That's So Second Millennium

I started off this part of the interview by asking Daniel about his own journey through life and faith. His early love was history, despite having a father who was also a doctor and an academic. His interests only turned to medicine after a time in Peru and exposure to brutal poverty, and then like many of us, he drifted into an academic career. Later in life he has been able to return to that original motivation.

Daniel and his wife were brought up in the Seventh Day Adventist faith, and still greatly respects the grounding in charitable work and the Bible he received then. Eventually he and his wife got the Newman bug and had to go deep into history and join one of the apostolic churches; they joined an Eastern Orthodox church.

In that context, Daniel laments the drift of the modern hospice movement away from Christian spiritual roots and into a secular, palliative mindset, and the broader question of what is missing from the often uttered or thought statement, "if it's legal, it must be moral."

"We confuse technological prowess with being deeper and more thoughtful."

An interesting consequence of our medical progress is that we now face a future where, for the first time, across the world, most people will die of conditions derived from aging rather than contagious diseases, accidents, childbirth, etc.

We discuss a bit the golden mean to be found, steering clear of euthanasia on the one hand, and of resorting to excessive means to stay alive in the face of a fatal illness.

Today we start a two-part series with Daniel Hinshaw, a professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Michigan, who has come to focus on palliative care for the dying. He sees his work as having deep roots in the Christian tradition, and has written on the subject of "kenosis" (the Scriptural concept of "emptying" or "reduction" or "wasting away" that is key to our understanding of the Incarnation and the Passion of Jesus Christ) as a useful concept for understanding our own mortality, at the scale of our individual cells as well as our whole composite being.

He shared some interesting spiritual perspectives with us. As someone who in his mature years moved from the Seventh Day Adventists and sought out the apostolic churches, he now belong to the Orthodox Church. We spent some time discussing the "microcosmos," John Chrysostom's idea that the human being contains all creation in miniature, and how that is oddly true in certain respects: we are each communities of organisms. Our gut microbiome, for example.

Daniel went on to talk some heavy duty biochemical shop. We discussed the oxidizing agents (e.g., hydrogen peroxide) involved in inflammatory ailments. He touched on the fact that some of the worst chemical warfare agents, like sulfur mustard gas, operate in a similar oxidizing mechanism, triggering apoptosis, and discussed some of his work on finding remedies for these agents, as well as how similar they are to the earliest generation of chemotherapy agents.

We shifted back to the question of faith, and discussed how both Daniel and his wife confronted suffering in their work (his wife as a psychiatrist treating AIDS patients in particular) and this was a core part of their journey. Daniel pointed out the provocative fact that we really seem to be programmed to age and die, and that the only exceptions to this... are cancer cells.

Another moral point we discover in modern biology has to do with epigenetics. As human beings, we can abuse our bodies to the point that we leave effects on our germ cells that can carry on the "sins of the father" to future generations.

In this episode, we expand on our introduction to the brain by discussing some theories - ranging from well-documented to rather speculative - about the specific structures of the brain that are active (or less active) in situations ranging from autism to depression, stress, and trauma.

At the end we spend a few minutes on a preliminary critique of the materialist reductionary attitude ("interpretation" is too grandiose a word for it) toward brain science by many of its practitioners and reporters. Free will, for example, is not an illusion just because the physical part of the brain where it happens can be injured and we can be deprived of it... but much more on such neurophilosophical issues as the year progresses.

In this episode, we lay out the basic groundwork for future discussions of the human brain.

The brain we humans have apparently evolved in three stages. This can't help but be a tremendous simplification, but it's a commonly encountered statement and seems to have considerable explanatory power.

The lowest part of the brain, the brain stem (the medulla, etc.) and the cerebellum, control unconscious processes, most of which we cannot take into conscious control even if we want to. Often this is called the "lizard" or "reptile brain."

A series of little suborgans, the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdalae (a - myg ' - da - la, the good Latin pronunciation, for the singular apparently; and my Webster's unabridged also informs me that it just means "almond shaped thing"), putamen (that habit-storing part I could not remember during the episode), and a few other parts form the limbic system, that communicates between the senses and the body, and that serves critical functions for things like emotion and memory that we share with mammals.

