Michael Heller, a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest, has been awarded the 2008 Templeton Prize.

According to the NY Times, Heller plans “to use his prize to create a center for the study of science and theology at the Pontifical Academy of Theology, in Krakow, Poland, where he is a faculty member.” (All you Polish speakers out there: The Pontifical Academy’s website is here.)

Excerpts from Heller’s recent book “Creative Tension: Essays on Science and Religion” can be found here.

Late 2006 saw the release of what has come to be a very influential report from the National Academies in Washington DC. The report – Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering – was researched and written by the aptly named Committee on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering. This was an illustrious bunch, consisting of 17 women and 1 man from the cream of the scientific establishment. The committee was chaired by former Secretary of Health and Human Services (as close as you’ll get in the US to a Minister for Health) and now president of the University of Miami, Donna Shalala.

As Shalala wrote in the Preface of the report, the committee was charged with the following tasks:

• To review and assess the research on gender issues in science and engineering, including innate differences in cognition, implicit bias, and faculty diversity.

• To examine institutional culture and the practices in academic institutions that contribute to and discourage talented individuals from realizing their full potential as scientists and engineers.

• To determine effective practices to ensure that women who receive their doctorates in science and engineering have access to a wide array of career opportunities in the academy and in other research settings.

• To determine effective practices for recruiting women scientists and engineers to faculty positions and retaining them in these positions.

• To develop findings and provide recommendations based on these data and other information to guide faculty, deans, department chairs, and other university leaders; scientific and professional societies; funding organizations; and government agencies in maximizing the potential of women in science and engineering careers.

The report was issued at a press conference in September 2006, and a press release listed the following broad range of recommendations made by the committee:

"Trustees, university presidents, and provosts should provide clear leadership in changing the culture and structure of their institutions to recruit, retain, and promote more women — including minority women — into faculty and leadership positions. Specifically, university executives should require academic departments to show evidence of having conducted fair, broad, and aggressive talent searches before officials approve appointments. And departments should be held accountable for the equity of their search processes and outcomes, even if that means canceling a search or withholding a faculty position. The report also urges higher education organizations to consider forming a collaborative, self-monitoring body that would recommend standards for faculty recruitment, retention, and promotion; collect data; and track compliance across institutions.

University leaders, the report adds, should develop and implement hiring, tenure, and promotion policies that take into account the flexibility that faculty members may need as they pass through various life stages — and that do not sacrifice quality to meet rigid timelines. Administrators, for example, should visibly and vigorously support campus programs that help faculty members who have children or other caregiving duties to maintain productive careers. At a minimum, the programs should include provisions for paid parental leave, facilities and subsidies for on-site and community-based child care, and more time to work on dissertations and obtain tenure."

Without many more details, it’s hard to disagree with the spirit of these recommendations.

However, the devil – as usual – is in the details, and a lengthy article in the March/April 2008 edition of The American (a project of the American Enterprise Institute) explains why.

If you’ve got time, it’s definitely worth a read, as the potential implications are profound.

The moderator of the panel discussion Communicating Science in a Religious America at the recent AAAS meeting, David Goldston, has published a column in the latest edition of Nature entitled The Scientist Delusion. (FYI, Corie Lok has already blogged her thoughts on this panel discussion.)

Goldston argues that although the interaction of religion and evolutionary biology still prompts all sorts of problematic responses from all sorts of people (particularly in America), there are potentially much bigger issues on the horizon. Near the end of the column, Goldston discusses two “facets of the way science and religious attitudes intersect” that the AAAS “panel failed to grapple with”. He writes of the second:

“[T]he panellists tiptoed around the fact that scientific discovery can genuinely undermine religious beliefs. The focus of the panel was on teaching evolution, but discoveries in genetics and neuroscience are likely to be far more problematic in the long run. The two fields are verging on drawing the ultimate materialist picture of human nature — humans as nothing more than proteins and electrical impulses, all machine and no ghost, to play off Descartes’ formulation. This view will challenge not only fundamentalist views about the soul, but more widely held notions about what it means to be a person. That will further complicate age-old questions about the nature of individual responsibility and morality.” (emphasis added)

I can’t help thinking that Goldston is conflating scientific findings with a particular philosophical position (materialism) here. What scientific experiment could one conduct that would demonstrate that humans are nothing more than proteins and electrical impulses? What does this claim mean, precisely, anyway?

Whatever one’s philosophical proclivities may be, Goldston’s column reminded me of an article in The Times that I read a few days ago, written by Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks. In that article, Sacks contrasts what it meant to be human to a figure from the Italian Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola, to what the International Academy of Humanism believe it means to be human (according to a 1997 statement, whose signatories “included distinguished scientists, philosophers and novelists”).

