The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

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

Against Christianity

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

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Science: Paracats

Ivan Illich (Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health) writes about the unintended effects of insecticides in Borneo: “Insecticides used in villages to control malaria vectors also accumulated in cockroaches, most of which are resistant.  Geckoes fed on these, became lethargic, and fell prey to cats.  The cats died, rats multiplied, and with rats came the threat of epidemic bubonic plague.”

To stop the dominoes, “the army had to parachute cats into the jungle village.”

Science: Elective Affinity

In an intriguing chapter on modern agriculture in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St), James C. Scott notes that the isolation of a few variables is “a key tenet of experimental science” and “both valuable and necessary to scientific work.”  It also, necessarily, means that scientists see things a certain way.  He quotes a chaos theorist: “There is a fundamental presumption in physics that the way you understand the world is that you keep isolating its ingredients until you understand the stuff you think is truly fundamental.  Then you presume that the other things you don’t understand are details.  The assumption is that there are a small number of principles that you can discern by looking at things in their pure state – this is the truly analytic notion – and somehow you put these together in some more complicated  ways when you want to solve more dirty problems.  If you can.”

With regard to agricultural research in particular, Scott argues that “scientific agricultural research has an elective affinity with the agricultural techniques that lie within reach of its powerful methods.”  These are primarily modernist agricultural techniques, measured by yields: “Maximizing the yields of pure-stand crops is one technique where its power can be used to best advantage. . . . The forms of agriculture that conformed to their modernist aesthetic and their politico-administrative interests also happened to fit securely within the perimeter of their professional scientific vocation.”

That is to say: What I don’t catch isn’t fish.

Science: God and science

Eagleton again, explaining the significance of the biblical idea of creation: “Because there is no necessity about the cosmos, we cannot deduce the laws which govern it from a priori principles, but need instead to look at how it actually works.  This is the task of science.  There is thus a curious connection between the doctrine of creation out of nothing and the professional life of Richard Dawkins.  Without God, Dawkins would be out of a job.  It is thus particularly churlish of him to call the existence of his employer into question.”

Science: Climate of Skepticism

A week ago, the First Things web site published a piece of mine on global warming.  See it here:

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/02/climate-of-skepticism

Science: End of ends

Descartes aimed for an objective science, not the science of the scholastics.  And that meant, especially, the deletion of final cause from science: “The entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing’s ‘end,’ I judge to be utterly useless in Physics.”

“Cause” is reduced to efficient cause.  Purposes and ends might be nice for morals and literature.  But they are not scientific, not knowledge strictly speaking.

Science: Empire of science

Bacon distinguishes three “grades of ambition in mankind.”  First, there is the ambition to exert power over one’s native country, but this is  a “vulgar and degenerate” ambition.  More dignity is evident in “those who labor to extend the power of their country and its dominion among men,” though along with dignity there is of course “covetousness.”  The most noble ambition, however, is “to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe,” a “more wholesome and more noble thing than the other two.”  This is the work of art and science.

Bacon is picking up on the biblical theme of dominion in the last of these ambitions, but he links this with an optimism about human uses of power that is not biblical at all: “Only let the human race recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest, and let power be given it: the exercise thereof will be governed by sound reason and true religion.”  Apparently, the sheer fact of dominion will overcome original sin with the light of reason and religion.  Such is the pure empire of science.

Science: What Mad Pursuit, 2

Steven Hayward (Weekly Standard) has a balanced and thorough analysis of the climate science emails made public a few weeks ago.  Hayward is not a knee-jerk global warming skeptic.  He begins the final paragraph of his piece with “Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future.”  And he, quite rightly, acknowledges that “The emails do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation.”  He recognizes the “distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA’s James Hansen, and other more sober scientists” whose public claims have been more cautious.

Instead, he sees the scandal as a particularly egregious revelation of the politicization of science: “What [the emails]reveal is something problematic for the scientific community as a whole, namely, the tendency of scientists to cross the line from being disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates for a preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand. . . .