The upper part of the brain, the big part in human brains, is the cerebrum. Its regions are referred to as cortex / cortices or lobes. We have large volumes of the brain dedicated to visual and auditory processing, motor skills, and the whole front of the brain is where the neural work of our most human capabilities occurs: judgment, reasoning, wondering, creativity, consciousness.

The following two books informed the discussion today:

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter

I cannot recommend The Body Keeps the Score highly enough. It starts out as a discussion of PTSD, but it grows organically into a discussion of problems that all children, and therefore all of us, are liable to have, and ways that are being discovered to bring both brain and body to peace.

On the other hand, Mapping the Mind is only intermittently good. The first hundred pages I found rough sledding, with little sense the author understood the facts being hauled out and stacked up. It got better. The last few chapters betray the common, poorly thought through materialist reductionism common in the field, no surprise, but the content of the final 200+ pages is mostly good. Autism, depression, and addiction come up, although the stock in trade is discussion people with bizarre, tragic, but fascinatingly specific brain damage and what those episodes suggest about how all the different mental aspects of being human are spread about the brain.

What sense can we make of the ancient and medieval idea that "the soul is the form of the body" in the light of contemporary neuroscience and psychology?

Highlight this idea's differences from Platonic and Cartesian dualism.

History of psychology as a discipline. Psychology has not evolved (a) master paradigm(s) that compel the bulk of the field to adhere to them the way that plate tectonics did for geology, Newtonian classical physics and then quantum and relativity did for physics, etc.

Peace of Soul (Fulton Sheen) remark that psychology has been furtively recycling Christian ideas and passing them off as new for a long time

Examining the convergence points of the advice for living from the Bible and Tradition, modern psychology, and the contemporary self-help / New Age-y movement that continues to spread and adapt through large sectors of modern culture.

Self-esteem, humility...

Confidence, faith, negative tapes...

Twelve Step spirituality (Richard Rohr and the intense overlap between 12 Step and Catholic spirituality)

Even many of us who are explicitly Christian have internalized a kind of Lutheran / Jansenist belief that we are so terrible that, in essence, God made a mistake in going to all this effort to save us, because we're not worth it. This is one of a number of areas in contemporary Catholic and Christian culture where we have let our understanding of Scripture and Tradition get very warped and imbalanced.

Issues surrounding how the Christian and scientific understanding of universal history could fit together.

What will "the end of the world" look like? Will it be the end of the whole universe or not? Will there be human colonies on other planets, orbiting other stars? How would the Apocalypse play out then?

You can find That's So Second Millennium at all of these places:

tssm.podbean.com

paggeology.net/blog

@infamousDrG on Twitter

That's So Second Millennium page on Facebook

giesting -at- alumni.nd.edu is Paul's email address

Please be in touch with your feedback, ideas for new episodes, and conversation of any kind!

Themes we'd like to grapple with in the Year of Our Lord, 2019, and beyond:

Last year was largely about the intellectual challenge leveled by many against religion, and we will continue talking about that as the podcast moves forward.

Paul's mission this year to work through Road to Reality

This year we also want to broaden the scope to include places where religion and faith converge, which means we're going to discuss psychology.

Looking forward to the SCS conference topic for this coming year: what it is, and has been, to be human. Neuroscience and what it implies for anthropology, and where it meets Catholic Christian anthropology coming the other way.

What is consciousness, anyway? What parts of the brain seem to be involved, and what do they do?

What is free will, anyway? Where are those breakpoints where the soul would have to affect the body in order for that to even work?

Crisis points in the way people in the post-Christian West approach the world.

Center for Ethics & Culture annual conference in 2018: Wilfred McClay & John Waters

"we care about everything, but without God... we have responsibility for everything, but we know that we are flawed and unable to provide solutions"

Post-Christian in this context includes both people who have explicitly renounced the Christian faith of the West and those who have a Christian identity in their back pocket somewhere but in reality are not relying on Jesus Christ or his teachings to guide their lives in any conscious way.

