Summer vacations have come to an end, classes are starting up again for the fall, so we all know what that means: Time for the Ig Nobel prizes! Serious about snake bites? Got questions about polar bear kisses? Curious about the nutritional merits of cockroach milk? The Ig Nobels have you covered with awards for research on those topics and more.

It may be tempting to think of the Ig Nobel Prizes as the Razzies of science, a “worst of” complement to the “best of” Nobels. I suppose the naming invites that mindset to a degree, as does the timing about a month before the Nobel announcements. But as I’ve discussed before, and a big reason why I keep coming back to them, the work itself is representative of the quality level of all science. These folks are not being singled out for poor methods or low quality results–and certainly not for the sort of actual misconduct like manipulating or fabricating data that could get your work labeled bad science. Rather, they are being celebrated for applying the exacting standards of scientific rigor to questions off the beaten track.

Take this year’s prize in Biomechanics, which went to

Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot, and Stuart West for devising a more precise definition of kissing—“non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer”—in ants, birds, polar bears, and humans.

Anybody can kiss. Anybody can be smitten by a photo of cute animals nuzzling. To make it science, you need a question to answer and a systematic way to collect data that can answer that question. While you wouldn’t know it from the Ig Nobel citation, the point of the paper isn’t to decide what a kiss is, or which animals kiss and which don’t. Defining kissing was just one of the first steps Brindle, Talbot and West needed to accomplish in order to label their data and start answering their actual questions: when in natural history did kissing emerge and why?

The actual work involved a literature review, along with watching videos of monkeys and apes, to identify which species kiss and which do not, as well as determining various other traits related to mating, diet, and food sharing. Then they constructed phylogenetic trees and worked backwards to determine when in the ancestry of primates different traits likely emerged. The authors admit that their data is likely incomplete, and treating kissing as a binary (ever observed/reported kissing or not) possibly too simplistic. But within the limitations of available data, they were as rigorous as they could be. The results may not be paradigm-shattering, but they shed some more light on common human experiences and bring a little romance and light-heartedness to science. Why not celebrate work like that?

If you peruse the other celebrated scientists, you may notice that this year’s prize in Biology went to a paper that has been retracted. The Ig Nobels make no mention of this fact; that is not the reason for recognizing the paper. I encourage you to read the retraction notice; it is brief and straightforward. The work involved constructing various controlled scenarios in which snakes and humans interacted and then observing whether the snake attempted to bite. The question being asked was which details of the encounter, such as snake age & sex, ambient temperature, time of day, and how the human & snake interacted, increased the probability of a bite. The protocol was reviewed and approved by an ethics committee, but after the paper was published the committee felt the work had exceed the scope of what had been approved by including newborn snakes and by using a technique of softly stepping on the snakes as one form of interaction. That discrepancy led to the paper being retracted by the journal.

Retraction is a rare but important part of the scientific publication process. But not all retractions are the same. Some papers are retracted because of deliberate misconduct like fabricating data. Others are retracted when the authors or others discover honest mistakes that substantially impact the findings. The snake paper is a third category; there is no suggestion the results are inaccurate, but rather that the data may have been improperly sourced. Ethical treatment of research subjects, human and nonhuman, is important, and a move like this signals how seriously it should be taken. Without knowing any of the details, I’m willing to believe this could be a case of either of miscommunication, where the authors thought they had been comprehensive in describing their protocol, or perhaps a field judgment where the researchers made an adjustment they thought was in scope with what had been approved, and either way the committee disagreed.

Whether the Ig Nobels intended to highlight this particular part of the scientific process or not, it is probably just as well that they did. It’s easy to get a romanticized and sanitized view of science from paying attention to Nobel prizes. The Ig Nobel prizes tend to shed more light on the day-to-day ups and downs of being a practicing scientist.

Perhaps there’s a good spiritual practice here in the celebration of the everyday and the ordinary. After all, the Bible makes clear that God is not just in the big moments, and it is not just the most successful or most adored who bear God’s image. Nutrionally dense cockroach milk, the smell of new babies (and teens), and monkey kisses are all just as much God’s creation as the Higgs boson and CRISPR gene editing. So let’s celebrate more of these meetings with God and God’s work.

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Saturday, September 26, 2026

Learn more & Register: https://network.asa3.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=2082216&group=

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If you’ve seen this summer’s most discussed blockbuster, The Odyssey, perhaps you also saw the trailer for Digger. Tom Cruise plays the eponymous character, a titan of industry with the ear of the president and the means to (inadvertently?) cause an existential crisis. Towards the end of the promo, Digger asks a subordinate “Help me shape the story.” To the suggestion that “They already know the story,” Digger replies “They know the facts. The story is yet to be told.”

What a fitting overture to the themes of the feature presentation to follow. We know there were Greeks. We know it was reported that Alexander the Great visited the site in Turkey he understood to be the site of Troy and the final resting place of Achilles. We know some places Troy might have been, and some times and places where it wasn’t. The leaves a lot of room for Homer, Wolfgang Petersen, James Joyce, the Coen Brothers and others to weave narratives. In the latest film, Christopher Nolan certainly takes advantage of that flexibility to tell the ancient tale with modern sensibilities. Likely Homer, if indeed any such person existed, also made editorial choices reflecting contemporary concerns to craft a story for his present audience rather than a record of the past.

