December 28, 2023 • 42 mins
Join Daniel Toma, Dan and Catherine to discuss nature's intrinsic purpose and the liturgical structure of the universe. Through the lenses of ecology, theology, and philosophy, they examine humanity's role in the grand cosmic hierarchy.
Daniel Toma is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Minnesota State University Mankato. He is the author of Vestige of Eden, Image of Eternity: Common Experience, the Hierarchy of Being, and Modern Science
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
There's individual organisms that have a
seasonality, that have sort ofdirected drives to them.
If you watch them and they allcome together, you know modern
science would call ecology.
It's very much similar to whatyou've seen in an orchestra, and
so I think there's a purpose,you know, not just at an
individual level but at thewhole as well.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Welcome to Purposeful Lab at Modja Center Podcast.
I'm Catherine Hedra with Dr DanKiebler.
In this episode we're joined bya different Dan who's also a
biologist.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
He also worked on fruit flies which I have as well
, so there's a lot of parallelshere.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
It's like, how did you guys just meet at this point
?
But we'll be joined by DrDaniel Tomah.
He's a professor in theDepartment of Biological
Sciences at Minnesota StateUniversity, mankato.
He earned his doctorate inbehavioral genetics from the
University of Illinois at Urbana, champaign, and his interests
are, like I said, in geneticsand also this convergence of
faith and science, and we'll bespeaking to him about this book
(00:57):
he published a few years agocalled Vestige of Eden Image of
Eternity, common Experience, theHierarchy of being and Modern
Science.
And this is really.
He offers us basically thisfresh, new lens of looking at
creation and the universethrough this liturgical lens.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
That's right.
So, like you know, everybodyyou know can look at the
scientific data.
How do you interpret it?
He interprets through veryinteresting lens that I think
resonates with a lot of thethings that we see in sort of
the Christian and Catholictradition.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Definitely a fresh take.
And with that, we take you nowto our interview with Dr Daniel
Tomah.
Dr Daniel Tomah, thank you somuch for joining us, traveling
all the way from Minnesota.
You are a biologist who studiesgenetics.
Always interesting to hearpeople's back stories and how
they got into their interests.
So what led you into thisspecific field?
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Well, I guess it goes back to when I was a kid.
We lived I'm from SouthernIndiana, northern Kentucky, and
my dad had a place.
I grew up.
My latter half of my youth wasin Southern Indiana, the first
half was in Kentucky and my dadhad a place several miles south
of Louisville on the rural areaand there was a lot of fossils
in that area.
So the Falls of the Ohio wasone of the best Mississippian
(02:12):
fossil beds in the world and soa lot of the creek beds going on
the rural area.
So I would wander around thewoods and everything, and so one
just experiencing nature there,you know there.
And then the fossil beds.
I was fascinated with them.
The creek beds were lined with.
Actually one time I hadcollected, I think, seven
grocery bags full of fossils,and so I'm not quite sure what
happened to them All.
They got lost somehow.
(02:33):
So that was even though I didn'tbecome a paleontologist, which
is a biologist that studiesfossils.
But that's sort of probablywhat really got me going on at
the scene all the fossils andthen just the natural
surroundings and seeingeverything going on.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah, that's great.
One of the things that I findfascinating about you as a
biologist.
You pen this book and we'regoing to talk a lot about it
Vestige of Eden, the Image ofEternity.
And this book.
It's got a lot of biology in itbut it looks really at the
intersection of theology,philosophy and science and I
(03:07):
think it's rare, I think, to getbiologists that are interested
in theology and philosophy thatactually have some
sophistication at that level,which you clearly do.
If you're reading the book,there's a lot that think they do
and just throw out the ideasthat don't really stick.
But I think what drove you toreally explore these bigger
(03:28):
philosophical, theologicalquestions?
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Well, there were two factors, again going back much
more to my childhood.
So my mom was Roman Catholic,my dad was Southern Baptist and
so there was that tension in thefamily all the time as I was
growing up.
So the time we were raisedCatholic.
But by the time I got to highschool I started questioning a
lot of things and wonderingabout them.
When I got to, I went toIndiana University as an
undergraduate and at the timefor the first couple of years
(03:52):
there they had a great NewmanCenter and their history and
philosophy of the sciencedepartment.
I'm not quite sure what it'slike now, I haven't looked into,
but the time was one of thebest in the nation I still think
it's up there pretty high andso they had attracted a lot of
people, several people from likeThomas Aquinas College and went
there as undergraduates theCatholic Great Book School, so I
got to know some of thesepeople.
And then the Newman Centerthere, and so I started reading
(04:13):
a lot of stuff.
And then the fourth floor ofthe library there had a
fantastic collection of thechurch fathers at the Indiana
University Library.
So I spent a lot of time justreading on these and answering
questions about my own, aboutCatholicism and so forth.
And then, as I was interested inscience, I started having this
idea that, well so, readingstuff about Catholicism and so
(04:36):
forth, there was this notionlike, for instance, the natural
knowledge of God that exists andthen the revealed knowledge of
God, that is a trinity, and thenyou have other things
accessible or reason, like youhave the nation and the state
and the cities or sort ofnatural societies, and you have
the revealed society of thechurch, and so it struck me as
(04:57):
being trained as a scientist.
Nobody seems to be talkingabout this same idea in the
context of the universe.
What's the revealed teaching ofthe church?
And by this time I thought,okay, catholicism is the truth,
and so whatever it teaches about, whatever the revelation about
it, it must be the best way ofunderstanding it.
And so that sort of drove me ona long quest to answer that
(05:19):
question, and it particularlyhit me as odd that nobody was
talking about it, because whenyou open up Genesis, god meets
us initially cosmologically.
In the beginning, god createdthe heavens and the earth, and
so when I got to California, Iworked for California for
several years after my PhD I raninto a monk at a monastery out
there who pointed me in thedirection of Dionysius the
(05:39):
Apegat and he said read that.
And so I read that and that'swhat answered my question, that
there's a revealed teaching.
And that led me to Maximus theConfessor and so on, the church
fathers and Aquinas on that sameidea as well, thomas Aquinas.
So that was sort of one thing.
And then the other thing thatfed into that was, I read I was
about 25 years old, I read Johnof the Cross from cover to cover
(06:02):
, and the teaching was soprofound to me I thought somehow
I thought, okay, there's ateaching on the Trinity, the
incarnation, and then this hasto be up there as well, the
whole notion of deification thathe's talking about.
And I was so struck by that.
I thought somehow, if this isreally true, then everything has
got to be somehow involved inthat.
And my sort of my intuitionswere correct when I started
(06:26):
figuring out what the revealedteaching of the church was.
You might read Dionysius andMaximus and St Thomas, and so
that's how I as a biologist sortof came about.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Speaking of your book , pretty early on in the book
you make this observation thatthere's this disconnect between
scientism and common experienceor common sense, and you argue
scientism seems to call intoquestion our common experience.
You expand on that and how yousee that happening.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Well, yeah, I think it's, because some of the
questions that come up from theanalyses that come up in science
are really several orders ofseparation from reality, like
atoms and so forth and what agene is and what an atom is, and
these are really abstractions,not that there's not a reality
(07:16):
base, but there's an abstractionwith them and there's several
orders removed from what ourcommon experience of things is.
But the way we know things isour initial contact with reality
and what we call firstprinciples, that we come in
contact with them and ourintuitions about reality and
(07:36):
certain things like cause andeffect, and the whole is greater
than some of the parts and theprinciple non-contradiction.
That would go beyond that.
Also, I'd say certainintuitions based on the
observations of the naturalworld and things as well.
And there's a disconnect.
And I think in the graduateprograms there's a culture
(07:56):
that's built up around.
This notion is a mechanisticanalysis and it sort of
separates one from you know.
It builds sort of a bit of anivory tower and it separates one
from the other.
And so I think there's aculture built up in the graduate
schools that sort of, you know,instigates this or works us
into the person as they gothrough the training.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Yeah, I think one of the things that you don't have
is this common philosophicaltraining that you don't find
anymore, and so you know ifyou're off in your silo in grad
school and so you get into adifferent way of thinking than
people in other disciplines.
So there's something to that.
Now, you know, one of thethings that you know we do on
the podcast that we sort ofstress, is looking at sort of
(08:38):
the purpose in Aature and in theuniverse.
You know, in your book you getinto a lot of sort of levels of
purpose right.
So they're like what's thepurpose of the squirrel, right?
What's the purpose of you or meas a raccoon.
I also mentioned in a coupleothers.
But then they bear.
What is the purpose of theuniverse, what is the purpose of
creation?
Right, and we ultimately wantto get there because you got
(08:58):
some very interesting ideas onthat.
But I just you know purpose isreally a dirty word in biology
often, you know, if you say,well, we can't tell you what the
purpose of things are, we canonly look at it mechanistically
and say this is what does what,and then so forth.
But you know what observationslike drive you to say, hey,
(09:18):
there's purpose in nature, andwhy do you think it's so hard
for people to you know, maybecome to terms with that?
And people try to deny that,particularly in science, like in
institutional science.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
If you go on and ask a farmer, I think he very much
would think that there's purposein nature and again, I think
it's a culture that's set up inthe, in the particular graduate,
you know level that does that,and with a couple with a
mechanistic analysis.
So what are the observations?
Well, I mean, there's ErzineKohak in the book Embers and the
(09:53):
Stars, who talks about hisexperience up in New Hampshire
and he has a myriad ofobservations out there and I've,
when I read his book I foundvery much of a kinship with
myself and my own experienceswhen I was younger in Southern
Indiana and Northern Kentucky inthe woodlands, and but there's
just, you know, there's a wholebunch of different things.