Christianity is a demanding religion. If you suck away all the grace and help it promises, but leave some of its demands for social justice or purity of intention, you have a recipe for constant internal condemnation.

Link:

CEC video

Wilfred McClay (University of Oklahoma) on “Guilt in the Immanent Frame”, and John Waters on “The Importance of Not Being God: A Higher Power Is Indispensable for Human Beings and Human Societies”

No, not THAT John Waters.

I had the chance to have an unofficial interview with Kirby Runyon. (Planetary science is a very publicity-heavy field, and planetary scientists often labor under certain constraints regarding their contact with the media. We avoided mentioning his institutional affiliation to emphasize the point that this interview in no way characterizes any official position by his institution. You can find out where he works, and get access to some of his work, via web search if you are curious, and there's a clue around 13:00 as well.)

We opened the interview with a discussion of Kirby's research on surface processes on planets. He works on data returned from the Moon, Mars, and Saturn's moon Titan to evaluate how winds, asteroid impacts, and other forces shape the surfaces of those bodies.

----more----We discuss the difficulties doing planetary geology, in particular the lack of samples from other planets. We have samples (lunar and Martian meteorites) that nature has shipped us from other planets via impact, but we don't have "provenance," the knowledge of exactly where on those planets the samples came from.

Kirby is a self-professed "space junkie," and gave us an update on the news of space exploration. The most exciting is arguably that New Horizons is reaching its secondary target, Ultima Thule, tomorrow (when this episode launches).

At about 20:00 we transition into talking about the culture of geoscience vis-a-vis religion and Christianity specifically. We spend some time discussing what relationship God might have with time, including Augustine's notion that God is outside time, and Hugh Ross' alternatives to that (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/50937.Hugh_Ross).

We spend some time discussing Kirby's ecclesial situation as a sacramental evangelical (as he understands the latter term, it means emphasizing the "personal relationship with Jesus" as opposed to some of the other connotations that have grown up around it). There were several questions that I intended to ask that I ended up throwing away as the discussion went off in a different direction. Kirby's sense of "church" I might sum up as being pretty heavy on Mark 9:40:

9:38 “Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”

As a Roman Catholic, I have to consider that while I could not possibly leave the Churches that carry the apostolic succession, and therefore some necessary amount of *institution*, the third millennium is going to see all these Churches wither to the extent that they cannot escape the clutches of a second millennium *institutionalism* that welded them to the secular state, condemned them to great hypocrisy, and fomented the long train of rebellions that have shaken Christendom and splintered it.

You can see Kirby and hear more from him at his YouTube channel, and you can follow him on Twitter @nasaman58.

In this episode we try to give a little workshop on thinking for yourself about a thorny passage in the Bible, specifically what we are to make of this star that supposedly influenced the Magi (wizards? astrologers?) from "the east" to come to Jerusalem looking for Jesus.

 ----more----

Skype had some audio problems for the first few minutes, but it corrected itself after that. Sorry for the poor sound quality there at the beginning.

Our first step is to engage in a little exploration of a common English translation of the Bible, the RSV, specifically its text of Matthew 2:1-12 where the story of the Magi is told, versus the Vulgate Latin text. This is a toy exploration... obviously, if you wanted to come to the best possible answers, you would bone up on koine Greek and read the best critical treatments of the text of Matthew directly. Still, even just comparing the English to another ancient language, Latin, that had a great deal more in common with ancient Greek, is I think very instructive.

The star makes its first appearance in verse 2:

vidimus enim stellam ejus in oriente

we have seen his star in the East

Immediately we already have an ambiguity. The Latin "in oriente" will bear the translation "in the East" but also "in [its] rising". Whether or not ancient Greek has the same ambiguity, I don't know, but I'd bet on it. And, of course, it's ambiguous for a very good reason. The Sun, the Moon, and the individual stars (which formed a far larger share of humanity's entertainment in ancient times) all rise in the east. In verse 1, the magi came "ab oriente," and of course this cannot be ambiguous: they came from east of Jerusalem, so somewhere in what is now Jordan, northern Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, or etc. (At that time those regions were called Arabia, Mesopotamia, or Persia.) The saw the star while they were in the East, but the passage likely means that they saw the star rise for the first time.

