by Elizabeth Bjorkman
The Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) addressed the very timely topic, "Human Meaning in a Technological Culture" at its 48th annual conference on Star Island from July 28 to Aug. 4. Sunshine and comfortable temperatures accompanied our scrutinizing the pros and cons of technology's impact on human beings. Conference co-chair Willem Drees, professor of philosophy of religion at Leiden University, the Netherlands set the stage in the opening lecture describing technological ages in human history. Each age changed human social life, e.g. after 10,000 BCE the wheel and ability to make copper and then iron changed social structures from nomadic to agricultural and created greater division of labor. The perception of technology as a threat to authentic human lives has been growing since the 1950's even as optimism remains strong. John Teske, professor of psychology at Elizabethtown College offered the example of the internet paradox: people are becoming physically more separated while being more interconnected. Midweek he fleshed out the psychological impact the internet is having on human relationships and the sense of self.
Computer scientist, Alice Mulevelhill, from BBN Technologies described how artificial intelligence research is being used so humans can collaborate with intelligent agent-based systems, e.g. retrieving in a data search only the information that is of relevance to the user. Conference co-chair and computer scientist Bruce Naylor exhibited some of his work in the field of virtual reality and raised some philosophical issues on the reality of virtual reality.
The interactions between science, technology and society were addressed by Penn. State University professor Rustum Roy who also is a material scientist. He is highly critical of science qua science and the "religion" of technology which it has produced. Science education is highly compartmentalized and flows from the abstract to the applied. Roy wants to see science as problem based and much more interdisciplinary so it is not alienated from human needs. He is a strong advocate for a holistic approach to medicine. Technology now is "flying high" much as science did over the past 300 years during which time it has done an incredibly thorough job of describing nature. In religion Roy sees more agreement among the faiths when there is a move from orthodoxy (belief) to orthopraxis (conduct); again a preference for problem based approaches over theoretical.
Cell biologist and past president of IRAS Ursula Goodenough presented Darwinian Biology 101 as background to an overview of the evolution of human technologies and some future projections. Biology and technology are combining to increase human life expectancy. We are, according to Goodenough, manipulating our mortality which calls her to ask what are our human resources for morality? She suggested five mindful virtues: mindfulness, fair mindedness, communion, reverence and courage.
The Buddhist perspective was explored by Penn. University professor of Japanese Studies Bill LaFleur. His special interest is how religions and philosophies get expressed in discussions of ethics. LaFleur described the different Japanese attitudes toward abortion, legalized in 1947, and organ transplants, which are viewed with great skepticism and approached with a healthy dose of prudence. The philosophy of Han Jonas seems to describe the Japanese preference for exploring new technologies to see if they are justified or not. In ethics "thou shalt not" has precedence over "thou shalt" for Jonas. Organ transplantation raises sticky questions on the definition of death, specifically brain death and implications of cannibalism when organs are "harvested". LaFleur asked, "what do we mean by human nature?" An individualist approach encourages essentialism, e.g. the brain is the human being. LaFleur argues for the Buddhist, holistic approach that requires us to look hard at the cumulative effects of our technologies and the attitude about the whole package we call human nature which we turn over to future generations.
Tom Rockwell, artist and designer of exhibits which combine art and science, used slides to demonstrate how technologies help us construct images of our world and our place in it. Rockwell is looking for integration in the visual sphere with the goal of creating a new image of "home". A video called "Powers of Ten" took us in less that 10 minutes from the human scale to the cosmically large and back and then to the quantum small and back. It dramatically illustrated the difficulties we encounter now in meaningfully relating images.
Dr. Billy Grassie focused on what we might expect from biocultural evolution in the 21st century. Grassie is the founder and executive director of the Philadelphia Center for Religion and Science and heads Metanexus. Grassie gave a convincing call for a more humble appreciation of our finitude with his assertion that human culture is increasing dominated by Lamarkian evolutionary processes which are best understood as complex distributed systems. These systems in nature do not lend themselves to predictive capacities or causative analyses. He feels religion, broadly understood will provide the metaphors and motivations for our biocultural evolution in the 21st century and beyond.
Formal presentations ended with Willem Drees asking the ultimate question "'Playing God? Yes' Religion in the Light of Technology". He pointed out that when we introduce god when technology fails (a kind of god of the gaps approach) the result is an instrumental type of religiosity. Likewise as our power via technology increases, so does our responsibility. Drees supported Carter Heyward's call for us to think differently about God and ourselves. Our task is to make God present in the world, or as she puts it, our task is "to god the world". The central theological theme is transformation. For Drees God might be understood as the source, or even the locus, of the values and possibilities in the cosmic process. Even non-believers according to Drees find 'playing God' a useful metaphor in criticizing new technologies. We accuse others of playing God when they move beyond what is given to us naturally to the other side of that boundary, thereby blurring that boundary. Drees repeated a theme from Rustum Roy with his assertion that practices are more important than ideas. He feels that "antibiotics and anticonception have contributed more to secularization in Western cultures than Darwin."
Phil Hefner, professor emeritus at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, editor of Zygon and director of the Zygon Center for Religion and Science served as chaplain for the week exploring the "technologization" of human becoming. He used poetry, art and the popular movie AI to expose how technology "shapes our images of ourselves as humans and these in turn shape the development of technology. Workshops were many and varied. While technology permeated many workshops, e.g. "Science, Technology and Morality", two thirds of the offerings ranged far from the topic, e.g. a field laboratory exploration of "Gull Goals on the Shoals and our Life Roles ", "Understanding ' A theory of Justice' by John Rawls", a computer program which provides "New Tunes from Dead Composers", a Shadow Box art experience, and popular repeat offerings on poetry and new angles on psychiatric treatment. Philosopher Michael Ruse brought his manuscript for "Darwin and Design: Science Philosophy and Religion" to the IRAS seminar for probing and lively discussion. The book will be published by Harvard University Press in 2003
IRAS was at its best as was the weather this year on Star Island. "We will come back!" to next year's conference which will address the question, "Is Nature Enough: The Thirst for Transcendence" with co-chairs Michael Cavanaugh and Terry Deacon.