Spirit in Action
Science & Spirituality, Part 1
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Something different today for Spirit in Action. I'm going to turn the mic over to some folks Gathered for a panel discussion on science and spirituality. Both subjects near and dear to my head and heart. We're heading to the sanctuary, actually I don't know if that's what they call it, so maybe it's the main stage at Eau Claire's Unitarian Universalist Congregation. On Tuesday, February 23rd, where in front we have four science professors from the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire lined up to speak to us. This gathering was brought together by Jim Rubicki, Professor of Physics and Astronomy and I'll speak to him individually later after we hear the panel presentation. But also on the panel are Derek Gingrich of Biology, Doug Matthews of Behavioral Neuroscience and finally we'll hear Matt Jewell of Material Science. Let's listen in while Jim Rubicki starts things off for Spirit in Action. Welcome to tonight's event on Science and Spirituality. I'm Jim Rubicki. I'm in the Physics Department, Physics and Astronomy at University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. I want to thank the UU Church here for hosting us tonight and our panelists of course. We've got Derek Gingrich and he's from Biology, Doug Matthews from Psychology and Matt Jewell from Material Science. And I'm going to turn it over to them in a minute. I just want to talk a little bit about what the format for tonight is and sort of where the idea came from. From a personal standpoint, engaging in these conversations with science and spirituality, these different ways that we try to connect and understand the world, for me personally it makes me feel more alive, more present, and the more perspectives I can hear on these things I think the better. It seems to be a subject that there's a great deal of interest in, the intersection of these two topics. I know when I was bringing it up to people there was a lot of lingering and people seemed to have things in particular that they wanted to get off their chest, things that they had in mind. And even when I met with the members of this panel that came out of our experience of talking this, seeing that each one of them had something in particular that they wanted to talk about on the subject. So out of that evolved an idea of how this is going to go tonight, which is that they're going to introduce themselves and they're going to talk for a little bit on an individual topic where they see an intersection between science and spirituality that interests them. And then after that, I have some questions for them. Hopefully you guys will have some questions for them as well and we can have a dialogue. I hope that that sense of connection with the world and feeling more present is something that you experience out of this. I know that sometimes we hear science and spirituality or science and religion brought up together, it's in an adversarial way. And certainly there are places where there are conflicts and I welcome people talking about where they see those things. I hope that it doesn't have the spirit of certain political debates that we've been watching lately or God forbid breakfasts about the education system in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Thank you, Scott Whitfield, for that. With that said, I think I will turn it over. Derek, you were going to go first. Thanks everybody again for coming out. All right, thanks again for everybody for coming out. Wow, this is a great turn out. So again, my name is Derek Engrich. I'm an associate professor in the biology department here at UWEC. I've been here now since 2007. So I'm going to start with a little bit of background, where I'm coming from, what my family background is and where my perspective sort of come from. And I'm just going to launch into a little bit of something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. So I was born in upstate New York to a Christian family. We were actually in Mennonites. It's part of a small Mennonite community in upstate New York. We were not a plain group, though my mother did wear a little head covering in church when I was young. I had pretty standard Christian upbringing within that community. I think fairly orthodox Christian Protestant beliefs. There was certainly a strain of biblical literalism within that teaching I had as a young child. I don't remember much from my childhood in those churches in terms of discussions about science and religion per se. In general, it's a community that didn't have a great deal of higher education within it. So those topics maybe weren't broached very much. I do have one very distinct memory, though, a book that my grandmother had. It was a book for pre-teens. It was a chapter book. And it was a book that had stories about this Christian family. And one of the chapters in the book was about how the Christian children had stood up to their biology teacher on the issue of evolution. And at the end of the chapter, the biology teacher got their comeuppance when it was revealed that pilt down man was a hoax. And so maybe you've had some of you have had those sorts of stories in your backgrounds. I attended Eastern Mennonite University and got my bachelor's degree there, majoring in biology and biochemistry. And it was really at EMU where I really started to interact with some of these ideas on a more intellectual level. I did take one semester course on faith in science that was taught by one of the biology professors. And in that course, we discussed many issues related to the intersections between science and faith. Certainly one of the topics was evolution that we talked about and some different Christian perspectives on that topic. I went on into my graduate work at Cornell University, the Biochemistry Cell and Molecular Biology program. While at Cornell, I was heavily involved in the Graduate Christian Fellowship at Cornell. That was an university connected group. Met a lot of really wonderful people. It's part of that group, people that I still interact with. Some really smart people. And in many ways, a lot of my intellectual development in terms of thinking about some of these science and faith issues really happened, not so much at Eastern Mennonite, but at Cornell and as part of that group. And I think there's something about being on a largely secular campus, but being part of a Christian group that the Christians who are involved in that group really think very deeply about these issues. Maybe even a way that's greater than sometimes happens if you're on a Christian campus as a Christian. So I went on, I did postdoctoral research for five years at UW-Madison in the lab and the genetics department there. Just a little bit about my research there. So we were interested in the topic of selective protein degradation in plants. So processes where specific proteins are sort of grabbing gotten rid of. And so I started a project there where I was looking at a family of genes that were involved in that process. And it turned out that a couple members of those family of genes have very prominent roles in light perception and light responses in