Agreeing Only to Disagree on God's Place in Science

reposted from NY Times

By GEORGE JOHNSON

Published: September 27, 2005

It was on the second day at Cambridge that enlightenment dawned in the form of a testy exchange between a zoologist and a paleontologist, Richard Dawkins and Simon Conway Morris. Their bone of contention was one that scholars have been gnawing on since the days of Aquinas: whether an understanding of the universe and its glories requires the hypothesis of a God.

The speakers had been invited, along with a dozen other scientists and theologians, to address the 10 recipients of the first Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion. Each morning for two weeks in June, we walked across the Mathematical Bridge, spanning the River Cam, and through the medieval courtyards of Queens College to the seminar room.

We were there courtesy of the John Templeton Foundation, whose mission is "to pursue new insights at the boundary between theology and science," overcoming what it calls "the flatness of a purely naturalistic, secularized view of reality."

On matters scientific, Dr. Dawkins, who came from Oxford, and Dr. Conway Morris, a Cambridge man, agreed: The richness of the biosphere, humanity included, could be explained through natural selection.

They also agreed, contrary to the writings of Stephen Jay Gould, that evolution is not a crapshoot. If earth's history could be replayed like a video cassette, the outcome would be somewhat different, but certain physical constraints would favor the eventual appearance of warm-blooded creatures something like us, with eyes, ears, noses and brains.

Then, just millimeters from complete accord, they forked in orthogonal directions. For Dr. Dawkins, an atheist, the creative power of evolution reinforced his conviction that we live in a purely material world. For Dr. Conway Morris, a Christian, nature's "uncanny ability" to converge on moral, loving creatures like ourselves testified that evolution itself was the handiwork of God.

Dr. Dawkins seemed as puzzled by this leap as he was exasperated. "We agree on almost everything," he said. Why insist on adding in a deity? When it came to science, Dr. Dawkins exclaimed, Dr. Conway Morris's God was "gratuitous."

Momentarily flummoxed, the paleontologist muttered to himself, and some of the fellows murmured their disapproval. But however abrupt Dr. Dawkins may have sounded, he had scored a crucial point.

Science is the name we give to the practice of finding physical explanations about the universe. Anything spiritual you bring to the table is extraneous, a matter of personal belief.

Scientists can study religion as a neurological or anthropological phenomenon, and religious leaders are free to offer opinions on the moral implications of new technologies. But the Templeton people are after something far more ambitious and volatile:

"to join science with faith,"

as the philosopher Boethius put it. Fifteen centuries later, amid the gothic spires of Cambridge, the debate was smoldering on.

A Foundation With a Mission

There is a journalistic tradition of biting the hand that feeds you. A few days earlier, in the van from Heathrow Airport to Cambridge, several jet-lagged reporters spoke skeptically about our host and its well-publicized agenda. The creation of Sir John Marks Templeton, a 92-year-old Presbyterian investor and billionaire who lives in the Bahamas, the Templeton Foundation is said to earn so much from its endowment that it struggles to give it all away.

By financing programs like "Science, Theology and the Ontological Quest" and "The Origin of the Laws of Nature and the Existence of God," Templeton almost single-handedly sustains the modern movement to reconcile science and religion - or, as some see it, he is keeping it alive on its death bed with extraordinary means of support.

This is not about intelligent design. While the foundation assumes the existence of a deity, it rejects biblical literalism as much as it does New Age fuzziness; no "crystals and faeries," it admonishes grant seekers.

While the winner of the annual Templeton Prize "for progress in religion" has almost always been a Christian, the award has occasionally gone to a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu or a Jew. The name of the honor, currently worth $1.5 million, was recently broadened to recognize research on "spiritual realities," a term that many scientists, Dr. Dawkins surely among them, would consider an oxymoron.

In its guidelines, the foundation says it is unlikely to sponsor projects that would bring together science and religion by letting one subsume the other. Nor is it interested in "approaches that erect walls between religion and science and begin with the assumption that they should never have anything to do with each other."

That, at least tacitly, is how many scientists approach the divide - by compartmentalizing, treating science and religion as what Dr. Gould called nonoverlapping magisteria ("noma" for short). Michael Faraday, a Christian and one of the premier scientists of the 19th century, put it like this:

"I do not think it at all necessary to tie the study of the natural sciences and religion together, and in my intercourse with my fellow creatures that which is religious and that which is philosophical have ever been two distinct things."

Even Isaac Newton, whose obsession with alchemy and biblical prophecy bordered on fanaticism, called for a strict distinction between religion and "philosophy," as science was called in his day: "We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion."

For the reconcilers, noma is considered a nonstarter. Accepting it would mean that the centuries-old divergence between these two domains would continue unopposed. It would also mean the end of the Templeton grants.

God, the Fine-Tuner

Modern science is sometimes said to have grown from the Christian belief in a single supreme being who created and sustains an orderly cosmos. Since he could have written the laws any way he wanted, it follows that they can only be discovered empirically, not deduced from first principles as Aristotle tried to do. The Book of Nature must be studied as assiduously as the Book of God.

