1. Science and Math Books

I can't imagine I will complete this idea, but as I am in the process of moving, my books are largely in boxes. Wouldn't it be interesting to catalog all my books? Well, it would be for me. I'll add to the list as I find them. I've put my favorites in bold.

Math

• Calculus 6e, by James Stewart (this is the book I've been using to make YouTube videos on calculus for several years now)
• Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula by Paul Nahin
• e: the Story of a Number by Eli Maor
• Linear Algebra, by Richard Penney
• No Bullshit Guide to Linear Algebra by Ivan Savov
• Differential Equations: A First Course by Guterman and Nitecki (my college textbook)

Chemistry

• Chemistry: The Central Science by Brown, LeMay, Burston, and Murphy (this is the book I've been using to make YouTube videos on chemistry for several years now)

Physics

• University Physics, by Young and Freedman (this is the book I've been using to make YouTube videos on physics for several years now)
• A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations by Daniel Fleisch
• Fundamentals of Physics I and II by R. Shankar
• The Feyman Lectures on Physics, vols I, II, and III
• The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman
• QED by Richard Feynman
• Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals by Richard Feynman and Hibbs
• Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli
• Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (I've had since late 80s)
• Just Six Numbers, by Martin Rees
• Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark
• The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose
• The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne
• The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
• The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene
• The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics, by Leonard Suskind
• Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind
• Thirty Years That Shook Physics by George Gamow
• Quantum Mechanics: A Complete Introduction, by Alexandre Zagoskin (bought in LA when I took Sophie to Pepperdine)
• Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (2nd ed) by David Griffiths
• Quantum Mechanics for Scientists and Engineers by David Miller (a textbook)
• Covariant Loop Quantum Gravity by Rovelli and Vidotto
• 30-Second Quantum Theory by Brian Clegg
• Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur by Lancaster and Blundell 
• Quantum Theory, by David Bohm
• Higgs by Jim Baggott
• Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin
• Relativity by Einstein (older version and 100th anniversary edition)
• The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity by Pedro Ferreira
• A Most Incomprehensible Thing: Notes towards a Very Gentle Introduction to the Mathematics of Relativity (both second and third edition)
• General Relativity by Robert Ward (a thick texbook I've had since 1984)
• Special Relativity by A. P. French

Biology

• The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong

Computer Science

• Learning Web App Development by Semmy Purewal
• Android: Programming and App Development for Beginners by Samuel Shields

Miscellaneous

• The Columbia University College of Physicians Complete Home Medical Guide (since 1985... I was in a book club)
• House Construction Details by Burbank and Romney (1979 - my dad was very patient with my requests)

Friday Gen Eds MS1: Math and Science

So I've been doing a series on Wednesdays called, "General Education in a Nutshell." I've already finished a series of twelve posts on philosophy. I'm about half-way through a series on world history. Now for the last few weeks on Friday I've been processing the content of math, chemistry, physics, and biology, in preparation for cooking them together for this series.
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1. As part of my philosophy series, I did a post on the philosophy of science. That post suggested that science was a language we used to describe and predict how the world works and would behave next time, but that it isn't actually language of how the world actually is. Our formulas, our language describes things that are real, but our language is like finely tuned myths that describe mysteries.

Science also proceeds by way of paradigms that, thus far, change over time. A paradigm is a way of looking at a particular area of knowledge, a particular way of thinking about a certain set of data, a particular set of glasses. So prior to Copernicus, the predominant astronomical paradigm saw the earth as the center of the universe, with sun, moon, and planets circling around it. Prior to Einstein, it was generally thought that space and time had fixed measures.

So paradigm shifts take place when the anomalies of "normal science" prompt new theories that, over time, come to be adopted as the new normal science.

2. The scientific method, therefore, is not exactly about reality itself. It is not exactly about what is absolutely true. It is about either confirming the usefulness of existing paradigms, about refining them, or perhaps about prompting a paradigm shift that will more precisely describe and predict the world.

We look at the data, we form hypotheses, we test them. When our hypotheses repeatedly seem to explain the data and correctly predict the results we will get the next time we test, we eventually call them theories. From the 1600s to the 1800s, discoveries were sometimes called "laws"--Newton's three laws of motion, the law of universal gravitation. We haven't used language of laws for a long time now.

3. So what is math? Some math seems to mirror reality in a much closer way than any scientific theory. I have ten fingers, so base 10 makes sense to me. But is base 10 really the most fundamental base of reality? Other numbers seem more intrinsic to the universe, like the number known as "e," which seems to pop up all over the place. [1]

Repeatedly, either mathematicians have realized possibilities that were later "discovered," or math was invented to explain what was already "discovered." The square root of negative 1, "i" is a case in point. Recognized in the 1700s, this curiosity would become essential in the quantum mechanics of the twentieth century. Carl Gauss and others explored the possibility of a non-Euclidean geometry in the early 1800s, but Einstein would apply it to general relativity in 1915.

