The Questioning Christian

Category: Science and Religion

  • Breathing, Photosynthesis, and the Continuing Creation

    Think about what happened the last time you took a breath, and consider the cosmic machinery that made it possible:

    • Within your body, the oxygen that you inhaled got combined with the energy-storing molecules in your food to release energy. That energy was used by your brain, your muscles, etc., to leave the cosmos just a tiny bit different than the way it was before.
    • The energy you used to make that cosmic change had to be packed into your food somehow.  As we know from high-school biology, plants stored that energy in the food's constituent molecules, using CO2 from the air and sunlight as "feedstocks" for photosynthesis.
    • One of the byproducts of your changing the cosmos was your release of a certain amount of carbon dioxide back into the air when you exhaled.
    • Your exhaled CO2 will eventually be recycled by other plants — again using solar-powered photosynthesis — into still more molecules that will show up in foods, building materials, etc.
    • Oh, and this:  All those molecules we've been talking about?  Every single molecule on the planet (apart from hydrogen and maybe some of the helium) is composed of atoms from the ashes of one or more exploded stars.
    • And those dead stars? They came about as a result of a titanic process that's been in progress for billions of years, starting with the unimaginably-huge release of energy at (what we call) the Big Bang.

    So let's sum up:  We humans are part of a very-long-term process by which the energy from the Big Bang is being busily transformed into an ever-evolving universe.  

    If we wanted to speculate, we might even call this process a project — a continuing creation — in which we get to participate.

    (Inspired by an NPR commentary yesterday by astrophysicist Dr. Adam Frank reminding us of the wonder of photosynthesis.)

  • The real meaning of “science” — Dr. Atul Gawande’s CalTech commencement address

    Dr. Atul Gawande is one of my heroes. His CalTech commencement address of yesterday should be required reading for any informed citizen of any country.

    Excerpt:

    If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too.

    Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation.

    [DCT comment: In other words, "science" is the practice of dealing with the universe as it is — or in another formulation: as the Creator wrought it — and not as necessarily being now what we wish it were.]

    The thing is, that [the scientific mindset] isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense.

    Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested.

    (Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

    Read it all.

  • How the American interior was settled — a word movie that brings to mind the Creator’s ongoing organization of the universe

    You've heard of word pictures? And you've seen those speeded-up videos of how a tall building or a ship is built?  A piece in the online NY Times by history professor Christopher Phillips provides a vivid fast-motion "word movie" of how river transportation enabled the settlement of the American interior. It made me think of what it seems to be all about in our universe, in which we humans serve as created co-creators (to use Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner's phrase), helping in a titanic construction project.

  • The Gospel according to the XKCD comic

    The justly-famous techie comic xkcd.com has one today that ties in nicely with evidence-based theology:

     

    The_economic_argument[1]

  • Morals without God? (NY Times blog post)

    A good read, by biologist Frans B. M. de Waal

  • The search for intelligent life elsewhere

    From the often-hilarious xkcd.com – I read every strip on Google Reader:

  • Science is necessarily atheistic (but of course, that’s not necessarily the end of the inquiry)

    Cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

    J.B.S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and a founder of population genetics, understood that science is by necessity an atheistic discipline. As Haldane so aptly described it, one cannot proceed with the process of scientific discovery if one assumes a "god, angel, or devil" will interfere with one’s experiments. God is, of necessity, irrelevant in science.

    Faced with the remarkable success of science to explain the workings of the physical world, many, indeed probably most, scientists understandably react as Haldane did. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism.

    While such a leap may not be unimpeachable it is certainly rational, as Mr. McGinn pointed out at the World Science Festival. … [T]he scientific process … is in fact rationally incompatible with the detailed tenets of most of the world’s organized religions. [¶¶]

    (Emphasis added.)

    Of course, the atheists can’t categorically rule out another possibility, held out by others such as scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne, namely that ‘God’ might interact with the world in ways that we simply lack the capability to understand or even observe, perhaps at the level of quantum mechanics.

    That doesn’t mean we should premise significantly-risky decisions on the assumption that God acts in the world, only that it’s important not to get locked into an anti-religious dogma that insists he does not.

