We live in a time when the appreciation of interdisciplinary cooperation is becoming rare. Two trends seem to underlie this: reductionism, and hyper-specialization.
Regarding hyper-specialization, most of us have had the experience, indeed the frustration, of going to a doctor with a problem, only to be referred to three different specialists. I recently took a fall. Now in the “old days” of my youth, I’d go to Dr. Williams. And he’d take an x-ray, (right in the office), tell me if I had a break or a sprain, hand me an ace bandage (if it was a sprain), tell me to take aspirin to reduce the swelling and say, “Take it easy, no more flag football for you this season.”
Recently I took a bad fall and the Dr. said, off to the radiologist with you. And, after that, off to the orthopedists. But at the orthopedist I was amazed to discover that there were different departments. So I had to see one doctor for my knee, and another for my ankle. There was yet a third, for the hand. Wowza.
Now, I’m not against specialization per se, but it does seem amazing to me that if I ask my pulmonary doctor a general medical question, she might just shrug, and say, you’d have to ask an endocrinologist. Now either she doesn’t know and has slipped away from basic medical knowledge, or she fears lawsuits.
But the bigger problem occurs when one doctor treats you for say, asthma by using steroids. Then the next doctor says you are getting fat and I’m going to put you on blood pressure meds. But you’re getting fat because of the steroids. And then the Blood pressure meds have other side effects, say depression, that a third specialist starts to treat. And the psychotropic drugs also contribute to weight gain, which worsens the pressure, and also brings on the diabetes, and in walks the endocrinologist with another cocktail of meds with other side effects. And the question is, who has the big picture in mind? Are all the specialists working at cross-purposes?
Well, you get the point. Now I am not telling a personal story here, my own doctor is quite good, but I have sure seen more than a few family members and parishioners running the medical gauntlet and it gets crazy after awhile.
But this is the first way that interdisciplinary approaches suffer in the modern age: hyper-specialization. It is not a mere problem in medicine but in many areas, including theology. Specialist loose sight of the bigger picture.
A second way is the modern tendency of reductionism. This is most evident in the modern problem of “scientism,” the view that the physical sciences alone describe reality, and amount to a whole explanation for any question. Why do we get depressed? Brain chemistry. Really, is that all? Where does consciousness and self awareness come from? Brain chemistry. Is that all? Does God exist? Of course not! Science cannot measure or account for your deity, therefore “it” does not exist. Where does everything come from? We don’t know yet, because science can’t tell us. But one day science will have the answer, and then we will know.
This is reductionism. In this case it is the reduction of all experienced reality to the physical, the material, and the insistence that the physical sciences are all that are needed to account for everything. Surely the physical world is an important reference, but to wholly deny metaphysical reality and metaphysical concepts such as justice, our sense of the eternal, and so forth is reductionist. To dismiss as valid philosophy, theology, literature, and the arts as having any real value in providing answers to deep and mysterious human experiences is reductionist. Religionists too who reject science or show unreasonable hostility to its discoveries are also guilty of reductionism.
It was not always so. In fact, modern science was largely born in and of the worlds of philosophy and religion. The fundamental religious insight that reality is intelligible (because an intelligent being (God) thought it into existence), provided the confidence that we could wrest meaning out of matter. The careful system of thinking that theology and philosophy developed for centuries, provided the road map for critical thinking so central to the scientific method. The religious and theological notion of God as a law giver also provided the framework for discovering God’s law, not merely in pages of the Bible, but in what he created. Science and its methods emerged from these worlds and insights.
As science has blossomed, it too can and does bless theology and philosophy. It confirms order and law and has given a deeper appreciation for just how deep, right to the atomic level, order exists in great complexity. It’s current theories confirm that the universe had a beginning, or at least an expansion from what some call singularity. Science’s amazing discoveries are a great source of wonder and awe for believers.
Literature and science also interact in a kind of two way street. Not only do many modern writers make use of science to weave their works, but science and technology too benefit from the imagination at work in literature, especially science fiction. Many modern inventions such as flight, space travel, cell phones etc., all began in the human minds and fantasies of writers and artists, who themselves were influenced by science and technology.