You know so the cycling, youknow the events of the, of the,
(10:17):
of the seasons, you know theseasonalities and the different
things that occur, you know, inthe springtime and the summer
and the fall and the winter, andthey're all coordinated.
There's a, there's a court,there's certain things seem sort
of disparate, like like certainflowers will bloom and then the
insects will come out and birdswill migrate, and so what's
triggering?
But there's a, there's atriggering factor.
You know, the daylightlengthens and it gets warm, so
(10:37):
the those two things together.
You know you're biologists thatthere's, there's mechanisms
that will trigger this, andanimals, and so there's, and so
everything seems to be there's a, there's a layer of different.
You know things that worktogether and coordinate things.
You know things seem to bemoving toward an end and toward
a purpose, if you, if you, youknow, just sort of passively
watch them, and in the naturalworld and I think that's that's,
(10:59):
at least for me, that's that'swhat and if we think about use
the idea of an orchestra, youknow, so the orchestra there's,
there's, there's differentmusical instruments that are
that are being used, and and youhave different.
You know you have a firstviolinist and so forth, and you
have others down from that, andthey're all coordinated with
with a conductor, and so youknow there's a the individual
(11:21):
parts come together to make awhole and it's it's, it's the
whole interacting together andall the subordinate parts
working together and all thesuperior and subordinate parts
that that make the harmony of anorchestra.
And I think there's very muchof there's a very good analogy
when you go out in the naturalworld, there's all these
different things happening.
There's individual organismsthat have a seasonality and that
have sort of directed drives tothem if you watch them and they
(11:42):
all come together, you knowmodern science would call
ecology, you know, and all theinteractions and there's
different layers of biochemicaland living interactions and
they're all coordinated togetherand I think it's very much
similar to what you've seen inan orchestra and I in in.
So I think there's a, there's apurpose.
You know that, not just at anindividual level, but at the
whole as well, the, the whole of.
You know the cosmos and thedifferent layers you can see.
(12:05):
And then Galileo and Newtonlooked at the behavior of
various things, like, like balls, you know moving and gravity,
and how things would drop.
And then they looked at the.
And then Newton looked at therevolution of the planets and
the assumption, and theassumption he made was well, you
know, they're behaving the samelaws, they're behaving the same
way as a, as a ball would, youknow, fall here on earth.
(12:25):
And so the idea is we extendthat out into the universe and
so the same laws that areoperative here are operative out
in the universe.
So there's an, there's an, evena science, there's an implicit
assumption that the, that thethings are working together in
the same way at different levels.
And Darwin sort of does that.
Actually, you know his idea ofof artificial selection.
You know he used artificialselection as a model and he said
(12:46):
okay, you know the, theagriculturalist selects certain
plants and animals and, and soin nature we're going to say
it's survival, and but heextends that through time, and
the same, you know, back throughtime, in the same way that
Newton did that through throughspace.
And so I think there's a,there's an implicit assumption
that there's a unity and thingswork together.
You know she couldn't make that, you couldn't make that mental
(13:09):
leap, so to speak.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Yeah, that's interesting, the point about
Darwin, because he did think ofthose universal laws operating
in biology.
He wasn't like us, it's justwilly nilly.
He felt that there's laws therethat were, were were behind
evolutionary processes, ifthere's some coordinated thing
going on and sort of adirectionality in a sense.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
So one of the most interesting ideas in your book
again, vestige of Eden, image ofEternity, is how creation
reflects the liturgy, which I'venever heard before.
I think that's reallyinteresting and it's the liturgy
, again, is really the center ofour Christian faith.
The right worship of God andall of creation reflects this
(13:49):
structure and there's threedifferent stages here.
There's purgation, illuminationand then finally union, which
finds its archetype in theliturgy.
Can you expand on this concept?
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Sure, the first thing we got to do, we got to move
away from the idea of the churchsimply as an institution.
It's, it's really a, a mode ofbeing or a mode of existence.
And you know, we, we call itthe.
You know the new creation, thebride of Christ, and the and the
new kingdom.
And so you know Moses goes ontop of Sinai and he's goes into
the cloud and he's revealed the,the heavenly liturgy and the
(14:24):
and the structure that theheavenly temple and God tells
him to make, the, the one in thedesert, under the same format,
and so he makes a temple, andyou get that part in the latter
part of Exodus, in the middle ofit, in case you get that long,
drawn-out thing about.
You know you got to have Xamount of bases with made out of
bronze, and then you know thecubits, certain cubits long and
certain amount of colored hidesthrown over this, and it's
(14:46):
seemingly very boring, but a lotof the church fathers are
fascinated with it because it'sto talk about the structure of
creation really is what it is,and so all churches after that
have been modeled on that.
And so you have the narthex,the nave and the sanctuary.
So the narthex is traditionallywe don't do that so much in the
modern is where the catechumens, those who were being oriented
(15:06):
away from the world and towardthe mysteries of the faith, that
they were being purged, so tospeak.
And then you have the nave, orthe, those who were baptized,
the illumined faithful are, andthen you have the sanctuary,
where they come into union withGod.
And so you have what's calledpregation, illumination and
union.
And so the idea is, as you walkinto the liturgy and you have
the readings, and the readingsorient you away from your
(15:27):
concerns with the world.
They're purging you away fromyour concerns with the world.
And then you move into theafter that, the Nicene Creed,
which starts teaching you aboutthe faith.
And then you move into theconsecration, where it becomes
the body and blood of Christ andit's the idea of Christ with
the disciples at Emmaus.
He's walking along and thenthey get to Emmaus and it says
(15:50):
they have the breaking of thebread and they didn't know who
he was.
And then they recognize him atthe breaking of bread, in other
words the Eucharist.
And then you've asked us fromtheir site.
So the consecration isillumination and then the
reception of the Eucharist isunion with God.
So pregation, illumination andunion.
And Aquinas, specifically in hiscommentary on the divine names
(16:11):
of Dionysus, he actually says hesays all creation is ordered
according to the structure tolead men from glee, humans and
creatures from those lowerthings and ascent up to God, and
so the whole of reality isstructured on this.
And then you have the Hierarchyof being and the material
universe.
You have plants.
You can actually do it in acouple different ways.
(16:33):
You have material things,non-living material things, who
are sort of they're purged awayfrom non-existence so far as
they exist.
And then you have animals andplants which are the
ornamentation and humans are theunion.
Or you could just do livingthings, which plants represent,
pregation, animals, eliminationand humans union.
And so the whole of theuniverse is there, like Aquinas
(16:56):
says, to lead men up, to leadhumans up to God, and so the
whole thing is there to mediatethis notion of deification.
So, talking about purpose,that's the highest idea is that
it's there to lead everything uptoward God.
It's to mediate to a greater orlesser degree, the same thing
that the liturgy does, and soeverything is participates to a
greater or lesser degree in theactions of the liturgy.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
And just like you see this, there's an analogy
between the spiritual journeywhere, on a journey towards
something, the church sees thatcreation is on journey.
It's towards an ultimateperfection.
So you see, this journey increation, this 14-building here
journey, you could see thisprogression in a sense that
mirrors this.
So is that what you would seein this sort of cosmic and
(17:42):
biological evolutionaryprogression?
Is it moving towards somethingalong the stages of a similar,
analogous to sort of a spiritualjourney?
Speaker 1 (17:50):
So all creatures are called to union with God.
Rational and electric creaturesare called to union with God.
But it's a much deeper andricher notion.
So we go back to one of yourquestions about initial
questions you asked.
So again, the idea of thedifference between natural
knowledge and revealed knowledge.
And so, in the same way thatthe existence of God, which is
(18:12):
accessible to our reason, itpales in comparison with the
revealed knowledge of theTrinity.
The simple notion that we talkabout I think we talk about a
lot and too much in Catholicism,in my opinion is a notion of
simply reality as being, whichis kind of a sterile idea, or as
reality is the very guts ofbeing, so to speak.
(18:35):
Our propagation, illumination,union is a much richer concept.
It's the whole notion ofdriving everything into this
notion of deification andtheosis and that the whole idea,
the incarnation, has perfusedall over it.
There's a very beautiful Iforget which church in the
Christian East, one of thechurch fathers they mentioned.
This is that the transformationof Christ, the Tabor on the
(18:59):
transfiguration, that thisTaboric light sort of went
through all of creation.
Since Christ is God, he'soutside of time.
There's a notion that could gobackwards and forwards in time
and it sort of perfuses all thereality and everything that's
good and beautiful in creationcomes from this Taboric light
and it's this deifying force ofGod that's transforming the
(19:20):
whole of creation, this wholenotion of purgation,
illumination, union.
This is what being is and thisis what the church is again, the
new creation.
And this is what it is.
It's not just some sterilenotion of being.
This is what it is.
This is this whole idea ofeverything being drawn into this
deified state with God.
So it's a much richer, deeperpenitentiary.
(19:44):
That is sort of what reality is.
I think I mentioned in my bookthat I like to think of it as
and it's not me, I mean in thepast, other writers all the
biological laws of the universeand everything are moving toward
Mary, a container for God tobecome incarnate, for this whole
process to occur.
So the whole 14 billion yearsof material laws and workings
(20:09):
are moving toward one singleperson to be able to bring God
incarnate.
Speaker 3 (20:13):
Yeah, yeah.
Now does this transform maybe,the way you have to see the
science of the natural world?
