chris' random ramblings

Good to know I could take on a class full of ‘em.

28

Thanks Tim!

Christian,

Because man is a rational creature, he wants to understand the universe in which he lives. Both religion and science are ways for man to pursue this quest for truth.

I don’t understand how Ricky’s testimony, while honest, is convincing. He doesn’t give any reasons for this conversion other than the fact that his older brother asked him, “Why do you believe in God?”, and he felt that neither he nor his mother had a satisfactory answer. I suppose he was saying that if his mother didn’t have a satisfactory answer, then one must not exist? Nothing against his mother, but just because you can’t explain something with 100% certitude doesn’t mean you can’t believe in it. Most scientifically-aware people would agree that the speed of light is the fastest that anything can travel in our universe, but would be hard pressed to explain why.

So, I would invite you to investigate why other people have decided that atheism just doesn’t make sense, and how faith and reason can and should complement one another. Religion, if true, can stand up to inquiry and criticism.

Great authors and thinkers such as C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton have made this discovery.

More recently, Jen at Et Tu? has a written a very moving story of her conversion from atheism, as well as a piece on why she believes in God in the first place.

I made this discovery myself about three years ago now. Part of the reason was that I realized that the natural sciences can’t explain the “why” of things. At the time I didn’t think that there was necessarily a purpose to life, the universe, and everything…but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why it was that the scientific method worked at all? We rely on our reason, logical and mathematical principles to explain the phenomena of the world around us. But why do our reason, logic, and math have any capability to explain? Math and logic cannot be explained by science, rather, they form the foundations of science. So why are math and logic true?

At the same time I was coming to the realization that there is a limit to human knowledge. I figured that since there is an infinite amount of knowledge to know (e.g. the set of transcendental numbers or the digits of pi), and since no person or group of people will ever live for an infinite amount of time, then some things will always remain outside the realm of knowable things. This meant to me that I could never disprove the existence of God…but could I prove it? This is the position of the agnostic: that we can’t really know one way or another.

The position of the Christian is that not only does God exist, but he wants to tell us about himself; so much so that he became one of us. I began reading more about what the Catholic Church had to say in the matter. The Church’s bold claim is that it is the earthly institution that was founded by none other than God, the Creator of the universe who became man. To my surprise, I found it to be an intellectual treasure trove. The Catholic Church is, and always has been, a great defender and promoter of reason and the sciences. Nothing in Christianity is contrary to reason. At the same time, it reminds us of the limits to human knowledge, and reveals truths to us that our reason could have never reached on its own.

All of this is my long-winded way of saying to you, and to all people of good will, that Christianity is not the enemy of reason, nor of science, nor of any legitimate human endeavour. It deserves a serious and honest analysis before it is discarded as logically fallacious or as merely an emotional crutch.

Cheers

To calculate the amount of free disk space in Python, you can use the os.stafvfs() function.

For some reason, I can never find the docs for os.statvfs() on the first or second try (it’s in the “Files and Directories” section in the os module), and I never remember how it works, so I’m posting this as a note to myself, and maybe to help out anybody else wanting to do the same thing.

A simple free space function can be written as:

import os
def freespace(p):
    """
    Returns the number of free bytes on the drive that ``p`` is on
    """
    s = os.statvfs(p)
    return s.f_bsize * s.f_bavail

I use the f_bavail attribute instead of f_bfree, since the latter includes blocks that are reserved for the the super-user’s use.

I’m not sure, however, on the distinction between f_bsize and f_frsize.

I stayed up a little past my bedtime last night to watch the eclipse, and to try and take some pictures.

I’ve never had much luck taking pictures of the moon, but these ones turned out not too bad. What amazed me the most after looking through the pictures is just how fast the moon moves through the sky! I was using a 300mm lens on a D70 (equivalent to 450mm on a 35mm camera), and trying to bracket the exposure between shots. In just a few seconds between shots the moon moved a significant amount through the frame!

I previously posted that I had problems getting my wireless device working with the new 2.6.24 kernel, running into a kernel oops in the process.

In kernels prior to 2.6.24 I used the bcm43xx driver, and let NetworkManager handle connecting to wireless networks.

I’ve since had some time to play around with 2.6.24 a bit more, and I’m happy to say wireless is working now!

Here’s what I did:
- Install b43-fwcutter
- Add b43 to /etc/modules
- Add ‘, ATTR{type}=”1″‘ after the MAC address to the line in /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules that contains your wireless device. This ensures that udev will assign the same interface name to the wireless device as it had before, which means you don’t have to reconfigure your firewall!

This post started out as a simple review of a book my parents bought for me for Christmas.

However, since I’ve found my new hero as a result of reading this book (my wife now asks who I like more, Alton Brown, or Chesterton), I feel I have to say a little bit more…

My parents bought me Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton for Christmas. I was a few weeks before I was able to get to it, but once I read the first few pages I couldn’t put it down. I finished it just a few days later wondering how I could have never read anything by Chesterton before. He has a very unique style, very funny, with deep insights into human nature and society. He uses metaphor extremely effectively, and quite frequently to humorous effect throughout his works. His works have had an influence on other writers I love, including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Orthodoxy was written in 1908, 100 years ago now. And yet amazingly it’s still relevant today.

In the second paragraph of the book he describes how he has always wanted to write a book about an English yachtsman who miscalculated his course and arrives back at England meanwhile believing he has discovered a new island in the South Seas. “What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again?” Later he explains why he mentions this: “But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered England. For I am that man in a yacht. I discovered England…I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before.”

After this, I was most definitely hooked.

Orthodoxy is a book that explains Chesterton’s reasons for being a Catholic and at the same time is a defence against or a response to the relativism of his day.

All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses. If you become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton. If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon. It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense. For instance, Mr. John Davidson tells us to have nothing to do with “Thou shalt not”; but it is surely obvious that “Thou shalt not” is only one of the necessary corollaries of “I will.” “I will go to the Lord Mayor’s Show, and thou shalt not stop me.” Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.

(emphasis mine here, and in following quotes; quoted from Project Gutenburg’s eBook available online.)

This newfound fascination with Chesterton lead me to the Internet. There’s some good information on G. K. Chesterton’s wikipedia page. I also found a great resource at the American Chesterton Society. They’ve got a bunch of Chesterton’s essays and other works online.

From his “Why I Am A Catholic” article,

The truth about the Catholic attitude towards heresy, or as some would say, towards liberty, can best be expressed perhaps by the metaphor of a map. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze. It has been compiled from knowledge which, even considered as human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel.

I like this quote in particular,

[Catholicism] does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up.

I find this especially relevant. Today there is the widespread belief that science is the sole source of knowledge. Anything that can be known, science can and eventually will discover. This is not to say that Chesterton (or myself) was down on science. It’s just important to recognize the limits of what science can tell us. At some level all laws of science are just hypotheses or theories. The universe appears to obey these laws, but the jump between saying these laws are good models for explaining natural phenomena, and saying that natural phenomena occur exactly according to these laws is a jump across an abyss, with nothing connecting either side. This is central to much of the evolution vs. so-called “intelligent design” argument raging in the US right now.

I also enjoyed his his essay on A Piece of Chalk,

One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel, or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.

I can’t wait to get my hands on another Chesterton book!

And he gives a great definition too! It could have been taken straight from the Catechism.

Follow the jump on over to the American Papist who has a YouTube clip of The Colbert Report from Monday night.

I saw this on TV and was hoping it would show up on YouTube…Stephen Colbert certainly knows his faith…or pretends to at least. It’s hard to tell sometimes if he’s serious or not.