I was born on October 23, 1985 in Pullman, Washington, USA. I lived out there in the middle of nowhere (in Palouse - slightly further out in the middle of nowhere than Pullman) until I left for college at the age of 17. I graduated from Garfield-Palouse High School - the only public high school for two towns combined - in a class of 33 in the spring of 2003 and subsequently attended the University of Pennsylvania. Due to some transfer credits from courses I took at Washington State University while in high school, it appears that I was able to complete three majors - computer science, philosophy and classical studies - in four years. I am often asked what I am studying to be, and the answer is: educated. I am studying to be educated. Then I will go do something that educated people do, such as make more educated people (teach). That's the plan, anyway. At present, I am working as a software engineer, but I intend to go back to school for a Ph.D in philosophy next fall. While at Penn I met my lovely fiancee, Lauren. We will be married in August of 2008. Lauren is applying for graduate study in physics.I was raised in an interdenominational (not non-denominational) Protestant church. I attended that same church until January 2003, when I became quite frustrated with some doctrinal difficulties and general strife. The church I attended at the end of high school is a Calvary Chapel. I am presently a member of Calvary Chapel on the King's Highway, but will be married in Tenth Presbyterian Church, where Lauren is a member. I began to follow the Lord seriously in 1999, the summer before my freshman year of high school. I was probably saved before then, but I can't really be sure. As to preaching (yes, that was a completely random change of subject), I must have been in the third grade when I gave a sermon at a church service we had at camp ... I imagine I was probably not so long-winded back then. I went to Ross Point Baptist Camp, the place where I first preached, for a total of 24 events over a period of 11 years. I was baptized there on August 15, 2001. I started going when I was in the second grade. I love it there. My first experience preaching during a regular Sunday morning service was on Pentecost of 2002, the spring of my Junior year of high school. I preached at two churches that morning and I was asked back to one of them two more times. I've also given talks at youth retreats called Chrysalises. On these retreats, about half of the talks are routinely given by lay-people, most of whom are not trained in public-speaking. It's up to the Spirit to make the whole thing work, and He is faithful and it always does. This is equivalent to the adult Walk To Emmaus. More recently, I've become a fairly regular speaker at Penn Campus Crusade for Christ, where I was a member and served in leadership while an undergraduate. Theologically, I was classifying myself as a fundamentalist for a while primarily as a reaction against liberal theology, but I've since discovered that I never believed anything accurately described as fundamentalism. What I meant by it was that I adhere strongly to the doctrine of the Trinity (including the divinity of Christ), the vicarious atonement and the absolute truth and inerrancy of the canonical Christian Scriptures. I also think that the modern Church ought to be patterned after the New Testament Church. A consequence of the inerrancy of Scripture is human depravity (that is, the Scripture teaches this, so if you believe in Scripture you must also believe this), which is also a doctrine I adhere to. When people question human depravity, I tell them to go watch the news. I'm fond of saying that if mankind is basically good, then we deserve to go to heaven anyway, and if we deserve to go to heaven anyway then I don't understand the difference between Jesus and Socrates (not that I'm not a fan of Socrates). There are two reasons why this is not accurately described as fundamentalism. First, when "the fundamentals" were originally defined by the people who coined the term "fundamentalism," they included the doctrine of a pretribulation rapture as one of the defining characteristics of Christianity. I'm not sure if I believe this myself, and I certainly don't think that any eschatology beyond the basic idea that Jesus is coming back belongs to the "fundamentals" of Christianity. There are other similar cases where I see the fundamentalist view of Christian orthodoxy as too narrow to account for all those who are properly called orthodox Christians historically. Secondly, it seems that when encyclopedias and such attempt to define fundamentalism in general (rather than Christian fundamentalism or Muslim fundamentalism individually) they tend to class it as an "anti-modernist" movement, but philosophically I am a classic modernist, and what I oppose is in fact better termed post-modernism. Then again, noted philosopher Alvin Plantinga says that "on the most common contemporary academic use of the term," the word 'fundamentalist' actually means "stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine." If I wasn't convinced not to self-label in this way before, I certainly am now! But it remains the case that I am a Christian who aspires to historical orthodoxy and doesn't see the need to revise Christianity to fit the times, or some