Evolution and Education

Sometimes I meet students who are afraid that evolutionary science poses a threat to their belief in God.  I think it is helpful for them to ask themselves this question:

Is God capable of creating through natural processes?

There are only two answers to this question.  If you say no, you make God too small to be worth worshiping.  If you say yes, then you see that there's no prima facie reason why belief in God and belief in evolution need to be opposed to one another.

Of course, this doesn't clear up all the obstacles to reconciling religious belief and confidence in science, but it's a start.

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If you're a teacher of students who also grapple with this, and you don't understand them, this might help.  Some of them will certainly be unreasonable.  For them, sometimes all you can do is be an example of reasonable beliefs and hope it sinks in someday.  But many of them are concerned about a few big questions, like these:

• The trust they've placed in their community.  Think about it: if your parents or your pastor or someone else you trusted taught you that there's an irreconcilable conflict between science and faith, you might distrust anyone who said otherwise.  It might help such students to go back to that community and ask the question I posed above.  This may take time, because there's a lot at stake here.
• An even bigger concern is the question of human dignity.  I think that's what's behind the old complaint that "I'm not descended from monkeys."  If the student is simply concerned about being descended from unwashed furry critters, they should probably look more closely at their family trees.  Monkeys are often nicer than our actual relatives.
• But there's another concern here that's actually quite positive, because it means that they care about ethics, and they're trying to preserve that in the face of a perceived threat.  Some students correctly intuit that what's at stake in evolution is not merely a theory of descent but a whole theory of knowledge, and of metaphysics.  Natural sciences rest upon an assumption of methodological naturalism.  That is, they assume that it is possible to explain natural phenomena by appeal to nature and nothing else.  So far, so good.  But sometimes we then make a little leap to saying that therefore whatever naturalism cannot explain is unknowable or nonexistent.  This is not just naturalism but a kind of reductionistic naturalism, and it's tricky territory, because it might imply that there is no real basis for ethics, or for valuing others' lives.  I'm not saying we're not free to value others' lives; I'm just saying that some of these students want to believe that there are good reasons to expect everyone to value everyone, not merely a world of subjective interests.  And many of them are reasonably suspicious that reductionistic naturalism cannot itself be supported by science; after all, how could natural science prove that what it can't see isn't there?  Such claims sound a bit like the misdirection of Wizard of Oz: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"  We'd be better off avoiding such claims, both because we cannot prove them and because they do a disservice to science.

Acknowledging your students' concerns will help them to see that you care about them as people and not just as names or numbers on a page.  Which will already begin to address their deepest concerns.

Safe and Sound: Guns, Fear, and Virtue

What do guns do for us?  Do guns make our lives better, or do they just make us feel stronger and safer?  I know those aren't the only two options, but I want to distinguish between two notions of salvation: on the one hand, we may be saved by what makes us more safe, while on the other hand, we may be saved by what makes us more whole.  I'm using a theological word, but I'm thinking more etymologically than theologically, connecting "salvation" with the Latin salvus, which can mean both "safe," and "well" or "sound." (I know word origins don't dictate meanings, but they do help us understand how our ideas developed.) 



So again, what do guns do for us?  It's probably true that in many circumstances guns make us safer, or at least make us feel safer, and that's not unimportant.  But I do wonder whether they make us better people.  I don't think this question is easily answered.  It's not hard to imagine someone developing great skill, self-control, and confidence through target-shooting, and I've known police officers who regarded their guns as tools that helped them to make their communities better places.  But this passage from Kerouac offers another possibility.  Kerouac's protagonist Sal Paradise (Kerouac's fictionalized autobiographical persona) describes what it was like to be alone in San Francisco, thousands of miles from home:  

“I tried everything in the books to make a girl.  I even spent a whole night with  a girl on a park bench, till dawn, without success.  She was a blonde from Minnesota.  There were plenty of queers.  Several times I went to San Fran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a bar john I took out the gun and said “Eh? Eh” What’s that you say?”  He bolted.  I’ve never understood why I did that; I knew queers all over the country.  It was just the loneliness of San Francisco and the fact that I had a gun.  I had to show it to someone.  I walked by a jewelry store and had the sudden impulse to shoot up the window, take out the finest rings and bracelets, and run to give them to Lee Ann.  Then we could flee to Nevada together.  The time was coming for me to leave Frisco or I’d go crazy.”* 

"I had to show it to someone."

