Knowledge 3

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10. In my sophomore year I had Mr. Atkinson for chemistry--Uncle Mel as they called him. He would become my favorite high school teacher, although he was almost everyone's favorite teacher. As a teacher he was ok. Mr. Pickett, who taught upper math, was actually a much better teacher, I thought, and I was very fond of him too. But Mr. Atkinson was the one who inspired so many students, including those who couldn't get chemistry.

He spent a fair amount of time in class, as I recall, talking about life. "Uncle Mel's story time." He had a dry sense of humor. One time he found amusing the question, "Can Ken come out to play?" He said it from the podium while giving me an award. I still don't get it. Maybe he thought I was too serious?

I remember once when a brilliant classmate of mind lost his temper because he was being razzed by some other student. He exclaimed in a loud voice, "Silence, all of you!" Mr. Atkinson replied in a calm voice, "Now, x, I'm disappointed in you."

He told once that he used to put a hot dog into a rubber glove and stick it into liquid nitrogen and then pretend to break his finger off. But apparently a girl on the front row fainted once and he stopped doing that.

One fun thing was that some Chem 2 students occasionally were doing experiments on the sides of the room while we first years were in the middle learning the basics. I thought a lot of the classes ahead of me. A number of really cool girls. :-)

11. I would take three years of Chemistry, but only get a 3 on the AP exam. The second year was a lot of experimentation. I remember a fun experiment where we somehow got oxygen trapped in a flask upside down under water. Then we put magnesium in the oxygen and watched it flash as it became magnesium oxide. Really bright reaction.

That reminds me of Mr. Atkinson helping us remember the name of a Florence flask by comparing its shape to a girl named Florence he once knew. We did titrations, the whole nine yards. I remember being annoyed that the state had required him to stop doing experiments with benzene because it was a carcinogen.

Those were the days where I thought government rules like that were stupid. No doubt my family poo-pooed the Democrats' attempts to stop us from using lead in our paint and gas too. Of course the studies had long been conclusive. There are interesting documentaries now about how businesses--especially big oil--used their money to prolong the use of lead for decades even though it was a proven health hazard, especially to young children.

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12 It was because of Mr. Atkinson that I started out college as a chemistry major. Frankly, I was more interested in physics. But I had a really hard time saying no. I was so embarrassed to tell Mr. Atkinson that I was going to Central Wesleyan College when I had the offer of full tuition to the University of Miami honors med school program. I was also accepted at Florida State, Rose Hulman in Indiana, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. I had an award in fact from RPI and at least some scholarship to these other universities.

He was so disappointed. I tried to tell him that I would have full access to everything at Central. I felt less comfortable telling him that it was where I felt God wanted me to go. It was one of those moments where my religion and the outside world came into sharp tension.

When it came to the science project I did my senior year, once again I let him talk me into a chemistry oriented experiment. I wanted to do something with quantum physics. I don't know what I would have been able to do. Instead, I did an experiment meant to contribute something relating to Alzheimer's disease.

It was a ridiculous experiment. I had three aquariums full of leeches (my poor dad). The water in one was normal. The other two had varying concentrations of aluminum sulfate in the water (just got rid of the AlSO4 in this move). We had snails in the water for them to eat.

The idea was that I would eventually dissect the leech brains and see if they had any neurofibrillary  tangles. But of course, without assistance and a much better microscope, I wasn't able to find squat. I wasn't even sure I found any of their brains at all, let alone being able to see on the level of tangles. All I could say is that the leeches in the aluminum water didn't like it.

I think I got an honorable mention. Didn't hardly deserve that.

Chemistry is an interesting subject. It seems to me both harder and easier than math/physics in some respects. I think it's because it involves a lot of memorization of what seem to be arbitrary details until you get really deep into it. Ultimately the details follow from the quantum physics, but they seem more random as you start into the subject.

Another Christmas gift--the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

13. My sophomore year I also had Mr. Atchison for Algebra 2. He was a little gruff, as I recall. We did the deed. We learned the stuff. By now Christina and I were back with the advanced group and would travel with them through to Calculus.

At the moment I can't remember the name of the English teacher for my sophomore year. I remember that we studied a lot of etymology and learned a lot of words with a view to the SAT. I also remember that she had us bring in a favorite record. We only had classical and gospel records, so I brought in Peer Gynt by Edward Grieg. Not that it was a favorite. It was just available.

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14. Without question, my junior year was my favorite. I was in Latin 3 and Electronics 3, my final years in these. I was in Chem 2 where we did a lot of experiments. I was never great at experiments, although I got As. My natural giftings were always toward the theoretical side, not toward those of an experimentalist.

For Trigonometry and Analytical Geometry I had Mr. Pickett. He was a spectacular teacher, the best perhaps I have ever had. He was a devout Protestant, although he did not talk about his faith in class. His foundations were so good that I was able to ride them into college math. I would get a 5 on the calculus AP exam, and Central would give me 8 hours of calculus for it.

We got through enough material my junior year that he spent a little time at the end of the year dabbling into number theory. At least one of my compatriots, David Alyea, would go on to study math in college (at Davidson). At one point I hoped to add a math major in college to a chemistry major. I remember one breakfast at Dennys at 4am with David finishing up something for some math contest my senior year.

I remember him talking about the asymptotes I think of the tangent graph. I remember him musing that perhaps if you go to a positive infinity you find yourself then coming back up from a negative infinity, a little like if you were to head east long enough you would eventually find yourself coming back from the west.