such. Which (sort of) brings us to philosophy. I first began to study philosophy at Washington State while in high school, and I majored in it at Penn. Parmenides, Plato, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Schopenhauer are (in historical order, rather than order of importance) probably my most important historical influences, Berkeley most of all. This places me firmly in the idealist/phenomenalist camp when it comes to metaphysics. I have recently been becoming more interested in contemporary metaphysics, but I continue to defend what I consider to be a neo-Berkeleian view, and this lessens the influence of contemporary philosophers on my thought (though Peter van Inwagen, David Lewis, D.M. Armstrong, and others have helped me to understand the problems more clearly, even if there are relatively few issues where I can accept their solutions). As far as political philosophy, I am a libertarian of the Nozickian variety - decidedly not an objectivist (I wish Ayn Rand had been half as good at philosophy as she was at writing novels). Metaphysics and philosophy of religion are my primary philosophical interests. I see the appartus of philosophy as much better equipped to handle questions of the basic meaning of religious doctrine than the types of approach more common in theology/religious studies departments. I'm also interested in the consequences to Christianity of various metaphysical theories and the consequences to metaphysical theories of Christianity. Philosophical ethics as a discipline frustrates me, as do ethical appeals in political philosophy. This is because ethicists often appeal to "ethical intuitions" and, partially as a cause and partially as an effect of my being an Evangelical libertarian, no one has the same ethical intuitions I do. This also leads into my taking much more of my philosophical thought from early modern thought than from contemporary philosophy. In addition to Christianity being much more common among early modern philosophers (but we're growing in the academic philosophy community again), they have total theories of the world, rather than dealing with issues in isolation, and this allows them to make, for instance, metaphysical appeals in their ethics, which is better than this whole intuitionism thing. And that's me and philosophy. Another random change of topic: I've always liked computers. I don't remember how old I was when my family got our first computer. I think it originaly had a 286 CPU in it. It had been upgraded to a 386 before we got it, and I actually think we later upgraded it to a 486. We also upgraded to DOS 6.2. We played some cool games on it. I remember when I was in the fifth grade I tried to read the source code to QBASIC gorillas. The only thing I could decipher was a variable controlling the size of the explosion when a banana hit a building. The diameter of the explosion was the screen width divided by a constant. I had lots of fun blowing up the whole screen. I tried to hack nibbles but it was too complex for my 10 year old brain. Sometime before I hacked QBASIC gorillas we got a new computer at my mom's house (at my dad's house we got a Packard Bell with Windows 3.11 sometime around 1995) and the old computer's new purpose was suddenly for me to hack it until it broke (it did - repeatedly). It was about 1995 or 1996 when we got our new computer, because it had Windows 95, which was brand new and full of bugs (surprising in a Microsoft product ... Yes, that was sarcasm). This was when we got internet access. I started building web-sites when I was in the fourth grade. I did it in raw HTML because I wanted complete control of what I was doing. Back then I wrote web-sites in Windows Notepad. Now I am of the oppinion that gvim with a proper X Window System is the ideal development environment. I despise WYSIWYG HTML editors and GUI layout designers, and generally dislike IDEs, though I have been forced to admit in recent years that Eclipse has its uses. I also refuse to install EMACS on my computer because I already have an operating system, and I'm not convinced it is possible to use EMACS with only ten fingers. I started doing freelance web design when I was in the seventh grade. From there, I wanted to do more cool stuff, so I started looking into CGI. Pre-written scripts didn't look like much fun, and I had never heard of PHP and DHTML support was still uncommon, so I set out to learn Perl. It took a long time, as I didn't have access to a Unix shell at first. In fact, I didn't really "get it" until I got my own computer with Linux on it for my 14th birthday. That was October of 1999. I finally got a new computer (and a nice one) when I moved in at Penn. Once I got the hang of Perl, I wanted to move on to bigger and better things. So, I moved on to Java. I was able to do this as an "independent study" at my high school around 2001. After learning Java, and determining that it wasn't actually "bigger and better" than Perl, I moved on to C++. Once I learned C++, I never wanted to program in Java again. I once hated Java, but Penn's computer science department loves it and at my job we use it exclusively, and I can now see that it is practically useful. The fact remains, however, that it is not as much fun to play with as C/C++. This is the end of this bio. I told you it was disjointed! |