Philosophy, Theology & Science
A great dinner party
The shift to once-a-week writing was intentional. The pros and cons are interesting, at least to me. In one short year, I have grown to LOVE writing. There is even a slightly addictive quality to it. At times, in my work career, I would evaluate new projects. I liked to consider what the project might be about in a less classic way of thinking. We are taught to think of the pros and cons. It turns out, at least in my eyes, the pros and cons are merely OUTCOMES, and judging their merits is in the eye of the beholder. Writing less is going to have lots of outcomes for me and I am excited, in different ways, for each of them.
Today’s title is not far away. While imperfect I associate a VALUE JUDGEMENT in our decisions on which outcomes to pursue. I think they can be loosely associated with the elements of my title today. I CERTAINLY believe if I asked each of you for a word for each of the three you might choose very differently. I think this might be affected by your worldview.
Philosopy - Ponder the possibility
Religion - Embrace the inspired truth
Science - Explore the difference
I think the MOST IMPORTANT takeaway from the three is that each MUST EXIST or what we believe, accept, and refine will never bubble up to the top at all. At a given time in history, what we know or believe is fixed. Being satisfied with where you are can bring serenity and that is perhaps valuable but travels with a terrible blindspot. Accepting uncertainty can do the same thing. What our journey on this planet tells us, at a given moment is there is much we do not know and perhaps may never know with certainty. Our minds become settled by more certainty. I believe this is an over-arching value of the revealed truth. Rejecting new explanations can do the same thing but at the price of creating conflict with some newly revealed, objective truth. I think it is all a matter of keeping our minds in a comfortable state of balance. So what you get from me for “what is right” is it depends.
Outcomes of Writing Once a Week
WAY more time to do other things — AKA explore the new
MORE time to carefully evaluate topics — AKA narrow my focus
MORE time to ‘polish the apple’ of a singular post — AKA sharpen the result
LESS time to explore and perhaps fashion a small idea into something worthwhile — AKA time back to develop other passions
Time For a Joke?
When I wrote the title, I immediately shifted in my mind to a joke. A philosopher, a minister, and a scientist walk into a bar. Try as I might I could not finish the idea but I invite a reader out there to fashion a good joke. I am sure there are some good ones to be shared! Here is as far as I have gotten but I’m confident this doesn’t meet the “good” standard quite yet.
A philosopher, a minister, and a scientist walk into a bar.
The bartender comments, wow I would never expect to see the three of you together, what will you have?
Each of them is flummoxed and ask the bartender, what is “good”
The bartender says “good” is in the eye of the beholder but I make a kickin’ gin and tonic.
The philosopher says, alright, I never CONSIDERED mixing those things together but I will try it.
The minister says, water and wine I’ve heard of but since I don’t think the mixture is FORBIDDEN, I will give it a try!
The scientist says, I’m not sure you will be able to actually mix those things together with just a swizzle stick. If you put mine in the blender I will give it a “whirl”.
The three of them sat down and decided, we should do this more often.
How Did We Get Here?
I have a cousin who I enjoy IMMENSELY. His life arc has been interesting. Faith is a big part of his life and when we speak philosophically, he has a lot of insight and opinion to share. I would imagine if we lived nearby I would enjoy talking through things with him. He has shared a bit of his reading list and I’ve made some room in my bulging TBR. Frequent readers know that my posts are often spawned on my treadmill excursions. Today was no different. While the story I heard was not really about philosophy, religion, or science, it peripherally touched them all. I believe my cousin would make a strong and persuasive case for one of the above.
My word/phrase of the day is “What is your worldview?” This expression exerts pressure on life nowadays. I think it reflects tension for many. I think our consciousness presses us for conclusions. Our brains are undoubtedly physical and have mechanisms to store thoughts and feelings. While this does not preclude other things at work, this does not seem controversial to me. I would imagine for someone with a fixed or rigid worldview, each scientific discovery about the nature of consciousness sucks and might unsettle them a bit.