Whether that synergy of trailer and film was intentional or not, the relevance of Digger’s words to the contemporary world are almost certainly deliberate commentary. They are just as apt a prelude to, say, the national TV interview of the head of the Department of Health & Human Services spinning a yarn about the much more recent past that is all about narrative over facts. Parts of his tale are just at odds with reality, but on technical matters that are unfamiliar to most. Even I did not know the history of RSV off the top of my head; I wouldn’t expect many other folks to recall the timeline clearly enough to know why the virus could not have been the product of laboratory research.

Other narrative threads are at best selective in their relationship to facts. The burden of disease during the COVID-19 pandemic has not been distributed uniformly in space and time. It would not surprise me if one could produce evidence of specific hospitals that, at one point or another between March of 2020 and March of 2022, were not overwhelmed with gravely ill COVID-19 patients. (Obviously, the virus continues to circulate globally and cause serious illness and death; I’m choosing that time period because that’s when everyone’s lives were noticeably disrupted by mitigation measures and so probably constitute “the pandemic” to many.) Many folks went without first- or second-hand experience of how serious the illness could get. In my own extended family, no one wound up in the ICU because of it. That is not to minimize the suffering and loss that many others went through, or the burden our healthcare workers bore on our behalf. It is simply to acknowledge that personal experiences varied, which lends credence for some to Kennedy’s attempts at revisionist minimizing. If you don’t have access to all the information, how do you know that selective information which aligns with your experience is incomplete?

And what about selective information that provides the answers you want? I would hypothesize that many people who trust the current health secretary do so because the COVID-19 mitigations were difficult to endure and they don’t want to go through that again. And frankly, yes, they were challenging and carried their own cost. Being away from church, from school, from family gatherings and from all of the other interactions big and small that make us human and enrich our lives was detrimental. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to relive all or any of that.

At the same time, we cannot rule the possibility of more diseases emerging in the future, perhaps ones that are even more contagious or more lethal. To make sure we are prepared, let’s focus on putting more and better tools into our toolkit instead of taking some out. For example, spread that fast and broad typically needs to be via the air, so let’s improve the air quality in our shared indoor spaces. We can increase the frequency that indoor air is exchanged with outdoor air. We can add filtration, something that will help with wildfire smoke as well. We can explore less conventional solutions like strategic placement of UV lights to see how effective they are.

Increased testing capacity would also help. A big reason we had to ask so many people to stay home everywhere early on was because we didn’t know where the virus was. For PCR tests, most of the testing components are essentially universal for all pathogens past, present and future. We can scale up the availability of the reusable machines and the chemical components that get used up with each test. The one part that is specific to the pathogen is called the primer, a short DNA molecule. Those can be made quickly with adequate infrastructure. Many East Asian countries took these steps after the first SARS outbreak and employed widespread testing effective this time around. We could even have PCR machines at home, with modular test cartridges for different viruses and bacteria. That tech already exists; you could have the machine now and get updated cartridges as needed. And it’s not too hard to imagine that we could further innovate at-home primer manufacturing, so that updating for the latest pathogen only requires downloading a file instead of shipping a cartridge.

And if we are innovating the process of making PCR primers, we’d almost certainly improve our ability to make mRNA vaccines; both involve generating specific nucleic acid strands. Obviously the safety and efficacy testing for a new vaccine would still need to be done. After that, however, we still had a big bottleneck in manufacturing and distribution. Maybe that means making your own vaccine doses at home, although that may raise other issues. But even if it just means faster and cheaper manufacturing, that would be a big help.

Sure, we’re veering into sci-fi territory a bit. But stories can shape our future as well as our past. So let’s tell stories where we get what we all want–minimal disruptions from communicable diseases–in a way that is consistent with the facts of how the world works.

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For as long as I have been aware of political goings-on, lawmakers have used scientific research in an attempt to score points about government waste. It’s a pretty easy game to play; any robust array of research funding will include some grants for high risk projects, niche studies, or ambitious moon shots. And if your audience has an implicit assumption that funding science basically amounts to buying obvious practical applications of utility to many, it’s that much easier to find projects that will fail that standard. Those who follow the history of science will know that valuable applications can come from unexpected places. And many see value in scientific knowledge beyond how it can impact day-to-day life. But not everyone has that perspective, and if you’ve already been convinced science can be wasteful, there’s even less incentive to look deeper.

Would you have thought to look at gila monster venom for diabetes medication? Would you suspect number theory held the key to global electronic commerce? Would you figure that a cure for sickle-cell anemia lurked in the antiviral response of bacteria? These are just some of the examples of life-changing technologies derived from unlikely beginnings. It is not hard to imagine that any or all of these lines of inquiry could have been cut short by requiring an upfront endpoint obvious to most lay observers. That doesn’t mean we just throw money at any old idea that anyone happens to have; these researchers had to demonstrate that they were capable of doing rigorous work and then deliver publishable results. What it does mean is that the untrained eye will likely struggle to identify fruitful research from grant titles or summaries.

If this is an old game, why bring it up now? Well, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is proposing rule changes for how federal grants are handled. Now, instead of picking out studies to be poster children for negotiations at the level of budget allocations, even grant would be subject to political review and possible rejection on an individual basis. This is a significant change to how federal funds are handled, and as such merits careful consideration. If you are reading this when it is published, you still have a few days to add a public comment that will become part of that consideration. The deadline is July 13, 2026.

