Listeners' Reflections

This is your place to publicly comment on the topics and issues addressed in Speaking of Faith programs. React in a personal way, and put into words what this program meant to you.

Submit Your Reflection about "Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth."

What We Mean by Faith (May 13, 2008)
I am a graduate student in theology, and I have to note that this is one of the most interesting interviews I've heard here. It was fascinating to hear (and read, in others' comments) about Jana's "rejection" of faith or her (at least) not making that "leap," as she put it.

Her drive to pursue the truth parallels the drive that constitutes my own faith. That drive is open to the revision of the ideas to which it has led me in the past, but the drive itself remains. I'm not so sure that this isn't a better understanding of 'faith' than our typical identification of faith with certain beliefs. There's an element of falling in love with the universe, a desire to know it as one would know a lover, that permeates both good science and good theology. If in any field of study one can say "we know we're getting closer to the truth even though we can't always prove it," then one knows what authentic faith — even religious faith — is.

Jeremy Blackwood
Milwaukee, WI (Listens to SOF OnDemand)

Natural Selection (April 9, 2008)
A very interesting show. I am always impressed by the intelligence of the guests. One thing that troubles me though is that Jana Levin seems to have a strong conviction of the truth of Natural Selection and yet does not believe in free will. The very word "selection" in the title of Darwin's theory suggests choice, and therefor free will. Males of every animal species engage in displays of beauty and power so they will be chosen by females of the same species. Are these choices not exercises in free will, and if not, what are they? Are they perhaps rituals for the amusement of themselves, or for us? For that matter can a creature with no free will even be amused, or even conscious. For what is consciousness but the ability to navigate through a verity of choices which must be made at every moment of every day? It seems clear to me that one idea must yield to the other. Either we have free will and therefor cho ice, or we are mechanically going through a lot of pointless theater.

Robert Wright
Philadelphia, PA (Listens to SOF Podcast)

Rejecting Faith (February 3, 2008)
Cosmologist Janna Levin is the most interesting, most enjoyable guest I have heard on your show. I am wonderfully grateful that you invited a scientist and novelist who overtly and specifically rejects faith in her appreciation of beauty, joy, meaning, and spirituality. I find the concept of faith itself to be fundamentally flawed, hurtful, and frightening. Faith is the enemy of honesty, kindness, ethics, and morality. Faith is the overt and conscious pledge to turn away from our senses, reason, and personal honesty.

Faith exists and has such a big place in human interaction because faith allows people to form groups and communities which promise to support each other and act in favor of ones own group and against other groups even when the facts and observable reality would suggest other paths or choices. Faith is a key ingredient of prejudice, hatred, sexism, racism, homophobia, war, oppression, and all other human evils. Faith encourages people to say and believe that "we" are better and more deserving than "them".

Faith that white people are better. Faith that Jews are evil. Faith that our country has God on our side. Faith that our religion is the only true religion. Faith that Allah supports the random murder of ordinary people. Faith that capitalism justifies millions living in poverty. Faith that communism is the only right way for people to live. Faith that we are right, and everyone else is wrong. Faith that torturing people for the sake of the afterlife is a good thing. Faith in human sacrifice to please god or the gods. Joyful, murderous, horrifying faith.

I am both pleased and surprised that you hosted a guest who finds joy and fulfillment in trying to do her best to accept the world and universe as it is, rather than as we wish it to be. Thank you for a great show. I am impressed.

Michael Kauper
Minneapolis, MN (Listens to SOF Podcast)

Faith in the Truth (January 29, 2008)
Perhaps we should not narrow our thinking along the absolute divide of dichotomies: being and nothingness, love and hate, heaven and hell, etc. Reality is often a combination of both opposites, sometimes existing in one entity.

Janna Levin is another great mathematician along the line of great thinkers. Lord Kelvin once said: "Mathematics is the only good metaphysics" and Sir Alfred North Whitehead said: "Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self." We always have faith in the truth.

