My Intellectual Journey Pt. 3

For years I had what the secular world would call cognitive dissonance between what I had been taught in school about science and what I learned in church about religion and creation.  Cognitive dissonance is when you try to believe two things that are true but are mutually exclusive.  One example is God is good and all powerful.  There is evil in the World.  A good God would not allow Evil. This is the problem of Theodicy and has been struggled with for millenia by all kinds of philosophers and theologians.

My problem was that I was taught in school that science is TRUTH and that part of science is evolution and evolution said that everything arises through natural means and there is no need for God.  Plus the world has existed for billions of years old and homo sapien history is at least 12,000 years old therefore the account in Genesis cannot possibly be correct.  This is what I believed after getting a degree in Engineering from BYU which is an LDS school.

There's a number of ways people deal with this situation.  We can say that the "day" in Genesis means an indeterminate amount of time.  The Lord used evolution to lead up to Adam.  There are others as well, but none seemed very good to me, so I spent my time wondering if I was a dupe to believe in the Bible.

In getting my engineering degree I had to take a lot of physics and math, and ended up studying a lot of natural systems and analyzing them.  It always kind of made me laugh at how often after learning complex math formulas and how to apply them we would in the final instance always have to use a safety factor because most of the formulas were just best guess estimates.  In other words once you really start studying systems you realize how much you don't know.  For some reason it never occurred to me that this could be applied to all science, not just hard sciences and engineering.

After college I started attending a Christian Toastmasters Club in Albuquerque NM.  One day a member who was PhD and worked at Sandia National Laboratory did a presentation on how the account in Genisis could be reconciled with a Young Earth Creation view.  His account had to do with the relativistic effects of space and time when close to a black hole and lots of other goodies.  To be honest I didn't understand lots of the talk and I'm not sure that I would have agreed with it  if I had.  (Of all creation accounts I think the Young Earth Creationists are the most dubious, but they have they have their points.  If in heaven I find out they are right I will be surprised, but not a surprised as the hard core evolutionists are going to be.)  The thing is that I'd never heard anything about creation science in my life!  The next day I was down at the public library checking out anything I could find about creation science.  Here were explanations of the historic evidence that I'd never heard about and I was pissed -- er very upset.

Here's just a few things that I remember learning about from those first books that I read.  You need to remember that "science" applies uniformitarianism which is the scientific belief that process that we observe in nature now are the only forces that we can assume have always been at work.  Well that's fine.  However, the best guess for how petrification takes place is that a dinosaur dies and silt infiltrates the porous material of bones and sometimes other soft materials, and then that silt hardens into rocks and we get fossils.  However, these books point out that the best places on earth that would replicate those conditions for forming fossils are swamps and when you put a corpse in a swamp it immediately starts to be devoured by bacteria.  The best guess for fossilization cannot be replicated.  Huh.  For fossils to form you need to encase the corpse in a way that precludes bacteria and oxygen.  Another point, for one foot of coal to be formed you need ten feet of vegetable matter to accumulate then get covered and compressed.  Where in the world is vegetable matter accumulating to the height of one foot? Much less ten feet?  In the Western USA coal is not mined unless the seam is ten feet or higher, some are much higher.  Where are there accumulations of vegetable matter of 100 feet, and then how will that be compressed?  None of this can be explained by uniformitarianism.

And a third point.  

Question: How do we know that deeper sedimentary layers are older than less deep layers?  

Explanation: Well that's obvious, or seemingly obvious, because naturally the older layers would be laid down before the younger layers.  It's like anything that's layered, like clothing you put on, or a cake.  

Response: Okay I buy that.  

Explanation: Then fossils that are in deeper layers are older than fossils that are in less deep layers.  

Response: Okay that makes sense as well.  

Explanation: Well sometimes we find that older sedimentary layers are found on top of younger sedimentary layers.  

Question: What how does that happen.  

Explanation: Well in geologic time and mountains are created by the movements of continents things happen etc...  

Question: Do things like that happen now?  

Explanation: No.  

Question: But wait, how do you know that the sedimentary layers are out of sequence?  

Explanation: Because of the fossils?  

Question: What?

Explanation: You see we have things called marker fossils that are wide spread fossils that are found in many areas and when we find a marker fossil we know how old the sediment it is found in is.

Question: Let me make sure I've got this straight.  Deeper layers are older because that's common sense.  Fossils that are in those layers are older because they're deeper?

Explanation: You've got it.

Question: But if the layers are out of order we know it because the fossils tell us?

Explanation: Exactly.

Question: Do you know what tautology means?

The most hilarious thing of all about this explanation is that one of the marker fossils that "was" commonly used was the Coelacanth.  Why is that hilarious?  Because the coelacanth was a fish thought to have been extinct for 66 million years, then it was found to be alive in 1935.  Obviously it's extremely rare, but that would throw off all usage of it as a marker fossil.  Was that done? No it was simply ignored.  Scientists often do ignore facts when they can.

These are just the things I learned at that time, and there were more.  The real thing that I learned is that there are many ways to interpret historical facts, like fossils and you can interpret them to fit your hypothesis, whatever it is.  If you believe there was a flood like in Genesis you can explain fossils that way (the example given in the book was at least that "could" account for a process that excluded oxygen and bacteria while no know natural process can), or coal or the increasing complexity of animals in the fossil record.  There doesn't have to be one way to do this.

