INTRO
In this series we will look into the distant past to see how a famous Religious movement unintentionally helped marginalize God and fragment our contemporary lives.
Over the course of 500 years, we will watch theology and money, power, science, and human creativity drift apart, then go to war with each other.
Not just because tracing this disintegration helps us understand contemporary conflicts.
Not just because of the strange beauty that can be found watching things fall apart.
And definitely not because we think some long-lost glory days held all things in perfect harmony.
We do this to give you permission
to pay attention to the deep intuition telling you the things we seek to understand and use when we do things like science and politics, economics and art, really do want to belong together, to help you see that we cannot know and use these things well if we continue to ignore their desire for belonging.
We do this to fuel an imagination for wholeness.
So for us, this peek into the distant past is not really about the past,
but a future integrated in Christ.
This episode we look at how the idea of a contemplative monk and a knowledge-producing scientist came to be seen as incompatible opposites.
STORY
Gregor Mendel is considered the father of contemporary genetics. He furthered this area of knowledge by spending his afternoons experimenting with peas, which he did as part of his daily rhythm of prayer, study, and work, which he carried out because he was an Augustinian monk.
If you enjoy music with melodies featuring multiple harmonies and parts, you can thank Hildegard of Bingen, a composer credited with moving music from ancient droning chant into modern polyphony in the 12th century. She was also a nun.
If you appreciate having the best information and the work of top thinkers translated into common languages, for that precedent you can thank a 3rd and 4th century monk named Jarome.
And these people are not exceptions, rather they stand as great examples of a rule. From about the fall of Rome through the medieval period, monasteries, and the monks and nuns who lived in them, played a central role in creating new knowledge and educating people. It's not always been the case that people believed religion and science must have nothing to do with each other.
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This is true even at the birth of our Universities. By the time of the Reformation, Universities had developed, in many cases in close relationship with the preceding monasteries. See, at that time, monasteries also carried the weight of providing medical care and operating as centers of food production along with their regular duties of prayer and devotion. So in an initially cooperative division of labor, Universities came to bear more of the load for the production and transmission of knowledge.
But with this division of labor, there remained a unity of shared worldview. And to us, within this worldview, it might seem like our distant ancestors put theology up on some untouchable heavenly pedestal. But in some key ways it was quite the opposite. Our ancestors valued theology because they also expected it to wear flesh and blood and have actual positive effects on how they thought and lived, day to day. So the church and the monasteries and the universities and political powers and the people all interacted in shared practices and common life.
At this point, the most important divisions were carried out on the level of labor, not of culture. And this means that theology was not sequestered away and buffered from all other forms of knowledge and new information.
A prime example is the rediscovery of Aristotle's work along with the science and philosophy of muslim scholars that came to the West in the 12th and 13th centuries. As is often the case with new things, at first this knowledge was seen by some as an incompatible threat. But instead of allowing Theology to continue on as if nothing happened, St. Thomas Aquinas led the way in integrating what was good and true of Aristotle and Avicenna. Not just because this is what theology was expected to do, but theology was expected to do this because theology at it's best, is what could do this. In pursuing communion with the Source of all things, theology was the field of knowledge that was looked to to help people reconcile all the different things they encountered and dealt with.
And this highlights a great point of difference between them and us. Because, how many of our contemporary cosmologists in leading Research Universities expect themselves, as part of their professional competency, to keep up with anything any of our best theologians have said? And how many professors and pastors can maintain their audience while insisting all of modern science is garbage?
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But where does the real difference lie? Our ancestors had the same tensions and conflicts, but overall, and in the long run, they worked them out because their production and dissemination of knowledge took place in a culture that did what strong cultures are supposed to do: integrate and hold together things like varying areas of knowledge and the daily lives of people. This cultural difference, rather than varying ways of dividing and facilitating the work, or the gap in the volume of information available to us, is the real difference between them and us.
And notice, in the ancient and medieval world, it was only possible for the conflicts between theology and astronomy to be carried out at the highest levels of learning because theology had to interact with other areas of practical life and knowledge. This unbuffered interaction is precisely what allowed theology to play a helpful and integral role in the culture.