Chinh Pham
Westminster, CA (Listens to SOF OnDemand)

Triteness of Human Constructs (January 13, 2008)
Thank you for sending me Janna Levin. As I listened to her interview this morning I found myself understanding her perspectives with great clarity. This is sometimes difficult to do with scientific minds. I was especially drawn to her non-theological views of the universe and the triteness of human constructs.

Linda Dugan
Hastings, NE (KHNE, 89.1 FM)

Apples and Oranges (January 13, 2008)
I found the Janna Levin interview unusually frank and more intuitive than most discussions of faith and the world. I appreciate her ability to exist with uncertainty. That said, I always wonder why mathematicians have such faith in their craft that they believe it is an expression of absolute truth.

I also think of it as a product, perhaps the most exquisite and powerful, of natural selection. I puzzle over the acceptance of such simple expressions as 1+1=2, because we first must be given one, as separate and yet indistinguishable from another one, so that they can sum to two. This works in concept, and manages the bananas, but as far as I can see, arithmetic always ends up adding apples and oranges. Isn't it true that there is no proof of one, except the one big One (the all, by definition), which clearly can't be added to another. Symbols can be added, but not matter. (Not that it really matters).

Richard Llewellyn
Los Angeles, CA (KPCC, 89.3 FM)

Free Will vs. Determinism (January 13, 2008)
Several times in your program, you more or less asked whether the determinism apparently present in physics meant that free will was impossible. I believe that one of the apparent paradoxes in modern physics suggests a way out of this.

First of all, I agree with your guest that the indeterminacy in quantum mechanics has no connection with the philosophical question of free will versus determinism. However, quantum mechanics has forced physicists to reconsider how they look at reality, the wave-particle duality being only the most famous example. The dichotomy — wave vs. particle — that seemed obvious to 19th-century physicists turns out to be a fallacy, an error in how humans look at the world.

In the same way, might the dichotomy — free will vs. determinism — turn out to be a fallacy? Might "free will" be the most useful way of looking at human behavior in some contexts, and "determinism" the most useful way in others? I think that public policy already acts this way: criminal laws are based on the assumption of free choice, while social policy is usually based on the idea that environment determines behavior.

Thus, even though there is no connection between quantum mechanics and free will, there may be a connection between how it is useful to look at quantum mechanics and how it is useful to look at free will.

Alan McKenney
Tarrytown, NY (WNYC, 93.9 FM)

Math's Limitation (January 13, 2008)
Janna Levin's comments on the limitation of math is a logical progression from the limited scope of any language. Much as a large flash or a series of flashes of light are beyond complete description in linguistic words, math is limited in its descriptive nature where an event already contains a random existence that is well beyond math's capabilities, even on a theoretical scope. We may miss it looking sideways. It can occur, perhaps, without an element of time and/or dimension beyond usual perceptions or mathematical description.

I truly enjoyed the discussion and interview with Ms. Levin, as she is a thought-provoking and positive voice in a highly structured world.

Dan Dickel
Mayer, MN (KHNE, 89.1 FM)

Thank God for Rationality (January 13, 2008)
I enjoyed your discussion with Professor Levin very much. In a society in which irrational faith is the default condition it is like a breath of fresh air to hear such a discussion.

Irving N. Wolfson
Worcester, MA (WBUR, 90.9 FM)

Modern Cosmology: Science or Folklore? (January 13, 2008)
I really resonated with Janna Levin's assertion that the results of mathematical analysis transcend national and cultural differences. In my book Beauty in Science and Spirit I show how the mathematical beauty of modern science emerged from the mystical beauty of ancient stories, astronomy from astrology. The big bang's whisper emerged from the "music of the spheres."