plants. So my research here at the university continues to look at those two genes and the roles they have in light responses. But I'm also interested in the larger family genes and how those genes have evolved. So I spent a lot of time looking at the land plants as well as some of the land plant ancestors and trying to understand how this family of genes has evolved and changed in evolution. So obviously as a biologist, the first topic that you think of when you think of science and faith and maybe conflicts that might arise is the flashpoint topic of evolution. And as a biologist and as a Christian, I've had to thought a lot about or had to think a lot about that topic. And so we have this natural world that's functioning according to physical laws. So how does God sort of work within that context? I didn't mention I'm currently in my family are members of Lake Street United Methodist Church here in town. So I continue to be a member of a Christian church. I can again consider myself to have fairly standard Orthodox Protestant Christian beliefs. So I believe in an act of God, a God that is involved in the world. So how does an act of God intersect with the world that is also running and functioning according to these physical laws? So how does God work in act? Does he work only through things that we would sort of maybe think of as supernatural, extra natural, miraculous processes? Does he work through natural physical processes through physical laws? How would that look? How would that look to a scientist trying to look at that? Can natural processes have their own sort of independence from God? Can they have freedom? You know, that sort of comes back to this evolution issue. I think for a lot of Christians, where the issue with evolution is, is when we describe a scientist's evolution being unguided or being random, or at least having random aspects to it. Maybe even the term that sometimes uses is without purpose. And Christians get a little bit concerned about that when we talk about evolution in that way. So I've been trying to think about, as a biologist and as a Christian, how do I sort of reconcile that belief of an act of God with this idea of an evolutionary process, which science very clearly shows is active and is working and can account for life on earth? This evolutionary process, which seems to have this own sort of freedom, right? And again, we have things, evolution is not random when people tell you that they're telling you incorrectly, but there are aspects to the process that are random, right? So how does that work? I'm going to tell you one way that I've thought about that and tried to reconcile that in my mind, and maybe we can discuss this further. And this is actually not an idea that's original to me, but it's an idea I got from one of my favorite writers on this topic. It's a guy named Ken Miller. Some of you may know that name. He's a cell molecular biologist at Brown University. He's been heavily involved in some of these discussions. He's written a couple books. This is one of his books, Finding Darwin's God. It's one of my favorite books on this topic. And Ken in this book talks about this idea of how do we reconcile the idea of God having a plan for the world with an evolutionary process that seems to have randomness and freedom built into it? And what Ken says, and Ken, by the way, is a Catholic, so he is Christian as well, and what he says is he asks Christians to think about the concept of free will. Most Christians, and myself included, would say that they believe in free will. In other words, we as humans have the ability, have the freedom from God to make our own decisions. We're not puppets that are manipulated by God. And so we can choose to accept or reject God. We can choose to do as well or not do as well. At the same time, most Christians would also believe that God has a plan for our lives and a plan for humans in general. How do we reconcile that? This idea that we truly have free will, we have this form of independence from God to make our own decisions with an idea that this all-knowing God has a plan for us. And what Ken says in the book is, in one sense, that's a conundrum. That's a mystery. Yet many Christians readily accept both as being true, and I do as well. Ken asks, why can't we apply that same thought to natural processes? Why can't natural processes also have a form of independence, of freedom, of creativity? And yet, at the same time, also be working towards what is a plan of God. And again, maybe in some sense, that's a conundrum, and we could maybe discuss that further. But Ken thinks that that's a way to think of it. And that's probably the favorite way, my favorite way of thinking about this. That we have this wonderful evolutionary process that has this freedom and creativity. And I said something really great about the Creator, that there's this wonderful creativity. And even though there is that freedom in it, there is also a way that is acting that is consistent with God's plan. And in fact, that freedom is part of God's plan in the same way that our freedom and our free will is part of God's plan. So good evening. My name is Doug Matthews. Let me start off by saying thank you again for the invitation to come and speak. And thank you to everybody for taking time out during your week and coming to hear what we might say and be part of a conversation. It's encouraging to see students in the room, particularly when I know at least one of them has a stats test on Thursday. So I'm the Chair of the Psychology Department here at Eau Claire. I've been here for about 18 months. And much just like the model that was set and done excellent, I'll just kind of follow a little bit of that. I'll introduce four concepts or ideas that I've struggled through over the year and then tell you a little bit about the kind of research I do and how that might intersect a little bit with faith and my science. So if I can just tell you a little bit about myself, when I was a young boy, two things happened which seemed like they were at two concepts that happened in parallel. And yet for what we're talking about tonight, really in many ways, it's exactly the concept that we're dealing with. When I was roughly nine years old, I became a follower of Jesus. And essentially what that meant was in my nine year old mind that I would do the best I could in my life to seek after what he might want me to do. I also deeply wanted to be an NFL football player. And I got the math used part right, but my parents named me Doug instead of Clay. So I didn't work out. So my second choice was science. I was just fascinated by the idea that we could investigate things and we could learn things and we could see how things fit together. That was just mind blowing to me. I thoroughly loved that. So the idea of this notion of a follower of Jesus in combination with loving science was just kind of natural. And in a way, I'll be quite honest with you, quite naive. It really held on to that kind of those two parallel tracks through being an undergraduate. I'm at a school in Missouri. And then I went to graduate school at Miami of Ohio. I was in the psychology department there. And I got to work with a guy that was