Good afternoon everybody. >> Good afternoon. >> Welcome to our last class, how about that? I'm going to be talking to you for awhile, and then I'll turn the stage over to Professor Ogilvie. The stage isn't big enough for both of us at the same time. But what we each want to do is to give you some concluding thoughts about the course and some ideas to take home with you. I don't know about you folks, but Professor Ogilvie and I have learned a great deal in teaching this course and it's kind of bittersweet to see it coming to an end. But coming to an end it is. Certainly, a lot of the course has been devoted to the differences and sometimes the conflicts between science and religion. But fundamentally, the course has been about beliefs, and beliefs are very important, no matter where they come from, because the human brain does not like things to be unexplained. And our poor little minds are just boggled if we don't have some sort of an explanation for something. We're uneasy, we're conflicted, we're anxious if we can't explain what is happening. And as it turns out, we don't really care that much what the explanations are. They can be scientific, they can be religious, they can be pseudoscientific, pseudoreligious, and as long as we have some sort of an explanation, that we can buy, and live with, then it puts our mind at ease. And what we find is, when we look at these things more carefully, is that once we have an explanation, we don't like to get rid of it. We like to keep it the way it is. We like to strengthen it. We like to protect it. And the beliefs that fare best in this whole process are the beliefs that are established early, preferably in childhood and repeated often. And once we have those things in place, we have a really strong kind of center in our recitation sections and other places. We've heard a lot about a moral compass, and I don't even know whether it has to be a moral compass, but we do have a certain stability about the beliefs that we have, and we try very hard to protect them. I want to spend a couple minutes talking about a strange disease. And that disease was known sometimes as the Holy Fire, sometimes as Saint Anthony's Fire. It was running rampant in parts of Europe, back in the middle ages. And it was a very disabling disease. Sometimes it would begin with people just acting a little bit cuckoo, and they would have these episodes, sort of like a psychotic episode of some sort. But the physical symptoms were really the bad ones. The fingers and toes would begin to hurt continuously, and for a long time. And eventually, the fingers began to turn black and get ugly, sometimes fall off as though they were being burned, hence the name the Holy Fire. And what was the explanation for that? Well, the common explanation when things went wrong, back in the Middle Ages, was that somehow one had angered the gods, and the way you anger gods is by sinning, and so that was the explanation, in many cases, for why these individuals had this horribly, disabling disease. It would sometimes result in death, because what we now know as infections would set in, and the person would die. But there was hope, there was hope. Because some people who really wanted to atone for their sins would go on the long, and I'm assuming, painful journey, to Saint Anthony's shrine, in a far different location from where they were. And there, they would atone for their sins and especially if they atoned early, they would receive some benefit, and the disease would tend to go away. So this was the story, that you fall into sin, you go to St. Anthony's shrine for atonement. A lot of times, though, when they came back home, the atonement didn't stick and they would have to go back for another visit. So this went on, perhaps even for several hundred years. But there is an alternate explanation for this. A modern explanation. And that is that the real cause of the disease is a fungus that grows on the rye and some of the related grains that they use to make bread. And that fungus contains a special chemical in it that has a profound impact on the brain, and especially on the small blood vessels that serve the fingers and the toes, causing them to constrict. And in the absence of having any blood that flows to the fingers or toes, they turn black and get gangrene, and fall off. Once you know that, you can prevent the fungus, in some cases, by spraying the fields, or take whatever other precautions are necessary to keep the fungus from growing. And if it does grow, you can treat the disorder with drugs that will counteract the drug that's in the fungus. And there's now a whole new explanation for it, that makes more sense, and provides a much more reliable treatment for it. So two different approaches here. And this has been and will continue to be far, far into the future, the way we go about things, coming up with alternate explanations. I talked a couple lectures ago about the human spark. And modern humans have been very impressive, and they've been impressive for a long time. For thousands and thousands of years, our ancestors have hunted and gathered. They have created villages. Sometimes they get sick. And they've made tools. They've made music. They've made love. They've raised families. They've hated some of their neighbors. They've waged war. They've prayed to countless gods. And they wrote most of our Holy books. And fact of the matter is, they knew almost nothing about the way things really worked. And that was a case for modern humans who would be Indistiguishable from ourselves. If you could go back ten or twenty thousand years, I'm confident that you could bring one of those people in and put them in this classroom, with the experience that you've guys have had, and they would not be any different than what you are right now. But about 500 years ago, which is a very short period of time in the grand scheme of modern humanity, about 500 years ago, some big ideas began to come about. We talked