 It's not the gun that makes him threaten strangers or that makes him want to steal; but the gun doesn't help, and it's not neutral.  It's a catalyst for something else, and when Sal feels lonely the gun becomes a way of expressing his pain.  It might make him safer, but it also affords an opportunity (which he seizes) to become less virtuous.  His trust contracts as his pain dilates. My eyes keep pausing on the line "I had to show it to someone."  Pointing it at strangers in the men's bathroom is at once a threat of violence and a plea to be known, a disclosure of a secret. 

 Hard times can make us wary.  Another novel, Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, comes to mind here, another novel about men drifting across America, searching for an elusive dream.  When Steinbeck's iconic drifters Lennie and George show up at a farm to look for work, the man who hires them remarks on how unusual it is for men to care for one another as they do: 

"Slim looked through George and beyond him.  'Ain't many guys travel around together,' he mused.  'I don't know why.  Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.'"**

Maybe so.  If you know the novel, you know the complicated ways guns, trust, love, and fear figure into it.  If you don't, I won't spoil it for you. Nor will I try to sort out what our laws about guns should be. Not here, anyway, because something else is weighing on my mind even more right now.  The question of laws, and of safety, is important.  But so is the matter of being not just safe, but sound. 

We certainly need better laws; we always do.  Just as importantly, we need to become better people. People who "travel around together" in difficult times, because it is better to do so than to spend our lives scared of the whole damn world. 

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*Jack Kerouac, On The Road. (New York: Penguin, 1991) 73.  
 ** John Steinbeck, Of Mice And Men. (New York: Penguin, 1994) 37. 

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I am looking for a better word than "virtue," but haven't found one yet, unless maybe "excellence" fits.

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A longer version of this post was published by the Chronicle of Higher Education in both print and online in the Chronicle Review under the title "Armed In Anxiety."  A subscription (often available through your library) is required to see the online version. 

The Moral Issue Of Land

In my daily readings a while back I came upon this:

"[The prince] is to give his sons their inheritance out of his own property so that none of my people will be separated from his property."  (Ezekiel 46.18)

Central Oregon

And this, written by Alan Paton.  His younger Jarvis (in Cry, the Beloved Country) also writes prophetically about South Africa.  What he says could have been written about any number of places, though:

"It is true that we hoped to preserve the tribal system by a policy of segregation.  That was permissible.  But we never did it thoroughly or honestly.  We set aside one-tenth of the land for four-fifths of the people.  Thus we made it inevitable, and some say we did it knowingly, that labour would come to the towns.  We are caught in the toils of our own selfishness....No one wishes to make its solution seem easy....But whether we be fearful or no, we shall never, because we are a Christian people, evade the moral issues." 

As a child I thought prophets were people who predicted the future, or who spoke things God wanted to say, like spokespeople.  As I've grown older, my notion of prophets has expanded to mean those people who disrupt our quotidian secular and economic concerns in order to remind us that love and justice may and must constrain our actions.  What could be more important than that?

Zena Reservoir and Overlook Mountain

The question I am pondering this morning: What do love and justice require of us when it comes to land ownership?  

This question is made more poignant as our state legislature is considering eliminating perpetual conservation land easements.  One argument against them is that it seems unreasonable to put limitations on future people.  We may rightly ask: can we consider those people who do not yet exist - and who therefore may never exist - as factors or agents in our moral reasoning?

Dakota prairie

And yet every time we consume a non-renewable resource we are making an irrevocable decision about what the land will yield for perpetuity.  Land easements may be one way to offset the effects of our other decisions, and they are at least reversible if the future proves them foolish.

Jarvis correctly diagnoses us: when we think about the future, frequently we are moved by fear.  Isn't that why the prince Ezekiel spoke of was tempted not to give up his land?

I also find that when I think about the future, I am also motivated by love, and that love is perhaps my strongest, my most angelic impulse.  I save, teach, build, conserve, and create for my children, and for others like them.  I may not be able to give them a better world, but I do feel - I admit it is, at its base, a feeling - that I owe them at least as good a world as I received.

Twin Falls, Idaho

Secret Poison

South Dakota's Attorney General announced today that he wants the state legislature to protect the names of the manufacturers of the poisons used to kill criminals sentenced to death.

