Science and Christianity are often viewed as incompatible, but they mix well for a renowned chemist who visited UW-Eau Claire Thursday.

Henry Fritz Schaefer III gave a presentation titled My Spiritual Journey to UW-Eau Claire students, faculty and staff. The former University of California, Berkeley professor who currently is director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry (CCQC) at the University of Georgia, also gave a talk over the dinner hour titled The Challenge of Being a Person of Faith in a Scientific World and ended his visit with a speech titled The Big Bang, Stephen Hawking and God Thursday night.

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Chemist mixes science, spirituality

For many, spirituality is a question of faith. But Dr. Richard Davidson, a renowned neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, wants to understand what's really happening to people's brains when they engage in meditation and other spiritual practices.

Through research conducted at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, which Davidson founded in 2008, scientists have found that meditation can have profound effects on the body. It can affect human behaviorby changing the way genes are expressed and can help cure illnesses by reducing cell inflammation.

Other scientists as well as the monks he wanted to study were once skeptical of Davidson's work, but it's now embraced by both scientistsand the religious. He has won the support of the Dalai Lama, who onceencouraged him to study the brains of Tibetan monks. Schools, corporate offices and the military are all starting to turn to meditation, now that there isscience to back it up.

But during a conversation with journalist Dan Harris at Manhattan's JCC last week, Davidson emphasized that his research is not just about reducing the stigma of meditation. Even though Buddhists have been meditatingfor centuries, he said there's still a lot to learn.

"There are hundreds of different kinds of meditation practices," Davidson said. "If we could do a better job of figuring out which people would benefit most from which kinds of practices, I think it could be very helpful. I'm confident that we could actually learn something about that through serious scientific research."

Watch the full conversation between Davidson and Harris here.

See the rest here:
The Science of Spirituality: What Happens to Our Brains When We Meditate?

Feature Article of Friday, 3 October 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

We are back yet again to the subtle relational dynamics between science and superstition. This question requires further clarification as superstition gradually begins to gain hold on public psychology, systematically replacing analytic thinking and threatening Ghanas development economics. The scholarly work of Dr. Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences awardee, linking gender equality, social justice, political liberalism, welfare economics, and poverty may have snippets of theoretical correlations to the general outline of our arguments. That having being said, we do also acknowledge the fact that in the ancient world (Egypt, China, India, Rome, Greece, etc) especially, science and religion never stood severally as antagonistic next-door neighbors in the philosophical investigation of the natural world, with the two coming across as Siamese twins instead.

We may have to add that the Age of Enlightenment (Age of Reason) and the Industrial Revolution, expansion of knowledge about the natural world, growing need for specialization, internecine tensions between science and religion brought about by vigorous scientific discrediting of superstition, modernity, etc., all contributed to complete decoupling of science from superstition. What we do also know for a fact that science, unlike superstition, makes adequate room for dialectic episodes of revision, repudiation, and debunking of established theories, laws, and hypotheses found operationally problematic in the event of new information, revelations or discoveries. As a matter of emphasis, superstition permanently finds itself fixed in time with all possibilities of theoretic renewal closed to new discoveries. For instance, scientists are presently looking for new innovative theories to explain new cosmic conundrums that have risen in the field of physics. Dark energy is one such good example of the handful of cosmic puzzles that currently has arrested scientists investigational attention and which the Theory of Relatively does not seem to sufficiently account for (See Prof. Eric Verlindes scientific paper On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton).

Can we find a fitting parallel example elsewhere to account for the juxtaposition of scientific flexibility? Let us see. A typical Christian has no problem gullibly accepting the miraculous birth of Jesus. But will that same Christian accept the miraculous birth of Buddha as divine revelation? Probably not! In fact the righteous hypocrisies go in the other direction as well. Again, are Christians willing to accept evolution as the quintessential backbone of the universe and life forms rather than St. Aquinass Five Proofs (Quinque viae) establishing the existence of God? Probably not! Charles Darwin took God out of the equational blueprint for the evolutionary parturition of the universe and life. The well-accomplished Christian scientist Dr. Francis Collins, in contrast, appends a divine signature to the evolutionary process, ultimately bringing back God from the abyss of obscurity. What were Charles Darwins and Friedrich Nietzsches reasons for killing God? And what were Francis Collins reasons for bringing back God from the land of the dead?