Naturally, one cannot eliminate politics from the question of how public funds are spent. And there is plenty of opportunity for political input. The legislative and executive branches work together to establish the budget, which determines how large the pools of money are for various kinds of grants. The executive branch, with confirmation from the legislative in some cases, appoints the leadership for the the various departments which administer the funds. Specific research practices or goals can be regulated or prohibited, either by law or by policy. There are state laws and federal regulations banning human cloning, for example. And all human subject research is subject to ethical guidelines to reduce the likelihood of exploitation.

One of the most significant debates about science funding in my lifetime was the conversation around research on embryonic stem cells. These cells have the potential to differentiate into many different kinds of cells which form into the various tissues and organs that make up our bodies. They represented a significant opportunity for basic science research and development of therapeutics. Before they were discovered, however, a federal law was passed banning federal funding for research that destroyed embryos. In 2001, in response to the subsequent discovery of embryonic stem cells, the Bush administration undertook a scientific and ethical review of the issues and ultimately implemented a policy permitting federal funding of research using preexisting cell lines, since this would require no further manipulation of embryos. Subsequent administrations have modified these policies, and further research has also revealed other ways of making stem cells that don’t use embryos.

As you might imagine, not everyone agreed with the specific decisions made. And certainly there was an impact on what science was done and not done. Nevertheless, this seems like a reasonable process for addressing an emerging area of research, since it involved an extended period of debate with input from multiple knowledgeable parties. While I suppose we can never know for certain what goes on in the minds of decision-makers, the process was least consistent with an informed, educated choice rather than finding a way to justify a predetermined outcome.

It is harder to see how the newly proposed process for review of individual grants can achieve the same level of depth. Reports of decisions being driven by simple keyword lists do not suggest detailed, knowledgeable review. If the concern is responsible funding, there is little reason to think a shallow or arbitrary process is going to make sure limited funds are spent in the wisest way.

Now, perhaps you are concerned that my concerns about these proposed changes are due to the fact that they come from this administration in particular. I’ll admit that’s not exactly a point in their favor; at the same time, such “if you’re for it, I’m against it” thinking is a big part of my concern. Certainly there is more to politics than that sort of knee-jerk reaction. Nevertheless, we have seen a lot of back-and-forth in executive orders and agency policies as administrations change. Scientific research requires patience and persistence, accumulating evidence, making incremental improvements, and deepening expertise. Funding that toggles on and off every 4 years is not conducive to any of that.

This proposed rule includes other changes as well. The other one that stands out to me is the limitation on using federal funds to pay for open access journal fees. Significant advances have been made in recent years to require that federally-funded research be published in a way that is accessible to the public rather than behind a paywall. In some cases, this involves pay the journal a fee to “unlock” a specific paper. If grant funds can’t be used to pay those fees, will we see fewer open access papers about the research we’ve all paid for?

Here’s the link again where you can leave a comment on the proposed rule change. I think the current system–in which lawmakers and administrators decide overall budgets, provide guidance and regulation, and set broad agendas, while scientists use their expertise to decide which individual projects merit funding as the best of the leading edge–represents a reasonable balance. I think the new rule would shift that balance too far away from the people who know the fields best, regardless of who the lawmakers and administrators are now or in the future. If you agree, feel free to let the OMB know. And if you think the rule change is a good idea, feel free to let them know that instead.

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Disclosure: A copy of A Systematic Theology of Love was provided to me by the author and/or the publisher. No expectation of a review or specific comments therein accompanied that gift.

The theology of Thomas Jay Oord has intrigued me since I encountered The Uncontrolling Love of God. I appreciate his desire for logical consistency, his engagement with science, and his reluctance to appeal to mystery if other options are available. His approach to the problem of evil makes more sense to me than any other I’ve come across. But of course none of that matters if his ideas aren’t seriously engaged with scripture. Fortunately, they are; everything stems from an understanding of God centered on love as reported throughout the testimony of Biblical writers. That orientation has led now to A Systematic Theology of Love, the first volume of which focuses on God and Creation. I won’t be unpacking the whole thing–although I think it is all worthwhile to consider–but focusing mainly on the places where it connects to science. We’ll look at the model of creation, panpsychism, and the problem of good.

Let’s start with the problem of good, since my comment is minor. Oord has a lot to say about the problem of evil–why does evil exist if God is good–throughout the book, since it is frequently cited as a significant barrier to faith. In the final chapter, he takes up the complementary problem of good, which asks whether the world could be as good and beautiful as it is without God. I’m personally not convinced there’s a perfect symmetry there; I think the problem of evil carries more force. Still, it’s a reasonable issue to address when being comprehensive.

To establish that there is such a problem, Oord first needs to establish that there aren’t other explanations. When it comes to the good done by living things, evolution is an obvious one. He does cite several works on the evolution of altruism, and summarizes them as claiming that “creatures are ultimately selfish, because every creature acts only for its own reproductive success” (p 390). Some may make such claims, but I don’t think that’s a broad consensus. For instance, I don’t think Martin Nowak comes to such a conclusion in SuperCooperators, since his mechanism for the evolution of altruism involves group selection. Further, we observe behaviors that are not just for the actor’s own reproductive success, such as treating the wounds of others. Thus it is not so clear to me that evolution can be dismissed as an explanation for good done by creatures. At the same time, Oord’s model of creation is not at odds with evolution, so evolving altruism can still be attributed to God. I’m not sure to disentangle those elements to settle the problem of good, which is a big part of why I don’t think it is as compelling as the problem of evil.

