It's over now...

Wow, it's very close to the time when this journal needs to be handed in so I had better do that.
The last thing I want to mention is on stem cells... I have probably discarded hundreds of ova, completely unused and no chance of being fertilised; men, I know have billions of sperm that get discarded or die and get destroyed. Would it be such a crime to put haploid cells together for research into medicines and sciences that may save lives?
I heard the other day that Cristopher Reeve aka Superman died, he made it his life's work to advocate potential life saving research such as stem cell research. I wonder if anyone listened...

To abort or not to abort???

Naturally if you live in this society and especially if you study science or philosophy you will run into some debate and discussion over abortion. Indeed a debate for one of my classes involved this issue and someone who is often a visitor in my boyfriend's office, as I am also a regualr visitor there, brought up the issue and how he often aggrevates girls with his views (which I happen to think are interesting and quite reasonable). I found a simple yet informative site at

http://www.btinternet.com/~l.element/pi1118/pi2020abortion.htm

that has helped me gather some thoughts. I have no answers except that I think it's sometimes the least of all possible evils, it's not good but maybe it needs to be done.

One point I have found very interesting is that if it's okay to turn off a person's life support whne they have no brain activity and cannot survive on their own, why is it not okay (according to some people) to do the same for a baby who is completely depentdent on its mother and has no brain activity (which according to the above site, starts at six weeks)? These people seem to do an almost good job of covering this idea:

"Presbyterians Pro-Life is committed to protecting the right to life of every human being from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death."

but what is "natural death" is someone dead if their brain isn't working and there is no clear evidence of the 'soul' still being present?

As with anything, there are pros and cons - the arguments I tend to think of are that abortion may help to prevent those too irresponsible or emotionally unfit to have a baby, having one and possibly stop them giving a child a more difficult and sad life than need be. A con to abortion is that it may increase irresponibility among sexually active people.

"For you created my inmost being;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
Your eyes saw my unformed body."
Psalm 139

It could be argued that God knits us together, indeed he knows us and has known us before we even came into the world, so how could he ever lose us and if he so chooses will create us again - were we to be aborted by the woman who conceived us.

What makes a person? Ah, the eternal question... this is an interesting idea from the lecture (even though my thoughts are fairly liberal for a stereotypical christian - I'm not necessarily that though)

"One definition: A person is an entity whom God knows and relates to. Following the above Psalm, then, we are already persons in our mother’s womb."

also

"At the moment the sperm fertilizes the ovum, the 23 pairs of chromosomes are complete – the zygote has a unique genotype distinct from both parents, which will determine its sex, the colour of its skin, hair and eyes, its temperament and its intelligence.

Each human being begins as one cell. An adult has 30 million million cells. 45 generations of cell division are in between conception and adulthood and 41 of these occur before birth."

and again

"The Bible has much to say about God’s care for the defenceless."

It does seem like they are little people that need our love and care. Darn reason and emotion! Sometimes they work together and sometimes they are passionately against one another, in the abortion case they do both!

Don't these people read the bible?

Heh, I guess the subject of this post is a little harsh and generally people who do read the bible manage to come up with radically different interpretations of it. Is this because God's spirit is not working in us; do we not allow it to work in us; do we go looking for a certain thing and find it, whether it was supposed to be there or not; do we not ask for God's wisdom and understand and true meaning? Who knows?

These thoughts initially come to mind because of this week's lecture and Charles Birch:

"Birch sees the DNA molecule as having “internal relations”. He sees our own consciousness, the ability to reflect on the world around us, as having evolved. The evolutionist has a problem with conscious being evolving from non-conscious ones, but Birch removes that problem by suggesting that all matter has consciousness of a kind. “Things that feel are made of things that feel”. All things, ranging from electrons up to people, have some degree of responsiveness and freedom, freedom to affect their environment. So God’s love is extended to all creation."

