My father and I had an intriguing discussion this evening which began at the discussion of black holes, Hawking, astrophysics, etc. We'd talked about this several months ago, when he expressed his skepticism of cutting-edge, "theoretical physics" by saying "they end up manipulating the observations to fit the mathematical model we have." It's backwards from the classical scientific approach of observation-first.

A few weeks before that I'd written the following:

You know why I write so much when expressing my thoughts? For clarity (Believe it or not). The ideas I have are complex, intuitive, in-depth models constructed from my wide array of experiences and vague memories, and thus are inherently unique, subjective, and thereby difficult to express. This is, I understand, the core observation behind the philosophy of "Constructivism." Explaining my philosophical, social, intuitive, and/or emotional thoughts to you is like trying to explain how I think when doing calculus, writing a piece of music, or memorizing facts for a history test.

This is my reaction to my first assigned reading for the class "Scripture" (HONS 214H) at Andrews University.

"All human communities live out of some story that provides a context for understanding the meaning of history and gives shape and direction to their lives."

[The following is a transcription of the handwritten journal entry I spent the latter portion of my afternoon writing:]

I have another strand of thought regarding this "Ven diagram of experience" idea [from earlier today in my journal]. Connect it with me, if you will, with the idea of a "liberal education."

This afternoon I received an article from the Center For Inquiry ("CFI"), a secular humanist organization who's mailing list I somehow ended up on last year, that discussed a case of alleged anti-religious discrimination at Suffolk County Community College (New York) that the American Center for Law and Justic ("ACLJ") is involved in.