ABOVE: Symmetrical and ornate, snowflakes are an example of morphogenesis, or the spontaneous creation of complex form. Credit: Kenneth G. Libbrecht, chairman physics department, California Institute of Technology, designed and built his own photo-microscope to capture individual snow crystals on film. He and Patricia Rasmussen used it to take photographs for their new book The Snowflake: Winter's Secret Beauty. www.SnowCrystals.com
Such certitudes have a religious ring to them and indeed critics have charged that such viewpoints are the foundations of the religion of scientific materialism. Parochial dogmatism, most often associated with religion, can also afflict science. The Foundation’s Humble Approach initiative is based on the growing intuition that an aggressive scientific reductionism may not be the best approach for all scientific problems. Science has progressed rapidly by specializing, and each discipline now has a narrow set of tools and paradigms that work very well on the narrow range of problems that lie within each discipline. But what if there are important scientific problems that are too complex, subtle, or wide-ranging to be solved within a single discipline?
The Humble Approach initiative is thus intentionally interdisciplinary, biased in favor of linkages, connections and nuance. The approach counters narrow parochialism and opens the door to new possibilities.
The Humble Approach initiative gathers leading scholars—scientists, theologians and others—to consider a deep and critical question. The various disciplinary lights focused on the problem illuminate it in highly original ways, creating the possibility that something new will come into view. Previous meetings have included the following:
• A symposium on contemporary glosses on panentheism, those clusters of ideas associated with the belief that God includes and penetrates the whole universe so that every part exists in him yet his being is more than the universe, chaired by Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke in 2001. It considered what general frameworks for conceiving of the God-world relation may be consistent both with biblical data and modern philosophical and scientific contexts at a gathering of leading scholars from disparate disciplines in St. George’s House within the walls of Windsor Castle.
• Hints from quantum theory that reality might be more holistic than classical physics suggested was the basis of a meeting held in 2002 on the northern shore of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Led by French astrophysicist Bruno Guiderdoni, scholars considered the startling possibility that ultimate reality might be an undivided whole, as has long been believed by Eastern religious traditions.
The director of the Humble Approach initiative is Mary Ann Meyers, Ph.D., the Senior Fellow at the Foundation, who formerly taught courses on religion in America at Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of a number of books. Meyers sees the Humble Approach initiative as a response to Loren Eisley’s observation of “a constant emergent novelty in nature that does not lie totally behind us.” That emergent novelty is best explored by being open to radically different ways of seeing the world, ways that often require finding hidden connections between the disciplines. And this requires getting scholars from very different backgrounds to listen carefully to each other.
“The Humble Approach symposia are interdisciplinary and sensitive to nuance in the research from fields ranging from theology to philosophy to biology to physics as well as several of the social sciences,” says Meyers. It assumes participants are open to new ideas and want to experiment.
“By working together across traditional boundaries,” says Meyers, “it really is possible to garner important new insights.” But scholars don’t naturally do this. “In both science and theology, or, indeed, any discipline, it's not unusual to talk only to one's colleagues.” The symposia that Meyers organizes enable participants to get into “cross-boundary conversations that challenge one to think in new and different ways about old questions and even ask questions that no one has thought to pose before.”
Humble Approach initiatives begin by identifying important topics that might benefit from a cross-disciplinary approach. Meyers pays special attention to finding the key scholar who can bring it all together. “It's a crucial decision,” says Meyers, “because the chair or chairs need to grasp both the scientific and the theological implications of the subject at hand.” The participants who are selected prepare papers that everyone reads in advance and then meet for two very intense days of conversation. Meyers describes the symposia as “launching pads for further exploration.”
“It is always our expectation that with a lot of hard post-symposia work, a book will emerge that is widely useful both to professionals in various fields and general readers,” says Meyers.
The Humble Approach initiative began in the fall of 1998 with a symposium at Queens’ College, Cambridge, exploring a kenotic view of creation—a perspective concerned with divine ‘self-limitation’ and ‘self-emptying’—and its implications for Christian doctrine and the scientific enterprise. Queens’ also was the site of the first 2004 symposium, on spiritual healing and the evidence for its existence. Other symposia have looked at how the discovery of life beyond the boundaries of Earth might impact the perceptions people have of themselves and their place in the universe (1998); the emergence of organized complexity (1999); the future of life in the cosmos and the far future of the universe itself (2000); the possible link between religiosity and human health (1999); how human concepts of God are changing in light of the modernization of traditional cultures, the secularization of society, and the discoveries of contemporary science (2000); purpose in biological and cultural evolution (2000); the impact of advances in the neurosciences upon religious beliefs (2001); the possibility of a multiplicity of possible or actual universes and the deep scientific, philosophical, and theological questions raised by this ancient idea, which is enjoying a new lease on life (2003); and more.
Despite the large number of symposia held to date, Meyers has no concerns that the need for such creative gatherings is in any way diminished. “There is a nearly inexhaustible number of deep and difficult questions,” she notes, adding, “New discoveries in science and new insights in theology can help us examine these questions with greater hopeof illumination.”
