Assumptions, Presuppositions and Sheep

Back in the 70's I read an obituary in Physics Today of a young physicist who had passed before his time. In the eulogy to the man, it was mentioned that he was so careful in making assumptions that if he saw a hillside with sheep grazing, he would only go so far as to say 'the side of each sheep that is in view is white'. As if to say that what is not seen could turn out to be another color. Now, that seems kind of ridiculous. But, in a laboratory, whether scientific or engineering, that kind of skepticism has its place.

We can't live our entire lives being skeptical like that but using this approach occasionally in disciplined way has value.

not been tagged but I'll play anyway

I just tagged myself.

Four Jobs I’ve Had:

-Nightwatchman at bubblegum factory (superbubble).
-Grad Student
-Visiting Prof. U. of Virginia
-R&D for ORNL

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over:

The Last Temptation of Christ - it's the music and sociological detail, not the Irish Jesus.

Four Books I Could Read Over and Over:

The Masks of God - Joseph Campbell (Ok, its a series of books)
The Story of Civilization - Will and Ariel Durant (once again a series)
Meditations on the Tarot - originally by Anonymous but now known to be V. Tonberg
ummm... I have to think some more about this one


Ten Places I've Lived:
Pocahontas, AR; Comanche and Velma Alma, OK; Lansing, MI; Rector, AR; Searcy, AR; Augsburg, FRG;Memphis, TN; Charlottesville, VA; Knoxville, TN

Four TV Shows I Watch:

-Hardball with Chris Matthews
- Countdown with Keith Olbermann
-UT Sports and Baylor Women's basketball where my niece plays

Four Places I've Been On Vacation:
-Jonesboro, AR
-Memphis, TN
- Los Alamos, NM
- Disney World

Four Websites I Visit Daily:

Travisblog
Abductive
Jim West's Theology Blog


Four of My Favorite Foods:

Tuna Curry
Any kind of Salmon dish
spaghetti with chili, peppers, onions, and lots of cheese
Any salad with Blue Cheese


Four Places I'd Like to Be Right Now:

I'm here at home already
Northern Europe

Psychology, Freud, and Politics

"...but one gift from Freud we ought never neglect; his return to the sources of culture in Mediterranean myths, rooting psychology not in the brain, or genetics, or blind evolution, but in the poetic basis of mind, whose imagination is structured by mythical configurations..."

from the article Point of View: The Gods, Disease, and Politics by James Hillman in Parabola Vol 29(4) p 72, 2004.

James Hillman is not a pop psychologist and his writings are difficult for me because I'm not well read and I'm a modern, ie. a disciple (whether I like it or not) of that dirt philosophy of Newton and John Locke.

Church of Christ Biology Professor and Evolution

I've recently discovered a Church of Christ Biology Professor who in my opinion is stepping in the right direction. His name is Daniel Brannan and he teaches at Abilene Christian University.

At the Metanexus site he reviews a book, Philip Clayton's God and Contemporary Science. Dan and Phil are tackling the boundary between Science and Theology.

Disingenuous

Disingenuous

1. Not straightforward or candid; insincere or calculating 2. Pretending to be unaware or unsophisicated; faux-naif

From Bartelsby.com American Heritage Dictionary site


How I see it used.

When someone makes a good argument and you do not want to acknowledge or address it, you can always accuse them of being disingenuous. Then you can move on.

Love those Saturn pictures

From one of NASA's "Image of the Day" series.

Singin in the Rain

My son took a course on film this past semester. He came home one day saying that his favorite of all the movies he'd seen was Singin in the Rain. We bought him the DVD for Christmas and watched it yesterday.

It was great!

It has been very many years since I'd last seen a singing and dancing show. Never had much interest in them...well yes I enjoyed the Sound of Music, Oklahoma, the Music Man, and the Student Prince. Come to think of it I did have some affection for the musicals. But I never had the slightest interest in the dance part of things. It has been many years since seeing any song and dance musical. Such things were on TV a lot when I was growing up, but I never paid much attention. Now after these years and finally seeing Singin in the Rain, I am really impressed. Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor were great athletes. They had rhythm. They could sing. They were upbeat and happy. It was a joy to watch. What a Blessing!