This was like a burst of light to me.  I don't know why this had never occurred to me before.  I knew from college that science raises more questions than it answers, and that real scientists are searching for answers that account for the most facts, and in engineering the answers shouldn't kill people and should work as expected.  I now think that the reason that that I used to think that science was the TRUTH was that it was taught to me as the TRUTH in grade school and high school.  I love science and just ate it up.  Anyone that knows me knows that I love reading and one thing that I loved reading when I was young was popular science and science fiction. Since it was taught to me as the TRUTH that's how I accepted it, and all the reading I did reinforced it.  Darwin was a saint and everything that happens happens through natural processes.  Luckily for me I also read the scriptures and had had experiences that my religion taught me that I would have so I also knew that religion had the TRUTH except really science was telling me that religion was only a "truth".  Also, engineering had taught me some "truths".

In writing this I find it amazing that I could go so long with the embedded thoughts that Darwin and Evolution were the TRUTH and everything else I learned had to bow to it.  I was upset, as in very upset ,once I learned this.  Since then I’ve done a lot of reading about the real way science is done, and taught.  Science is knowingly taught this way because it makes it much easier to accept.  When someone is first learning something usually the nuances are not taught.  This is true in engineering, it’s as you go higher in your own field that you start to learn both the power of the scientific method, and the limits.  Apparently you don’t question the expertise of experts in other fields, and you accept the TRUTHS that you’ve learned as a youth and don’t think to question them.  

I’ve read that this happens I just didn’t realize that it had happened to me.  Until right now.  I guess blogging can be good.

Great Courses Review: Theory of Evolution: History of a Controversy

This is not a bad course, and Prof. Larson is an excellent lecturer, one of the better ones that I've listened to.  I bought this series because the reviews were pretty good, and I generally have enjoyed the science oriented lectures that I've purchased.  I also have steered away from lectures dealing with evolution because I'm pretty sure I'll disagree with them, but I did buy the series Biology: The Science of Life, which I quite enjoyed it and learned a lot from it.  There was a lot of hand waving in the parts where it talked about evolution but when it talked about the current trends in Biology it was fascinating.  In fact I would suggest Prof. Larson might benefit from listening to it.

One good thing did happen from this series was for myself.  Prof. Larsen talked about the "red eyed fruit fly" and that's something that I'd never heard of.  A little background checking to see what he was talking about and it appears that Prof. Larsen made a mistake and meant the white eyed fruit fly.  That's OK we all make mistakes but I'm somewhat surprised that this wasn't found and edited out some how.  It seems that I've noticed things that sound like edits on other series (when the sound quality changes somewhat from the surrounding lecture).  Well I'd heard of the white eyed fruit fly before, but didn't know very much about it and while I was checking on it I read a lot more about it.  That was very interesting.

Then Prof. Larsen talked about the peppered moth in England and I said to myself; "What the heck, that study's been discredited and he's using it?"  Now the funny thing is, that I'm nearly 100% sure that the first time I'd heard about the discrediting of that study was on another Great Courses series because that pretty much all I listen to anymore and it's not something that I remember reading.  It was most probably in Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It by Prof. Steven Goldman or Philosophy of Science by Jeffery Kasser.  If I had to guess it is probably the first series, Science Wars, one of my favorite series.  He also talked about the fossil record of the horse as being proof of evolution, and I knew that had been discredited as well.  This caused me to look around for more information about the peppered moth studies and that caused me to finally read The Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells.  I'd pretty much decided I wasn't going to read that book, because from the reviews I'd read I thought it was going to be a strident discourse about how evil evolution is and why it shouldn't be taught in schools.  I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't that.  All it was was a critique of the way evolution is taught as dogma in schools, and how all the examples taught as dogma have been discredited.  This course by Prof. Larsen proves Prof Wells case perfectly as far as I'm concerned.

After reading the book by Prof. Wells I went back and listened to the lectures again just to make sure that I'd heard everything correctly and it was just my imagination.  I found that Prof. Larsen used even more icons of evolution in his lectures and I hadn't known they'd been discredited so I had heard correctly, it was just worse than I thought.

Obviously I'm a person who finds the way evolution is taught is a travesty, so why would I buy this course?  Well first the title was Theory of Evolution: A History of a Controversy and I was hoping that the course might actually explain why there is still a controversy about evolution.  However, the only thing that I got from the series is that the only reason there is a controversy is because of benighted fundamentalist Christians don't accept evolution.  That may be a little polemical but that's how I felt.  However, I do have to give Prof. Larson points for admitting that Julian Huxley pushed a humanist atheist religion that was based on evolution.  Probably because Julian Huxley was honest enough to admit that that was what he was doing as opposed to Richard Dawkins who teaches the dogma just as strongly but doesn't claim to be doing that, he claims he's doing science.  Also, I have to give Prof. Larsen credit that when he talked about Intelligent Design (ID) he was honest enough to, seemingly grudgingly, admit that those who support ID are "mostly" Christian.  Most people who don't agree with ID just say that it's a bunch of Christian Creationist's and that it is only "Creationism in a tuxedo".  At least Dr. Larson's statement allows those who might be interested to know that there are atheists, agnostics, Indian Hindi's and people of other philosophical beliefs involved with it, who often don't like to be described as Christian Creationists.  Phillip Johnson may have started the Discovery Institute and came up with the idea of using ID as a wedge, but there are many others who find the ID arguments compelling and the Discovery Institute is practically the only place people can do ID research because everywhere else they are censored by the establishment.  The discovery Institute accepts fellow travelers even if they're not Christians.

The other reason I bought the series was because it was on sale and I had a coupon code that made it even cheaper.

Over all listening was a good experience and I learned a lot, not so much from the content of the lectures, but just from the fact that the lectures prove a point.  This has actually decided me on buying the other course on evolution that others reviewers have recommended as being more in depth just to see if it confirms my suspicions on college level teaching of evolution.