Do you have to change your viewof scientific discovery, or the
nature of science, or does thescience?
It's almost like you have thismeta-analysis of how to a lens
(20:34):
by which to view nature.
Right, but it doesn't changehow you do science or so forth.
It's just a different, a richerway of seeing what and viewing
what the natural world really isall about.
Does that?
Speaker 1 (20:50):
It doesn't change the scientific method one bit,
because that's a valid way ofanalyzing it.
It changed the interpretationof it, interpretation of the
data, in many instances, and sowe'd have to get into how
Aquinas looks at this in termsof what they call the essential
actions at the different levelsof material being to fully
answer that question.
But in short, it changes the.
(21:12):
I would say it changes theinterpretation of data.
So let me give you just a quickexample.
Just have a look at theevolutionary record, the idea of
different body plans.
You go from asymmetric spongeson the fossil record to radio,
like Nidarians and jellyfish,where everything is like a piece
(21:32):
of pie.
You cut a piece of pie and youhad the same nerves and
everything and the samebilateral which we are.
You split us down the centerand we're mere halves.
Now the standard biologicalinterpretation is in a bilateral
organism.
You have all the senses are upfront and the visceral
reproduction and digestion aredown below.
And so the standard biologicalinterpretation is and it's a
(21:52):
valid point, I'm not, you knowand that animals do this in
order to survive and make somesurvive better.
They all their senses up front,they can see their predators
and catch their prey better.
But if we again, if we takethis liturgical structure and
look how Aquinas analyze whatare called the essential actions
of those, the higher way ofinterpreting, I would say, this
(22:15):
liturgical idea is that thewhole of life is being organized
to put the senses up front, toprepare for a rational creature.
In other words, everything'sbeing prepared for the reception
of the human soul, for anirrational organism.
Not that the standardbiological question is wrong,
but I think there's a higher wayof looking at it.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
What was it that Thomas Aquinas you mentioned him
earlier.
What was it that Thomas Aquinastalked about the hierarchy of
beings.
And then what does that reflectagain about this liturgical
aspect of creation?
Speaker 1 (22:49):
He gives what I would call a natural liturgical
analog to this.
He says what is the essentialaction at each level?
And he does this by saying andI guess the best way of putting
it in context the technical termis the immanence of it, but
let's use the word interiority.
So as you move up the hierarchyof being, there's a greater and
greater interiorization ofactions at each level of being.
(23:10):
So let's start with non-livingthings, using a billiard ball.
So a billiard ball simply is anexternal force transferred to
one billiard ball and it rollsand hits another billiard ball.
And that's really what allmodern science, like physics, is
about.
It's analysis of extra.
You know, your taught inphysics, you know the force of
actors acting on things.
So it's about essentially asuite of external forces acting
(23:32):
on something and thosetransferring it.
There's no real self-movementof the thing.
You know a non-living thing.
So you move it to plants.
Plants are dependent on theexternal world, granted.
I mean, you know they drawsunlight for photosynthesis,
they use, they use, they draw onminerals like nitrates and
everything.
But they bring all these in andthere's an interiorization,
(23:53):
transient interiorization, andthen they produce something
completely different.
They produce a flower and afruit.
They produce a self, again,essentially an exteriorized self
, but there is a transientinteriorization of this.
So you move to the level ofanimals.
Animals, again, are dependent onthe outside world.
They sense things and so but,and so what they're doing is
they're sensing, you know,they're hearing, they're seeing,
(24:15):
they're smelling, and they forma interior memory.
So the action terminatesinteriorly.
So you have the sensing, actionterminates as an interior
memory.
I mean anybody who's a dogexperience that remembers you,
and so forth.
And so the action of sensingwill terminate interiorly, as an
interior set of memories.
So we move to humans, again,depending on the exterior world,
(24:36):
we have to sense things, but weuse sense things.
We get to the idea of awhetness, you know.
We get to the idea of theessence of the thing.
We go beyond what an animaldoes and they were able to use
that to come up with ideas thatyou don't directly sense, like a
perfect triangle ormathematical laws, or like the
distinction between an app.
(24:57):
You know the whet of an apple,you know.
So I can, you know, you and Ican't share the exact same apple
.
If we're eating it, you have totake one bite, I think a
different bite, but the idea.
We can, we can share Matter offact.
By discussing it, we both canhave the same idea and actually
enrich the idea even more.
And so humans, because the ideais not strictly material, it's
(25:20):
something beyond that.
And so humans come to theconclusion of things by using
exterior objects, they come tothe idea of things that you
can't necessarily con in reality, and they also come to the
notion of a sense of excuse me,a sense of self.
So they form by theirexperience of everything.
They start forming this idea ofthemselves and you start
(25:42):
thinking about yourself and youhave sort of an image of
yourself which is sort ofreproduction.
It's an interior reproductionof you, and so there's much more
of a dynamic notion in humansthan there is with animals.
So it becomes yet more and moreinterior.
We conclude the things and wereason the things that don't
have any existence, that wecan't sense outside of us, that
they don't exist but we can'tsense outside of us.
(26:03):
And then let's go just beyond,just to flesh this out to the
angelic world.
And so they're not dependent atall for their knowledge.
Outside, everything is theideas are given by God at the
moment of creation, and theyconclude everything interiorly.
And then finally we say we haveGod at the pinnacle of this,
who just simply knows himself.
It knows everything as a resultof that, so it's purely God's
(26:25):
not dependent on anythingoutside of him, he simply knows
himself.
And then things exist becausehe wills them into existence.
And so there's a movement,increase in interiority all the
way up, and that's sort of anatural liturgical analog, and I
will come you back to the ideaof this.
I talked about body organization, the body plant, and so you can
(26:50):
see that there's this movementtoward interiorization, toward
rationality in the materialworld, and again I mentioned the
body plant.
So things are being organizedfor sensing, for a rational soul
, and we can use other data,just like the.
So we talk about, we see aprogression of more primitive to
(27:10):
more advanced than the fossilrecord yet and we use that as a
basis for modern biologicaltheories such as evolution and
so forth.
But the hierarchy of being,that the man, evils and the
ancient use this liturgicalstructure would say predicts
that exactly as well.
I mean, that's the idea thatyou're going from the more
simple to the more complex.
So it would predict that justas well.
(27:31):
And so the data.
It's the same data that you seein science the exact same data.
So it doesn't change thescience.
It doesn't change theacquisition of scientific data.
It's just a different way ofinterpreting it that's more
inconstant and it makeseverything.
It makes the whole of the faithmore sense, because Christ is
not in the incarnation, is notdropped down into this
(27:52):
interacting universe of atomsand particles that have no
relationship to them.
He's dropped down into auniverse that he's literally
created to draw to himself.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Yeah, I just like that you can take on how you,
because I think a lot of whatyou said resonates for someone
with a sort of a Catholic orChristian understanding of
reality.
So many kids, so many youngpeople are.
They're taught through modernscience that there's no purpose,
there is no meaning.
(28:24):
You see it in evolutionarytextbooks there's no
directionality, there's nopurpose.
How would you?
A student comes up to you, drToma, there isn't anything,
there's just chance all the waydown.
There's nothing going on here,there's no directionality, there
is no meaning to this.
How do you help them with thatwhen they might not be able to
(28:51):
grasp the liturgical structurebecause they don't have a faith
background?
Okay, how would you approachthese people?
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I would just point out the initial questions about
natural world.
I hate to think there's purposein the natural world.
You talk about what animals doand the seasonality of things
and the interactions of things.
That they all bespeak ofpurpose and it's very much like
an orchestra or an army how thedifferent ranks of military
(29:20):
interact together and it's anyother hierarchical structure.
I think it's very evident withthe natural.
So I would argue it from thatstandpoint.
A co-hack in his book, theEmbers and the Stars actually he
talks about he says the problemis he uses the idea of time.
He says the problem we have ineducating people and so forth is
(29:40):
we lean very much toward amechanistic analysis.
We make artificial constructsfor the use of science and then
we basically tell people this isthe way it is, for instance, in
time.
He says the natural experienceof time is seasonality.
It's not hours and minutes.
That's a construct that we usefor our convenience and that's a
construct we use in scientificexperiments to control things,
(30:03):
to analyze things, but it's apurely artificial construct.
The natural experience of timeis the seasonality in the summer
, the winter, the spring, thedays, because the sun comes up
and goes down andso forth, and the lunar cycle,
the moon.
When you look at those incontext of what they're doing
with the rest of the world, Ithink there's a purpose in this
that comes about, whereas theidea of seconds and minutes and
(30:27):
so forth, it mechanizes it.
But that's the way we tend tothink.
You ask anybody at time they'llsay what hour is it?
Yeah, and so we've mechanizedit and I think, just leaning
students and a lot of studentshave grown up in cities and
they've never seen anythingabout the natural.
They have no idea.
They really have no experienceof it whatsoever, and so they're
living in a series ofartificial constructs that
(30:49):
they've been taught about thesethings.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yeah, that's interesting.
The distance from naturedistances you from the reality.
You have this veil between youand reality.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yeah, I was reading.
I think I forgot where I wasreading.
Some nun was in a Catholicschool was talking about she got
her students.
It took her all year but shegot her students fascinated by
watching Aunt Mountain if theywould kick it, how the ants
would run around and she saidshe considered that a major
victory actually to be able toget them interested in something
out, yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
No, I know a college professor that does an exercise
where he has students go out anddraw the faces of the moon over
time, over a month, and theyhave no idea.
Do I go out at the same timeevery day?
Well, we'll see if that works.
