Philosophy and the Sandwich

The thesis is taking most of my time, but I remembered an interesting interaction I had several years ago and thought to commit it to the cloud.

I was invited to a UCSD Philosophy Club discussion regarding theodicy, or the supposed problem of an apparent contradiction between an omnipotent, benevolent God and the existence of evil. While not getting into this pointless debate too much, I'd like to make two observations.

First, every time I hear this matter come up, I am dumbfounded at the consistent lack of defining the terms before the discussion. What is "good"? What is "evil"? It is always assumed that everyone present knows what these terms mean, but how can you debate good and evil, let alone God, without defining the terms?

Second, at this particular discussion, I created a peculiar metaphor for our discussion that goes as follows. It was like we were sitting around a table with a cover on it, and the proposition being debated was the existence of a sandwich underneath the cover. The Christians at the debate, believing in the sandwich because many of them had tasted it at one time or another, argued strongly for its existence. The atheists, never before having tasted the sandwich, argued that it could not possibly exist. However, no one simply lifted up the cover, picked up the sandwich, and took a bite. That's what I would have done, and that is what I would encourage any aspiring philosophers to do. Eat the sandwich; then you'll know once and for all whether or not it exists.

Finally, to the aspiring philosophers, should any actually find this post: don't summarize philosophy, do philosophy. I could not believe how much of that pointless debate was the summarizing and quoting of previous philosophers' works, and how little was actual synthesized ideas from the participants.

Grandpa in Pictures

See part 1 for the story of Grandpa.



Grandpa and me





Grandpa, Jen, and me

Being Preserved

all verse links are to the Recovery Version for comparison

In a copy of the NIV with footnotes written by Charles Ryrie:
Gal. 3:16

The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The Scripture does not say "and to seeds," meaning many people, but "and to your seed," meaning one person, who is Christ. (NIV)

The note on this verse says:

seed. Since Paul's argument here is based on the singular form of the word in the OT (Gen. 22:17-18), he must have believed in the accuracy of the very words of Scripture.

Ryrie goes on to use this and another example from Matthew to explain the inerrancy of every word in the Bible—even singular, plural, or tenses of words are important.

However, when we come to 1 Thessalonians 5:23 or Hebrews 4:12,

spirit, soul and body should not be understood as defining the parts of man, but as representing the whole man.

Such is the contradiction by those who insist that man is merely two parts—body and soul (which is supposedly the same as the spirit)—and ignore or explain away the many verses in the Bible that speak of the three parts of man. In Greek, spirit is pneuma and soul is psuche, two distinct words. So according to the fact that every word of the Bible is God-breathed and inerrant, soul and spirit should refer to two distinct parts of man. The tendency to confuse the two is even apparent in the translation of the NIV in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 referred to above—the conjunction and is removed from between "spirit" and "soul," although it is unquestionably there in the original Greek text.

More important that simply being correct on this doctrinal point, however, is the idea put forth in the verses from 1 Thessalonians 5 that we must be preserved in all three parts of our being. Verse 23 uses two marvelous words, "(sanctify you) wholly" and "(be preserved) complete," to speak about this preservation. From the footnote, and explained in more depth in Life-study of 1 Thessalonians messages 23 and 24, wholly is quantitative and complete is qualitative. Therefore, we must not only know that we have three parts—spirit, soul, and body—but we must go on to know our three parts and open to the Lord that they be sanctified wholly and preserved completely.

Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs

Creative consultation by Jolene

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Goldilocks. She lived in the woods with her father, who was an inventor. One of his inventions was a time machine. But she wasn't allowed to play in it. However, Goldilocks didn't always obey, and she was very curious.

So one day, when she was playing with her dog, her dog jumped into the time machine, and she climbed in to get him. But he jumped out to go chase his ball. She was about to climb out of the time machine, but she noticed that there was a spot on one of the buttons. Not wanting to leave it dirty, she started to wipe the spot off, but as it came off, the button accidentally depressed and started the time machine. Before she could climb out, the time machine went back 150 million years to the Age of the Dinosaurs.

Goldilocks climbed out of the time machine and heard a noise coming from the trees to her left. As she poked her head through some bushes, she saw a clearing, and right in the middle was a small Allosaurus. He had his leg caught in some logs and was trying to get it out.

Goldilocks walked over to him and said, "Hello." the Baby Allosaurus replied, "Can you help me get my leg out?" Goldilocks said, "Sure," and proceeded to wiggle his leg loose from the logs in which it was trapped. Just as the leg came loose, there was a terrible crashing and two larger Allosaurus came through the trees, roaring loudly. Goldilocks began to be a bit frightened, but the Baby Allosaurus looked at the larger dinosaurs and called, "Hi Daddy, hi Mommy, this person just helped me get my leg out." Goldilocks looked up at the fearsome predators and said, "Nice to meet you, my name is Goldilocks."

The smaller of the two adult dinosaurs replied, "I am the Mommy Allosaurus and this is the Daddy Allosaurus. Thank you for helping our Baby Allosaurus free his leg."

"You're welcome," said Goldilocks.

"We were about to get dinner," said the Baby Allosaurus, "would you like to join us?"

