Fire and Knowledge

I was looking through the magazine rack at the hospital and noticed a number of Watchtower pamphlets. For those who don’t know, Watchtower is the Jehovah’s Witnesses propaganda magazine. I became frustrated that they would put their literature there, preying upon sick and scared people at the hospital.

It also reminded me of my time in high school when a friend and I would put gospel tracts in books (especially in the Occult section) at Books-a-Million. That was lame, but not this lame. I wasn’t preying upon the sick and scared, wooing them into a religion where it’s a sin to have blood transfusions.

Anyway, there are no more Watchtower magazines at that hospital.

When I was a child I used to watch politics on C-SPAN and CNN with my grandmother. For fun, I’d guess who were the Democrats and Republicans. I could do it pretty well. I had a rigorous test: I would look at their faces and decide if they looked mean or nice. The nice ones were Republicans, and the mean ones were Democrats. It never worked out perfectly, but I was right more than wrong.

I’m sure that doesn’t give any hints about the political affiliation of my family. I assure you, I was very objective and unbiased and remain so to this day.

What happens if I apply my old philosophy to the 2008 campaign? Huckabee has the most real smile and I would inevitably thought him a Republican. He’s sort of the funny Uncle in the race, someone you like and respect but think he’d be better at running a tractor than the country. McCain I might have mistaken for a democrat, though. His smile is more grim, yet there is kindness there. Obama I would have mistaken for a Republican for sure. If you didn’t already know, he’s going to win. Hillary, however, would have been unmistakably Democrat. I would have been afraid of that smile.

Steve Hargadon argues that Web 2.0 is the future of education. I disagree. Of course it will influence and change education to some extent, but will it be the future of education? Unlikely.

Steve says Web 2.0 will help move education “from formal schooling to lifelong learning.” People have been devoted to lifelong learning long before the Internet. The Internet does make some information easier to retrieve, but many people do not take advantage of this, just as many people didn’t take advantage of books on their shelves. I’m not convinced the Internet is going to change this too much. Hopefully I’m wrong here, though, because it would be great if more people were interested in lifelong learning.

I took a quick look at Classroom 2.0, which Steve recommended for learning about education and Web 2.0. On the homepage was a teacher asking this question:

I’m looking for a new project for my (online) students in an Ancient Civilizations class to deomostrate their knowledge of the material we’ve been learning. They’ve written numerous blogs, they’ve created PowerPoints, and I’ve offered podcasting or videos( but haven’t had too many students intersested in in these). I was thinking of a comic strip project to where the students show how the geography of the area has played a very important role in determining how the society developed and what technologies evolved. I’m having trouble finding a comic strip generator that students can use their own clip art or has appropriate pictures for this assignment. Anyone have a suggestion? or other ideas for web 2.0 projects for this class.

Now it would be hard for me to find a better demonstration for my skepticism. This is a teacher for “gifted” students. She misspells demonstrate and interested. She’s having her students write “numerous blogs,” which I assume she means blog posts, which I assume must be something like very short, undemanding essays. And a comic strip generator? Good God. Has it really come to this?

This is, in essence, a teacher asking how to do the basics of teaching. How can your students demonstrate their knowledge of a subject? You have them write papers and debate with other students. You ask them questions. Yes, there are creative ways to have them learn. But if you want them to create a comic strip, you can have them draw it on paper. But, alas, that doesn’t have very much to do with Web 2.0 and flashy websites and cool technology.

Can Web 2.0 help education? Possibly. But it can also hinder it, as we see with the teacher’s question above. I suppose teachers really exist who are having their students mess around with comic strip generators and powerpoint and podcasts instead of writing and reading and debating. And I thought I got a lousy education.

So I don’t think the future of education is Web 2.0. I don’t think nifty websites can replace the classroom, reading classics, writing essays, memorizing, debating ideas, doing painstaking research, or running experiments.

The Sparrow (1996) by Mary Doria Russell, 408 pages.

Summary: After intercepting alien radio waves, Jesuit scientists are sent to the planet Rakhat on an anthropological mission of contact. They travel on an outfitted asteroid and arrive many years later. While learning about the sentient species and their cultures, things go terribly wrong. Emilio Sandoz is the only survivor of the mission, and he doesn’t want to explain why.

It’s an interesting, easy, disturbing read. The friendships that are formed by the main characters make the reader long for similar companionship in life. The priests are shown as real people with real struggles (though perhaps a little too much so).

The most weighty questions addressed are the existence, goodness, and plan of an omnipotent and compassionate God. Is everything that happens the plan of God? Fr. Sandoz, after much doubt and wrestling, comes to believes this. And as he comes into the culmination of God’s plan, he is spiritually broken when it turns out to be his worst possible nightmare.

