Evolit: Week 4--Evolution as a non-foundational narrative story

I responded to this earlier, but my post must not have gone through. (Computers!!!) Anyways, here is my post for last weeks' talk:

In today's discussion, I had a major deja vu. It struck me like the usual bolt of lightening dialogue and filled me with this odd sort of fuzzy feeling. 

The little experience was triggered as we discussed the Universe as a whole. Where it came from, how it developed, and the many many theories existing to explain these phenomenon. While trying to imagine this cone-shaped existense of inconceivable size, the feeling that I had experienced the same thing before then. It didn't help the factor that whenever I think of the universe or pick up my well-loved Stephen Hawking I get a slightly creeped out tingle running down my spine. It amplified this feeling to the point that I was nearly trembling with a mix of a smile and a frown somewhere on my lips. 

Science, the Universe, Philosophy and Life. Where do they all coincide? Or do they even hit each other? Some may qualify that all science is reality, and that reality the only concrete thing in the universe. Another mind triggers Mr. Descartes with the idea that reality is a construct of perception. If we can't even peice together the confines of how we measure the universe and reality, how is it possible for us even to begin understanding the potentially overlapping areas of science and every facet of thought. That puts me in a nice, round circle- a Logic Loop if I may- going around and around and never being able to pick a spot to land. I desperately want to be able to find a niche to sit down and pick a perception and understanding for the universe and all it's intricacies, but I feel like this will never happen. Perhaps I really want to stay in the loop that way I will never be stuck with one single understanding. Will I land when I am supposed to, or will I stay in my Logic Loop forever, doomed to deja vu's and tingling feelings up my spine? 

I have been doing the reading for this week and I don't really know what to think of it.  The author keeps talking about how Darwin's ideas will bring us to some incredible conclusions and this frustrates me for two reasons. I'm a little skeptical about the existence of these conclusions and I wish he would just tell us already. 

As for the discussion on religion and science, I do think they are different, but I also don't think it is necessary to choose one or the other.  My feelings are basically the same as they were on science and the humanities. I maintain that there are differences, but that doesn't mean there aren't also similarities and that one can't enjoy both science and humanities classes.  I'm not sure why people think that science requires giving up other parts of one's life. Why are people encouraged to choose between science and the humanities, or science and religion?  I believe that science does overlap with other parts of life and I don't see why so many people believe that science can't overlap with other parts of life.

Sorry about the delay- Haverford plenary.

I wanted to respond to something brought up in the new reading for tuesday...I've basically just started it so I don't know if the author is going to get around to answering one of the smaller questions he put out there, so I wanted to hazard an answer myself. He was talking about purpose, Aristotle's fourth "cause," the answer to the "why" (basically, about what we've been refering to as foundationalism), and whether or not their could be a purpose without it being someone's purpose. I feel like, even in Darwin, actually, we see that we can. The point is to survive, and while I'm not sure it's entirely philosophically sound then to say that survival is "good" thing, I think the implication is definitely embedded in Darwin. And, more to the point, continuing life is therefore a better thing- having offspring, babies, is being naturally supported. Do I think you can add to that with other beliefs? Sure, and for many people, myself included, there needs to be a little something more and there are ways to question, consider, and understand that (religion or spirituality being a common way.)

I suppose in general my "His Dark Materials" reading self can't see purpose and meaning as necessitating a God...Not after Mary Malone's revelation in the chapter "There is Now" when she discovers basically the opposite.

As I mentioned in our discussion I consider myself to be very religious. I am a methodist who was born and raised in the church, I have helped run sermons and special events and my Mother works as a secretary at a church. I believe very strongly in the teachings of the bible and in the Christian faith.I am also an anthropology major with a minor in bology. I have been convinced that the theory of evolution is correct and have no qualms with any of the proven scientific theories of our age. (I'm still a little confused by quantum theory but that's neither here nor there). 

At a young age I was essentially told that I would eventually have to give up one for the other. I could not believe in both science and God. After some careful consideration I decided that that was simply not going to happen and from then on I have worked hard to understand both science and religion and have since found some amazing similarities between them. I refused to give up my love of either and just wanted it to be known that science and religion are not mutually exclusive and it was quite frustrating in class to hear people dismiss one view for the other.

i just wanted to let this class, this school and this world know that it is possible to have both God and evolution. The most intense religious experiance I have had in my young life occured as I read the introduction to Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" a book about the history of scientists and their theories. Don't be exclusive of any story and please, respect the fact that science and religion are equally important in the lives of some of your class mates. 

In large part, much of my academic work draws on the kind of post-structuralist thinking that has grounded our discussions of the subjectivity of science and history. I think it is hugely important to recognize the manner in which different kinds of agendas--be they economic, political, or cultural--inform the stories we are told and tell ourselves, and that much of what we accept as distinterested truth is in actuality never truly neutral.

That being said, the assertion that "everything is challengable" disconcertingly opens the door for a refutation of histories that are important to recognize and to face. I was thinking about the tactics of some creationists (notably this guy) who exploit one apparent weakness in evolutionary theory(in this case the lack of transitional stages) to discredit an overwhelimg amount of positive evidence. I think this gesture is not dissimilar from many of the strategies of Holocaust Revionism, which will take one piece of contentious evidence(like, for example, the idea that Nazis made soap out of their victims, which has been shown to be false) to argue that none of the testimonies of survivors can be trusted. I wonder how can we both accept that history and science are subjectively informed, but also retain a knowledge that some things are in fact fact, and desperately need to be recognized as such for the sake of humanity. 

