Science is perhaps the most successful endeavour that human beings have ever engaged in. It is tempting to think that it should also answer the big questions of life, such as why we are here and whether there is a purpose to life.
Such hopes give impetus to modern versions of secularism. At the same time a fully fleshed out scientism, the idea that only science brings us reliable knowledge about the world, remains unpopular in the academy, in part because it hollows out these existential questions. I will argue that it is not hard to see that neither science, nor any conceivable advance of science, can answer such existential questions. Nevertheless, implicit versions of scientism remain surprisingly influential in the academic world. What can and should we do about this? (See also Tom McLeish & Sy Garte lectures on science and faith)
Ard Louis is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford, where he leads an interdisciplinary research group studying problems on the border between chemistry, physics and biology at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics. He also writes and speaks widely on science and faith, for which in 2013 he was elected a member of the International Society for Science and Religion. He recently made the 4-part documentary Why Are We Herewith David Malone and appeared in The Story of God with Morgan Freeman, giving him an Erdős–Bacon number of 6.
The Appeal of Caesar: the Future of Christians Living in the Authoritarian Context of the Middle East.
Thursday, January 20, 2022 @ 7:00 PM
Dr. Paul Rowe
Professor of Political and International Studies Chair of the Department of History, Political, and International Studies at Trinity Western University.
Abstract
The past decade of crisis in the Middle East has claimed the lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of its indigenous Christian populations. Among those small communities that remain, age-old strategies of survival under authoritarian governments persist. What are these strategies, and how might small numbers of Christians continue to claim a place in a region that seems singularly hostile to their persistence?
Biography
Dr. Paul Rowe,Professor of Political and International Studies Chair, Department of History, Political, and International Studies at Trinity Western University. He earned a PhD from McGill University in 2003. His dissertation title is “Ancient Crosses and Tower-Keeps — the Politics of Christian Minorities in the Middle East.” He has spent extended time in the Middle East and continues to study the politics of religious groups in developing countries. He is author of Religion and Global Politics, Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada, 2012; and The Routledge Handbook of Minorities in the Middle East. Routledge, 2018.
“A freed activist, a captive church? How do Christians navigate new forms of authoritarianism in the Middle East?” ~Paul Rowe
Brian Bird, Assistant Professor Peter A. Allard School of Law, UBC DCL (McGill), BCL (Oxford), JD (Victoria), BA (Simon Fraser), of the Bar of British Columbia
The Struggle for Tolerance
Thursday, November 18 at 4 PM
Abstract
In many liberal democracies, there has been a tectonic shift in how we handle ideological conflict. Whereas the starting point was once a robust form of tolerance (live and let live), this principle is now fading. Tolerance, once widely regarded as an essential element of free and democratic societies, has become suspect. It is much easier to exhibit tolerance when we agree with each other. But we must also do the same—perhaps especially—when we disagree. If a grassroots rediscovery of tolerance does not occur, and tolerance fades further from view, our society will inevitably gravitate closer to the so-called tyranny of the majority, or at least the tyranny of an intolerant minority within the majority. Such a state of affairs is antithetical to the essence of liberal democracy. It also runs the risk of creating a vicious cycle: in which today’s tyrannized minority will be tempted to become tomorrow’s tyrannizing majority. Human nature, we can agree, is flawed. We do well to avoid inviting such human frailties to take centre stage in today’s culture.
Biography
Brian Bird is an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. Before joining Allard Law, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He clerked for judges of the Supreme Court of British Columbia and for Justice Andromache Karakatsanis at the Supreme Court of Canada. Brian completed his doctorate at McGill University on The Freedom of Conscience and holds degrees from Oxford, University of Victoria, and Simon Fraser University. Brian’s academic writing has appeared in venues such as the Dalhousie Law Journal, Cambridge Law Review, Alberta Law Review, Supreme Court Law Review, and Manitoba Law Journal. He is co-editor of The Forgotten Fundamental Freedoms of the Charter (2020, LexisNexis Canada). His primary research interests are constitutional law and theory, interactions between courts and legislatures, jurisprudence, philosophy of law, legal history, and bills of rights.