In Oration on the Dignity of Man, della Mirandola imagines God addressing the first human:

"We have placed you at the world’s centre so that you may survey everything else in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.”

500 years later, the International Academy of Humanism says much the same thing as Goldston (although perhaps with a little more humility):

“As far as the scientific enterprise can determine, Homo sapiens is a member of the animal kingdom. Human capabilities appear to differ in degree, not in kind, from those found among the higher animals. Humankind’s rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover.”

Commenting on the difference between the two accounts, Sacks writes:

“What is striking is the sheer loss of the sense of grandeur and possibility that drove Renaissance humanism.”

Now I’ll be the first to admit that these are not straightforward issues that Goldston and Sacks are dealing with. And whether or not God should be brought into the conversation is the topic for another day.

But the question of what science can teach us about what it means to be human – and whether this is all that we can say about what it means to be human – is clearly an important one to ponder for the future.

According to The Times, the Vatican is to erect a statue of Galileo inside its walls.

From the article:

Nicola Cabibbo, head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and a nuclear physicist, said: “The Church wants to close the Galileo affair and reach a definitive understanding not only of his great legacy but also of the relationship between science and faith.”

In light of this announcement, it would seem that the recent protest over Pope Benedict’s speech at La Sapienza University – a protest sparked by then Cardinal Ratzinger’s supposed defense of Galileo’s condemnation at the hands of the Inquisition – was more misguided than ever.

The latest issue of Nature has two interesting reports related to creationism: an Editorial on the application by the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to grant online master’s degrees in science education, the other on the recent vote by the Florida State Board of Education to include the theory of evolution in its teaching standards.

The headline on the ICR’s website for their news article relating to the Florida vote: Florida schools must teach evolution, despite public opinion. As though public opinion was the best point of reference.

As the ICR article states (in support of its headline),

According to a recent poll by the St. Petersburg Times, almost two thirds of 702 registered voters surveyed in Florida were unconvinced of evolution.

Of those two thirds, “|29| percent said evolution is one of several valid theories. Another 16 percent said evolution is not backed up by enough evidence. And 19 percent said evolution is not valid because it is at odds with the Bible,” the report stated.

It is this body of constituents that proponents of evolutionary theory apparently fear most and have tried to discredit by casting the debate as “science versus faith” and “scientists versus everyone else.”

And on the issue of their application for granting higher degrees in Texas, the ICR writes,

According to the media and blogs, evolutionists highly favor citing politics (i.e., Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District) rather than research to defend their views. If science is truly the double-blind body of inquiry by which we understand the world around us, then Darwinism should support itself without the aid of political crutches.

Hmmm.

If you’re ever looking for a regular source of high-quality writing on a variety of fascinating topics, the monthly Harper’s Magazine is hard to beat.

In addition to the (almost universally) fabulous essays, Harper’s also has two intriguing features that always catch my eye. The first, Harper’s Index, contains a list of sometimes amusing, often ghastly, but always engrossing facts and figures compiled from a wide variety of sources. Here are some particularly worrying numbers straight from the March 2008 issue.

Portion of US GDP that is accounted for by consumer spending: 7/10
Proportion of China’s GDP: 1/3

Chance that a British man admits to fantasizing about his favorite sports team during sex: 1 in 9

Percentage of full-time university faculty in 1992 who taught less than four hours per week: 15
Percentage today: 30

The second feature, which is always to be found on the very last page of the magazine, is called Features. It contains, in condensed prose form, a summary of the latest and greatest (or, as you’ll see below, perhaps not so great) findings from scientific research.

Here’s the first paragraph from the same March 2008 issue.

Japanese scientists unveiled a robot that plays the violin, a robot that solves Rubik’s Cubes, a robot that recognizes itself in a mirror, a robot snowplow that eats snow and excretes ice bricks, a robot exoskeleton that can be worn by elderly farmers, and a robot that walks at the command of a monkey on a treadmill in North Carolina. German primatologists found that male Barbary macaques thrust more vigorously during sex if their female partners shout loudly, and that it is almost impossible for the male macaques to climax if the females do not shout. [Perhaps it might help if the British ones thought about their favorite sports teams?] An American gynecologist speculated that humans have bigger penises than apes because humans’ large brains required the development of large vaginas, which in turn demanded large penises. Zoologists suggested that apes and humans share an ancestor who laughed. Researchers at Eotvos Lorand University programmed computers to translate the various barks of Hungarian sheepdogs into the words “alone,” “ball,” “fight,” “play,” “stranger,” and “walk.” Scientists taught dolphins to sing the theme song from Batman.

