A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Ward on creationism and ID

VI favorite Keith Ward has an article in The Tablet (registration req’d) on intelligent design and creationism (via). He distinguishes between belief that the universe was designed in the sense that all theists accept, namely that its existence and structure is the result of a purposive intelligence, and the narrower sense promoted by Intelligent Design theorists who point to specific features of the physical world which, they contend, cannot be the result of a natural process and require some kind of supernatural intervention to explain their existence.

He also makes a good point about the bloody-minded literalism that can’t accept a creation account couched in mythic and poetic terms and the grandeur of the vision of the universe provided by modern cosmology, and laments the demise of a religious imagination which can’t see the words of the Bible as anything but purported accounts of physical fact. This same kind of literal-mindedness, I might add, seems to afflict many atheists who, once they discover a few contradictions in the Bible, think its value and truth have been decisively discredited.

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21 responses to “Ward on creationism and ID”

  1. John

    How awful would it be for Christianity if God didn’t create the physical universe? Not just that he didn’t assemble the whole thing in six days, but that he had nothing whatsoever to do with it? Evolution can account for the undesigned self-organization of humanity, of life, of the universe itself without invoking outside interventions, or “skyhooks,” as Daniel Dennett calls them. Maybe it’s time for the religious think tanks to explore variants and ramification of the no-Creator scenario.

    The only significant references to the Creation in Scripture are the first 3 chapters of Genesis – suspect historically even among the faithful. Most of the rest of the book is about human history, law, poetry, exhortation, redemption. If the church can peel off the Genesis stories, why not discount also those other few passages referring to the Creator scattered through the rest of the Bible?

    I’m not being ironic or sarcastic. Other religions have gods who didn’t create the universe – they came from somewhere else, or are pure spirit, or emerged from the self-organizing flux of the impersonal universe itself. The Judeo-Christian God is mostly about righteousness and meaning and relationship and love. Just let the creation part go.

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  2. Lee

    I’m afraid that the article of belief that God creates the universe is a non-negiotable part of Christianity. Anything else smacks of gnosticism or manicheeism. It’s enshrined in the creeds and confessions of the church and is an integral part of the hope Christians have that God will ultimately redeem all of creation.

    Anyway, I don’t see how evolution can account for “the universe itself.” How can the very existence of the universe be accounted for by processes which are internal to it?

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  3. ktismatics

    I just posted a comment and the site assigned me the name “John.” I used to be “ktismatics” in Blogger world. Let’s try again, see if my identity has been restored.

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  4. ktismatics

    You point out that God as creator is enshrined in the creeds. Genesis 1-3 is enshrined in the Canon, but it’s possible to reinterpret the texts to mean something they didn’t mean back when the Creeds were written. Why can’t the Creeds be reinterpreted? Or even overhauled — the Creeds were the work of men using the knowledge and inspiration available to them at the time. Orthodox doctrine took a few hundred years to stabilize; it remains a work of man and as such it can be revised.

    God is going to redeem the creation. Might that not mean something other than a kind of ecological overhaul of the physical stuff of the universe?

    As to whether an entire universe can be self-organizing, this is certainly part of mainstream scientific speculation. It is conceivable, just as the idea of an eternal God is conceivable.

    In prior posts you talked about Ward’s speculation that God imagined all possible universes and picked this one. Can’t we, who are made in the image and likeness of God, imagine all possible relationships between God and the material universe? Are we afraid of offending Him by exercising our imaginations? Afterwards we might decide to leave well enough alone, but at least the possibilities will have been laid on the table.

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  5. Lee

    There’s nothing wrong with speculation as such, but given that the weight of tradtion and scripture is clearly on the side of the doctrine of creation and that it’s bound up with so many other doctrines (redemption, eschatology, etc.), I just don’t see what the motivation for abandoning it would be.

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  6. ktismatics

    The motivation is truth.

    Our economy would fall apart if without institutionalized slavery? Our cosmology would fall apart if we abandoned an earth-centered universe? Our understanding of ourselves as the chosen people, of the Law, of redemption and eschatology, etc. would fall apart if we embraced Jesus as the Messiah? Too bad; start over again.

