Download Science and Religion: The Myth of Conflict

Science and Religion: The Myth of Conflict
There is a widespread perception that there is some kind of conflict or contradiction
between science and religion. Atheists confidently assert that there is, and many
religious people fear that there might be. This has helped to undermine the faith of many.
Now, certainly, some religious beliefs do conflict with science. But why is there a
perception that all religion, religion per se, is contrary to science?
I think people are mistaking one thing for another. There is a real, longstanding, and often
bitter conflict going on. But it is not between religion and science, it is between religion
and a philosophy called “scientific materialism.” Scientific materialism is an idea that
grew up alongside of science, was inspired by science, and wraps itself in the mantle of
science. It is the worldview of many scientists and of some people who presume to speak
for science. But it has no claim to being science --- it is rather a philosophical idea.
The central tenet of scientific materialism is very simple, and this simplicity accounts for
much of its appeal. It is that the ultimate reality is matter, so that everything that exists
and everything that happens can be explained by the laws of physics and blind chance.
For some of its adherents, however, scientific materialism is more than this: it is a
passionately held ideology that sees science as having a saving mission, which is to free
the human mind from irrationality and superstition, among which they count religion. It
is not enough that science is good and brings us understanding; there must be an enemy
to be vanquished, and they cast religion in that role. This explains the strange zeal that
some materialists have in propagating their ideas. They feel that they are taking part in a
grand struggle between reason and its enemies. This gives their lives a heroic meaning
and purpose.
Scientific materialists have a well-developed critique of religion which has at least three
aspects: philosophical, historical, and scientific.
Their philosophical claim is that there is an inherent contradiction between the scientific
and religious outlooks. Science is based on reason and evidence, whereas religion, they
say, is irrational, because it is based on dogma, faith and mystery, which involve belief in
things that cannot be seen and for which supposedly there is no evidence. Science is
based on natural explanations and natural laws, whereas religion is based on miracles and
the supernatural. They see religion as a matter of myth and magic, and therefore pure
superstition, which is the very antithesis of a rational scientific outlook.
Their historical claim is that religious believers and institutions have been hostile to
science and have tried to suppress it. This is powerfully symbolized, in the eyes of many,
by the Catholic Church’s treatment of Galileo. And this impression is constantly
reinforced in the public mind by the battles waged against Evolution by biblical
literalists.
Their scientific claim is that the actual discoveries of modern science over the last four
hundred years have debunked or undermined fundamental Christian beliefs about the
universe and mankind’s place in it. As the story is often told, science has dealt one blow
after another to the religious conception of the world: Copernicus showed that man is not
the center of the universe; Newton showed that the world is governed by blind and
impersonal forces; modern astronomy showed how small and insignificant we are
compared to the cosmos as a whole; Darwin, they say, showed that humans differ only in
degree from lower animals; discoveries in fields such as neuroscience and Artificial
Intelligence are expected to show, if they haven’t already, that the supposed “soul” is just
the working of the brain, a complex biological computer; and modern cosmology is
invoked to show either that the universe had no Beginning or that the universe created
itself out of nothing by a quantum fluctuation.
I will deal with each of these strands in turn.
First the philosophical. The philosophical critique is largely based on crude
misunderstandings of traditional ideas about God and Creation.
Let’s start with supernaturalism. Christianity and Judaism were never based on
supernaturalism, if we mean by that the rejection of the idea of a natural order. Indeed,
scholars say that the Book of Genesis was in part an attack on the supernaturalism and
superstition of ancient pagan religions. When Genesis said that the sun and moon were
merely lamps placed by God in the heavens to light the day and night, it was attacking the
paganism that worshipped the sun and moon. When it said that man was made in the
image of God and was to exercise dominion over the animals, Genesis was, among other
things, attacking the paganism in which men worshipped and bowed down to animals or
to gods made in the image of animals.
In paganism, the world was imbued with occult forces, and populated by numerous
deities. But Jews and Christians taught that there was only one God who was to be sought
not within Nature, not within its phenomena and forces, but outside of Nature, a God who
was indeed the Author of Nature. In this way, biblical religion desacralized and
depersonalized the physical universe and made it indeed into a natural world, and thus
helped to clear the ground for the later emergence of science.
The biblical religions, then, taught that there is a natural order, which comes from God.
What characterizes this natural order and reflects the rationality of its Creator is precisely
that it is orderly, harmonious, and lawful. Consider this passage from the famous Letter
of Clement to the Corinthians, written about 97 AD.
“The heavens, as they revolve beneath his government, do so in quiet submission
to him. The day and the night run the course he has laid down for them … . Sun,
moon, and the starry choirs roll on in harmony at his command, none swerving
from his appointed orbit. .... Laws of the same kind sustain the fathomless deeps
of the abyss and the untold regions of the netherworld. … The impassable Ocean
and all the worlds that lie beyond it are themselves ruled by the like ordinances of
the Lord. … Upon all of these the great Architect and Lord of the universe has
enjoined peace and harmony.”
