Family History: 2. The Dutch Schencks

A Family History of the United States continues with chapter 2. Previously was Jamestown.
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1. In 1620, Roelof Martense Schenck was born in what would become the Dutch Republic in Europe. In 1650, the year that his father died, he left for America.

He was from a prominent family in the land we now call the Netherlands. We can trace his family’s story back back at least to the 1400s. It would be natural to think that the name "Schenck" is German. That is, if it were really pronounced “shank,” German would make sense.

However, its proper pronunciation is actually “skank.” The skank pronunciation reflects its Dutch origins. One day early in my marriage, we were watching Saturday Night Live, and in one skit, Mike Myers said, “Look at those two skanks.” We looked at each other with surprise. 

From that point on, we realized that a "skank" was a not so flattering a reference to a certain kind of woman.

2. There is evidence of a Wynant Schenck living in the Bleijenbeek Castle in the Netherlands in 1405. The castle was built about fifty years earlier and would generally be in Schenck possession for the next couple hundred years.

As far as direct lineage, we can go back to the mid-1400s:

Textbox: Dederick Schenck van Nydeck
Dederick II Schenck van Nydeck (1481-1525)
Dederick III Schenck van Nydeck (1514-1560)
Pieter VII Schenck van Nydeck (1547-1580)
Maarten Schenck van Nydeck (1584-1650)
Roelof Schenck van Nydeck (1620-1704)

The “van Nydeck” or “van Nydeggen” part indicates the origins of the family in Nideggen, which is currently in western Germany. This is where the family was located when they took on the last name (or surname) Schenck.

At some point in the Middle Ages, people began to take on surnames. Schenck has the sense of a cupbearer or, perhaps more likely for this area, a tavern keeper. So perhaps, the ancestors of the Schencks in 1000s Nydeggen ran a tavern, a place for food and fun.

We also must remember that the national boundaries that exist now did not exist in the late Middle Ages. The Netherlands was not a country then, nor was Germany. All this land was then part of the Holy Roman Empire, which was a vast collection of almost 2000 small states, each with a castle of its own. Although it seems a bit bizarre now, this area of the Netherlands was even under Spanish control in the 1500s. The part of Germany in which Nideggen is located only really became German in 1713 when Prussia took it over.

In those medieval days, this part of the Netherlands was mostly the Duchy of Guelders, and most of it is still in the province of Gelderland today. If you look at where the ancestors of the Schencks were born, they are in this area, although Goch was in the nearby Dutchy of Cleves. This is, by the way, where the family of Vincent “van Gogh” traced back to.

Textbox: Birthplaces
Dederick II (1481-1525) – Bleijenbeck Castle
Dederick III (1514-1560) – Bleijenbeck Castle
Pieter VII (1547-1580) – Goch
Maarten (1584-1650) – Doesberg

3. As I said, Roelof came to America in 1650, the year that his father Maarten died. There is a fun story from the late 1500s about Maarten's uncle, who was also called Maarten. 

This Maarten was born in Goch (1540-1589), like Roelof's grandfather Pieter. Both were military men. Pieter was a general. And Maarten too was a military commander in the fightings of that era. He fought with the Dutch William of Orange in the fight for independence from Spain. This fight began in 1568 and would continue off and on until the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648 (sometimes called the Eighty Years War). At the end of that war, the Dutch Republic was finally born as an independent state. And our ancestor Roelof left for America two years after independence!

Back to Uncle Maarten. He wanted Bleijenbeek Castle for himself, so he physically took possession of it from his cousin. But the court of William of Orange legally favored his cousin. He became unpopular with William’s court. The last straw was the crushing Dutch defeat by the Spanish at the Battle of Gembloux in 1578. You can hear the Schenck in him. “Incompetent leaders. Ungrateful idiots. I want to be on the winning side.” He switched sides and fought in the Army of Flanders (Spanish, Catholic side) for a few years before coming to his senses.

Whichever side he was on, he was known for daring, charisma, and occasionally, winning by cleverness and daring. It is said he could eat, drink, and sleep while riding on his horse, “and his men followed him like dogs.” Again, in good Schenck fashion, after a few years, he didn’t feel like the Spanish were treating him right, and he returned to the Dutch side in 1585. He became Lieutenant Governor of Gelderland. In 1586 he was commissioned to build a fortress in a village that still exists today, Schenkenschanz.

My own father, Lee Schenck (1924-2012), interestingly went through this area of modern Germany when he was in World War II. He had no idea he was passing through the lands of his ancestors. He was always reminded of these “plains of Westphalia, Germany” when we would drive south of Gainesville, Florida, coming home from Indiana. The landscape there comes down from higher ground into lowlands, and it reminded him of his time in Germany.

It is interesting that he was that far north during the war. The Allies took the north Rhineland and Westphalia back from the Nazis from March to May 1945. I knew he was stationed in Nancy, France, and then later in Manheim, Germany. But he must have crossed into Germany at some point in the north. He was well behind the front line when he moved to these places, never really in harm’s way except perhaps from possible leftover snipers.

4. Maarten would seem to have been a tricky character. In a move not unlike the Trojan horse, he got into one city by disguising soldiers on a salt wagon. Maarten met an untimely death that, again, somehow seems quite appropriate for a Schenck. He was trying to take Nijmegen for the Dutch by entering the city through windows on the river Waal.

The river was flowing faster than expected because of rain, and they were not able to enter where they had planned. Half their barges overshot their goal. When they finally were able to get in some windows, they stumbled onto a wedding party that ended their hopes for a surprise attack. In a hasty retreat, he jumped into the river, where his armor and the swollenness of the river caused him to drown. When they found his body a few days later, they decapitated him, put his head on a pike, and quartered his body. He died August 10, 1589.

Our ancestor Roelof Schenck was Maarten’s great nephew, the grandson of Maarten’s less controversial brother Pieter. Pieter was also a general for the Dutch throughout those conflicts—the whole time. Roelof’s father married a woman in Amersfoort, Utrecht in 1619. The Dutchy of Utrecht was to the northwest of Guelders. And that is where Roelof was born in 1620.

5. My impression is that these Schencks were doers, not so much thinkers. Plenty of thinking was going on at the time in the Dutch region, but I’m not sure how much our ancestors paid attention. They seemed much more interested in fighting the war for independence from Spain. The parts of Dutch culture from this period that we prize today largely took place in the County of Holland to the west, where Amsterdam is located. This area was a distinct culture where the primary language spoken was Frisian.

The fight for independence put them on the Calvinist side, and the Schencks would be devoted to the Dutch Reformed Church after they arrived in America. We cannot know whether these Schencks even knew of Jacobus Arminius in Amsterdam and later Leiden (1560-1609). The Schencks of my generation firmly espouse Arminius’ perspectives against the Calvinists, ironically. Arminius argued that God empowered our human wills so that we became able either to choose or not choose God. The Calvinists believed that God predetermined who would be saved.

Arminius taught in Leiden until 1609, when he died. In the aftermath of his death, his view would be considered heresy at the Synod of Dort in 1619, where the Calvinist TULIP became the official position. Again, who knows whether our ancestors had strong opinions on such things. I wonder rather if they mocked those silly Frisians to the west and their arguments over unimportant things.

Textbox: The TULIP
Total depravity – Humans are thoroughly evil.
Unconditional Election – God chooses the saved.
Limited Atonement – Christ only died for the elect.
Irresistible Grace – You will be saved if God chooses.
Perseverance of the Saints – You will make it.

6. This was also the time when Rembrandt was painting, also in Leiden (1606-69). This was the age of Grotius (1583-1645), one of the greatest thinkers of the time. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1618 for being an Arminian. He escaped and finished out his life elsewhere.

Baruch Spinoza was about 18 when Roelof left for America. Spinoza was an unorthodox Jewish philosopher who believed in pantheism and is often mentioned in the trio of rationalists from this period: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Descartes himself, sometimes called the father of modernism, lived in Holland from 1629-1649. It was here that he published his famous, “I think; therefore, I am” (1637).

Our ancestor thus left the Dutch Republic for New Amsterdam in the prime of the Dutch Golden Age. If the greatest thinkers of the day were in Holland, Roelof headed for a new conquest in the New World. Who knows what he thought of them? Crazy liberals? I’m out of here. His family would prove influential in New Amsterdam as well.

Sermon Starters: Today Is the Day (Hebrews 4:1-11)

Title: "Today is the Day"

Location: Hanfield Methodist Church

Text: Hebrews 4:1-11 

A paraphrase: "Since a promise to enter God's rest has been given us, we should be concerned if some of you would miss out. For just like Israel had the promise of entering Canaan, God has given us good news as well. The promise to them didn't help them because they didn't believe in it. For only those who trust God can enter his rest. 

"Remember where Scripture says that God rested on the seventh day? There's also going to be a
Sabbath rest" for God's people today as well. Because they did not enter, God set aside another day in the Psalms, 'Today.' 

"Those who have entered God's rest, rest from their labors like God did on the seventh day. So let's do our best to enter that rest!"

Introduction

• My tolerance for procrastination
• Waiting for a "Round Tuit"
• We can procrastinate important things too: time with children or parents, time with friends and family.
• Illustration

I. There is a future rest.

• Hebrews 4 talks about a sabbath rest. God ordered the world for 6 days. Then he 'rested" from that work. So we are "working hard" right now. Having faith can be hard work too. But there is a rest that is coming in the kingdom of God and in heaven while we wait.
• Hebrews 3 -- They'd left Egypt. They'd been baptized. They were in. They had the promise. They didn't make it. Their corpses fell in the desert. See 1 Corinthians 9 also.
• Glad this is a Methodist church. There is no eternal security in Hebrews.
• Different theories of what they're facing: 1) pressure from synagogue, 2) demoralization of a destroyed temple, 3) delay of Christ's return, 4) fatigue of bearing shame.
• Sometimes we forget God because times are good. Versus "There are no atheists in foxholes."
• C. S. Lewis -- "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." Not sure I like the way he put it, but pain does the job on its own well enough.
• Recurring cancer. This is the audience's second bout with persecution.
• Hebrews 12 -- keep running the race to get the prize (Phil. 3)

II. We can rest today.

• This is not a promise that God will take trouble away. That's a misreading of Romans 8:28, by the way.
• The image above is an oasis. It's a place of peace in the midst of the desert. Revelation 11, the nations trample the outer courts but we're with God in the inner courts.
• Cody Carnes, Christ is My Firm Foundation: "I've still got joy in chaos. I've got peace that makes no sense..."
• Victor Frankl -- living with any "how" if we have a "why"
• Our "why" is Christ.
• There isn't a comprehensive answer to the problem of evil and suffering, but Christ has shown us that he is with us. The Son of God in the fiery furnace. Christ on the cross.
• We can't pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. This kind of rest only comes through the power of God.