I feel that the bible specifically says, or at least fairly conclusively implies that humans were made to be in relationship with God, that he made us his people and gave us dominion over the world under him. Not necessarily that it is only us that gets minds, but it is only us that is reallysubject to God's love. I suppose I am more with Francis Schaeffer on this one.

"Psalm 104:24: “O Lord how many are thy works! In wisdom thou hast made them all; the earth is full of thy possessions.” So our function is to use them and enjoy them, to wonder at their beauty and the intricacies of their design. But we do not own them. We are God’s stewards in His garden... It is not God who has done a lousy job (as the modernists said at the beginning) but we have done a lousy job in the way we have lived our lives and in the way we have cared for God’s world."

Amen to that.

Religion as natural

I found a very interesting and quite clever journal article while I was researching the essay. It's not from a refereed journal, which seems fairly obvious from the title of the journal. The reference for the article is

Boyer, P. (2004). Why is religion natural? The Skeptical Inquirer 28(2), 25-31.

Basically the ideas involved is that the common conception of atheists and those not sympathetic to religion have a belief that it is a suspension of unbelief referred to as "the sleep of reason". The writer doesn't adhere to this idea and argues that religion is very reasonable - not true - reasonable.

Evidence that Boyer suggests for this is that religious thoughts activate the same parts of the brain as non religious thoughts do; he also argues that certain capacities that we attribute as aspects of religion are evolutionary bi-products that promote our survival, an example is the food laws for Israel in the Bible and the Torah - these, Boyer considers to be created from the evolution of our natural intuition to avoid possible contaminants or pathogens. Boyer also writes that religious ritual stimulates the same attitudes, actions and brain areas as does OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). He concludes that religion is natural because it invades our intuitive cognition.

One has to admit - it's a very clever argument, the author does the whole thing almost in support of religion, never dissing it, but when you think about it afterwards it seems that religion may be natural but it is still silly. We are led to think, why should we attribute meanings to things - lets try and see them as they are - then we can add another few degrees of freedom to our scopes.

25 years of Neuroscience

I chose the neuroscience essay because it seemed interesting and I wanted to learn something about this field and its relationship with religion. I did learn things and I found it very interesting, unfortunately I don't think I really had a satisfactory 2000 words to say about it, it was okay, but a lot of what I read I couldn't tie in and there was one paper

(1996). Interfacing religion and the neurosciences: A review of twenty-five years of exploration and reflection. Zygon 31(4),545.

that I couldn't get my hands on. It sounded like something that would have been perfect for an overview and to receive more direction. I suppose it wasn't supposed to be. I'd still like to read it though.

Dualism

I studied these ideas in a philosophy course all of last semester - you'd think that I might want to do my essay on consciousness. Think again! After looking at about 15 philosophers what I saw was that people can be really self-indulgent and conceited to think that they alone can unravel the mysteries of life. I finished the course believing that no one yet has found the answer and that no one ever will. Why is this? Probably because of the nature of consciousness and the idea of self - we are different, even identical twins are different (which does suggest some level of not yet explained phenomena that we refer to as a soul), and so everyone's theories will be influenced by his own experience. Even Descartes who began his theories of mind matter and the machine that is the body being separate and the mind having a causal relationship on the body by doubting the existence of everything was influenced. He was influenced by religion, he never really denied the existence of some kind of maker; he always held onto the belief that even if nothing else existed he did, because he was there doubting things, which is a thinking action; thus "I think therefore I am." Many philosophers after him picked on these things saying either everything exists or everything doesn't. I'm not sure whether it was the scope of the course and the lecturers but it seemed we found more philosophers who said everything exists and is the same, like Jean Paul Satre and other existentialists and other schools of materialist thought.
In the end I wasn't convinced by any and I still thought Descartes made alot of good points despite the scrutiny his ideas have endured.

"This is probably the most difficult area of the course. Maybe I am saying this because my own views are in a state of flux and are continually being challenged. The scientific insights here are much newer and religions have not really properly come to grips with them – at least Christianity as a whole does not seem to have done so."