These questions are interesting for a number of reasons. We ask: Did they all look objectively at the same scientific evidence? Why did one make the evolutionary process entirely atheistic, the other entirely theistic? Our point is that religion and superstition are very powerful tools for mind control. They are exceedingly powerful in their controlling influence on human psychology because spirits, hell, deities, devils, heaven, fear, and other paranormal structures are involved. Cheikh Anta Diop and Albert Einstein are mortal. Enoch and Elijah are immortal. God and the Devil are immortal. We are also familiar with some of the worlds infamous dancing faces of the devils of science. Let us mention them here: Dr. Wouter Basson (South Africa), Dr. Joseph Mengele (Germany), Drs. Eugen Fischer and Stabsartz Bofinger (South-West Africa, now Namibia), Dr. Shiro Ishii and Otozo Yamada (Japan), Dr. Raymond A. Vonderlehr (America), etc., and the pain they collectively wrought upon the world via diabolical acts of human experimentation. Some may have a hard time trying to juxtapose or reconcile the atrocities wrought on mankind via science and superstition. Who are the Gods of science? None.

Thus it is superstition, not science, that ultimately puts man in close contact with the paranormal structures of transcendence. The fear factor which we mentioned earlier incidentally plays into ready, gullible acceptation of superstitious absolutism as a defined point of spiritual contact with the dreadful mystery and intimidating caprice of transcendence. Superstition therefore constitutes an avenue through which man takes advantage of opportunities offered him by his mind to understand or explain an extension of his environment whose ontological appreciation is otherwise narrowed by scientific materialism. The scientific approach to understanding the natural world operates likewise though the means and ends of scientific inquiry passes through the testable conduits of rationalism, verifiable observations, and empiricism. Nonetheless, the repressive intolerance of superstition and its un-amenable tendencies toward historical revisionism constitutes a major obstacle to advancement. The imagined or perceived threat from paranormal hellfire in the case of Christianity and Islam is not encouraging, either, given mans conscious experiences with the chemistry of fire, thus making acceptance of superstitious absolutism an easy undertaking to many.

Superstition also neutralizes serious investigational or exegetical tendencies toward Koranic inerrancy or Biblical inerrancy, making either sacrilegiously unmentionable. It could as well be that superstition may, perhaps, represent a mythologizing of life actualities and cultural normative in the distance past whose practical correlation to contemporary existential instances is lost in the remoteness of time. The metaphysical fluidity and crushing weight of this question may be beyond the empirical grasp of scientific affirmation. On the other hand, this and other questions drive a section of humanity to pursue the ideals of atheism, agnosticism, ignosticism (igtheism), and deism. Further, the ideological battle raging between proponents of creationism and evolution largely stems from superstitious impositions of grotesque epistemology and the realistic imperatives of science. The irony is that a significant portion of evolutionary theory itself is built on the infrastructure of superstitious absolutism.

The contrasting ideological animus between proponents of pro-life and anti-abortion (the right to life) directly translates into a connotative derivation of the philosophical conflict between creationists and evolutionists. Evolution is partly science, partly superstition. And science itself is partly infused with elements of superstition. Dr. Chandra Kant Raju, a world-famous Indian computer scientist, mathematician, historian, physicist, and statistician has written extensively on this subject (See his scholarly books The Eleven Pictures of Time: The Physics, Philosophy, and Politics of Time Beliefs and Mathematics and Religion: Essays on the Relation of Religion to Mathematics, Logic, and Probability and his scientific paper Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: The Nature of Mathematical Proof and the Transmission of the Calculus from India to Europe in the 16th CE). Thus we do ourselve
s a great disservice at the very point we exclude this useful knowledge, the subtle and not-so-subtle marriage between science and superstition, from general discussions on superstitious absolutism.

On another level the historical evolution of science is deeply intertwined with the absolutist charisma of superstition. Alchemy and psychoanalysis readily come to mind! Yet the metaphysical contestation between God and man, exactly as St. Augustines advanced it in The City of God and exactly as the Persian Prophet Mani developed it through Manichaeism, reflects in our treatment of girls and women at trokosi shrines and witch camps. An immediate cultural instance is the ritualistic auguries used to single out individuals believed to be doused in demonological mud, ritualistic strategies we deem methodologically sexist and therefore operationally problematic. Sadly most of the human outcomes of these questionable auguries are girls and women. Perhaps the deities involved in these divinatory rituals are female. Perhaps the numerical representation of women in the traditional priesthood may have to see a proportionate increase in order to bring about telluric and transcendental balance in gender relations.

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Ghanas Many Problems: The Promise of Humanism 3

Traditionally spirituality has been defined as a process of personal transformation in accordance with religious ideals. Since the 19th century spirituality is often separated from religion, and has become more oriented on subjective experience and psychological growth. It may refer to almost any kind of meaningful activity or blissful experience, but without a singThere is no single, widely-agreed definition of spirituality.[note 1]Surveys of the definition of the term, as used in scholarly research, show a broad range of definitions, with a very limited similitude.