III. We enter God's rest daily.

• Hebrews 3:13 blew my mind as a teenager. Enter into God's rest every day that is called "today." That's every day! I've never been alive any day but today! It's never been yesterday for me. It's never been tomorrow for me. It's today every day for everyone alive.
• So every morning, we wake up, and it's another today, another day to enter God's rest. "This is the day that the Lord has made. Let's rejoice and be glad in it.
• My wife is always telling our children, "It's a great, great day if you make it that way!"
• So every morning we should wake up and resolve. "It's another today. I choose to enter into God's rest today."
• When we were starting Wesley Seminary, we had 6 spiritual formation courses in a sequence, and the last one ended up being primarily about overcoming addiction. Something in the book for that class struck me and has stayed with me ever since. If you have struggled at some point with an addiction, the addict needs to wake up every morning and say to him or herself. "I am an addict. Today, I'm not going to give into temptation. 
• The idea was that there is always going to be a hole in that person's psyche, a hole that they are in danger of falling in. They need to pay attention to that hole every day. I've had some push back that this idea contradicts the idea of victory through the Spirit. I'm not denying the power of the Spirit. But this seems to be a reality of our flesh. We always have our flesh with us. The Spirit can empower us to do the good. But if we don't keep plugged in and charged, our flesh is there in our bodies potentially to exert itself again.

IV. Conclusion

• My freshman year of college, we had a Freshman Seminar that tried to teach you how to adjust to living on your own in college. In other words, growing up. I remember there was a chapter in the book for the class: "Be Here Now."
• That title has always stuck with me. If you don't watch it, life will pass you by. And walking with God every day is something you don't want to pass by for sure. How many people have come to God later in life and realized what a blessing they missed all those other years.
• You can close with some moments of silent prayer for each person to ask God to show them how they might need to enter his rest even today.

Preached on my 60th birthday.

Descartes' Meditation II: A Paraphrase

Here is an AI-assisted paraphrase of Descartes' second Meditation. The first Meditation is here.
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The Human Mind: Why It’s Easier to Know Than the Body

1. Yesterday’s meditation left me drowning in doubt. I can’t forget how much I can doubt, and I can’t see any way to certainty. It’s like I’ve fallen into deep water. I can’t touch the bottom, and I can’t keep myself floating on the surface either.

But I’m going to keep going. I’ll take the same approach I took yesterday. I’ll set aside anything I have even the slightest reason to doubt and treat it as if it were completely false.

And I’ll keep going until one of two things happens. Either I will find something that I can be completely certain about, or I will establish with certainty that nothing is certain at all.

Here’s what is keeping me going. You may have heard of Archimedes—the great ancient Greek mathematician and physicist. He once said that if you gave him a single firm, fixed point to stand on, he could move the entire earth.

(He was talking about levers and leverage. If you have a long enough lever and a fixed fulcrum, you can move any weight. He is often quoted as saying, “Give me a place to stand, and I can move the world.”)

I feel the same way about this project. I don’t need to find a hundred certain things, or even ten. I just need one thing. One single thing I can know with complete certainty. If I can find that, I can build everything else from there.

2. So, let’s do this. I’m going to assume that everything I see is just made up. I’m going to assume that nothing my memory tells me ever actually existed. I’m going to act like I have no senses. I’m going to assume that my body, my shape, the space around me, movement, my location—I’m going to act like all of it is just some fiction my mind has invented.

If so, what’s left? What then can I actually hold onto as true?

Could it be just this one thing: that there is absolutely nothing certain?

3. But wait. Just because I’ve stripped everything away doesn’t mean there’s nothing left. Let me think about this more carefully. Is there something—anything—that I can’t doubt?

What about God (or some kind of being, whatever we want to call it), who is causing all these thoughts to happen in my mind? Maybe there’s a being out there that is causing all my thinking.

Then again, maybe I am causing my own thoughts. Maybe I don’t need to bring God into it at all.

But if I am causing my own thoughts, then I must exist. Am I at least something?

And here is where I hesitate. I just doubted that I have a body and that I have senses. So, if I were nothing but body and senses, then I wouldn’t exist either. Right?

Hold on. I was just now convinced that there was absolutely nothing in the world—no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Was I therefore convinced that I didn’t exist either?

No. Absolutely not. Because I was the one being convinced of all this. Something was doing the convincing. Something was doing the thinking. And that something was me.

So, even if there is an evil demon, a massively powerful, endlessly cunning demon doing everything he can to deceive me, even he can’t make me nothing. Because as long as I am being deceived, I must be something. You can’t deceive nothing.

Therefore, I come to this conclusion after this careful consideration. It seems impossible to escape:

I am. I exist.

That is to say, “I think, therefore, I am.” [1] This “proposition” (pronunciatum) is necessarily true every single time I think it or say it.

As long as I am thinking, I cannot doubt that I exist.

4. But knowing that I exist isn’t enough. I still don’t know clearly what I am. And I need to be careful here. I’ve established one certain thing: that I exist. But now I don’t want to accidentally smuggle in assumptions about what kind of thing I am. That would contaminate the one piece of solid ground that I’ve found: that I exist.

So, let’s go back to basics. What did I think I was, before I started all this doubting? Then let me apply the same filter I’ve been using throughout. Let’s strip away everything that can be doubted, until only what is completely certain remains.

5. So, what did I think I was when we started all this doubting? A man, obviously. But what is a man?

The traditional answer from the time of the Greek Aristotle (384-22 BCE) is “a rational animal.” But that answer just opens up more questions. What exactly is an animal? What exactly is rational? I’d end up chasing definitions down an endless rabbit hole, which is not what I want to do right now. Instead let me think about what naturally came to mind when I asked myself what I was—before I started all this philosophical questioning.

First, I thought I had a face, hands, and arms. In fact, I thought I had a whole physical body. Mind you, it’s also what you’d see if you looked at a corpse. That’s what I call my “body.”

Second, I thought I did things. I ate, I walked, I perceived things, I thought. I attributed all of that to my soul.

But what exactly the soul was I never really stopped to think about carefully. If I tried to picture it at all, I imagined something extremely light and airy. Maybe it was like wind, or flame, or some kind of invisible gas spread throughout my body. Vague, in other words.

As for the body, I thought I understood that perfectly well. Here’s how I would have described it back then:

“A body is something that has a definite shape. It takes up space and fills that space so completely that no other body can occupy the same space at the same time. It can be perceived by senses like touch, sight, hearing, taste, smell. And it can be moved, though not by itself. It moves if something external acts on it.”

What a body cannot do—or so I thought—is move itself, perceive things, or think. Those abilities seemed like something else entirely. In fact, I was genuinely puzzled when I encountered living things that seemed to have both body and these other mysterious abilities.

6. But here’s the problem. Remember I was exploring what would happen if there were an extremely powerful, malicious being dedicated entirely to deceiving me. I was asking, “What can I actually claim about myself right now in that light?”

Let’s go through the list. Can I claim that any of those physical attributes I just described are real? My shape, space, movement, senses? No. None of them. If the evil demon is deceiving me about everything physical, then I can’t claim that any of those things are true about me with certainty. So, let’s set the body aside entirely.

What about the various attributes (characteristics) of my alleged soul? I mentioned nutrition and walking. But if I have no body, I can’t walk and I can’t be nourished. Those go out the window too.

What about perception? What about my seeing, hearing, and feeling? Perception requires a body. And besides, I’ve had plenty of experiences in dreams where I thought I was perceiving things that turned out not to be real at all. So, perception goes too.

But wait. What about thinking?

Here’s where everything changes. Thinking is different from all the others. I cannot doubt that I am thinking right now. Even if the demon is deceiving me, the deception itself requires that I exist as something being deceived. And existing as something being deceived requires thinking. Thinking is the one thing that is completely inseparable from me.

So here is what I can say with complete certainty: I am. I exist. And I exist precisely as long as I am thinking. If I were to stop thinking entirely, I might cease to exist altogether.

So, what am I? Stripped of everything else, I am one thing and one thing only: a thinking thing.

It is a real thing. It is a truly existing thing. I am “a thinking thing.” [2]

7. But wait. Am I anything more than just a thinking thing? Let me push further and see if I can discover something more.

Could I be my physical body? Could I be the collection of arms, legs, organs, and members?

No. I already imagined that all of that might not exist, and yet I would still know I exist. So, I am not my body. [3]

Could I be something like air, or wind, or flame, or vapor? Could I be some kind of invisible physical substance spread throughout my body?

No. I could imagine that all of those things didn’t exist either, and I would still exist. So, I’m none of those things either.

Now, here’s an interesting wrinkle. Maybe those things that I’m imagining don’t exist are actually more connected to me than I realize. Maybe they’re not as different from me as I think.

But I honestly can’t figure that out right now, so I’m going to set that question aside.

Here’s what I can say. I know I exist. And I’m trying to figure out what kind of thing I am. And importantly, I’ve realized that, no matter what I actually am, it doesn’t depend on any of the physical things I’ve been doubting. My existence as a thinking thing is completely independent of my body. [4]

Now here’s something else important. I might be tempted to use my imagination to figure out what I am. But that would be a mistake. Imagination only works with physical things like images, shapes, and bodies. When I imagine something, I’m always picturing something physical.

