Humility as a Guide to Progress
By Frederica Mathewes-Green – Special Contributor
The age of specialization has successfully concentrated brainpower on solving many vexing problems, but sometimes, solutions come only when experts step outside their disciplines and talk to others.
Take, for example, the puzzling mass deaths of honeybee colonies. Recently, an unlikely team of military scientists and entomologists announced a likely solution to the mystery—an answer that both sides say they couldn’t have discovered on their own. Their work demonstrates the tremendous good that can come from high-level collaboration across disciplines to tackle big questions.
That’s the animating hope behind the John Templeton Foundation’s Humble Approach Initiative (HAI). Since 1998, HAI has been organizing symposia around the world where leading thinkers from diverse fields can gather and talk about a provocative and significant question. As philosophers, theologians, mathematicians, natural scientists, social scientists, and others contribute from their own areas of knowledge, new ideas can emerge, and fresh insights can strike. That’s possible only when people are humble—when they recognize that someone from a wholly different research area might say something worth listening to.
 |
Anyone can eavesdrop on these deep and fruitful conversations, because the symposia culminate in published volumes of revised and expanded versions of contributors’ presentations. For example, The Paradox of Disability: Responses to Jean Vanier and L’Arche Communities from Theology and the Sciences (edited by Hans Reinders) explores the ways that people who live with and care for the disabled find their lives enriched by that experience. In Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work? (edited by Roy Baumeister, Alfred Mele, and Katherine Vohs), a dozen philosophers and psychologists contribute thoughts on a multitude of questions like, “If we think free will is an illusion, how does that affect our behavior?” The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology (edited by John Polkinghorne) tantalizingly challenges the notion that theologians and scientists have little to say to each other. Its essays on quantum physics and theology explore the concept of a profound interconnectedness underlying visible reality—an idea key to religious thought for millennia, and now one on the cutting edge of physical science.
 |
Along those lines, the most recent book from the Humble Approach Initiative is Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics (edited by physicist Paul Davies and theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen). We learn in school that the universe is composed of matter and energy, but leading scientists are now speculating that “information” exists prior to matter and energy. If true, that concept has revolutionary implications for the study of both physical and spiritual realities.
“Physicists such as Seth Lloyd and Davies argue that first we have quantum information, then laws of nature and material configurations,” says Gregersen. “Biologists like John Maynard Smith argue that biology is essentially an information science. But to what extent does human communication stand in continuity with biological information processing? To what extent does the symbolic language of homo sapiens sensitize our species towards unseen possibilities, such as the reign of God?”
Sir John Templeton’s motto was, “How little we know, how eager to learn.” That in a nutshell is the idea behind the “Humble Approach” to spiritual and intellectual progress. It was a character trait of Sir John himself, says HAI director Mary Ann Meyers, senior fellow at the Foundation and friend of the late philanthropist.
“Sir John embodied humility in his openness to new ideas,” she recalls, “and also through the invitations he issued, so frequently and so exuberantly, to people at all stages of their careers and in all sorts of fields. He was always eager for others to share with him what they were learning. In conversation, his focus was never on his own accomplishments, but on the insights and discoveries of others. He was ever eager to learn from them.”
Science and the Giving Season
At a time of the year when Americans focus on the giving spirit, scholars affiliated with the University of Notre Dame are hard at work investigating the science behind generosity. Thanks to a four-year, $5 million grant from the Templeton Foundation, sociologist Christian Smith, director of the university’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society, is overseeing a cross-disciplinary research project looking at economic, psychological, social, and neurological causes for generous (and stingy) behavior. Smith told USA Today for its November 30 issue that it’s relatively easy to know who gives and who doesn’t, and their conscious motivations for being generous. The trick is determining what’s going on at an unconscious level to promote generosity.
For example, University of Kansas social psychology professor Omri Gillath is working with the Notre Dame project to determine whether a secure belief that we ourselves are worth loving is a cause of generosity. According to USA Today, Gillath is measuring brain waves at the moment individuals decide to give, and comparing results from people who are secure, and those who are not. He is trying to discover if gaining a sense in early childhood of being loved by others is connected to a generous disposition in adulthood. Similarly, the newspaper reported, Stephanie Brown, who teaches preventive medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is using a Notre Dame grant to investigate possible links between altruism and the brain circuitry associated with maternal feelings.
The project’s findings will benefit everyone, Smith told USA Today, by helping us understand better how to foster generosity. “There’s something about learning how to get beyond one’s self and helping other people that is good for the giver.”