For me, being a christian, the bible is an important source for understanding the idea of a soul, or consciousness, and also what or how we may be when we are raised up on the final day. This verse has been one of encouragement and something to ponder - whatever its true meaning may be...

Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, "He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us"?

James 4:5

Neuroscience essay

Here I am thinking about this essay - due tomorrow (yes I am very disorganised and fairly unwise when it comes to big assignments and doing them last minute).

From lecture 11 - "Mind, Soul, Spirit and Consciousness", these are some of the questions that may be pertinent to my essay:

*Epiphenomenalism: The conscious mental life is a by-product of physical processes in the brain. - implies that psychology will reduce to neuroscience.
*Is there a genetic element influencing religious behaviour? Do identical twins end up with the same religious beliefs? The answer here seems to be that genetics is a factor but not the only factor.
*Particular regions of the brain are associated with particular cognitive tasks (PET studies show this). [PET = Positron Emission Tomography].

I think that the way to go is not to try to say what is right or not but to simply look at the studies that have been done, to outline their findings and to possibly conclude what seems to be likely and what effects this has on faith.

Would we even know?

"There is a problem with the idea of God “interfering with Nature” as God is the creator and upholder of Nature, it would seem that he is “interfering” with his own work. On the other hand, because it is his own work, he might be seen as free to change the laws of physics, his laws, when it suits him. The question is ‘Would he change the laws of physics?’"

I've been wondering, in terms of prayer and miracles, if God did do something - "interfere" with the world - would we know about? If he wanted to change the laws of physics would we realise? If somebody suffering from regret and grief prayed for God to change the past to alleviate their pain would he? If he did, surely he would take it right back so that no one knew about the change - groundhog day doesn't actually happen does it? No one relieves experiences. Maybe, because God is outside time and space but can work within it, he does do those things and we just don't realise. When we do see things we think are miracles then it's because God lets us see them.

I wonder if this perspective of things demeans the power and majesty, fatherhood and benevolence of God. If you agree with what Bob Russell (in lecture 10) says about everything being the direct act of God then for us to ask for change and it to occur, even when we don't realise it, it might be like God making a decision and then changing his mind because we ask him to. In a way - he is God, he may do whatever he likes - lucky he's benevolent.

Out on a limb.

"...there may be a darker side to meditation and this is exposed in the book “America. The Sorcerer’s New Apprentice – The Rise of New Age Shamanism” by D. Hunt and T.A. McMahon, Harvest House Publishers, 1988. This book suggests that Transcendental Meditation may be dangerous and may lead to the practitioner being “possessed” by occult powers."

Some years ago now, I watched a movie called "Out On A Limb". It is the story of much of Shirley McLean's life. Let me tell you - it's weird! It really spun me out, for several days; I felt very disoriented, I became unsure of everything; it was a bit of a Descartes moment - when nothing really exists except your own doubting mind.

This idea of Transcendental Meditation reminded me of this film and its themes, which included meditating in such a way that your mind becomes completely clear of everything and you find yourself flying above yourself further and further away until you return. All the time you attached to your body by a silver cord and supposedly death is when that cord breaks. The rest of the movie also involved aliens, a guy who introduced Shirley to their "religion" having found all these things out from an alien whom he fell in love with.

I know what I believe is true; it's funny, don't you think that most people "know" that what they believe is true otherwise they wouldn't try to get others to believe or continue on the hard path of believing. Even believing in nothing I think is hard. I have been blessed by God in many ways, he gives me joy and sprouting from that recently has been a lot of happiness [there is a difference, I don't know if anyone who isn't a christian knows that and even if you are a christian, you might have thought about it]. My friend who is generally agnostic says that she wishes she was as happy as I am - I know what she is really saying (although she may not realise it) is that she wishes she has what I have, she can't have it without accepting Jesus first - because "true" or not (not that I doubt it is) that is the source of my joy and the source of my happiness is everything that I have in life.

