Artwork: The Ghent Altarpiece, 15th century

Stay tuned later in April for an episode featuring the name Sixtus...only five of them but quite the history.

--Paul

Image credit for Christ, the Man of Sorrows: https://www.wga.hu/html/c/ceccarel/sorrows.html

1. The bracket is back! Paul’s application of March Madness oddsmaking to the name and fame of popes throughout history returns in this episode. Co-hosts Paul and Bill, after completing a tour of popes called Leo, now look at Pope Gregory, a popular name that appeared in sixteen iterations. This makes for an informative roller coaster ride through the past.

2. This chain started out with a man actually born as Gregory. He chose to be Pope Gregory I and ruled in the Vatican in the years 590-604, but the Catholic Church has chosen to call him Gregory the Great. He did much to shape the Church of the Dark Ages and Medieval times. He was a great administrator, even helping to “orchestrate” the development of Gregorian Chant. He is a canonized saint.

3. Gregory II reigned in 715-731. He was one of the popes dealing with warring European factions and with the rise of Islam. He is a canonized saint.

4. Gregory III, whose term was 731-741, addressed issues such as iconoclasm, a penchant among some European Catholic factions as well as in Islam.

5. Paul goes on to tell tales of Gregory IV (827-844) and of Gregory V (996-999), who was the first German pope, and of Gregory VI (1045-1046). This simoniac resigned a year before his death.

6. Gregory VII (1073-1085) was born Hildebrand of Sovana. This great reformer is a canonized saint. Gregory VIII ruled for two months in 1187.

7. Gregory IX (1227-1241) was followed by Gregory X (1271-1276) and by Gregory XI (1370-1378), who was the last French pope and the last pope to reign in Avignon as the holy see.

8. Gregory XII (1406-1415) He was the last of the Roman line during the Western Schism (1378–1417), when the papacy was contested by antipopes in Avignon (France) and in Pisa (Italy).

9. Gregory XIII (1572-1585) promulgated the Gregorian Calendar.

10. Gregory XIV had a short tenure in 1590-1591. Then came Gregory XV (1621-1623).

11. Gregory XVI (1831-1846) presided over debates on how to handle the future of the papal states, and he supported traditional monarchies in Europe, says Britannica. He was the last pope named Gregory.

12. The classic papal name Gregory provides a throughline for viewing immense change between the secular and the sacred, spanning conflict and continuity in the first and second millennia of the Common Era. The calendar changed, but the Church is still here.

Photo: Unidentified, San Gregorio Magno, 18th century, carved and painted wood, 27 1⁄2 x 9 5⁄8 x 9 1⁄4 in. (69.8 x 24.5 x 23.6 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Teodoro Vidal Collection, 1996.91.58A-B

Artwork: by Francesco Solimena - Web Gallery of Art: Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

1. “That’s So Second Millennium” retains its online longevity, posting this 149th episode. We invite listeners to keep returning with us to our past-present-future perspectives on the world’s third millennium (Anno Domini or Common Era). Former college professor Dr. Paul Giesting (call him Paul) resumes and expands his discussion of the “pope name bracket” he created, inspired partly by the 2025 basketball season but well-informed by the Church’s remarkable past.

2. In this podcast’s new season of episodes, which began with Papal Names Bracket—Part 1, we continue our review of popes’ names in context, including the popularity of certain names. It’s a handy launch pad for a quick and insightful tour of history.

3. See below the database Paul established as a guide to our sweeping review of the au courant name “Leo.” Like the “TSSM” podcast, it keeps popping up!

4. (Paul credits assistance from The Catholic Encyclopedia, still authoritative though first published in 1914 and preserved and presented at the New Advent website. As a valuable resource, it too keeps popping up.)

5. Pope St. Leo I "The Great" 440-461 - of the Tome and the pacification of Attila the Hun

Pope St. Leo II 682-3

Pope St. Leo III 795-816 - who crowned Charlemagne in 800

Pope St. Leo IV 847-853

Pope Leo V 903?

Pope Leo VI 928-9

Pope Leo VII 936-9

Pope Leo VIII 964-5

Pope Leo IX (Bruno) 1049-54 - early reformer in an era of simony and clerical incontinence

Pope Leo X (Giovanni de Medici) 1513-1521 - Renaissance pope at the time of Luther

Pope Leo XI (Alessandro de Medici) 1605

Pope Leo XII (Annibale della Genga) 1823-1829

Pope Leo XIII (Gioacchino Pecci) 1878-1903 - Author of Rerum Novarum

6. Paul inserts this personal comment about his presentation, recorded Jan. 17, 2026, before the historical tour begins: Please pardon the awkward insertion of "from Irenaeus of" [Lyon] into the episode toward the end...I had originally, mistakenly, called him Ignatius...and a few oddly timed pauses where I took the opportunity to blank out some even more excessive than usual "uhs". I miss podcasting and being in the classroom to keep me sharper on my speaking skills.

7. Note that Pope Leo XIII and our present-day Pope Leo XIV are scholars of the Catholic Church’s Canon Law. You can read the entire tome here. Now that’s transparency!

8. Bill Schmitt concludes the episode with his co-host contributions, kindly appended to the podcast by producer Paul. Bill’s dual focus is the context of Pope Leo XIII’s huge contributions and their relevance to these days of Leo XIV. Leave it to Bill to segue from profound Church history to the subject of Greenland.

9. You can read Bill’s ongoing “Phronesis in Pieces” commentaries—on the intersection of Catholic values, public affairs, and trends in communications—at billschmitt.substack.com and at OnWord.net.

Updated bio of Bill Schmitt: Bill Schmitt is a journalist, educator, and marketing communications specialist who has been an adjunct professor of English and media at several schools, most recently Holy Cross College in Notre Dame, IN. He served on the communications staff of the University of Notre Dame from 2003 to 2017, managing many projects and joining in a wide range of multimedia, interdisciplinary collaborations. Since then, his freelance work has included feature-writing, editing, podcasting, and blogging, with much of his work centered on the Catholic faith. Bill holds a BA from Fordham University and an MPA from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Find his work at billschmitt.substack.com, OnWord.net, and billschmitt-onword on Linked-In.

TSSM: NEW BOOK EXPLORES MEANING IN MOTION

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. The book, Shields explains, goes on to apply natural philosophy and metaphysics to such subjects as statistical mechanics, contemporary cosmology, and even biology.
6. 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.

• We talked about Wyoming Catholic College, where Paul is on the faculty, and we talked Holy Cross College, where Bill taught as an adjunct professor for three semesters before moving from South Bend, IN, to Troy, NY, in 2022. Both solidly Catholic colleges, we agreed, excel in their efforts to integrate the different aspects of our humanity and the various forms of knowledge within the hearts and minds of students.
• Paul and Bill are inveterate Catholic communicators and educators. Learn more about Paul’s background in teaching, consulting, and public service. Learn more about Bill’s life as writer-editor, broadcaster-blogger, and author.
• Here are some of the people we have been privileged to interview: SCS president Stephen Barr; planetary scientist Jonathan Lunine; astrophysicist and astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ; theologian Paul Seongh Chung; Magis Center president and EWTN series host Father Robert Spitzer, SJ; astrochemist Karin Oberg; neurobiologist Maureen Condic; speaker-evangelist Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers; pro-life experts Richard Doerflinger and Christopher Bell; geologist Anne Hofmeister; cybersecurity expert Michael Cloud; psychologist Darcia Narvaez; business professor-author Anjan Thakor; and soul and spiritual musician Micki Miller. Learn more about them in the show notes accompanying their TSSM episodes. Thanks also to our friend, composer and performer Vin Marquardt, for writing our podcast’s closing theme for a long time, “Igneous Grok.”

Not respecting our emotions leads them to hijack us in many ways. A notable example is compulsive behavior or obsessions. The extreme versions of these we call addictions.

Matthew and Chantal developed their emotional fitness practice in order to reach people across a variety of cultural and economic backgrounds in South Africa, children in particular. Learn more about Matthew and Chantal's work at 5th Place.

Note: Paul received a one month access pass to the 5th Place class on emotional fitness prior to recording this episode. Nothing else of monetary value was exchanged.

Be sure to check out:

Scott: Causing the Effect Podcast, on YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram

Our interview

Scott's recommended read, Mindfulness in Plain English

• Info on the conference
• SCS YouTube channel with videos of talks
• Link to the slides for Paul's talk on uranium and nuclear power

1. Darcia Narvaez, who holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Minnesota, is a prolific public intellectual who uses many tools of multimedia communication to do research and to address needs of everyday people. Her work enhances and taps deeply rooted wisdom about human nature so that it can be applied in everday tasks, such as parenting.
2. She is a Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of Notre Dame. Links to much of her work can be found at her personal website, as well as her Notre Dame faculty site.
3. A capstone of Prof. Narvaez’s interdisciplinary scholarship is her 2014 book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom. See her summary of the book.
4. She received the Expanded Reason Award, a distinctive salute to innovative research in the spirit of Pope Benedict XVI, in 2017. The honor is bestowed by the Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation.
5. In recent years, she has invested much research in a source of useful insights for families drawn from the concept of a nest for children that humans have inherited from their ancestors. Learn more about this work at org and evolvednest.org.
6. Also see her blogs, including one she writes for Psychology Today.

Paul and Bill have interviewed Darcia Narvaez previously in episodes 55-56 and 96.

In any case, the seventeenth century would be the one in which Greek mathematics and Aristotelian natural philosophy gave way precipitously to new approaches. Algebra, lurking in the background of Greek thought and poking its head above the canopy in Arabian and Italian mathematics, would finally spawn analytic geometry and calculus. The focus and methods of natural philosophy would shift in many ways, including the use of mathematics and a great increase in the number of people collecting observations and conducting experiments and discussing their results with others. The existing sciences of astronomy, mechanics, botany, and zoology would be transformed, and chemistry and geology would be born outright. Inventions like the telescope and microscope would begin to reveal unsuspected layers of richness in the universe.

-Bacon: bio and politics -The Reformation had to attack Scholastic *theology* but the universities continued to be heavily Aristotelian -Aristotle and the distinction between philosophy and science that would be inverted by the 19th century -Aristotle's focus on deduction and Bacon's polemical critique of the syllogism: "The New Organon" -The role of induction and statistical reasoning; Bacon's blind spot for mathematics and his tables

Image: Francis Bacon by Paul van Somer, courtesy Wikimedia (By Paul van Somer I - pl.pinterest.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19958108)

1. Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers is one of the most incisive and authentic Catholic speakers and authors who have arisen to serve the New Evangelization, including an outreach to the younger generations who hunger to combine secular reality and meaningful Church values.

2. Paul and Bill know Deacon Harold through our connections to the University of Notre Dame. But the Deacon’s reputation has spread internationally; as a scholar and a presenter nicknamed “the Dynamic Deacon,” he offers large groups from many backgrounds fresh resources for spiritual renewal, including the refreshment of male spirituality. This topic is masterfully addressed in his book, Behold the Man.

3. Deacon Harold has appeared frequently on the EWTN Catholic radio and television networks. Recently, he took part in a discussion on racism and Catholic responses in an episode of the “Franciscan University Presents” program.

4. A number of other books authored by Deacon Burke-Sivers over the years can be found here.

Bill, also a Secular Franciscan, recently appeared on Dave's podcast, and I spoke with Bill about that conversation regarding journalism and virtuous communication. We discuss whether missionaries and scientists are also journalists and the spiritual value of seeking and spreading truth. Be sure to find their original conversation at Dave's site.

1. Greek arithmetic and the Pythagoreans
2. The crisis of incommensurables (irrational numbers)
3. The triumph of geometry over arithmetic
4. Emphasis on axiomatic systems and proofs: Euclid
5. Archimedes: physics within the Euclidean paradigm
6. Aristotle and the medieval: qualitative and categorical accounts of motion
7. The long reach of ancient methods and paradigms
8. Galileo and his big ideas, shaky proofs, and tedious Euclidean methodology
9. 16th century algebra and the need for negative numbers to simplify the cubic equation
10. Galileo’s multiple cases of proportions of times, spaces, speeds in the Euclidean paradigm
11. Overturns in algebraic notation and the advent of analytical geometry in the 17th century
12. The looming role of calculus in Galileo’s attempts to argue by means of infinite parallels
13. Imaginary and complex numbers in the solution of cubic equations with real roots, real physical problems

Show notes prepared by TSSM co-host Bill Schmitt

Find out more at:

https://wordonfire.institute/faith-and-science-summit

If you're a Word on Fire Institute member:

https://wordonfire.institute/faith-and-science-summit-wofimembers

The book and our interview discuss what seems as if it should be common sense: people perform better when they believe what they're doing has a higher purpose than extracting paychecks and profit. Yet this common sense observation is now counter to decades of economic orthodoxy, both in the "practical" world and in academia, which focus on evaluating ways for employers to control and coerce employees using the tools of the market system. And it's not entirely surprising, since in many ways human nature is always poised to devolve into this style of interaction. Listen in and, if you're anywhere near as intrigued by this work as I was, read their book for more.

• Thakor co-authored The Economics of Higher Purpose: Eight Counterintuitive Steps for Creating a Purpose-Driven Organization with Robert Quinn, business professor emeritus at the University of Michigan.
• Thakor referred to a University of Michigan study of call-center workers. They came away with a higher sense of purpose—and effectiveness—after talking with students who had received scholarships based on fund-raising efforts in which the workers were participating. If you change a worker’s mental map for seeing their job, this affects their performance.
• Authenticity requires a business leader’s believable commitment to—and passion about—the organization’s higher purpose, Prof. Thakor said. He also referred to insights from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks about the importance of societal and organizational motivation stemming from a sense of covenant, not merely contract. Covenant entails a sense of shared purpose.
• Noted business executive Bob Chapman says 88 percent of American workers say they want a sense of higher purpose but don’t feel it is integrated in their work life. Thakor said his own research shows that employees whose companies have a sense of purpose are more likely to describe a sense of purpose in their lives—a spillover effect.
• The commitment to purpose must be top-down. Then, it cascades through the organization if you help employees learn and absorb what it means for them and their job, Thakor said.
• Harvard Business Review had a special issue on the importance of a sense of purpose.

Our discussion with Dr. Dolch about the Hillsdale community included a mention of the college’s Center for Constructive Alternatives.

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

1. Jean-Pierre Isbouts, Ph.D., is a best-selling author, historian, and filmmaker who has invested decades of work in to understand and explain the Biblical foundations of Christian faith from an interdisciplinary perspective. His career as a humanities scholar began with his doctoral degree from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He is a professor of human development at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, CA.
2. Isbouts’s latest book, published in 2017 by National Geographic, is In the Footsteps of Jesus: A Chronicle of His Life and the Origins of Christianity. In addition to reading his books, you can take his course, “The History and Archaeology of the Bible” through the Great Courses library of products. He has made several notable films, and he recently has posted a series of videos embodying his new book, available by searching his name on Vimeo.
3. Isbouts talked with Paul and Bill about key findings that help to increase public understanding of the historical context of Jesus’ life and how he loves to deepen that understanding through visual images of lands where Jesus taught, plus explorations in maps, art, archaeology, and more. His book features a beautiful collection of images.
4. The discussion with TSSM looks into Jesus’ background, which is much more extensive than the typical label of “carpenter.” He notes that Jesus’ role in rebuilding the city of Sepphoris presaged his message of action and solidarity aimed to build the Kingdom of God.  The times during which he taught on earth were filled with social and economic chaos, when the rule of Herod and his son decimated the economy of Galilee and displaced thousands of peasants in severe poverty.
5. These historic times, Dr. Isbouts points out, resonate with readers today during a period of pandemic and polarization. We need to hear again Jesus’ call to come together as citizens of the Kingdom to practice basic principles of the Torah—compassion, social justice, and total faith in God as Father. Dr. Isbouts himself says his studies have drawn him closer to the figure of Jesus and “what fired his ministry.” The application of various fields of scholarship helps to tear down walls that many people today see dividing the worlds of science and faith.

1. Paul and Bill discussed a number of resources for pondering the nature of sin and how it affects our lives—as well as how people act based on their perceptions of sin in themselves and others. Without the Church’s wisdom and reliance on Christ’s grace, behaviors based on a misunderstanding or dismissal of sinfulness can distort our lives as individuals, in our minds and hearts, as well as our lives in society.
2. The co-hosts concluded that we need to invest time throughout our lives to discern how sin—and a need for forgiveness and grace which is poorly grasped in secular society—in integrated in our mental and spiritual health. We cannot just set aside the matter of original sin and our ongoing inclination toward evil. We tapped into the Catechism of the Catholic Church, especially the paragraphs around #400 and beyond, for guidance to sort this out.
3. Such guidance is important in countless cases, such as reflection on Jesus’ teaching on separating the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25.
4. We discussed The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.
5. Paul spoke of being pointed toward books by Henry Nouwen and commentary by Eckhart Tolle, a popular proponent of new-age syncretism with echoes of Christianity and Buddhism. He also spoke of exploring life-solutions propounded in EMDR therapy.
6. He mentioned having found useful insights when exploring that therapy through Francine Shapiro’s Getting Past Your Past.

