Another offering from Lehigh Valley Meeting’s Spiritual Life Program Series
Rob Root, a member of Lehigh Valley Monthly Meeting and Professor of Mathematics at Lafayette College will speak on the topic Math: A Path to Peace Via Evolution.
We don’t think of math as a way to explore the natural human desire for peace; quite the opposite. When we think of math, we often focus on its uses in war, as alluded to in the recent film Oppenheimer, for instance.
Evolution is another scientific framework with a poor reputation among people of faith. Tennyson’s poem in Memoriam A.H.H. famously contrasts “love Creation's final law” with “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” for instance. Evolution seems to pit each person, really each organism, against all others in a relentless and inescapable struggle to survive and pass on genes. Naturally this generates dissonance for almost any thoughtful person, as it is so different from our personal experience.
Oddly enough, combining these two discomfiting ideas suggests that our preconceptions about them both might benefit from reconsideration. Can math turn evolution into evidence that we live in a world where love really is the answer and peace the goal of a moral arc of the universe bending in the long term towards not just justice, but mutual care and consideration?
This virtual program is free and open to the public; click here for the Zoom link.