Big tangent but I think I will come back to saying that transcendental meditation, along with things that seem to have similar consequences, scares me and I am very happy and joyful in not looking to "fly" outside my body, not until I die anyway.

But you can never take our FREEDOM!!!

"To be human is to want freedom. Look at what suffering people have willingly endured for the cause of freedom (in East Timor, for example). They desire freedom more than comfort or economic stability. Freedom to make their own mistakes, even to hurt and do evil.

Jean-Paul Sartre once said that we are “condemned to freedom”.

Yet others seem to fear freedom. Freedom brings too much responsibility. There are too many hard decisions to make. Maybe these are the people who choose legalistic religions where all the rules rare set down – these are the words of the prayers you should pray, these are the time to pray each day, these are the actions you need to take when you pray – and so on. It is much easier if a priest, rabbi or Imam tells you what to do and you don’t need to think through the various situations of life for yourself. Galatians 5:1-15 discusses legalism and freedom from a Christian perspective."

Interesting concept - freedom. All through the book of Romans Paul says that if you are not slaves to God and slaves of righteousness we are slaves to sin. It's very much like the Truman Show or the Matrix where people have no idea they are kinds of slaves or that they are being influenced or controlled by anything other than themselves and they are quite happy to continue in what they are doing, in their slavery. In that sense there is no such thing as freedom.

I suppose the concept of freedom is like "degrees of freedom" not those used in statistics to determine the probability of an occurence using "T" or "Chi" statistics. It's more like we want as many degrees of freedom as we can get and we want to make our own chances. People will fight and suffer for those degrees of freedom so that they may have a chance, at a job, or a better life, or world domination - those things that people fight for.

Life is about chances really, people always want a chance at something and the freedom to have that thing fulfil their needs.

"... and is everything meant to be or are some things just chance?"

From lecture 6:

"You never know exactly when a radioactive substance will emit a particle. You never know exactly where an electron is situated within an atom. You just know the probabilities of when and where.

In the biological realm the theory of evolution is underpinned by statistics. All these scientific findings have led some scientists to declare that the Universe is without purpose and is going nowhere."

This may be a reasonable assumption given the evidence, but it kind of makes life very dreary and pointless, which I guess is what they're saying, that life is pointless - but that's just depressing! Perhaps if you take these statistical circumstances and have faith in God it represents how God may know but we may never know everything.

I've never heard this one before, it's really cool, and quite a good analogy (I love when a good analogy comes together!)

"Sometimes the wave-particle duality is used as a metaphor for religious antinomies – like the belief that Jesus is both God and Man."

I think this is a cool idea because people see how there are different natures to light, light does different things and these natures can be demonstrated at the same time, and sometimes they are not present at the same time. Either way people see this and because they can show it repeatedly they are happy to believe it. Christ is similar in that there were some things that made him man, he could be tempted, he bled, he slept he ate, he drank, he lived on this earth. There were also things that people saw in him that were divine; he knew a lot, he was very very wise, he could heal people, he claimed to be the son of God and the only way to heaven, he rose from the dead! For many reasons people don't believe these things; they can't see it, they can't reproduce it; there is a good reason why they cannot - it's history. John 20:29 says Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." So I suppose I'm saying both that this is an effective analogy for both understanding the nature of the Jesus God-Man argument and also for seeing how people's approach to science and religion or different kinds of belief are very different.

In regards to the way pinball machines are completely random and were not mastered by youth of a certain era because of the way something that is very small effects something in a big way down the line (the speed of the ball may change its trajectory by one degree which is unnoticable at the time but makes a big difference):

"So this is the idea of chaos: differences in initial condition so small as to be unmeasurable may give rise to very large differences later in the motion. The other classic example is that the smallest movement of a butterfly’s wing in the Amazonian jungle may change the initial conditions of the atmosphere to such an extent that a severe cyclone may be generated thousands of miles away on the tropical Australian coast."