We'll see if that works.
They don't even know the cycleof the moon around them and when
it rises, and so forth.
We have this disconnect that Ithink, like he says, leads us to
(31:42):
okay, what do we read in ourtextbook and how do we mechanize
things?
Because that's easier andsanitary and I don't have to go
out and see what's actuallygoing on in nature.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
And yet we're made to go outside of ourself and to
observe what is around us.
And again, applying thisliturgical lens to the universe,
it seems what we're talkingabout, this hierarchy, really
puts human intelligence at theapex.
And you talked about theincarnation, and it seems like
we're yeah, we're the bridgebetween the two.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
A lot of the church writers would say that we're the
bridge between the two.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
And so the fact that we are these essential bridges,
if you will.
What's your reaction to peoplewho think, oh no, humans, their
creation is just by chance onthis planet, that's
insignificant.
Do you have any kind ofreaction?
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Well, it is sort of insignificant the planet itself
and the content because they'rejust looking at the universe
from a materialistic standpoint.
It is insignificant from amaterialistic standpoint where a
moderate-sized galaxy in anarea and we're actually in one
of the arms of the galaxy that'snot that dense with other stars
(32:50):
Fortunately we wouldn't be here, because if you get too dense,
because the other stars providetoo much radiation for life and
we're one planet and we'rediscovering planets all over.
So in a materialistic sense,yes, we're insignificant, but
that's not the only way we viewthings.
We never view things strictlyon the basis of materiality.
I mean, you don't do that onyour ordinary day, but we tend
(33:12):
to want to do that in scientificarguments and cosmological at
least the modern way of doingthat but not from the standpoint
of what we are and not in thestandpoint of the incarnation.
No matter how insignificant youtry to reduce the planet Earth
and everything you can make itinsignificant as you want, it
still doesn't abrogate thesignificance of the incarnation
(33:33):
and that we're the central focalpoint of reality.
Because of that, Well, it'sgreat.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
This is a very great discussion.
It's an excellent book.
I recommend it to our listenersand just give you a last chance
to reflect on particularly whatwould you like our listeners to
take away from your book if youhad to say this is what I think
is the key insight that thiscan offer people and help us to
(34:01):
better understand reality.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Well, okay, to the Catholic I would say that
there's another, completelydifferent way of looking at
reality that you should availyourself of.
That is much more consonantwith your faith, that makes
everything pull together.
And to the non-Catholic I wouldsay there still is another way.
In the medieval and theancients, you know, like Aquinas
talking about the differentlevels of the hierarchy of being
(34:25):
, and it doesn't contradictmodern science at all.
And so modern science againgoing back to that notion of the
hierarchy of being that looksat things from the essential
action, whereas modern sciencelooks at it from the standpoint
of structure and functions.
And so there's another way oflooking at it.
So I guess the bigger point is,whether you're Catholic or
Christian or non-believer,there's a different way of
(34:46):
looking at reality than justwhat we're being taught.
I think in the modern worldwe're taught in a very confined
way that this is the only way ofdoing it and the only way of
looking at it.
And it's not.
And in other ancient ways arejust as valid and they have a
lot to contribute.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah, Not only they have a lot to contribute, they
don't disrupt our science.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
They don't disrupt science at all.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
You can keep all of modern science, looking at it
with a different, more richer,as you've mentioned frameworks.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Yeah, thank you for illuminating us, so that's new
perspective Dr Daniel Tommet.
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Okay, Thank you Again .
Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
It's great to have Dan join us, traveling all the
way from Minnesota.
Something that stood out to meis this theme that we've hit on
now, a few different episodesabout how we, as man, are
designed and created to beoutside of ourselves.
We've talked about that's whatultimately leads to happiness
when we're serving others, whenwe have this empathy and he hit
on that as well.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Yeah, he did, and I think you talked about how the
evolutionary process of gettingthe centralized nervous system
and even though you think ofupright posture to free up my
hands so I can interact withpeople in a way, there's
something about the man is meantto be drawn out of him.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
What else stood out to you?
Speaker 3 (35:59):
I think the one key thing that stood out to me and
this is something I think isreally important for people to
understand is that everybodylooks at the science through
some lens.
This is because the science,without interpreting, it's just
a bunch of facts.
It's just a bunch of facts.
You have to look at the factsand try to interpret and make
sense of it, and everybody doesthat through some lens, and
(36:21):
there's some philosophical lensand biases that people are
bringing to it.
A lot of people don't recognizeit.
So, whether you're bringing anatheistic lens, a materialistic
lens or a Christian lens, youare bringing a lens to interpret
the scientific data, and he'svery upfront that he's
interpreting the scientific datathe same data that everybody
else has through this Christianlens, and I think that.
(36:45):
So how do you determine whichlens is the best?
I think you look at it, whichone that gives you the richest,
most accurate picture of reality.
That corresponds to how we seereality in our common everyday
experience, or something aboutthat.
And that's what he talks aboutthe purpose and seeing that in
nature, because that's what yousee as you interact with nature.
Things are ordered towards anend and a purpose, and the
(37:06):
cyclical nature of things, theseasons and so forth, and the
ecologies and so forth, and Ithink that resonates more.
That resonates more with thesort of catholic liturgical
understanding of creationcreation meant for an end.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
No, that's really important, because you'll hear
people say no, I'm just lookingat just the facts, just the
science, but whether you realizeit or not, there's some
philosophical lens that it'sfilling that perspective.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
So that's right, making those connections there
Right.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
All right, well, great interview, really fresh,
interesting perspective to hearthat.
But with that we go now tooffice hours.
We've got some fresh questionsfor you, dan, so I'm going to
throw them at you now.
Saw this article.
The Journal of Sciencepublished further evidence that
points to footprints in NewMexico being the oldest sign of
(37:55):
humans in the Americas.
So this is a pretty recentdiscovery.
The backstory is two years ago.
There was this team ofscientists and they published
findings and it really rockedthe world of archaeology, from
what I understand and from whatI've read, because there were
human footprints found in NewMexico's White Sands National
Park between 23,000 and 21,000years old, and that puts them
(38:20):
during the height of the ice ageand at least 5,000 years before
most archaeologists thoughtpeople had even arrived in the
Americas.
How significant is this, dan,and does this change our
understanding of human evolution?
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Yeah, no, I don't think it changes it that much,
but I think it's a verysignificant finding and it's
interesting because modernhumans are known to have left
Africa about 50,000.
The last wave of modern humansthat left Africa about 50,000
years ago, that's the wave thatwent and basically colonized the
globe and it shows how quicklyhumans migrated.
That wave, you know, peoplerecently thought it got to the
(38:59):
Americas about 15,000 years ago.
Now it's 20,000, maybe 25,000years ago.
But that wave got to Australia40,000, 45,000 years ago.
So it just shows the drive thathumans have for exploration.
I think, and maybe we should becalled homo-wanderlustus.
We have this wanderlust whereas soon as they leave Africa, we
go and migrate as far as we can.
(39:21):
And so I think that'sfascinating and speaks to what
makes humans unique, that wewant to go and explore and drive
and, unlike many in the otherworld, we can live in so many
different habitats because wehave the ability to shape our
environment and to survive inall kinds of different places.
And it really speaks to theuniqueness of the humans.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Especially if this was at the height of the Ice Age
Like I cannot even imagine.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Yeah, to get across the Bering Strait and down into
the new world Wouldn't have beenan easy trip, but you know
that's why people go climb MountEverest.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
I guess Better than me.
This next question is inspiredfrom a conversation I seen to
how with my husband every Sunday.
So he's a huge football fan andit seems every time we're
watching a game together thereare really serious injuries.
And you hear these professionalfootball players, I think, talk
pretty casually at times aboutrepeated concussions.
(40:18):
There's this phrase, you know,got my bell rung, yeah right.
Curious from your reaction tothis as someone who's a
biologist, someone who's, youknow, an athlete in your own
right.
Would you let your sons playprofessional football?
You know how damaging is it.
We talk about it it's prettycommon to hear this of just
(40:39):
repeated concussions.
But how damaging is that.
Speaker 3 (40:42):
Yeah, I think, all the data and I do a survey
course that I teach atFranciscan and we talk about
this because students are alwaysinterested in about concussions
, and not only in football andother sports, but particularly
in sports, in football.
You know the number ofconcussions, particularly at a
young age.
You know, unless you're youthfootball, you know this is, I
(41:03):
think, you know, a problem thatpeople have really put a lot of
research into address and everystudy you find you shows that.
You know in general that peopleare probably having more
concussions than they actuallyrecognize and that there is
changes in the brain Now exactlywhat they do and how long term
studies.
But even looking atprofessional football players,
(41:24):
you see changes in their brain,you know, down the road.
So there's a lot of evidencethat points to you know there's
some serious problems and Ithink football, you know, as a
sport, is looking at differentways to try to minimize this,
because I think it is certainlya serious, serious issue.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
I think I've heard some people say playing a
professional football game isthe equivalent of getting in a
serious car accident everysingle week.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
So no, yeah, so it's not.
I'm glad my kids they, theythey they steered away they
didn't play football, it was, Ithink.
They were just small when theywere little, so they just went
into different sports.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
So well ended up, maybe helping them in the long
run.
Well, okay, thanks foranswering those questions and I
want to let our listeners andviewers know that you can submit
your questions as well byemailing info at monjacentercom.
You can also call our hotline,calling us at 949-257-2436,
949-257-2436.
(42:23):
We have that number for you onthe screen as well.