However, I believe her viewpoint of modern cosmology overlooked that fact the 75 percent of the mass/energy in the universe is dark energy, for which scientists have no explanation. A more realistic view of our present understanding of our universe is expressed in the article "Modern Cosmology: Science or Fiction?" by astronomer Michael Disney, published in the September-October issue of the American Scientist. Current cosmological theory rests on a disturbingly small number of independent observations. Disney states: "Without having to understand the complex astrophysics, one can still ask, at an epistemological level, whether the number of relevant independent measurements has overtaken and comfortably surpassed the number of free parameters needed to fit them."

Paul H. Carr
Bedford, NH (WBUR, 90.9 FM)

Levin Rejects Faith (January 13, 2008)
Janna Levin is the most interesting, most enjoyable guest I have heard on your show. I am wonderfully grateful that you have invited a scientist and novelist who overtly and specifically rejects faith in her appreciation of beauty, joy, meaning, and spirituality.

I find the concept of faith itself to be fundamentally flawed, hurtful, and frightening. Faith is the enemy of honesty, kindness, ethics, and morality. Faith is the overt and conscious pledge to turn away from our senses, reason, and personal honesty.

Faith exists and has such a big place in human interaction because faith allows people to form groups and communities which promise to support each other and act in favor of ones own group and against other groups even when the facts and observable reality would suggest other paths or choices.

Faith is a key ingredient of prejudice, hatred, sexism, racism, homophobia, war, oppression, and all other human evils. Faith encourages people to say and believe that "we" are better and more deserving than "them."

I am both pleased and surprised that you hosted a guest who finds joy and fulfillment in trying to do her best to accept the world and universe as it is, rather as we wish it to be. Thank you for a great show. I am impressed.

Michael Kauper
Minneapolis, MN (KNOW, 91.1 FM)

Everything You Know Is Changing… (January 13, 2008)
I am gratefully amazed at the popularity of the science vs. faith struggle. This is exactly why journalism majors should not take science courses — as I am a Technical Writing BA with a Physics/Philosophy double minor! There has been throughout history evidence that everything we know is wrong — from Linnaeus' ordering of the world from rocks to angels to God, to the Copernican "in your face" argument with Rome's papacy to Heisenberg's chaos theory that simply says "now we know that we will never know."

An excellent (but dated) ten hour series (and book) on this periodic cultural upheaval may be found in James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed, circa 1986. In it he pursues this notion that the Greeks instilled in us a natural curiosity in the West, while Eastern cultures have left it to their gods to sort it all out — i.e. there are no answers to find because there are no questions that need asking. It is in the balance where truth lies — acceptance and realization that no one approach is absolute. We do indeed live in the gray areas.

How much better could we be if there was a better acceptance of the extremes that make up our little bit of the galaxy. We don't need the conformity, but the globe is getting way too small not to become more accepting. Thanks, Krista Tippett. I have made room for you on any topic…

T Gregory Orf
Atlanta, GA (WABE, 90.1 FM)

Faith in God compatible with the Truth of Scientific Discovery (January 13, 2008)
I am not a scientist and so cannot intelligently discuss questions of physics, advanced mathematics, and the origins of the universe. I am a CPA, speak several languages fluently (English is not my native language), have lived in different countries, traveled in many, and consider myself a fairly educated person. Even though I think it is very important to continue our scientific research, it is equally important to put time and effort into the pursuit of spiritual truths which will hopefully lead to the embrace of some creed that challenges us to become not only more educated, but more loving people who practice humility and charity towards all we come in contact with, even at the cost of personal "self-actualization." This seems to be a very foreign concept for many and yet has calmed my existential fears and given me peace in all the circumstances of my life.

Jeanny Foster
Rockford, IL (WNIJ, 89.5 FM)

Exploring Science-Religion Reconciliation (January 13, 2008)
I want to thank you for your interview with Janna Levin. She was a wonderful guest, and you interviewed her in the best possible manner. As a science writer, I must say that your sum-ups of the science and math she invokes were clear and accurate. That's deeply gratifying.

