HOW v. WHY

I have taken a few days off from the blog to work on a new business venture, a mobile kiosk that will soon be moving through the streets of Baltimore, spreading joy and dispensing vanilla lattes. As I was working on adapting the plumbing and electrical systems, a thought occurred to me- you can't run water through a wire, but you can run electricity through a pipe.

This rather profound thought occurred to me as I was wiping the water that had just burst from a pipe out of my eyes, realizing that I had failed to turn off the electricity. Luckily, I did not electrocute myself, but I did learn something- morons shouldn't mess with plumbing.

I also realized that sometimes, we as humans, attempt to use a wire to funnel water. We use the wrong tools to build the birdhouse. We use the wrong lens when examining a problem.

Let me give you an example- my brother (the real brain behind the book) is a doctor, is engaged to be married and will soon be a first-time father. As a doctor, he needs to look at a problem that a patient brings from a detached, scientific perspective. However, if he uses this same perspective in dealing with his fiance', he might experience the following:

[fade in on couple getting dressed for dinner party]

Honey. Does this dress make me look fat?

Well, dear. Given that you are pregnant, your body is storing higher levels of glycogen, thereby increasing your bmi, so technically you are fat. The dress really has nothing to do with it. 

[zoom in on crying girl and fade out]

In other words, you can't use your medical school training to comfort your pregnant fiance'. You need to use different paradigms when examining different types of problems. You can't use philosophy to work out a scientific problem. You can't use science to work out a philosophical problem.

This is because science answers one specific question- how? Philosophy and religion, on the other hand, don't offer the necessary framework to understand how. They are meant to help discover why. Part of the problem that exists between science and religion is that too often scientists forget that they don't have the why tools, and philosophers sometimes mistakenly believe that are able to reason out the how.

In the Fallen Angel Trilogy, we attempt to use both. I hope we don't electrocute ourselves in the process.