Editor's Section




Abstract Stuff

In Our Method we said that much of Christian theology has been shaped by Greek thought. And we encouraged site visitors to do some exploration of their own. The internet has given us an extremely useful tool for this kind of learning. So, we prefer to encourage the use of the internet as a means for learning at a more personalized pace and at a level that suits each person individually. We will also offer the opinion that this kind of hyperlink learning is really far better than the traditional school linear approach. Certainly the more gifted reader will do this instinctively. This is perhaps the reason that gifted children are viewed as disruptive in regular school classes. When introduced to a new subject the gifted child (and adult) immediately sets up a template in their mind and the template has a sequence. The sequence is important to the gifted person and the template's Field 1 has to be filled in before their mind can progress to the next step. Traditional linear teaching does not always allow for this (and gifted people will know this is an understatement!)

Hypertext linking allows the gifted person to fill in the fields of their template in the sequence that suits them, although not necessarily at the pace they would like. We suggest this method is something that would benefit everyone, not just the gifted. In fact, we would hope that state run schooling would one day see this and learn to teach children that it is good to become aware of the templates their minds create. This plus computers could make school a much more rewarding and achieving experience. It would also move schooling away from the mould pressing we saw in our look at Romans 12:2 and get it to a metamorphosis process.

So, what is all the fuss about? We can be pretty sure the universe has not changed the way it does business during the last few decades, but the way we view the universe most certainly has. Has mind therefore changed? I think yes. I give my views on mind, what mind is and how it develops and behaves in the Emergence page. But I also need to say that these views are not and cannot be the ultimate views. I say this because we so often see a publicized progression of careers, speeches, books and websites from someone or other's breakthrough or revelation. They claim to have reached the ultimate. They have their fifteen minutes of fame and then they fade and the next star begins to shine. Perhaps it would help if we could learn to qualify our comments by saying simply that this is how we see things now. The future is, after all, the future. Isn't it?

The way we perceive the universe forms our thoughts of the possible. In turn our thoughts give rise to possible new methodologies and we begin to plan. This is the process of reification. Romantically, we might call it the process whereby dreams come true. It is the process whereby concepts are materialized.

An example: When Einstein gave us relativity he opened up a whole new way of conceptualizing the universe. It was abstract and difficult to imagine. But from this others thought of new possibilities and new methods of engineering. We all know the atomic bomb and then the hydrogen bomb came from this. Thoughts are very fine scale parts of the universe and they can feed back on the universe with profound, if localized, effect. Relativity did not remain abstract for long.

For the universe the feedback of fission may not be all that significant. There's already enough fission in the universe. We live, after all, on a small planet orbiting a medium sized star, one of billions in a galaxy that in turn is just one of - well, how many? So, at the far end of the universe a bit of fission here doesn't matter all that much.

But fission mattered a great deal to the people of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl, and it matters today to children living near nuclear power plants who contract leukemia and it matters to children where depleted uranium ordnance has been used. At our small end of the universe we see in this example the feedback of thought onto the larger system. Reification in the material.

This should bring home the importance of having appropriate thinking tools.

In my view, Christians have not paid sufficient attention to the relation of their thinking tools to their works, nor even in most cases have they been aware of their thinking tools. The bad guys have understood this stuff all too well while Christians have mainly sat on the sidelines tut tut tutting. We cannot believe for a moment that this is what Jesus intended.

What we think with is as important as what we think about. Indeed, what we think with gives shape to what we think about. In the article The Theology of Structure we take a look at the cultural meme that has shaped so much of Christian thought and activity and its development.

An illustration I often use is that of a corral. Some readers may not be familiar with this word since it is generally associated with America's old (and new) west. A corral is a simple enclosing fence that keeps horses under control and prevents them from running away. Once the horses are inside and the gate is closed the corral becomes their entire world.

It is a good illustration for us. Many of us live in 'thought corrals', thinking enclosures built by someone else. We cannot get out and we may not even be aware that we live and think in an enclosure constructed by someone else who wants to engineer our thinking. We live in the enclosure and they throw in the tools they want us to think with and even the things they want us to think about.

