What To Do

I want to make it a discipline to write at least a short blog entry every day. Here is the first one. I shall start by writing a bit about my day. Then I shall write a little about what I'd like to do with the blog.

What I Did Today

Today, I sang as the tenor voice in the Renaissance quartet at Guardian Angels Catholic Church. We performed Guerrero's Ave Maria for communion at the later two of the three morning Masses. For the first Mass, I also sang by myself the communion antiphon chant. Practicing and performing with the quartet is one of my favorite things right now.

I did not make confession yesterday, and so I did not receive communion today.

After eating lunch with the family, I spent the afternoon and evening at work trying to catch up. I am behind schedule on my current project. I get some fraction of my overtime paid right now.

To Do

Here are some topics, each of which I have been thinking about and should like to write about:

• What "science" is. Despite my Ph.D. in physics and my current job as an engineer in the aerospace industry, I am not a scientific realist. This seems to put me out in the cold, outside the main stream of thought. I am drawn to scientific instrumentalism, however, for at least a couple of reasons: (A) It is not possible to demonstrate that a scientific theory is true. (B) The rejection of scientific realism seems to open an avenue for dialogue between someone who finds current scientific theories compelling and someone else who, for religious or other, non-scientific reasons, adopts positions at odds with current scientific theory.
• The challenge that the Christian doctrine of the Fall presents to a scientific world view. Although the typical Christian who accepts both the Fall and a scientific world view sees no conflict between them, it seems to me that, on close inspection of the situation, conflict can be avoided only if either (A) one posit an unsatisfyingly ad-hoc notion of preternatural grace or (B) one be open to the possibility that the Fall is much more radical an event than traditionally imagined. I find the second option interesting to explore. My starting point is to assume that even the suffering and death of animals is evil and did not occur before the Fall. The basic idea is that the physics that would well describe the universe before the Fall must be radically different from the physics that well describes the universe in its fallen state because every living thing must die in the fallen universe. Yet the same physical theory seems well to describe the universe almost back to the beginning of time, in any event back to a time long before humans appeared on Earth. So the Fall would seem to have an effect on all of time, all the way back to the beginning. It would be as though Adam and Eve, after sinning in the Garden universe, suddenly found themselves in a different and unfriendly universe, on the surface of a planet in bodies that had formed over millions of years of bloody struggle for survival. It would be as though time in the fallen universe runs along a different dimension than "time" when the universe had the form of Eden. Or perhaps there was not time in Eden in the same sense as there is time in the fallen universe.