So if the theories of science are far more precise myths to express reality than the stories of the arts and humanities, then numbers are the characters in those myths.

Of course math is much more than quantities. It is more than geometries. It is also a number of tools to help get at quantities and geometries.

5. Over the next twenty weeks, I hope to survey the main fields of math and science. I'm not exactly doing "what a college student should know," but this may not be too far off that idea.

• The Basic Types of Numbers
• The Atom and Quantum Physics
• The Periodic Table
• Molecules and Ions
• Chemical Reactions
• The Basic Tools of Algebra
• Thermodynamics
• Basic Geometry and Trigonometry
• The Physics of Motion
• Basic Calculus
• The Forces of Motion
• Electromagnetism
• Genetics and Evolution
• Cells and Microbiology
• Botany
• Zoology
• Geology
• Astronomy 
• Relativity
• Basic Probability and Statistics

[1] e is 2.7182818284590452353602874713..., an irrational number that goes on infinitely.

Liberal Arts 6: In Honor of Pluto

Sixth post in my series on the importance of the liberal arts for civilization. Previous posts include:

A Vision for the Liberal Arts
The Value of Philosophy
The Value of History
The Value of Music and Art
The Value of Literature, Writing, and Speech

1. Last evening, something happened that hasn't happened in the history of the universe. A probe launched in January 2006 passed less than 8000 miles from the cold dwarf planet we call Pluto. It carried some of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh with it, the man who discovered Pluto in 1930. He died in 1997.

It is a truly remarkable thing, that we could throw a baseball from a pitcher's mound spinning at 1000 miles per hour while moving at over 66,000 miles an hour around the sun accurately enough that would hit Pluto nine years later 3 billion miles away. I thank God, who deigns to let mere mortals know such things.

And he has let them know these things, not through the Bible in this instance, not through a special revelation given to a prophet in a congregation. But God has deigned to let us discover such things through science. Math and science are also the language of God.

2. I am truly amazed that so many Christians mock science. Do they mock the planes they fly on, the GPS devices they steer by, the cell phones they call and text by? Do they mock the medicines they are cured by, the computers they write by, the flat screen TVs they spend most of their time by?

No. I strongly believe that Christianity can co-exist peacefully with science. I shudder to think of the other alternative. I do not hold to the other alternative.

3. Science gets at one of the most important foundations of Western civilization--evidentiary thinking rooted in a quest for objectivity. Science tries to proceed with as few presuppositions as necessary. It proceeds to make hypotheses that it then tests until it arrives at one that works well enough to be called a theory. But even then, it does not rest on theories past. Theories are always open to revision or even abandonment, especially if new data arises that points in another direction.

This is the scientific method. It asks what the most likely interpretation of the evidence is. We all have biases. Scientists have biases. But evidentiary thinking requires us to suspend our desires for the truth to be a certain way in order that we can move toward what is more likely to be the truth, toward the best explanations of the data we have.

Many of us pretend to operate on the basis of evidence. We talk the language of evidence. But what we are really doing is trying to find a possible way to make the evidence fit our preconceived notions or desired theory. Science teaches us to determine what the most probable interpretation of the evidence is and to modify our preconceived notions accordingly. Again, I shudder to think of what the implications would be if Christianity could not survive such a method. I firmly reject that suggestion.

This quest for objectivity is the great hope for a democratic nation, indeed for a civilized world. Along with its companion, logic, it is essential for the success of civilization. Without it, society disintegrates into tribes and interest groups whose only common ground is the fact that they are all out for their own interests. Those who cannot think in an evidentiary way are liabilities to civilization.

4. Science and math play an important personal function for most of us. They humble us. At least they should. Dare we think we understand the thoughts of God when we cannot understand algebra? God is greater than algebra. Yet every yahoo thinks he or she knows what the Bible teaches. The evidence suggests they are hilariously wrong.

I am not, of course, suggesting that mathematicians and scientists should be leading society and making all the decisions. The gifts that enable a person to think in these ways can produce glaring blind spots in other ways of thinking. There are other inabilities that should humble the scientists of the world. Scientists need the other liberal arts to balance them out, including a sense of religion, as much as we need math and science to balance us out.

Nevertheless, if philosophy did not teach the student that the wise person is the one who realizes how little he actually knows, science and math are always around to help--if we listen.

5. It would be wise for all college-educated individuals to have some basic knowledge of the conclusions of science. Everything is made out of atoms. Space is expanding. Trees and humans exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with each other. All living things have DNA that maps out what they will look and be like.

These things are so basic to me that I can't imagine the view of the world people have when they don't know them. I seriously knew someone once who questioned whether we had really gone to the moon. I shudder to think about how that person decides how to vote. And woe to the person on trial who might have someone like that in the jury.

