Faith, Wisdom and Gravitational Waves

Thursday this week saw a wonderful gift from a large international team of scientists and engineers to the rest of humankind.  They reported the first detection of gravitational waves following their prediction by Albert Einstein a century before (in Einstein, A., Annalen der Physik 49, 769-822 (1916)] .

The discovery is the first-fruits of overwhelming human imagination, to conceive of such a thing as a wave that travels in the warp and weft of space and time itself, of the extraordinary talent, skill and care taken in building the exquisitely sensitive LIGO detectors, and of the deeply impressive patience, over decades, of researchers willing to devote fruitless decades to the long search in the hope that it will one day open our gravitational ‘ears’ to the sounds of the universe.

The astounding work deserves to be shared and enjoyed widely, and the scientists and science journalists have done an excellent job in trying to do so.  Even so several people have asked me, quite baffled, to explain what has happened.  I have found that the analogy of ripples on a lake works well:

Ripples from a splash in a lake take a while to reach the toy boat at your feet, like the gravitational waves from the black holes.

Imagine that you are standing on the shore of a calm lake.  You have a small toy boat with you that you set afloat at your feet. Then you find the largest stone within reach and heft it away into the lake.  On landing and sinking it creates a large splash a few metres away from you.  Then ripples start to spread out in circles from the entry point, widening and weakening as they travel.  After a few moments, the toy boat at your feet is disturbed by the ripples as they arrive at the shore, and very gently starts bobbing up and down.  The splash is the equivalent of the merging black holes, the surface of the lake behaves like the space between the Earth and the distant galaxy where the black holes dwell, the ripples model the gravitational waves, and the toy boat corresponds to the sensitive laser-beam detectors, which also were caused to ‘bob’ by tiny amounts as the waves passed by.

 

If you understand that, then you have understood everything about the LIGO discovery, apart from the details of the particular space-time geometries of the gravitational waves, and some rather different numbers.  The splash was not metres away but 1.3 billion light years, in a galaxy far, far away.  We know that very simply from being able, thanks to Einstein, to work out how much energy was released at the source, and therefore how far away it must have been to produce the signal strength observed here on Earth.  The wave speed was not a few metres a second, but the speed of light, fast enough to circle the earth 7 times a second.  The detector bob was not a few millimetres, but one thousandth of the diameter of a single proton.  The sheer sensitivity achieved by the experimentalists to achieve that measurement is perhaps the most impressive aspect of the whole work.

The opportunity to enjoy, celebrate and contemplate this beauty is an opportunity I looked forward to in Faith and Wisdom in Science (which, coincidentally, appeared in paperback this week).  The story embodies many of the aspects of the cultural narrative of science that I advance there: the long human story of looking into nature and seeing with our minds into its hidden structure, the experience of pain and longing in the often painful process of gaining wisdom about nature, the extraordinary human ability to do this – to reconceive of cosmic structure almost as if we were creating a universe, the experience of the joy of a sort of reconciliation when we do it, the faith in the rationality of the universe and our continuing ability to understand it.  I cannot think of a better example to illustrate how science ought to be thought of as a humanity, rather than in some form of opposition to the disciplines of language, art and poetry.  I found myself writing this brief facebook post on the day itself:

This beautiful discovery is utter human joy. The last time we saw such a wonder was in 1888. Heinrich Hertz detected waves of the electromagnetic field predicted by James Clerk Maxwell’s field equations of electromagnetism in 1865. Einstein wrote the field equations of gravity in 1915. They have wavelike solutions. It took 100 years to see them. The last 40 or so required men and women to dedicate fruitless decades to this beautiful idea. Today their gift is inestimable. It is a sort of poetry – wild imaginative force that entertains the dance of death between black holes of immense proportion, constrained by the tight form of space time curvature and the displacement of a thousandth part of a proton. Yet we noticed just that. The contemplation of all this is a gift. Thank you my patient, loving, enduring, believing fellow scientists.

There are still some glimmers of hope that there are still human activities that have not entirely been monetarised in our Western society.  There is hope that there may be more if we can learn to draw from the ancient resources of Wisdom thinking for today.  A celebration of ‘natural philosophy’ – of ‘the love of wisdom to do with natural things’ that is the real name for ‘science’ – as a deeply human activity, and a necessary part of our individual humanity, has been enriched this week.

