Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost has the numbers to put Iraq in perspective.

Paul Musgrave over at In the Agora offers an interesting critique of Bill Gates’s recent speech at the World Economic Forum. Gates’s heralded Chinas as having a “brand new form of capitalism.” Musgrave, in response, writes:

Similarly, Gates’s description of China, and in particular his admiration for the brainy, reflective scholar-administrators of China (I really do not understand his thinking on this point), is reminiscent of previous claims of capitalism’s overthrow. Always the predictions are tiresomely repetitive. Either it is the sudden scarcity or surplus of some material deemed crucial to the economy that threatens the system; the venality or saintliness of politicians or business leaders or both is often a contributing factor. Sometimes capitalism’s demise leads to devastation and poverty, other times it is the first step on the way to that long-promised, long-delayed worker’s utopia.

This kind of writing is just one of the many reasons In the Agora is becoming one of my daily “must-reads.”

For an a summary of attitude toward China at WEF, read here.

Who knows whether initial estimates of 70% will hold up, but clearly the majority of Iraqis turned out in favor of democracy. John Kerry, on Meet the Press, councils caution in celebrating today as a victory as democracy. President Bush, on the other hand, called it a “resounding success.” The contrast between the two men has, perhaps, never been starker. Thank God for a leader willing to inspire through positive messages and an unwavering enthusiasm for what the country has undertaken.

In order to answer the numerous inquiries about dates and times and every other detail imaginable, I have begun Marital Blogging, a blog dedicated to all things “Charity and Matt.”

Okay, so it’s actually an outlet to vent about the pains of registering (the silver toaster or the white toaster???), but I may include interesting thoughts on the communion of persons, if I ever have any.

Oh, and yes, this does fall in the hot category of “meta-blogging.” Anything sounds cooler with “meta” in front of it…..”meta-Torrey,” “meta-narrative,” “meta-inflammation,” “meta-perspiration,” “meta-disambiguation,” “meta-ambulation….” Try it. It’s fun, really.

Kudos to Keith for being the meta-cool-word-guru.

Trinbagonians are united against yampee. Just in case you were wondering.

Courtesy one of my new favorite sites.

…

There is one defense of the modern usage of the word that my housemate and award-winning debater put forth.

“OK,” he said, “But ‘problem’ has a certain amount of intimidation value. If I can toss ‘the Problem of Evil’ at you, that has more force than, ‘the Question of Evil’, or worse yet, ‘How is it that a good god can exist when there is such heinous suffering in the world?’ The latter actually offers you the opportunity to respond.”

My response is to agree that “problem” is a bit more intimidating. But, learning is not competition. Despite the existence of the “sport” of debate, the appropriate use of argument, the activity of persuading and being persuaded, is to know the truth and teach it.

I think people find what they’re looking for. If I, with my friends (or enemies), am not looking to know the truth, I will not find it. If we are looking to find the truth, we will. (It may take awhile). If we are fighting over who has the biggest problem to deal with, laughing at our opponents’ consternation, perhaps we will neglect to solve our own.

Biola has published an analysis and response to the NY Times Magazine piece of a few months ago that highlighted Biola. My brother wrote then that the Times write-up was an “accurate reflection of the tension between faith and secularism in the evangelical college experience.” The Biola response mostly agrees with this analysis. Peters writes, “As it turned out, many Biolans were pleasantly surprised by the article. Shapiro’s treatment — though secularly biased — was thoughtful, her tone friendly. The thrust of the article is the tensions that exist at a school that, on one hand, is firmly committed to the tenets of evangelical Christianity and, on the other, is seeking to engage the larger world with those beliefs.”

The defense, which is well-worth reading, also features friends and fellow-bloggers Jonathan and Dr. Reynolds opining on the Times’ treatement of home-schoolers and homosexuality, respectively.

