Taking science AND faith seriously.
Episodes
Monday Apr 22, 2019
Monday Apr 22, 2019
Today we present the second half of the interview with Darcia Narvaez, social scientist at Notre Dame and a specialist in childhood inculturation, attachment, and bonding issues.
We start out this half of the interview with a discussion of what Karl Polyani called the "great transformation" of European society, involving the breakdown of the pre-modern order and its safeguards for a stable population by means of understandings about community use of land, perhaps resulting in the popularity of emigration to the New World by dispirited, dispossessed, and to some extent dangerous people.
Several times Darcia disparages "hierarchy," understood in its general sense of social stratification, which she or other who have influenced her theorize to have caused huge social catastrophes, including the corruption of the Christian Church by its integration into the late Roman state and the collapse of populations and cultures in the New World on contact with the colonizers from Europe. Late in the podcast I ask her explicitly whether there is any benefit to civilization... let us know in the comments on Facebook or Podbean what you think about the answer!
Darcia's claim is that humans are by nature more egalitarian than other animals. This goes right down to childrearing, where human children, born so completely needy, have an innate expectation that their requests for assistance will be met. She comments that there is a Native American word, "wetiko," that was used to describe an attitude thought of as akin to a sickness that characterized those who acted in an aggressive and exploitative way toward others. Whether or not premodern peoples were all more free of this, it's certainly a common feature of civilized peoples. The Old and New Testaments certainly testify to this, and the need to confront it with compassion and an egalitarian attitude. We discussed the specific example of the disease of the large organization, society, business, or government, in which those at the top are simply disconnected, both intellectually and morally, from those at the bottom.
We mentioned subsidiarity, and might have mentioned clericalism... the social science of these concepts will hopefully be fodder for future podcasts.
Monday Apr 15, 2019
Monday Apr 15, 2019
Find Darcia's writings and resources across the internet:
Resource Page at Psychology Today
Topics we discussed in this podcast:
The human need for socialization from the very beginning, and ways that goes awry in contemporary society.
Things we can do to learn some of these lessons later in life:
- Self-calming via breathing, meditation, prayer. (Does our contemporary culture of outrage stem from a lack of the ability to calm ourselves that we are meant to learn starting in infancy?)
- Build a social network. We were meant to have interaction with an extended family that spans all age ranges for proper socialization. It's not too late to play with children, talk to the elderly, interact with people at other stages of life.
- Learn new languages and interact with people in different cultures. What are their reasons for doing the things that they do?
- Spend time with nature.
- Practice going outside yourself, defusing rigid thinking and attachment to "it has to be done this way." Intelligence is a measure of flexibility as much as anything.
Bill asked about social media and our tendency to seek out those who already agree with us. Darcia noted that we need guidance on how to socialize. Up through age 30 or so, it's natural for human beings to get that kind of guidance from others. Unfortunately we get that guidance through TV and video games now.
As usual, this was the first half of our interview. More discussion and more questions than we could possibly answer next time!
Monday Apr 08, 2019
Monday Apr 08, 2019
In this episode we roll out a new format for Season 2.
We recap Season 1 (April 2018 - March 2019) and the three focus areas of the podcast so far:
- Discussion of the fundamentals of the question whether it's reasonable to believe in both science and the Catholic Christian faith, and some exploration of particular topics, like the role of geology in the interpretation of the book of Genesis.
- Review and comments on the speakers at the Society of Catholic Scientists Conference 2018.
- Interviews with scientists and scholars living out their Christian faith, many of whom are actively trying to spread the truth that the presumed conflict between science and religion is false, born from shoddy understandings, strawman arguments, and reactions against hypocrisy. Three of these people (Patricia Bellm, Chris Baglow, and Jay Martin) do this work at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.
We then go on to discuss our plans for coming episodes, turning to topics of religion, spirituality, and psychology (including topics like child development and addiction) where the intersection of faith and science allows us to build new solutions or give tremendous new life to old solutions to the problems of human life.
Sunday Mar 31, 2019
Sunday Mar 31, 2019
0:00 - The question of relativism vs. hyperrationalism
1:00 - God's love is not a "fact" but, say, hominid ancestry is
1:30 - Tapping into the belief in the rationality of science to bring back belief in reality in faith
2:30 - "Kicking in the back door of relativism"
4:00 - Linkages between theology, philosophy, and science: e.g. logical consistency
5:30 - Effects on the rest of schools that participate in the Science & Religion Initiative
6:30 - Encouragment to integrate, say, history, economics with faith as well
7:00 - Congregation for Sacred Doctrine 1977 "The Catholic School"
8:00 - Faith & literature, arts
9:30 - The true limits of dogma; need to understand how limited Catholic dogma really is, and how non-restrictive
13:00 - Teachers woefully overworked and underpaid, not given the ability to succeed
14:30 - Blessed to have excellent but also humble panelists & experts intending to listen to one another
19:00 - Story of the second & first editions of Baglow's textbook
Thursday Mar 28, 2019
Thursday Mar 28, 2019
Compartmentalization by students at Notre Dame
Bill: ethics as a checklist
The Science & Religion Initiative (see Baglow & Martin interview)
The need to get the same message in the biology class and in theology class
The change in the teachers after a few days in the workshop: divisions fade out
It's a challenge having an "athletics" teacher in the program (phys ed)...
