Stories from the Sunflower: Lucy (1)

"A student asked his biology teacher, 'How did Charles Darwin propose his wife?'

The mentor thought for a moment, then said, 'In mathematics, you can arrive at 'the right answer', but regarding human behaviors, 'the right answer' could be a myth. However, you can find 'the best answer' or 'good judgement' after comparing a variety of statements from many of points of view and of course, should be valid.'

'So, what do you think is 'the best answer'?' the student was curious.

'Darwin proposed and revealed that his future wife, was chosen because a 'survival of the fittest',' concluded the instructor."

"Have you ever watched a film 'Lucy', a 2014 French science fiction action film written and directed by Luc Besson, about a woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, accidentally caught transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human logic?" said the Sunflower while waiting for Wulandari, the Moon, that hadn't been arrived yet, after greeting with Basmalah and Salaam. "

Why Lucy? I'm not going to talk about sexy, captivating, or even cute woman—grandma says it's dangerous, and it's expressed by Cak Imin in an interrogative words—who makes men are stunned. No, it's not.

Before moving on, let me tell you that the Sunflowers, me and and my kind, are known for our ability, called heliotropism, to track the sun throughout the day, following its movement from east to west. It's a clear symbol of time’s passage. Time is an elusive concept that has captivated human imagination for centuries. As the sun sets and rises again, we track its movement, a reminder that time marches on. Furthermore, sunflowers have been used as a symbol of the cycle of life and death. So, we are a beautiful and powerful symbol of the passage of time and the cycles of life, making us a fitting addition to any discussion of flowers that represent time.

I remember when the New Year was approaching, the elders looked at the young people, and they shook their heads while muttering to each other, 'How quickly time flies!'

And I wonder, 'What is time? Did it have a beginning and will it ever end?' These are profound questions that have been asked by serious thinkers over the centuries, from early speculations among the ancient Greeks to the startling discoveries in the modern sciences, says H. James Birx. Both philosophers and theologians have offered dynamic worldviews to accommodate new facts and ideas about time and change. Because of its elusiveness, time still challenges those individuals who strive to understand and appreciate the flux of reality and the pervasive influence of time on all objects and events within it (including our own species). Perspectives on time range from subatomic particles to cosmic evolution. Temporal changes may encompass merely attoseconds or billions of years. Remarkable advances in technology, particularly in telescopes and microscopes, along with rapid improvements in computers, have greatly increased our scientific knowledge of this universe in general and our planet in particular. The history of life on Earth stretches back about 4 billion years, while human culture began less than 3 million years ago. Even so, this expanding cosmos is expected to endure for billions of years into the future. And, no doubt, human views about time will change over the coming centuries if our species survives.

Birx then tells us that the ancient Greeks pondered time and change. Of special importance was the idea from Heraclitus that this cosmos is endlessly changing, manifesting ongoing cyclical patterns. Later, Plato and Aristotle interpreted this universe in terms of geometry and biology, respectively. A philosophical dispute emerged as to whether reality is a static being in which change is an imperfection or an illusion, or an eternal becoming in which permanence is an illusion. Since antiquity, ingenious attempts have been made to synthesize change and fixity in a worldview that does justice to both. Such attempts are found in the cyclical cosmologies of Eastern philosophies.

With the coming of Christianity, religious thinkers attempted to reconcile an eternal and perfect personal God with a temporary and imperfect material universe. Concerning time, different beliefs emerged about the divine creation of this finite cosmos and its ultimate destiny. Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas Aquinas offered subjective and objective views of time, respectively. For both, the origin of this universe was held to be an event that occurred only several thousand years ago. This created cosmos had the earth at its center and the human being occupying a special place in static nature. The end of time was held to be in the near future. Until the emergence of modern astronomy and physics, according to Brix, earlier believers could never have imagined either the vast age of this universe or the complex history of life forms on our planet.