Everyone today seems to have an opinion on climate change, evolution, pollution, and so forth. But few get their opinions from science. They get their opinions from cable news. An educated person should be exposed to arguments on these subjects from someone trying to be objective who is an expert in science and hasn't been handpicked by a certain channel because of their target audience.

6. Most people do use some math in their lives. They have bank accounts. They submit taxes. THEY BUY LOTS OF STUFF. Perhaps not everyone needs to know algebra, but how to make a budget? Yes. Math can be taught in a relevant way.

7. Learning math and science can actually make a person a better thinker. Math is closely related to logic. Geometry teaches inference and proof. Algebra involves deduction.

When people ask, "When am I ever going to use this stuff?" The answer is that your brain will use these skills every day if you are a person who thinks clearly and reads the world around them well. Math expands your mental capacity. Becoming better thinkers is always a benefit to you as an individual and to society as whole.

8. Most people have such a narrow view of the world, yet everyone thinks they know everything about everything. If they are taught well, math and science expand our horizons beyond ourselves and our experiences to things we could not have imagined. They expand our "common sense" beyond what's true in Marion, Indiana, to what is true in the universe. They point us to God.

8th Grade Biology Textbook

I was helping my son with his 8th grade biology homework tonight and came across this fun paragraph:

"Science aims to be objective, but scientists are humans too. They have likes, dislikes, and occasional biases.  So, it shouldn't surprise you to discover that scientific data can be misinterpreted or misapplied..."

I was fine with the paragraph so far.  Then the thrust of the paragraph changed.

"... by scientists who want to prove a particular point.  Recommendations made by scientists with personal biases may or may not be in the public interest.  But if enough of us understand science, we can help make certain that science is applied in ways that benefit humanity" (Miller & Levine, Indiana Biology, 14).

I thought to myself, "Gee, I'm sure glad we can depend on the scientifically astute Indiana legislature to sort out the personal biases of those stinkin' subjective scientists.  We would hate for them to hurt humanity with their so called 'scientific knowledge.'"  

P.S. Those last couple sentences should be read with the following tone.

Radio, Relativity, the Quantum

The last book I bought on my way out of Germany a year ago was one called, The German Genius.  It's an attempt to address the fact that all anyone seems to know about Germany these days is the Nazis.  I jumped in the middle this week and read chapter 25, "The Discovery of Radio, Relativity, and the Quantum," a chapter about end of the century Germany in science.

Germany was clearly the world leader in physics at the end of the 1800s/beginning of the 1900s.  In fact, I have to believe that the world would look a lot different in terms of science and technology if that idiot of all idiots Hitler had not driven many of the brightest German minds in physics out of the country because they were Jews (Einstein, for example).  Perhaps the Germans would have been the first to the moon, for example.

Here are some of the highlights of this chapter:

• In 1888 Hertz invented a device that could send electromagnetic waves across a room.  He thought the discovery was "of no use whatsoever," but he had produced radio waves that we now use in all our communication, remote controls, etc.
• In 1895 Röntgen discovered x-rays
• In 1900, Max Planck gave birth to quantum physics by suggesting that energy increased and decreased in discrete packages called quanta.
• 1905 was the "annus mirabilis" of science (wonderful year).  Einstein published three papers, the third one gave birth to he special theory of relativity. It argued that time moves faster or slower depending on the speed something is traveling.
• Richard Dedekind defined continuity in math not in terms of "nothing between" but in terms of numbers connecting both to what comes before and after.
• Georg Cantor invented set theory and argued that some infinite sets are bigger than others.  Yet he also proved that the number of points on a line segment is equal to the number of points on a plane figure.
• Frege and Husserl are mentioned in relation to the philosophy of number but their contributions are not completely clear to me.  I have taken from Frege myself the parable of "sense and reference" in the meaning of words.  Wittgenstein undermines this model significantly, but I still find it useful in many circumstances.  It's the idea that a word has both a sense and a reference.  The reference is what it points to in the real world.
  
  I have little interest in Husserl.  I feel sorry for him and the way his life ended.  He thankfully passed before Hitler rounded him up but Heidegger apparently left him out to dry after he lost his post at Freiburg.  In general, though, I have little interest in the phenomenological school of philosophy, which seems to reign supreme across the map of my philosophical world right now.  

• Finally there's Hilbert.  He and Einstein developed the notion of "infinite dimension Euclidean space" or, as it is called, "Hilbert space."  He and Einstein developed general (rather than special) relativity.

Science Friday: Factor-Label Method

The science novel madness continues!  Here's tonight's excerpt:
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After writing it all down, Stefanie's exhaustion from the day finally got the best of her. She climbed in her bed and quickly drifted off. But after four nights without chemistry intruding into her dreams, the monster returned.

The dream started off fine. She was at a mall. It was two stories with a big open space in the middle. Look, there's a Cold Stone. Look, there's a Mexican restaurant. Look, a Fazolis. It was her kind of mall!