really just a wonderful mentor. He taught me how to do science. He taught me how to record neurons from freely behaving animals. It was really neat. But what made Phil a wonderful mentor was the conversations we had in his office over coffee the head that were just free flowing. He participated in the march on Washington and he would talk about that with tears in his eyes. And from for a young boy that grew up in a small town in Missouri, that was just a really neat experience. But one of the things Phil said that really first started me thinking about the intersections between faith and science was he said, we were talking about faith one day. And he said, you know, I live my life this way. When I walk into the laboratory, I put on my science hat. And I have, I'm a scientist and I'm a scientist inside of my laboratory. And then when I leave my laboratory, I take off my science hat and I put on my spiritual hat. And I was just a fledgling psychologist at the time and I really wasn't all that, I guess I was a little too brash. And I said, Phil, in my world we call that schizophrenic. You know, and I just don't really understand why you would do that. Why would you not have a unified worldview in terms of how you view life? And that's something I really struggled through tremendously and it became very important to me that I would, as best I could, have a unified worldview. And in essence, my science would impact my spirituality and my spirituality would impact my science. I've done a variety of study on that, a lot of conversations on that, which is really critical for me. And that's one thing that was the first step that I really had to take in working through this. So my excellent work on this is worldview is a concept and the universe next door. Just outstanding books looking at unified worldviews from a variety of different frameworks and how they answer a variety of questions. One of which is how do we know things, the nature of epistemology and what is the rule of science? You know, so really working through that whole nature of wanting to have a unified worldview. When I was in graduate school then, my area is behavioral neuroscience. So I study how the brain impacts behavior, primarily with addictions, and I'll get to that in a little bit. So when you're a younger student in neuroscience, whether you do it or not, you buy this book, right? This is the Principles of Neuroscience, this is by Candel, and none of us read it, but we all have it on our shelves, right? And we take it in the first day of class and put it down in hopes that what we do is we intimidate our students so that if we say something, they really follow. But I did decide, you know, we lived in Asia for a while and I decided that I would, then I'll get to that in a minute, and I decided that I'd try and read it because the plane flights across the Pacific Ocean are long. And I want to read you two quotes out of just the very first chapter. This is written by Candel, who in my opinion is probably the most prominent, most influential neurosciences. And in his first chapter titled Brain and Behavior, he says, I'm not going to read you the full paragraph, but he just says this last step allows to achieve a unified scientific approach to the study of behavior. This is a key sentence. Such a comprehensive approach depends on the view that all behavior is the result of brain function. If you go to the end of the chapter, he touches back on this. I think these are the two most important sentences in his book. He concludes this chapter by saying indeed the excitement evident in neuroscience today is based on the conviction that at last we have in hands the proper tools to explore the extraordinary organ of the mind so that we can eventually fan them the biological principles that underlie human cognition. I agree with him completely in some ways the last paragraph, not so much in the first sentence, but what struck me about his statements, the use of the word view, the use of the word conviction. In fact I went to a Thesaurus before I walked over here and I looked up the word conviction, and the first word that came up was faith. We could substitute Candel's words there by saying if we have the faith that we now have the tools, and what that struck me was it doesn't really matter where we fall, we're all people of faith. We all have faith in something. That I thought was a big step in my development because in science sometimes it's easy to be criticized to be a person of faith. But I realized, Candel's right, we all are people of faith. I suppose what separates us then is what we place our faith in. That led me to my next thing, and this is one of the areas I still work on a lot, is the concept of a blind faith versus a reasoned faith. I was trained as a scientist, I was at Miami, Ohio, and from there I went to the medical school in North Carolina as a postdoc and I stayed there for a couple of years before I took a job first at the University of Memphis in their psychology department, and I decided that if I was going to have faith, I was going to have a reasoned faith. I was going to try and take the best training I could in terms of scholarship, and I was going to apply it to my faith, and I was really going to try and push the envelope and ask the question, is there a reason to have faith inside of this? And that's been a rich area of study. Matt has a book that maybe he'll reference in relation to that. But two things I think I would say just that were very, very good for me. One was really taking a scholarship approach to, for one, like the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is a reason to believe that that dinner did not occur. Could that hold up to an academic investigation? The second being the historicity of the scripture, if I'm going to place my faith in such a document, is it legitimate at all? That's been really rich, and that's something that I would encourage everybody to really do, explore the depths and the boundaries of where your faith is and what you have on that. Finally, the last thing I'm working on right now, and this is for my student switcher in the audience. You'll hear me say this off and on. One of the most influential books I've read in the last, I don't know, five, six years is by Oz Guinness. It's called The Call. I'd highly recommend this book. And what Guinness talks about is strongly work to find what it is your call to do. When I'm teaching students at the university, there is a sense of just fulfilling the purposes of my life that I've been given that is just tremendous. I hope that my students know me in a way that's unique, that's different, that I care for them, because there's a God that cares for me. And I hope that comes out whether I'm explaining what a neuron is, what my science is, or what a theory of mind is. So I think it really impacts the nature in which I teach science. In terms of my science, I study the biological basis of addiction. I primarily study GABA-A receptors, which is a chemical receptor set of proteins in your brain and how alcohol abuse primarily is influenced by GABA-A receptors. What happens when animals are dependent on the drug? What happens to individuals when they consume for a long