1. Megan Levis is a fifth-year graduate student in bioengineering at the University of Notre Dame. The topic of her talk at the annual conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists was “Created in the Image and Likeness of Man.” She described the University’s bioengineering program.
2. Growing what can be deemed the beginnings of a human brain, for purposes of research, invites important ethical considerations. Levis has found resources at and through Notre Dame for deeper study of the responsibilities entailed in such research. She has worked with the John J. Reilly Center on science, technology and values. She has also been part of the Leadership Advancing Socially Engaged Research (LASER) program within the Graduate School.
3. Levis participated in an NSF-supported workshop on engineering design principles of multicellular living systems. Such workshops reflect a growing nationwide interest in the ethical and societal ramifications of rapidly developing technology related to systems of living things. The interest is prompting collaboration among philosophers, scientists, ethicists and engineers.
4. It’s a false dichotomy to separate faith and engineering. Levis said her advisor [Jeremiah Zartman] has been supportive of integrating values-related concerns, and that integration has made her research better. Now that there is an increased focus in bioengineering on the transfer, or translation, of knowledge from the lab bench to hospitals and clinical practice, the assessment of ethical implications is even more important.
5. Organoids are systems built from human cells that begin to look like an organ. In this new field, it’s important to create room for philosophical understanding, but right now the field is dominated by engineers and scientists largely using terms that sound like clunky jargon. Philosophy tells us we need to define our terms better, Levis said. We need better ways to describe what’s going on in accessible ways that allow for ethical thinking. Engineers tend to look at every component in its specifics, but there is value in seeing how one thing is similar to something else so both may come under similar ethical principles.
6. This is the second half of TSSM’s interview with Megan Levis. We talked at greater length about this graduate student’s research and its good fit with values-informed thought, with the Society of Catholic Scientists, and even literature. The Society held its third annual conference at the University of Notre Dame a few months ago.
7. In Megan’s presentation to the scientists at the SCS annual conference, she posed the question: How do you distinguish and exercise ethical responsibilities when something like brain organoids are “made in the image and likeness of man rather than the image and likeness of God.” Organoids are multicellular systems built from brain tissue. Are they just cell cultures or something so akin to the human being—particularly when they are brain organoids—that ethical duties arise out of respect for human dignity? This is a relatively new field where the scientific understanding and moral consideration still must develop in tandem, she explained. A New York Times article touched on some of the questions being raised.
8. Megan’s own main research project as part of her graduate studies at Notre Dame deals with microfluidics. They are devices, a kind of miniature bio-reactor, in which researchers can grow cells and small organs. Her goal is to make it easier and less expensive to make microfluidics that can be used in future research. Here are resources on microfluidics from the journal Nature.
9. Her collaborations in this area came about from her meeting with a leader in microfluidics technology, Dr. Fernando Ontiveros, while they were both attending a previous SCS conference. His team is exploring new applications for microfluidics, such as the growing of organoids.
10. At what point should moral concerns tied to the dignity of the human person “kick in” when dealing with the brain and brain organoids? Where do you as a person reside in the body? The existence of a capacity for rational thought is a conventional scientific benchmark for the existence of personhood, Megan said. There are many theories of the complex brain-mind-body connection with personhood. The human person is a complex creature, not reducible to the brain or body alone. Here’s an exploration of some insights from National Geographic.
11. There is a real role for literature in helping us to explore the many questions that combine operational questions of engineering and more abstract, integrated thinking about persons, Megan says. She recommends renowned author Walker Percy, who explored such subjects in Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. He comments that being a human is inevitably an uncomfortable process involving tensions within our nature. Our culture tends to look to science for answers to the big questions of human nature, but literature and art are pathways to answers too; literature allows us to think without predispositions and suppositions, to discover truths about ourselves and the world that transcend scientifically measurable parts. As Megan put it, the ability to wonder about the world is a gift that is transmitted sometimes through engineering and sometimes through literature and art.
12. Megan has been able to work with Ontiveros while he has done research and prepared journal articles at Notre Dame. With the support of mentors and advisors, she has embraced opportunities at Notre Dame and elsewhere to spend time thinking about faith and science in relationship. She attended a conference with like-minded graduate students interested in these connections. She has appreciated the insights of SCS president Stephen Barr and microbiologist Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, OP, a speaker at this year’s SCS conference. Barr is the author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith.
13. Austriaco has recorded a podcast available through the Thomistic Institute titled The Science and Practice of Christian Prayer.
14. What does Megan recommend for graduate students and others who want to advance in their bioengineering studies while staying informed and mindful about the faith-related aspects? She highlights the power of community, building friendships and conversations over time with a diverse range of people on similar journeys, including philosophy and science. One can attend relevant lectures and conferences, such as those sponsored by Notre Dame’s De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. She recommends the resources of the Collegium Institute. Building and updating such mindfulness is a long-term process requiring persistence, she adds.

Do not blame Morgan for the sound quality of this episode! All complaints should be directed to Paul at the email link at https://www.thatssosecondmillennium.net.

Bill and I hope to be back in action soon.

1. Co-hosts Paul and Bill agreed that the film—and Broadway play—called “Network” shows foresight in its reflections about human dignity and corporate values in competition on an individual and global scale.
2. Pope Damasus changed the dominant language of the (Roman) Catholic Church from Greek to Latin (what would have been called the vernacular language in that time and place).
3. John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty and helped to advance the authentically liberal project of freeing up human creativity and truth-seeking in the marketplace of ideas.
4. Many U.S. citizens (and people in general) are reverting to tendencies toward self-centeredness in human communication and civil society—tendencies against which common-good principles of the United States have served as societal guard-rails with remarkable success during much of our history.
5. The self-centeredness runs counter, too, to the zeal for connection-making which drives many messages from Pope Francis. By the way, that drive is a factor leading to the long length of the Pope’s encyclical, like his most recent document, Fratelli Tutti.
6. Communication (and communities like those in social media) tend toward exclusion of unwanted information, rather than a greater spirit of inclusion.
7. The Distracted Mind, recommended by Paul, is an academic book that is timely reading in what Bill calls this media world of “information inflation.” That inflation leads toward a purposeful or kneejerk limitation on attention—one cannot consume everything from today’s firehose of data!—and even what Paul described as weaponization of attentiveness.
8. To the degree that a sense of exceptionalism guides us, history may justify some adoption of that in our thinking about the principles and aspirations of the United States. But it can be risky if it shuts off our thinking about, or respect for, the uniqueness and dignity that individuals around the world bring to the idea marketplace. We can’t reduce our thinking to dismissive judgments against them as merely packages of entirely good or bad ideas.
9. Pope Francis writes for a present moment that needs a strong sense of right and wrong but also a realistic, holistic, transparent vision of the earthbound state of human thinking around the world. Paul notes that this can lead toward a sense of hopelessness, but both Paul and Bill say the papal messages—and the faith behind them—can offer a hope based on reliance on God’s operation in daily life. The messages include his annual teachings for World Communications Day.
10. That’s a better approach than a video-game philosophy favoring destruction—and deconstruction—before a rebuilding in line with modern principles and atomistic priorities, as Paul points out. The better approach allows for fuller embrace of complex, reflective thinking, of “adulting” with a sense of moderation and responsibility to individuals and the common good, to the past as well as the future. Bill points out that the U.S. Constitution is one earthly source of insight from the past There are other such sources, too,  Paul notes. GK Chesterton spoke of a population’s respect for the wisdom of its predecessors as a “democracy of the dead.”

Insight by Bernard Lonergan and 20/20 hindsight.

What else (besides the coronavirus and similar epidemics) are we not preparing for? Can we? We can't know all the unknowns, and it is somewhere between difficult and impossible to quantify the risks even for the things we can anticipate. Yet quantification is reasonable and laudable because individual lives do matter... the 1,000,001st victim of a tragedy just as much as the first.

Problem areas:

Education and the bureaucratic / engineering mentality "we already know everything we need to make a decision" and "let's do something to make it look like we're doing something."

Finance and the herd mentality. Bullwhip chains of overreaction in the face of unknown risks. A reacts semi-rationally to the situation, B overreacts to A's reaction, C overreacts to B, etc. Federal forgiveness, however good in itself, has the side effect of blinding banks to their own internal information channels regarding default rates, etc. Banks are looking around at employment figures and other data, guessing what to do, overreacting, looking at their peers and emulating the most extreme.

There are a lot of really tired people working in logistics right now.

Job seekers giving up due to pessimism and the difficulty in thinking statistically. It's hard for me to go ahead and spend the effort to do something when I know its individual success rate is well under 50%. Now things are worse. All that means is that more repetitions will be needed to achieve success. However, it is easy to fall into the fallacy of "it was hard before but worth trying; now it's harder and therefore not worth trying," making an all-or-nothing qualitative proposition out of something that in its nature is gradational and quantitative.

Hope really is a virtue.

Audio editing by Morgan Burkart.

Bill and Paul discuss attitudes toward masks, and then consider why the science wasn't more settled on the subject long before Covid-19. We discuss the obsession of modern society with all things novel and consider how this plays out in science, politics, and our individual lives and families.

    1. A discussion of masks as defenses against the pandemic led Paul and Bill to ponder how scientific knowledge about the functionality of these masks for the common good  is not always viewed as a fundamental, enduring value. In our media, the mask discussion gets wrapped up in political and symbolic and power-struggle considerations. The methodical pursuit of knowledge based on shared values and needs has been partly replaced by a marketplace of ideas that gets bored with what we know. Support for ideas gets hijacked by pursuits of vaguely defined notions of progress which are relativistic and individualistic and not systematically carried out through time.      2. Paul pointed out that he sees in the world of science that there are some surprising gaps in knowledge about certain things that resulted partly from people seeing no particular motivation—or research grant money—to drive knowledge forward. With some important exceptions, knowledge in some fields grows more randomly than through a coordinated sense of purpose. Paul recalled an earlier discussion about “p values” that can fail to give researchers the persistence born of confidence that next stages of knowledge will give us what we need to solve problems in a meaningful way.     3. As Paul put it, a “p value” may tell you the likelihood of your data given your hypothesis, but what we’d really like is to know the likelihood of our hypothesis given our data.     4. Bill pointed out that traditional notions of the university seemed to have a more obvious commitment to nurturing, collecting, and spreading knowledge so that it could become the reliable framework for incrementally  building new knowledge that brings us closer to solving problems. But there is a notion in the present-day university—and in the marketplace, as Paul agreed—that progress is gained through disruption—dismissing or dismantling or deconstructing current knowledge because it isn’t as exciting or satisfying as a march toward future knowledge can be. That knowledge is seen as inherently better, Bill said, but our eager disregard of today’s knowledge suggests we will treat tomorrow’s knowledge in the same dismissive way. So we’re moving but not really expecting to get anywhere better as a society.       5. We’re caught up in the search for novelty. We’re  looking for the next revolutionary thing that makes old learning moot. Shouldn’t we be trying to build and improve upon the good parts of the status quo. Can we find a golden mean between a love for innovation and a desire for preservation (a conformism?) that values the knowledge already acquired. In some sectors, has innovation been redefined at its very roots? Are we disinterested in the long-term trajectories of our human engagements and projects? Are we only focused on doing what’s new, bigger, and better in the current moment, leaving little interest in yesterday or tomorrow?     6. We’re describing a disposable mindframe. Today’s sense of urgency amid impending crises can make us so focused on new action for its own sake that we are willing to disrupt or tear down much of our current life and the history that brought us here. There seems to be too little argument in favor of recognizing the good things we have achieved and our responsibility to conserve/preserve these things. We have so much social capital built up over time, we feel less responsibility to preserve current sources of stability and sustainability. It seems okay to tear these things down. In periods of human history where survival has been more at stake, where there has been less of a cushion of social capital, the marketplaces of ideas and capital have more doggedly pursued incremental change which values and builds upon what has come before. On a grand scale, we don’t expect to feel a pain of loss, but at the personal and spiritual level, people are feeling the pain of loss, fear for the future, dislocation and disconnection, all the time. Indeed, our overall happiness as a society has eroded.

    7. People have come to see the future as so urgently problematic that they’re more willing to quickly and readily dispose of stuff from the past without allowing any grounded time or space for wise transitions. No one is coaching  us to press pause.

Audio editing by Morgan Burkart.

Find an overview of his distinguished career in this story about Dick’s zeal for researching and promoting education reform. (The story was written for Purdue’s College of Engineering by Bill last year.)

Dick’s book traces his growing concerns about problems in public elementary education. Those concerns led to extensive research from a business executive’s perspective, applying systems analysis skills from his background in engineering. Our interview probed not only the findings from that research, but even more current knowledge of education reform efforts which Dick continues to harvest and share. He has created an online gallery of videos for the general public, explicating what he has learned about educational-outcome statistics and various efforts to improve the outcomes. The videos are part of his “Elevate Teachers” website, which champions robust investments to help both teachers and students succeed.

1. This episode contains a conversation between Paul and Bill in which you’ll learn new things about their experience in particular fields—geology and journalism, respectively—and where their zeal to harvest and connect information bumps up against troublesome uncertainty. You’re accustomed to hearing us as podcast co-hosts, sharing our  opinions and our interviews with experts to explore insights at the intersection of science, everyday human experience, and the values of theology and philosophy. We welcome an audience that, like us, hungers to understand the details that well-informed research provides—in light of the wonder, mystery, and uncertainty that we complex human creatures provide. We embrace deeper and broader consideration and communication, and these values feed into our “day jobs,” which involve writing, teaching, consulting, and more.
2. Paul’s efforts to dig more deeply into the methods of purposeful scientific learning recently prompted him to enroll in a data-science “boot camp”—an intense, 12-week course offered by an organization called Metis. He wants to extract every bit of value from the oceans of data generated in this world. Or at least he wants the value that will serve his own colleagues and clients as he tackles projects and secondarily adds content to “Dr. G’s Blog,” named for him—Dr. Giesting. One of his guiding maxims is mentioned here: “No Data Left Behind.”
3. (Testifying to the diversity of the “That’s So Second Millennium” duo, Bill likes to focus on story-telling for clients to describe various accomplishments of science and values, sometimes faith and reason. And he’s writing in his  OnWord.net blog these days about crucial times in our world today that will require rich knowledge and deliberation alongside problem-solving strategies marked by prudent, civil, inclusive dialogues and inquiries. This is an example of the approach he’s formulating. But today’s podcast draws its energy mostly from the Paul’s recent ruminations.)
4. Those thoughts include a look back at something called the “p-value.” Their discussion of p-values in the world of scientific statistics led Paul and Bill into consideration of the co-existence of intellectual rigors necessary to the practice of research and unavoidable uncertainties inherent in the real-world application of data-driven knowledge. That co-existence of firm principles and subjective interpretation turns out to be a phenomenon that both co-hosts have experienced in their respective fields. They agreed that the pursuit of more and more data, nurtured by practicality and idealistic values, is a beautiful thing, but it’s not always possible. In many cases where a specific project is choosing and using a finite set of data, the consumers of scientific or journalistic information have reason to quote the skeptic’s famous aphorism that “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
5. Bill cited examples from the past reporting of political polls, which too easily can neglect important  nuances that should influence an audience’s interpretation. Both Bill and Paul noted that, during the Covid-19 crisis, the public is seeing science and its generation of statistics play out in real time, with massive policy implications, and the practice of “objective” science now seems to many people as iffy and subjective as theology-based interpretations of the world. That’s ironic since observers have said the availability of scientific certainty and experiential knowledge has driven them away from religion as a poor, mythological substitute for reality.
6. Neither co-host called for a dismissal of the knowledge gained through religion, philosophy, or  statistics; after all, in many policy matters surrounded by uncertainty, statistics are a huge part of the guidance empowering human reason. But there is much going on behind the scenes at every point in a statistics-driven exercise, with some of that context warranting caution in our binary decisions about importance and implementation. Paul acknowledged that he encountered this in preparing his capstone report for the Metis data-science program. Scientists have grappled with ways to assess the validity of some data, the replicability of some experiments, and the dominance of some assumptions about statistical analysis. Indeed, the “p-value” suggests good examples of doubts that have arisen.
7. This podcast discussion did not unearth any solutions for doubts about statistical findings, but it did prompt a meeting of the minds. Both the scientist and the journalist determined that all of us seeking to optimize understanding for reasonable policies and practices must continue our zealous pursuit and values-informed stewardship of data.

Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

Episode 107 of “That’s So Second Millennium” next month will include part two of the interview with Dick Garrett. If you find the audio quality for this episode a little lacking, don't blame Morgan... she's on vacation this week. It's all Paul's fault (as usual).

Liner notes by Bill. Audio editing by Morgan. Cover art for this epsiode was produced by Paul... in conjunction with the Landsat 8 mission, the scikit-learn and seaborn libraries, and Mauna Loa and Kilauea volcanoes. (See his final project slides here.)

1. His latest column for Catholic News Service examines the implications of the “Science Wins” maxim publicized by Pfizer Inc. in a recent TV commercial. You can see the commercial here.
2. Doerflinger mentioned libertarian bioethicist John Harris in connection with the developments and moral controversies surrounding research on embryonic stem cells some years ago. Once concerns about human dignity were successfully eased by the development of pluripotent cells, science and society both did win from a prudential pullback from reliance on embryonic cells.
3. Phronesis is practical moral judgment that integrates human wisdom and prudence to make the best decisions possible on public policy and practice given the facts human beings know from science—in light of virtue as a crucial factor.
4. In the Catholic journal First Things. James Hankins has written recently about Machiavelli as the political guru of his day, who introduced scientism as a values-free guideline for geopolitical strategy. Machiavelli’s own predictions about outcomes in the absence of moral judgments led to strategic failures rather than successes, Doerflinger pointed out.
5. The only law of history is the law of unintended consequences, according to Niall Ferguson, famed analyst of history, economics, and science. Doerflinger commented that unintended negative consequences have indeed been known to result from cases where science was unleashed without the exercise of human prudence.

Photo credit: The Criterion (Indianapolis)

John Ratey, popular psychologist, talks about how our sensory apparatus affects how we function in everyday life.

Paul’s comments on the subject of autism connect candidly with recollections from his early life.

Hilaire Belloc, a legendary British author of the early 20th century who wrote on many topics, famously was a friend and Catholic “fellow traveler” with G.K. Chesterton.

“Never waste a good crisis.” Bill says crises in our polity and society are often weaponized rather than used as a learning, community-building experience. This maxim, worded in different ways, has been attributed to various persons, from Rahm Emmanuel to Winston Churchill to Saul Alinsky. 

Image by Sukinah Hussain from Pixabay

1. Paul and Bill continued their conversation about skepticism toward science and religion. They touched on several examples of science failing to show that it “knows everything” or gets everything right. There must be a constant push for additional inquiry and knowledge. Bill said the teaching of religion in K-12 Catholic schools needs to express the hunger to learn more—the dynamic sense of joy in seeking God—just as the teaching of science sets an exciting stage for learning.
2. The co-hosts discussed the lack of sure scientific knowledge about the COVID-19 pandemic. This led to references to the Spanish flu. Its history is poorly understood by most people, just as there was poor understanding in 1918 about the flu’s origins and impacts.
3. Philosophy and natural science became unmoored from each other after the 17th century. Bertrand Russell appeared to share an opinion that Paul considers quite natural—the reluctance to accept that no philosophical inquiry into reality can be conducted without employing at least some original, foundational assumptions.
4. Stephen Pinker acknowledges that materialistic thinking suffers from logical inconsistencies, Paul said. He referred to Pinker’s landmark book, The Blank Slate, an inquiry into the origins of human nature.
5. Quantum physics, in its effort to explain how everything works by describing the behavior of atoms, is full of paradoxes, Paul said.

Image by Miroslava Chrienova from Pixabay

1. Tim Short, OFS, is a member of the Secular Franciscan Order, whose initials in Latin are OFS. This international, canonically approved Roman Catholic order was founded by Saint Francis of Assisi especially for laypeople. Members belong to local, regional and national fraternities. Tim is the director of formation for the Our Lady of Indiana regional fraternity. He previously served as formation director for the Immaculate Conception local fraternity of the Order (still commonly abbreviated as SFO in the United States), located in Mishawaka, Indiana.
2. Tim and podcast cohost Bill Schmitt are both professed members of the SFO, having professed a lifetime commitment to the Rule of Life which St. Francis composed. Francis also composed rules to govern orders of friars and nuns, the latter commonly called the Poor Clares.
3. Tim has been instrumental in starting a new website that will serve SFO fraternities’ needs for “ongoing formation.” Find this “OFS Ongoing” website at https://secularfranciscansusa.org/ongoing-formation-resources/ When you visit the site, you’ll see a major resource Tim composed for a series of small-group discussions that can be used by any fraternity but was used first by the fraternity in Mishawaka.  The resource, “A Journey Through John,” is based on the Gospel of John and  reflects the importance Secular Franciscans are to place upon the Gospels as keys Francis used in building an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ. Resources drawn from Franciscanism, Pope Francis, and the beloved “Peace Prayer of Saint Francis” have been composed by Bill Schmitt and are also described at the new website.
4. Other priorities in formation include an ever-deeper embrace of the Rule of Life and of the early writings from St. Francis and his friars who provided authoritative insights into the foundational Franciscan charisms.
5. Tim pointed out in our interview that Saint Francis lived during a time when the old ethos made little distinction between Catholic religious thinking and what we would call scientific thinking. A time of greater doubt and division was emerging during Francis’ lifetime (circa 1180-1226). Francis’ sense of mission emphasized peacemaking, healing, and an embrace of natural life in all of creation, so one can see him as a bridge-builder encouraging love and awe for circumstances we would deem ripe for scientific analysis.

See more of Tim's work at ofsongoing.com.

1. Paul and Bill continued a discussion that began in the previous episode. They allowed the sense of gravitas they felt in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic to push them along a path through many uncertainties—where it’s tempting to rely on one’s GPS guidance system and, if possible, an autonomous (self-driving) vehicle. But should human beings relieve themselves of all responsibilities for self-guidance, and if not, how should they accept and address those responsibilities?
2. Underlying this discussion was the perception that society has chosen to confront the pandemic through the wisdom of science, which boils down to a healthy use of reason, which of course is a God-given gift. But we are also blessed (and cursed?) with the gift of sensing that reason is not enough. Can we put ourselves on automatic pilot by trusting completely in calculations of risk and probability and a in human understanding that can’t take all possible values and outcomes into consideration?
3. Paul cited observations by Hilaire Belloc, a great British writer and Catholic commentator from the early 1900s. Belloc argued that being “practical” and “realistic” is  not enough, especially if a human being seeks to make decisions with Godlike precision, effectiveness, and comprehensiveness. For example, Paul pointed out that “social distancing” and related policy weapons being utilized against the spread of the Coronavirus are not enough to say that we are systematically reducing the risk of death or harm in an easily calculable way. For example, forbidding public gatherings of any significant size can be seen as a wise precaution against certain people becoming infected, but little thought is given to the fact that all the cancelled meetings of twelve-step programs means people who were being helped to address their own particular issues and risks might suffer tangibly from losing their support network.
4. At some point, there is a need to acknowledge that some risks, like human death, cannot be eliminated, and a perfect society cannot be achieved. This meshed with Bill’s concern about whether “social distancing” might push man people further toward the phenomenon of social polarization, characterized by isolation, indifference and marginalization in many instances. Or will the experience of being distanced wake us up to the unhealthy results of these characteristics and rein us back from the precipice of thinking we can define and enforce the right answers that will yield the best outcomes?
5. Ultimately, Bill and Paul agreed that humans seeking to provide humane, prudent leadership in a crisis must be “all in” as participants in a robust civic life in a well-ordered civil society that respects the many sides of individual experience. Can we put all our faith in the decision-making of a political system, especially if we have not made an equivalent commitment to enrich the body politic—and indeed to contribute in ways that go beyond mere gestures of political participation, such as voting?
6. We must take into account a larger part of the story of human challenges, not risk management alone. At the time of this writing, for example, Bill learned that the Governor of Pennsylvania, after having ordered the shutdown of all liquor stores in order to slow the spread of the virus, was reconsidering his decision. According to news reports, experts had told him that a sizable portion of the alcohol-dependent population could suffer severe consequences from suddenly withdrawn access to hard liquor, meaning harm would be done by other means.

Image by Angelo Giordano from Pixabay.

1. One should not assume that “social distancing” breaks connections. Paul and Bill got together to talk about the subject and found that it connects to many other things, at least as an intellectual exercise. But also with many emotional, spiritual and sociological implications.
2. Bill said that, upon first hearing about “social distancing,” he instinctively connected it to a phenomenon he ponders and writes about a lot—the phenomenon of social polarization. (He writes about it in his OnWord blog, and in 2018 he wrote a book (When Headlines Hurt: Do We Have a Prayer?) reflecting on Pope Francis’ concerns about the polarizing effects of contemporary news and digital information flows.
3. Social distancing, apart from the validity of scientific claims that it is needed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, looked to Bill like a physical, societal manifestation of the polarization trend which leads to the isolation, exclusion and defamation of people. It encourages them toward confirmation bias because they choose to hear only the opinions that back up their pre-conceived notions.
4. Paul said social distancing also seems to tie into America’s infatuation with the “loner.” He recalled the self-imposed isolation discussed in Robert D. Putnam’s 2000 book, Bowling Alone.
5. Both participants in the conversation connected the concept of loner with many ideas: the modern assumption that being a loner need not carry high risks, like it once did, because of the protection offered by government; the omnipresent promise among colleges that they will prepare their students to become “leaders” as opposed to followers; the observation by Alexis de Tocqueville (in Democracy in America) that Americans of the 1800s were instinctively individualists; and the more recent observation that we live in an age of celebrity when everybody wants to famous, even in relatively impotent, purposeless  ways.  This latter notion was discussed by Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft in an episode of EWTN’s “The Philosopher’s Bench.”
6. It is especially sad that, at a time when Pope Francis points out that the Church has many valuable responses to the tendency toward social polarization and isolation, “social distancing” has prompted an end to Mass attendance. As remarked in a blog post by David Seitz, OFS, one of Bill’s favorite Franciscan commentators, the loss of civic solidarity and civil conversation is a profound kind of penance.

Image by Austin Monroe from Pixabay.

Addendum: Paul pointed out the official podcast series of Purdue University’s College of Engineering, “Sounds Like the Future.” Bill says it has been one of the great privileges of his journalism and media-consulting career to collaborate with the College in launching the podcast, and he notes it could not have taken shape without the production skills, academic insights, valued friendship, and “great radio voice” contributed by Paul. New episodes will be posted monthly.

Audio production for this episode by Morgan Burkart.

1. University of Utah’s information page for Dr. Maureen Condic. She is an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy, with an adjunct appointment in Pediatrics. Her research focuses on the role of stem cells in development and regeneration. She has taught human embryology in the University’s Medical School for 20 years.
2. See Dr. Condic’s biographical summary in the list of speakers at the Society of Catholic Scientists 2019 conference titled, “What Does It Mean to Be Human?” At the conference, this embryologist and specialist in developmental neurobiology delivered the St. Albert Award Lecture: “Human Beings are Defined by Organization.”
3. Dr. Condic is the 2019 recipient of the St. Albert Award, named for Saint Albert the Great, the Catholic Church’s patron saint of natural scientists. The award is given annually to a Catholic scientist whose life and work give witness to the harmony that exists between the vocation of scientist and the life of faith. See more details about the award, including its previous recipients.
4. Dr. Condic’s previous awards include the Basil O’Connor Starter Scholar Research Award, created in 1973 and presented by the March of Dimes to support a young scientist’s promising new research. The March of Dimes was established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, initially to fight polio. Today, the foundation focuses on health problems in babies, especially premature birth, birth defects, and low birth weight. Find context for the program of research support here.
5. Dr. Condic also has been the recipient of a Scholar Award for research from the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience.
6. In 2018, she was appointed to the National Science Board. The NSB establishes the policies of the National Science Foundation and serves as advisor to Congress and the President.
7. She is a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which is dedicated to promoting the Catholic Church’s consistent life ethic and supporting research in bioethics and moral theology.
8. When confronted with alternative views and occasionally accused of being “brainwashed” with a pro-life stance, Dr. Condic says one must ask, what view actually makes more sense of the world? A quote from the episode: “What vision of the world actually accounts for most of the data? In my experience, it’s a Christian vision of the world, and particularly a Catholic vision of the world, that very much endorses precisely the kind of questioning mind that promotes scientific investigation….”
9. Another key thought from the episode: The information generated in scientific disciplines is so huge, it forces many scientists to make their own fields of specialized inquiry “narrower and narrower.” Also, “they have no time” to give deep consideration to many big questions about life, the world, and the origin of the universe. “Particularly in biology, there’s such an intoxication with success.” Individuals who are indeed brilliant and making remarkable progress for people may become confident that they can answer all the important questions.
10. Starting at about the 22-minute mark in this episode, Dr. Condic tells the story of an event that changed her life and produced her commitment to public advocacy and public education.“ She saw a need to combat ignorance or oversimplification about scientific advancements and to be “an advocate for patients and knowledge and factual information.”
11. Dr. Condic also provides a valuable, clear update on parts of the debate about disease treatments using embryonic stem cells as opposed to adult stem cells, with research on the latter having resulted in a huge number of clinical trials and prospects for various treatments. A major new phase of the research has moved on to the use of induced pluripotent stem cells, which do not raise the same ethical issues as embryonic cells.
12. In presenting the St. Albert Award during the Society of Catholic Scientists conference, president Stephen Barr, Ph.D., pointed out Dr. Condic’s “courageous public defense, on scientific and philosophical grounds, on the human status of human embryos.”
13. Our discussion of totipotent, pluripotent, and plenipotent stem cells helped to clarify a complex subject of great importance to many people, such as those who suffer from diseases awaiting therapies capturing the power of these cells. Dr. Maureen Condic, as a pioneer in this field, contributed insights in 2013 by developing the concept of plenipotent cells. See her journal article.
14. Our discussion also led to a sense of wonderment about the ability of cells to follow such complex paths of development, starting with the organism created when sperm and egg combine. The product and the process can easily be dismissed as a simple mass of cells, or one can recall Psalm 139:14, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” In this episode, we discussed how it seems viscerally sad that the amazement, which is itself so full of potential, can be lost in everyday discussions of human life.
15. Related to this, Dr. Condic pointed out that there is an unfortunate lack of philosophical education among many scientists. Here is a blog post from Scientific American discussing synergies between science and philosophy—synergies which are at the core of this podcast’s mission.
16. We discussed the relevance of the philosophical concepts of form and substance. Here’s a web page explaining those concepts.
17. This book, written by Dr. Condic and her brother sounds like it is a rare and valuable synthesis of philosophical and biological insights about life: Human Embryos, Human Beings. She noted in our episode that such an extended, on-point synthesis is rare for various reasons, including the need to clarify vocabulary used on both sides of the dialogue, avoiding the risk that we will talk past each other.
18. She has written another book, this one examining the biological and philosophical issues around human twinning, Untangling Twinning. It is scheduled for publication in the summer of 2019. For now, a computer search using this title yielded, as one of the first finds, a copy of a news release written by TSSM podcast co-host Bill Schmitt and posted at classicaltheism.com.
19. The conversation involving Dr. Condic, Dr. Giesting and Schmitt turned to the complexities of the nation’s debate about abortion. That debate engages a mix of biological facts (which may or may not be probed in the full context of updated knowledge), personal experiences, and deeply held principles, positions, and emotions including authentic sympathy for the circumstances in which pregnant women find themselves. Although providing scientific insights is a crucial advancement of the debate because people deserve to have comprehensive information, the laying out of certain biological facts alone will not necessarily change minds, Condic said.
20. In many cases, much of the public presentation of the abortion controversy dividing people is manufactured, but there is room for honest discussion on particular grounds. We each can play a part in adding to human understandings in this controversy. People evolve their judgments on the wide scope of the debate incrementally over time.
21. But the search for a full overview is complicated; indeed, Dr. Condic referred to difficulties she and her brother Samuel Condic encountered (different vocabularies, etc.) in compiling their book Human Embryos, Human Beings. The book aims to bring together philosophical and biological insights about human life at its beginning. In short, the abortion debate requires us to spend more time in listening to each other, asking questions, probing the basis of people’s stances, and less time in simply lecturing, she said.
22. Paul talked about his experience with identical twins in his family. Twinning is a complex arena for understanding “who you are,” raising core questions with biological and philosophical implications. Our discussion around the microphone extended to research on the topics of compaction and chimeras. Condic has written a book that delves into the complexities. Untangling Twinning is scheduled for publication this summer.
23. There are also biological phenomena complicating an understanding of our human nature in sexual terms. There can be complex factors differentiating between one’s genetic sex and one’s hormonal sex, Condic said. A very small segment of the population has genetically compound sexual identities. Intersex disorders can occur in a variety of ways, although in the vast majority of cases questions of a person’s gender identity are not grounded in physical causes, Condic said. Studies in some areas raise questions within the LGBTQ community itself. Among many, endeavors focusing on a “gay gene” that would undergird a statement that “I was born this way” have been diminished by a view that gender identity is fluid or is driven by non-genetic factors.

