Episodes
Friday Jun 30, 2023
Ep 147 - Daniel Shields on Nature and Nature’s God
Friday Jun 30, 2023
Friday Jun 30, 2023
Paul felt it was important to put Daniel's book title in the episode title, but Bill's suggested title is too good not to place somewhere:
TSSM: NEW BOOK EXPLORES MEANING IN MOTION
- In this new episode of the “That’s So Second Millennium” podcast, your host Paul Giesting, assistant professor of mathematics and sciences at Wyoming Catholic College, interviews his faculty colleague, Dr. Daniel Shields, assistant professor of philosophy. Shields’s book, Nature and Nature’s God: A Philosophical and Scientific Defense of Aquinas’s Unmoved Mover Argument, has just been released by Catholic University of America Press and is available for purchase here.
- This discussion is tailor-made for these two Catholic scholars who bring broad scientific and philosophical knowledge, plus fervor for conversations at the intersection of multiple disciplines, to their research and teaching. It is also tailor-made for the “TSSM” podcast, which seizes this golden opportunity for a curtain-call while remaining on official hiatus. The podcast generated about 150 episodes between 2018 and 2022, with co-host Bill Schmitt. They focused on the intersection, incorporating everyday life and the pursuit of virtuous wisdom—past, present, and future.
- Shields makes reference to Dr. Robert C. Koons, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Koons wrote a review of Nature and Nature’s God, praising its integration of natural philosophy and metaphysics. The book combines scientific knowledge with insights into the writing of St. Thomas Aquinas.
- Shields and Giesting go into depth on Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God, especially his favored “first way”—arguing our cosmos filled with motion needs an “unmoved mover” at its origin (and beyond). The discussion elaborates on the idea that God keeps everything in motion.
- The book, Shields explains, goes on to apply natural philosophy and metaphysics to such subjects as statistical mechanics, contemporary cosmology, and even biology.
- Through it all, Shields and Giesting make mention of many historical figures, from Aristotle to Copernicus to Newton to Maimonidesto Helmholtz. Present-day references include Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, known as the Pope’s Astronomer, and quantum physics scholar Sean Carroll.
Monday Sep 13, 2021
Ep 132 – The Long Road to Mathematical Physics
Monday Sep 13, 2021
Monday Sep 13, 2021
A solo episode from Paul today inspired by the content of Wyoming Catholic College’s Deductive Reasoning in Science course (SCI 301).
- Greek arithmetic and the Pythagoreans
- The crisis of incommensurables (irrational numbers)
- The triumph of geometry over arithmetic
- Emphasis on axiomatic systems and proofs: Euclid
- Archimedes: physics within the Euclidean paradigm
- Aristotle and the medieval: qualitative and categorical accounts of motion
- The long reach of ancient methods and paradigms
- Galileo and his big ideas, shaky proofs, and tedious Euclidean methodology
- 16th century algebra and the need for negative numbers to simplify the cubic equation
- Galileo’s multiple cases of proportions of times, spaces, speeds in the Euclidean paradigm
- Overturns in algebraic notation and the advent of analytical geometry in the 17th century
- The looming role of calculus in Galileo’s attempts to argue by means of infinite parallels
- Imaginary and complex numbers in the solution of cubic equations with real roots, real physical problems
Monday Jun 28, 2021
Episode 128 - Radio Astronomer Signals Wonderment of ET Life
Monday Jun 28, 2021
Monday Jun 28, 2021
- Paul and Bill interviewed Timothy Dolch, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics at Hillsdale College. Dr. Dolch is a member of the Society of Catholic Scientists, and he spoke in June at the Society’s 2021 conference, titled, “Extraterrestrials, AI, and Minds Beyond the Human.”
- His talk, “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: An Overview,” offered his perspectives as an astrophysicist with expertise in radio astronomy. The talk, alongside others from the conference’s Saturday session, can be viewed here.
- Here are some links to terms used during the conversation. What is a parsec? What are the transient luminous events known as red sprites and blue jets? What is the Low-Frequency All-Sky Monitor operated at Hillsdale? What are SETI and the Arecibo Message? What is the Square Kilometer Array telescope now being built?