Finally, here are the actual signals detected at the two sites, showing the rapidly increasing and quickening oscillations as the two giant black holes circle each other and merge into silence.  Superimposed on the data are the calculations from Einstein’s equations for general relativity, supposing just this scenario.  The ‘chirp’ song could not be clearer.  Not only have we seen gravitational waves for the first time, but also made the first direct detection of a black hole (in fact of course a pair of them).

The original paper in Physical Review Letters is open-access, very readable, and here. What a gift!

The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works,^[c][d]
    before his deeds of old;
²³ I was formed long ages ago,
    at the very beginning, when the world came to be.
²⁴ When there were no watery depths, I was given birth,
    when there were no springs overflowing with water;
²⁵ before the mountains were settled in place,
    before the hills, I was given birth,
²⁶ before he made the world or its fields
    or any of the dust of the earth.
²⁷ I was there when he set the heavens in place,
    when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,
²⁸ when he established the clouds above
    and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,
²⁹ when he gave the sea its boundary
    so the waters would not overstep his command,
and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.
³⁰     Then I was constantly^[e] at his side.
I was filled with delight day after day,
    rejoicing always in his presence,
³¹ rejoicing in his whole world
    and delighting in mankind.

Hymn of Wisdom from Proverbs chapter 8

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Why all those religions? – lessons from the Wisdom of Science

Every so often, social media supports a round of comment picking up on the question of the many faiths and religions there are and have been overtime.  One such ‘poster’ was endorsed recently by the American Atheist organisation (which by the way does wonderful work in support of atheist views in public and political life, including the highly desirable electability of atheist politicians in that most paradoxical of countries).

But here is the post, originating with comedian Ricky Gervais:

What is going on here hides two unstated assumptions that turn the rather silly quote into an aspirational argument for the illogicality of religious belief:

(1) Every religion teaches that it is correct and the other are wrong

(2) Given an object or aspect of external reality, people will have the same narrative concerning it

This is supposed to be strong evidence against any external reality that anyone has ever called ‘God’ because by syllogistic reasoning, the existence of God would activate (2), which is in conflict with (1). However, neither (1) nor (2) is true. I will briefly treat both in the following (though necessarily at greater length than the post itself).  For this is one of the common fallacies of atheism (at least the popular kind) that would be helped by some scientific thinking and experience.

One thing ought to be made quite clear as a preliminary – that the implied claim of the lazy ‘3000 religions’ language is that there are thousands of arbitrarily different religions in existence with essentially no common features. This is not so – the vast majority of the world’s population (which is still in overwhelming majority religiously affiliated) are Christians (31.4%), Muslims (23.2%) and Hindu (15%) [1]. Christianity, Islam and Judaism all root themselves in a common history of revelation beginning with Abraham, share a great deal of scriptural, theological and ethical teaching and practice – and furthermore recognise that in their teaching (see below). Together with basic (Vedic) Hinduism all are mono-theistic and creational. So we are not at all faced with the smorgasboard of random religious proliferation you suggest at all.

So on the substance of (1) the rhetorical sleight of hand here is to force evaluation into a 1-bit ‘right or wrong’ measure. To a scientist, incidentally, this trick rings warning bells a mile off – we never get to be black and white, right or wrong, about the world – we get better or poorer accounts of it, and a sure sign of a desperate move from a weak position is that its proponents start demanding 1-bit status from their opposing theoretical camps. So, as C.S. Lewis once put it [2], ‘If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view’.

The recognition of both truth and value in other religions is also formalised (in those traditions that like to formalise things). The relevant Roman Catholic statement is ‘Nostra Aetete’, for example [3] which contains the following observation: ‘From ancient times down to the present, there is found among various peoples a certain perception of that hidden power which hovers over the course of things and over the events of human history; at times some indeed have come to the recognition of a Supreme Being, or even of a Father. This perception and recognition penetrates their lives with a profound religious sense.’ Islam, too, has a tradition of respect for the ‘People of the Book’ in both Koran and non-Koranic teachings [4] which played out historically, for example, in the degrees of Mohammed on peaceful relations with Jews and Christians onwards.

There is furthermore a long tradition of the philosophy and anthropology or religion that carefully identifies commonalities and differences in religions. The leading-edge original work here is probably best exemplified by Kant (as in so much else) who in his ‘Religion’ identified an inner structure which he called the ‘pure rational system of religion’. This is a common core that speaks, in differentiate language, of the human state of corruption and need of redemption in some form or other [5].