Yet there are things: doping and respect of the body
Patricia believes "you become what you eat" applies to violent video games as well
Feed yourself and your children good things instead
Monday Mar 25, 2019
Monday Mar 25, 2019
0:30 - McGrath Institute for Church Life: Science & Religion Initiative outreach to high school teachers to integrate science & faith
2:00 - Gulf Coast Faith Formation Conference (a good time to be away from Notre Dame)
3:00 - Summer seminars: Foundations Notre Dame, Foundations New Orleans, Capstone
4:00 - Foundations ND: lecture based, top scholars in specific disciplines, with workshops
6:00 - Foundations NO: experimental work and discussions
7:00 - Dialogue between science & theology teachers about their own specialties
8:00 - Capstone: topic-based theme & lecturers; special track for administrators; teaching practices
11:00 - Templeton Foundation study showing schools already trying to do this on their own
12:00 - The need to do this well and not engage in pseudoscience or gloss over tough questions
14:00 - ICL team making "housecalls" to individual schools
14:30 - Baglow textbook on science & faith
18:00 - Vast multiplication of interest from schools just since 2011
19:00 - Real motivations for believing faith is inconsistent with science: the need for hope [and, not made explicit, the appropriateness of hope]
20:00 - "I thought I was the only one"
21:00 - The historical and emotional impulse: rebellion against Christian hypocrisy
22:30 - Baglow makes the Fulton Sheen point: "I also hope THAT God doesn't exist!"
23:00 - The questions he wishes people would ask about God, meaning, science, etc.
24:00 - "What do you mean by 'God creates everything'"
25:00 - The nature of the discourse we encourage
26:30 - "I don't know"
27:00 - "When did science and religion enter into conflict?" - because they have not always been
28:20 - The true role of the university in integrating human wisdom
30:30 - Newman on evolution in the context of Development of Christian Doctrine
Thursday Mar 21, 2019
Thursday Mar 21, 2019
The Bible as an instrument of getting to tell people what to do
Flood geology and cramming one's ideas into a "literal" reading
Adam and the Genome
Monday Mar 18, 2019
Monday Mar 18, 2019
What do we want to do in this podcast?
Goals for the year
Values of experience, e.g. Mexico: solar ovens from recycled materials
Credit consulting, etc., for exploited women in Mexico
The little estate in Mexico
Back to credit cards & exploitation of ignorance
Responsibility of those to whom much is given
Bringing it around to science
Career and sacrifice and little deaths
Chris, the handicapped man at the ND Center for Social Justice
The ethics of "fixing" or preventing Chris from being the way he is
The lack of philosophic background and the intellectual amnesia of contemporary science
Philosophy of science and the disappointment of 20th century physics, but the culture goes on unaware
Science, fundamentally cannot replace faith
...this is where Patricia makes that claim that science is about control
Ethics of changing human beings, other elements of creation
Bill poses the relativism question again
Patricia responds that "you can control science"
Everyone confronts the same Reality, and we cannot control it, but we prefer the illusion that we can
Saturday Mar 16, 2019
Saturday Mar 16, 2019
The blind man who could see more than his neighbors... asking Patricia about German reunification
The industries that used up his sight
Monday Mar 11, 2019
Monday Mar 11, 2019
0:00 - Three issues: entropy, decoherence, Schrodinger vs. Dirac equations
2:30 - Schrodinger uses a non-relativistic Hamiltonian, with a p^2/2m kinetic energy
3:00 - Dirac equation absorbs special relativity by shifting from scalar to spinor field
4:00 - Quantum field theory as a further extension, accommodating fields that include many particles
5:00 - Field Lagrangian and all the particles and interactions in the Standard Model
6:00 - Even "everyday" gravity is in some sense accommodatable in the theory, just not extreme gravity capable of "separating out the vacuum"
8:00 - Decoherence, not to be confused with the measurement problem
9:00 - Decoherence arising from the interaction of a simple system with other systems
10:00 - Reduced density matrix begins to look classical
11:00 - Zurek and the work on decoherence: states that are "chosen" to survive interaction with the environment
11:30 - Measurement problem not solved by this work
12:30 - Entropy: the proposal that entropy is most fundamentally lack of information
progress from the special case of thermodynamic entropy, to statistical mechanics,
to von Neumann's quantum definition, to Shannon's information theory
21:00 - Craig's career: why is an engineer so interested in the fundamentals of physics?
24:00 - Journey of faith
30:30 - People of Praise in Indianapolis
31:20 - Final thoughts