Let's not forget we have a Foe!

It's the feast day of St. Michael - the day we ought to recall that we have a dangerous Foe working against us...

Speaking of Lucifer, one thinks of Michael, a name which means “who is like God.” It is also a hallowed shorthand, telling perhaps less of God than of Lucifer's daring and downfall. Lucifer wanted to play God. How an angel can do that is a question for which answers, very speculative to be sure, may be found in the writings of an Aquinas or a Maritain. All such answers rest on considering angelic nature, pure intellects, whose cognition has three main features. The mode of that cognition is intuitive, its origin is innate, and its operation is independent of things. The Cartesian theory of errorless human knowledge is expressed in exactly the same terms. It should not be surprising that a man, believing himself to be capable of knowing in such a way, should try to play God. Descartes tried to do this in the only sense in which a poor mortal can do it, namely, to dictate to God how to go about the business of creation.
[Jaki, Angels, Apes, and Men 15-16]

Let the scientific enquirer continue to cultivate the patience of science. Let him linger - at any rate let me linger - in the place of popular entertainment whatever it may be, and take very careful note (if necessary in a note-book) of the way in which ordinary human beings do really talk about each other. As he is a scientific enquirer with a note-book, it is very likely that he never saw any ordinary human beings before. But if he will listen carefully, he will observe a certain tone taken towards friends, foes and acquaintances; a tone which is, on the whole, creditably genial and considerate, though not, without strong likes and dislikes. He will hear abundant if sometimes bewildering allusion to the well-known weaknesses of Old George; but many excuses also, and a certain generous pride in conceding that Old George is quite the gentleman when drunk, or that he told the policeman off proper. Some celebrated idiot, who is always spotting winners that never, win, will be treated with almost tender derision; and, especially among the poorest, there will be a true Christian pathos in the reference to those who have been "in trouble" for habits like burglary and petty larceny. And as all these queer types are called up like ghosts by the incantation of gossip, the enquirer will gradually form the impression that there is one kind of man, probably only one kind of man, perhaps, only one man, who is really disliked. The voices take on quite a different tone in speaking of him; there is a hardening and solidification of disapproval and a new coldness in the air. And this will be all the more curious because, by the current modern theories of social or anti-social action, it will not be at all easy to say why he should be such a monster; or what exactly is the matter with him. It will be hinted at only in singular figures of speech, about a gentleman who is mistakenly convinced that he owns the street; or sometimes that he owns the earth. Then one of the social critics will say, "'E comes in 'ere and 'e thinks 'e's Gawd Almighty." Then the scientific enquirer will shut his note-book with a snap and retire from the scene, possibly after paying for any drinks he may have consumed in the cause of social science. He has got what he wanted. He has been intellectually justified. The man in the pub has precisely repeated, word for word, the theological formula about Satan.
[GKC "If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach" in The Common Man]

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle! Protect us, our families, our countries, and help us do our work well, to the glory of God. Do not let us walk into our labs or classrooms thinking we are God Almighty...

GKC on the Mystery of Observation

I had no time to arrange a posting this week on our topic, so I will just give you this important excerpt from a Chesterton essay.
--Dr. Thursday

I have seen with my own eyes in print all the above explanations of the Sea-Serpent as seen by sailors. They are all perfectly plausible and typically modern; they all only forget one thing: that it would be just as easy to apply this distributive and disruptive process to any other object that had only been momentarily seen on some score of occasions. When first the giraffe was described by travellers it was treated as a lie. Now it is in the Zoological Gardens; but it still looks like a lie. If few save stray travellers had seen the thing, and if the scientists (for some muddle-headed reason of theirs) had decided to doubt it, it would have been quite easy for them to explain every alleged appearance in the same way. There might be a tall python with a stretched neck just behind a horse with a hidden and sunken head: this might give the impression of a quadruped with a dreadfully long neck. There might be an animal with a long nose and pointed ears peering from the top of a lonely and leafless tree: this might give the impression, in certain lights and shades, of a tall vertebral column terminating in an ovine face. There are no limits to these coincidences of illusion on land or at sea; but we have the right to ask two questions of those who actually use them as an argument against the possible existence of giraffes. We have a right to ask, first, why all these coincidences tend to create the image of a giraffe? And we have a right to ask, secondly, why the dickens there should not be such a thing as a giraffe?
[GKC ILN October 21 1911 CW29:176-7]

Yeah - interesting, even if humorous, isn't it?