I didn't get her credited in the outro, but Morgan Burkart produced the audio for this episode. Like her style? Let us know in a review and look her up at Ball State University.

Photo: a deacon wearing a dalmatic, from Test Everything.

This podcast's title and logo were inspired by the "What Should I Do?" discernment retreat put on by the Indy Catholic young adult ministry this past weekend.

- What could this "new heavens and a new earth" possibly be? - How could Jesus appear in the heavens at the end of time if the human race has colonized multiple planets, or multiple solar systems, or multiple galaxies?

On the other hand, some of the predictions seem very possible, like the world being destroyed by fire (e.g., 2 Peter), which could take the form of several astronomical phenomena or our own nuclear holocaust.

In this episode, Paul sashays a bit into this even less frequented frontier region between science and Catholic doctrine.

1. Gold Masses for those in the natural sciences were celebrated in a dozen cities on Nov. 15, the feast day of St. Albert the Great, who is the patron saint of natural scientists. One of those Masses, as described by TSSM co-host Dr. Paul Giesting, took place in Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.
2. The Society of Catholic Scientists is the pre-eminent sponsor/supporter of these Gold Masses as part of an initiative established relatively recently. The Society’s website contains a page where the most comprehensive listing of planned Gold Masses is compiled.
3. What is a Gold Mass? The SCS provides this information.
4. Here are details of the life of St. Albert the Great.
5. The Criterion, newspaper of the Indianapolis Archdiocese, is expected to publish an article about the Nov. 15 Gold Mass in early December.

We simply don't know what the possibilities are for life beyond the chemistry that it uses here on Earth. A potential tragedy that we would want to avoid at almost any cost would be the introduction of terrestrial microbes into a viable environment elsewhere, where they could become invasive species, grow and potentially outcompete the native life, which we would never get the chance to study and understand. NASA and other space agencies have policies in place to address this risk... hopefully, they will work.

Dr. Jonathan Lunine is the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Science and chair of the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University. He is also the vice president and a co-founder of the Society of Catholic Scientists.

Christianity and Extraterrestrials?: A Catholic Perspective , by Marie George, is a book worth reading, Dr. Lunine said.

He thanked all those who spoke at the 2019 conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists, and he commented on the high quality of the event. The website provides links to several TSSM episodes interviewing conference speakers.

Watch videos of speakers here.

Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay

Image by ChadoNihi from Pixabay

The pace of interviews is likely to slow a bit, but we have several that we're looking forward to. Next week we have Fr John Hollowell, an engaging priest, campus minister, prison chaplain, blogger and social media personality here in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. We will be talking to Jonathan Lunine again soon to further explore his fascinating perspective. Bill is in discussions with John Cavadini, theologian at Notre Dame, and hopefully we will get the chance to explore some issues related to education and culture from a Catholic perspective. Paul is also getting ready to record the first version of a talk on faith and science in his own life that he hopes to begin giving at colleges and perhaps parishes, which we will release here as well.

Discussions are still underway for Gold Masses here in central Indiana. It's possible that Indiana University, IUPUI in Indianapolis, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and Purdue University might have Gold Masses, depending on whether more people get involved and help make the events happen.

Now some thoughts from Bill:

1. Friends, this episode is a short, simple, heartfelt note befitting an approach that has been at the heart of “That’s So Second Millennium” right from its start nearly a year and half ago. The approach springs from the vision that prompted Dr. Paul Giesting to start this podcast and which resonated strongly with Bill Schmitt—yours truly, Paul’s co-host and the “show notes” writer.
2. What is the vision? As Paul says at the beginning of each episode, “we look forward to the new synthesis in the new millennium between faith, philosophy and science.” We seek to celebrate continuous inquiry in all three fields by talking with great guests about how their own pursuits of knowledge and wisdom have brought deeper, broader insights from which we all can benefit. There’s good reason to pursue the benefit because this third millennium has brought us more challenging questions which must be addressed with a full toolkit for understanding.
3. Inspired by our passion to spread updated, holistic, well-grounded understanding of many aspects of human life, visible and invisible, this podcast aims to generate authentic conversations with you, our listeners. The authenticity includes candor about another aspect of life in this millennium (or any millennium): It’s tough out there on Planet Earth. One must give voice to the frustrations marking our past, present and future as earthen vessels who are called to carry forward graces inextricably submerged in mystery. Paul’s inviting us to share the frustration and mystery with him in order to deepen our conversations.
4. It’s our intention to continue expanding the conversations on our side of the podcast. If we don’t do that, there’s no chance to help achieve the synthesis that can bring greater happiness and healing in our very exciting world of cracked pots. Paul outlines some of our planned interviews and collaborations as an invitation for greater outreach on your side of the podcast. Let’s keep the amazing momentum of 77 episodes going and growing!

1. Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University, is a member of the board of the Society of Catholic Scientists. He spoke of the influence of reading Carl Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection and receiving Sagan’s advice for pursuing a career in astronomy.
2. Dr. Lunine has been on the scientific teams leading several missions of space exploration, including Cassini and, now, the James Webb Space Telescope.
3. He described his early spiritual journey, seeing how science and religion could be intertwined. The journey took him from Jewish family roots to a Methodist church and then to Catholicism. He spoke of being impressed by the connection between the Catholic faith and its Jewish roots.
4. Astronomers have been excited to learn of the abundance of planets to be found in our galaxy. As Dr. Lunine pointed out, thanks to initiatives like the New Horizons spacecraft, we have turned our “cosmic backyard” into a place where we can study an enormous variety of geology “and even, potentially, biology.”
5. He expressed gratitude for astronomers and others who became role models embracing the compatibility between science and faith. A key figure, about whom he has made presentations, is the Belgian priest Georges LeMaitre, known as the father of the big bang theory.

This was one of our most enjoyable conversations, and we definitely hope to have Dr. Lunine back on the podcast again.

1. Rev. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P., Ph.D., is a Dominican priest and molecular biologist, on the faculty of Providence College. See his page on the college’s website.
2. Cells carry a genetic program for self-death for the good of the organism. Cancer cells do not exercise this self-death. Here is one explanation of that phenomenon.
3. Fr. Austriaco belongs to the Eastern Province of the Dominican Order. An early introduction within that order entails learning to remain silent, to trust in the loving presence of God. We talked about the American cultural propensity for busy-ness as a key to one’s sense of success.
4. How can we think about the intersection of biological science and moral theology? Fr. Austriaco said this. Biology can help you figure out what’s good for you and what’s not good for you. We are creatures shaped by God through an evolutionary process that took place over a long time frame. Our fulfillment includes trying to understand which of our instinctual desires are perfected and which ones still have to be mastered. That’s the gist of Catholic moral theology. God calls us to joy, and that includes our fulfillment as the biological creatures we are. We must figure out what pleasures achieve the fulfillment of our nature and lead to joy. Pleasure is a grace; it can be a very good thing so long as the pleasure is ordered to our true human nature, our integral human fulfillment, what Christ calls us to.
5. Is there a sense in which the Catechism of the Catholic Church is like an “owner’s manual” for the human being in living out a human life? Fr. Austriaco explained that the Gospel is a love letter from God, inviting us into friendship. The Catechism shows us the expectations that come with accepting that friendship. It’s not about what we “have to do” but what we want to do because the friendship is offering the relationship with Christ that brings us fulfillment. An “owner’s manual” concept suggests rules to follow to avoid car malfunctions, but our pursuit is more of a proactive response to God’s invitation of love and happiness. A mechanistic approach like an “owner’s manual” still suggests “I’m in charge” as an individual with a checklist—a deeply American interpretation, as Fr. Austriaco pointed out.
6. Shortly after speaking at the annual conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists, Fr. Austriaco also spoke at the Vita Institute, sponsored annually by the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame as an intensive overview of Catholic pro-life principles.
7. You can see Fr. Austriaco’s talk to the Society’s 2019 conference on YouTube. You’ll also find there a video of Fr. Austriaco’s 2017 lecture, “Defending Adam after Darwin.”

16:00 dogs and chocolate; biology gives us a specific perspective on what is good and bad for us.

18:00 pleasure and its purpose as well as how it leads us astray

20:00 Bill and the "owner's manual" perspective

22:00 rules secondary to relationships

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

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

[This file is vastly improved from the original version; Bill was able to provide a backup from his portable microphone.]

The individual videos of the conference talks are or will be posted soon at https://www.catholicscientists.org/ideas/theme/video-archive

 We had a panel discussion with two conference attendees, Merissa Newton, a philosophy instructor at the University of New England and Geoffrey Woollard, a cancer researcher at the University of Toronto.

This conference was a heady experience, and as a self-taught amateur podcaster and interviewer, I was absurdly far out of my comfort zone. Things went surprisingly well save for one critical error: I neglected to do much of any testing of my laptop and microphone before I started recording. A whole bunch of lessons I hopefully learned there... In any case, today's audio may be the worst of the conference. I had to think long and hard about whether to air this episode, or what if anything to cut. Bill had backup audio starting halfway through this episode, so feel free to skip ahead to about 17:10 to miss the problematic section. 

The individual videos of the conference talks will be posted soon at https://www.catholicscientists.org/ideas/theme/video-archive

The audio quality is definitely off on this one. Maybe a hardware issue.

Jonathan Lunine is a prominent planetary scientist. He teaches at Cornell and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences; he has won a Urey award and holds a number of other academic distinctions. He worked with the radar and other instruments on the Cassini mission to Saturn and is co-investigator on the Juno mission now in orbit at Jupiter as well as on the MISE instrument for the Europa Clipper mission. He is on the science team for the James Webb Space Telescope, focusing on characterization of extrasolar planets and Kuiper Belt objects.

I opened the interview by asking his side of the story of the beginning of the Society of Catholic Scientists. We discuss its growth so far and how it is reaching the point where hopefully more members will become involved in planning and carrying out activities.

We discussed the overall trajectory of conference themes so far. (Remember, kids, two points may suffice to draw a straight line, but not to define a trend!) The first SCS conference topic was Origins (mostly of the physical universe). The second focused on the Human Mind and Physicalism. This third one zooms out somewhat again and covers humanity more broadly, and touches on two hot-button points:

- If we have all these distinctively human features (consciousness, free will, etc.), is there any way of knowing when in absolute, archeological/geological time those came into existence?

- Given all our biological and electronic capabilities, we can change our own bodies and brains in radical ways, and these capabilities are only going to grow. Where should we stop? What channels should these abilities be directed into, and where do the dikes belong?

Jonathan hopes that the diversity of speakers, not just from different sciences but across the science-facing pieces of the humanities, will become a hallmark of the SCS conferences: a place where badly needed interdisciplinary conversations are fostered. We discuss the difficulties inherent in our siloing, not just of academic disciplines, but of journalism, too.

Once again, SCS conference will happen June 7-9 at the University of Notre Dame. We will be providing bonus episodes during the conference as we discuss the topics and speakers with conference attendees, and will have breakdowns of the conference and speaker interviews rolling out over the ensuing weeks.

Also be sure to check the SCS website for videos of the actual talks!

Themes we discussed:

The question of human origins:

from the natural theology perspective… when did consciousness, qualia, free will appear?

From the perspective of Judeo-Christian revelation… how do the origin stories in Genesis compare to contemporary archeology and anthropology?

The question of evolution and its significance in a universe with divine providence.

The question of human modification through bio- and electronic technology.

If you are a Catholic scientist, whether a student or a graduate, there is still time to register for the Society and the conference coming up June 7-9 at Notre Dame. The deadline for registration is May 15.

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!

  The question we take up at the beginning of the Easter season is this: Why has Western society gone to such pains to throw away the best thing going, intellectually and otherwise?

  In his ongoing podcast research, Paul has come across the Pat Flynn Show, and listened to some really good interviews with Fr. Robert Spitzer (a TSSM interviewee) and Ed Feser (whose talk at the 2018 Society of Catholic Scientists conference was the topic of one of our most popular episodes). Bob Spitzer’s interviews in particular were some of the most inspiring things I’ve encountered recently and really led me to propose this series of conversations with Bill about how Catholic Christianity is the best way of looking at the world.

  Of course, Western society has drifted hard away from its roots in classical Greek and Jewish/Christian heritage. Ireland is the most recent example of a society, one of the last to retain a semi-traditional cozy relationship between the Church and the state, now deciding to punish the Church for the crimes of the hypocritical members of its clergy by trying to erase its very history. Progressivism in general replaces traditional dogmas with dogmas-of-the-day, and the record up to this point has been pretty dismal.

  We spend some time discussing the roots of what the contemporary West seems to consider its greatest achievement, modern science, in the critical tradition of Scholasticism (knowledge of which was practically the first thing to go after the Reformation began the process of intellectually punishing the Church). We would do better to have a broader memory of the Scholastic tradition even among us Catholics...to recall that it was a movement in which Thomas Aquinas was embedded, rather than remembering only him. In our time as well we don’t need single hero figures, we need a community. The scientific community knows this very well.

  We go on to consider what this fraught term “dogma” really means. The Christian dogmas are really testimony, and they can’t change without repudiating the unrepeatable testimony of the events of salvation history. This is the context of the warnings at the end of the Apocalypse of John, “cursed be he who adds or takes away from the words of this book.” As Chesterton and many others have pointed out, these dogmas are not a straightjacket but a foundation and structural members that allow us to build both intellectual structures and actual human lives that don’t sink into the morass of changing human inventions. Admittedly there are many Christians, Catholics included, who seem to take comfort in the false idea that the Bible, or Tradition, provides us all the answers we could possibly want to know and there is no need or use in further growth. That is not the teaching of Jesus when he commented that the Spirit would [future] lead us to all truth.

  The high Middle Ages confronted the question of harmonizing Aristotle with Jesus Christ. This was both a creative and a logical process that led to great works of criticism and synthesis… excellent practice for the scientific process as we now know it.

  A reminder that the Society of Catholic Scientists Conference is approaching June 7-9. Registration is open through May 15.

We start out this half of the interview with a discussion of what Karl Polyani called the "great transformation" of European society, involving the breakdown of the pre-modern order and its safeguards for a stable population by means of understandings about community use of land, perhaps resulting in the popularity of emigration to the New World by dispirited, dispossessed, and to some extent dangerous people.

Several times Darcia disparages "hierarchy," understood in its general sense of social stratification, which she or other who have influenced her theorize to have caused huge social catastrophes, including the corruption of the Christian Church by its integration into the late Roman state and the collapse of populations and cultures in the New World on contact with the colonizers from Europe. Late in the podcast I ask her explicitly whether there is any benefit to civilization... let us know in the comments on Facebook or Podbean what you think about the answer!

Darcia's claim is that humans are by nature more egalitarian than other animals. This goes right down to childrearing, where human children, born so completely needy, have an innate expectation that their requests for assistance will be met. She comments that there is a Native American word, "wetiko," that was used to describe an attitude thought of as akin to a sickness that characterized those who acted in an aggressive and exploitative way toward others. Whether or not premodern peoples were all more free of this, it's certainly a common feature of civilized peoples. The Old and New Testaments certainly testify to this, and the need to confront it with compassion and an egalitarian attitude. We discussed the specific example of the disease of the large organization, society, business, or government, in which those at the top are simply disconnected, both intellectually and morally, from those at the bottom.

We mentioned subsidiarity, and might have mentioned clericalism... the social science of these concepts will hopefully be fodder for future podcasts.

Faculty website

Author website

Resource Page at Psychology Today

Topics we discussed in this podcast:

The human need for socialization from the very beginning, and ways that goes awry in contemporary society.

Things we can do to learn some of these lessons later in life:

• Self-calming via breathing, meditation, prayer. (Does our contemporary culture of outrage stem from a lack of the ability to calm ourselves that we are meant to learn starting in infancy?)
• Build a social network. We were meant to have interaction with an extended family that spans all age ranges for proper socialization. It's not too late to play with children, talk to the elderly, interact with people at other stages of life.
• Learn new languages and interact with people in different cultures. What are their reasons for doing the things that they do?
• Spend time with nature.
• Practice going outside yourself, defusing rigid thinking and attachment to "it has to be done this way." Intelligence is a measure of flexibility as much as anything.

