Old site

Version 1.0, 5-1-05

I could do without the real world. I am essentially a lazy person. And besides, the world of ideas is so much more fun. Unfortunately, in order to keep living and to do it conveniently, you have to expend a certain amount of energy. It probably takes less in the US than in a primitive, tribal society, but still it takes some. So here I will share with you some of the things I've found that have made my life a little easier to maintain. Because we all have better things to do.

Of course, many people make their living out of the things on this page. They actually enjoy doing things like managing finances or selling clothes or designing exercise plans. I consider such things to be necessary evils, and I take great pleasure in marginalizing these people's whole careers. I figure if they're going to enjoy making my life more complicated, I might as well retaliate by denigrating their chosen occupations.

This page will be dedicated to the good people who make these necessary evils more invisible. These people clean up the mess created by the overenthusiastic people of the last paragraph so that I don't have to deal with it. The less I have to think about, say, buying a car, the better. So if someone tells me exactly what I need to know to do that, they have just improved the world by holding back the evil that desires to encroach upon my life. And if no one is doing that, I'll just have to do it myself and save both myself and other people time in the future. Hence you'll find a few of my own stress-saving creations here too.

When my mom told me to get my head out of the clouds when I was growing up, I don't think she quite meant this ...

Version 1.0, 3-20-05

I would spend all my time in the normal world of everyday experience, but it's too boring. Sometimes I need a bit of strangeness injected into my life. Hence, this section. "Weird Stuff." If anyone can think of a better name for it, please let me know.

I've never had a paranormal experience, and I hope to keep it that way. I just like reading and hearing about it. Books and the Internet help with the first of those, and the radio helps with the second. As a child I would often end up in the paranormal section of the library, inspecting the picture of the Brown Lady or walking out happily with the Loch Ness Monster tucked under my arm. In my early teen years I listened to Bob Larson, a controversial Christian radio talk show host who dealt with these kinds of weird things. Occasionally he even talked to demons on the air when someone called in who was possessed, if you can believe that. I got my first doses of conspiracy mania from Marlin Maddoux on his radio show Point of View.

In high school I dropped everything for apologetics, but in college a friend brought me back by periodically alerting me to current events in paranormalia, such as the Hale-Bopp controversy. Then I discovered Art Bell while driving home after my late night job one summer. Art Bell hosted (and still does on the weekends) the popular paranormal radio talk show Coast to Coast AM. This was also the summer I discovered Politics and Religion, a talk show about the end times and associated conspiracies. Since then I've wandered through all kinds of weird territory, mostly on the web, picking up bizarrities here and there. I also took a class at Wheaton called Psychology and Contemporary Mysticism, which dealt with a lot of these topics from a scientific and Christian perspective. Needless to say, I was fascinated. It was one of my favorite classes ever, and it has greatly influenced my thinking on the subject.

I explore these strange stories and ideas partly for entertainment, partly to exercise my critical thinking skills, and partly to ponder the implications, if any of it is true. These purposes take different forms depending on the topic.

Paranormal phenomena

My views on the paranormal are somewhat complicated. I'm alternately skeptical and credulous. I do think that weird things go on in the world; I'm unwilling to discount everything I hear. But I am trying to learn to be more careful in my reasoning. My general rule of thumb is that paranormal believers conclude too much from the evidence, and skeptics don't take enough of the evidence into account.

This subject is also a theological obstacle course. The aspects of paranormality that I do accept I struggle to fit into my Christian world view. I don't completely buy the explanation that all unusual experiences are demonic. But in any case, I compare the paranormal to science fiction or fantasy. Even if it's not real, sometimes it's fun to consider the possibilities.

Alternative science

Any realm of science you can think of has a fringe element. The nice name for this is "alternative science." A couple of different things go on in this arena. One is the formation of alternate theories to explain established scientific data, like the "reciprocal system of theory," an explanation of subatomic physics. Another is the investigation of anomalous phenomena or technologies, like antigravity and free energy machines.

The nice thing about alternative science is that it purports to be science. Thus, you can subject it to scientific evaluation. On the other hand, I don't know how much of this scientific evaluation actually goes on, since most scientists seem to think they have better things to do than addressing fringe claims. Whether the alternative researchers are right or wrong, this seems like a fruitful field of study for understanding the nature and culture of science.

Alternative science also tends to be very hopeful. The knowledge and technologies many of these researchers are pursuing would have a profound and positive impact on human society. If they're on the right track, I say more power to them.

Conspiracy theories

The conspiracy theories I'm especially interested in are the global kind. I don't really care how the CIA is involved with drugs or who shot Kennedy. The future world dictators are the ones that pique my interest (more of my fascination with the fundamental). These theories usually involve organizations like the UN and the Trilateral Commission and groups like the international bankers.

I'm ambivalent toward conspiracy theories. I tend to discount them out of hand, but I'm not sure whether I like them even as entertainment. It's intriguing to think about the idea of secret decisions being made by high-powered men to alter world events. But conspiracy theories are pretty nasty things, when you think about it. These aren't fictional characters the theorists are accusing; they're real people. If the theory isn't true, it's tantamount to slander. When the conspiracy is fictional, however, I love it. The X-Files is one of my favorite shows, and I liked Nowhere Man, too, the few episodes I saw. I should probably read some Robert Ludlum novels.

