Did you hear about the latest power scheme? San Francisco is apparently preparing to test collection carts and biodegradable bags in a city center popular with dog walkers. The theory: dog poop could be scooped into a "methane digester," a device which uses bugs and microorganisms to convert the substance to methane. The gas would then be trapped and burned to power a turbine which produces electricity. Since dogs and cats in America produce about 10 million tons of waste a year, the possibilities are obvious. And the dogs don't seem to mind.

Like them, I have no idea how all that is possible. There is so much I don't know or understand about the world. Not long ago a friend e-mailed me with a large list of new facts. Among them:

--Money isn't made out of paper, but cotton.

--The 57 on the Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickles the company once had (the number doesn't really represent anything).

--A rat can last longer without water than a camel

--Susan Lucci is the daughter of Phyllis Diller (another Urban Legend).

--A duck's quack doesn't echo. (It has been proven it does echo...it's just so quiet, it's hard to hear).

--The "spot" on the 7-Up label comes from its inventor (an albino), who had red eyes (yet another Urban Legend).

--John Wilkes Booth's brother once saved the life of Abraham Lincoln's son.

--The number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per side in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000.

--"Upper" and "lower" case letters are so named because the "upper case" letters were stored in the case on top at the printer, and the "lower case" letters in the case below it.

--There are no words in the dictionary which rhyme with "orange," "purple," and "silver."

--celery has negative calories--it takes more calories to eat a stick of celery than the celery has in it.

And the world's store of knowledge doubles every eighteen months. Who knows what we won't know then!

In this chapter I'm not going to contribute to the knowledge glut beyond what is absolutely essential. Writing what follows is painful for me, since I'm leaving out far more than I'm putting in. But since this is a survey intended to help Christians understand their faith and serve God more effectively, and not a survey of historical philosophy on its own merits, perhaps the scholars among us will forgive me.