Now, to help you out - kindly print these out in a nice, fairly large font, and post it somewhere for you and others to read and think about:

When first the giraffe was described by travellers it was treated as a lie.

Now it is in the Zoological Gardens; but it still looks like a lie.

--G. K. Chesterton, 1911



One of the severest tests
of a scientific mind
is to discern the limits
of the legitimate application
of scientific methods.

--J. C. Maxwell, 1878

In order to consider the Scientific Method, we must first consider what Science is

I wrote a lot yesterday, in the tactile sense (pen and paper) and have only just begun to transcribe it... it will come in fragments, just as it is fragmentary in its character. But it helps move us along. And so, let us begin...

In order to examine this topic of the "Scientific Method", we first need to consider what "Science" is. As big as our chosen topic is, as argumentative as it may be, the matter of "science" is even larger and more argumentative.
This is neither a New Thig, nor one which has arisen from the usual issues blamed for "new" things, such as:
1. The Renaissance
2. The Protestant Reformation
3. The "Enlightenment" (which some of us call the Endarkenment)
4. The "rise of science"
5. The Industrial Revolution
6. Quantum Mechanics
7. Modern - that is, 20th and 21st century life.
and so on...

Why? Simply because the question as to What Is Science dates as far back as the 1200s, or even further.

For over 800 years, people have been debating on "science" - its definitions, its divisions and order, its methods... and even more amazing, these were people who
1. were friends
2. were quite orthodox in their belief and behavior, and not in any sense "protestant" (Though I think they were Reformers in the best sense, that is, in the sense of John the Baptist: they not only wished but worked to reform their lives, which we are all called to do.)
3. were authentic believers but at the same time they were "scientists" (if I may be permitted to use the term before we've defined it - we computer scientists do this, and I will talk about that another time.)

That is, these people wished to consider seriously the reality of things and apply their intellects - and indeed their whole energy - to understanding at least a little of that reality.




(to be continued)

note: three references on this topic I have here with me are:

1. The Division and Method of the Sciences - St. Thomas Aquinas' commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius, tr. Armand Maurer
2. Science and Creation inthe Middle Ages by Nicholas Steneck (this considers the work of Henry of Langenstein (d. 1397) on Genesis.
3. The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor tr. with notes by Jerome Taylor

An Important Comment

Alan Aversa posted the following comment which is worth its own entry in our records:

This site has a whole collection of his online works. There is also a very nice OCRed and formatted PDF version of his La théorie physique, son objet, sa structure (1906).

Paul Needham has just produced the first full-length translation of one of Pierre Duhem's scientific works: Commentary on the Principles of Thermodynamics by Pierre Duhem. From its preface:

Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (1861–1916) held the chair of physics (changed to chair of theoretical physics in 1895) at Bordeaux from 1894 to his death. He established a reputation in both the history and philosophy of science as well as in science (physics and physical chemistry). His pioneering work in medieval science opened up the area as a new discipline in the history of science, and his La théorie physique (Duhem 1906) is a classic in the philosophy of science which is still read and discussed today. Although his work in these two fields is now well represented in English with a number of translations that have appeared in recent decades (Duhem 1892b, 1903, 1902, 1905–1906, 1906, 1908, 1915, 1985, 1996), there is little of his scientific work available in English. The original manuscript of Duhem (1898) was translated by J. E. Trevor, one of the editors of The Journal of Physical Chemistry, for its first issue. But his work almost invariably appeared in French. The present volume contains translations of some of his important early work in thermodynamics, which I hope will contribute to a more balanced picture in English of the breadth of Duhem’s publications and provide a further source of insight into his thought.

Thanks, Alan! I've not had time to check any of this out, perhaps later. I would like to learn French also, but I have no time. Besides, PD's work is too important for it to remain in French.

