Philosophy for Limited Beings - Modesty in Knowledge Claims

Scanning the afterword and bibliography of Stanley Rosen's illuminating collection of essays:
Hermeneutics as Politics: Second Edition ,  which reviews the meltdown of the Enlightenment epistemological narrative into the post-WWII post-modern demolition project, the author of this title popped up, and a wiki bio page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_C._Wimsatt  pointed to this later publication:


 Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality

   William C. Wimsatt

Although Wimsatt remains enchanted by the "just-so" stories of Darwinian orthodoxy, his reflections on the need for a sounder account of how knowledge is actually pursued are an illuminating model for those who claim to live by Psalm 23 and Proverbs 3:5-6.  Several short excerpts from the reviews posted at the Amazon listings suggest why this might be so:

Wimsatt is concerned with an aspect of the philosophy of biology that has not been a major concern of most philosophers in modern times. He is grappling with the issue of biological complexity and it is certainly an important set of questions. Indeed, it may be the central issue for the philosophy of biology.
--Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor,Harvard University

Wimsatt is very thoughtful and imaginative. He has a subtle position on reduction. He shows that it is necessary to hold to a sophisticated position on this issue, [and he] avoids reifying things at the upper level.
--Herbert Simon, recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Economics

In the rich and impressive collection of essays gathered as Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings, Bill Wimsatt argues that philosophy of science, in its standard forms, has chosen the wrong models: the wrong models of scientists, of their products, and of their explanatory targets...Wimsatt is among the most creative, original, and empirically informed philosophers of our day. These essays clearly demonstrate his imagination, his mastery of many diverse literatures, and his eye for the big question...Few essay collections are integrated and systematic: Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings is an important exception.
--Kim Sterelny (Science 20080718)

About the Author

William C. Wimsatt (born May 27, 1941) is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science (previously Conceptual Foundations of Science), and the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. He specializes in the philosophy of biology, where his areas of interest include reductionism, heuristics, emergence, modeling, heredity, and cultural evolution. He is a Winton Professor of the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota and Residential Fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science.

 

 

How Do Physicians Know?

Medical Dispatches

What’s the Trouble? How doctors think.

by Jerome Groopman January 29, 2007

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/01/29/070129fa_fact_groopman?printable=true

The physician who authored the above article has also published a book,
http://www.amazon.com/How-Doctors-Think-Jerome-Groopman/dp/0547053649/ref=ed_oe_p
How Doctors Think (Paperback - "coming soon", Hardback available now)
by Jerome Groopman

It's worth a look, anyway, and probably available in a library near you (or, if not, it could become available if you request that they get it). If some of physician or other medical service person stumbles on this reference and checks it out, and decides to share what they think of it at some point, it would be appreciated.

One of the AMAZON reviews, the short one, is appended. Even if you decide the book is not for you, give the article and reviews a try. You probably won't regret it.


From Publishers Weekly
Reviewed by Perri Klass

I wish I had read this book when I was in medical school, and I'm glad I've read it now. Most readers will know Jerome Groopman from his essays in the New Yorker, which take on a wide variety of complex medical conditions, evocatively communicating the tensions and emotions of both doctors and patients.But this book is something different: a sustained, incisive and sometimes agonized inquiry into the processes by which medical minds—brilliant, experienced, highly erudite medical minds—synthesize information and understand illness. How Doctors Think is mostly about how these doctors get it right, and about why they sometimes get it wrong: "[m]ost errors are mistakes in thinking. And part of what causes these cognitive errors is our inner feelings, feelings we do not readily admit to and often don't realize."

Attribution errors happen when a doctor's diagnostic cogitations are shaped by a particular stereotype. It can be negative: when five doctors fail to diagnose an endocrinologic tumor causing peculiar symptoms in "a persistently complaining, melodramatic menopausal woman who quite accurately describes herself as kooky." But positive feelings also get in the way; an emergency room doctor misses unstable angina in a forest ranger because "the ranger's physique and chiseled features reminded him of a young Clint Eastwood—all strong associations with health and vigor."

