That's So Second Millennium

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, economics with faith as well 7:00 - Congregation for Sacred Doctrine 1977 "The Catholic School" 8:00 - Faith & literature, arts 9:30 - The true limits of dogma; need to understand how limited Catholic dogma really is, and how non-restrictive 13:00 - Teachers woefully overworked and underpaid, not given the ability to succeed 14:30 - Blessed to have excellent but also humble panelists & experts intending to listen to one another 19:00 - Story of the second & first editions of Baglow's textbook

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 video games as well Feed yourself and your children good things instead

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 & theology teachers about their own specialties 8:00 - Capstone: topic-based theme & lecturers; special track for administrators; teaching practices 11:00 - Templeton Foundation study showing schools already trying to do this on their own 12:00 - The need to do this well and not engage in pseudoscience or gloss over tough questions 14:00 - ICL team making "housecalls" to individual schools 14:30 - Baglow textbook on science & faith 18:00 - Vast multiplication of interest from schools just since 2011 19:00

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 way he is The lack of philosophic background and the intellectual amnesia of contemporary science Philosophy of science and the disappointment of 20th century physics, but the culture goes on unaware Science, fundamentally cannot replace faith ...this is where Patricia makes that claim that science is about control Ethics of changing human beings, other elements of creation Bill poses the relativism question again Patricia responds that "you can control science" Everyone confronts the same Reality, a

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 the theory, just not extreme gravity capable of "separating out the vacuum" 8:00 - Decoherence, not to be confused with the measurement problem 9:00 - Decoherence arising from the interaction of a simple system with other systems 10:00 - Reduced density matrix begins to look classical 11:00 - Zurek and the work on decoherence: states that are "chosen" to survive interaction with the environment 11:30 - Measurement problem not solved by this work 12:30 - Entropy: the proposal that entropy is most fundamental

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 19th century physics underappreciated 15:00 - Laplace's demon 16:30 - Thermodynamics 17:30 - Future not contained in the present 19:00 - Einstein & hidden variables 20:00 - Bell inequality experiments 24:00 - Entanglement 26:00 - Human experience: both, as physical, but also as having choices 27:00 - Quantum physics on many body systems 28:00 - The hard problem of consciousness 29:00 - The explanatory gap 31:00 - The tendency to explain the brain as "just like" some recent piece of technology 33:

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 (song of God; Bonaventure) 12:00 - vs. strepitus naturae 15:00 - Thought and spirit vs. matter [This harks back to, e.g., the Ed Feser talk at the SCS conference. I personally think there is an enormous gap--bridgeable, but still to be bridged--between these arguments that the ability of the mind to generate and handle abstract concepts implies a non-material component to thought on the one hand, and the work of modern neuroscience to track the activity of neurons around the brain in specific patterns as we thin

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.) 20:00 - How does this dragonfly relate to Christ? 22:00 - Despair that can color one's attitude toward bridging faith and science 23:00 - (The basswood tree that can be counted on to grow the same shape of leaves every year.) 24:00 - Treating things according to their nature, the "grammar" of natures 25:00 - Grammar of connection and hope... and human flourishing (Center for Science, Faith, and Human Flourishing) 28:00 - Scientism and reduction of life to technocracy, rather than being a whole human being engaged in s

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 greatly respects the grounding in charitable work and the Bible he received then. Eventually he and his wife got the Newman bug and had to go deep into history and join one of the apostolic churches; they joined an Eastern Orthodox church. In that context, Daniel laments the drift of the modern hospice movement away from Christian spiritual roots and into a secular, palliative mindset, and the broader question of what is missing from the often uttered or thought statement, "if it's legal, it must be moral." "We conf

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 the scale of our individual cells as well as our whole composite being. He shared some interesting spiritual perspectives with us. As someone who in his mature years moved from the Seventh Day Adventists and sought out the apostolic churches, he now belong to the Orthodox Church. We spent some time discussing the "microcosmos," John Chrysostom's idea that the human being contains all creation in miniature, and how that is oddly true in certain respects: we are each communities of organisms. Our gut microbiome, for exam

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 reporters. Free will, for example, is not an illusion just because the physical part of the brain where it happens can be injured and we can be deprived of it... but much more on such neurophilosophical issues as the year progresses.

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 called the "lizard" or "reptile brain."   A series of little suborgans, the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdalae (a - myg ' - da - la, the good Latin pronunciation, for the singular apparently; and my Webster's unabridged also informs me that it just means "almond shaped thing"), putamen (that habit-storing part I could not remember during the episode), and a few other parts form the limbic system, that communicates between the senses and the body, and that serves critical functions for things like emotion and me

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 of Soul (Fulton Sheen) remark that psychology has been furtively recycling Christian ideas and passing them off as new for a long time Examining the convergence points of the advice for living from the Bible and Tradition, modern psychology, and the contemporary self-help / New Age-y movement that continues to spread and adapt through large sectors of modern culture. Self-esteem, humility... Confidence, faith, negative tapes... Twelve Step spirituality (Richard Rohr and the intense overlap between 12 Step and Ca