession you have can, and eventually will go away.

But if you invest in educating children? If you invest in saving the environment? If you invest in peace, love, understanding, and all sorts of other hippy-dippy stuff like that? The return on that sort of investment is worth more than any amount of money.

A friend of mine remarked that when he watches the news these days, and sees people evacuated from fire areas, repeatedly they so often seem to cry out that they have lost "everything." He wondered to me, "Don't they still have their lives? Don't they still have their families? Don't most of them have insurance that will allow them to rebuild most if not just about all of what they did lose?" It would be a tragedy if I were to lose all those material possessions, no doubt. But so long as I have my wife, my children, and my God, I have all that I truly need. And even if I did lose my family, I would have the fond memories of the joy we shared. No fire can take that away from me.

Whys and wherefores without wherewithal

What happened five years ago on September 11, 2001 means something different to everyone, but for just about every American, it was a life-changing moment in time.

The people of my generation were told that we would remember 9/11 vividly the way a previous generation would remember the assassination of President Kennedy. I do actually remember fairly vividly many of the details of that morning. I remember sleeping in on that morning, as I had already decided to take the day off of work for personal reasons, and the phone rang. It was my mother-in-law, who urged me and my wife to turn on the television. "Somebody's bombed New York or something!" We turned it on in time to see the first building collapse.

For me though, there was an eerie quality to the whole first half of September that I occasionally play over in my mind. For me personally, the events of 9/11/2001 were one tragedy in the midst of a string of several that happened in my life. In my life, but not directly to me, I suppose, tragedy is a strange thing. Tragedies come with a factor of distance and severity. The other tragedies were closer to me but of course less severe than a pair of 100-story buildings collapsing to kill several thousand people. Still, the exchange in those factors made them all seem fairly even to me in a fashion; does that make sense?

Many of the things that happened were too personal to discuss here, but I will speak of the first and the last of them all. First, a beloved family member passed away. There had just been a funeral, right at the start of the month. He had gone to the doctor complaining of some problems, and the doctor had told him nothing was wrong, he should go home and rest. So he did. A couple days later, he was dead.

Why did the doctor miss his diagnosis? Why did this man accept the diagnosis without question, even as his symptoms grew worse? Why did he have to die? Why does it hurt for those of us left behind even though all of us who were believers in Christ were certain of this man's salvation, and felt it safe to assume he was in heaven? None of those are questions that are easy to answer.

The last thing that happened, to me anyway, was that I received notice of a friend and co-worker from a couple years back having committed suicide. She was an intelligent, beautiful, fun person that everybody liked, and she seemed to have a lot going for her as far as anybody knew. But apparently on the 9th of September, she hung herself in her apartment, and wasn't discovered until nearly a week after. She left no note.

Why did she kill herself? What was it that was causing her enough suffering that dying seemed like an improvement over her situation? Was there anything that I myself could have done, either at the time or back years previously when I had known her better, to change her mind? Does suicide really relieve one of suffering if there is an afterlife? Might she have suffered worse or found a reason to live if she had waited a few more days and seen the horror in New York? These are questions that are virtually impossible to answer.

But while I had never been to New York, while I had never seen the towers in person, while I didn't know any of the people who died on *that* day, some of the most nagging questions linger on that central event. When two planes crashed into towers in New York and two tried (one unsuccessfully) to crash into buildings in Washington, DC, we were left with a lot of questions that I sometimes wonder who is asking.

Why? Don't we want to know why? This isn't about 72 houris awaiting each hijacker in paradise, not to Osama bin Laden. This isn't about "Islamofascists" who "hate freedom". I don't buy that. Osama bin Laden wanted to send a message to the world. Even if we refuse to respect that message, even if we condemn that message for the brutal manner in which it was sent, doesn't the severity of that make us want to sit up and at least hear what it was he was trying to say? If only to respond intelligently?

It's an odd thing about myself. My religious beliefs lead me to hold the view that human beings are, at their heart, evil. Yet at the same time, I believe that there also exists a drive in people that makes them desire to do what they think is the right thing. Bin Laden and his cohorts who planned out and executed the attacks of 9/11 may appear to be evil, and indeed, they most likely are. Isn't it not just possible, but likely that they believed that what they were doing was the right thing to do? The 19 hijackers were willing to give their lives for it. The al-Qaeda organization, while maybe weaker than it once was, still exists, so I assume its members didn't look at 9/11 and say, "My, that was a bit too brutal for my tastes!"

