Taking science AND faith seriously.
Episodes
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
Monday Mar 04, 2019
Monday Mar 04, 2019
0:00 - Introduction
1:00 - The power of physicalism/reductionism: a tremendously powerful method
2:00 - Course on physicalism and Catholicism; Sean Carroll's least hysterical "poetic naturalism"
3:00 - The lack of evidence for "emergence" in the sense of "downward causation"
3:30 - Soft and hard emergence
10:15 - Materialism vs. physicalism and reductionism: philosophical materialism
13:00 - Are human beings exhausted by this account of reality?
14:00 - The break with the mechanical universe of 19th century physics underappreciated
15:00 - Laplace's demon
16:30 - Thermodynamics
17:30 - Future not contained in the present
19:00 - Einstein & hidden variables
20:00 - Bell inequality experiments
24:00 - Entanglement
26:00 - Human experience: both, as physical, but also as having choices
27:00 - Quantum physics on many body systems
28:00 - The hard problem of consciousness
29:00 - The explanatory gap
31:00 - The tendency to explain the brain as "just like" some recent piece of technology
33:00 - Complexity of neurons, the continuing relevance of physical laws amid the complexity
35:00 - Continuing relevance of quantum effects at the level of neurotransmitter molecules, etc.
36:00 - Quantum effects in weather and rock mechanics
Thursday Feb 28, 2019
Monday Feb 25, 2019
Monday Feb 25, 2019
0:00 - Science is materialist by method, but scientists need not and should not be materialist by philosophy
2:00 - The world must be real and intelligible for science to make sense
3:00 - And faith provides a philosophical basis that allows this to happen
3:30 - Students' testimony on faith and science
4:30 - Removing the faith/science obstacle is only one step on the road toward faith
5:00 - God vs. Godzilla
6:00 - The true God and His use of secondary causes
11:00 - Creation as carmen Dei (song of God; Bonaventure)
12:00 - vs. strepitus naturae
15:00 - Thought and spirit vs. matter
[This harks back to, e.g., the Ed Feser talk at the SCS conference. I personally think there is an enormous gap--bridgeable, but still to be bridged--between these arguments that the ability of the mind to generate and handle abstract concepts implies a non-material component to thought on the one hand, and the work of modern neuroscience to track the activity of neurons around the brain in specific patterns as we think.]
17:00 - Philosophical gaps in the picture of existence without God
18:00 - Infinite regress of causes, temporal/efficient causes and extra-temporal
19:00 - Postmoderns in general have a depressing view: a para-Christian morality without God; doctrinaire atheists live in an even more depressing paradigm of complete lack of meaning
21:00 - Basil & Pope Francis on creation
22:00 - Basil on the interpretation of the six days and other aspects of creation
23:00 - Guides on the tour of creation
25:00 - Symbolic language (numbers) in Scripture
27:00 - Scriptural mandate to tend creation
29:00 - Historic ginning up of the conflict between science and faith
Monday Feb 18, 2019
Monday Feb 18, 2019
0:00 - Introduction
1:00 - Catholic roots
2:00 - Early sense of vocation
4:00 - Lure of biology and ecology, early experiences in the field
9:00 - Swing to doing theology with reference to ecology rather than ecology with reference to theology
11:00 - Intellectual honesty in philosophy, science, theology
13:30 - Science, Creation, Theology course
15:00 - A theology course with a lab component
19:00 - (Fr. Terry loves basswood trees. They were a go-to example of a specific created type of being.)
20:00 - How does this dragonfly relate to Christ?
22:00 - Despair that can color one's attitude toward bridging faith and science
23:00 - (The basswood tree that can be counted on to grow the same shape of leaves every year.)
24:00 - Treating things according to their nature, the "grammar" of natures
25:00 - Grammar of connection and hope... and human flourishing (Center for Science, Faith, and Human Flourishing)
28:00 - Scientism and reduction of life to technocracy, rather than being a whole human being engaged in science
Monday Feb 11, 2019
Monday Feb 11, 2019
I started off this part of the interview by asking Daniel about his own journey through life and faith. His early love was history, despite having a father who was also a doctor and an academic. His interests only turned to medicine after a time in Peru and exposure to brutal poverty, and then like many of us, he drifted into an academic career. Later in life he has been able to return to that original motivation.
Daniel and his wife were brought up in the Seventh Day Adventist faith, and still greatly respects the grounding in charitable work and the Bible he received then. Eventually he and his wife got the Newman bug and had to go deep into history and join one of the apostolic churches; they joined an Eastern Orthodox church.
In that context, Daniel laments the drift of the modern hospice movement away from Christian spiritual roots and into a secular, palliative mindset, and the broader question of what is missing from the often uttered or thought statement, "if it's legal, it must be moral."