period of time? One area that I'm starting to work on now is the intersection between recovery programs and the biological nature of addiction. I think the evidence for things such as 12-step programs and how individuals can walk out of addiction through that, I think is quite fascinating. I think the evidence is quite strong that they do produce statistical benefits. I think the interesting question now is why? And the combination between pharmacological agents and things such as counseling or 12-step programs and just how it can help an individual with addiction. So that's a little bit of my faith journey. The one thing I didn't mention, so I was a Memphis from Memphis, I went to Baylor. I was only at Baylor for two years. I decided that if I was going to be someone of faith, it had to, at least for me, it had to mean something. So I worked for some people in India. We started a mission in India to build schools and start businesses over there. Texas to India is kind of a long flight. So we moved to Singapore so that we could do that in a much quicker and kind of convenient way. We were there for about five and a half years. And it only been in Eau Claire for a year and a half. We decided to come when the state government would make it a fun time to be here. So that's my story. And like I say, thanks for coming. I hope to have an opportunity to dialogue with you. Great, thanks Doug. And yeah, I'll just add my thanks to everybody who's here. By the way, I need to say I have the tallest stack of books. So I think I win, right? I think that's how it works in academia. So my name is Matt Jewell. I'm in my fifth year here at Eau Claire and I teach in the material science program. My research is in this class of materials called superconductors, which we use to make very large magnets. So if you need a ginormous magnet, you have a few million dollars, I'm your man, just right here and I'll be up. I also just want to tell you a little bit about my background, kind of my perspective where I've come from, as a person of faith and also a little bit as a scientist. And then I'll try to maybe suggest a few topics or give a few strong opinions to maybe kind of get the discussion going. So our one to start is in the church that I grew up in. So I've been a Christian most of my life. The church I was in when I was very young was kind of a little bit of a separatist community. And they really kind of saw most of the world as kind of dangerous and wrong. And we have to kind of pull ourselves back from this a little bit if we're going to be safe and be pure. And there was one guy that came to church one day and he put up this picture on the screen that I still remember. You know, 30 years on here. And the good folks, I googled it this morning, I found it. It's online because everything's online. And the good folks here at UU got a projector all set up for me, and my laptop didn't have the right adapter, so I'm sorry, I'll have to just describe it to you, you'll have to imagine it. So in this picture, which I was probably seven or eight years old at the time, there are these two castles. And the one castle says Christianity. And the other castle says humanism or secular humanism or something like that. And there's like cannons on each castle. And there's like these guys shooting the cannons. And like the humanist is a pirate, I don't quite know what that was about, but you know, whatever. And the cannonballs are kind of going back and forth. And above the humanist castle are all these balloons, which are labeled, I don't remember, abortion, euthanasia, all these kind of, you know, bad things. And the Christians' cannons are trying to pop the balloons. But at the bottom of the castles, each castle is sitting on a foundation. And underneath the humanist castle, it says evolution. And underneath the Christian castle, it says creation. And while the Christians are all shooting their cannonballs up the balloons, the humanists are shooting their cannonballs down at this foundation of creationism and are, you know, eroding it away slowly. And I think that's perspective I held onto for a while, you know, that we are fundamentally at war with each other, that we need to kind of beat the other side. And this idea slipped in there that essentially this scientific issue, evolution versus creationism, is somehow the underpinning of both those systems of belief. And there's maybe lots of ways, places I could go there and kind of talking through that and how my ideas have, let's say, evolved over time, like what it is there. But let me just say two things maybe that, you know, I think I've hopefully moved on quite a bit from exactly that picture. But I think two things in particular. One, of course, as I got out of that community, which is a little bit kind of separated and secluded from society, as I actually got to like know some scientists and people had different beliefs from me I saw that, you know, actually most of them were not trying to destroy my faith. Most of them were interested and engaged, probably a lot of you here in this room don't have the same, exactly the same beliefs as I do, but you're here and you're willing to have a discussion and that's great. The other thing that occurred though, that from the faith point of view that was really important to me, and I think is one of the kind of main points I want to kind of talk about tonight, there's kind of this fundamental conceit and I would go as far as to say maybe lie that these systems of belief are built on what we believe about the foundation of the world, about how the world began. And in particular now as a Christian, hopefully maybe a little bit more mature than I was at the age of seven, this idea that the creation story, how the earth came to be, that should be the underpinning of my faith. That's actually a little bit offensive to me now and I think that's because really in my life I've gone through what I would describe as a personal transformation, at some point in my life I really came to see that as a person I did a good job of smiling on the outside and getting good grades and doing what people expected of me, but actually on the inside I really had a lot of selfishness and hypocrisy and kind of a lot of things I wasn't so proud of. And where I came to see my faith interacting with my life was I came to understand that for me at least about how I understand the Bible and the Christian message is that Christianity is not really the search for God. It's not really us kind of working and working and getting closer and closer to God. In my view Christianity is a story of God coming to us. In my point of view it's a story of Jesus coming down to earth and being a person we couldn't be and actually kind of taking us out of ourselves, getting us away from this life of selfishness and hypocrisy and whatever else. That was a really important kind of step for me and it's important because it means that foundation picture of what you believe about history, about how the earth started, some of that needs to be your base of faith. No, no, I think that's completely backwards. At least as a Christian I can't really speak for other belief systems I'm not as familiar with. There's this thing we call