Elliott and Lara - Science

On Science, Faith, and Boxes

Tue, 05 May 2009 13:44:00 -0500

This was written by Elliott on elliottandlara.com.

Today's Lunch Break:
The evangelical atheists and Mormon anti-evolutionists have joined forces

Those who know me well know that science is a subject very dear to my heart. When given the chance to speak at my graduation convocation for the College of Life Sciences a year ago, I spent my entire alloted time quoting Elder John Widtsoe and Dr. Francis Collins and gushing about the beauty of biology and evolution.

Those who know me well have probably also had me pestering them to check out The Mormon Organon, a blog written by my former BYU professor. The following excerpt is from his latest post, and is today's featured LB article.

(Note: I wanted to highlight certain sentences, but it is all so good I don't know where to begin. Just read it, even though your brain may want to bypass it since, you know, its indented.)

"The presence of God is found in inwardness, as Kierkegaard argued. God's grace is his willingness to be known. Directly. Not found as part of a scientific deduction. This is where the fear of evolution goes astray...

"The naïve view that we must protect our belief in God from the physical facts of the universe (like evolution, big bang etc.) generates harm because it suggests that God can only work in our lives like we can--as a physical mechanic that intervenes in simple manipulations of matter (God took a handful of dust and made it into a body like an advanced claymation creature). No. Unlike the atheists, and those believers who have joined with them, in thinking the battle is fought in the physical world, I suggest that they look towards building a relationship with God in the inward reaches of their soul. That's where the atheists will find the evidence they seek, and the believers will find they don't need to protect our religion from the findings of science. And what they'll find once they discover (the atheists), or trust (the threatened believers), this relationship with God in inwardness, they'll find that God permeates the physical universe in ways they never expected."

I often think of a film from my molecular biology class. It was a documentary of college students from strong Bible-belt upbringings making their journey into the sciences, chronicling their early concerns and later passion for the study of evolution. In the film, it was evident that these students had decided—despite their parent's anger and vitriol towards the subject—that they didn't have to choose between science and faith. In the words of one of the students (I simply love this line): "God was bigger than the box I put him in."

One does more than miss out on the inspiring beauty and order of nature by dismissing science—they also unwittingly and arrogantly constrain God. Feeling empowered by their interpretation of scripture that was never meant to be a treatise on history, geology, or physics, they insist that He did things at a certain time in a certain way that fits within the rigid confines of their worldview—forgetting that God's ways are not our ways, nor his thought our thoughts.

God is bigger than that box. And yet, even after one moves past the dogma that God had to manually sculpt the first humans out of raw materials, it's probably still impossible to escape framing God in other ways. To a certain extent, that's OK. Boxes can serve a purpose, just as Newtonian physics is still taught as a precursor to quantum mechanics. But until we know the truth of all things, man-made boxes should not be the end-all for a God who is endless.

While evolution may seem a controversial subject, the reality is that evidence from the fossil record and genetics is mounting and undeniable. I for one do not believe that God is trying to trick us with all these clues in the natural world. I like this written response to my professor's article:

"...Could all things on and in the earth have been created how they are or placed on the earth as they are as a deception to try our faith? No! As Alma states, "all things denote there is a God". If this is true (and it came from the mouth of Alma), how can science disprove God or be at odds with the gospel? It can't and it's not! The evidence and history contained in the rocks and in the earth are the evidence and history of the hand of God. No member of the church should fear having their faith tried when they visit a natural history museum. On the contrary, it should be a faith building experience as I'm sure your BYU classes are as well."

Having a healthy attitude towards science does more than just help us spiritually. In writing this post, I am reminded of a New York Times essay I read last January:

"That endeavor [science], which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that...is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world."

I hope that it is true. And I hope that believers embrace these fruits of science openly and freely, instead of waging destructive culture wars. For while science and religion serve us in completely different ways—and while God's grace, in the words of my professor, is "not part of a scientific deduction"—I believe that science deserves an important place for every person of faith.

I've rambled, and I could go on much further. I hope, at the very least, I've convinced you that science is not just a lame subject in high school or a pork project that McCain twitters against. Expect to hear more on this subject from me in the future.

UPDATE: I just learned about The BioLogos Foundation, which was recently established by Dr. Francis Collins. I highly recommend a visit to the website, http://biologos.org.

Global Warning (Needed)

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:50:00 -0500

This was written by Elliott on elliottandlara.com.

Today's Lunch Break:
Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe

While the disaster movies would have you believe that it's going to be an asteroid, nuclear war, or virus outbreak that kills most of us off, it may be nothing less than a case of bad weather.

Well, space weather, that is. A large enough ejection of coronal mass from the sun (a phenomenon often coinciding with solar flares) would disrupt the Earth's magnetic field, induce large currents in wires, melt transformers, knock out continental power grids, and render large sections of our interconnected and electricity-dependant infrastructure completely useless.

I think what this doomsday scenario should teach us as a civilization is a little humility. For all our greatness, it would just take a little puff of solar plasma to plunge our cities into darkness, starvation, and chaos.

Apparently, our best shot at achieving adequate global warning is to replace the aging Advanced Composition Explorer probe, which currently only might buy us fifteen minutes to prepare our power grids for the impact.

