Stephen P Smith

Wine grapes had come to Napa years ago, but in my youth you could still find dairy farms and walnut and prune orchards in the Napa Valley. My boyhood was spent on such a Napa dairy farm, the Rockinar Dairy it was called. Few of my readers have ever milked cows, or shorn a sheep, like I did. That`s hard work, but I have been blessed to have had such experiences. That early foundation brought me to study agriculture and the life sciences, and by the mid 1980`s I was a research scientist working in Australia studying dairy cows. My training also included an advanced education in mathematics and statistics, and I later worked as a professional statistician when I returned to California. My technical apex came when I published a paper having to do with the automatic differentiation of a computer algorithm called the Cholesky decomposition, but we don`t need to get bogged down in mental gymnastics and my mathematical vanity. Nevertheless, it was in the wake of this accomplishment that I learned to become reflective enough to study philosophy, and I was fortunate to find enough time to read so many books. Years ago I had thought philosophy to be abstract nonsense, but I was very wrong. Philosophy was discovered to be as practical and hands-on as milking cows, much to my amazement. I concluded that both philosophy and science are needed together if we are going to make sense of the world. That brings you up to date with my background. I make some bold claims in my book Trinity, nevertheless I believe I am justified in making these claims. I feel strongly enough to tell my story, otherwise I would be back on the farm or Australia.