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Science: What Mad Pursuit

Over at the New Atlantis site, Ivan Kenneally gives a brief and damning summary of the contents of emails hacked from University of East Anglia’s Climactic Research Unit (CRU).  He writes,

“Perhaps the most damning e-mails concern CRU deputy director Keith Briffa’s analysis of the diameter of tree rings in Yamal, Siberia. That research is a major evidentiary pillar in support of twentieth-century global warming and it helped resurrect Michael Mann’s ‘Hockey Stick’ graph of global warming. The scientist largely responsible for challenging Mann’s work, Steve McIntyre, turned his attention to Briffa’s resurrection of it and accused him of cherry-picking samples that would confirm his politically desirable hypothesis.

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Science: End of materialism

A funny thing happened on the way to mapping the genome, says James Le Fanu (Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves).  Humans have 25,000 genes.  That’s enough to get the job done, of course, but scientists were surprised to discover so few.  To transform an egg into a baby, those genes have to “multi-task.”

That’s just the beginning of sorrows.  A fly has 17,000 genes, and so do tiny worms.  Why are the numbers so similar when the organisms are so vastly different.  And vertebrates: Chimps and even mice have a genome that is “virtually interchangeable” with human the human genome.  Good news for Darwinists perhaps; bad news for people who wanted to crack the mystery of living things.

Le Fanu explains the disappointment:

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Science: The Real is the Relational

In expounding on the coherence of Trinitarian theology with contemporary physics, Polkinghorne notes htat “it is striking that so methodologically reductionist a subject as physics has pointed us in this relational and holistic direction.  This tendency is surely reinforced by chaos theory’s discovery that at the macroscopic level of physical process there are many systems that are of such exquisite sensitivity to the details of their circumstance that they cannot be properly isolated from the effects of their environment.  The slightest disturbance will totally change their future behaviour.”

The discovery of the relationality of the universe might force a re-vision of what we have thought of as the laws of nature: “the detailed character of the laws of nature that we have formulated on the basis of isolatable experimentation is no more than what one might call a ‘downward-emergent’ approximation to some more holistic account of physical reality, so that what we presently believe we know is only really valid in the special circumstances that an effective degree of separation is a good approximation to the situation.”

He sums up with a gloss on Zizioulias: Not “Being as Communion” but “Reality is relational.”

Science: Rational universe

Polkinghorne is better when he points to the import of the remarkable fact that we can understand the inner structure of the universe: “our human ability to understand the universe far exceeds anything that could reasonably be considered as simply an evolutionary necessity, or as a happy spin-off from that necessity.  The universe has proved to be astonishingly rationally transparent, and the human mind remarkable apt to the comprehension of its structure.  We can penetrate the secrets of the subatomic realm of quarks and gluons, and we can make maps of cosmic curved spacetime, both regimes that have no direct practical impact upon us, and both exhibiting properties that are counterintuitive in relation to our ordinary habits of thought.  Our understanding of the workings of the world greatly exceed anything that could simply be required for human survival.”

Mathematics is a particularly penetrating illustration of the point.  Though “mathematics is pure thought,” yet it enables us to discern the inner structure and beauty of the physical universe.  Polkinghorne quotes Eugene Wigner’s comment about the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,” and notes that for Wigner mathematics is “a gift that we neither deserved nor understood.”

Science: Genetic Platonism

In a recent interview on his Mars Hill Audio magazine, Ken Myers interviews Craig Holdrege, co-author of Beyond Biotechnology.  One of Holdrege’s key points is that scientists have moved well beyond the early idea that the gene is the “unmoved mover” that determines everything about an organism and now recognize that genes too have a history and are interdependent on other factors in the organism.

Thus falls yet another form of Platonism, that enduring quest to find some point of changelessness that can account for all change. Thus falls too the entire technical effort to manipulate genes to undo human frailty. 

Not that the quest will cease.  Its motives are ultimately religious.  Like every idolatry, it is restless, as it forges ever onward hoping to discover, down some unexplored path, an Archimedean point other than the eternal Word in whom all things consist.

Science: Magnetic Bovines

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.

Science: Scientific laws

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:

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Science: Sentient plants

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.”

Science: Replaceable parts

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.

Science: Dance of life

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.”

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Science: Real time

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.

Science: Devil’s Delusion

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.”

Science: Intelligent design

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.

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