Other errors occur when a patient is irreversibly classified with a particular syndrome: "diagnosis momentum, like a boulder rolling down a mountain, gains enough force to crush anything in its way." The patient stories are told with Groopman's customary attention to character and emotion. And there is great care and concern for the epistemology of medical knowledge, and a sense of life-and-death urgency in analyzing the well-intentioned thought processes of the highly trained.

I have never read elsewhere this kind of discussion of the ambiguities besetting the superspecialized—the doctors on whom the rest of us depend: "Specialization in medicine confers a false sense of certainty." How Doctors Think helped me understand my own thought processes and my colleagues'—even as it left me chastened and dazzled by turns. Every reflective doctor will learn from this book—and every prospective patient will find thoughtful advice for communicating successfully in the medical setting and getting better care.Many of the physicians Dr. Groopman writes about are visionaries and heroes; their diagnostic and therapeutic triumphs are astounding. And these are the doctors who are, like the author, willing to anatomize their own serious errors. This passionate honesty gives the book an immediacy and an eloquence that will resonate with anyone interested in medicine, science or the cruel beauties of those human endeavors which engage mortal stakes. (Mar. 19)

Klass is professor of journalism and pediatrics at NYU. Her most recent book is Every Mother Is a Daughter, with Sheila Solomon Klass.

TIME - the basic asset of life

As an "applied mathematician", which is how my household earns its bread in the division of labor in the economic system that governs our community and nation, I find much of my work devoted to looking for solutions to "optimization under constraints" problems. Such problems come in many disguises:

The market rate for this product is P. Can we arrange our resources to offer this product at a price equal to or less than P?

We have accumulated a database of experience that includes records of transactions with data elements deemed important by our risk analysts. Given this experience and appropriate assumptions about the continuity of past experience and probable conditions in the future, what cost and revenues should we expect to flow for future transactions of similar type?

Given our marketplace, and identified customer needs, can we create a product that meets the listed needs in such a way as to meet certain customer needs at a price that many customers will delighted to pay, and that our shareholders will be delighted to finance?

All of these questions emerge from an enterprise which receives resources from hopeful shareholders in the enterprise, employs workers to convert these resources into means of supplying goods and services to the marketplace, and aims to generate an enduring relationship with customers in that marketplace which is satisfying to them and to the hopes of the shareholders who commit their resources, and the workers who invest their lives in maintaining and managing the processes which accomplish this.

All of the actors in this drama bring their various talents, desires, visions, appetites, and energy to the "show" with one major constraint that none can avoid: the constraint on their time. Time is the vital ingredient in all of our activities "under heaven". It flows without interruption, and cannot be accumulated for "later use": it must be invested as it becomes available, or lost forever. Most importantly, the franchise of each mortal being is given only a finite amount of time within which to accomplish (or set into motion) all of the productive life output for which the franchise was granted.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

Two noteworthy papers appeared in the mathematical literature, one by a physicist, Eugene Wigner, and the other, 20 years later, by the applied mathematician
R.W. Hamming.

The first, published in 1960,

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences

and the other, published in 1980,

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics


Alternative discussions of these papers may be found at:
Wikepedia article

and

Jeff Rankin commentary

The first discussion gives a good background on the setting from which Wigner wrote, while the second aims at impugning the original papers' authors wonder at the "fit" between mathematical constructs and nature. It dances around the necessity of starting "somewhere" to neutralize the sting of the realization that, contrary to the popularized view of science at war with theology, both of these disciplines ultimately demand a faith commitment to the subtance of their foundations, though it is true that some theological accounts are more conducive to the scientific enterprise and thus it is no accident where and when the scientific enterprise developed as a self-sustaining cultural artifact. Moreover, there is nothing which guarantees that the faith commitments required to motivate the scientific enterprise will continue to prevail, and some signs that abandonment of these commitments is well underway in the countries in which the enterprise originated.

This is my thesis, and it needs lots of developing. As it stands, it is merely a set of assertions, without supporting argument. I will be back to edit this post frequently, as time permits. Comments and responses will be helpful in developing the argument (or significantly revising the thesis and argument, depending on the comments).