As for that model of creation, Oord rejects creatio ex nihilo and proposes instead creatio ex creatione sempiternalis en amore, which he translates as “God everlastingly creates out of creation in love” (p 292). I think Oord makes a strong case that creatio ex nihilo is not a necessary conclusion from scripture. And rejecting creatio ex nihilo aligns well with Oord’s theology of love, in which God cannot coerce or unilaterally bring anything about by fiat. I’m open to all of that, At the same time, I struggle to understanding exactly how Oord’s model works. He simultaneously embraces the idea of God everlastingly creating entities, each of which have finite spans in time and space. Yet he rejects the idea of any kind of actual infinite as incoherent. If the point is that the number of things cannot be “infinity,” fair enough; infinity is not a number that can be reached like 42. But infinity is also the shorthand we use in math for a series that goes on everlastingly. So I’m not sure that everlasting creation can be entirely separated from the notion of the infinite.

I’m also having trouble wrapping my head around how there is always something distinct from and yet dependent on God for God to create with. On some level, I know that when dealing with the everlasting, the question of where did the first “stuff” come from will be met with “there was no first.” Still, it is a hard question to let go of, because an answer would help me know how to better understand the relationship between the dependency of creation on God while maintaining the God is not a sufficient cause. In fairness, it’s not as if we have physics models that definitively answer these kinds of questions either. So for now, perhaps we just have to live with not knowing all the details.

Another aspect of Oord’s model is to ascribe agency to entities at all scales of creation. I can see where that aligns with the idea that God coaxes rather than coerces. How do you coax a quark if it has no agency? This also comes with a form of panpsychism, ascribing a mental aspect to all of those entities as well. Again, this seems like a natural extension; we tend to associate agency with minds. I don’t believe Oord explicitly ties all of these elements together in this way, but they do seem to fit together well. However, I’ve always struggled with panpsychism, so I wonder if there isn’t another way.

Arguably, Oord has an issue with panpsychism as well. He finds it easy to describe subatomic particles as having agency and thus a mental aspect, and of course many accept that various living organisms have agency to one degree or another. But he feels obligated to come up with a story about the mental aspect of rocks and chairs. I don’t think it’s an accident that everything which poses a challenge falls into the category of “inanimate object.” I actually think his explanation for why rocks don’t appear to think is largely correct. He says that they are not organized in a way that allows the small mentality of each component particle to add together, like metal which is not a magnet because the dipoles of its components are scrambled rather than aligned. I agree that minds require a particular type of organization not found in rocks or rockers. That organization includes sufficient internal degrees of freedom to facilitate information processing. For this reason, I also don’t think quarks can have a mental aspect, because they have no internal degrees of freedom.

The other reason I find it difficult to ascribe a mental aspect to quarks is because the ontology at that level isn’t quite so neat. Our current best understanding is that what is fundamental are various universal fields, and what we register as particles are localized excitations of those fields. So is it the quark field, for example, that has a mental aspect, or each individual excitation? If the latter, does the mental aspect come and go as virtual particles emerge and return to the vacuum state? Maybe these are again the wrong questions, but they are what come to mind when I contemplate panpsychism.

When I thought about the problem of good, another issue that came to mind is Herbert Spencer’s notion that whatever persists, exists. Oord defines goodness and evil in terms of making the world overall better or worse, respectively. It seems to me that things which make the world better will have a greater tendency to persist and proliferate, while things that make the world worse won’t. This creates a selective filter towards the good. This could be part of an answer to the problem of good. But let’s take that a step further. Perhaps the space of possibilities is constructed in such a way that it is biased towards the good. And what if we suppose that God is the reason it is constructed this way.

I think this has a few advantages. One, it allows us to describe how God could coax entities which do not have a mental aspect or agency; God arranges the possibilities for them to tend in a particular way. This is not the same as determinism; it is a stochastic bias which still allows complete moment-to-moment freedom. Two, it potentially offers dimensions for the divine Spirit to have a substance, rather than in the dimensions of the physical dimensions where our substance is realized. And three, it addresses the problem of good in scientific language without excluding God; it gets into some of how God does what God does rather than describing an alternative.

Allow me to be the first to admit these are just some inklings, not nearly as robustly interrogated as Oord’s systematic theology. His answers may also be more correct in addition to being more comprehensive. But what I appreciate about A Systematic Theology of Love, in addition to all the things I think it describes well and correctly which I have at best hinted at, is that it is different enough from other theologies I’ve engaged with that it can inspire new questions and new inklings. I hope it can do the same for you.

The post Science Corner: Loving Systematically appeared first on Emerging Scholars Blog.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:

Summer is here or nearly here in the world of academia.

What does this mean for you?

For some of us, that means our teaching or class load might decrease while our research load increases. It might mean a slight break, or, if not a break, at least a different rhythm to our work. It might mean different connections within our communities as people take off for vacations or visits home in the coming months.

I was always overly optimistic about what I would accomplish over these three months. Without any classes or associated work, I thought I could finish all the projects I set out for myself. Yes, I could reorganize my office, clean out files, finish that writing project (or two), start a new hobby, go on vacation, have friends over for weekly meals, read my growing stack of books, walk more, eat better . . . .  And the list could go on.