Hoaxes and urban legends

Hoaxes are an especially good critical thinking builder because they represent falsehoods that have already been discredited. There's a lot to be learned from both hoaxers and the people who discredit them, as well as from the people who get sucked in.

The topic of urban legends is pretty straightforward and uncontroversial. But urban legends do tend to be unusual, which is why they get circulated. Whenever I get e-mails about suspicious sounding stories, I always go straight to the Internet and see if it's been recognized as an urban legend. Usually they've been debunked, but a few urban legends are true.

Of course, there is a more serious side to all this. Some people are terrorized by their strange experiences, and some are slaves to paranoia. And from a Christian standpoint, spiritual deception in this domain is rampant. But to be honest, while I sympathize with the plight of such people, I think that freeing them is someone else's ministry. I don't have the spiritual or psychological fortitude for it. My service is to inform. ... (Now watch me eat my words!)

Version 1.1, 5-1-05

I grew up on computers. My dad is an electrical engineer, so we've had at least one computer in the house since I was little. The first family computer we had was an Osborne 1. Yes, I know, you've never heard of it. To me it was the best thing since sliced bread, which I had only discovered a few years earlier. My dad taught me how to program in BASIC, and for a while that was my major pastime. My brother Michael is the one who really picked it up, however. He is one of my chief sources of computer information, so his name will probably make frequent appearances in this section.

I dropped programming in junior high for other things, and I regret it in some ways. The tech world is very interesting to me, and I have some friends in that sphere, but the learning curve for being conversant in computer science is pretty steep and I haven't kept up with it, so I'm sort of at a disadvantage. But oh well, you can't do everything. I keep up with programming and computer technology in my own small way, and it's usually enough for me.

After not having programmed for about ten years, I started learning Perl at my brother's recommendation. It is not an easy language to learn because it can be very cryptic. But I rediscovered what I love about programming. It boils down to two things: puzzles and power. Power because when you know how to program, you can get the computer to do what you want it to do. You're not limited to what other people's programs will allow you to do. And puzzles because programming is a process of problem solving, and it can be surprisingly engrossing. I can sit there for hours, totally absorbed in working out the right code to achieve my goal.

But I do have limits. I don't naturally think like a computer, and contorting my mind into those patterns is taxing. So as with everything else but more so in this case, my attention to the subject comes and goes in phases.

There are many other things about the world of computers that interest me, from artificial intelligence to the open source movement to the OS wars. I am fascinated, too, by the philosophical and methodological insights that can be drawn from computer science and applied to other areas.

As for hardware, I bought a laptop in 1996, my freshman year of college. It was a Toshiba Satellite 205CDS, a P100 that had about 780M of hard drive space, an 11.5" screen, and 24M of RAM. This was fine for a few years, but it took a noticeable dive in performance as the software I was trying to run began to surpass it. I also had to clear off hard drive space all the time to have room for my puttering. Eventually I'd had enough and started saving for a new laptop, this time one that would hopefully stay ahead of the software for a while longer. It took me two years to save for it, but finally I got a Sager 5690 at 3.2GHz with a 60GB hard drive, a gigabyte of RAM, and a 15" screen. That's a bit better than my old computer. In fact, so much better that it's way more than I need, so I named it after my favorite overpowered starship Petey, the Tausennigan Thunderhead Superfortress from the webcomic Schlock Mercenary! I partitioned the hard drive down the middle so I could dual boot with Windows XP and Linux. So that is what I am currently operating off of, just to give you a frame of reference.

Now, about this math, science, and technology section. I'm following the pattern I started when I stuffed the rest of the social sciences into a corner of the psychology page. Basically these are side interests of mine that I needed a place to put, and the computer page seemed the most natural place.

My dad is an electrical engineer. I would never be an electrical engineer. But his interest in things technical extends into related fields like physics, math, and astronomy, and that is one thing I did pick up from him. In fact, in junior high I thought I might want to be a scientist when I grew up. Then one year I worked in a lab for a science fair project, and I was cured. But my interest remains. What I like about science is that it amazes me, and I like to be amazed. The natural world is a strange and incredible place. Mainly I'm into the astronomical-physical end of the science spectrum, since that's what up with I grew.

And when you apply science to practical problems, you get technology. I like to be impressed by people's engineering creativity and the power we can wield over the physical world. That's one of the main reasons I like Star Trek. As Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, technology is like magic. So every once in a while I'll point you to some new bit of technological wizardry I've been gaping at.

Math I flirt with occasionally, and I do mean occasionally. It was always my weakest subject in school, but it still intrigues me in some ways. It's good training for logical thinking, and the philosophy of mathematics asks some interesting questions. So I'll dip into math here every once in a while too.

Version 1.1, 5-1-05

"Aesthetics" is a strange title. Why don't I just call it "Entertainment" or "Art"? Well, I would, but "entertainment" is too superficial for what I have in mind, and "art" sounds too highbrow; some of what's here is just entertainment. But I am at heart a philosopher rather than an artist or entertainer or even a consumer, so I've called it something philosophical, "Aesthetics." I do like immersing myself in the experience of fun, beautiful, or profound things, but I am equally (or more) interested in the ideas they represent and in what makes them fun, beautiful, or profound. You'll notice I also have an aesthetics section on the philosophy page. I'll try to put my more theoretical discussions of aesthetics there. I guess you could call the subject of this page "applied aesthetics."