About what we have seen... or haven't seen

So, Doctor (you are thinking to yourself) with all this odd meditation about reason and faith (or trust) and principles, have you not lost your way? Aren't you trying to understand a little more about the scientific method? Or have you decided to write about something else?

Thank you, my dear reader. you are helping me stay on track. but I do wish to point out, that for me, like Chesterton, "My trouble is that I never can really feel that there is such a thing as a different subject. There is no such thing as an irrelevant thing in the universe; for all things in the universe are at least relevant to the universe." [GKC ILN Feb 17 1906 CW27:125-6] Which is another one of those priceless gems we ought to keep as a lovely posting on the walls of our labs and classrooms, whether they be philosophy or physics, theology or automata theory...

But really I rather expected you to quote Chesterton's famous groan from his readers: "But why does Mr. Chesterton drag in his Roman Catholicism?" [See GKC's The Thing CW3:227]

Yeah - why does Dr. Thursday always drag in HIS Roman Catholicism? Well... today, I will annoy you even more, and drag in, not a papal encyclical, but two other curious source books. Even if you are not annoyed you will be surprised.

The first is to be found among the very remarkable collection of texts classed as "Children's Fantasy" or "Fairy Tale". We know that this is wise, since no less an authority than GKC relies on these for building his argumentation about science and other matters - an argument which is well worth your study. It is found in the chapter called "The Ethics of Elfland" in his 1908 masterwork called Orthodoxy. Note that a sizeable chunk of that chapter was quoted in the 1957 work called Great Essays in Science, edited by the very famous Martin Gardner. The anomaly of this is discussed at length in Jaki's Chesterton: A Seer of Science, a book that every scientist and philosopher ought to have, and ought to read periodically, as a sanity check. If someday (please God) our Duhem Society becomes a tangible reality, I hope we might have an entire conference on this book. It ought to be germinating, and fructifying into new and useful things...

But, as I said, I wish to examine a line from one particular text, and no, it is not Chesterton, nor Jaki, nor Gardner. It is from the work of another famous children's writer, E. Nesbit, and it is incredibly relevant to our topic - in some ways, it is the entirety of our topic, even though it is nothing more than a question. Believe me, I was stunned when I read it. Here it is:

"Do you think there's nothing in the world but what you've seen?"
[E. Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle, 16-7]

Well... we might just write Q.E.D., dust off our hands, and proceed to the next topic. But we won't, since there's more to say, and another item from another book to consider.

So let's take it again, slowly: Do we think there's nothing in the world but what we've seen? Well... let's be honest, which is the First Virtue of a scientist. The obvious answer is No - we are certain - more certain perhaps of this truth than of any other - that there is more, indeed, far more, in the world than what we have seen. And my God, we ought to be happy, grateful, joyful beyond words. The old maps were wrong: ne plus ultra = "nothing more beyond" was just a bit of tongue-in-cheek hubris on the part of the map-maker. We may not have travelled to the last shores, the "final frontier" - but we've already seen such sights as to beckon onwards to ever-new vistas. Science writ large... it is that glorious line from Newman:

There is but one thought greater than that of the universe, and that is the Thought of its Maker.
[Newman, The Idea of a University Part II Chapter VIII Christianity and Scientific Investigation, 3]

(Yes, if time permits, we shall examine that chapter - indeed, that book in detail, but not today. Let us proceed.)

If we are honest, we scientists will admit to being very childlike. Consider this very insightful comment about children's literature, and see what it reveals about scientific literature:

A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales - because they find them romantic.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:257]

Scientists like realistic tales - yes, because we find them romantic. Did I not quote for you that other famous line from the same book about "The greatest of poems is an inventory." [Ibid CW1:267] Is there not some mystic magic in the Periodic Table, or in the vast splendors of biological taxonomy? Of course... and they reveal to us things that we have not yet seen. How many chemists believe in praseodymium - or in californium? Have you seen them? Or biologists - even marine biologists - who have seen the glories of the orders of cubomedusae and stauromedusae and antipatharia?

Perhaps Jesus also referred to us scientists when He told Thomas that "blessed are they that have not seen and have believed." [John 20:29]

We have more - much more - to say on this, since as we have pointed out, this is our topic. But we need to clarify the topic before we can hope to proceed.