So when looking at the unintended effects of the Reformation on knowledge, this is exactly where we locate the prime shift that leads to the disintegration that characterizes our own age.
Once Luther found a massive audience and split with the Roman Church, secular authorities like princes and kings started choosing sides. Here, a real disintegration begins, but at this point the disintegration had yet to make its way into everything. Christianity was still an institutionalized worldview. So we must understand that within this still-Christian culture, the word "Secular" did not mean to them what it means to us today. It simply meant not specifically and directly dealing with the church. So a "secular" role was merely a position of authority not officially carried out within the church.
So even secular rulers - like princes and kings - carrying out their job within this institutional worldview still believed they must do their job as Christians. That they would be held accountable by God for what they did with their power in their moment.
So. Once Christendom began to split, the secular rulers felt they had a duty to determine which side they believed to be most right, and then to protect that side's teaching. So this university, under the protection of this secular ruler, became a Protestant University. While this other school, under the protection of a Catholic secular ruler, became a Catholic University.
This wrote the Reformation's doctrinal disagreements into the institutions themselves.
And, in a misguided attempt at faithfulness, trying to protect the Catholic side from the Protestant heresy, or vice versa, the rulers threw their secular political power into protecting their Theology from having to engage the arguments of the other side, and from having to integrate the findings of others schools of thought.
And I, as a theologian sitting where I do now, wish we could have done this differently. Because this is the point where the disintegration was given what it needed to infect everything.
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With our institutions now working not to make us work things out together, but institutionalizing our disagreements, they unintentionally rendered our doctrinal controversies unsolvable. So as the fighting drug on and on, more and more people simply gave up on theology, and moved on to find common ground in other pursuits like, as we will explore in a later episode, shopping, or in what is at the center of this episode: producing new knowledge.
But then, with more people finding common ground by devoting their time and energy and money to science and research, our culture got really good at making new knowledge.
Here, the buffering of theology from the rapidly increasing field of scientific discovery backfired in several ways. Because theology did not have to keep up and stay conversant with new knowledge, theology was unable to offer it's gifts for integrating new information into a view and set of practices that could aid the wholistic flourishing of life. Further, as the gap widened between what theology said and what new knowledge revealed about how things work, to many, theology seemed increasingly irrelevant. Yet, for a while, theology remained institutionally protected. As long as the political powers would stand behind and fund it, theology could act like nothing was happening. But this only delayed a reckoning, long enough that when it came, it was disastrous.
But not just for theology.
Because when people began to leave theology to the past and made knowledge-making their central concern, the faster rate of information production combined with a growing consumptive demand that we will outline in our coming episode on the reformation and economics, and this combination shifted the very nature of knowledge itself. Rather than facing the expectation that it must integrate with a larger culture, new knowledge was freed to largely define the culture, and so was also freed from other cultural, and indeed religious concerns, like morality. This is how "secular" came to mean "having nothing to do with God and things associated with religion," and how knowledge became secular as we now use that word.
But we don't think it would be good for us as a people if the idea of a monk-scientist continues to seem like a strange contradiction.
So in the conversation that follows, Julius and I discuss how the unfettered freedom that enabled us to produce more, as fast as we possibly could, without having to be slowed by pangs of conscience or thorny concerns for how to assure that some new thing we are suddenly capable of doing will be good for other things, shapes our experience of knowledge and its practical effects.
DISCUSSION [Auto-Generated Transcript]
Julius: Thanks for tuning into “All Things.” This is Julius, and…
Wilson: Nobody tuned…
Julius: You don’t know that…
Wilson:…on your radio…. What's a radio dial?
Julius: [Laughs] Colloquially “tuning in” on your podcast app or wherever you find your podcasts. Or whatever podcasters say.
Wilson: Speaking of cultural holdovers…
Julius: I think I, maybe I mean, on like a um… Nevermind. [laughs] I mean “tuning in” and on a more spiritual level.
Wilson: That's right, with your attention.
Julius: Yeah. For tuning in your attention… And that is where we're beginning today. This is—as per “uzhe” —Julius, joined by Wil… I’m going to have fun trying to notate that on the transcript, cause I never know how to spell the word “uzhe”… the abbreviation for usual.