The majority of the people of the world heard about what had happened to our country on 9/11, and their sympathy and support went out to us as a nation. That is a good thing. However, there exists a minority of the world's population who, upon hearing the news, celebrated. Some of these people are in fact so elated by this attack, that if they had the chance to be a part of another attack like it in the future, they wouldn't hesitate. This is a phenomenon that makes me want to ask "Why?" but unlike the other things that make me want to ask "Why?" there are people who are willing, able, and probably eager to answer it. Shouldn't more of us be asking?

Rising to the challenge, part I: My goose cooked?

Well, as I may have hinted in my last post, I have a number of subjects on deck, so to speak, and just haven't gotten around to polishing them up and posting them due to them being not up to my usual quality (insert self-deprecating blog humor here). In particular, let me foreshadow that I had a few things to say about the evolution vs. creation debate that I think will be thought-provoking, but maybe I'll break it down into several posts like I did with the separation of church and state posts (1 2 3 4).

At the moment, I am going to go back and revisit one of my previous posts that's one of my favorites, and has now become a much more popular one thanks to my sneaking a link into a much more popular blog. I think the post itself doesn't need much in the way of restatement, but various responses I have finally received lead to further discussion.

Francois Tremblay says something that I think cuts to the heart of the matter, partially because I asked for an opinion on whether the suggestion of God proving Himself or my responding challenge really has meaning. He says "it is quite impossible for us to know that any given event is non-natural" which I hope believers in the supernatural will see to be quite true! Hypothetically, if there was an event that was non-natural, how would we be able to tell? (I may take this in more detail as a future post soon.) He also points out that believing that God could exist implies living in a completely different mind frame than believing that God could not exist. What little significance the "atheist challenge" has, if any, depends largely on what sort of atheist a person is. A person who knows God does not exist will see it differently from a person who is of the opinion that God does not exist, who will in turn see it different from someone who simply doesn't know whether God exists or not.

On a side note to this last point, I've heard atheists make the clever comment that most people are atheists of some sort or another. I may believe in Jesus, but I am an atheist in respect to Zeus, get it? So one interesting restatement of the original question that will allow Christians and other theists to play along in this sort of philosophical train of thought is:

3: Give a hypothetical undeniable proof of the existence of the God of the Quran. (If you're a Muslim, you could still use the wording of challenge #2.) Essentially, suggest a way that "Allah" could send an unambiguous message to the world so that everyone could understand fully that our purpose in life should be to follow the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. You may have a good answer, or you may see from this perspective why the original question is not so meaningful.

Bookjunky makes some suggestions that I think are very good, but I will save for my next post. Partly because I he reposted much of his comment in my blog, and I'll respond to those posted here separately, and partially because his response is in an odd fashion related to Zachary Moore's response, in which he points out that while surely there may be miraculous signs that would make you give consideration to God, you might still not "worship a being so immoral". This is oddly enough a more difficult hurdle for people who do not believe than lack of physical evidence. People don't believe because they don't want to, and they feel perfectly justified in denying a perceived cruel deity.

Zendo Deb refers to the ending of Carl Sagan's book "Contact", which he says was "expunged" of all religious references when made into a movie. Oddly enough, I found "Contact" to be an incredibly spiritual movie myself, so I'm more eager than ever to read the book, which is high on my list of books to read sometime soon. His suggestion?

Obviously non-random information would have to be hidden in various computations. The digits of pi, when expanded to some large number of digits would be seen to contain certain messages, and so on for other non-rational real number representations.

I find this a fascinating suggestion, and one that I could devote a whole series of posts to. I may do at least one. My thought on this? In the movie "Contact", Jodie Foster's character hears some radio pulses coming from outer space and says, "Those are primes! 2,3,5,7, those are all prime numbers and there's no way that's a natural phenomenon!" If the pulses did come from a natural phenomenon, say a radio source that had a fifty/fifty chance of either pulsing or pausing, the chance of that particular sequence coming up is one in 1,048,576. That alone was enough to convince her that this was not natural, but on top of that, there was encoded within the signal the blueprints for a massive and complicated machine.

