Philosophy of Science in the Comedy Club
by William Grassie

Twice each week I descended the stairs of the Ha! Comedy Club to do stand-up philosophy of science. The basement club was painted all black and smelled of stale beer. The students sat around cocktail tables with their laptops, eager to learn what they needed to know to pass the Norwegian exam... I am sorry to report that neither the venue nor the circumstances turned me into a witty and hilarious lecturer... I tell my students to pay attention to the grand narrative of the semester, so they can better track the rise and fall of the field and the some times colorful characters, who ride on this philosophical roller coaster.

Reinventing Science Education in the 21st Century
by William Grassie

After decades of disappointing educational outcomes, it’s time to work some educational alchemy with a real philosopher’s stone – as proposed by Alfred North Whitehead and others. Centuries of scholarship and scientific research have made us privy to a new and true creation myth, which explains who we are and how we got here. Nothing could be more romantic, more precise, and more general. We now possess the means to move our students with a sense of awe and hunger for a fuller understanding of the universe and themselves. STEM careers demand a long, often difficult discipleship that requires significant romantic commitment on the part of students, teachers, and professionals. Big History is the first step in STEM literacy in the world. Such literacy and expertise will be needed in great supply to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. more

Millennialism at the Singularity:
Reflections on Metaphors, Meanings, and the Limits of Exponential Logic by William Grassie

Will the Singularity lead to the supersession of humanity by spiritual machines? Or will the Singularity lead to the transfiguration of humanity into superhumans who live forever in a hedonistic, rationalist paradise? Will the Singularity be preceded by a period of tribulation? Will there be an elect few who know the secrets of the Singularity, a vanguard, perhaps a remnant who make it to the Promised Land. These religious themes are all present in the rhetoric and rationalities of the Singularitarians... more

Resources and Problems in Whitehead's Metaphysics
by William Grassie

This paper was presented at Metanexus 2009 in Tempe, AZ. I give an overview of Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics. I show how Whitehead’s process relational metaphysics solves many philosophical problems in understanding and interpreting contemporary science. I argue, however, that Whitehead’s process metaphysics tends to (1) depersonalize God to the extent of rendering theism irrelevant and (2) naturalize moral evil in the service of evolution. I will offer a partial solution to these problems. more

In the Heavens as It is on Earth:
Astrobiology and the Human Prospect
by William Grassie

"It is not the terra-forming of Mars that keeps me awake at night, but the anthro-forming of Terra that darkens my dreams. Can human civilization be more civil and more bio-friendly? We need to get serious about enhancing the richness and diversity of life of Earth, if we ever hope to do it elsewhere in the universe. Maybe the most significant societal impact of astrobiology is the opportunity to look back at ourselves and to appreciate in new ways the extreme good fortune we have of being able to call ourselves Earthlings." more

Entangled Narratives: Competing Visions of the Good Life,
by William Grassie

"Every time we use a cell phone, pump 200 million year-old rainforests into the gas tanks of our cars, or travel across the continents in an airplane or via the Internet, we affirm the reality of this new scientific, evolutionary cosmology in deed, if not in thought. With this common cosmology as a basis, a hermeneutical foundation that also happens to be progressively true, our global civilization would be much better situated to solve the great religious and ideological debates of our time." more

Nationalism, Terrorism, and Religion:
A Bio-Historical Approach,
by William Grassie

"While much harm has been done in the name of nationalism, I want to emphasize that group identity is a normal, natural, and necessary part of being human.  One can be a nationalist without being xenophobic and chauvinistic... One of the more destructive forms of nationalism is when it is combined with BigMan governance.  In these instances, the BigMan and his cronies use nationalism as a form of political legitimation and control.  By controlling the power of the State, they are able to manipulate rewards and punishments to entrench themselves through the Alpha-Factor.  And like little chimpanzees that we are, most humans are only too happy to fall in line.  Big-Man governance, however, disrupts the dialectic of competition and cooperation, so the society stagnates, becomes inefficient, and at war with itself or the outside world." more