Stars (the fixed stars, in ancient parlance) rise all night, on a fixed schedule, based on the time of year, that was already known in Mesopotamia centuries before the birth of Christ. That begs the question why the rising of this particular star was considered significant. (The further question of how someone in one of those countries could link this particular significant star specifically to Judea is also begged in this passage, but we are going to run out of time and material to work with before we can even start on that one, alas.) Presumably it was a star "out of place," not part of the constant yearly pattern.

The planets (which means "wanderers") shamble about the sky at different rates. They are in nearly the same place relative to the fixed stars from one night to the next and can therefore be tracked, but their differential rates of motion, and the fact that they all stick to the same track across the sky that the Sun and the Moon use, means that from time to time pairs, and occasionally even triplets, of them draw very close to one another to form a conjunction. These are rare enough events that they have been used for millennia in astrology to predict supposed significant events. It's conceivable that a conjunction of planets was what the magi saw and interpreted as meaning the birth of a king was imminent. The text doesn't really suggest that, but ancient writers could be so maddeningly vague (certainly to our minds) that it's not out of the question.

Still, we might consider other options. If we take "stella" to mean a single light in the sky, we can consider it to have been in one of three places:

In the atmosphere

In the Solar System

Outside the Solar System

That should exhaust the possibilities.

If the light were in the atmosphere, it would not rise in the east like stars do unless it was being rather tricky indeed. We will drop that possibility for this exercise.

In the Solar System, we do have occasional bodies that get bright enough to see: comets. (The asteroid Vesta is also bright enough to see on rare occasions with the naked eye, and in fact was this past summer. I am not aware of ancient astronomers making records of it or Uranus either for that matter, so a brief sighting would be unexpected.) Comets do not always have long visible tails; sometimes they are just points of light. Some comet--one we know about, like Halley's Comet, or one we don't--could have approached the Sun, become visible, and been noted by the magi. A comet moves as the planets do, shifting just a bit from night to night relative to the fixed stars.

Outside the Solar System, there are dozens or hundreds of transient phenomena that could have produced an unusual star in the sky for a while and been noted by the magi. Star explosions, novae and supernovae, are perhaps the most common reasons why a star might temporarily appear to our eyes in the night sky. In any case, whatever the source of the light, a source outside the Solar System would move in lockstep with the other fixed stars. Its sudden appearance would be the only distinguishing feature.

To have any hope of distinguishing the likelihood of these various possibilities, we will need to sift the text for any additional clues.

The text of Matthew does not actually mention the star very much. There is a longish interlude where the magi hang about Jerusalem waiting for the local experts to tell them where to expect a king of the Jews to be born--one important enough to have his own special star, and therefore probably the Messiah. Matthew reports that the words of the prophet Micah were used to direct them to David's home of Bethlehem. Thus, we see that the star was not somehow leading the magi around, not on their journey from the East to Jerusalem. They noticed a distinctive star rise, linked it to Judea somehow, and went to Judea to investigate. It's only when they follow the Jewish sages' advice and leave on the *extremely short* journey to the little village of Bethlehem that the star does anything all that strange:

abierunt et ecce stella quam viderant in oriente antecedebat eos usque dum veniens staret supra ubi erat puer

they went their way; and lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was

I stuck "usque dum veniens staret supra" into a translator app and got back "until it stopped over," but that leaves two words out. Dum--usque dum seems more wordy than needed to convey "until," but I struggle with conjunctions, so I won't say more about that. Veniens--this is the word that seems completely left out of the translation. It means "coming," and it's singular, so the star is what's coming or approaching, not the magi. The RSV translation does seem to contain this word: "came" to rest, but I wouldn't translate the Latin that way. I would render this line

they went their way; and lo, the star which they had seen at its rising was in motion in front of them until, as it was coming on, it stood over the place where the child was

Here I have stuck in "as" to translate "dum", put in an understood "esset" to get "veniens esset = it was coming on" (and yes, dropping a form of "to be" or "is" or "was" is something Latin writers did), and switched to the other meaning of "staret," not "to stop" but "to stand."

