Keeping up with reading

So, what have you been reading? I've been trying to keep a lively reading schedule. Last week I read Wendell Berry's Life is a Miracle which is broadly sympathetic to my own view of science. I'm also half-way through Ernst Mayer's One Long Argument, a primer on the development of Darwinian theory. I'm about to finish up Augustine and the Catechumenate, a study on the education of those seeking baptism in the fourth century church. In those days it took roughly three years of instruction in the life and liturgy of the church before one petitioned for baptism. How easy we have it these days. Biblically speaking, in addition to the readings from the lectionary read at prayer, last week I read Esther and Ezra once each and then Romans about four times (I find Paul troublesome).

I just picked up a copy of Hendry's Theology of Nature which I sampled earlier today (the chapter on "Science of Nature") and look forward to consuming and digesting it in its entirety very soon. In addition I got a collection of William Blake's poetry and Harold Bloom's introduction to Blake's poetics entitled Blake's Apocalypse - both just to satisfy curiosity. And when there's time I'm looking for an excuse to delve into Michael Polanyi's Gifford Lectures (published as Personal Knowledge).

Besides that I don't really have much time. I'm trying to work on my Ph.D. (which means also reading scientific literature, at present that on the mathematical theory of intermittent dynamics in nonlinear systems), keep up with my wife, and train the dog (whose behavior has become demonstrably worse... I think we have to re-establish our disciplined routine). In the yard: our tomato plants are starting to produce. Our two-year-old vine (that's right, we kept it alive all winter in the attic) has between 7 and 9 tomatoes at various stages of development. The vine that our Italian friends gave us seems to have one or two very small fruits, and the other four tomatoes still need time to mature. The squash plant has 3 or 4 more squashes developing, and the pepper plants are starting to make their upward thrust. A new sport we're developing in the yard is training Jax to stalk rabbits, for which he seems to have some intuitive grasp.

That's all for now.

Science of Blame

Previously I said:

"Science really has no resources for talking about what should be and yet we see quasi-religious fervor in the debate over the reality, source, and necessary responses to global warming even within the scientific community."

It strikes that it is worth commenting on the debate around the sources of global warming. When we ask "How is this happening," what is it that we want to know? We are, one assumes, asking what the efficient cause of global warming is. The answer: increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. So we ask what the efficient causes of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations might be. Part of the answer: fossil fuel emissions. The chain of causes continues: vehicles, power plants, American industry, growing economy, etc.

The point, in short, is that the science of global warming can only tell us the efficient causes in a mechanistic chain of events. And in fact relatively quickly we reach an echelon at which science is on shaky ground for talking about efficient causes. For example, what chain of causality made man such a magnificent fossil fuel burner? And don't think that relating the story from the history books amounts to establishing causation!

That is, given that technology is what it is, science can tell us which are the offending technical agents. It cannot tell us, for example, who is to blame or when we went wrong. It cannot even tell us that global warming is a bad thing! Such questions require sound judgment. But surely a scientist, so well trained in logic and so well apprised of the facts, should be able to exercise sound judgment in the matter. Why? Thinking deductively, or at best thinking clearly, does not amount to prudence.

As I see it, we have equipped scientists to answer such questions only in technological terms. The offending agent in global warming is a piece of technology (or set of technologies), according to science, and the solution is then (straightforwardly) to design alternative technologies that are not climatically offensive.

Brilliant!

This seems to be precisely where we've arrived, culturally. The energy debates are debates about how to transition the economy to a fuel that will neither severely hamper the U.S. economy nor promise significant climatic alteration (which again, creates economic uncertainty). We applaud ourselves because we are behaving honorably, deploying the greatest epistemological apparatus (i.e., modern science) in the history of mankind onto the knotty problem of saving the planet. Bravo! Bravo!

The unacknowledged assumption is that moral questions are technological questions. The "blame" for global warming goes to those silly fossil fuel technologies (and perhaps to anyone who willfully subverts the transition to alternative fuel). Scientifically we simply can't sort out another recipient of blame, and culturally we are ill equipped. Other examples of the moral-technological link are not hard to find, I think, perhaps the most conspicuous being obesity drugs. Consider it an exercise to find examples of where we have produced solutions to questions of morality through technological contrivance.

