John Templeton Foundation Newsletter -- March 2005"Milestones" is a monthly newsletter of the John Templeton Foundation. In
interview format, it highlights the achievements of scientists involved in new
initiatives, research and programs in progress as well as awards and conferences
here and abroad.
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There isn't Only One Answer to the Question
The New Visions Program Seeks Multi-Faceted Responses
By Stephen Henderson
As director of New Visions of Nature, Science and Religion, a program launched
in 2003 at the University of California Santa Barbara and funded by the John
Templeton Foundation, Jim Proctor likes to ponder pachyderms. Specifically, he
often muses upon the fable of blind men standing by an elephant, arguing over
what they have encountered.
"One man grabs the tail and draws his conclusions; another devises theories
based on touching the trunk. The problem is that of substituting a part for the
whole, and of saying 'this small niche is my domain,'" Proctor said. "I don't
think this is allowable. To understand something bigger, we have to realize the
finiteness of our particular field."
Proctor is fond of this elephantine metaphor because it provides a clear analogy
for the divergent ways scientists and theologians approach life's largest
questions. A natural wonder, the elephant is also an appropriate image because
nature has been at the heart of theories of science and religion from the days
of Thomas Aquinas and Isaac Newton, right up to contemporary thinkers like Ian
Barbour, John Polkinghorne and Holmes Rolston.
"Nature is the mother of all nexus. And, whereas in the recent history of
language, nature is defined as birds and trees, an older use goes back to the
notion of human nature," Proctor explained, while describing the New Visions
program. "We want to capture all the ways nature is understood and deployed,
then look at the assumptions we make. We can't build a new vision, unless we
know what we are building on."
To organize New Vision's variety of activities, nature is defined in five
different ways: evolutionary nature; emergent nature, meaning from the
scientific perspective of complex systems; malleable nature, which examines such
phenomena as biotechnology; nature as sacred; and nature as culture.
In October of 2004, sixteen participants - anthropologists, historians,
geographers, and mathematicians among them - met in Santa Barbara, California to
commence a two-year research program that will explore these divergent
understandings of nature. Underlying their conversations, Proctor said, is a
theory that certain aspects of spirituality may be as empirically verifiable as
are discoveries in science.
This core group is now interacting on-line via a closed forum website, with a
plan to reassemble in October 2005. At that time, participants will present
early versions of essays based on their research, with the intention of
publishing a book in spring of 2006.
Other facets of the New Visions program are running simultaneously. The
Dialogues in Nature, Science and Religion lecture series was launched in January
of this year when the distinguished scholars Evelyn Fox Keller, Professor of
History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and Simon Levin spoke on the topic of "Ecology, Complexity and Metaphor."
"Theology, for me, should be the equivalent of trying to stretch science beyond
the things it can address. It should be a mode of questioning rather than taking
everything on faith," said Dr. Levin, who is the George M. Moffett Professor of
Biology at Princeton University, where he is also the Director of the Center for
Biocomplexity. "Great religious philosophers of all religions have always
confronted these questions."
The "Dialogues" continued in February when Evan Thompson, the Canada Research
Chair in Cognitive Science and the Embodied Mind in the Department of Philosophy
at York University, and Frans de Waal discussed "Primates, Monks, and the Mind."
"In my work with monkeys and apes, I have found many cases of one individual
coming to another's rescue, putting an arm around a victim of attack, or having
other emotional responses to the distress of others. More complex forms of
empathy occur as well, indicating that primates can take the perspective of the
other," said Dr. Waal, C. H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the
Department of Psychology at Emory University.
Concurrently, New Visions is offering an on-line course of study that is open to
UCSB students as well as the general public. This curriculum includes lectures,
readings and discussion forums that feature a wide range of scholarly
perspectives on biophysical and human nature.
"We feel one of the biggest impacts we can have is on students," Proctor
elaborated. "We are also constantly on the look-out for dynamite proposals that
address the intersection of nature, science and religion." This inclusive
philosophy enables New Visions to cast a wide net when searching for such
research proposals.
Lisa Swanstrom, for example, is a doctoral student in comparative literature at
UCSB. She received a grant from New Visions to study the representation of
technology in science fiction. This genre intrigues her, she said, because it
provides a "hypothetical space" in which people of divergent viewpoints can find
common ground.
"People read into technology with their own suppositions, so sometimes it's all
grim and dark, like the idea of robots taking over the world," Swanstrom
suggested. "Whereas, I believe technology can advance our human-ness, even our
spirituality."
Another intriguing topic is the ways in which nature is physically zoned apart
from metropolitan areas. This is currently being researched by Evan Berry, a
doctoral student in the Religious Studies Department at UCSB, who's also the
recipient of a New Visions research grant.
"When we talk about nature, it is always as something out there, beyond a city's
limits. Yet, there are interesting things behind how this dividing line is
established, such as specific methods of landscape architecture, that signal the
boundary between urban and rural," said Berry. "Such techniques force us all to
agree, at an important level, what nature is, and how one gets to it. These
methods, though, ask questions that are part of a broader framework in the
fields of nature and ecology."
Science fiction and landscape design may sound rather far a field from the
debate between science and religion. Yet, that's exactly the point, according to
Jim Proctor. He wants to delay any premature synthesis of ideas, and forestall
the impulse - so popular within at least the European tradition - to feel that
all scholarship must arrive at a "big conclusive moment when everything comes
together."
"There is a huge amount of beautiful diversity," he continued. "If we go a few
levels below large notions of nature, science and religion, and look at things
in a more pluralistic sense, we may find notions that are easier to support than
a single, grand, synthetic vision."
That leads Proctor from pachyderms to the symbolism of a dodecahedron, which is
the graphic icon for the New Visions program. This geometric structure, each of
whose twelve sides is a pentagon, has intrigued mystics and mathematicians from
Pythagoras to Johannes Kepler, and Leonardo Da Vinci for the last 2,000 years.
It is thought to represent the "fifth element" (after earth, air, fire and
water), and to be a perfect mediation of things infinite and finite.
Contemplating the dodecahedron, some believe, is to meditate upon the Divine.
"In the end, my challenge is to ask how we can bring things together. Can we
come up with something new? We can't promise any scientifically proven
verification of spirituality. We don't know what we will find," concluded
Proctor. "But we are going to try. I don't want the academy to hide behind
complexities."
To learn more about New Visions of Nature, Science and Religion, please visit
the website, http://www.newvisions.ucsb.edu
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Stephen Henderson is a freelance writer based in New York and a frequent
contributor to the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun and Religion News Service.
Milestones is a publication of the John Templeton Foundation.
To subscribe to any of the Foundation's various free publications, including
Milestones, please go to www.templeton.org
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