That's So Second Millennium

That's So Second Millennium

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That's So Second Millennium episodes

  • Bonus Episode - Patricia Bellm: Compartmentalization vs. integration

    Compartmentalization by students at Notre Dame

    Bill: ethics as a checklist

    The Science & Religion Initiative (see Baglow & Martin interview)

    The need to get the same message in the biology class and in theology class

    The change in the teachers after a few days in the workshop: divisions fade out

    It's a challenge having an "athletics" teacher in the program (phys ed)...

    Yet there are things: doping and respect of the body

    Patricia believes "you become what you eat" applies to violent video games as well

    Feed yourself and your children good things instead

    6 min
  • Episode 052 - Chris Baglow & Jay Martin: the mission to (re)integrate science & faith

    0:30 - McGrath Institute for Church Life: Science & Religion Initiative outreach to high school teachers to integrate science & faith

    2:00 - Gulf Coast Faith Formation Conference (a good time to be away from Notre Dame)

    3:00 - Summer seminars: Foundations Notre Dame, Foundations New Orleans, Capstone

    4:00 - Foundations ND: lecture based, top scholars in specific disciplines, with workshops

    6:00 - Foundations NO: experimental work and discussions

    7:00 - Dialogue between science & theology teachers about their own specialties

    8:00 - Capstone: topic-based theme & lecturers; special track for administrators; teaching practices

    11:00 - Templeton Foundation study showing schools already trying to do this on their own

    12:00 - The need to do this well and not engage in pseudoscience or gloss over tough questions

    14:00 - ICL team making "housecalls" to individual schools

    14:30 - Baglow textbook on science & faith

    18:00 - Vast multiplication of interest from schools just since 2011

    19:00 - Real motivations for believing faith is inconsistent with science: the need for hope [and, not made explicit, the appropriateness of hope]

    20:00 - "I thought I was the only one"

    21:00 - The historical and emotional impulse: rebellion against Christian hypocrisy

    22:30 - Baglow makes the Fulton Sheen point: "I also hope THAT God doesn't exist!"

    23:00 - The questions he wishes people would ask about God, meaning, science, etc.

    24:00 - "What do you mean by 'God creates everything'"

    25:00 - The nature of the discourse we encourage

    26:30 - "I don't know"

    27:00 - "When did science and religion enter into conflict?" - because they have not always been

    28:20 - The true role of the university in integrating human wisdom

    30:30 - Newman on evolution in the context of Development of Christian Doctrine

    33 min
  • Episode 051 - Patricia Bellm: Responsibility and control in science and engineering

    What do we want to do in this podcast?

    Goals for the year

    Values of experience, e.g. Mexico: solar ovens from recycled materials

    Credit consulting, etc., for exploited women in Mexico

    The little estate in Mexico

    Back to credit cards & exploitation of ignorance

    Responsibility of those to whom much is given

    Bringing it around to science

    Career and sacrifice and little deaths

    Chris, the handicapped man at the ND Center for Social Justice

    The ethics of "fixing" or preventing Chris from being the way he is

    The lack of philosophic background and the intellectual amnesia of contemporary science

    Philosophy of science and the disappointment of 20th century physics, but the culture goes on unaware

    Science, fundamentally cannot replace faith

    ...this is where Patricia makes that claim that science is about control

    Ethics of changing human beings, other elements of creation

    Bill poses the relativism question again

    Patricia responds that "you can control science"

    Everyone confronts the same Reality, and we cannot control it, but we prefer the illusion that we can

    26 min
  • Episode 050 - Craig Lent: decoherence, entropy, and faith

    0:00 - Three issues: entropy, decoherence, Schrodinger vs. Dirac equations

    2:30 - Schrodinger uses a non-relativistic Hamiltonian, with a p^2/2m kinetic energy

    3:00 - Dirac equation absorbs special relativity by shifting from scalar to spinor field

    4:00 - Quantum field theory as a further extension, accommodating fields that include many particles

    5:00 - Field Lagrangian and all the particles and interactions in the Standard Model

    6:00 - Even "everyday" gravity is in some sense accommodatable in the theory, just not extreme gravity capable of "separating out the vacuum"

    8:00 - Decoherence, not to be confused with the measurement problem

    9:00 - Decoherence arising from the interaction of a simple system with other systems

    10:00 - Reduced density matrix begins to look classical

    11:00 - Zurek and the work on decoherence: states that are "chosen" to survive interaction with the environment

    11:30 - Measurement problem not solved by this work

    12:30 - Entropy: the proposal that entropy is most fundamentally lack of information

    progress from the special case of thermodynamic entropy, to statistical mechanics,

    to von Neumann's quantum definition, to Shannon's information theory

    21:00 - Craig's career: why is an engineer so interested in the fundamentals of physics?