Book Review: The Man Who Knew Infinity

I had heard about Ramanujan before, but not enough to know his name, just that his case was used in arguments to show that the education system is a failure and that genius can come from anywhere.  I agree that genius can come from anywhere, but this book puts paid to the fact that it is a failure of the education system.  At one point the question is asked, are there other Ramanujan's out there.  The book points out that Ramanujan's brilliance is a once in a life time, or century.  That with all of the success of the Western European educational system a genius like Ramanujan only rises occasionally.

There is a question in science, and I suppose other fields, that talks about the effect of the genius.  In this book there is a person who states the differences in genius.  There is the regular genius who is very good at doing the normal things.  When he shows you what he did you can understand it, you just realize that the genius is just very much better than you are.  Then there is the magician, when the magician shows you what he or she did you still can't understnad how they did it.  Magicians change they way the world sees itself.  Magicians are men like Kepler who sees that orbits are eliptical, or Einstien and brownian motion, and Newton and gravitational force.  Not anyone could see what they saw, but once they point the way the world is a better place.

According to this book that is Ramanujan who kept notebooks, three of them, during the years when only he believed in himself, but which are still being studied and proved many years after his death.

This book is also about the other type of genius G. H. Hardy who was a mathematician that Ramanuhan wrote to who recognized his genius and nutured it and brought Ramanujan to the attention of the world.  Some would say that anyone could have discovered Ramanujan but Hardy is the third mathmatician that Ramanujan wrote and the other two didn't discover him.  From the book it said that since Ramanujan didn't have a lot of formal training his notation was hard to understand.  Not wrong just different and it takes some time to see what he was actually saying.  The book said it was like instead of saying "Penny wise and dollar foolish." you say "Quater wise and two dollars and fifty cents foolish"  Same thing but doesn't ring right.

Fascinating book about two fascinating men.  Very good read.

Great Courses Review: History of Science: Antiquity to 1700

I only got this course after listening to the others in the trilogy and then wondering if they had a course covering the time period not covered by the other courses.  I'm glad I found it.

I've read some of the other reviews and it seems to me that people are mistaking science for technology.  No one would mistake the Wright brothers for scientists.  They owned a bike shop.  However, they did build a flying machine when most "scientists" of the time were saying a heavier than air craft would never be built.  Once the technology was proven scientists could then help improve the technology.  It's possible that a course could be taught on the history of the science of aeronautics without ever mentioning airplanes or jets.  It would probably be boring and depending on how far back you went it might be hard to explain just why the scientists switched from believing heavier than air flight wasn't possible to it was possible.  In fact Dr. Principe alludes to this when he talked about the "Clock Work Age" and how those who built the mills were illiterate for the most part and not interested in natural philosophy (science) but made great strides in the  technology of the time.

It amazes me how much people don't understand how closely Christianity and science are linked.  Some reviewers have complained that Dr. Principe gives Christianity too much credit.  I personally enjoyed his insights and the linking of advances in natural philosophy to Christian philosophy.  In fact in my opinion it is exactly because Europeans were Christians that they developed "science" as we know it.  Certainly the inhabitants of the Asian Peninsula — incorrectly referred to as the "Continent of Europe" because of continental envy when Western geography books were written — were behind the great cultures of the East for most of history, with the possible exception of the Roman Empire.  Dr. Principe doesn't make a big deal of this but it's true only in the West did alchemy become chemistry, or astrology become astronomy.  Europeans were introduced to gunpowder by the Muslims from the Chinese, and they perfected it so that when the Europeans went on the voyages of "discovery" they totally dominated the historically great cultures because they had perfected putting gunpowder in tubes and shooting projectiles, among other things.  In fact Europeans took the ideas introduced to them and improved on them all.  They were introduced to algebra  and developed calculus. They were introduced to optics and developed telescopes, microscopes and glasses.  I can go on but the point is already made.

Another reviewer was upset because so much time was given to Newtons writings and studies on theology and alchemy.  Dr. Principe didn't make up the fact that Newton spent all his time studying and writing about those topics and ignoring the fact, like they did during the 18th century, doesn't make Newton a greater scientist — oops natural philosopher — it just makes him less interesting as a human.  Many biographers of Newton have said that he thought his writings on theology were his most important works.  That's just the way it is, most great scientists before the enlightenment were very devout Christians.  Many still are today.

I really enjoyed this course.  Dr. Principe covered a lot of ground and I thought he covered it as well as could be expected in 36 lectures.  Just be sure you know what he's going to talk about. 

Science: It's Not What It's Cracked Up To Be part 2

Science doesn't really exist.  Scientific beliefs are either proved wrong, or else they quickly become engineering.  Everything else is untested speculation. — James P. Hogan

Since I wrote the first part of this series I went back and reread "Kicking the Sacred Cows."  I figured since it seemed to be such an influential book I should maybe reread it.  I was surprised at what was in it.  Mostly I was surprised at what was not in it.  It turns out that in my researches on the internet a lot of what I learned was beyond what Mr. Hogan was talking about and pointed me towards.  However, he did say a lot of good things.  I particularly like the quote above which is what he starts his book out with, right at the beginning of the introduction.

In my listening to the lectures on the Philosophy of Science I learned something that is amazing.  Science is founded on a logical fallacy.  At one time scientists, or natural philosophers as they were then known, knew this and worried about it.  Today scientists don't seem worried about it at all, just the Philosophers of Science, and I'm pretty sure that most of the rest of us don't know anything about it.  The fallacy is called Affirming the Consequent, or sometimes Affirming the Ascendant.