But I already know that everything physical might be a dream or an illusion. So, using my imagination to understand my mind would be like trying to see something more clearly by going to sleep and dreaming about it. That’s completely backwards.

The conclusion is this: imagination is useless for understanding the mind. The mind can only be understood by the mind itself. That is, it can only be understood by pure thinking, not by picturing anything.

8. So, I’m a thinking thing. But what exactly does that mean? What is a thinking thing?

A thinking thing is something that:

• Doubts
• Understands
• Conceives ideas
• Affirms things (says yes)
• Denies things (says no)
• Wills—wants things, makes choices
• Refuses—doesn’t want things, rejects choices
• Imagines
• Perceives

That’s what I am. All those activities are forms of thinking. And all of them are happening in me right now.

9. That’s actually quite a lot. Think about it. Right now, I am a being who:

• Doubts almost everything?
• And yet understands and conceives certain things?
• Affirms one thing as true and denies others?
• Wants to know more and doesn’t want to be deceived?
• Imagines things, sometimes even when I’d rather not?
• Perceives things, as if through the senses?

Yes. All of that is me. Right now. In this moment.

And here’s the crucial question. Could any of that be false? Even if I’m dreaming? Even if the evil demon is using every trick in the book to deceive me?

No. Because even if everything that I am perceiving is false, the perceiving itself is real. Even if everything I am imagining is false, the imagining itself is real. Even if I am wrong about what I am doubting, the doubting itself is real.

Think about it this way. Right now, I seem to see light. I seem to hear a noise. I seem to feel heat. Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe the demon is feeding me false impressions. Fine. Let’s grant all of that.

But this one thing cannot be false: that I seem to see, seem to hear, seem to feel. All of that “seeming,” that experiencing, is real. It’s happening. And that experiencing is itself a form of thinking.

Therefore, even my perceptions, even my imaginations—even if their content is completely false—they are still forms of thinking. And thinking is what I am.

10. I am starting to get a clearer picture of what I am. But I have to be honest about something. Even now, after everything I’ve just worked through, physical things still feel more real and more clearly known to me than my own mind does.

I know. That’s strange. Think about what I’m saying. Think about the things I have just called into doubt—the physical world, my body, external objects. Those things probably still feel more vivid and more “real” to me than the thing I’ve just proven actually exists: my own mind.

The doubtful stuff feels more real than the certain stuff. That seems exactly backwards. And yet I can’t seem to help it.

Here’s why this is happening. My mind keeps wandering back to the physical world. I’ve been programmed my whole life to pay attention to things I can see and touch and imagine. Asking my mind to focus on something invisible and non-physical—like itself—is genuinely difficult.

So, here’s what I’m going to do. Rather than forcing my mind to stay focused on itself right now, I’m going to let it wander for a moment. I’m going to let my mind look at the physical world that it is so comfortable with.

But I’m going to do this strategically. In this way, afterward, when I gently pull my mind back to thinking about itself, it will be more settled and more ready to focus.

Think of it like letting a restless child run around for a bit before asking them to sit still and concentrate.

11. OK. Let’s look at physical things, the kinds of things we normally think we know best. Not physical things in general, but one specific physical thing. Let’s do a little experiment.

Take a piece of wax. Say it just came from a beehive. [5] Say that it’s completely fresh. It still smells like honey and flowers.

You can see its color and shape. It is hard and cold. You can easily pick it up and hold it. Tap it with your finger and it makes a sound.

In other words, it ticks every box. It can be known by every single one of our senses. If anything can be clearly and distinctly known through the senses, it is this piece of wax right in front of us.

Now let’s put it near a fire.

Watch what happens. The taste disappears. The smell evaporates. The color changes. The shape melts away. It gets bigger as it melts. It becomes liquid. It gets hot. You can barely touch it now. And if you tap it? No sound at all.

So, here’s the question. Is this still the same wax?

Of course it is. Nobody would seriously argue otherwise. We all know perfectly well that it is the same wax. It’s just in a different state.

But wait. If it’s the same wax, what exactly did I know about it? Everything I knew through my senses has completely changed. The smell, the taste, the color, the shape, the texture, the sound—it’s all different. And yet the same wax remains.

Think about it. Whatever I knew about the wax, it wasn’t anything my senses told me. Something else is going on here.

12. Now let’s ask, “What exactly did I know about the wax?” Let me think about this carefully.

The wax wasn’t the sweetness, or the smell, or the color, or the shape, or the sound. All of those changed. What I knew was something more basic. There was a thing that was presenting itself to me in one set of forms before the fire and in a different set of forms after. The same thing, different appearances.

But what exactly is that thing? Let me strip away everything that changed and see what’s left.

What remains is something that takes up space, that is flexible, and that can move and change. That’s it. That’s the wax underneath all the appearances.

But here’s where it gets interesting. When I say the wax is “flexible,” what do I mean? Do I mean I can imagine it changing from round to square?

Well, yes. But it can change into an infinite number of shapes, not just those two. And I can’t picture an infinite number of shapes in my imagination. So, my imagination isn’t what’s grasping the wax here.

And what about the space it takes up—its “extension” in space? That changes too. It gets bigger as it melts, bigger still as it boils. The wax can expand in ways I have never even imagined.

So again, my imagination isn’t capturing what the wax really is.

Here’s the conclusion: I cannot understand what the wax is through my imagination at all. Only my mind, my pure thinking, can grasp it. [6]

And here is the really fascinating part. What about the wax that I know through pure thinking? Is it a different wax from the one I see and touch and imagine? No. It is exactly the same wax. It always was. I just didn’t realize that what I was actually knowing all along was not coming through my senses. It was coming through my mind.

When I perceive the wax, I’m not really seeing it or touching it or imagining it. I’m doing something called “intuition” (inspectio). It is a direct mental grasp of what the thing is. And that mental grasp can be fuzzy and confused, as it was before I started thinking carefully, or it can be clear and distinct, as it is now.

13. But here is something that genuinely surprises me about my own mind. Even when I am thinking all of this through carefully, language keeps tripping me up.

Here’s what I mean. We say things like “I see the wax.” Not “I judge the wax to be there” or “my mind perceives the wax.” Just “I see it.” And that casual way of talking makes it sound like sight is what is doing the knowing. Like my eyes are the thing in charge.

But think about this. Say I am sitting by a window, and I look down at people passing in the street below. What do I actually see? Hats. Coats. That’s it. I see hats and coats moving along the street.

And yet I say, “I see people.” Without even thinking about it.

But what if those hats and coats were covering robots? Machines controlled by springs and gears, moving around in human clothing? My eyes couldn’t tell the difference. What I actually see is hats and coats. What I know is that there are people underneath them. And that knowing—that judgment—isn’t coming from my eyes at all. It’s coming from my mind.

So, when I say, “I see the wax,” I’m doing the same thing. What my eyes actually give me is a set of colors and shapes. What I know is that there is a piece of wax in front of me. And that knowing is a judgment of the mind, not a report from the senses.

Language hides this from us. But the mind is doing far more work than we give it credit for.

14. But I shouldn’t get too distracted by the way ordinary language misleads us. Someone who is seriously pursuing knowledge shouldn’t need to keep tripping over the way everyday people talk. Let’s get back to the main point.

Here’s the real question. Did I know the wax better when I first encountered it, when I was smelling it, touching it, and seeing it with my own eyes? Or do I know it better now, after thinking carefully about what it actually is and how it can be known?

That’s not even a close call.

When I first perceived the wax, what did I actually have? A set of sensory impressions. I had smell, color, texture, sound. But honestly? Any animal could have that. A dog can smell the wax. A cat can feel its texture. There’s nothing distinctly human about perceiving the wax through the senses.

But when I strip away all those surface appearances, I realize something different is going on. When I mentally undress the wax, so to speak, and look at what it actually is underneath, I get to real insight. I might still make mistakes in my judgment. But one thing is certain: this kind of knowing, this grasping of what the wax really is beneath its appearances, requires a human mind. An animal can’t do this. A machine can’t do this. [7]

15. Now, let me turn this whole argument back on myself. Remember, I have not allowed that I am anything other than a mind right now. Accordingly, what can I say about my own mind?

I have just spent all this time figuring out that I know the wax better through my mind than through my senses. But if that’s true, then I must know my own mind even better than I know the wax.

Think about it this way. Say I decide that the wax exists because I see it. Well, it’s at least possible that what I’m seeing isn’t really wax. Maybe my eyes are deceiving me. Maybe I don’t even have eyes.

But here’s what’s not possible. It’s not possible that I don’t exist while I’m seeing the wax (or even just thinking that I’m seeing it). The seeing (or the thinking that I’m-seeing) proves I exist. Every time.

And it’s not just sight. If I determine that the wax exists because I touch it, I exist. If my imagination convinces me the wax is there, I exist. Whatever “faculty” I use or reason I give that leads me to believe anything about the wax, the same reasoning proves that I exist. Every single time. And what is true of the wax is true of every external thing I perceive.

Here’s something worth pausing on. The more faculties I brought to bear on the wax, the more clearly I knew it. These were faculties like sight, touch, imagination, and reasoning. But every one of those faculties derived from my mind. Every time I knew the wax more clearly, my mind was simultaneously revealing itself as the thing doing the knowing.

This fact means that my mind must actually be more clearly known than the wax. And on top of that, the mind has additional ways of knowing itself that have nothing to do with bodies at all. [8]

In the end, what the body contributes to our knowledge of the mind is barely worth mentioning.

16. And just like that, I’ve arrived exactly where I wanted to be.

Here’s what the wax experiment has shown me. Physical things like bodies are not actually known through the senses or through imagination. They are known through the intellect alone. Through pure thinking. We don’t know the wax because we see it or touch it. We know it because we understand it.

