Ideas That Have Ruined Me: Criticality and Doubt

1.5 weeks without a post? Beginning a sentence--nay, a blog entry--with a number? It must be mid-term...

I posted earlier that one of the ideas that have ruined me is the importance of criticality and doubt in thinking.

I discovered this importance in Pascal's reason-based doubt-proof-submission paradigm outlined in the Pensees. He argues that reason employs the tactics of doubt (trying to disprove something that seems dubious or potentially dangerous to believe - the tool of the skeptic), proof (trying to concretely and inescapably affirm something that seems intuitively reasonable or advantageous to believe - the tool of the mathematician), and submission (accepting a truth by faith - the tool of the theist); to abandon one or two of these tools would result in philosophical shipwreck.

(Note: Given this scheme, "doubt" is not equivalent to "unbelief"---which the Bible identifies as the root of all sin---but simply a questioning of validity. A Christian would certainly want to "doubt" a heretical statement, in that sense. It's more closely akin to modern-day "critical thinking.")

What has struck me as I thought about this paradigm over the last few years is that I have neglected the discipline of doubt for most of my life. (I always dreaded those "critical thinking" questions in English class growing up.)

Now, I can't stop questioning ideas, be they about physics, theology, or how to best carry my books on my way to class!

Even this week, I've spent a good three hours brain-dead over how to prove to my class a simple physics principle used in every introductory textbook. (I'm omitting the particular details here partly out of a desire for relevance and partly out of embarrassment.) I keep reexamining the argument critically, and can't seem to escape!

But this is where the submission comes in: Because of God's commitment to me, I believe I will escape the circle of doubt. (Well, at least over important things; I suppose it doesn't matter if I swim in doubt over unimportant things. --> There - I doubted my own statement again!)

Which tool of Pascal's trifecta have you ignored? Which have you overused?

Ideas That Have Ruined Me - Follow-Up on "Going to Heaven"

I mentioned last week that I've been ruined by the idea that Christians spend eternity on the new earth, and that God comes to us (rather than us leaving a doomed world behind to float in the clouds). A related idea that has also ruined me (though not in my original list) is the thought that I honestly don't know what an unfallen world would look like.
We often make comments that suggest we do know what the restored creation will look like:


"I can't wait 'til heaven, when I'll be talented enough to sing," I read a friend's post on facebook once.


"I can't wait 'til God tells me everything I've ever wanted to know and I can understand it instantaneously," I've often said.


And my personal favorite was R. C. Sproul's off-handed comment in a video I once saw: "Entropy is a great little result of the Fall."

It amazes me that we are so self-derogatory that we think that what we perceive to be insufficient talent is a consequence of our sinfulness, or that having to learn is a mark of imperfection. If even God is described as "learning" in the Bible (yes, I'm aware of the danger of taking such verses out of context, and that's not what I'm doing here--hence the quotation marks), why should our process of learning be a source of shame?

[And I'm still trying to understand how the integral of (1/T) with respect to Q (because that's what entropy is) could be a result of sin... I suspect Dr. Sproul was simply reaching for an illustration.]

What aspects of human life (or the universe in general) do you often attribute to the Fall? Is it necessarily so?