There’s something about summer that makes it seem like so much is possible. Maybe it’s the longer days, along with memories from those seemingly never-ending childhood summers.

However, I often find that at the end of the summer, and I know I’m not alone, I haven’t accomplished most of the list. If I have, then I’m exhausted by not taking the opportunity to rest well. There was no time for everything.

So, I’ve started to look at my summer rhythm more realistically and give myself a lot more grace. Perhaps I’m starting to recognize the wisdom shared by the writer of Ecclesiastes – there is a season for “every activity under heaven.” And the limits on my time are good. They help me to trust in God more than myself, and to delight a bit more in each day and the work and rest it offers.

Here are some areas to consider when planning your summer.

Rest. How will you take time to slow down this summer?  Perhaps you can adjust your daily schedule a bit.
Pray. A Christian scholar is a scholar who prays. How will you spend time with God this summer?
Relate. How will you stay connected with people – or build your community?
Read. What one or two books do you want to read for enjoyment?  What books for your research or classes do you want to catch up on?
Work. What needs to get done this summer?  What are reasonable expectations?
Walk. How will you include movement and the outdoors in these months?  Both are so healing for our bodies, minds, and souls.

Blessings as you consider the best rhythms for you this summer.

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Your faith and your work… one vocation, or two competing demands?
You know your research interests. Do you know your calling?
The academy gives you metrics. Who gives you meaning?

If you’ve wondered about the same or similar questions, join

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Right now, there are generally two types of people on social media: those awash in red button/blue button discourse, and those blissfully unaware of it. For those second types, at the heart of the conversation is the following thought experiment. Everyone in the world has to privately choose to press a red button or a blue button. If a majority of people press blue, everyone lives. If a majority of people press red, only red-pressers live. The current conversation apparently kicked off a few weeks ago with this X poll; a similar conversation was stirred up a few years ago with a similar poll phrased in terms of pills rather than buttons. Both times, blue prevailed in the non-random polls, albeit by a smaller margin this time around.¹ Unsurprisingly, lots of people have strong feelings about why their choice is correct. I’m less concerned about your choice of button; I want to talk about math.

If the extent of your relationship with math is the typical arithmetic-to-calculus-through-algebra journey with a geometry side quest, followed by adulthood accounting and maybe the odd DIY project, you might see math as largely about performing calculations to achieve the single correct answer. There’s a case to be made that this is why we invented math (and writing)–to resolve questions of who owes what to whom in a way that both parties will agree. Things can get messy quickly if I, the monarch of grilled beef patties, think that $5.69 for a burger and $3.09 for onion rings adds up to $8.78 and you, my royal customer, think it’s $4.12 (or worse, beleventy christophthree). But nothing everything in life is financial; as we apply the mathematics we’ve developed over the millennia, we find that sometimes “Under what conditions does each answer make sense?” is a better question to ask than “What is the right answer?”

For example, going to the hassle of carving clay (other storage media are available) with records of business transactions and account balances presumes that you are going to be dealing with the same people over and over again. If I’m only going to trade with you once, we just make whatever deal we are both comfortable walking away with and that’s the end of it. Maybe that means we work out a deal we both think is fair. Or maybe I decide it is worthwhile to skew things in my favor, getting you to accept less either by trickery or coercion. If I know I’m never going to see you again, what do I care if you think I owe you something? And what good does it do you to record that debt?

But now suppose we aren’t so nomadic that we can count on mutual ghosting. On the one hand, I have an extra incentive to deal more fairly because I know you can come find me if you feel aggrieved. On the other hand, you might be willing to take the short end of a deal this time knowing that you can make it up next time, so long as we both agree on what’s owed. If we are asking the question “What’s the maximum value I can get out of this deal?” the “right” answer will depend on which scenario we’re in and what I believe I can get away with.

We’ve since developed math beyond accounting to investigate various such questions, creating fields like economics and game theory. A classic example is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Two people are imprisoned for a crime and each privately given the chance to testify against the other; testifying means getting set free while the other is penalized, unless both testify, in which case both are penalized to a lesser degree. The best possible outcome for either prisoner is to testify when the other doesn’t, but if both choose that option, they both get a worse outcome than if they had collectively said nothing. It turns out that the best strategy to use changes if you are in this scenario once or if you face the same deal repeatedly with the same person. The repetition creates the opportunity to essentially coordinate without coordinating (that is, without directly discussing your plans with the other person). You can demonstrate that you can be counted on to stay silent, your partner can do the same, and thus you can both take the risk of not testifying and have some confidence that your counterpart will do likewise, earning that better outcome than both testifying.

Martin Nowak covers this and related findings in his book SuperCooperators about what conditions can lead to altruism. Many have written on similar topics, but Nowak also brings his Catholic beliefs into the conversation in a way that might be of more interest than other takes. Here again, the question is not “Is altruism the correct answer?” but rather “Under what conditions is altruism the correct answer and under what conditions is ego the correct answer?” Because the reality is that either one can be the correct answer under different circumstances. One general finding is that groups of altruists can succeed better than groups of egoists in a variety of settings, yet it can often be personally more beneficial to act in an egoist way as a member of a group of altruists–provided enough of the rest of the group remains altruistic.