Then it kind of changed. She was facing two stories, but there were bowling pins--and humungous strips of chicken from "arroz con pollo," a Mexican dish, on both floors. They were different colors.

Suddenly, her sister Stacy was standing on the second floor in a tuxedo and tights, wearing a top hat and holding a very long black cane.

"OK, Stefanie," she yelled down. "Your job is to match the things on the top floor with the things on the bottom. Let me do one for you."

Normally, Stefanie wouldn't pay any attention to Stacy's instructions. But you know how dreams are. Things that are normally bizarre seem completely normal and real. Stefanie began to get nervous, even broke out in a sweat.

"See this twisted 1.3 meter long piece of chicken," Stacy continued, touching the chicken on the second floor. It strangely began to glow. "This piece is exactly like the 1.3 meter long piece of chicken on the bottom." And then her cane extended down to touch the other piece of chicken on the bottom. It glowed for a second and then both disappeared. "Now it's your turn."

Instantly everything disappeared and then a series of things appeared on both the top and the bottom. Two red bowling pins and a twisted piece of chicken on the top. A red bowling pin and a meter long piece of celery appeared on the bottom.

"Um," Stefanie hesitantly said. "It looks like all the bowling pins should disappear."

"WRONG!" Stacy said in a triumphant voice. "There's only one red bowling pin on the bottom so only one of the red bowling pins on the top can disappear. So what does that leave?"

Now in the dream Stefanie was quite unusually flustered. "I guess it leaves one red bowling pin and chicken strip on the top and just the celery on the bottom."

"Exactly," and with that balloons of all colors started to fall incessantly from somewhere overhead.

Stefanie woke up in a start. "What was that all about?" she actually said out loud. "Humph," she said, "like Stacy would ever make me nervous"

For the rest of the chapter, see here.

Science Friday: Converting Fahrenheit to Celsius

I've used the fact that my step-daughter will probably take chemistry this summer as an excuse perhaps to dabble a little in chemistry this spring: http://moleculestutorials.blogspot.com/

Here's an excerpt for my "Science Friday":
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... Her step-father took out his pocket notebook and wrote down the formula: F=9/5C+32.

"Yep, that's one of them," she said.  "Then going the other direction it's C=5/9(F-32).

It was too much for her step-dad to resist.  While they walked on, he launched into a lecture about why the formulas made sense.  Mind you, no one was listening to him.  Stefanie and her mom were whispering to each other in the front.  Tom and Sophia were competing to see who could count more birds. Meanwhile, Stefanie's step-dad Ken muttered on and on to himself.

"It's easy to figure out the formulas if you forget them," he said.  "It has to do with the fact that on the Celsius scale, 0 degrees (0°) is where water freezes and 100 degrees (100°) is where water boils.  What the conversion formula does is it matches these temperatures to the places where water freezes in Fahrenheit (32°) and where water boils in Fahrenheit (212°).

"So if you're going from Fahrenheit to Celsius, first you subtract 32, like you were going from 32° in Fahrenheit to 0° in Celsius.  Taking away 32 aligns the Fahrenheit scale with the Celsius scale.  Or when you're going from Celsius to Fahrenheit, adding 32 at the end aligns the two scales.

"The other part of the conversion has to do with how much bigger a Celsius degree is or how much smaller a Fahrenheit degree is.  If you subtract the 32° from the boiling point of water, 212°, then you can compare how the two types of degree relate to each other.  180 degrees on the one scale corresponds to 100 degrees on the other.  So you can figure out how big a degree is in one scale compared to the other.  Fahrenheit degrees are 180/100 times more (which reduces to 9/5). Celsius degrees are 100/180 times less (which reduces to 5/9).

"That's the ratio.  You multiply a Celsius degree by 9/5 to get a Fahrenheit degree.  You multiply the aligned Fahrenheit by 5/9 to get a Celsius degree.  It all makes sense."

"Oh, I see," Stefanie cleverly responded as they arrived at the ticket booth, where her other sister Stacy was waiting.  But of course no one had paid any attention to Ken's lovely explanation...

Science Friday: Evolution of Adam

Normally I want to post more pure science or culture on Friday, but since I haven't come to anything really interesting to me in the biography I'm reading about James Clerk Maxwell, I thought I would post about the introduction to the new book by Peter Enns I'm also reading, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins.

This is going to be a hard book to read, not because Enns himself is caustic or confrontational.  In fact, quite the opposite.  I have been impressed with how sensitive and "exploratory" a tone he has adopted in this book.  His evangelical background as an OT scholar comes through clearly, not as someone who has been burned (Westminster Theological Seminary effectively pushed him out, even if he did the resigning), not as someone bitter because they feel stupid from the past (very, very common).  The tone is thoroughly respectful and truth seeking. It doesn't have the condescending tone Giberson and even Collins sometimes seem to have.