My worldview is much like hers, but I try to listen and empathize with other worldviews — and thus I enjoy your show even when what I hear makes me shudder (e.g., Rick Warren claiming that God has a plan for each person.) I spent four years working with the Metanexus Institute to try to explore avenues of science-religion reconciliation. My deepest hope is that religion will mature to embrace a scientifically informed worldview, rather than cling to flat-Earth myths about our history and present condition.

Clay Naff
Lincoln, NE (KUCV, 91.1 FM)

Science, Metaphor, Poetry: Truth, Meaning, Beauty (January 13, 2008)
Krista's conversation with Janna Levin prompted me to consider if we search for meaning, or search for experience? Perhaps numerous associated experiences could be elaborately organized to pass for meaning?

What prompted doubts in Kurt Godel and Alan Turning also prompted Chuaing Tzu to reflect a few millennia before them, "I dreamt I was a butterfly. And now, I wonder if I am not a butterfly dreaming that I am a man writing this?" Chuaing Tzu had no elaborate hierarchy of axioms and propositions, only the same impulse to doubt — to imagine beyond taking some given for granted.

A fractal pattern can be experienced as a scalable set of experiences. O.K., then what does a fractal pattern "mean"? A metaphor can be merely a model that is scalable. For instance, electromagnetic propagation that reaches us from some distant galaxy, oscillates to us all along the way, with each "photon-packet" growing to robust maximum amplitude and collapsing to decayed decrepitude, cycling back again — much as the generations of life that Shakespeare wrote about in his sonnet, "Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore / So do our minutes hasten to their end / Each changing place with that which goes before / In sequent toil, all forwards do contend. / Nativity, once in the main of life / Crawls toward maturity, wherewith being crowned / Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight / And time that gave, now doth his gift confound." That sonnet always reminds me of the elctromagnetic fields associated with the propagation of light.

How much would these tiny micro fields inluence each other's adjacent field along each wave front of one single frequency, traversing from billions of light years away? The universe is filled with many frequencies, moving in every direction. How can we completely and circumspectly describe the electromagnetic field conditions at one point in space at one instant in time? Maybe we can never do so. Although no one has ever seen a light wave from the side, it's electromagnetic field is still there. Does that field exist in only two dimensions? or in three? There might be an explanation for the "background noise" of the universe in all this.

As life propagates its generations through geologic time, each animal, mineral, vegetable (especially including human) "field" contributes to the "wave front" of its contemporaries, of its "neighbors," and of communities of generations yet unborn. Thus the destiny of our planet and our solar system (and not just the course of history) unfolds.

This sort of propagation through time is about waxing and waning, maturing and declining: the pendulum's pulsing toward a strong field, then toward a weak field, and back to a strong field, etc. Carl Gustav Jung proposed that what is carried forward are the archetypes "no mere repository of the past… but germs of future psychic situations and ideas."

I'm no scientist, and too loose with metaphors to be a poetic craftsman. But, just imagine if the Big Bang is only convenient 20th-century mythology? The transforming power of the hydrogen atom on a Pacific atoll? The roar of ICMBs lifting off during the Cold War? The Space Shuttle in our own time? All convenient pop metaphors for the Big Bang? Perhaps it's more simple to believe, rather than to seek anomalies in our processes and to challenge and document? The red-shift may not be doppler at all; but rather the cumulative retarding effects of gravitational accelleration pulling back against the wavelengths of those forward-propagating packet-pulses. We say that gravity "bends" light. What if there is something akin to refraction going on with the red shift?

