Are large brains worth it?

"It takes brains to be stupid," says the carton of oat milk in my fridge. Seems relevant.

Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

“We revere the absolute but are bound to the transitory.”  

“...as Stephen Jay Gould summarized it, 'A large brain allowed us to learn…the inevitability of our personal mortality' and 'all religion began with an awareness of death.' But whether religion then took hold because it transformed that awareness into an adaptive advantage is a wholly different question."

"Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment."

"When you recognize that we are the product of purposeless, mindless laws of physics... you recognize that looking out to the cosmos to find some answer... is just facing the wrong direction. At the end of the day, we have to manufacture our own meaning, our own purpose." THIS: https://t.co/HPX4L57F9E

— Maria Popova (@brainpicker) April 25, 2020

Can Trees (and other parts of Nature) Sue?

It was my great privilege to be sworn in as a member of the bar by United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in 1974. Justice Douglas was a larger than life personality. Appointed to the Court by FDR, he was the longest serving Supreme Court justice in history (1939 - 1975). He was a strong advocate for individual and environmental rights. He was from Washington state, and an avid outdoors man; a peripatetic. He was married four times. As a young liberal lawyer, he was a hero of mine. One of his most famous opinions is his passionate dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton (1972), where he argued that nature should be entitled to sue for injury. Given the various posts and comments regarding Earth Day, it is worth reading some of his dissent.

The Sierra Club was formed and acted to protect and conserve the national resources of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It sued the U. S. Forest Service to block development of a ski resort by the Disney company. The District Court held that the purpose of the Sierra Club made it "sufficiently aggrieved" to have "standing" to sue on behalf of Mineral King (the area to be developed). The Supreme Court, however, rejected the lawsuit on the basis that the Sierra Club lacked “standing.” To have standing under the Constitution, a party must allege a specific injury to a legal interest it has in order to maintain the suit.

In his famous dissent, Justice Douglas argued that trees should have standing. Douglas advocated for a federal rule that would allow for litigation “in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage.”

“Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes…. The ordinary corporation is a "person" for purposes of the adjudicatory processes, whether it represents proprietary, spiritual, aesthetic, or charitable causes. So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes -- fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it. Those people who have a meaningful relation to that body of water -- whether it be a fisherman, a canoeist, a zoologist, or a logger -- must be able to speak for the values which the river represents, and which are threatened with destruction.”

Inanimate objects still do not have standing, but environmental litigation proceeds if they have a co-plaintiff with a legitimate legal interest.

Week's postings:

On 4/19, posted comment to discussion question

On 4/19, posted comment on Phil’s post on Battered Bastards

On 4/19, posted comment to Jamil post on A. Finn

On 4/19, posted comment to discussion question

On 4/22, posted Science + Religion on blog

On 4/22, posted as a comment to Science + Religion

On 4/22, posted Can Trees Sue? on blog

On 4/22, posted reply to Earth Day comments  

Interesting Video

As a lover and adamant thinker of "What if's?", I find videos that discuss the possibilities of What ifs to be very interesting.

Given our recent talks of Earth day, and human involvement in her decline, I'm posting this to see if 1. You've seen this video before
2. What are your thoughts?

Earth Day, "world's largest secular holiday"

Today is Earth Day. It was first observed in 1970, but its roots go back to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s (books by this author) landmark book, Silent Spring, exposing the effects of pesticides and other chemical pollution on the environment.

During the late 1960s, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson had the idea to harness the energy and methods of the student protests against the Vietnam War to organize a grassroots conservation movement. At a press conference in 1969, he announced plans for a nationwide demonstration, to take place the following spring. Twenty million people nationwide participated in the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, and the government finally took notice, forming the Environmental Protection Agency and passing the Clean Air, the Clean Water, and the Endangered Species Acts.

In 1990, on the 20th anniversary, organizer Denis Hayes took Earth Day to the international arena, and coordinated events in 141 countries worldwide, boosting the awareness and practice of recycling. The year 2000 marked the first time the event was coordinated on the Internet, and the message was the need for clean energy to counteract climate change.