Historians go on to describe how science shed its theological chrysalis and went its separate way. The result is what the Templeton people call "flat science." Early in the seminars, Denis Alexander, a Cambridge immunologist and Christian, made the radical suggestion that science reclaim its theistic roots, taking as its deepest premise the existence of God.

Another speaker, John Polkinghorne, a Cambridge physicist turned Anglican priest, saw profound significance in the fact that humans - rational, conscious creatures endowed with intentionality and free will - find themselves in a universe with laws they can understand. In "The Faith of a Physicist," he gives his take on the big bang theory with God stepping in to ensure a chemistry "fine tuned" to generate life.

Listening to the reconcilers and reading their books, even an agnostic could appreciate how the beauty of the cosmos might compel one to believe in something transcendent. But what writers like Dr. Alexander and Dr. Polkinghorne are talking about is not just the awe one feels hiking above the timberline or inhaling the ocean air. They are looking to science for something far more specific - the constant, hovering presence of the kind of God described in Sunday school, who watches over us and responds to our prayers.

This is not the God of deism, who cranked up the universe and let it run. In drafting the principles of physics he left trapdoors - what Dr. Polkinghorne calls "causal joints" - through which to intervene, placing the earth in a hospitable orbit or unleashing the cascade of mutations needed for a microbe to evolve into a man. The trick is to do this without appearing to violate his own laws.

Some theologians speculate that this happens on the subatomic level, when a particle appears to dart probabilistically, with a roll of the quantum dice. Maybe it is God doing the shuffling, and what appears to mortals as quantum indeterminacy is divine intervention in disguise.

Others propose that God acts through nonlinear dynamics, in which microscopic fluctuations give rise to potentially earthshaking results - chaos theory's "butterfly effect." Here too the influence would be undetectable. With or without the guiding hand of the creator, reality would appear the same.

An Elusive Common Ground

Dr. Dawkins has written that "a universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without." If the God hypothesis is meaningful, it should be subject to a test. But the theistic gloss Dr. Polkinghorne and others give to science is immune to this kind of scrutiny. It has, by design, no observable consequences.

The reconcilers insist that the same is true for the belief that there is nothing but matter and energy, that you can be either a materialist or a theist and still do good research.

But for many scientists, entertaining supernatural explanations is a violation of the craft. A study reported in Nature in 1998 found that only 7 percent of the members of the elite National Academy of Sciences believed in God. For biologists the figure was just 5.5 percent.

"You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs," Peter Atkins, an Oxford University chemist, has said. "But I don't think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge."

Cloistered inside the walls of Cambridge, we listened as a theologian wondered whether Christ's powers of healing might be quantum mechanical, and a physicist considered whether Jesus would appear on other planets in extraterrestrial form.

Trying their best to collide, Dr. Gould's nonoverlapping magisteria seemed farther apart than ever, two great ships passing in the night, pointed in opposite directions.

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Beyond Belief debate - Science v Religion

Chris Street blogged the Beyond Belief debates here and here.

A Free-for-All on Science and Religion

By GEORGE JOHNSON

Published: November 21, 2006

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”

By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?

“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”

“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”

Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”

In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”

It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.”

He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.

But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.

He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.

“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”

reposted from: new york times
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments

******** Selected Comments from NYT up to comment 25 *******

2.

November 21st,
2006
12:14 am

Religion creates more borders & boundaries than bridges. Communities are defined as much by who is not included as who is included - they are defined by their collective identity against the ‘other’. Until religious dogma is replaced by reality, peace and human dignity (without recourse to myths and self-inclusive communities) will never exist.

— Posted by Ryan Frace

4.

November 21st,
2006
12:24 am

Every means for promoting the scientific approach to knowledge should be used, from soft sell to evangelicalization. However, emphasis should be on applying scientific method to question religious claims. Let the experimental pudding be the proof. Once we have sufficient acceptance of science, evangelical style indoctrination will be irrelevant.

— Posted by Jack Blalock

7.

November 21st,
2006
12:32 am

I believe we must speak up - much in the vein encouraged by Sam Harris and others. I would begin by reviewing the fact that our standard of living has been achieved through science and technology while religion is threatening to destroy us. Comment on how many times religion has attempted to disprove science only to be found wrong. Ask which “god” is really in control when various religions cannot agree.

— Posted by Dr. Kenneth Stueben

10.

November 21st,
2006
12:45 am

The fundamental nature of science is a skeptical outlook on the world, to view evidence, and explanations with a jaundiced eye, then to demand layer upon layer of evidence, from all sides of the problem, consistent with the hypothesis, and never give up the possibility that there is another explanation *consistent with the evidence* that explains it all and permits predictions. This tool alone differentiates real science from any of the other facile substitutes that are being promulgated by various charlatans as “science”. However, this also excludes using “evangelical” (i.e. “big lie”) approaches which are essentially a totalitarian form of philosophy (”my way or the highway”). This is the same problem that liberal democracies have in the face of any fanatically held belief. The usefulness of real science, providing answers that lead to new knowledge, and not just to comforting beliefs, is its great strength

— Posted by Dr. William F. Colmers

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