Tom McLeish, Department of Physics, University of York
The Poetry andMusic of Science
Wednesday, September 29, 12 Noon, 2021
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This lecture will be recorded
Biography
Tom McLeish FRS, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics at the University of York, also affiliated to the University’s Centre for Medieval Studies and the Humanities Research Centre. He has conceived and led several interdisciplinary research projects, and is a recognized UK expert on formulating and evaluating interdisciplinary research. He co-leads the Ordered Universe project, a large interdisciplinary re-examination of 13th century science. From 2008 to 2014 he served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at Durham University and was from 2015-2020 Chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee. He is a brilliant, creative mind and has won many awards for his work and teaching. He is the author of two important books on science and religion: Faith and Wisdom in Science (2016); and The Poetry and Music of Science (2019).
Abstract
In this address, Dr. McLeish suggests that the ‘Two Cultures’ division between the arts and the sciences is not the best classification of creative processes, for all creation calls on the power of the imagination within the constraints of form. The three modes of visual, textual and abstract imagination have woven the stories of the arts and sciences together, using different tools. As any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. McLeish draws on past testimony and personal accounts of scientists, artists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians to explore the commonalities and differences in creation. He offers close-up explorations of musical, literary, mathematical and scientific creation, illustrating how creativity contributes to what it means to be human, drawing on theological ideas of the purpose of creativity and the image of God.
Tom’s Latest Book
“The Romantic era of nature-writing constitutes one of the great hopeful chapters of history, where imaginative writing and imaginative science seemed on the edge of becoming the warp and weft of a single cultural tapestry.” (175-6)
“We are meaning-seeking animals immersed in a world of the aleatory and contingent as well as the wonderful and sublime. Part of our desire to make sense of the world seems to find an outlet in its recreation, or at least in creation of models of it. An experiment becomes a window on the world, and a local habitation for it.” (T. McLeish, The Poetry and Music of Science, 188)
“The ability to bring something new and valuable into being is a wonder. At every turn we have found the process of creation to draw on the deepest human energies, most radical thought, and most powerful emotion. Hope, desire, cognition, vision, dreaming, craft, skill, expertise and passion are summoned in the task of conceiving and realizing our imagination. They weave a much more complex picture.” (T. McLeish, The Poetry and Music of Science, 301).
Four Stages of Creation: Ideation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification
“Art and science must both reassure and trouble, call on extension of both seeing and hearing, must both distance and immerse…. Art and science share the same three springs of imagination. The visual image offers perspective, insight, illumination. The written and spoken word bring the possibility of mimesis through the textual, the experimental, and the narrative form for the story of creativity itself. The wordless depths of number, the musical and mathematical draw on the ancient insights of the liberal arts at the limits of comprehension. These are the trinity of disciplines and of modes of creation that transport our present longings for a fruitful and a peaceful home in the world, toward a future in which we are less ignorant, wiser in our relationship, but no less caught up in the wonder of it.” (T. McLeish, The Poetry and Music of Science, 336, 339)
“Science becomes a moral and spiritual exercise in personal and corporate healing and flourishing…. The embedding of the scientific imagination within a much larger narrative of human advancement towards the divine constitutes a modern echo of the narrative described by Anselm and Grosseteste in their own times, but emerging within the new experimental programme of enlightenment science.” (T. McLeish, The Poetry and Music of Science, 269 and 276)
Notes:
-The Creation Narrative: we begin with a blurry vision of something–>desire to respond–>series of attempts to create–>encounter with constraint–>the final answer/idea emerges from the subconscious.
-Tom sparks memory of Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge.
-Albert Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
-see Mary Midgley’s Science and Poetry, a rebuttal of Richard Dawkins’ reductionism.
-beauty is what the human mind responds to at its deepest place.
-Malcolm Guite: “Science and poetry are sisters.”
-Goethe: “Science and poetry come from the same cradle.”