Wilson: How you, how are your phonics?
Julius: Yeah, I'll try my best. But today we're picking up on um… we’re well into the series about the Reformation and its ripple effects on society at large, both within the church and outside of the church, and why those distinctions feel so hard in the first place, um… in our lived experience. And today we're talking about knowledge.
So recapping from the story. I think, I think our intention here is to not just point out the ways that the Reformation rippled out into like, to affect our current life and like our culture, our relationships and knowledge in negative ways, but also to point out the ways that these consequences were not aligned with maybe the original intentions of the people who were seeking to reform the church.
And in hoping to understand that, maybe our hope is to kind of move forward and recover some of the things that were lost in these unintended consequences. So I guess. If we can revisit the story of… we're talking about knowledge today and the way that the reformation changed our relationship with knowledge, I guess it’s easy to kind of simplify the story in a way that like…
Around the time of the Reformation there were just so many doctrinal disagreements based on differing interpretations of scripture that eventually it became too exhausting to try to harmonize these points, and that the church ended up kind of institutionalizing um… the, this kind of “agree-to-disagree” mentality in how we approach theology and kind of just like, “You know what, it's all, it's all up to interpretation so we're just gonna…We’re just going to leave it that way.”
And that um, like… maybe that’s… is that too simplistic of a way to kind of understand where this begins? That the disagreements become too hard to harmonize and so that differing camps just start to…
Wilson: Yeah, I think what you started to point out there that could be really helpful for us to understand is naming super clearly in the Reformation. What we're saying is the key thing to keep your eye on is that what got institutionalized at the beginning was this disagreement, right? So, we can't agree on this, but there's still that cultural holdover— the princes, the local rulers, they believe they've got, you know, they have a duty to God, so they choose sides and they just institutionalize it.
This will be a Protestant university. This will be a Catholic university, right. That carries over for a while. But what, what I want us to trace now is to see that that institutionalized move and fragmentation continues even in our secularized environment.
Julius: Right.
Wilson: Because, broadly— and this is retracing, some of the stuff from previous episodes, right—it used to be, we believed God and religion would be the thing that would hold us together. So we institutionalized that.
If God and religion can't hold us together, what will? You know, and the enlightenment was an experiment in “Well, maybe human rationality will.” So we institutionalized human rationality. And this is, this is where you can see it really, really clearly.
I mean, this is true across the board in most of our Western institutions, but the example, the institution that serves as an example of this would be the growing research universities that start to develop and reach their peak in, you know, the 17th, 18th, 19th, centuries… you know, and then even still now in the 20th century.
So they institutionalized human rationality—a certain sort of like… divorced from God, divorced from theological questions and concerns, which, theological questions would be like, “But what is it really? Like in its, in its nature, what is it? And what's its potential?”
And if this is what it is… right? You know, science is great in like, “What is it made of? What power does it have? What effects could it cause?” Right? In describing those kinds of things. But the realm of theology is the realm of meaning and purpose. So like, what is it and what could it be and how do we discern—
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: And, and there's bad theology for sure. There's bad religion for sure.
But good theology, healthy religion helps us determine good goals and good purposes. And so, we institutionally bet on human reason, but divorced from these kinds of theological questions, right? And this proliferates, we get, we get tons of new descriptions, right? Which is, it's producing new kinds of knowledge that describe “What this is made of? What kind of timeline was involved in this? The process that led to this?”
Science crushes it at that for a couple of centuries. But then we start to see that human reason won’t to hold this together either. Because just like human reason will disagree on scripture, human reason will disagree on interpreting science… whether or not, right, we're going to w- there's no way around those questions that we tried to bracket off with the scientific method.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: You cannot live a human life without asking questions about like the essence, the nature of a thing, the purpose, the goal, the meaning… what should we do with this? We have all this power, but what's gonna, what's gonna like direct it? And without some sort of common religious culture you have a bunch of warring different goals and so now you see this…
And this is how postmodernism starts to kind of organically develop as a reaction to all of this. Human reason and the differences there, the differences in interpretations and the warring goals leads to violence. Hands down—it’s not even close— hands-down the 20th century was the most efficiently, bloody century of human history in terms of sheer body count, no century comes close.