15. At some point in these years I began to develop a line of thinking I have used in philosophy and other contexts ever since. I was always intrigued by the fact that you cannot divide by zero. God, I wanted to say, can divide by zero. God can get something out of nothing.

In a couple novels I never finished, there is an omega button an angel presses that gets one out of zero. 1/0 = Ω. If you can invent i for the square root of negative one, why can't I invent omega as the solution to the problem of 1/0?

I was also intrigued by the notion of empty set being different from 0. At some point it occurred to me that creation ex nihilo is not really creation out of zero. It is creation out of empty set. The line of thinking here relates to Einstein's theory of general relativity, where space itself can expand and contract. That means that there is something more empty than emptiness.

I have used this notion often in talking about creation. God does not simply put stuff into empty space. God creates the empty space itself. God does not merely work within the rules of the universe that already exist. God creates the rules themselves. This is in part why, when I first taught ethics in college, I was drawn to Divine Command Theory (DCT). Good is good because God says so in this universe. We have no point of reference to know what God says in other universes.

Some of this line of thinking was also sparked by Henry Morris' book Scientific Creationism. In it he connects God's omnipotence to the fact that he has to have all power if he is to create all the power of the world. God must have all knowledge to design all the laws and aspects of our existence. Perhaps I will have occasion to talk more about this later.

16. I had Mr. Pickett my senior year for Calculus as well. I remember him telling us not to worry about the "epsilon-delta confusion" at the beginning of the book. He said the only person he knew who actually understood it was a fellow math major at Florida State who was always falling down the stairs. They'd yell, "You alright, x?" And he would respond back that he was.

The summer after high school I read through those sections of a calculus textbook. They weren't really important to people who aren't math professionals, but I understood it. I came to believe that Mr. Pickett must have actually understood it. He was just making us feel good and helping us focus on what was more important.

17. I learned to think like a scientist. Maybe I always had. When I was Dean of the School of Theology at Indiana Wesleyan University, John Lakanen (a chemist) used to say that I didn't think like a theologian, but like a scientist. John Drury once likened me to Friedrich Schleiermacher, who saved theology in the universities in Germany by treating it like a kind of science.

[I will return to this issue later. There are two different ways of thinking, both of which are valid, I believe. It is similar to the question of how analytical and phenomenological philosophy might fit together.]

But math and science are incredibly reliable. There are edges, of course. After years of assuming that parallel lines never meet (although it was always acknowledged that it was not proven), suddenly we had the rise of non-Euclidean geometry. But that development did not prove that prior geometry was wrong. It really just supplemented it.

There are aspects of science that are changing as we get more information. I will talk about Thomas Kuhn soon enough. But the rules of physics and chemistry have pretty much remained the same on the macro-level. The edges are in flux, but these are the edges or the underlying dynamics.

Religion has not been as reliable as science. Christianity as an institution has not been as reliable as math and science. Obviously I believe Christ is absolutely reliable, but the people who believe in Christ and the systems of which they are a part are frequently unreliable. Churches are regularly unreliable. Interpretations of the Bible are countless and varied.

What I am saying is that math and science are God's natural revelation. They are revelation of a sort. They should be respected and should be dialog partners as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling. Those who reject science might as well turn in their cell phones, labtops, and automobiles.

18. The summer after my junior year was spectacular. I went to Boy's State in Tallahassee. I touched the door of the magisterial theoretical physicist P.A.M. Dirac (he would die the next year in 1984). I was elected as a representative, coming out of "Coast Guard County."

I went to Rose Hulman for a 10 day laser camp. For solving a problem I was given a Physics textbook from Harvard that I still have. I have always been struck by the fact that it taught calculus as it was needed to do physics. This model of teaching has stuck with me and even impacted the original design of Wesley Seminary. We learn things best when we need to know them to do things, not as far removed theoretical prolegomena. Or as John Dewey said, "We learn by doing."

When I taught New Testament Survey at IWU, I always did flashbacks to New Testament background. I did minimal introduction so we could get into the material as soon as possible. My New Testament introduction is laid out this way. So many teachers want to cover all the background first because that seems logical. Sometimes it seems like the course is a third (or more) over before you ever look at the actual subject of the class! Drives me crazy!

There is a spectacular introduction to relativity that uses this principle--A Most Incomprehensible Thing. I want to do one on quantum mechanics but I don't know enough yet. I believe there is a way to teach math and science in the inner city using an integrated approach something like this. I would love to try it in Buffalo for Houghton. But there are so many things to do in the world, and most people can't see what I see.

I was also a camp counselor for junior camp that summer, with Stacey and Stephanie Bodenhorn. Along with God, Stacey played a role in me going to Central Wesleyan College as well. I slept very soundly and the first night some of my kids snuck out of the cabin. The next night I slept in front of the door.

One evening a boy decided to walk home because someone had made fun of his weight. We found him, stopped him. As we hugged him, it was clear to me that he really didn't want to run away. He just wanted to be loved. He pretended to resist us, but it was an act. I felt God's presence in a way I had rarely felt in my life. It was a special moment.

I also remember running across the camp running an errand. I was running so fast. I never remember ever feeling such speed at any other time in my life. I caught a glimpse of what it must be to be so good at something. How exhilarating it must be to be an Olympic runner or swimmer, to be so awesome at something! How fantastic it must be to be an artist who can create a masterpiece.

I have felt this at times with writing or singing. There are times that I have sung in a certain acoustic situation where the sound is exhilarating. There are times I have cried at my own writing or poetry. Perhaps no one else would feel that way. :-)