a lot about these. Math, physics, biology, all of a sudden, made great strides during what we have labeled as the Renaissance. More people were able to read and write, and take advantage of it. We learned how to observe things. We invented science, and learned how to measure things, how to test things. And this was a whole new way of life. Whole new way of life, and we encounter the grand, and frustrating, sometimes exhilarating search for evidence based knowledge. And that took a whole lot of getting used to, a whole lot of getting used to, because it doesn't actually feel very good on the surface. It's hard work. It's very often counterintuitive. We have marvelous brains that can make Decisions that we become comfortable with, in a flash. And to ignore that and go into a laboratory or out into the field and start measuring things and collecting data, kind of goes against the grain of the way we survived for thousands and thousands of years before all of this evidence-based thinking came into being. But it came into being. And we now have a whole bunch of things that we know. Now there are probably some people here from philosophy and you may argue that well, we don't ever really know anything. Okay, I might even buy that, but there are things that we know, and that we're comfortable with, given the knowledge and the ideas that we have right now. And there are a whole bunch of them, and instead of listing the several thousand, I'll just list the ones that fit on this slide. That the sun is the center of our universe and the Earth rotates around it. The Earth is round and very old. Our universe follows the laws of physics. Species are sort of temporary, constantly evolving, and that includes humans. DNA is kind of the written record of our creatures past, present, and now even into the future a bit. Blood circulates through the body and delivers oxygen and nutrients. The mind is what the brain does. These are all things that we know. And if you are going to be an educated person, you can't pick and choose among them. You can't say I like this one, and this one, and this one, but this one I don't like, and this one I don't like, because there's only about a nickel's worth of difference in the evidence for all of these. So this is not like going into the deli and deciding what you want to buy. There are just a whole bunch of things that we have to learn to live with, because it's the established knowledge of the day. And we all have multiple belief systems, and I think it's really important to at least make some room for the things that we have as our knowledge base, and perhaps save some room for some other things as well. But don't try to pick and choose, and discard, some of the things that we know. We talked a little bit about this last time or the time before, when I was talking about the Scopes trial. And Clarence Darrow's characterization of the Bible is it not being a book of science and never was, and never was intended to be, and don't even necessarily have to pick on the Bible here, you can take any of our ancient holy books that were written before the revolution 500 years or so ago. And the people who wrote these, their eyes were shaded from the factual information of the future. They may or may not have been channelling God in their writings, in terms of moral laws and recommendations that can very easily go on and on and on into our future. Some really good stuff there. But the factual information did not go beyond the days where they were living, and that ends up being part of the conflict. And now, when we have both these science things on the one hand, and the religious things on the other hand, and try to bring in the idea of humans having an everlasting soul, it doesn't slide into these other pieces of knowledge very easily. And when we try things like weighing the soul and trying to find out that it weighs 27 grams or whatever it is, that looks like it might fit, but there's no really good evidence for that. The experiment was shoddily done in the beginning, and probably wouldn't have made sense if it had been done right. So we have then some situations where we have to sort of try to deal with the different kinds of information and belief systems that we have. And one of the ways that we've talked about this, a couple of times, the non overlapping magisteria between science and religion. We've got science over here, religion over here, and we just need to keep those separate. I have argued on a couple of occasions that, that might not be the best thing to do. That maybe we need to tear down that wall a bit and, try to at least have a conversation about it. Couple lectures ago, I showed you this image here, that shows a summary of all the different religions in the world, probably not even all of them, but a bunch of the major ones, and where they are. And you see that they fit pretty nicely into geopolitical confines, even to the point of our very close and comfortable neighbors, Canada, they have a different color than we do. And Alaska, which really ought to be a part of Canada geographically, it shares our color down here, so we have these religions parsing up the world. It occurred to me that you can take that exact same image and have it all one color here. And those are all the different sciences in the world. There are no different sciences in the world. We agree on things like that. And there might be a little of a disagreement between string theorists and quantum theorists or something like that, but everybody is on the same page. And as far as I know, we haven't had any major wars over the differences in the various sciences. I'm not too fond of the chemistry department, nonsense. But anyway, we don't have wars between the different sciences because we have a set of guidelines that are the same. So there is a fundamental difference in the type of beliefs between the sciences and the religions. And it occurred to me as I was thinking about this just this week that