Paul and Bill do a quick rundown of the highlights of the SCS Conference. Look for our panel discussion and interviews with conference speakers starting tomorrow! The audio quality is definitely off on this one. Maybe a hardware issue.
We had more insane audio problems on this episode; Paul's audio from Zencastr was unusable. I had to record a new introduction and first question, then splice in our backup recording from Zoom. Jonathan Lunine is a prominent planetary scientist. He teaches at Cornell and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences; he has won a Urey award and holds a number of other academic distinctions. He worked with the radar and other instruments on the Cassini mission to Saturn and is co-investigator o...
Bill and Paul discuss the upcoming SCS conference at Notre Dame, June 7-9, on “What Does It Mean To Be Human?” Themes we discussed: The question of human origins: from the natural theology perspective… when did consciousness, qualia, free will appear? From the perspective of Judeo-Christian revelation… how do the origin stories in Genesis compare to contemporary archeology and anthropology? The question of evolution and its significance in a universe with divine providence. The question of human...
Today we continue our conversation with Stephen Barr about this year’s Society of Catholic Scientists conference, which will feature great speakers discussing the nature of humanity and its bounds in terms of time and technology. You can see a full list of speakers here and the program for the conference here ....
We welcome Stephen Barr back to the show. We are humbled and delighted to be your podcast hosts for the Society of Catholic Scientists Conference 2019 and hopefully beyond. In that context, today we interview Dr. Barr about his experience as a writer and speaker on the relationship between Catholic faith and science that led up to an eventful conversation between himself and Jonathan Lunine. He discusses the formation of the Society of Catholic Scientists in 2016 and the conferences they immedia...
This ended up being an emergency episode Paul recorded solo, since Zencastr ate all but a few minutes at the beginning of each recording. There seem to be serious problems with Zencastr since Paul’s MacBook died and he had to resurrect his Windows laptop. The Big Bang; cosmology seems to require a beginning, uncaused cause Problems of mind; intellect / qualia, possibility of free will. There is no materialist explanation of human intellect, only assertions of dogma and crude shufflings of the fe...
Apologies for the sound quality today; Zencastr wasn’t working, so we recorded on Zoom, and even then there were problems with the audio especially in the latter half of the podcast. The question we take up at the beginning of the Easter season is this: Why has Western society gone to such pains to throw away the best thing going, intellectually and otherwise? In his ongoing podcast research, Paul has come across the Pat Flynn Show, and listened to some really good interviews with Fr. Robert Spi...
Today we present the second half of the interview with Darcia Narvaez, social scientist at Notre Dame and a specialist in childhood inculturation, attachment, and bonding issues. We start out this half of the interview with a discussion of what Karl Polyani called the "great transformation" of European society, involving the breakdown of the pre-modern order and its safeguards for a stable population by means of understandings about community use of land, perhaps resulting in the popularity of e...
Find Darcia's writings and resources across the internet: Faculty website Author website Resource Page at Psychology Today Topics we discussed in this podcast: The human need for socialization from the very beginning, and ways that goes awry in contemporary society. Things we can do to learn some of these lessons later in life: Self-calming via breathing, meditation, prayer. (Does our contemporary culture of outrage stem from a lack of the ability to calm ourselves that we are meant to learn sta...
In this episode we roll out a new format for Season 2. We recap Season 1 (April 2018 - March 2019) and the three focus areas of the podcast so far: Discussion of the fundamentals of the question whether it's reasonable to believe in both science and the Catholic Christian faith, and some exploration of particular topics, like the role of geology in the interpretation of the book of Genesis. Review and comments on the speakers at the Society of Catholic Scientists Conference 2018. Interviews with...
0:00 - The question of relativism vs. hyperrationalism 1:00 - God's love is not a "fact" but, say, hominid ancestry is 1:30 - Tapping into the belief in the rationality of science to bring back belief in reality in faith 2:30 - "Kicking in the back door of relativism" 4:00 - Linkages between theology, philosophy, and science: e.g. logical consistency 5:30 - Effects on the rest of schools that participate in the Science & Religion Initiative 6:30 - Encouragment to integrate, say, history, eco...
Compartmentalization by students at Notre Dame Bill: ethics as a checklist The Science & Religion Initiative (see Baglow & Martin interview) The need to get the same message in the biology class and in theology class The change in the teachers after a few days in the workshop: divisions fade out It's a challenge having an "athletics" teacher in the program (phys ed)... Yet there are things: doping and respect of the body Patricia believes "you become what you eat" applies to violent vide...
0:30 - McGrath Institute for Church Life: Science & Religion Initiative outreach to high school teachers to integrate science & faith 2:00 - Gulf Coast Faith Formation Conference (a good time to be away from Notre Dame) 3:00 - Summer seminars: Foundations Notre Dame, Foundations New Orleans, Capstone 4:00 - Foundations ND: lecture based, top scholars in specific disciplines, with workshops 6:00 - Foundations NO: experimental work and discussions 7:00 - Dialogue between science & theo...
The Bible as an instrument of getting to tell people what to do Flood geology and cramming one's ideas into a "literal" reading Adam and the Genome
What do we want to do in this podcast? Goals for the year Values of experience, e.g. Mexico: solar ovens from recycled materials Credit consulting, etc., for exploited women in Mexico The little estate in Mexico Back to credit cards & exploitation of ignorance Responsibility of those to whom much is given Bringing it around to science Career and sacrifice and little deaths Chris, the handicapped man at the ND Center for Social Justice The ethics of "fixing" or preventing Chris from being the...