While not a joke and imperfect, here’s a take on the title via the photo image
Food for Thought
The impetus for writing this post arises from a couple of recent scientific findings that I was happy to hear about. Why was I happy? I guess I celebrate knowledge and hearing a new point of view. I have mentioned it before in my writing but I revel in the ingenious design of experiments. I think people in the past sought explanations for many things and were confident an alternate explanation was beyond our comprehension. Here are some examples of things I would imagine were safely locked away and beyond the reach of humans to figure out. Each of these has become something we can now safely estimate with some precision. These are some of the most basic questions:
HOW OLD: How old something is, especially the inanimate. It was perfectly reasonable, and I dare say quaint to declare the age of the earth, the rocks, etcetera, and guide your audience on how inviolate your facts were. In the context of today’s knowledge, this seems absurd. I had a colleague many years ago who worked for GE. He described to me how artificial diamonds are created. In those days it was for diamond drill bits to explore the earth and drill for discovery. Without an understanding of how they came to be (and the time horizon) in the natural world (natural diamonds), none of this was possible. His knowledge was just another nail in the coffin of the premise that our world is about 6,000 years old. For those with more interest, Carbon-14 dating is often cited as a cool way to date stuff. In truth, there are now hundreds of radioactive dating approaches that guide us with different classes of objects. Dendrochronology (tree rings) is another cool way to date stuff. Finally, we now spend time assessing content in ice cores to figure out what was going on thousands of years ago. Each of these, “to an inquiring mind” is a fascinating rabbit hole.
HOW BIG: I am a sucker for astronomy. I would imagine that long before we spoke but merely grunted, the night sky must have engendered awe amongst our ancestors. Our human eyeball, as wonderful and majestic as it may seem was no match for what would someday be understood. A clear night (which the whole world had in those days) was a given for everyone! No lights of the city nor pollution above occluding our view of the sky. To look up and view the constellations and the closer bodies like the moon and the nearby planets must have been a lot to take in. It is no wonder we have surviving explanations of what the sky is all about. My favorite observation of the tales was the consistency of their limitation. A story of 7th heaven was broadly consistent. The limits of our eyeballs constrained our imagination. The bodies we could consistently refer to were (1) the Moon, (2) Mercury, (3) Venus, (4) the Sun, (5) Mars, (6) Jupiter, and (7) Saturn. This became the basis for the heavens and our understanding of all monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) as well as the major polytheistic religions (such as Hinduism & Jainism among others). The beauty of this writing has survived the centuries and was the beginning of understanding. The arrival of dominant points of view STUNTED further evaluation. The discovery of the telescope and the realization that the lowly human eyeball was equipped to “see” nearly nothing of the light spectrum. What an exciting world would lie beyond such a limitation. A nice synopsis of 7th Heaven is just a click away. I wrote about this in “I See”.
HOW SMALL: We just finished a wonderful book in my book club titled “The Swerve”. This was part of the impetus that brought this post to life. It was an inspiring story of the imagination of a philosopher named Lucretius. It was the POWER of imagination, in the absence of tools to evaluate what he described. He envisioned a world of atoms although he did not name them. His ideas were sequestered and nearly destroyed centuries later by forces like the Catholic Church and others. His mere ideas were dangerous as they conflicted with the revealed truth. When I was in high school I enjoyed chemistry. I remember repeating a famous experiment called the Millikan Oil Drop Experiment. An ingenious man, lacking the tools to “see” an electron, nevertheless fashioned an experiment to measure the charge and later weigh an electron. Only 40+ years later, we’ve managed to go much smaller than the electron on a journey to understand the fundamentals of matter. I am confident that the following link will explain the experiment for those who are interested. My money is on this link NOT getting much exercise. I wrote about small stuff in “5 Nanometers”
Finally Some Cool Observations
I hope that AT LEAST one of these items will lead you to want to learn more. ,For me it was all of the above or this post could not have happened.