Christian Gospel as a "Manufacturers Recall Notice"

Wife, the other member of the bi-personal being to which I belong, forwarded a copy she had received from a friend that is a somewhat humorous framing of the Christian message as a "Manufacturer's Recall Notice".

If it's not familiar to you, the original version may be found at one of these links (only if you have Adobe Reader installed will you be able to use the first one).


Recall (PDF file)
Maker's Recall(2)
Maker's Recall (3)


I appreciated the novelty of the concept, but saw a few problems with the details of the exposition. Perhaps it was because of some recent extended thinking about the connections between persons, and how the very idea of a completely isolated person is self-refuting. Give some thought to the process by which you became a self-aware being and perhaps this will help you consider what I'm saying (not that I fully understand it myself - - -which is why I have been struggling with this notion of person, and its relationship to family, community, to "others", for some time). It helps to have been a parent seeing one's children grow, I think. It is hard to recall our infancy and acquisition of language, though that perhaps is a key ingredient of formation of our "person". Perhaps some of the psych students out there can help me with this (references please)?

Appended here is my edited version of the "recall notice", for what it's worth. Comments and feedback would be appreciated, but of course are entirely optional. Some related passages that have stimulated thinking about our connectedness to God and to each other are appended. Of course, my version would need a lot of editing and cutting back to give it the flavor of a true recall notice, but hopefully in my less-than-tight prose draft, the main idea will get through, and a talented writer can improve the delivery without losing the main point - - - namely, The Recall is about being reconnected to the Father, through the Son, and inhabitation by the Holy Spirit, and thus drastically improving our connectedness to one another (a frequently repeated theme in discussions of what "the church" is all about).

These thoughts also help us to understand the problem of a case for monotheism that does not allow for an eternal Being that consists of more than one person (if indeed "person" in isolation is an impossibility). Polytheists may have a field day with this, but on the plane of philosophical thinking (like Solomon's "man under the sun" in Ecclesiastes), Plato dealt decisively with the incoherence of polytheism (and various other incoherences common to the priestly profession in every age) in the Euthyphro dialogue (copy may be found at the following link):


PLATO - Euthyphro Dialogue

Theologically, the entire Old Testament makes the case for monotheism in opposition to the polytheism that was the "norm" in the ancient world, and to which the people of Israel were drawn repeatedly.

An important question for monotheists who buy into the idea that One God contains the possibility (indeed the necessity) of a multi-personal unified Being, and most especially we who are Christian monotheists (do I hear the Muslims and Jews chuckling over this??) is: what is so special about Three? And how does the very striking passage in Proverbs 8, in which Wisdom is given a feminine personality and described as "there at the foundation of the cosmos" (see verses 22-31) fit into this notion (at this point perhaps only the Muslims are still chuckling)? Is there perhaps a Fourth? (and then the question becomes, "What is so special about Four?") Any theological experts out there who can help me with this would be very appreciated if they could direct me to a few references for consideration of this question. In two millenia of Christian theologizing, it has to have come up at least a few times!


NOTICE OF RECALL!!

The Maker of all human beings is recalling all created units , regardless of make, model, or year, to repair a terminally serious defect in the unit’s motivational component, the heart. This defect is due to a malfunction in the original prototype unit. code named Adam and Eve, which resulted in their fatal disconnection from the Maker. As a result of an essential element of the original design, the reproductive function which empowered the original bi-personal being to fulfill the Maker’s purpose, this fatal condition has been inherited by all subsequent units.

This defect has been technically termed, "Subsequent Intentional Non-connection", more commonly known as S.I.N.

