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Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
The Economist (August 30) reports on research by a team from the University of Duisburg-Essen on animal magnetism - not animal charisma, but animals responding to the magnetic polarities of the earth. Studying pictures from Google Earth, they “concluded that cattle do generally align themselves in a north-south direction. Moreover, at high latitudes - where the geographical and magnetic poles are perceptibly separate from one another - it was to the magnetic pole that animals pointed. Unfortunately, even the high resolution of Google Earth is not good enough to tell routinely which end of a cow is its head, and which its tail.”
People appear to respond to the poles too: “there have been studies which suggest that magnetic fields influence biological processes such as rapid eye movement in sleep. Also, electroencephalograms seem to vary according to the direction in which people are facing when they are recorded.”
The writer suggests it’s analogous to GPS, but my first thought was feng shui.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 6:08 am
Nobel chemist Ilya Prigogine’s work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility, Barbara Adam argues, not only challenged particular scientific laws but the classical notion of a scientific law. In classical physics, to arrive at a law was to arrive at a timeless substructure of natural reality.
Adam summarizes the implications of Prigogine’s work:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 10:56 am
R. Fischer says, “The relativity of our reference point can be demonstrated by taking a moving picture of a plant at one frame a minute and then speeding it up to thirty frames a second. The plant will appear to behave like an animal, clearly perceiving stimuli and reacting to them. Why, then, do we call it unconscious? To organisms which react 1800 times as quickly as we react, we might appear to be unconscious. They would in fact be justified in calling us unconscious, since we would not normally be conscious of their behavior.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 6:13 am
Behind much of today’s biotechnology is the (Newtonian?) notion that living organisms are machine-like. And living organisms can look like machines in some respects. But they aren’t. Barbara Adam points out that the cells of our bodies are incessantly self-renewing - our limbs aren’t like gears that stay the same over time. Nor do the regularities of living organism meet the mechanical ideal of invariant repetition. Living organisms constantly balance decay and renewal, so that their stability is “fundamentally dynamic.” Very un-machine-like.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, June 16, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Summarizing findings in physics and biology that should inform social science, Barbara Adam writes, “All organisms, from single cells to human beings and even ecosystems, display rhythmic behaviour. Rhythmicity is a universal phenomenon. Scientists conceptualise atoms as probability waves, molecules as vibrating structures, and organisms as symphonies. Living beings, they suggest, are permeated by rhythmic cycles which range from the very fast chemical and neuron oscillations, via the slower ones of heartbeat, respiration, menstruation, and reproduction to the very long range ones of climactic changes. Their activity and rest alternations, their cyclical exchanges and transformations, and their seasonal and diurnal sensitivity form nature’s silent pulse. Some of this rhythmicity constitutes the organisms unique identity; some relates to its life cycle; some binds the organism to the rhythms of the universe; and some functions as a physiological clock by which living beings ‘tell’ cosmic time.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, June 16, 2008 at 4:36 pm
KG Denbigh wrote in 1981 that physics treats time as a simple continuum: “It knows of no means of picking out a unique moment, the now or the present. The t-coordinate is an undifferentiated continuum, and, if this coordinate is ‘taken for real’ as has been the tendency among many scientists and philosophers, the familiar distinction between past, present and future, so important in human affairs, comes to be regarded as a mere peculiarity of consciousness. It is as if every event along the coordinate is, in some sense, ‘equally real’ even those events which (to us) ‘have not yet happened.’ On this view of matter it is a function of consciousness that we ‘come across’ those events, experiencing the formality, as it has been said, of the events ‘taking place.’”
But of course, a time in which every time is equally present is fundamentally a-temporal, which is precisely what Newtonian absolute time is.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, June 16, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Of all the people I’ve seen on film recently, the one I’d most want to be is David Berlinski, whom Ben Stein interviewed extensively in his Paris apartment that reeked with sophistication and culture. Berklinski, by his own definition a “secular Jew” with no memory of Hebrew, has just published The Devil’s Delusion, a response to the militant atheists.
