April 5, 2002

• Many thanks to Fugitive for the new banner.  It's Friday again.  The most glorious day of the week.  This is the day that we do school quickly in order to get out of the house for fun.  We will probably go out to lunch, hit the grocery store - maybe even go to CompUSA and replace the mouse that's beginning to fail.  (My clicker doesn't click like it's supposed to - when I click and drag it randomly rearranges my text - not an endearing quality in a mouse.)  And tonight we'll have family fun night.  Maybe we'll order pizza.  Maybe we'll rent a movie and have hot dogs and popcorn.  But, the point is that it's Friday!

  
  

  The question of the day is whether Fridays are real or exist only as a figment of my imagination.  Think about it for a second, that's more profound than it appears on the surface.

  
  

  It's analagous to whether mathematics represent something real.  Have you ever thought about that question?  Do numbers represent reality?  Or are they just figments of logical thought?  Once you leave the realm of integers, mathematics become impossible to demonstrate in the "real" world.  They deal with the ideal.  A point, for example, was defined by Euclid as "that which has no part."  Well, that sounds a whole lot like our definition of "nothing."  But, where would mathmeticians be without their points?

  
  

  Did you ever set out to write a proof of the mathematical equation 1+1=2 that would conclusively deomonstrate to a strict materialist that the concepts under discussion were real?  Bertrand Russell did that.  It consumed two years of his life, and resulted in a book that would break your toe if you dropped it at the wrong moment.  But, in the end, Russell and other like minded persons are forced to admit that there is no intellectually coercive proof that any concept is real in a material sense.

  
  

  Last night I was reading a book by John Polkinghorne.  He is an internationally known theoretical physicist who has made a second career as a theologian.  He is a pioneer in the recent dialogues between science and religion.  Dr. Polkinghorne included a little postscript to his work that has prompted my blog this morning.  He says that his views are based on "a generous and just view of the nature of reality, according as much significance to our [intuitive] experiences of beauty and moral imperative as we do our more objective encounters with the material world."  He goes on to say that "I find that if I am in a discussion with someone unwilling, at the least, to try to conceive of this wider view, there is insufficient common ground for us to meet upon."

  
  

  In my communications theory classes we called this "being stuck on the ladder of abstraction."  The materialist reduces every discussion to a snapshot of a particular element at a particular moment in time.  (Of course, even if you were able to take an almost infinite number of photographs of the object from every conceivable angle, the photographs would never give you the same information you receive by holding it.  This is the difference in a nutshell between objective analysis and intuition.)  The abstract thinker must either agree to a constricted view of reality, or be content that no communication can take place.

  
  

  I've given some thought to whether I could squeeze my mind into that box, and I've given up.  I'll just have to live with the knowledge that there are some topics that I can't discuss with everyone.  Faith, love, joy, transcendence, mathematics, and Fridays.  But if you are able to stretch outside that box a bit, there will be a slice of pizza at the Verrette Villa this evening for you.  Come on over.

  • 7:45 am
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