Faith + Reason = Truth

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?  April DeConick, Professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University in Houston, has called for posts today on Church Father Tertullian's famous question.  Apparently Tertullian was frustrated with the assault of Greek reason on the early Church and wanted to make the point that subjecting scripture to philosophical reasoning in the tradition of Platonic, Stoic, or other Greek schools was not applicable, as faith and reason are two distinct realms (as I have pointed out in this space on more than one occasion!).

I will look at this question from another perspective, the perspective of Greek vs. Judeo-Christian societal tendencies.  The Hellenic peoples had never been content with a homeland, and had always sought to expand outwardly into the unknown world around them.  This seems to have been born purely of the desire to expand their horizons, geographically as well as experientially, and this would characterize the Hellenes for centuries to come.  It would also be the blueprint for Western civilization to follow for the remainder of human history up to and including today.  Athens, of course, would eventually become the center of this world by the 5th century BC.

Meanwhile, the Jews, a "wandering" race of people, only did so in pursuit of the Promised Land.  While the Hellenes had a land of their own yet wanted more, the Jews were continually trying to get to the land they called home.  The Jews were focused on their individual relationship with God, doing what they were personally instructed to do through Abraham and Moses and sticking to that plan with as little deviation from it as possible in terms of behavior and custom.  The Greeks, on the other hand, seem to have been more focused on the polis and on citizenship with their fellow humanity, things that could be and were continually improved upon if they kept open minds regarding all that they experienced.  So when Christ died as a Jew in Jerusalem, His message was one of personal salvation and how to personally achieve it for oneself; when the Apostle Paul got a hold of that message, however, he applied all of his Hellenic tendencies to it and transformed it into something that needed to expand beyond Judea, beyond Jews, to the entire world for all to access.

The West is continually referred to as "Judeo-Christian" in its values and tendencies, but I would strenuously disagree with that; the message itself, one of love for neighbor and acknowledgment of the one true God and Savior of mankind, is certainly Judeo-Christian, but everything else about the West's intellectual and psychological makeup, including the very way that Christ's message has developed and spread, is undoubtedly Greek.  That, to me, is what Athens has to do with Jerusalem.

This is something I created at IBM's Many Eyes data visualization tool site.  Thanks to Paul Kedrosky for sharing this amazingly cool and simple technology's existence via his financial blog.

I've frequently heard The Timaeus of Plato cited by religious scholars as a source of references to God by the Greek philosopher, so I copied and pasted it in its entirety from the Internet Classics Archive at MIT into this data viz tool, then chose Word Tree as the method of visualization, then picked the word "God" as the word to visualize in all of its appearances throughout the text in tree form.  Here's the result:

In light of the shocking development regarding a journalist being sentenced to death in Afghanistan for something written, in a country with free and democratic elections, here is a post of mine from April 26, 2007 that I trumpet today, louder than ever:

April 26, 2007

"More Important Than Elections By the People"

Reason.  The human intellect is, for me, the most difficult obstacle to overcome in my struggle with faith.  It's not the bad day, or the hard week, or the unlucky month, or the crappy year that can and does happen to anyone and everyone; no, it's my brain telling me what's logical, what makes sense, or what simply cannot be.  When one falls into the trap of asking "why?", then one can quickly start sinking into the mud of faithless human reason as his or her driving force.  The only way out of or around this is faith, the ability to accept things without knowing why. It's actually strikingly similar to trust, but I would differentiate the two as being either of this world (in the case of trust) versus not of this world, not of our direct personal physical experience (faith).  Trust can eventually be borne out, or demonstrated that one was correct or incorrect in the decision to place the trust in what it was placed; faith, on the other hand, will not be rewarded until after the death of the body.  That's what makes it so difficult:  we base our trust on the experiences and words of those communicated with by God in direct, intelligible ways, whereas we do not have that direct or intelligible experience.  There have been, perhaps, hundreds, or even thousands, who have had that type of experience, while there have been billions who have not.  So the odds are not good.  But don't ask "WHY would God do it this way?" or "HOW does He choose whom to communicate with, HOW to communicate, WHEN to communicate?"  It does not, it cannot, make sense to us.  The more I uncover in the history of faith in general as well as in my specific faith, the more questions I have, not the fewer.  My intellectual arrogance is tangible at times, and it is at these times that I (hopefully) catch myself and hit my spiritual RESET button by asking myself, who am I to question God?  It's a simple question, and unlike other faith-related questions, it has a simple answer:  I am who God made, and He created me to seek answers to questions that have none.  I freely and passionately accept and embrace that answer, as must everyone who has these types of questions.  If they do not, then their faith will not endure, they will live possibly happy and content lives, they will die, and they will cease to exist.  As irrational or superstitious or backward as it may seem to the rational faithless types, I choose to put my faith in an alternative ending, or shall I say beginning, to my existence, and I thank God for creating and instilling that faith in me!

The New England Patriots in the Super Bowl have had a few of their unorthodox secret weapons exposed over the past couple of days.  The first one I came across was an article on espn.com about an extraordinary football genius (probably even more so than coach Bill Belichick) that's been working with and influencing Bill since their high school days at Andover.  The next one arrived in my inbox this morning from MIT Technology Review.  Both are stimulating and insightful, both mention the same influential academic research paper about going for it on fourth down, and both cover the subject of non-traditional statistical analysis to maximize human resource returns as well as strategic decision making on the field.

Is it a coincidence that the two exemplars of using analytics in sports to rise to dominant championship levels are both found in Boston, home of the Red Sox and Patriots?  Those are the only teams in pro sports, in my opinion, that have truly developed a systematic formula and blueprint for maximizing the dollars spent on their rosters, as well as a plan for in-game management in the case of the Patriots, and turned them into consistent championship-level contenders (the Oakland A's don't count, since they employ the same methods but with more highly constrained financial resources and therefore no championship-level results).  It seems like there must be at least a little cross-pollination  of ideas between the franchises in the same city, even if at the very least it's just the exposure to each other through intensive local media coverage.  It can't be too long before everyone else catches on - then again, I've been thinking that same thought every since Moneyball came out, and since that time, only the Red Sox have been able to bottle the same kind of magic that the A's Billy Beane originally developed.