THREE BALLPARKS WHERE THE GAME IS FOR KEEPS

Everyone's looking for just the right catchphrase. Words that leap off the page and grab both your head and your heart in a spectacular stranglehold of conviction. Pols are big players. Remember: "Walk Softy And Carry A Big Stick," "The New Deal," "The New Frontier," "It's Sunrise in America."

But anyone can play this game. So here's a new one: "Think Small!"

Sounds counter-intuitive, but actually it's been an idea in play for generations. Played inside three different ballparks or realms of thought. Theology. Psychology. Now Biology. For centuries theology was the playing field on which we tried to win an understanding of ourselves  [there exists some first-cause-higher-power ]. Beginning with Freud, psychology emerged as a more tangible playing field  [our mind is the higher-power we must examine ].

Recently, however, Western Civilization has found evolutionary biology the best playing field on which to figure ourselves out [ basically we're evolved matter whose various genes, chemicals, and circuits are what we need to understand to understand ourselves].

Advancing from theology to psychology to biology, sounds like progress. Only there are those theologians and psychologists who wonder if in our progress we've left something important behind. What's happened is that we are thinking smaller and smaller. Rather than how we may fit into some cosmic grand design, psychologists focus narrowly on ids and libidos, while biologists even more narrowly on synapses and lobes.

None of us yet know for sure all the answers. And yet, doesn't it make sense this game of knowledge  be conducted on all three fields of play? Our lobes operate within our id which operates within whatever first-cause started all this. So while today's excited evolutionary biologists see only biology at work, psychologist and theologians still belong in the game. I mean how else do you complete one of the game's biggest payoffs -- the triple play?