Read Present at the Future Online
Authors: Ira Flatow
I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Not long ago, I moderated a panel discussion at the TriBeCa Film Festival in New York. The festival doesn’t normally invite science journalists to host a panel discussion, but the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation had sponsored a prize for screenwriters who had penned the best screenplay with a science theme, and I was asked to bridge the science and the arts divide.
Sitting on the panel, beside the usual film folks, was Dr. James Watson, the famous codiscoverer, with Dr. Francis Crick, of the three-dimensional structure of the DNA molecule, 50 years before. Not only had they gone on to win a Nobel Prize for their discovery but also a film about the effort was made in Great Britain some years later starring Jeff Goldblum as the notorious Dr. Watson. (The science–arts connection on the panel…)
The public was invited to sit in the audience and ask questions, and having Watson right in front of them, perhaps the most famous biologist in the world, was an opportunity hard to resist. One questioner in particular was most memorable. She walked up to the microphone, politely introduced herself to the panel, and with great reverence quietly directed a question to Watson about what motivated him in his research. “Did your religious beliefs influence your work?” she inquired very politely. Little was she—or the rest of us prepared—for the tirade that followed.
Watson lashed out at the poor woman for bringing God into the picture. His voice rising to the occasion, he lectured that the main reason he chose to unlock the secret of DNA was to take God out of the picture. He would show how life is created without the need to include the deity. How dare she insult him in such a manner? And in a torrent of insult, profanity, and histrionics, Watson proceeded to verbally beat this woman to a pulp. Crushed, she retreated to the safety of the audience, silenced and in a state of shock and awe.
Over the course of the next few months, I would have the opportunity to interview Watson many times and see a similar spectacle: Ask him about religion and he flies off the handle. (After watching this repeatedly, I’ve come to the conclusion that Watson is a showman and this is his act.)
Other scientists, such as Steven Weinberg and Richard Dawkins, are as opinionated about science and religion as Watson. And they take no prisoners either, though they lack the flair for the dramatic that Watson has cultivated. All of which raises the questions: Just how much does a person’s faith influence his or her work in science? Can a person with serious religious beliefs also be a serious, respected scientist?
These questions are especially relevant in the current religious climate. Has there been a time, in the past hundred years, where science and religion have clashed more forcefully than we are witness
ing now? Not since the Scopes trial in 1925 have we seen such vocal clashes between opposing forces of science and religion.
From President George W. Bush and his “the verdict is still out” when it comes to the validity of evolution, to the Pennsylvania judge who wrote the definitive ruling against teaching creation in biology class, to the debate over embryonic stem cell research, science and religion have been in the news almost every week. Which again highlights the issues: Can science and religion coexist? Can religious scientists also be good scientists? What does religion inform scientists about their work? What does research inform scientists about their beliefs?
The answers are not simple. Over the many years that I have interviewed scientists, I have never seen a wider range of views by scientists and theologians about religion and science than I do now. The opinions tend to fall into three broad categories:
• Religion is antiscience, and as long as the two maintain a distance, the better. Many who hold this view are atheists.
• Extreme fundamentalist views of religious beliefs, where the bibles, of many faiths, are taken to be literally true and thus cannot accommodate modern scientific beliefs such as evolution, age of the Earth, and the equality of the sexes.
• Religious views are not in opposition to science and can bend as science makes new discoveries. An interesting corollary to this places God outside of the natural world so that God and science don’t intersect except in unusual circumstances called miracles.
I’ve collected some of the more cogent and vocal lines of reasoning to illustrate the three views above and to give you a flavor of the various and creative ways that scientists have come to terms with religion in their lives, both welcoming its influence and forcefully shunning it.
Just as religions provide you a buffet of choices out of which to
find a belief that fits your worldview, so do the following personalities, opinions, and ideas, out of which I’m sure you’ll find some with which you agree. Maybe even a few!
The debate about religion and science is sure to be a topic for years to come, as it has been for the last four centuries.
THE FLAMETHROWERS
On one end of the spectrum lie those scientists who show little accommodation for religious points of view. James Watson, mentioned above, is a good example. But he is not alone. “I grew up without religion, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more inclined to dislike the influence of religion in the world and to hope that the human species will eventually outgrow it,” says Dr. Steven Weinberg, professor in the Department of Physics, University of Texas at Austin, and winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics. Weinberg is an avowed atheist. “I’m in physics because I love physics. But I do hope that the advance of science in general and physics in particular will in the long run continue, as it has in the past, to weaken the hold of religion on people’s minds.”
When I first heard Weinberg’s acid critique of religion and those who are believers I was shocked. It is not unexpected that some scientists harbor these beliefs. But here was someone who, like Watson, hardly sugarcoated his message. And he never shied away from telling just how he felt about it. For example, while Weinberg said in a 2005 appearance on Science Friday that he is in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, he said that such an exchange would not be a constructive dialogue. “There is no conflict between science and religion on the level where religion is simply a matter of ethnic identification or habitual practice or aesthetic enjoyment. But when it comes to belief in things being true or not true, as, for example, that there is something beyond the physical universe, that there is an afterlife, that there is a deity, it’s on the level of belief that science and religion come into conflict. That’s not all of religion, by any means, but it is an important part.”
The most famous case of religion intruding on science and seeking to influence its findings is the one involving Galileo reporting that he had seen the moons of Jupiter revolve around that planet. That put him at odds with the Catholic Church and he was forced to retract what his eyes told him to be true on the threat of excommunication by the pope. Weinberg says that as science has advanced through the centuries, it has caused religion to retreat from areas in which it used to make very definite statements of belief about science and nature. “I think that’s a good thing.” But, he says, it still has not been a full retreat.