What answers may we discover if we begin by imagining new metaphors? We will imagine ourselves into new myths and new meanings. Minnesota poet Robert Bly describes fields that can change the course of history in his "The Origin of the Praise of God": "…beings unknown to us start out on a pilgrimage to their Saviour, to their holy place… a small black stone… rolled away from a door… this dance… awakens, intensifies, swarms… inside beams of sunlight so thin we cannot see them…."

and "In the pulse-beat is the life and longing, all embraced in the great circle of Belonging, reaching everywhere, leaving nothing and no one out. This embrace is mostly concealed from us who climb the relentless and vanishing escalator of time and journey outside where space is lonesome with distance. All we hear are whispers, all we see are glimpses; but each of us has the divinity of imagination which warms or hearts with the beauty and depth of a world woven from glimpses and whispers, an eternal world that meets the gaze of our eyes and the echo of our voices to assure is that from all eternity we have belonged and to answer the question that echoes at the heart of all longing: while were are here, where is it that we are absent from?" from "Eternal Echoes" by Irish poet, John O'Donohue.

Ralph Palasek
Arlington, VA (WAMU, 91.1 FM)

Free Will (January 13, 2008)
Free will, like many things in physics, depends on your reference point. For most of us, it doesn't matter whether there is truly free will or not, because to us there appears to be free will. Since we (most of us) don't know what is going to happen in the future, we have to make decisions and act as if we have free will because we don't have another alternative. How we choose to handle this lack of knowing the future varies, in deed, even if one believes there is no free will, one still has to act as if there is free will and make decisions and act (or not act, which is still a decision).

Lissa Fahlman
Odessa, FL (WLRN, 91.3 FM)

Clarity and Poetry in Concepts (January 12, 2008)
I have never written before, but just had to thank you for the wonderful Janna Levin interview. I'm a totally non-religious person who almost always listens to your show because there are often insights to be perceived there "out of the corner of my vision" from speakers from many traditions and viewpoints. But Ms. Levin is the kind of thinker I most value, she brings a clarity and poetry to concepts that are a muddle to most of us. We need to bring science and mathematics to the great questions, there is nothing to fear from them. Thank you for you wide-ranging views, there is no other program like yours!

Judith Marsh
Norwich, VT (WNYC, 93.9 FM)

I Know That I Do Not Know (January 12, 2008)
This was, of course a very interesting interview. To state Godel's incompleteness more simply: in any axiomatic system as complicated as arithmetic or more complicated, there are propositions that the system can not prove to be true or false. So the axiomatizing efforts of the early 20th century can't completely succeed, and there is a limit to how much we can know about anything through mathematical models, or even about the mathematical models themselves.

Ms. Levin was very fair about her statements and what she knew and didn't know. Her position could be described as Socrates' position: I know that I do not know. She does not know if God is real, she does not know if we have free will, and that's the state of her knowledge at this point. In the part of her book that was quoted, the characters do not know if we exist as we seem to exist. This seems to be the honest and noble conclusion of reason by itself: we ask questions but we can not say we know anything for certain. It's enough to say that nothing she said, or that science has discovered, is inconsistent with the reality of God.

I had thought that Einstein had proven that the universe was finite (bounded). Since space is curved, it eventually curves back on itself, and light emitted from here eventually returns here, given enough time. Do I not remember correctly? Given the Big Bang, and the expansion of time and space from that moment, how could the universe be anything but bounded?

To a person of faith, where faith does not contradict reason, but completes it, and brings it to perfection, free will is an attribute of the soul and can not be found wholly in matter. It might find reflections in matter. One idea would be that the randomness found in Quantum Mechanics is the freedom that matter in itself can achieve, and that all things are created in the freedom that they are capable of. (Just a note that evolutionary thinking is not in conflict with the idea that things are created. Evolution is a very elegant way for things to have been created.)

Edward Helmrich
Larchmont, NY (WNYC, 93.9 FM)

Manmade Things (January 12, 2008)
I might not have heard her exactly but, Janna Levin said something like she "doesn't take purely manmade things too seriously." With my limited knowledge on the subject, isn't organized religion, as we know it, purely manmade? If that's the case, I wish she were "ruling" the world. Then, just maybe, all of these horrible religious-based violent conflicts would not exist because they they are just manmade trivia.