His audience is Christian, especially evangelicals, and especially American evangelicals.  Yet he is also addressing those who believe evolution must be taken seriously.  Respect of Scripture is a primary value, although he clarifies that "the most faithful, Christian reading of sacred Scripture is one that recognizes Scripture as a product of the times in which it was written and/or the events took place--not merely so, but unalterably so" (xi).

I will not debate this claim, although I think there may be more to Christian hermeneutics than the original meaning.  Nevertheless, I agree it does no honor to the Bible to pretend that it meant something different than it did (even if I think there is room for self-consciously different readings).

In any case, the reason the book will be a hard read is because of his conclusion: "If evolution is correct, one can no longer accept, in any true sense of the word "historical," the instantaneous and special creation of humanity described in Genesis, specifically 1:26-31 and 2:7,22" (xiv).  In particular, he does not believe we should speculate about Adam in ways foreign to the original meaning of Genesis.  For example, he will not let us say that Adam and Eve were the first two homo sapiens in which God put a soul because that is certainly not anything Genesis itself was thinking.

Enns does not believe, rightly I think, that Genesis is, in the end, the real point of conflict between evolution and the Bible.  Paul is.  He sees four options:

1. Accept evolution and reject Christianity (he will say no to this).
2. Accept Paul's view of Adam as binding and reject evolution (he will say no to this as well).
3. Reconcile evolution and Christianity by positing a first human pair (or group) at some point in the evolutionary process (he thinks this doesn't respect Genesis enough in terms of its original meaning).
4. Rethink Genesis and Paul (clearly the option he believes has the most integrity).

So the book begins.

Afternoon at the Museum...

Yesterday afternoon we checked another thing off our "do before leaving Munich" list.  We went to the Deutsches Museum, which is full of actual planes, boats, submarines, space craft, etc.  You could actually climb into a lot of them.  I would have loved it as a child.

Maybe it's because I'm a little stressed in general but I was thoroughly depressed by the time I left for several reasons.  Here are just a few:

1. My kids won't be going/didn't go on field trips to anything like this from Justice/McCullough, or Marion High School.
2. The vast majority of American kids don't care about this sort of stuff... meaning America has no future in the world.
3. The accumulated knowledge this museum represents is way beyond anything I know... and I mean pick any point in time from some 1800 ship to the 1960 jet to the 1980's space craft.

Just thought I'd cheer everyone up on a Monday morning. ;-)

China owns the moon...

China is poised to set up colonies on the moon.

We certainly won't be there, given the current trajectory in American politics.

At Conference End...

The conference has come and gone, and thankfully I'll be home for a while now.  Interestingly, Monday after next begins the "Pedagogy of Science and Faith in the Classroom" conference at IWU.  As I mentioned before, it is on pedagogy rather than positions or content.

I ended up really enjoying the Christian Scholars Conference.  I got here too late to hear Polkinghorne, but nabbed a copy of his presentation to read.  I heard Collins. The other plenary speakers spoke on the dangers of genetically-modified food and on the ethical landscape with regard to stem cell research.  I was well prepared for this last talk because of a presentation Burt Webb gave at IWU a few years back.

And of course I gave my paper on Hebrews.  Jerry Pattengale of IWU was hear talking about the Green Collection.  And IWU's Wim Van de Merwe was here.

Pepperdine and the conference turn out to be Church of Christ (non-instrumental).  It struck me as we finished singing three hymns at the end of a dinner/celebration of Thomas Olbricht that we were singing a cappella and that it had significance in context.  I was reminded of our little enclaves as Christian groups, each with our own idiosyncrasies.  Biblical scholarship is very important (on one level) to the children of the Stone-Campbell revivals like the Disciples and Churches of Christ.  They are part of the Restorationist Movement that puts such a high premium on getting back to the early church.

And they have their quibbles like whether you should have instruments in church.  I talked to a Christian minister working on his PhD in church history yesterday and he suggested that the reason Christian churches in the south went non-instrumental were because they were poorer and couldn't afford organs like the churches in the north, who won the Civil War.

The ideological debate was thus, as almost always, an epiphenomenon of social dynamics going on between people.  The pretense is thus that there are no organs in the Bible.  The reality is that we live in the South, are poor, and have slaves.  You are wealthy abolitionists in the north.

And of course the scholars who grow up in these enclaves usually recognize the idiosyncrasies, but there is enough that is true or that they agree with to stay with their movement.  I saw the same when I was at the Seventh Day Adventist Andrews University a few months back.  And I experienced the same growing up Wesleyan, one of the many Methodist splinter groups.

There is a current in America that says education makes you liberal.  I think it would be more accurate to say that education causes you to see the idiosyncrasies of your group, your starting point, which almost always broadens you in relation to your group.  That means that education should also broaden those who grow up in "liberal" circles. ;-)

So it's not so much that truth tends toward the liberal.  It's that education tends to unravel the simplistic assumptions of your starting point, whatever simplistic assumptions you may start out with.   As Socrates once allegedly said, the wise person is the one who realizes at some point how much he or she does not know.