As a result, having an altruistic group is not a stable state, meaning a situation where no one has an incentive to act differently. The challenge then becomes how to maintain an altruistic group against the incentives to gain even more by putting oneself first. One way or another, the answer basically involves making egoism more costly, whether through monetary penalties, loss of status, loss of freedom, or other measures. Groups that don’t have some means to encourage altruism run the risk of losing their group advantage. At the same time, human psychology is complex. If individuals perceive, accurately or otherwise, that they are incurring those penalties no matter what they do may feel justified in therefore taking the egoist route so that they at least get the maximum benefit to offset the penalty.

I wonder if some amount of this is manifesting in the button discourse, particularly among those defending their choice of red. In this particular framing, the self-interested selection of red does not intrinsically come at a cost to anyone else; it is possible for everyone to press red and live. Sure, one might make the assumption that someone will wind up pressing blue for any number of reasons, but in a thought experiment like this it is also valid to make some “spherical cow”-style assumptions and assume everyone understands the instructions and the implications perfectly, is able to perfectly execute their intention, and knows the same is true for everyone else. Since it is thus possible to construct red button scenarios where everyone lives, it may be worth exploring what assumptions and values someone brought to the analysis instead of just going by the single bit of information available from their color selection. You may still disagree with their choice or their reasoning, or think that they scenarios they are considering aren’t the right ones. But at least you’ll understand better where the differences lie.

¹I don’t think much can be inferred from the differing outcomes. There are just too many ways that social media polls can be biased in a statistical sense–the two pollers could have very different audiences, the algorithm can make different decisions at different times about who is shown the poll in their feed, etc.–for them to be taken as anything more than curiosities.

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Listed below you’ll find many Christian professional and academic societies, along with links to their websites and, in some cases, links to conferences and publications. For other connections with graduate students or faculty, see InterVarsity’s directories of local campus fellowships.

Affiliation of Christian Engineers

The Affiliation of Christian Engineers (ACE) is intended to serve as an organizational vehicle to facilitate Christian engineers and others in body of Christ intentionally and collectively seeking God’s will for the engineering profession and its Christian members, documenting the results, and then collectively and intentionally influencing the engineering profession accordingly.

Affiliation of Christian Geologists (ACG)

Promoting fellowship for Christian professionals in the geosciences and providing educational resources for people interested in issues relating to geology and Christianity.

American Scientific Affiliation (ASA)

The American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) is a fellowship of men and women in science and disciplines that relate to science who share a common fidelity to the Word of God and a commitment to integrity in the practice of science.

• Affiliation of Christian Biologists is a member organization of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), the ACB seeks to encourage fellowship among Christian biologists and provide a supportive environment for networking, exchanging ideas, and assisting with integration of biology and Christian thought in research and teaching within both Christian and non-Christian universities.
• Christian Women in Science an affiliate group of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA). The mission of CWIS is to encourage Christian women of all ages to pursue, sustain, and grow in a career in science, technology, engineering or math, and to encourage women in these endeavors to pursue, sustain, and grow in the Christian faith.
• God and Nature Magazine

Association of Christian Economists (ACE)

ACE seeks to encourage Christian scholars to explore and communicate the relationship between their faith and the discipline of economics, and to promote interaction and communication among Christian economists.

Association of Christian Librarians

ACL is an organization for evangelical librarians and publishes the print and online versions of the Christian Periodical Index, the leading guide to evangelical perspective journal articles.

Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences (ACMS)

The ACMS stated purposes are 1) To encourage Christians in the mathematical sciences to explore the relationship of their faith to their discipline; 2) To promote interaction among Christians in the mathematical sciences; 3) To encourage research and writing by Christians, especially on topics interrelating their faith and their discipline; and 4) To promote innovative and effective teaching.

• Conferences
• Journal 

Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS)

CAPS is an association of Christian professionals which exists to encourage understanding of the relationship between Christianity and the behavioral sciences at both the clinical/counseling and the theoretical/research levels, to promote fellowship among Christians in psychological and related professions, to support the spiritual, emotional and professional well-being of our members, and to offer educational and research opportunities that assist the profession and the community at large. Through its various programs,CAPS encourages the pursuit of excellence … in the counseling clinic, in the classroom, in the community and in the member’s spiritual and emotional life.

• Conferences

The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity

The Center is a Christian bioethics research center of Trinity International University, whose mission states, “exploring the nexus of biomedicine, biotechnology, and our common humanity,” designates our commitment to anticipate, research, and analyze the emerging bioethical issues of our day. In this way, the Center exists to equip thought leaders to engage the issues of bioethics using the tools of rigorous research, conceptual analysis, charitable critique, leading-edge publication, and effective teaching.

Chr-astro for Professional Astronomers

Chr-astro was developed as a website and e-mail list for professional astronomers who are Christians. The idea for chr-astro began over lunch at the January 1998 AAS conference in Washington, DC. This lunch group found that meeting other Christians in astronomy and discussing issues of common interest was useful and encouraging.

The Steering Committee decided to create a mailing list for ongoing (but low-volume) e-mail communication among Christian astronomers.

The purposes of this e-mail forum are:

1. To build a community of Christians in astronomy. We accomplish this in part by organizing gatherings at astronomy conferences and by distributing the contact information of subscribers to the list (inclusion is voluntary).
2. To discuss issues and share resources on topics of interest to Christians in astronomy.

Christian Business Faculty Association (CBFA)

The Christian Business Faculty Association exists to assist and encourage Christian business faculty in the study, integration, teaching, and application of Biblical truths in service to the academy, students, and the business community.