It goes like this, A therefore B, does not necessarily lead to B therefore A. Mr. Hogan gives the best example of this I think.  If the sprinklers turn on the grass will be wet.  Ok the sprinklers turn on and the grass is wet, that's true.  Say the next morning you wake up and go outside and find that the grass is wet, does that mean the sprinklers turned on?  No it doesn't.  Maybe it rained, or maybe there was a hard dew last night, or maybe a UFO passed by and emptied it's cooling tanks on your lawn.  See that last part is where Mr. Hogan's science fiction writing comes in and why I thinks his example is so great.  Much better, I think that the wikipedia version which can be found HERE.

How does that apply to science.  Well as I said it's foundational, but let me explain something first.  There are two ways that we can come to knowledge.  One is called deductive reasoning, and it is full proof and gives an excellent example from the history of philosophy.  A standard example is

All ravens are black. P1
That is a raven P2
Therefore is is black. D1

As long as the premises are true the deduction is true.  The history part is they used to say "All swans are white," but when Australia was discovered they found black swans and therefore the first premise was not true anymore.  They've never, so far, found a raven that was not black.  The problem with deductive reasoning is that it's not predictive so your limited in what you can learn.

The second kind of reasoning is inductive reasoning and it is where you reason from specific facts to general facts.  It's power is that it's predictive.  It goes like this

The sun has always risen in the morning.
Therefore it will rise tomorrow, and every morning after.

Bertrand Russel who was a very smart man and wrote "Principia Mathmatica", liked to show that this type of reasoning is flawed and to show it he talked about a hen who reasoned, every morning the farmer brings me food, and went out to meet the farmer every morning for breakfast, until the farmer one morning cut her head off so that he could eat her for dinner.

However, while inductive reasoning is flawed, it's power is that it's predictive and allows us to do things in life and so we depend on it.  So what does this mean?  It means that we depend on the logical fallacy of Affirming the Consequent to do science.  Lets go back to Mr. Hogans example

If the sprinklers turn on P1
The grass will be wet D1

In science we call P1 the hypothesis.  So we give it a fancy name and then forget about it.  The problem is that as a society we give science such a high level of credence, that we don't always question what they are saying when we should be questioning them a lot more.  Karl Popper a famous philosopher of science saw this problem and said that a statement can only be meaningful if it can be falsified.  The above statement could be falsified.  I could cover the grass with a tarp and turn on the sprinklers then the grass wouldn't get wet.  The scientist would then go back and either discard the hypothesis or alter it to fit the then known facts.

Now I think what the problem is really is that we, who live in the first world, live in a world that is a world of engineering marvels, and we falsely attribute it to science.  I'm not saying that science is not part of engineering I'm just saying that we can't see science, but we can see engineering.  Let me give a perfect example.

At the turn of the century, most "scientists" were saying that it was impossible for man to achieve heavier that air flight, or powered flight.  Why?  Because up till then all attempts at it had failed and they were explaining why.  The a couple of bike mechanics ignored the scientists, the Wright Brothers, and built an airplane.  Then the scientist got involved and started to improve on the Wright Brothers invention and in less that 70 years we went from powered flight is impossible, to putting a man on the moon.  And that is pretty much how science works.  However the scientists had to discard their hypothesis.

As I was thinking about this topic I was wondering if engineering, or technology, is still driving science.  Now we have big science, which I think is a problem, and I wasn't sure.  Then I serendiptiously read the December 2013 issue of the Smithsonian magazine.  It was the issue where they were talking about the people they gave their innovation awards to.  One of them was Professor John Rogers.  For his PhD research he was doing research that could determine the properties of thin films by subjecting them to laser pulses.  Before he was out of school chip manufacturers were interested in the research.  The way they were then measuring the ultra thin layers of a microchips was by tapping them, which was not only slow but risked corrupting the chips.  The laser system would be much better.  Dr. Rogers and a classmate recruited students from the management school and came up with 100 page business proposal.

They were giving a presentation to an executive from Tencor and were showing many, many screens of equations and theories telling how the could determine the properties of the thin films stiffness, delamination, longitudinal sound velocity, thermal transfer etc.  Finally the executive said I don't care about any of that can you tell me how thick the film is?  Rogers said yes they could but it was something they hadn't even put in the business plan, because as a scientist it was probably the least interesting thing about thin films.

Matthew Banet, who was the friend who co-founded the startup said: "It was a seminal moment in all of our lives.  We went back with our tails between our legs."  They went back and worked on their equipment until it could measure variations in thin films as small as on tenth of an angstrom.  Dr. Rogers said that "sometimes the technology push drives scientific understanding, rather than the other way around."  He also said that Tencor's requirements forced them "to understand a lot more about the optics and physics and acoustic and signal processing.  It put all scientific research into the context of something that could have value beyond publication in a scientific journal."

The startup, Active Impulse Systems raised $3 million in venture capital funding in 1995.  They produced their first unit, the InSite300, in 1997, and sold the compony in August 1998 for $29 million.

That's how it works.  Science turns into engineering that we can see and makes the world a better place.  Science that never turns into engineering is just guessing.  That's all it is.  Here is something that I also learned in the lecture series.  Every thing that science believed was true at the beginning of the 20th century turned out to be wrong by the end.  Why should be believe that it will be any different at the end of the 21st Century?

I'm Out to Improve Myself - And the Lord is Helping

Just before the New Year I was reading an article about a former missionary who'd gone to Hong Kong to expand his business. It was a Forbes magazine article and it really hit me that it was a pretty good article. He said that he was ADD and that he'd been stuck in a rut for the last 10 years of his life and needed to get out of it. He knew he could do better because he'd proven it to himself on his mission just how much he could accomplish when he stuck his mind to it. I'd been feeling that I was stuck in a rut and would like to improve myself, and I'd just recently found out that I might be dyslexic. This guy mentioned in his article that he depended on books like "Getting Things Done" and the "Power of Habit" to help him keep on track with his ADD. I'd read "Getting Things Done" and thought that it was a great book so I decided that I should read "The Power of Habit" since he'd recommended it. I was hoping that I could get some ideas from it and maybe start accomplishing a little more in my life.