The Neurosciences of Religion,
by William Grassie

A lecture given at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy, Sri Lanka on November 22, 2007: "We assume that a neuroscientific study of a cricket exemplar will be more revealing, so we select Sanath Jayasuriya of the Sri Lankan National Team to be our subject for a neuro-imaging study of cricket, assuming that this is generalizable in some way to all cricket players, indeed to all sports.  Before the big match we outfit Sanath Jayasuriya with a remote control IV, so that we can inject him with radioactive tracers in the midst of batting one of his cut short shots during a big game.  He swings the bat and hits a big one, but unfortunately now we have to stop the game, in order to whisk Jayasuriya away to the laboratory, and put him into the SPECT scan.  Don’t worry the game can resume in a half an hour, because we will have finished the scan and can begin our analysis comparing his base-state brain with his cricket-state brain." more

The Evolution of Religion,
by William Grassie

A lecture given at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy, Sri Lanka on November 1, 2007: "This discussion of morality from an evolutionary perspective gets us close, but no all the way to our subject matter – how does evolutionary psychology explain the origins and function of religion.  Evolution requires some kind of adaptive function, otherwise why would it exist.  If evolutionists have a hard time understanding altruism, they have an even harder time understanding religion…  Why indeed divert precious labor and resources to building cathedrals and pyramids, temples and mosques?  These are opportunity costs.  The resources and labor might have been diverted to improving industry and agriculture, strengthening the national defense, improving education, and so forth.  Why divert precious social resources away from the more pressing tasks of survival and reproduction into ‘somersaults of the most elaborate sort.’  I will explore three rival evolutionary theories of religion – memes, spandrels, or adaptations -- and conclude by offering a fourth option." more

The Economics of Religion
by William Grassie

A lecture given at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy, Sri Lanka on October 17, 2007 "...Whatever we think of economics, we need to recognize that markets are complex distributed systems with their own logics and rationalities that we cannot fully understand, predict, or manage.  Religions are also complex distributed systems, but religions point beyond themselves to questions of ultimate meaning and values.  I close by recalling the words of Socrates, “Wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing both to the individual and the state.”  I am sure Lord Buddha would agree. more

Metanexus 2007: The Challenge Ahead
by William Grassie

For me personally in my own spiritual and professional journey, I was always motivated first by the hope that this crazy and wonderful engagement between the domains of science and the domains of religion provided some leverage in a troubled world. I still believe that the constructive engagement of religion and science provides both a fulcrum and a lever to move the world in more positive directions. I discovered along the way that this is not only a powerful tool, but it also fun and endlessly fascinating activity. more

Teaching the History of Nature
by William Grassie

There is more at stake here, than simply the future of science and science education.  Humans are profoundly storied animals.  Our deepest beliefs and values and actions in the world are constructed through a narrative thought processes.  The great challenge of the 21st century will be whether and how we succeed in incorporating the new stories of science into our normative cultural stories and our civilizations’ doings. more

The New Sciences of Religion
by William Grassie

"The last few years have witnessed a torrent of new books by noted scientists purporting to scientifically explain religion, mostly with the intentions of explaining religion away (Stenger 2007), (Dawkins 2006), (Dennett 2006), (Harris 2006), (Hamer 2005), (Harris 2004), (Wilson 2002), (Boyer 2001).   What is religion? What is spirituality? How does one study it? How does one teach it?  What does it mean to take a scientific approach to the study of religion? Are religions healthy and functional for individuals and societies, or are they unhealthy and dysfunctional?  These are difficult questions at the center of some of the most challenging controversies of the 21st century." more

Metanexus 2006
by William Grassie.

"The juxtaposition of the concepts “science” and “religion” in our civilization is a kind of Rorschach Test for all kinds of deeply held prejudices and beliefs.  The terms are often thought of almost as antonyms and reflect a profound cultural ambivalence in our postmodern civilization. That is why we decided to create a new term, a neologism that in our wildest dreams will eventually work its way into the English language and perhaps other languages as well.  We took the Greek prefix, meta-, meaning “transcending or transforming,” and combined it with the Latin noun, nexus, meaning “connection or core.”... more

Science, Religion, and the Bomb
by William Grassie

Present at the International Congress on Science and Religion in Tehran, Iran, May 2006. "Concurrent with the planning of this Congress has been a growing conflict between Iran and the West about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not to mention the US invasion of Iraq on the pretext of finding weapons of mass destruction.  And so I want to address some of these sensitive political and military issues with you today, because science and religion also are also involved in these debates about international relations and military power.  In the history of nuclear armaments, science and religion intersect in multiple and profound ways..." more

Universal Reason:
Science, Religion, and the Foundations of Civil Societies
by William Grassie