    There are points of Pauline theology that seem to depend on there having been a literal Adam. Luther split from Roman Catholicism over the doctrine of official doctrine of transubstantiation. There are contemporary Christian theologians who seem agnostic at best with respect to Jesus’ divinity, yet who are perceived as leading lights in the post-evangelical postmodern firmament.

    The motivation for shaking up the tightly-structured theological system is truth. It’s survived before; it will survive again.
    Besides, we’re just speculating. What if…? Would the faith really crumble if some form of traditional creationism isn’t retained?

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  7. Lee

    Right, but what’s the motivation specifically for abandoning the doctrine of creation? Nothing I’m aware of in science, philosophy, etc. seems to require it.

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  8. ktismatics

    Truth. Empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that man evolved from apes, that life evolved from inorganic matter, that the universe self-organized from the big bang. Even if science can’t prove these things, they can eliminate the need for a creator or designer to account for the evidence.

    Why abandon the literal reading of Genesis 1-3 wherein the trees came into existence before the sun? You can’t prove that it’s false — God might have installed some sort of temporary lighting system before hanging the sun in the sky. But you’re prepared, I think, to acknowledge that such a scenario is pretty unlikely on empirical grounds. I think the evidence is pretty strong that man evolved from apes, etc. You can’t prove it, and you could hang onto a separate creation out of faith, but at some point you’re fighting a losing battle. Truth should prevail over tradition.

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  9. Lee

    I’m down with evolution, but to talk about the universe self-organizing from the big bang doesn’t seem to me to even begin to answer the question of creation. Why a big bang at all? Or anything for that matter?

    Also, fwiw, the Christian doctrine of creation is rooted in John 1 as much as Genesis.

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  10. ktismatics

    OK fine, never mind — just a thought experiment. A hundred years ago you likely wouldn’t have bought into evolution. What if, a hundred years from now, the evidence supporting the spontaneous emergence of the universe is as strong as neo-Darwinian evolution is today. Will the church fold up its tents and go away? Will it continue a campaign of denial comparable to the intelligent design advocates today? Will it rethink its doctrines and its hermeneutics regarding Genesis 1-3 and John 1?

    Okay, I’ll drop the bone now.

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  11. Anonymous

    Our economy would fall apart if without institutionalized slavery? Our cosmology would fall apart if we abandoned an earth-centered universe? Our understanding of ourselves as the chosen people, of the Law, of redemption and eschatology, etc. would fall apart if we embraced Jesus as the Messiah? Too bad; start over again.

    Those examples aren’t really analogous. Slavery was never an item of Christian dogma, and in fact it was generally regarded negatively until the arguments leading up to the Civil War caused some people to come up with theological justifications for it. Geocentrism was also never a core Christian belief, and the Galileo problem was more a personal thing between him and the pope. The switch from Judaism to Christianity, meanwhile, was brought on by a revelation from God himself.

    Scientific discovery and theorizing is not revelation. In fact, Christianity has gotten itself in trouble in the past by embracing scientific theories that turned out to be wrong. Much sexual doctrine came from the belief that sperm are tiny embryos (the female ovum having been unknown) and that women are underdeveloped men. Science, in other words, is as culturally embedded as everything else, so it is not inherently a more reliable guide to truth than revelation is.

    Finally, I think you’re underestimating the damage done by the dissenting movements you mention. The Reformation may have been necessary, but it was also a tragedy that divided the church and sparked a great deal of bloodshed. Moreover, there already was a Christian sect that made human reason the highest source of truth: Unitarianism. Ten years ago, the Unitarians disclaimed being Christian, acknowledging what had been functionally true for years. So disbelieve core Christian beliefs if you like, but don’t pretend that Christianity will hum along just fine without them.

    –Camassia

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  12. Lee

    In addition to Camassia’s points, which I heartily endorse, I’d add that there are important dissimilarities between the case of evolution and the case of creation. Evolution is about one kind of process within the created world, but the doctrine of creation is about the dependence of all created being upon God. Science refers everything back to general laws, but it’s hard to see how it can account for the existence of those laws themselves and the existence of a universe which they describe, since science, qua science, doesn’t have a larger field of reference.