This is to say that culturally we may be losing the ability to criticize ourselves on any plain that does not admit of description via efficient causes or technological manipulation. Science cannot tell us not to live the way we do; it can only offer us a choice of technologies for doing so. And we seem to be happy with that.

To sum up this post, our approach to global warming has not been to ask if our way of life needs revision, but whether our technologies need revision. It's a conservative question, one that hopes to preserve the status quo, and projects a confidence that the path that led us to technologies that offend the climate is not inherently a bad path, just one with a hiccup.

That is tremendous optimism.

Jax-I

How's the dog? Well, after a two week hiatus from puppy class we have developed enough bad habits to take us forward for a while. Jax exceeded even his normal exuberance this past Tuesday night, reducing H to utter frustration. The other owners apparently persist in tranquilizing their dogs with heavy sedatives before class.

The one activity in which Jax's dynamo showed itself to be both entertaining and within the requirements of the class was during the recall practice. The arena is about a 30ft square in the main room of the building and is bounded by a low gating system to deter the dogs from exits, etc. For the recall exercise one of the handlers would hold the dog at one corner of the arena while the owner would go to the diagonal corner. The handler would then release the dog at approximately the same time that the owner recalls the dog, "Jax, come!" After watching a few dogs trot over to their owners, or maybe wander over while sniffing along the way, it was nice to see Jax excel by doing his best impression of a Saturn rocket on its way into orbit. You could see the fear on H's face as, in the split second that it took Jax to reach escape velocity, she tried to decide whether Jax would be able to stop himself before he ran her over.

In her uncertainty she failed to secure the treat bag.

So when the Jax-I rocket did arrive, H held out her hands in self-defense and the contact sent treats rolling about the floor. This was the perfect opportunity for Jax to demonstrate that the Jax-I comes complete with an anterior Hoover attachment. Once the treats were consumed, Jax and H left the arena as a pair, though H was the redder of the two.

In the next iteration of the same exercise a second handler sat in the arena off to the side of the diagonal linking owner and dog and provided some mild distraction with a tennis ball. I was concerned how Jax would do with such a distraction in play. Never fear. The reason rockets don't have wings is that you don't turn rockets, at least not quickly. Jax noticed the tennis ball as he passed at about Mach 9. He then created something of a mess of H as he touched her, made a half orbit, and then went back for the ball. When he realized that he'd been duped (that deceitful lady didn't really want to play ball at all) he headed back for H.

Jax slept on the way home, as usual.

Evolution and Reason

Sorry, I know I promised something ordinary. Humor me.

For those who want to be too committed to evolutionary explanation: The Darwinian materialist has to explain his own explanation in Darwinian terms. He has to give a Darwinian account of why the neural activity of Homo sapiens necessarily produces a true thought (i.e., Darwinism). If he cannot give a reason why evolution should produce such true thoughts (or give an evolutionary account of truth), then it seems that he has no way to claim that he is not engaging in a Darwinian delusion.

The implication is that physicists are dependent on biologists to give an account of why physics should be true at all (in the sense that it is more than a very effective delusion). And that is an ironic reversal.

Some thought must be put into just how such a committed Darwinian materialist may get out of this predicament without resorting to circularity (e.g., "Darwinism is true because it is the result of Darwinian selection").

Does this mean that I don't "believe in" evolution. Well, no. It means that I don't believe in scientific materialism. That's no news to anyone who has read much of this blog. I think Dawkins is deluded, but not because he's a scientist.

It's because he's an ass.

And if you've read Judges, you'll know that it's the jawbone of the ass that will slay the Philistines.

Originality or lack

Some of you might realize that my criticisms of science are not strictly speaking "original." I have been influenced by Wendell Berry (mostly his novels and poetry [from which you may recognize "practice resurrection"], though I have also read The Unsettling of America). Berry has long been an opponent of uncritical technological consumption, as well as of scientific materialism more generally. He has also gone to the Bible for close readings to re-evaluate how we understand our situatedness within creation (see "The Gift of Good Land" or "Christianity and the Survival of Creation"). In short I think he is the foremost (both temporally and qualitatively) proponent in America of a genuinely Christian engagement with creation.