Now, alas - I must muddy the waters, for I will turn from the sound and simple lore of children's books to a thoroughly technical reference dictionary on archaeology, edited by Ruth Whitehouse. No, I am not going to be critical - or at least not of that text; I am not in any position to critique it. Rather, I want to quote a wonderful line I found in it, a line which bears directly upon our topic, and is in some way the corollary to the Nesbit question mentioned above. (It also is very Chestertonian, and I may try to give a short excursus on that in a future post, it deserves it.) The line appeas in the entry for model, and is definitely an editorial augmentation, but its truth is inarguable, and it deserves to be highlighted, considered, remembered:

...all archaeological processes are strictly untestable, because they have already happened...
[Whitehouse, ed. The Facts On File Dictionary of Archaeology, 332]

That statement reveals so much - as I said, the counterpoint to the Nesbit dictum. There are certain things which are going to be forever out of our reach.

But blessed are we who have not seen, and yet believe... Such is Science. Clearly we have much to disentangle, but we need to keep these ideas very clearly in front of us, lest we fall by pride into thinking we have seen everything, or can test everything. Thank God for Maxwell, who told us to seek out the limits of the scientific method - and if we are to do that, we need to understand just what it is we are doing.

We'll stop here; there's a lot to think about. I hope you will ponder these matters, and find yourself stimulated to a greater enthusiasm in our work.

"Take my word for it"

Yes, we are continuing our discussion of the "Scientific Method" - and I understand that so far I have only given what might be a disjoint collection of notes that might get worked up into something more coherent someday. I ought to reassure you: I do have some ideas on getting to the topic in a more "scientific" fashion, but I prefer to give you some jottings now, lest I get busy again, and lose the opportunity.

Indeed, I am quite aware of the central lacuna: the fact that I have not yet even stated what this "Scientific Method" is! Though you may have some ideas, and are of course enough of a scholar to understand the absic sense of these two words joined together: A "method" is something "a way (metHOD comes from Greek hodos = "way") or technique or approach to getting something done - and "scientific" obviously means that whatever is getting done is getting done in one of the branches of Science - physics, chemistry,and so on. But no, we are still not ready to define it yet.

Rather, I want to examine a different word today - that pesky word "faith" which always comes up, either directly or indirectly - and is present, either obviously or latently, in everything. As we well know, the problem that arises in treating of the matter of "faith" comes from it being a stand-in pronoun or assumed euphemism for "religion" or "worship" - something abstract and personal, and hence not useful for "getting something done" - which is what Science (and a fortiori Engineering) is all about.

But really, we need to begin to see "faith" as having a solidity like a foundation - something providing a greater agreement, not a greater quarrel - and it may help if we take one of its synonyms and consider using a word like "trust" or "confidence".

You might not like that last, since it is a sneaky way of hiding faith in a Latin disguise (fide). That's all right - then stick with "trust". Now, let us proceed.

Very much of our lives - and very much of Science and Engineering - depends upon Trust. That is, accepting the truth of a statement - whether from a person (verbally) or from a publication (in print, be it tactile or electronic) - for no other reason than we trust that source as being reliable. I have already pointed out that every one of us begins our work by relying upon a very large foundation of unquestioned truths, namely the complex system we call "language". Coupled with language is another, rather vague system - which I feel must be compared rather like the vagus nerve compares with the spinal cord - it handles some very critical matters which are not exactly language, but are not entirely separated from it either. The usual term for this system is "common sense", though I may be abusing the term. Chesterton often refers to it under that name, though sometimes he calls it "logic". It is somehow allied with the nature of "semantics" - with the basic meanings of words, not so much inthe pure grammatical sense, but in the reasoning sense. It is why we know there's something wrong (or funny) about the phrase "eating a lavender adverb" and so forth. To frame this point another way: we receive from our parents and elementary teachers our own native speaking and writing tongue. (There's a curious juxtaposition, isn't it? a "writing tongue".) But we also receive a treasury of information - some of it received perhaps from chance interactions as children, some from our own experiences (and more on that another time, since it leads to our major topic!) But it is received, and we take it as given.

