BIG QUESTIONS IN CHALLENGING TIMES

Prof Berry Billingsley, Professor of Science and Education and Director of LASAR (Learning about Science and Religion)

 

COVID 19: This is a moment to ask Big Questions about human personhood – and to clarify for students and the wider public that there are many different types of questions that individuals and society are asking at this time. I have written about this here http://www.epistemicinsight.com/?p=1315

 

It is a time to value Education and a moment to reflect on the impacts of this pandemic on Education now and in the future. What will we keep, what do we want to keep, what will we be glad to lose?

 

It is a moment to reflect on the role and nature of science – so this is to value science as activity and also to notice how science has become a word with the capacity to bring a society together and give its people confidence.

 

It is a time to value religion – personally – and also to notice the importance of religion in society – and how many public figures are talking about prayer…

 

At home and in my small everyday life, it is a time when I am grateful for my commitment to work and its capacity to give each crazy day a sense of purpose. It is also a time to wonder about when to put on the very noisy washing machine given that I am now always ‘in’. Running in the background like a piece of music, there is a continuous worry about my family. And so, it is almost a relief to catch the sound of two boys practising their skateboards in the car park outside our window. I think they belong in the same household and they are clearly getting a lot from being here together, but shouldn’t they be at home and working online with school?

 

Apparently, there is a side-effect of being in lock-down which is that you sometimes struggle to finish a thought process or become lost and distracted part-way through a sentence.  This suggests to me that I should keep this short and attempt now to finish.

 

One of the purposes of this blog is to invite you to please join us for the LASAR 2020 Conference which will now be online – on June 22nd and 23rd. We will be asking and exploring Big Questions. There are some more details below – and the latest information including a timetable will be published here  http://www.epistemicinsight.com/?p=1315

 

LASAR 2020 CONFERENCE – Science, Religion and Big Questions: What are the Big Questions for school students and young adults – and how we can help them to explore them?

Conference Themes:

  • Artificial intelligence and humanlike machines
  • Strategies to care for the planet,
  • Communication in a multicultural world,
  • Physics and the nature of reality,
  • Biology, health, and wellbeing.
  • COVID 19 -an opportunity to study the nature of science in a real-world context and a multi-disciplinary arena

Epistemic Insight Initiative and collaborators.

The Epistemic Insight Initiative is a national research and curriculum innovation strategy led by the Faculty of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University. Within the ‘EI’ Initiative, teachers, student teachers and tutors are collaborating on ground-breaking research to design and test strategies to engage school students in more dialogue about Big Questions.

To engage wisely with big questions like whether robots can think for themselves and why life exists – children need to build their understanding of the strengths and limitations of disciplines like science, maths and the arts. At the same time, teachers need to find ways to bridge curriculum boundaries and to encourage enquiries that involve science and technology and can sometimes be religiously sensitive.

 

 

 

 

Corona Cornering Humans: Another Humbling Experience of Science

Job Kozhamthadam

 

As I was watching with dismay the formidable havoc Covid-19 has been wreaking worldwide, the nursery rhyme I memorized during my early school days flashed across my memory lane: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Who this Humpty Dumpty was, and what exactly happened to him are unimportant. The fundamental message is clear – the pathetic helplessness of the most powerful king with all his resources to put the shattered Humpty back to normalcy. The sad and progressively deteriorating Coronavirus predicament seems to have created a similar situation for us humans. Brilliant science, backed by amazing technology, has almost touched its peak now. The physical science is getting ready to probe into the mysterious world of dark matter and dark energy, hopefully with the help of gravitational-wave technology. The Chinese just 3 years ago achieved the hitherto unmatched feat of teleporting photons to a distance of 1,400 Kilometres, seemingly defying Einstein’s Relativity Theory. In the biological world, assisted by breakthroughs in the field of genetics, the same Chinese scientists have succeeded in coming up with genome-edited human babies with HIV-resistant capabilities. In the world of neurology, scientists are ready to produce robots and humanoids that are claimed to be capable not only of equalling humans but even outsmarting them. Space science seems to have reached a stage where space-travel can become an everyday affair. In fact, there have been reports that the scientific maverick Elon Musk has already started taking bookings for interplanetary trips. So goes the long book of the success-story of human-made science. It seems that science is all set to write the last chapter of the success story of its triumph over Nature. Precisely then ushers in the shocker, the puny little Coronavirus-2 with its scary Covid-19 just to remind human arrogance that Nature too is capable of playing a few “dirty tricks” on humans.

