I enjoyed this conversation. I think the main part that really stood out to me was Marcello discussing the beauty of imperfection and how science is coming to terms with that. I think there is so much in that idea that I would like to explore further.

Can we expect the transcript here in the coming days?

Every week is rich and expansive. This week is possibly the widest and deepest. Wow. I love it when we invite atheists into the conversation. Gleiser takes us into the sacred mystery in unique and important ways. And, Robinson? I don't know what to say. I'll read anything she writes! Thank you Krista and team.

The discussion of the terms describe vs. explain should include the word create. Science uses the term loosely. Our arrogance is our biggest obstacle to true knowledge and understanding. Robinson and Gleiser did not hesitate to use the term. I was alittle dismayed. The conversation was going welll to that point then returned to the ego driven state most intellectual discussions end in.

We do describe rather than explain. We also manipulte rather than create.

I thought science was about measurement, observations and organized data? Yet your 2 guests whom you had a “public conversation” with two scientists M. Robinson and Gleiser, was full of pithy lines and loaded with quotations of others, no data or observations, just generalizations, nominalizations, presumptions, history of others beliefs instead of their own, and undefined jargon. These two brought nothing to the conversation.

When Marilynne (Irish/Scottish? accent) lectured us on how Americans are so dumb regarding sciences, she gave no examples and you did not follow up and have her elaborate. I was constantly confused by the pseudo-debate since they both spoke of the “presence of God” yet both seem desperate to trump God with science. Wish you could have deconstructed that a bit(?)

Wish Marcelo could have touched on the mechanics of Big Bang theory. What data exactly is he talking about? And he couldn’t support unified theory imply or string theory or God……what exactly does he believe? Very confusing people, that much is true. Was sad when Marilynne lectured Gleiser on his usage…… like he was an 18 yr old college student.

If you want a useful debate/conversation/even controversy, could you just once balance with a real theologian? Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, Dr. E Michael Jones? How about a conversation with Robert Sungenesis who believes we are in a geocentric solar system. (sounds like Marcelo might agree with him?). See if your backers would allow a Catholic spokesman on your show.

It's gratifying and encouraging to hear a brilliant compatriot speaking so humbly about the marvels of the Atlantic forest, the enchantment of nature, uncertainty theory and the vast domaine of the brain. It's also encouraging to see Marcelo transcending ethnic limits, a Brazilian contribution to the world. "Transculturation", the dynamics of Latin American cultures, characterized by absorbing, transforming, and reinventing is what his words brought back to mind. Congratulations Marcelo! Would you spend time in to Brazil share what you have been saying in the US? People will adore you!

The first time I ever listened to this program, and I was "blown away." I was driving home, listening, after an intense work weekend in southern Vermont where the radio signal threatened to fade off, so I slowed down to hear the end before I lost the signal. There were so many revelatory thoughts .... I cannot isolate one. The dialogues from disparate fields was so fascinating. I arrived home in NW Mass. and shared with my wife about the issues raised. So want to hear again and share with her... how can I download?

Krista! Like your e-mail audience, I couldn't be happier that you were able to get Marilynne Robinson to do this live conversation. As editor of a sixty-five year old scholarly journal, RENASCENCE: ESSAYS ON VALUES IN LITERATURE, I had the good fortune to hear three talks on Robinson's work in May of this year. I am currently working on a special issue on Robinson's work. The more I hear about and read her work, the more I am impressed with the importance of this voice for the religious view in Amercia. With great gratitude.

Please check out ny new book (just published) "The Joys and Benefits of Connecting with Our Cosmic Spirit". It describes what True Meditation is and how to connect with the Spirit within your Being (It explains what is meant by "The Kingdom of God is within You").
Thanks.
Lloyd

I tell a story about an in-person meeting with Dr. Gleiser in my kickstarter project video.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/72062118/philosophy-of-oneness-essay...

