Ira Flatow Sings in Descant to Pope Francis's Tune in Laudato Sii

Earlier this afternoon as I was running errands I caught a few minutes of Ira Flatow’s weekly NPR program “Science Friday.” I usually don’t listen to it—it is neither at a convenient time for me nor does it fit my interests—but as the engine turned over and the radio came on I heard Professor Proton, I mean Ira Flatow, saying something about experiments for a vaccine for chlamydia done several years back which were done on people from the developing world, including children.  Now, chlamydia is a sexually transmitted disease and it strikes me as pretty exploitative on a number of levels to use children in these experiments, but to be honest I was appalled that these experiments for the benefit of us in the developed world were done on the poor from the developing (aka “third”) world. 

This is one of the issues that Pope Francis speaks about in Laudato Sii and it only goes to reinforce the import of his encyclical.   People in the developed world see people less economically advantaged than we are as “tools” to be used for our benefit.  Medical experimentation is particularly offensive but how many of the advances and even comforts we enjoy come at cost to the poor of Africa, Asia, the Pacific Rim, and Latin America?  Whether it is in the trade of blood diamonds, the use of sweatshops to produce consumer goods, drugs (legal and illegal), cheap sources of food for our tables, the fur of endangered animals—how much of our lifestyle depends on the exploitation of others. 

I am not quite through with the Encyclical yet—I have about twenty more pages to go, but what I have read has made me stop and think, or actually stop and look into my own conscience.  It is a profoundly Christian document that draws on the writings of previous popes, Councils, Fathers and Doctors of the Church, our rich mystical tradition, as well as on science and common sense.  Laudato Sii provides a profound challenge to so many of the things we take for granted and offers us the vision of what our world could be if we stood in solidarity with both the world’s peoples and the world itself.  

Time for a New Copernican Revolution

Meeting of the Pontifical
Academy of Science 

Easter Sunday morning, I read an extremely disturbing article in the New York Times.  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/us/ashley-diamond-transgender-inmate-cites-attacks-and-abuse-in-mens-prison.html?_r=0

It is the story of Ashley Dimond of Rome Georgia who was born male thirty-six years ago but who in adolescence began living as a woman and who, for 17 years now, has been undergoing hormone therapy designed to support her transition to female.  Ms. Dimond had achieved some small degree of professional success as a song-writer and singer before falling into the trap of drugs and petty crime.  She eventually ended up in the Georgia Penitentiary system where she was placed in a men’s prison—she has male genitalia (a word, by the way, I never thought I would be using in my blog) where she has not only been subjected to humiliation by prison officials but raped more than a half-dozen times by fellow inmates.  She was denied continued access to the hormone therapy she has been on the past 17 years and that has had serious physiological as well as psychological impact on her.  Now I know that this posting is going to get some hostile and even vulgar remarks from various krazies—if they are offended by what I write about the Traditional Liturgy they sure aren’t going to like what I write about a transgendered person—but actually Ms. Dimond is not my primary subject.  This article stopped me in my tracks.  I don’t believe I have ever met, much less have known, a transgendered person.  Consequently, I have never given the issues regarding transgendered people much thought.  When I read a newspaper story or heard something on the news, I think I just shoved it into a pre-fit category in my mind and moved on to something more within my experience.   We had a neighbor, when I was growing up, that liked to wear his wife’s underthings around the house.  We kids weren’t supposed to know what our parents and the other neighbors were laughing about, but kids aren’t stupid and eventually find out the story.  I have certainly met my share of effeminate men and even a few who, while not exactly dressing in women’s clothes didn’t exactly dress like men either.  (I mean people other than certain prelates who like to get all frilled up Cinderella style.) But I must admit that I am totally unfamiliar with this transgender phenomenon and so I think I just lumped a wide spectrum of people into a single category and not a very flattering one.  This article has made me stop and realize that I need to learn more before I rush to judgments or even stereotypes.  I realized reading this article that I had always misidentified transsexual persons as transvestites when in fact it is something very different and that I know very little, and understand even less, about either phenomenon