- As Dr. Dolch mentioned, part of the discussion at the conference dealt with differing expectations about the process of evolution as it might happen in extraterrestrial life. He referred to another speaker, Simon Conway Morris, Ph.D., an earth scientist studying evolution at the University of Cambridge.
- Dolch mentioned Solaris, a science fiction novel later made into a film. You can view the film here. This classic work imagines an alternative kind of conscious extraterrestrial life form—other than what human beings might call a person.
Our discussion with Dr. Dolch about the Hillsdale community included a mention of the college’s Center for Constructive Alternatives.
Tuesday Jun 08, 2021
Episode 127 - SCS Meeting 2021
Tuesday Jun 08, 2021
Tuesday Jun 08, 2021
Paul and Bill provide an on the scene review of the Society of Catholic Scientists Conference 2021 at the Washington, D.C. Hilton. The themes were Extraterrestrial Life, Artificial Intelligence, and Minds beyond the Human.
As an added service, here are some links provided by the after dinner speaker, Jennifer Wiseman, to works and groups dedicated to faith - science dialogue:
Book: "The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to
Hawking" (Editor Prof. Dennis Danielson, UBC; Perseus, 2000)
Book: "The Language of God", by Francis Collins (Director of the U.S. Human Genome
Project; Free Press, 2006)
Organizations and Websites:
Society of Catholic Scientists! catholicscientists.org
Dialogue on Science, ethics, and Religion (DOSER), American Association for the
Advancement of Science: aaas.org/doser
sciencereligiondialogue.org
Sinai and Synapses: sinaiandsynapses.org
American Scientific Amilation (ASA) asa3.org
(network of scientists, engineers, teachers, and science enthusiasts Interested in
the relationship of science and Christian faith)
Biologos.org
Science for the Church: scienceforthechurch.org
Scientists in Congregations: scientistsincongregations.org
Faraday Institute for Science and Religion: www.faraday.cam.ac.uk
Tuesday May 11, 2021
Episode 125 - Chris Baglow and Jay Martin (rerun, full episode)
Tuesday May 11, 2021
Tuesday May 11, 2021
- Paul and Bill are proud to present this encore episode featuring the Science and Religion Initiative featuring the Science & Religion Initiative program conducted by the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. In 2019, we interviewed Chris Baglow, Ph.D., director of the program, which equips Catholic high school educators with big-picture insights and detailed tools to communicate effectively regarding the complementarity of faith and reason, science and religion.
- We spoke with Prof. Baglow about topics covered in his recently published book, the second edition of Faith, Science, & Reason. He will be keynote speaker at the 2021 conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists, scheduled for June 4–6 in Washington, DC. Find information about the conference
- We also spoke with Jay Martin, Ph.D., a scholar in systematic theology who was the Science & Religion Initiative’s assistant director and is now Assistant Teaching Professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Theology.
- The initiative, with support from the Templeton Foundation, encourages a coordinated approach to educating young Catholics, helping them to avoid the trap of a focus on science as an exclusive source of truth and “real” knowledge. Such a focus can drive students away from the Catholic Church’s wisdom and values if it dismisses religious faith as meaningless—not worth serious engagement in their minds and hearts.
Monday Nov 25, 2019
Episode 087 - Fr. Robert Spitzer and Intellectual Culture (rerun)
Monday Nov 25, 2019
Monday Nov 25, 2019
Unfortunately, this week Paul got deathly ill and that prevented us from recording the promised "end of the world" episode. Here instead is a re-edited version of Bill's interview with Fr. Robert Spitzer from August 2018 (originally run as Episode 20). One of our earliest interviews and still, amid all the great guests who have given time to this little podcast, one of the best.
Monday Jul 22, 2019
Episode 069 - Fr. Lawrence Machia OSB and Daniel vanden Berk, part II
Monday Jul 22, 2019
Monday Jul 22, 2019
- For background on Fr. Machia and Dr. Vanden Berk and this interview, see the show notes for Episode 68.