Why?

It is enshrined in a famous phrase. "Take my word for it." This is what we do, simply because we are in need. Now, it would be delightful to go into how this ties into Subsidiarity - since it is precisely here that even as children we invoke that great principle, appealing to another to supply us in our needs - but that will take us too far afield. Let us remain in the idea of taking someone's word - and consider that a little more regarding our topic, that of Trust.


Now, that trust may be just as reliable in an unbeliever as in a believer - and that trust may point in either direction, never relying upon or being defeated by any particular issue of religious belief or form of worship:

I am an atheist; I have no god to call on for those who will not take my word. But I tell you in the name of every root of honour that may be left to a soldier and a man...
[GKC "The Resurrection Of Father Brown" in The Incredulity of Father Brown]

What, then, is required? As we examine the matter, it seems to me to require three attributes:

1. The words of the statement must actually communicate something meaningful, that is, by the suporting foundation of the already-accepted system of language.

The first truth involved is a truism, but a truism often as little understood as any mystery. It is that the artist is a person who communicates something. He may communicate it more or less easily and quickly; he may communicate it to a larger or smaller number of people. But it is a question of communication and not merely of what some people call expression. Or rather, strictly speaking, unless it is communication it is not expression. A signalman cannot be said to express the fact that the Scotch Express is coming from York, if he communicates the fact that it has broken down at Newcastle. A messenger cannot be said to express his sorrow at a king having been shot, if he only succeeds in communicating the news that he has been crowned. The word "expression" implies that something appears as what it really is; and that the thing that is recognised outside is the same that has been realised inside.
[GKC ILN Nov 27 1926 CW34:206-7]

2. The concept must form a unity with our understanding of Reality according to "common sense".

...the line between legitimate and illegitimate expansion of a word is so difficult to draw, that there is little to be gained by questioning it except that mere quarrel about a word that is called logomachy. There always are some confusions about a definition or exceptions to a rule. The great principle that Pigs is Pigs does not dispose entirely of the existence of pig-iron, or of cannibals calling a man a long pig. We all know the plain practical man, the sceptic in the crowd, the atheist on the soap-box, who boasts that he calls a spade a spade, and generally calls it a spyde. But even he may have to deal with the learned and sophisticated man, who will prove to him, that even in the case of the ace of spades which he planks down in playing poker, the spade is not really a spade; being derived from the Spanish espada, a sword. If once we begin to quibble and quarrel about what words ought to mean, or can be made to mean, we shall find ourselves in a mere world of words, most wearisome to those who are concerned with thoughts.
[GKC "The Hound of Heaven" in The Common Man]

3. The person giving this statement must be trustworthy. Typically there must be some reason for us to grant, at least provisionally, the dignity of listening to what the man has to say. Often, that's because we have already had experience with that speaker, and have found him reliable in the past - and as we find our trust validated, we gain an increasing respect for his accuracy. (Even when on rare instances we find he has made a mistake in his statement, we are more willing to let it pass - but that is also another topic.)

When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say "My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truths that flowers smell." No: you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father, it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine...
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:360]

Yes, I know I quoted that before, but it's well worth pondering. We do find our reliance growing as the statements of an authority are verified, again and again, by experience... and this is something we will consider more later.


Now, it is well worth pausing here and considering something - again, something unusual, which is all to easy to overlook - that is, the idea of trusting ourselves. It would be quite as dangerous to Science (and to many other things) if we somehow factor ourselves INTO the equations or experiments...

Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test. It is not pride to wish to do well, or even to look well, according to a real test. It is pride to think that a thing looks ill, because it does not look like something characteristic of oneself. Now in the general clouding of clear and abstract standards, there is a real tendency today for a young man (and even possibly a young woman) to fall back on that personal test, simply for lack of any trustworthy impersonal test. No standard being sufficiently secure for the self to be moulded to suit it, all standards may be moulded to suit the self. But the self as a self is a very small thing and something very like an accident. Hence arises a new kind of narrowness; which exists especially in those who boast of breadth. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all.
[GKC "If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach" in The Common Man]

Also, in our delight with machines - oh, how silly we are, using these machines to communicate, and yet we can also find reliance in them, just as we do not stop at every bridge to check its stability - and what tools might we use? How would we check those tools? Well, we need to consider another of Chesterton's warnings, from his famous detective story about the "lie detector":

"...Isn't that better evidence than a lot of gabble from witnesses: the evidence of a reliable machine? "

"You always forget," observed his companion, "that the reliable machine always has to be worked by an unreliable machine."