“There are still idiots out there in the world who think the world was created six thousand years ago and that all the species were created at the same time.” He is willing to admit that those folks represent a minority opinion, though.
THE MODERATES
Dr. John Haught doesn’t believe that the purpose of religion is to compete with science. “If religion were in the business of trying to give out scientific information, then surely it’s going to compete with science, and there could only be a retreat if that was the function of religion,” says Haught, professor of theology and director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Science & Religion at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “I grew up as a Roman Catholic and I also came from a family of scientists, and so I’ve always had a love of both science and theology, and as a Catholic, I’ve never had any problem reconciling the two.”
Here is the typical middle ground of the moderate view: “In many ways, the coming of science has delivered religion from the moonlighting job of trying to provide anything similar to scientific information. Religion is in the business of doing something quite, quite different. And as such, there can be no conflict. In a very broad sense, you could say religion is belief in something of ultimate importance, and even the scientist has religion in that sense.
Or in a more narrow sense, you could say religion is belief that there’s some sort of incomprehensible mystery that surrounds the universe. Einstein himself accepted religion in that sense of the term.”
Einstein’s God was a spiritual God, one whose secrets were there to be discovered. A “cosmic religion,” as he called it. He dismissed the idea of a “God conceived in man’s image, so there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it.”
“Where I think the rubber hits the road and things really get sticky,” says Haught, “and I think Steven Weinberg would probably agree with this, is where religion is understood as belief in what Steven calls an interested God or a personal God. I think what religion is attempting to do in using the symbol of a personal God is to get across the belief or the conviction that the universe ultimately is undergirded by a principle of care, by a principle of intelligence, by a principle of meaning. And you know, science doesn’t do anything like that. Science is in the business of gathering a much more limited kind of information, and as such, I don’t think it can conflict with religion as I’ve understood it.”
Does Weinberg agree? “There still is perhaps not a conflict but a tension, as Susan Haack, the philosopher, calls it between science and religion, on two levels. It’s certainly true that science is never going to disprove the existence of an interested God or an afterlife. But when you learn the way the world works, as you learn more and more about the laws of nature and their chilling, impersonal quality, as you learn more and more about the irrelevance of human life to the general mechanism of the universe, the idea of an interested God, of a path that has been laid out for human beings, of a cosmic drama in which human beings are playing the starring role, becomes increasingly implausible; not disproved but just implausible.
“But there’s even a deeper level on which there’s a conflict or a tension between science and religion, and that is that science demonstrates a mode of knowing, which, as has been said, is culture-free,
does not look back to sacred texts. No one today, in trying to settle an argument about general relativity, would quote Einstein as an authority, because we progress. He’s a hero of ours, but he’s not a prophet. He’s not someone whose sacred writings we have to take seriously.
“This is rather different from the world’s religions. Even on the elevated, and I would say rather exceptionally enlightened level, the tension is there, and I think it will continue to weaken the influence of religion; even though certainly, I would never argue that science is all we need. Yes, there’s a lot more to life than science. There’s a lot of things science can never give us. But I just hope that the people will grow up and stop looking for the other things that science can’t give them in the supernatural.”
DOES SCIENCE MAKE IT HARDER TO KEEP RELIGIOUS FAITH?
Ever since the enlightenment, ever since astronomers started pointing telescopes at those moons of Jupiter or assaying the age of the rocks and seeing them to be quite older than the Bible says, scientists have been wrestling with the problem of how to reconcile what new discoveries tell them to be true with religious views that may be in conflict. Can religious views be “updated” or “modernized” to conform to constantly changing views of the world?
“Judaism has gone through many different changes and understandings of science,” says Laurie Zoloth, director of bioethics for the Center for Genetic Medicine and professor of medical ethics and humanities and religion at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Evanston, Illinois. “It’s been a witness to extraordinary changes in our understanding of the molecule, of the self, of the cell, of the universe. And in fact, the religion is strengthened by a more acquisitive and inquiring pursuit of what the real world looks like. It’s never diminished the understanding of what it is to be a Jew or the duties that a religious Jew carries forward into the world.”
So perhaps some religions, or rather some liberal or more flexible sects of those religions, find it easier to accommodate changing scientific views of the world. But not all. “The general question about whether science makes it harder to keep religious faith is the wrong question,” says Susan Jacoby, director of the Center for Inquiry—Metro New York and author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. “The question is: What kind of religious faith are you talking about? You cannot, for example, believe in the scientific method or accept the theory of evolution and also believe that the universe was created in seven days, as fundamentalist Christians do. You can certainly believe in the theory of evolution and believe that God set the universe in motion. What you cannot do is believe in the scientific method and believe in a fundamentalist, literalist form of religion, whether it’s fundamentalist Judaism, fundamentalist Protestantism, fundamentalist Catholicism, or fundamentalist Islam.”
Zoloth disagrees. She sees it possible for religious dogma to bend to new interpretations that do not conflict with scientific understanding. “Let’s just look at the example that you just gave, Susan. You can be a Jew who believes in traditional texts and understand that the world could be created in seven things that are translated as days, but aren’t Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Right? So then there’s a linguistic and normative account of reunderstanding what we mean by a day. And that’s the move that’s made in traditional texts and even in traditional communities.” In other words, a day can be much longer than 24 hours; perhaps it can be eons, if you want to reconcile it with science. Zoloth says a close reading of Genesis notes that the concept of “days” being periods of 24 hours doesn’t exist early on in the creation story. There are “things called days before there’s suns and moons to define them, so there’s got to be some other way of understanding it. And oftentimes people have said, ‘Look, there’s two different ways of thinking about the word, the
text and that’s been done since the very beginning of textual interpretation.”