Tuesday, December 23, 2008
If evolution is the response, what is the stimulus?
Evolution and natural selection are the best descriptors of the process that results when a certain set of conditions are established and maintained in the physical world. This raises the question: how were these conditions established and maintained?
Monday, September 01, 2008
Untitled
What are the piecesand how do they run?
Who put them together
and made them all one?
Stare at the beautiful
pieces that run.
Admire the web
He has lovingly spun.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The future
Five thousand years ago, the Egyptians built a civilization whose greatest art and science survives to this day, inspiring us with beauty and awe, a testatment to the capacities of the human spirit. If they could produce such marvelous works that have withstood the test of time, how much more should we, who are the inheritors of the entire world’s cultural, artistic, scientific and spiritual heritage, contribute our share of beauty and creativity to posterity. Today, in spite of our technological advancement, we are far from accomplishing anything even remotely as wonderful as what the ancient Egyptians have created.The eradication of poverty and preventable diseases, the provision of employment and sufficient and nourishing food for all, the end of war and conflict, these are easy problems to fix. These are the easy questions. These are but the beginning of the rest of our collective life. What we do next is the real challenge.
Our duty is to work for the unification of the human race so that we can set ourselves to the more serious task of building a civilization whose works will bear testament to our capacity to work as a unified humanity and survive into the furthest reaches of time.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Amazon.com: The Last Lecture: Randy Pausch,Jeffrey Zaslow: Books
Amazon.com: The Last Lecture: Randy Pausch
"I think the most important thing I learned as I grew older was that you can't get anywhere without help. That means people have to want to help you, and that begs the question: What kind of person do other people seem to want to help? That strikes me as a pretty good operational answer to the existential question: 'What kind of person should you try to be?'"
"I think the most important thing I learned as I grew older was that you can't get anywhere without help. That means people have to want to help you, and that begs the question: What kind of person do other people seem to want to help? That strikes me as a pretty good operational answer to the existential question: 'What kind of person should you try to be?'"
Saturday, April 05, 2008
My Purpose in Life
My purpose in life is to investigate reality and share what I discover with others.
Sounds vague, right? Well, it so happens it perfectly captures and explains my all-embracing curiosity and love of knowledge, whether it's art, literature, physics, math, medicine, cosmology, theology, meditation, dance, technology and the list goes on.
And it explains why I listen so intently and why I'm not afraid to appear in public, why I'll try almost anything at least once, why I love to travel and need constant novelty in my life.
Sounds vague, right? Well, it so happens it perfectly captures and explains my all-embracing curiosity and love of knowledge, whether it's art, literature, physics, math, medicine, cosmology, theology, meditation, dance, technology and the list goes on.
And it explains why I listen so intently and why I'm not afraid to appear in public, why I'll try almost anything at least once, why I love to travel and need constant novelty in my life.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Going Public with the Religious Process
Adapted from
"Going Public with the Scientific Process" by Ruth Cronje
published in Science 14 March 2008:
Vol. 319. no. 5869, p. 1483
DOI: 10.1126/science.319.5869.1483d
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5869/1483d
(write me for a copy of this article if you cannot access it yourself)
==========
The idea of using framing strategies to communicate religion to the public has recently been taken up in religious forums, the mainstream media, and the blogosphere. Most participants in the framing religion debate limit their notion of religious information to religious truths. However, confining religion messages to just the truths interferes with public understanding of religion as a systematic, logical process of human inquiry and effaces the distinction between reality and religionists' reasoning about reality. To communicate successfully, we should focus on religious process by emphasizing two important elements of religious rationality: skepticism and dynamicism.
Religionists deliberately integrate skepticism into their procedures by trying to refute their own hypotheses, retaining them only when confronted with compelling evidence sought through carefully controlled procedures. Religionists tend to shy away from revealing the intrinsic skepticism of religion to the public, fearful that it will open the door to doubt about the validity of their conclusions. But communicating only the truths of religion (framed or unframed) destabilizes public confidence in religion. A truth doesn't allow religion communicators to reveal, justify, and ultimately promote the skeptical reasoning process that helps make religionists more confident that their reasoning is correct.