Though Peters claims that “many Biolans were pleasantly surprised,” the Alumnus in this corner remains non-plussed about Shapiro’s treatment of Biola. Call me biased if you will, but it is now practically impossible to discuss Biola’s culture without mentioning the Torrey Honors Institute. Well known enough to be satirized by an Intramural Football team (the THI Bulldogs, a group of non-THI students who wore costumes when “playing”) and offering the only regular plays on campus, THI’s presence was remarkably absent from the article. This was especially surprising considering Shapiro stayed on the floor of a THI member and interviewed two THI students. Regarding Shapiro’s write up of his interview, Timothy Caroll (one of those THI students) writes: “I feel that in general she glossed over everything I had to say about the school and how well it was doing even in light of what could be seen as hindrances, and instead focused on the interesting specimen of humanoids that inhabit this quint little plot of land in the middle of the LA metropolis” (from a personal email).

Perhaps most frustrating, however, was the ambiguous treatment of Detweiler’s RTF class. The opening sequence presents Detweiler as exposing his class to “secular” music and art in order to make them aware of “where God exists in the music crossing this globe.” Detweiler’s insistence that art is not propaganda is an idea prevelant in Biola circles, at least the (non-artistic!) circles I am in. However, it’s not clear whether Detweiler is actually rejecting exclusivism, as Shapiro makes it seem. His comments that “The spread of indigenous cultural music is pushing hard against exclusivism. Christ is going to be a tough sell in this world, and I don’t think [the students] are ready for it” could be understood as a rejection of exclusivism, or a comment about the students ability to defend exclusivism. Shapiro clearly interprets it in the former way, as is evident from the way she ends her article: “On some level, [Brittany and Nicole] seemed already to know what Craig Detweiler is trying to teach, and what is evident in the often open-ended, messy tales of the Bible: that the most compelling tales unfold when you don’t start out with the answer.”

If being cloistered is Scylla, Shapiro represents Detweiler (and by extension, Biola) as being sucked in to Charibdis–a rejection of exclusivism in favor of acceptance and the ability to relate to the culture. Shapiro speaks favorably of Detweiler, but (1) it’s not clear if this is an accurate representation of Detweiler’s (ambiguous!) position, and (2), if it is, it gets on to a fight that is happening within Biola’s and the broader evangelical culture over whether the best way to reach the culture is through “relating” to the culture, or through “withdrawing” from it. It’s a false dilemma, to be sure, but if I had to choose, exclusivism and tension with the culture will get my choice 10 times out of 10. If I remember right, Nancey Pearcey’s latest work highlights statistics that indicate that churches that are markedly different than the surrounding culture grow faster than those that attempt to “reach the culture where it is at.” One thinks of the Orthodox Church and it’s (much balleyhooed!) growth amongst college age students.

At any rate, I would highly recommend Biola’s response for a fair assessment of Shapiro’s position and a reasonable explanation of Biola’s treatment of homosexuals.

What is common to all of the cases mentioned below? Here is what I notice: They are all questions. (with the exception of the second “problem of evil” which was stated as a thesis)

So in response to the question “Put what forward?”: We’re putting forth questions.

Why not then call it”The question of evil,” “the question of knowledge” and all the rest?

“Because,” you will say, “‘Problem’ and ’solve’ have just come to mean ‘question’ and ‘answer.’ It doesn’t just mean a ‘thing thrown before you.’ We are in the process of re-defining ‘problem’ to mean a specific kind of thing, namely, a question.”

OK. First of all, why go through all the effort bending a word to mean question when we already have a word that means question? (Namely, “question”)

Secondly, there is something we gain from using “question” that we lose when using “problem. I will contend that there is only one means to “solving” “problems” of the sort mentioned below. That is conversation between human beings. The only way to answer “What is knowledge” is to go about the tedious business of talking about it. “I think knowledge is justified true belief.”
“I think you’re wrong! What about when I think a clock is right, and I’m right, but it’s not?” “Huh?”
and so on…

Question derives from “quest” – to seek, to search. From the start of the conversation we are seeking, rather than solving.

The use of “problem” stunts discussion. If I am right that conversation is the only way to go, then it slows, if only a little, the single available means for “solving” the problem.

