The Humanities and Science

This semester I am teaching a course on cognitive science and religion.  It is called

The Bible and the Brain

, and I am writing a book under the same title.  The course is exploring ways that religion can be better understood when we take into consideration the cognitive abilities and limitations of human beings.  More on these ideas as the semester progresses.

As I am teaching this course, I am aware that there continues to be an uproar about whether the humanities should be in dialogue with the sciences and if so to what degree.  Steven Pinker has written for the New Republic an impassioned plea for humanities' scholars to get with it and engage the sciences

HERE

. He articulates in this piece a call for humanities scholars to show more interest in science, especially in the downward spiral that is strangling us in the wake of post-modern critique.  There have been many responses, most like Leon Wieseltier, also published by New Republic,

HERE

. The title of his piece summarizes pages of his own impassioned plea which he calls "Crimes Against Humanities: How Science Wants to Invade the Liberal Arts. Don't let it happen."

There was a time in my life when I was very content to go along teaching and writing what I would call strictly humanities content.  I saw very little connect between anything scientists did and my own work and interests.  That is until I married a physicist.  I realized three things very quickly.

First, the scientific understanding of the world is our reality.  We live it everyday.  We have no choice but to engage it.

Second, scientists are studying the universe and human beings, the same subjects that I study as a humanist, and they have information that is essential to how we

all

understand ourselves and our world today.  This information is so essential that it will likely alter the way we have been perceiving our academic disciplines.  I see this particularly in terms of cognitive studies and embodiment which can help us reformulate the way we "do" history and understand religion.

Third, if we as humanists don't jump into the conversation that scientists are engaging in very public ways, we will be leaving the interpretation of knowledge about humans and the world to them.  Frankly I think we have been so slow on the uptake that this has already happened. In other words, scientists (and social scientists for that matter) are going to continue to run well-funded experiments on our subjects, subjects that we as humanists hold near and dear.  And then they are going to control its interpretation, when in fact, they know very little about the subjects we study, like religion, for instance.

A case in point.  I read a fascinating book this week by Drs. Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili, called

Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief

.  I couldn't put it down, riveted to the results of their SPECT scans on Tibetan monks and Catholic nuns during meditatively induced states of Unitary Being.  Since I study mysticism, their findings really caught my attention.  But what also caught my attention was the fact that their understanding of religion is under the weather so to speak.  They equated religion with a form of mysticism that is relatively recent in human history (derivative of Underhill and James) and tried to overlay that on Neanderthal burial and cult practices.  They argue that all religion originates from someone's mystical experience and that the purpose of religion is to perpetuate those experiences of unitary being.  So here we have scientists with really good experiments, but with little knowledge of the field of religious studies in which to make good sense of them.  But their views are popular and well-cited in the literature.

If we don't engage the sciences as humanists, we are not just doing ourselves a disfavor, but the public too.  We are leaving the interpretation and popularization of our field open to scientists like Richard Dawkins, rather than doing it ourselves and doing it better.

Humanities and technology

Working in the trenches of humanities in face of the rise in the last decades of the internet and the overwhelming belief that knowledge is about information and data and number crunching, that everything about being human can be reduced to scientific investigation, I have been very concerned about where we are going as a people.

It is as if utilitarianism and efficiency and speed are all the driving forces behind anything we now consider most valuable.  Everything is short and sweet and public.  If it doesn't make us richer, faster, or easier, we don't want it.  We don't think it is worth pursuing.

We are becoming thin and instant like our devices.  We are remaking ourselves in the images of our devices.

We are scattering our attention.  Like our devices, we do two or three things at once.  We watch TV and check our email, giving neither full attention, while ignoring the other people in the room.  Screens intersect and offset us from others as we type away behind them.

At restaurants, in classrooms, in cars we are on the internet, uploading pictures to Facebook to get instant feedback about where we are or what we are doing.  Nothing seems to wait.  Gaming draws us in and keeps us coming back, psychologically preying on our desire for instant feedback and success. 

We mistake computer intelligence for the human mind.  We are held in the grips of our iPhones, iPads, our Facebooks, Twitters, and Texts, as if they were lifelines that plug our brains into other brains.  Some of us have become so addicted to technology that to unplug, even for a day, is traumatic.

I am not against technology.  I have a laptop, iPhone, iPad, a digital camera and all the rest.  And I love them.  What I worry about is what this is all doing to us so quickly.  What are our lives becoming?  How has it changed the way we think about things?  Interact with others?  Value things?

Where is our humanity in all this? What is happening to us spiritually and intellectually as we disengage and devalue the pursuit of knowledge which we have mistaken for information?  When we are convinced that we can reduce everything about us to scientific answers?

Leon Wieselttier gives us something to think about in his commencement address published by Republic

HERE

.  He argues that humanities and its pursuit has suddenly become countercultural.  Take a look.  It is worth the read.