And if that is true of physical things, then it follows immediately that my own mind—the thing that does the understanding itself—must be the most clearly and easily known thing of all. It is more clearly known than any physical object. It is more clearly known than the wax. More clearly known than anything.

But I’m not going to rush past this point. I have just overturned something I have believed my whole life: that the physical world is the most real and most clearly known thing there is. It is such a deeply ingrained habit of thought. It won’t just disappear because I have proven it wrong.

So, I’m going to sit here for a while. I’m going to let this new understanding sink in. I’m going to keep thinking about it until it becomes as natural and automatic as the old assumption used to be.

The mind is what knows. And what it knows with absolute certainty is that it exists.

[1] Descartes coined this phrase earlier in his Discourse on Method (1637), but he does not actually use it here in the Meditations. In Latin, it is cogito ergo sum.

I personally agree with the German philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99), who argued that Descartes’ argument only implied that “thinking” was happening, not that I was thinking. The concept of a unified “I” requires much further argument.

[2] Descartes uses several Latin terms in this section: mens (mind), animus (soul). These terms are sometimes also translated as understanding or reason. Descartes is not yet sure which term is exactly right. But whatever we call it, his answer is the same: I am a “thinking thing.”

The Latin for “thinking thing” or “thinking substance” is res cogitans. It is one of his most important technical terms. He pairs it with res extensa or “extended thing.” He uses that term to refer to everything physical that takes up space.

The distinction between these two kinds of substance is the foundation of what philosophers call “Cartesian Dualism.” This is the view that mind and matter are two completely different kinds of thing. This idea has been debated by philosophers ever since.

[3] The philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously attacked this conclusion in his book The Concept of Mind (1949). He called Descartes’s picture of the mind a “ghost in the machine.”

Ryle argued that Descartes’s argument was like being shown all the buildings, faculty, and students at a university and then asking, “Where’s the university?” For Ryle, mind wasn’t a separate thing that inhabits the body. It was just what we call the body doing certain things.

[4] The conclusion that the mind is a completely separate substance from the body was famously challenged by Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680), one of Descartes’s most brilliant correspondents. In letters to Descartes, she pressed him on a problem he never fully solved: if mind and body are completely separate substances, how do they interact? When I decide to move my arm, how does an immaterial mind cause a physical arm to rise? This is called the mind-body interaction problem, and philosophers are still debating it today.

[5] If you have never had any experience with wax, you might do a quick search to get a little background.

[6] Descartes uses the Latin mens (mind) and French entendement (understanding) here. Both of them can mean mind or understanding. This is the faculty of pure rational thinking, distinct from imagination or the senses.

[7] Descartes mentions “common sense” (sensus communis). He doesn’t mean common sense in the way we think of it. He means our mental ability to combine and integrate all our different sense impressions into a single unified experience.

[8] Examples might include pure reasoning, self-reflection, or introspection.

Family History: Jamestown 3

Continued from last post

10. In 1640, Thomas and Elizabeth were married. That same year, they had their son, Augustine I, the first of the Shelburnes to be born in America. 

As I mentioned, Thomas died in 1676, the year of Bacon's Rebellion. Here's the story.

In that year, Nathaniel Bacon led an armed uprising against the colonial government of Virginia. The settlers on the frontier were upset that Native American tribes would conduct raids on "their" land. (Of course, it was only their land because England had said so. No one had asked the Native Americans.)

But the Governor of Virginia -- who was actually related to Bacon by marriage -- would not authorize agressive military action against the Native Americans.

But the rebellion quickly became about more than that. It became about ordinary people versus the elites. Bacon's rebellion swept in small farmers, indentured servants, and even black Virginians -- both enslaved and free. In September, they marched on Jamestown and burned the colonial capital to the ground.

But Bacon would die of dysentery, and the rebellion would collapse. The governor, a man named Berkeley, would hang 23 of the rebels. Then he was recalled to England in disgrace by the king.

Virginia's elite were shaken. The rebel army had united white and black, free and enslaved Virginians. It was a reminder of what always happens when the "little people" have had enough.

Many think 1676 was a hinge point. Distinctions between white indentured servants and black slaves became tightened legally. Those of dark skin were increasingly treated as slaves by nature rather than individuals who might work their way to freedom. The children of Africans were now born into slavery, owned by those whom their parents worked for. 

To be sure, this process had already been under way. In 1662, the slavery of a child was connected to the status of a mother rather than a father. In 1667, Christian baptism no longer implied freedom. Tobacco needed workers. This was the solution.

In 1670, roughly 80% of Virginia's unfree laborers were white indentured servants. By 1700, roughly 80% were enslaved Africans.

11. Augustine I was born in Jamestown (1640-1725). He would see the death of his father Thomas in 1676 and the death of his mother in 1702. 

From what we can tell, his wife was named Mary Mansfield (1656-1729). They would have a son named Augustine II in 1698. If these dates are correct, Augustine Sr. was 58 when Augustine Jr. was born. His mother would have been 42.

Jamestown never fully recovered from its burning during Bacon's rebellion. After the capital building burned again in 1698, the capital of Virginia was moved the next year to Williamsburg.

It is thus probably no coincidence that Augustine and Mary would move further inland about 15 miles to Blissland Parish in 1699. His mother Elizabeth would die in Williamsburg, about 10 miles east of where she had lived most of her life. 

Thus the 1600s came to an end for the Shelburnes. The oldest part of my American lineage had lived in Virginia for most of the century.

Notes Along the Way 4.3 Interviewing at IWU

Continued from here
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20. It's a sign of my privileged life that I immediately had access to a little money when I arrived in Brussels from Africa. I had booked the plane ticket to give me two days on the continent (three?) on my way back. Then I was supposed to meet with Bud Bence in Indiana before finally going back to Florida.

This was before cell phones. If you wanted to send an email abroad, you went to an internet cafe. AOL was riding high. Then there was this thing called writing letters.

Somehow, perhaps by actual letter, I had told David Fox and Rachel Leonard that I would be at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris at noon on something like April 2, 1997. If they could make it, great. If not, I like Paris.

So I landed in Brussels that morning. I rented a car, and tore off for Paris. By noon, I was there at the Arc de Triomphe. I had no phone to call. I had no clear path to email. I waited about an hour and figured they weren't coming. So, what should I do?

Why not drive to Tübingen? So, I got in the car and tore off west. No GPS of course. I don't think I even had a map. But I knew the general path, and there were these things called road signs. Just as it was getting dark, I had arrived. I wasn't exactly sure where Christoph Lorenz was living, but I remembered Reinhard Schmolz's house. Sure enough, he was home.

So I was able to meet up with them for an evening. That was nice. I was sure to have a Doner Kebap and a Currywurst. And I think I spent the night at Reinhard's house.

That might have been it. I may actually have had to head back the next day. Such was the 30 year old Ken. 

I decided to drive back through Luxembourg, just to be able to say I'd been there. It was a long day. At a rest park, a man asked for a ride. Since I was still in the "Ken can't say no stage of my life," I gave him a ride, despite my incredible fears of doing so.

We conversed in German for a good twenty minutes before we finally realized that neither of us was actually German. I think he was Danish. In any case, I was glad when I let him off wherever.

21. Bud Bence had contacted me before I left for Africa, and we had set up a meeting. When my plane landed from Brussels in Indy, I would drive up to Elwood and meet him at a Jim Dandy's there (it's gone now). 

There was an open New Testament position at Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU). Bud was understandably cautious about me. I had studied with James Dunn. He had undergone significant trouble at Houghton College because of a Dunn student, David Meade. Under pressure from the denomination and president, he had let David Meade go. Then, when the faculty had their chance, they dispatched him.

Mind you, IWU celebrated him for his decades there, but Bud once told me that he bled Houghton, so the scar was real.

Bud later told me that it was ironic that he turned out to think more freely than I do. He actually apologized to me for his suspicions of me back at that Jim Dandy. In any case, I must have reassured him enough in Elwood for him to approve of me coming to the campus for an interview.

22. I don't think it was too much longer thereafter that I had my interview. I met Keith Drury and Steve Lennox for the first time. Jim Lo, Keith Springer, the older David Smith (not the one we know today). I don't think Wilbur Williams participated in the interview. Nor did Joe Seaborn. He was leaving the faculty to become the pastor of College Wesleyan.

I gave a classroom presentation based on Bruce Malina's Portraits of Paul, which I had recently read. There were still students around, so it must have been later that month in April. 

Ancient identity was based on gender, genealogy, and geography. I remember Bud asking what a woman did to convert to Judaism, since circumcision obviously wasn't involved. I think I said she would likely be attached to a man, so that would likely mark her transition, but that of course there were the food laws and purity rules. I don't think I knew much about Joseph and Asenath at that time.

23. My interview proper was at Hostess House. I don't think very well on the spot, so it's always a bit nerve wracking. I think best in writing. If I know I'm going to have a high pressure conversation, I rehearse it over and over out loud. Of course, in person conversations are much less predictable than the ones you have to yourself.

I can't remember if Bud asked me his classic "Robert Frost lover's quarrel with the church" question. I mainly remember the two questions Keith Drury asked. First, he more or less asked if I was gay. He said something like, "We have to ask. You're 30 years old and single." 

That was an easy one. I had only dated a little up to that point. Two serious girlfriends. I was painfully shy when it came to women, and the cuter the woman, the harder it was for me to talk to them. And I was a dreamer. I wanted a love story.

A funny story that year. A minister took me to a Hooters. I thought it was incredibly odd. What was he thinking? I thought he might have a problem. But as I thought about it a few years later, I wondered if he was looking for my reaction. People are funny.

The other question Keith asked was equally frank. He pointed out that the Religion Division at that point was entirely male. But there were many female ministry students, and the Wesleyans certainly said that they believed in women in ministry. 

Then came the question. If you have two equally qualified candidates for a department like this one, one is a guy and the other is a woman, who would you hire. I said I would hire the woman.

