Monthly Archive for May, 2009

Nothing?s Changed

Published
by
gillt
on May 29, 2009
in syndicated
. Closed

Rumor has it Francis Waterfall-Worshiping Collins, the genius behind BioLogos, is a shoe-in as Obama’s pick for head of the NIH. I get it. NHGRI is a classy institute, the proud Figurehead on the NIH mothership, and Collins was a well regarded administrator there, equally loved by underlines and colleagues alike. But what’s his worldview concerning science and reason? He says he’s against Creationism and Intelligent Design, but he promotes something called theistic evolution and a designer God. From this we can conclude that Collins has a politician’s brain with the ability to think two self-contradictory thoughts at once.

Then there are pages 2&3 of Collins’ book The Language of God, where he ruminates on the events of June 26, 2000, at a White House press conference with Craig Venter, Bill Clinton, and himself.

But the most important part of his speech that most attracted public attention jumped from the scientific perspective to the spiritual. “Today,” [Clinton] said, “we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.”

Was I, a rigorously trained scientist, taken aback at such a blatantly religious reference by the leader of the free world at a moment such as this? Was I tempted to scowl or look at the floor in embarrassment? No, not at all. In fact I had worked closely with the president’s speechwriter in the frantic days just prior to this announcement, and had strongly endorsed the inclusion of this paragraph. When it came time for me to add a few words of my own, I echoed this sentiment: “It’s a happy day for the world. It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.”

What was going on here? Why would a president and a scientist, charged with announcing a milestone in biology and medicine, feel compelled to invoke a connection with God? Aren’t the scientific and spiritual worldviews antithetical, or shouldn’t they at lest avoid appearing in the East Room together? What were the reasons for invoking God in those two speeches? Was this poetry? Hypocrisy? A cynical attempt to curry favor from believers, or to disarm those who might criticize this study of the human genome as reducing humankind to machinery? No. Not for me. Quite the contrary, for me the experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship.

Thank you Larry Moran for that revealing quote.

I wonder if Collins would have been taken aback, tempted to scowl or embarassed if Clinton had made a blatantly religious reference to the mighty Kane, Ku and Lono? We should not fault the Jews, Muslims and Christians for simply having a more popular god than those poor ocean-locked Hawaiians with their tiring list of deities. After all, it doesn’t matter what god you believe in so long as you believe in something.

Still, I suppose one could be forgiven (especially if you’re Hawaiian) for thinking it a “cynical attempt to curry favor from [Judeo-Christian] believers,” especially considering the kind of political triangulation for which Bill Clinton is known.  And what’s this talk about “reducing mankind to machinery”? It’s complete chicanery to say machinery when Collins very well knows the correct words are chemistry and physiology. Only a politician would…

Considering how many scientists are methodological naturalists, its obvious how heading an evidence-based medicine and scientific research institute is not compatible with the above quote, not to mention the concept and existence of BioLogos. I’m not saying it’ll be as bad as nominating Jenny McCarthy head of the CDC, but it’s on a continuum. I thought that this current administration was parting ways with ones previous. I had thought that we would stop appointing creationists to the highest levels of government.

The Way of the Academic

Published
by
gillt
on May 12, 2009
in syndicated
. Closed

If an academic pens writes something that winds-up on the internet, what are we to do with it? Aren’t we used to them chirping in some half-recognizable dialect in another dimension? What brings these theory-generators, these gurus of the referential out from the shadows? That Spring is in the air, is no excuse for lines like this:

“World history tends to abstractions that art can flesh.”

That sentence is meant to be read, not comprehended. How about “History is made tangible through art.”

Now, intelligibly written, we see what a pate, unremarkable–and quite possibly false–assertion we find ourselves confronted with.

An English Professor at the Univesity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee worries over the state of literary theory and what it all means in the grand scheme of everything all over the place and forever. Bombastity never looked so impermeable.

Fortunately, there are glimpses of what appear to be attempts by the author, Ihab Hassan, at clarity.

Admittedly, our perplexity nowadays is partially due to the radically disjunctive legacy of modernism, postmodernism, and assorted avant-gardes in the last hundred years. But haven’t we inured ourselves to the various avant-gardes by now? Haven’t we absorbed their shock? We actually live their scandal, or, rather, we let the media, if not our servants, live it for us. In any case, the arts continue to create their audiences somehow–with the possible exception of contemporary music.