I like his Paris home; I also like the way he writes: “A little philosophy, as Francis Bacon observed, ‘inclineth man’s mind to atheism.’ A very little philosophy is often all that is needed. In a recent BBC program entitled A Brief History of Unbelief, the host, Jonathan Miller, and his guest, the philosopher Colin McGinn, engaged in a veritable orgy of competitive skepticism, so much so that in the end, the viewer was left wondering whether either man believed sincerely in the existence of the other. Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation is in this tradition, and if he book is devoid of any intellectual substance whatsoever, it is, at least, brisk, engaging, and short. To anyone having read Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, these will appear as very considerable virtues.”
One of Berlinski’s central arguments is that the militant atheists assume that “there is something answering to the name of science,” which, he claims is simply false. There are great scientific theories, but they are “isolated miracles, great mountain peaks surrounded by a range of low, furry foothills.” He quotes Roger Penrose to the effect that these theories are “magnificent, profound, difficult, sometimes phenomenally accurate,” but also quotes Penrose’s admission that these theories constitute a “tantalizingly inconsistent scheme of things.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Dispassionate he’s not. In his recent book on evolution and the “big questions,” David Stamos tried to show how evolution can answer all the big questions of existence, far better than ID, for sure. Intelligent design is not “genuine science” but instead “essentially mythological thinking masquerading in a lab coat. It is the attempt to take a way of thinking common to frightened and ignorant peoples living in pre-scientific societies [like, what, Africans?], a way of thinking possibly rooted deeply in human nature, and to make it intellectually respectable.”
Stamos is a philosopher, but you wouldn’t know it from this passage. But then he later says that “many philosophers and scientists” think that religion does more harm that good, citing Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens. Since Hitchens is no scientist, he must be a philosopher, and once we know that Stamos considers Hitchens a philosopher his own philosophical style makes much more sense.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, May 9, 2008 at 4:10 pm
The news actually broke this summer, when Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka announced that he had found a technique to transform cultured mouse skin cells into cells nearly identical to embryonic stem cells. As Nature magazine pointed out, if something similar works in humans, a simple skin biopsy could be used to create embryonic stem-cell equivalents “without using embryos or even eggs.”Jody Bottum reports in the online Wall Street Journal on a breakthrough in stem cell research. The whole article is available at: www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110010915
Here are a few paragraphs:
Stem cell research “has bubbled up again with the report from London’s Daily Telegraph that Ian Wilmut, the cloner of Dolly the sheep and the world’s most famous biological researcher, is abandoning cloning. Instead, he’s chosen to follow Mr. Yamanaka’s lead: ‘a way,’ as the Telegraph explained, ‘to create human embryo stem cells without the need for human eggs, which are in extremely short supply, and without the need to create and destroy human cloned embryos, which is bitterly opposed by the prolife movement.’
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 at 7:12 am
In a typically dense article in a volume of essays on William Desmond, Milbank suggests that both Darwin and 18th-century design theories were operating with similar post-Scotist and Newtonian notions of God’s relation to the world. He sees a quite direct analog between the development of Darwinian theory and Newtonian physics: “while absolute space and time and the force of gravity represent the direct presence, this is still manifest in a totally regular fashion expressible by comprehensible laws. There appeared to be no biological equivalent to this regular divine governance, so both [The Bridgewater Treatises and The Origin of Species] are interested in compensating for this lack in terms of discovering more regular immanent at work in features exhibiting apparent organic design. . . . The difference is that, in the case of the Bridgewater Treatises, divine design ultimately explains the mutual adaptation of species and environment; while in the case of the Origin of Species the immanent law of one-way selective adaptation of species to environment becomes a sufficient explanans unto itself.”
Mix in some Malthus: “Darwin’s central move was to extend the Malthusian political economy to the economy of life as such. In doing so, he at last completed the Newtonian ambitions of the English design tradition - which one might describe as a bizarre fusion of a rather tame picture of nature on the one hand with the idea of a nature as ‘hard school’ of training in order and excellence on the other. On the one hand, watercolours; on the other, cross-country runs.”