Religion is also dynamic; it is a cumulative enterprise that requires religionists to situate their instrumental activities and interpretations against the evidence that has come before and to alter them in light of new evidence. Insisting that new reality be interpreted within the context of past and future reality will ferret out and correct error over time, but it means that a truth cannot, by definition, be anything more than the (ephemeral and fallible) consensus of religionists at a given point in time. A "just the truths" strategy can and often does backfire, ultimately fueling public alienation from religion. When religionists inform the public of "truths" (as with the Catholic Church's 16th-century claim that the sun and planets revolved around the earth), and then that "truth" is refined or altered, the public is justifiably confused. Studies suggest that the public tends to regard normal religious refinement and self-correction as equivocation or incompetence. Instead of sweeping uncertainty under the rug, religion communicators should help the public understand the logical and systematic procedures by which religionists confront it.
The true majesty and promise of religion lies in its systematic, logical, skeptical, and dynamic reasoning procedures. "Successful" religion communication should not be regarded as any message that enlists public support for religion. Rather, we should define "success" in religious communication as achieving a public that celebrates religious reasoning procedures.
==========
I wanted to remain as close to the original as possible, so I made only the following substitutions:
science --> religion
fact --> truth
and I had to substitute a different example of refinement: in this case, I chose the flat earth claim.
Finally, I don't know what studies suggest regarding public perception of "normal religious refinement and self-correction" but I left the phrase intact.
"Going Public with the Scientific Process" by Ruth Cronje
published in Science 14 March 2008:
Vol. 319. no. 5869, p. 1483
DOI: 10.1126/science.319.5869.1483d
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5869/1483d
(write me for a copy of this article if you cannot access it yourself)
==========
The idea of using framing strategies to communicate religion to the public has recently been taken up in religious forums, the mainstream media, and the blogosphere. Most participants in the framing religion debate limit their notion of religious information to religious truths. However, confining religion messages to just the truths interferes with public understanding of religion as a systematic, logical process of human inquiry and effaces the distinction between reality and religionists' reasoning about reality. To communicate successfully, we should focus on religious process by emphasizing two important elements of religious rationality: skepticism and dynamicism.
Religionists deliberately integrate skepticism into their procedures by trying to refute their own hypotheses, retaining them only when confronted with compelling evidence sought through carefully controlled procedures. Religionists tend to shy away from revealing the intrinsic skepticism of religion to the public, fearful that it will open the door to doubt about the validity of their conclusions. But communicating only the truths of religion (framed or unframed) destabilizes public confidence in religion. A truth doesn't allow religion communicators to reveal, justify, and ultimately promote the skeptical reasoning process that helps make religionists more confident that their reasoning is correct.
Religion is also dynamic; it is a cumulative enterprise that requires religionists to situate their instrumental activities and interpretations against the evidence that has come before and to alter them in light of new evidence. Insisting that new reality be interpreted within the context of past and future reality will ferret out and correct error over time, but it means that a truth cannot, by definition, be anything more than the (ephemeral and fallible) consensus of religionists at a given point in time. A "just the truths" strategy can and often does backfire, ultimately fueling public alienation from religion. When religionists inform the public of "truths" (as with the Catholic Church's 16th-century claim that the sun and planets revolved around the earth), and then that "truth" is refined or altered, the public is justifiably confused. Studies suggest that the public tends to regard normal religious refinement and self-correction as equivocation or incompetence. Instead of sweeping uncertainty under the rug, religion communicators should help the public understand the logical and systematic procedures by which religionists confront it.
The true majesty and promise of religion lies in its systematic, logical, skeptical, and dynamic reasoning procedures. "Successful" religion communication should not be regarded as any message that enlists public support for religion. Rather, we should define "success" in religious communication as achieving a public that celebrates religious reasoning procedures.
==========
I wanted to remain as close to the original as possible, so I made only the following substitutions:
science --> religion
fact --> truth
and I had to substitute a different example of refinement: in this case, I chose the flat earth claim.
Finally, I don't know what studies suggest regarding public perception of "normal religious refinement and self-correction" but I left the phrase intact.
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