Bill asked about social media and our tendency to seek out those who already agree with us. Darcia noted that we need guidance on how to socialize. Up through age 30 or so, it's natural for human beings to get that kind of guidance from others. Unfortunately we get that guidance through TV and video games now.

As usual, this was the first half of our interview. More discussion and more questions than we could possibly answer next time!

We recap Season 1 (April 2018 - March 2019) and the three focus areas of the podcast so far:

• Discussion of the fundamentals of the question whether it's reasonable to believe in both science and the Catholic Christian faith, and some exploration of particular topics, like the role of geology in the interpretation of the book of Genesis.
• Review and comments on the speakers at the Society of Catholic Scientists Conference 2018.
• Interviews with scientists and scholars living out their Christian faith, many of whom are actively trying to spread the truth that the presumed conflict between science and religion is false, born from shoddy understandings, strawman arguments, and reactions against hypocrisy. Three of these people (Patricia Bellm, Chris Baglow, and Jay Martin) do this work at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.

We then go on to discuss our plans for coming episodes, turning to topics of religion, spirituality, and psychology (including topics like child development and addiction) where the intersection of faith and science allows us to build new solutions or give tremendous new life to old solutions to the problems of human life.

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

Bill: ethics as a checklist

The Science & Religion Initiative (see Baglow & Martin interview)

The need to get the same message in the biology class and in theology class

The change in the teachers after a few days in the workshop: divisions fade out

It's a challenge having an "athletics" teacher in the program (phys ed)...

Yet there are things: doping and respect of the body

Patricia believes "you become what you eat" applies to violent video games as well

Feed yourself and your children good things instead

2:00 - Gulf Coast Faith Formation Conference (a good time to be away from Notre Dame)

3:00 - Summer seminars: Foundations Notre Dame, Foundations New Orleans, Capstone

4:00 - Foundations ND: lecture based, top scholars in specific disciplines, with workshops

6:00 - Foundations NO: experimental work and discussions

7:00 - Dialogue between science & theology teachers about their own specialties

8:00 - Capstone: topic-based theme & lecturers; special track for administrators; teaching practices

11:00 - Templeton Foundation study showing schools already trying to do this on their own

12:00 - The need to do this well and not engage in pseudoscience or gloss over tough questions

14:00 - ICL team making "housecalls" to individual schools

14:30 - Baglow textbook on science & faith

18:00 - Vast multiplication of interest from schools just since 2011

19:00 - Real motivations for believing faith is inconsistent with science: the need for hope [and, not made explicit, the appropriateness of hope]

20:00 - "I thought I was the only one"

21:00 - The historical and emotional impulse: rebellion against Christian hypocrisy

22:30 - Baglow makes the Fulton Sheen point: "I also hope THAT God doesn't exist!"

23:00 - The questions he wishes people would ask about God, meaning, science, etc.

24:00 - "What do you mean by 'God creates everything'"

25:00 - The nature of the discourse we encourage

26:30 - "I don't know"

27:00 - "When did science and religion enter into conflict?" - because they have not always been

28:20 - The true role of the university in integrating human wisdom

30:30 - Newman on evolution in the context of Development of Christian Doctrine

Flood geology and cramming one's ideas into a "literal" reading

Adam and the Genome

Goals for the year

Values of experience, e.g. Mexico: solar ovens from recycled materials

Credit consulting, etc., for exploited women in Mexico

The little estate in Mexico

Back to credit cards & exploitation of ignorance

Responsibility of those to whom much is given

Bringing it around to science

Career and sacrifice and little deaths

Chris, the handicapped man at the ND Center for Social Justice

The ethics of "fixing" or preventing Chris from being the way he is

The lack of philosophic background and the intellectual amnesia of contemporary science

Philosophy of science and the disappointment of 20th century physics, but the culture goes on unaware

Science, fundamentally cannot replace faith

...this is where Patricia makes that claim that science is about control

Ethics of changing human beings, other elements of creation

Bill poses the relativism question again

Patricia responds that "you can control science"

Everyone confronts the same Reality, and we cannot control it, but we prefer the illusion that we can

The industries that used up his sight

2:30 - Schrodinger uses a non-relativistic Hamiltonian, with a p^2/2m kinetic energy

3:00 - Dirac equation absorbs special relativity by shifting from scalar to spinor field

4:00 - Quantum field theory as a further extension, accommodating fields that include many particles

5:00 - Field Lagrangian and all the particles and interactions in the Standard Model

6:00 - Even "everyday" gravity is in some sense accommodatable in the theory, just not extreme gravity capable of "separating out the vacuum"

8:00 - Decoherence, not to be confused with the measurement problem

9:00 - Decoherence arising from the interaction of a simple system with other systems

10:00 - Reduced density matrix begins to look classical

11:00 - Zurek and the work on decoherence: states that are "chosen" to survive interaction with the environment

11:30 - Measurement problem not solved by this work

12:30 - Entropy: the proposal that entropy is most fundamentally lack of information

progress from the special case of thermodynamic entropy, to statistical mechanics,

to von Neumann's quantum definition, to Shannon's information theory

21:00 - Craig's career: why is an engineer so interested in the fundamentals of physics?

24:00 - Journey of faith

30:30 - People of Praise in Indianapolis

31:20 - Final thoughts

1:00 - The power of physicalism/reductionism: a tremendously powerful method

2:00 - Course on physicalism and Catholicism; Sean Carroll's least hysterical "poetic naturalism"

3:00 - The lack of evidence for "emergence" in the sense of "downward causation"

3:30 - Soft and hard emergence

10:15 - Materialism vs. physicalism and reductionism: philosophical materialism

13:00 - Are human beings exhausted by this account of reality?

14:00 - The break with the mechanical universe of 19th century physics underappreciated

15:00 - Laplace's demon

16:30 - Thermodynamics

17:30 - Future not contained in the present

19:00 - Einstein & hidden variables

20:00 - Bell inequality experiments

24:00 - Entanglement

26:00 - Human experience: both, as physical, but also as having choices

27:00 - Quantum physics on many body systems

28:00 - The hard problem of consciousness

29:00 - The explanatory gap

31:00 - The tendency to explain the brain as "just like" some recent piece of technology

33:00 - Complexity of neurons, the continuing relevance of physical laws amid the complexity

35:00 - Continuing relevance of quantum effects at the level of neurotransmitter molecules, etc.

36:00 - Quantum effects in weather and rock mechanics

2:00 - The world must be real and intelligible for science to make sense

3:00 - And faith provides a philosophical basis that allows this to happen

3:30 - Students' testimony on faith and science

4:30 - Removing the faith/science obstacle is only one step on the road toward faith

5:00 - God vs. Godzilla

6:00 - The true God and His use of secondary causes

11:00 - Creation as carmen Dei (song of God; Bonaventure)

12:00 - vs. strepitus naturae

15:00 - Thought and spirit vs. matter

[This harks back to, e.g., the Ed Feser talk at the SCS conference. I personally think there is an enormous gap--bridgeable, but still to be bridged--between these arguments that the ability of the mind to generate and handle abstract concepts implies a non-material component to thought on the one hand, and the work of modern neuroscience to track the activity of neurons around the brain in specific patterns as we think.]

17:00 - Philosophical gaps in the picture of existence without God

18:00 - Infinite regress of causes, temporal/efficient causes and extra-temporal

19:00 - Postmoderns in general have a depressing view: a para-Christian morality without God; doctrinaire atheists live in an even more depressing paradigm of complete lack of meaning

21:00 - Basil & Pope Francis on creation

22:00 - Basil on the interpretation of the six days and other aspects of creation

23:00 - Guides on the tour of creation

25:00 - Symbolic language (numbers) in Scripture

27:00 - Scriptural mandate to tend creation

29:00 - Historic ginning up of the conflict between science and faith

Daniel and his wife were brought up in the Seventh Day Adventist faith, and still greatly respects the grounding in charitable work and the Bible he received then. Eventually he and his wife got the Newman bug and had to go deep into history and join one of the apostolic churches; they joined an Eastern Orthodox church.

In that context, Daniel laments the drift of the modern hospice movement away from Christian spiritual roots and into a secular, palliative mindset, and the broader question of what is missing from the often uttered or thought statement, "if it's legal, it must be moral."

"We confuse technological prowess with being deeper and more thoughtful."

An interesting consequence of our medical progress is that we now face a future where, for the first time, across the world, most people will die of conditions derived from aging rather than contagious diseases, accidents, childbirth, etc.

We discuss a bit the golden mean to be found, steering clear of euthanasia on the one hand, and of resorting to excessive means to stay alive in the face of a fatal illness.

He shared some interesting spiritual perspectives with us. As someone who in his mature years moved from the Seventh Day Adventists and sought out the apostolic churches, he now belong to the Orthodox Church. We spent some time discussing the "microcosmos," John Chrysostom's idea that the human being contains all creation in miniature, and how that is oddly true in certain respects: we are each communities of organisms. Our gut microbiome, for example.

Daniel went on to talk some heavy duty biochemical shop. We discussed the oxidizing agents (e.g., hydrogen peroxide) involved in inflammatory ailments. He touched on the fact that some of the worst chemical warfare agents, like sulfur mustard gas, operate in a similar oxidizing mechanism, triggering apoptosis, and discussed some of his work on finding remedies for these agents, as well as how similar they are to the earliest generation of chemotherapy agents.

We shifted back to the question of faith, and discussed how both Daniel and his wife confronted suffering in their work (his wife as a psychiatrist treating AIDS patients in particular) and this was a core part of their journey. Daniel pointed out the provocative fact that we really seem to be programmed to age and die, and that the only exceptions to this... are cancer cells.

Another moral point we discover in modern biology has to do with epigenetics. As human beings, we can abuse our bodies to the point that we leave effects on our germ cells that can carry on the "sins of the father" to future generations.

At the end we spend a few minutes on a preliminary critique of the materialist reductionary attitude ("interpretation" is too grandiose a word for it) toward brain science by many of its practitioners and reporters. Free will, for example, is not an illusion just because the physical part of the brain where it happens can be injured and we can be deprived of it... but much more on such neurophilosophical issues as the year progresses.

The brain we humans have apparently evolved in three stages. This can't help but be a tremendous simplification, but it's a commonly encountered statement and seems to have considerable explanatory power.

The lowest part of the brain, the brain stem (the medulla, etc.) and the cerebellum, control unconscious processes, most of which we cannot take into conscious control even if we want to. Often this is called the "lizard" or "reptile brain."

A series of little suborgans, the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdalae (a - myg ' - da - la, the good Latin pronunciation, for the singular apparently; and my Webster's unabridged also informs me that it just means "almond shaped thing"), putamen (that habit-storing part I could not remember during the episode), and a few other parts form the limbic system, that communicates between the senses and the body, and that serves critical functions for things like emotion and memory that we share with mammals.

The upper part of the brain, the big part in human brains, is the cerebrum. Its regions are referred to as cortex / cortices or lobes. We have large volumes of the brain dedicated to visual and auditory processing, motor skills, and the whole front of the brain is where the neural work of our most human capabilities occurs: judgment, reasoning, wondering, creativity, consciousness.

The following two books informed the discussion today:

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter

I cannot recommend The Body Keeps the Score highly enough. It starts out as a discussion of PTSD, but it grows organically into a discussion of problems that all children, and therefore all of us, are liable to have, and ways that are being discovered to bring both brain and body to peace.

On the other hand, Mapping the Mind is only intermittently good. The first hundred pages I found rough sledding, with little sense the author understood the facts being hauled out and stacked up. It got better. The last few chapters betray the common, poorly thought through materialist reductionism common in the field, no surprise, but the content of the final 200+ pages is mostly good. Autism, depression, and addiction come up, although the stock in trade is discussion people with bizarre, tragic, but fascinatingly specific brain damage and what those episodes suggest about how all the different mental aspects of being human are spread about the brain.

Highlight this idea's differences from Platonic and Cartesian dualism.

History of psychology as a discipline. Psychology has not evolved (a) master paradigm(s) that compel the bulk of the field to adhere to them the way that plate tectonics did for geology, Newtonian classical physics and then quantum and relativity did for physics, etc.

Peace of Soul (Fulton Sheen) remark that psychology has been furtively recycling Christian ideas and passing them off as new for a long time

Examining the convergence points of the advice for living from the Bible and Tradition, modern psychology, and the contemporary self-help / New Age-y movement that continues to spread and adapt through large sectors of modern culture.

Self-esteem, humility...

Confidence, faith, negative tapes...

Twelve Step spirituality (Richard Rohr and the intense overlap between 12 Step and Catholic spirituality)

Even many of us who are explicitly Christian have internalized a kind of Lutheran / Jansenist belief that we are so terrible that, in essence, God made a mistake in going to all this effort to save us, because we're not worth it. This is one of a number of areas in contemporary Catholic and Christian culture where we have let our understanding of Scripture and Tradition get very warped and imbalanced.

Issues surrounding how the Christian and scientific understanding of universal history could fit together.

What will "the end of the world" look like? Will it be the end of the whole universe or not? Will there be human colonies on other planets, orbiting other stars? How would the Apocalypse play out then?

You can find That's So Second Millennium at all of these places:

tssm.podbean.com

paggeology.net/blog

@infamousDrG on Twitter

That's So Second Millennium page on Facebook

giesting -at- alumni.nd.edu is Paul's email address

Please be in touch with your feedback, ideas for new episodes, and conversation of any kind!

Last year was largely about the intellectual challenge leveled by many against religion, and we will continue talking about that as the podcast moves forward.

Paul's mission this year to work through Road to Reality

This year we also want to broaden the scope to include places where religion and faith converge, which means we're going to discuss psychology.

Looking forward to the SCS conference topic for this coming year: what it is, and has been, to be human. Neuroscience and what it implies for anthropology, and where it meets Catholic Christian anthropology coming the other way.

What is consciousness, anyway? What parts of the brain seem to be involved, and what do they do?

What is free will, anyway? Where are those breakpoints where the soul would have to affect the body in order for that to even work?

Crisis points in the way people in the post-Christian West approach the world.

Center for Ethics & Culture annual conference in 2018: Wilfred McClay & John Waters

"we care about everything, but without God... we have responsibility for everything, but we know that we are flawed and unable to provide solutions"

Post-Christian in this context includes both people who have explicitly renounced the Christian faith of the West and those who have a Christian identity in their back pocket somewhere but in reality are not relying on Jesus Christ or his teachings to guide their lives in any conscious way.

Christianity is a demanding religion. If you suck away all the grace and help it promises, but leave some of its demands for social justice or purity of intention, you have a recipe for constant internal condemnation.

Link:

CEC video

Wilfred McClay (University of Oklahoma) on “Guilt in the Immanent Frame”, and John Waters on “The Importance of Not Being God: A Higher Power Is Indispensable for Human Beings and Human Societies”

No, not THAT John Waters.

We opened the interview with a discussion of Kirby's research on surface processes on planets. He works on data returned from the Moon, Mars, and Saturn's moon Titan to evaluate how winds, asteroid impacts, and other forces shape the surfaces of those bodies.

----more----We discuss the difficulties doing planetary geology, in particular the lack of samples from other planets. We have samples (lunar and Martian meteorites) that nature has shipped us from other planets via impact, but we don't have "provenance," the knowledge of exactly where on those planets the samples came from.

Kirby is a self-professed "space junkie," and gave us an update on the news of space exploration. The most exciting is arguably that New Horizons is reaching its secondary target, Ultima Thule, tomorrow (when this episode launches).

At about 20:00 we transition into talking about the culture of geoscience vis-a-vis religion and Christianity specifically. We spend some time discussing what relationship God might have with time, including Augustine's notion that God is outside time, and Hugh Ross' alternatives to that (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/50937.Hugh_Ross).

We spend some time discussing Kirby's ecclesial situation as a sacramental evangelical (as he understands the latter term, it means emphasizing the "personal relationship with Jesus" as opposed to some of the other connotations that have grown up around it). There were several questions that I intended to ask that I ended up throwing away as the discussion went off in a different direction. Kirby's sense of "church" I might sum up as being pretty heavy on Mark 9:40:

9:38 “Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.” 39 “Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, 40 for whoever is not against us is for us." (NIV)

As a Roman Catholic, I have to consider that while I could not possibly leave the Churches that carry the apostolic succession, and therefore some necessary amount of *institution*, the third millennium is going to see all these Churches wither to the extent that they cannot escape the clutches of a second millennium *institutionalism* that welded them to the secular state, condemned them to great hypocrisy, and fomented the long train of rebellions that have shaken Christendom and splintered it.

You can see Kirby and hear more from him at his YouTube channel, and you can follow him on Twitter @nasaman58.

 ----more----

Skype had some audio problems for the first few minutes, but it corrected itself after that. Sorry for the poor sound quality there at the beginning.