"We confuse technological prowess with being deeper and more thoughtful."
An interesting consequence of our medical progress is that we now face a future where, for the first time, across the world, most people will die of conditions derived from aging rather than contagious diseases, accidents, childbirth, etc.
We discuss a bit the golden mean to be found, steering clear of euthanasia on the one hand, and of resorting to excessive means to stay alive in the face of a fatal illness.
Monday Feb 04, 2019
Monday Feb 04, 2019
Today we start a two-part series with Daniel Hinshaw, a professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Michigan, who has come to focus on palliative care for the dying. He sees his work as having deep roots in the Christian tradition, and has written on the subject of "kenosis" (the Scriptural concept of "emptying" or "reduction" or "wasting away" that is key to our understanding of the Incarnation and the Passion of Jesus Christ) as a useful concept for understanding our own mortality, at the scale of our individual cells as well as our whole composite being.
He shared some interesting spiritual perspectives with us. As someone who in his mature years moved from the Seventh Day Adventists and sought out the apostolic churches, he now belong to the Orthodox Church. We spent some time discussing the "microcosmos," John Chrysostom's idea that the human being contains all creation in miniature, and how that is oddly true in certain respects: we are each communities of organisms. Our gut microbiome, for example.
Daniel went on to talk some heavy duty biochemical shop. We discussed the oxidizing agents (e.g., hydrogen peroxide) involved in inflammatory ailments. He touched on the fact that some of the worst chemical warfare agents, like sulfur mustard gas, operate in a similar oxidizing mechanism, triggering apoptosis, and discussed some of his work on finding remedies for these agents, as well as how similar they are to the earliest generation of chemotherapy agents.
We shifted back to the question of faith, and discussed how both Daniel and his wife confronted suffering in their work (his wife as a psychiatrist treating AIDS patients in particular) and this was a core part of their journey. Daniel pointed out the provocative fact that we really seem to be programmed to age and die, and that the only exceptions to this... are cancer cells.
Another moral point we discover in modern biology has to do with epigenetics. As human beings, we can abuse our bodies to the point that we leave effects on our germ cells that can carry on the "sins of the father" to future generations.
Monday Jan 28, 2019
Monday Jan 28, 2019
In this episode, we expand on our introduction to the brain by discussing some theories - ranging from well-documented to rather speculative - about the specific structures of the brain that are active (or less active) in situations ranging from autism to depression, stress, and trauma.
At the end we spend a few minutes on a preliminary critique of the materialist reductionary attitude ("interpretation" is too grandiose a word for it) toward brain science by many of its practitioners and reporters. Free will, for example, is not an illusion just because the physical part of the brain where it happens can be injured and we can be deprived of it... but much more on such neurophilosophical issues as the year progresses.
Monday Jan 21, 2019
Monday Jan 21, 2019
In this episode, we lay out the basic groundwork for future discussions of the human brain.
The brain we humans have apparently evolved in three stages. This can't help but be a tremendous simplification, but it's a commonly encountered statement and seems to have considerable explanatory power.
The lowest part of the brain, the brain stem (the medulla, etc.) and the cerebellum, control unconscious processes, most of which we cannot take into conscious control even if we want to. Often this is called the "lizard" or "reptile brain."
A series of little suborgans, the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdalae (a - myg ' - da - la, the good Latin pronunciation, for the singular apparently; and my Webster's unabridged also informs me that it just means "almond shaped thing"), putamen (that habit-storing part I could not remember during the episode), and a few other parts form the limbic system, that communicates between the senses and the body, and that serves critical functions for things like emotion and memory that we share with mammals.
The upper part of the brain, the big part in human brains, is the cerebrum. Its regions are referred to as cortex / cortices or lobes. We have large volumes of the brain dedicated to visual and auditory processing, motor skills, and the whole front of the brain is where the neural work of our most human capabilities occurs: judgment, reasoning, wondering, creativity, consciousness.
The following two books informed the discussion today:
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter
I cannot recommend The Body Keeps the Score highly enough. It starts out as a discussion of PTSD, but it grows organically into a discussion of problems that all children, and therefore all of us, are liable to have, and ways that are being discovered to bring both brain and body to peace.
On the other hand, Mapping the Mind is only intermittently good. The first hundred pages I found rough sledding, with little sense the author understood the facts being hauled out and stacked up. It got better. The last few chapters betray the common, poorly thought through materialist reductionism common in the field, no surprise, but the content of the final 200+ pages is mostly good. Autism, depression, and addiction come up, although the stock in trade is discussion people with bizarre, tragic, but fascinatingly specific brain damage and what those episodes suggest about how all the different mental aspects of being human are spread about the brain.