• Conferences
• The Christian Business Academy Review

Christian Educators

The mission of this organization is “To Encourage, Equip and Empower Educators according to Biblical Principles.” Its members have served the youth of America since 1953 through classroom teachers, administrators, and para-professionals in education.

Christian Engineering Society (CES)

The Christian Engineering Society is a loose-knit group of individuals interested in the relationship of engineering and Christianity. The society hosts a bi-annual conference.

Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers (CFAMC)

The CFAMC seeks to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ and help build His kingdom by encouraging Christian fellowship among its members in the context of their work and witness as composers of art music. We pray that believers will embrace our musical integrity because of our Christian witness, and that our commitment to musical excellence will allow us to bring our Christian witness to the wider art music world.

Christian Legal Society (CLS)

CLS is seeking justice with the love of God. Its mission is to inspire, encourage, and equip lawyers and law students, both individually and in community, to proclaim, love and serve Jesus Christ through the study and practice of law, the provision of legal assistance to the poor, and the defense of religious freedom & sanctity of human life.

• Conferences

Christian Medical & Dental Associations (CMDA)

CMDA exists to motivate, educate, and equip Christian physicians and dentists to glorify God.

• Conferences

Christian Neuroscience Society (CNS)

CNS is a group of Christians who are interested in furthering the dialogue between neuroscience and the truth of the Christian faith.

Christian Nuclear Fellowship (Nuclear Science and Technology)

The Christian Nuclear Fellowship (CNF) is an informal, interdenominational group of evangelical Christians who work in the field of nuclear science and technology and who want to encourage each other to faithfully follow Jesus Christ in both their private and public lives (including in their professional activities). Thank you for visiting our website.

Christian Performing Artists’ Fellowship (CPAF)

The Christian Performing Artists’ Fellowship seeks to bring the love of Christ to a relatively untouched mission field: the many thousands involved in the world of the performing arts. This includes performers, teachers, and audiences, as well as arts administrators. CPAF is organized as a trans-denominational ministry dedicated to performing and teaching the classical arts to the glory of God and to spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Christian Pharmacists Fellowship International (CPFI)

Christian Pharmacists Fellowship International is a worldwide ministry of individuals working in all areas of pharmaceutical service and practice. Their Mission is to provide fellowship among like-minded professionals, to challenge and promote spiritual growth, to encourage the advancement of knowledge and ethics in the practice of pharmacy, to encourage evangelism and the integration of faith into practice, and, to provide support and opportunity for service in both home and foreign missions.

Christian Scientific Society

The Christian Scientific Society is a society in the model of the Christian Legal Society and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations. It differs from some other science societies in that 1) members must be actual scientists or grad students (though others may become associate members), and 2) it is fairly theologically conservative but it is not a “young earth creationist” society.

Christian Society for Kinesiology and Leisure Studies (CSKLS)

The Society supports and encourages Christian professionals in the disciplines of health, physical education, recreation, dance, sport, and movement sciences to promote research and information that will contribute to the health and well-being of all people, image bearers of their Creator God.

Christian Sociological Society

The Christian Sociological Society is organized to provide a forum and fellowship for Christian Sociologists and related professionals and students to enable them to integrate their sociological academic background with their Christian faith.

Christian Veterinary Mission

CVM’s mission is to challenge, empower, and facilitate veterinarians to serve others through their profession, living out their Christian faith.

Christians in Political Science

CPS intends to encourage, and assist members to integrate their Christian faith into their research and writing; encourage, stimulate and assist members to bring insights and perspectives from their faith to classroom teaching in appropriate, creative ways; and provide a forum for fellowship among Christians in political science.

Christians in Theatre Arts (CITA)

Encouraging and Equipping Christians in Theatre Arts to impact the world and further the kingdom of God for over 20 years!

Conference on Christianity and Literature (CCL)

The Conference on Christianity and Literature is an interdisciplinary society dedicated to exploring the relationships between Christianity and literature.

• Journal: Christianity & Literature

Conference on Faith and History (CFH)

The purposes of the CFH are to encourage scholars to explore the relationship between Christian faith and historical studies, to provide a forum for discussion of philosophies, methods, and traditions of history and to foster research in the general area of faith and history, to encourage and advance teaching and research informed by Christian faith commitments, to bring before the larger historical community the concerns and perspectives of Christian historians, and to provide a context for mentoring and networking among historians from various Christian traditions.

• Conferences
• Journal: Fides et Historia

Engineering Ministries International (EMI)

EMI is a non-profit Christian development organization made up of architects, engineers and design professionals who donate their skills to help children and families around the world step out of poverty and into a world of hope.

Evangelical Philosophical Society

Founded in 1974, the Evangelical Philosophical Society (EPS) is an organization of professional scholars devoted to pursuing philosophical excellence in both the church and the academy. Interested laypersons can join as full, associate, or student members.

Evangelical Theological Society (ETS)

ETS is a professional society of Biblical scholars, teachers, pastors and others involved in evangelical scholarship in order to serve Christ and His Church.

The Faraday Institute for Science & Religion

The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion is an interdisciplinary research enterprise based at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. In addition to academic research, the Institute engages in the public understanding of science and religion by means of courses, conferences, lectures, seminars, and the media.

• Papers

Fellowship of Christian Librarians and Information Specialists (FOCLIS)

FOCLIS is a nondenominational organization of people involved in the library and information profession who are committed to the Christian faith and seek to reflect its principles in their personal and professional life.