Who ever said that non-scientific publications (although, I admit, this highfalutin’ literary magazine isn’t exactly your everyday, mainstream magazine) don’t understand science? And who would have ever thought that science could sound so fun? I’m clearly in the wrong research area…

While I’m certainly no philosopher (much as I wish it were otherwise), I greatly enjoy dabbling in the topic on occasion. At present, I’m reading On Religion by John Caputo, a continental philosopher of religion at Syracuse University.

Although it comes as no surprise to hear that the book is predominantly about religion, it has got me thinking about the strident and defensive tone that many scientists use when the boundaries of their discipline are encroached upon, and about the frequent assertions of the primacy of scientific knowledge over other forms of knowing.

In chapter 2, Caputo races through a history of Enlightenment modernity. Through the work of philosophers from Descartes to Kant, the Mediaeval idea of the “self” as a “sinful, self-questioning, passionate, prayerful, weepy being, of restless heart and divided will” has been displaced by a “sovereign, self-possessed, dispassionate ‘thinking thing’, fully in charge of its potencies and possibilities, surveying the contents of its mind to sort out which among them represents something objective out there in the external world and which should be written off as merely internal and subjective.”

According to Caputo, “the moderns have a rigorous sense of boundaries, limits, and proper domains, and they make everything turn on drawing these boundaries neatly and cleanly. They insist on drawing sharp lines between subject and object, consciousness and the external world, science and religion, faith and reason, public and private, rational and irrational, empirical and a priori, cognitive and non-cognitive, fact and value, is and ought, descriptive and normative, sacred and profane, religious and secular.” In all, reason is king.

Then along come Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who wake the world from its rationalistic slumber. “In both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the world is a chaotic tumult, a senseless game into which we did not ask to be entered. … In Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the world of Enlightenment Reason … is left far behind.”

In place of universal reason, “Nietzsche … argued for the historical contingency of our constructions, the revisability and reformability of our constructions, all of which, as he said, are ‘perspectives’ that we take on the world and that have emerged in order to meet the needs of life.” Famously responsible for the “death of God”, Nietzsche “thought … that the death of ‘God’ implies the death of ‘absolute truth’, including the absolutism of scientific truth; physics too is a perspective.”

As Caputo sees it, thanks to the post-modern insights of thinkers following the trail blazed by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, “knowledge … does not require freedom from presuppositions, but … is seen as uniquely structured by presuppositions that should be as supple and fertile as possible.” Indeed, many of today’s philosophers now “think that disciplined learning in the sciences and the humanities has a lot more to do with the insights and instincts of the well trained, the suggestions and questions of the initiates, imagination, a measure of good luck, and an ability to cope with an utterly unexpected turn of events than with the much-vaunted ‘method’ of modernity.”

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In light of Caputo’s argument, I can’t help wondering why the very contingency of all human knowledge – that is, its dependence on cultural, historical, economic, political, religious, and social factors and contexts, among others – including (as the preceding quotes suggest) scientific knowledge, is not more widely acknowledged within the scientific community. It seems that we’re stuck in a perpetually defensive mode, singing the praises of our superior way of knowing while any and all challenges to scientific rationalism and reason are quickly pounced upon and discredited by the scientific establishment. A closer look at our philosophical heritage, however, might suggest that we don’t have quite the unshakable grounds for claiming the universality of scientific knowledge and truth as we think we do.

Of course, none of this is welcome news to an activity that must survive by forever extolling its virtues to funding agencies – just read the opening paragraphs of practically any grant application and you find all manner of self-justification and self-aggrandizement of the nature and status of science. However, I wonder whether the stentorian claims one regularly hears about science and its ability to plumb the depths of reality, to teach us anything and everything there is to know, should perhaps be toned down a little.

It would be something of an understatement to say that there has been quite a lot of discussion recently, on Nature Network and elsewhere, about the interaction of science and religion.

Now, the Ian Ramsay Centre for Science and Religion at the University of Oxford is pitching in with a significant new research project funded by a £1.9 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The project is entitled Empirical Expansion in Cognitive Science of Religion and Theology. (A brief summary of the project can be found here.)

According to their website, “The project seeks to support scientific projects that promise to yield new evidence regarding how the structures of human minds inform and constrain religious expression including ideas about gods and spirits, the afterlife, spirit possession, prayer, ritual, religious expertise, and connections between religious thought and morality and pro-social behavior.”