The blind man who could see more than his neighbors... asking Patricia about German reunification The industries that used up his sight
0:00 - Three issues: entropy, decoherence, Schrodinger vs. Dirac equations 2:30 - Schrodinger uses a non-relativistic Hamiltonian, with a p^2/2m kinetic energy 3:00 - Dirac equation absorbs special relativity by shifting from scalar to spinor field 4:00 - Quantum field theory as a further extension, accommodating fields that include many particles 5:00 - Field Lagrangian and all the particles and interactions in the Standard Model 6:00 - Even "everyday" gravity is in some sense accommodatable in...
0:00 - Introduction 1:00 - The power of physicalism/reductionism: a tremendously powerful method 2:00 - Course on physicalism and Catholicism; Sean Carroll's least hysterical "poetic naturalism" 3:00 - The lack of evidence for "emergence" in the sense of "downward causation" 3:30 - Soft and hard emergence 10:15 - Materialism vs. physicalism and reductionism: philosophical materialism 13:00 - Are human beings exhausted by this account of reality? 14:00 - The break with the mechanical universe of ...
0:00 - Science is materialist by method, but scientists need not and should not be materialist by philosophy 2:00 - The world must be real and intelligible for science to make sense 3:00 - And faith provides a philosophical basis that allows this to happen 3:30 - Students' testimony on faith and science 4:30 - Removing the faith/science obstacle is only one step on the road toward faith 5:00 - God vs. Godzilla 6:00 - The true God and His use of secondary causes 11:00 - Creation as carmen Dei (so...
0:00 - Introduction 1:00 - Catholic roots 2:00 - Early sense of vocation 4:00 - Lure of biology and ecology, early experiences in the field 9:00 - Swing to doing theology with reference to ecology rather than ecology with reference to theology 11:00 - Intellectual honesty in philosophy, science, theology 13:30 - Science, Creation, Theology course 15:00 - A theology course with a lab component 19:00 - (Fr. Terry loves basswood trees. They were a go-to example of a specific created type of being.)...
I started off this part of the interview by asking Daniel about his own journey through life and faith. His early love was history, despite having a father who was also a doctor and an academic. His interests only turned to medicine after a time in Peru and exposure to brutal poverty, and then like many of us, he drifted into an academic career. Later in life he has been able to return to that original motivation. Daniel and his wife were brought up in the Seventh Day Adventist faith, and still ...
Today we start a two-part series with Daniel Hinshaw, a professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Michigan, who has come to focus on palliative care for the dying. He sees his work as having deep roots in the Christian tradition, and has written on the subject of "kenosis" (the Scriptural concept of "emptying" or "reduction" or "wasting away" that is key to our understanding of the Incarnation and the Passion of Jesus Christ) as a useful concept for understanding our own mortality, at t...
In this episode, we expand on our introduction to the brain by discussing some theories - ranging from well-documented to rather speculative - about the specific structures of the brain that are active (or less active) in situations ranging from autism to depression, stress, and trauma. At the end we spend a few minutes on a preliminary critique of the materialist reductionary attitude ("interpretation" is too grandiose a word for it) toward brain science by many of its practitioners and reporte...
In this episode, we lay out the basic groundwork for future discussions of the human brain. The brain we humans have apparently evolved in three stages. This can't help but be a tremendous simplification, but it's a commonly encountered statement and seems to have considerable explanatory power. The lowest part of the brain, the brain stem (the medulla, etc.) and the cerebellum, control unconscious processes, most of which we cannot take into conscious control even if we want to. Often this is c...
What sense can we make of the ancient and medieval idea that "the soul is the form of the body" in the light of contemporary neuroscience and psychology? Highlight this idea's differences from Platonic and Cartesian dualism. History of psychology as a discipline. Psychology has not evolved (a) master paradigm(s) that compel the bulk of the field to adhere to them the way that plate tectonics did for geology, Newtonian classical physics and then quantum and relativity did for physics, etc. Peace ...
Themes we'd like to grapple with in the Year of Our Lord, 2019, and beyond: Last year was largely about the intellectual challenge leveled by many against religion, and we will continue talking about that as the podcast moves forward. Paul's mission this year to work through Road to Reality This year we also want to broaden the scope to include places where religion and faith converge, which means we're going to discuss psychology. Looking forward to the SCS conference topic for this coming year...
I had the chance to have an unofficial interview with Kirby Runyon. (Planetary science is a very publicity-heavy field, and planetary scientists often labor under certain constraints regarding their contact with the media. We avoided mentioning his institutional affiliation to emphasize the point that this interview in no way characterizes any official position by his institution. You can find out where he works, and get access to some of his work, via web search if you are curious, and there's ...
In this episode we try to give a little workshop on thinking for yourself about a thorny passage in the Bible, specifically what we are to make of this star that supposedly influenced the Magi (wizards? astrologers?) from "the east" to come to Jerusalem looking for Jesus. ----more---- Skype had some audio problems for the first few minutes, but it corrected itself after that. Sorry for the poor sound quality there at the beginning. Our first step is to engage in a little exploration of a common ...
0:00 Experience as a Christian scientist 1:00 The billion year contact; awe 2:00 Awe and the vast scale of Earth science 3:00 Discoveries never shake faith 4:00 Evolution, randomness, the shortage of provable things 6:00 The bureaucratic mindset: certainty and judgment 7:00 Yucca Mountain, studtite, and uranyl peroxides (Peter Burns, Karrie-Ann Hughes) 8:00 Uranyl chemistry 9:00 Guy Consolmagno's thought experiment on planetary atmospheres 10:00 Uranyl peroxide buckyballs... 11:00 NOT in the ini...