You can leave us a voicemailand maybe your question will be
read here and Dr Dan Keeber willanswer that.
But that does it for thisepisode of Purposeful Lab, a
Modja Center podcast.
Make sure to subscribe and goto ModjaCentercom for the latest
.
Thanks.
There's individual organisms that have a
seasonality, that have sort ofdirected drives to them.
If you watch them and they allcome together, you know modern
science would call ecology.
It's very much similar to whatyou've seen in an orchestra, and
so I think there's a purpose,you know, not just at an
individual level but at thewhole as well.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Welcome to Purposeful Lab at Modja Center Podcast.
I'm Catherine Hedra with Dr DanKiebler.
In this episode we're joined bya different Dan who's also a
biologist.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
He also worked on fruit flies which I have as well
, so there's a lot of parallelshere.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
It's like, how did you guys just meet at this point
?
But we'll be joined by DrDaniel Tomah.
He's a professor in theDepartment of Biological
Sciences at Minnesota StateUniversity, mankato.
He earned his doctorate inbehavioral genetics from the
University of Illinois at Urbana, champaign, and his interests
are, like I said, in geneticsand also this convergence of
faith and science, and we'll bespeaking to him about this book
(00:57):
he published a few years agocalled Vestige of Eden Image of
Eternity, common Experience, theHierarchy of being and Modern
Science.
And this is really.
He offers us basically thisfresh, new lens of looking at
creation and the universethrough this liturgical lens.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
That's right.
So, like you know, everybodyyou know can look at the
scientific data.
How do you interpret it?
He interprets through veryinteresting lens that I think
resonates with a lot of thethings that we see in sort of
the Christian and Catholictradition.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Definitely a fresh take.
And with that, we take you nowto our interview with Dr Daniel
Tomah.
Dr Daniel Tomah, thank you somuch for joining us, traveling
all the way from Minnesota.
You are a biologist who studiesgenetics.
Always interesting to hearpeople's back stories and how
they got into their interests.
So what led you into thisspecific field?
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Well, I guess it goes back to when I was a kid.
We lived I'm from SouthernIndiana, northern Kentucky, and
my dad had a place.
I grew up.
My latter half of my youth wasin Southern Indiana, the first
half was in Kentucky and my dadhad a place several miles south
of Louisville on the rural areaand there was a lot of fossils
in that area.
So the Falls of the Ohio wasone of the best Mississippian
(02:12):
fossil beds in the world and soa lot of the creek beds going on
the rural area.
So I would wander around thewoods and everything, and so one
just experiencing nature there,you know there.
And then the fossil beds.
I was fascinated with them.
The creek beds were lined with.
Actually one time I hadcollected, I think, seven
grocery bags full of fossils,and so I'm not quite sure what
happened to them All.
They got lost somehow.
(02:33):
So that was even though I didn'tbecome a paleontologist, which
is a biologist that studiesfossils.
But that's sort of probablywhat really got me going on at
the scene all the fossils andthen just the natural
surroundings and seeingeverything going on.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah, that's great.
One of the things that I findfascinating about you as a
biologist.
You pen this book and we'regoing to talk a lot about it
Vestige of Eden, the Image ofEternity.
And this book.
It's got a lot of biology in itbut it looks really at the
intersection of theology,philosophy and science and I
(03:07):
think it's rare, I think, to getbiologists that are interested
in theology and philosophy thatactually have some
sophistication at that level,which you clearly do.
If you're reading the book,there's a lot that think they do
and just throw out the ideasthat don't really stick.
But I think what drove you toreally explore these bigger
(03:28):
philosophical, theologicalquestions?
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Well, there were two factors, again going back much
more to my childhood.
So my mom was Roman Catholic,my dad was Southern Baptist and
so there was that tension in thefamily all the time as I was
growing up.
So the time we were raisedCatholic.
But by the time I got to highschool I started questioning a
lot of things and wonderingabout them.
When I got to, I went toIndiana University as an
undergraduate and at the timefor the first couple of years
(03:52):
there they had a great NewmanCenter and their history and
philosophy of the sciencedepartment.
I'm not quite sure what it'slike now, I haven't looked into,
but the time was one of thebest in the nation I still think
it's up there pretty high andso they had attracted a lot of
people, several people from likeThomas Aquinas College and went
there as undergraduates theCatholic Great Book School, so I
got to know some of thesepeople.
And then the Newman Centerthere, and so I started reading
(04:13):
a lot of stuff.
And then the fourth floor ofthe library there had a
fantastic collection of thechurch fathers at the Indiana
University Library.
So I spent a lot of time justreading on these and answering
questions about my own, aboutCatholicism and so forth.
And then, as I was interested inscience, I started having this
idea that, well so, readingstuff about Catholicism and so
(04:36):
forth, there was this notionlike, for instance, the natural
knowledge of God that exists andthen the revealed knowledge of
God, that is a trinity, and thenyou have other things
accessible or reason, like youhave the nation and the state
and the cities or sort ofnatural societies, and you have
the revealed society of thechurch, and so it struck me as
(04:57):
being trained as a scientist.
Nobody seems to be talkingabout this same idea in the
context of the universe.
What's the revealed teaching ofthe church?
And by this time I thought,okay, catholicism is the truth,
and so whatever it teaches about, whatever the revelation about
it, it must be the best way ofunderstanding it.
And so that sort of drove me ona long quest to answer that
(05:19):
question, and it particularlyhit me as odd that nobody was
talking about it, because whenyou open up Genesis, god meets
us initially cosmologically.
In the beginning, god createdthe heavens and the earth, and
so when I got to California, Iworked for California for
several years after my PhD I raninto a monk at a monastery out
there who pointed me in thedirection of Dionysius the
(05:39):
Apegat and he said read that.
And so I read that and that'swhat answered my question, that
there's a revealed teaching.
And that led me to Maximus theConfessor and so on, the church
fathers and Aquinas on that sameidea as well, thomas Aquinas.
So that was sort of one thing.
And then the other thing thatfed into that was, I read I was
about 25 years old, I read Johnof the Cross from cover to cover
(06:02):
, and the teaching was soprofound to me I thought somehow
I thought, okay, there's ateaching on the Trinity, the
incarnation, and then this hasto be up there as well, the
whole notion of deification thathe's talking about.
And I was so struck by that.
I thought somehow, if this isreally true, then everything has
got to be somehow involved inthat.
And my sort of my intuitionswere correct when I started
(06:26):
figuring out what the revealedteaching of the church was.
You might read Dionysius andMaximus and St Thomas, and so
that's how I as a biologist sortof came about.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Speaking of your book , pretty early on in the book
you make this observation thatthere's this disconnect between
scientism and common experienceor common sense, and you argue
scientism seems to call intoquestion our common experience.
You expand on that and how yousee that happening.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Well, yeah, I think it's, because some of the
questions that come up from theanalyses that come up in science
are really several orders ofseparation from reality, like
atoms and so forth and what agene is and what an atom is, and
these are really abstractions,not that there's not a reality
(07:16):
base, but there's an abstractionwith them and there's several
orders removed from what ourcommon experience of things is.
But the way we know things isour initial contact with reality
and what we call firstprinciples, that we come in
contact with them and ourintuitions about reality and
(07:36):
certain things like cause andeffect, and the whole is greater
than some of the parts and theprinciple non-contradiction.
That would go beyond that.
Also, I'd say certainintuitions based on the
observations of the naturalworld and things as well.
And there's a disconnect.
And I think in the graduateprograms there's a culture
(07:56):
that's built up around.
This notion is a mechanisticanalysis and it sort of
separates one from you know.
It builds sort of a bit of anivory tower and it separates one
from the other.
And so I think there's aculture built up in the graduate
schools that sort of, you know,instigates this or works us
into the person as they gothrough the training.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Yeah, I think one of the things that you don't have
is this common philosophicaltraining that you don't find
anymore, and so you know ifyou're off in your silo in grad
school and so you get into adifferent way of thinking than
people in other disciplines.
So there's something to that.
Now, you know, one of thethings that you know we do on
the podcast that we sort ofstress, is looking at sort of
(08:38):
the purpose in Aature and in theuniverse.
You know, in your book you getinto a lot of sort of levels of
purpose right.
So they're like what's thepurpose of the squirrel, right?
What's the purpose of you or meas a raccoon.
I also mentioned in a coupleothers.
But then they bear.
What is the purpose of theuniverse, what is the purpose of
creation?
Right, and we ultimately wantto get there because you got
(08:58):
some very interesting ideas onthat.
But I just you know purpose isreally a dirty word in biology
often, you know, if you say,well, we can't tell you what the
purpose of things are, we canonly look at it mechanistically
and say this is what does what,and then so forth.
But you know what observationslike drive you to say, hey,
(09:18):
there's purpose in nature, andwhy do you think it's so hard
for people to you know, maybecome to terms with that?
And people try to deny that,particularly in science, like in
institutional science.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
If you go on and ask a farmer, I think he very much
would think that there's purposein nature and again, I think
it's a culture that's set up inthe, in the particular graduate,
you know level that does that,and with a couple with a
mechanistic analysis.
So what are the observations?
Well, I mean, there's ErzineKohak in the book Embers and the
(09:53):
Stars, who talks about hisexperience up in New Hampshire
and he has a myriad ofobservations out there and I've,
when I read his book I foundvery much of a kinship with
myself and my own experienceswhen I was younger in Southern
Indiana and Northern Kentucky inthe woodlands, and but there's
just, you know, there's a wholebunch of different things.
