The Solomon Scale (2 of 6)

Dear Grandmother,

I got your letter and you are right. I forgot to talk about the kind of man Dr. Solomon is. He is an incredible man who loves God. I respect his work and his character. We stay in touch and have collaborated on a number of studies.

To answer your other question, the the machine was hailed with all variety of reactions. Most were skeptical of it until it started showing consistent and useful results. Goodness, it would soon be discovered, was not quite what everybody thought.

And yes. You are right. Every person in the world does have a goodness level, a Solomon score, at any given moment. Actually that’s not entirely true; some people have no recordable goodness. On young children and the mentally handicapped, the machine returns “error.” This was a great disappointment to many people, as they expected the children to be consistently higher than the rest of us. These “Innocents” are one of the many groups that still remain skeptical of the value of the Solomon Scale. Though in my opinion, they are naming the solution to their objection. Innocence is not goodness, it is innocence; the machine is a goodness machine, not an innocence machine. But that’s another debate.

But it does remind me of Dr. Solomon’s most recent work on modifying the machine to break out the individual virtues. His preliminary data shows that two people at 20S might be there by different means; one might be a courageous miser and the other a generous coward. But this work is still very preliminary; I’ll keep you updated in later letters.

Sorry I didn’t have much time for letter writing this week and rambled a bit. I had another grant to submit (please pray for me!). Next week I’ll have the time to answer your questions about the science itself.

With love,

Jeremy

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