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)

Open Thread: Week 7 Natural Theology and History

Chapter 6: The Fortunes and Functions of Natural Theology
“The object of the chapter is to uncover some of the reasons why this integration of science and religion proved so viable, despite the existence of trenchant critiques. We shall also consider the extent to which a commitment to natural theology affected the scientific enterprise and the extent to which advances in science affected the plausibility of arguments from design. ” (p. 15)

“The idea that divine wisdom could be discerned in nature was attractive in different ways, both to Christian apologists and to deists. Christians found the argument useful in their dialogues with unbelief. It seemed to offer independent proof of a God who they believed had also revealed Himself in the person of Christ. On the other hand, Deists also had reasons for promoting the design argument. The more that could be knwn of God through rational inference the less perhaps it was necessary to refer to revelation at all” (p. 193)

“For Calvin, any knowledge of God inferred from nature would be distorted, the defective product of a dimmed and fallen intellect. The image could only be rectified by reading nature through the spectacles of Scripture” (p. 195)

“Natural theology flourished in England not because of a peculiar English mentality but because there were social and political circumstances that gave the English Enlightenment a distinctive character” (p. 200)

“… according to Kant, was that no matter how much wise artistry might be displayed in the world, it could never demonstrate the moral wisdom that had to be predicated of God” (p. 205)

“On one level, natural theology was not so much destroyed by science as eased out of scientific culture by a growing irrelevance.” (p. 219)

“Whewell continued to argue that the best explanation for the mind’s capacity to discover scientific truth was that it had been designed for the purpose. As priest and preacher, however he stressed that the way back to God was not through rational considerations. For one thing, that would leave God out of the conversion process; for another it would take insufficient account of the fact that design arguments were really only compelling to those that already believed.” (p. 224)

Chapter 7: Visions of the Past: Religious Belief and the Historical Sciences
“The assumptions made in reconstructing the past were often highly controversial even among naturalists themselves. We shall therefore stress the competition between rival scenarios, in which the political and religious preferences sometimes constituted a hidden agenda. Although there were countless attempts to harmonize these disturbing vistas with biblical texts, they were eventually abandoned – at least among academic theologians – as the methods of historical research were brought to bear on questions of biblical authorship” (p. 14)

“With the emergence of more sophisticated historical scholarship, particularly in Germany, it had already become clear to many Christian intellectuals that adherence to the literal inerrancy of Scripture was no way to present the credentials of Christianity to the modern world.” (p. 231)

“The science of history had created a watershed. One set of presuppositions took one toward a more human, but historically elusive Christ. The other – more traditional – allowed the retention of the Christ of faith, but at the cost of severing ones ties with what Strauss called “our modern world”” (p. 270)