One example of important detail in this tradition of study is the common appearance of the motif of a dying and rising god [6]. This was instrumental in the development of Lewis’ realisation that one could countenance a ‘True Myth’ as a source of a wide mythological tradition – namely the incarnation of God in Jesus, his death and resurrection as the healing move in answer to the (equally commonly felt – see Kant) need of redemption.

Finally I should add that all this is true in personal experience. I have three times now been privileged to be a participant at inter-faith discussion of science and religion held at CERN under the auspices of its former Director Rolf Heuer. These 3-day symposia of discussions between Jewish, Muslim, Janist, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and atheist scholars and scientists have been living evidence of the mutual respect, learning and valuing that is at the heart of a response to God.

That’s probably enough to show how mistaken proposition (1) is. As for (2) hopefully this doesn’t need to take as long. History of science [7], anthropology [8], cognitive neuroscience [9] all show us that consistently a common externality does not give rise to a common internal human experience nor a common narrative in communities. We bring our own experience, stories, symbols, language to bear on the interpretation of the external world both at the level of individuals and communities. So very radically different accounts of external experience with a common source not only may be different but are expected to be different.

Long-exposure photograph of the Milky Way looking towards the centre of our galaxy

Different cultures have as many stories to tell about the Milky Way, rainbows, the nature of animals, the musical possibilities of sound, as there are cultures. As ideas develop, thinking advances, communication enriches, these change to be sure, and in the area we call ‘science’ do converge to some degree. But timescales for this vary radically. In religion I think the timescales are very much longer than in chemistry.

One reason for the divergence of explanatory narrative about experience is that by ‘explanation’ we mean typically by linking one object or mode of behaviour to another. So explanation becomes especially problematic for aspects of experiences reality that are unique (such as consciousness). McGilchrist (op. cit. – a wonderful book by the way) is very good on this. So there is and cannot be an expectation that as unique an entity as God would give rise to a clearly unequivocal narrative across humanity – quite the opposite in fact.

So in conclusion, since both of the assumptions behind the one-liner are demonstrably wrong, as are a number of the implied co-assumptions, it leads us to a very different place than its author and followers think it does. Far from adding weight to any argument that Christianity is incredible, it exemplifies the difficulties that atheism has in accounting for a universal human experience and response, and the disingenuous tactics that its proponent need to deploy, I am sorry to say, to sustain its appeal, ignoring centuries of reflection on precisely the questions it claims as shiny and new and worthy of the little child who points out the nakedness of an emperor.

The Emperor is naked of course – he hangs there, creator of the stars, stripped and suffering on a cross – ‘foolishness to the Gentiles’ [10] and offering forgiveness and life.

You couldn’t make it up [11]

[1] Pew research Centre statistics http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/pf_15-04-02_projectionstables8/

[2] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Harper-Collins, New York (2001), p35

[3] http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html

[4] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein (1973). Sufi Essays. State University of New York Press. p. 139.

[5] Kant, Immanuel, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. (1793). George Di Giovanni (trans.), 57–215.

[6] Lee W. Bailey, “Dying and rising gods” in: David A. Leeming, Kathryn Madden and Stanton Marlan (eds.) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion (2009) Springer, pages 266-267

[7] J. Brooke and G. Cantor, ‘Reconstructing Nature’, T&T Clarke (1998)

[8] K. Harstrup, Anthropology and Nature, Routledge (2013)

[9] I. MacGilchrist, ‘The Master and his Emissary’, Yale University Press (2010)

[10] St Paul, 1 Cor 1:23

[11] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, once more

2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,900 times in 2015. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Being Human with Music and Light and a Fabulous Day

This excellent piece was written by my colleague at Durham, Dr. Giles Gasper, who is Principal Investigator of the Ordered Universe project – our interdisciplinary investigation into medieval science. This is the first report (there will be more!) on the afternoon last week where we sought to bring the science and music of light together in mutual reflection. I’ll post some further thoughts on the thought-shape of this interaction, which brings both intellectual and emotional engagement to the surface and hitches them to each other. What was special for me was the experience of immediate juxtaposition of the joy of understanding and ‘seeing’ more into the structure of light, with the immediate sensation of beautiful musical communication of colour, meaning and life.