I didn't appreciate Ms. Robinson's dig at Richard Dawkins, who has done so much for science. It seems that Ms. Robinson feels threatened by atheism and those who advocate for it. Intuition certainly plays a role in science's quest for truth because scientists must rely on their own best educated guesses about how things work in order to formulate hypotheses and design experiments. I don't want to base my own understanding of the origins of the universe on faith in a religious text, some sort of personal "experience" of a deity, or gut feelings. I want facts and figures. If you truly understand the enormity, complexity, age, and magnificent energy of the universe you will feel awe and wonder in a way that no manmade religious myth could ever duplicate. I enjoy On Being, but this is the first time this show ever offended me, a devout atheist. Here is a gorgeous video called "Science Saved My Soul From Religion." Yes, it may offend those who believe in an organized religion, but it's breathtakingly beautiful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcRWKAPwRZ4

Marcello notes how what we can understand about reality is limited by what we can observe and experience about the world.

It may be technically true that our instruments are limited and incapable of making certain measurements, thus limiting our direct understanding of reality, but it seems that Marcello also alludes to us being limited by a subjective perspective that is not fully possible to overcome.

This butts-up against our desire for ultimate truth, which extends from our need for understanding of our origins (As Marilynne notes, if we know our origins we feel that we will then be able to find our purpose in the universe or the meaning of our existence), but perhaps opens up a plurality of paths that may all lead to some understanding of the self and its place in the universe for the individual who chooses to pursue them.

Interestingly, Marilynne praises science for its capacity for self-criticism, yet there are truisms familiar to scientists that go along the line that science may only progress one funeral at a time. Science is a human endeavor, and the way in which new ideas are adopted can be a human and so chaotic process.

I have just listened to and enjoyed this conversation between Marcello Gleiser and Marilynne Robinson, conducted by Christa Tippet. I found the podcast having already discovered Marilynne Robinson's book "Absence of Mind", which I return to often.

At one or two points in the conversation, the physicist Richard Feynman is mentioned. Marilynne Robinson refers to writing by Feynman in which he wonders how it is that my self can persist, and I can have memories of my self, when over the course of time the atoms of my brain are replaced. Robinson reminds us that the English empiricist philosopher John Locke arrived at this thought in the 17th or early 18th century, to reiterate, I think, that thought is capable of reaching places at a time many would regard as pre-scientific, or at least backward in some sense, compared to our time. Marcello Gleiser refers to Feynman as one of his personal heroes.
There was also some discussion of the role of the words "describe" and "explain" as used in popular science, and a consensus seemed to be reached in this conversation that describe is the better word, because it preserves a notion of incompleteness to our thought.

While listening to these things I was reminded of a wonderfully entertaining lecture given by Richard Feynman which I think, somewhat paradoxically, illustrates both the tendency of popular science to want to diminish mind, and also the brilliant awareness Feynman had of treating mathematics as descriptive while also being mindful of the "explanatory power" of any physical theory.
The lecture is called "The Relationship Between Mathematics & Physics", from 1965, and is on YouTube and other places.
It is Feynman's closing statement to this lecture that has interested me, in which, really I think out of a feeling of frustration or even inadequacy, he wants to admonish people of what he calls "the other culture" (by which he seems to mean philosophers) who wonder how or why it is that our thinking, our mathematics, should, so to speak, fit the world. Feynman says, with not a little force and even animus, "The horizons are limited which permit such people to imagine that the centre of the universe of interest in man".

Given Marcello Gleiser's view that science needs a kind of aesthetic shift towards recovering human "centrality" in the universe, and his evident admiration for Feynman as a scientist, which so many share, I think Feynman's statement, and it's context, is interesting here. From Marilynne Robinson's side, she has been concerned to show the ways that the style of thinking evinced by popularisers of science, in their writing, tends to close down questioning in advance. So again, I think Richard Feynman's performance of this lecture, and his closing statement, is interesting.