My general aesthetic theory is that people have different emotional or intellectual desires in life, and they use art to help fulfill them. This leads them into different realms of artistic taste. For instance, I like to use music to create an environment for me to live in, so I don't listen to music that takes a lot of concentration to appreciate. I tend to listen to new age or ambient music, sometimes classical. I like art that I can "get" at a glance but which also has deeper layers of structure and meaning that I can uncover over time. Additionally, my favorite genres of just about everything are science fiction and fantasy. This is due to the fact that the real world is boring.

Before I get started on the subsections, a note on my links: I link to websites I like, but I don't necessarily approve of everything on those sites. This is true whenever anybody links to anything on the web, but I just want to say to my more conservative readers that while I try to associate myself with wholesome things, sometimes the things I like about a work are accompanied by other things I could do without (usually it's language and violence). I try to overlook those and just enjoy the parts I do like. I hope my aesthetic and other values will become evident to you as you read through my site.

Music

I've been a musician since I was three. I took violin lessons from three till first grade, piano first through twelfth, French horn in band sixth grade through high school, and church choir the whole time. By the end of high school, my musical activities had proliferated so much that I was tired of music altogether. Except for band. Band, I can honestly say, was the best thing I did in school, and I loved it the whole way through. I still kind of miss the French horn. I'll probably pick it up again someday. When I went to college, I dropped music entirely for a couple of years, after which I helped out with the music at church until our little church closed.

Performing is fun (when I'm not doing too much of it), but what I really want to do is compose. This is what I unconsciously wished I was doing whenever I'd sit down at the piano to practice. And I did compose some, though it wasn't much and not that good. But what I really wanted my teachers couldn't give me, which was formal training in composition. I did take a music theory class in high school, but that was about it. Wheaton offers a major in composition, but I had other priorities. You can't major in everything. So now I plan to teach myself. I want to start with tonal harmony and counterpoint and then get into digital music.

And of course, I listen to music, too. I don't connect with most styles of popular music. As I mentioned earlier, mostly I listen to new age, ambient, and other electronic music, some classical, and a few movie and game soundtracks. I used to listen to a lot of Christian music, but these days I don't connect well with Contemporary Christian Music. I do like hymns. But in general I'm an instrumental person. Vocal music just doesn't do much for me, with a few exceptions.

This section is called "Music," but other auditory things will likely appear here as well, like sound effects and instrument samples.

Writing

Writing. Yes, I read as well as write. But "literature," again, sounds too highbrow. I occasionally read high art literature but not that much. I would use "narrative," but I'm interested in other kinds of writing as well. So I'll just call the whole thing writing because really, when I'm analyzing other people's writing, my goal is to know how to write better myself.

I read almost no fiction while I was a teenager, except for the stuff we were forced to read in school. I read a lot of fiction when I was younger, but once I hit my teenage years my analytical mind took over, and I read mainly apologetics. What brought me back was a video game. I never played them growing up, but my senior year of college I was introduced to Chrono Trigger, and I was hooked. Chrono Trigger was an RPG for the Super Nintendo that came out in 1995. I played it for hours at a time, and instead of feeling brain-dead like I did after playing other video games, I always came out of it feeling exhilarated. As I looked for other games like it, I realized that what I liked most about it was the plot, and of course, I could get that from literature. So I broke my narrative fast and picked up The Hobbit, a book I had tried to read twice before and had dropped in the middle of Mirkwood each time. This time I finished it and moved on to The Lord of the Rings. And my fiction consumption has just snowballed from there. Usually I read science fiction and fantasy. And I mostly listen to audiobooks because it lets me do other things at the same time.

Despite all this fiction I'm reading, I haven't been writing any stories like I did when I was little. I have these huge mental blocks that keep me from getting very far with ... well, anything, but especially creative writing. My writing is all of a more expositional nature. This is something I hope to overcome. Narrative really fascinates me, and I have this impulse to create that so rarely gets channeled into anything productive.

Poetry rarely does anything for me, usually because I find it hard to understand, but I strongly prefer metrical, rhyming poetry over freeverse. I especially appreciate meter-and-rhyme when it occurs in music, though I am also impressed when someone can set prose to a melody and not sound like they're rambling musically.

Art

I'm including in this category anything visual, such as architecture. I know even less about visual art than the other areas of aesthetics, and my tastes here are even more limited. I'm pretty much at the level of pop culture. Art museums bore me about as much as the average person. I don't typically care about any art produced before the twentieth century, and the avant garde types of modern art are nonsensical to me or at least uninteresting. My favorite kinds of art are nature photography, fantasy art, and surrealism. Then I have other miscellaneous visual interests, mostly having to do with computers and publishing, like fonts and tiling images. Sometime I want to explore the ins and outs of computer graphics.

Comics

Comics, along with video games, were one of those things I wished I could get into when I was young but didn't because they cost too much. I did grow up on comic-related TV shows and movies, however. I watched Superfriends, The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Batman. Superman and Wonder Woman were at the top of my list of superheros, though they've now been supplanted by Spider-Man. There's something about comics that's just cool (not a word I use often, but here it fits). To some degree it depends on the comic, but partly it's the medium itself that intrigues me. The first comic book I actually read was volume one of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. Kind of a dark one to start out on, but that's what I picked up. Anyway, that launched me into comic books. But one comic medium I had already discovered was webcomics! What a great way to pass the time. I occasionally have the urge to try drawing my own, but who knows if that will happen. I can't do everything. I have to keep reminding myself of that (if you don't know what I mean, take a look around this site!). I also dabble in anime and manga, which I like because they are weird and because they are character-driven. And for the record, Calvin and Hobbes is the best comic strip in the universe. The best webcomic in the universe is General Protection Fault.

