I don’t know, I don’t have anything for a good title

Well it seems like I must have missed out on an interesting debate over Dawkins’ article. I’ll just leave my opinion here.

To start off, I don’t like Richard Dawkins. He’s one of those people who are so aggressive with their conviction that I just get rubbed the wrong way. I honestly believe that no one is or can be completely correct when it comes to religion. I have my own beliefs when it comes to religion, and I am by no means a religious person, but I know that I’m not necessarily correct, it’s just what I believe. So when someone like Richard Dawkins comes along and really attacks religion, it comes off as arrogant and foolish to me. 

However, I tend to agree with some of Dawkins points. Children can’t be labeled with religion, but working with children teaches you that they can’t really be labeled with much. I also agree that religion should not be treated better than other disciplines in education, but honestly education needs to treat all disciplines equally.

I agree with more than just those, but I really don’t agree with how he says it. It all goes back to that conviction thing, and the fact that he pits science and religion against each other in some sick death match. 

Do Androids dream of electric sheep? Do they?

At one point in our class discussions the fact that all of the authors of the recent readings have been scientists dipping into the humanities came up. We all started wondering if anyone from humanities had dipped into science. Well, as I was standing in the shower, solving all the issues of the world as one tends to do while thinking in a shower, an idea hit me. 

Science, wait for it…………Fiction.

It never occurred to me that one of the genres I love reading from is humanities dipping into science. Science Fiction is writers exploring science through the lens of the humanities. While most science fiction does require the suspension of disbelief, what makes it different from fiction is its basis in scientific possibility. 

I found that really interesting. And if anyone wants further proof, I recommend reading some of Isaac Asimov’s work. Here’s a story in case anyone is interested:

http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

The Existential Moment I shared with Sabato

“The Universe is many but it is also one: below the infinite diversity must run some unifying theme, one that can be discovered through our attempts at synthesis.” 

This line from Ernesto Sabato’s One and the Universe stuck out to me. Reading it made me think of two points in my  life that this quote resonated with.

I attended a Jesuit run private-school, and as such we had a strong religious aspect to our education. The Jesuit education I received in  high-school culminated in a class called Senior Synthesis. In this class we had to write a forty page paper synthesizing our lives in the context of our four years in high-school. It was an experience that I bemoaned at the time (writing roughly forty pages in one or two days really bummed out a second-semester senior), but ultimately was one that I am extremely grateful for. Synthesis is a combination of two or more entities that results in something entirely new, and to have gone through the process, I can see that Sabato is correct in his statement. After reflecting on the lowest, highest, and most profound moments in my life to find the questions I found most important, I researched what various faith traditions believed about those questions. After the research I reflected again, and was challenged to put into words my ideologies; to create the foundation for the beliefs I would carry out of my adolescence and into the world.

It was during all this reflecting, researching, and synthesizing that I recalled the most profound moment of my life. I once had the opportunity to spend a night camping in the Ica Desert in Southern Peru. It was a stereotypical desert, dunes as tall as mountains and as far as the eye could see. In the middle of the night I climbed to the top of a nearby dune to relieve my bladder. After doing so I looked up and came to a great realization. The universe is freaking massive. I don’t know if you’ve ever been on top of a literal mountain of sand only to look up at a perfect view of the milky way, but it is quite literally a breathtaking sight. Individual grains of sand were tiny to me, but I was even smaller to the stars. It was an interesting moment, to be able to see how vast the universe was, to know how small a part of it you are, but to realize that you are indeed part of the massive construct.

During my synthesis process I began to appreciate that moment even more. Looking at all the events in my life and having had an existential moment like my experience in Ica, I began to almost see a thread in the Universe. During a process where I brought myself together, it was as if almost all things were coming together. I could go on, but there is a forty page paper dedicated to that, so I’ll wrap up this blog post by saying that Sabato’s line resonated with me strongly. It doesn’t really represent the paper as a whole, but that single line is probably what I’ll remember most.

This is an image of the desert itself, for those who were interested.

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Two Cultures at odds

I find it interesting that the two lectures, The Two Cultures by C.P. Snow, and Two Cultures? The significance of C.P. Snow by F.R. Leavis, discuss the idea of the sciences and the humanities being two distinct cultures. I say this because the two lectures are a very good example of the gap between the sciences and the humanities.

Snow attempts to set himself up as almost a bridge between the two cultures. He makes it very clear that he is both a scientist and a novelist, though at times he leans more heavily on his status as a scientist. Snow argues the point that in education within England, the humanities are being more rewarded than the sciences and as such the students coming out of school are less prepared for the developing sciences and how they will impact the world. 

Leavis see’s Snow’s point and becomes personally offended by it and by Snow’s idea that he is an example of both cultures coming together. Even the title of his lecture, Two Cultures? The significance of C.P. Snow, shows his contempt for Snow and his Rede Lecture. Leavis argues that Snow has no claim as an author, places him firmly on the side of the sciences, and then lays into Snow and the sciences. 

The irony here is that Leavis is providing fuel to Snow’s fire. Leavis, representing the humanities, sets himself apart from Snow, who represents the sciences, and shows the readers just how large the gap between the two cultures is.

I would be interested in reading the response of someone who is not affiliated with either the sciences or the humanities. Seeing the ying and yang symbol that someone posted made me think. The third component of the ying yang is called the wuji. The wuji is the absence of ying and yang, and I think a view on the two cultures with the absence of a scientist or humanist would be interesting to read.