So, I'm not raising any new issues.

If anything, I approach the issue slightly differently. Berry's style, and indeed much of the strength of his critique, relies I think on a sort of embodied common sense. The gauntlet that he throws down before the modern view is that it doesn't make sense practically. My proposed approach is more circumspect as it relies methodologically on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. There are essentially two prongs to my attack. One is to examine the early stages of modern science, say around Newton and the Royal Society, and challenge the inevitability of scientific materialism historically. I think it is a contingency that science is the way it is. It is not that science has privileged access to "how the world is" and that such access has dictated materialism. (I've just written myself out of conversation with Dan Dennett.) This approach is to follow MacIntyre's historical approach to rival rational traditions. In this case we have rather than two rival traditions being synthesized (as for Augustinianism and Aristotelianism into the Thomist synthesis), instead a divergence of traditions. So, I want to understand rationally how this occurs if even just in the particular case of the scientific revolution.

The second prong in the attack is to challenge the Humean Is/Ought distinction that seems implicit to modern science. I think that science's supposed ethical/moral neutrality is a rational mistake finding its roots in the Enligthenment. The result is the sort of ad hoc scientific value judgments that are being leveled in the modern climate debate. Science really has no resources for talking about what should be and yet we see quasi-religious fervor in the debate over the reality, source, and necessary responses to global warming even within the scientific community. Furthermore, the inevitable result of such conceptual poverty is that responses to the perceived danger are characterized almost exclusively by the need for further research to decide what our options are for out-engineering the disaster.

So, I want to talk about science's inheritance as the favored child of the Enlightenment and how this has eroded its conceptual resources for ethical debate. To make the criticism that science divorces knowledge from action (epistemology from ethics) is, I think, to level a criticism that is consistent with Wittgenstein's remarks (which is not to say that it is what Wittgenstein "meant" or "said" through his remarks).

The entire critique is MacIntyrean. While I think that Berry's critique is more meaningful on the whole, I am sensitive to MacIntyre's notion of criticizing rival schemes on their own terms.
Since science doesn't contain any ethical "terms" I think that there is an opening in the environmental debate to show how science can pose a problem that it cannot deal with on its own terms.

A normal post about the dog, etc. is forthcoming for those who hate all this other nonsense.

On track with Wendell

Wendell Berry says, "My work has been motivated by a desire to make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native and chosen place."

I reckon that's a good place to start for most anyone. My own inclination is to modify the motivation to "make myself faithfully at home in this world and in my native and chosen place."

The change is probably more a matter of taste than content.

Oh, wow...

This is precisely what I am not about:
http://www.re-discovery.org/gravity_1.html

Scary. Think Tank or Fruit Basket?

In support of my views

By chance I found this letter to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement by one Andrew Janiak (Duke University) in response to some rather dismissive comments by Steve Weinberg (imminent physicist and careless historian of science):

Sir, – Steven Weinberg's review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion contains some inaccurate remarks about the history of Weinberg's discipline, mathematical physics. If the contemporary debate between religious thinkers and defenders of "scientific" conceptions of the world is to be constructive, we must recognize the historical specificity of the current positions. The fault lines of the raging debate about intelligent design, and related matters, may seem permanent, but the relation between science and religion was decidedly different during the era of modern physics's emergence. For instance, although contemporary physicists like Weinberg may now understand Sir Isaac Newton as having promoted a secular conception of natural phenomena and of their ultimate origin, this characterization reflects a decidedly anachronistic picture of Newton's own conception of his work.
Weinberg contends that Newton's theory of gravity in Principia mathematica challenged religion because it provided a natural explanation of various phenomena, such as the planetary orbits. But this was certainly not Newton's own understanding of his theory; indeed, in the first edition of the Principia, published in 1687, Newton argued that the solar system could only have been given its current configuration by the intervention of a wise and intelligent being. Weinberg misrepresents Newton again when he contends that the "argument from design" was refuted by Newton's explanations of the world. In fact, Newton himself endorsed a version of the design argument, and in the very text in which he presents his explanations of natural phenomena. In the famous "General Scholium", added to the second edition of the Principia in 1713, Newton writes that "the diversity of created things" could only have arisen "from the ideas and the will of a necessarily existing being". More generally, Newton made it clear that discussing God by analysing the phenomena of nature is a proper part of his natural philosophy. The task now confronting us, then, is to understand precisely why science and religion are understood as conflicting with one another, given their intertwining in the past. [my italics]

ANDREW JANIAK
Department of Philosophy, Duke University,
Durham, North Carolina 27708.