For me, the idea that we could discover a complicated code that gave instructions for the building of an elaborate machine that was not created by human intelligence would be evidence enough for me to assume a higher intelligence was out there and was interested in talking to us. Of course, as far as I'm concerned, that's a good description of DNA. Living things, down to the very cellular level are perplexingly intricate machines that are far beyond the ability of any human engineer to design. This message is obviously not unambiguous enough for everyone to believe there's something more than mere random effects of evolution walking about on our planet, but for me it tends to be enough to wonder. Is it enough for Zendo Deb or any other skeptic to at least consider agnosticism?

Challenge to atheists: prove God exists

Okay, this is essentially a reprint of the post below, but that one doesn't show up on Technorati right, and someone (Wade, whose new atheist blog is here, so give him some traffic) commented that the challenge was actually worded a little vaguely. To review, I have had many atheists/skeptics claim that if God really wants us to believe in Him, He ought to give "undeniable" proof of His existence. My contention is that there is no such thing as "undeniable proof". My challenge to skeptics who wish to make such an accusation is to come up with a hypothetical example of what such proof would look like. Remember, this is not just proof that you personally find acceptable (there are already about a couple billion people who seem to have that), but proof that nobody could deny. Either of the following would be permissable:

1: Give a hypothetical undeniable proof for the existence of an intelligent being that created the universe with a purpose in mind.

2: Give a hypothetical undeniable proof of the existence of the God of the Bible. Complete adherence to all facts presented in the Bible is not necessary, but the following aspects must be shown: omniscience, "quasiomnipotence" (that is, absolute power over matter, space and time, but not neccesarily over logical foundations of truth), absolute benevolence, and is the inspiration for (if not the actual author of) the Bible. Actually, it need not be the Bible, one could substitue the Quran or some other Holy Book of a major religion that has a fairly well-defined concept of the deity(s) within it.

I once asked an atheist, "If God pushed the sky aside as though it were a curtain, stuck His head down throught the gap and waved, saying, 'Hi, I'm up here!' would you be convinced that God exists?" He pondered and replied, "No, I'd probably think it was an hallucination." I actually admired him for his honesty.

Practical religion

People use the word "zen" a lot, usually to refer to someone being zoned out or disconnected from reality. The popular idea about zen or meditation is that it makes you passive or remote. My experience after a dozen years sitting and following my breath a little each day is that I feel more active and more connected to day-to-day life--not less. -Algernon D'Ammassa

I saw this quote recently, and it got me to thinking about an important religious issue. It's not really an issue just for Zen Buddhism or Christianity, but an issue for all religions, maybe even atheism as well. The issue is, whatever sort of spiritual/moral belief system you live under, can you say honestly that it's serving a purpose here on earth?

I remember in college taking a philosophy class on eastern religions & philosophies. At the beginning of the class, both the instructor and the textbook emphasized that eastern religions were unlike the western ones in that there was always an aspect of them that implied practical application to make life better in some way. The unsaid implication? That in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, religion is something you do one day a week and then go back to business the rest of the week as though you were no different from an atheist. In fact, you're probably worse than an atheist, because at least the atheist isn't a hypocrite for living out their beliefs at selective times.

It's that secondary implication of hypocrisy that makes me question the premise, though. If there is a chance for hypocrisy in merely living a plain day-to-day life (which seems to be widely accepted by many theists and atheists alike) then that means that those who live that way are living their religion wrong. Therefore, there is a way to live it right.

It's often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi as saying, "Preach the gospel at all times. Use words if necessary." In the Epistle of James (v. 2:18), the early church leader says, "Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do." A true Christian faith should show results in a life well-lived, and I suspect it should be the same for any faith.

And what is a life well-lived? Is it just a faith that serves itself? As the quote above seems to imply, even Zen, with its reputation for turning inward and shutting out the distractions of the world is a practice that in the end should make you more connected with the world. Christianity and so many other religions have a disappointingly spotty history of so-called believers that felt the best way to live out their faith was to coerce others by force to adhere to it. Why? So those people can in turn force others? Shouldn't there be an end goal in mind? Sure, Christianity is supposed to bring salvation, but do people really think a forced confession of faith is genuinely going to bring about a changed heart?