maybe these are the non-overlapping magisteria, that it might not be so much the line between science and religion as important in terms of our future, as it is the differences between the various religions that can really get cranky with each other. Really get cranky with each other, and certain religions get cranky with science, but so far, I guess that's fortunate. They haven't all done it at the same time. It tends to be little pockets of things. Maybe none of this stuff is important. Maybe it's just a healthy debate between science and religion. Or maybe it's not. What I have here on this graph is a plot between religiosity, and I think this was a pew pole that established that, and international science scores, some sort of a science exam that was given to lots and lots of students in lots and lots of different countries. And plotting them against each other. And what you see here is that in terms of religiosity, Japan is pretty low. Korea and Canada just a little bit above them, and the United States is the highest ranking amongst this group in terms of religiosity. And now you look at the science scores, and Canada, and Korea, and Japan get really good science scores, and the United States, not so much. We're the lowest amongst the industrialized countries. So maybe it does make a difference when you have these head to head conflicts, like they had in Tennessee with the Scopes trial, and like they had in Dover, Pennsylvania with the Kitzmiller versus the School Board trial. These things may actually make a difference nationally in the outcome of our education. Does it look like a healthy debate when you look at that graph? What if it were possible to have science and religion show mutual respect for their very different goals? So maybe instead of having talk about non-overlapping magisteria, maybe we ought to just agree to have non-interfering magisteria? Now what if it were possible to have all those different religions that are blocked out on that world map? What if we could get them to stop thinking about killing each other, because they are believing in different things? Might have a little better world there. All together, I guess that means tolerance. Tolerance for the beliefs that other people are carrying around, and then maybe instead of those goats butting heads, we can have them standing under the clouds of the world and kissing each other and trying to make nice. Wouldn't that be a better world if we could do that? want to spend just a little bit of time in closing here, talking about my personal traveling self, since you've been watching me up here for a long time, and wondering, in some cases, what makes this guy tick. As you know, I was raised on a small farm in Iowa, and when you're raised on a small farm in Iowa, you really learn a lot about the cycle of life. You see lots of births. You see lots of growth and maturity. You see lots of death in all of the critters that go through your farm, and you're very close to the earth. And coupled with that, I had a fair amount of religious instruction, the most important of which was in a small church that served no more than a dozen farm families. And from there, the early morning Sunday services there, people would go off to the big churches in town, to the Presbyterian church, to the Methodist church, to the Baptist church. That's all there was, not a whole lot of diversity in rural Iowa at that time. And on Sundays, weather-hardened farmers, men and women alike, would gather looking uncomfortable in their Sunday clothes, and they always talked about crops and livestock and weather. And if a drought were going on and the corn was turning brown and dying, there would be prayers for rain. Hymns would be sung. There shall be showers of blessings, and so on and so forth. And as a young child, I started to wonder about that, that surely if it were going to rain, as a result of these prayers, it would rain on everybody in Kielce County. And there were some people who didn't necessarily want it to rain that week, because they were putting up hay and they just as soon have the rain come later to help their corn. And really can you expect results from these things, when the outcome of your prayers are going to influence other people, sometimes negatively? And so those things began to call into question, my own ideas about what to believe in and things like that. But another influence on the farm was there are sometimes cases where your cow or your horse gets sick, and you need help. And so you get on the phone and call the veterinarian. And the veterinarian comes out and has his whole bag of wonderful little gadgets, and tools, and medicines, and things. And pretty reliably fixes your sick horse, or your sick cow, or inoculates your pigs or things like that. And in some very real sense and I didn't really fully realize that until I got to this course, but in some very real sense, that veterinarian became my holy man. I don't even know his name, but he became the symbol of evidence-based information that can make our lives better. And so there wasn't any particular day, or week, or whenever, when I became enamored by evidence-based guidance, if you will. But as far as I can tell, I have not paid any price for this. I see beauty in the natural environment every day. I've had a long and rewarding career. I am happy with people around me, and so on and so forth. And so I think there are all different kinds of ways to navigate this life. But I did want to say that I have recently received a very unexpected gift, and that was the opportunity to teach this course. That after all of the years of Rutgers teaching courses very narrowly within my discipline to have the opportunity for my colleague, Professor Ogilvy, to put together this course and say, oh you want to come along and help? And I said, well sure, having no idea what a grand experience that that would be. But it has been a genuine pleasure and I want to thank you all. >> [APPLAUSE]