Ordered Universe

Saturday 14th saw the first two of four events organised at Durham as part of the Being Human, National Festival of Humanities 2015. Now in its second year, the Festival takes place up and down the country with a cornucopia of events for the public. Big questions, big debates and opportunities to engage with academic research of all sorts and interests. 2015, as well as being for those of a medieval bent a year of octocentenaries for Magna Carta and the 4th Lateran Council, is the UNESCO designated International Year of Light. To celebrate this, and the bigger questions the nature of light raises, Tom McLeish curated a public workshop and concert, which took place at Trevelyan College on the Saturday afternoon. Teaming up with the Institute of Physics, the Durham Singers, and supported by the RVW Trust,  the two events presented a multi-faceted tour of…

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Professor Tom McLeish – Towards a theology of science

Here is a reblog from my recent visit to the University of Queensland Emmanuel College Centre for the Study of Science, Religion and Society. There’s also a rather sharp set of questions over 20 minutes at ABC Radio embedded!

Emmanuel Centre for the Study of Science, Religion & Society

On 15 September Tom McLeish, Professor of Physics at Durham University, gave incredible insights into the breadth of his research in two presentations at the CSSRS.

McLeish spoke at a lunchtime seminar about his recent OUP publication Faith and Wisdom in Science in which he argues that the problem with the contested “science and religion” relationship lies in the conjunction. Neither science nor religion, he contends, does “and”. Instead, McLeish posits a case for the importance of a “theology of science”. In a fresh reading of the book of Job, McLeish argued that science — as the attempt to understand the natural world — is a deeply human and deeply religious activity. Focusing particularly on the passages that detail God’s response to Job in chapter 38, McLeish argued that questions like “canst thou bind the sweet influence of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?” are not only musings…

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Our Latest Scientific Collaborator was a Medieval Bishop

Tom McLeish, Durham University; Giles Gasper, Durham University, and Hannah Smithson, University of Oxford

There was something unusual about our recent research collaboration on the science of light, colours and the perception of rainbows: one member of the team wrote his best science in the 1220s.

The Ordered Universe Project sees humanities scholars and scientists come together to carefully read the 13th century scientific treatises of the English polymath Robert Grosseteste. It was set up in the hope that the work’s technical content might receive a deeper analysis than previous scholarship.

What no one expected was that the scientists in our team would be inspired to do new work as a result. They have ended up becoming co-authors of new scholarly editions of medieval texts. And the humanities scholars among us now also co-author papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society and other scientific journals.

Grosseteste – “The Greatest Mind You’ve Never Heard of” according to the title of the festival event sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council – lived at an explosive period in the history of thought. He was born in East Anglia of humble origins in the late 12th century. But his studies in Hereford, Oxford and probably Paris enabled him to crest the new intellectual tidal wave surging through the schools and early universities of Europe, triggered by the rediscovery of most of Aristotle’s writings, transmitted by Jewish and Muslim translators and commentators of the previous centuries.

The bright, eager and incisive mind that Grosseteste clearly possessed fed hungrily on this wealth of new material. He was also clearly inspired by the realisation that the human mind can through observation and thought discover structures within the material world that were previously hidden and understand them for the first time.

For example, in his treatise on the rainbow, De iride, he is the first to identify refraction as the phenomenon that produces the rainbow (rather than reflection, as Aristotle thought). Any scientist today would also recognise his articulation of the “aha!” moments we all live for, a phenomenon he calls “sollertia”.

A truly integrated mind

His thinking is, of course, of its own time not of ours. So when he tackles the problem of cosmic origins, the physical problem he sets himself is the creation of a universe with the Earth at its centre, a model we know today to be wrong.

His Christian worldview does inform his thinking, motivating him to argue that the physical origin of the cosmos is a real issue, contradicting Aristotle who proposed a world without any beginning. But for this 13th century bishop (Creationists please note) it is the questions, not the answers, that lie in the book of Genesis.

The result is a highly mathematical and physical “Big Bang” theory of an early expanding universe driven by the force of light, that for the first time unites the Earth, the Moon and the cosmos beyond them under a single physical theory of matter. His formulation gave the team some computational headaches to work through even 800 years later.

A colour projection inspired by Grosseteste’s De iride
Author provided

His was a truly integrated mind that expected to see the laws of light and matter at work in the cosmos also visible in common objects on Earth. So for Grosseteste, colour is a manifestation of just this. The Ordered Universe team were able to tease out from the 400-word jewel of a treatise De colore (On colour) that he thinks of colours within a three-dimensional abstract space. For Grosseteste, the differences between all possible colours can be captured using variation of just three qualities.