According to Waaijman, the traditional meaning of spirituality is a process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape of man, the image of God. To accomplish this, the re-formation is oriented at a mold, which represents the original shape: inJudaismtheTorah, inChristianityChrist, inBuddhismBuddha, in theIslamMuhammad."[note 2]

In modern times the emphasis is on subjective experience.It may denote almost any kind of meaningful activity[note 3]orblissful experience.It still denotes a process oftransformation, but in a context separate from organized religious institutions, termed "spiritual but not religious".Houtman and Aupers suggest that modern spirituality is a blend of humanistic psychology, mystical and esoteric traditions and eastern religions.

Waaijman points out that "spirituality" is only one term of a range of words which denote the praxis of spirituality.Some other terms are "Hasidism, contemplation, kabbala, asceticism, mysticism, perfection, devotion and piety".le, widely-agreed definition.

Source : google wiki

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Scientific spirituality | Science Of Spirituality Blog on ...

Vero Beach, FL (PRWEB) October 01, 2014

Has science now proven that God exists? Douglas Ell, author of the new book Counting To God, will speak about this and other big questions related to science and faith in two lectures at Trinity Episcopal Church in Vero Beach.

Times: Tuesday, October 21, 2014, 6:00 pm Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 6:00 pm

Location: Trinity Episcopal Church 2365 Pine Avenue Vero Beach, FL 32960

Both talks are open to the general public and there is no charge.

In Counting To God, Ell applies the lens of mathematical analysis to a series of scientific discoveries, drawing startling conclusions about the relation between scientific and religious truths.

The Treasure Coast resident and former atheist brings a unique vantage point to the subject matter: He is a prominent national attorney who earned a double major in physics and math from MIT, and a masters degree in theoretical mathematics from the University of Maryland.

Ell said Ive spent more than 30 years reconciling science and God, because I needed scientific evidence to believe in God. He has lectured to both scientists and church groups.

I highly recommend this thoughtful exploration of the relation between science and spirituality, said Professor Peter Fisher, Head of the MIT Physics Department about Ells book.

Counting to God is now available at the Vero Beach Book Center, 2145 Indian River Blvd., in Vero Beach, and also through various online retailers.

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Does Science Now Point to God? Local Author to Discuss Discoveries in Cosmology, Biology, Evolutionary Theory

Feature Article of Thursday, 2 October 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

The level of assumptive reasoning propping up our body of arguments boils down to a simple factual reality: A sitting president who has legal knowledge of being prosecuted or impeached upon serving his tenure and sentenced to prison if found guilty by a competent court could not make light of his public conduct. Apparently as it is we are not saying this on the authority of the layered mechanics of interpretation, though, given our lack of formal jurisdiction over matters of constitutional niceties. We thereby plead ignorance of the taxing temperament of constitutional annotation. However, it is the dilemmatic repercussions of the Indemnity Clause for holding occupants of the highest seat in the land accountable for egregious public misconducts detrimental to national security and economic stability that grates on our quizzical conscience. Thus the Indemnity Clause cripples an important aspect of moral philosophy upon which the sucklings tiny lips, which we shall call equality before the law, feeds. Apropos, must we always put the complex problem of constitutional inequities squarely at the feet of leadership?

Not necessarily.

Leadership is extension of families, marriages, communities, nation-states, continents, or such. And the community in question has a moral responsibility to ensure the behavior of every member of its constitution conforms, either through unspoken signals or through constitutional instruments, to the moral and ethical values of group dynamics. This tacitly or constitutionally agreed-upon concordance must uphold the virtues of mutual respectability and mans innate impulse for individual, or collective, survival. Moreover, if the Indemnity Clause enjoys unflinching constitutional imprimatur and if it fits the rugged articulation of moral self-defense in protection of a few, who is there to say the Freedom of Information Bill (FOI) cannot similarly benefit from the institutional benevolence of constitutional accommodation? Unfortunately neither the NPP nor the NDC has demonstrated any commendable height of leadership on this critical matter. The same goes for lack of leadership on the epidemic of Ebola. As it were the political and moral cost of leadership failure to society is enormous, if incalculable, indeed.