    In other words, the doctrine of creation gets at the most fundamental distinciton in a Christian ontology, which is between created and uncreated being. Augustine, for instance, could uphold that distinction without endorsing any particular creation account with respect to how particular beings came into existence (he was, in fact, a non-literalist when it came to the opening chapters of Genesis).

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  13. ktismatics

    Camassia –

    Slavery, earth-centered cosmology, Judaism – these were all tightly-structured systems that resisted dismantling but that managed to restructure themselves afterward. Another analogy: if the US quit holding prisoners indefinitely without due process and torturing them – would the war on terror be lost, as Bush implies, or would the government find another way?

    You imply that science remains so embedded in culture that it’s an unreliable source of truth. While science never reaches absolute truth on anything, its methodology does make it possible to move progressively toward closer approximations to truth. The examples you cite demonstrate that progress has been made. Just as biologists and paleontologists gradually approach reliable knowledge about evolution, so do astrophysicists gradually zero in on the origins of the universe. You can always put God behind and underneath all natural phenomena – maybe God needs to be involved somehow in the routine operation of gravity, or genetic mutation, or the expansion of the universe. I think scientists just fail to see why it’s so important to force him into performing these unnecessary jobs.

    Revelation may be reliable, but it needs human interpretation, just as scientific data need interpretation. The revelation of Genesis 1 has gone through a lot of reinterpretations over the centuries, for a lot of different reasons. Does Biblical hermeneutics have a reliable method for zeroing in on the truths of revelation, or are they so culturally embedded that they can never transcend their historical era or their community’s culture?

    I didn’t say radical restructuring is easy. When the Pope and Luther fought the irreconcilable battle between transubstantiation and consubstantiation, which one of them was disregarding core Christian beliefs? Why couldn’t they have agreed that even the nature of the Eucharist, seemingly crucial at the time, wasn’t really pivotal to the faith?

    Lee –

    Scientific laws aren’t part of nature; they’re the products of human imagination, intended to make sense of natural phenomena. Science can’t know the true nature of gravity or evolution or anything else. Its truth tests are relative and pragmatic, intended to achieve the best possible human understanding of how something works. No “God’s eye view” is possible with science. It’s almost axiomatic that a good scientific theory is one that fully explains a phenomenon without having to invoke outside forces like God. In a sense, the whole empirical scientific method aims at systematic agnosticism. I have little doubt that within a generation the community of scientists will converge on a pretty solid understanding of the natural mechanisms accounting for the beginning of our universe – how about you?

    Of course the principled agnosticism of science can never turn to doctrinaire atheism without a leap of faith. But I don’t believe that the community of faith can ever achieve a completely reliable interpretation of revelation either. I’m discounting the role of the Holy Spirit here, but I don’t think it’s possible to prove whether or not, say, the interpreter who says Genesis 1 is an allegory does or does not have the mind of Christ.

    There may be a general Christian consensus that the souls of those who die in Christ go straight to heaven; there are others who don’t believe this to be true. Both rely on interpretation of a common body of revelation to support their beliefs; both claim to be Christian. Why insist that there is a right belief here? Now we know in part; why not hold a loose rein on doctrine until the perfect comes and we know in full?

    You may say that the doctrine of creation is nonnegotiable. Was it so important for the early church councils to excommunicate the neo-Platonists who couldn’t believe that God would create an imperfect universe? Augustine and Aquinas couldn’t believe that a perfect eternal God would act in imperfect linear time, so they believed that God created the universe in an instant. Maybe they were right, but for the wrong reasons. Is it so important to excommunicate the scientists who can’t believe that the universe was created at all? If they love God, they bear the fruit of the Spirit, they subscribe in general to the Christian faith, why not remain open-minded about doctrine or what constitutes the core beliefs or the fundamental ontology?

    And now it’s bedtime in my part of the world. I’ll let you know if anything is revealed to me in my dreams pertinent to this discussion.

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  14. Lee

    K –

    I’m afraid I don’t share your optimism. What you’re asking for, in effect, is an explanation, by way of natural mechanisms, for the very existence of … natural mechanisms. The question of creation is why there are any natural mechanisms at all in the first place.

