You’ve probably noticed that the world is a bit of a mess. Every day it seems that there is some new problem that requires our attention and/or provides some new topic for people to argue about discuss and debate. Some of the issues that spawn arguments discussions are trivial matters like whether pineapple belongs on pizza (yes, it absolutely does). Other topics, like global climate change, the impact people are having on the planet, and our responsibility as Christians to care for the Earth, are much more serious. The opinions on this second matter are wide ranging, and it is not my intention to argue about debate the issue in this space and time. Rather, I hope we agree that, as people who have been commanded to love our neighbors, we could do a better job caring for the living space, (i.e., the Earth) we share by being conscious of the mess and cleaning up after ourselves.
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Science Book Review: Being You – A New Science of Consciousness
At various times while reading Anil Seth’s engaging and accessible Being You, I was reminded of the people in Helen Thomson’s Unthinkable, the subject of a previous blog post. Thomson was documenting the distinct experiences of people whose perception of themselves and/or the world around them depart substantially from what is typical: people who think they are tigers or dead or who can have their orientation to the world flipped instantaneously. Seth is giving an account more generally of why perception works the way it does, and so I found myself regularly wondering if his model accounts for the full breadth of perceptual experience. That is a testament both to how memorable Thomson’s accounts were and to how compelling Seth’s writing is that I believed his model probably could.
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Science Corner: Preeclampsia Awareness and Practicing Faith Over Fear
During the last two years, “Faith over Fear†has become a guiding philosophy, and for some people a battle cry, for dealing with the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and everything else going on in the world. All in all, faith over fear is a good mantra. Multiple verses in the Bible give this advice, and there are women and men throughout the Old and New Testaments who amazing examples of people who practiced faith over fear. Abraham following God’s command to pack up his family and leave everything he knew for the promise of a new, completely unknown place is just one example. On some level preaching “faith of fear†seems natural and easy, but how it works on practical, personal level is a bigger challenge. As someone who is Christian and a scientist, I find that having faith over fear involves considering the situation, understanding the possible dangers, asking (praying) for wisdom from others who have more experience and knowledge about the options for dealing with the possible outcomes, and acting with faith that God will be with me regardless of what happens. In other words, during scary times it has served me well to pray and post a guard. This strategy has served me well so far, especially when I had preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome.
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Science Corner: Magical Multiverse Thinking
I went to see Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness this weekend. (There are no spoilers ahead.) This was only my third trip to an indoor movie in 2 years. Part of my calculus was the fact that I’d be going to see my daughter in her first school musical later that evening. I obviously wasn’t going to miss that. At the same time, if I were to get sick later, I wouldn’t want that to retroactively cloud my memories of my daughter’s performance. But with multiple activities in the same weekend, I add plausible uncertainty without putting other people at additional risk (meaning it was very unlikely I could get infected at the movie in the morning and already be contagious by the evening). Is that kind of thinking scientific? Is it rational? Is it magical?
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Science Corner: Let There Be Light (But Not Too Much)
According to Genesis 1, on the first day of creation God called the light into being, he separated light from darkness, he called the light “day†and the darkness “nightâ€, and he called it good. Most of us would agree that light is, indeed, good. Both literally and metaphorically light drives out the darkness and allows us to see so that we can find our way. And it is not only humans that value light—all of the natural world benefits from it.
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