I'm happy to see the same mention of the gravitation controversy as well as the "intertwining" of science and theology in the past. Of course, we don't have the same views, but I think Janiak is highlighting the same intellectual ambiguity out of which modern science has sprung. It is perhaps just my reading of Janiak that sees a sympathy with the notion that things did not have to turn out the way the did.

I should also mention that my comments on Newtonian gravitation are drawn from the book "Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism" by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs (with a name like that, surely she also wrote a cookbook? I hope that's not belittling). It's a great little book on Newton and his first followers. See pages 50-51 and 59 for the most direct route to the topics in question.

Clarifying the degree...

After reading my own post from yesterday, it occurred to me that while I essentially said what I meant, I may have unwittingly undermined the degree to which I am challenging science. There is one reading of that post which focuses on the example of retarded innovation as the key to what I am on about, as if perhaps I am just bemoaning my own inability to keep pace with technology or perhaps that I have a bit of the Luddite or Ruskinite romanticism in me.

While I challenge those characterizations of what I said (as I continue to stand by the challenge to innovation as a good in and of itself), here I only want to make it clear that such was not the extent of what I am on about. While the process of experiential learning that is the foundation of our notions of the "scientific method" are unlikely to change, the characterization of those experiences are likely to be greatly altered in a theological setting. I can only offer one example from the history of science off the top of my head. The early debates over what exactly Newton was expounding in his theory of gravitation are instructive, I think, to see where historically the church failed to recognize the seriousness of the task at hand. Where Newton himself (devoutly and scholarly religious albeit non-trinitarian) recognized the threat of heresy, via materialism, in the precise interpretation of the gravitational force, the church failed to grasp the danger. I would be careful here with diction since it is not my view that the church is at such a point on the defensive. Rather, it was the failure to appropriate such learning into the church's initiation into truth, or rather it was the church's small-minded rejection of the notion that such things might teach us further about how to be faithful, that led to the defensive. The failure was, I think, the result of the church's desire to remain powerful by remaining within the framework that it had already mastered (sociopolitically), over and above its humility in remaining faithful.

In fact, the issue at hand was whether gravity was to be understood as a passive property of all matter (which is more or less the view we have inherited to this day) or whether it was to be understood as a dynamic act of God. Many will see the latter as a sort of deus ex machina because that's simply not the sort of hypothesis scientists make, nevermind that Newton favored this view and indeed feared the waywardness the former would engender. Newton foresaw scientific materialism and consciously rejected it. Well, you say, Newton was after all just the proto-modern scientist. He laid the foundation but was quite all there. We've since advanced beyond his superstition. Perhaps. Or maybe there is simply a rival description and rationality for what happens "physically". It seems to me that it is not greater leap to credit God with action at a distance than it is to impute a universal property to all matter that somehow links it with other matter (I am, of course, ignoring modern understandings, and misunderstandings, of gravitational force because philosophically they are the heirs of this early materialism. It is precisely the pursuit of a particular type of question, that of how this latter materialist understanding "works" in nature that we have our modern theory). But surely now, you say, I am engaging in quackery.

Maybe, but I am not in the least convinced. Where Newton saw no rational departure in contemplating the explanation of gravity as property versus action (and settling on the latter), I think we must be careful to consider that the materialism inherent in the rationale of modern science is not intrinsic to the subject matter, but is perhaps rather a property of the kinds of questions and answers that apprentices to science are taught to ask and offer.

