Thank God for Science and Religion!

Homemade sign in a neighbor's yard.

Sunday night I had a dream about anticipating a college science exam the next morning and being unprepared—unstudied of class notes and unread of class texts. It’s the standard post-school nightmare that I haven’t had for decades.

I guessed the cause was my plan to write this post Monday about Jeremy Narby’s book, Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge, which I’ve referenced in two recent posts. There was a quote I needed to find which required my rereading all my underlined and checked segments—as it turned out, a delight for my morning prayers that day.

Those who know me as an activist, author, and minister may be surprised that in high school I was a member of Phy-Chem-Bios, my high school science club. What may surprise others, given the present (and I’d say ludicrous) divides between science and religion is that our faculty advisor was both science teacher and an evangelical Christian, one so dedicated that he had qualms about his future family inheritance of a nationally-known beer company, given his abstinence.

(One of my biggest “aha’s” reading Karen Armstrong’s A History of God was how scientists of times past were often people of faith, especially in Islam.)

The awesome insight I wanted to share with you was “that the human brain has many times more connections than stars in our galaxy” [p126]. That’s an “aha” from the inside out, or rather, way, way beyond!

The human brain…contains about one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons. Each neuron can form thousands of links with other neurons [p126].

Furthermore, the brain is not limited to the skull. My gut alone contains about one hundred million neurons capable of learning, remembering, and responding to emotions, just like the larger brain in my head [p129]. … Having a gut feeling is not just a metaphor [p130].

Admittedly, this may be dated science, given the 2005 publication date, but it still gives me appropriate pause to wonder at the universe. I’ve remarked before about feeling the weight of billions of years of Big Bang stardust coalescing into stars and planets and systems that can give rise to life and its subsequent evolutions, including you and me.

I think of all the neurons I have wasted!

The word “religion” has a verbal ancestor meaning “to bind” together, and there are many ways to be bound—by conviction, community, commitment, commonality. For believers, Creation is added to the list.

Narby is not a creationist but rather appears to believe that matter and energy have a lifeward direction, life that requires inherent intelligence of some kind. And viewing other creatures as mere machines denies our material relationship with them, giving rise to exploitation, abuse, misuse, and more. Calling him a “shaman among scientists” [p49], Narby credits Darwin for demonstrating that relationship through his discernment of evolution.

Recent squabbles for “personal freedom” as science recommends wearing face masks and social distancing to prevent further spread of the novel coronavirus reminds me of the HIV/AIDS pandemic when a few, citing “pandemic fatigue,” claimed their personal freedom to ignore safe sex practices.

As an activist described this “right” to an audience, Roman Catholic scholar Daniel Helminiak became distraught and finally spoke out, “If you get infected, you will expect others to care for you, friends and family and volunteers, first responders and health care workers. And you will prompt rising costs of health insurance and health care that fewer will be able to afford.”

Religion and science remind us that we are all in this together, that we belong together, bound together in this marvelous universe and this most amazing life.

 

Related Posts:

In Memory of Trees

Contemplation in Science

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Contemplation in Science

Anthropologist Jeremy Narby’s book, Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge, which I referred to two weeks ago, reminded me of the role of contemplation in the scientific quest.

I’ve written before about Einstein’s famous “thought experiments” by which he developed explanations for natural phenomena, comparing them to the imagination Saint Ignatius felt was needed in the contemplative life.

In a chapter entitled “Plants as Brains,” Narby reports the work of Anthony Trewavas, a biologist at the University of Edinburgh, which he summarizes:

Plants have intentions, make decisions, and compute complex aspects of their environment. … When attacked by herbivores, some plants signal for help, releasing chemicals that attract their assailants’ predators. … When a plant is damaged, its cells send one another electrical signals just like our own pain messages [p 83-4].

Trewavas prefers to use the word “compute” to “think” when applied to plants [p87] and disputes the long held scientific position that plants are passive because they do not move, explaining “it requires an equating of movement with intelligence. Movement is an expression of intelligence [p85]” speculating that “plant communication is likely to be as complex as within a brain [p93].”

I will leave all of that for scientists to hash out. What interests me as a contemplative wannabe is Trewavas’s process developing such thoughts, “I find it’s only by long periods of doing nothing but think that suddenly facts start coming into your mind [p90].”

Half of Narby’s book consists of detailed footnotes that undergirds or sometimes questions his text. I find these details occasionally hard to understand, as I am clearly not a scientist, but I can appreciate their gist. I’m not a footnote kind of guy, but I find these footnotes awesome and well worth the read. It’s there that I found these thoughts from W. I. B. Beveridge, written in 1950 under the title The Art of Scientific Investigation:

The most important prerequisite is prolonged contemplation of the problem and the data until the mind is saturated with it. … The mind must work consciously on the problem for days in order to get the subconscious mind working on it [p 206].

Diversions and distractions are to be avoided, but idle time can be useful and fertile. This made me think of Vincent van Gogh’s idle time after being dismissed from his pastoral position by church hierarchy dismayed at his lack of social distance from his parishioners. It was then van Gogh thought he might take up drawing and painting, hoping his paintings would have the same consoling effect the Christian faith once offered.

Beveridge continues:

Most people find intuitions are more likely to come during a period of apparent idleness and temporary abandonment of the problem following periods of intensive work. Light occupations requiring no mental effort, such as walking in the country, bathing, shaving, traveling to and from work, are said by some to be when intuitions most often appear… [p207].