-Three creative mode commonalities across the disciplines: Visual, Textual, Abstract
Comparing Creativity in Science and Art
Tom McLeish
Challenges the obvious assumption that science is less creative than art and illustrates the contrary (contra C.P Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’)
digging down to a foundational core of science and humanities
Treats art and science on an equal footing and shows their interplay
Shows the points of contact between science and music, literature and visual art
Draws on historical and contemporary examples to provide a broader understanding
Brings medieval philosophy and theology to bear on current questions of creativity
Discusses the conscious and non-conscious mind involved in a breakthrough
Reports on individual conversations with artists and scientists and provides personal perspectives on their personal creative processes
Illustrates with rich and detailed examples such as a close reading of mathematics and music
Offers a rich conversation within academia and beyond–a wellspring of issues for dialogue and reconciliation
Supported in part by the UBC William G. Murrin Fund
Co-sponsored with Canadian Scientific and Christian Affiliation
Professor of Indigenous Theology at the Vancouver School of Theology
Can We Handle the Truth and Take Responsibility for Reconciliation?
Wednesday, March 10, 2021 @ 4 PM
Abstract
In the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report on residential schools, Canadians have often viewed Christianity as the enemy of Indigenous people. But there is another side to the story, claims Professor Ray Aldred. Almost two-thirds of Indigenous people in Canada actually call themselves Christian and appreciate what they have learned from Christian leadership over the years. Aldred notes that there is currently real hope for a better day, a way forward for our Indigenous people. This hope begins in community, in rethinking our identity, who we are and where we have come from. In this address, he will show the need to tell the truth and use human imagination to heal relationships with the land/creation, with family, clan and community, and with the Creator. At the heart of Indigenous peoples’ quest for healing is a shift in identity from shame to dignity of heritage. Mohawk writer Patricia Monture notes that key to this shift is a decision to take responsibility for all relationships, “Responsibility is at the heart of Indigenous freedom and self-determination.” We must strive to live in harmony with all things and all peoples, including the new visitors. We also wish to heal our treaty covenant relationships: through the threefold strategy of telling the truth, listening to one another, and seeking a common plan to repair the damage of abuse. Employing the principles of restorative justice, the difficult task of retelling our stories offers an important, creative way forward. These stories help us revisit the pain, face reality, and rediscover the good roots of our heritage. These vital steps constitute the effective direction of hope, as Ray has discovered through much experience.
Biography
Reverend Dr. Raymond C. Aldred holds a Master of Divinity from Canadian Theological Seminary, and a Doctor of Theology from Wycliffe College, Toronto School of Theology. Currently he is the Director of the Indigenous Studies Program, whose mission is to partner with the Indigenous Church around theological education. He is professor of Theology: Narrative, Systematic, Indigenous at the Vancouver School of Theology on the UBC campus. A status Cree, he is ordained with the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Canada. Born in Northern Alberta, he now resides with his wife in Richmond. Formerly Ray served as the Assistant Professor of Theology at Ambrose Seminary in Calgary, Alberta. He is former Director for the First Nations Alliance Churches of Canada, now a committee member, where he works to encourage Indigenous churches. Ray also has had the privilege of addressing several college conferences and meetings to raise awareness of these issues. He and his wife, Elaine, are involved in ministry to help train people to facilitate support groups for people who have suffered abuse.
Critical Realism: An Enduring Epistemology for Science and Theology
Wednesday, January 27 at 4:00 p.m.
Abstract
Critical Realism emerged as a way of thinking about knowledge in the mid twentieth century. After disillusionment with positivism and straightforward empiricism, critical realism (CR) established itself as a way that many scientists and scholars think about how knowledge is won and progress achieved. This realization came with an associated insight that reality is made up of different strata of reality: molecular, biological, psychological and spiritual, rather than a picture of reductionism of various entities to simple parts. Borrowing from the historian of science Ernan McMullin, the Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan and several other thinkers, I want to affirm two things about CR: 1) it best describes how to affirm reality in judgments whilst conceding the variety of historical paradigms that have affected how we know things to be true. 2) CR can help us understand how to do theology, notably with respect to scriptural testimony and doctrinal claims that were written and formulated in different cultures and in accord with different assumptions than our own.
Biography
Dr. Paul Allen specializes in systematic theology, the science-theology dialogue and theological anthropology. He taught at Concordia University prior to coming west. His publications include his doctoral dissertation, published as Ernan McMullin and Critical Realism in the Science-Theology Dialogue and (with Peter M.J. Hess), Catholicism and Science. More recently, he has written Theological Method: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T & T Clark, 2012) as well as articles in journals such as Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Heythrop Journal of Theology and Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosphie.
Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
Senior Fellow, Miller Center of Public Affairs
University of Virginia
Abstract
Three decades after its supposed permanent global triumph, democracy is in trouble nearly everywhere. In the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, constitutional self-government is on the back foot, as polarization destroys societal trust and anti-liberal populist movements and leaders gain power. Autocracy is becoming even more entrenched in the two giants, China and Russia. Some other countries proclaim the desire to be more like them. Once seen as an inevitability, democracy now appears a fragile achievement. In world politics, there is an evolutionary dynamic which the international environment selects for some types of state. Since World War II, the United States and other mature democracies have deliberately tried to preserve democracy at home by shaping the international environment through a liberal-internationalist foreign policy. In the language of evolutionary theory, they have engaged in niche construction, altering their environment to “select for” constitutional self-government, and “select out” authoritarianism. They enjoyed great success, but in recent decades, the niche has actually come to undermine democracy, favoring autocracy. Liberalism itself has been transformed from its earlier classical forms to a cosmopolitan version that seeks to erase all barriers to economic and social interaction in the name of individual fulfillment. Such cosmopolitan liberalism has provoked a cultural and economic backlash that acts to jeopardize constitutional democracy itself. China and Russia meanwhile are constructing their own niches, reshaping the international order to select for autocracy. Defending democracy from the outside will require a reformed liberal internationalism that will de-polarize electorates, restore solidarity among democracies, and be less inclusive of authoritarian regimes. As the most powerful constitutional democracy, the United States retains the most important role in this reformation.
Biography
John M. Owen is Ambassador Henry J. and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and the Miller Center of Public Affairs, at the University of Virginia. Owen is author of Confronting Political Islam (Princeton, 2015), The Clash of Ideas in World Politics (Princeton, 2010), and Liberal Peace, Liberal War (Cornell, 1997), and co-editor of Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order (Columbia, 2011). He has published scholarly papers in the European Journal of International Relations, European Journal of International Security, Global Policy, International Organization, Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, International Politics, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, and several edited volumes. His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Hedgehog Review, The Hill, The Washington Post, National Interest, TheNew York Times,and USA Today. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of Security Studies; he serves on its editorial board and that of International Security. Owen has held fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, the Free University of Berlin, and the WZB Berlin Social Science Research Center. He is a recipient of a Humboldt Research Prize (2015). He holds an AB from Duke, an MPA from Princeton, and a PhD from Harvard. In Fall 2020, he is a Visiting Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of British Columbia.
Respondent: Tyler Chamberlain’s research interests sit at the intersection of philosophy and political science. He is particularly interested in early modern political thought, conservatism, and the Classical Realist tradition in International Relations. Tyler’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Canadian Political Science Review and The Canadian Journal of Political Science.”
Karl Mannheim 1942: “With the coming of the Renaissance and Liberalism, Christianity failed to remain the basic ferment and integrating force in social life… The spiritualization and regulation of human affairs, public and private, has gradually been left to the competing institutions in society… This secularization produced a stimulating variety of human experience… But the fact that the competing value systems cancelled each other out led to the neutralization of values in general. This is one of the reasons why liberal society at its present stage is handicapped in resisting the spiritual and political challenge coming from the totalitarian states… A liberal and competitive economy and its society can function quite well with neutralized values as long as there is no threat from within or without which makes a basic consensus imperative… [in which case] liberal education for intelligent partisanship… must gradually be replaced by a new education for responsible criticism, wherein consciousness of the whole is at least as important as awareness of your own interests… Such a new morality can only be achieved if the deepest sources of human regeneration assist the rebirth of society”.
Tolstoy predicts the current epidemic of fake news: “The more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers, and journals there are; the more means there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become” (The Kingdom of God is Within You – 1893).
Jonathan Chaplin’s Faith in Democracy: Framing a Politics of Deep Diversity (SCM Press, 2021). Although focusing exclusively on the UK situation, it is a model of faithful political reasoning and shows how the rich resources of the Christian intellectual tradition can help regenerate and reshape the decaying democracies in many of our countries. In one of his chapters Chaplin has a footnote reference to a forthcoming volume Christianity and Constitutionalism, co-edited by Nicholas Aroney who is on this Listserve. It looks like another worthwhile read for those of you in law and politics.