24. And they did. I suppose that explains what Joe Seaborn said to me from his dark office before I left. It was something like, "I'm rooting for you." But it had a sullen tone to it. I've been in enough searches since then to know this vibe. You can feel it, often accompanied by long silence.

As part of the interview, I also met with Paul Collard, the VPAA. And I met President Barnes. I only remember one question he asked. He said, "Now your father has questions about certain fundraising techniques we use?"

I smiled because I immediately knew the culprit. "That would be my Uncle Eugene," I said. I believe he was actually a Marion College alumnus. My father would never write to someone like President Barnes about something like that.

25. Well I also remember a dinner time back in Fort Lauderdale when I later got a phone call from Bud Bence. Duane Thompson, the philosophy professor, was retiring. They had a one year slot for someone to teach philosophy. No promises of anything after that. Was I interested?

Of course I was interested! I surely didn't want to substitute teach another year.

Bud's emphasis on the "only one year" betrayed his ongoing fears that I would blow something up. That whole first year, he more than once put a job opening advertisement on my chair. I imagine some might also have had questions about philosophy. Sometimes philosophy has an uneasy place at a Christian college. Might they even been thinking about removing it from the gen eds?

Nevertheless, I loved the subject, and I would love teaching philosophy. In the fall of 1997, I would begin teaching at Indiana Wesleyan University.

Notes Along the Way: 4.2 Two Months in Africa

The year after Durham continues from the previous post.
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6. Some time in the fall of 1996, Kerry Kind contacted me about Africa. 

Kerry had left Wilmore and his PhD program at the University of Kentucky to become head of Wesleyan World Missions (and would eventually be over Education and the Ministry). We had been at Stonewall Wesleyan Church together, and he had long felt like I might be a possibility for missions. I've already mentioned that he had asked me if I was interested in taking over as coordinator of the work in England, and of course my sister Juanita had been a missionary to the Philippines for four years (and had married the Philippines General Superintendent's son).

I do think that I had the temperament to be involved in missions. I care very little for any possessions (except for my books). I do not need nice cars, houses, or clothes (perhaps to my wife's chagrin). [1] I have always been eager to learn and adopt the culture of wherever I am. I am above average at languages and consider it anathema not to learn the language of the place you are serving.

7. Those were the days of the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. In 1996, Liberia was just emerging from the scourge. I believe the Pococks had gone there just before the civil war decimated the country, and they had to be evacuated. 

Kerry had a burden to send someone to Liberia to help the church there know that the Wesleyan Church had not forgotten them. I was still single at the time, so I was expendable. :-)

Upon further reflection, they decided against sending me there. The sewer system was not entirely repaired and there was a real danger of hepatitis. So it was decided that I would go teach for two months at Sierra Leone Bible College in Jui, just outside Freetown, Sierra Leone.

The civil war in Liberia had spilled over into Sierra Leone. In February 1997, when I went over, it had not come to Freetown, the capital city. It was mainly up country, especially in the south. I remember a young man whom I ran with a couple times who had escaped a bus rebels had stopped by crawling away.

By the way, next to this young man I might as well have been standing still. The extreme heat (since Sierra Leone is about 500 miles from the equator) made running exhausting. More on running in a moment.

The fearful Kenny was quite present while I was there. Some nights I would look out my window at the lights of the cars coming toward Freetown from Waterloo, wondering if there were rebels in them. Jui is east of the city on a peninsula. When the rebels did come to Freetown -- less than two months after I left -- they would ransack the Bible college property.

8. Kerry prepped me for the trip over the phone, as I recall. He told me stories of the time that he was there. However, I'm not sure they were the best stories to tell me. There was the time he found a cobra behind the fridge. Then there were his tales of hunting down rabid dogs with bats. "If you hear a dog with a strange howl, it's rabid," he said.

That was all so very reassuring. I was quite afraid of snakes while I was there, although I never saw one. They had burned the ground behind where I stayed to discourage them from coming toward the house. There was a day I came across several men preoccupied with a tree. They were at various stages of height in it. When I asked what they were doing, they didn't really say. I wondered if they were fetching a black mamba.

There was a rather large spider in my room for a time. I wasn't particularly troubled by it until I realized it was pregnant. And then, with apologies, I dispatched it to the afterlife. There are limits for such things, after all.

There were large cockroaches that would come out at night. And of course there were many ants that carried off various and sundry things. One night I decided not to throw away the remains of a squashed cockroach. Sure enough, it was gone in the morning.

Another episode of "fun with cockroaches" was when one set of ants from the back of the house were in a tug of war with a set of ants from the front of the house. They were pulling in opposite directions on the parts of a dead cockroach. It was quite entertaining and I watched for some time.

9. The trip to Sierra Leone was like passing through zones of foreignness. The first step was still Western, a stop in Brussels to change planes. It struck me that airports are like liminal zones between countries. You are neither in the country you are leaving nor the one to which you are headed.

The flight south was another zone of greater foreignness. We stopped in Conakry, as I recall, although we didn't deplane. I remember seeing a 747 take off, but then I saw a plane very similar land a few minutes later. Was it the same plane, I asked myself. I imagined some young men taking a joy ride with a 747. I had the feeling that I was entering the theatre of the absurd.

I was picked up from the airport by a Seventh Day Adventist missionary couple. They were perhaps the only Western missionaries still in the country. Everyone else had evacuated. They were living in the Wesleyan house in Freetown. I would spend a couple weekends with them.

In fact, they were going to take me up country to the famed Kamakwie hospital and I think the Gbendembu Bible college. But the very weekend we were to take the trip, the civil war rekindled up country. I would never make it past Waterloo.

10. I taught two subjects: Communication and Historical Books. I'd never taught either. The classroom format was old school, imported from Western colonization, a blast from the past.

As a side note, I once heard a critique of American college teaching for being cultural, and without question it is true. However, the person critiquing was from abroad, and I at least had the question whether what was being advocated was some element of colonial pedagogy from a century ago. I don't remember the details. I just remember wondering whether what was in fact happening was Western colonialism past critiquing Western pedagogy present.

The students in those classes would go on to become leaders in the African church of the future: Usman Fornah, Warren Fornah. Abu Conteh was the Academic Dean at the time. The Principal of the college at that time was a Baptist.

Probably enough time has passed for me to share some of my feelings. No doubt it was in part cultural, but I felt there was some of a "big man" dimension to senior leadership in Africa. You get into top leadership, and you operate like a king.

Suffice it to say, this grates against my holiness background. Leaders who lord it over those under them seem flatly to contradict the teachings of Christ and the New Testament. So, when I was given the opportunity to preach on the campus, I chose Philippians 2 -- how Christ, although having the authority of God, humbled himself and became a servant.

I suspect it is a human dynamic. We like "strong" leaders. And pseudo-masculine guys who get in positions of leadership love it a little too much. In short, we stupidly appoint jerks as leaders. And this happens in holiness circles just as much as anywhere else. And we should know better.

I remember a conversation I had with Keith Drury about someone appointed as a leader that I thought was a horrible decision. Keith's remark was that this person was a strong leader, and that's probably why. Let's just say I believe my reservations were justified by history.

11. I remember a moment in the Historical Books class when I was talking about the contextual nature of Scripture and how passages need to be interpreted in the light of context. A fairly strong reaction, a quote from Malachi 3:6: "I the LORD do not change."

I do not usually think fast on my feet, but my immediate response was that God doesn't change but culture does and that God meets us where we are so that we can understand. Also, God's values play out differently in different contexts.

If you've been reading these posts, you know that there was over a decade of my own struggle in that exchange. 

I did enjoy covering that part of the Bible. I had not really focused on Joshua to Esther before. As for communication, I only remember that I leaned into logos, pathos, ethos, which was in my bailiwick.

12. I enjoy learning about other cultures. There were numerous moments of learning. First, there were the easy ones. Food. I paid a woman a certain amount each week to prepare some easy dishes. Probably the most striking to me was cassava. I liked it. 

It is also toxic if it is not cooked enough. In 2005, at least 30 elementary school children died in the Philippines because the cassava was not prepared correctly by an outside vendor.

One question was with meat or without. My first week I did try some goat. I determined that I could easily be a vegetarian in Sierra Leone.

The rest of the time I didn't bother with the meat. It also cost more and I was on a very thin budget. I think the Wesleyans gave me $200 a month (it might have been $200 for the whole time). I didn't have access to an ATM and there wasn't any easy way for my parents to get me money either. This would have to do.

This amount was tight because I was immediately cast in the role of patron. I understood the construct well enough from Bruce Malina's The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology. However, by the time I got on the plane to go home, I had PTSD from all the entreaties. Even at the airport, a boy asked for money. I had no money. I had nothing. I had given it all away.

I gave the last $50 to a minister in training to buy a sewing machine. Remember those were the days of "Ken can't say no." I hope that it provided a great livelihood to that family. I remember eating with the man. As men, we ate in the foreroom. The women prepared the food and ate separately in the back room afterward. And the children ate separately. It all grated on me, although I understood it was the culture.

13. I was given three offers in marriage while I was there. In two cases, there was an intermediary. One man said, "If you as an American man marry an African woman, you are getting a good deal. She will do whatever you want. It doesn't work so well when an American woman marries an African man." I'm sure that's not universally true, but I wouldn't be surprised if this would be a fairly common sentiment there.

In one case it was an upper class woman who came to me herself -- the elite can always break the rules. As I recall, she boasted that she was not circumcised. She told me that if you look around at all the women I can see, almost all of them have been circumcised. But not her. She said that even in Christian circles, they secretly do it, even though it is frowned on. She said they come for the girls in the night and take them somewhere in secret to circumcise them because it is the cultural tradition. 

Female circumcision is a heinous practice. What they do is cut off the part of female anatomy that is key to pleasure during sex. The limitation of pleasure is thought to discourage cheating. Of course, as usual, men are freer to do what they want.