I know we make a lot—and we should, we don't sweep it under the rug about previous religious wars and conflicts… But none of those come close to the 20th century. And so in, in the 1900’s, people start to lose faith in human reasons ability to hold us together, because look: we're still fighting. We're still killing. Genocide is still happening.
And now we have these incredibly powerful rationalistic, super efficient, modern tools, industrialized methods, not just for y’know, building things, but for killing people. And so post-modernism is this reactionary move saying, well, human reason won't hold us together. You know, what will? But what happens with knowledge after this is this the same sort of fragmentation gets institutionalized in our higher education.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: And so now this is why you have departments. And I mean, just think about the way most universities are laid out. You have this department over here, you've got this, the economic department over here, philosophies over here. If there is a theology school, it's over here in this other corner, and then you've got the humanities, and you've got the social sciences, the music…
And the, and students might move from one to the other, but there's no real integration between the different departments. There, there isn't a field of inquiry or study that really integrates these things together.
Wilson: And so, even down to now, you see it. You might have a university, but within the departments, I mean… I’ve, I've been there. And, and I, and I think comparing the university I work at to others, we’re better at it than other places where I've seen this try to happen. But you try to have an interdisciplinary dialogue and it's a total circus.
Julius: Totally.
Wilson: It's a, it’s a massive exercise in misunderstanding each other and talking past each other. And so I guess, what, what is it— to, to speak to your question— what does it look and feel like? I think it looks like that. And I guess what it looks and feels like, I guess on that feeling question, I'll share a little story.
A couple of years ago I was teaching a class and we were going through this material. Um. And I got onto looking at the way Christian thought has conceptualized what it means to be a person over the centuries. And how, you know, this is, in the first few centuries this is what we talked about: a human person being created an image of God, and this is how it shifts… you know, in the Medieval period. And then Reformation, post-Reformation, Modern period, looking at all of this.
And I sat there and I thought: all of these students just, just heard exactly what I said. And the handful that are going to crush it on the test are going to give me exactly what they know I want on this test…
Julius: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wilson: But then they're going to go to economics and they're going to hear something radically different about what a human person is. You know, depending on the school of economics, even still… you know, this could even, within that, it could sub-fragment, you know, if, if the economics teacher that they're going to go listen to is of this economic school, they're going to hear that the human being is this rational being hat makes the best rational choices based on the opportunities in front of them.
And so this is how they, this is how the human being as an economic creature exists and functions in the world.
And then they're going to go to their social science class. And they're going to hear about the human being, being an arbitrary construct of social forces that's beyond their personal agency, and they're going to go to philosophy and here's something totally different.
And then they're going to go over here and they're going to hear something totally… and what got me is, here's what I think it feels like at this point for, for many of my students. I think, when I think, maybe the most poignant thing we could say about what it feels like is that it doesn't feel like much— that we're numb to it.
I don't think a single one of my students was troubled by that the way I was. To them, what it is to participate in a university, what it is to participate in school in, in gaining and participating in knowledge for them has basically just devolved into performance.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: And it’s: "Well, I'm in this classroom… and in this classroom, this prof is the one with the power and the influence, so if I care about the grade, I'm going to give that prof what they want.”
Julius: Right.
Wilson: “And when I'm in this classroom, studying this subject, I'm going to give this prof what they want about what it means to be a human person. And over here, when I go to professor Ryland’s class, I'm going to give him what he wants to hear about….”
And, and I even started to see this in the students questions when they're coming to me. And they're not just asking about, “How do you want me to format this paper?” They're talking about the content itself. And instead of being concerned with learning the stuff the way they constantly phrase it is, “What do you want?”
What do you want when I, what do you want when I, how do you want, how would you want this expressed? Right.