"Why, what do you mean?" asked the detective.

"I mean Man," said Father Brown, "the most unreliable machine I know of."
[GKC "The Mistake of the Machine" in The Wisdom of Father Brown]

Let us conclude with this brilliant observation:

Science can analyse a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but science cannot analyse any man's wish for a pork-chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love of the beautiful. The man's desire for the pork-chop remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven. All attempts, therefore, at a science of any human things, at a science of history, a science of folk-lore, a science of sociology, are by their nature not merely hopeless, but crazy. You can no more be certain in economic history that a man's desire for money was merely a desire for money than you can be certain in hagiology that a saint's desire for God was merely a desire for God. And this kind of vagueness in the primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final blow to anything in the nature of a science. Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.
[GKC Heretics CW1:117]

Our First Contest

(I ought to have done this yesterday, for Fr. Jaki's birthday; I apologise.)

Announcing the first contest of the Duhem Society!

The Genesis One Contest

As we all know, the first chapter of Genesis is the summary or "Great Creation" story - as compared to that in Genesis 2 which talks mostly about Adam and Eve and the garden. We also know that this is one of the major bones of contention when it comes to any sort of discussion about science (writ either large or small) and faith (also writ either large or small). It's sad, since (as GKC might say) it's stingless for the most orthodox. Ah well. Perhaps you already have a copy of SLJ's Genesis One Through the Ages, which gives a great deal of interesting information about the topic; as with most such topics, it comes up in many of SLJ's books. You also ought to have read (or at least seen our posting) about the very critical comments by St. Augustine from his own work on the topic - see here for the reference.

Anyway, the contest is a rather tongue-in-cheek affair, though one which ought to be attempted by every serious Historian of Science, just as a corrective against assuming too much - or too little. It is a writing exercise, and yet it should be fun, and very interesting and instructive.

Here it is:

The Genesis One Contest

Write a comprehensive statement of Creation which includes all things, and indicates not only the entire system of physical things, but also stresses their origin. (Who, and How - you decide how to proportion it all, as long as What is "everything" = "all things visible and invisible".)

You may use whatever style you wish, but you are restricted to under 759 words - which is (at least by one estimate) the number of words in Genesis One. You need not work out a division into verses, unless of course you use a poetic form.

In order to enter, you may submit it to me by e-mail (see my "profile" for the e-address), or you may post it on your own blogg, then send me a link to it. If you use e-mail, let me know whether you will permit your entry to be posted on our Society blogg.

Note that this exercise is not to prove anything (except perhaps to you, the entrant). We will not impose historico-critical analysis, or doctrinal verity, or any of those formalisms to your submission; you must be the final arbiter: when you are done you will have to find yourself satisfied - and be able to say as God did, that it is indeed VERY good. (If you're not, wait a year, revise it, and try again!)

Due by September 23 - that is, Before the Fall. (hee hee)

An aside: if you think that this seems to suggest that there might be more to Genesis One than a rather liturgical "emphasis on the seven-day week and the holiness of the Sabbath" - well, I think that's plain, especially once one reads the relevant chapter. But then SLJ does say a lot more than that; it's always a matter of emphasis. And let's not forget what St. Augustine says about it!) Maybe it's because I'm an architect of systems, and that last line about how God saw the System of All Things as very good... well, you write enough fiction (or software), and you'll begin to understand that such writing is a lot different than purely academic commentary. I am sure it will be a shock to some, but there is such a thing as Reality. Ahem. But that's just an aside.

I hope this will be an annual activity. Please enter early and often. I make no guarantees about any sort of prizes, but I am sure the fun you have writing it, and the fun we'll have reading it will be worth more. Perhaps someday when we have our journal, we'll also be able to have real (tangible) prizes.