During the Italian Renaissance, the artistic genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) reflected on the marine fossils he discovered in rock strata while walking in the Swiss Alps. He reasoned that these fossils were the remains of once-living organisms in the remote past; natural forces had elevated the fossil-rich sedimentary layers of the Mediterranean Sea over thousands of years. In fact, at a time when the common consensus maintained that this universe was created only a few thousand years ago, Leonardo’s dynamic view of earth history held that our planet is at least 200,000 years old. Furthermore, his cosmology held the universe to be eternal, infinite, and filled with other planets. Taking change seriously, Leonardo claimed time to be the evil destroyer of everything. Speculating on the end of the earth, he foresaw a future catastrophic event in which fire would destroy all living things on the planet (including our species).

At the end of the Italian Renaissance, the monk Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) challenged the entrenched Aristotelian philosophy and Thomistic theology that dominated Western thought. Using his critical intellect and remarkable imagination, he envisioned an eternal and infinite universe with an endless number of stars and planets. His cosmology also included other inhabited worlds with intelligent beings. Consequently, Bruno’s bold interpretation of this universe paved the way for new ideas about time and change. It may be argued that he ushered in the modern cosmology, which is free from geocentrism, anthropocentrism, and a fixed ceiling of stars. His worldview even anticipated the relativity framework in modern physics.

With the Age of Enlightenment, natural philosophers stressed the value of science and reason. Rejecting earlier beliefs and opinions, they emphasized critical thought and open inquiry. For them, history was a progressive process, and scientific advances promised freedom from dogmatism and superstition. These enlightened thinkers established an intellectual atmosphere that was crucial for paving the way for the emergence of the social sciences, including anthropology and psychology. The new social sciences would supplement the established natural sciences. Extolling the value of individuals, the academic stage was now set for exceptional naturalists and philosophers to make substantial contributions to understanding and appreciating both cosmic time and earth history.

At the end of the Enlightenment, long before nanotechnology and genetic engineering, the visionary philosopher Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) foresaw ongoing advances in the natural sciences resulting in future human beings enjoying an indefinite life span.

At the beginning of the 19th century, naturalists began to take the study of rocks, fossils, and artifacts seriously. Their investigations challenged the traditional ideas concerning the age of our earth, the fixity of species, and the recent appearance of the human animal on our planet. Historical geology, comparative paleontology, and prehistoric archaeology became distinct sciences that together offered an incredibly vast temporal framework. Over the decades, the accumulation of empirical evidence clearly demonstrated the enormous age of our earth, the evolution of species over eons of time, and the great antiquity of the human animal. Throughout geologic time, the fossil record even revealed that many past species had become extinct. Nature was no longer perceived as manifesting a divinely preestablished design; the alleged fixed order of our planet was now replaced by pervasive and ongoing change. Earth time was now recorded in the millions of years, and the origin of this universe had occurred in a remote past lost in the immensity of cosmic time.

After the beginning of the 20th century, the genius Albert Einstein presented to the intellectual world his special and general theories of relativity. The physicist challenged the basic ideas of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton by denying that space and time are independent absolutes and, instead, maintaining that they constitute a space-time continuum in a four-dimensional reality (with time being the fourth dimension). Moreover, for Einstein, there is no fixed frame of reference in this universe from which absolute judgments may be made concerning time and motion; his only fixed constant is the speed of light.

In the 20th century, an inevitable conflict emerged between those biblical fundamentalists who clung to a strict and literal interpretation of Creation as presented in Genesis and the scientific evolutionists who accepted the new temporal framework that is clearly upheld by the empirical evidence in geology, paleontology, and biology, as well as the results from radiometric dating techniques. In fact, this conflict between traditional religion and modern science continues today and shows no sign of ending in the foreseeable future.

Thomas Dixon illustrates that in Rome on 22 June 1633, an elderly man was found guilty by the Catholic Inquisition of rendering himself ‘vehemently suspected of heresy, namely, of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture’. The doctrine in question was that ‘the sun is the centre of the world and does not move from east to west, that the earth moves and is not the centre of the world, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined as contrary to Holy Scripture’. The guilty man was the 70-year-old Florentine philosopher Galileo Galilei, who was sentenced to imprisonment (a punishment that was later commuted to house arrest) and instructed to recite the seven penitential Psalms once a week for the next three years as a ‘salutary penance’. Galileo accepted his sentence, swore complete obedience to the ‘Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’, and declared that he cursed and detested the ‘errors and heresies’ of which he had been suspected–namely belief in a sun-centred cosmos and in the movement of the earth.