This is remarkable. As there are the three different types of wavelength-selective cone cells in the human retina, colour really does possess a three-dimensional structure (that’s why screens display colours as a mix of red, blue and green).

The appropriate abstract geometry to represent differences between colours is still a question of active research today. The problem was that Grosseteste’s qualities of greatness, clarity and purity had no obvious mapping onto red, green and blue. If only we could have given him a standard colour chart to comment on.

Delightfully, there is such an eternal colour chart: rainbows are the same yesterday as today in all their variations of angle, raindrop sizes and solar illumination. And these three natural “rainbow co-ordinates” are just the ones Grosseteste uses to describe their colour.

After considerable calculation of the spectral features of all possible rainbows, we projected them into a standard 3D perceptual colour space developed by vision scientists in the 20th century. We found that our vision scientist of the 13th century had indeed recognised that rainbows create a way of mapping this space, with the beautiful twist that they generate a new “double-spiral” co-ordinate system for colour-space (see image above).

It feels like a collaboration across the centuries, but the project also affirms the sense that deeply interdisciplinary research takes us into our academic core.

The authors presented their work on Grosseteste at the Cheltenham Science Festival on 7 June 2015.

Tom McLeish is Professor of Physics and former Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at Durham University.
Giles Gasper is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Durham University.
Hannah Smithson is Associate Professor in Experimental Psychology (Perception) at University of Oxford.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

The Liberal Arts at Lincoln and a Choral Homage in Grosseteste’s Chapel

A reblog from a post of mine on our medieval science project. Latest revelations of thought from 13th century ..

Ordered Universe

Easter Week saw the Ordered Universe project team converge for three days on the ancient city of Lincoln – where Robert Grosseteste was Bishop from 1235-1253.  It felt almost like a pilgrimage for those of us who have been studying the scientific works of this 13th

Lincoln Cathedral

century polymath together for 5 years now.  We even brought our very own bishop (and medieval scholar) with us in the form of David Thomson (Huntingdon). Familiarity (and depth of scholarship) go back far futher for Prof. Cecilia Panti who joined the group once more from Rome, and Neil Lewis, who ‘skyped’ in from Georgetown.    It felt rather like a family gathering with new friends.

Ceratinly Ordered Universe workshops are increasingly anticipated with a growing sense of academic excitement (What will we uncover together this time? What will I learn about the unfamiliar but intriguing  disciplines that I find an increasing source of wonder?) but increasingly delight at…

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Islam, Christianity and Science: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

One of the questions I am often asked at Faith and Wisdom in Science discussions is along the lines of, ‘What do other religions say about such a theology of science?’.  Even if I have persuaded the questioner that the ‘conflict narrative’ is inapplicable to christianity and science, except by construction, the thought behind the question is often that other religions must percieve science as a sort of threat.  The religion most commonly suggested at this point is Islam.

I have just returned, by coincedence, from Paris, in a week marked by thoughts of Islam and conflict.  I was there as an external advisor to a French science committee of the CNRS (the main French national science funding body), but had the opportunity of witnessing at first hand the solidarity of the Parisiens in their determination that the atrocious gunning down of satirical journalists, a police officer, and shoppers in a Jewish supermarket should not escalate into violent community divisions.  It was an impressive and moving experience.

The juxtaposition of science, conflict and a religious response of reconciliation reminded me of the ‘homework’ I had set myself and others in the final chapter of Faith and Wisdom when I look at its consequences.  We found that science has a theological human purpose of participating together in reconciling humanity to the material world – and that far from being in confict with religion, it is that outworking of the story of God and creation that speaks of the relationship between humankind and nature.  One of the consequences of the ‘new geometry’ of faith and science is the hope for a new strand of dialogue between faith traditions themselves.  I found that in Islam (and in Judaism and more) wherever thinking was not hidebound into doctrinal power-structures, there was the same theological embracing of science rather than a flight from it.  The Muslim philosopher Muhammad Iqbal has written of Koranic sayings that speak of human freedom to share in the task of creation – a very close idea to the participative relational theology of Biblical ‘Wisdom’ writings.