I remember hearing after I left that a man who had a fairly prominent position in the Wesleyan Church -- secretary of the country or some such -- had a second wife up country. He had been using the relative wealth he received from the Wesleyans to support two families. 

The Wesleyan position on polygamy was that one should not put away multiple wives when one became a Christian but should not take on any additional wives. That seemed like a very wise and just position to take. 

Mind you, polygamy is never prohibited in the Bible. I was very sheepish to mention that in my early days of teaching. I could still see my mother's reaction when I taught. But polygamy is a perfectly normal practice in the OT (e.g., Deut. 21:15). If someone responds, "But what about Genesis 2:24 -- a man leaves father and becomes one flesh?" Yes, a man becomes one flesh with each wife.

This is one of those many unexamined assumptions we have when we read the Bible. We see things that aren’t there. I grew up hearing that you must marry the first person you have sex with because you are married to that person in God’s eyes.

1 Corinthians 6:16 seems to break that idea. There’s no way Paul would tell someone to go marry the prostitute you had had sex with. Yes, you became one flesh with the prostitute. No, you did not marry the prostitute.

Don't get me wrong. I do not believe that polygamy should be a Christian practice. I'm just pointing out that this is a point where we have (rightly and legitimately) played out biblical principles in ways that go beyond the Bible itself.

14. I noticed a stratification in both language and denominations. The highest class spoke Krio, the lingua franca of the country. It is a pidgin English. A prayer might begin, "Papa God. We go tell you tanke for what you done done for we."

The highest class spoke Krio and might be Anglican. Then below that were people like the Methodists. Then below that were the Baptists. As you went down the social classes, you would be more likely to speak a tribal language as your first language, maybe something like Temne. I think the Wesleyans up country mostly spoke Temne.

The relationship between Sierra Leone the country and the tribal regions of the country are a reminder that "map is not territory." [2] The relationship between Sierra Leone the country and the tribal regions of the country are a reminder that “map is not territory.” We draw lines around the world that are not really there. They’re in our heads.

This is, by the way, a key insight to immigration debates. The feeble mind thinks that a border has a real ontological status. It does, but only because human minds consider it so. And the significance of the line may differ from one person to another. Why should it be a big deal for someone to cross an imaginary line? It is only a big deal for those who consider it a big deal. And of course there are consequences if the person that thinks it’s a big deal has a gun.

So, the lines of Sierra Leone were drawn by the British in the late 1800s. I guarantee you they were a puzzle to the Africans that actually lived there at the time, especially out in open country. The British drew a map, but it wasn’t real territory to the people who lived there unless there was someone there with a gun.

I went to the HQ church on Easter Sunday (March 30, 1997) about half way between Jui and downtown Freetown. I was able to catch some of the Krio sermon because of the proximity to English.

I remember one stretch of the sermon. He was talking about how resurrection is not resuscitation. He told a story (I think it's a well known trope) about a man some gravediggers were burying. They noticed the man had some valuables that they decided to come back and steal that night.

But the man was not actually dead. So when they dug up his coffin, he sat up and said, "What's going on?" One of the graverobbers was so scared he had a heart attack and died. Then the not-so-dead man ran into town and said, "There's something crazy going on at the cemetery."

The preacher's point was that resurrection was not like that.

At another time, I went to the wake of a man. The body looked very old and I asked how old he had been. As it turned out, he had been in his thirties (I think). But they did not embalm, so the body had deteriorated that much in one or two days.

15. There was a wealthy Wesleyan church in Freetown. That's where the Wesleyans who were involved in government went. I frankly didn't have a good feeling about some of the dynamics there. One of them -- I can't remember his name -- was later murdered during the civil strife. I think they pulled his car over. Kerry would have known.

During my time there, we did some evangelism on one afternoon each week. I remember talking to a young Muslim man and him expressing how difficult it would be to change religions. He would be shunned by his whole family. Again, Malina's material on group/collectivist cultures provided important framing for these discussions. 

I remember thinking how much more easily an African might understand the culture of the Bible than an American. In fact, I think maybe it was a comment on greeting the brother with a holy kiss that set off the comment on Malachi and God not changing. They pointed out that many Africans do greet each other with a kiss on the cheek. It was harder for me to find areas where they didn't practice things the Bible addressed to believers in ancient culture.

I remember a girl coming out of a hut in a school uniform. It was a clash of paradigms, I would later reflect. In Freetown, you had normal houses near huts. And you had a modern school uniform coming out of a hut. It was surreal to me at the time, but I couldn't quite find the words to express why.

Kuhn later helped. There was my paradigm of the modern city, my paradigm of the private school with uniforms, and my paradigm of the primitive hut. These were clashing together. My assumptions and frameworks were clashing together.

16. I remember having a conversation with one of the Wesleyan leaders about his son, who had sickle cell anemia. You may know that African genetics have a weakness here. He indicated that his son would not likely make it to adulthood, and I believe that turned out to be the case.

The way he said it struck me because of how resigned he was. I have long wondered if death was much more normal in other times and places. When a significant portion of children die as children, do you assume it will happen? Does it become somewhat normal? When women die frequently in childbirth, does it become normalized to some extent?

I've wondered if the problem of evil and suffering looks different in a world where it is just the way it is. Similarly, I've wondered if we are more sensitive to it because we are so blessed with modern medicine and science.

I remember one day someone appeared at my door asking if I had any aspirin. I did. But it struck me how privileged I was to have a bottle of aspirin. Imagine the millennia when you just had to put up with a headache. Yes, any “light challenges” I might have had in my brief two months were nothing compared to what most people have experienced throughout history. And they certainly were nothing compared to what they were about to experience.

17. One of the highlights of my time was a field day. The slow white man was going to run the two mile race. Everyone knew I was a runner. How would I do?

Horrible! I mostly blame the heat. I slowly made my way around the dirt track eight times (it might have been sixteen). The front runner lapped me. Pretty embarrassing. Someone on my team who had never run was way ahead of me. He may have lapped me too.

But near the end he suddenly ran off the track and got down on the ground to rest. He couldn't finish. He was exhausted. So Ken the tortoise continued his rounds and finished second to last.

A compliment (I think it was genuine) given me was that I was not like a lot of missionaries. The person talked about growing up in the shadow of the great Kamakwie hospital up country. I am in no position to say whether his critique was fair, but he clearly thought that the doctors and nurses lived in their own world and stayed separate from the people of the town. With perhaps a small hint of anger, he spoke of the mansions they effectively lived in, and how they would go to work and go home without interacting with nationals much.

I don't know if that was fair or not, but it reminded me of the fact that Albert Schweitzer lived too long. Seen as a medical benefactor for the first part of his service in Africa, he ended being thought of as a condescending colonialist.

I've already mentioned that I felt the weight of the expectation that I would be a patron. By some it was perhaps seen as a moral obligation. I dreamt of a college teaching job that might start off paying, who knows, $40,000 a year? I would be able to support them from afar.

But because I didn't like to say no, by the time I left I felt like I had less than everyone around me. I don't know if I had $5 in my wallet. I was so drained from all the asking and fear of civil war, that I didn't believe the trauma was over until the wheels of the plane had left the ground.

18. The day after Easter, maybe a day or two before I left, I took a taxi to the beach. Somehow it seemed I was charged significantly more than everyone else in the van. Because I didn't want to pay for the taxi back, I walked all the way back to town. It was a very long walk. I was so sunburnt on my ears that I had scabs and eventually had a dermatologist remove the remnants of the scar.

I took public transportation back to Jui. From what I remember, there were people hanging out the sides while the bus like vehicle went at high speeds.

As I said, on May 25, 1997, less than two months later, the rebels did in fact break through to Freetown. The people suffered greatly, including many Wesleyans. Arms were amputated. Pregnant women were cut open. Young boys were recruited and then made addicted to drugs. They did unspeakable things.

I believe Usman Fornah would play a significant role in negotiating peace. I believe he even went to the United Nations (correct me, those who know). I would see him a couple times while he was visiting the States.

I started a family the next year, and the starting salary of a professor turned out not to go as far as I thought it might. In the end, I was not able to give much after I left.

19. I had an old laptop of my dad's from work while I was there. As usual, I had a novel idea afterwards. I think it was titled something like Out of the Darkness. It was to be about a short term missionary abducted by rebels. It was to have a theatre of the absurd feeling to it. He would be freed after appealing to the childhood Christianity of a captor.

Never finished it, of course.

[1] Dare I say that, like Diogenes the Cynic, I find so much of the rules of tidiness to be foolish (e.g., the Kehrwoche in southern Germany). There are individuals I know whose houses are so immaculate that I hesitate to step on the premises. It's a fine hobby. But dare not think it important to spend undue time doing something elective that you'll just have to do again tomorrow! Don't consider yourself superior or me inferior because I don't get alarmed for accidentally wearing two different shoes! Order is practical and cleanliness is healthy, but anything beyond that can be a sickness.  

[2] A term that comes from Alfred Korzybski in a 1933 book Science and Sanity.

Family History: Jamestown 2

A Schenck History of the US continues from the last post.
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7. Much would happen between 1607 and the first record of Thomas Shelburne in 1640 when we know he was married and had a son.

The years from 1610-14 involved brutal fighting between the settlers and the Native Americans around them. 1614 saw the famed marriage between John Rolfe and Pocahontas, a peace treaty of sorts. At least it slowed the fighting. She would be paraded back to England where she would die in 1617. 

In 1619, the first Africans (about 20) were traded to the colony as captive laborers in exchange for food -- workers for supplies. The two ships that brought them were not slave ships but had stolen 50-60 Africans from a Portuguese vessel they had attacked that was carrying them. Thus the first Africans had been brought against their will to the mainland of the New World.

Paradigms shift over time. Some of these Africans show up as free landholders in the early records of the Virginia colony. That suggests that their servitude was not clearly seen as permanent slavery at that time. Some were apparently able, over time, to become free.