Our first step is to engage in a little exploration of a common English translation of the Bible, the RSV, specifically its text of Matthew 2:1-12 where the story of the Magi is told, versus the Vulgate Latin text. This is a toy exploration... obviously, if you wanted to come to the best possible answers, you would bone up on koine Greek and read the best critical treatments of the text of Matthew directly. Still, even just comparing the English to another ancient language, Latin, that had a great deal more in common with ancient Greek, is I think very instructive.

The star makes its first appearance in verse 2:

vidimus enim stellam ejus in oriente

we have seen his star in the East

Immediately we already have an ambiguity. The Latin "in oriente" will bear the translation "in the East" but also "in [its] rising". Whether or not ancient Greek has the same ambiguity, I don't know, but I'd bet on it. And, of course, it's ambiguous for a very good reason. The Sun, the Moon, and the individual stars (which formed a far larger share of humanity's entertainment in ancient times) all rise in the east. In verse 1, the magi came "ab oriente," and of course this cannot be ambiguous: they came from east of Jerusalem, so somewhere in what is now Jordan, northern Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, or etc. (At that time those regions were called Arabia, Mesopotamia, or Persia.) The saw the star while they were in the East, but the passage likely means that they saw the star rise for the first time.

Stars (the fixed stars, in ancient parlance) rise all night, on a fixed schedule, based on the time of year, that was already known in Mesopotamia centuries before the birth of Christ. That begs the question why the rising of this particular star was considered significant. (The further question of how someone in one of those countries could link this particular significant star specifically to Judea is also begged in this passage, but we are going to run out of time and material to work with before we can even start on that one, alas.) Presumably it was a star "out of place," not part of the constant yearly pattern.

The planets (which means "wanderers") shamble about the sky at different rates. They are in nearly the same place relative to the fixed stars from one night to the next and can therefore be tracked, but their differential rates of motion, and the fact that they all stick to the same track across the sky that the Sun and the Moon use, means that from time to time pairs, and occasionally even triplets, of them draw very close to one another to form a conjunction. These are rare enough events that they have been used for millennia in astrology to predict supposed significant events. It's conceivable that a conjunction of planets was what the magi saw and interpreted as meaning the birth of a king was imminent. The text doesn't really suggest that, but ancient writers could be so maddeningly vague (certainly to our minds) that it's not out of the question.

Still, we might consider other options. If we take "stella" to mean a single light in the sky, we can consider it to have been in one of three places:

In the atmosphere

In the Solar System

Outside the Solar System

That should exhaust the possibilities.

If the light were in the atmosphere, it would not rise in the east like stars do unless it was being rather tricky indeed. We will drop that possibility for this exercise.

In the Solar System, we do have occasional bodies that get bright enough to see: comets. (The asteroid Vesta is also bright enough to see on rare occasions with the naked eye, and in fact was this past summer. I am not aware of ancient astronomers making records of it or Uranus either for that matter, so a brief sighting would be unexpected.) Comets do not always have long visible tails; sometimes they are just points of light. Some comet--one we know about, like Halley's Comet, or one we don't--could have approached the Sun, become visible, and been noted by the magi. A comet moves as the planets do, shifting just a bit from night to night relative to the fixed stars.

Outside the Solar System, there are dozens or hundreds of transient phenomena that could have produced an unusual star in the sky for a while and been noted by the magi. Star explosions, novae and supernovae, are perhaps the most common reasons why a star might temporarily appear to our eyes in the night sky. In any case, whatever the source of the light, a source outside the Solar System would move in lockstep with the other fixed stars. Its sudden appearance would be the only distinguishing feature.

To have any hope of distinguishing the likelihood of these various possibilities, we will need to sift the text for any additional clues.

The text of Matthew does not actually mention the star very much. There is a longish interlude where the magi hang about Jerusalem waiting for the local experts to tell them where to expect a king of the Jews to be born--one important enough to have his own special star, and therefore probably the Messiah. Matthew reports that the words of the prophet Micah were used to direct them to David's home of Bethlehem. Thus, we see that the star was not somehow leading the magi around, not on their journey from the East to Jerusalem. They noticed a distinctive star rise, linked it to Judea somehow, and went to Judea to investigate. It's only when they follow the Jewish sages' advice and leave on the *extremely short* journey to the little village of Bethlehem that the star does anything all that strange:

abierunt et ecce stella quam viderant in oriente antecedebat eos usque dum veniens staret supra ubi erat puer

they went their way; and lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was

I stuck "usque dum veniens staret supra" into a translator app and got back "until it stopped over," but that leaves two words out. Dum--usque dum seems more wordy than needed to convey "until," but I struggle with conjunctions, so I won't say more about that. Veniens--this is the word that seems completely left out of the translation. It means "coming," and it's singular, so the star is what's coming or approaching, not the magi. The RSV translation does seem to contain this word: "came" to rest, but I wouldn't translate the Latin that way. I would render this line

they went their way; and lo, the star which they had seen at its rising was in motion in front of them until, as it was coming on, it stood over the place where the child was

Here I have stuck in "as" to translate "dum", put in an understood "esset" to get "veniens esset = it was coming on" (and yes, dropping a form of "to be" or "is" or "was" is something Latin writers did), and switched to the other meaning of "staret," not "to stop" but "to stand."

Obviously, this is the strange part. Stars and planets and comets never, or almost never, move that fast so as to be able to say "it went before them" (antecedebat) or it "stopped" or "came to rest" over a specific place. How would anything above Earth's atmosphere appear to do that? It would have to be very nearby. Something too far away would have to be moving faster than the speed of light (a common constraint when interpreting motions of heavenly bodies). I have sat and puzzled over what these words might mean, and I think that my alternative translation of the Latin (which I did on the grounds of what seemed to make better sense of the words, in my own admittedly very limited grasp of Latin usage) is actually a little easier to envision as an astronomical phenomenon.

Planets and comets move across the sky at different rates given their position relative to Earth. Further, comets move at different rates in the absolute sense because, as they approach the Sun, gravity accelerates them. A comet near the Sun is at its brightest and also at its fastest. A comet that happened to pass rather close to Earth, traveling in the right direction, might be moving fast enough to note a difference in its position over the course of the few hours' walk from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and be visibly close to the zenith as they reached their destination. I softened "antecedebat" even further to "was in motion in front of them" in order to reach a final picture of a comet near perihelion and near Earth that happened to be moving north in the sky so that it "came" toward them as they walked south, and just happened to be straight overhead when, probably after asking at a few houses, they found the one with the boy child born near the night they first noted the comet (or whatever other criterion they had in mind). The comet didn't stop, and would have kept right on moving as the night progressed.

This would be even easier to envision if the magi were traveling eastward and the star, migrating westward with the perpetual motion of the night sky, were simply coming toward the zenith according to its ordinary motion. Then again, there would have been nothing unusual about that, and it would have been considerably less likely to have registered with them as an event worthy of the great rejoicing they do in v. 10.

The star, a comet on this interpretation, was very possibly not all that bright. To my knowledge it is not mentioned in secular history (although I think Fr. Longenecker alludes to possible records of it in China or India). It would have been these magi's little secret, almost; they were among the few, or were the only, people to notice its passing.

It goes without saying that this is not an authoritative treatment of the question in any way. It was meant just as a demonstration of how cautious we ought to be before decided we know what the Bible (or any other ancient text, for that matter) says about event X and either take it on faith in despite of science or use it as a stick with which to beat the text in question and decry it as unreliable.

Credit is due to Jimmy Akin at his blog on the National Catholic Register (in particular for providing the text of the RSV for the passage in question). Fr. Dwight Longenecker has written a book, Mystery of the Magi, dealing with these issues and Bill forwarded me a five minute extract of an interview dealing with the issues around the star and how it would have been interpreted in the ancient Near East.

1:00 The billion year contact; awe

2:00 Awe and the vast scale of Earth science

3:00 Discoveries never shake faith

4:00 Evolution, randomness, the shortage of provable things

6:00 The bureaucratic mindset: certainty and judgment

7:00 Yucca Mountain, studtite, and uranyl peroxides (Peter Burns, Karrie-Ann Hughes)

8:00 Uranyl chemistry

9:00 Guy Consolmagno's thought experiment on planetary atmospheres

10:00 Uranyl peroxide buckyballs...

11:00 NOT in the initial fate and transport model for Yucca Mountain

12:00 Real life is lack of certainty

13:00 Where we'd put uranium if we had to...

14:00 Hanford, Washington and uranium migration

15:00 Phosphates as immobilizers

16:00 Humans and squirrels: digging stuff up to bury it again

17:00 Kirby Runyon

18:00 Difficult conversations

20:00 The Bible

21:00 Cyclic nature of human history, scriptural history

22:00 The second millennium history of reaction, after reaction, after reaction against hypocrisy

23:00 Secularism and the irreligious right

24:00 Progressive movement as a para-Christian critique of society

26:00 Modern psychology and spirituality:

Fulton Sheen's image of the psychologist pulling Christian truths out of the garbage can

and passing them off as discoveries

29:00 The need for God

30:00 Companions on the way

31:00 Providence

26:00 Galaxy motions

27:00 Galaxy rotation curves: do not match Keplerian orbits

28:00 Galaxies spin more like records (laggy soft records); mass distribution is nothing like the Solar System

29:00 Hurricanes as a better analogy for galaxies

30:00 Stars in a galaxy move in local organization

32:00 Nebulas

34:00 The opposite extreme: rigid body rotation

35:00 Gravitational attraction between stars creating coherence

36:00 Curiosity that gravity and electrical forces are both inverse square laws

37:00 Poisson's equation

38:00 Summing densities in Poisson's inhomogeneous term is physically meaningless; intensive quantities can't be summed that way

40:00 Gauss' theorem: flux through a surface and quantity within a volume

41:00 Summing is for extensive variables

42:00 Pressure an ambiguous variable

43:00 Future work

44:00 Thermal expansivity: Giauque

45:00 Problems with the glass transition measurements done in the past: need to completely drive out water from the experimental charges

48:00 Wrapup

The times below are keyed to the start of the interview and ignore my opening (just over 2 min).

0:00 Introduction

1:00 Anne's background (sorry, this part Anne was talking so quietly that I can't seem to fix it with Audacity, but bear with us; we moved the microphone and figured some things out and it gets better)

2:00 Spectroscopy and heat transfer

3:00 Thermal conductivity experiments and their pitfalls

5:00 Criticism of the history of thermodynamics and heat transfer; identification of light and heat

6:00 Problems with equilibrium and elastic collisions in theories of thermodynamics

8:00 Criticism of phonon theory

10:00 Electron and vibrational transfer of heat decoupled; metals and heat transfer

13:00 Garnet

14:00 Earth's interior: convection, the Rayleigh number

15:00 Viscosity

16:00 The Earth's mantle: nearly all solid

17:00 Plate tectonics without mantle convection

18:00 An even more radical idea: heat is being trapped inside the solid Earth

19:00 [there was a distortion I had to cut]

20:00 Implications: heat generation is in the crust (this part is widely known!)

21:00 Implications: the core is melting, not solidifying?

22:00 The geodynamo and magnetic field

23:00 The core: buffered at the temperature of melting high pressure iron

24:00 Magnetic modes diagram for the planets: spin and magnetic field

0:00 Paul introduces

1:00 Bill: Lemaitre announcement

2:00 Lemaitre: faith & science not opposed

3:00 Barr: Lemaitre announcement

4:00 Ignorance of Lemaitre

5:00 Ignorance of the Christian, Catholic origin of science & famous Catholic scientists

6:00 Barr: late 19th century critical period for the forging of the myth of Church as anti-science

7:00 Science only professionalized in the late 19th century, looking for influence

8:00 More famous Catholic scientists

9:00 Mission of the Society of Catholic Scientists; religious people looking askance at scientists, 10:00 Scientists timid about showing their faith in the presence of a few loud atheists

11:00 Catholic scientists joining SCS & finding others like themselves

12:00 Witness to the world

13:00 Conferences, past and future: next June at Notre Dame

14:00 2017: origin of universe, life; 2018: mind and matter

15:00 2019 conference: what is it (and has it been) to be human; speakers from outside the faith

16:00 Past non-Catholic conference speakers

17:00 Peter Koellner's talk at 2018 conference

18:00 Koellner and Godel's theorem

19:00 Neaderthals, language, reason

20:00 Godel's beliefs about mind and mathematical truths

21:00 Mathematical truth and religious truth

22:00 Depth & sophistication of the law that governs the universe

Donna Strickland

Nadia Murad

Segue: Lemaitre press release

Transition: the early 20th century golden age from Chesterton to Fulton Sheen

Theme: All Saints Day

Augustine

Isidore

Albert the Great

Roger Bacon

Nicolaus Steno

Gregor Mendel

Georges Lemaitre

Please leave us feedback here by hitting the "Email Paul" link or using the "Facebook" link and commenting or messaging us there.

Image: Braulio of Saragossa and Isidore of Seville, writing his Origins (Etymologies)

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Br. Guy goes on from the subject of his books to talk a little about John Scalzi's take on the common advice to authors to "kill your darlings"..."the failure mode of clever is idiot." (I am not unfamiliar with John Scalzi, who is certainly a master of the craft: see my review of Old Man's War on Goodreads.)

Bill references the science & religion initiative at the McGrath Institute at Notre Dame, to which Br. Guy has contributed. The Institute tries to form high school teachers with a sense of the complementary, rather than adversary, nature of science and faith. Br. Guy goes on to talk about how hard a high school teacher's job is, and the need for enthusiasm in presentation. If you are listening to two enthusiastic people talk shop about almost any topic, however little you yourself know about it, you get drawn in. That's the goal, except most high school teachers have to do it by themselves.

A teacher that can maintain enthusiasm and also model comfort with not knowing the answer and intellectual humility..."I don't know; let's go find the answer"...is a great gift to insecure, "self-conscious but not self-aware" teenagers.

Paul probes Br. Guy about the modern attitude of trying to discard as much of the past as possible. Br. Guy comments how living in Italy gives you perspective on how the attitude has shifted from the medieval attitude (discussed in great depth by CS Lewis in The Discarded Image) of reverence for the past, whose achievements we could never match, to the modern one. Rome gives you the perspective that while science and engineering may have advanced, art and architecture have not. Humanity can only progress so far...we can't get away from original sin. We do things we know are wrong, destructive, etc. That's why Twelve Step programs exist. A great 20th century tragedy, as has been noted many times, is the failure of great schemes (like communism) for revising society in some theoretically perfect new form.

A chance reference to Shakespeare, and then to Star Trek VI (of course), leads us off into a discussion of language and the way it shapes our lives, from the fun people have had since Tolkien inventing whole new languages, to the difference in what Sarah cooks for Abraham's visitors in English (yuck) versus Italian. Br. Guy makes the provocative statement that one has to learn more new words in freshman biology than in freshman French. When you learn philosophy, you learn new words, and with those words (if you're really learning them) you learn new ways of thinking.

As a final note, that's why you need others to truly learn and work in a subject...or in a faith. The Ethiopian that Phillip baptized in the Acts of the Apostles had a hard row to hoe.

https://vofoundation.org/blog

https://vofoundation.org/faith-and-science

Books mentioned in the interview:

Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Unapologetic by Francis Spufford

The Rock by T.S. Eliot

Image courtesy Robert Macke (wikimedia Commons)

Paul then poses the question of the recently discovered Galileo letter. Br. Guy defuses a bit of the noise surrounding this letter, likening the situation to scientists down to this very day putting out provocative theses and then pulling them back under criticism from their peers.

(My dog Riley starts barking at UPS personnel sometime between 13:00 and 13:30. This was an eventful session.)

Galileo in his time was rather like Carl Sagan in his time: a popularizer and a controversialist. Br. Guy, who met Carl Sagan a few times, recognizes the value that both of these controversial figures brought to the field. He goes on to discuss the travails that Sagan faced in his own life, dealing with fame and the risks he ran to get his message out (the massive debt he incurred in making Cosmos) and notes his own fraught relationship with his own faith.

Carl Sagan was a serious scientist, in the 1960s one of the first to grapple with the unexpectedly, incredibly hot temperatures the first Venus probes reported and to link it with the very thick carbon dioxide atmosphere Venus has.

Br. Guy talks a little about his experience "coming out" as a religious believer, and the opposition he _didn't_ receive in publicizing his decision to become a Jesuit. He moves on to discuss the romance of science, why we're attracted to it, and why it's important to steer a middle path (that Aristotelian mean again) in both science and faith between "I already know everything worth knowing" and "God / the universe is so big I can never understand it." Of course you won't learn it all, but of course you'll be able to learn and love something. He likens it to a good friendship or romantic relationship, in which you rejoice in both the known and the unknown.

