English Pictures

i've got a couple pictures from my trip to london back in december. the first is in front of the tower bridge across the thames, and the second is of st. paul's cathedral. what a fun trip that was. photo credit to craig chen, a fellow stanfordian-oxonian philosopher.

On Faith

the subject of faith has come up with unusual frequency in the past few weeks, and i was going to write a brief article to post here, something along the lines of "Toward a Definition of the Word 'Faith'". i may still publish those thoughts when i have a chance to flesh them out, but for now i want to take the surer path to wisdom: plagiarism. i read this passage from francis schaeffer's Trilogy tonight, and i'd like to share it with you.

Appendix B: "Faith" versus Faith

One must analyze the word faith and see that it can mean two completely opposite things.

Suppose we are climbing in the Alps and are very high on the bare rock, and suddenly the fog shuts down. The guide turns to us and says that the ice is forming and that there is no hope; before morning we will all freeze to death here on the shoulder of the mountain. Simply to keep warm the guide keeps us moving in the dense fog further out on the shoulder until none of us have any idea where we are. After an hour or so, someone says to the guide, "Suppose I dropped and hit a ledge ten feet down in the fog. What would happen then?" The guide would say that you might make it until the morning and thus live. So, with absolutely no knowledge or any reason to support his action, one of the group hangs and drops into the fog. This would be one kind of faith, a leap of faith.

Suppose, however, after we have worked out on the shoulder in the midst of the fog and the growing ice on the rock, we had stopped and we heard a voice which said, "You cannot see me, but I know exactly where you are from your voices. I am on another ridge. I have lived in these mountains, man and boy, for over sixty years and I know every foot of them. I assure you that ten feet below you there is a ledge. If you hang and drop, you can make it through the night and I will get you in the morning."

I would not hang and drop at once, but would ask questions to try to ascertain if the man knew what he was talking about and if he was not my enemy. In the Alps, for example, I would ask him his name. If the name he gave me was the name of a family from that part of the mountains, it would count a great deal to me. In the Swiss Alps there are certain family names that indicate mountain families of that area. In my desparate situation, even though time would be running out, I would ask him what to me would be the adequate and sufficient questions, and when I became convinced by his answers, then I would hang and drop.

This is faith, but obviously it has no relationship to the other use of the word. As a matter of fact, if one of these is called faith, the other should not be designated by the same word. The historic Christian faith is not a leap of faith in the post-Kierkegaardian sense because He is not silent, and I am invited to ask the adequate and sufficient questions, not only in regard to details, but also in regard to the existence of the universe and its complexity and in regard to the existence of man. I am invited to ask adequate and sufficient questions and then believe Him and bow before Him metaphysically in knowing that I exist because He made man, and bow before Him morally as needing His provision for me in the substitutionary, propitiatory death of Christ.

(Francis Schaeffer. Trilogy, pp349-50. 1990 Crossway Books.)

Oh, yeah

Oofta, it has been a bit of time, hasn't it. For the clueless among you, I am no longer at Oxford, and haven't been since December 12th, when I left. The week or so before that was ridiculously busy, as it suddenly occurred to me that I was taking classes besides my tutorial, and it was about time to do something about that. So I did, and suddenly, poof, it was time for twenty hours or so of planes, buses, and layovers, and then I was home.

The three weeks or so after that were not ridiculously busy. By any stretch of the imagination. But I guess, really, they weren't so flagrantly indolent as I like to pretend. The main accomplishments of the break:

• Sleeping. And how. It really was a bit of a project to shift the biological clock around, but a less unpleasant project than it was the other direction. I went to bed as soon as I got home--11 pm Pacific time, 7 am Greenwich time--and woke up at about 6am Pacific time, 2pm Greenwich time. Which is already a pretty substantial shift. And then I progressively woke up later each subsequent day, until by the end of the vacation I was well-adjusted to the healthy, normal wake-up time of noonish. Ahhh, vacation.


• Visiting relatives. Again, and how. Both sides of the family, in a mad yuletide blitz. My dad's sister's family was back from France, so the grand old get-together in Tacoma was of somewhat greater proportions than our typical gala, and there was much feasting to be had. Oh yeah,


• Eating. I'd say "and how" again, but I think you get the idea. Mmmmm.


• A project. Because, by a now-quite-established tradition, no vacation is complete without some kind of geeky programming project. Yes, I program computers in my spare time, because I like it. I'm sorry if any of you feel like you can't be my friends anymore, but that's just who I am. This vacation's project was designing a framework--a simple scripting language--for creating Myst-like adventure games, or anything else that would use an interface like that, I suppose, with images, sounds, music, and video. As several people have pointed out, it was pretty much like Hypercard, from the Macintosh glory days. It was written, like all good programming projects, in Python, using the pygame library, which made everything very, very easy. (Yay!) It also came in handy for


• A treasure hunt. It's another pretty-well-established tradition in the Russell house that every Christmas involves at least one treasure hunt. It's a convenient way to deal with gifts that don't fit under the tree, but an awkward gift isn't a prerequisite, since any old present can be made much more exciting by making it hard to find. In the days of our youth the treasure hunts started out as simple chains of commands--"go to the tire swing", "go to the laundry room", etc. But soon our (read: my) thirst for the more complicated led to more and more involved trails of ciphers, puzzles, and riddles. I really, really like making treasure hunts. I don't want to reveal too much about this year's clues, because if East Flo does The Game and the staff lets me design a clue again this year, I want to reuse at least one idea. But, as I mentioned, my scripting language was handy for one clue, in which my brother and I used digital photos to make an adventure game set in our house, complete with authentic on-site-recorded sound effects, and a forbidding microsoft-paint-drawn Evil Gate. Brian and I are looking for a publisher, so let me know if you've got connections...


• Reading. I picked up The Mathematical Experience again, and read most of it, and got thinking about philosophy of math again. Oh, I have a question for you: How should a person decide what questions are worth asking? Worth dedicating time, thought, energy, money, whatever, toward pursuing wholeheartedly? What criteria do you use?
  
  I also read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, written from the perspective of an autistic teenager. Quite good. Also, the first of the Lemony Snicket books, The Bad Beginning, and I really must find an inexpensive way to get my hands on the rest of them.

One thing I did not do was finish the econ paper for my incomplete. Which means I still have, oh, maybe a page or two to write of that, and I really ought to take care of that before this quarter starts in earnest. I'll get to it, I'm sure.

Now that I'm back at Stanford, the main challenge before me is figuring out where I left all my stuff. So if you've got anything that belongs to me, um, drop me an email, ok? Thanks. I'm on the third floor of Cardenal once again, which is peachy by my reckoning. There are lots of fun people in the FloMo vicinity, and my new roommate, freshman Kevin Lai, seems to be a fan of both Settlers of Catan and Half-Life--which were, incidentally, my two most auspicious Christmas gifts (meaning no offense to anyone who gave me anything else, because your gifts were very nice, too). I think I'm going to like it here quite a bit.

And it is very good to be back.