the gospel which is just this picture I've been trying to describe which is at the basis of our faith and not these kind of views of history of the earth. In terms of how I sort of reconcile my life with the scientists, with my life as a Christian I would say the first thing is it's not really that much of a challenge for me because for me what I build my faith on is not really my views of what happened 4.5 billion years ago or 13 billion years ago in the universe and that sort of thing. So that was a little bit of my early development and then when I did my undergrad at Madison and stayed there for grad school I went to Florida State and dragged my poor wife around the world, we were to France for a while and then back we went there with what three kids and came back with fours so we were having a busy time of life. But it was a great time for us, got to just really see more cultures, different perspectives and really came to kind of appreciate people who came from different backgrounds in us. And what I wanted to do here, just to kind of as I said, stir the pot a little bit for the discussion, is we are in a political season as Jim said, just so I just kind of bear my religious soul to you, I'll just bear my political soul to you too, why not? You know, I get very kind of disheartened by the political process and really all I want in the politician is someone who's going to say the hard thing to their own base, right? Everybody's willing to say the hard thing to the other guys, you know, supporters, the other base. I'm looking for the guy, I'll say some hard things to his or her own side. So let me just try to do that right now, so having just said that we shouldn't kind of, you know, see things as two camps let me nonetheless say as someone who's lived most of my life with kind of one foot in each of those camps, let me just try and say a few maybe hard things, hopefully not too incendiary, kind of those groups and then maybe we can have a discussion about it. Okay, so first I would say to my Christian friends, people who were raised in a place of faith and maybe have some doubts or concerns or whatever about kind of scientists or their views on certain things. First say what I said before, which is, if that's the basis of your faith, maybe you should really kind of think about whether your faith is aligned with what you say you believe that there's a different basis, at least in the Christian faith, for what we're supposed to base our lives on rather than origins and scientific theories. Second thing I would say is a lot of pushback amongst my Christian friends, the scientists out there, there's kind of the Richard Dawkins and the same heresies of the world who are kind of very militantly atheistic, very strongly, not just that religion is something we set aside, but the religion is really wrong or evil. And we can talk about some of their ideas if you guys want to, but what I want to say for now is, just please understand, I don't think that viewpoint really represents the consensus in science. I've been here, I'll play it for five years, I've been in lots of different kinds of science environments before this. I've been pretty open, as I've been open tonight about my faith, I've never really felt people kind of trying to shove me in a corner or say no, that's a view that you can't have. So I don't think it's fair to paint the scientific community with a brush that's painted sometimes because of a few high profile individuals. Third thing I would say, recently I think in Christian circles, views about origins and history of the world have shifted from kind of traditional views of the earth of 6,000 years old and creation happened one week. To more, I guess, nuanced views of kind of what we call intelligent design, that we have sort of gaps in our scientific understanding, and so we kind of put God in those gaps because maybe there's some complexity there that can't be understood or rationalized except through supernatural cause. And I want to encourage you, if you're coming as a person of faith, please be very careful with that argument. And here's why, because as scientists, we keep learning new things. So if you tell me that, look, I know there's a God because of these 12 things that can't be explained, well what happens when nine of them get figured out? All right, please, my faith is important to me, it's deep-seated, and this is a source of real frustration to me that it gets characterized in this way that essentially the more science learns, suddenly the less room there is for God or less room for faith. And I have pushed back very strongly against that, again, we can talk more in the Q&A if you want about that. Okay, last thing today on this side, before I shift over, I would say natural processes are not the fact that things we observe have a natural cause or natural process behind them. I would argue are not antithetical in any way to the idea of God at work in the world. All right, as communities of faith, we use a lot of language, we talk about the rain being a gift from God or a blessing from God. And yet there is no push amongst any Christians that I know to destroy the foundations of modern meteorology, right, that doesn't exist. No one is upset by the fact that we understand the natural process, but still can see it as something that God is giving us and is a blessing from God. Similarly, I would just argue then that other things as far as how plants and animals developed on the earth, the age of the universe, the stars we see in the sky, we can apply similar logic. It's okay. It doesn't take God out of the picture. Okay, thanks, my friends, maybe come from science perspective, maybe not as much of a religious background potentially. I would say a couple things also. First of all, we had this focus in science on sort of objectivity, on data, on trying to do experiments that are reproducible. That's great. Understand, it's also a little bit limiting in the scope of things we can talk about. And what I mean there is that I sometimes hear from my friends, not coming from background to faith, say things like, well, look, you know, I'd consider faith or I'd consider Christianity, but you've got all these, you know, the problem of evil. Why is there evil in the world if God's so great? Why is there pain in the world if God is so powerful? And again, I'm happy to kind of share some of my views on that if you like later, but I just want to say for now, kind of please understand, science has, from my point of view, basically nothing to say about those issues, because we have to rely on what's repeatable and what's testable and what's wholesalifiable. There's all kinds of areas of life that as scientists, we just can't say very much about. And so you can argue, if you like, that people of faith don't have good answers to those questions, but at least they can ask them. I would also say that when we start getting into social issues, it's true that people of faith have stuck their feet in their mouth so many times on kind of these examples of being kind of, you know, giving these kind of false things about why evolution's wrong or whatever, and it just gets kind of like, oh man, okay, here we go again. But I would say