Presented at the Institute for Wisdom and Philosophy, Tehran, Iran, May 9, 2005. "At a time of heightened alienation and conflict between Islam and the West, there is an urgent need to promote a “dialogue of civilizations” as called for by President Khatami some years ago.  The thesis of this paper is that the dialogue between science and religion provides an important point of departure for such an ambitious project, in part because science provides a modest set of universalities for such a dialogue to build upon."  more

Beyond Intelligent Design
by William Grassie

"The English theologian William Paley wrote an influential book in 1802 entitled Natural Theology: Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature.  Paley employed the metaphor of a watch discovered on a beach.  One would not know who made the watch, but one could infer that there was certainly a watchmaker.  In such a way, humans studying nature could also come to understand God as its creator and designer.  This metaphor of nature as watch is perhaps one of the most famous metaphors in the philosophy of science and haunts us to this day, as we see in the current debates about “equal time” for Intelligent Design Theory in the science curriculum of public schools." more

Ecology, Religion, and Science
by William Grassie

"Humans have often understood the metaphysics of the universe in terms of philosophical dualism—animate and inanimate, human and non-human, mind and brain, spiritual and material. Modern science undermines many of these dualisms. Religions have promoted both dualistic and holistic metaphysics. Humanity is lost in this new understanding of the universe without a compass or a map to the great moral, aesthetic, and ecological questions. The ecological sciences are offering a more holistic vision of life—human and non-human—which has implications for more comprehensive environmental ethics." more

Biocultural Evolution in the 21st Century:
The Evolutionary Role of Religion
by William Grassie

"We live at an extraordinary moment in the natural history of our planet and the cultural evolution of our species.  Human population has soared in the last century to over six billion.  Every bioregional ecosystem in the world has been significantly altered by humans.  We are about to embark upon large-scale genetic engineering of other species and ourselves.  Humans are a Lamarckian wild card in the epic of evolution.  Increasingly, it is not the material basis of nature that determines civilization, but our culturally transmitted belief systems and abilities, for better or worse, that will direct the future evolution of both the planet and our species." ...more

Toward a Constructive Theology of Evolution
by William Grassie

"...Humans, as noted above, always seem to use nature as a metaphor and context for interpreting cosmic purpose and moral order.  This is no less true of Darwinism, than the earlier Aristotelian view of natural kinds and separate creation.  Darwinism seemed to support the view that the universe is governed not by a powerful and benevolent God, but by random genetic drift and natural selection.  The process necessitated an inordinate amount of suffering, death, and waste.  If God exists, then natural selection rendered God an incompetent or malevolent Creator.  Of course, the challenge of theodicy existed prior to Darwinism, but this theory of evolution multiplied the doubts of God’s goodness with the magnitude of the ages and the multitude of struggling species.  So Darwin’s theory of evolution contributed to undermining the earlier cosmological hierarchy and sense of moral purpose..." more

Science, Semiotics, and the Sacred
by William Grassie

"...Many religions have understood language to be in some way primordial to the material constitution of the Universe.  In Hinduism, the Upanishads talk of a primal word, Om, which functions as the creative source of all Nature.  In Jewish Midrash, the grammatical ambiguity of the first line of Genesis and the extravagant linguistic creativity of Elohim, leads to philosophical speculation about a pre-existent Torah, which God uses to speak reality into being.  In Medieval Judaism, this Rabbinic tradition gave rise to the wild speculations and philosophical subtleties of the Kabbalah.  The Greeks, including Plato, drew upon Heraclitus' notion of logos, viewing the embodied word as that fire which animated and ruled the world, to explain their understanding of primeval, material language. In the Gospel of John, Christians celebrate this Word or Logos in a radical incarnationalist vision of a Cosmic Christ in whom and through whom all things come into being.  Language, the spoken word and the written word, was the ultimate medium for creation, revelation, and redemption.  Every time we communicate, we participate in a miracle of ultimate significance, or at least so our ancestors intuited." more

Hermeneutics in Science and Religion
by William Grassie

"Hermeneutics is the branch of philosophy that deals with theory of interpretation.  It can be argued that any discussion of the relationship between science and religion is implicitly or explicitly a matter of interpretation.  This can be seen, for instance, in Ian Barbour’s (1923 - )advocacy of “critical realism” in matters both religious and scientific.  Interpretation theory necessarily stands at the intersection of the dialogue between science and religion, though few authors in the field have articulated formal theories of interpretation as part of this exploration." more