If I have one gift in life it is that I have a love for learning, and in all my learning I try to get understanding about the gospel. I would like to think that I have a gift of being able to teach the things that I learn to others. I'm trying to share my ideas in writing more with this blog. To go along with that gift of learning I feel that I'm sometimes led to books, or topics where the spirit seems to whisper to me: "Buy this book it'll be a good one." That may be just the way I justify spending all the money I spend on books, but I really believe it happens and when I does I usually learn things, about the gospel generally and myself sometimes.

That's what happened when I read this article about this book. Then when I was looking at "The Power of Habit" I came across the book "The Willpower Instinct" and I felt I had to read that book as well. Then felt that I should read "Emotional Intelligence" and "Emotional Intelligence" and then I saw a Great Courses lecture series called the "The Spiritual Brain" and I felt I should get that as well. After I read the first two of these books it reminded me of "Feeling Good" which is a all time life changing book for me.

I started with "The Power of Habit" and it was pretty good in laying the ground work there's been a lot of study on the brain with new imaging techniques. Where people used to try and figure out what was going on in the head, they can now actually see. Well they can see where blood flow is, or electrical activity and they assume from that that that is where the activity is taking place. Three things I remember especially from this book is that: 1) Marketers use the power of habit to market to you. 2) Organizations have habits 3) That the brain can imprint habits without the conscious part of the brain helping.

Number three was especially fascinating. A man got some type of encephalitis that destroyed the part of his brain that consciously learns things. His wife was told that he needed exercise and that he could never leave the house alone because he wouldn't be able to find his way back. Well she took hime for a walk every day on the same path so that she could meet both of those conditions. One day the man left the house by his self and the wife freaked out, but the man came back on his own. Scientists who were interested in him would go on the walk with this guy and he would have no idea why he was turning on certain street, or where his house was when he was only a few houses away, but he would walk into the house sit in his chair and watch the history channel. His brain had created a habit he could follow although he no conscious memory of it. He could do the same thing with making himself breakfast. He would get up go to the kitchen and mage himself eggs and bacon, but he couldn't tell you where the kitchen was. The brain was building habits that could fire but he didn't consciously know what he was doing.

One key thing that I took away from this book, besides the interesting things I mentioned, is that their seem to be key habits that if someone will do they also start doing other things in their life as well. The classic example they give is that when someone starts exercising everyday as a habit it will start spilling over into other parts of their life. They might start saving more, or eating less or other things that they've wanted to do. He also says that you should examine your habits to see why you're doing something. He then gave an example about how he would always get up in the afternoon and go to the cafe at his work to get a cookie and then talk with coworkers. When he started to examine why he was doing this he found that he mainly was doing it as an excuse to talk to coworkers, so he started just visiting with coworkers instead. Something like that. However, he never tells you how to do this, what a key habit would be, or how to examine your emotions.

The second book, "The Willpower Instinct" was by far the most interesting, and some of the information in it was in the first as well I'm sure. The author of this book says that it's taken from a class that she gives as a extension course at Stanford University. When she first offered it she was worried that no one would show up, but they had to move the class 4 times that first semester until they were in the largest lecture hall at Stanford. I don't know how big that is, but I'm sure it's pretty big. She said that the way to use the book is to try and implement one chapter a week the way they do at Stanford. She said that you could obviously read it through at once to get an overall flavor, but that you should go back and do one chapter a week. So that's what I did.

One of the first things that the first two chapters teach if meditation and breathing practice. From my short experience with trying yoga I could see that both of these were simplified yoga practices without the religious aspects to them. In the meditation portion she said that people who practiced it after as little as 11 hours of practices imaging or their brain showed that the portions of the brain that control our willpower had become "thicker" meaning more connections had been made in those portions of the brain. This is pretty much the same thing that the professor in the "Spiritual Brain" had found and they'd had their participants do a meditation practice that was similar.

For years I've thought that the eastern religions with their knowledge and understanding of the spirit and body connection probably had a lot to teach the west. However, I never really understood what it was getting at and why it was important. This gives a great reason, and it might be a little different than the reason they teach the meditation practice, but all religions say that you should meditate, at least all the ones I know about.

Anyway as I've said I've tried the meditation and breathing practices and haven't really done them in a while, however I've started again and I find them very beneficial when I know what I'm doing them for, and they fit in my spiritual practices. I don't really want to try and have a nirvana experience by doing something that I consider in many ways a waste of time everyday. However, when she talked about controlling your breathing to help with relaxation and that you should shoot for 3-6 breaths a minute I thought that might be hard, but after doing it for a couple time the second week, because it's part of the second chapter, I found that I was able to do 3 breaths a minute already. So maybe somethings stuck with me after all.

Also, books talk about how the mind is wired with the amygdala, a part of the mind that is supposed to be very ancient. The amygdala controls the emotional part of the brain, and it starts to fire before your conscious part of the brain even gets the signals. It's also the part of the brain that seems to imprint emotional memory. Emotions turn out to be very important. There is a story about a man who had something happen so that his amygdala was damaged and he felt no emotion. Far from being a Spock or Data he couldn't make decisions any more because he couldn't feel that anything was important to do. Turns out that emotions are an important way to run our lives. Our prophets have always taught that one way the Lord, talks to us is through emotions and I think this shows that they're right.