Prayer, Meditation & Neuroplasticity
What happens when we pray or meditate? What I KNOW is I become more peaceful. Perhaps the word is tranquil and it works to center me. I am afraid I would not be a candidate for the study, however. You see, the focus of this study is to find people who pray or meditate at least two hours per day! The wonders of modern brain scanning yield some clues about our frontal lobes and our parietal lobes. The frontal lobes are regions where WE SELF-MONITOR AND CONTROL OUR RESPONSES to ACHIEVE A GOAL. When we pray or meditate our frontal lobes light up like a Christmas tree! The parietal lobes are regions where THE BRAIN INTERPRETS input from other areas of the body. When we pray or meditate intensely our brains STOP DOING THIS and the lobes largely go blank!!! So when we intensely pray or meditate we intensely concentrate on peacefulness and block our senses from interrupting. That sounds pretty great!!! Performing this action in the long term is where the neuroplasticity brings reinforcement to the pattern and leads to our peacefulness, increased concentration, and sense of well-being. I did my best to describe this. Here is a long-form written or audio explanation.
Are You a left or right-brainer?
When you hear the discussion of how we have right and left hemispheres in our brain, I imagine most people think, yeah, so what? We are not alone in having two hemispheres in our brains. What makes us special is the two hemispheres are “networked” together much more extensively than in other animals. It appears, in other higher-order animals, the evolutionary changes to coordinate the two have begun but only in humans does it seem to have traveled a long way.
Due to epilepsy, in some cases, radical surgery severs the major connection between the hemispheres. Patients of this sort have become major sources of insight into “how we work”. In the 1960s (pretty recently!), some studies did the following:
flash an image in front of the right eye only (connects to the left side of the brain only). In a split second, the left side of the brain could recognize the image and describe it VERBALLY
flash the image in front of the left eye only (connects to the right side of the brain). The patient could not see the image at all! However, if they were asked to DESCRIBE the image non-verbally matters got weird! The patient could point to an image or even DRAW something describing the image they could not see!!!
If you read or listen to the interview you will be freaked out by the role of a SHOVEL. Ridiculous and a tribute to great experimental design.
What’s In A Memory or a Belief?
While I do not have an affinity for rats necessarily, they are extremely useful to our efforts to advance frontiers of knowledge. I enjoy cleverly designed experiments and this one qualifies. I think it is safe to say we develop memories and even beliefs by what we observe. Does that mean they are “valid” memories? What happens when a memory or belief forms? We clearly can forget stuff. We also seem to be able to establish durable beliefs and stick with them when new evidence emerges. A lot going on with this topic. The phrase basic research comes to mind. If we theorize it’s all in our neurons, it might be helpful to understand how we imbed something in a neuron and perhaps even remove it. The scientific study provided here does just that! Rats were modified to allow us to set and reset something as low-level as fear into an array of neurons. Most importantly they figured out a remote way of eliminating the fear. Is that what happens when we pray or meditate? What I KNOW is I become calmer and get a more settled mind when I take the time and make the effort.
It’s A Wrap
I would imagine if I could cajole a philosopher, a minister (my cousin who went to Divinity School for example), AND a scientist to read this content, I would get wildly different takeaways. I am glad I have never been interested in hanging around with just one kind of person!
The Poll & Music
Tonight the poll refers to who you might invite to Thanksgiving Dinner (or already do). The three are of course the philosopher, the minister, and the scientist.
What a wonderful array of music came to mind as I wrote this post. For philosophy, this one gets right to it. As for the minister, this one is on the spot. Finally, a song for a scientist. This one is pretty good also.
What’s Next
The next post is fun and light and is titled “Let’s Make Mirth & Golumpki.
You’re so right: we need more of a mixture of religion, science, & philosophy. They all ask similar questions with different methods. Also, I’ve been meaning to read The Swerve since it came out! Your post might actually get me to finally read it!
Love the idea that we need all three lines of inquiry—and not surprised that option one is getting the most votes. If I had to pick one for Thanksgiving I’d probably go with the ministers bc with the scientists and philosophers there’s more risk they’d be all wrapped up in some super niche area of academia beyond my comprehension.