Meaning can be straightforward — a red octagon means “Stop!”, a hand wave with a smile means “Hello,” or adding two and two equals four.
But meaning is often more complicated — a friend saying they’ll eat “whatever” for dinner or a significant other texting, “We need to talk.”
In this episode, our speakers invite you into the messiness of meaning — and discuss how best we can search for it.
You’ll hear a conversation between mathematician Satyan Devadoss (U San Diego) and biologist Stuart Firestein (Columbia). Satyan and Stuart bring their scientific backgrounds and religious perspectives as they explore the role of reason in the search for meaning, what can and can’t be taken at face value, and what strategies can help us find truth — from the scientific method to literary analysis to religious tradition.
This Forum was held at Columbia University in 2014. Thanks to the forums planning team at Columbia for making this event possible.
You give me ten different texts, and they all say different ways of what it means to be morally good. Who am I to pick which one's right? But I have to pick one. Well, what tools do I have to pick one? Is there anything else that's testable out there? For me, the fact about the Christian faith and the Judeo-Christian faith is there are some historical claims being made. That's attractive to me. You can actually do something.
Familiarity does not breed greater acceptance, necessarily. In fact, the longer something is around, the more it gets tested. It gets beat up as much as one can possibly beat it up. The idea of science is to take what is familiar and try and beat up on it, if you will. And I think that's the power of it for me.
I believe there's a God. And then the fair question to ask is, "If he is so good and so powerful and so strong, where is he?" This is the question people have asked throughout the ages in Scripture, and there is no cheap answer to that. There's no easy answer to that. My only answer to it is, "God understands that."