Some other symptoms of this failure to remain properly connected to the Maker, according to the Original Intent, include

1. Loss of direction (due to operation of judgmental function contrary to design specifications and limits)
2. Foul vocal emissions (due to internal code reassignments that deface and replace the Maker’s code)
3. Amnesia of origin and purpose (due to disconnection from Maker’s complete eternal information archives)
4. Lack of peace and joy (due to persistent disconnection from the Maker’s presence and fellowship)
5. Selfish (unconnected) behavior, frequently erupting into violent acts destructive both to self and others
6. Depression or confusion in the mental component (due to the many disorders, internal and external,which have followed from the Original Disconnection)
7. Fearfulness(due to the inevitable discovery of the infinite mismatch between the disconnected being’s powers and the awesome forces of both internal and external circumstances, and thus the being’s personal subjection to these forces)
8. Idolatry (self-creation of false, ultimately futile, connections to other elements of the created cosmos in the attempt to remedy the consequences of the missing connection without reference to personal accountability and connection to the Creator)
9. Rebellion (acting contrary to the Maker’s design function and purpose with ruinous consequences)
10. Adultery and Treason Failure to recognize the unity of the bi-personal being and their representation of the Maker, resulting in erosion of personal within-family connections, perpetuation of disconnected and disoriented offspring, distortion of communal connections, accumulation of inter-personal disorders into family dissension, communal iniquity and strife, and warfare between communities and national assemblies of communities.
11. Death Eventual dissolution of the being’s physical substance due to the absence of connection to the organizing and motivating power source which was originally designed to enable the unit and its offspring to persist indefinitely.

The Manufacturer, who is neither liable nor at fault for this self-inflicted defect, is providing factory authorized repair and service free of charge to correct this SIN defect. The Repair Technician, JESUS, has most generously offered to bear the entire burden of the staggering cost of these repairs. There is no additional fee required, since the actual cost is beyond the capacity of any unit to finance; moreover, any attempt to supplement or supplant this free offer with a substitute offer on terms defined by the unit simply perpetuates the condition which the offer is intended to remedy. Thus the free offer is made on an unconditional and un-negotiable basis and cannot be received on any other terms. The number to call for repair in all areas is: P-R-A-Y-E-R. Once connected, please upload your burden of SIN through the REPENTANCE procedure. Next, download ATONEMENT from the Repair Technician, Jesus, into the heart component. No matter how big or small the SIN defect is, and provided that the unit remains connected to the Maker according to the Maker’s specifications, JESUS is empowered to cause the Maker’s Spirit to indwell the unit’s heart, replacing the former contents with:
1. Love
2. Joy
3. Peace
4. Patience
5. Kindness
6. Goodness
7. Faithfulness
8. Gentleness
9. Self control

Please see the operating manual, the B.I.B.L.E. (Believers Instructions Before Leaving Earth), for further details on the use of these fixes according to the Maker’s design specifications.

IMPORTANT NOTE (See I Tim 1: 5-11) Each B.I.B.L.E. user is warned that this manual is specifically designed for units under repair, was not written as a rule book for self-empowerment by undamaged units (a self-refuting concept), and indeed, unless used as intended, could subject misdirected units into a continuation and even intensification of units’ severely damaged condition .

"I AM THE VINE, YOU ARE THE BRANCHES. WITHOUT ME YOU CAN DO NOTHING."

WARNING: Continuing to operate the human being unit without correction voids any manufacturer warranties, exposing the unit to dangers and problems too numerous to list and will result in the human unit being permanently impounded. For free emergency service, call on JESUS.

DANGER: The human being units not responding to this recall action will have to be scrapped in the furnace. The SIN defect will not be permitted to enter Heaven so as to prevent contamination of that facility. Please assist where possible by notifying others of this important recall notice!!! Thank you for your immediate attention.

For a brief Maker’s message concerning the intent towards all damaged units and for a recognition test to assess personal response to the recall offer, see the recall and repair manual notice at John 3:16-21.

THE VERTICAL CONNECTION - MOTIVATED AND TESTED

John 3
16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. 18 "He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. 21 But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God."


THE VERTICAL CONNECTION ILLUSTRATED

John 15
1 "I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. 2 Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away;[a] and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. 3 You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. 4 Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. 5 "I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing. 6 If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned. 7 If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you. 8 By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples.

