Present at the Future (25 page)

FUNDAMENTALISM

What about rigid religious beliefs that don’t bend?

“Everybody is talking very nicely, as though there doesn’t have to be a conflict because you’re talking about people who want to make accommodations, who want to make the days a metaphor for something else,” says Jacoby. “But I don’t see how any of us can deny, whatever faith we have: there’s a very large percentage of people in this country and this world who do not want to make those accommodations, who are not interested in those accommodations, and who in fact say, ‘No. If the Bible or my interpretation of the Koran doesn’t say this literally, it cannot be true.’ And this is why we’re having so much controversy. I think we face a situation, a dangerous situation, where a lot of people refuse to allow their religion to be modified by secular knowledge at all.”

Sounds very much like Weinberg’s view. “I think what we’re hearing is a very enlightened view of religion. It’s one which I would argue does represent a retreat in the sense that if these opinions had been expressed about the fact that religion does not compete with science in the description of the world around us, the physical world, these are people who would have been burned in the Middle Ages and might today have quite a lot of trouble in many Islamic countries.”

Islam is a very interesting example. Islam had a “golden age” of science and math. Muslims were encouraged by the Prophet Muhammad to seek new knowledge, to search for it even as far as “China.” As for diseases, scientists were encouraged to find cures for which Allah had provided. While Islam has a long tradition of welcoming and creating advances in science and math, Dr. Ebrahim Moosa, associate research professor in the Department of Religion at Duke University and codirector of the Center for the Study of Muslim Networks, says
today, “The political conditions in different parts of the Muslim world create certain levels of anxieties that, in my view, block that kind of flourishing of intellectual thought, and you have forms of political repression as well as a very atrophied version of religion that is very loud, and that also creates further repression of critical and scientific thought.”

GOD VERSUS NATURE

One way that many scientists have come to grips with their beliefs is to put them in separate boxes. We don’t need to modernize our religious views, no need to jump through hoops to make text match science because there is no conflict: God and nature coexist but don’t interact.

“If God has any meaning, God is outside of nature, not bounded by nature,” says Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. You may remember that he led the public effort to decode the human genome.

At first glance, this might seem to be a contradiction. Isn’t God part of nature? Doesn’t the Bible tell us that God created “the heavens and the Earth”? Or is God supernatural, outside the boundary, as Collins posits? Think about it. When you look around at nature and believe that God has created it, isn’t it natural to assume that God is part of nature? But what if you can put the two worlds in different “boxes”? Because if you can put the deity outside of nature, into a box of its own, then you don’t have to have a conflict between religion and nature. If God is supernatural, the logic goes, and science can explain only the natural world, then you don’t have a conflict. You can believe both in science and in God.

“So while science is the only really reliable way to understand nature, science is relatively powerless to help us with the question of whether God exists, and if so, what he is like,” concludes Collins. And others agree.

“The doctrine of creation is trying to get across the point,” says Haught, “that the universe is grounded in an ultimate reality, that the universe is a gift from something other than nature itself, that it’s trying to answer the question ‘Why is there anything at all rather than nothing?’ rather than trying to give us information, scientific information, about how our universe came into being.”

“I believe there are many, many things in human life which transcend the explanatory levels of life, and religion is precisely dealing with those other aspects which have little to do with explaining natural phenomena,” says Dr. Varadaraja V. Raman, professor emeritus of physics and humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. “It seems to me that the two kinds of truths—religious and scientific—belong to entirely two different categories, ontologically speaking. One, religious truths are grounded, anchored, to geographical, historical, and cultural truths, which are enormously important, whereas scientific truths transcend these and are, by definition, space and time invariant and culture invariant. And that is why efforts to bring the two together often fail.

“I come from the Hindu tradition, where religion means something very different, because it is not based on our beliefs but on our experiences, the idea being that there is something beyond the physical world, which we experience in different ways. So I have always been introduced into this mystical dimension, as it were, or the spiritual dimension, more exactly, and my love of physics has been there since my high school days, and so I’m as much a physicist as one devoted to the other dimension of human life, mainly the spiritual.”

Dr. Owen Gingerich is the author of God’s Universe. He is senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and research professor emeritus of astronomy and the history of science at Harvard University. He is one of the most respected historians of science in the world. He does not believe that by studying science one can find proof of the existence of God. Rather, for him,
“the universe makes more sense with this understanding.’” And he too has no trouble separating science from religion: “A creator-God gives a coherent understanding of why the universe seems so congenially designed for the existence of intelligent, self-reflective life. You don’t even ask whether God exists because God is not an object, and therefore it’s the wrong question.”

“And so while science is the only really reliable way to understand nature, science is relatively powerless to help us with the question of whether God exists, and if so, what he is like,” says Collins. “Is it not immediately apparent that those questions [about God] are not scientific questions. And if you seek answers to those, you have to find them in another place. And that’s what, in very much a strong way, drove me toward considerations of spirituality after having been living for quite some time in a very materialist perspective as a graduate student.”

Collins’s conversion occurred as a medical student “when after watching people lean on their faith for great support at times of considerable challenge—and many of them facing certain death—I got curious about what this was all about and how people could derive such strength from it. And seeking to shore up my atheism by having a better defense against that kind of faith, I accidentally converted myself.”

So does Collins find that his science life impacts his religious views?

“Oh, yes, it does. Stephen Jay Gould, of course, had this famous argument: that the spiritual and the scientific world views are both valid, but they ought to avoid appearing in the same room or the same brain at any given instance because an explosion might occur—the nonoverlapping magisterial model.

