I'm Optimistic

Well actually I'm not. Not usually. Not on some really deep level. When I think about the depth of the problems we face as a species - climate change, resource depletion, population run amok -its hard to really believe that we are gonna master our worst impulses and manage, for the first time, in all history recorded or not, to pull it together and work together.

The astronomer in me looks at the problem dispassionately, looks at a galaxy with a 100 billion stars, and thinks "whatever. its a big Universe. Must happen all the time"

But the dad in me says - "please, no horror for my or anyone's kids."

So its the dad that is optimistic. Its the dad that sees our 44th president, a truly intelligent guy who understands the need for, the value in ,science and thinks "maybe, just maybe."

The can be no doubt that it is time to go post-partisan wherever possible. No species can live forever a finite planet chock full of enemies. Reason informs and passion inspires. Perhaps president Obama and the new generation of leadership he is ushering into power have the capacity and the wit to move us in a new and more sustainable direction. For the first time in a long time, it seems possible.

I'm optimistic. For real.

It Sounds Better When They Edit

A link to an interview in the Rochester alternative paper City. Thank you Ron Nesky for turning my rambling into something that sounded coherent.

http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/news/articles/2009/01/PROFILE-Beyond-Science-vs-Religion/

I have gotten the most comments on this quote

"I would love to get Deepak Chopra alone in a dark alley, because it's such crap"

Sigh.... everybody loves the promise of a good brawl.

The Work

"If I know your sect I anticipate your argument"
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The work, the creative work, before us all is to stop having the same argument over and over again and see if there is a way to realign and reimagine the topic. Science and Spiritual Endeavor are each the locus of enormous human effort. Much of our best and most imaginative creations have come from these two activities. It is for that reason that we owe it to ourselves to try and rise above a reliance on habitual understandings of what each means on its own and in relation to the other. We owe it to ourselves, given the big fat mess we are in a'la climate change and resource ceilings, to go beyond anticipating the argument and actually listen, actually imagine that their might be something that has not been heard before.

Re-examining history gives us this opportunity as does the exploration of pre-history. What was the impulse which become religion before it became codified into the major forms we see today? What forces shaped the development of science before it became an institutional power in its own right? Expanding our understanding of other cultural perspectives can also free us from anticipating the argument. The western intellectual and spiritual traditions have grown around certain poles which have not been the focus of other societies. What can be learned from those very different evolutions.

In all cases we standard of the past need to be transcended because the no longer serve our needs. We need to stop jumping to a conclusion which deadens our creative response and limits our options.

Overturn

'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it'

Max Planck

This quote is really sums up what we are talking about when it comes to moving beyond the traditional debate between science and religion. The point is not to get Richard Dawkins and Jerry Falwell (or whomever) to agree. They aren't and never will. Religious fundamentalists will never see their scriptures as anything other than literal revealed Truth. Funde-atheists will never see anything but human suffering and intolerance in anything that touches the domains of the sacred. Ok. Whatever.

But what about all the rest of us? Based on my experience there are a lot of people who simply are not literalists of any persuasion. They may be scientists who have never been part of any organized religion and don't hold a belief in a Deity. They may church-goers who have spent their lives trying to understand their experiences within a particular tradition. They may be people who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious". For all those who respect the open ended nature of life and inquiry literalism just doesn't satisfy when compared to the richness of what actually happens. For all these people I think its possible to move in a different direction. Let the media hype the yelling and screaming of the old battle, maybe the rest of us are ready to do the work of moving on.

Given the state of affairs and the challenges we face on the planet I don't think it is really an option to keep the old debate going. We will need narratives of the sacred to motivate our collective will and we need science to tell us how to put that will into action.

On Paradigms

Enough already with Evolution vs Scripture!

Is that really all there is to say about the two great creative human endeavors of Science and Spiritual Endeavor? Does that debate really exhaust all there is to say about these domains where so much effort and time have been poured?

I have no problem with people like Dawkins and company taking people's intolerance to task. I too am intolerant of the intolerant. But there simply is too much at stake not to take the long view and as an astrophysicist the long view is what I was trained for. In that sense the phenomena of "Religion" stretches far, far back into its roots in Mythology, a word which must been taken in its positive sense of "sacred narratives. Taken in this way the positive roots of Science can be found in Myth as well.

Its only been 50,000 years since the awakened encounter between human self-consciousness and the world began in earnest (a bare instant in cosmic time) so the long view here is the only one which makes sense.

Paradigm change in science comes not when some long standing paradox is resolved but when it is transcended. For decades at the end of the 19th century people fretted about the relativity of the speed of light. Whole books worth of results on the luminiferous aether and its properties were worked out. Einstein did not solve this problem he simply ignored it. Instead of figuring out how the speed of light would change in different moving frames of reference he simply said "It doesn't" and followed the consequences of that radical assumption.

When it comes to Science and Spiritual Endeavor I propose something similar. The tired debate about some particular interpretation of some particular scripture, the narrow debate about some particular idea of a particular form deity, is old and tired and backward looking. We have become a global species folks, a global community with a view that stretches back to the dim past and forward to an infinite future. Time to get inclusive.