Obviously, this is the strange part. Stars and planets and comets never, or almost never, move that fast so as to be able to say "it went before them" (antecedebat) or it "stopped" or "came to rest" over a specific place. How would anything above Earth's atmosphere appear to do that? It would have to be very nearby. Something too far away would have to be moving faster than the speed of light (a common constraint when interpreting motions of heavenly bodies). I have sat and puzzled over what these words might mean, and I think that my alternative translation of the Latin (which I did on the grounds of what seemed to make better sense of the words, in my own admittedly very limited grasp of Latin usage) is actually a little easier to envision as an astronomical phenomenon.

Planets and comets move across the sky at different rates given their position relative to Earth. Further, comets move at different rates in the absolute sense because, as they approach the Sun, gravity accelerates them. A comet near the Sun is at its brightest and also at its fastest. A comet that happened to pass rather close to Earth, traveling in the right direction, might be moving fast enough to note a difference in its position over the course of the few hours' walk from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and be visibly close to the zenith as they reached their destination. I softened "antecedebat" even further to "was in motion in front of them" in order to reach a final picture of a comet near perihelion and near Earth that happened to be moving north in the sky so that it "came" toward them as they walked south, and just happened to be straight overhead when, probably after asking at a few houses, they found the one with the boy child born near the night they first noted the comet (or whatever other criterion they had in mind). The comet didn't stop, and would have kept right on moving as the night progressed.

This would be even easier to envision if the magi were traveling eastward and the star, migrating westward with the perpetual motion of the night sky, were simply coming toward the zenith according to its ordinary motion. Then again, there would have been nothing unusual about that, and it would have been considerably less likely to have registered with them as an event worthy of the great rejoicing they do in v. 10.

The star, a comet on this interpretation, was very possibly not all that bright. To my knowledge it is not mentioned in secular history (although I think Fr. Longenecker alludes to possible records of it in China or India). It would have been these magi's little secret, almost; they were among the few, or were the only, people to notice its passing.

It goes without saying that this is not an authoritative treatment of the question in any way. It was meant just as a demonstration of how cautious we ought to be before decided we know what the Bible (or any other ancient text, for that matter) says about event X and either take it on faith in despite of science or use it as a stick with which to beat the text in question and decry it as unreliable.

Credit is due to Jimmy Akin at his blog on the National Catholic Register (in particular for providing the text of the RSV for the passage in question). Fr. Dwight Longenecker has written a book, Mystery of the Magi, dealing with these issues and Bill forwarded me a five minute extract of an interview dealing with the issues around the star and how it would have been interpreted in the ancient Near East.

0:00 Experience as a Christian scientist

1:00 The billion year contact; awe

2:00 Awe and the vast scale of Earth science

3:00 Discoveries never shake faith

4:00 Evolution, randomness, the shortage of provable things

6:00 The bureaucratic mindset: certainty and judgment

7:00 Yucca Mountain, studtite, and uranyl peroxides (Peter Burns, Karrie-Ann Hughes)

8:00 Uranyl chemistry

9:00 Guy Consolmagno's thought experiment on planetary atmospheres

10:00 Uranyl peroxide buckyballs...

11:00 NOT in the initial fate and transport model for Yucca Mountain

12:00 Real life is lack of certainty

13:00 Where we'd put uranium if we had to...

14:00 Hanford, Washington and uranium migration

15:00 Phosphates as immobilizers

16:00 Humans and squirrels: digging stuff up to bury it again

17:00 Kirby Runyon

18:00 Difficult conversations

20:00 The Bible

21:00 Cyclic nature of human history, scriptural history

22:00 The second millennium history of reaction, after reaction, after reaction against hypocrisy

23:00 Secularism and the irreligious right

24:00 Progressive movement as a para-Christian critique of society

26:00 Modern psychology and spirituality:

Fulton Sheen's image of the psychologist pulling Christian truths out of the garbage can

and passing them off as discoveries

29:00 The need for God

30:00 Companions on the way

31:00 Providence

3:00 Jill's career