Science – Anna's Alcove

Ken Myers, a former National Public Radio persona, spoke about “Religion and the Humanities” to hundreds of students and faculty members at Cole Auditorium on Thursday, March 29.

“A good education recognizes the whole of what we are, that we are imaginative creatures and not just rational creatures,” Myers said. “That we were made for more than just mere survival.”

Of his personal convictions, Myers said, “I would assert that human beings were made to love what is true, to honor what is good and to delight in what is beautiful.”

Humanities helps to uncover the meanings and purposes of life, said Myers. He went on to explain more about what humanities and education really is.

Philosopher Josef Pieper called attention to the difference between being educated and being trained, Myers said.”

Training is concerned with one aspect while education is concerned with the whole world, according to Pieper.

Myers explained that education has been historically grounded in the disciplines under humanities.

“While vocational training shapes skills, humanities shapes persons. Training provides information, humanities opens a way for wisdom. Training departs practical abilities while humanities provide the framework for guiding our practices,” he said.

Myers cited Jacques Barzun, a 1970 American historian, and discussed how he used a farming metaphor to describe the role of humanities in society.

“Cultivation means that minds are not just databases that need to be filled. They’re more like fields that need to be prepared for fruitfulness,” Myers said.

For example, literature, philosophy, language, and the arts are not just classes to take, Myers said. They should be encountered in everyday life.

“The time of formal education is simply the intense preparation for a lifetime of informal education,” said Myers. “The field isn’t just cultivated once because there is more than one crop to be harvested. Education is just the beginning of our relationship with these different areas of research.”

Humanities frees us to live as more than just mere animals, Myers said.

In a 1910 lecture to the Association of American Universities, Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, warned against schooling that was merely training, said Myers.

The trained individual is a tool, not a social mind, said Wilson. Society needs minds that are imaginative and not just capable of logic or reasoning.

Poetic knowledge is a central part of the humanities, said Myers. This knowledge requires involvement and participation. It’s an invitation to engage and respond.

Poetic knowledge calls us away from detachment and dominion, toward love and community, Myers explained. It challenges our objective and subjective knowledge.

In this sense, education is more than just training for a job, Myers said. If we think that human beings have a higher purpose than mere survival, then education can be seen as to equip us for that higher purpose.

We are created in the image of God according to the western humanism and religious viewpoint, said Myers, but we continue to make mistakes because of our humanity.

Myers quoted historian Steven Ozment in saying that “we study the past, not to avoid repeating it, but to learn how previous generations survived the same mistakes that we make.”

The search for truth is essential to communities, said Myers. “Just knowing the truth wasn’t enough. We need to get together and talk about it.”

Myers then went on to point out the similarities between the church and the university. The church had always read the Bible out loud to a gathered community of believers and, likewise, the university also had its own “canon of writings.”

The church researches the Bible, while the university takes the texts that others had written and compare other articles with that text, Myers continued. The church looks to the Bible for guidelines on how to do theology and the university looks to written texts to see how professors before them had taught certain subjects.

In his closing remarks, Myers quoted literary scholar, Marion Montgomery, in saying, “A good education isn’t just the combining of ideas. It’s a communal wrestling of ideas of reality and then take it to the next step.”

–Anna Tielmann (Taken from The Spectator, Vol. III, Issue 22)

Ken Myers, a former National Public Radio figure, gave a presentation in Cole Auditorium on “Religion and Science” to hundreds of students and faculty on Wednesday, March 28.

“Both terms in popular usage have hardened into defensive positions that have created an unnecessary sense of opposition,” Myers said.

Science is regarded as purely objective and detached from personal choices, said Myers, while religion is seen as entirely subjective, more personal and private.

According to John Polkinhorne, a physicist and theologian, the ideas and thoughts that can be gained from these matters are obstructed by the myth of the battle between the “scientific light” and the “religious darkness.”

Yet, there has been fruitful conversation among scientists, philosophers, and theologian about the relationship between science and religion, said Myers.

“It’s a fruitful conversation because the scientific and theological ways of knowing actually have much in common,” Myers explained.

Thomas Kuhn, author of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” said that the main challenge is the assumption that we can separate the objective from the subjective.

Some scientists say that when they are behaving in a completely objective manner when, in reality, science relies heavily on the authority of other scientists, Myers pointed out.

“Science must rely heavily on the authority of fellow scientists,” explained Myers. “The community of scientists is one of authority, of trust, and tradition, as are religious communities.”

According to Herbert Butterfield, an English historian, people tend to point to the scientific revolution as outshining everything since Christianity and reduce the Renaissance and the Reformation as “mere episodes,” Myers said.

But, in the 17^th century, there wasn’t a single cultural unit called “science,” said Myers. A diverse variety of cultural practices was aimed at understanding, explaining, and controlling the natural world.

There’s a sense that’s detached science from all sorts of human activities, which is very similar to how some people regard religion, Myers pointed out.

“What we call science and what we call religion are deeply human activities. That they’re situated in human history and they’re connected to other aspects of human experience and, to the dismay of zealots on both sides, they’re very much intertwined with one another,” said Myers.

In the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, there was talk that science was the “new religion” and had succeeded the position that religion had previously enjoyed, Myers said.

In his 1874 book, “History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion,” John William Draper, claimed that science and religion were “necessarily at war.”

According to Draper, there will come a time where men have to choose between immobile faith and ever-advancing science.

Steven Shapin, a historian of science, said that “there’s no such thing as science and there’s no such thing as religion.” They are huge words that lump together human practices, beliefs and institutions, he said.

According to Shapin, science and religion are much more complex than the terms suggest, Myers said.

“I’m not trying to prohibit the use of certain words,” Myers said. “I just want us to recognize that they are used really loosely. The concrete realities that they describe might be obscured if we’re not mindful of the fuzziness of the word.”

“We know the world as persons and as persons we are necessarily tied to an inheritance of knowledge,” Myers said in his closing remarks.

“Merely to use a language, with its distinctive, poetic possibilities, is to be involved in a tradition of knowledge. Such traditions either in science or religion, can be reformed but they can’t be avoided.”

–Anna Tielmann (Taken from The Spectator Vol. III, Issue 22)

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Category: Science

Former NPR Personality Discusses Religion Conflicts – Religion and Humanities

Former NPR Personality Discusses Religion Conflicts – Religion and Science

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