HORIZONTAL CONNECTIONS THROUGH THE VERTICAL CONNECTION

John 15
9 "As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. 10 If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. 11 "These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. 12 This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. 14 You are My friends if you do whatever I command you. 15 No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you. 17 These things I command you, that you love one another.

Ephesians 5
22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. 24 Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. 25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, 26 that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, 27 that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. 28 So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. 30 For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. 31 "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." 32 This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. 33 Nevertheless let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

"What is truth?" And there Truth was, standing right in front of him.

John 14
1 “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. 2 In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. 4 And where I go you know, and the way you know.” 5 Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

John 18
33 Then Pilate entered the Praetorium again, called Jesus, and said to Him, “Are You the King of the Jews?” 34 Jesus answered him, “Are you speaking for yourself about this, or did others tell you this concerning Me?” 35 Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered You to me. What have You done?” 36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now My kingdom is not from here.” 37 Pilate therefore said to Him, “Are You a king then?” Jesus answered, “You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.” 38 Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?” And when he had said this, he went out again to the Jews, and said to them, “I find no fault in Him at all.

I don't think Ron grasped how strong the impact of these scenes were on his instructor, as they worked through the chapters of the Gospel of John together.This is not surprising because it only sank in very slowly to the one who was being affected by this strange idea: truth is a person, and that person claims a cosmic importance in every other person's life. We are all accountable to the truth, thus defined. This is still a dizzying thought, and yet it made a strange kind of sense, for one steeped in the lore of logic, philosophical and mathematical.

Students of logic come to view truth as an abstract value to be manipulated with the computational machinery of mathematial inference checking in order to determine the validity of an argument that certain propositions have certain properties (true, false or, in some cases, indeterminate). There was always one important constraint, however. The machinery, no matter how elegant and powerful, could never get you started. You had to come to it with a set of provisional axioms and then, if you were fortunate (as Godel discovered in the 1930's only very limited good fortune was to be had) you could establish formally that the axioms were mutually consistent and infer a limited set of consequences from them. But that's all, and even that was not always possible.

So, everyone has to start somewhere. Where to start? Jesus says, "Begin with Me."

John 8
31 Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. 32 And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” 33 They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How can You say, ‘You will be made free’?” 34 Jesus answered them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. 35 And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. 36 Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.

Euler's Identity - "Euclid looked on beauty bare", indeed.

This is one of Analyst_for_Life's favorite mathematical truths, asserting an identity that relates the additive identity, zero; the multiplicative identity, one; the ratio of circumference to diameter in any circle, PI; the imaginary unit, i (aka "the square root of minus one"); and the base of the natural logarithms, e (aka "Euler's Number").

An article at this link:

Euler Identity

does a decent job of explaining the essential background to the identity, pointing the reader to an array of elementary and not-so-elementary topics that are tied together in this remarkable fact. Don't miss the links to extended discussions of the properties and significance of the numbers PI and e .

The fascination with the ability of mathematical investigations to pack massive quantities of beautiful relationships into tiny expressions like this was part of what got Analyst_for_Life hooked on the subject early on, seducing him away from the further study of physics which had been his father's hope for him: a fully crendentialed physicist laboring away at some prominent center of research and graduate study.

But he found physics was far less coherent, indeed he became convinced that physicists had lost their way. Whenever he sought for a lucid, coherent, consistent account of the physical reality behind the confusingly contradictory experimental evidence which is the domain of "modern physics", the answers boiled down to "accept the mathematical description, which resolves the apparent contradiction, and don't try too hard to intepret it or you will just get confused". You might say he finally lost faith in the explanatory power of physical theory. But the mathematics itself was fascinating, beautiful, and apparently went as far as possible in "making sense" of the evidence. So that, for him, became "where it's at" (one of the irritating, ungrammatical youthful code expressions of that time).

In due time, he came up with a few neat new insights (actually just one little insight, combined with some big hairy insights borrowed from earlier students of the subject), packaged it up in a short paper entitled, "On the Transcendence of Certain Exponential Products", and persuaded his review committee to confer a Ph.D for the work just in time to go off to a small Christian liberal arts college and begin professing his favorite subject. The year was 1975: a very good year for Analyst, which also saw the arrival of our middle son. The roaring turbulence in the world around us faded into dim background noise in the face of these outpourings of gracious blessings from our Father, who we had only come to know a short time before.