- In Episode 69, we mentioned approvingly one of the many books about Galileo, who was central to Fr. Machia’s talk at the conference. The book is Galileo’s Daughter. Contrary to a still-commonplace assumption in popular culture and the average person’s understanding of history, Galileo did not see his life as one centered on conflict with the Catholic Church.
- People’s instincts to see a huge conflict between science and religion in our own time deserve to be taken seriously. Co-host Paul points out that, even in his youth, he was interested in the polemic potential between his faith and his interest in geology. This was crystallized (no pun intended) by his reading of Great Geological Controversies, published in 1983 by Oxford University Press. It identified challenges—among scientists themselves—which were raised to previous understandings in geology.
- How can scientists of faith, such as the members of the Society of Catholic Scientists, play a role in addressing the conflict between science and religion as it exists today? They can act as witnesses to the compatibility of the two fields of knowledge in their own lives, said Dr. Vanden Berk.
- Fr. Machia pointed out that, as expressed by Saint John Paul II, one key to the compatibility is that one discipline does not pretend to do what the other does. Don’t read the Bible as a science text, he said, since science is not what the Bible is about; it spends a relatively tiny amount of time on subjects that might be construed to be science-focused. The two fields of knowledge have their own distinct competencies.
- Saint John Paul II wrote about the compatibility of science and religion. Here’s an essay by noted bioethicist Father Tad Pacholczyk on the subject, drawing from John Paul’s insights.
- As Fr. Machia points out with reference to the insights of Pope John Paul, one area of relationship between the disciplines of science and religion is the subject of ethics. After all, what’s the point of doing anything, like scientific research, if you’re not thinking about why you’re doing it? In the case of science, humans confront issues of power over creation—and how to exercise that power. That answer is informed by how we see our humanity, and that question was exactly the topic of the SCS conference at which we held this podcast discussion.
- Galileo himself wrote about the compatibility of these fields of knowledge in his letter to Madame Christina of Lorraine in 1615. Here’s an essay discussing that letter.
Times continue from the Episode 68 listing.
28:00 Galileo's Daughter
30:00 Biblical minimalism
32:00 Geological arguments about the Flood
34:00 Conflict thesis persistence; Daniel another who never saw the conflict
36:00 Need to teach the contemporary theory, wherever our religious theories place us
37:00 Contributions of Catholic scientists to the future of science: need to respect the "volume argument"
38:00 Galileo on the Bible as not an astronomy textbook
40:00 Past, present and future of science
42:00 Wrapup
Monday Jul 15, 2019
Episode 068 - Fr. Lawrence Machia OSB and Daniel vanden Berk, part I
Monday Jul 15, 2019
Monday Jul 15, 2019
- Father Lawrence Machia, OSB, is a Benedictine monk at St. Vincent College and Archabbey in Latrobe, PA. The public can view his 2019 Society of Catholic Scientists presentation on You Tube.
- Father Machia’s talk made reference to Galileo’s letter to Benedetto Castelli.
- Dr. Daniel Vanden Berk is an associate professor of physics at St. Vincent College.
- Fr. Machia and Dr. Vanden Berk, both very interested in astronomy, have worked together on designing planetarium shows on the St. Vincent campus. They have always seen the complementarity of science and religion, faith and reason, in contrast to many people’s rejection of religion based on supposed conflicts with scientific, rational, experiential learning.
- Dr. Vanden Berk was intrigued at an early age by the “Cosmos”- series presented on PBS by Carl Sagan, but the program posited a conflict between science and faith.
- Among Dr. Vanden Berk’s astronomical adventures: working on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. He has worked with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, processing data captured by the Digital Sky Survey.