One other thing that I found super interesting is in the 5th chapter which I re-read this week and that is the power of dopamine. The first indication of this was back in the '50s when some scientists were doing a test on some rats and had stuck an electrode into the rats brain. I turned out that when the rat was allowed to push a switch that would excite the electrode it would do it until it fell from exhaustion. When the made the rat run over an electrified field that would burn it's feet to push the switch they would do so until they could run anymore. The scientists thought they had found the reward center of the brain, but what they'd found was the anticipation portion of the brain, the place were dopamine was secreted. When they destroyed that part of the brain in the rats and then gave them sugar they would get the same dopey look on their face (that the authors words, she's very funny) they still got the reward, but now you couldn't get them to do anything to earn the reward because there was no dopamine.

Apparently the brain send out dopamine when it thinks you should be taking action to do something. So if there's some tasty food around the brain starts telling you to crave it so that you'll go get the food. Apparently when getting tasty fattening food was scarce it was a good thing that your brain would put you in the mood for doing what it took to get it. You became a risk taking machine. But it might not be so good when tasty fattening food is all around you. She also said that when you saw a pornographic image the same thing happened your brain floods with dopamine. She said it probably happened because in the past you usually saw something like that only when you had a chance to spread your genes not on a daily bases. However, they've shown that showing people sexy images does flood the brain making it a risk taking machine which will cause them to spend more money for example. Obviously something that advertisers have figured out. When I was reading about some of the information that Bro. Christopherson talked about in his talk at the Priesthood Session in Oct 2012 one of the things that I found was that young men can get addicted to pornography or video games but it was the same addiction and addiction to arousal, or dopamine.

One interesting thing that this book talks about that there are 3 types of willpower. The "I will," the "I won't," and the "I want." She says that sometimes we can change an "I won't" to an "I will" challenge or an "I want". I'd never really thought about it that way before. It seems like I've always concentrated on the "I won't" part.

Anyway this book has much more information on how to implement willpower in your life, and how it works. I've really enjoyed this book and the insights it gives.

"Emotional Intelligence" was not that great of a book. I got the 10th anniversary edition of it. It gave some interesting information and ideas. Basically it says that Emotional Intelligence or EQ is more important to your success than IQ or your personal outlook. He says that research has shown that your IQ is pretty much set for life at birth, and that people seem to have a personal set point in the way they look at things. Some people are just more outgoing and some are just more timid. These traits appear in children at about 8 months and are pretty much set for life. However, you can change your EQ and it can make a great difference in your life. However, he doesn't really say how to do this other than some ideas on how to raise kids. It's sad the way some kids are raised.

"Emotional Intelligence 2.0" is totally different. It give you 4 basic areas that you can work on in your EQ and then give 63 different ideas to work on. Many of these ideas I've read about in other books but not explaining why they were important or how they were going to help. This book lays out a little more refined plan with explanation. It also says that you should just work on a few ideas at a time and then move on. Trying to change to much at once is overwhelming. In fact all the books say the same thing about only changing small things at first, although "Power of Habit" doesn't really tell you what to change, just that if you get a key habit it will change your whole life. I guess "Willpower Instinct" doesn't say what to change, just that you should only take on one challenge at a time.

Finally I listened to the "Spiritual Brain." It covered a lot of these areas but in a different way. The first part of the lectures, I think, where basically saying that religion does effect your brain in positive ways and here are the positive things that it does for you. He also knows that his research is very going to be controversial and he spent a long time talking about how he took questions that people were going to raise about his research were going to bring up. I found it amazing. At one point he talked about research that shows that Mormon males live longer and healthier lives as evidence that living a religious life is good. He said that at one of his presentations that a minister stood up and said that he thought that what he was doing wasn't very good because people are going to start to try to be religious for the physical benefits not for the theological ones. He said that that's not what he's doing and he doesn't think it would work anyway that people are only religious for the same reasons they've always been, but that here's more information about why it works. I think he's right and I like to hear stuff like that.

That was the first half of the lectures the second half I think was more about neruotheology which is a new field of study and he's written a book about it. In this section he tries to explain why the brain would believe the theological things that it might believe and why. I didn't find this section as interesting as the first section, and it may have been because I really wasn't prepared for it. I'm going to have to listen to it again. One interesting thing is that he talks about mystical experiences, and I found this interesting. He tries to lump Joseph Smith in with other mystics, but I now really see what Author Henry King and Hugh Nibley mean when they say that Joseph's account is the exact opposite of a mystical experience. He just went into a forest and tells exactly what happened, noting ineffable at all about what happened. In fact that seems to be the most amazing thing about the accounts of all prophets visions. The things that happens may seem bizarre in the telling but they're tellable. None of this I was light and dark at the same time, or I could touch everything at once. However, as the professor says many people of different religions have these experiences and all of them, after they have them say that they're life changing. Also, at least to me they seem to be remarkably similar no matter what religion the person having them is. However, it seems like most people have to work to attain these visions through some sort of meditation technique, that also seem remarkably similar.

This is what I found unattractive about the Buddhist meditations. I didn't want to spend all the time emptying my mind of everything, so that I could achieve some state of nirvana, that I don't think is important. However, this seems to be an experience that many religions have and from the descriptions it seems to be an experience that's very important to the people that have them. I'd say they're important, but I'd like to know why. The prophets teach us that we should ponder on things that we want to understand better, and many people have talked about how they have sudden enlightenment but it's on topics that are of concern to them. Some prophets have talked about how they've had visions opened up to them, like Nephi and Joseph F. Smith, but these are indescribable accounts of lights and feelings etc. It something that I'm going to have to ponder about, and I'm going to look more into neurotheology.

For me it's been an enlightening few weeks. I know that these ideas are going to be helpful to me and they're very exciting.

Great Courses - The Philosophy of Science

This was a very tough course for me.  I'm glad that I listened to the "Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It" before I listened to this, or I doubt that I could have understood any of it.  Unless you have a real interest in this topic you might want to listen to the other lectures as well.