The short of it is, while there are those who believe that being a Christian (or other religious person) is a waste of time, I truly believe that is only the case if that person's religion is empty or misled. Christians of true faith will be found working incessantly to make the world a better place for the glory of God. Would that we all were doing the same.

Membership hath its privileges

There's an interesting facet of Christianity that I find sometimes hard to swallow on an intellectual level, despite the fact that I take it on faith. People that are not Christians, mostly agnostics and atheists, complain that it's unfair for Christianity to make the claim that it has exclusive access to Truth-with-a-capital-T. If Jesus is going to say "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6) then isn't he being rather intolerant? Well aside from the fact that I don't think that this technically fits the actual definition of intolerant, and that Jesus, being God, pretty much has the right to set the rules however He wants, the thing I think this objection misses very often is the fact that Christianity is not the only religion by far that makes claims of exclusivity. Lots and lots of religions claim to be the only "true" religion, and really, it's a whole topic in itself as to why I think that's not only acceptable, but desirable in a religious practice. But this topic of exclusivity is not the "facet" that I really wanted to talk about, although it's somewhat related, I suppose.

The thing about Christianity that I was pondering yesterday evening was part of the whole, "Don't say you'll believe it when you see it, but believe and then you'll see!" phenomenon. While I believe that there is a great deal of Christianity and its doctrines that can be intellectually understood without having to be a Christian, I think all (well, perhaps most) Christians realize that there is an element of faith that only true believers have a grasp on. We evangelicals have what we like to call "a personal relationship with God." What is that, exactly? I don't think I can describe it to someone who hasn't experienced it for themself, which is too bad, since it's what's really at the heart of Christianity when you strip everything else away.

Interestingly enough, and one of the reasons it's related to the topic in the first paragraph, I found myself pondering this in the midst of reading about Zen Buddhism. I realized that exclusivity is not the only thing by far about Christianity that's hard for an outsider to accept, yet is common to many religions. What is at the center of Zen Buddhism? The experience of zen. What is zen? Well, although philosophers of various religious beliefs can talk about it at length and discuss things about zen, zen itself is not something that can be put into words, even by those who have experienced it. In fact, the inability to describe zen is an inherent property of it, the word "zen" meaning essentially "wordlessness".

Such a concept is found in the Bible in a number of ways. Paul wrote about a vision in which "He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell." (2Cor. 12:4) But aside from that special incident, he writes more generally and practically that "The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned." (1Cor. 2:14) There is a concept in many religions that there is just a certain level of spiritual enlightenment that only the true believers will ever experience.

Interestingly enough, I'd say that it's a belief that even some atheists harbor in an odd way. I've been told by atheists that if only I would cease to believe in God for a moment, I'd see how ridiculous the Bible and Christianity as a whole are. Perhaps they're right, but if so, aren't they essentially suggesting that there is such a thing as special atheistic enlightenment that only true atheists can experience? What a concept! (It's hardly a common view among atheists in general, though. If atheists were a religious classification as Christianity is, there would probably be as many "sects" of atheism as there are atheists.)

I'm wondering if the only point of this blog is to toss out thoughts on unanswerable questions that I'm not really asking, nor looking for feedback on. I'm not sure what my point is here in general, and it sounds like yesterday's post, with a lot of "well maybe, or maybe not". Are these facets of Christianity logically unacceptable? Yet they're used by so many. I remember the irony of once having a discussion on the value of various "ex-gay" ministries. There was a lesbian who claimed that if any of these sorts of ministries ever had any successes, it wasn't that they were turning homosexuals into non-homosexuals, but that they were turning bisexuals into operative heterosexuals. How could she be so sure? Because if they were able to be attracted to women ever, then they were simply not homosexuals, nor had they ever been. I thought this was a very familiar concept, and realized it was from 1John 2:19: "They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us." See, there's no such thing as an ex-Christian; if a person leaves Christianity, it means they were never really a part of it in the first place.

Christianity has its particulars that are strange and hard to understand, but they don't set it apart as particularly wrong so much as just one among many belief systems. Sure, Christianity is special, but not for any of the above reasons.