I thought this was an interesting line of thought as to how God MIGHT intervene in our lives (I still think that it's fun to speculate but that quite frankly we may never completely or even in a tiny way understand God) but I always thought that the butterfly phrase was something to do with coincidence, or how big the earth is yet how small it is, not actually true - I might be taking it too literally =)

The human brain and intelligence of life.

Reading through the 5th lecture (which I should have done last week but didn't because I was ubersick) I've come across something really interesting, it has to do with with chance, evolution and coincidence. It's funny how my last post I was talking about the complexity of the human brain and in the lecture it was said...

"the chance argument... suffers from a lack of precision. We only have 15 billion years to go from the Big Bang to human intelligence. Is that really long enough for the various statistical processes to work to give rise to us? I would suggest that no one has done this calculation yet in a convincing manner.

Many, like Hugh Ross, argue that some element of design is required, not just pure chance. Ross suggests that the probability we evolved by chance is similar to the probability that a Boeing 747 would appear after a tornado struck a junkyard!

This is not to say that the Big Bang Theory of time and so on is incorrect and Evolution is completely false. It's just not as some have believed that evolution is the "unguided" process by which life has become the way we know it. I read of a definition - possibly the NCSE saying that it was an unguided process. Looking at their website though it seems that in American education, just as many other places, the teaching of evolution has became more accepting of co-existence with religion and God, since the writing of that partiular book.

Finishing the reading of that lecture... I thought it was a bit over the top with it's "evidence" of a guided creation. It gave 25 parameters which if they were remotely different this universe would not exist. Then at the end it said that some may argue that there may be many universes with different values than the ones we have that might work together to form a different universe than ours and that the only problem with this is there's no evidence of any other universes. Duh! There aren't any other's because this one is the one that happened! If this one had not had it's supporting elements to build then maybe a different one would have. Maybe I'm taking what Robert said the wrong way and I need to go read the discussions to better understand the end of this lecture.

Dissension in the ranks.

The first aim of the current module is "To understand the controversy in some religious circles over the age of the universe." I've recently come across something that is somewhat controversial in the science world, not just religion.

Church held a "men's breakfast" a little while ago, which of course I was not invited to, being of the female variety and all. However at church someone gave a quick run down of what a guest speaker who is a brain surgeon said. It was said that this surgeon (who is a Christian) had said that geology claims that the earth is so many years old (15 billion if I remember correctly) and genetic investigation suggests that humans evolved lets say 10 thousand years ago, this surgeon claims that none of these times would have been sufficient for the evolution of the very complex human brain. In my interpretation of what was going on this seemed to be him saying that this was some of his evidence that leans against evolution and towards spontaneous creation. As one with no major objections to the model of evolution at this current moment, I found this a very peculiar and curious claim.

Lookin' better every day!

Hazaar!
Turns out that the lecture this week is titled "Is the bible true?" which was very exciting given my last post... not that I was saying I didn't know if it was true or not, I know it is, I just would like to fit things together a bit more.
I feel like life is one big massive, gigantic puzzle, and I just don't know where all the pieces fit, and I know they do fit, but I just kindof had to stop staring at it and put together what I can and then kind of smoosh the rest is and hope that someday I'll be able to put it together properly.
Anyway, some interesting things were said, such as; Charles Wooly excavated Ur - the city which Abraham came from and he found ten feet of clay! That means ten feet of evidence of a darn big flood! Which is cool, I wasn't aware that there was any, it's nice to know that not only was there a very large flood around 4000BC but that hey - the city where Abraham came from is real and has been explored.
So it's looking more likley (in my mind) that Abraham is real, which may fall back to Noah is real and Adam is real... but I will come back to this more later, stay tuned!

Are you saying my grandma was a monkey!?!

