The Human Spark on PBS - Dim and Flickering

So last night we watched an episode of the 3-part PBS series, The Human Spark. In it, sanctimonious creep Alan Alda explores what it means to be human by interviewing Ivy League academics who are studying the brain. It's a wonderful, if unintentionally instructive, look into modern science and academia. It showed scientists brilliantly mapping out the mechanisms of the brain while utterly floundering on the basic meanings of what they saw.

This little vignette is enough to illustrate the show. It's a part that shows how infants prefer good behavior over bad behavior, even in puppets. The segment lasts only 2:40 and encompasses all C. S. Lewis needed to convert himself from atheism to Christianity as detailed in his book, Mere Christianity.

Directly after this portion of the program, tweed-clad Ivy League academics condescendingly sneered at all religions, claiming that their research explained how it's all really based on humans anthropomorphizing objects and that there wasn't really that much difference between primitive animism and the religions of today. There was plenty of clucking about the unfortunate results of religious wars and, of course, the Crusades*.

As I watched the program, having just finished the first part of Mere Christianity where C. S. Lewis goes through the logical steps that led him to religion, I found it amazing that none of these scientists could make the same steps. It was as if that intellectual path was closed to them. It was right there in front of them and they turned around and walked away from it. I came to two conclusions.

1. They had never read any theology. No Aquinas, no Augustine, no C. S. Lewis. There was no way on Earth you could have been familiar with Lewis' work, performed those experiments and not begun to wonder about his conclusions. Somewhere in their education, they had been deprived of the genius of these and other thinkers, people who had considered the great questions of life from a different approach.

2. Much of what the scientists discovered is implicitly known by all of us. They gushed about how they had discovered that people like people who like other people and other stunningly obvious conclusions. Their technical work was fabulous, but their hubris matched it. Humility was completely absent as was any real sense of what they had discovered. Any parish priest I have ever met could have run rings around them when it came to human behavior.

In the end, Lewis, a simple infantryman from the Great War who had pondered the great questions of existence understood better the lab results of the brilliant physicists and chemists and biologists of our mightiest schools who actually performed the experiments.

Too much intellect for Harvard to handle?
* - Is it coincidence that the Islamists use the Crusades as a rallying cry, too? Is there something in Islamists and modern, secular Academics that they need to explain their failures by pointing out Christian, religious violence from hundreds of years ago?