The result is that modern biology suffers from an inherent ambiguity: “insofar as Darwinism remains pure, it belongs to old-fashioned, possibly outmoded Newtonian science; insofar as it can be correlated with modern physics, it ceases to remain, exactly, Darwinism.”
Milbank suggests that evolution only retains its Newtonian feel if one remains, as Dawkins does, as the genetic level. But he says that there’s no reason why natural selection shouldn’t happen at higher levels as well. He notes the work of Theodosius Dobzhansky, who examined “auto-poetic and internal shifts in animal constitution that are more to do with adaptation to an environment than with the struggle for scarce terrain. Indeed, such a perspective has brought to the fore how species actively modify their own environment, and can sometimes modify it in harmony with other species with whom they form a yet larger quasi-grouping.”
He points out that Darwinism cannot “escape the question as to why there is a ‘drive to survival,’ an expression which sounds just as anthropomorphic as, say, the drive to appear, or to appear as beautiful.” He also cannot escape questions about the persistence of organisms: “Why should there by any tendency in nature consistently to remain rather than endlessly to disintegrate, disseminate and re-form only momentarily? In other words, why is not the glissando of continuous variation far more absolute than it appears to be? Why are there any consistent living things at all?” In short, Darwinism cannot escape questions of teleology, and once a telos is admitted, “then there is no reason not to suggest that there is equally a biological drive to expand self-manifestation in terms of growth and engendering.” And once this move is made “it becomes more plausible to read biological life in terms of an intense manifestation on the surface of a transcendental ‘life’ that undergirds all of finite reality and is even coterminous with being as such.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, November 19, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Joseph Silk is Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, and in The Infinite Cosmos, he offers a layman’s summary of what’s happening in cosmology.
One of the central principles of modern cosmology is the “cosmological principle,” the theory that the “universe is approximately the same in all directions. In contrast to pre-scientific mythical cosmologies, this principle is based on solid empirical evidence. Admittedly, it’s “not quite the evidence you can hold in your hand,” but it is “the evidence you can see through a telescope.” In fact, it “has been verified to exquisite precision, in so far as this can be achieved from our vantage point.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 3, 2007 at 8:34 am
With advances in medical technology, it’s possible to keep people alive longer than ever before. This certainly has its wonders, but it’s really an ambiguous achievement. It means that death more and more is the result of decisions about treatment and ending treatment. We can keep someone breathing artificially, a heart beating artificially; we can maintain blood pressure and other functions through medication. Even if we decide not to use aggressive treatments, it’s a decision; and if one decides to end aggressive treatments, the heretical imperative is even more evident.
Death has become a “choice” in a way that it never was before, and that places a strange burden on patients and their families.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, July 19, 2007 at 1:12 pm
A TLS review of several recent books on bio-computing contained old news for some people, but new news for me. The latest wrinkle in computer technology has been to use biological material - DNA - rather than silicon for information storage and processing. One USC scientist was able to create a bio-computer that can play tic-tac-toe.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, July 19, 2007 at 1:08 pm
How long will monkeys typing randomly on typewriters take to produce the works of Shakespeare? That’s been a way of thinking about Darwinian evolution since who knows where. In 2002, researches at the Paignton Zoo in England decided to find out. They left a computer terminal in a cage with six monkeys. The results: Mike Phillips, one of the researches, said “They pressed a lot of S’s” and “the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.” That is not even to mention the regular urination and defecation on the keyboard. After a month, the monkeys had produced about 5 pages of material, with very little resemblance to Shakespeare.
Nothing daunted, Richard Dawkins trots out the the monkeys in describing a computer experiment that transformed a nonsensical string of letters into Hamlet’s “Methinks it is like a weasel.” He tries to show that while it is highly improbable that this sentence could be produced at random in one moment, it can be produced through a series of intermediate phrases that approximate closer and closer to Shakespeare’s sentence. From a random string of letters, the computer generates the phrase in 43 generations. “Computers are a bit fast at this kind of thing than monkeys,” Dawkins comments, “but the difference really isn’t significant.”