You know so the cycling, youknow the events of the, of the,
(10:17):
of the seasons, you know theseasonalities and the different
things that occur, you know, inthe springtime and the summer
and the fall and the winter, andthey're all coordinated.
There's a, there's a court,there's certain things seem sort
of disparate, like like certainflowers will bloom and then the
insects will come out and birdswill migrate, and so what's
triggering?
But there's a, there's atriggering factor.
You know, the daylightlengthens and it gets warm, so
(10:37):
the those two things together.
You know you're biologists thatthere's, there's mechanisms
that will trigger this, andanimals, and so there's, and so
everything seems to be there's a, there's a layer of different.
You know things that worktogether and coordinate things.
You know things seem to bemoving toward an end and toward
a purpose, if you, if you, youknow, just sort of passively
watch them, and in the naturalworld and I think that's that's,
(10:59):
at least for me, that's that'swhat and if we think about use
the idea of an orchestra, youknow, so the orchestra there's,
there's, there's differentmusical instruments that are
that are being used, and and youhave different.
You know you have a firstviolinist and so forth, and you
have others down from that, andthey're all coordinated with
with a conductor, and so youknow there's a the individual
(11:21):
parts come together to make awhole and it's it's, it's the
whole interacting together andall the subordinate parts
working together and all thesuperior and subordinate parts
that that make the harmony of anorchestra.
And I think there's very muchof there's a very good analogy
when you go out in the naturalworld, there's all these
different things happening.
There's individual organismsthat have a seasonality and that
have sort of directed drives tothem if you watch them and they
(11:42):
all come together, you knowmodern science would call
ecology, you know, and all theinteractions and there's
different layers of biochemicaland living interactions and
they're all coordinated togetherand I think it's very much
similar to what you've seen inan orchestra and I in in.
So I think there's a, there's apurpose.
You know that, not just at anindividual level, but at the
whole as well, the, the whole of.
You know the cosmos and thedifferent layers you can see.
(12:05):
And then Galileo and Newtonlooked at the behavior of
various things, like, like balls, you know moving and gravity,
and how things would drop.
And then they looked at the.
And then Newton looked at therevolution of the planets and
the assumption, and theassumption he made was well, you
know, they're behaving the samelaws, they're behaving the same
way as a, as a ball would, youknow, fall here on earth.
(12:25):
And so the idea is we extendthat out into the universe and
so the same laws that areoperative here are operative out
in the universe.
So there's an, there's an, evena science, there's an implicit
assumption that the, that thethings are working together in
the same way at different levels.
And Darwin sort of does that.
Actually, you know his idea ofof artificial selection.
You know he used artificialselection as a model and he said
(12:46):
okay, you know the, theagriculturalist selects certain
plants and animals and, and soin nature we're going to say
it's survival, and but heextends that through time, and
the same, you know, back throughtime, in the same way that
Newton did that through throughspace.
And so I think there's a,there's an implicit assumption
that there's a unity and thingswork together.
You know she couldn't make that, you couldn't make that mental
(13:09):
leap, so to speak.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Yeah, that's interesting, the point about
Darwin, because he did think ofthose universal laws operating
in biology.
He wasn't like us, it's justwilly nilly.
He felt that there's laws therethat were, were were behind
evolutionary processes, ifthere's some coordinated thing
going on and sort of adirectionality in a sense.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
So one of the most interesting ideas in your book
again, vestige of Eden, image ofEternity, is how creation
reflects the liturgy, which I'venever heard before.
I think that's reallyinteresting and it's the liturgy
, again, is really the center ofour Christian faith.
The right worship of God andall of creation reflects this
(13:49):
structure and there's threedifferent stages here.
There's purgation, illuminationand then finally union, which
finds its archetype in theliturgy.
Can you expand on this concept?
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Sure, the first thing we got to do, we got to move
away from the idea of the churchsimply as an institution.
It's, it's really a, a mode ofbeing or a mode of existence.
And you know, we, we call itthe.
You know the new creation, thebride of Christ, and the and the
new kingdom.
And so you know Moses goes ontop of Sinai and he's goes into
the cloud and he's revealed the,the heavenly liturgy and the
(14:24):
and the structure that theheavenly temple and God tells
him to make, the, the one in thedesert, under the same format,
and so he makes a temple, andyou get that part in the latter
part of Exodus, in the middle ofit, in case you get that long,
drawn-out thing about.
You know you got to have Xamount of bases with made out of
bronze, and then you know thecubits, certain cubits long and
certain amount of colored hidesthrown over this, and it's
(14:46):
seemingly very boring, but a lotof the church fathers are
fascinated with it because it'sto talk about the structure of
creation really is what it is,and so all churches after that
have been modeled on that.
And so you have the narthex,the nave and the sanctuary.
So the narthex is traditionallywe don't do that so much in the
modern is where the catechumens, those who were being oriented
(15:06):
away from the world and towardthe mysteries of the faith, that
they were being purged, so tospeak.
And then you have the nave, orthe, those who were baptized,
the illumined faithful are, andthen you have the sanctuary,
where they come into union withGod.
And so you have what's calledpregation, illumination and
union.
And so the idea is, as you walkinto the liturgy and you have
the readings, and the readingsorient you away from your
(15:27):
concerns with the world.
They're purging you away fromyour concerns with the world.
And then you move into theafter that, the Nicene Creed,
which starts teaching you aboutthe faith.
And then you move into theconsecration, where it becomes
the body and blood of Christ andit's the idea of Christ with
the disciples at Emmaus.
He's walking along and thenthey get to Emmaus and it says
(15:50):
they have the breaking of thebread and they didn't know who
he was.
And then they recognize him atthe breaking of bread, in other
words the Eucharist.
And then you've asked us fromtheir site.
So the consecration isillumination and then the
reception of the Eucharist isunion with God.
So pregation, illumination andunion.
And Aquinas, specifically in hiscommentary on the divine names
(16:11):
of Dionysus, he actually says hesays all creation is ordered
according to the structure tolead men from glee, humans and
creatures from those lowerthings and ascent up to God, and
so the whole of reality isstructured on this.
And then you have the Hierarchyof being and the material
universe.
You have plants.
You can actually do it in acouple different ways.
(16:33):
You have material things,non-living material things, who
are sort of they're purged awayfrom non-existence so far as
they exist.
And then you have animals andplants which are the
ornamentation and humans are theunion.
Or you could just do livingthings, which plants represent,
pregation, animals, eliminationand humans union.
And so the whole of theuniverse is there, like Aquinas
(16:56):
says, to lead men up, to leadhumans up to God, and so the
whole thing is there to mediatethis notion of deification.
So, talking about purpose,that's the highest idea is that
it's there to lead everything uptoward God.
It's to mediate to a greater orlesser degree, the same thing
that the liturgy does, and soeverything is participates to a
greater or lesser degree in theactions of the liturgy.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
And just like you see this, there's an analogy
between the spiritual journeywhere, on a journey towards
something, the church sees thatcreation is on journey.
It's towards an ultimateperfection.
So you see, this journey increation, this 14-building here
journey, you could see thisprogression in a sense that
mirrors this.
So is that what you would seein this sort of cosmic and
(17:42):
biological evolutionaryprogression?
Is it moving towards somethingalong the stages of a similar,
analogous to sort of a spiritualjourney?
Speaker 1 (17:50):
So all creatures are called to union with God.
Rational and electric creaturesare called to union with God.
But it's a much deeper andricher notion.
So we go back to one of yourquestions about initial
questions you asked.
So again, the idea of thedifference between natural
knowledge and revealed knowledge.
And so, in the same way thatthe existence of God, which is
(18:12):
accessible to our reason, itpales in comparison with the
revealed knowledge of theTrinity.
The simple notion that we talkabout I think we talk about a
lot and too much in Catholicism,in my opinion is a notion of
simply reality as being, whichis kind of a sterile idea, or as
reality is the very guts ofbeing, so to speak.
(18:35):
Our propagation, illumination,union is a much richer concept.
It's the whole notion ofdriving everything into this
notion of deification andtheosis and that the whole idea,
the incarnation, has perfusedall over it.
There's a very beautiful Iforget which church in the
Christian East, one of thechurch fathers they mentioned.
This is that the transformationof Christ, the Tabor on the
(18:59):
transfiguration, that thisTaboric light sort of went
through all of creation.
Since Christ is God, he'soutside of time.
There's a notion that could gobackwards and forwards in time
and it sort of perfuses all thereality and everything that's
good and beautiful in creationcomes from this Taboric light
and it's this deifying force ofGod that's transforming the
(19:20):
whole of creation, this wholenotion of purgation,
illumination, union.
This is what being is and thisis what the church is again, the
new creation.
And this is what it is.
It's not just some sterilenotion of being.
This is what it is.
This is this whole idea ofeverything being drawn into this
deified state with God.
So it's a much richer, deeperpenitentiary.
(19:44):
That is sort of what reality is.
I think I mentioned in my bookthat I like to think of it as
and it's not me, I mean in thepast, other writers all the
biological laws of the universeand everything are moving toward
Mary, a container for God tobecome incarnate, for this whole
process to occur.
So the whole 14 billion yearsof material laws and workings
(20:09):
are moving toward one singleperson to be able to bring God
incarnate.
Speaker 3 (20:13):
Yeah, yeah.
Now does this transform maybe,the way you have to see the
science of the natural world?
Do you have to change your viewof scientific discovery, or the
nature of science, or does thescience?
It's almost like you have thismeta-analysis of how to a lens
(20:34):
by which to view nature.
Right, but it doesn't changehow you do science or so forth.