If I am right then “problem” is… Inexpedient. That’s all I’m saying. The problem with “Problem” is that it is not as good as “question.” It is not wrong, or horrible, just… Unhelpful.

Let’s call these difficult things what they are, questions that plague us deeply. Questions we ask ourselves at night in bed, that give us pause, that make us nervous when we dwell on them. Yes, it is uncomfortable to sit in one’s own ignorance, but is there any other way?

What is knowledge? Why does God allow evil? God, what are you thinking?

…

Why do we refer to things as “problems”? You may say I’m picky, but I think word choice is the most important thing… Plus the name you give a thing influences how in what way we’ll approach it. If we are naming things incorrectly, we will not approach them correctly, and given the kinds of things that currently earn the name “Problem” (”the problem of evil,” “the problem of unity and diversity,” “the problem of knowledge,” “the problem of particulars”), it is really, really important to me to approach to them correctly.

Let’s flesh this out. The “problem of evil”, correct me if I’m wrong, when stated, runs something like this: “How can a loving, good God exist if there is such horrendous suffering and evil in the world?” or maybe, ” A loving, good God cannot exist in a world of such horrific evil.”

The problem of unity and diversity is phrased: “Are the thing(s) that exist many, or one?” “Is the universe one thing or many things?”

The problem of knowledge: “What is knowledge? What are the conditions for knowledge?”

These are big nuts we’ve been cracking for millenia. Whatever they are (surely not “nuts”), they have not been referred to as problems but for a few centuries at most (does anyone have any insight onto the history of the term?).

The problem with “problem” is that the word literally just means, “a thing.” The Greek is proballein - to throw before, put forward.

To put what forward?

…

“How were classes today?”
“Fascinating.”

I would bet large portions of my monthly income that the above conversation has not taken place between a high schooler and his parent in America for decades.

Now I know why.

I am writing a curriculum workbook for The Academy I wanted to give the students a quick intro to logic. I wrote down the the basics in an accessible, easy-to-read format, and I felt proud. A friend of mine looked it over and said, “It sucks. It’s boring.”

Why? Because I took what I love about logic, dumbed it down, and spat it out.

How did I personally become interested in logic? I dove into the ocean of argumentation and swam around. I felt the need to understand the basic fallacies, the building blocks of a syllogism, the types of argument. I knew their was too much content for me to handle, but I became motivated by my own desire to ingest as much as I possibly could.

The same is true of my friend Andrew Johnston. He’s “math-minded” but has been bored to tears by every math class he ever took (and excelled in). It wasn’t until, by mistake, a friend of his gave him a Calculus 4 book that a passion for learning awoke within him. Now he loves math.

Do you want to know what they learn in Calculus 4? The same content as Calculus 1 all over again. How can that be? It’s simple: In Calculus 4, they cover the exact same stuff, but do not dumb any of it down. They present the same stuff they covered in Calculus 1 but without lying about the utter tentativeness of mathematics theory. No, here they present the really big, scary intimidating math problems as the exist in the minds of the brightest professional thinkers alive today, without deception, without apology. The writers of a Calculus 4 textbook are simply presenting difficult problems and inviting readers into the investigation. “Come along! I love this problem. It’s stumped me for three years. Take a crack at it, will ya?”

Education has become an artificial step-by-step process whereby hubristic instructors declare what will or will not be “easy enough” for increasingly stupid generations of school children to “get”, coaxing and cajoling them to learn it. Self-motivated learning is the only learning. If a subject isn’t interesting, and I mean from-the-gut, visceral, “God, this hurts and I love it” interesting, then the subject will lie unattended.

I’m not talking about infants or pre-schoolers, but pubescent children of fully functional intellects. Millions of bored-to-death high schoolers can testify: “This sucks. It’s boring.” If not even the textbook writers aren’t taking their writing seriously, then why should anyone else? “If you’re bored than you’re boring.”

What’s the alternative? Something more like apprenticeship. As a student of architecture could be forced to build doll houses until he’s “qualified enough” to go on a real construction site, where he’ll learn an entirely new and independent set of skills, or could follow around real engineer/architect on site, full of awe and humility, gripped by the overwhelming process that is construction.

