EVOLVING CONTINENTS

Session Five

SU SPRING 2008

Better source of video site:

http://meaningoflife.tv/

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

Famous cinematic “irrelevant line”

Connectivity as Image

Locating “Black Holes”

Limits of Scepticism/Speculation

"Scepticism is the beginning of faith.“ Oscar Wilde

"There's a sucker born every minute."

P T Barnum

Biblical speculation

Another Speculator

Scientific Speculation

Tulane physicist Frank Tipler

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).

All-Star Wrestling

Don delivering books for Darrel

My reluctance to teach the course

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.

Rudolph Bultman

Bultmann was famous for “demythologizing project”

Richard Dawkins

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

Minimalist as Cognitivist

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)

Creation as COSMIC EPIC

Next week’s EPIC: the emergent Divine Matrix of interdisciplinary, multi-level assertions:

1. the last formidable frontier of method, theory, and limits of Know-ability and

2. the humble quest for domain convergence and a robust ethical plan for the future of the planet