This is all just to make the clarification that my critique of science is not fundamentally just about the ethical practice of science or the ethical use of its results. Instead I am fundamentally calling into question the material presumption of scientific enquiry. The notion that scientific practice has an ethical dimension is a wrongheaded way to approach it. A fundamental objection exists in my approach which is that science does not by virtue of method have access to knowledge. Rather, science (as we know it) is devoted to effectiveness. This devotion leads to a dualism between knowledge and ethics, what is and what ought.

An alternative I think is to reject the notion of knowledge being a collection of cognitive "facts", and rather that science's aim must be to refine our participation in creation. As such, scientific knowledge cannot be something attained by the individual because it must presuppose participation in some community life. Newton recognized that care must be taken in conceptualizing each advance in experiential knowledge lest it be misunderstood and lead us astray. The advance that Newton was thinking of was the generality of his gravitational formula. Remember, though, that it was a simple formula that yielded overwhelmingly correct predictions that then led to this debate over the understanding if its term: gravity.

So then, I think we have to admit the possibility that we may have misunderstood the data before our eyes. It is not just a question of pursuing the ethics of science but about pursuing a faithful understanding of why creation behaves as it does.

As a delightful piece of creative writing about creation, consider this quote from Chesterton:

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they
are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated
and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up
person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people
are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is
strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says
every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening,
"Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that
makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately,
but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the
eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old,
and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may
not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE."
-GK Chesterton

Back, finally...

I have finally returned to the blogosphere after a long hiatus. The past couple of weeks have been both fun and frustrating. After a series of dentist visits, a trip to see the family (and meet new family), and $1200 in car repairs (meted out over, count them, three different instances), we have now returned to the relative calm of normal life, albeit with a puppy who refuses to sleep through the night. In fact, the pup impresses me because he can actually bark through the entire night without having any water in his crate. That has to be a notable feat. H can still sleep soundly through his noise, but his barking affects me physiologically (think of how fingernails on a chalkboard often affects people) and thus reduces my sleeping hours to a seemingly endless period of cringing tension. Cottonballs in the ears don't seem to help, so we're going for all out ear plugs so that I can get some sleep while also not giving in to the dog's demands for midnight attention. The humans in this household will prevail. Mark my words.

A slow initiation into the truth

Meanwhile the vocation debate rages, no doubt to the chagrin of those family members keeping up with things from the shadows. My options seem to be academic engineering, consulting engineering, and (almost non sequitur) theology. H is frustrated that all those folks from whom I ask for advice are themselves already vocationally biased toward the latter choice. I'm not getting a fair external appraisal, she worries. That's an honest grievance, I admit. On the other hand, consider first that it is not particularly easy to find people who have experience in both camps and then that the bias from the two camps is not exactly symmetric. That is, the bias toward dismissiveness is much stronger from the science/engineering camp toward theology than vice versa. The overwhelming social presumption is that theology dismisses science at its own peril while science dismisses theology almost by virtue of its own (science's) integrity. People who worry about where the twain shall meet are at best an oddity, perhaps epistemologically schizophrenic, or at worst just engaging in quackery.

I am against quackery, imminently concerned with the unity of my psyche, and admittedly desirous of being viewed as no more of an oddity than I am at present.

That said, I think there is good reason for theologians to start taking science to task. Granted, this won't make a lick of sense to anyone who is not Christian. Not a lick. At least not unless they have significant empathic potential and a willingness to put on the Christian shoe for a while. You simply cannot boil Christianity down to a scientific position because clearly in doing so you have already presumed that Christianity does not fundamentally challenge the "scientific" position as such. That is, the act of translation precludes the ability of the Christian to fundamentally challenge science. When Christians accept those terms at the outset they have effectively committed rational suicide in the debate.

This leaves us paralyzed, does it not? The Christian cannot speak to the scientist nor vice versa (and this violates what we know from experience). Well, as usual it is more complicated than just this. But, in a way, that is the gist of it, or at least that's where much of the contemporary debate is stalled.