The evolution of Darwinism

"Did God, the supreme intelligence, deign to design distinctive shell patterns for the tortoises of each island?"
-"Evolution of a Scientist," Newsweek, Nov. 28, 2005, p. 54

Evolution is always an interesting subject to me. Partly because it's such a hot-button topic for many people, and partly because despite that fact, there are many people who insist it's not a hot-button topic at all.

In a recent Newsweek article about the life and legacy of Charles Darwin, there were a number of interesting comments, including the above quote, which I'll get to. One thing in particular that jumped out at me was a quote from the sidebar. "Evolution is not controversial in the field of science." (quote by "Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education") While in a sense this is not quite true (there are scientists who feel that evolutionary theory is not sufficient to explain life as we know it), in another sense it's so true as to be a sort of "duh" statement. The strange thing about "science" in what I believe to be its truest form, is that nothing is controversial from within science. The idea of "science" is to find ways to understand the way the world works. Ethics, philosophical truth, theology, popular opinion and the like, while indeed able to influence scientists, should not in theory influence science itself. Some people who oppose evolutionary theory do so with the argument that saying we humans evolved from lower life forms cheapens the value and dignity of human life. While not everyone agrees with this, from the scientific point of view it doesn't matter if a scientific theory cheapens anything at all. If a scientist found a way to make substantial amounts of gold from common household items, then the value of gold would be cheapened, but that wouldn't change the fact that the method would exist. (Of course, atomic theory would tell us such a method does not exist, but that's beside the point.)

Another excellently thought-provoking quote was, "[Intelligent Design] says, if there's some part of science that you can't understand, that must be where God is. Historically, that hasn't gone well. And if science does figure out [how the eye evolved]—and I believe it's very likely that science will ... then where is God?" (quote by "Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian") There once was a time when I believed this, and it's a popular view, actually: that God is to be found in the gaps that science cannot fill. But Collins is right; if we claim this to be the case, then does God get smaller and smaller each time science takes a step forward? I personally believe that there is nothing about the physical world that is beyond the range of science to understand, given enough time and resources. If there is no end to time, and scientists eventually get to the point where there is virtually nothing that is not understood in a scientific perspective, will God suddenly cease to exist? I have heard some atheists express the view that we're already there, particularly in the case of evolution. To many atheists, the existence and complexity of life on the planet was one of the biggest hurdles to overcome to be confident that there is no God. As Richard Dawkins has said, evolution makes it "possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." The fact is, no matter how unlikely a person may think the idea of life evolving from non-life spontaneously is, the probability is not completely zero, and it allows atheists to get a toe in the door of plausibility. I don't like the idea that somehow the more plausible the atheists' claims on truth may be, the less plausible theists' claims become to balance things out. And what may be worse, when one views science as the enemy of faith, I believe one will tend to reject anything science has to offer. This is a great shame.

The article also points out that scientists don't call it "Darwinism". I have no idea if this is true on the whole but I don't doubt it's true in general. Calling something by a word that ends in an "-ism" makes it seem more philosophical than scientific, and even if a scientist might reject evolutionary theory, they would surely prefer to dismiss it on scientific grounds rather than cheapening it with an easy label. Still, "Darwinism" is found in many dictionaries, and is indeed a well-understood word, even to those who would rather not use it. Also, my main concern about "Darwinism" is that I often wonder why it is considered more of a science than a philosophy. I don't say it to cheapen it, I actually do believe that evolution clearly happens, I only question the scale: yes, animals change and speciate, but does that mean that all life as we know it today is here as a result of speciation from some single original life form? As I said, evolution does have a toe in the door of plausibility, but does having that toe imply that the door must be flung wide? Yes, we see speciation, we have a fossil record that shows us some rather extensive history of evolution, but until all the gaps are filled in (which they may never be, even if evolutionary theory of the more extensive sort is true) how can we really know the origin of life? Claiming that science can explain a one-time event that happened billions of years ago with no record to speak of smacks of philosophy to me rather than science.

