Who Are You? (S1E5 Encore)

So Curt, let's talk about anthropology a bit.

So what, why does anthrop- what does anthropology have to do with, um, our s- our present story?

Fir- first of all, it, it's, uh, t- so that our audience is aware, is we're, you know, we're not just trying to sling fancy schmancy scientific terms around.

The word anthropology refers to the study really of what it means to be human.

Like, what, w- what, when we understand, like, what is a human being, and how do we come to understand that? The reason it's important for us to explore that and to have some sense of it is because a lot of us are living taking for granted who we are and what we do and how we operate and so forth and so on, without recognizing that the whole notion of studying anything, but particularly studying what it means to be human, is always something that takes place within a particular community context.

In other words, this notion of science, what it tells us about the world, whether it's chemistry or biology or anthropology or psychology, whatever those things are, that science, that study always takes place within a particular community of people, a c- a particular human tradition.

So for instance, there was a time when, uh, most people, most scientists, if you will, although they weren't called that at the time, if they were t- if you would've asked them about the, uh, geography and the geology of the world, they would've said that the world is generally flat.

Well, that notion that the world was flat didn't just spring up just all by itself out of nowhere.

You know, people were told this by other people, and those people believed it, and then they'd pass that information on to other people, and that was a particular community lens through which they understood the data that they were looking at, right? You look out on a flat horizon, and it looked like the world just ended.

And of course, you could sail your boat out there and the horizon would keep going, but, like, we knew that at somewhere the end of the world would be reached.

But somewhere along the line, somebody starts to s- you know, learn something else or study something.

They've got some questions about this tradition, some questions within the context of the community.

And those scientific changes over time take a long time to happen because the communities are really resistant to this kind of change, and so everybody from Copernicus to Galileo and so forth and so on, this notion that the world is actually not flat but round is something that took a lot of time.

So it takes place in the context of a community that's telling a story even about the science that we're learning.

And when it comes to anthropology, that particular kind of science, we have to recognize that even when it comes to the neuroscience that we're talking about on our podcast, how the brain works and what its purpose is and meaning and so forth, what's really important is that we're not understanding that science in a vacuum.

We're understanding that science in a particular time in history.

And when we think about, you know, the way most scientists...

If you were to take a poll of most scientists these days, not everyone, but most scientists would say that the whole notion of God, the whole notion, let alone the notion of Jesus and Christian faith, doesn't have any role in science, doesn't play a role.

These are two separate things, that religion and science are separate things.

And we've come to learn that that's the case, that there's a separation between the science that we learn that tells us the truth about the material world and our religion, so to speak.

But what's really important is that as the...

There's a famous philosopher of science by the name of Michael Polanyi, and he once famously said, "There's no such thing as science.

There are only scientists." Meaning that the data doesn't speak for itself.

People have to talk for the data.

We are the ones who have to tell the story about what the mind actually is.