But let me start from another vantage. Implicitly we seem to think that Christianity is about the supernatural or the spiritual while science is about the natural or physical. So, the Christian needs the scientist in order to say true things about, well, things; while the scientist needs the Christian in order to be able to say true things about ethics. I am not sure that such categories should be accepted by the Christian (in fact I feel much more strongly about it than just that). From a theological standpoint "science", if we mean the systematic investigation of causes and effects via our experience, is naturally a rigorous approach to investigating creation. The fundamental distinction from a Christian standpoint is that between creature and creator rather than natural/supernatural. And insofar as theology has a category for creature, then it seems that theology should be engaged in the investigation of creatures within the scope of all other Christian inquiry. And, in fact, this is largely how Science (in the way we mean the word today) found its genesis. Unfortunately, I do not think that the church was as adept theologically at discerning heresy (as distinct from proclaiming heresy for base ends like retention of political influence, say) early in the investigation of creation (i.e., around Galileo, Newton, etc.) as it was, say, in the Christological controversies. The result, I think, is the rise of scientific materialism and (fast forward) the present friction between Science and the church.

This is to say that there is no formal reason why Science (as we know it) is the only way to describe the world we call physical. Does this mean that there is another scientific method out there somewhere that could be the Christian one? Well, that seems a bit silly. It's probably silly to claim that there is a single "scientific method" at all (despite high school textbook claims), but far sillier to think that the basic methods of experiential learning would be drastically altered. While we would in all probability learn about creation in much the same experiential way, one fundamental difference is that theologically such activity could never be abstracted from the rest of the theological project. Or, to be less lofty, it could never be abstracted from the pursuit of the Christian life. How might this be different? A devastating difference might be that the means to scientific advancement cannot be overlooked in light of the result. The utilitarian notion that the sacrifice of an individual's family life for the sake of scientific advance that would save millions of lives might just be irrational within a theological framework. A theology of creation would not, I think, have as its end mechanical effectiveness or utilitarian salvation (which is fundamentally about ratios). Virtue would almost certainly trump technological advance. The ability to care for a dying person through loving service would almost certainly trump the drive for a cure (Christianity is, after all, about a revolution against the power of death). By "the ability to care" I mean the community raising and training virtuous people into the capacity of doing so. Loving service takes work.

In short, a Christian-based "science", that is, a robust theological enquiry into creation, would be subordinated to liturgical time and practice, indeed to the development of the understanding of virtues in light of such new knowledge, and as such would almost certainly proceed at a comparative snail's pace when compared to that innovative capacity with which we are now accustomed. Innovation for its own sake is not rational theologically. A scientist who does not pray cannot speak faithfully (and thus truthfully) even if he speaks effectively.

One might ask whether the world wouldn't be worse off if I had my way with science. Fewer vaccines, slower travel, fewer mechanical conveniences. Wouldn't that suck? The only answer from the Christian, I think, is to ask which option is more faithful. The Christian's goal, after all, is faithfulness and not effectiveness or comfort. It is the Christian predicament that faithfulness is to God and that all truth cannot be truth abstracted from the worship of God. So the question of curing more people through a mode of life that is less faithful is just to ask the Christian to engage in knowing deceit, to bear witness against Jesus Christ of cross. Indeed, it is the predicament of the Christian that "knowledge" is never independent of worship, that knowledge must be true to be known and no truth comes but by faithfulness to the Son who is truth. There is simply no way for the Christian to hold that a bunch of "facts" are in any way "true".

That striving for faithfulness, it seems to me, extends to learning about the creation.

I'll end with this summary paragraph:

Knowledge, for the Christian, is about participation. Learning about the creation, as for all Christian learning, is ultimately about becoming more faithful and not about becoming more powerful. Learning is the slow initiation into a life that bears witness to truth. Studying creation is in this way no different than studying scripture, each is the process by which we are initiated into the truth that will transform all life. This, I think, is a starting point for science understood theologically. Such a notion is fundamentally ascetic. But just read Romans 5 again:

"Through him we have also obtained access into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."

Vocation

Well. There are just too many choices.

Assuming for a moment that all is well for me to graduate with a doctorate in the spring of '09, just what should I do next? Postdoc? Faculty? Research scientist? Work for an environmental consulting firm? Or maybe get an entry level engineering job on the road to being a practicing civil/environmental engineer? There are more barriers to the last option simply because my undergraduate degree is not in engineering (grad degrees count for relatively little). But if I'm not picky about where any of these jobs are, I could probably find something in each category.