    And, regarding excommunication – no church that I’m a member of even has a mechanism for excommunicating people as far as I know. However, what the church publicly teaches and confesses is contained in the regula fide – the creeds, etc.

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  15. Anonymous

    Slavery, earth-centered cosmology, Judaism – these were all tightly-structured systems that resisted dismantling but that managed to restructure themselves afterward.

    Not exactly. The first two ceased to exist. The latter was split into an old, unchanged faction and a new faction that no longer identifies itself as Jewish. What happened to Judaism with Christianity was, in fact, similar to what happened with Unitarianism: it was such a radical revision of the old faith that it could no longer identify as the same religion. Your original question was “How awful would it be for Christianity…?” I think that given the examples of that kind of revision (not just any old revision) indicates that any group that denied God as Creator would eventually cease to be Christian in any meaningful sense. Sure, it would be socially functional, but that’s a different question from whether it would be Christian.

    I don’t deny that science can be instructive, but I am objecting to placing it above all other ways of knowing truth. According to you, Scripture and Tradition should both be discarded if they fail to comport with science. Yet suppose science changes its mind and it turns out Tradition was right about something after all. It’s going to look pretty stupid, isn’t it?

    Also, I’m not even sure that what you’re talking about qualifies as “science.” Science is a system of creating theoretical models that have predictive power. But how on earth can you prove empirically how the universe began? What would the markers of that look like? I realize there’s evidence for the Big Bang, but how can one know what happened before that? It sounds more like speculation than science.

    You admit that you’re not really accounting for the Holy Spirit in all this, and I think that’s a crucial point. You ask how we can really know when anybody interprets the Bible correctly, or what the afterlife is like, or whatever. You seem to simply be asking for empirical proof of faith. Again, you seem to be placing empiricism above all other sources of knowledge. Yet, like I said, your own speculations defy empirical proof.

    I also feel that your idea of being “made in the image of God” (though how this can be so if God isn’t Creator I have no idea) is tied entirely to our capacity to reason. Yet reasoning is only one aspect of human nature: humans also tend to have mystical experiences, to believe in the afterlife, and to trust traditions and resist change. Are these qualities also part of our imago dei? Should the just be tossed aside when the get in the way of Reason and Progress?

    –Camassia

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  16. John

    I’m disheartened by this whole exchange. I’d followed along with the interesting posts about Pascal’s Fire, commenting from time to time. I read this post, and not without some trepidation I ventured into speculative realms. “The belief that the universe was designed in the sense that all theists accept, namely that its existence and structure is the result of a purposive intelligence,” says the post. What if all Christians didn’t accept this version of the theistic premise? “Bloody-minded literalism” – what if, instead of moving to a mythopoetic reading of Genesis 1 and holding fast to the basic theistic premise, Christianity upheld a neo-post-radical literal reading of Genesis 1 and introduced a mythopoetic interpretation of the theistic premise? “Laments the demise of a religious imagination” – what if we let the imagination wonder a bit?

    “Every word – even every idle word, will be accounted for at the day of judgment,” warns the banner of this blog. Then there are the words of sixteenth-century English theologian Richard Hooker:
    God is no captious sophister, eager to trip us up whenever we say amiss, but a courteous tutor, ready to amend what, in our weakness or our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright.”

    Now for specific responses to the last round. Lee – Astrophysics doesn’t address why; neither does any other branch of empirical science. Science is agnostic about why. What if the universe is intrinsically meaningless: can God create meaning and impose it on the meaningless? Camassia – What can I say? Maybe in this exercise in speculative theology you’ve decided to play the role of radio talk-show host: nitpicking (I meant that the economy recovered, not slavery; etc.), distorting my position, putting words in my mouth, playing to the audience, calling me a worshipper of Reason and Science and Empiricism and Progress and a disdainer of Scripture and Tradition and Creed and Faith and the Holy Spirit (OK fine, you didn’t literally call me these things; I’ve distorted your position and put words in your mouth).

    Finally, I invite you to visit my blog. Click through on my “ktismatics” name on my last comment and I think eventually you’ll get there — this time I think I’m back to being “john” (which by the way really is my name). I was planning to extend the invitation to you both before this particular brouhaha erupted, but I couldn’t find your email addresses on your blogs and I didn’t want to clutter up your sites with my own self-promotion. (So now I’ve violated my prime directive.)