Episode timeline:
3:00 Machia's time in college, science to theology
5:00 Machia's beginning to discern a religious vocation
8:00 St. Vincent College and the archabbey
10:00 Pre-novitiate and novitiate
12:00 Vows
15:00 Why TSSM, following on from Lawrence's plans to finish and continue his physics education
16:00 Begin vanden Berk
18:00 Sci-fi influences
20:00 He and his wife's discernment process
22:00 Daniel's early career, the early Hubble mission
24:00 Sky surveys
26:00 Texas sky survey
Monday May 06, 2019
Episode 058 – Let’s Act Like We’re on the Winning Side (Since We Are)
Monday May 06, 2019
Monday May 06, 2019
This ended up being an emergency episode Paul recorded solo, since Zencastr ate all but a few minutes at the beginning of each recording. There seem to be serious problems with Zencastr since Paul’s MacBook died and he had to resurrect his Windows laptop.
The Big Bang; cosmology seems to require a beginning, uncaused cause
Problems of mind; intellect / qualia, possibility of free will.
There is no materialist explanation of human intellect, only assertions of dogma and crude shufflings of the feet.
Ongoing occurrence of miracles, Lourdes medical board, Fatima, Shroud of Turin; Bob Schuchts
There are far too many miracles and supernatural phenomena that defy materialist explanation: Eucharistic miracles, healings at Lourdes and elsewhere, Fatima, demonic possession…
The testimony of the first Christian disciples requires absolutely crazy explanations that themselves defy our best science even if we reject the idea that Jesus rose from the dead.
The continuing existence and expansion of the Church in the face of persecution is likewise historically unparalleled, save only for the continued existence of Judaism.
Second of all, it provides perspective and healing for human problems that nothing else does.
John Warner Wallace from Breakpoint podcast; LAPD homicide officer
What has God done in my life... we GET to that, we don't start there like Mormons
Christianity provides a shockingly direct answer to the question of evil: the transcendent, all-good God is Himself willing to experience it.
The Christian faith continues to spread in Africa and Asia in the face of continued persecution, whether of the violent or of the brainwashing variety. Why is that?
The attempts of Western society to escape Christianity have made us amazingly miserable amid all our material possessions and security. Why do we so halfheartedly turn away from these distractions?
The most characteristic failing of our age, I would argue, is addiction, and addiction has evoked a powerful response in the form of the Twelve Steps. Although these Steps are deliberately offered to everyone with no attempt made to proselytize them to any specific religion—indeed many recovering addicts refuse to identify themselves as religious—nevertheless, the principles of the Steps are completely and suspiciously consistent with Catholic Christianity.
The Catholic intellectual tradition has a tremendously formidable intellectual structure, the most robust philosophical realism, an enormous storehouse of moral philosophy and psychological insight, and a wealth of stories of human drama in the lives of both saints and sinners.
Why do we slave along as intellectual second or third-class citizens in the modern world? I was just looking at the want ads of literary agents and realized that they are all blithely “progressive” members of the stumbling, bumbling cultural vanguard. Our culture is shaped by stories forged out of this nihilistic experience of forgetting an entire civilization’s worth of wisdom.
We are looking to help out at the Society of Catholic Scientists Conference this year, and are in talks about how we can do that. We’re really excited about working to create a greater sense of community among Catholic scientists!
Sunday Mar 31, 2019
Sunday Mar 31, 2019
0:00 - The question of relativism vs. hyperrationalism
1:00 - God's love is not a "fact" but, say, hominid ancestry is
1:30 - Tapping into the belief in the rationality of science to bring back belief in reality in faith
2:30 - "Kicking in the back door of relativism"
4:00 - Linkages between theology, philosophy, and science: e.g. logical consistency
5:30 - Effects on the rest of schools that participate in the Science & Religion Initiative
6:30 - Encouragment to integrate, say, history, economics with faith as well
7:00 - Congregation for Sacred Doctrine 1977 "The Catholic School"
8:00 - Faith & literature, arts
9:30 - The true limits of dogma; need to understand how limited Catholic dogma really is, and how non-restrictive
13:00 - Teachers woefully overworked and underpaid, not given the ability to succeed
14:30 - Blessed to have excellent but also humble panelists & experts intending to listen to one another
19:00 - Story of the second & first editions of Baglow's textbook