Students used to be trained not on stupid versions of cool problems but the coolest, most difficult, most cutting-edge problems of the day. Gradation took place naturally according to ability and personal desire, rather than artificial testing. This way is better.

Children grow up by being given responsibilities just too much for their current level of maturity. They then sink or swim. I am plucking the plank from my own eye. As long as we’re feeding them (and ourselves) dumb-downed versions of what is actually fascinating, we will lose their interest and probably their well-being.

Lewis in Weight of Glory makes the point that for any higher thing (like a three-dimensional cube) to be transposed onto a lower medium (like a two-dimensional piece of paper) two things must be true: a) the thing must lose something (in this case, a dimension) and b) in the lower medium, the transposition will be built of borrowed parts, parts which have another meaning (in other words, a triangle on a 2D paper can mean either the receding corner of a cube or, simply, a triangle).

Having said this, he goes on (and this is where I became interested) to criticise introspection on the whole. Suppose you have this really great conversation with a family member of yours. You feel really connected, it was a deep, engaging time, hours long. You finished the conversation and get in your car and drive home. While driving you look inside yourself and think, “Wow, that was so great! I wonder why that was such a good conversation.” Essentially, the argument is that that whatever you examine at that point, whatever emotional and physical properties you remember having, will be properties coincidental to what was going on, not essential to what was going on.

I do not believe this discredits introspection outright. It discredits, surely, a reliance on past nourishment for present nourishment, but there is (in my experience) much to be garnered from the memories of the days experiences.

On the other hand, I am grateful to Lewis for the insight. It gives me a vocabulary with which to understand the unrelenting fact that good conversations cannot be recounted, only re-created.

It’s nice to be blogging again! Greek and Roman philosophy are on my mind…

Plato’s Euthyphro recounts the conversation Socrates had with Euthyphro, a religious leader, just before his trial. It comes out that this man is also awaiting a trial: he is going to prosecute his very own father for letting one of his slaves die. Socrates is shocked, but Euthyphro defends himself saying that he is doing a pious deed. The rest of the dialogue concerns the nature of piety.

This topic and the situation of the dialogue show that it is probably Plato’s response to Aristophanes’ play, The Clouds. In that play, Socrates’ school of the Good and Bad Logic makes a certain man’s son rebel against him and learn to beat him. The son justifies himself using sophistical reasoning purported to come from Socrates. This play very well may have led to the condemnation of Socrates because, in a comical way, it carried the idea that Socrates’ method of teaching leads to rebellion and impiety. Indeed, impiety and corrupting the young were the very charges leveled against Plato’s teacher.

One of the Euthyphro’s main concerns, I take it, is to present a Socrates that is actually very much in defense of the religious-type bond between father and son and he implies that it is quite impious to take an action against one’s father as Euthyphro is about to do. Logic and religion are not opposed, as Aristophanes implies in his play, and it is Plato’s goal to show that. In fact, only when we are truly thinking logically will we be able to manifest piety. Aristophanes drove a wedge between the two because the “birth-pangs” of philosophical reasoning are that it is misused to gain power, e.g. Alcibiades. Aristophanes certainly goes about things the wrong way – one might call it the “ostrich with its head in the sand” way. Plato’s attempt to synthesize the two is the much nobler approach. As conservative evangelical Christians, we may be tempted to take the “Aristophanic” way out, but let us avoid that temptation, C.S. Lewis-style.

Adrian Warnock, a “rising star” in the evangelical blogging sphere has begun handing out the “Warnies,” an award commending we’re not sure what, except that Warnock likes your blog or post.

His first award? Torrey’s very own Dr. John Mark Reynolds. Reynolds’s posting has been sporatic recently, but is often entertaining. In his acceptance entry, Reynolds manages to compare Hugh Hewitt with Beatrice (with, thank God, the appropriate qualifiers), make a lame Plato joke, and allude to England or Lewis in 6 out of his seven paragraphs (of his actual “speech).

Congrats to Dr. Reynolds, and God save us all from speeches such as that.