However, I've listened to this lectures series twice now, and gotten more out of it each time and I'll probably do a little more reading and come back to it again.  I got one excellent term out of this series although Dr. Kasser never says it but he almost says it "Science is epistemologically privileged", and it's what he means.  As a society we tend to think that if it's scientific the information must be better.

Dr. Kasser's presentation is excellent.  If it wasn't I could never have stayed with the lectures.  I thought he brought up a lot of good an interesting ideas, and I have to admit that I've always thought Science was a little special, even though I've always been glad to be an engineer and thought that engineering is better than science.  I was surprised at many of the points that he brought up.

One thing that drives me crazy about this is how powerful a concept logical positivism is as a philosophy even though it's been mostly shown to be lacking.  Most people that I know think that science is only facts that are indisputably proven.  I kept hoping that he would bring up A.J. Ayer who said that the only thing wrong with logical positivism was that is was almost all wrong, but he didn't.  I actually heard that in another Great Courses Lecture Series, but I forget which one it was.

Good course.  I'd recommend it but with reservations.

Great Courses - Science and Religion

Here's my review of this set of lectures.  I don't know if it's going to get posted on the Great Courses site it's a little polemical.

I thought this was a very good set of tapes. I'me giving it a high ranking because of some of the low rankings that it's received. I thought this might be a good set of lectures to listen to, but I seriously thought it might just be covering ground that I've already covered in other lecture series that I've listened to such as "Skeptics and Believers". I looked at the rating and thought, man that's a low rating (it's actually gone up since I first looked at purchasing the set) and then I started reading the reviews. It was the low reviews of this set of lectures that did it for me. I bought it listened to it and enjoyed it.

There is a belief system in the world that hates religion, and believes that they have co-opted science. When you question their world view at all they become rabid. I think some of the reviews show this. Can you imagine that someone might question Saint Sagan!!!??? One of their most rabid leaders is Dr. Richard Dawkins, perhaps Pope Dawkins is better — who I believe hung out with Saint Sagan and may become unquestionable as well once he dies — who actually believes that the power of the state should be used to stop anyone from questioning his world view. That sounds exactly like the Catholic Church that tried to shut down Galileo. However, as Dr. Principe tries to show there was a lot more going on than just that they disagreed with Galileo. I don't know why Dr. Dawkins thinks that anyone that disagrees with him must be insane, and won't even debate with them because to do so give them credibility (I believe that's what he told Saint Sagan now that I think about it). If Dr. Dawkins is so sure about the power of his ideas he ought to debate every time he get a chance, to overcome their ideas with the power of his, not try to shut ideas down, but no: Shut those heretical ideas down he believes.

Anyone that would like a more nuanced approach to what has happened in the interactions between religion and science should like this set of lectures.

Science: It's Not What It's Cracked Up To Be part 1

I've listened to a bunch of lectures on the history of science, and the the philosophy of science and what I got out of it was pretty astounding. Science is nowhere near what I thought it was cracked up to be.

In my experience Science is taught in schools as fearlessly pursuing the truth, shining the pure light of reason on the mysteries of the universe wherever that might lead.  It's taught in an almost Whiggish fashion.  If there are questions in a scientific theory everyone accepts that and they work towards the answer knowing that only the fact matter.  That's not the way it is at all.

The first crack was when I first learned about Creation Science.  I went to BYU, a well know LDS sponsered college.  I got a degree in Mechanical Engineering.  I always wondered in the back of my mind if I was being duped by not believing completly in Evolution.  I mean I couldn't doubt my spirtual experiences, but did that spill over into Science?  I of course thought yes.  Then I joined a Christian Toastmasters group because it was suggested that I should by a sales job manager I had at the time.  One presentation there was done by a PhD Physicist who worked at Sandia Laboratory and he gave a presentation on how Young Earth Creationism works with Einstien Relativity.  I can't remember exactly what he said, and while I won't be suprised to find out that YEC is correct, I'm a little skepical about it.  What I do remember is thinking that I'd never heard anything that this guy was talking about!  Next day I was at the library checking out a book on Creation Science and what I read was astounding.  They seemed to have very good arguments, or reinterpretaions of the evidence of Evolution.  The idea in the back of my head that I was being duped was gone, I wasn't being duped by religion I was being misinformed by our education system.

That being said, I'm not against evolution being taught in schools, and would be upset if it wasn't.  I read in book about LDS Scholars where they shared their testimonies, a biologist said that he sometimes found it strange that he worked in a field that had at it's foundation an idea, evolution, that he didn't necessarily believe in.  That's all that I remember and I'm not sure what he meant.  I would say that it's obvious that species evolve and I think that's what biology is based on.  To me it's not obvious that species evolve into other species.  However, I made sure that my kids knew that there were other interpretations to what they were learning in school.