Games

In a sense, games are the centerpiece of my aesthetic interests, specifically what I call "narrative games." These are any games that revolve around stories. My primary focus is on computer games, like text adventures and computer RPGs. Narrative games bring together two topics that are deeply fascinating to me: narrative and interaction. Why they are so intriguing to me is a mystery I haven't yet explored. Of course, most people wouldn't explore it at all. Those people are normal.

As I mentioned in the writing section, the game that got me started was Chrono Trigger, which I played about six years after it came out. I love that game. To a certain degree it has become the model by which I evaluate many of the other games I play, at least the RPGs. Since then I've been playing a fairly steady stream of RPGs and adventure games, both commercial and freeware.

One of my goals in life is to write at least one or two of these games. I want to write at least one text adventure and one graphical adventure. There are other kinds of games I want to create, too--games that are mindless but rewarding. I mean, really. I play games to relax, not to challenge myself. Most games take too much thought or skill.

Mass media

I don't watch much TV or many movies, but I listen to the radio a lot. I used to alternate between talk and music in phases, but now my musical tastes have drifted away from the kinds of things that get played on the radio, so I listen to talk radio almost exclusively.

And even though I pay very little attention to mass culture, in this category goes one of the few things I can genuinely say I'm a fan of, and that's Star Trek. The X-Files comes in second. Star Wars is growing on me, along with one or two others.

Humor

Humor is necessary for my survival. I am addicted to it. And to go along with my philosopher tendencies, I also analyze it. Everything else in this section will be a surprise.

Version 1.0, 3-20-05

The summer after my junior year in high school, our church youth group went to a week-long camp in North Carolina with about five other youth groups. Youth camp happened every summer, but this was the first time the camp had included other churches. Maybe they felt the need to regroup, or maybe it was their practice to begin with, but whatever the reason, early in the week a few of our guys started meeting together at night to talk about what was going on in their lives and how they were doing spiritually. A day or two into it, I was invited. I had never seen anything like it. Certainly I had never been involved in such a thing. I had always been withdrawn, and I'm surprised I even had the kind of friendships that would get me there in the first place.

But instead of feeling threatened by all the openness, I was enlivened by it. It wasn't, as one friend suggested, that I was glad to see that other people's problems were worse than mine. It was that people were gathering to share something that was somehow of vital importance to me--their inner lives. Eventually the gathering became co-ed and grew to about forty people (we had a large youth group). My fascination only grew as the group did. The more the merrier, to me!

Thus was my interest in psychology sparked. I am never content just to experience things like the communal self-disclosure of those meetings. Anything that so engages me I have to study. So the human mind became something to explore. By coincidence I was already signed up for a high school psychology class the next year, which was also fascinating, and I decided to major in it in college. That changed to Christian education the next year, however, though I kept psychology as a minor. There were a couple of reasons for the switch. One was that I could see myself in a church setting more readily than in a counselor's office. The other was that I didn't entirely trust psychology. I had been reading Christians who believed that our guide to human nature was supposed to be the Bible and that psychology was intruding on Scripture's territory. There was something compelling to me about their arguments, and it is an issue I'm still wrestling with. Nevertheless, psychology still has a huge draw for me, and I do see a lot of benefit in it.

Several topics in psychology capture my attention. One is psychotherapy, which is basically what drew me to psychology in the first place. Sitting in those youth camp meetings, I felt impelled to help the people who revealed their personal struggles, even though I had no idea how. Helping people is what I had in mind as a psychology major and even when I switched to Christian Education, although it would be a somewhat different format for my helping role. Psychotherapy was also my main point of tension with psychology. Christianity and psychology seemed to have competing ideas about what was wrong with people and how they could be helped. As I said, I'm still exploring this question. Many of the topics that fit under psychotherapy could fit just as well under spirituality or philosophy, so my categorization of some of these essays will be somewhat arbitrary.

The psychology of personality has been one of my central tools in understanding human nature and in relating to the people around me. One of my friends got me into the Myers-Briggs personality theory our senior year in high school, and it was a major obsession of mine for the next year. Fortunately, the obsession was temporary. Myers-Briggs is helpful, but it isn't everything. In any case, I am also intrigued by the Enneagram and am generally willing to try out any personality theory that comes along. The thing I like about these personality theories is that they represent systems of values and strategies for dealing with life. As you will no doubt discover if you keep reading this site, I am enthralled by systems, values, and strategies. Other facets of individual differences also interest me, like birth order and gender.

The psychology of education grabbed me in the middle of my sophomore year in college when I got fed up with the anxiety of exams and decided to analyze what made school so stressful. That began a process of discovering how I learned and worked and what practices made a teacher helpful or unhelpful. But my interest in education is broader than a concern for my own stress levels. Personal growth is what engages me, both my own and other people's. It's an occupation that penetrates to the bedrock of my life and sends out tendrils to every part of it. One means of growth is education--growth by knowledge and interaction, two of my other pervasive concerns. I suppose this means I'm destined to become a teacher.