In the course of writing this blog I have several times suggested that the Church too must rethink certain issues “from the ground up.”  A variety of the sciences –the medical, the sociological, the anthropological, the psychiatric—have made discoveries that fundamentally change the way that we are able to understand a variety of moral quandaries from in vitro fertilization to same-sex attraction to embryonic stem-cell research to gender identity.  I am not saying that this demands that we come to different conclusions, but we do need to take the new knowledge into account as we theologize for a Christian response to people whose lives are locked into these and other complex realities.  In the past it has too often taken us, as Church, far too longer to make the interface between our faith and the contemporary world, especially the sciences.  I am not going to get into the whole Copernicus/Galileo thing, but with the knowledge explosion in contemporary society we cannot afford not to engage in that dialogue now.  The Church’s—and indeed religion’s—credibility has already been all but lost to the under 30 generation.  It will take work for the theologians to absorb the immense motherload of new scientific data and it will take trust for the Magisterium to delegate the research to competent scholars, but our faith should assure us that while the way ahead seems dark and filled with pitfalls, the Holy Spirit ever guides the Church towards the truth.  There is nothing to fear about knowledge; nor is there any reason to block inquiry.  There is but one Truth and we cannot be afraid to search for it.  

Once Again, Sheldon Cooper Solves the Paradox

Last Saturday evening I caught an episode of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon reaches through a wormhole into a series of parallel universes in an attempt to discern whether there is life there.  It is actually a practical joke he is playing on Howard and Raj who are invading his privacy to satisfy their own curiosity and it plays out quite funny.  I will come back to this point, trust me. 

Then I read an article on the internet Sunday morning giving the reasons that Americans are becoming a secularized nation and rejecting religious beliefs.  I wish that I could have found the article Sunday evening when I sat down to write this blog and if it sounds familiar to any of you readers, please send me the link. 

The article claimed that scientists and philosophers are in a consensus that humankind has outgrown religion.  Science sees the claims of religion not only as improvable but as unfounded in a world where science has unlocked the mysteries of human existence.  Indeed, the author asserts,  religious claims are clearly in conflict with scientific knowledge and thus without credibility.  Philosophers, for their part, range from the materialist atheism of Diderot with an absolute denial of a Deity to the Enlightenment concept of a Deity who sets the clockworks of the universe in motion and then withdraws from its running its course to the Jeffersonian concept that God and Religion have a crucial role to play in the establishment of a moral order for those persons unlike themselves who are not sufficiently intelligent or moral to arrive at a natural understanding of human ethics.

I am probably not doing the article justice—I only had time to read it once before it disappeared in “the Cloud” or wherever things go these days and I don’t mean to dismiss it.  To the contrary I found it a compelling argument despite its troubling thesis.  I wasn’t overly impressed by statistics such as the claim that only 7% of scientists are religious believers; statistics as every historian knows can be cooked to come up with whatever results supports our thesis.  But the article did make me stop and think and I had fully intended to go back to it after Mass and give it a second and third read.  Again, if anyone can help me find the article, I would be interested.   

What interrupted my reading the article, ironically, is that I wanted to go to Mass.  Our parish has a monthly Mass for “Families with Special Needs”—kids with Autism, Downs Syndrome, and other life challenges.  This was the pre-Christmas Mass and the number seemed to have doubled—perhaps about 250 people, about 35 or so who are “Special Needs” and the rest being their family, friends, and parishioners whose ministry is the liturgy and social that follows.  The Mass is pretty lively—it is also somewhat chaotic as the normal conventions of social behavior don’t apply.  One never knows what little bit of theatre will play out but that is precisely why we have this Mass.  Parents can bring their families to Church without worrying if some outburst or other activity will disturb the other worshipers.  We all know the fundamentals of the game at this Mass before we cross the church threshold.

But as I watched that congregation in Church and thought about the academics who are becoming evangelists for the rising secularism of our post-Christian culture, I could only think back to Sheldon and his wormhole into various parallel universes and it hit me how we believers and our non-believing friends live in parallel universes.  The Special Needs faithful and their families would not have any interest in what the Philosophical and Scientific communities supposedly are saying about religion.  They wouldn’t (for the most part) understand it and, more important, it would ring false to their experience.  And the academics (and remember I know those ivory towers well having spent my years in the club) are, for the most part, clueless about what it means to live a life of 24/7 responsibility for someone who faces the sorts of challenges that a parent or family member of a “Special Needs” individual has.  I am not saying that one is right and the other is wrong.  Each system has its own internal cohesion, but the reality coordinates differ in each universe.  I also know from attending these monthly Masses which universe I want to live in—which universe has the reality coordinates that ring most true to my experience and in which universe I might not find sure and fixed answers to speculative questions, but where I do find meaning for life. 