Pedagogy of Faith in the Science Classroom

Indiana Wesleyan University is hosting a conference on campus, June 27-29, on the question of how faith and science should or might co-exist in classrooms of all kinds.  Here is the website for the conference.

The purpose of the conference is not to discuss the merits of various positions on issues (e.g., theistic evolution) but to discuss pedagogy and to discuss it in the pursuit of insight, not indoctrination.  So not only will there be young earth creationists there, but Karl Giberson of BioLogos will be keynoting.  J. P. Moreland the apologist from Talbot at Biola will also be keynoting.

It should be interesting!  Dennis Brinkman, chair of the School of the Physical and Applied Sciences here, has had no shortage of angry emails, ranging from those who think faith and science should have nothing to do with each other to those who think Christian pedagogy should only indoctrinate against evolutionary theory.  Papers of all sorts are on the program, including a paper from a self-avowed atheist who insists he cannot help but discuss questions of faith in his classes because, whether he likes it or not, his students always bring the issue up.

Admission is $125 if you have your own lodging.  It is $225 if you need to stay in our lodges.

Holy Centigrade, Batman

I was sitting in a Greek pub here in Ontario, Canada--about a mile and a half from my lodgings and chomping on a gyro--when the news said it was going to be 15 below zero.  "15 below," says I!  That's cold!

Then I remembered that only we scientifically backward Americans still use Fahrenheit.  That's only about 7 degrees.  That's no worse than Indiana.

It was a fine walk home.

Thoughts on high school science education...

I took yesterday and today off to be with my family the last day of their Fall Break.  We went to Chicago, a little more than 3 hrs away.  This morning we were at the Museum of Science and Industry.  I had the same feeling I've had for a while now.

We are a nation that makes fun of smart kids.  The general populace not only feels comfortable questioning things overwhelmingly assumed by scientists.  They villify them for it (e.g., the so called global warming conspiracy). We are increasingly a nation that doesn't want our government taking any of our money to invest in general scientific investigation.  With our rhetoric against "earmarks" we are almost relegating the advance of science to things companies can make an immediate profit on or the government can protect or kill with (and you can imagine what this does for the arts that keep us human). In short, I worry about the long term prospects. 

As for my idea... After what we have done at the new seminary to integrate Bible, theology, and church history with the practice of ministry, it is hard to look at the way we teach math and science in high school the same.  First, there is just so much more to learn than thirty years ago when I started high school.  I had a hilarious conversation recently with a college math professor who didn't like the fact they were teaching geometry and things so early.  Her complaint was that a child's brain was not yet developed enough to get the abstractions accurately. 

I laughed because her approach--don't teach it until they can get everything accurately--consigns math and science to almost no one.  We have to start as early as possible, even if it involves imperfection (after all, Newtonian physics is imperfect).  You can often learn something more quickly by learning it first a little wrongly and then perfecting your understanding later, like chiseling at a block of marble.  You "learn it wrong to learn it right."

I wish I knew math and science well enough to integrate the teaching the way we have tried to integrate Bible, theology, and church history.  Students from the earliest ages would work on various problems and learn the math and science to solve them.  They would not learn some individual math or science item and then do an example about that one thing.  They would learn it all in a bundle by constructing things, learn science by building things.  They would create Tesla coils, launch projectiles, blow up things, and learn calculus, chemistry, and physics by doing it, in order to do it.  It would be the "engineering project" that would dictate the interlocking items in math and science to learn.

To teach this way would require informed pedagogues mapping practical projects to a mega-list of math and science outcomes--individual bits to learn distributed among countless science projects.  Then in college they could do it the traditional way, learning isolated and specialized disciplines in depth.  But they would learn what science can do in middle and high school.  They would do engineering type things in school and whet their appetite.  No more abstract and seemingly irrelevant math and scientific theory.  All of it would be integrated with the practice of science in high school.  Then the depth stuff would come in college for those who go forward, which would be more than now because they would see what it can do.

By the way, getting college credit for AP is something you should only do if you don't plan on going on in that area.  High school chemistry AP, for example, even if you get a 5 on the exam, is simply not adequate to go forward with a chemistry major.  You need to start from the beginning again with university chemistry.  High school chemistry won't carry you straight into analytical chemistry very well.

My thoughts...