    And indeed, Krauss nails it when he says, "The current crisis in Iran has laid bare the striking inconsistency between a world built on reason and a world built on religious dogma.”  The same would seem to apply to any variety of dogma.

  • Norman Mailer: God as artist, not lawgiver

    From John M. Buchanan, Writers and words, The Christian Century, March 10, 2009, at 3:

    Not long before he died [, author Norman Mailer] granted a series of interviews, which are published in the book On God. Mailer said that he was an atheist for 30 years before coming to acknowledge that he did believe in God.

    He tried reading theology and was repelled. Theologians, Mailer concluded, “were undernourished in their appetite for inquiry.” I wish he could have had a conversation with the theologian Joseph Sittler, for one.

    Mailer came to believe in God, he said, because of his intense lifelong “exploration of human reality.”

    He envisioned God as “an artist, not a lawgiver, a mighty source of creative energy,” and human beings as God’s “most developed artwork.”

    (Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

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  • Evolutionary explanations for religious beliefs?

    From a Scientific American posting, Is Religion Adaptive? It’s Complicated – A group of Darwinian theorists discuss religion in Edinburgh, Scotland, by Jesse Bering of Queens University, Belfast (links are in original):

    … [T]he past decade has seen tremendous and quite rapid developments in the naturalistic study of religion. Topics such as God, souls and sin are no longer being treated as “outside science” but rather as biologically based emanations of the evolved human mind, subject to psychological scrutiny like any other aspect of human nature.  …

    Here is the fly-on-the-wall’s view of just a few of the topics discussed last weekend: [¶¶]

    Political scientist and evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson from the University of Edinburgh presented his argument that the idea of omniscient supernatural agents served an adaptive social policing function in the ancestral past. Johnson reasons that this would have encouraged individuals in groups to conform to group sanctions out of the fear of divine punishment, thus lessening the chances of social fission. This phenomenon would have been biologically adaptive since larger groups meant better chances of survival and reproductive success for individual members. It’s a bit like Santa Claus knowing whether we’re bad or good (but Santa doesn’t cause you to suffer renal failure, kill your crops, or sentence you to everlasting torment).

    Anthropologist Richard Sosis summarized his “costly signaling” hypothesis of religious behavior. The gist of Sosis’s clever theory is that people engage in all sorts of costly religious behaviors—wasting time on rituals, wearing uncomfortable clothes, spending their hard-earned money—because, in doing so, they are advertising their commitment to the religious in-group. In other words, if you’re willing to do things such as cut off your child’s foreskin, pay a regular alms tax of 2.5 percent of your net worth or sit twiddling your thumbs for two hours every Sunday morning on a hard church pew, then your fellow believers will assume that you’re really one of them and can therefore be trusted.

    Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers from Rutgers University, meanwhile, discussed the possible role of psychological self-deception in the realm of religion and reviewed the impossible to ignore evidence that religiosity positively effects human health. …

  • Evidence of multiple universes? And if so, just what does that say about the existence of God?

    It’s possible that our universe wasn’t specifically designed to support life as we know it, but is merely one of many possible universes, and ours happens to ‘work.’  This, according to some atheists, is supposedly a rebuttal to the claim of scientist-theologians that the fine-tuning of our universe suggests the hand of a Designer.

    (The atheists generally brush under the rug the question posed by the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne: If in fact there are multiple universes, that’s all well and good, but then where did they come from?)

    Hacker News points us to Dark flow: Proof of another universe? by Amanda Gefter, New Scientist, Jan. 22, 2009.  Here’s an excerpt:

    Kashlinsky, a senior staff scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, …. and colleagues have clocked galaxy clusters racing at up to 1000 kilometres per second – far faster than our best understanding of cosmology allows. Stranger still, every cluster seems to be rushing toward a small patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.

    Kashlinsky and his team claim that their observation represents the first clues to what lies beyond the cosmic horizon. Finding out could tell us how the universe looked immediately after the big bang or if our universe is one of many. Others aren’t so sure. One rival interpretation is that it is nothing to do with alien universes but the result of a flaw in one of the cornerstones of cosmology, the idea that the universe should look the same in all directions. That is, if the observations withstand close scrutiny.

    (Emphasis added.)

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