Then there are a few other topics that wander through my mind. One is cognitive psychology, which has a natural tie-in to epistemology. Another is interpersonal psychology, which includes things like friendship and conversation (and personality, but I separate that one out). And then there's linguistics, which isn't psychology but is a social science, and I don't have a better place to put it. I have a passing interest in other areas of social science as well, like anthropology. But even though psychology is one of my major interests, as with philosophy, I don't know that much about it yet.

Version 1.2, 7-29-06

Philosophy can be thought of either as a way of thinking or as a specific set of topics to be thought about. The academic discipline of philosophy is made up of the latter and hopefully uses the former. I am made up of the former and sometimes drift into the latter. (That's right! I am in fact an abstract thought process and not an embodied human being. The truth is out!)

I've been a philosopher as long as I've been alive, but it wasn't until recently that I recognized it as a distinct part of myself and gave myself the label. I just approach life philosophically. That is, I analyze things and think about their broader implications.

As far as the actual discipline of philosophy goes, my formal education has been meager. Most of the philosophy I've learned has come from my own sporadic reading, and I still consider myself pretty new to it. But my primary loyalties are definitely with analytic philosophy. I think of myself as being interested in continental subjects while taking an analytic approach. I am grateful to Michael Martin, even though we are diametrically opposed on some major issues, for his Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, which was my first real exposure to analytic philosophy and helped to kindle my love for it.

A common way to organize philosophy as a discipline is to divide it into three categories: epistemology (the theory of knowledge), metaphysics (the theory of reality), and axiology (the theory of value). Not everything in philosophy fits neatly into those categories, but they are an easy way to get a handle on the subject.

Epistemology

Epistemology has by far the most draw for me and I'm sure will accumulate the most material. I ask epistemic questions always and about everything. How do I know which politician is telling me the truth? How do I know which car is the best one to buy? What criteria should I use when evaluating a movie? How did the characters in this novel know the correct solution to their problem? How do I know who is right in an interpersonal conflict? These are the kinds of questions that invariably pop into my mind whenever I face a new situation.

In fact, epistemology is my philosophical starting point. Even though I know that any epistemological view will carry assumptions about metaphysics and axiology, I feel a need to answer questions about knowledge first and then use those answers to help me gain knowledge about existence and value. I have a hard time doing it the other way around.

I want to deal with the more abstract questions of epistemology (can we trust our senses, and all that), but my main concerns are practical. I would like to come up with a generalized set of guidelines and procedures for investigating an issue from start to finish. They would cover things like the kinds of questions to ask about a topic, effective research methods, criteria for evaluating evidence and arguments, cognitive pitfalls to avoid, and the epistemic idiosyncracies of various subjects. For lack of a better term I'm calling this my "investigative process project." I want to go beyond the basics, which are readily available anyway. I'm always discovering nuances as I observe people's ways of dealing with issues, and this project is partly an effort to gather these observations in one place and to make them useful. It's sort of a meta-project, since the process of investigation is involved any time anyone studies anything.

I love reference works. Give me an encyclopedia and I'm happy. The problem is I have no good place to put such things on my website, and I'm not going to create a whole category just for reference. I already have enough categories already. So since general reference works have to do with knowledge, I'm just stuffing them in the epistemology section! You'll notice I do that kind of thing a lot.

Metaphysics

About metaphysics I have mixed feelings. I like practicality and certainty, and metaphysical issues seem to teeter on the edge of complete irrelevance and unanswerability (I could probably say the same about some epistemological questions--but I won't!). However, to be fair, some of the questions of metaphysics are somewhat relevant to everyday life (are people basically good or evil?). Some of them are only really relevant to other philosophical or theological questions, but some of those other questions can be important (for example, the nature of time is relevant to certain arguments about the existence and nature of God). And some seem relevant to philosophical reasoning in general (such as the distinction between necessary and contingent truths). Certain issues, like the question of determinism, I'm not sure can even be resolved, apart from divine revelation, if even then. Still, they are all questions I will try to address seriously at some point. I acknowledge my massive ignorance on the subject.

Axiology

Axiology can be divided into ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Here my feelings are even more divided. I care intensely about the value dimension of life (as I do about epistemology), but I have a certain despair about its arguability (as with metaphysics). With aesthetics it doesn't matter so much. Getting your aesthetics wrong doesn't usually carry serious consequences unless you're a professional artist.

With ethics, on the other hand, the issues are vitally important, both to me personally and to society in general. They pop up everywhere every day. Two problems haunt me when I consider interacting with other people about ethical issues. One is that I feel that people are very bad at discerning the real issues in most moral debates. The other is that even if they do understand them, agreement is impossible if the participants don't share certain fundamental moral assumptions. So I tend to avoid moral debates because they're just so complicated and frustrating and generally painful to me. Maybe I'll be more willing to engage in them after I've fully investigated the issues on my own.

Why do I have a whole page on my site called "Aesthetics" and then a subsection of my philosophy page for aesthetics? Well, it's just another example of the contents of my mind trying to burst through the boxes I shove them into. The philosophy section is really the most natural home for a section on aesthetics. I just needed a term for my entertainment section that reflected the philosophical way I approach entertainment. My discussions of aesthetics in the philosophy section will be more general and theoretical, while the material in the main aesthetics section will be more practical.

For convenience, I'm going to consider the philosophy of life to be a branch of ethics. One of my overarching aims in life is to understand the world so that I can fit myself into it. This amounts to forming a philosophy of life. It involves questions like, what is the meaning of life? What are its appropriate goals? What activities are worth spending one's time on? These questions rival epistemology for the amount of thought I pour into them, so the material will probably pile up in this section as well. This topic overlaps significantly with spirituality.

