Ideas That Have Ruined Me

Below is a list of ideas that have "ruined" me--i.e., ideas that have forever altered my way of perceiving and thinking about the world around me and how I interact with others' perceptions and thoughts. I hope to write more about each in the coming weeks.

1. At the end of the Bible's story, believers spend eternity on the renewed earth, not "in heaven." This has forever changed my reaction to much Christian music and thinking.
2. The importance of criticality and doubt in thinking, thanks to Pascal's reason-based doubt-proof-submission paradigm.
3. "All truth is God's truth," thanks to Calvin.
4. "Calling is the truth that God calls us to Himself so decisively that everything we do, everything we are, and everything we have is invested with a special dynamism and devotion lived out as a response to His summons," thanks to Os Guinness. (My apologies if the wording is out of order, as I'm writing from memory.)
5. "An intellectual is someone who loves ideas... A Christian intellectual is [one who does so] to the glory of God," thanks to James Sire.
6. "Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks," thanks to Herbert Simon. In my mind, this idea has spent the last six months in an intergalactic collision with the idea that the way we "do church" is not specifically prescribed in either the Old or New Testament.

What ideas have "ruined" you?

The Moral Dimension of the Mind, a la Sire

I've been rereading Sire's Habits of the Mind, and just finished his challenging Chapter 5: The Moral Dimension of the Mind. In it, he lays down the truth that should haunt all Christians:


We only know/believe what we obey. Or, we are responsible for living based on what we know.


Thus, Christian intellectuals bear a great deal of responsibility.

Here is the great dichotomy that I found on this reread:


We fail in our responsibility as Christian intellectuals, and so Christian intellectualism needs the gospel. But living out the gospel (the actions he describes as aspiration--setting our minds on what is good--and mortification--denying our flesh) requires Christian thinking (and therefore Christian intellectualism). Each necessitates the other.


In general, in fact, the only way to respond to the gospel is in obedience, and the only way to obey is to believe the gospel.


But what does all of this have to do with being a Christian physicist? I came up with a few answers...

• I need to connect physics to worship.
• I am a teacher, and not just a physicist. (This thought also led me to consider the differences between the terms "physics teacher," "physicist teacher," and "teacher physicist." I'll tease out those differences in another post some day...) I need to value my students, their learning, and their future.
• Physics is applied to help creation. (I normally say, "help humanity," but with all the thoughts of the oil spill floating around in my head, and my multi-year-long fascination with the Cultural Mandate in Genesis 1, it occurred to me that I needed to expand my understanding of my own sphere of responsibility. Again, probably more about this in a future post...)

Summertime

...and the bloggin is easy. Apparently not, since I haven't posted most of this month! I think I'll post sporadically over the summer. It's been a good year but my brain is tired...

A few personal updates:

• My five year anniversary with Amy Lane is this Friday!
• I started teaching Aviation Physics as a hybrid course last week. I've never taught (or seen) a hybrid introductory physics course. So far it's going well. (Of course, we haven't hit free-body diagrams yet...)
• I'm listening through Beethoven's Symphonies, as conducted by Leonard Bernstein. I'm halfway through #5, and find it sad that the second movement is so often upstaged by the first.
• I'm trying something very different in my Electromagnetic Theory I course in the Fall; more on that later...
• I'm re-reading Sire's Habits of the Mind. As always, when I re-read a book, I find myself wondering why I highlighted some of the things I did, and why I didn't highlight others. Sire & Newman are right: The mind is like a mountain climber...

See you around!

About Me

“Abraham believed God, traveled to Egypt, rescued Lot, and was the father of Isaac. Now, was that before or after he became the sixteenth President, fought the Civil War and freed the slaves?” –Me, Age 8

I was often very confused as a child. I knew for certain there were two things I needed to succeed at: school and church. And these were both very similar: We read at both school and church, we learned history at both school and church, we were asked questions at both school and church, we moved from one grade to another at both school and church. They were so similar that I thought that they surely must be related.

That’s where the confusion came in, leading to questions like the one I quoted earlier. School seemed to get more serious (requiring more reading and more homework, playing fewer games and getting fewer breaks) while church (particularly Sunday school) didn’t seem to change all that much (never requiring homework, playing games even when we seemed too old for them, and spending as much time in chit-chat as we did opening the Bible). There was also a growing difference in content. In school, we learned more details year after year, had to memorize the years that events happened, had to learn how everything (science, math, American history, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, technology, etc.) fit together. In church, though, no one ever seemed to say in what year the events in the Bible occurred, nor did we really learn how everything fit together; I had the vague feeling that Jesus came after everybody in the front of the Bible, but not much else.

Little did my middle-school-self know, my questions about how the things I learned at school and church related to each other told the story of conflict and estrangement between the church and the academy.

I remember in ninth grade when one of my classmates in Biology who also attended my church asked our Youth Pastor to pray for us, since we were studying evolution. “We’re not studying evolution,” I responded. “We’re just studying taxonomy. Evolution’s not until the next chapter.” It was as if getting even close to evolutionary theory was like looking into the sun for this student, and I didn’t understand why.

I remember in tenth grade in World History, we spent a chapter studying the Reformation. “Luther,” I read in my textbook, “made the radical claim that salvation was based on faith in God, and not on works.” “But,” I responded, in shock, “that’s what I believe!” I then had two questions that have haunted me ever since: 1. What did people believe before that? 2. Why did no one in church tell me about this history? The first question has been more or less settled in my mind. The second question, I have come to realize, is a form of the tension between Christian faith and academic study that has developed over the years.

Experiences like those in Biology and World History have largely shaped me today, leading me to ask questions about how my faith as a Christian relates to my study and teaching as a professor. I’ve received abundant help from other Christian scholars in venues such as the Christian Study Center of Gainesville and in books such as The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Habits of the Mind, and The Decline of the Secular University. It’s my hope that this blog will serve as a sounding board for those questions and provide help to others as they wrestle with similar issues. Thank you for joining me.