But what of creationism? What of God's role in all of this if indeed He exists and has taken a role? Couldn't God have used evolution as a tool, but not necessarily the only tool at His disposal? Could God have created life that has the appearance of having evolved when, in fact, it did not? Why not? It seems to me that every argument and piece of evidence I have heard for evolutionary theory could be reworked into evidence for creationism. For instance, all mammals have either five digits on each of four limbs, or evidence of rudimentary structures that suggest four five-fingered limbs. To a biologist that believes in evolution, this suggests a common ancestry for all mammals. To me, it suggests a common base design for all mammals that has been tweaked by the creator in various ways. The same goes for similarities in DNA, protein structures, etc. Is it common ancestry, or common design? I think evolutionary theorists are making the same mistaken logical leaps that "intelligent design" advocates are. Like the idea that God is where science cannot explain things, ID suggests that if we find biological structures that we cannot explain the evolution thereof, they must have been designed. Why does this make any more or less sense than to say that those things we can explain must have evolved (without any supernatural intervention)? I think it's flawed inference on both counts.

But Darwin famously did an extensive study of variations in finch beaks in the Galapagos Islands. So many different kinds of finches, and each one had its own little ecological niche to fit into. He speculated (not proved) that perhaps they all might have come from a common ancestor. This speculation seems reasonable enough, but why must it then follow that God had no hand in the matter? Could not God have created different species of finches? Could not God have directed varieties of finches towards the ecological niches that they would best fit? Could not God have created the original ancestor of all finches, whose descendants then had, by very simple natural forces, come to speciate into their modern equivalents? Why is God excluded? Matthew 10:29 says "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father." If God takes personal interest in the life of a sparrow, why not the beak of a finch?

Would God "deign to design distinctive shell patterns"? Why is the answer an implied "no"? For all the glory and power and honor the Bible attributes to God, I believe it also attributes the kind of character that gives us a clear answer of "yes". Does that mean God did? I don't know how one would find the answer to that.

Taking the stairs

There's a phrase that I tend to use that I can't seem to find any reference to anyone else using. I wonder if there's a commonly-used phrase or even just a single word for the phenomenon: "running from elevators".

I use the phrase symbolically when I catch myself or other people behaving in an illogical manner due to the fact that they are impatient. The idea is to imagine a person on the fifth floor of a building who wants to make a hasty exit. He goes to the elevator and presses the button. When the elevator doesn't show up within five seconds, he turns and runs off, looking for the stairwell, thinking, "I don't have time to stand around all day waiting for the elevator!" The fact is, unless the elevator is exceptionally slow, if you're higher than the second or possibly third floor, choosing not to wait for the elevator is very likely going to take longer. So "running from elevators" is engaging in behavior that feels faster and better, but is probably in reality going to take longer and is generally a stupid idea.

(Actually, on December 11th, 1990, I actually decided to take the stairs rather than the elevator, and in rushing down the stairs at a much more rapid pace than is at all advisable, I tripped and sprained my ankle, never making it to my destination at all that day.)

So, I'm sure I had a point here... A couple months ago, I was reading a philosophy book on the problem of evil, i.e., "How could a loving, omnipotent God allow suffering and evil in the world?" It's a good question, and one that most consider to be well-worth pondering. However, one of the philosophers in the collection of essays apparently wanted to make the point that pondering this question is a waste of time for Christians, because while the question does indeed exist, God had intended us to be vessels for change, spending our time combating evil directly through works of charity rather than spending our time trying to solve philosophical conundrums. While I don't completely agree, there's a good point there, too. It led me to think about philosophy and theology in the life of a Christian. I expend an awful large portion of my mental energies pondering philosophical issues, when I suppose I could be using them to solve practical problems of the world.

Yet these philosophical issues are important. People really do want to know why God would allow suffering! I know I do. People really do want to understand how the Trinity works. People really do want to know why the Bible should be given more respect than the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita (or not)! Can a person really ignore those issues? Can one sort out with a clear demarcation which issues are practical issues and which are academic?

One thing that occurred to me in particular is that as a Christian, I believe that all of these questions will be answered in time, if only we wait for God to answer them for us. If not in this life, at least we will know them in Heaven. Is all of this mucking about with trying to figure through intellectual issues really a waste of time when the simplest and fastest way to get anything done as a Christian is just to "Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding." (Proverbs 3:5)?

Right or wrong, wise or foolish, I just don't think I can help but take the stairs.