Politics can be thought of as ethics applied on a societal level. It can also be thought of as a social science, and I will dip into that aspect of the subject, but I'd rather have a single place to put it all, and I'm more a philosopher than a social scientist. It may be a while before I write much in this section. I'm a complete novice when it comes to thinking about politics because it's only been in the past couple of years that I've begun paying much attention to it, so for now I'm much more of an observer than a debater, and my interests within the subject are rather vague.

Topics on the national and international levels appeal to me, whereas local politics tends to leave me yawning. I think it's because national and international politics are more dramatic and seem to more directly reflect the fundamental issues in political philosophy. As for my basic position, I was raised a conservative, and I'm happy to remain one unless my studies convince me otherwise. However, my feelings about politics are a lot like my feelings about ethics, only less intense. The issues are important, but the answers are hard to nail down.

Despite the tension and frustration it sometimes puts me through, I like philosophy. It is the best way I have for dealing with life. I used to think I might make it my career, but now I'm thinking about psychology. Whatever I end up doing, I will do it using philosophy's tools.

Version 1.0, 3-20-05

Theology has gone on mostly in the background of my life. It's not endlessly fascinating to me like other topics, but I still consider it important.

I first noticed theology in high school when I read some discussions about Calvinism on an apologetics mailing list. I had grown up in a tacitly Arminian, Southern Baptist church, and Calvinism seemed rather repugnant to me. Still, when I read certain parts of the Bible, they did sound suspiciously Calvinist. So I got myself to the point of at least not minding Calvinist doctrines and then sat myself squarely on the fence.

My first semester at college, in the midst of various discussions with my friends, I drifted off the fence and down onto the Reformed side of the lawn. By a happy coincidence, my professor for Theology of Culture happened to be very Reformed, and through his lectures I was introduced to the wonder of Reformed theology. Reformed theology inspired me. Its God was huge. He was sovereign without limit, able to bring about all his purposes, utterly worthy of worship. Someone once observed that people who come into Reformed theology from other realms often describe their experience in terms of a second conversion. That's certainly the way it was for me. The summer after that school year I didn't find a job, so most of that free time was spent reading. There's a cornucopia of Reformed theology on the web, and I just devoured it. One of my key sources was the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. They were very helpful because they contrasted Reformed teachings with the kinds of ideas I had grown up with (and contrast is one helpful way to achieve clarity!).

At my friend's Presbyterian church there was a saying: "There's no one more obnoxious than a newly converted Calvinist." All through that next year I could have been a poster child for the Obnoxious Baby Calvinists' Guild. I criticized Arminianism right and left. But I can never stay committed to any point of view for too long; I just think too much. So over time I mellowed out, partly because I came to believe that Calvinism wasn't quite so earth-shatteringly important and partly because I was entering a more questioning period in general. Everything was up for review. Not all at once, however, so the opinions that had to wait in line, such as Calvinism, only got very quiet.

That, in fact, is the situation I am in now. I still have my beliefs, but I also believe that true knowledge, especially theological knowledge, is pretty hard to come by. A lot of people are very confident that they have it, but confidence alone isn't a very good argument. Yet despite the difficulty, I still hold on to the thought that the truth is findable and that it is important. So I will keep searching.

Version 1.0, 3-20-05

My senior year of college I started an accelerated masters program at Wheaton in New Testament, which I exchanged for their new Biblical Exegesis program a couple of years later because that program also covered the Old Testament. I thought I wanted to end up working in some branch of practical theology, but that's not where I wanted to start. Being a thorough sort of person, I believed that the large-scale ideas of theology have to be built on the tiny details of the biblical text. This called for interpretation, or the more technical term, exegesis. Hermeneutics, as I use the word, is a more general term for the theory of interpretation, while exegesis is the process of interpretation itself or the end result of that process.

I had already been thinking about interpretative methods for a few years. I didn't do much Bible study growing up, but when I got to college and became interested in theology, I thought Bible study would be a good thing to get into. My wandering attempts to do this received a boost when I planted myself at Trinity Baptist Church. Our pastor was really into expositional preaching, and Bible study was the major activity of the church as a whole, so I was exposed to a lot of it. Gradually I got an idea of how it worked. And as with everything, it got me asking questions. Why did we ask this question of the text and not this other one? Why did we zero in on these particular features? Why do we assume the writer laid out the book this way? And so on.

While my graduate program did teach me the tools of exegesis, there's only so much you can learn in a class. In these courses we were hard at work learning the exegetical techniques of our professors. These techniques belonged to an interpretative approach called the historical-grammatical method. Historical-grammatical interpretation analyzes the language of the text and tries to understand the text based on its historical context. This method seemed like a perfectly natural way to interpret things, but I wanted to know more about ... the others.

In our biblical criticism classes, we learned about other methods of biblical interpretation, both current and past. As it was explained to us, critical interpretation of the Scripture began around the Enlightenment ("critical" in the sense of "involving careful judgment," usually judgment about things like the historical circumstances of the work and how it was composed). Thinkers of the time were throwing off the shackles of human institutions, all institutions, including the church. Their goal was to submit only to the authority of reason. Thus, they decided that the Bible was just another human book, not a divinely inspired one. Instead of simply believing it, therefore, they began evaluating it to sort out the true from the false. The idea was that once they knew how the Bible had come to be written and which parts were true, they would know how to interpret it and make it useful for modern society. In the process they came up with a succession of critical approaches to biblical interpretation, each one gaining acceptance and then giving way to a new approach as the old one's flaws became evident. These critical approaches were obviously unacceptable to many conservative Christians, who attacked them vigorously, especially in the early twentieth century. Evangelicals today do use these critical methods but typically in modified forms that are more friendly toward inerrancy.