    Despite our differences here, I’ve found your blogs to be stimulating, open-minded, and good-hearted; mine is mostly about an alternative reading of Genesis 1. My motivation for playing out the what-if scenario here is partly in anticipation of criticisms that might be directed at my exegesis – that is, if anyone ever happened to read it. I get about 5 visitors a day over there, and most people don’t get past the first page. Alas, yet another disheartening scenario.

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  17. Lee

    K/John –

    I think you have to admit that the view that God created the universe and all that’s in it (however we understand the how of it) is the overwhelming consensus not only of Christianity, but all theistic traditions. So, to propose a radically differnt variant will natural meet with a certain skepticism.

    We can all only be so open-minded about our foundational beliefs. Speaking for myself, it would take a nearly overwhelming amount of evidence and argument to convince me that God exists but didn’t create the universe. The traditional view and atheism each seem far more plausible to me. I was an atheist for a number of years but gradually became convinced that theism was true. And I’m not convinced that creation as such is a particularly problematic notion. Also, Camassia is right that, for Christians, revelation carries an independent weight that isn’t easily overturned. Now, I admit that certain parts of purported revelation have been reinterpreted over the years, but creation is such a central piece of it, that it’s difficult to see what could overturn it for a Christian. (Wittgenstein’s On Certainty seems relevant here.)

    But, in the interests of fairness I will check out your site when I get a chance.

    Best,

    Lee

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  18. Anonymous

    I’m sorry if you feel I’ve distorted your position. I did not do it on purpose. It just sounds to me like you’re giving reason greater authority than other forms of knowledge (“Truth should prevail over tradition” etc.) I suppose if you really gave no account to revelation you wouldn’t be studying the Bible at all, so I shouldn’t imply that.

    About slavery etc. ceasing to exist, I knew what you meant, but the question is whether systems have value in their own right or if they just exist for some other goal. Yes, if we don’t have slaves to pick cotton we can invent machines to do it. If the U.S. didn’t torture people it could keep back terrorism some other way. But what is the goal of Christian faith? Certainly it fulfills some social purposes, but so do many other religions. What makes it unique is its own unique set of beliefs, and it exists to preserve and propound them. The fact that Christianity today is not a branch of Judaism shows that some changes in beliefs are too big to maintain a continuous communal identity.

    Anyway, I apologize again if I was uncivil. I know I can be sinfully uncharitable sometimes in arguments.

    –Camassia

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  19. John

    Lee and Kamassia –

    Thanks for your replies. Now maybe I can save you the trouble of going to my blog.

    My project was to read Genesis 1 not for theological reasons but to see what insights it offered about the work of creating. I purposefully disconnected the creation narrative from its larger contexts – the rest of the Bible, the creeds, the traditional interpretation of the Judeo-Christian community. I proceeded as if Genesis 1 was an independent narrative describing some actual ancient event. Using conservative exegetical techniques I sought a literal interpretation that maximized internal consistency and that didn’t blatantly contradict longstanding general knowledge about nature.

    The results of the exegesis led to various inferences about the creative practice of elohim: he creates entire realities rather than isolated artifacts, he creates inside temporal intervals of non-instantaneous but limited duration, etc. I speculate that this “elohimic ethos” might be the source of the historical creativity of the Judeo-Christian culture. I also propose that the elohimic ethos might help lift Western culture from mere adaptiveness and market responsiveness and pleasure-seeking toward a renewed commitment to creating what’s good for its own sake.

    In the course of doing this work I concluded that Genesis 1might describe not the creation of the material universe but rather the creation of a way of making sense of the universe, a kind of first course in natural science. This reading doesn’t deny that God made the universe ex nihilo; it just says that Genesis 1 might not be a description of that particular creative event. I thought maybe this exegesis could get the evangelicals “off the hook,” upholding inerrancy on a particularly troublesome passage of Scripture without blatantly contravening modern natural science. (There’s irony, of course, in that my reading of Genesis 1 describes God’s creation of natural science itself.)

