Frank Turk has a provocative post today about saving faith and its progression over time. It comes complete with a math analogy.
Now, if in 10 years my son and I sit down and he says to me, “Dad, open up your laptop for me – I want to see what you’re doing at work,” I’ll be glad to oblige. My fatherly optimism will be that he’s just completed Trig and he’s about to show me how to simplify some of my 3-legged-dog formulas into something a little more sleek and functional.
But if we open up the laptop and when he looks at the spreadsheets he says to me, “You know what, Sir Dude? [he uses ‘sir’ out of respect because he was raised right] I still don’t buy the algebra thing. I know what you call it – I just don’t buy it. It doesn’t work. 2 + 2 = 4; A + B doesn’t equal anything. All this stuff you say you’ve been doing for the last 10 years is just guff. And there’s no way for you to prove to me that itdoes work.”
At that point, we have crossed over from incomplete knowledge to something else – a knowledge which refuses to grow, refuses to receive more. It’s willful ignorance.
Read it all and tell me what you think.