Paul probes Br. Guy on whether Sagan influenced him in his own popular books. Br. Guy professes that not only did Carl Sagan influence his confidence in being able to discuss the wonders of planetary science and astronomy with a popular audience, as well as his colloquial tone, but even his wardrobe served as a good precursor (compare Carl at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0755981/ with Guy at https://www.radiokerry.ie/portraits-of-gc36-delegates/ and for good measure another great Italian scientist who wore the collar well https://www.torinoscienza.it/personaggi/giuseppe-mercalli).

Image courtesy Robert Macke (wikimedia Commons)

Paul gives a rundown, with many apologies for the exact data of isotope numbers and half-life lengths he has managed to forget, of the theory of radioactive decay. Bill, our proxy for the man on the street, starts us off with a common notion of half-life. From there we cover some of the basics and most commonly used isotopic systems: uranium-lead, thorium-lead, a discussion of why carbon 14 is so seldom used in geology, potassium-argon, and a note that more systems are always being brought into use. We discuss the distinct types of rocks that are best used for radiometric dating and how the relative dating methods have to be used in an interwoven system with radiometric dating in order to assemble the whole system of geochronology that we use today.

We end the podcast with a discussion of how science is the very opposite of a conspiracy theory or a political campaign. The geologic dating systems need interlocking data, and they also benefit from it. In such a system, contradictions do spring up--one study doing biostratigraphy might conflict with another using zircons. What science does is not to sweep that under the rug...instead we throw resources and graduate students at it until we get a resolution to the conflict.

(Zircon photo credit Harald Schillhammer via mindat.org. Note the pink and brown coloration...brown zircon is commonly that color due to radiation damage from the uranium and thorium it contains.)

You will note that in passing I mentioned that the idea of extinct organisms was difficult for European scholars, specifically, in the 17th century to accept, and then I go on to give you a tell by speaking of Renaissance "gurus"...of course, I mean to contrast European thought with Indian thought, in which the idea of extinct organisms is not so hard to fit in to an idea of long, cyclical histories of periodic destruction and remaking of the Earth and universe.

Two specific points: One, the word evolution contains a lot of conceptual components. What we are discussing in this episode, what is almost beyond realistic controversy at this point, is what I would term "succession of species." Matching sequences of fossils, in their relative age relationships as indicated by Steno's laws, recur in innumerable outcrops across the Earth. (I note in passing that an all-knowing Creator building this out of nothing in instantaneous creation must assuredly have known that this would deceive human beings eventually into thinking that there was a succession, and then you have to deal with the intellectual baggage of God deliberately lying to us.) That is different than the mechanism by which this succession of species was made to occur: inheritance, survival of the fit and extinction of others as environment and competition varied with time, mutations, viral transport of DNA, and whatever else actually caused this succession of species. That is less clear.

Two, the early workers in stratigraphy (especially the British ones) by and large wanted the Biblical narrative, and even the Biblical minimalist narrative to work out. The evidence forced them out of this interpretation. To reiterate the point from last episode, there was never a conspiracy to submerge the Bible story of creation and Noah's flood: the cycle of observation, reflection, and criticism of ideas killed theories depending on excessively broad interpretations of the Genesis text.

To better understand the impact of Steno's times on his thought and vice versa, we have to discuss extensively the intellectual world of the seventeenth century. If the thirteenth century saw a grand synthesis of Christian teachings with the best that ancient Greek philosophy had to offer, the seventeeth century was a time of vicious bickering over the Bible and between people just beginning the arduous task of observing the natural world and coming up with theories to interpret how it worked that were actually consistent with the observations. It was a time where we see the very beginnings of ideas that now are bedrock (pardon the pun) parts of our understanding of the world adrift in a sea of other ideas that now sound outright insane.

Steno bequeathed several principles of interpretation. Three (or so...depending on how one names and numbers them) have to do with rocks and fossils (at that time, "fossil" could mean almost any notable object embedded in a rock, whether the remnant of a living thing or a crystal or what we would now call a sedimentary structure, such as a raindrop cast or a ripple mark) and the order in which they formed; the fourth has to do with crystals, and allows one to distinguish crystals of different minerals. They are the laws of superposition, inclusion and/or cross-cutting relationships, original horizontality, and constant interfacial angles.

If you're interested in hearing another take on this brilliant and enigmatic man, you can now watch Andrew Sicree's talk from the Society of Catholic Scientists conference (discussed in last month's episode).

I think we miss a great deal of the point if we do not take into account the relentless critique Christianity has mounted OF ITSELF over the past half millennium. The Reformation splintered the Christian nations and sparked unprecedented bloodshed between Christians. There had been terrible episodes before, but these wars, culminating in the Thirty Years' War, were on a new scale. The massive hypocrisy of Christians killing Christians, and the continuing hypocrisy of Christian clergy enjoying positions of wealth and privilege in both Catholic and Protestant nations, sparked further critique, leading to the Enlightenment and modern liberalism and progressivism. I ask you...do you think anything like modern progressivism, which bases itself on advocating for the poor and the repressed, could have arisen except as a Christian critique of Christianity?

In any case, we continue down to the present to be living in the dwindling, waning days of that union between Church and State, even in the US, and the scandals from that are still with us, as we know this month in Pennsylvania and with the spectacle of Cardinal McCarrick. That provides powerful impetus to look for other sticks to beat Christianity with.

It doesn't help that there are also people, in numbers enough to be visible, who really do espouse a form of religion that is contradictory to science. The Bible itself makes no claim to be the only book worth knowing, but the post-Reformation world has quite a few people willing to make that claim on its behalf.

Turning back to the intellectual issues within the debate itself, I bring up the question: why does so much of the fracas around science vs. the Bible center on biology, when the real question is the Bible vs. geology? Biologists have no real basis for determining the rate and overall progress of evolution if they were not given access to the fossil record and geological time scale...by geologists. Further, there is a great deal more of the Bible that makes claims about geology than about biology. (It's still an extremely small fraction, but of that small fraction...)

In fact, as the science of geology got started with people like Nicolaus Steno (his sketch of a shark and shark's teeth is the image for this episode), one of their first tasks was to try to evaluate the record of stones and sediment for evidence of Noah's Flood. One of the first crises in geology was dealing with the failure of this quest to find evidence for a global flood (which may or may not be an accurate translation of the intent of the writer of that part of Genesis, but that's another story).

Paul: "Welcome to Episode 20 of That's So Second Millennium. "I'm Paul Giesting, a geologist, researcher, consultant, writer, and your co-host on this journey through the beautiful frontier country between science, philosophy, and religion as they stand here at the beginning of the third millennium. My opposite number is Bill Schmitt, a journalist, radio personality, and dab hand with the accordion. "This week Bill managed to snag an interview with Father Robert Spitzer, who runs the Magis Center out on the West Coast and is the host of Father Spitzer's Universe on EWTN. He's published a number of books, which tend to have provocative titles; the one that I've read is called New Proofs for the Existence of God. That's an exciting read for anyone interested in the subject matter of this podcast, and travels through scientific and philsophical and mathematical arguments like the debate over fine tuning--whether Someone had to deliberately create the universe as it is, given how tightly constrained many physical constants seem to have had to be in order for any of the complex structures of atoms, planets, and stars to form and allow the appearance of life--and the question of whether it really makes any sense to speak of a "reverse infinity" and a universe that has always existed. Indian thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, and even Thomas Aquinas either thought that the universe has always existed or at the very least that there is no logical contradiction in saying that it could have always existed in time, even while Aristotle and Thomas asserted that the universe could not have an infinite chain of causes and needed a Prime Mover. Spitzer, in New Proofs, brings forward arguments from the philosophy of mathematics that perhaps this idea of a reverse infinity is not really logically coherent at all...a topic for one or more future podcasts. "For today, Bill talked to Father Spitzer about the state of culture and the demographics of young people leaving the practice and even the identification of faith and citing as one reason the perceived contradiction between science and faith, initiatives to fight that, and the real absurdity of this perceived contradiction. With that I'll let Bill take it away."

Bill: Introduces our podcast and the motivations: value to filling holes in the culture, addressing the young. Spitzer: Most recent Pew survey in 2016 comments on the high fraction of young people not just leaving the Church for a while, not just leaving a Church, but leaving faith altogether and becoming agnostic or atheistic. 49% of those leaving cite the perceived contradiction between science and religion as a key reason. Bill: Proposes two reasons why that might be: was this gap "percolating" for a long time and just not being addressed, or is there a recent development pushing this. Spitzer: It's both. The gap has been there for a long time [below the surface]. There are a lot of internet resources, social media outlets devoted to pushing an atheistic worldview. This feeds back into schools. Science teachers and professors that publicly espouse atheism meet audiences that are already primed that direction and certainly have no answers to contradict what they're being told. One of his initiatives is crediblecatholic.com, where there is a bundle of resource modules presenting core arguments for the consistency of the Catholic faith and science and even arguments that discoveries in science point toward faith, not unbelief, in a Creator as the more sensible interpretation of reality. Pushing to get this curriculum into every diocese and every confirmation class and Catholic school curriculum. Example topics: the Shroud of Turin, evidence for an intelligent Creator, near death experiences, evidence for a transphysical soul, 20th and 21st century accounts of miracles that have been thoroughly investigated with scientific methods. Bill: The New Atheism is almost built on being shallow, on an attitude of mockery rather than on a serious analysis of evidence. This approach is the opposite: really multi-faceted. Spitzer: Cardinal Newman talked about the "informal inference" to faith. It's not one argument; it's about twenty lines of reasoning. In our day we have if anything more of these, all the way from philosophical to scientific arguments to faith on the large scale to countless examples of miracles that have withstood thorough scrutiny by skeptical researchers. This is what the Credible Catholic approach is trying to convey. We've tested the curriculum on beta groups of students in Austin, New York, Los Angeles and gotten remarkably high marks from these groups (97% positive / very positive, rated anonymously). Bill: Pope Benedict foundation awards for "expanded reason" and the problems with positivism, scientism. Spitzer: The logical contradiction at the very foundation of Vienna Circle positivism: it makes the self-contradictory claim that "the only valid knowledge is scientifically verifiable knowledge"...good luck checking that statement by scientific methods. That's a school of thought from the turn of the 20th century; we in the Church have been wrestling with it for a long time. Reminiscence about a debate on Larry King Live with Stephen Hawking (et al.) and the claim that science had replaced philosophy...this is likewise straightforwardly impossible; science and philosophy do fundamentally different things. For that matter, so do science and mathematics. Bill: A contradiction that I see more than ever: our culture and educational system is arguing for atheism and at the same time dumbing down our understanding of basically everything, while there is a growing s(S)ociety of Catholic Scientists...[a quick back and forth] Spitzer: Artificial intelligence's potential is overrated when it is claimed that it can become creative in anything like a human fashion. It can't find new truths; they don't love [or will] or have any of the transcendentals. Computers are marvellous tools that, *in tandem with us*, can take us to new places we could not get without this kind of effort multiplier... Studies on religious and non-religious affiliated groups, with the latter having much higher rates of maladaptions: suicide, substance abuse, impulsivity, depression, etc. Augustine's comment about our hearts being restless until we rest in God seems to be empirically corroborated. Closing: CredibleCatholic.com, Notre Dame initiatives to educate high school science teachers on the interrelations between faith and science.

"So there we have it. I also want to thank Father Spitzer for taking the time to give this interview. We hope to present many more interviews as That's So Second Millennium matures and gets going. The point of the podcast has always been to get conversations started about these core issues, whether and how to be a logically coherent believer in the modern age. It's started with these conversations between Bill and I, but the point is to move outward and engage with more of you. The time is rapidly coming to expand this outreach another step or two, through social media and ordinary human interactions. Right now you can check out the Facebook page for That's So Second Millennium, and you can leave ratings and reviews on one or more of our podcast servers, Apple, Google Play, Stitcher, or Podbean."

Juan Martin Maldacena was after her, and was presented the St. Albert Award. You don't schedule Juan Maldacena and not have him talk about his own physics research; he is famous for research on workable forms of string theory in anti-de Sitter space and some results on the shape and nature of black holes. His talk was very technical and rather hard to summarize, but an intriguing aspect of it was the recurring notion that black hole singularities and the original singularity of the Big Bang might have a lot in common.

Sunday morning after Mass Michael Dennin led off with a talk structured around a book called "The Big Picture" by somebody I think I've heard of but don't know why named Sean Carroll. In this book Carroll apparently divides reality into "poetic naturalism", where "poetic" means "stories we tell ourselves about large complicated objects" and "naturalism" means "quantum physics, which is actually reality". Dennin made four points:

1. Emergence. Reality does not appear to be just quantum physics (or, I would elaborate, not even just a unified theory that somehow gets gravity and relativity united with quantum physics). There are really new laws that emerge as you go to larger, composite, varied objects...the laws of thermodynamics, entropy in particular, are an example.
2. Physical reality. It's a little much to talk about "reality" so cavlierly; it ignores basically metric tons of philosophical questions people have spent centuries debating. Is physical reality basically sense data? Is it the particles we theorize to be out there to explain, ultimately, our sense data in the context of the experiments we do and the natural objects we observe? Isn't there nonphysical reality: mathematics, wavefunctions (they can't be completely physical), conscious reality / qualia? How can we be sure there aren't nonphysical "forces" acting on physical objects? In some way, don't they have to? (mathematics and logic in some way constrain reality, that's a rumination of mine while writing this)
3. Free will...the Comptonesque observation that quantum physics leave room for this nonphysical soul or mind to affect the physical body
4. MIracles. Dennin actually led off the talk with an exercise, asking us to define miracles, and then he went on a fairly vigorous campaign against the idea that miracles ever incorporate the violation of physical law, or at least that they require it, that that should be in the definition. I noted "Contrasting focus on God's will/purpose..." but I cannot really reconstruct what he seemed to be driving at.

Craig Lent, a professor at Notre Dame, went next and gave an interesting talk that interfaced with others. He actually seemed to conflict with Barr in that he commented early on that the "state vector," which had be be the wavefunction since it had the same Greek letter psi for its symbol, contained all the information possible to have about a system and not just one observer's (the concept Barr used). He also addresses the measurement problem, but my note broke off mid-sentence. He went on to summarize the content of Scarani's talk, that Bell inequality experiments all show that the universe is not deterministic. He then addresses the claim that while atom-scale particles show quantum indeterminism, larger stuff does not, and nerves are enough larger that the human brain must be deterministic. That's probably not true; even 10,000 atomic mass unit molecules like neural transmitters show quantum behavior in experiments. We are left again with the Arthur Compton point that while obviously physics constrains us, our brains are not deterministic machines; if our souls are not affecting them, then at the very least some of their functionality is random.

The final talk was by (Padre) Javier Sanchez-Canizares on "Mind, Decoherence, and the Copenhagen Interpretation." This again comments on many of the topics in previous talks. Unfortunately the talk seemed to paw about problems already discussed without coming to any new realizations. I cannot tell from my notes whether I learned anything about decoherence, which I was really hoping to do; I think I had to look it up afterward, and even then the answers I've found so far are not satisfying. He asked the "Wigner's friend" question that Barr mentioned about the "cut" between the observer and the system in a quantum physics observation. He also made some intriguing comments on the nature of classical physics: if quantum physics is reality, why is it so hard to get rid of classical physics terminology? We still describe things that way. A recent physicist, Zurek, comments that classical physics entities somehow embody a "survival of the fittest" (the sort of comment I start questioning for influence of the divine name of evolution). Heisenberg apparently said that classical physics terms are just unavoidably part of how humans interact with the world.

We moved on to discuss Peter Koellner. Koellner was the next talk and probably deserves his own podcast. I have gotten his lecture slides from him but won't have time to analyze them for a few weeks. The short version for now is that he gave us some perspective on Godel's theorem, a result in mathematical logic that many (including many agnostics like the physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose) have taken to imply that human thought must transcend any finite logical system that could be, say, programmed into a computer: in other words, the human mind is not a computer. Koellner argued, in large part from Godel's own writings, that what he actually proved is probably that EITHER human thought transcends the mechanical OR that there are mathematical truths that transcend mind. This is potentially a blow to a number of people who rely on the argument to prove our superiority to our own machines, but I myself find either conclusion to be exciting.