After looking at the model of evolution in biology for the HSC and also now in university biology, I've come to think of this model and the theories in it as a reasonable interpretation of the evidence that has been discovered and uncovered... and while I'm certain that what the Bible teaches is true, and I have no substantial reason to not believe the things commonly recognised as good long standing theories. I'm still having trouble reconciling the two. It can be difficult to know what in the Bible is real in the way we think of things real, the kind of things we see and know are tangible, and what is story, where the main message is not knowledge of the world but knowledge of God.
Specifically Genesis, the stor(y/ies) of Adam and Eve can more easily taken as allegory in respect to the creation of the world, man and man's disobedience towards God than other stories like Noah and the Ark, or Abraham, but I suspect that because of the way the New Testament refers to Genesis - in Romans, Paul talks about Abraham, as does James in his letter to other Christians and also in the genealogies found in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 and I'm sure there are many other references - this language would suggest that they believed these people to be real people and their stories to be real also...
So why is it that there seems to be no evidence of a world wide flood as in the story of Noah? What archaeological evidence might a flood leave anyway? Would many fossils of dead animals be the only tell-tale sign? There are periods in fossil records where there appears to be an influx of fossil life - however these are generally considered to be pre-human evolution, as far as I know.
So I don't know - when a friend said to me that she thinks the answer to whether Adam and Eve existed, is the same as the answer to whether Noah existed, I didn't think so at all, but now I think that she is correct, and that it makes perfect sense that they be the same answers, but what is the answer?
_____________________________________

Just as a note - I hate when ignorant people, just to be a pain in the bum during a discussion say "so, are you trying to tell me that my granparents, or my parents were gorillas?"
The answer is "no, stupid! did it sound like that was what I was saying?!"
I do like the situation that was described in one of the Gens lectures though...

"The famous encounter happened on 30 June 1860 when, during an address to the British Association, the Bishop asked Thomas Huxley whether he thought of himself as having descended from an ape on his grandfather’s or on his grandmother’s side. Huxley’s reply that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop was so shocking that it is reported that one lady fainted and had to be carried out."

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo Figaro...

Heh, in one of the lectures for this course there was another quote that I think is the bomb - as in it goes off!

“The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes”.

I think this is so cool! It works both ways too - obviously Galileo was down with the idea that science has its purpose and faith and religion have their other purpose - we can know why because of God, and we can know how because of science. Naturally we won't ever have all the answers to how or why but we can get some and it's up to our own powers of discernment to know which of each is correct ie which religion and which theories or models in science... or maybe it's not our own powers of discernment but those of the Holy Spirit as Galileo says.

what is a blik?

While not being an actual dictionary definition of the word - or even being an actual word for that matter - a blik is an idea that was introduced by the Science & Religion lectures;

“A blik is a theory grown arrogant which cannot be altered by experience.”

'bout time!

So it's week 3 and I've finally got around to starting my "journal" for Gens4010 Science and Religion. Being the non-computer geek that I am, this seemed like a spiffy way to go about it.

The first thing I wanted to say something about was a quote that was brought up in a biology lecture, philosopher Karl Popper said that the thing that distinguishes scientific thought from all other kind of thought is "Falsifiablilty - the capacity for an idea to be shown wrong." I love the way he puts it! It's a fantastic idea because I've encountered so many people that say that they are "too scientifically minded" to believe in the possibility of certain things - such as God, or anything else non-physical. It seems to me that they are not so scientifically minded if they have an inability to embrace the scientific method, that an observation is made, a hypothesis is formed, a theory is tested and if it's not supported then you go back and theorise again - if when a theory, even if it has been held up by evidence for a long period of time, is shown to possibly not be true, or not apply in a certain situation, if it cannot be reviewed again, then science, and those who think themselves to be scientifically minded, become "bliks", they hold onto what they want to believe whether the evidence supports it or not, they become the kind of stubborn people that the world hates because they are not open to suggestion, they make science something it was never meant to be - a man-made religion rather than a search for knowledge.

Science doesn't oppose religion, nor should it become the religion.

That's my piece for today =)