In the meantime, maybe it wouldn't hurt to plant a moon garden or two, far away from all the chaos and destruction.

A Womb of My Own

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 14:45:00 -0500

This was written by lara on elliottandlara.com.

With windchill, it hit -10 F last night. And our house is chilly too, even though the space heater has been running nonstop for days. So except for getting food, I've stayed in bed all morning, reading.

Whence comes my fascinating fact of the day: since baby girls are born with all the eggs they'll ever have, part of each of us was inside our maternal grandmother's uterus.

My mom's mom died 15 years before I was born, but half of my genetic material resided inside her for nine months.

Intellectually, I have no problem understanding this. But somehow my mind is irrevocably blown by this fact of biology.

NPR, Pendulums, Moral Complexity

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:06:00 -0500

This was written by elliott on elliottandlara.com.

Lara and I are still without a car (ever since the deer incident), and I was reminded this week why I've been so slow in looking for a new one.

I meet with a pathologist in Baltimore twice a month as part of my branch's ovarian cancer study, and I rented a zip car to get there. There are many reasons for not owning a car, including the freedom from liability, the extra money saved from insurance and fuel expenses, and the daily pleasure reading while riding the train or bus. This week, however, it was the horrendous DC traffic that really made me grateful for public transit.

But I digress. What I do miss about owning a car is NPR.

At some point between Baltimore and DC on I-95 there was a spirited and interesting discussion on the Diane Rehm Show entitled "Bush Legacy on Presidential Powers" (you can listen to here). The guests were Bruce Fein, Stuart Taylor, and Joseph diGenova.

I don't know much about Fein, an expert in constitutional law, but I was duly impressed with his remarks. (And he's not an ideologue; in his career, he has called for the impeachment of both Bill Clinton and Bush/Cheney.) I won't go into detail about what he said in the program, as I'm not meaning for this post to be of a political nature; I recommend listening to the discussion on your own. (You can also read his take on the departing administration's "executive despotism" in his book Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy.)

I would like to comment on one thing that Joe diGenova, who played Fein's foil, said:

"I must say though, this is something that I find rich. There is in the world, particularly in academia, and on the left sometimes, the view of 'moral relativism,' meaning that 'There are no absolutes. There never is. There's never a right, theres never a wrong. Its all situational.'"

He later attacked "moral relativism" again during the program, and in both cases, the inclusion of the term seemed like a pretty random thing to make as a main point (and suspiciously like the kind of political rhetoric that people identify with even though it is contextually meaningless). Diane Rehm, however, didn't indulge him by letting the conversation go off track.

But I'll take your bait, Joe! So, I'm wanting to throw this question out there, and I'm asking this from a philosophical angle, not a political one: Isn't the debate between moral absolutism and moral relativism largely irrelevant, regardless of which is true (forgive the pun)?

It strikes me that talking about moral absolutism in a practical sense is like a lab scientist who claims that the reactions in the controlled conditions of a petri dish will be replicated in a complex system such as human tissue.

A classic example in chaos theory is the pendulum, a simple harmonic motion that is well covered in entry-level physics courses. But attach that swinging pendulum to another swinging pendulum, and you have what appears to be a totally chaotic, random motion that no entry-level physics student could predict. Despite their name, "chaotic" systems are actually deterministic and non-random; it is merely the small, incremental changes amplified over time that make the system appear to behave randomly.

In the same vein, even if there is an universal moral framework--a "right" and "wrong" that corresponds to the "up" and "down" of a pendulum--when one attaches all the situations and people together, the combined system is an incredibly complex picture, containing varying degrees of "rightness" and "wrongness" [1]. It is not that the rules are relative, or change from scenario to scenario, its just that each scenario has so many component parts that, for all practical purposes, absolute guidelines can't be applied (which is why I believe we need inspiration from God to help guide us through a non-absolute world).

After all, even the first example of human moral agency in scripture wasn't clear cut. The easiest case for a moral absolute--a direct decree from God--was challenged right there in the first book of Moses, when Eve essentially has to directly disobey God's command so that mankind can experience sorrow and ultimately understand joy [2]. Clearly, God wants our obedience, but His tests are not made up of dichotomous true/false questions. Obedience is hard because it is almost never straightforward [3].

Whether you believe in God or not, adhere to the idea of a moral absolute or not, this is an incredibly complex world which we need to navigate. To believe that any problem, situation, or solution--even involving something as horrendous as the 9/11 attacks--can be seen as black and white seems to me an incredibly naive.

While it certainly is an important philosophical concept, I hope people will stop throwing around the accusatory term "moral relativism" in political discussions like it's some sort of zinger (especially against Bruce Fein, a libertarian constitutional scholar for crying out loud).

So, in closing, I'm really going to do badly at this blogging bit if I can't master brevity. The problem is, the loose, anything-goes-format of a blog only tends to encourage the ramblingness of my writing style.

Notes (because I'm getting paid by the word)

[1] Physicists and philosophers, of which I am neither, please humble me with your wisdom.

[2] I realize in some Christian theologies Eve is seen as the one who blew it for all of us. In LDS theology, however, there is a critical difference. Realizing that there could be no progression without challenges, Eve did an important act in turning down the sin-free safety of the garden, and she is considered a great hero in the story. Yay Eve!

[3] Those darned sins of omission.