Can a Biologist Believe in the Existence of Life? | Prof. Stephen Meredith

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2023

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on March 8, 2023 at Vanderbilt University. The handout for this lecture can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/yw4y92cn. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Stephen Meredith is a professor at the University of Chicago’s Departments of Pathology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Neurology. He is also an associate faculty member in the University of Chicago Divinity School. He has published more than 100 journal articles, focusing on the biophysics of protein structure. Much of his work has been the application of solution and solid-state NMR to the study of amyloid proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease. He has also published articles on literature and philosophy in diverse aspects of medical humanities and bioethics. His teaching includes courses to graduate students in biochemistry and biophysics, medical students, and undergraduates and graduate students in the humanities, including courses on James Joyce’s Ulysses, St. Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Dostoevsky (focusing on Brothers Karamazov), Thomas Mann and David Foster Wallace. He is currently working on a book examining disease and the theological problem of evil. Other current writing projects include a study of James Joyce and the problem of evil.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.8	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.1	To learn more and to attend these events,
0:21.7	visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:29.4	When I teach pathology, biochemistry, biological sciences,
0:35.2	if you spend any time trying to define things like health and disease
0:41.3	or life or anything like that, what you get is a lot of eye rolling.
0:46.3	And, you know, I think students consider such exercises to be boring and silly.
0:56.0	Now, this is in contrast to teaching the humanities, which I also do.
1:04.0	And there are a lot of time, for example, is spent on defining what is a text.
1:10.0	Okay?
1:11.6	Now, whether such exercises are truly boring or silly is not my point.
1:19.6	My point is that such exercises are above all futile.
1:25.6	Why is that? Now, as is my want, I tend to quote James Joyce a lot,
1:36.3	and these are, this is the first of a few citations, quotes from James Joyce's Ulysses.
1:44.0	These are two episodes from episode three called Proteus.
1:49.8	And Joyce didn't call it that.
1:52.1	Everyone else calls it that.
1:53.9	Stephen Dedalus is a would-be writer.
1:57.3	And he's one of the protagonists of the novel, and he's walking along Sandy Mount Strand.
2:03.6	He's thinking about wildly diverse topics.
	...

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