This is a key developmental point in ideological history. By the time Thomas passed from the scene, slavery was becoming more and more intrinsic to being "black." Black = slave. But it was not clearly so at first. Many would argue that this shift in thinking was solidified during the time of Bacon's Rebellion. [1] More on that in a moment.

The first real influx of women to Jamestown came in 1620, ninety women. The demand for a wife among the mostly male, severely isolated colony was tremendous. We can imagine that the gentlemen absorbed the newcomers quickly. Another 57 arrived the next year.

I have come across multiple traditions that Thomas came over on the same ship as Captain John Smith as a cabin boy -- just like the family tradition my mother knew. Then there are traditions that Elizabeth was one of the women who came in 1620. [2] The historical records don't support either claim, however. It's possible but the evidence is silent. My guess remains that he actually came in the 1630s.

8. John Rolfe was a dominant figure during the 1610s. Delayed because his ship wrecked around Bermuda, he arrived in 1610 after the famed "Starving Time." (Shakespeare's The Tempest in 1611 may have been inspired by his shipwreck) Aside from his brief trip to England when his wife Pocahontas died, he was a leading figure in the colony from 1610-1622, when he possibly died during the "Indian Massacre of 1622."

It was he who had the idea of growing a sweeter, West Indian strain of tobacco, and it did indeed turn the colony around economically. But it required lots of workers, creating demand for indentured servants from England and of course, soon enough, slaves. 

Then there was the "Indian massacre of 1622," when a quarter of the colony was killed (347 people). Tensions had been high between the settlers, who were steadily moving up river, and the Powhatans had enough. Most of those killed were outside the city, which was warned in time to prepare.

9. In 1624, King James finally took over. The massacre and consistent mismanagement of the venture gave way to it becoming a Crown colony. The investors no longer ran the show from afar. Now the king did. 

As the first settlers came in 1607, they would have brought either a Bishop's Bible or the Geneva Bible. The King James Version would come in 1611 and no doubt would quickly be expected to be the standard Bible. Religious freedom does not seem to be a dominant motive for these first settlers, at least not publicly.

However, in 2015, the remains of Captain Gabriel Archer were found where the earliest church at Jamestown was. He died in 1609 or 1610 during the starving time. What is interesting is that a box was buried with him that may have had holy water and some bone relics inside of it -- very unusual objects for an Anglican. 

Some have wondered if he were a closet Catholic. He would of course have had to swear the Oath of Supremacy to King James as the head of the Church of England. But people swear all sorts of things to save their skin. In 1633, for example, Galileo recanted believing that the earth goes around the sun.

Tobacco required lots of workers. Landowners in the colony of Virginia would pay for the passage of an indentured servant from England and would get land in exchange. And after working the land for a certain number of years, the indentured servant would be freed of his obligation and could get land himself.

This was the system into which Thomas Shelburne came. Was he an indentured servant? On one account, his wife came from the Argall family, which played a prominent role in the early decades of the colony. If so, it might suggest that he was also of a higher class than a former indentured servant.

If his wife, Elizabeth's maiden name was Augustine, that also seems to be slightly higher class. Indeed, they named their son Augustine, and he named his son Augustine Jr. These seem like the practices of slightly higher class individuals.

Perhaps it is a coincidence, but Thomas also died in 1676, the year of Bacon's rebellion. It is tempting to think he died in the conflict. But if so, which side was he on? If my guess is correct about his class, I'm guessing he was on the side of the governor.

10. In 1640, Thomas and Elizabeth were married. That same year, they had their son, Augustine I, the first of the Shelburnes to be born in America.

[1] Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom.

[2] Hiram Kennedy Douglass My Southern Families and Shelburne, the Book of Augustine (Richard W. Buck, 1988).

Notes Along the Way: 4.1 Substitute Teaching in Florida

Continued from last time. This may be the second to last in the first half of this series, Notes Along the Way: My First Thirty Years.
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1. Somehow, I thought that a teaching job would be quickly forthcoming after finishing my doctorate at Durham. I was in for a rude awakening.

Up to that point, I was used to getting everything I applied for. So it was disappointing not to get that teaching job in Southampton. I foolishly passed up on the potential job in Manchester. 

The Society of Biblical Literature does have a system of Openings, but I never even got an interview. I remember I applied to teach at the University of Louisiana. I thought, surely if I get an interview, I have a chance. Never happened.

I wanted to go on the Dunn path. Publish in Eerdmans. Write monograph after monograph.

I remember going to the 1995 SBL in Philadelphia. Be seen. Nothing. As a side note, I had a hint of an English accent after living in England for a couple years. Bill Patrick and I laughed at how a waitress seemed unusually interested until I confessed that I was only an American.

2. Welcome to a year of substitute teaching in Broward County, Florida. It was so bad that in the spring I would go to an African country in the middle of a civil war to get away.

If you knew me in the first thirty some years of my life, you might know that I had a very hard time saying no to anyone. In my first years of teaching, I annoyed the heck out of the responsible students by caving in to changing deadlines at the request of the more irresponsible students. You could almost always get credit on a quiz if you had a plausible reason for the wrong answer you put.

In England, I alienated a key friend by always saying yes to lesser friends when I had agreed to do something with him. Thinking he would overlook it, I would say yes to the latest request. Such was Ken the people pleaser. It was a major weakness of the first half of my life. If you try to make everyone happy, you usually end up with everyone upset with you.

I would say that the number one qualification of a good substitute teacher is the ability to manage a classroom. At this, you might guess, I was abysmal. A few moments stick out.

First, there was an opportunity to substitute teach virtually every day. The county stretched from Hollywood in the south to a fair bit north of where I lived in Wilton Manors. Every morning sometime between 6-7am I'd get that call. I'd groggily get up and drive to who knows where.

Most of the "opportunities" were middle school. These were the worst, but I accepted them all for the money. I think I might earn $50 a day, although it's hard to remember the exact number. Middle school is the worse because the young mind is just hitting formal operations. All sorts of new creative thoughts are now entering their minds, and they don't realize that we adults had those same thoughts 20-70 years earlier. (Of course, I suspect many a middle aged mind has forgotten their middle school antics.)

3. I remember one time I did a half-day in a portable. The teacher was actually there when I arrived. But as soon as he left, all mayhem broke out. I shouted at the top of my lungs, "THE ASSIGNMENT IS ON THE BOARD! IF YOU WANT A GRADE FOR THE DAY, DO IT! IF YOU WANT TO FAIL, THAT'S UP TO YOU!" I'm not sure anyone heard me.

I did Kindergarten music one day. How hard could that be? And they were watching a Disney movie! 

Nope. They were endless motion. The movie meant nothing to them. I did my best, and it wasn't the worst day, but it was exhausting.

The worst experience was a day in the southwestern part of the county. Middle School. Portable. Last period of the day. I had survived, but I was trying to keep them from leaving the portable before the bell rang. There was this one kid determined to get out. I physically blocked him. Then I made the critical mistake. I physically held him to keep him from leaving.

He went crazy. Said he was going to go home and get a gun and come back. I wrote the referral and went home. He was expelled. I was never invited back.

4. As the year went by, I found that the jobs I enjoyed the most were the special needs classes or adult services classes, where there was always one or two other people in the room. I was always willing to help. It was just the behavior management I had trouble with.

I remember this one adult who had been a doctor but had driven into a canal and had gone long enough without oxygen that he had some significant brain damage. He was very high functioning. In fact, his IQ was probably average. But I sensed that he spent most of his days struggling to regain whatever he could of what he once had. 

He inspired one of the dozens of novels I never finished. A University of Miami physics professor who had discovered a theory of everything. But he had a terrible accident one night and lost any real sense of what he had discovered. Meanwhile, a love story unfolds between his nurse -- a former student who we find out later had a child with him -- and the doctoral student desperate to unlock the secrets lost to his memory.

There was another young man who from birth had little of the cerebrum of a normal brain. He was mostly medulla and some cerebellum. Was he a person? I think we have to say he was.

5. My friend Bill Patrick and I drove to New Orleans for SBL that year. In typical Ken fashion, I said yes to a friend who wanted me to come do a Bible study with his small group in Atlanta on the way. Do you know how much extra driving that was? Bill would mock me for years.

It seemed to us that the reason for the invitation was that this friend wanted to impress a certain young woman in his group by inviting an up and coming scholar to come speak (me, in case you were wondering). But, at least it seemed to Bill, that she was far more interested in me than she was him. She came up afterward and said to me, "Sometimes I feel like there's a little theologian inside of me just wanting to come out."

Bill wouldn't let me forget that for years either.

Before we had left Florida, Bill had invited me to speak to a Sunday School class of his. I think though that they met on Thursday nights.

If you know Bill, this story won't surprise you. Bill graduated from Rollins College and would sun/swim at their pool regularly in Winter Park. (He also adjuncted for them for several years.) Guess who also used to swim at the Rollins College pool?

Mr. Rogers.

Bill invited Mr. Rogers to come hear me speak on Hebrews. And he came! I picked him up in my Chevy Citation. He rode in the front seat of my car. And he was, as you would expect, very complimentary.

He actually wrote a letter to the chair of the board at Princeton Seminary encouraging them to hire me. Of course board chairs don't decide such things. But it was a very nice thought.

Descartes' Meditation I: A Paraphrase

I'm hoping this fall to slowly paraphrase Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, with Claude helping. After several months, here is finally a paraphrase of his first meditation. (I have the Synopsis paraphrased already too.)
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Meditation 1
Things We Can Doubt

1. It has been several years now since I first realized something unsettling. From the time I was young, I had been accepting all kinds of opinions as true without ever really checking whether they were. And if the foundations were wrong, then everything I built on top of them was probably wrong too.

So, I made a decision. At some point in my life, I was going to have to tear the whole thing down and start over. Not just fix a few mistakes here and there—that would be like patching a rotten wall instead of rebuilding it. I needed to go all the way down to the foundation and start fresh, if I ever wanted to build something I could actually trust.