And that's where it clicks to me is, is even what it is for them to go through school. They're not trying to actually participate in something bigger than us, bigger than me, bigger than this class, than this class, than this class— it's all fragmented and broken down to just that “me” in this class, the other professor in this class, than the other professor in that…
Julius: Well, that's super interesting… yeah. Cause I think one of the things that I wrote down while I was kind of processing all this leading up to this conversation was to connect it to our t- to connect it to our previous kind of conversations in the past series about like, “practice” and “external vs. internal goods”…
It feels like the way particularly the academy, or at least like Western approach to pedagogy has been shaped, is that we've lost touch with something like the internal good of the pursuit of knowledge… that it's all primarily an external good. And it feels like the commodification of, of knowledge—that like that whole like, “Knowledge is power thing,” means like… our understanding of knowledge-as-power is that knowledge is this kind of… that our grasp of what, like, the culture and the academy defines as knowledge is like our relationship with is that we treat it almost as, as a…as a currency to achieve greater and greater arbitrary levels of achievement of like… so as a student, I, I totally like understand it.
And I felt that, like, “What, just tell me what I needed to put on the test,” because that's the point it's the external good of, like, “I just need to know what to write down so I can pass this class. Cause I need to pass this class. Cause I need a number of my GPA and I need a number of my GPA to get the certificate and I only need this certificate so I can get this job.”
But then like, what's happening is we're shaping people who don't have any connection with the internal good—we’re just good at memorizing facts and telling people what they want to hear.
Which was a super interesting thing that when you were starting to talk about—I mean, this leads kind of into that next aspect of, of “specialization,” right? When you're talking about the fragmentation and like, the seeming impossibility of different disciplines to kind of talk to one another, what you're s-you’re starting to kind of point out is what we'd talked about, I guess, in the conversation prior to this… of like our dichotomy between the subjective and the objective, like subjective and objective knowledge and how even maybe the way that we use those terms are super simplified and divorced from a deeper understanding of what that means.
But I think that we use it in a sense of like “subjective” is that which is subject to opinion. And so like, that's your opinion, this is this person's opinion. And that's just how it is. There's no way to kind of find, like, what is truly true, which would be “objective.”
And I think, sorry, like this might, this might be a lot to…
Wilson: Run with it.
Julius: Maybe a lot to track with, but it feels like… Our assumption is that we treat stuff like theology and the humanities as purely subjective studies. That like, these are a lot of different opinions and interpretations on things, but we leave it at that.
There's no way that there can be something that harmonizes this… but then we'll treat something like math and science as: this is objective. And this is—and I think we find a comfort in it because we think that there's no mystery in it, but actually the deeper you go into these fields, like what you were saying, you realize that there are differing interpretations on science, different, like… and that people are engaging with it. Like, but I think that those people are few and far between to kind of get into those deeper levels. So where to go with…
Wilson: yeah, so I think what's, what's, I mean, w w we could get into a whole nother podcast series talking about the development of even the categories of subjective and objective, but a quick, just, I mean, I just a passing kind of narrative to hold that?
since, since we brought that. Those terms into the conversation is I think something that's important for people to understand is especially in the 20th century and especially in the latter half of the 20th century, there were lots of schools of thought.
And, and the way we, because this comes out of a time, it grows up in a time where we're already so fragmented. You know what you start to see popping up. Yeah. Certain sociologists, certain theologians, certain philosophers, right. And now, even within these, the what, the, the kind of common move or what all these different people shared is something that was shared in common regardless of whether or not they professed religious belief.
So what I'm about to talk about there were, there were Christian, there were Jewish. There were there were Muslim and. There were atheistic philosophers, sociologists, whatever they would make a common move. And one of these common moves is we've got, there has to be some kind of knowledge that holds us together in some kind of harmony.
There, there has to be a way to know this. And so I think maybe what I would say. So like one. The brightest and has been probably one of the most influential for me is Martin Heidegger. And this is what sets off his whole project that like made his career, made his, his name in philosophy is is he was, he was working within a, they call it a phenomenological school of philosophy, which is really like, okay, look, when, when you break this stuff down into these arbitrary rationalistic categories, we get so divorced from everyday life.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: And so let's just. And he never, you know, he actually trained as he, he early on trained in theology, but left that and never picked it back up and never again, like claimed any sort of religious beliefs.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: but he says, as soon as we set things up within the categories of subjective or objective, we don't actually like understand the way we, we really live and we lose the whole thing.
