A creation that works together

Sometimes organisms make things easy for each other

‘[Fungi] are often completely essential to the trees they form a relationship with, and can even pass nutrients from one plant to another. This is yet another example of how the ‘red in tooth and claw’ picture of the living world is only one side of the story. Cooperation is every bit as important as competition. It is thought that fungi helped plants to transition onto land, and that in fact nearly every major transition in the evolution of living things involved a new type of cooperation. In other words, in the struggle for survival, a bit of snuggling is often needed.

Quoted from Ruth Bancewicz’s Science and faith blog — always worth a read.

2007, one of those dates

Some years just stick out in the cultural memory. 1812. 1914. 1945.

How about 2007?

The idea that ‘the future is here, it is just unevenly distributed’? Thomas L Friedman in his book Thank you for being late seems also to suggest that 2007 was the year the future started to get distributed.

This is also so scarily not-that-long-ago, as history goes, that I remember lots of it.

Late 2006: Google bought YouTube

  • Late 2006: the Internet had more than 1 bn users for the first time
  • Sept 2006: Facebook, previously just for students, was opened to the world
  • Jan 9 2007 at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world: I remember watching the preasentation on my mac.
  • 2007 Twitter spun off from an earlier startup and started to scale globally. I remember joining Twitter shortly afterwards courtesy of the Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast — and finding nothing going on, came off again.
  • 2007 AT&T found a way to use software to expand its capacity. Its throughput of data increased 100,000% (in Friedman’s words) between Jan 2007 and December 2014
  • 2007 Amazon released the Kindle.
  • 2007: Google launched Android.
  • Spotify (though Friedman doesn’t mention it here) started in late 2008.

Of course other dates in 2007 may also make a mark on history:

  • Bulgaria and Romania join the EU, marking (in the light of future events) its maximum extent?
  • BNP Paribas blocked withdrawals by three hedge funds that were drowning in sub-prime mortgages, triggering the financial crisis.
  • (And there was a school shooting in the US, only a couple of dozen dead, not news at all.)

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Hopefully not the apocalypse

Summarizing the environmental work to do

Thomas L Friedman’s stimulating book ‘Thank you for being late’ reminds us that the Holocene era, an era of unusual stability, has lasted just the last 11,500 years or roughly the same time we’ve had farms and civilisation.

Can we ourselves disturb this happy Holocene stability? It seems we can. Friedman summarizes eight different ways we may be inducing planetary organ failure, based on work by Rockstrom, Steffen and others in Science on Feb 13 2015:

  • Climate church – already reached Holocene-rocking levels (they claim)
  • Loss of biodiversity -ditto
  • Deforestation – ditto

Then he lists four more that his source considers within safe levels, but only just:

  • Ocean acidification
  • Freshwater use
  • Atmospheric aerosol loading (diesel particulates and whatnot)
  • Introduction of novel entities (plastics, nuclear waste etc)

Finally one example of where we did breach safe levels but are now retreating back to safety: stratospheric ozone.

A useful summary, then, of the big main environmental issues. Human civilisation has only thrived in the Holocene bubble. Will we pop it, a DIY apocalypse?  Or will we seek God for our ‘daily bread’ and manage to preserve our species and our planet for further adventures?

Share the gospel or preach good principles?

A randomised trial of religion has surprising results

Fascinating experiment in the Philippines. International Care Ministries (a Christian charity) helps the Philippines’ poorest people with a training course that contains anumber of modules. Some just explain the gospel. Others teach things like financial planning or health. The charity can deliver all the modules, or just some.

So they tried just the gospel portions on one large group of villages. They tried just the life-skills module on another group. Still another group got the full course. And for a control, they looked at villages where they did nothing. It was (reports the Economist, ‘a randomised controlled trial of religion’) 1

The group who got the gospel (6000 households, a large sample) became more religious, a bit gloomier about their prospects, and their incomes ‘had increased by 9.2% compared with the others. ‘

As the Economist points out, ‘For now, anyone recalling nudges from grandma urging wakefulness through tedious sermons should consider that she may have been right.’

Two eyes are better than one (2)

How science can be earthed by contact with friendly theologians

In a recent post I speculated about ways that grasping truth through science can enforce a kind of rigour onto theologians to make them better theologians. Now the reverse question. What can theology do for science? I think plenty.

1. Monomaniacal materialism is not the answer to everything. Science observes and measures, then theorizes, then measures again. (At least on its best days.) This is fantastic for scoping out the material universe, for understanding how things work and how to fix them, for inventing things, for curing cancer. These things matter a lot. But not only are they not everything, they are not even nearly everything. What does it all mean? Do I have significance? What is love? What is a good life? Science can only scrape away at the patina of these questions. On its own, scientific perspective leaves a hole bigger than the Universe unfilled in our hearts. We need help from elsewhere, stories from outside, revelation from the Unknowable.

2. Skulduggery. Theology joins with post-modernism in pointing out that science will be flawed as long as it is carried out by humans — humans who are all prejudiced, all likely to shut our ears to opposing arguments, inevitable in our misuse of academic power and prestige because we abuse every power and gift of God. Scientists are sinners, like the rest of us, held back from our worst, like the rest of us, only by cultural strictures and the grace of God.

3. Science doesn’t do transcendent. It sort of can’t; science would have to un-science itself to do so. But that leads to a lopsided perspective. Science cannot (by definition I think) see beyond cause and effect to an Uncaused Cause. Quantum physics sometimes talks about the quantum vacuum, an eternal, uncaused thing from which universes spring. But that is striking a match in the darkness and hoping to create a Universe of suns. It is too much to ask, I think, for a mere quantum vacuum to somehow lead to consciousness and love and purpose. Only an Uncreated God, ‘source of all being and life’ as the creed says, can do justice to the Universe that science sees and sees but does not comprehend, that it measures and measures but does not know.