Impressive? Not really, say Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt in their entertaining and insightful A Meaningful World (IVP, 2006). Wiker and Witt want to outdo design arguments; they want to show that the creation not only displays evidence of design, but of genius, in a way analogous to the genius displayed in Hamlet.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, July 9, 2007 at 3:11 pm
An addendum to an earlier post on Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay, “The Metabolism of Science.”
Though he sees world, nature, and physis as identical in some ways, he also distinguishes them. We have different experiences of the external world, and there are summarized in the Anglo-Saxon “world,” the Latin “nature,” and the Greek “physis” (he notes, intriguingly, that this list mimics the order of the inscription on Jesus’ cross - vernacular [Hebrew], Latin, and Greek).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, February 1, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay “The Metabolism of Science” shows him at his deconstructive best. He doesn’t analyze postcards, but he does something similar, finding significance in the most marginal of glosses, in the repetitions of a book title, in the handwriting style of a lab worksheet. It’s all very playful, but produces a deadly serious analysis of modern science.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 3:30 pm
In their Science & Grace (Crossway 2006), Tim Morris and Don Petcher helpfully define a law of nature as “God’s sustaining of, or man’s description of, that pattern of regularity that we observe in nature as God works out His purposes towards His own ends in HIs covenant faithfulness, through His Son, the eternal Word, by means of His Spirit.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 28, 2006 at 2:33 pm
Challenging Cunningham’s suggestion, against Deleuze, that without some hierarchy of goods, there is no way to determine preferences, even for something as basic as diet, Kenneth Surin cited a bumper sticker: The top line says, “I love animals,” and the second “They’re delicious.” This, he claimed, was simply an expression of preference that didn’t require any sort of hierarchy.
Cunningham responded by citing a (hopefully fictional) bumper sticker of his his own: Top line, “I love people,” and the second “They’re delicious.” He then challenged Surin to explain how on Deleuzean, purely immanent, terms this isn’t just a tolerable expression of preference.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, November 21, 2006 at 7:24 am
In his Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff tells about the Australian aboriginal tribe of the Dyirbal, who speak a language that classifies everything into four categories. One of these, “balan,” includes “women, bandicoots, dogs, platypuses, echidnas, some fish, birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, the hairy mary grub, anything connected with water or fire, sun and stars, shields, some spears, some trees” (the summary is from Walter Truett Anderson). The classification is based on analogies between women and each of these objects. The grub’s, for instance, feels like sunburn, which puts it in the same group with the sun, conceived as feminine among the Dyirbal.
Western science seems to have a more objectively grounded system of classification, but even in modern science there are oddities and anomalies. Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that biological classification systems are either “pheneticist” (based on similarity of form, function, etc) and “cladist” (based on evolutionary genealogy. The former classify all three types of zebra in one group, but the latter consider the mountain zebra to be from a distinct ancestry.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 8, 2006 at 5:00 pm
The church’s response to Copernicanism is often cited as a textbook example of the tyranny of faith over investigation and reason. Dogmatically committed to geocentrism, the church wanted to shut the door on alternative explanations. The truth, Owen Barfield argues, is very nearly the opposite: “When the ordinary man hears that the Church told Galileo that he might teach Copernicanism as a hypothesis which saved all the celestial phenomena satisfactorily, but ‘not as being the truth,’ he laughs. But this was really how the Ptolmaic astronomy had been taught! In its actual place in history it was not a casuistical quibble; it was the refusal (unjustified it may be) to allow the introduction of a new and momentous doctrine. It was not simply a new theory of the nature of the celestial movements that was feared, but a new theory of the nature of theory; namely, that if a hypothesis saves all the appearances, it is identical with truth.”
The church rose up in defense of the very traditional idea of the plurality of scientific theory.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 at 7:02 am
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