According to the Earth Day Network, Earth Day is celebrated by a billion people, making it the world’s largest secular holiday. WA

Earth Day 2020 was supposed to be a blowout 50th-birthday activist event, a public celebration of our planet and a call to action to ensure its preservation as a sustainable and hospitable abode for our species. COVID-19 has ruined that, but every day should be Earth Day.


"There is a tomorrow" Honors Lecture Feb.3, 2020





If you're looking for a Fall course addressing these concerns, please consider PHIL 3340-Environmental Ethics. Texts: 

• Environmental Ethics: A Very Short Introduction by Robin Attfield
• Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben
• On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein 
• The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here by Hope Jahren

How bad is climate change now?

The only real debates left are over how fast and how far the climate will change, and what society should do to  limit the damage.

The 'Profoundly Radical' Message of Earth Day's First Organizer

Fifty years on, Denis Hayes is still trying to keep the spirit that made Earth Day a world-changing event alive — and to refocus its energy on climate change.

Coronavirus and climate change, the great crises of our time-LISTEN

==
How The Times Covered the First Earth Day, 50 Years Ago



For the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, The New York Times went big.

The paper covered the day’s events — rallies and teach-ins attended by millions — across the entire country, from New York to California. These days, that kind of wall-to-wall coverage would be called “flooding the zone.”

Two articles, one from New York, the other from Washington, made it onto Page One of the next day’s paper, with a top-of-the-page photo of crowds on a carless Fifth Avenue.

The Earth Day coverage continued for nearly two full pages inside. Yet for all the newsprint The Times devoted to the event, the accounts were mundane, weighed down by politicians’ speechifying and descriptions of community cleanups and other feel-good activities... (continues)
==
==
What We Know About Climate Change
by Kerry Emanuel

An M.I.T. climatologist and a conservative, Emanuel sounds the alarm in a measured and scientifically sound way, making clear what we know and what we don’t know. There is little panic in this slender book, but there is a lot of troubling information.

Emanuel specifically thought of his book as a way of offering ammunition to those trying to convince family members or friends who are skeptical or don’t understand the science.

“Young adults who are disputing this problem with their own parents or an uncle or something — they can hand the book to them and say, ‘Will you at least read this?’” Emanuel said in a 2013 interview with The Times. “One at a time, you might change minds.” (more reading recommendations)
==

There is a tomorrow. #EarthDay2020 #EarthDay50 https://t.co/hRkH3qXTSu

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) April 22, 2020

We've all had to adapt to cope with a pandemic. Climate change will force far harsher changes on our kids. All of us should follow the young people who've led the efforts to protect our planet for generations, and demand more of our leaders at every level. https://t.co/uNueQl5bNX

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) April 22, 2020

Science + Religion

This article appeared in a tab on my computer. I had sometime previously been working on chapter two of Ruse, dealing with science and religion. I have no memory of opening it. I have searched the blog for it, thinking that I opened it while reading someone's post, to no avail. So it must be there as a result of divine intervention. Thus I am compelled to pass it on.

To riff on the opening lines of Steven Shapin’s book The Scientific Revolution (1996), there is no such thing as a science-religion conflict, and this is an essay about it. It is not, however, another rebuttal of the ‘conflict narrative’ – there is already an abundance of good, recent writing in that vein from historians, sociologists and philosophers as well as scientists themselves. Readers still under the misapprehension that the history of science can be accurately characterised by a continuous struggle to escape from the shackles of religious oppression into a sunny secular upland of free thought (loudly expressed by a few scientists but no historians) can consult Peter Harrison’s masterly book The Territories of Science and Religion (2015), or dip into Ronald Numbers’s delightful edited volume Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009).