Gegrapha

Gegrapha is a fellowship of journalists from all over the world who work in the secular media and share a common faith in Jesus Christ.

Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion

Image fosters contemporary art and writing that grapple with the mystery of being human by curating, cultivating, convening, and celebrating work that explores religious faith and spiritual questions.

International Arts Movement (IAMCultureCare)

IAM gathers artists and creative catalysts to wrestle with the deep questions of art, faith and humanity in order to inspire the creative community to engage the culture that is and create the world that ought to be.

The Network of Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA)

Christians in the Visual Arts exists to explore and nurture the relationship between the VISUAL ARTS and the CHRISTIAN FAITH.

North American Association of Christians in Social Work (NACSW)

NACSW equips its members to integrate Christian faith and professional social work practice.

• Conferences
• Social Work & Christianity

Nurses Christian Fellowship (NCF)

The mission of NCF is engaging students and nurses with the good news of Jesus Christ to bring God’s love and justice to nursing and healthcare.

• Journal of Christian Nursing

Society of Christian Philosophers

The Society of Christian Philosophers was organized in 1978 to promote fellowship among Christian Philosophers and to stimulate study and discussion of issues which arise from their Christian and philosophical commitments.

• Faith & Philosophy

Due to the dynamic nature of operating a website and having a “home” page online, we cannot speak to the whereabouts of organizations that might have changed their names, numbers, or website addresses since the compilation of this list and humbly apologize for any inconvenience if the list is not presently up-to-date.  If you find a link that needs to be updated or know of a group that should be included on this list, please contact esn@intervarsity.org.

We value the contribution of writers who are not employed by InterVarsity, some of whom may not necessarily agree with all aspects of InterVarsity’s ministry, doctrine, or policies. These writings are the words of the writers and may or may not represent InterVarsity. The same is true of any comments which may be posted about any entries. Submitted comments may or may not be posted at the writer or the editor’s discretion. 

The post Christian Professional and Academic Societies appeared first on Emerging Scholars Blog.

Last Wednesday, the world’s eyes looked to the skies (well, via streaming, natch) as the four astronauts of the Artemis II mission departed Earth to swing around the moon at a distance farther than any Terran has been from home. It’s pretty remarkable what humans can do when we put our minds to it and collaborate. So what’s next? There’s talk of moon bases, trips to Mars, asteroid mining, and more. Or we can stay here and focus on terrestrial matters.

You can check out a debate on some of those options (or listen here if you prefer):

While I’ll admit to not knowing the ideal path to get there, count me among those in favor of boldly going where no one has gone before…as far as we know. Sure, growing up on sci-fi probably gave me a certain leaning. And I recognize it will not be easy, cheap, or without the possibility of exploitation. Nevertheless, for me it boils down to this: Life is the most interesting thing we know of in the cosmos, and the more life there is in more places, the more interesting it will get.

And since we just observed Easter, I can’t help but think that goal is consistent with what we were celebrating (along with the astronauts). Of course, there are many layers to the culmination of the gospel that is Jesus’ death and resurrection. I hope you don’t think it diminishes any other aspects to observe how the life God gives is so abundantly overflowing that not even death could contain it. Why not do what we can to magnify that life even further?

Now, we don’t know there isn’t life already out there in places other than Earth. Maybe just next door on Mars, maybe under the ice on Europa, or maybe nowhere closer than MoM-z14 (although the concept of “already” gets a bit fuzzy talking about something 33.8 billion light-years away). If life is already abundant in the cosmos, great! Still, the work needed to figure that out has a lot in common with the work needed to take life from Earth elsewhere. We can plan for both scenarios and pivot as needed once we get out there.

Of course, “out there” is very, very far. Even just Mars is over 100 times farther away than the record that was just set. There are those who see the vast distances and inhospitable space in between as evidence that the cosmos is not meant for life, or that life is an insignificant part of the cosmos. Personally, I think there are other ways to measure significance besides physical volume occupied.

For example, we can consider the idea of the adjacent possible, as introduced by Stuart Kauffman. The realm of the actual consists of all the things that currently exist, from quarks to water and oxygen to you and me and our digital watches. We can then take various objects that actually exist and combine them to make new objects. Many of those will be duplicates of things that already existed, but some of them will be never-before-seen novelties, like the Orion spacecraft hanging out by the moon. Everything that could exist which is one step away from what does exist is the adjacent possible. And once new things from the adjacent possible become actual, some things which were previously two steps away are now just one, adding to the current adjacent possible. From what we can tell, the adjacent possible of life is much larger than the adjacent possible of interstellar space. So why can’t we consider that evidence of the cosmic significance of life?

While we contemplate expanding the sphere of life in the physical space of the cosmos, we can also consider expanding the adjacent possible of life on Earth. That can be innovating or bringing more living beings into the world. That can also be creating opportunities for others, or perhaps even just not eliminating opportunities for others. That can be a grand, global effort, and it can be an every day habit of creativity, of collaborating, of leaving the world with a little more potential that it had when we woke up. After all, if we are going to bring life to more of the cosmos, we want to bring the best of what we have to offer. Might as well working on bringing our best to everywhere on Earth too and keep the winning streak for life rolling.

The post Science Corner: Life Victorious appeared first on Emerging Scholars Blog.