Books Read in 2005

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
by Kathleen Norris

This is a book to be savoured slowly. It starts out kind of like a geography lesson/travelogue but meanders and transforms to an account of a spiritual journey. Kathleen grew up all over but had family roots in South Dakota. She and her husband were writers in the the writers' center of the universe, New York City, when she inherited a house back in Dakota. They did not intend to stay in that small town but they did. We receive a most interesting account of the people who live there and how the land affects who they are and how they feel about themselves and how they live. Her religious/spiritual orientation changes are described where she goes through various stages beginning with childhood to a secular period in the 70's to becoming, rather reluctantly, a minister. Interesting how she handles the influences of her background. This included a fundamentalist grandmother and a devout but less, shall we say, intense grandmother. She weaves into the story lessons and activities involving monasteries and the brothers there with whom she becomes spiritually intimate. This is a book I'll be going back to.


The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity by Carl A. Raschke

I used to think postmodernists were purely irrational. I came by that opinion honestly because of my occupation as an R&D applied physicist, my background in the Churches of Christ, a place where common sense reasonong is ostensibly given the highest role in establishing normative religion, and because of my innate personality (I'm a geek oblivious to things you more normal folks perceive). Given that, during my adult life up until recently, I perceived there are two alternatives: Fundamentalism or Modernism. Not much of a choice. With fundamentalism and conservative Christianity, you make a mistake and fry on the griddle forever. With modernism, the world is a mechanism and when you die, you are gone forever. But works like the above by Raschke and the one by Nancey Murphey below, show us, intellectually at least, the way to move beyond this.

It is a friendly universe after all!


Anglo-American Postmodernity: Philosophical Perspective on Science, Religion, and Ethics by Nancey Murphy

Am understanding a fraction of this. Am particularly interested in the phenomenon of emergence. The origin of consciousness and free will must have something to do with this.

Big Bang: The Origin Of The Universe
by Simon Singh

My son loaned me this. It is a great account of the history of astronomy and the folks who made the discoveries leading up to and including the big bang. Amazing to me and I think instructive is the recognition that up until about the time of Galileo, the earth-centered view of our cosmos actually had as much data and sound reasoning behind it as the sun-centered. That should inspire some humility on my part. I had learned much of the information in this book from various sources through the years but this brought it all together so that I now have a much clearer concept of what the Big Bang is and how, for today, it is the best explanation for the mechanism of the origin of the universe.

This Hebrew Lord by John Shelby Spong

Say, this is a pretty good book.

Conversations of Goethe
by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann, J. K. Moorhead, Havelock Ellis (Introduction), John Oxenford (Translator)

Hard going but worth the effort.

The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea
by Arthur Oncken Lovejoy

This one was hard. I bought it because of reference to it in Ken Wilbur's The Marriage of Sense and Soul, a marvelous book. Lovejoy is a philosopher and characteristically takes a long time to say things. Will try again a few years from now.


The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
by Brian Greene

I learned a lot about string theory in the first half but got bogged down after that.

Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind
by Arthur Zajonc

Here's what I said earlier this year.

"Just finished reading this book by Arthur Zajonc. It is great. I posted this at Travis Stanley's Blog.

I would like to recommend a book I've just read. It has all the things I like in a book: ancient history, science, religion, poetry, great prose ... It is "Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind" by Arthur Zajonc. It is a kind of history of how we humans have perceived the nature of light since the time of the Greeks and it has nearly always been at that juncture between what we conceive of as the divine and the material. It is full of metaphor and unexpected turns of thought. I'll give one example of something interesting. He discusses how several poets and artist types were depressed (my word) by Newton's reduction of the phenomenon of the rainbow to a mere scientific explanation. He quotes a poem by a Thomas Campbell (not the RM one) that captures their attitude

"When Science from Creation's face
Enchantment's veil withdraws,
What lovely visions yield their place
To cold material laws"

And John Keats wrote also

"...In the dull catalogue of common things,
Philosophy will clip an angel's wing's,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, the gnomed mine ...
Unweave a rainbow..."

It struck me as I read this that it may bear a relation to why so many American's have such a resistance to what science has learned about our origins. We love mystery, we desire wonder, we do not want to believe in what many perceive to be a cold, remote and random process based material law. Comfort is sought in the miraculous.

But there may be a third way and books like this one help illumine the path to it."

The Way of Discovery: An Introduction to the Thought of Michael Polanyi
by Richard Gelwick

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
by Donald Miller

Now this is the type of Christian writing that anyone can respect. The scene of the confessional was one of the most creative acts I have ever heard of in my entire half century life. Simply Beautiful.