this, as scientists, we have to be careful not to grow our envelope too much. There are lots of questions that have a genuine scientific basis and we need to apply science to understand them, but there are other questions. The question of, for example, is it right or wrong to use stem cells from humans and in what way? All right, science can inform us about the benefits of that and potential dangers, what might be the outcomes, but then I would argue it's fundamentally moral questions. It's fundamentally not a scientific question to say, at the end of the day, is that a right thing to do or is that a wrong thing to do? And so I think we need to be informed by our communities of faith and other people if we want to kind of process through that issue. And you can imagine a lot of sort of social issues like that. Okay, and then the last thing I would say to my friends in science or friends who don't come from a faith background, in the same way that I would urge my Christian friends not to allow themselves to paint their view of scientists by what Richard Dawkins says. I'd say please, if you're a scientist, don't let your view of Christians be too painted or view people of faith be too painted by what you see from Ken Ham and answers in Genesis and these, you know, these guys who are kind of very strident and militant. I think it's kind of the same thing, but inverted. They have a position, they want to push it, and they're willing to go through kind of any barrier to get there, and I don't support those efforts, but I would say they don't represent the mainstream either. I think actually you find most people of faith are willing to sit down and have a discussion with you if it's something that you are willing to do. Okay, that's my attempt to stimulate some discussion, and let's go to it. Hi, I don't have a mic, so I'm going to move over here. I don't have books either, so I'm feeling insecure, but I do have some quotes. What I have in mind here, we've got a little time. I'd like to ask them some questions prompted on what they've talked about and started dialogue here, and then I'm going to run around with one of those mics in a little bit, and if you guys have questions, then we can get some from the audience as well, if that works for everybody. So, the word "faith" came up a lot during that. Doug, you talked about this idea of not having two hats. This is sort of science and your spirituality or religious background, sort of being the same person all the time, and I wanted to ask you guys about this idea of faith, because it seems to me that there's two ways that we use this word. I'm a physicist. For instance, let me do a little time for a couple hundred years. I have faith in the Newtonian system mechanics for physics. I can talk about faith in that working, but that's a faith based on trust in it working. But I also know that if it stops working, then I'm willing to expand and move from that, so it's a faith in something to a certain degree, and then I expand it. So, I start moving with things that are moving very, very fast, and I say, "Oh, Newtonian mechanics isn't working. I need to expand this. I need to be willing to change my base of ideas," adds special relativity. This is one example of how science, when I think of it in faith and science, works. Then there's this idea, and this is a little unfair, because the definitions for faith that I have here are actually from not religious people, but from one's a mathematician, one's a philosopher. Bertrand Russell talks about faith in the religious sense as being a firm belief in something for which there's no evidence. Martin Gardner, who's a popularizer of mathematics, talks about religious faith as a belief unsupported by logic or science in both God and in afterlife. So, I just wanted to talk about how that word's used in two different ways, and I guess what I wanted from everyone up here is this sort of clarity. When you guys talk about faith, since it's the word that I think used the most out of all the words up here on topics, what do you mean by faith, and do you use the same idea for faith in science that you use in religion? So, whoever can pick up on my fastest can go first. You know, I think it's an interesting question. I disagree with the two quotes you read, to be honest with you. I think that's part of kind of what Matt maybe was referring to that we run into, problems on. Essentially what both of your quotes gave, or the way that you asked the question, sets up a dichotomy really. One is a, which really gets to the issue of one is a learned faith, one is a reasoned faith, one is a grounded faith in data. And the other is just a blind faith that has no backing whatsoever. And I think that that's a problem that we get ourselves into. I think that that hurts our ability to talk to one another. I think if I was going to study the Near East, and I wanted to study it roughly 2,000 years ago, what I'd do is I wanted the books, and I think most scholars would agree that I would read as a gospel of Luke. He's probably one of the best historians. In fact, his account has done an excellent job of being able to demonstrate the governmental system that existed in the time, which was against much of what the historical documents were at that time. To say that that's not reasoned is completely, in my own opinion, not a valid statement. So I think even as a person of, and I'll say now, spiritual faith, just to make it clear what I'm talking about, what I would say, and one of the things I was trying to get at was I want to push the limits of what my faith worldview is. You know, if this is true, then I should be able to look at that and gain reason to believe in that. One of the things I referenced was the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ never existed, that's a ludicrous thing to believe in, and it would be frankly not a great idea to go to Christian Scripture for documentation because that would be if we were in law, a friendly witness. But I could go to Jewish historians at the time, and I could read the man named Jesus that was from this location, at least it justifies that the person existed. You know, so I think that people in faith traditions are actually doing exactly what the scientists, at least the way that I view it, is doing. We're asking the questions, we're looking for data, and we're evaluating what we learned based on that data. I do think there's a distinction in how you describe faith being used. I think as a scientist, you know, I couldn't put together an experiment, but I didn't have some faith in how it was going to go. I have to start somewhere, but then I think as a scientist, we just have to be willing to change our ideas. We have to follow the data where it goes, right? So is there an element of faith there? Yeah, there sure is. Then there's also a feedback loop which is different in a science laboratory than maybe it is from any of us in our personal lives or in our faith lives. I think as far as our spiritual faith being reasoned, I mean, I certainly am not going to disagree with that. We certainly need to have reasoned faith. At the same time, it is called a faith for a reason. I mean, our people of faith, because everything is not