The Creation and E. O. Wilson

"Let us see, then, if we can, and you are willing, to meet on the near side of metaphysics in order to deal with the real world we share." (p. 4)

"If religion and science could be united on the common ground of biological conservation, the problem would soon be solved." (p. 5)

"Scientific knowledge, humanized and well taught, is the key to achieving a lasting balance in our lives." (p. 12)

"But what is Nature? The simplest possible answer is also the best: Nature is that part of the environment and its life forms that remains after the human impact. Nature is all in planet Earth that has no need of us and can stand alone" (p. 15)

"People need insects to survive, but insects do not need us. If all humankind were to disappear tomorrow, it is unlikely that a single insect species would go extinct, except three forms of human body and head lice." (p. 33)

"Such is the philosophy of exemptionalism, which supposes that the special status on Earth of humanity lifts us above the laws of Nature. Exemptionalism takes one or the other of two forms. The first, just expressed, is secular: don't change course now human genius will provide. The second is religious: don't change course now, we are in the hands of God" (p. 83)

"Life on this planet can stand no more plundering. Quite apart from obedience to the universal moral imperative to saving the Creation, based on religion and science alike, conserving biodiversity is the best economic deal humanity has ever had placed before it since the invention of agriculture." (p. 99)

"...it is possible to glean a picture of the great goals of present-day biology. They are, I believe, as follows:
Create life: ...
reconstruct the steps that led to the origin of life ...
cure disease and repair injuries...
explain the mind ...
complete the mapping of Earth's fauna and flora ...
advance medicine, agriculture and public health. ...
Create a Tree of Life for all species ...
protect and stabilize Earth's biodiversity ...
unveil the coevolution of genes and culture." (p. 106)

"Ultimately, and at the deepest level, the Encyclopedia of Life is destined, I believe, to transform the very nature of biology, because biology is primarily a descriptive science" (p. 123)

"The Holy Grail of liberal education is the formula by which passion can be systematically expanded for both science and the humanities, hence the best in culture" (p. 127)


"Chapter 14: How to Learn Biology and How to Teach It
Teach top-down ...
Reach outside biology ...
Focus on problem solving ...
Cut deep and travel far ...
Commit yourself"

"Once the standard symbols and operations of mathematics are learned and used repeatedly to the point of second nature, scanning an equation is not very different from reading a passage in a book." (p. 133)

"From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning. From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge. And from mastery of the novel and beautiful world awaiting every child comes self-confidence. The growth of the naturalist is like the growth of the musician or athlete: excellence for the talented, lifelong enjoyment for the rest, benefit for humanity" (p. 147)

"My foundation of reference has been the culture of science and some of secularism, as I understand them. From that foundation I have focused on the interaction of three problems that affect everyone: the decline of the living environment, the inadequacy of science education, and the moral confusions caused by the exponential growth of biology. In order to solve these problems, I've argued, it will be necessary to find common ground on which the powerful forces of religion and science can be joined. The best place to start is the stewardship of life." (p. 165)

"You and I are both humanists in the broadest sense: human welfare is at the center of our thought. But the difference between humanism based on religion and humanism based on science radiates through philosophy and the very meaning we assign ourselves as a species. ... What are we to do? Forget the differences, I say. Meet on common ground. That might not be as difficult as it seems at first. When you think about it our metaphysical differences have remarkably little effect on the conduct of our separate lives. My guess is that we are about equally ethical, patriotic, and altruistic. We are products of a civilization that rose both from religion and the science-based Enlightenment. We would gladly serve on the same jury, fight the same wars, sanctify human life with the same intensity. And surely we also share a love of the Creation." (p. 168)

OK, So it was never really about length but ...

As Nietze said, "That which does not kill you will make you stronger."

The term paper is now behind you. The average length of the term papers submitted was 1740 +/- 550 words. When you think about it that is a respectable length for an essay. The shortest essay was 1161 words and the longest was 2279 words.

Those of you with overdue interlibrary loans had better get them back to the library or face penalties.

Open Thread: Week 9/10

The Area of Interaction

"In actual fact the truth is altogether more complex and correspondingly more interesting" (p. 5)

"The Galileo affair by no means indicates that there is an inevitable incompatibility between science and religion. One unwise incident does not imply a continuing conflict"

"Theology discovered that the dignity of humankind depended neither upon its inhabiting the center of the universe nor upon Homo sapiens being a separately and instantaneously created species." (p. 8)

"The doctrine of creation implies that:
- the word is orderly, since God is rational;
- no prior constraints are imposed on the Creator's choice of creation's pattern, so that one has to look (observe and experiment) to see what the divine will has selected;
- because creation is not itself sacred, it can be investigated with impiety;
- because the world is God's creation, it is a worthy object of study." (p. 9)

"Scientists are driven by the desire to understand and not simply by the ability to correlate or predict accurately." (p. 13)

"The occasional occurrence of radical revision in scientific theory-making means that one cannot claim the achievement of science to be that of the attainment of absolute truth." (p. 16)

The Scientific Picture of the World

"This decision corresponds to the realist strategy of seeking as close and alignment as possible between epistemology and ontology. In a phrase of Polkinghorn's, "Epistemology models ontology" ..." (p. 31)

"In the minds of contemporary scientists, the guarantee of reality is not objectivity but intelligibility ..." (p. 33)

"Both chance and necessity are indispensable partner in the fruitful history of the universe. A purely contingent word would be too haphazard to be fertile; a purely necessitarian world would be too rigid to be fertile." (p. 39)

"On one hand, in a deterministic universe, total knowledge of the present would enable total prediction of the future and total retrodiction of the past (as Laplace pointed out two centuries ago), so that in that sense it would be quite natural to accord past, present and future equal ontological status in this case. On the other hand, an open universe with a variety of causal principles at work, including the choices of free agents, is naturally conceived of as a world of true becoming in which the reality of the moving present would be expected to be accommodated, rather than a world of static atemporality" (p. 48)

Science / Religion Debate In Time Magazine

The link below is to a debate between two men of science in Time Magazine from last fall. Again this course is not about evolution but it does address the philosophical positions of thiesm and reductionism. In this debate we have a sometimes unvarnished and clear view of the end result of reductionism. It makes for interesting reading.