Goldilocks said she would and she followed the three carnivores as they stalked and caught a stegosaurus. After a delicious meal of stegosaurus steaks. Goldilocks said she had to be going and made her way back to the time machine. After getting in and going back to the instant she left, she realized that she had forgotten her camera and hadn't taken any pictures of her new friends.

Grandpa

8/28/1919 to 11/26/2009

While many pages could be written about what Grandpa accomplished in his lifetime of over ninety years, one memory stands out to me.

Jen and I were visiting him and Grandma Dorothy several summers ago, about a year after we had finished the full-time training in Anaheim. On our way to Corning, I asked the Lord how Grandpa was with Him. I didn't know how to bring up the subject with someone so much older than me, and whom I respected to the uttermost. So as he and I were sitting on the sofa while Jen and Grandma Dorothy were off doing something else, I wanted to say something, but didn't know what.

That's when Grandpa turned to me and said something like, "You know, Ben, I feel like the Lord has been taking care of me my whole life."

I was first amazed, and then thankful to the Lord for answering my earlier prayer. Grandpa proceeded to tell me of an experience he had while in the Air Force, flying a large cargo plane. While flying in formation, the pilot to his left began to roll right too early, heading directly for Grandpa's plane. Grandpa gave it power and pulled up as fast as he could in a plane that large, causing the two to miss by less than 50 feet. Once on the ground, the other pilot was devastated thinking of the accident he had almost caused, but Grandpa was stern yet forgiving.

What was even more impressive than this story was how Grandpa's comment reflected the end of the life of another man of God, Jacob. Genesis 48:15-16 says:

And he blessed Joseph and said, The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, The God who has shepherded me all my life to this day, The Angel who has redeemed me from all evil, bless the boys; And may my name be named on them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; And may they be a teeming multitude in the midst of the earth.

Praise the Lord who both shepherded Jacob all his life, and who took care of Grandpa his whole life.

Every time we visited Grandpa in the last decade of his life, he always had a new story to tell me, one I had never heard before. And the final time we saw him, this past summer, he got to meet his Great-grandson, who shares his middle name, Jesse, and who is the first boy of his generation to bear the last name Gallarda.

Thank You, Lord, for Grandpa.

Windows 7

...or 6.1?

I skipped Vista (except for one machine in the lab that we have to run it on because a certain bit of microscopy software won't work with anything else). By the way, even on a pretty high-powered Dell Precision 690 workstaion with 12 GB of RAM and a medium/high-end Nvidia graphics card, Vista (64-bit) is still slow, annoying, and about as painful to use as Windows 98 on Jen's 233 MHz Pentium laptop she used in college. But this post isn't about Vista, it is about how much better Windows 7 is than Vista.

Since the Windows 7 Beta was released to the public on 1/9/09, I've ignored the advice not to run this on production machines and installed it on the second partition of my MacBook Pro. Through the Beta, the Release Candidate, and now with the RTM freshly installed, I've gotten the feeling that Windows 7 is finally giving Mac OS X a run for it's money (that is, until 10.6 came out). A few observations:

1. Windows 7 is way faster than Vista, and is even faster than Windows XP on my machine.
2. From the Beta through the RTM, it has been the most stable version of Windows I've ever used. I even ran a data analysis loop using IGOR Pro overnight and it didn't crash.
3. The windows management—docking right, left, and top; aero previews, etc.—is actually a bit superior to the Mac. I really like being able to throw one window to the right of the screen and one to the left in order to compare their contents side-by-side. This works especially well on multiple monitors.
4. Taskbar and Start Menu search make organizing and finding applications and files incredibly easy—comparable to Quicksilver on the Mac.
5. Much like Mac OS X, there are just a lot of incremental changes that show that the developers paid good attention to detail to enhance the overall experience.
   

I'm still convinced that running Windows 7 on a MacBook Pro is best. The Mac still has a few design advantages over PCs that make it easier to use (like two-finger scrolling on the touchpad instead of that annoying side-scroll strip). But Windows 7 as a product is easily as good as Mac OS 10.5. With the advent of 10.6, Apple still seems to be one step ahead, integrating higher performance features into the OS in a user-friendly way—just check out the new services for an example. Not to mention that it is way easier to backup Windows from another partition (the Mac OS X one) on the same machine than from within Windows itself.

In sum, Windows 7 is a huge step in the right direction for Microsoft and upgrading from Windows XP was a no-brainer.

Snow Leopard

Or Mac OS X 10.6.

It's out, it's been reviewed, so I'll add a simple comment.

Perhaps this is Apple's way of compromising with PowerPC users. If you have an older Mac, you are still able to run Leopard (10.5), an awesome operating system with great features and performance. You can't upgrade to Snow Leopard though, because it is Intel only. But, Snow Leopard doesn't include all the new features that differentiated 10.5 from 10.4; in fact, most of it's touted features are aimed at the higher-powered Intel-based machines (Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL). Therefore, if you are still using a PowerPC Mac, you shouldn't be too put out by not being able to use Snow Leopard, and should stay happy running one of the best operating systems ever, Leopard, on an older machine.

Finally, the last PowerPC-based Macs were made around 2006, so by the time 10.7 or whatever is next rolls around, it will be high time to buy a new machine to take advantage of it.

Image by Ltshears;
and can be found at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Snow_Leopard_Louisville_Zoo.jpg