This line of thought reminded me of a piece that Michiko Kakutani wrote for the Times in 2006 after word broke that James Frey's best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces  was largely falsified. In it, she writes about how adademic post-structuralism was co-opted by the Bush administration to  turn "truth" into a kind of dirty word that stood for a radical, leftist agenda, despite a tide of evidence that suggested their actions and rhetoric were based on little to no certainty. She  suggests that the presence of "phrases like 'virtual reality and 'creative nonfiction'" reflect an unacceptable "relativism" in our society that does a disservice to first-person testimony and the accomplishments of science.

How does such an argument change our conversations thus far?  Can we have our "crack" cake and eat it too, or does the destabalization of "fact" too insiduously make possible its appropriation by detrimental agendas? Is there a happy medium between nihilistically clamining that "everything is subjective" and naively accepting every "fact" we are taught?

Throughare discussions of The Origin of Species I am becoming more and moreskeptical about it as a scientific work. As I think about it, I realize that I don’t really questions things I learnin the context of a science class. The Origin of Species really reminds me of ancient philosopherswho would just observe and think about things and come up with logical explanationsand call it science.  That isreally what Darwin was doing.  Inmy biology class we are reading a book called Beak of the Finch and itis about many different scientist who actually conduct experiments to prove anddisprove aspects of evolution. Many people think of evolution as a “soft science”, meaning that it ismore about stories than experiments and proof.  I feel like viewing evolution as a narrative makes it lessinteresting, making it into a topic that can be easily dismissed.   

In our last group meeting we discussed a lot about the differences between religion and science and the proper environments for teaching each together or separately.  I began to think a lot on what distinguishes the two from one another.  Religion tends to embody an aspect of trust that science does not; there is an element of faith and inner belief that must be assumed as a result of intangible evidence.  In science, this trust is nearly absent, and if present, stems from the fact that there is tangible evidence to support an assumed conception.  We also discussed how religion contains an assumed moral doctrine that is absent in science.  This morality tends to stem from the belief in an authority figure that is able to determine your actions.  Science on the other hand is not influenced by an authority; actions happen because science dictates them to occur.  However, in some sense science is dictated by an authority because certain theories are given a higher respect as a result of the popularity of the theorist and that of the subject matter.  (Does authority have an influence on the importance of our stories?) Religion tends to offer a discourse on the “why” and the “why not” debate while science tends to answer more of the “how” questions.  Professor Grobstein posed the question, “where does this morality come from?” A society constructs a hierarchy of approval, existing within it a necessary sense of needing to display proper conduct as a result of social laws.  In trying to further develop this idea, I started to ask myself if morality includes a sense of survival.  If so, then maybe the divide between science and religion isn’t as big as I originally thought it was.

In Prof. Dalke's Thursday section we had a lengthy conversation on why science and religion are so divided in the United States and eventually came to the idea that science and religion answer two different questions. Science is the how and religion is the why. Science explains how we came to exist and how we ended up the way we are, but it never clearly describes how all the events were set off- is this where religion comes in? Religion can be used to explain how everything was set into motion by a supreme being. I can't help but be reminded of deism which emerged during the scientific revolution and stated that the world was like a clock in that a higher power sets it in motion and does not intervene afterwords, but instead allows it to run according to the laws of nature. Deism is an interesting fusion of both science and religion as it requires the existence of some kind of higher power to set the world in motion while also claiming that the world acts in accordance to laws of nature and scientific observation.

Another interesting topic we came across in this discussion was faith. Many felt that the difference between science and religion was the concept of faith. In science, we have observations and experiments to prove something exists while in religion all we have is our own personal faith. I say our own because an individuals faith cannot be duplicated like an experiment could be duplicated in a scientific setting. However, Professor Dalke pointed out something that I had never considered before- science too demands a fair amount of faith. An interesting example brought up in discussion was how we know the earth is round. Many of us were taught this in school and took it as fact which requires a great deal of faith because I'm sure none of us had the opportunity to hop on a spaceship and see for ourselves.

I also just want to mention how thought provoking Professor Grobstein's lecture was on Tuesday. I was a bit taken aback at how ignorant I was as to how large the universe really is. The picture illustrating multiple galaxies really put the infinite size of the universe into perspective for me. I did not realize how small we really are until seeing that picture. It's almost unsettling, but fascinating at the same time.

      In Prof. Grobstein's Thursday section, we discussed whether science and religion had a common ancestor and endured a 'speciation event.' After struggling as a class to distinguish the fundamental difference(s) between the two, most of us agreed that this was probably the case. Perhaps there is no real essence to either that allows them to be separated, and we only define the two as similar by their common ancestor. I did a little web-search and I found a sentence from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that I very much disagreed with: "Modern western empirical science has surely been the most impressive intellectual development since the 16^th century. Religion, of course, has been around for much longer..." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-science/

      While I agree that religion has undoubtedly been in existence before the 16th century, I don't think that religion should be considered older than science. I think that science pre-dates humans; that is, if science is about summarizing observations, modern animals, humans, and ALL of our ancestors were 'scientists.' I think that science was a lifestyle, and that those who fulfilled this lifestyle were able to yield descendents more suited to make the necessary observations. Eventually, humans came along and were sophisticated enough to do more than just make the observations...they could question them too! Whatever they couldn't immediately explain likely made them think out of the box, and thus religion (man-made) was created.

      HOWEVER, one might also argue that none of these scientific phenomena could have occured 'randomly' at any point in time, and that some greater power existed long before the 'science lifestyle' happened. All that is new, then, is the human recognition or speculation of such powers, and NOT the 'acts' of such powers themselves.

      So temporally-speaking, science and religion seem really difficult to separate. I do think that less-obvious scientific phenomena have led to religious inquiry, and that religious ideas have led to scientific curiosity/discovery. Now though, their dependence on each other does seem to be waning...and they seem to be more self-sufficient in their ability to produce inquiry. This is beginning to sound like that 'chicken and the egg' question.