It is hardly surprising that this humiliation of the most celebrated scientific thinker of his day by the Catholic Inquisition on the grounds of his beliefs about astronomy and their contradiction of the Bible should have been interpreted by some as evidence of an inevitable conflict between science and religion, Dixon further added. The modern encounter between evolutionists and creationists has also seemed to reveal an ongoing antagonism, although this time with science, rather than the church, in the ascendancy, says Dixon.

Does that mean the conflict needs to be written out of our story altogether? Certainly not, says Dixon. The only thing to avoid is too narrow an idea of the kinds of conflicts one might expect to find between science and religion. The story is not always one of a heroic and open-minded scientist clashing with a reactionary and bigoted church. The bigotry, like the open-mindedness, is shared around on all sides–as are the quest for understanding, the love of truth, the use of rhetoric, and the compromising entanglements with the power of the state. Individuals, ideas, and institutions can and have come into conflict, or been resolved into harmony, in an endless array of different combinations.

Scientific knowledge is based on observations of the natural world. But observing the natural world is neither as simple nor as solitary an activity as it might sound. Take the moon, for instance. When you look up at the sky on a clear night, what do you see? You see the moon and the stars. But what do you actually observe? There are a lot of small bright lights and then a larger whitish circular object. If you had never learned any science, what would you think this white object was? Is it a flat disc, like a kind of giant aspirin? Or is it a sphere? If the latter, then why do we always see the same side of it? And why does its shape change from a thin crescent to a full disc and back again? Is it an object like the earth? If so, how big is it? And how close? And do people live there? Or is it a smaller night-time equivalent of the sun? Finally, perhaps it is like one of the little bright lights but larger or closer? In any case, how and why does it move across the sky like that? Is something else pushing it? Is it attached to an invisible mechanism of some kind? Is it a supernatural being?

Now, if you are well informed about modern science, you will know that the moon is a large spherical rocky satellite which orbits the earth completely about once a month and which rotates once on its own axis in the same time (which explains why we always see the same side of it). The changing relative positions of the sun, earth, and moon also explain why the moon displays ‘phases’ – with either the entirety or only a small crescent of the illuminated half of the moon visible at a particular time. You may also know that all physical bodies are attracted to each other by a gravitational force in proportion to the product of their masses and in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them, and that this helps to explain the regular motions of the moon around the earth and of the earth around the sun. You will probably also know that the bright little lights in the night sky are stars, similar to our sun; that the ones visible to the naked eye are thousands of light years away and those observable through telescopes are millions or even billions of light years away; so that to look up at the night sky is to look into the distant past of our universe. But however much of all this you know, you did not find it out by observation. You were told it. You possibly learned it from your parents or a science teacher or a television programme or an online encyclopaedia. Even professional astronomers will not generally have checked the truth of any of the statements I 've told you before, by their own empirical observations. The reason for this is not that astronomers are lazy or incompetent, but simply that they can rely on the amassed authoritative observations and theoretical reasonings of the scientific community which, over a period of many centuries, have established these facts as fundamental physical truths.

During the Dark Ages very few Greek classical texts survived in Europe. The few that did survive were read and valued by Muslim philosophers and scholars, and some of them were translated into Arabic. When the Muslims were driven out of Spain in the 12th century, a few medieval Christian scholars were curious enough to translate these manuscripts from Arabic into Latin. Some of these translated texts dealt with the natural world, including human origins. For example, the 13th-century Italian Christian philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, integrated Greek ideas about nature and modern humans with some of the Christian interpretations based on the Bible. The work of Thomas Aquinas and his contemporaries laid the foundations of the Renaissance, when science and rational learning were reintroduced into Europe.

According to Bernard Wood, after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, Graeco-Roman ideas about the creation of the world and of humanity were replaced with the narrative set out in Genesis: reason-based explanations were replaced by faith-based ones.

With very few exceptions Western philosophers living in and immediately after the Dark Ages (5th to 12th centuries) supported a biblical explanation for human origins. This changed with the rediscovery and rapid growth of natural philosophy that was only later called science. But, paradoxically, not long after the scientific method began to be applied to the study of human origins in the 19th and 20th centuries some religious groups responded to attempts by scientists to interpret the Bible less literally by being even stricter about their biblical literalism.

