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Hello and welcome back to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host John DeLin. We are in part two of what I think is a fascinating discussion with Adam Miller, author of Letters to a Young Mormon.

Tell us your book or books by, uh, comfort books just as a favor to Greg and Brad and, and, uh, and Lloyd.

My book was Greg Cofer Books is called Rubbe Goldberg Machines. essays and Mormon theology. You know what a Rubbe Goldberg machine is?

Uh, actually I'm cheating because Brad, Brad explained it to me thusly. He said it's, uh, it's, it's some type of machine that does something very simple in a very complex, unnecessarily complex way.

Yeah, you know, you know, there's like the, like kind of those home alone can, in the movie, home alone, the kid rigs up all those crazy contraptions that, uh, that trip up the burglars, but in the end, right?

All they do is drop a brick, even though they went through like 15 steps in the process.

That's a Rubbe Goldberg machine and, and the analogy is that, you know, doing theology is a little bit like, you know, being a professional philosopher is a little bit like building Rubbe Goldberg machines.

You spend your time building elaborate contraptions, conceptual contraptions that in the end are really just trying to do something very simple.

Right.

And, um, but, but you know, it's needed, I think.

Why is it, you know, if you ever thought about why that's needed, why is it needed?

Why do we just like believe in, and, and serve? And that's it.

Yeah, I don't, I don't know that such a thing is possible.

I don't know it's possible that it's possible in the end to avoid Rubbe Goldberg machines because.

And part of the human experience, I think, is that we're always working, kind of ad hoc with materials that aren't quite designed for what we need to do.

And we're always making things up on the fly and we're always having to, we're always having to, uh, to rig things up that maybe weren't quite intended to do what we need them to do.

I think that's just part of the human experience.

Yeah.

So that's, it's true when religion is anyplace else that we're working that way.

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