Christians and Evolution (philosophy)

Let the failure begin... I wasn't able to finish my planned section of the philosophy book for today. I used all my writing time finishing, polishing, and editing the previous chapter. So I'll share some of what I worked on yesterday in this regard, and move on.
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It is beyond the scope of this book to engage in Christian debates over the science of macroevolution. [1] Over the last few decades, a significant literature has emerged against it by scientific creationists and more recently, by those who hold to Intelligent Design theory (ID). The former group marshaled biologists, geologists, and other scientists in the 1970s to argue for a young earth whose complexion is best explained on the basis of catastrophes like
the biblical Flood.[i] Their model of the earth’s geology is thus called catastrophism, as opposed to the uniformitarianism of Darwinism. Uniformitarianism assumes that the earth’s geology has resulted from the same slow processes we observe today, just over billions of years.
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Darwinism: the idea that evolution has taken place gradually over millions of years simply by nature “selecting” organisms better equipped to survive in particular environments

mutation: a change in the fundamental molecular structure of an organism

neo-Darwinism: a revision of Darwin’s theory that understands mutation as the method by which organisms arise that are better equipped to survive in particular environments

scientific creationism: a Christian approach to scientific evidence that arose in the 1970s to counter belief in macroevolution. It assumes a literal seven day creation and explains the earth’s geology by recourse to a world-wide flood

Intelligent Design theory (ID): a more recent Christian approach to scientific evidence that suggests it cannot be explained adequately without recourse to an Intelligent Designer, namely, God

uniformitarianism: the idea that the earth’s geology can be explained on the assumption that conditions have largely remained the same over the course of its history

catastrophism: the idea that the earth’s geology is largely explained by a major catastrophe, namely, a world-wide flood
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Intelligent design theory takes a slightly different tactic.[ii] It suggests that certain aspects of life reflect an “irreducible complexity” that could not have evolved by chance. They attempt to demonstrate that the evolution of certain things like proteins is a mathematical impossibility by chance, because they are so complex. Unless they were designed, we cannot account for their existence.

At the same time, the evolutionary community has not stood still either. Many evolutionists no longer hold to the strict uniformitarianism of Darwinism and now suggest that the most radical phases of evolution may take place “quickly” in various spurts (quickly meaning over thousands rather than millions of years). This process is sometimes called punctuated (not spontaneous) equilibrium.

Again, our purpose is not to examine the science involved. We can refer to a body of Christian scientific literature that makes scientific arguments against macroevolution.[iii] Other Christian scientists argue for theistic evolution, the idea that God directed the evolutionary process.[iv] When the theory of evolution first began to gain prominence, some Christians strategized to fit it with their Christian understanding. For example, some suggested what became known as the “gap theory,” the idea that dinosaurs and other extinct animals might have lived in between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. They suggested that Satan’s fall from heaven might have caused the world of 1:1 to become “formless and empty” in 1:2.

Over time, however, evolution was used as an excuse for social Darwinism, the idea that the rich and powerful should naturally run over the poor and powerless in society. After all, they were the fittest! It is quite possible that William Jennings Bryan, who famously argued against evolution in the famed Scope’s Trial of 1925, was so vehemently opposed to evolution primarily because of what he saw as its unchristian social implications, more than because it violated a literal understanding of the Bible.[v] That emphasis of scientific creationism came more to the front in the 1970s.

We might briefly mention the biblical texts that most come into play in such debates. The first is obviously Genesis 1, which presents creation in terms of seven “days.” Theistic evolutionists take such language as figurative and poetic rather than a straightforward, literal description. Perhaps the days represent ages of history, they might say. At the same time, fundamentalist interpreters put a high premium on taking the days as literal 24 hour days. Similarly, when Genesis says God made everything “after its kind,” this description is taken to preclude evolution between species.
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social Darwinism: the application of the idea of “survival of the fittest” to its “have’s” and “have not’s,” justifying the domination of the powerful over society’s weak

theistic evolution: the idea that God in some way directed the evolutionary process or at least that macroevolution is compatible with belief in God
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Perhaps a greater challenge to the theistic evolutionist view comes from the book of Romans in the New Testament. In Romans 5, Paul tells the Romans that death entered the world through sin, through the sin of Adam in particular (e.g., 5:12). From the similar passage in 1 Corinthians 15:22, it is clear that Paul includes physical death in what he is talking about. [6] Yet evolution requires lots and lots of death to take place before Adam. The theistic evolutionist must thus take Paul’s argument somewhat less than literally.

For some, like Kenneth Miller, the Adam and Eve story might shift into the category we explored at the beginning of the chapter: a story expressing a mystery that does not refer to historical figures.[vi] This solution of course then removes for us Augustine’s “free will” explanation for world-wide evil and natural calamity—we would have no human parent on which to pin the “Fall.” Other theistic evolutionists see God much more involved in the process of evolution. They might accept the existence of an Adam and see him as the first homo sapiens into which God put a soul. They would then see Paul’s language of death really having more to do with spiritual death than physical death. Indeed, they might argue that Adam and Eve themselves were designed to die unless they ate of the tree of life (Gen. 3:22).

What is non-negotiable for the historic Christian is that God created the universe and has all power and knowledge of it as He sees fit. Further, God is involved in the world and through Christ will eventually set right everything that is wrong in it. Within these boundaries, we find some variety of perspective among faithful Christians. Each one will have to decide what they think is acceptable to believe.