During the Dark Ages, very few Greek classical texts survived in Europe. The few that did survive were read and valued by Muslim philosophers and scholars, and some of them were translated into Arabic, says Wood. When the Muslims were driven out of Spain in the 12th century, a few medieval Christian scholars were curious enough to translate these manuscripts from Arabic into Latin. Some of these translated texts dealt with the natural world, including human origins. For example, the 13th-century Italian Christian philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, integrated Greek ideas about nature and modern humans with some of the Christian interpretations based on the Bible. The work of Thomas Aquinas and his contemporaries laid the foundations of the Renaissance, when science and rational learning were reintroduced into Europe.

The move away from reliance on biblical dogma was especially important for those who were interested in what we now call the natural sciences, such as biology and the earth sciences. An Englishman, Francis Bacon, was a major influence on the way scientific investigations developed. Theologians use the deductive method: beginning with a belief, they then deduce the consequences of that belief. Bacon suggested that scientists should work in a different way he called the ‘inductive’ method. Induction begins with observations, also called evidence or ‘data’. Scientists devise an explanation, called a ‘hypothesis’, to explain those observations. Then they test the hypothesis by making more observations, or in sciences like chemistry, physics and biology, by conducting experiments. This inductive way of doing things is the way the sciences involved in human evolution research are meant to work.

No one knows when human beings first appeared. In the scientific evolutionists point of view, our only clues lie in fossils and stone tools. The journey started some time around six million years ago (mya) in Africa. Humans are classified as primates, a group that includes apes and monkeys. Our closest living relatives are chimpanzees, with whom we share almost 99 percent of our genes, but this tiny genetic difference is what makes us so far removed from apes. According to the evolutionists, one of the earliest known human ancestors is a small forest-living primate named Ardipithecus anamensis, which flourished in Afar, Ethiopia, some 4.5 mya. Ardipithecus was probably the ancestor of the Australopithecines—highly diverse hominins that appeared for the first time one million years later. The earliest found, Australopithecus afarensis, was famously nicknamed 'Lucy' by the archaeologists who found her in 1974. Although it seems that this longlimbed hominin spent a great deal of time in the trees, some well-preserved footprints reveal that the species was bipedal (walked on two feet). As such, 'Lucy' is an important link between us and our treedwelling ancestors.

What I want to tell you is not that one of religions is that bad, no, but rather, if we ponder about time, we will come to the question of who we are and where we come from. Socrates was once asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied, ‘Know yourself.’ Aristotle says, 'Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.' 'Know thyself, O man, and thou wilt know thy Lord' says Avicenna. And we started to study History. History is important and that we can all learn from the triumphs—and mistakes—of our ancestors, says Adam Hart-Davis. And we are constantly aware of time. Tides, erosion, lunar phases, solar eclipses, returning comets, recurring seasons, and alternating days and nights illustrate for us that this universe is always changing. The birth, development, and death of organisms are a sobering reminder of the finitude of life forms on our planet. With such awesome and disturbing examples of time and change, it is not surprising that great minds have attempted to grasp the flux of reality. Even measuring time and change to ever-greater degrees of certainty is an ongoing challenge to modern science and technology.

By the way, as an Indonesian, don't you want to know why you are called an Indonesian? Don't you want to know everything about your Indonesian background? Let's find out in the next session, of course from the perspective of 'how foreigner assess Indonesia'. Bi' idhnillah."

Then, the Sunflower sang Vanessa Carlton's song,

Take my hand, live while you can

Don't you see your dreams

lie right in the palm of your hand?

In the palm of your hand *)

Citations & References:

- H. James Birx (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Time: Science, Philosophy, Theology, & Culture, 1-3, 2009, Sage

- Bernard Wood, Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction, 2005, Oxford University Press

- Dorling Kindersley, History: The Definitive Visual Guide, 2007, DK Publishing

- Smithsonian, Timelines of Everything, 2018, DK Publishing

- Thomas Dixon, Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, 2008, Oxford University Press

*) "Ordinary Day" written by Vanessa Carlton

[Session 2]

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