These days the big deal is reader-response criticism, which is actually an outgrowth of postmodernism rather than modernism. While the earlier methods were a problem, at least as they were originally conceived, reader-response seemed to be public enemy number one for my evangelical professors. The main question in this debate is whether we can know what the "authorial intent" of the text was--what the author meant by what he wrote--and whether it's important in the first place. The historical-grammatical critics say we can know it and it's very important, and the postmodern critics say we can't and it isn't.

Well, I'm all for the historical-grammatical method, but it seems strange to me that when it came to interpreting any particular passage, not only was there no consensus in my classes, but there was no agreement among the professional commentators either. Don't take that too far, by the way. I don't mean each commentator had a totally different opinion on every little point, only that I was surprised at the number of places they disagreed and how widely their interpretations could differ. It made the text seem very unclear.

So I'm curious about these "heretical" interpretative methods, both modern and postmodern. What can be said for and against them? Our discussions in the exegesis program were good, but the theoretical courses covered too much ground to deal with everything to my satisfaction, and the practical courses were less concerned with these questions. So I am left to my own devices, which is what I prefer anyway.

Version 1.0, 3-20-05

Evangelism is a controversial topic these days. Not everyone thinks we should do it. It tends to offend people who are of a pluralist persuasion or a private nature. When I was young, around junior high, I didn't know any of that. I was just discovering how significant my Christian faith was to me, and I had a hefty sense of mission for someone my age. I wasn't preaching on street corners, but I did make "projects" out of several of my non-Christian friends, and I tried to persuade other Christians to make evangelism a habit as well. I was even working on a book (which fell by the wayside once I got into apologetics). It was going to be a Complete Guide to Soul-Winning, and I spent hours and hours compiling notes from other books on the subject. I was a devoted kid.

It all seemed so simple in the beginning. Just show unbelievers the Roman Road or the Four Spiritual Laws, maybe make an appeal to their emotional turmoil, lead them in the prayer, and they'd rush right into the fold. And if they were skeptics or followers of other religions, well, it seemed simple enough to prove them wrong and guide them to the truth.

Only it didn't work out that way. I had three fairly quick converts, but I wasn't very good at follow-up, so I don't know how they turned out or even if their conversions were genuine. The others just wouldn't be persuaded. I talked to some of them for years, and at least one of them got fed up with my attempts. Fortunately she didn't give up on my friendship as well.

Evangelism was just getting more and more complicated, and gradually it faded into the background because I had a growing sense that I didn't know what I was doing. It was still important; it had just moved itself from the list of "ways I direct my activities" to the list of "life problems to solve." The more I explored the issue, the more complications I found. I didn't know how to introduce the Gospel into my conversations. I didn't know how to connect the Gospel effectively to people's lives. I wasn't even sure what the Gospel included. Is the Gospel about justification only or also things like physical healing? And how do faith and works fit together anyway? People have answers to these questions, of course, but these people don't all agree, and a lot of their solutions seem unsatisfactory to me anyway.

To put it another way, I think of evangelism as a great World-Saving Machine, kind of like a tank, sitting in a clearing in the middle of a forest. Now, I would hop in the driver's seat and barrel across the countryside, using the machine's magic to scatter people's delusions and pull their lives together ... only the machine seems to be broken. In fact, it's very broken. Some of the parts are missing, there's very little fuel, vines are growing all over it. This thing isn't going anywhere. Now, to judge from the stories, other people's World-Saving Machines are humming along just fine ... or at least certain other people's. I suspect I'm not the only one scratching his head.

So I'm in a muddle. Now, I do have a few definite opinions. If the Bible is true (as I believe it is), then evangelism is important. The most obvious reason is that the majority of the human race is lost and on its way to hell, to put it bluntly. This is not a flattering view of humanity, and maybe that's behind a lot of people's objections to the practice. But if you're a Christian and you can get yourself to view things so starkly, evangelism becomes a frantic rescue mission. The panic involved is tempered by other considerations, such as the gentleness and patience of God, but the urgency is still there in the background.

But while impending doom is a persuasive factor for me, at a more fundamental level I am driven to do evangelism (or at this point, just to figure it out) simply because to me, conversion is a part of one's personal growth. Human beings were created to be like God, to embody his character, and in our current state that is impossible. Being recreated by Christ is the crucial ingredient, and that involves conversion, and that involves evangelism. I am interested in the whole process of becoming like Christ, from the initial unbelief and first contact with the Gospel, to the point of belief, to the process of sanctification after. I want to know how that journey works and how I can be involved in it, both for myself and for other people. It's a large part of what drives my life. So evangelism is a big deal to me.

As I said before, evangelism is controversial. I'm interested in the controversies, too. How can evangelism be a justifiable activity in today's enlightened, pluralistic culture? Are there "anonymous Christians," or must people believe in Jesus by name to be saved? And if there are such people, is evangelism really that urgent?