    24:00 - Journey of faith

    30:30 - People of Praise in Indianapolis

    31:20 - Final thoughts

    35 min
  • Episode 049 - Craig Lent: physics and humanity

    0:00 - Introduction

    1:00 - The power of physicalism/reductionism: a tremendously powerful method

    2:00 - Course on physicalism and Catholicism; Sean Carroll's least hysterical "poetic naturalism"

    3:00 - The lack of evidence for "emergence" in the sense of "downward causation"

    3:30 - Soft and hard emergence

    10:15 - Materialism vs. physicalism and reductionism: philosophical materialism

    13:00 - Are human beings exhausted by this account of reality?

    14:00 - The break with the mechanical universe of 19th century physics underappreciated

    15:00 - Laplace's demon

    16:30 - Thermodynamics

    17:30 - Future not contained in the present

    19:00 - Einstein & hidden variables

    20:00 - Bell inequality experiments

    24:00 - Entanglement

    26:00 - Human experience: both, as physical, but also as having choices

    27:00 - Quantum physics on many body systems

    28:00 - The hard problem of consciousness

    29:00 - The explanatory gap

    31:00 - The tendency to explain the brain as "just like" some recent piece of technology

    33:00 - Complexity of neurons, the continuing relevance of physical laws amid the complexity

    35:00 - Continuing relevance of quantum effects at the level of neurotransmitter molecules, etc.

    36:00 - Quantum effects in weather and rock mechanics

    39 min
  • Episode 048 - Terry Ehrman: God vs. Godzilla, carmen Dei vs. strepitus naturae

    0:00 - Science is materialist by method, but scientists need not and should not be materialist by philosophy

    2:00 - The world must be real and intelligible for science to make sense

    3:00 - And faith provides a philosophical basis that allows this to happen

    3:30 - Students' testimony on faith and science

    4:30 - Removing the faith/science obstacle is only one step on the road toward faith

    5:00 - God vs. Godzilla

    6:00 - The true God and His use of secondary causes

    11:00 - Creation as carmen Dei (song of God; Bonaventure)

    12:00 - vs. strepitus naturae

    15:00 - Thought and spirit vs. matter

    [This harks back to, e.g., the Ed Feser talk at the SCS conference. I personally think there is an enormous gap--bridgeable, but still to be bridged--between these arguments that the ability of the mind to generate and handle abstract concepts implies a non-material component to thought on the one hand, and the work of modern neuroscience to track the activity of neurons around the brain in specific patterns as we think.]

    17:00 - Philosophical gaps in the picture of existence without God

    18:00 - Infinite regress of causes, temporal/efficient causes and extra-temporal

    19:00 - Postmoderns in general have a depressing view: a para-Christian morality without God; doctrinaire atheists live in an even more depressing paradigm of complete lack of meaning

    21:00 - Basil & Pope Francis on creation

    22:00 - Basil on the interpretation of the six days and other aspects of creation

    23:00 - Guides on the tour of creation

    25:00 - Symbolic language (numbers) in Scripture

    27:00 - Scriptural mandate to tend creation

    29:00 - Historic ginning up of the conflict between science and faith

    34 min
  • Episode 047 - Terry Ehrman: theology and ecology, respecting the grammar of natures

    0:00 - Introduction

    1:00 - Catholic roots
    2:00 - Early sense of vocation
    4:00 - Lure of biology and ecology, early experiences in the field
    9:00 - Swing to doing theology with reference to ecology rather than ecology with reference to theology
    11:00 - Intellectual honesty in philosophy, science, theology
    13:30 - Science, Creation, Theology course
    15:00 - A theology course with a lab component
    19:00 - (Fr. Terry loves basswood trees. They were a go-to example of a specific created type of being.)
    20:00 - How does this dragonfly relate to Christ?
    22:00 - Despair that can color one's attitude toward bridging faith and science
    23:00 - (The basswood tree that can be counted on to grow the same shape of leaves every year.)
    24:00 - Treating things according to their nature, the "grammar" of natures
    25:00 - Grammar of connection and hope... and human flourishing (Center for Science, Faith, and Human Flourishing)
    28:00 - Scientism and reduction of life to technocracy, rather than being a whole human being engaged in science

    32 min

About That's So Second Millennium

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Taking science AND faith seriously.