This is where the fulcrum of our fears lie: that humans as a species and we as thinking people, will be shown to be no more than a machinery of atoms. The crisis of our confidence springs from each person’s wish to be a mind and a person in the face of the nagging fear that one is only a mechanism.
~Jacob Bronowski, Mathematician, Biologist and Historian of Science
Further Reading on Neuroscience and Mind-Body Issues:
Craver, C.F., (2007). Explaining the Brain: mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience. Oxford.
Nagel, T., What is it like to be a bat?; (2012) Mind and Cosmos.
Brown, W.S. & Strawn, B.D. (2012). The physical nature of Christian life: Neuroscience, psychology and the church. NY: Cambridge University Press.
Jeeves, M. & Brown, W.S. (2009). Neuroscience, psychology, and religion: illusions, delusions, and realities about human nature. West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press.
Brown, W.S. and Murphy, N. (2007). Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: philosophical, and neurobiological perspectives on moral responsibility and free will. Oxford Clarendon.
Markham, Paul N. (2007). Rewired: Exploring Religious Conversion. Eugene, OR: Pickwick
Murphey, Nancey. (2006). Bodies and souls, or spirited bodies? New York, NY: Cambridge
Green, Joel & Palmer, Stuart. (2005). In search of the soul: four views of the mind-body problem. Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
Jeeves, Malcolm, ed. (2004). From cells to souls–and beyond: changing portraits of human nature. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Jeeves, Malcolm. (2006). Human nature: reflections on the integration of psychology and Christianity. Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press.
Swinburne, R. (2007). The Evolution of the Soul. Oxford.
Bill Newsome:
is the Vincent V.C. Woo Director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Harman Family Provostial Professor and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He received a BS degree in Physics from Stetson University and a PhD in Biology from the California Institute of Technology. He served on the faculty of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at SUNY Stony Brook before moving to Stanford in 1988. Dr. Newsome is a leading investigator in the fields of visual and cognitive neuroscience. He co-chaired the NIH working group that planned the US national BRAIN initiative.
Dr. Newsome hs made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception and simple forms of decision-making. Among his many honors are the RAnk Prize in Opto-electronics, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, Karl Spencer Lashley Award of the American Philosophical Society, the Champalimaud Vision Award, and most recently, the Pepose Award for the Study of Vision, Brandeis University.
He has given numerous distinguished lectureships and was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2011. His scientific publications include more than one hundred research articles in preeminent scientific journals.
Co-sponsored with the Canadian Science & Christian Affiliation. Other lectures in the series at csca.ca/van
Supported by the UBC Murrin Fund and Oikodome Foundation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IBegL_V6AAJonathan Haidt NYU and Jordan Peterson University of Toronto on why we need to preserve debate within the university for the sake of democracy.
Jurgen Habermas, Three Normative Models of Democracy
Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, Dialectics of Secularization.
Dahl, Robert A. (1989) Democracy and its Critics. London: Yale University Press. This is a seminal piece by one of the greats of Political Science. It charts the course of democracy through a series of ‘transformations’ from the city state through to the nation state. It provides a very nice exposition of the various elements of ‘democracy’ and the different ways in which democratic principles can be applied to systems of government.
Achen, C. & Bartels, L. (2016) Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. This is one of the most important contributions to the study of democracy over the last decade. It makes for pretty uncomfortable reading: with empirical evidence, the authors really challenge some of our assumptions about the things we expect elections to do. It’s a good diagnosis of some of the problems with (a narrow focus on) electoral democracy, but sadly it doesn’t consider many substantive solutions.
Van Reybrouck, D. (2016) Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. London: Random House. This isn’t an academic work. It channels some of the criticisms of electoral democracy made by Achen & Bartels, but it’s very accessible and makes quite a persuasive (and counter-intuitive) case for supplementing traditional institutions with more extensive citizen-based decision-making.
Lijphart, A. (2007) Thinking about Democracy: Power Sharing and Majority Rule in Theory and Practice. Basingstoke: Routledge. Lijphart has been one of the key theorists on democracy as power-sharing (as opposed to the exercise of majority rule). His work significantly influenced the development of Northern Ireland’s political institutions as a form of conflict management, but his work has had a great deal of influence in a range of conflict and non-conflict contexts.
UBC Graduate & Faculty Christian Forum 