To which I reply--in appeal to the Christians of South Dakota, at least--the scriptures condemn those who make poisons to kill other people for profit.  Why then should we offer them a special protection here in our state?

The answer appears to be that if the producers' names become public, they may be shamed into no longer selling human-killing drugs. What they do may be legal, but let them at least face the scrutiny of the marketplace. 

If you're ashamed of what you sell, maybe you shouldn't sell it any more. 

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Unless you're Mossynoecians, that is.  The Mossynoecians are mentioned in several ancient texts, notably Xenophon's Anabasis and Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica. They surprised Greek visitors because they regarded love and procreation to be public goods that could be practiced outdoors, while they regarded commerce to be dirty and shameful, something to be practiced indoors.  But I take it South Dakota is more like the Greeks than the Mossynoecians.

What Philosophers Do

Sometimes, when people ask me what I do, I am a little hesitant to tell them that I am a philosophy professor.  I'm afraid to answer largely because I know that much of the time my answer makes the person who asked feel a little awkward.

I think this is because most people I meet don't know what philosophy is, or what one does with it.  So when I say what I do, they aren't sure what to say next. 

So let me tell you what I do: I ask questions, and I teach others how to do that.*

You could say I'm a professional trainer of skeptics.  I train people in curiosity.   My aim is to be like a child again in front of big ideas, and to show my students that it's alright to indulge in a little wonder.

Because we don't just learn by being given good answers; more than anything, we learn by asking good questions.

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* By the way, it's a fair question to ask if you want to know how I do that. 

And it's also fair to notice that by suggesting that you ask that question I've just given you a little example of what I do.

One Reason I Love Winter

Morning frost

Writing, Law, and Memory in Ancient Gortyn

In the ruins of Gortyn, in central Crete, some of the famous ancient laws of Crete are preserved in stone.  Archaeologists uncovered them in 1884, and have since built a brick enclosure to protect them from the weather.

Gortyn, Crete

Even though I'm not an expert in the Doric dialect, I love to read this inscription, for several reasons that might interest even those who don't know Greek.

First of all, it has an unusual alphabet, containing fewer letters than modern or classical Attic Greek.  It lacks the vowels eta and omega (for which it uses epsilon and omicron), and the consonants zeta, xi, phi, chi, and psi (for which it substitutes other letters or combinations of other letters: two deltas for zeta, kappa+sigma for xi; pi for phi; kappa for chi; pi+sigma for psi.)

It also uses a letter that has since fallen out of use, the digamma.  The digamma (or wau) is probably related to the Hebrew letter waw (or vav) and to the Roman letter F, which it closely resembles.  By the classical age it had dropped out of use in Greek, and is fairly rare, like the letters sampi and qoppa.

(There is also a digamma in Delphi, not far from the Athena Pronaia sanctuary, on an upright stone dedicated to Athenai Warganai.  That second word is related to the Greek word for "work" or "deed," ergon, and also to our word "work."  This stone, pictured below, evinces several peculiarities of archaic Greek script.  Look at the second word, which looks like it says FARCANAI. The first letter is digamma; the third letter, rho, very much resembles the Latin "R"; the letter immediately after it, gamma, looks like a flattened upper-case "C.")

"Athenai Warganai" inscription at Delphi

Second, the writing is in boustrophedon style.  Boustrophedon means something like "as the ox turns."  Today we write in stoichedon style, in which all the letters face the same direction, like soldiers standing in formation.  Boustrophedon is based on an agricultural, not a military ideal: the writer writes as a farmer plows.  Write to the end of the line, and then, rather than returning to the left side of the page, turn the letters to face the opposite direction and write from right to left.  When you read boustrophedon, your eye follows a zig-zag across the page -- or the stone.

Have a look at this close-up of the engraving at Gortys and look at the way letters like "E," "K," and "S" face in adjacent lines:

Close-up of the Gortyn Code

(By the way, that "S" character is actually an iota; sigmas look like this: M; mu is like our "M" with an extra stroke added.)

There are a lot of other reasons to like this place, and this inscription, but I'll limit myself to just one more thing for now: memory.

This inscription is one way that an ancient community deliberately remembered their laws.  They wrote down what they decided, and that has affected our lives.  Writing the law down makes it accessible to everyone, and makes judicial decisions transparent. It establishes a set of expectations for conduct in the community, and makes those expectations known even to aliens.