Human Creativity:
Expanding Complexities and Evolutionary Discontinuities
by William Grassie

In this paper I examine human creativity within the context of natural history and cultural evolution.  In order to establish an evolutionary framework for examining the phenomenon of Homo sapiens, I begin by reviewing theories of evolution -- Pre-Darwinism, Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism, and what some are calling Post-Darwinism.  I favor the so-called Post-Darwinist paradigm for both scientific, moral, and metaphysical reasons.  Regardless of the processes involved in non-human evolution, however, I argue that human culture evolves in a Lamarckian manner whereby acquired innovations are passed on more-or-less directly to the next generation.  So while there are undeniable continuities with non-human nature, as well as myriad natural constraints upon human culture, I argue that there are also significant discontinuities in the evolutionary epic.  In order to understand this process, however, we need to understand that human creativity is primarily expressed as a distributed system.  I examine brains, language, economics, technology, and morality, as distributed systems.  In discussing the expanding complexities of human creativity, I pose the question of whether these rapid changes are for better or worse.  Finally, I examine religious and metaphysical issues, wondering whether a transcendent telos is expressing itself through natural history and cultural evolution and what constraints it might place upon our contemporary worldviews and world-doings. more

Human Creativity Revisited
by William Grassie

I am grateful to Michael Ruse for his thoughtful response to my essay on "Human Creativity: Accelerating Complexity and Evolutionary Discontinuity" and also for his more colorful criticism at the recent Haverford Conference on "Gentices, Bioethics, and Religion." Ruse summarizes and criticizes my argument in three points. I shall respond in four. more

Technology, Artifical Intelligence and Social Location
by William Grassie

"... Writers like Merlin Donald and Terrance Deacon have argued, I think persuasively, on the bases of the contemporary neurosciences and evolutionary anthropology that our human cognitive, linguistic, and intellectual abilities are fundamentally “located” outside of the architecture of individual human brain in the distributed space of culture.  For instance, this distributed understanding of cognition and linguistics can be understood in the tragic cases of otherwise normal human infants deprived of linguistic and social stimulation who grow up to be permanently mentally retard by age five." more

Postmodernism: What One Can't Know
by William Grassie

Postmodernism and its philosophic cousin deconstruction are often misunderstood by their detractors and overstated by their proponents.  On the one hand, postmodernism and deconstruction are celebrated as the end of philosophical self-delusion, a critical attack on all oppressive metanarratives, and the final dissolution of foundational thought.  On the other hand, postmodernism and deconstruction are denounced as relativistic, nihilistic, irrational, and hyperrational.  The inaccessible philosophic language of most postmodern thinkers and the heated confusion about what postmodernism represents make it difficult for the average professor teaching a science and religion class to acquire a working overview.  And yet, at least a cursory understanding of these debates is essential to any discussion of science and religion in the late twentieth century.  So in this short essay I will foolishly go where angels fear to tread and attempt to provide a brief overview of key postmodern issues, while relating these issues to the specific problems of scholarship and teaching in the science and religion multidiscipline... more

Powerful Pedagogy in the Science and Religion Classroom
by William Grassie

This essay is a discussion of effective teaching in the science and religion classroom.  I begin by introducing Alfred North Whitehead’s three stages of learning -- romance, discipline, and generalization -- and consider their implications for powerful pedagogy in the science and religion classroom.  Following Whitehead’s three principles, I develop a number of additional heuristics that deal with active, visual, narrative, cooperative, and dialogical learning styles.  Finally, I present twelve guidelines for how to use e-mail and class-based listservers to achieve some of these outcomes... more

Reinventing Nature: Ch 3: Hermeneutical Models of Science
by William Grassie

...In moving to hermeneutics, I will sidestep the inconclusive epistemological debate about the status of natural sciences with it's continuous dichotomizing of philosophical objectivity and realism, on the one hand, and subjectivism and idealism, on the other hand.  By the extension of Ricoeur's work in hermeneutics, I will develop a framework for the mythological treatment of modern scientific cosmology which can help us productively reframe and reshape the content and culture of science.  This abnormal treatment of science is practically motivated by my search for the power to aid us in becoming new beings in the context of a global breakdown of ecological and economic life support systems... more