I think of evangelism as sort of a meta-issue or an organizing principle. It has its own issues to be worked through, but I think some of the major difficulties will be cleared up as I deal with other issues, especially apologetics and spiritual formation. It ties together many aspects of Christianity nicely, which makes evangelism itself a good spiritual discipline. Evangelism isn't the end goal of being a Christian, but it is a significant piece.

Version 1.0, 3-20-05

Apologetics came to my attention very early as a part of my attempt to be comprehensive in evangelism. I wanted to know how to evangelize everyone; and if I got right down to basics and found out how to convince atheists, I thought I could cover all my bases.

There was a more practical reason for my study of apologetics, and that was that I really was trying to evangelize atheists. I was friends with at least a couple of them and also a Mormon. I spent most of my junior high and high school years trying to persuade them and got basically nowhere, but at least it helped me. Studying apologetics taught me a lot about critical thinking, Christianity, the Bible, philosophy, science, and scholarship in general. It also taught me that the world is very complicated. Not only do people not simply convert just because of a few arguments, but the truth is not always a simple matter to uncover. Things are not always as they appear.

At first I read popular apologists because they were readily available and I wasn't aware of anything else. But the libraries I visited did have a few books on the academic level; and once I discovered them, those were the authors I gravitated towards. Two notable examples were William Lane Craig and Michael Martin. The first Craig book I picked up was The Son Rises, a popular-level treatment of his arguments for the resurrection. The resurrection had been the subject of one of Craig's doctorates. I was immediately impressed. Michael Martin was not an apologist (not for Christianity anyway), but his book Atheism: A Philosophical Justification gave me my first major dose of analytic philosophy.

As I wandered deeper into the world of academic apologetics, it bothered me that there was not more material like this available to the general Christian public. The average churchgoer was not going to walk into the local university library and make a beeline for the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. But this information was important, at least to people who wanted to talk meaningfully with the skeptics in their lives. Bridging that gap, I decided, was one of my life goals. Since then I have noticed a trend in that direction in Christian publishing, for which I am glad.

In that first round of apologetic study, I concentrated on evolution, Mormonism, the cosmological argument, and the resurrection. Evolution was first, probably because it's the most visible apologetic issue. I studied Mormonism because my best friend was Mormon, and we spent about two years straight debating religion over lunch. The cosmological argument came along because I wanted to study apologetics systematically, and the creation of the universe seemed like a natural place to start. The resurrection entered the scene with Craig's book, and it stuck because it was just such a fascinating topic and, of course, so central to Christianity. I came out of that period thinking that a) the creation-evolution debate is hopelessly complex and not very important anyway; b) Mormonism is unfounded but not easy for its adherents to walk away from; c) the cosmological argument probably works but proves very little; and d) among Christian historical evidences, the arguments for the resurrection are uniquely compelling, both in their force and in their implications. Through an apologetics listserv I subscribed to, I was also introduced briefly to presuppositionalism.

My study of apologetics was interrupted at the end of high school by my personal revival, and during my college and grad school years I neglected apologetics almost completely. Too many other pressing issues were weighing on me. I did learn a lot more about presuppositionalism in my study of Reformed theology, and I considered myself a presuppositionalist for a while; but as with most things, my mounting pile of questions overcame my commitment to the position, and I ended up agnostic on the subject. I also took a short graduate course on apologetics which added some important elements to my thinking about the existential, human side of apologetics. But mostly I was occupied by other things.

During this non-apologetic period, questions settled like dust on my mind. These came from both my studies and my independent reading and reflection. Despite being an evangelical school, Wheaton was still a good place to collect troubling questions about one's faith. I found that my professors in the biblical studies program did a good job of exposing us to non-evangelical scholarship and of training us in evangelical methods of interpretation, but they did an uneven job of refuting their opponents' viewpoints. I suppose you can't do everything. But I did gain the tools to answer many of these questions myself.

These questions nudged me back toward apologetics, and they had help. My professors and other influences inspired me to develop my research and critical thinking skills further. This resolve was strengthened when I became irrationally alarmed by some conspiracy theories just before the Iraq war. After I recovered from my brief paranoia, I concluded that I was too gullible and that the solution was to learn to use critical thought more consistently.

Somewhat unexpectedly, I realized that if I was going to be a critically thinking person in general, I couldn't leave religion out. I had to think critically about that as well. My reasoning was that each person is born into the world in circumstances that they didn't choose, and these circumstances include one's religious environment. People are accustomed to taking the religion they grew up in to be true. But if not all religions are basically the same, then letting your circumstances choose your religion amounts to rolling dice to decide on your spiritual condition, perhaps your eternal destiny. It would be wiser to make an informed choice. And I was not exempt.

So the nudge back to apologetics became a shove. I knew the need for critical thought about religion from my earlier expeditions into apologetics, but during that period I took it for granted that Christianity had solid foundations. I probably gave lip service to evaluating one's faith; but Christianity was my starting point, and as far as I was concerned it only needed rational defence, not evaluation. Non-Christians were the ones who really needed to evaluate their viewpoints. But once I acquired this more critical approach to life, I believed that Christianity had to be examined along with everything else. I didn't want it fail, but a serious test seemed necessary. So that's where I find myself now.

This section is not for the faint of heart. I ask difficult questions, and I don't settle for easy answers. If you're a believer and you easily careen into anxiety and doubt, maybe you would do better to go somewhere else. Check out my apologetics links. These guys will take care of you. I can promise you no such thing.