The code at Gortyn records (in Column IX, around the middle, if you're curious) the presence at court of someone in addition to the judge: the mnemon.  You can see by the word's resemblance to our word "mnemonic" that it has to do with memory.  The mnemon's job was to act as a witness to previous judicial decisions, and to remember them and remind the judge of those decisions.  The mnemon's job was not to decide cases but to be a kind of embodiment of the law and therefore an embodiment of fairness.  

Unfortunately, no mnemon lives forever.  Presumably, the writing on the wall at Gortyn was a way of preserving what mattered most in the court, so that when they passed away, their memories would live on through the ages.

National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Possibly a child's dish? The sixth letter is digamma.

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Harold Fowler writes in a footnote to his 1921 translation of the Cratylus that under Eucleides the Athenians officially changed their alphabet from the archaic one to the Ionian alphabet in 404/403 BCE.  This expanded their system of vowels, adding the long vowels eta and omega.  It became known as the Euclidean Alphabet.

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If you can find it, Adonis Vasilakis' The Great Inscription of the Law Code of Gortyn (Heraklion/Iraklio: Mystis O.E.) is a great resource.  It has a facsimile of the whole wall, a complete translation, and some helpful historical observations.  ISBN 9608853400

Books Worth Reading

After my recent post about great books, pedagogy and hope I've had some queries about what I'm reading and what I recommend.

I'm reluctant to make book recommendations because I think what you read should have some connection to what you care about and what you've already read.  In general, my recommendations are these:

First, I agree with what C.S. Lewis once said:* it's good to read old books.  Old books and books written by people who are not like us have a remarkable power of helping us to see the world with fresh eyes.

Second, let your reading grow organically.  If you liked a book you read, let it lead you to the next book you read.  Often, books name their connections to other books.  Or authors will name those connections, dependencies, and appreciations.  The first time I read Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, I missed the fact that the preface named H.G. Wells and that the afterword referred to Bernardus Silvestris.  When I read it again as an adult, I caught those obvious references and let them lead me to other books.**
 
Third, I recommend learning the classics.  That's an intentionally vague term, and I use it to mean that it's good to know those books that have given your culture its vocabulary.  People who have stories in common have enriched possibilities for conversation.  One of my favorite Star Trek episodes explored this idea, and it appealed to me because I believe that it's not far from how language really grows. If you need a place to start, check out one of the various lists of "great books" floating around out there.  For instance this one, or this one.

With all that being said, if you're still interested in what I'm reading, here are some older titles I've enjoyed in the last year or so:

• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. (Mixed feelings about this one. My mind enjoyed it more than my aesthetic sense did, if that makes sense.)
• John Steinbeck, Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men. (I discovered Steinbeck late in life, thanks to a friend's recommendation.  I've also recently read his Log From The Sea of Cortez and Travels With Charley In Search Of America.  I think these two will forever shape me as a writer.)
• Graham Greene, Our Man In Havana, The Quiet American, The Honorary Consul, Travels With My Aunt, The Power And The Glory. (I will let the number of titles speak for itself.) 
• Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country. (I was surprised by how contemporary this old book felt, and by how relevant to America an African book could feel.) 
• The Táin. Because I have a thing for reading really old books, and this is one of the oldest from Europe.

And here are some of the more recent books I've enjoyed:

• China Miéville, Kraken.  (London. Magical realism.  Bizarre and witty.)
• J. Mark Bertrand, Back On Murder (I don't read many detective novels, but I really enjoy Bertrand's prose.)
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road. (The final lines spoke to my salvelinus fontinalis -loving heart.)
• David James Duncan, The River Why (I've re-read this one a few times.  If you like trout and philosophy, you might like this book.)
• Mary Karr, Lit. (Third in a series of memoirs. Some of the best storytelling I've read in a long time. Brilliant insights into addiction, love, and prayer.)

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* Lewis said this in his introduction to Athanasius' On The Incarnation (which, by the way, is now available from SVS Press in a dual-language edition, Greek on one page, English on the facing page.)

** There are two excellent books on Lewis' "Space Trilogy" or (as I think it should be called) "Ransom Trilogy":  This one by Sanford Schwartz, and this one by David Downing.

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I realize I'm posting a lot about Great Books and St John's College lately.  I'll stop soon.  They don't pay me for this; I'm just a grateful alumnus.

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Update, 8/11/14: I've posted another list like this one on my blog, with new recommendations.  You can find it here.