David Sloan Wilson, evolutionary biologist who participated in our "God vs. Science" debate in April 2007 with Pulitzer winning science journalist Natalie Angier, will speak at the Capital Region Theological Center, April 25 and 26, 2014.
More about the upcoming event: http://crtc.org/civicrm/event/info?id=478&reset=1
More about God vs. Science in 2007: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/angier_n_wilson.html
Showing posts with label god. Show all posts
Showing posts with label god. Show all posts
Thursday, March 20, 2014
David Sloan Wilson addresses Albany theologians
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Dear God, I Hated This Book....
"Dear God, I hated this book. I hated this book more than Shakespeare and I really hated Shakespeare. The only work I hated more than Shakespeare's was the Old Testament, and I hated this book even more than I hated the Old Testament...." More. Read More......
Monday, March 19, 2012
On Fact and Fiction
"One of my own writing teachers, Richard Price, used to caution us students not to be too attached to facts. 'God’s a second-rate fiction writuh,' he’d say dismissively in thick Bronx-ese."
"I think he’s right. Some things are too perfect to be believable:
When I lived in New York I was dating a guy whose brother was a resident at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens. One night we smuggled him out—apparently he didn’t have off-site privileges—and took him for Chinese food. When the fortune cookies came, Robbie and I read ours. But when Brian broke open his own fortune cookie, there was nothing for him to read; the paper inside it was blank. I remember wanting to cry and not crying. I also remembered knowing that a scene like that, occurring in a novel or a short story, would seem heavy-handed, lugubriously symbolic. "
Jo Page, who speaks tomorrow at UAlbany and the Albany Public Library, published a meditation on what stories are and how they are told in her "Reckonings" column in last week's issue of Metroland.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Let Us Now Praise Satirical Jews
"Let us now praise satirical Jews. It's a noble tradition that includes such luminaries as Groucho Marx, Fran Lebowitz and Jon Stewart, outsiders who mock society with a surgical scalpel of wit to reveal the ridiculous in sharp relief. To that illustrious group some may consider adding writer Shalom Auslander. In his debut collection of short stories, Beware of God, Auslander takes his knife to the pious veneer of modern-day religious Jewish life and makes sport of exposing its underbelly. For the Gen-X and Gen-Y Jews who wear 'Moses Is My Homeboy' T-shirts and read Heeb magazine, a poet laureate may be in the making."
Ruth Andrew Ellison reviewed Shalom Auslander's debut story collection, Beware of God, in the L. A. Times in 2005. Read more.
Auslander visits the Institute tomorrow, Thursday, 3/1.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Alan Lightman Talks About God, fiction, etc.
Alan Lightman, novelist and physicist, talks on YouTube about God, books, physics and other weighty matters during his recent visit to the New York State Writers Institute on February 2, 2012.
"I let books choose me. I like to let ideas thrash around in my mind for a year or two...."
Lightman presented his new book, Mr. g: A Novel About the Creation (2012).
See the video.
Friday, February 17, 2012
The Mind of God
Physicist and bestselling author Michio Kaku, who visits the Writers Institute Tuesday 2/21, is at work on a "theory of everything" as proposed by Einstein.
Kaku approaches the issue via string theory, to which he is a major contributor:
"Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on vibrating strings, and the mind of God, the mind of God that Einstein worked on for the last 30 years of his life, the mind of God would be cosmic music. Cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. You see, our universe is a symphony. It's a symphony of vibrating strings and possibly membranes, but when it was born, it was born as a perfect entity in 11 dimensional hyperspace. That may eventually give us 'a theory of everything.'"
"So, people come up to me and say, 'Professor, if this is a theory of everything, what's in it for me? What's in it for numero uno? Why should I care?' Well, let me tell you why you should care about a theory of everything." More.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Looking into the void....
Alan Lightman visits this coming Thursday to present his new novel about God, Mr. G:
"As I remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I decided to create the universe."
"Not much was happening at that time. As a matter of fact, time didn't exist. Nor space. When you looked out into the Void, you were really looking at nothing more than your own thought. And if you tried to picture wind or stars or water, you could not give form or texture to your notions."
"Those things did not exist. Smooth, rough, waxy, sharp, prickly, brittle--even qualities such as these lacked meaning. Practically everything slept in an infinite torpor of potentiality. I knew that I could make whatever I wanted. But that was the problem. Unlimited possibilities bring unlimited indecision. When I thought about this particular creation or that, uncertain about how each thing would turn out, I grew anxious and went back to sleep. But at a particular moment, I managed . . . if not exactly to sweep aside my doubts, at least to take a chance."
Read more from Alan Lightman's Mr. g.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Science and Religion
Karen Quamme of the Columbus Dispatch finds Alan Lightman's unholy mixture of science and religion a delight:
"The novel might be too imaginative for readers who want to stick to the facts and too blasphemous for those who want their religion undiluted, but those who find science, poetry and religion a palatable mix will be delighted." More.
Alan Lightman visits this Thursday, 2/2.
Friday, January 27, 2012
The Most Interesting Unsolved Problem of Science
Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, who visits 2/2, is interviewed in the most recent issue of The Atlantic:
Q: "Mr. g" [the character of God in the novel] spends quite a while experimenting with consciousness, adding cells to an organism to see when it becomes conscious. What intrigues you about consciousness
A: For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
More.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
The Mind of God
Alan Lightman, who opens our series on Thursday, 2/2, interviewed on CBS News yesterday:
"In my novel Mr g, God is the narrator and tells the story in the first person. After living with the voice of God for the year that I worked on the book, with the power to create time and space, matter and energy, animate matter and consciousness, now and then I had tiny flashes of what it feels like to be all powerful."
"I had not expected this feeling, but I always try to inhabit the minds and bodies of the characters I create, and in this case I was attempting to imagine what it would be like to be God -- in a literary sense of course." More.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
A Capricious God
"[Shalom Auslander] is scabrously funny, especially on faith and meaning, but his stories have a habit of breaking down. This is partly because his great subject, God's capriciousness, is a closed loop and as such can be difficult to frame as narrative. 'Pascal's last words were: May God never abandon me,' he observes early in the novel. 'A moment later, God did.' In such a universe, it's not that bad things happen to good people, but that everything that happens is ultimately defined by its own meaninglessness, by the futility of being alive."
Read more of David Ulin's review in the L. A. Times.
Shalom Auslander visits the Writers Institute on March 1st.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Alan Lightman in Nature
"When a physics heavyweight is mentioned in the same breath as Salman Rushdie and Italo Calvino, it is tough for a reviewer. Few venture into air that rarefied and make it out alive. But when the book is Mr g, a creation myth by physicist Alan Lightman, it is worth the risk."
Read the review by Pedro Ferreira in the science journal, Nature.
Lightman visits the Institute Thursday, February 2nd.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Is Life Possible?
Physicist and author Alan Lightman (who kicks off the Visiting Writers Series on February 2) contributes an essay to the December 21st issue of Harper's about the burgeoning interest among physicists in the "multiverse theory," the theory that there are an incalculable number of universes.
He also addresses the mathematical impossibility of the fact that life exists, the rejection of intelligent design by the scientific community, and the possible explanation provided by multiverses. The more universes, the more likely that a mathematical fluke like life can come to be "by accident." Click to read the essay.
Lightman's essay received a 2011 Sidney Award bestowed by New York Times columnist David Brooks for the year's best American magazine essays.
Lightman will talk about his new novel, Mr. g: A Novel About the Creation, a playful exploration of the "grand ideas" of cosmological physics and the Creation stories of human religion.
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