Let us try to see the bigger picture. We have the opinion that Ghanas National Reconciliation Commission, an institution patterned after South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission, did a good job to prevent the specter of mutual revenge taking hold of public psychology in the lead-up to the Forth Republic. But Soyinka has categorically faulted South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission for letting go of men and women who committed crimes against humanity by merely testifying before the Commission and showing remorse. He believes the kind gesture extended to respondents has the tendency to breed impunity in the new South Africa (See his book The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness). However, regarding Ghanas, we argue that it will be morally sacrilegious or sensitively hypocritical on the part of any individual to ascribe the aggregate happenings that eventually led to the formation of Ghanas Commission to individual personalities, since the June 4, 1979 Revolution had the full backing of popular sovereignty.

However, we cannot underestimate the force of Soyinkas moral arguments in light of the culture of impunity that has evolved in Ghana. It should interest us to know that this contention may or may not have anything to do with the violence that accompanied the Revolution, given the indebtedness of the latter to the putschism that topped Kwame Nkrumah and to those between. We could stretch the argument to say that Ghanas National Reconciliation Commission, like South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was raised on a strong moral foundation of humanism, which Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu otherwise labeled Ubuntu. Besides, American-trained intellectuals like Dr. Vincent Kwabena Damuah (later Osofo Okomfo Damuah), founder of the Afrikania Mission, joined the ranks of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), bringing along their humanistic baggage. What did the Revolution achieve in the long run? That is for history and posterity to answer!

The question is: Can humanism co-exist with the corrupt practices of religion and politics? This is not an idle or soluble question. Undoubtedly, the question is philosophically tied to the social marriage between leadership priorities and the prerogatives of community dynamics in the knowledge that leadership failure cannot be easily decoupled from the imposed prerogatives of community dynamics. The moral disconnect between the two, leadership priorities and prerogatives of community dynamics, feeds the embers of mutual repulsion and mutual suspicions. Overall, this is not healthy for Ghanas internal stability and temperamental organization. It also does not reflect well on the integrity of society when a sitting president, a corrupt one at that, is legally mandated to terminate the services of subordinate public officials who run afoul of public trust and constitutional expectations, whilst his train of malfeasances enjoys full protection under the motoric dictatorship of constitutionalism. We make this bold assertion in the light of the constitutional implications of the Indemnity Clause.

Indeed equality before the law is an essential concept. On the other hand, the concept requires the prodding of practical affirmation, not theoretical groping, to establish a moral presence of institutional attestation. It constitutes an exemplar of moral irony when Ghanaian courts impose steep penalties on petty criminals while professional white-color criminals receive lenient pats on their chubby cheeks from milking the state to the tune of millions of dollars. Social gullibility and institutional weakness are partly to blame for the moral problematic of leadership elitism. In fact, the hostile stench of institutional weakness and social gullibility, coupled with the raving spirit and letter of constitutional dictatorship, are responsible for the elitist distance setting ruler and the ruled apart, ruler against the ruled, and so on. The open cracks lodged in elitist distance, an exclusive club for white-color criminals, mostly politicians, are fertile grounds for growing the social seeds of corruption.

Nevertheless, the immortal story of corruption and social inequity is an exceedingly tall, obese, and labyrinthine one. Humanism is thus up against a formidable foe. It still beats the prying imagination of conscientious men and women to see Ghanaian politicians, like their counterparts elsewhere, endlessly engaged in the intoxicating sins of white-color criminality despite the enormous perquisites that accrue from their political responsibilities. Thus, taming the malignancy of corruption will require conscious moments of continuous radical opposition. We employ the word taming in close congress with the moral fight against corruption because corruption, we acknowledge, is ineradicable. It is suppressible at best. Let us face facts. Thus, the kind of fight that must be mounted against the height of entrenchment to which corruption has attained in Ghanaian society could not be simply explained away through cosmetic apologetics. Humanism and public opinion have a difficult task ahead of them.

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Ghanas Many Problems: The Promise of Humanism 2

Countless poems, songs, novels, television programs, and movies share a perspective on what love is but many, if not most, miss the mark. Today people are looking to smart phones to define love even recording each others pulses on phones equipped with heart-rate monitors as a way of showing how much they love each other.

But basing love on these measurements isnt where we find the answer to what love is, because love isnt something that is physically seen. It is not a measurable entity. We cant reach out and touch love or take loves temperature. This is because love is a quality a quality that, in its truest sense, comes from the highest power there is namely, God.

The Bible points to this, saying that God is love (I John: 4:16). The Bible infers that Love, or God, is infinite, and this is why we could never measure Love, or measure the amount of love that emanates from God. We could never use a limited metric, such as a tape measure or smart phone, to calculate infinity. Similarly, we cannot physically see Love or God because the material senses cannot see omnipotent Spirit. The physical senses are limited tools, which cannot grasp infinity. In order to see love we must use another sense.