Link to Dawkins / Collins Debate in Time

Thinking Evolution While Believing Creationism

A number of you have expressed interest in the case of the man that worked several years to get a PhD in evolutionary geology while believing in creationism. I have given a link to the article below.

Link to Creationist with PhD in Evolutionary Geology



Click on the image to see at full size.

Preparation for Part III: Contemporary Science

Some students will have problems with details of the next part of the course. In particular the discoveries and interpretations of modern science and specifically quantum science. There is no doubt that the recent experiments cause serious concerns with our perception of "reality".

To break us in gently I would invite you to spend some time with Richard Feynman. He was an extraordinary scientist that died in 1988. He was (and is) considered extraordinary because he combined genius, brilliance (never forget that they are different) and personality in a package that each generation seeks in its leaders. Students that were taught by him were devoted to him like disciples and he marked those that he touched. Most of America "discovered" Richard Feynman not because of his publications, discoveries or his Nobel Prize. He came to the worlds attention during the investigation into the first failure of the space shuttle. He was on the committee looking into the accident. During one particularly onerous session with one of the manufacturers of the shuttle (about the temperature dependence of the elasticity of the rubber rings that failed and caused the accident) Richard Feynman grabbed a piece of the rubber and plunged it into the pitcher of ice water that the committee had been drinking. It was immediately evident that in even this simple experiment that the rubber became stiff and would not form a seal thus leading to the failure of the shuttle. He was that kind of guy.

One of the last students to be taught by Richard Feynman wrote this:

"Feynman was gazing at a rainbow as if he had never seen one before. Or maybe as if it would be his last.

I approached him cautiously and joined him staring at the rainbow. It wasn’t something I normally did – in those days.

“Do you know who first explained the true origin of the rainbow ?” I asked.

“It was Descartes” he said. After a moment he looked me in the eye. “And what do you think was the salient feature of the rainbow that inspired Descartes mathematical analysis?” he asked.

“I give up ... what would you say inspired his theory?”

“I would say his inspiration was that he thought rainbows were beautiful”"

Feynman’s Rainbow, Leonard Mlodinow, Warner books, New York, 2003.

Of all the geniuses that populate the modern world of physics Richard Feynman was the most reflective and willing to engage the humanities in discussion. I strongly think that you would benefit from taking a few minutes and watch this video of Feynman that was recently posted by an Institute of Technology (so I assume that the rights are "clean")

Link to Feynman Video

Open Thread: Week 8 Thinking About Science

"...evangelicals who pursue science in the universities, who are employed as scientific experts for industry and government, or who teach science at the Christian colleges have usually approached their subjects as carefully segregated fields of knowledge rather than with the intent of studying scientific concerns in relation to theology or other spheres of thought" (p. 177)

"For nineteenth century evangelicals, science usually meant "Baconianism," or the belief that strict induction from verified individual facts to more general laws offered the best way to understand the data of any subject." (p. 178)

"Precisely this belief - that properly scrutinized results of the main culture's scientific enterprises should assist biblical interpretation - was the sacrifice offered by the Evangelical mind on the alter of fundamentalist theology" (p. 185)

"Modern creationism arose, by contrast, from the efforts of earnest Seventh Day Adventists who wanted to show that the sacred writings of Adventist founder Ellen G. White (who made much of a recent earth and the Noachian deluge) could provide a framework for studying the history of the earth." (p. 189)

"Reasons for the success of creation science are, by the nature of the case, complex. Doubtless a combination of factors account for what is one of the great innovations of recent Evangelical history - the establishment of an alternative form of science to the form taught by the intellectual establishments of the culture.

... first because of the intuitive belief of many evangelicals that it embodied the simple teachings of scripture.

...the production of influential biology textbooks that not only introduced major contemporary findings but also propounded grandly phrased metaphysical claims about the evolutionary character of the cosmos.

...the widespread resentment against America's self-appointed knowledge elites.

... A biblical literalism, gaining strength since the 1870's, has fueled both the intense concern for human origins and the end times." (p. 193)

"Creationists regularly reaffirm the principles of Baconian science: no speculation without direct empirical proof, no deductions from speculative principles, no science without extensive empirical evidence. The tragedy is that creationists preserve a misguided Baconianism for the Bible and abandon a healthy Baconianism for science." (p. 197)

"For Galileo, as for Bacon and Augustine before him, to think that one could interpret the Bible on scientific questions without employing a dialogue between natural and biblical observations was to guarantee misunderstanding of Scripture." (p. 206)

"The testimony of Augustine, Bacon, Galileo, and Warfield can be summarized by focusing on a concrete example: if the consensus of modern scientists, who devote their lives to looking at the data of the physical world, is that humans have existed on this planet for a very long time, it is foolish for biblical interpreters to say that ""the Bible teaches" the recent creation of human beings. ... It means that, for people today to say they are being loyal to the Bible and to demand belief in a recent creation of humanity as a sign of obedience to Scripture is in fact being unfaithful to the Bible, which, in Psalm 19 and elsewhere, calls upon the followers of God to listen to the speech that God has caused the natural world to speak." (p. 207)