Coronavirus-2 or simply Coronavirus is the short form of SARS-Cov-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2) and the disease it causes is Covid-19. Biologically speaking, viruses are at the bottom of the ladder of living beings. In fact, scholars point out that they may be placed in the grey area between living and non-living beings. Being a parasite, strictly speaking, they do not have an existence of their own. They need to have a host to survive and reproduce themselves. They attach themselves to the host living cells and use the genetic materials of these to reproduce themselves. When coming to their size, they are smaller than bacteria which are single-celled beings. Scholars point out that we can place about 500,000 viruses side by side within a centimetre of length. Despite all this low status and limited capabilities, they can be deadly on us humans. They are infectious, and they target successfully the most vital and vulnerable part of the human body – the respiratory system. In fact, today the mighty, space-ready humans are helplessly shivering before this Coronavirus! Tens of thousands have already died, and many more are waiting in the death-row! The most ominous statement came from Dr. Anthony Fauci, top infectious disease expert of USA, just on 30th March 2020:  “Looking at what we’re seeing now, I would say

between 100 and 200,000 (deaths).”[i] Of course, the range he gives is vast; let us hope and pray that the reality will not be so bad.  As of 9th April 2020, the frightening data is: 1,568,928 cases tested positive, 92,108 deaths and 345,867 recoveries. It may be noted that the recoveries I have been able to study were mostly milder cases of comparatively healthy persons with no serious medical complications. What about those lucky not to be infected yet? They too have to bear the brunt of it all. The whole world is held in ransom, having become literally a global prison! I wonder whether the world had such an experience even at the peak of World War II! These tiny little mischief-makers, who do not own a home of their own, who cannot earn their own daily bread, have really played havoc with us mighty humans. With all our ultra-modern telescopes that can peer into almost 13 billion years in the past, with all our super-specialized microscopes which can detect the tiniest of the tiniest, we humans have been cornered by this corona, at least for the time being. Surely, I am confident that an effective vaccine is on its way, but seems to a rather long way – experts today give 12-18 months for it to reach us. I hope and pray that it will not take that long! But by the time that happens more than enough damage will have been done not only to human lives, but also to human pride and independence!

What are the takeaways? A few quickies as they flash across my mind. We live in a webbed world through and through – we are all linked together intrinsically and intricately. In such a world everyone matters – even the tiniest, faceless, address-less Corona! No one can be taken for granted, no one can be ignored. The fragility of humans is another lesson we learn in this context. With all our laudable and admirable achievements, we are fragile. A small misstep can be fatal. Experts tell us that Corona was no newcomer into our world. They cohabited with bats for ages. But last year they decided to pay an unfriendly visit to humans – it was a very costly visit! We did not have the power to stop the visitor. Human limitedness is another message of this experience. We have achieved a lot, particularly in science and technology. Yet, we are nowhere close to writing the last chapter. We have miles and miles to go – that is the lesson I learn from my long study of almost 450 years of the triumphant march of science. It is pretty clear that Nature cannot be outsmarted by us humans. For Richard Dawkins God is an illusion; for Stephen Hawking God is the unnecessary and unwanted creation of the unenlightened. But the “Ancient One” of Albert Einstein refuses to go away, refuses to hand over all the secrets to humans, and humans time and again find themselves helpless to change this state of affairs. Our fate is not much different from the ancient Humpty Dumpty! Periodically, without fail comes the reminder: Humans are creatures of the Creator, and will remain so. Humans can never become co-equals with the Creator. But through their capabilities and hard work they can become collaborators with the Creator, and contribute towards the wellbeing of humanity.

 

 

[i] Devan Cole, Kevin Bohn and Dana Bash, CNN, “US could see millions of coronavirus cases and 100,000 or more deaths, Fauci says,” 30 March, 2020,

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/29/politics/coronavirus-deaths-cases-anthony-fauci-cnntv/index.html, 1/4/2020.