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The Row Boat

"Had we but world enough, and time..." *

Science In Assembly

5/21/2007 00:49:56

Lately I'm in the process of trying to assemble the next project I'll be working on, for my master's thesis at UCSB. Maybe you can help me.

My thinking is very much toward spiritualities of science, and hopefully venturing toward something that will make me of some political use. That is, something that might inform the complicated problems of the public consumption of science. It will help that this summer, as I am writing, I'll be working at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in their Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion. I will also be lucky enough to attend a science and religion conference in Lancaster, England. All of this God Willing, of course.

The hope is that perhaps I might be able to contribute to efforts to create spiritualities of sustainability - geopolitical, ecological, and the rest. Not ones monopolized by radical movements but possible for all and habitable enough to be inevitable. (Can and should spiritualities be consciously manipulated?)

The thinking begins with the experiences I've been having in my religious studies department lately relating to the cognitive science of religion. This is a relatively new area of work, an attempt to explain religious belief by better understanding the evolved cognitive mechanisms of the human mind. The work by Pascal Boyer, Justin Barrett, Scott Atran, Thomas Lawson, and others in this field is very exciting, while also somewhat over-optimistic about its claims.

In recent weeks, my advisor has been trying to present this work in our graduate seminar and things have been very interesting. There has been a great deal of resistance from several fronts. Some resist it because these methods seem to require a whole 'nother Ph.D., which would be impractical. Others because it rests on assumptions about the mind and brain hostile to those of their religious traditions. Others are so concerned about its epistemological and phenomenological ambiguities that they don't quite begin to enter the theoretical mindset of experimental work.

In other words, I have been watching a maze of the permutations and strange twists that scientific language and process can be received with. It seems to cease to be scientific when that happens, it gets taken out of its element. I saw something much the same in my research on the evolution controversies a year ago: "evolution" means a different thing to a fundamentalist Christian than to a cell biologist. For the first it seems to be a theological term, while for the second it is a technical scientific term. Even so, after work, it cannot help but affect the biologist's theologies and the fundamentalist's science.

Then just today, a visiting priest from Switzerland assured my church that "some scientists who are serious about their work" have shown that there are unknowble "spiritual" elements built into matter. Consequently, we should feel confident in believing in the Ascension of Jesus. What could that mean? What is he talking about? What scientists? Does it matter, rhetorically, spiritually?

More and more, from Scientology to my Catholic mass, the spiritualities of today do not seem comprehensible without some amount of pseudo-science.

I could go on with a list of questions.

Is "science," or more precisely "scientific language" a thing in itself, something constant in sensibility and authority from quantum physics to evolutionary biology? Can it be marked off from other kinds of talking?

What are the consequences of the spiritual authority that science takes on in a society like ours? To what extent can we think about its professionals as a kind of priesthood? What is the place of gender in that priesthood? Is the male-dominated scientific community creating a new patriarchal monopoly on truth?

Can a spirituality exist today somehow that is not connected to, that actively resists what it takes to be real science? Is our time unusual in this respect?

Can a spirituality meaningfully believe something actively apparently contradicted by its accepted science? For instance, can we believe in the Ascension while also believing it factually impossible? (The problem seems to be less that it is impossible than that it is pointless. So what if Jesus goes up in the sky. I go in the sky in an airplane all the time. Nothing special up there.)

If religion were shown scientifically to be "just" the consequence of natural, evolved happenings in the brain, would we bother to still believe it? Could we help doing so? What strategies might be adopt to manage these proclivities?

Is a scientifically sound spirituality possible? Or does a spirituality of it cloud the scientific process, making falsifiability seem unappealing? Can one do good science without believing in it spiritually?

Especially after meeting the neoconservative theologian Michael Novak last week, actually, I have been thinking more and more that globalized capitalism is the inevitable world for the moment and perhaps the only way to rescue it, along with manipulating financial incentives, is to refashion the spirituality of the people within it.

re:Science In Assembly - 5/21/2007 00:55:05
Posted by nathan

I would like to point out the first Google ad that showed up when I put this post up:
http://www.betterhuman.org/
It promises a belief system based on science and exemplified by a creepy rabbit that "is symbolic of the ethereal entity (or entities) that all religions profess the existence of, and how religion uses this psychological tool to intimidate with fear and to inhibit the progression of humankind's intellectual evolution."

I really recommend clicking the Google ads. They are always interesting and I get money when you do.

re:God and Dice? - 6/12/2007 03:35:50
Posted by Nathan

The visiting priest was speaking about whom? A nameless scientist? Einstein's famous quip has quite convincingly been thrown out. In fact, Einstein's certainly that there should be something unexplainable, the added constant to his famous universal theory, has been shown to be one of his (and sciences) biggest blunders. There is a serious misstep confusing spiritual beliefs of scientists and science's spiritual beliefs. I can't help but believe that ANY scientist who claims a spiritualism in science's empirical observations or theoretical calculations is conflating the two. It may not be possible to separate them (see string theory), but the most highly praised and disciplined scientists are strict empiricists and experimentalists. There is a great little book called what I believe but cannot prove. I suggest you check it out. It skirts these issues generally and many scientists directly address the fact that a strict empiricism may mean that nothing is certain in the end -- that's the nature of the system they operate under. That leap of faith? Not science, it's personal.

re:Science In Assembly - 6/13/2007 15:01:07
Posted by nathan

I appreciate your comment. I don't think it was Einstein he was referring to, but who knows. I wonder if, in some respects, the question is actually a literary one, or can be approached from the angle of literature. Compare, for instance, the articles in scientific journals (which speak in highly technical language about a very specific study) and the popular scientific literature (which attempts to summarize and organize and communicate the former). In the latter of these, there is the near-universal expectation that some spiritual meaning-of-life stuff be expressed. They make the theories interesting. They draw. The conclusion to Darwin's Origin of Species is the classic example, in some regards: the scientist becomes responsible, not only for the data and natural theory, but for a spiritual interpretation as well.

I wonder if for a human being, even awash in technical articles, this spiritual interpretation is avoidable. This, in fact, may be a question of how the cognitive system (i.e. the scientific community) is distributed.

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