Then there is another idea. There are those who would argue that my interests/passions/abilities in philosophy/theology are sufficient to challenge the default option of continuing in science. At least one person I know who commands a level of respect and admiration has suggested as much. And of course all those friends of mine whose bent is also theological have seconded the idea.

This highlights a minor schizophrenia. It happens that my friends fall almost entirely into mutually exclusive camps of Christians and scientists/engineers. Some might try to see some higher significance in this division, but I see the disjoint nature of the sets as being circumstantial (if also padded by popular prejudices toward both science and religion). So where do I go to get "integrated" advice - someone from either both camps or no camp, as it were? Would such a perspective be useful in the end?

And the fact remains that probably most folks who read this blog will know me as either scientist or amateur theology enthusiast and rarely as the combination. I find it quite common among family and friends that they will identify with or understand one or other side but find great difficulties in making much sense of my passion for the other.

So, as I said, there are just too many choices. I have the benefit of choices, and the difficulty of making them. It's not a bad situation to be in.

But as I said to H the other day, it might just be that the only profession that people back home would find less intelligible than scientist might just be that of theologian.

Conquering mite

Jax went in for his one month Demodex checkup. The good news is that Jax's hair has regrown in almost all of his trouble spots. So, it was hard for the vet to find a spot to scrape for mites. In the two spots that he did scrape he found only one mite. We're not out of the woods, but the ivermectin seems to be controlling the outbreak well. Jax has returned to former cuteness, seems to have overcome the itching, and will probably only need two more skin scrapes. With a little luck the current ivermectin bottle will last for the duration of the treatment.

We also went for our third puppy class last night. The pattern continues. Jax is the most hyper-active dog in the group, but the trainers are impressed with how much he already knows and how easy he is to train. One of the trainers thinks that Jax has about 1/4 Rhodesian Ridgeback in him (awesome! he's a lion killer!), but who knows. I admit that he looks a lot like a ridgeback, and even has a bit of a dark streak on the back of is neck, but nothing like the actual ridge on a Ridgeback. He has gained another five pounds and is now almost exactly twice the weight he was when we brought him home. Two months to double his weight. Let's hope that doesn't happen again. At puppy class they continued the socialization exercises, this time by distributing an array of strange objects in the ring for the dogs to interact with, including some props from the agility classes. As it turns out, Jax loves tunnels. Back and forth, back and forth, to his heart's delight. I should get him some sort of tunnel for the yard.

Jax has a new game. I taught him last week to play "Find it". I put him in a down-stay in the front bedroom and then drag his favorite toy all over the house and hide it somewhere. Then I go back up front, release him, and say "Jax, find it!" and he goes tearing through the house looking for his toy. He's never given up prior to finding either. Good persistence. So far he seems to be relying primarily on sight, but he still finds the toy in more difficult scenarios, so I think the sniffer is going too. This is a good precursor for tracking I think. Exciting stuff.

Oh, and he's also discovered that there's a window in the front bedroom from which he can watch me come and go. So now when I leave in the mornings Jax runs to the front window and watches me leave while Hannah holds the curtains out of his way. Today I waved goodbye to him and he waved back. Sweet dog.

Anyway, that's the latest on the pooch.

Canonical Narratives

There has been a little bit of disgruntled chatter about the decidedly philosophical turn the blog has taken. Humor me for a paragraph or two and then I'll get back to the dog in the next post.

So, continuing the thoughts of the last post, I am struck by how much common law, theology, and science have in common. In each case a system is produced by the continual interpretation and repositioning within a set of canonical narratives. For law the narratives are court cases, for theology they are scripture and the body of tradition, for science they are the published accounts of experiments. Just look at the dialogue occurring at the forefront of each discipline. Each is in the business of drawing together past narratives (or even past meta-narratives, in the case of theology especially) to tweak the modern understanding in some way... this is what citations are all about. Each discipline is self-consciously a tradition building on particular narratives and each wrestles with the continual difficulty of translating those narratives into a theory.