Charlie Roberts
Oceanport, NJ (WNYC, 93.9 FM)

Co-existent Contradictory Realities (January 12, 2008)
Thank you for your thoughts. Your scientific/philosophical honesty meant a lot to me. In a topic like yours people usually apply their ample intelligence to find a happy but, in my opinion, false, reconciliation between what science tells us and what our "convincing feelings" tell us. You have followed a path of coupling humanity and sensitivity with tough intellectual honesty.

You didn't offer any analysis or reasoning for how these seeming contradictions can exist other than they do exist in the person of you. I'd like to comment on that and point out something in my perspective that differs slightly from yours.

You seem to have chosen science and physical reality as truth and "our convincing feelings" have been given a secondary role. I understand this. It was certainly the case with me for decades. In my high school Physics class, I fell in love with Newtonian Mechanics and was subsequently shocked and bewildered by its deterministic implications. I believed in the product of my intellect and struggled to reconcile it with my experience of free will. Partly because I didn't have the intellectual resources and partly because of who I am, I was miserable for a couple of decades.

At about the time my children were born, I came up with a resolution of sorts when I stopped believing truth was one, when I was able to accept scientific truth and humanistic truth simultaneously even though they appear to contradict each other. You have done that but I am not sure why you grade scientific truth above humanistic truth. Sure, there are things our "convincing feelings" cannot tell us about the empirical world, but there are also things scientific logic and empiricism cannot tell us about the humanistic world.

I suppose that I think that science is another kind of "convincing feeling" in that it is a convincing feeling of civilization. You will probably agree that there is an element of arbitrariness in science, and that there are elements of belief (even if it is in the belief of causality). It is this that makes me feel that science is on a par, not above, my belief in my own free will.

Thank you for allowing this conversation. I have never found a person and only a few authors (Nagel and Medawar) who were interested and willing to give science its proper place in this discussion.

Frank Vitale
Tomkins Cove, NY (WNYC, 93.9 FM)

Faith in Black Holes (January 12, 2008)
Our consciousness is like a black hole, and when we have experiences that do not conform to scientific logic or principles, we are perceived as not being credible. Yet like the discovery of the immune system, which we cannot fully define or see, or stem cells, which we never could imagine existed, we had little understanding of such phenomena until new tools and new conceptual developments in our consciousness led to new insights. It is the continuing dialog with the intriguing elements of life that leads us to new insight, sometimes beyond the normal depth of consciousness to indescribable higher realities that can bring us comfort when we face existential pain.

Life is everlasting like the universe, but it is also mysterious, unpredictable, and exciting just like a black hole in space. Yet trying to define a black hole is most complex because as we discover new tools and new aspects of the universe we have to change our views of black holes. So inconclusively, life is similar to a black hole whose entropy is not increasing, but it is convoluted to the extent that energy is reabsorbed continuously, and in doing so black holes are recreated in their mysterious depths. Maybe convolution concepts can be explained mathematically by transforms {Fourier DTFT or Laplace}.

Perhaps the query relating to "Math, Purpose, and Truth" can refer to the writings of Lao Tzu who tried to explain the universe in his ancient deliberations. Look, it cannot be seen - it is beyond form. Listen, it cannot be heard - it is beyond sound. Grasp, it cannot be held - it is intangible. These three are indefinable, they are one.

I recall the self-empowering chant of the Civil Rights Movement: "Black is Beautiful." Is life any different?

Bazil Graye
Naperville, IL (Listens to SOF OnDemand)

Human Constructs (January 11, 2008)
I was reminded of two other resources that listeners might enjoy along this line: When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom and the film What the Bleep Do We Know Anyway. Thirty years ago, as a theology student, I was introduced to the notion of "human constructs." Many things are what they are because we say they are. This program was a wonderful delving into those reflections. The political ramifications for such thinking are enormous. In this area, George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant is excellent.

Peter Lambert
Biwabik, MN (WSCN, 100.5 FM)