And so he's moving towards some sort of like, Yeah.
you might, there might be that thing that is not me. Right. And there's me, which is the knower, but, but there's gotta be a kind of communion between these things, Right.
And so knowledge is not just passing certain facts about this other thing from one spot to another, transmitting it from here to another, especially in the things that matter most in life.
Like if you come down and you, and you think that like scientific method is the only thing that can give you any kind of knowledge of an object outside of your brain, then even in relationship, like I, according to that criteria, I can not know that my wife loves. I can know she's here often. I can collate a lot of data about how much time she spends with me and that she doesn't leave and go live in a different. Right. I can, I can quantify the number of times that she's kissed me, that she's spoken, incur. Well, even that I don't know that I could quantify encouraging words cause encouraging words now were right. Whether they're words, I can't know that they're incorrect. They were intended to be encouraging that they actually ultimately were in.
Right. All I can say whether or not she loves me. I can't know that if we're talking about just data.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: And so I think maybe, maybe even better, that was kind of a long excursus, but pulling it or sidetrack, you know, but pulling it right back in to the main point here, I would suggest that maybe a. A better way to talk to think about the categories, because you can have both of these and these can work together as dimensions of the same thing.
These do not have to be set up as.
Julius: Ooh.
Wilson: sort of polarized, this is a subjective thing or an objective thing. You can have both of these things and they can both be necessary, have roles to play and work together even as they're distinguished. And as you think about like propositional knowledge, this is facts.
These are statements that we can weigh and judge that we can evaluate, right? Propositiaonal knowledge and participatory knowledge.
Julius: Yeah,
Wilson: Participatory knowledge is the thing. Like you hold it together. Like, I’d insist this. I know my wife loves me. Right?
But if I try to prove that in only propositional, only rationalist, only scientific methods, I cannot prove that… but I can, I can experience that, and I can know that by participating in what our relationship is.
Wilson: And, and that only comes though when you've got some sort of shared way of life. And this is now, this is bringing it back to the crux of the matter. What we fragmented was a shared common way of life.
Julius: Hm.
Wilson: what used to be institutionally. Was common practices and a way of life that let us participate in something good.
Right. And yes, the theology played a central organizing role in this one. And now it's pulled together the series because of its object. What it's seeking to know that the object of its inquiry is God, the source of all things. The only thing, conceptually, philosophically, that is capable of holding all things to.
In all its richness is and all this diversity with all the different potentiality, right. Is God. And so from that to ask, if it comes from God, then what is this thing that gives us a way to begin right. To, to ask that question that religious question, but what is it? Right. And so now, if it is this, it has all this power and this potential, it could be used for this.
It could be put to this purpose, right. And. And then to think about the final goal, right? This is its essence, its nature. What's its final goal. If it has this power, what would be a good use of this in a way that it would integrated with other things? How could it bring wholeness and goodness, like an example of how specialized knowledge just kind of runs away with the game.
It can end up totally backfiring. If it's severed from these kinds of religious theological questions of like. But what is it in that sense? Not what is it made of? Not, not how much energy does it contain? Not, not that sort of description, but that, that more mysterious question of like, but, but what is it and what could it do when it's severed from that?
You know, you think of like, what, what are modified food is we, we know so much about what makes up the food that we can get in there and start manipulating it. And we are incredibly good now at making tons and tons of.
Julius: Yeah,
Wilson: And this is where we would say when it's severed, you know, again, you're, it's not that you're not going to have some kind of end goal, some sort of main purpose or reason or meaning is just, what's going to determine it.
And right now what's institutionalized is consumerism and consumption. And so. Since we had this knowledge, that knowledge has been untethered from religious questions. And so it's been freed and I know we tend to think of being free is only a good thing. But here I'm saying this is. Proven to be a good thing, that it has been freed to serve the goal of consumption. so we, we know this much about it. We can modify it and so we can make more of it than we've ever had. And look at all this food, but guess what? We've so manipulated it, that the very food that we're eating is poisoning some of it. right. It's backfired on us.