There are obvious examples. Take the evening television news, for instance. It directs our attention to those events which will hold our attention long enough for us to watch the commercials. Once an item becomes stale it disappears. Seldom do we get follow-on news. This is especially disappointing for people who want to follow a particular story. However, most viewers simply go with the ebb and flow of current events as determined by the television networks and stations. They put us in a 'news thought corral'.

There is also the often used illustration of elephants. A baby elephant in captivity is chained from a band on its ankle to a stake in the ground. It soon learns it cannot go where its mind wants to take it. It associates the ankle band with restriction. In time its mind loses the desire go elsewhere. An adult elephant trained this way from birth does not need the stake in the ground. Just the ankle strap and a length of chain is enough.

A few years ago I sat drinking a moderately good cup of coffee on the patio of a cafe on a hill in Richmond Park, in the south west of London, overlooking the valley through which the Thames gently flows. Below me I looked at roads, homes and trees. A peaceful scene. Then, I let my time focus wander and imagined how the scene might have looked in accelerated time. The roads developed according to needs of a past age, the houses built by wealthy folk and the trees planted along the roads and in the gardens of the homes.

For people today traversing the roads, living in the homes or appreciating the trees few thoughts are given to origins. And few thoughts are given to the influence this set structure has on their thinking. In other situations there is a similarity, although more negative. Take for example public housing developments. These are constructed ostensibly to provide housing for those on low incomes or those with no incomes. But these at first glance benevolent motives are not the only concepts that are reified. Sadly, little thought, and certainly little money, is given to human considerations. What gets reified is the accountant's need to maximize the number of people housed per unit of tax money. Or the ideas of the architect which in turn are reified from his/her architectural cultural meme. These combine and intertwine in an iterativeIterative

The process of putting the result of a calculation back into the equation to get a new result. Can be used in the study of population changes in clusters of animals or people. It is also the process whereby, in an improperly adjusted public address system for example, the amplified sound feeds back through the microphone into the amplifier, producing the familiar high pitched noise.

 process until the final blueprints are agreed. The social consequences of this reification are well known. And they are highly destructive. Has anyone done any cost effectiveness studies, studies that take into account the human costs? And how would one document and quantify lost hope, unwarranted aggression, or under-developed intellect?

Our dreams become material. Our materialized dreams set the structure for others. And before our dreams are our thinking tools. This subject is important for Christians.

To examine our thinking tools we must be brutal towards ourselves and fully prepared to adopt new methods. This requires zero-basing and it is perhaps helpful if we understand the gentlemen's agreement.

The Gentlemen's Agreement:

This is not to say that we are militant in following the gentlemen's agreement. We may not be aware that we are. Our cultural meme is the most likely influence in getting us into this trap. But once we realize we are party to the agreement we would be succumbing to cognitive dissonance if we were to stay there.

Our cultural meme, in the west at any rate, is filled with metaphorical expressions derived from bivalency and geometry. We speak in terms of "a level playing field", "the balance of nature", "straight lines", "flat surfaces", and so on. And yet nothing is level, or in balance, or straight, or flat. The Greeks knew this and had to postulate the existence of ideals to justify continued use of these concepts and terms. Geometric concepts are useful in engineering and just generally in our mid-range structured lives. But there is no such thing as a straight line, or a point, or a circle, or a triangle - anywhere in the universe. Never has been. Never will be.

We can benefit from the new sciences and step out of our thought corrals and end our participation in the gentlemen's agreement. The trick is to iterate our own paradigm and perform recursions on our life's experiences. Easy enough to say, but can it be done?

We think it has to be. We are also aware that this takes much courage and self-examination. But the cost of discipleship is never cheap. Once we as Christians accept that we are in the business of changing the world and that the conclusion of the second millennium does not give us much reason for believing we have succeeded, we will be compelled to look critically at what we do.

To be in the business of changing the world is to be in the business of affecting the future. As we delve into chaos, complexity, emergence and fuzzy we will learn about systems. With this learning we will compare our current practices to what we find in the Bible. Then we will attempt to iterate our own thinking processes and develop our methods from this. We will learn how to infuse information into ongoing systems, what sort of information is biblical and how the information is to be infused.

We won't be giving a full treatment of the topics below, just enough to get started on their application to biblical thinking. But we hope some appetites are whetted and that readers will search the internet for more detailed treatment of these fascinating frontiers.

At the end of this thinking adventure we will be better equipped to influence this hurting world.