clear, we don't understand God's full nature. And obviously, probably many people in this room with different views about faith issues than my own, and that's okay. And so I think there doesn't even be a distinction in how we use it in kind of our professional scientific lives and how what we mean in our kind of spiritual lives. We're going to take a break right now from this past Tuesday's panel discussion at Eau Claire's UU congregations main stage where we've been listening to a panel on science and spirituality. I want to remind you that you're listening to Spirit in Action, a Northern Spirit radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org. With more than 10 and a half years of our programs, yours free for listening and download. There are links to our guests and more information about them. There's a place for you to post comments and make our communication two-way. And there's a place to click to donate, which is 100% how this full-time work is supported. But before supporting Northern Spirit radio, remember to first support your local community radio station with your wallet and hands. Keeping alive the unique mix of news and music that you can get only from community radio. So start there. We just heard the panel discussion on science and spirituality beginning to transition into Q&A. And we will hear the rest of that next week when I speak with three of the panel's science profs from University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. That is Derek Gingrich of biology, Doug Matthews of behavioral neuroscience, and Matt Jewell of material science. But right now, I'm going to call up the moderator for this science and spirituality examination, UWEC's physics and astronomy prof Jim Rubicki. Jim, it's good to get a chance to speak to you individually for Spirit in Action. Hi, thanks Mark. Thanks for having me. And thank you for the program that was back on Tuesday night at the UU. I was disappointed by one thing though, Jim, and that was that you didn't speak. Why did you make that decision? Well, you know, when I started trying to put this together, I had some challenges getting people to just say yes initially. I think that there's some reluctance because people see this as two areas, science and spirituality that clash. And so I offered to serve as a moderator to try to facilitate things and create dialogue, and it just seemed people were more receptive once I offered that. Okay. But one of the things I really think would have enriched it was your own experience. Since you do attend the UU, since you're a unitary universalist, and the other three folks were specific strains of Christian, I thought that you might have added some nice diversity to the mix. Was that not a priority? Well, you know, originally because of also that I had given the talk on my own spiritual journey with connection to science at the UU, I guess I de-emphasize that importance. Also, we hope that this is going to be the first of many events, so hopefully I'll get to get my two cents in at some point there. Well, I think maybe you can have your two cents right now. Can you give me a little bit of the idea of your background? I mean, each of them spoke about how they grew up and the Christian families and how that came forward. You teach physics and astronomy, and that's something clearly after my own heart since I was a physics teacher along the way. So what's your background? I was born into a Catholic family. While my brother went to Catholic school, I did not, and I would say that we went with some irregularity, the Catholic mass. And so it wasn't a big part of my life, and I don't think I really associated myself ever as really a Catholic. But I did notice in my teen years I was looking for spiritual life. Maybe this seems a little strange, but my background really, I always thought I was going to be an author. I thought I was going to write fiction. And I remember being a student in high school and taking physics my senior year. And it was just one of these what should have been an unremarkable moment of looking at how to calculate the recessional velocity of something going down an incline plane. And there was just this moment of being able to understand the universe, to be able to learn some of the universe's language. It felt like I was really being taught a language about the world around me. And I said, maybe this is a place where I can get some spiritual guidance. And so really, originally I became a physics major just because I thought it would be a way to feel more connected. But I will say those sort of high fluent ideas of what science was going to provide me. It really didn't provide me what I thought as a teen. It was going to, in that sense. But it did help me start to connect and think about some bigger questions and try to look for some other ways to connect to the world, which is why I go to a church like the UU now, I guess, because it's a place where people are still asking questions. So you like questions, which of course fits with science very well. But the spiritual draw, what does that mean to you if you try and put that into words? What is spiritual to you? Well, I'll try to describe it as an experience, which is that I walk around during the day. And a lot of time I can be caught up in my own anxiety, stress, personal needs and all those things. When I try to get quiet and ask some sort of higher power that I don't really understand just to connect with me and try to make me more aware of the world around me, I find it a better place. And one of the ways that helps me slow down and do that is to kind of meditate to re-great works of art and to sort of agree, work on physical problems, things that come out of physics, and really the history of physics also. While I don't have a specific spiritual practice like Christianity, that idea of UU what drew me to there was a place where people were trying to connect through the world, trying to understand it better, and trying to just find ways to engage with it. And so I find my spirituality throughout the day with it, trying to connect myself to something that's larger than me. And I find that it helps me be less selfish, more mindful of others, and more just understanding that I'm just part of a larger world. Are you at all sensitive to the accusation that you can't be spiritual when you're being a very dedicated scientist? Is that an issue for you at all? I don't. And part of the reason why I really wanted to have this larger discussion with people is I think that anyone in science will find that there's a vital need to address certain questions and understand things that we just can't get from science at this moment. I'm not saying that we can't ever get an idea of morality by mapping the brain and get a better sense of what that means or other questions along those lines, but we don't have that now, and we need some way to address it, and I think spirituality is a way to get that. You can't wait around centuries for science to be able to provide those answers. You need those in the moment, and I think being part of a culture and a community that asks those questions is helpful. I'd be hard-pressed for anyone in science to say questions of morality and how you should live your life aren't important, and I think to also say that science alone can provide that, I don't think that. There's a lot of people who would think that. I think you know, Jim, that I'm a Quaker, and there's a lot of theological overlap between Quakers and UUs, so I find myself very comfortable around UUs in terms of talking about these important things. One of the things that I wonder about, you said earlier something about you don't have a spiritual practice, like all those Christians do, that were on the panel, and I thought you had some excellent guests, by the way. I really enjoyed all three of them. They really were fantastic. I'm so grateful that they took part. But one of the things that sometimes people seem to confuse, and you as a UU and me as a Quaker, and I think people from unity, likewise, we're all spiritual people, but we do not have creeds. And so perhaps maybe what you were confusing there was a spiritual practice with having a creedal basis. