To Make a Difference

Every semester, I meet individually with each of my students to discuss their plans and dreams for the future, and offer some personalized career counseling.

With many, I ask them a pair of questions to try to get below the surface, and for many, it is very difficult to answer them, even for those that have thought about them before.

1)      What are you good at? What are your gifts, strengths, talents, or skills? What do your friends admire about you?

2)      What are you passionate about? What energizes, motivates, or inspires you? What makes you exult or rage?

For many, if not most, the most common passion expressed is to make a difference in the world or to help people.

It is striking to me that this should be such a common refrain, as it seems independent of any spiritual tradition or other recognizable single factor. However, there are some interesting things I have either noticed or inferred from the sum of their comments.

Happy Birthday!

I am very excited to celebrate one year of The Scholar Redeemer. There have been readers from 72 countries totaling nearly 11,000 views of 349 posts. By far, the most popular topic was the Professor Martin Gaskell court case. Topics have ranged from meditations, devotions and random thoughts, to observations of education in general and higher ed in particular, to government interactions with education, to the educational culture to apologetics to science/faith issues and so on.

It has been a faith journey for me personally as well. Many have asked how I am able to write something every day. Often I’d sit down, usually late at night, wanting nothing more than my pillow, to face a blank screen. Without any ideas jumping to get out, I’d simply pray for God to direct my thoughts and show me things from the day that might inspire, encourage or challenge folks.

Planting a Semester

With the first summer term starting Thursday, I’m busy doing my semester prep, which consists of about 25 things, some minor and some major, that need to be done every semester. Much of it must wait until very shortly before and even after classes start. Some are as simple as reserving rooms for various meetings during the semester and some are as complex as reconfiguring web pages that have a difficult user interface, but that aren’t available until shortly before the term starts. Much of it is busy drudgery that takes enough brain power that it isn’t easily automated or delegated.

I started thinking about how the beginnings and endings of terms are always my busiest and most stressful times, and there simply isn’t much that can be done about them. It is very cyclical, so I started thinking about other life cycles and realized that the academic term for a faculty member can best be compared to the growing season for a farmer.

Scheherazade

Today I started listening to Arabian Nights in the car. It’s about a Persian king who marries a new girl every night and beheads her in the morning because his first wife cheated on him and so he prevents any future wife from getting the chance. This is bad for the morale of the realm. Then the vizier’s daughter, Scheherazade, volunteers to marry the king.

Rugged Frailty

In Perelandra, the second book in C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, Venus is an Eden-like planet, complete with an Adam and Eve. Weston, a human from earth is possessed with a demon and comes to Perelandra in order to cause the Fall there. The hero, appropriately named Ransom, is sent by God after Weston to preserve the innocence of the Eve character. The longer Weston is on Perelandra, the more depraved he becomes. He mauls some frog-like creatures horribly, and Ransom stumbles upon them, and seeing their suffering condition, tries to put them out of their misery, but they will not die, because Death hasn’t entered that planet yet. Ransom realizes he’s just adding to their suffering and leaves them, since he is also unable to heal them.

What has stuck with me about that episode since I first read it in college is

Thinking of Grad School?

As I teach mostly upper division students nearing graduation, I am often asked about the whole grad school thing. It occurred to me that it might be beneficial to offer my perspectives here—both for the benefit of students and also to see if faculty in other fields have similar views or not. This will be coming of course from a science/engineering perspective, so feel free to chime in!

I typically start out by comparing my advice to that of parents giving their preteen the ‘puberty talk.’ It isn’t meant to be discouraging or scary, but informative. I start here because the first question to be answered is “Should I go to grad school?”

It is important that the Ph.D. should not be your goal in and of itself. You should view it as a means to an end, not the end itself. There are two issues here. First, passing your final defense tends to be rather anticlimactic, surprisingly. Your committee files out of the conference room door, shaking your hand with a hearty “Congratulations, Doctor!” This is cool. However, you still have to go home and fix dinner, go to bed, and get up to the rest of your life the next morning. If the letters after your name are the goal, then all of a sudden, you are faced with a need for a new goal or vision for your life, and some have found that depressing. However, if you have a vision, a purpose for the next steps, the anticlimactic feelings are still there, but the depressed feelings do not tend to accompany them.

Secondly, grad school has often been referred to as the “long dark night of the soul.” This is because a nearly universal truth is that you will run into a brick wall where you feel like you are making NO progress. This singularly thrilling period may continue for weeks, months or even years. Einstein quipped “if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it ‘research.’” It is common to ask yourself, “What am I doing here?” If you don’t have a clear vision or purpose for why you are pursuing the degree, the question tends to shift emphasis, “What AM I doing here?”

As I said, I do not intend to be discouraging. These experiences are normal. Therefore, knowing this going in helps to recognize and deal with it when it happens. At the same time, if this is completely discouraging, it is a wise idea to examine the issue and see if grad school is the best option for you at this time. Sometimes, it is appropriate for a different chapter in your life. Grad school is a real commitment, and not to be done lightly or because you have nothing better to do.

The Ph.D. is a noble pursuit, and is good for those who have a vision that requires it or those who have a passion for continued in-depth learning and research. In spite of what I’ve shared, I remember that time fondly and as the time of my adult life with the greatest freedom of schedule and chance to explore things at whim.