There have been, are, and will be many ways in which human beings interpret their encounter with that aspect of experience they feel as "sacred". That is the direction to face now. That is the third alternative rising above battles about God vs Physics. I am certainly a-theistic in that, like my boy Einstein, a personal supernatural deity who always fails to choose the Mets as the world series champs (dang!) does not resonate with my experience, intuition or understanding. But "religion" does only refer to particular arguments about God and his/her/its' imagined powers. That is the long view. To dismiss that view because of the "popularity" of various fundamentalisms around the world is to miss the promise that perspective offers.

So I propose changing the question we ask and seeing where it leads us. The problem is not how does anyones scriptures, sutra's etc match with scientific results but instead how does the aspiration, born of lived experience, drive what is best in Science and Spiritual Aspiration. Perhaps this route taken with radical open-mindedness and radical scepticism - the hallmarks of true science and true spiritual longing - can lead us on a new path away from an antagonism that only serves the antagonists and teaches the rest of us absolutely nothing.

Not Your Fathers Science vs. Religion Debate

So my book is now beginning to make its way into the world and I am hearing some reaction already.

One argument I can anticipate is people saying "Oh god not another book on science and religion. I am soooooo tired of the topic."

http://scienceblogs.com/sunclipse/2008/12/book_announcement_the_constant.php

I could not agree more. That was in fact the reason I wrote The Constant Fire in the first place. The traditional debate which pits christian scripture against the latest results of science be it evolutionary theory or cosmology is tired. There is nothing more there we can learn from since most of the people involved in the debate are simply talking past each other. What I set out to do was look beyond issues of God vs Physics and ask about Religion or better yet Human Spiritual Endeavor as a broad and very old phenomena and ask is there any other way of seeing what happens there in relation to what happens in science. My answer is a definitely YES. There are entirely other ways of seeing the science and religion debate which go beyond the tired confines of historically conditioned prejudices. The most important stepping off point however is to see that Religion can not simply be about whatever your parents handed you.

We live in a rather remarkable moment in history in which humanity is forced to see itself for what it is - a species as a whole with stewardship over the planet as a whole. If we want to argue about what happens in science and what happens in religion then we have to broaden our view to see the long history of the human encounter with what it experiences as sacred. If the debate is tied to some particular vision of deity of some particular subsect of a religion then there is unlikely to be much progress. The history of culture is such that the longing which gets defined as "spiritual" manifests in a lot of different ways. Sometimes it has an explicit creator and sometimes it does not. Better to go beyond particulars and look at the phenomena as a whole and where it connects with science.

That is why I looked to scholars like William James and Mircea Eliade and why I looked to domains of comparative mythology to gain a different perspective. While people may not agree with what I found there it is not, I hope, business as usual.

Honey I Scared the Kids

This week I had the unique privilege of giving the keynote address at Rochester's School of the Arts inductance ceremony for their honors society. SOTA is one of the city school district's best efforts in an otherwise pretty beleaguered system. Anyone who has ever been to the annual dance concert or senior jazz band knows what these kids are capable of.

The ceremony begins with the lighting of a candle as a symbolic flame of knowledge. I had some general notes on what I wanted to say but that little flame, flickering on the table at the front of the stage, got me thinking.

So I told them I had bad news and good news. I told them that the bad news was that the light sputtering there before them could go out. I told them it often had in the past. The I told them the good news was they were going to make sure that it wouldn't go out now.

They didn't look to happy about that. Who would?

Every generation gets a name these days. The baby boomers. Generation X, Y and Z. Now maybe we are all Generation O. Deciding on that label can be a kind of self-indulgent exercise in collective naval-gazing but for the kids coming up now it may be an exercise in facing reality. Unlike the boomers and their flirtation with rebellion and the Gen X tendency to existential whining, the kids coming up now are staring down into something real, palpable and unpleasant. The world we left them is falling apart. After a 50,000 year experiment in self-consciousness and culture, they face the unique possibility of watching a newly formed global civilization collapse.

Pinned between climate change, resource depletion and a population that is simply more than this little world can carry, the next generation will face problems which the last few could not have dreamed of. We are about to pass through a bottleneck in our history as a species. We may squeeze through and come out on the other side. We may make it having learned something deep and lasting about what it means to be embodied intelligences enmeshed in a planetary ecosystem. We may also, collectively, screw the pooch and watch our project of civilization laid to ruin.

No way to know before hand.

So if this generation gets a name it may be one they aren't really looking for: the heroic generation. They may need to be heroic simply because so much will be asked of them. They may need to find their heroism as they are forced to endure changes and challenges that tax their creativity, intelligence and resolve.

I told them all this. I didn't intent to scare them but it seems to me immoral to leave them in the dark. How else can we expect them to understand the value of all that is symbolized in the little candle at the head of the table. How else might they understand how delicate this whole enterprise called democracy and law and learning really is.

Scholarship. Knowledge, Culture. The Arts. Compassion. You just can't pull em apart