This is the interdisciplinary progress, dependance and mutual appreciation that seems to be breaking down a bit today, due to reductionism and hyper-specialization. Self enclosed worlds are far less enriching and imaginative, far less inventive and holistic.
In the video below is a remarkable story of how Galileo opened the door to modern physics by wrestling with the questions raised in a literary work of speculative theology written in his day: Dante’s Inferno (part of the Divine Comedy). The video explains in detail how he, meditating on the careful descriptions of Hell in the work gained insight in the interrelationship between math and physical form (proportion). From this meditation was born, at least in it infancy what we call physics today.
Enjoy the video and behold what gifts an interdisciplinary approach and interdisciplinary appreciation and respect critique can being forth. Could or would physics exist today without theology and literature. Perhaps. But the fact is, it does NOT exist apart from those fonts, and did in fact emerge from a wonderful interaction of science, math, literature and theology.
The title I gave this post “How physics came from hell” is playful and designed to attract readers. But the fact is, it did not come from Hell. It came from science, math, literature, theology, philosophy and many other interdisciplinary sources. For those who like to think of Galileo only in terms of the conflict of science and theology, perhaps there is a little more to the story and perhaps the true picture is a little more complicated that the simple (reductionist) portrait of modern times.
Enjoy this informative video:
There were many connections in physics that I made during my time in seminary. Physics is a glorious subject (one I happen to have a degree in)…Although the study of physics goes way back well before Galileo…
Now either she doesn’t know and has slipped away from basic medical knowledge, or she fears lawsuits.
At the risk of going off on a tangent from the rest of the post, another possibility is the unions. Under the collective bargaining agreements of many unions, only specified people are allowed to perform particular jobs.
And the medical industry is a prime target for unionization. Need to be wheeled down the hallway 50 feet from one room to the other and you are waiting, waiting, waiting despite ten nurses standing there at the nurses station looking at you? Too bad. The CBA says that pushing patients is within an orderly’s job description and only they, not nurses, can push you.
I did not know that doctors and others in the medical field belonged to unions. When did this happen?
It’s been happening for a long time. For example, the hospital where I used to work, once upon a time, was heavily unionized. And apparently it still is according to the website listed below.
Here is a listing of the various unions at the University of Michigan hospital system –
AFSCME Agreement: American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees
House Officers (physicians and dentists) Agreement: University of Michigan House Officers Association
IUOE Agreement: International Union of Operating Engineers
MNA Agreement:: Michigan Nurses Association
POAM Agreement: Police Officers Association of Michigan
Trades Agreement: University of Michigan Skilled Trades Union, Inc.
Oh, and by the way, when I was working there –
Yes, the nurses did go on strike.
Galileo is probably one of those cases — no, definitely one of those cases — where he should have stuck to his specialization, rather than attempt some interdisciplinary global unified theory of existence.
The main reason that he got in trouble with the Holy Office was because he was not content to stick with science — he also started demanding that the theolgians change their ideas to conform to his theories.
’twas not Galileo’s thinking that got him into hot water with the Holy Office, but that of Cartesian dualism “I think therefore I am”, the sundering of ‘truth’ from goodness, a reductionist iconoclasm of the so-called ‘enlightenment’ read Prof. D. C. Schindler’s “TRUTH AND THE CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION: THE REFORMATION OF CAUSALITY AND THE ICONOCLASM OF THE SPIRIT” at
http://communio-icr.com/articles/PDF/DCS33-4.pd
“Cause for Galileo is not what accounts for an
effect, but what produces an effect, and indeed does so wholly
through direct, material contact. Moreover, the only relationship
that holds in an essential way between cause and effect is temporal
succession.” (related to Machiavelli’s rejection of the
significance of the imagination, see The Prince, chapter 15.)
The geeks at the Boston Globe err in revering the mere opinion (Platos’ line segment B-C, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy_of_the_divided_line) of a contemporary academic over the accepted wisdom of the ages (line segment C-D) to arrive at their faulty conclusions on Galileo’s revolutionary effect on math and science – beware: Dante himself warned “Abandon hope all ye who enter in”
Interesting and great choice of topic. I have an Orthodox Jewish friend who just began studying electronics…lots of physics at the start. He is awed by the opportunity to engage the created world in this way and the physical world now speaks to him in a different way of the amazing plan of the Creator. Everything in the proper context!