[1] For the spectrum of positions Christians have taken on this issue, see Greg Boyd, ed., Across the Spectrum (***).

[i] E.g., Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism (Green Forest, AR: Master, 1974).
[ii] E.g., Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000).
[iii] In addition to nn.ii-iii, we might also mention Michael J. Behe’s, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Free, 2006).
[iv] E.g., Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution (New York: Cliff Street, 1999).
[v] See Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 189.

[6] For an arugment that Paul does not have physical death in view, see David Snoke, A Biblical Case for an Old Earth (***).

[vi] See n.iv. Another excellent resource for Christianity in relation to science is Francis Collins' The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (***).

Wiki-Space--how 'bout it NASA?

I was listening to NPR Science Friday today. It's been 40 years since we first went to the moon and over 35 since we've been back. That to me is an atrocity.

Anyway, it's the same old conundrum. When our nation is in such massive debt, when there are children who have no medical care, how can we spend billions and billions of dollars over the next 10 years designing new space craft?

Some at NASA have an innovative idea. Take parts from the existing space shuttles and put together one new craft at massively less cost and time. The problem? Then you have one craft that can go to the moon... and do precious little to advance our exploration of space elsewhere.

Then my mind went to Nupedia. Ever heard of it? No? It was scrapped before it hardly got started. It was old school encylopedia. Commission some experts to write some articles for a new online encyclopedia. Why didn't it make it? Wikipedia did thousands and thousands of times more in a year or two by letting us all make it.

Now someone like me shouldn't be allowed to post on Wiki-Space. You should have to have a graduate degree in some relevant discipline. But what if NASA and the space agencies of the world opened up a Wiki for development? This group of the geekiest of the geeks works on engine stuff. That group works on shield stuff. This one on navigation. That one on life support. Certainly some stuff wouldn't be public and there would be NASA people putting it into final form.

But the genius of decentralization is the ticket. This sort of people does this kind of stuff as a hobby. Imagine having 200 geniuses give thousands of hours of research for free! You've heard of Open Source software? It's Open Source engineering!

Miscellaneous in the News

Very busy this week--maybe you're enjoying it more because of the absence of long interpretive posts. Somehow we managed for three of our children to have birthdays on the 8th, 9th, and 10th of September. Not good planning!

Also there were some major events this week in the possibility of an MDIV and seminary at IWU. We moved significantly closer to seeing this become a reality this week. Nothing certain and no promises, but the snail moves along.

I heard part of an interview on NPR with Bob Woodward on his latest book having to do with Iraq. He suggested that the violence was decreasing for four reasons:

1. The shift of allegiance from Al-Qaeda to the US by various Sunnis in Al-Anbar province (that is, homegrown Al-Qaeda in Iraq that didn't exist at the time of invasion). This of course happened before the surge. McCain misspoke on this one during some interview.

2. The decision on the part of Muqtada al-Sadr to tell his cronies to stop attacking US troops. Again, this had nothing to do with the surge. If anything, he did it on the advice of Iran.

3. The surge. Clearly with so many troops on the ground, violence is going to be down. The big question is what will happen when the troops lead. We have to hope it will stay down.

4. A secret weapon. Apparently it is classified, but with Woodward talking Manhattan Project as an example of technology making all the difference, apparently we now have something that makes it easier to target people. The Bush administration has confirmed.

I don't personally feel like I have enough information to know whether to pat anyone on the back for the surge yet. I'm willing to. I won't in any case pat Bush on the back since it was an act of desperation to clean up a mess he caused in the first place.

Another interesting item in the news is the new particle collider in France-Switzerland. Certainly I hope it doesn't destroy the earth, but am excited about this sort of stuff. Part of me wonders why this thing is in Europe and not in the US. I hope we're not in the twilight of our culture, where we're fat and enjoying the benefit of past hard working generations without realizing that others are passing us and will leave their children the next prosperity.

Poor Pluto

Pluto has just been downgraded to a dwarf planet and is no longer one of nine. Poof, there are only eight planets in our solar system now. Poor Pluto.

Actually, I'm pretty happy with the decision over and against its alternative, which was to count Charon, Zena, and a whole bunch of other icy things orbiting the Sun. Pluto wasn't big enough to clear everything out of its orbit (it crosses Neptune's) and was just too small.

The funny thing is of course that yesterday it was a planet. In other words, the category of planet is a human construct in this instance. The difference between our planets and the many suns out there is not a human construct, nor are certain key differences between Pluto and Neptune that have constituted the different classifications.

But the name planet is a human sign whose definition might just as easily have come out something different. We humans created the planets today.

And since as a son of Adam I can make names too, I will continue to refer to Pluto as a planet. I'll be selling Schenck dictionaries on Amazon so you can know what I really mean. But of course someone will have to learn your language and mine in order to write it in yours.