The founder of this newspaper, Mary Baker Eddy, called this other sense spiritual sense, which is something everyone has. It is through our innate spiritual sense that we can understand things that are spiritual. Things of the Spirit love, principle, truth, and so on are good and eternal. They are true qualities of God. As the Bible explains in Genesis, God is good and made everything, including man, good. It was through this enlightened sense, through the inspired Word of the Bible, and through her lifes demonstration of healing, that Mrs. Eddy was able to discover how Christianity brings healing and she named this discovery Christian Science. Through this spiritual lens she was able to see that [t]he Christianly scientific real is the sensuous unreal (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 353).

Understanding this statement with our spiritual sense means that what is actually substantial, permanent, and real is Spirit a reality only barely recognized by what we see with material sense. A merely material sense of ourselves and everything around us fails to perceive our spiritual nature, which is natively good, harmonious, lovable, and loving. Spiritually understanding God, Love, and man as his image and likeness is what enabled Mrs. Eddy to heal, and her message continues to help countless others to heal today.

The Bible records many experiences of people calling on the power of Love to heal. In fact, the best healer of all, Jesus Christ, not only taught us to love one another, he actually commanded that we do it (see John 13:34). By loving, Jesus was, through spiritual sense, seeing man as the reflection of God all perfection. Mrs. Eddy describes Jesus ability to heal this way: Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw Gods own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick (Science and Health, pp. 476-477).

The less our thought is absorbed in a sensual view of ourselves and others, and the more we see others as Jesus saw man, the more we are able to find a permanent peace and joy that brings us into harmony with the description of man outlined in Chapter 1 of Genesiswhere man is described as being created in Gods image and likeness, the likeness of Spirit or divine good. Casting off sensuousness enables us to perceive Spirit and what each of us truly is as Spirits likeness. Seeing with spiritual sense brings our experience into harmony with eternal good, and this is where we find healing. To the degree that we turn away from physical sense, we make way for infinite Love, which is caring for its entire creation. This understanding of Love brings joy to our relationships, because it brings a love that is lasting and true.

According to Mrs. Eddy, Jesus was unselfish. His spirituality separated him from sensuousness, and caused the selfish materialist to hate him; but it was this spirituality which enabled Jesus to heal the sick, cast out evil, and raise the dead (Science and Health, p. 51).

As we understand the permanent joy of Spirit, we not only find the answer to the question What is love? but we are able to heal ourselves and others. We learn more about what love is by loving one another and find a higher sense of life.

In the words of First John: No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us (I John 4:12).

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Seeing love and healing

The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy & Mysticism by Alexander Roob, Taschen, 576 pages

Long before Dow and designer drugs, the alchemists of medieval Europe were already dreaming of better living through chemistry. Far from a pseudo-scientific pursuit of turning lead into gold, alchemists saw their rites of metal and fire as an occult spirituality carried on from antiquity. Physical elements, like iron and copper, could yield philosophical truths through rituals of smelting and extraction.

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Book Reviews "The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy & Mysticism" by Alexander Roob

Science and Christianity are often viewed as incompatible, but they mix well for a renowned chemist who visited UW-Eau Claire Thursday.

Henry "Fritz" Schaefer III gave a presentation titled "My Spiritual Journey" to UW-Eau Claire students, faculty and staff. The former University of California, Berkeley professor who currently is director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry (CCQC) at the University of Georgia, also gave a talk over the dinner hour titled "The Challenge of Being a Person of Faith in a Scientific World" and ended his visit with a speech titled "The Big Bang, Stephen Hawking and God" Thursday night.

Schaefer said he hasn't always been a Christian. He became one during his fourth year as a professor at Berkeley.

"I was challenged to consider the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ," he said. "I did that for a couple of years and became convinced intellectually that's true."

He said he hoped to get students thinking about "spiritual things" during his time in Eau Claire.

"The questions he's trying to answer are questions of life -- questions that don't change -- that we tend to ask as human beings," said Dave Johnson, who works with Cru, a religious group that brought Schaefer to campus.

Schaefer also met with UW-Eau Claire chemistry students Thursday afternoon and took the opportunity to do some recruiting.

"We were looking for new Ph.D.

Schaefer is friends with Berkeley professor Richard Saykally, a UW-Eau Claire alumnus.

"I'm looking for the next Rich Saykally to come and work with me for a Ph.D.," Schaefer said.

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At UW-Eau Claire, chemist mixes science, spirituality