“That doesn’t work for me. For me, being a scientist who’s also a believer is a wonderful, comforting, harmonious experience. So that as a scientific discovery looms into view—and we scientists have the chance to do that from time to time—it is both a remarkable moment
of realizing that you’ve discovered something that no human knew before, but God knew it. And so you are experiencing discovery and also a chance to glimpse just a little bit of God’s mind. And for me that is just a privilege and a wonderful experience not to be missed.”

Sentiments like that set Gingerich to quoting Scripture. “I think the most important verse in Genesis 1 is that ‘God created man in his own image. Male and female created he them.’ And what would that mean? I would say it’s creativity, it’s conscience, it’s consciousness. By being a scientific researcher and discoverer, we are, in a kind of sense, linking ourselves with God because the rationality of the universe, the fact that we can find these regularities and so on, is part of this logical structure that is God.”

Collins points to our old friend Galileo “who obviously got into some hot water here but who was also a strong believer as well as a wonderful scientist—wrote this wonderful sentence: ‘I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.’

“So I agree with what Owen is saying. One of our greatest gifts in the image of God is an intellect and the ability to explore the natural world, God’s creation. And I think God expects us to use that gift and is not threatened by what we discover.”

How do these beliefs square with the rise of intelligent design, the effort to teach the biblical story of creation in biology class, as a challenge to evolution? Collins believes those intentions are misguided.

“As a believer and a scientist, I am quite troubled by particular interpretations of Genesis 1 or of the failings or positive revelations of evolution that pit believers against scientists in a way that, I think, is really unnecessary. Intelligent design as it is currently being proposed is a very special kind of view about evolution—namely, that evolution was not sufficient to account for some of the really complex molecular machines that we find inside ourselves, like the bacterial flagellum, for instance, which is a favorite example.

“Proponents of [intelligent design] argue that only the intervention of a supernatural force would make it possible for such machines to come into being, because they are constituted of so many subunits. And if you knock any one of them out, you lose the function, that evolution would never be able to put this all together, since you wouldn’t gain any advantage until the very last step.

“That really flies in the face of what we’re learning about how such machines are built up bit by bit from smaller subunits that had other functions. And so I fear intelligent design is a God of a “gaps theory,” which puts God in a box and makes, ultimately over the course of time, a theory that is likely to collapse before too many more years go by, and in the process does no damage to science but actually may do damage to faith.”

Collins believes that the tactics used by creationists may backfire “because young people looking at the evidence may soon conclude that if you’re going to be a believer you have to basically deny scientific facts that are well substantiated. And that’s a terrible choice to ask somebody to make and a totally unnecessary one, although I don’t question the sincerity of those who are promoting the intelligent design perspective or those who believe in young Earth creationism. These are people who have really seriously attached themselves to something that they feel defends them against what they perceive as a very atheistic perspective that seems to be coming out of some quarters in science, a perspective which, I might add, is unnecessary and also destructive.”

“I like an example given by John Polkinghorne, who’s an eminent physicist and also an Anglican priest,” adds Gingerich. “He asks the question: Why is the water in the teakettle boiling? Well, you can explain it by the heating going in the bottom, the molecules rushing faster and faster, some of them finally flying out the top. The water begins to evaporate. But you can also answer the question: Why is the water in the teakettle boiling? Because I want some tea.

“These are examples of what Aristotle would call efficient causes
or final causes. Science works by efficient causes. Explaining how things work, that’s where it’s made its great success, and that is the kind of answer that can get your spacecraft to Jupiter, for example. Explaining it in terms of the molecules or explaining evolution in terms of DNA, genetics, mutations, selection, that’s an efficient cause. A final cause may be that this is part of a divine plan for how the cosmos is supposed to turn out.

“But I don’t think you can swap one of these for the other. You can’t replace the teaching of evolution in biology classes with intelligent design, even though at some level both may be true.”

A MIRACLE: GOD INVADES THE NATURAL WORLD

The conversation gets even more interesting when the subject of why life chose Earth as its home planet. Why have we not so far found life in other parts of the universe? Could it be that the conditions for life on Earth are so precise as to make it a unique place in the universe? And if so, is it a sign of the hand of God? Gingerich does not rule out the possibility.

“Even Stephen Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time, points out that this precise tuning of these physical constants, sometimes referred to as the “authropic principle,” seems to have major theological implications. And I think that’s actually a fairly interesting argument that most people aren’t aware of. Why should it be that the gravitational constant has exactly the value that it needs to in order for, after the big bang, actual coalescence of stars and galaxies and planets to have occurred instead of having things continue to drift off infinitely or else come back together quickly in a big crunch? And I think actually, considering the options, it’s a pretty good option” that God wanted it that way.

Let’s follow this line of reasoning a bit further. Does that mean that a scientist who believes in the Bible, where lots of miracles happen, would also tend to believe in miracles in nature?

“The big question,” says Gingerich, “is whether you’re willing to
accept the reality of God as a supernatural being. That is the decision that all of us at some point are faced with having to make, although many of us try to avoid it as long as we can because maybe the whole question of faith makes us uncomfortable. But once you’ve come to that point, as I did at age twenty-seven, of accepting the possibility—in fact, the reality—of God who is outside of nature, then that solves the miracle problem for you fairly quickly. Because if God is real, there’s no reason that God could not occasionally stage an invasion of the natural world, which would to us appear as a miracle.