That was my first crack that maybe science is not everything that it's cracked up to be.  Over the years I'd read interesting things like that when the data by Miliken and the oil drop experiment, and Mendel's sweet pea data were examined with statistics it was discovered that the data was most likely faked.  Oh well at least they were right, and everyone cheats a little I thought.  I also read that Author Eddington was so sure that Einstien was right that he only showed the photos that proved that he was right, and ignored that ones that didn't by the logic that something must be wrong with them.  Well Einstien was right, right?  Well I then read a book called "Kicking the Sacred Cows" by James P. Hogan.  Mr. Hogan was a very good science fiction writer that I'd discovered on the Baen Books site, and when I read the excerpt on the book I didn't think it sounded that interesting.  Mr. Hogan sounded much like myself, with a few differences.  One big difference is that he describes himself as agnostic.  He had an engineering degree, and he bought into Evolution whole heartedly.  He explained that in his early novels he'd written about evolution as a fact.  Then one day he'd seen a book about Creationism or Intellegent Design, and he read it mostly with the idea to ridicule it.  Well that didn't happen, he became convinced that Intellegent Design (ID) was correct.  After that his novels pushed ID, so much so that when Earthlings discovered inhabited planets elsewhere in the Universe it was possible to interbreed with them.  Reading "Kicking the Sacred Cow" was eye opening about just how unscientific science is.  One of the funny things about this is that Mr. Hogan points out that people who say that ID is just an in for Creationism don't know what they're talking about.  Mr. Hogan doesn't accept the Bible, and there are people from other religious faiths who accept ID and obviously don't accept the Bible.  Most people who say that about ID is just Creationism are just trying to discredit it.

Some of the things that Mr. Hogan wrote about I'd known about agreed with.  Others I'd never heard of before and was surprised to be reading the stuff.  The most embarrising thing about the book was the information on Immanual Velikovsky, who wrote "Worlds in Collision".  Someone had asked me what I thought about him at church and I'd just looked around the web and decided that he was a crackpot because that was the accepted account.  After reading the book I started reading a little more deeply around the web and decided that maybe he had some good ideas after all.  I don't know that I agree with all of them but I don't dismiss them all now like I used to.  Pretty much everything that was said in Mr. Hogan's book I now agree with.

Dr. Rodney Stark pt 2

Dr. Stark makes the claim that the reason that Christianity was able to develop Science was because it raised reason to the level of faith and it had the concept of a personal God.  He's 100% right.  He points out that every society has had astrology but only the West developed astronomy, and all societies have alchemy but only the West developed chemistry.  Why is this?  Why did the Greek and Romans not develop science?  They had the engineering skills and knowledge to do so. They could build aqueducts and buildings that could last for millennia.  The Greeks produced thinkers like Socrates and Aristotle but they didn't develop science.  Aristotle was a natural philosopher par excellence.

I've read a number of possible explanations that have tried to explain why the Greeks didn't make leap and the best explanation was economic.  The Greeks knew about the steam engine but didn't develop it because they had slaves and it wasn't economical to develop machines when you had slaves.  They also had the technological skills to make clock works that couldn't be replicated until the fifteenth century, as demonstrated by the Antikythera mechanism.  That makes sense. Humans are almost infinitely flexible and even today can do more than any machine.  What doesn't make sense is why would slavery end?  Every culture has had slavery except one, and that is Christianity which saw all men and women as brothers and sisters.  However, when you see someone as a brother and sister you don't keep them as slaves.  Dr. Stark points out that by the year 1000 slavery had been mostly eradicated in Europe.  That's something that Christianity needed to arrive at because the Bible clearly condones slavery.  Dr. Stark also points out that that era around the year 1000 could be called the clock work era because there were literally thousands of clockwork mills doing all kinds of work, that formerly would have been done by slaves such as grinding grain.

St. Augustine was the first to write my reason informs my faith and that has informed Western culture since the time he wrote it.  Well what was the faith that informed their reason? Faith in a loving Father that created the World for them. A rational Father that made a World according to a plan.  Not one of the willful gods of the Greek Pantheon that could be bargained with according to the gods whims.  Why study something that could be changeable?  Islam took a different route.  They believed, not in a willful God, but in a God that couldn't be limited in any way.  So saying that gravity could act only one way would limit God therefore a Muslim wouldn't even consider studying something like that.

In my reading it seems like all the great monotheist religions reached a point where they have to ask the question about what their philosophers are doing when they try to discover more about God.  Al-Ghazali, a Muslim philosopher, wrote Incoherence of the the Philosophers in which he condemned metaphysics but that then spilled over into all branches of physics and the Muslim culture turned away from science.  Bernard of Clairvaux made much the same arguments at about the same time.  However Christians decided that since God is all powerful and could have made the world in any form the fact that he made it the way that he did says something about God.  Western Christians decided that their were two books the Scriptures and the Book of Life, or nature and that by reading the Book of Life or studying nature you could learn about God.  Robert Boyle, of Boyle's Law fame, felt that experiments in the study of nature were so worthy that they were an acceptable activity for the sabbath.  Johannes Kepler thought that that his studies into the rotations of the planets were a form of praising God.  I could go on, but it was this kind of thinking that led to the development of science only in Western Christianity.  Eastern Christianity took a more mystical turn where they praised God through rites, much like the Muslims did.  That resulted in Peter the Great realizing the West was much more advanced than Russia and him trying to force Russia to catch up.  Different mind set, different result.

Dr. Stark made a startling insight, at least to me.  He points out that science was the process of proving hypothesis, and that the whole endeavor of Christian Science should be considered the proving of a meta-hypotheses, which is my word, that there is a loving God, who is our Father, and deals with us in rational ways and we can learn more about Him by studying the world that we live in.  I would say that that is proven.  By science.  And the result is the wonders of technology.

Dr. Stark is also a guest lecturer in China.  He says that the Chinese have told him that they have studied the West and they feel that it is Christianity that caused the West's great scientific and technological advantages.  Obviously Dr. Stark agrees with that.  The interesting thing moving forward will be to see if science has a solid enough foundation and methodology that it can be pursued by atheists without a Christian foundation.  I guess the future will tell us that.

An interesting side note, for me, is that Dr. Stark revealed some of his personal thoughts in a forward of one of his books.  He said that he started his career studying religion as a sociologist as an agnostic at best, but that over the years he's become enough of a non-denominational believer that he felt that he could work for Baylor University, which is a Baptist affiliated university.  I thought that was a great story.