Out of the Question...Into the Mystery : Getting Lost in the GodLife Relationship
by Leonard Sweet

These emerging types are gonna get to me yet with all their talk about relationship. I just might get it...someday.

The Last Word and the Word after That : A Tale of Faith, Doubt, and a New Kind of Christianity
by Brian D. McLaren

Excellent. Even though I have attended the churches of Christ all my life, I have been a universalist throughout adulthood. Brian, in the course of his narrative, give's reasons that evangelicals should be able to live with. I think Origen's apocatastasis idea is worth thinking about.

The Empiricists : Locke: Concerning Human Understanding; Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge & 3 Dialogues; Hume: Concerning Human Understanding & Concerning Natural Religion
by John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume

Boring.

A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey
by Brian D. McLaren

Read it for the third time.

Cosmopolis : The Hidden Agenda of Modernity
by Stephen Toulmin

Background for understanding enlightenment and postmodernism.

The Last Juror by John Gresham

This was lots of fun. I identified with it cause I'm from small town Arkansas just across the river from Gresham's fictional Mississippi place. There are a couple of reference to the Church of Christ. Always interested in that. His main character, a newspaper man, attended all the churches in town. He mentions the CofC two times. Of course he brings out our most salient feature, the lack of musical instruments. The other characteristic that he mentioned was the lack of emotion.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

What it is like to walk the Appalachian Trail. You will fee like you are there.

Jesus Through the Centuries by Jaroslav Pelikan

I'm gonna read this one again and then comment. Some of it is still soaking in. I tried Mary Through the Centuries : Her Place in the... as well but couldn't get into it.

The Universe Next Door by James W. Sire

An apologetic from one of the evangelical perspectives. It is an introduction to other philosophical approaches than his and necessarily is an abbreviation of them.

There's more to be added later.

Quote on Evolution from Brian McLaren

From Brian McLaren's The Church of on Other Side: Doing Ministry in the Postmodern Matrix

But if by the term evolution we mean simply an observation of adaptive development from simple to complex, a pattern of change suggested by the data of the fossil record, then we have something potentially very different. We have one of the possible means by which God created. As such, evolutionary process can be seen not as an enemy of God, or as a god itself, but rather as a creation of God. In this view, it would be a creation intended to produce other creations, a "natural" tool used by a supernatural God, a creative process or tool of God's design (such as erosion or plate tectonics) for producing planet earth as we know it. If evolution is seen in this way, it can become yet another of the praiseworthy elements of the universe's desgin, inspiring awe and wonder, leading to adoration and worship of the Creator --not denial and disenfranchisement. Behold --an enemy becomes a friend. (p76 2000 edition)

Sounds good to me. Wish more people felt that way.
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Beyond Liberal and Conservative

Consider this.

"One of the most promising promises of postmodern theology, in my view, is the potential for moving beyond the 20th century categories of liberal, conservative, and evangelical (or at least decentering the categories in importance). Spirituality in America, an article by Leigh Schmidt published in the Wilson Quarterly, offers a brief history of "seeker spirituality" in America. The author suggests ..."

http://www.generousorthodoxy.net/thinktank/2005/11/beyond_liberal_.html

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Wisdom from Goethe

I have been reading about how many of the fundamental constants which govern the development of the cosmos are finely tuned in order to provide a livable universe. For instance, a slight increase or decrease in the strength of gravity would result in universe either of only black holes or, respectively, of no suns or galaxies at all. Then I come across this from"Conversations with Goethe" (Da Capo Press edition 1998, p 75):

"Nature goes her own way and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order."

The Search for Noah's Ark

We all have seen television shows and movies about the search for Noah's ark. It is clear that it is a dream on the part of many people that someone or some team will find it and confirm a literal reading of the book of Genesis.

What kind of a God would put us through this? Would hide such a piece of important evidence for thousands of years. What kind of a God would want us to care about such a thing?

Quotation from Spong's 'The Hebrew Lord'

"The primary purpose of the gospel design is to lift our vision, not to give documentary photographs to baffle our minds."

The Dalai Lama and Ann Coulter

This week in a bookstore in the Chicago Airport, I saw two books side by side. Ann Coulter's book "How to Talk to a Liberal" was next to the Dalai Lama's "The Wisdom of Forgiveness."

Was it by design or by chance?

Those two together, it was pretty cool. Just thinking about forgiveness, to and from several directions, the implications are wholesome.

The Hike from Sugarlands to Gatlinburg