It's just a different, a richerway of seeing what and viewing
what the natural world really isall about.
Does that?
Speaker 1 (20:50):
It doesn't change the scientific method one bit,
because that's a valid way ofanalyzing it.
It changed the interpretationof it, interpretation of the
data, in many instances, and sowe'd have to get into how
Aquinas looks at this in termsof what they call the essential
actions at the different levelsof material being to fully
answer that question.
But in short, it changes the.
(21:12):
I would say it changes theinterpretation of data.
So let me give you just a quickexample.
Just have a look at theevolutionary record, the idea of
different body plans.
You go from asymmetric spongeson the fossil record to radio,
like Nidarians and jellyfish,where everything is like a piece
(21:32):
of pie.
You cut a piece of pie and youhad the same nerves and
everything and the samebilateral which we are.
You split us down the centerand we're mere halves.
Now the standard biologicalinterpretation is in a bilateral
organism.
You have all the senses are upfront and the visceral
reproduction and digestion aredown below.
And so the standard biologicalinterpretation is and it's a
(21:52):
valid point, I'm not, you knowand that animals do this in
order to survive and make somesurvive better.
They all their senses up front,they can see their predators
and catch their prey better.
But if we again, if we takethis liturgical structure and
look how Aquinas analyze whatare called the essential actions
of those, the higher way ofinterpreting, I would say, this
(22:15):
liturgical idea is that thewhole of life is being organized
to put the senses up front, toprepare for a rational creature.
In other words, everything'sbeing prepared for the reception
of the human soul, for anirrational organism.
Not that the standardbiological question is wrong,
but I think there's a higher wayof looking at it.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
What was it that Thomas Aquinas you mentioned him
earlier.
What was it that Thomas Aquinastalked about the hierarchy of
beings.
And then what does that reflectagain about this liturgical
aspect of creation?
Speaker 1 (22:49):
He gives what I would call a natural liturgical
analog to this.
He says what is the essentialaction at each level?
And he does this by saying andI guess the best way of putting
it in context the technical termis the immanence of it, but
let's use the word interiority.
So as you move up the hierarchyof being, there's a greater and
greater interiorization ofactions at each level of being.
(23:10):
So let's start with non-livingthings, using a billiard ball.
So a billiard ball simply is anexternal force transferred to
one billiard ball and it rollsand hits another billiard ball.
And that's really what allmodern science, like physics, is
about.
It's analysis of extra.
You know, your taught inphysics, you know the force of
actors acting on things.
So it's about essentially asuite of external forces acting
(23:32):
on something and thosetransferring it.
There's no real self-movementof the thing.
You know a non-living thing.
So you move it to plants.
Plants are dependent on theexternal world, granted.
I mean, you know they drawsunlight for photosynthesis,
they use, they use, they draw onminerals like nitrates and
everything.
But they bring all these in andthere's an interiorization,
(23:53):
transient interiorization, andthen they produce something
completely different.
They produce a flower and afruit.
They produce a self, again,essentially an exteriorized self
, but there is a transientinteriorization of this.
So you move to the level ofanimals.
Animals, again, are dependent onthe outside world.
They sense things and so but,and so what they're doing is
they're sensing, you know,they're hearing, they're seeing,
(24:15):
they're smelling, and they forma interior memory.
So the action terminatesinteriorly.
So you have the sensing, actionterminates as an interior
memory.
I mean anybody who's a dogexperience that remembers you,
and so forth.
And so the action of sensingwill terminate interiorly, as an
interior set of memories.
So we move to humans, again,depending on the exterior world,
(24:36):
we have to sense things, but weuse sense things.
We get to the idea of awhetness, you know.
We get to the idea of theessence of the thing.
We go beyond what an animaldoes and they were able to use
that to come up with ideas thatyou don't directly sense, like a
perfect triangle ormathematical laws, or like the
distinction between an app.
(24:57):
You know the whet of an apple,you know.
So I can, you know, you and Ican't share the exact same apple
.
If we're eating it, you have totake one bite, I think a
different bite, but the idea.
We can, we can share Matter offact.
By discussing it, we both canhave the same idea and actually
enrich the idea even more.
And so humans, because the ideais not strictly material, it's
(25:20):
something beyond that.
And so humans come to theconclusion of things by using
exterior objects, they come tothe idea of things that you
can't necessarily con in reality, and they also come to the
notion of a sense of excuse me,a sense of self.
So they form by theirexperience of everything.
They start forming this idea ofthemselves and you start
(25:42):
thinking about yourself and youhave sort of an image of
yourself which is sort ofreproduction.
It's an interior reproductionof you, and so there's much more
of a dynamic notion in humansthan there is with animals.
So it becomes yet more and moreinterior.
We conclude the things and wereason the things that don't
have any existence, that wecan't sense outside of us, that
they don't exist but we can'tsense outside of us.
(26:03):
And then let's go just beyond,just to flesh this out to the
angelic world.
And so they're not dependent atall for their knowledge.
Outside, everything is theideas are given by God at the
moment of creation, and theyconclude everything interiorly.
And then finally we say we haveGod at the pinnacle of this,
who just simply knows himself.
It knows everything as a resultof that, so it's purely God's
(26:25):
not dependent on anythingoutside of him, he simply knows
himself.
And then things exist becausehe wills them into existence.
And so there's a movement,increase in interiority all the
way up, and that's sort of anatural liturgical analog, and I
will come you back to the ideaof this.
I talked about body organization, the body plant, and so you can
(26:50):
see that there's this movementtoward interiorization, toward
rationality in the materialworld, and again I mentioned the
body plant.
So things are being organizedfor sensing, for a rational soul
, and we can use other data,just like the.
So we talk about, we see aprogression of more primitive to
(27:10):
more advanced than the fossilrecord yet and we use that as a
basis for modern biologicaltheories such as evolution and
so forth.
But the hierarchy of being,that the man, evils and the
ancient use this liturgicalstructure would say predicts
that exactly as well.
I mean, that's the idea thatyou're going from the more
simple to the more complex.
So it would predict that justas well.
(27:31):
And so the data.
It's the same data that you seein science the exact same data.
So it doesn't change thescience.
It doesn't change theacquisition of scientific data.
It's just a different way ofinterpreting it that's more
inconstant and it makeseverything.
It makes the whole of the faithmore sense, because Christ is
not in the incarnation, is notdropped down into this
(27:52):
interacting universe of atomsand particles that have no
relationship to them.
He's dropped down into auniverse that he's literally
created to draw to himself.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Yeah, I just like that you can take on how you,
because I think a lot of whatyou said resonates for someone
with a sort of a Catholic orChristian understanding of
reality.
So many kids, so many youngpeople are.
They're taught through modernscience that there's no purpose,
there is no meaning.
(28:24):
You see it in evolutionarytextbooks there's no
directionality, there's nopurpose.
How would you?
A student comes up to you, drToma, there isn't anything,
there's just chance all the waydown.
There's nothing going on here,there's no directionality, there
is no meaning to this.
How do you help them with thatwhen they might not be able to
(28:51):
grasp the liturgical structurebecause they don't have a faith
background?
Okay, how would you approachthese people?
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I would just point out the initial questions about
natural world.
I hate to think there's purposein the natural world.
You talk about what animals doand the seasonality of things
and the interactions of things.
That they all bespeak ofpurpose and it's very much like
an orchestra or an army how thedifferent ranks of military
(29:20):
interact together and it's anyother hierarchical structure.
I think it's very evident withthe natural.
So I would argue it from thatstandpoint.
A co-hack in his book, theEmbers and the Stars actually he
talks about he says the problemis he uses the idea of time.
He says the problem we have ineducating people and so forth is
(29:40):
we lean very much toward amechanistic analysis.
We make artificial constructsfor the use of science and then
we basically tell people this isthe way it is, for instance, in
time.
He says the natural experienceof time is seasonality.
It's not hours and minutes.
That's a construct that we usefor our convenience and that's a
construct we use in scientificexperiments to control things,
(30:03):
to analyze things, but it's apurely artificial construct.
The natural experience of timeis the seasonality in the summer
, the winter, the spring, thedays, because the sun comes up
and goes down andso forth, and the lunar cycle,
the moon.
When you look at those incontext of what they're doing
with the rest of the world, Ithink there's a purpose in this
that comes about, whereas theidea of seconds and minutes and
(30:27):
so forth, it mechanizes it.
But that's the way we tend tothink.
You ask anybody at time they'llsay what hour is it?
Yeah, and so we've mechanizedit and I think, just leaning
students and a lot of studentshave grown up in cities and
they've never seen anythingabout the natural.
They have no idea.
They really have no experienceof it whatsoever, and so they're
living in a series ofartificial constructs that
(30:49):
they've been taught about thesethings.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yeah, that's interesting.
The distance from naturedistances you from the reality.
You have this veil between youand reality.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yeah, I was reading.
I think I forgot where I wasreading.
Some nun was in a Catholicschool was talking about she got
her students.
It took her all year but shegot her students fascinated by
watching Aunt Mountain if theywould kick it, how the ants
would run around and she saidshe considered that a major
victory actually to be able toget them interested in something
out, yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
No, I know a college professor that does an exercise
where he has students go out anddraw the faces of the moon over
time, over a month, and theyhave no idea.
Do I go out at the same timeevery day?
Well, we'll see if that works.
We'll see if that works.
They don't even know the cycleof the moon around them and when
it rises, and so forth.
We have this disconnect that Ithink, like he says, leads us to
(31:42):
okay, what do we read in ourtextbook and how do we mechanize
things?