Science and Religion: Dialogue or Divorce?

Physicist Leonard Mlodinow

Yesterday I wrote about how religion and belief are being pushed to the margins of our culture, out of the public square and away from public discourse—except for ridicule.  This aggressive sort of secularism is a threat to cultural pluralism and indeed to our basic freedoms as religion played a major role in the 20^th century in balancing various forms of political and social tyranny whether it was apartheid in South Africa, American sponsored dictatorships in Latin America, Johnson’s “Great Lie” leading us into war in Vietnam, or totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and the Communist bloc.  I am not naïve about—and will do some entries on—how religion has been used in the past to suppress human rights and freedoms as well.  We need a balanced picture, but we must be careful to nuance our histories accurately so that the broad strokes of ideological rhetoric don’t distract us from what remains a very important question for the future of our society regarding the coming place of religion and the rights of religious believers to practice their faith—whatever that might be—without restrictions.
That being said, I was listening to NPR on my way home from church this morning and Krista Tippett hosted physicist Leonard Mlodinow during her program On Being.  Krista brought up the issue of religious belief because, I gather, Mlodinow co-authored a book with Deepak Chopra entitled: War of the World Views: Where Science and Spirituality Meet—And Do Not.  I would have wished for a more profound author to state the case for Spirituality, but Mlodinow’s remarks were interesting.  Unfortunately my route took me through several tunnels where the radio was “in and out,” but one remark that stuck with me was when Mlodinow referred to religion as being “outside science.”  That is a strange way to regard science.  Science is the study of phenomena and religion is a phenomenon.  It is only “outside science” if scientists push it there and then we must ask them why they have chosen to do that.  Granted “God” most likely can never be examined, much less proved, by science.  Nor, for that matter, is “the soul” a likely subject for science.  “God” or “the soul” are experienced by some as phenomenon but whether they have any objective existence in and of themselves is the very question that separates believers from those who do not believe.  There is a line, probably an unbridgeable gap like that referred to in Luke 16:26 between physics and metaphysics.  After all the word “metaphysics” means “beyond physics.”  But the phenomenon of religious belief is something the existence of which is beyond dispute and which can be studied by scientists.  Why do people believe?  Why do they believe what they believe?  Are they conditioned for belief by their biology?  Are they conditioned for belief by their psychological makeup?  What difference, if any, does religious belief cause in the structure and functioning of the brain of the believer?  Does “prayer” alter the neurological makeup of the believer?  Does religious belief and practice cause physiological changes that predispose the believer to certain ethical choices?  I think there is a lot here for scientists in a number of different disciplines to look at—if, of course, they choose.  Or they—or the universities for which they work and which pay them a salary, or the opinion of their peers, or the pressures and biases of the larger society and its limited interests—could lead them to dismiss these questions as “outside science,” if not as subjects that would only interest the eccentric.    Again, I think that our culture is pushing religion to the margins in the hopes that it will become both invisible and impotent for social influence.  That would be sad. 
In 1972 Sir John Templeton, wealthy American/British philanthropist, established an annual prize to be awarded “for progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities.” The honorees include some of the best known humanitarians of the last forty years—Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Aleksandr Solzhenistyn, the Reverend Doctor Billy Graham, and Dame Cicely Saunders.  Winners have also included a variety of scientists, including eleven physicists.  On the other hand, as another example of a secularist who is unwilling to engage the phenomenon of religious belief, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins snarkly said that the Templeton Prize “is usually given to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion.”   Of course it would be fascinating for a person like Dawkins who turned from religious belief to non-belief to allow himself to be studied scientifically as well to ascertain the psychological and possibly physiological determinates of his own evolution from his previous religious faith to his current atheism.  But just as psychologists are usually more anxious to look at the idiosyncrasies of their clients rather than their own, scientists too seem to shy away from self-examination.  Too bad.  The inner world of one’s own psyche is far more fascinating than whatever we find outside ourselves and while we must ask the great questions of the universe, unless we know ourselves and how our own biases shape our perception, whatever knowledge we gain of the world beyond our own inner self is highly suspect.  γνῶθι σεαυτόν