But that’s a big project. So, I waited. I kept waiting until I was old enough and mature enough that I couldn’t keep telling myself I’d be better prepared later. That time is now. Today, I find myself with a quiet mind, free from distractions, with the time and the peace to actually do this. (Descartes was living in peaceful retirement when he wrote this—deliberately setting aside time for serious philosophical work.)

So, today I begin. I am going to systematically set aside every opinion I have ever held. All of it goes.

2. Now, I want to be clear about something. I’m not going to try to prove that all my former opinions are completely false. That might actually be impossible—and it isn’t necessary anyway.

Here’s why. If I find even one good reason to doubt something, that’s enough to set it aside. I don’t need to prove it’s wrong. I just need to show it isn’t completely certain. (Think of it this way: if you’re not sure whether the milk is bad, you don’t drink it. You don’t need to prove it’s definitely sour.)

And I’m not going to go through every single opinion one by one either. That would take forever. Instead, I’m going to do something much more efficient. I’m going to attack the foundations. If the foundations crumble, everything built on top of them crumbles too. So, the question is: what are my most basic beliefs built on?

3. Everything I have ever believed with complete confidence came to me through my senses—through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. My senses have always felt like my most reliable guide to what's real.

But here’s the problem. My senses have deceived me before. And if something has deceived you even once, it’s not wise to trust it completely.

4. But wait—someone might object here. Sure, our senses can mislead us about small things or distant things. Maybe I misjudge the size of something far away or miss a detail too tiny to see clearly. But what about the obvious stuff? Surely I can’t doubt that I am sitting here right now, by the fire, wearing my dressing gown, holding this piece of paper in my hands. Some things (“presentations”) are just too immediate and obvious to doubt.

And honestly, that’s a fair point. How could I seriously deny that I have hands? That I have a body? That I’m sitting exactly where I think I’m sitting? Only a madman would doubt something that obvious. (Descartes is thinking here of people who suffer from serious delusions.) I’m thinking of people who sincerely believe they are kings when they are penniless. Perhaps they think they are dressed in royal robes when they have no clothes at all or that their bodies are made of glass or clay. Or maybe they think they are a squash. (These weren’t just hypothetical examples to Descartes. Such delusions were documented in his day.)

To doubt something as obvious as my own hands would put me in the same category as those poor souls.

5. But here’s the thing. Even if doubting my own hands would make me sound like a madman, don’t I sleep? I am a human being, and human beings dream. Think about it. When I’m dreaming, I often experience things just as vividly as I do right now. Maybe I’m sitting by the fire, wearing my clothes, holding this paper. Dreams can feel completely real while they’re happening. How many times have I dreamed I was sitting exactly where I'm sitting now, only to wake up and find myself lying in bed?

Right now, in this moment, everything feels obviously real. My eyes are open. I’m moving my head. I’m consciously extending my hand and watching it move. Surely this is different from a dream. Dreams aren’t this clear and vivid, are they?

But wait. I’ve thought that before. And I was dreaming.

The more carefully I think about this, the more unsettling it becomes. I cannot find a single reliable test—not one—that would definitively prove I’m awake right now rather than dreaming. And that realization is genuinely shocking. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I start to wonder... Am I dreaming right now?

6. OK, let’s go with it. Suppose we’re actually dreaming right now. Let’s suppose that opening my eyes, moving my head, extending my hands— it’s all just part of the dream. Let’s even imagine that I don’t even really have a body or hands at all.

Even if that’s all true, here’s the interesting thing. Dreams have to be made of something. When we dream, we dream of things—faces, hands, rooms, fire. Those dream images had to come from somewhere.

They’re like paintings. And here’s the thing about paintings. Even the most imaginative painting—like a siren, a dragon, or a creature that has never existed—is still made up of parts taken from real things. A painter can combine a woman’s face with a fish’s tail, but she can’t invent something from absolutely nothing. Even if every element is rearranged into something new and fantastical, the colors themselves are real.

(Think of it this way. Even the most bizarre dream you’ve ever had was made up of things you’ve actually seen or experienced. Your mind doesn’t create from nothing. It recombines things you’ve experienced.)

So even if everything in my dreams is imaginary and unreal, the basic building blocks must be real. The simple, universal elements that dreams are constructed from are real, things like eyes, hands, and bodies.

And even more basically than that, there are things so fundamental that they are the assumptions that make all these other images in our minds possible. These are simple, universal concepts like shape, size, quantity, and the fact that things exist at all in space and time. This is true whether we are talking about real or imaginary things, whether we are awake or dreaming.

7. So, what kinds of concepts belong to this most basic level of reality? These are ideas like physical existence in general. The idea that things take up space, have shape and size. We can count them. We can locate them somewhere in space and time.

8. This leads to a surprising conclusion about the sciences. Take sciences like physics, astronomy, or medicine. They study complex, “composite” things (things made up of parts, not “simple” things). Our train of thought puts them on shaky ground. They depend on assumptions about the physical world that we’ve just called into question. If we are dreaming, we can’t fully trust what our senses tell us about the physical world. And those sciences overwhelmingly depend on our senses.

But subjects (Descartes calls them “sciences” too, as the people of his day did) that deal only with these simple, universal concepts are on much firmer ground. These are sciences like arithmetic and geometry. In fact, they might be the most certain knowledge we have!

Here’s why. Whether I’m awake or dreaming, two and three still make five. Whether I’m awake or dreaming, a square still has four sides. These truths don’t depend on whether the physical world is real or not. They don’t depend on our senses at all. They just are true, no matter what.

9. But wait. There’s something I’ve believed for a long time that complicates everything we just said about mathematics.

I believe in God. And not just any god. I believe in an all-powerful God who created me and everything about me. And if that’s true, it raises an uncomfortable question. What if God arranged things so that there is no earth, no sky, nothing that takes up space, no shapes or sizes or locations? What if he has only made me think those things are real? What if my entire experience of reality is just God feeding false perceptions directly into my mind?

And here’s where it gets even more unsettling. I sometimes notice that other people are completely confident they know something—when they’re completely wrong! What if that happens to me with math? What if every time I add two and three and get five, I’m actually wrong? What if I’m actually wrong to think a square has four sides? What if God is allowing me to be deceived even about something that simple?

Here’s where someone might object, “But God is supposed to be supremely good. Surely a good God wouldn’t deceive me like that?”

But think about it. If God’s goodness means he wouldn’t let me be deceived at all, then why does he allow me to get things wrong sometimes? Yet, clearly, he does.

Apparently, God’s goodness doesn’t protect me from being deceived or wrong. That means it might not protect me from being deceived on these basic things either.

10. Now, some people might try to escape this problem by simply denying that God exists. If there is no all-powerful God, then there’s no all-powerful deceiver either. Problem solved, right?

But let’s not get sidetracked by that debate right now. Let’s just grant it for the sake of argument. Let’s suppose that God doesn’t exist. Let’s suppose I got here by pure chance, or fate, or just an endless chain of causes and effects. Say one thing has led to another all the way back for eternity.

Here’s the problem with that. If a powerful, intelligent God didn’t create me, then whatever did create me was less perfect, less intelligent, less capable. And the less capable my creator, the more likely it is that I came out flawed—including flawed in my thinking.

In other words, ditching God doesn’t actually help my certainty. It makes things worse. The less impressive the cause of my existence, the more reason I have to doubt whether my mind works reliably at all.

So, here’s where I’ve landed. I cannot find a single thing I formerly believed with complete certainty that I can’t now find some reason to doubt. I’m not saying this carelessly or rashly. We have found some serious, carefully considered reasons to doubt everything.

From this point forward, if I want to find anything truly certain, I need to treat every belief I have with suspicion, including all the beliefs I was previously very confident about. I should give them exactly the same suspicion I would give to something I knew was completely false.

11. But recognizing all this isn’t enough. I also have to make sure I don’t slip back into my old ways of thinking.

Here’s the problem. Those old familiar beliefs don’t just sit quietly in the corner once I’ve decided to doubt them. They keep coming back. They’ve been with me my whole life. They feel natural and comfortable and reasonable—far more reasonable than doubting everything. And as long as I keep thinking of them as “probably true but slightly doubtful,” they’ll keep sneaking back in and taking over my thinking almost without my noticing.

So, I need a different strategy. Instead of just telling myself these beliefs are doubtful, I’m going to deliberately treat them as if they are completely false. Not because I actually think they’re false, but because that’s the only way to counteract the powerful pull they have on my mind. I’ll fight the old prejudices with a new, deliberate one going in the opposite direction. Only then will my judgment have a fighting chance of finding its way to actual truth.

And before anyone panics, this isn't dangerous. I’m not about to go out and act as if the world doesn’t exist. (That really would be madness.) I’m doing this purely as a thinking exercise. I’m not looking for a guide to action right now. I’m looking for knowledge. And in the search for knowledge, you can’t be too suspicious.

12. So here is my plan. Instead of worrying about whether God might be deceiving me, I’m going to imagine something even more extreme. I’m going to suppose that there exists an evil demon, one massively powerful and completely dedicated to deceiving me in every possible way.

This demon has constructed the entire world I experience as an elaborate illusion. The sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds—all of it is just a trap he has set for my mind. I don’t actually have hands, eyes, flesh, or blood. I just think I do because the demon is feeding these false impressions directly into my mind.

I’m going to hold onto this assumption as firmly as I can. And even if this exercise doesn’t lead me to truth, it will at least accomplish something important. It will keep me from being fooled. As long as I maintain this radical suspicion, the demon—whatever his power—cannot get me to agree to something false.

But I’ll be honest. This is hard. There’s a part of me that just wants to go back to my comfortable old beliefs. It’s like being a prisoner who is having a wonderful dream about being free. When he starts to suspect it might just be a dream, he doesn’t want to wake up. He’d rather stay in the comfortable illusion than face the cold reality of his cell.

That’s me right now. I can feel myself wanting to slip back into my old familiar way of seeing the world. Waking up from this comfortable sleep is going to be hard work. And I’m not even sure the effort will pay off. But I have to try.