The 12th century Cordoban muslim philosopher Averroes

This should not surprise us if we reflect for a moment on the debt that the rise of medieval and early modern science owes to the scholarship and natural philosophy of the great Islamic thinkers Avicenna (Ibn-Sina, 980-1037), Averroes (Ibn-Rushd,1126-1198), Al-Kindi (801-873) and others, in the early medieval period.  The extraordinary early science advances made by the English 13th century polymath Robert Grosseteste, which we are uncovering in the Ordered Universe project at Durham, drew essentially on Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and other texts. Not only the Aristotelian emphasis on the observation of nature, but also the quest to deepen our understanding of nature beyond Aristotle, and a theological motivation for doing so, all re-energised European thinking via the Islamic tradition of Pesia, North Africa and Spain.  An instructive example occurs in the route from Aristotle’s linear, and physically unsupported, ordering of colours from black to white, and Grosseteste’s full three-dimensional colour space.  It was Averroes who, in his de sensu, motivated a theory of colour with a higher number of degrees of freedom by suggesting that colour arose from the double nature of material transparency and light itself.  In the 13th century we see Christian scholars reading Muslim commentators and scientists, themselves reflecting on Greek, pagan, authors – and making transformational progress in our  knowledge of nature and in the very direction of science.

A very influential thinker, transformational physicist and devout Muslim I might have referred to in the book is Nobel prizewinner

Abdus Salam, Nobel Laureate in Physics 1979

Abdus Salam.  He drew not only his motivation to do science from his muslim faith, but also descibed how his experience of doing theoretical physics shed light on his reading of the Koran.  At one point in his  Nobel Prize address, Salam quoted the Koranic verse:

Thou seest not, in the creation of the All-merciful any imperfection, Return thy gaze, seest thou any fissure? Then Return thy gaze, again and again. Thy gaze, Comes back to thee dazzled, aweary.

 

He commented:

This, in effect, is the faith of all physicists; the deeper we seek, the more is our wonder excited, the more is the dazzlement for our gaze.

But he did not stop at that point.  He drew from this one of the other great lessons that also emerged in Faith and Wisdom:

I am saying this, not only to remind those here tonight of this, but also for those in the Third World, who feel they have lost out in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, for lack of opportunity and resource.

Alfred Nobel stipulated that no distinction of race or colour will determine who received of his generosity. On this occasion, let me say this to those, whom God has given His Bounty. Let us strive to provide equal opportunities to all so that they can engage in the creation of Physics and science for the benefit of all mankind. This would exactly be in the spirit of Alfred Nobel and the ideals which permeated his life. Bless You!

This is still a future hope – that the deeply human need to reconcile our understandind with the material world – the endeavour we now call science – can be opened up to everyone.  In developed countries exclusion arises from inequitable or uninspiring education, from a media and press that stigmatise and isolate science.  Elsewhere there are still economic exclusions.  Sadly there is also damage done to the enjoyment of science everywhere in the world from a failure to understand that science is a theological gift and mandate, rather than a threat.  Both Christianity and Islam suffer from containing some within their communities who sustain the severe and damaging error of literalistic misunderstanding of scriptures.  In both cases the perverse doctrine of ‘young earth creationism’ denigrates science as well as doing violence to their own holy writings.  Yet that, too, though unwelcome, is a shared challenge.

At a time when reconciliation is as starkly urgent as at any we can recall, rediscovering science as God’s gift looks like a project that people of Abrahamic faith and beyond should embark on urgently.

The unsolvable tension: faith, science, or faith in evidence?

Here is a really clear articulation of one of the difficulties some people have with my view that the ‘conflict narrative’ for science and religion is a category error (but for subtle reasons not to do with non–overlapping magisteria). Answer to follow anon …

Writing my own user manual

A couple of weeks ago, a puzzling piece appeared on The Conversation: the title “Restoring science’s place in society will help us resolve the big debates” naturally caught my eye, and I started reading it expecting to find some hints on how to surpass the common attitude that grants the same weight to opinion and evidence. Reading it, however, quickly became puzzling and made me experience a sort of dissonance discomfort. As a result, I posted the link on Reddit, with a very short and critical disclaimer (further explained in a subsequent comment), and then tweeted my disappointment directly to The Conversation.
To my surprise, Tom McLeish, the author of the original article replied to my rather blunt tweet (it’s official, Twitter is fine for praise, but it really doesn’t work for criticism, constructive or not), and we engaged on a short and very civilised exchange

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What a wonderful world – aha-moments triggered by insights into a medieval thinker’s mind

What a wonderful world – aha-moments triggered by insights into a medieval thinker’s mind.

via What a wonderful world – aha-moments triggered by insights into a medieval thinker’s mind.