The University of the Philippines College of Science (UPCS) in Diliman yesterday held its recognition ceremonies honouring the class of 2009. The UPCS was founded in 1983 with the split of the College of Arts and Sciences into  colleges of science, arts and letters and social sciences and philosophy. In the past two years, social scientists have been invited to give the commencement speech. Last year it was bu sociologist Randy David, and this year was by anthropologist Mike Tan ( I will post the speech once the UPCS has it on its website) .

While Randy David’s 2008 speech dealt with philosophical convergence between the natural and social sciences (which only those who have read a bit of philosophy of science may appreciate fully), Mike Tan’s speech touched on science and religion, first in the global context and in the Philippine context. No serious Filipino academic in the social and natural sciences  has ever done this.

Tan’s thesis is that the Filipino is inherently religious and this allows him/her to . But since Tan cited Darwin so many times, I am tempted to believe that Tan subscribes to the Darwinian thesis that religion evolved as a result of natural selection.

Since Tan deals with anthropology of health issues, he is the right man to say that the inherent religiosity of the people gives fitness to survive in a changing environment. With a disaster prone geography, Filipinos will probably need RELIGION more than people in the West today.But religion as an adaptation giving fitness is still the subject of research.  Science  advanced in the West as society began to empirically understand natural phenomena. Reductionism allowed for a greater confidence in predicting outcomes. But in an age of observable within a lifetime climate change, will the West get that “old time religion” back?

This is what Tan challenges the 2009 science class. How can science and religion work out in Pinoy society for the better?  What he calls as “religious exceptionalism” (Tan doesn’t want to use the F word ! not the 4 letter one but Fundamentalism) seems to be a foreign import. The majority Catholic Philippines is a unique case in evangelization history. Very few friars were martyred in the Philippines as compared in other Asian countries. The evangelization of the Philippines occured rapidly. Was it that Filipinos were not prone to exceptionalism? Some historians of religion cite that the inciepient monotheism inherent in Filipinos made it easier for the friars.

Tan also cites the obvious fact that religion “preserved” the knowledge needed for science to develop. I found Tan’s discourse on the matter very interestung for he started out with Islam and how it preserved Greek knowledge in mathematics. medicine and astronomy that would have been lost to the West. The Roman Catholic Church benefited from this and Science (which the UPCS is heir to) is a Daughter of the Roman Church. The Roman Church’s thesis is that you need reason and faith to understand the cosmos. For this reason, the Roman Catholic Church is the only religious organization today that has an academy of science under the Pope’s patronage.

And so back to Darwin, Einstein and Galileo. All of them had run afoul of religious exceptionalism in their time. But all of them saw something Divine in the natural phenomena they sought to explain.

With a more pluralistic society evolving in the Philippines, Tan says that the exceptionalists are getting louder. What scientists in the Philippines have to do is to get into the talk!

If Mike continues with this line of academic inquiry, he could be the perfect counterfoil to Richard Dawkins!

BTW, graduation ceremonies are one of the best venues for the public to be appraised of developments in the state of Philippine science. Dean Caesar Saloma appraised the audience on the challenges of the College of Science. While UPCS has made great strides in graduate training in the sciences, there is still much to be desired. According to Saloma, the college graduates only 13-14 PhDs per year. Given that the college has many PhDs, it should be churning out at least 70 a year. To speed up national development, all of our higher educational institutions should have at least 1/3 of their faculty as PhD holders. There is a need really.

I think one reason is that our infrastructure development has lagged behind faculty development. One of reasons why young PhDs leave is that they can’t find a lab to work in. The on-going construction of the National Science Complex in Diliman should answer much of that need.

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