That is, research performed and funded by the project will seek to address the following questions:

• Why do people believe in gods?
• Why do people believe in God?

Further, “we desire to stimulate scholarship that explores the philosophical and theological implications of findings from the evolutionary and cognitive sciences as applied to religion.”

That is,

• Does the naturalness of religious beliefs mean that they’ve been explained away and you shouldn’t believe in God?

Cognitive science approaches to religion are certainly valuable. As the Ramsey Centre researchers themselves explain, “The cognitive science of religion does not pretend to be able to explain why any given individual believes in their God or gods. Rather, the cognitive science of religion attempts to identify numerous factors that contribute to the general tendency for people to believe in gods generally and God specifically.”

There’s a very large (and growing) literature on this topic – no doubt a great deal more ink will be spilled before this project is completed. Here’s hoping that at least some of it will be worth reading.

A quick side note: The relatively new head of the Ramsey Centre is Peter Harrison, an Aussie formerly at Bond University on the Gold Coast. If you’re interested in hearing a calm and measured voice in the science and religion dialogue, one that takes the history and philosophy of science seriously, you could do worse than read some of his many recent essays.

[In case you were wondering, I take no credit for “British boffins”. My title is almost a direct quote from a Sydney Morning Herald story on this topic.]

For those of you who are interested in what’s going on over here in the old US of A, the call for a presidential debate on science and technology has been heard.

The debate will be held on April 18 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

At least one prominent Washington insider thinks that the debate may not be such a good idea. Whatever the distinction of the signers of the call for the debate, it remains to be seen exactly how the debate will be organized, what questions will be asked, and thus how beneficial the debate will likely be.

A few weeks ago, I posted an entry about a protest at an Italian university over the impending appearance of Pope Benedict XVI on campus. The protesters were concerned about the Pope’s apparent hostility to science, supposedly voiced in a lecture he gave in 1990.

Well, it turns out that the protesters didn’t do such a thorough job of researching Benedict XVI’s writings. According to a February 6 story from the Catholic news agency Zenit, the protest letter signed by 67 professors at La Sapienza University, in which it was claimed that Benedict XVI was hostile to science, contained erroneous information that was copied and pasted directly from the Italian-language Wikipedia entry about Benedict XVI.

The errors reported in the February 6 article aren’t particularly grave when viewed on their own. The original speech that then Cardinal Ratzinger gave in 1990, in which he supposedly voiced his hostility to science, was given on February 15, and not on March 15, as the Wikipedia entry (and thus the letter) supposedly stated. Further, the speech was given in Rome – at La Sapienza University (the site of the recent protest, no less) – and not in the city of Parma.

As the Vatican’s own newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, writes, “In the name of liberty and the investigation of science, they [the protesters] have taken as true a falsehood, accepting an affirmation without proving its credibility.”

Couldn’t at least one of the 67 professors have checked the original sources? It is positively laughable that university faculty used Wikipedia to obtain incorrect information about their subject.

However, a matter of significant concern is raised at the end of the following quote, taken from a January 17 story in Zenit:

“The rector of Sapienza University had invited the Holy Father to speak, but a small protest that eventually reached the point of several students occupying the rector’s offices motivated the Holy See to cancel the visit. The protesters accused the Pope of being "hostile” to science and took issue with a 1990 speech by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on the Galileo case.

The 1990 speech in its entirety showed the protesters to have taken Cardinal Ratzinger’s words out of context."

In the 1990 speech, Cardinal Ratzinger apparently quoted philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend’s views on Galileo and the Inquisition. As the latest Zenit article states, quoting L’Osservatore Romano:

“What’s surprising is that the person who took the Feyerabend citation could not have read the complete Wikipedia entry, which enables one to realize that the meaning of Ratzinger’s phrase is exactly the contrary to what the 67 professors have aimed to attribute to the Pope.”

According to an article in the Guardian, “The newspaper Il Giornale, which republished his [Cardinal Ratzinger’s] 1990 speech, said the Pope had "expressed a different position” from that of the Austrian scholar Paul Feyerabend, “absolutely not adopting it as his own”.

It is a serious matter indeed if the protesters took Cardinal Ratzinger’s words out of context to provide ammunition for their own agenda. It’s hard enough to have real conversations with those whose worldviews are different from our own; we do ourselves (and our conversation partners) no favors if we resort to prooftexting and smear campaigns in an attempt to completely exclude them from the conversation. Whether Benedict XVI is hostile to science or not, he deserves the courtesy of not having his words taken out of context and used against him.