Julius: Oh
Wilson: And so instead of nourishing us and providing, providing for life it's causing cancer, like the, the opposite of what is supposed to be.
And so, so what we're, what we're making the case for recovering and reintegrating is, is noticing what has been institutionally. How this has restricted us from being able to do participate in a shared way of knowing and think about what is it to recover that, to get, to get back to a place where no, we don't, we don't run from deep questions.
We don't run from it. You know, this knowledge, like we said, in the story that wasn't good for theology too, but where theology and. Can play its role in helping us form a shared life together that allows us to participate together in something good instead of just further fragmenting and this and this thing.
And having those off towards the goals determined by institutionalized consumerism.
Julius: Yeah. That's really interesting. I feel like are you talking about there with, yeah. Like if. If we think that like freeing up knowledge is just kind of Like the ability to do, to do whatever we want and kind of like increasingly when the point becomes about accruing knowledge itself and like, what can we do and what can technology do?
And we stop asking the questions of like, wait, but why, and what holds us together. And what is this directed to it's that, it's the, it reminds me of that kind of image you've brought up before of kind of like powerful things are kind of like handing. Handing a kid, a chainsaw, like a chain size, a powerful thing, and it can be directed to something good, like building a table or whatever else, but like without the proper kind of guidance or at least just like.
A relationship to like, wow, this is a powerful thing, but this also has the power to destroy. And so we should ask, who's wielding it. We should ask how are they wielding it and towards what And I think that's the key to cause because going back to kind of your observations on what it's like, what it feels like to be a student, especially once you get to the undergraduate and maybe gradual, I mean, graduate feels like more specific to a field or whatever.
And even that whole thing, like is a part of the specialization of knowledge that we're talking about. Right. But I think on the flip side of that illustration, I think when we started talking about this, I was reflecting on my experience in undergrad and how I felt like, you know, on the contrary I felt like me and maybe like a handful of my friends, for whatever reason, I think the way that.
Engaged in school is it almost felt sometimes like Providence, that the classes that I would sign up for on a certain semester, all informed each other. Like I happened to take sociology the same semester. I was taking a philosophy class called ethics responsibility and love. And I was taking that class at the same time that I was taking a class on like liturgy and and.
I think maybe because of just like the type of person that I was and the type of person that my friends were like, that the way that we would talk about things after class would kind of tease out the connections where these things would inform each other. And it was a really beautiful thing to see how these like.
Wilson: I
Julius: think there was such like a wonder about how like, wow, like this thing that I'm learning in sociology really makes me think and like puts it into conversation with this stuff we're talking about in philosophy. And I don't think that that's limited to just people who are bent towards like philosophy and the arts.
I think it's like a certain I think it's a disposition of openness and curiosity and wonder and people who ask like the why and what is this connected to? One of my, one of my good friends is like, he's, he was a math major, but he's like one of the most kind of thoughtful, like inter like his relationship with numbers and math is.
Inspiring in that, like, the reason that he does this is held by something like greater than himself. And that allows him to see connections between like math and theology. And might've just point out that the person like Brad Gregory, right? The person who wrote unintended reformation, who has served as the fodder for a lot of this conversation, like taking these, that he's a head of the department of history and that
Wilson: but he has a master's degree in theology. So he's cross-disciplinary and it's allowing him to integrate different fields of knowledge. Yeah. And.
Julius: Yeah. And so it's just, I, and I remember kind of bringing that to you will, and you kind of pointing out this phrase that I actually don't remember what I think you've told me a lot of times now, but the phrase that theology was considered the queen of all the science. And how there's something in what theology is getting at, or has to offer in connecting this to something greater than ourselves.
That greater thing, being God and like asking questions of why is this stuff here in the first place that helps us like that, that it, what it offers is the ability to see all of these things in harmony, like the sciences, the math, all of these subjects that we kind of fragment. And I think what it is is it's a certain.
It's a relationship to, it's a relationship to God. And therefore that informs our relationship to the world. And I think what it comes down to is like what we talk about all the time, that it's a relationship that is built out of love and a desire for communion. And when we approach knowledge in that way, then like, It's hard to just be okay with seeing things as fragmented and at its best at enables us to see things with wonder the way that things are incredibly intricately connected.