    I’ve tried to identify people who might find this work particularly interesting. My atheist scientist buddies have no use whatsoever for any sort of Bible-based endeavor. The Christian liberals haven’t much interest in the Bible generally speaking. Trolling around blogworld I came across what to me was an unknown “post-evangelical” sector of Christianity: serious about the Bible but open to interpretations other than the traditional evangelical ones.

    What I’ve come to realize is that the post-evangelicals are more prepared than their predecessors to find their place within the historical and living tradition of the faith. The writers and readers of holy texts coexist within a shared Christian interpretive community. It’s this community that generates the core beliefs and practices: the texts, creeds, systematic theologies, etc. are efforts to make explicit what the community already believes implicitly. So, for example, Genesis 1 is really about the one true God creating the universe ex nihilo because that’s what the writer’s community had come to realize/believe about God. The text might not be a literal narrative, but it nonetheless makes explicit the underlying shared belief. At least that’s the general trajectory, isn’t it?

    This post-evangelical hermeneutic moves in the opposite direction from the one I happened to take. Instead of subsuming the text inside its context, I excised the text from that context. I discounted the unity of Scripture, the faith system of the writer, the faith system of the contemporary Judeo-Christian culture, even the usual interpretive intention of discovering truths about God. I don’t pretend that my hermeneutic isn’t culturally determined; it’s just a different variant of what post-evangelical might look like if, say, it followed Derrida’s hermeneutic rather than Gadamer’s.

    You see the implications. In my exegesis I don’t start inside an interpretive context dominated by a monotheistic God creating ex nihilo. All I know about elohim is what I read in Genesis 1, the very first story. Elohim might be one god or many, strong or weak, smart or dull-witted, spiritual or physical, creator of the material world or not. In short, mine was an exercise in post-structural hermeneutics. I’m sure I wasn’t always loyal to this commitment, but you get the idea.

    That’s why I asked if you could imagine a God who had nothing to do with the creation of the material universe. My Gen. 1 exegesis remains noncommittal on the origins of the material universe, but it’s readable only if you set aside the big presuppositions for awhile. So which do you prefer: a literal reading of Gen. 1 that doesn’t support the presuppositions, or a figurative reading that does? After a month of wandering through blogspace I tentatively conclude that the presuppositions hold firm, and that reinterpretations of revelation are most likely to get a hearing if they claim embeddedness in the tradition.

    I think it’s easier to imagine something that you might be able to believe. So, for example, which is easier to contemplate: a God who imagines all possible universes and chooses to implement one of them, or a God who could think up only this particular universe? Clearly it’s the first God. Why? Because it’s easier to believe that God has infinite mental powers far exceeding our own. And again, why? Presumably because it’s easier to worship an infinitely powerful god than a god with limitations. So, imagination is filtered by belief, which in turn is filtered by “worshipability.”

    I’m not arguing the superiority of “zero-based exegesis” over a community-grounded exegesis. It’s just a different way to go, and it can lead to different interpretations of the same texts. You don’t have to believe the interpretations that come out the other end, or worship the god who emerges from the process. The intention isn’t to promote scientism or tradition, faith or atheism, the big bang or intelligent design – it’s to look at familiar texts in an unfamiliar way. It’s purposely to ignore tradition and structured theologies and creeds in search of other, less familiar strands of meaning.

    The whole project often seems fictional to me. The text might be a fiction; my exegesis might be wrong; my inferences about creational theory and practice would then also lose their foundation; the whole endeavor takes place in a vacuum that no one ever sees. Sometimes I consider turning it all into a novel: The Exegete, soon to be a major motion picture starring Jim Carrey.

    My daughter and I are reading Moby Dick together. Lightning engulfed the ship last night, tipping the yardarms with pale fire “like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.” Ahab grasps the end of the lightning rod, and the power of God surges through him: “The lightning flashes through my skull; my eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded.” In his tempestuous delirium Ahab the high priest shouts his imprecation:

    “Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent! There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! Leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!”

    Me? No thanks. I’ll just sit here on the shore and drink my iced tea, if that’s all right with thee.

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  20. Joshie

    I think I need a long island iced tea after trying to figure out what the heck you’re talking about John.

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  21. ktismatics

    Joshie — Was there something in particular I could help you with, or were you just feeling thirsty?
    John

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