Likewise, assumptions that theological and scientific methodologies and truth-claims are necessarily in philosophical or rational conflict might be challenged by Alister McGrath’s book The Territories of Human Reason (2019) or Andrew Torrance and Thomas McCall’s edited Knowing Creation (2018). The late-Victorian origin of the ‘alternative history’ of unavoidable conflict is fascinating in its own right, but also damaging in that it has multiplied through so much public and educational discourse in the 20th century in both secular and religious communities. That is the topic of a new and fascinating study by the historian James Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition (2019). Finally, the concomitant assumption that scientists must, by logical force, adopt non-theistic worldviews is roundly rebutted by recent and global social science, such as Elaine Eklund’s major survey, also published in a new book, Secularity and Science (2019).

All well and good – so the history, philosophy and sociology of science and religion are richer and more interesting than the media-tales and high-school stories of opposition we were all brought up on. It seems a good time to ask the ‘so what?’ questions, however, especially since there has been less work in that direction. If Islamic, Jewish and Christian theologies were demonstrably central in the construction of our current scientific methodologies, for example, then what might such a reassessment imply for fruitful development of the role that science plays in our modern world? In what ways might religious communities support science especially under the shadow of a ‘post-truth’ political order? What implications and resources might a rethink of science and religion offer for the anguished science-educational discussion on both sides of the Atlantic, and for the emerging international discussions on ‘science-literacy’? https://aeon.co/essays/its-not-science-vs-religion-but-each-one-via-the-other

Final report, final review

REMINDER: There will be no final exam. Course grades will be based on participation and reports. The final report can expand on your midterm topic,if you wish. It should include bloggish content like hyperlinks, video embeds (copy and past the YouTube embed code, make sure the formatting doesn't spill over the margin), images, etc. 

You may also post a short (500+ words) final review of our texts (Baggini, Neuroexistentialism, This Life, Ruse) for extra credit, reflecting on what each has contributed to your present perspective on atheism, secularism, humanism etc. 

OR, you may submit an expanded review (1,500+ words) as your final report...

If you want to get creative with the final review, here's a suggestion: consider writing it in the form of a dialogue featuring several of our authors and yourself in imaginary conversation: base their statements on quotes and paraphrases drawn from the texts we read during the semester, documenting those sources parenthetically; have the authors  interact with one another and with you, touching on the major themes we've addressed: meaning, evolution, existentialism, free will, naturalism, secularism, spirituality etc. 

Have fun with the format, while being faithful to the authors' actual views as you understand them. 

Whichever report/review option you select, the last draft is due May 5 (but if you just want to do an extra credit review, that's due on Tuesday Apr 28th. You may still choose later to expand and submit it as your final report on May 5.

If you're not yet an author on this site, email me to request an invitation: Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu.

Pew Research--Religious People Report Higher Levels of Happiness Than The Less Religious and Nones

Ed's comment on the last quiz regarding faith and whether or not it is a psychological need got me thinking about the various studies that have shown increased levels of happiness among religious people. I found this research report by Pew Research Center in 2019, showing that actively religious people report themselves as "very happy" more frequently than those who are less religious or not religious. Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be any connection between physical health (obesity rates and amount of exercise) and religiosity.

What Say You?

Could it be that humans have a natural psychological need for faith, and those who don't fulfill it are less happy as a result?

Or...

Do you think it is some other factor? Maybe ideological structure, community, societal acceptance, etc, play a bigger role?

For now, all we can do is speculate, but I think it may be good for us to explore why "nones" don't seem to report the same levels of happiness and how we can possibly improve and get a bit happier 😄 (just discovered we can use emojis on here... I think my happiness levels went up a bit).


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Are religious people happier, healthier? Our new global study explores this question

BY JOEY MARSHALL

(Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images)

Studies have often credited religion with making people healthier, happier and more engaged in their communities. But are religiously active people better off than those who are religiously inactive or those with no religious affiliation? The short answer is that there is some evidence that religious participation does make a difference in some – but not all – of these areas, according to a new Pew Research Center report that looks at survey data from the United States and more than two dozen other countries...(Read More).