Because that's easier andsanitary and I don't have to go
out and see what's actuallygoing on in nature.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
And yet we're made to go outside of ourself and to
observe what is around us.
And again, applying thisliturgical lens to the universe,
it seems what we're talkingabout, this hierarchy, really
puts human intelligence at theapex.
And you talked about theincarnation, and it seems like
we're yeah, we're the bridgebetween the two.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
A lot of the church writers would say that we're the
bridge between the two.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
And so the fact that we are these essential bridges,
if you will.
What's your reaction to peoplewho think, oh no, humans, their
creation is just by chance onthis planet, that's
insignificant.
Do you have any kind ofreaction?
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Well, it is sort of insignificant the planet itself
and the content because they'rejust looking at the universe
from a materialistic standpoint.
It is insignificant from amaterialistic standpoint where a
moderate-sized galaxy in anarea and we're actually in one
of the arms of the galaxy that'snot that dense with other stars
(32:50):
Fortunately we wouldn't be here, because if you get too dense,
because the other stars providetoo much radiation for life and
we're one planet and we'rediscovering planets all over.
So in a materialistic sense,yes, we're insignificant, but
that's not the only way we viewthings.
We never view things strictlyon the basis of materiality.
I mean, you don't do that onyour ordinary day, but we tend
(33:12):
to want to do that in scientificarguments and cosmological at
least the modern way of doingthat but not from the standpoint
of what we are and not in thestandpoint of the incarnation.
No matter how insignificant youtry to reduce the planet Earth
and everything you can make itinsignificant as you want, it
still doesn't abrogate thesignificance of the incarnation
(33:33):
and that we're the central focalpoint of reality.
Because of that, Well, it'sgreat.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
This is a very great discussion.
It's an excellent book.
I recommend it to our listenersand just give you a last chance
to reflect on particularly whatwould you like our listeners to
take away from your book if youhad to say this is what I think
is the key insight that thiscan offer people and help us to
(34:01):
better understand reality.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Well, okay, to the Catholic I would say that
there's another, completelydifferent way of looking at
reality that you should availyourself of.
That is much more consonantwith your faith, that makes
everything pull together.
And to the non-Catholic I wouldsay there still is another way.
In the medieval and theancients, you know, like Aquinas
talking about the differentlevels of the hierarchy of being
(34:25):
, and it doesn't contradictmodern science at all.
And so modern science againgoing back to that notion of the
hierarchy of being that looksat things from the essential
action, whereas modern sciencelooks at it from the standpoint
of structure and functions.
And so there's another way oflooking at it.
So I guess the bigger point is,whether you're Catholic or
Christian or non-believer,there's a different way of
(34:46):
looking at reality than justwhat we're being taught.
I think in the modern worldwe're taught in a very confined
way that this is the only way ofdoing it and the only way of
looking at it.
And it's not.
And in other ancient ways arejust as valid and they have a
lot to contribute.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah, Not only they have a lot to contribute, they
don't disrupt our science.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
They don't disrupt science at all.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
You can keep all of modern science, looking at it
with a different, more richer,as you've mentioned frameworks.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Yeah, thank you for illuminating us, so that's new
perspective Dr Daniel Tommet.
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Okay, Thank you Again .
Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
It's great to have Dan join us, traveling all the
way from Minnesota.
Something that stood out to meis this theme that we've hit on
now, a few different episodesabout how we, as man, are
designed and created to beoutside of ourselves.
We've talked about that's whatultimately leads to happiness
when we're serving others, whenwe have this empathy and he hit
on that as well.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Yeah, he did, and I think you talked about how the
evolutionary process of gettingthe centralized nervous system
and even though you think ofupright posture to free up my
hands so I can interact withpeople in a way, there's
something about the man is meantto be drawn out of him.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
What else stood out to you?
Speaker 3 (35:59):
I think the one key thing that stood out to me and
this is something I think isreally important for people to
understand is that everybodylooks at the science through
some lens.
This is because the science,without interpreting, it's just
a bunch of facts.
It's just a bunch of facts.
You have to look at the factsand try to interpret and make
sense of it, and everybody doesthat through some lens, and
(36:21):
there's some philosophical lensand biases that people are
bringing to it.
A lot of people don't recognizeit.
So, whether you're bringing anatheistic lens, a materialistic
lens or a Christian lens, youare bringing a lens to interpret
the scientific data, and he'svery upfront that he's
interpreting the scientific datathe same data that everybody
else has through this Christianlens, and I think that.
(36:45):
So how do you determine whichlens is the best?
I think you look at it, whichone that gives you the richest,
most accurate picture of reality.
That corresponds to how we seereality in our common everyday
experience, or something aboutthat.
And that's what he talks aboutthe purpose and seeing that in
nature, because that's what yousee as you interact with nature.
Things are ordered towards anend and a purpose, and the
(37:06):
cyclical nature of things, theseasons and so forth, and the
ecologies and so forth, and Ithink that resonates more.
That resonates more with thesort of catholic liturgical
understanding of creationcreation meant for an end.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
No, that's really important, because you'll hear
people say no, I'm just lookingat just the facts, just the
science, but whether you realizeit or not, there's some
philosophical lens that it'sfilling that perspective.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
So that's right, making those connections there
Right.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
All right, well, great interview, really fresh,
interesting perspective to hearthat.
But with that we go now tooffice hours.
We've got some fresh questionsfor you, dan, so I'm going to
throw them at you now.
Saw this article.
The Journal of Sciencepublished further evidence that
points to footprints in NewMexico being the oldest sign of
(37:55):
humans in the Americas.
So this is a pretty recentdiscovery.
The backstory is two years ago.
There was this team ofscientists and they published
findings and it really rockedthe world of archaeology, from
what I understand and from whatI've read, because there were
human footprints found in NewMexico's White Sands National
Park between 23,000 and 21,000years old, and that puts them
(38:20):
during the height of the ice ageand at least 5,000 years before
most archaeologists thoughtpeople had even arrived in the
Americas.
How significant is this, dan,and does this change our
understanding of human evolution?
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Yeah, no, I don't think it changes it that much,
but I think it's a verysignificant finding and it's
interesting because modernhumans are known to have left
Africa about 50,000.
The last wave of modern humansthat left Africa about 50,000
years ago, that's the wave thatwent and basically colonized the
globe and it shows how quicklyhumans migrated.
That wave, you know, peoplerecently thought it got to the
(38:59):
Americas about 15,000 years ago.
Now it's 20,000, maybe 25,000years ago.
But that wave got to Australia40,000, 45,000 years ago.
So it just shows the drive thathumans have for exploration.
I think, and maybe we should becalled homo-wanderlustus.
We have this wanderlust whereas soon as they leave Africa, we
go and migrate as far as we can.
(39:21):
And so I think that'sfascinating and speaks to what
makes humans unique, that wewant to go and explore and drive
and, unlike many in the otherworld, we can live in so many
different habitats because wehave the ability to shape our
environment and to survive inall kinds of different places.
And it really speaks to theuniqueness of the humans.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Especially if this was at the height of the Ice Age
Like I cannot even imagine.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Yeah, to get across the Bering Strait and down into
the new world Wouldn't have beenan easy trip, but you know
that's why people go climb MountEverest.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
I guess Better than me.
This next question is inspiredfrom a conversation I seen to
how with my husband every Sunday.
So he's a huge football fan andit seems every time we're
watching a game together thereare really serious injuries.
And you hear these professionalfootball players, I think, talk
pretty casually at times aboutrepeated concussions.
(40:18):
There's this phrase, you know,got my bell rung, yeah right.
Curious from your reaction tothis as someone who's a
biologist, someone who's, youknow, an athlete in your own
right.
Would you let your sons playprofessional football?
You know how damaging is it.
We talk about it it's prettycommon to hear this of just
(40:39):
repeated concussions.
But how damaging is that.
Speaker 3 (40:42):
Yeah, I think, all the data and I do a survey
course that I teach atFranciscan and we talk about
this because students are alwaysinterested in about concussions
, and not only in football andother sports, but particularly
in sports, in football.
You know the number ofconcussions, particularly at a
young age.
You know, unless you're youthfootball, you know this is, I
(41:03):
think, you know, a problem thatpeople have really put a lot of
research into address and everystudy you find you shows that.
You know in general that peopleare probably having more
concussions than they actuallyrecognize and that there is
changes in the brain Now exactlywhat they do and how long term
studies.
But even looking atprofessional football players,
(41:24):
you see changes in their brain,you know, down the road.
So there's a lot of evidencethat points to you know there's
some serious problems and Ithink football, you know, as a
sport, is looking at differentways to try to minimize this,
because I think it is certainlya serious, serious issue.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
I think I've heard some people say playing a
professional football game isthe equivalent of getting in a
serious car accident everysingle week.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
So no, yeah, so it's not.
I'm glad my kids they, theythey they steered away they
didn't play football, it was, Ithink.
They were just small when theywere little, so they just went
into different sports.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
So well ended up, maybe helping them in the long
run.
Well, okay, thanks foranswering those questions and I
want to let our listeners andviewers know that you can submit
your questions as well byemailing info at monjacentercom.
You can also call our hotline,calling us at 949-257-2436,
949-257-2436.
(42:23):
We have that number for you onthe screen as well.
You can leave us a voicemailand maybe your question will be
read here and Dr Dan Keeber willanswer that.
But that does it for thisepisode of Purposeful Lab, a
Modja Center podcast.
Make sure to subscribe and goto ModjaCentercom for the latest
.
Thanks.
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