The story of Noah is on the surface rather straight forward. The people are bad, Noah is good, God decides to wipe out the Earth but saves Noah and a large number of representative animals in a big wooden boat. After bringing down rain for 40 days and nights, the rain stops, and Noah sends out two animal emissaries, when the second finds dry land, they disembark. Makes for a great children’s book, cartoon, or sci-fi movie. Versions of this tale are found throughout the ancient world, and much literature is dedicated to the roots of this story.
Culture
Keeping Science and Technology in Check
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There’s no denying that science and technology have drastically changed our way of life in the last 250 years. Moreover, to many it seems that the wheels of science and technology are spinning out of control and there’s no way to slam on the brakes. When it comes to issues as disparate as global warming and government surveillance, our ethics and values are not always reflected in our use of science and technology. So how do we keep science and technology in check? How do we use them as tools rather than allow them to have power over us and our way of life?
Rethinking Religion
Debate with Christopher Reiger about "A Call For Sacred Biologists"
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Artist Christopher Reiger sent Tikkun an email expressing his differences with my piece “A Call for Sacred Biologists,” which his painting “submerged in his erotic mystification” accompanied in the March/April 2010 issue of Tikkun. I responded and a conversation developed. Our intern Sarah Ackley has edited our emails down to this post. If I could sum it up in a phrase, I would say that Christopher is committed to the idea that science and religion are both valid ways of knowing but they are separate ways, whereas I believe we have to move towards a unified approach to knowledge (the nature of which I’ll take up in a forthcoming issue of the magazine). I was happy to have such a reasonable conversation about a topic that arouses such passion.
Environment
A living biologist more important than Darwin?
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You might think, on this site, that I would be talking up a sacred biologist, someone who combines a spiritual worldview with strong scientific credibility, but I don’t know too many of those (Francis Collins is one). I look forward to seeing more come out of the woodwork as this century progresses. This purely scientific story, though, does have spiritual implications for us. It tells us that the whole biosphere is much more interconnected at the DNA level than biologists including Darwin previously thought. I’m throwing in a related story about our human DNA, which it turns out isn’t so simply human after.
Scientism
Scientism Makes for Bad Science and Big Money: Complementary and Alternative Medicine as a Case Study
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Complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM, which includes herbal medicine, chiropractic, acupuncture, Ayurveda, and traditional Chinese medicine, sits at the awkward intersection of medicine, spirituality, and tradition. Often touted for being antiestablishment, CAM is increasingly finding its way into the mainstream, through doctors’ offices, insurance companies, supplements, and the media. There’s even a division of the National Institutes of Health, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), devoted entirely to CAM. Established in the early 90s, NCCAM’s mission is to determine which CAM therapies are effective and why. Medical schools, funded by NCCAM and private philanthropists, are now offering classes in and have their own research facilities devoted to CAM.
Rethinking Religion
Spiritual Wisdom of the Week
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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a quotation from Albert Einstein (1875-1955), as translated by Alan Harris:
The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive form – this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness. The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and oldest mainspring of scientific research.
General News
The "God Particle"
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The so-called “God particle” and the search for it at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, has spurred a lot of hubbub.
There are many reasons for this, I’m sure. To name but a couple, the LHC is the largest modern science experiment, costing billions of dollars, and, in Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, antimatter is developed at the site of the LHC in order to destroy the Vatican.
But I think a good deal of the hubbub has to do with the name “God particle” itself.
Culture
How Scientism Endangers Science, and the Entire Planet
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“The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.” — Claude Lévi-Strauss
But are scientists asking themselves enough questions about scientism? We have asked a science graduate (of MIT) who is interning with us, Sarah Ackley, to write a series of posts on this question, not straightforwardly channeling Tikkun’s editorial stance but wrestling with it from her own point of view. I told her I would try to set the scene. I should say up front that I have come to think that this is one of the two or three most critical intellectual issues of our time.