Perhaps some time there will be a visitor who will laugh at how trivial Euler's identity is. That being is referred to an even more marvelous construct known as the "j-function". Analyst_for_Life will be pondering the content of this for "duration_of_franchise", or later if the issues of eternity allow. That more exalted being may digest the j-function and "move on" to bigger and better things. May it be so, provided that one is well connected to the Creator. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/j-Function.html

Note: I ended up at the above link while searching for some background on the "Monster Group", the foundational "simple group" of greatest cardinality discovered in the multi-decade search for a comprehensive classification of "simple" finite groups, which ended before the start of the 21st century. Apparently this search is still in a controversial stage. A good reference for the "latest and greatest" news on this project is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simple_groups

Laying Foundations

About three months after my birth, a new chapter was opened in an inheritance dispute that had been underway for at least several millenia. The origin of this dispute, between groups of people claiming common descent from the patriarch Abraham, is shrouded in a fog of conflicting claims and historical documents of varying credibility. However, the intensity of the dispute in recent times is beyond question, because the founding of the modern state of Israel at midnight on May 14, 1948 triggered an immediate demonstration as armies from several surrounding Arab states converged to strangle the new state "in its crib". The initial attempt to terminate the new state failed, as have the several followup efforts over the years, but the hostility shows no signs of diminishing 58 years later, and instead is merging with many other such disputes of long standing around the globe to set the stage for what could be another century of conflict even bloodier and more destructive than the worst of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, a few years before this, in fact two days before August 6 1945, the day when an American B29 bomber (affectionately named "Enola Gay" by its crew) inflicted the world's first nuclear bombing on the city of Hiroshima in Japan, my wife was born in a small hospital in Mankato, Minnesota. Her father, a Marine pilot serving in the Pacific, learned about her arrival a few days later by telegram along with news of the surrender of Japan and the formal end of the war. He returned home to continue his military career, graduating from prop driven fighters to jets, serving in Korea and through successive stages of the Cold War up through the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and into the early years of the Vietnam conflict. My wife and her sisters got to know many parts of the country as their family was moved from one air station to another, in North and South Carolina, California, Alabama, and Virginia. As her father retired from military service in 1964 and began a new career as a high school English teacher, she began college where her parents had studied, met, and married, and there she met me.

Over the same period of time, my parents also moved our family around quite a bit, from Princeton New Jersey to Ponca City Oklahoma, to Spokane Washington and finally to St. Paul-Minneapolis Minnesota, as my father found employment in various industrial research facilities contributing his specialized knowledge of solid state physics and the analysis of the atomic structure of matter using the then-new techniques of X-ray crystallography. My parents had saved up as much as they could to help my sister and me pay for a college education, but in my senior year, we were fortunate to hear of a full tuition scholarship offered through an academic competition run by a local school, Hamline University. I entered the competition and became one of the ten winners selected for that year.

So, we both ended up at Hamline University where we met, got to know each other, and married in the summer before my last academic year. We started our family soon after I went off to graduate school , where I studied mathematics in some depth for six years, finishing a Ph.D. and commenced a teaching career as a professor at another local liberal arts college, while wife honed her "estate management" skills (the latest results of which are on display at our homestead, where she designed, lined up the the contractor, closely monitored the work, and finally moved us into our beautiful new home in the fall of 2003 - a true Prov 31 woman!). In the midst of those studies, we encountered Jesus Christ, publicly identified with a local congregation of His church, and thus became involved as interested parties in that third great body of people staking a claim to the inheritance promised to the patriarch Abraham - the Christian congregation, the Body of Christ. Since that time, we have been working out the implications of that claim and its meaning for our lives.

This blog is one more attempt to pursue that meaning in a more productive way, and thus discover and fulfill the purpose of our lives. Wife is way ahead of me, having written and published (to our extended family) an autobiography that, so far, runs to several hundred pages of text.