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's well said. That's more precise language, I agree. So you probably grew up saying, "I believe in God the Father, who might be creator of heaven, earth, and Jesus Christ is only Son." You probably grew up saying that, at least occasionally when you went to Catholic Mass, I was raised Catholic, by the way. And that creed, I found myself increasingly uncomfortable saying, not because I knew it was wrong, but because I didn't hold it to be true, and I don't say things are true that I don't know to be true. How does that work for you? Did you find yourself maybe in your teens having discomfort with saying the words that you were asked to say in church? So this is interesting. It requires me looking back and trying to look at 10 points a moment. One moment that came to my head right now was, I remember in class one time in junior high having to, we were watching some sort of historical movie about Christianity, we had to list the different historical characters that were in there. And I remember at that moment, wondering if I was, you know, this is a very naive at this point, list Jesus as an actual historical figure. Now, of course, regardless if you think he's the son of God or not, he was a historical figure, but I do remember that moment wondering if my teacher was going to allow that as an answer and thinking, well, they should. So I must have at least ended junior high thought that that was true, but at some point after that, I don't know where it was exactly, but it started to shed, and I don't remember it as a particularly painful or divisive thing for me. It seemed to have something that I sort of drifted from casually, so I don't have a dramatic story for that, and I don't know exactly what happened except that it wasn't emphasized a lot in my house. So I think one other alternative ideas were provided. It was easy to move towards them, because like you said, I don't have a lot of evidence to support that that actually was the truth. One of the most powerful points in the evening, and I'm displaying my prejudice in saying this, was when Matt Jewell spoke. He was the fourth in line to speak, and he spoke advice that he would give to people of both of the camps in which he has a foot, to the Christian folks that he's part of and the scientific folks. And he was essentially just tried to say hard tasks to both sides, hard challenges to both sides. That was my favorite moment of the evening. It was for you too, good. It was. What did you resonate with there specifically? I think that there was a little bit of a general call to courage that he put out there saying it's easy to preach to the choir, since I can't think of a better metaphor in this case, right? But that when you have to talk to the people you agree with about the things that you think that they're doing wrong, that's more challenging because you want to be aligned with them, right? You want to feel connected. And to just that idea of this is what we all need to be doing, regardless of even the specifics of what he said, I think it was a good model that he was putting out there being willing to be in front of 100 people and say, "Look, I align with you in all these ways, but I think there are these things that I disagree with, and I have to let you know that." I think that that's a good practice for all of us. And as you know, if it wasn't in some hurrying way that he did it, he articulated himself well, and I think he did it in a way that made people feel included. Yeah, I think that you expressed it well, both my perspective. Just not a curiosity for you. Were there any of his specific things he brought up? Was there one that jumped out for you? I know you're doing the interviewing here, but I'm just curious. I find myself as a person of faith, but a faith that's so different from the doctrinaire stuff that many people associate with, and I think sometimes very invalidly with Christianity, I thought each of his challenges was right on. It's like don't think all those other people think the same and that they're all the color of the worst person in the group. And he said that in both directions. My personal experience is that I can speak with anyone across anywhere on the spectrum of belief. Atheists are fine with me and very devoted people are fine with me. There is a truth and a power in some of their experiences and words that I always find enriching. And he challenges us to do that. And the thing is, since I was a physics teacher as well, and I worked in computer programming now for more than 35 years, I'm very scientifically oriented and that's not a complete picture. There's something else we need. And he correctly identifies our blindnesses that we, when we want to put the other people beyond the pale. I just think it's so wonderful that he did that without hitting anybody with a mallet over the head. That's great. And I hope that one of the things that came off with sort of the way I express myself there is I really, one of my goals was there was to just not have the night be antagonistic to understand that this was about a dialogue, not about trying to create a wrestling match for entertainment between these two sides here. So I appreciate everyone bringing that sentiment and that spirit to the event. Well, and I appreciate you facilitating this, making that evening happen there at the UU. It was great stuff. And I really appreciate that I just had the chance to hear a little of your spirituality. Thanks so much, Jim, for joining me for spirit and action. Thanks so much, Mark. That's the time that we have for today. First listening to the Science and Spirituality panel at Eau Claire's UU congregational space. And just there with moderator and UWC physics and astronomy professor, Jim Rubicki. Next week we'll be back with a recording of the Q&A follow-up to the panel and with individual interviews with the three other panelists. In the meantime, go well, be well, and do good. And we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ (upbeat music)
4 scientists from UW-EC gather to share about the intersection of science & spirituality at the UU Congregation in Eau Claire. See the article about the interview linked via the CVPost.