This video is an interesting reflection on the benefits of regular interdisciplinary communication and education.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0af00UcTO-c
Thanks for this post! As a physics teacher, I was preparing my venomous remarks after reading the title, but I laughed at myself when I read the third to last paragraph.
Very interesting. Hope you are getting better.
“To understand how things work, you have to start with the math”.
Perhaps no more fundamentally false statement is imaginable.
To understand how things work, you have to start with the observations.
To start with the math is to impose an assumption upon reality, that reality is, like math, reducible to infinitely-divisible linear extension.
This insanity makes stock markets crash, and turns science into metaphysics, ultimately proposing a universe which self-assembles from a Nothing that turns out to contain Something.
Of the many evils which have followed the Council, among the worst is the failure of the Church to recognize the powerful materialist metaphysics which has supplanted operational science.
I would certainly agree with your comment on the last line of the video. I do not assert everything the video says. But your own last contains a very interesting expression: “materialist metaphysics” Do you intend the oxymoron? I surely agree with what I think your point is, namely that, although the materialists claim to reject metaphysics, and want to and claim to explain everything physically, that claim is in itself a metaphysical claim, one that cannot be verified with science. Science cannot verify scientism.
““materialist metaphysics” Do you intend the oxymoron?”
>> Exactly.
Scientism has departed in its fundamental research programs (e.g. evolution, Big Bang cosmology) the operational/experimental domain. Through mathematics (the assumption that reality can be represented in terms of infinitely divisible linear extension), it has developed and persuasively proposed a *materialist metaphysics*.
That they deny it to be metaphysics is the biggest problem, since if they admitted it to be such it would, as you correctly point out, self-falisfy.
If the Church did them the favor of teaching them correct metaphysics science would begin to progress rapidly again.
As things stand we could easily spend several hundred trillion dollars and a century or so elaborating the multiverse mathematically, without ever so much as the possibility of a single related scientific observation occurring.
My impression of math is that it’s not so much a science but, rather, the language of science. Using math can clarify but, when we seek to use it as a basis of research to define, instead of to understand what is found through processing data, then we seem to risk letting semantics dominate observation.
Data on the miraculous seems to be very well hidden by secular information sources and, that which makes its way into common knowledge is treating like isolated things rather than a part of a greater whole. Isolated from who? God? Who would be behind such an agenda?
Leaping to an hypothesis – then studying its accuracy and adjusting it (or sometimes discarding it for another) as appropriate – looks like the “leaping” is a conceptual, right brain, action and … that the meticulous research and peer consultation (prior to peer review of the end product) is a technical, left brain process. Does the historical record of research show God guiding us toward bringing; the subjectivity of right brain and the objectivity of the left brain; into a harmony – beginning, perhaps, with the science lesson in the first chapter of the book of Daniel? A science lesson of which Thales of Miletes (called the first scientific thinker) would have very probably heard.
Left brain and right brain coming into accord so that we can better seek truth? John 8:32.
Hyper specialization isolating individuals from a general knowledge of their field, on the one hand, and regarding the arts, philosophy and such as mere fluff, on the other hand … all taking us away from this harmony?
The title was provocative and got me a tiny bit riled but, it led to me looking inside at my preconceived notions and turned out to be a good thing. Thanks for that.
As a scientist and researcher for the past 15 years, I concur with some of your statements. Specifically, the idea that science holds the answer to all truths. Telling my colleagues that science seeks testable hypotheses, provable facts and makes no claim on universal truths, is almost as useful as herding cats. The scientific method is a great tool and has the ability to understand many ways in which the physical world is composed. The arrogance usually comes in somewhere mid doctoral degree (at least it did for me), that because I know a lot of facts the truths can be explained by them. I hope it’s clear how I’m distinguishing facts from truths or you will think I’m slightly schizophrenic. But after years of colleagues saying, as stated in this essay, that science will prove…how brain chemistry works, cognition, etc. means the person no longer treats science as a method to understand and explain observations. It means they have faith in what science can do or will do. They abandon the very reason associated with proving facts and delve into the faith required to believe what has not been proven. In short, I think science is a great tool. It’s the wonder-hammer. But it still is limited to things that look like nails.