I like that. The media as buffering reagent against the harsh oxidants and bitter ascorbics of the avant-gardes, the technicolor porn of Takashi Murakami or Tom McCarthy and his International Necronaughtical Society. It’s subversive and fresh and probably false.

Like the figures in Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, which he references, Hassan looks, thrashing this way and that, for a spit of land for his literary theories to gain purchase. The world is flat, which really means it’s round, which means globalization begets glib diversity, which leaves us with the human body as final refuge, as a template, “a choreography of blood and bones.”

Hassan asks, “Can the death-heavy body serve not only art but also theory in an age of diaspora and division?” Who’s to say when metaphors are mixed, cliches ressurected and words change meaning without notice?

I’m pretty sure he’s referring to the human body, but wait! Body can also be a stand-in for an abstraction, and for an entity which contains an abstraction, a spirit. Not a spirit in the literal sense, that would be dogmatic and pedestiran, but a spirit in the Wittgensteinian sense, as “everything we mean when we talk about it.”

Had enough? Well Hassan has plans to pack even more meaning into this seemingly simple word we thought we all knew and understood.

body not only as a political or aesthetic entity, the refuge of exiles who sew their lips and artists who mutilate their genitals, but also as the locus of experience, an epistemological ground, waiting to be worked, waiting to be known, leaking away its life.

What Hassan finally gets around to saying, possibly maybe, is that this is the age of “me,” the reign of the “epistemological concept of experience.” And in this age theory falls under ego’s boot. We have to learn or relearn (he isn’t quite clear on that) the “epistemic compact,” known to the rest of us as trust. Keep in mind that evil Globalization has scoured trust from the very surface of the earth.

Trust is a quality of attention to others, to the created world, to something not in ourselves. “All mean egotism vanishes … I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing, I see all.” That’s the vision of the Man at Concord, perhaps the vision of us all when we profoundly trust.

Without trust, Hassan forebodes, critics will fall silent, the artist will put down her brush and picks up a camera, pig plague will run amok, and the heavens will cleave. But trust in what. . . certainly not one another? We are to trust in Nothingness, which means “giving oneself to the void,” or something.

So far so good? Anyway, Hassan, sensing he’ll eventually have to bring his mind-scatterings together, says recursively,

But I know that literary theory in a time of contested globalization will not find legitimacy in sectarian politics or fundamentalist dogma, not in cultural identity or transcendental philosophy. In what, then, beside pragmatic trust?

I don’t know Hassan; that seems a pretty random thing to conclude, considering how you failed to mention why you think sectearin politics or fundamentalist dogma are necessarily hostile to theory. But trust and plurality are nice and obvious concepts to think up when it comes theory, if theory is defined as something we generally agree with.

Whatever Hassan, whatever.

BioLogos: Issue#3

Published
by
gillt
on May 7, 2009
in syndicated
. Closed

A physicist also thinks minimally of BioLogos via Collins:

Collins may have convinced himself he has “reconciled” his faith with science by waving his wand and shouting “Stupefy!”, but his spellbook has but precious little use when one is actually trying to do quantum physics.

Even New Scientist finds Collins’ musing on physics coming up short in the competence department. This is the same British science rag who recently ran with a cover story titled “Darwing was Wrong,” a comprimised piece of science journalism with a few boring tidbits of molecular biology foisted upon an unsuspecting public as if it were actual news.

Through the sheer dint of hours wading through the shallow interseas, we happen upon that bloated ammassment of vacuities, BioLogos, and discover it prostrating in service to a higher power. BioLogos is in bed with the scary-huge funding giant and religion-peddler, the Templeton Foundation.

I’m all for getting along, but not at the expense of intellectual forthrightness. The Templeton Foundation is in the dubious and premature business of mapping the limits of science. The Foundation actively discourages free inquiry by coercing emperical research toward sectarian ideological ends. They award scientific and philosphical work that can be interpreted as favorable to a religious worldview. They award scientists and philosophers who write books that draw imaginary lines before science and then arbitrarily declare from this point onward magic lies. They sponsor science conventions with the stipulation that these gatherings give a formal nod to religion, as if it were integral to doing science. The Templeton Foundation is the God of the Gaps Foundation, and this mission statement of theirs is made reality through the most powerfully coercive force in all of Western Civilization: money. And the Templeton Foundation is swimming in green. It is also well within its legal rights, rights I willingly support as I speak out against the dishonesty.