Tomorrow, I’ll share how to find a graduate program, and after that, how to choose a research professor.

SDG

2. What is Science?: 6 Questions

Think back to your English classes. Yes, way back when. Remember the 6 Question Words? They were drilled into us as the foundational questions we humans ask. Who? What? Where? When? How? Why? Let’s revisit them here.

Which are questions asked by science?

Who?    No, that is a History question.

(“Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”)

What?   Sure, that is a great Science question.

(“What is the average airspeed of an unladen swallow?”)

Where? No, that is the realm of Geography.

(“Where is the North Pole?”)

When?  Again, that’s History.

(“When was the War of 1812?”)

How?    Yes, another key Science question.

(“How does warp drive work?”)

Why?    Here is where this topic gets interesting.

Let’s ask a common why science question: “Why is the sky blue?” Sounds like a science question. If we try to rephrase it, we find that this could be one of two questions: “What is the mechanism causing the sky to appear blue?” or “What is the purpose for the sky being blue?” If we are asking the first, then it is actually a science question. It is really a cleverly disguised ‘what’ or ‘how’ question. If we are asking the second, it is truly a why question. A pure why question is about purpose, reasons, etc. It is a philosophical/ theological question, not a science question.

So we humans ask six basic questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? What is our universe made of? How does it all work? When did it all begin? Why are we here in the first place? Science answers two of them—one third. Granted, it is a very powerful third, but still only a third. Furthermore, this implies that science and religion are not fundamentally in conflict but should complement each other as they answer different questions. This concept is known philosophically as NOMA, or Non-Overlapping MAgisteria. It basically means that the areas of authority of science and religion (and the other fields) don’t overlap. (For a bit more on this topic, see the post, Vibrant Dance:  War Report!)

With this in mind, let’s look at a noncontroversial scientific subject like human cloning. A researcher, looking at the world from a purely scientific perspective, asking the ‘what’ and ‘how,’ looks at cell division (mitosis) and asks, “How did that happen?” As part of checking it out, other questions arise: “What factors affect it?” “Can I do the same thing?” “If cells can clone themselves, what about bigger organisms?” “Higher” organisms reproduce either sexually or asexually, and there is usually genetic variation in the offspring, whereas with a cell it is usually impossible to tell the parent from the child. In sexual reproduction, where there are gender differences within a species, the parent from each gender contributes half of the genetic information. This is done through the process of producing special reproductive cells (gametes) with only half of that parent’s genes (meiosis). These gametes are known as eggs (female) and sperm (male).

The scientist understands all of this and knows that eggs have the special property that when they have a full set of chromosomes, they start cloning themselves as the first step to forming the full organism. So, if a higher organism is to be cloned, then it must be done by removing the half load of genes from an egg and reloading it with the mother’s full genetic set, and then letting the egg do its thing. So we get cloned fruit flies, mice, and so on, and finally a sheep. (Good Baaa, Dolly!) As we progress up the organism complexity chart, we look to the top and see good ol’ Homo sapiens, and we wonder if the process works on organisms in that rarified stratum. So far, the scientist is merely investigating the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of various kinds of biological reproduction. As it is truly impressive work, it gets noticed by the larger community. The ‘why’ folks, the theologians and philosophers, start looking at the research from their perspective, see where the scientist is headed, and comment, “We obviously are doing this cloning thing, but should we?”

The scientist is asked to comment on the concerns of the why group, and responds, “Those are good questions. I haven’t really thought about it, as I’ve been concerned with looking at the mechanisms and trying to understand and manipulate them.” The rest come back with, “You haven’t thought about it? You have a moral obligation to examine the ethics of what you do!” The scientist responds, “I suppose you have a point. However, my training is in the ‘what’ and ‘how,’ not the ‘why.’ If you want me to comment on the why issues, we all have to recognize that I am stepping out of the science and into philosophy. If you want me to stick to science, I can tell you all about how organisms reproduce, what obstacles there are to multicellular cloning, what its current limits are, what the biological risks are, as well as the possibilities. My business is understanding nature and how we can manipulate it. Your job is to set the rules on who can use which of these tools, when and how.”

It would be nice if things were that cut-and-dried—if our roles were that independent of each other. Fortunately or unfortunately, they aren’t. A human being by nature is an interdisciplinary organism, not a single-function robot. Every human being asks all six questions. Each one of us is a historian, a scientist, a geographer, and a philosopher. So it is reasonable to ask scientists about the ethics of their research. But we have to remember that we are not asking scientific questions.

Since professional scientists have focused their talents and energies on asking the ‘what’ and ‘how,’ we need to realize that when we ask them the ‘why’ questions, their answers tend to be colored by their desire to fulfill their training and explorations.

We as scientists need to realize that our research has implications in the ‘real world’ and that the results will be available to fallible and even malicious human beings, and so we must adjust our perspectives as scientists accordingly. We also must be mindful that even if we understand all of the mechanistic mysteries of the universe, it will neither answer all of our questions nor solve all of our problems.

Thus, NOMA is not a truly workable philosophical model today as much of our research runs into walls between the six questions, and not just in biology. Cosmology and physics also run into areas of overlap repeatedly. As this series progresses, we will examine a framework for how a relatively peaceable interplay between the magisteria can be achieved.

SDG