That’s the way I work, by spending a little “idle” time that allows thoughts or feelings, patterns or analyses to “bubble up.” In college I read process philosopher Henri Bergson, who suggested that along with rational thought we needed intuitive thinking. Intuition may simply be the subconscious mind offering an insight or solution from its hidden depths.

To me, that’s the gift of contemplation in the spiritual life as well.

 

For Thanksgiving in the U.S. tomorrow, please see last week’s post: Thanksgivings

My friend and blog reader J. Barrie Shepherd is offering a holiday chapbook:

A Poetic Pandemic Christmas Pudding “a plump and spicy concoction of words, phrases and images to evoke the many flavors and aromas of the yuletide feast. P.S. Add brandy to ignite.

Proceeds go to food pantries in his area of Maine. $10 per copy plus $2 postage. Send check made out to J. Barrie Shepherd to 15 Piper Road – K325, Scarborough ME 04074. Copies will be signed and can be inscribed by request. Or order though his email: barrieshep@aol.com.

Donations to Progressive Christian Reflections may be given safely by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

In Memory of Trees

The tree that was (in spring)

A few days before Halloween, Wade and I were awakened one very dark and early morning by a loud swooshing sound followed by a thud that shook the house. A neighbor’s (and our pastor’s) very tall oak fell across the yard of the neighbor between us and into our backyard, taking out two fences (ours was brand new!) and a good portion of our only tree there, compliments of the winds and rain of Hurricane Zeta, which took down 350 trees in Atlanta.

The Bradford flowering pear, doomed eventually to split anyway by its very nature, was the sixth tree over 26 years that I have planted in the backyard. Each full-grown tree fell or was irreparably damaged due to a variety of natural circumstances, including drought, storms, and high winds: a maple, a cottonwood, a weeping willow, and two cypresses.

Our pastor's daughter and cat Luna

strolling toward our backyard in the distance.

Photo by Rev. Jenelle Holmes.

Probably related to the earlier storm, a very old and tall oak fell late afternoon on Halloween across our street to our front yard, demolishing our crepe myrtle and dogwood and burying our fountain and its flower bed. Thanks to the pandemic (how often do we get to use this phrase in a favorable way?), no trick-or-treaters were endangered.

In both cases, our yards got the top part of the trunk with all its branches, making quite a mess. Ironically, this season our lawns and yards had never looked so good, and now—! Where we live, where the tree lands is the landowner’s responsibility, and homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover tree removal except at the very point it intersects with a structure.

Tree across Berne Street, our front yard on the right.

This event coinciding with the fearful pandemic and the contentious election, the biblical character Job came to mind. And, given how we were feeling about our yards, the phrase, “Pride goeth before a fall.”

Virtually all who saw our wreckage said it’s a blessing we were not injured and that our house was not damaged. A couple of passersby and several friends told us we must have had someone watching over us. One older black neighbor, Mary, cried to see the damage, grateful to find we were not hurt, and Wade realized she needed a masked-but-non-socially-distanced-yet-assuring hug.

Several neighbors/friends/members of Ormewood Church helped us clean up what we could before we brought in the “big guns” of a tree service to clean and remove the debris this week. One of them loaned us a generator to keep our fridge running during two periods without power. As Mister Rogers always said, in times of crisis, “look for the helpers.”

View from our front porch.

You know my penchant for observing synchronicity, what some call coincidence and others name miracle. When all of this happened I was finishing up reading Intelligence in Nature during my morning prayers, researched and written by anthropologist Jeremy Narby. He compares the wisdom of indigenous animist shamans in the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil with worldwide scientific research discovering intelligence in other animals (not just the human animal) and in plants and microscopic creatures.

God knows a virus can outwit much of our national leadership!

Another bit of synchronicity: friends recommended and we watched (and also recommend) a Netflix documentary entitled, My Octopus Teacher, about a relationship of an octopus with a South African diver. Narby reports that “Octopuses have the largest brains among invertebrates, and scientists have noted their intelligence (p73).”

Narby explains that “intelligence” comes from words meaning “choosing between (inter-legere) and implies the capacity to make decisions.”

Anthropologists have pointed out that some cultures have no concept for intelligence, while others define it in ways surprising to Westerners, for example in terms of good listening skills, or a strong sense of ethics, or the ability to observe, interpret, and negotiate the social and physical landscape (p44).

In my view, then, intelligence is what spirituality is all about, especially “good listening skills.” For me prayer and meditation require good listening, not just for God’s “still, small voice” but to ourselves and one another in our own decision-making.

I grieved for the lost trees. The one in back outside my office window especially served as my “axis mundi” during morning prayers, my center of the universe. Just as trees send chemical warnings to other trees of impending predators, I’ve wondered if these fallen trees were trying to warn us of how we are endangering our climate, we who are the most invasive predatory species.

Sitting on the back-deck seconds before the tree across the street came crashing down, something jumped on my sleeve, grabbing my arm. Startled by either its talons or claws, I jumped up, dislodging whatever it was, a bird or a chipmunk. I never saw it. Then I heard Wade shouting from inside the house as I heard a splintering groan.

I wonder if the creature on my arm was simply escaping the disaster or was flung over our roof.

Or was it trying to warn me?

Damaged tree from my office window.

Related post: I Live in a Forest Called Atlanta

Donations to Progressive Christian Reflections may be given safely by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.