Anne, the doctor, also struggles with the age-old question of theodicy. For example, after a teammate dies, she says:

“Why is it that God gets all the credit for all the good stuff, but it’s the doctor’s fault when [death] happens? When the patient comes through, it’s always ‘Thank God,’ and when the patient dies, it’s always blaming the doctor. Just once in my life, just for the sheer … novelty of it, it would be nice if somebody blamed God when the patient dies, instead of me.” (198)

I’d cautiously recommend this book. The vulgarity can get annoying and feel forced, but the book is challenging and perspective changing. It made me wrestle through theodicy along with the characters. If there is a loving God, why is there so much suffering? “Perhaps we can’t understand the answers,” says Fr. Marc Robichaus in his eulogy for Alan Pace,

“because we are incapable of knowing God’s ways and God’s thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable.” (201)

And yet, we press on.

We’ve had HTML and websites for over a decade now, isn’t it about time we can start using tabs? There’s still no easy way to do this with HTML, which is why most websites have a space between each paragraph instead of a tab. There’s something backwards here. Let’s get a &tab;!

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.

–Wendell Berry, “The Total Economy” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 69

[Berry is relentless here. A corporation is still made up of people. It's not just a "pile of money." People make and implement the decisions, so a corporation can be as careful or as careless as the people who make it up. In a good corporation, no one has "sold their moral allegiance." Employees can speak their minds and change policies. In fact, with the right people, a corporation can benefit society far more than one solitary person through innovation, implementation, cost-saving, and philanthropy.

If a person has to give up their morality to work for an employer, they're working at the wrong place.]

The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing on the “free market” without restraint, will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war.

–Wendell Berry, “The Total Economy” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 68

[Berry is rhetorically winsome here, but I disagree with him. The law of competition is at work in nature, yet it rarely reduces the number of competitors to one. (And when it does, the winner loses.) It rarely reduces competitors to one in a free market, either. This may change with large technological companies because of the tremendous start-up costs and knowledge involved (notice that there are really only two big CPU manufacturers, Intel and AMD), but so far the American free market has not reduced all competitors to one, and it's been going on for quite a while now.

What's the alternative, anyway? Socialism isn't any better – see any economic analysis on the Soviet Union. It was horrible. A free market lets scarce resources get to the most needed places at the right prices very quickly. I'm not aware of any other economic system that is comparably efficient.]

Anthony Flew was a defender of atheism for over 50 years. Then something amazing happened — he embraced deism in 2004. This was astounding news and celebrated by Christians: one of the most prominent academic defenders of atheism no longer disbelieved in God! The evidence for this first came in a video from May 2004, with Flew conversing with “the Orthodox Jewish physicist Gerald Schroeder and the Christian philosopher John Haldane”:

When at last Flew speaks, his diction is halting, in stark contrast to Schroeder and Haldane, both younger men, forceful and assured. Under their prodding, Flew concedes that the Big Bang could be described in Genesis; that the complexity of DNA strongly points to an “intelligence”; and that the existence of evil is not an insurmountable problem for the existence of God. In short, Flew retracts decades’ worth of conclusions on which he built his career. At one point, Haldane is noticeably smiling, embarrassed (or pleased) by Flew’s acquiesence. After one brief lecture from Schroeder, arguing that the origin of life can be seen as a form of revelation, Flew says, “I don’t see any way to meet that argument at the moment.”

In other words, it seems Flew might have embraced deism due to his declining mental facilities, not because of new arguments or insight. It would be similar to Billy Graham becoming an atheist today – we wouldn’t say it was because of a new mental clarity, but rather because of mental confusion from old age.

Flew’s new book has been ghostwritten on a number of levels by theist friends, and Flew cannot remember many of the names or ideas he cites throughout the book with his name on it:

In “There Is a God,” Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, “Do you know Brian Leftow?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think I do.”

“Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie?” Leslie is discussed extensively in the book.

Flew paused, seeming unsure. “I think he’s quite good.” But he said he did not remember the specifics of Leslie’s work.

“Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?” In his book, Flew calls Paul Davies “arguably the most influential contemporary expositor of modern science.”

“I’m afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!”….

He didn’t remember talking with Paul Kurtz about his introduction to “God and Philosophy” just two years ago. There were words in his book, like “abiogenesis,” that now he could not define. When I asked about Gary Habermas, who told me that he and Flew had been friends for 22 years and exchanged “dozens” of letters, Flew said, “He and I met at a debate, I think.” I pointed out to him that in his earlier philosophical work he argued that the mere concept of God was incoherent, so if he was now a theist, he must reject huge chunks of his old philosophy. “Yes, maybe there’s a major inconsistency there,” he said, seeming grateful for my insight. And he seemed generally uninterested in the content of his book — he spent far more time talking about the dangers of unchecked Muslim immigration and his embrace of the anti-E.U. United Kingdom Independence Party.

As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.

If this is true, it is disturbing. Is Flew being exploited in his old age by his theist friends? Read the article and decide for yourself.

Update: Roy Varghese responds to the Oppenheimer article in a comment on Christian Today’s blog.