Feynman's lecture was given at a time when there seems to have been a considerable cultural stand-off between the disciplines of sciences and humanities. When Feynman, in his lecture, refers to the "other culture" I think he has in mind a book called "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" by CP Snow, which was published in 1959. This book shows a personal attitude (on the part of CP Snow) hostile, for various complcated interesting reasons, to the kind of things valued in humanities academic disciplines. I think it is a book which contains many of the "declensions" Marilynne Robinson describes as common to what she calls "para-scientific" literature.

I wonder if Feynman would have been quite so antipathetic towards those of the "other culture" if he had been alive to the importance to Einstein of Kant's attempt to answer that very question of why our minds seem to fit the universe such that we can have knowledge of it? Newton's theory, the very model of warranted knowlege, was being overturned, after all. It seems to me that Karl Popper was driven to develop his adaptation of Kantian epistemology and philosophy of science in opposition to the attitude that mathematics is in direct contact with the world. He is the philosopher of science who would be at pains to support the use of the word "description" in preference to "explanation", precisely to deter the feeling underlying scientism or positivism that we have achieved complete knowledge. Again, I wonder if Feynman would have had any interest at all that people like Popper, or Kant or Einstein for that matter, could have found interesting any kind of problem to do with why our mathematics works. My feeling is probably not.

I write because I listen to a conversation like this one and come to anticipate mention of, say, Kant, or Popper, or Heidegger, or Wittgenstein, particularly from the scientist. Popper seems important to me, because he makes explicit that science is an outgrowth of mythical thinking, and of the same character as mythical thinking. Science is an expression of human being, and cultural. For Popper there is no cognitive divide (as Marilynne Robinson speaks of in "Absence of Mind") that elevates our thinking so greatly that we can be dismissive of the past. His work is quite deflationary in that sense.

At the beginning of the conversation, Marcello Gleiser refers to the centrality of the notion of irreducibly conflicting values in the work of the one-time linguistic philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin. Not long ago, I was very motivated to research and get to the bottom of what I had come to regard as a characteristic antipathy towards, or blindness for, the kinds of thing valued in humanistic or humanities learning. It was because I had found this antipathy in myself at a young age, as it had been in my father, and it has had a huge impact on my life. So I was very grateful to come to (not long before finding Marilynne Robinson's book) to an essay by Isaiah Berlin called "The Divorce Between the Sciences and the Humanities". I think Berlin locates a time and a place, after Descartes, when certain human-centred studies are preserved from the limitless domain of mathematics, in the person of the Italian philosopher Vico.

I am very concerned about the closing-down quality of thinking that goes into the "para-scientific" literature, because it comes from people who are popularly regarded as thinkers par-excellence when, even before any thoughts are put down, the tone of presentation is already conveying to the reader or listener that all the thinking has already been done and "he has it". It is not from science that we acquire the ability to understand the significance of style in communication, but from attending to qualities of feeling, in other words from art. Yet, armed with facts and bolstered by prestige and plaudits, what para-scientific thinking seems to push onto impressionable minds is that there is nothing for me to learn, because there is nothing to learn, because it has already been learned (by him). The reader finds himself participating in the writer's assumption of completeness. An opening into what could possibly make of my style of presentation, of my voice and tone and choice of words, anything remotely significant is closed off in advance, always in advance. Becoming aware of this in oneself is disquieting and painful. It is painful to be gripped by an essay like "Modern Science, Mathematics and Metaphysics" by Martin Heidegger, only to find that the "scientific world view", sanctioned by virtue of its success, and pressed into one, casts those insights as meaningless, and that writer as a charlatan, if not an irrationalist. One does not want to be caught unaware quoting the work of a one-time Nazi, and another reason comes up to feel defensive about even raising any kind of query or question or reservation over the value of science.

I'm sorry for a meandering response, but as you can see, I found this conversation very thought provoking!

Richard Feynman did not, at least at the time of his 1965 lecture at Cornell University, " The Relation Betwee Mathematics And Physics", share Marcello Gleiser's desire for a science with humanity in any place of importance. Speaking of people of the "other culture" (by which it seems he meant humanists), he says, at the close of this lecture, with some force and animus, "the horizons are limited which permit such people to imagine that the centre of the universe of interest is man".