evolving continents session five su spring 2008. better source of video site:
TRANSCRIPT
Four Major Issues at stake
I remind you of the four controverted areas of science and religion:1. cosmology or origins/big bang2. quantum physics (micro-physics and indeterminacy)3. evolution and developmentalism4. human nature (interplay of environment and genetics) Ian Barbour
Creation/Cosmos as SKETCH
By SKETCH I am trying to capture in a single word the minimalist position. It is the honest scientific sceptic position; as well as the honest religious sceptic position. Neither position is intended to be disrespectful.
Most scientists are SKETCH oriented (or find the faith question irrelevant); but a growing number in the last three decades have become cross-over EPIC oriented (my term). Why?
Ups and Downs of SKETCH Model
1. Unlike ACCOUNT that attempts blending, SKETCH moves past amalgam toward a deterministic bio-genesis or de-mythologized worldview
2. But SKETCH raises other concerns such as value relativism and the place of teleos in science and religion
Limits of Scepticism/Speculation
"Scepticism is the beginning of faith.“ Oscar Wilde
"There's a sucker born every minute."
P T Barnum
Tipler as Speculator
The Physics of Immortality explores the possibility
that if our universe is closed, it will collapse
into a final Omega Point or Singularity, but…
Intelligent life might be able to 'engineer' this
collapse at a specific rate in order to survive (a
'Taub'-like collapse).
Cosmological Viewpoint
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
TS Eliot Hollow Men
SKETCH proponent reaches out
“I am puzzled that so many religious leaders, who spiritually represent a large majority of people around the world, have hesitated to make protection of the Creation an important part of their magisterium. Do they believe that human-centered ethics and preparation for the afterlife are the only things that matter? Even more perplexing is the widespread conviction among Christians that the Second Coming is imminent, and that therefore the condition of the planet is of little consequence.” EO Wilson (appeals to a Southern Baptism minister)
Bultmann and Dawkins: Sceptics
1. Rudolph Bultmann’s “form critical” de-mythologization project has never been fully rejected, but it minimalizes the God-talk of the Bible
2. Richard Dawkins’ neo-evolutionary human nature project has drawn fire for its unintended passivity in the face of ethical issues
Explanation of Demythology
Demythology is a type of interpretation of
the New Testament proposed by Rudolf
Bultmann that strips away elements from
the New Testament to find real truth. He felt
primitive and pre-scientific man used
language of myth to understand themselves
and world around them.
Explanation of Memes
This is not something that I’ve ever wanted to push as a theory of human culture, but I originally proposed it as a kind of... almost an anti-gene, to make the point that Darwinism requires accurate replicators with phenotypic power, but they don’t necessarily have to be genes. What if they were computer viruses? They hadn’t been invented when I wrote The Selfish Gene so I went straight for memes, units of cultural inheritance.
Richard Dawkins
Two Domains/NOMA thesis
Argument # 1—Science and Religion are distinct equal magisteria
Argument # 2—Science and Religion are inseparable polar magisteria
But any mixing or overlapping of the two leads to bitter and unnecessary conflict
Source: Rocks of Ages Stephen Jay Gould
Scopes Trial Redux
A 2005 court case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania, declared that Intelligent Design is creationism re-packaged, not science.
The judgment had “nothing to do with politics, but evidence and precedents…”
Ruling by a Judge John E. Jones
ID: agnostic inter-faith concept?
“Intelligent design trades on this insight to propose that only a designer could create life in the first place. The theory is spiritual, but it's not bound by Scripture, as creationism is. A designer is a nondenominational ecumenical possibility, not a dogmatic formula.”
John West Center for Science and Culture
Highjacked Disciplines
Did a designer set Earth's life processes in
motion? Few questions are more interesting
or intellectually rich. Because the evolution
debate is so rancorous, however, the how-
did-life-begin question is usually lost amid
shouting matches between orthodox
Darwinians and hard-line creationists.
Deficits of Sketch
Simply stated: the worst of SKETCH is its reductive, passive, inorganic, and mechanistic mindsets taken by both the religious and scientific communities
SKETCH focuses on one domain and tends to disregard other co-disciplinary inputs
Stumbling block
Zoology is still a minority subject in universities, and even those who choose to study it often make their decision without appreciating its profound philosophical significance. Philosophy and the subjects known as 'humanities' are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.
Richard Dawkins
From his autobiography
“I occasionally sounded not a few
naturalists, and never happened to come
across a single one who seemed to doubt
about the permanence of species. Even
Lyell and Hooker, though they would listen
with interest to me, never seemed to agree.” Charles Darwin
Confessions of Richard Leakey
“One experiences a powerful sense of awe in holding a hominid fossil, a piece of one’s past, a piece of the past of all homo sapiens. It never fails to thrill me, and I know I am not the only one to talk this way…it doesn’t sound scientific…”
From his book Origins Reconsidered
Cosmological Prescience
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
What is our personal blindspot?
Is the Brian McLaren proverb correct: what we miss is determined by our focus?
SKETCH summary
“A mistake about Creation will necessarily be a mistake about God.”
Thomas AquinasSKETCH neither sanctifies nor vilifies
science and religion, evolution and revelation; all knowledge comes to an end. “We see in a glass darkly…”
Paul I Corinthians 13
A parable
Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. "But perhaps he is an invisible gardener." But is there a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible, to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves?
Andrew Flew in an essay written in 1950
More of the parable
So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well's The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced.
Ending of parable
At last the Sceptic despairs, "But what
remains of your original assertion? Just
how does what you call an invisible,
intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ
from an imaginary gardener or even from no
gardener at all?"
Sessions Review and Prospects
Summary to date or Creation and Cosmos as
1. Story (Memory)
2. Record (Revelation)
3. Chronicle (Special truth)
4. Account (Trans-symbolics)
5. Sketch (Agnostic tale)
6. Epic (Interdisciplinary multilevel notion of cosmology/fate of the planet and ethics)