Andrew Sicree was next. He gave this tremendously gung-ho talk about Father Nick Steno, the 17th century member of the founder's club of geology (I think that's fair; Sicree basically called him the founder, singular). It was mostly fairly familiar stuff to me, some of which I have lectured on myself in classes in passing. He is still known today for Steno's Laws of stratigraphy (i.e., the relative ages of rocks):

Principle of Superposition

Principle of Original Horizontality

Principle of Inclusions

and in mineralogy he is remembered for the Law of Constant Interfacial Angles, basically the very dimmest beginning of crystallography. However, Sicree gave some time to other aspects of Nicolaus Steno's thought and also to his career as a layman and cleric. I only thought I was a Nick Steno fan before this talk. Andrew Sicree is the real deal.

This is very weird. Barr cited a long list of quantum theorists (von Neumann, London, Bauer, Wigner, Peierls, and others) who considered the problem and whether mind as such is crucial to whatever it is that does the measuring and observing to collapse quantum systems. Wavefunctions, with their consequent probability distributions, evolve according to Schrodinger's [or Dirac's?...a question I've had in the back of my mind many times...] equation with no internal mechanism to cause this collapse. Clearly two very unlike things interact to form quantum mechanics as we know it, as von Neumann stated explicitly (calling the observer / collapse phenomenon "process 1" and the wavefunction evolution "process 2").

It is clear that we can shift our mathematical formalism to incorporate any physical measurment device into the "system" and thus recognize it to be in the realm of wavefunction behavior. There is the "Wigner's friend" thought problem where even a human observer of an experimental setup can be placed in the "box" from the point of view of another human observer.

When we consider the observer problem from the point of view of a descriptive science (geology, astronomy, zoology, etc.) there is the immediate and rather alarming philosophical question: What was happening to, say, this star or tectonic plate or ancestral population of invertebrates before there was an observer to collapse the wavefunctions? Someone raised this question with Dr. Barr in the question and answer session after the talk. There is a phenomenon called "decoherence" (warning: that link is informative in places but far from the clearest read) which occurs for systems that are very open, interacting with their surroundings. Broadly speaking, the observable in question can trade uncertainty with its surrounding and settles down into a tighter range of possible states, simulating to some extent the effect of an observer collapsing the wavefunction. However, the two phenomena are not the same.

Feser's objective was to highlight how our ability to be rational, and in particular for our thoughts to mean something unambiguous - even in the face of our inability to express ourselves in a completely unambiguous way in our spoken or written words - makes it difficult to maintain a purely materialist / physicalist view of human minds and therefore of the universe they inhabit.

At the outset he noted that rationality tends to occupy less attention in philosophy of mind and matter than two other properties, consciousness and intentionality, which seem widely taken as more difficult to explain by our contemporaries. For ancient and medieval philosophers, however, rationality was probably the clearest indication that the human mind is not some sort of solely physical mechanism.

Feser presents an argument via James Ross (Thought and the World) to try to bring this older consensus into the mainstream. It can be presented thus:

• Formal thought processes can have an exact, unambiguous content.
• Material signs and processes never have unambiguous content.
• Formal thought processes must employ an element not dependent on materials signs and processes.

We discuss Feser's points and a few of our own in favor of the two premises: our inability to be sure of the content of arithmetical symbols used outside our own range of experience, the ambiguity of translating ancient languages like Linear A, and the absurdity of believing I can't ultimately know what I'm thinking about.

Quantum mechanics demolished this intellectual basis for determinism, although it is clung to fiercely down to the present day, including the profoundly horrifying "many worlds" hypothesis

Bell inequality and the talk by Valerio Scarani about the closing of the loopholes that would allow a "hidden variables" interpretation of quantum mechanics (which would also save determinism, in a much saner way than the "many worlds" hypothesis) Materialism and "spiritualism" (if you will) are on an equal logical footing, even if cultural issues continue to propel many scientists and intellectual citizens of the contemporary world away from belief in extramaterial beings Society of Catholic Scientists as a place of refuge from this social pressure toward materialism

The gap between spiritual and material in ancient thought versus modern thought

The problem of qualia, choice, and consciousness and the lack of an actual materialist model for these, as opposed to evasive and reductionist language

On the other hand, the reality of a physical manifestation of all (or nearly all) mental phenomena, the dignity of matter in this detailed participation, and the absolute need for human souls to have bodies in order to be complete human beings (in contrast to Manichean, Platonic, or Cartesian dualism)

The scholastic notion of the human soul as form of the body The Aristotelian soul / souls Are vegetative (and animal) souls the forms of those bodies...are those essentially their genetic structure? This ties back to our existing discussions about "hylomorphism for the third millennium" (so to speak) The need for a new metaphysics and philosophy in general to rise up and deal with the strange new world that modern science has brought to our attention.

The scholastics, Aquinas of course being the one we remember, had a philosophy that was capable of being constructive...Chesterton's comment that modern philosophers ask us to accept some crazy thing in order to found their system, while Aquinas' starting point was common sense.

The difficulty of thinking and doing interdisciplinary scholarship in the modern world, despite decades of recognizing that we need to do it, due to the volume of human knowledge today and also the whole economic and sociological apparatus that depends on measuring scholars' output somehow...which is tremendously easier for single-focus scholars to maximize.

There is a unique joy that we can have as scientists of faith...both in our subject matter and in our fellowship with each other.

Our next few episodes will look at the subject matter of specific talks at the conference.

Bill interviews Paul about his experience and observations at the Society of Catholic Scientists conference that took place June 8-10 at the campus of Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

The SCS is a very young organization. Its first president is Stephen Barr, a physicist at the University of Delaware. Its first conference was in April 2017 in Chicago. The theme of the 2018 conference was "The Human Mind and Physicalism"--physicalism being a somewhat more precisely defined term than its synonym, materialism. (Believe it or not, some folks at the meeting thought those two elements in the title were probably incompatible.)

Paul discusses the meeting and the variety of scientists he saw and met there, including Barr, Juan Martin Maldacena (a prominent string theorist), Aaron Schurger (a neuroscientist), and more. Bill and Paul do a little digging and comment on motivations for the group, including the desire for fellowship (like the existing group, Catholic Association of Scientists and Engineers) but also to band together against the folly of the existing culture and its tired, hugely outdated idea that science and faith (certainly the Catholic faith) are logically incompatible. GK Chesterton was quite right when he commented that the quarrel between science and religion was properly left to prematurely arrogant scientists and sola scriptura fundamentalists back in the NINETEENTH century. It's the twenty-first, now, and we should get ourselves to the business of putting this to bed.

Paul elaborates on this final fact at some length, discussing the parallels between the current day and the scholastic synthesis of the thirteenth century. Odd, is it not, that in the broad sweep of history, Aristotle and his universe existing indefinitely backward in time lost out to the stories of a bunch of Hebrew peasants who thought the Prime Mover had actually created the world at a specific point...

That still leaves us with a picture of intellectual citizenship as a really, frighteningly large responsibility for all of us to try to bear. We spend some time discussing the other side of the issue: we either live in a universe with no loving Creator or moral principle of compassion, in which case it hardly matters what we do or don't do, or else we live in a universe that does have such a Principle, in which case our best effort is good enough, because that Principle has things well in hand no matter what we do. If we let that sense of security sink in, that frees us to start with whatever issue attracts our attention first and go from there. We can take almost any example and infer some principles from that, which can be taken to other problems in the world.

Another point inspired, at least indirectly, by The Death of Expertise is the thought that all of us...certainly all of us who have an interest in the subject matter of this podcast...can, should, and probably already have become experts in something, so that we have offer something back to the world. That very expertise also gives us a lot of grist for considering the work of other experts and coming to some sort of judgment as to whether they are fulfilling their obligations and are more or less trustworthy.

Paul then asks Bill, in his personal expertise in journalism, for some pointers on how to judge media. Bill promises to discuss it more in the future, but takes some time to lament the decline many of us perceive in journalists' willingness to report as opposed to opine and engage in punditry.

Bill asks Paul to close out the podcast with a meditation on how model-based thinking could apply to religion as well as science. One prominent way is to consider how we use the examples of the lives of figures in Scripture and the saints to infer models of how human life can go. We don't get very far if we try to replicate another person's life exactly, and yet there are principles we can abstract from the examples of the saints that can help us on our way.

Apparently, we have not even touched on the issue that inspired Bill's original question about "intellectual citizenship." Whether we do that next episode remains to be seen.

In the political system we inhabit, in the U.S. and other contemporary representative democracies, we choose whom to trust to make decisions for us. There is a tendency to think about our choices in voting as a process of simply matching up policy preferences, but that leaves out of consideration the very important human question of which candidate will actually act on his or her stated policy preferences and do so effectively.

In our awareness of the broader world, when we give our allegiance to science, it's good to have an idea to what sort of thing we are pledging ourselves. Different sciences are at different stages of development and are more or less ripe for further paradigm shifts. Those paradigm shifts may come more or less "off in the distance," where they may or may not affect how we solve practical problems. The paradigm shifts we've discussed in physics didn't change how civil engineers made their calculations, but the plate tectonics revolution in the 1960s did have practical ramifications for economic geology and hazards assessment, just to name two things. The human sciences of economics, sociology, and psychology are good examples of sciences that are ripe for paradigm shifts. Indeed, currently, they are in the really unstable situation of having multiple competing paradigms.

When we apply science to a practical question, like the issue of climate change, being a good intellectual citizen means gaining at least some awareness of the different parts of the problem and the degree to which our experts can express certainty on each issue. Climate change requires at least three big components. First, we need the basic thermodynamics of how air and water respond to heat, how they move and mix. On that abstract level of physical laws, we have great certainty. Second, we need detailed data on the temperatures, wind speeds, air composition, etc. all across the planet. On that level, we have a great deal of data, but not as much as we could conceivably want. Third, we need models that run on as dense as possible a cluster of node points, which is to say models that divide up the atmosphere, land, and oceans into the largest number of little boxes possible; and likewise, models that take into account as much of the physics as possible, and not just a few of the elements. This is the really hard part, even with the computing resources we now have.

Bill wraps up the episode by noting how daunting we have made the question of intellectual citizenship and also how important the question of models is whenever we try to apply science...and maybe any body of intellectual knowledge...to our problems. We will take these questions as our point of departure for the next episode.

We discuss the difficulty of canning a “curriculum” or “program” to address anything, let alone a problem as nuanced as this is, before plunging ahead and taking our chances.

Paul argues that there are actually significant parallels between the religious, and specifically Christian, concepts of “mystery” and “dogma” and inescapable aspects of thinking about and doing science.

A mystery is an issue within a system of religious doctrines where it is confidently pronounced that human debate and philosophizing will never exhaust the issue and solve it completely. That is very different than saying a mystery is something to encounter and then stop thinking. It’s the opposite. It’s a promise that continued thinking and contemplation will continue, world without end.

Even the concept of dogma has analogues, especially if you broaden your horizon of scientific thinking enough to take in the observational or descriptive sciences like geology, zoology, and paleontology. In these sciences, we try to understand phenomena that we don’t have the power to replicate. We can’t run the experiment “Venus” over again, changing the parameters until we understand for certain why it came out with this thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and high surface temperature as opposed to being more like Earth or Mars or anything else. We can do experiments that help us interpret the observations we make, but we have to accept the testimony of the geologic, paleontologic, or astronomic record as it has been presented to us.

Christian dogmas boil down to testimony. We can’t run the experiments Mary or Jesus of Nazareth over again. A Catholic Christian accepts testimony that has been handed down, and if he is a thinker of any kind, he works that into his worldview.

Again, key points in this discussion we owe to Stephen Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith.

Paul’s profile on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4658045-paul.

Shift from the classical to the quantum paradigm

Light is in individual packets of energy whose size is keyed to the frequency of the light.

This is the solution to the blackbody problem: the mathematics of emission of quanta of light energy produces the well-behaved curve with a peak at a given color that we see for hot objects, whether the Sun, iron in a forge, or a light bulb filament

It is also the solution to the photoelectric effect: light of high enough frequency is needed for the individual light quanta to add enough energy to eject electrons. Apparently the atoms can only interact with these photon quanta one at a time; you cannot add multiple red photons to eject an electron, but rather you need a single blue one.

The spectra of the Sun (with absorption lines) and energized gases (like neon or sodium lamps, with emission lines) turned out to be compatible with this quantum theory as well. The structure of the atom itself must be quantized, and electrons must live in well-defined energy shells; when they move from one to another, they emit or absorb photons of a well-defined frequency. Quantum theory began to solve problems chemists did not necessarily even realize they had about, e.g., why chemical bonds tend toward exchanging or sharing electrons so as to reach the number 8 in the outer shell.

Still, even with all this evidence, as the saying went, “Science progresses funeral by funeral.” Many older scientists stayed in the old paradigm to the end of their careers, whether as recalcitrants who refused to even believe in the new paradigm, or perhaps more often as castaways adrift in the new sea, clinging to the old research programs they were comfortable with and hoping, implicitly, that their work would add up to something that would remain untouched in the new world order their students would inhabit.

Religion: why do people believe? Is it reasonable or just arbitrary?

Picture a craftsman in Corinth c. 50 AD/CE.

This guy named Paul shows up in the stall next to you and starts making tents. While he’s not making tents, he’s talking about this Jesus guy with these crazy claims that he’s been killed and then “rose from the dead,” whatever that means.

You don’t think too much of it until the day you watch him grab Alexander the cripple by the hand and he suddenly starts walking! You’ve seen this guy for 15 years sitting there begging…

Yet for all the miracles, do you change your beliefs?

It helps that Paul is talking about this Jesus as the Son of, not some Greek god few of you really believe in any more, but some transcendent God that sounds a lot more like Plato’s Form of the Good or Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

It helps a lot more that you see changes in yourself as you listen to Paul: the things you’ve done and the things you’ve suffered make more sense. You want the forgiveness and the joy that Paul says this Jesus brings.

All of which is to say, in both scientific paradigm shifts and religious conversions, it takes a convergence of falsified old predictions, verified new predictions, and the ability to fit things that still work from the old paradigm into the new paradigm for the paradigm shift to take place.

Tension between Aristo-Thomist metaphysics, post-Cartesian idealism and Kantian/Humian criticism and etc., and science

Philosophy of science: what is it?

My own introduction: Popper and falsification key, Kuhn and the sociology of science revolutions / paradigm shifts

Tendency to exaggerate contrasts and play down common elements between them

Quantum foundations, classic experiments leading to quantum physics, wave-particle, uncertainty principle – falsifying classical physics, bringing about a new paradigm

Existing paradigms of classical physics & chemistry:

Light is definitely a wave phenomenon, period. It displays diffraction / interference effects that only make sense for waves, not little shooting corpuscules a la Newton

The electrons (protons and neutrons not being discovered yet) are particles with a given mass, location, charge, velocity.

Classical failures of light

Why do hot objects give off light, or rather, how? Classical physics applied to this problem winds up with a completely unworkable “ultraviolet catastrophe” where all objects at all temperatures have a frequency – intensity curve that shoots off to infinity.

Why do photoelectric materials only shed electrons once light of high enough frequency hits it? That makes no sense; it should be the brightness / intensity of the light that matters, right?

This is not an alien concept to religion, and certainly not to Christianity. The moment you take the Christian scriptures as a set of texts written by real people scattered across over a millennium of history, you have to accept that God's revelation has unfolded over time. Evolution has mileposts, and the time before the scriptures began to be written, the time during which they were written, and the time afterward are all marked off by mileposts just as the time before and after, say, multicellular life first evolved is different. There is no going back.

Paul takes the excuse to geek out a bit about how minerals evolve as well. The fairly averaged, semi-homogenous solar nebula that gave birth to the Sun and planets condensed into particles, a few of which collected into the rocky planets like Earth and Mars. From their original fairly undifferentiated state, these planets evolved by segregating out a core full of reduced metallic iron, while the surface was irradiated by the Sun and oxidized. On Earth the process led to even more evolution of minerals as its watery surface gave birth to life, and that life eventually started pumping this ludicrously caustic gas we call "oxygen" into the atmosphere. Of the many thousands of minerals known to science, a very large proportion of them have come into existence only since that time as minerals have "evolved" to meet the "demands" of Earth's unique atmospheric chemistry.

Getting back to religion...if evolution is a concept contained within Christianity, why are other instances of it now claimed to be alternatives to it? One major influence is the trend of the latter half of the second millennium to rebel against the hypocritcal leadership of theoretically Christian kings and prelates who luxuriated in wealth and power. Once there were Protestant churches, these were eventually rebelled against as well, and now the secular institutions and culture are engaged in attacking themselves. The habit of criticism has certainly allowed us to make astounding advances in science--20th century physics could not have emerged without it. Yet the cry "totally revolutionary new way of..." is now a hackneyed piece of salesmanship all across our culture.

Next time we plan to start discussing some of the concepts of philosophy of science, including the role of criticism and falsification. Paul wants to ask whether there's really such a hard line between religion and science as is commonly supposed, both by religion's enemies and its adherents...