You’ve got a meeting tomorrow, in Manhattan, with a very important client. People manage this sort of thing all the time, right? Easy as pie. Only, suppose you can’t communicate with your client. Not now, not tomorrow until you meet her face to face. You don’t have a time or a location for your meeting. You know this, your client knows this, and you both know that the other knows. Where and when will you be?
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science in review
Science in Review: Looking Back at 2016
Incrementing a year on the calendar may be somewhat arbitrary, but it’s still a good excuse to take stock and remember where we’ve been so we can get a better handle on where we are going. With that in mind, here are some of the standout moments from the year 2016 in the realm of science and the intersection of science and faith.
- As the year began, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was still being resolved. The epidemic has finally been contained, and recently it was announced that a vaccine tested during the epidemic proved to be 100% effective in preventing infection. That should significantly improve containment efforts for future outbreaks.
- Just as the Ebola outbreak wound down, the WHO declared that the Zika virus outbreak in Brazil and other parts of South America constituted a public health emergency because of its association with microcephaly. Prevention measures, the change in seasons and the urban focus of the Brazil Olympic games kept Zika exposure to a minimum for that event, and endemic transmission of the virus has not yet been established in the United States. Still, once the weather warms up in 2017 be prepared for Zika concerns to re-emerge.
- It was announced that gravitational waves had been observed for the first time. These waves were predicted by Einstein’s general relativity theory one hundred years ago, and required a significant collaboration to detect.
- The passing of John Glenn provided a chance to remember a pioneer of the space program, a public servant, and a faithful Christian who was comfortable with the word of God and the language of science.
- A computer program defeated a human master at the game of Go. The victory was a milestone for artificial intelligence in general, and specifically the field of deep learning, an extension of neural networks that leverages today’s increasingly parallel computer architecture. Algorithms based on deep learning already have found a number of applications such as piloting autonomous vehicles, and look to become significantly embedded in our decision making processes.
- Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels remained above 400ppm all year for the first time, a milestone for greenhouse gas accumulation in a year that will go down as the hottest recorded so far in the modern era. The announcement this year that the Antarctic ozone layer is recovering reminds us that global cooperation is possible to stop and reverse manmade environmental damage; we should press on to achieve similar results for greenhouse gases.
- The first human trials of CRISPR-based therapies began in China. CRISPR technology allows scientists to precisely and efficiently modify the genes of living cells. Current trials are focused on treating certain cancers, but the potential uses are numerous and wide-ranging, from preventing disease to creating the fabled “designer babies.” The ethics of CRISPR are likely to be a focal point of conversations about the future of medicine and biotechnology.
- Feathers and tail vertebrae were discovered in 99-million-year-old amber. Tissues samples of any sort that old are noteworthy finds, but this one was especially exciting because it appears to directly confirm that dinosaurs had feathers. Of course, any find that old will generate controversy; everything from the age of the sample to the identification of the source organism has been disputed.
- Evolutionary biology also made an appearance on the big screen in X-Men: Apocalypse, although the film was too much of a dud at the box office and too muddled narratively to spark the kind of conversation I expected. Still, I think the film revealed a lot about how the wider public thinks about the evolution of the human race and also of religion. Meanwhile, Doctor Strange wound up having a lot to say about reconciling science and faith more generally, and Arrival proved to be a very timely meditation on the challenges of communication across language and culture barriers.
- How I Changed My Mind About Evolution, a collection of personal reflections on reconciling Christian faith with evolutionary biology, was published.
- Evolutionary biology wound up being a central theme of my science reader question series, which also explored the nature of time and matters of statistics.
- Your questions also form the basis of an ongoing series funded by a STEAM grant to ESN. Look for this series to continue and expand in 2017.
I’m grateful for the chance to explore the intersection of science and faith with you for another year. I appreciate all of the comments, questions and feedback I’ve gotten from readers. I’d love to hear your reflections on 2016 and what you’d like to hear more about in the year to come. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below, and join me in 2017 to see where science takes us.
Science in Review: Symbols and Symbiotes
Given my interest in the metaphoric use of scientific language, I couldn’t pass up this editorial on metaphorical science experiments. Physics has made some remarkable advances in its ability to study and hypothesize about features of the universe far removed from everyday experience. Black holes aren’t on every street corner; there was just the one Big Bang; quantum entanglement doesn’t work with billiard balls. In order to pair observational data with with theoretical developments, some researchers design clever experiments on related systems that are available in the lab. The math describing the proxy systems is analogous to models for the inaccessible systems. For example, one group created sonic black holes, systems which trap sound in the way black holes trap light, and used them to explore predictions made about the behavior of regular black holes. How far does the analogy carry? It’s not clear; if we could test black holes to see if their behavior matches these sonic substitutes, we wouldn’t need the substitutes. We might be learning something or we might be tumbling down the rabbit hole.
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Science in Review: A Strange Prescription for Reconciling Faith & Science
Note: The following is a discussion of themes in Doctor Strange which touches on some plot points.
There is no forbidden knowledge … only certain practices.
So cinema’s greatest action librarian Wong informs Dr. Strange when he inquires about certain magic tomes. If Strange were studying at Hogwarts, those books would occupy the restricted section. Instead he is a novitiate at Kamar-Taj, more a dojo of the mystical arts than a magic academy within the Marvel superhero film universe. This more libertine policy reminds me of Paul: “‘Everything is lawful,’ but not everything is beneficial.” And yet Doctor Strange is definitely the sort of film that one chapel speaker or another would have warned me about during my Christian school career.
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Is God Relevant in an Age of Science? (STEAM Grant Series November Question)
This academic year, ESN is creating a Faith/Science curriculum for young adult small groups. We’re partnering with InterVarsity graduate student discussion groups to identify faith/science questions that are important to emerging scholars, and then commissioning thoughtful Christians in science or theology/philosophy to explore those questions in a series at the ESN blog. We will publish these posts as a  booklet curriculum for campus groups. You can find previous posts in the series and related posts here.Â
This project was made possible through the support of an award from the Science and Theology for Emerging Adult Ministries project at Fuller Theological Seminary. The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Fuller or the STEAM project.
To start off the ESN STEAM grant blog series last month, we asked a current graduate student to write about his own faith/science questions. This month, we begin exploring the questions we received from InterVarsity grad discussion groups in response. We plan to engage with questions about perceived conflicts between science and faith later on, but this month we think through a scenario which may be even more familiar to some science students who are Christians: how to respond if someone is not hostile to faith, but simply sees it as completely irrelevant to science. ESN’s regular science columnist addresses the student question below.Â
How do we confront the narrative of irrelevance, as opposed to conflict or integration? (That faith is irrelevant in a modern secular age, and therefore politely tolerated).
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