This is a great comment. Our challenge is to assist the wonder-hammerers in coming to understand that there do indeed exist things that do not look like nails.
These things that exist and do not look like nails have a great deal to do with understanding why so many nails successfully wonder-hammered nevertheless have no power to successfully design the house.
love it ! “a great deal to do with understanding why so many nails successfully wonder-hammered nevertheless have no power to successfully design the house.” indeed ! Galileo was pondering the effect of gravity on a structure he assumed to be terrestrial (merely physical material sense) not the metaphysical figurative sense of Dante’s scheme (impulsive sins of the flesh least heinous, premeditated sins of thought against self or neighbor moreso, sins against the primum mobile (the Divine, God himself) as most evil): bodies, mind, heart/will.
Galileo had no knowledge of mass as compressible (think of deep-sea divers and the bends) or the geology of plate techtonics where the earth’s crust is solid for only a fraction of the diameter of its spherical volume, molten mostly (not entombed in a frozen abyss removed from love’s vivifying warmth as in Dante’s metaphorical figure) here’s some of the original sketches:
http://www.italnet.nd.edu/Dante/text/Hell.html
Glad to hear that you are on the mend, Monsignor.
Here is another example of hyper-specialization: hundreds of years ago, if a man worked all day making pins he might make twenty pins in one day. Then, it was discovered if eight men each made the eighth part of a pin, instead of making 160 pins in a day (8 x 20), they could make hundreds of pins in a day, maybe 800. They called that the division of labor. Imagine spending forty hours a week for forty years making the eighth part of a pin. I think it could be a good life, if the pin maker made enough jack to purchase a house and start a family.
When it comes to things like brain and heart surgery, I think we all would prefer a hyper-specialist.
Another evil of the Pill that I haven’t heard mentioned is that it is an unspoken factor when employers haggle with workers over wages. Employers instinctively realize that it now much easier for workers to avoid having children and can adjust wages downward. The legitimization of pornography has the same effect.
Science like the mind, makes a good servant but is a terrible master.
Father, I do hope you are getting better. A friend of mine goes to a lot of specialists who have the poor man on a cocktail of medicines. His health is actually worse now than it was when he went to the doctor in the first place.
Actually my health is fine. I did have a fall that caused injury a couple months back. But all is well.
Bembo’s moral schema is the most relevant for modern audiences to take note of:
http://www.italnet.nd.edu/Dante/images/tp1515/1515.wc2.150dpi.jpeg
I like to think Boyle’s primum frigidum is the thermodynamic model that Galileo was seeking for!
(having not abandoned hope we trust that fidelity — and the necessary dose of humility– will land us on the shores of Mt. Purgatory of course:
http://www.italnet.nd.edu/Dante/images/tp1515/1515.wc3.150dpi.jpeg)
have had experience where chutzpah has worked well. When my bed clothes needed changing, and I had waited long enough, I found the linen room, grabbed sheets, pillow cases etc. and headed back to my room. I was asked what I thought I was doing. I said, “making my bed.” Never heard anything about it.
On another occasion my l advance care document needed a witness before my operation. No one would touch it. I said I am not going anywhere until the document is signed. Everyone waited until a chaplain showed up. I don’t remember how long, but it was more than a few minutes. We had a good conversation, he signed it and made sure it was with my chart.
Another time, I wanted to leave. I was told that I would have to sign releases. I said ok, as long as they are here in the next 10 minutes. They weren’t and I left.
I have been very lucky. The doctors I see are very good at listening. We usually have a discussion to arrive at the simplest approach.
Have I had problems? Yes. A little pushing, as long as I am on the right side, helps
PS 7 sinus surgeries, one triple bypass as a result of a heart scan. My feeling is that the patient is the one who makes the decisions. It is absolutely ethical. Anyone who says different or thinks it is not, need to do some reading. In a way, medical personnel are consultants. Very important consultants. The patient is the best advocate for the patient.