Sage Advice

Here’s a piece of sage advice:

“The easiest thing to create is a pile of garbage. Just throw a piece of paper in the corner of a room, and watch what happens in just a few minutes.”

Think about it—when some expresses an attitude that brings down an organization or a community, it doesn’t take long for others to follow. When you, as one particular example, create garbage discussions of faith and science, almost anyone can come along

and thrown in a piece of garbage advice.

Incidentally, I like this proverb better than the better known, “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch” (despite of course the Jackson Five’s contributions), which is essentially a more passive image. A garbage pile elicits active, if at times unconscious, contributions, but it demonstrates that we indeed play a part with our actions.

And that’s the problem with any number of societal ills and our discussion of them. Today, it often involves assuming a victim’s role in. And I’m tired of that. Because frankly, there are some true victims in the United States (which I know, to some degree, because my wife Laura directs our local ministry for the homeless in Chico). The true victims rarely get the mic, as it were. So if you hear victimization loud and clear, be forewarned.

Take our consistent cavils by our President about the “mainstream media” as if his cozy relationship with Fox and Friendsisn’t an alliance with a wildly popular news program. How can we, except by a certain perverse logic, describe this top-rated TV show as anything but mainstream? And then of course, the media outlets that dislike President Trump return the favor by ready themselves to spin everything to the negative and pronouncing a daily dose of everything dire.

Ah, it’s tiring…

That’s also the problem with the "conflict thesis" as the most accurate relationship of science and religion (first promoted by Andrew Dickson White and William Draper in the 19th century, and that still lives on today in Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins). When we start throwing garbage out there, it attracts other pieces of similarly useless opinion to be thrown in the garbage corner. 

That’s why I found this radio interview last week about my book, Mere Science and Christian Faith to be some needed oxygen. Al Kresta is a Catholic thinker who grasps the topic of science and faith with sensitivity and insight, which meant of course that he knows how to ask questions that push the conversation forward. Instead of into the garbage pile. If you want to here it, start at about 22:40 here.

Can we make a pact? Let’s be part of the solution and not part of the problem. Let’s not create garbage.

(And, by the way, it was my father—a true sound lay philosopher—who gave me this advice, and though he’s gone, who’s insights I still treasure.)