Wilson: And then, and so I, I would also say, because knowing a little bit of. Your actual schooling, the, the actual professors that you studied with that you were given, some of these tools to integrate you were, you were you were given permission to try to integrate which a lot of people don't feel like they are given permission to integrate, because if they try to do that, they're going to get laughed out of this class and they might get an a, in this one, but get an F in that one.
Right? So you're giving permission and you're giving tools to do that. And that's what we're about. This series is a part of, is trying to give more people the desire for that permission to seek that and some tools to be able to experience that kind of integration in life. Because when that happens, then, you know, hearkening back to some of the stuff you just said, we're not just free to do whatever we want. Right.
It's not just that our scientific power and our technology will let us do what we want than that. It frees us to become the kind of people that can train and wanting. What's good. And then in wanting what's discerning what's good and wanting what's good, then that, that unleashes our scientific knowledge and our power and our technology in a totally different way to serve what is good instead of.
Just serving our desires as they currently are right now. Even if those desires will solely kill us and destroy our world.
Julius: Okay.
MEDITATION
Monks and Scientists don't have to represent warring ideals.
We'd like to propose that a decent way to think of how we might move toward a more integrated culture that could facilitate an interactive and harmonious division of labor between scientific knowledge and Theology is to appreciate that
Science is great at describing in increasing detail, the what and how of things. Science leads us through questions like "What is this thing made of?" Or "How does energy transfer from one set of conditions to another? From stored water to light from a bulb?"
And instead of competing for the job of explaining things, Theology is there to help us explore the "why" and the "for what" dimensions of the very same questions.
Theology leads us through questions like, "Why would we use energy this way? What would it lead to? And would this result be good?"
It's important to see, that the fields of theology and science are already more united than we tend to appreciate at first glance.
Both fields involve reason.
And, if we are to truly understand reason and knowledge in any depth, we must not overlook the truth that both science and theology also involve love.
After the Reformation set off a couple of centuries of fighting rooted in passionate convictions about God, it's easy to understand why many would turn their hopes to a dispassionate reason. But there is no such thing.
No one will put in the time and energy necessary to engage deep and mysterious things like the subatomic make up of carbon or real questions of meaning and purpose if love is not involved.
And once we know something, that knowledge will inevitably be used to serve what we love. So this flows right into the theological questions of whether what we love is something healing and sustaining, or consuming and destructive.
So when we try to sever knowledge and love, faith and reason, we end up living lives full of contradictions and unnecessary gaps.
But it does little good to simply critique this aspect of the broader culture if we're not willing to let something shift in our own character. So, to engage this on a personal level:
Name a piece of knowledge you gained that proved powerful or valuable ... Think of something you understood that many other people could not engage on the same level you could.
And can you also name a moment that that knowledge became severed from Love?
Maybe you used your expertise to help develop a highly addictive and anxiety-producing social media app.
Or you used some sensitive information to shame and tarnish the reputation of someone you were afraid might be some kind of threat to you.
Or you won another argument, but lost yet another friend or lover.
But now, just bring some of the basics of Theology into your understanding and use of knowledge.
Along with teaching that God is the source of all things, one of the most foundational ideas of Christian thought is that this source is not just some mindless energy, but that God is love.
And since the reason of both Science and Theology involve love, what both long for and serve is a larger communion.
When you research with love, you're not just seeking facts. You're seeking some level of communion with the thing you are studying.
And when you genuinely communion with God, you're not only sharing a private oneness with some mysterious entity, but also uniting with everything that God loves, and everything that God's love produces.
So name a time your knowledge and love came together. Think of a moment when your understanding unlocked a larger flourishing and communion for you and the the people and things around you.
In that moment, you didn't just feel smart did you?
You felt alive. And grateful.
Moments like that are times we glimpse something of our vocation, of what we were put here on this earth to do.
Because those moments, my friends, are times we participate in God.
And just what would become of your knowledge and power if you also learned to love the One who loves and wills the good of everything?