Or consider this passage from the Christian apologist Minucius Felix, writing around 200
AD:
“If upon entering some home you saw that everything there was well-tended, neat,
and decorative, you would believe that some master was in charge of it, and that
he was himself much superior to those good things. So too in the home of this
world, when you see providence, order, and law in the heavens and on earth,
believe that there is a Lord and Author of the universe, more beautiful than the
stars themselves and the various parts of the whole world.”
So it was not the supernatural or miraculous departures from the order of nature, but the
order of nature itself and its lawfulness that were seen as pointing to its Creator. The
ancient argument was that if there is a law there must be a Lawgiver. God was the
Lawgiver not only to Israel, but to the cosmos itself. God says in Jeremiah 33:25-26,
“When I have no covenant with day and night, and have given no laws to heaven and
earth, then too will I reject the descendants of Jacob and of my servant David.” Psalm
148 tells of the Sun, the Moon, the stars, and the heavens obeying a divinely given “law
that will not pass away.”
The idea of God as rational lawgiver very likely helped give birth to modern science, as
even some atheists at times concede. For example, the eminent biologist E.O. Wilson
suggested the following as the reason that Chinese civilization, for all its impressive
achievements in science and technology, did not produce a Newton or Descartes:
“[Chinese scholars] had abandoned the idea of a supreme being with personal and
creative properties. No rational Author of Nature existed in their universe;
consequently the objects they meticulously described did not follow universal
principles. … In the absence of a compelling need for the notion of general laws -- thoughts in the mind of God, so to speak --- little or no search was made for
them.”
And the well-known cosmologist Andrei Linde has suggested that the notion of a
universe governed by “a single law in all its parts” is historically rooted in monotheism.
Christianity does, of course, teach that there are supernatural realities, such as divine
grace, that have effects in the world. But the word supernatural, which means “above the
natural”, would make no sense unless there were a “natural order” in the first place.
And the concept of “miracles”, which are extraordinary events that go beyond what is
naturally possible, presupposes that there is a natural order that determines what is
naturally possible and what is not. There is no logical contradiction between the idea of
miracles and the idea of a lawful universe, for the same Lawgiver who established the
laws of nature can also suspend them.
There is much confusion today, even among some Christian believers, about how nature
relates to God. Instead of seeing God as the “Author of Nature”, they see God and nature
as somehow opposed or in competition. So that if something has a natural explanation,
then God has nothing to do with it; and, conversely, if God is the cause of something it
must be supernatural. Many, therefore, look for evidence of God only in what is outside
the course of nature or inexplicable by science, that is, in the gaps in our scientific
understanding --- hence the expression “the God of the gaps”. And atheists think that by
closing those gaps they will leave no place for God to hide.
The traditional Christian and Jewish view was quite different. If God, as Creator of the
natural world, established its laws and gave things their natural powers, then his existence
is evident in nature itself and its ordinary processes, whose “power and working” reflect
God’s own power and wisdom. This is the message of the following passage from the
Book of Wisdom, a Jewish work of about 100 BC, which is recognized as part of the
Bible by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches:
“For all people who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature; and they were
unable from the good things that are seen to know the one who exists, nor did
they recognize the artisan while paying heed to his works; but they supposed that
either fire or wind or swift air, or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water, or the
luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world. If through delight in the
beauty of these things people assumed them to be gods, let them know how much
better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them. And if
people were amazed at their power and working, let them perceive from them
how much more powerful is the one who formed them. For from the greatness
and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.”
Notice that the evidence of God to which this passage points consists of phenomena that
are perfectly natural: “fire,” “wind,” “swift air,” “the circle of the stars,” “turbulent
water,” and “luminaries of heaven [i.e. the stars, planets, Sun and Moon].”
Medieval theologians distinguished two ways in which God acts in the world. He can act
directly in a supernatural manner (for example, turning water into wine), or he can
accomplish his will through the operation of natural causes and processes. It has always
been the Christian view that God ordinarily acts in the latter way. In the words of the 17th
century Catholic theologian Suarez, “God does not interfere directly with the natural
order where [natural] causes suffice to produce the intended effect”.
This principle was important for the founding of science, for it implied that when
confronted by some puzzling event or new phenomenon, we should look first for natural
explanations. Superstitious people tend to see the supernatural in every unusual or
strange event. But this was strongly criticized by the great medieval scientist-theologian
Nicole Oresme. In explaining marvels of nature, he said, “there is no reason to take
recourse to the heavens …, or to demons, or to our glorious God, as if he would produce
these effects directly, any more than [he directly produces] those effects whose [natural]
causes we believe are well known to us.” Another great medieval scientist-theologian
Jean Buridan said that when confronted by new phenomena we should seek “appropriate
natural causes”. That’s why the Catholic Church does not declare a miracle to be worthy
of belief until it has excluded the likelihood of natural explanations.
This brings us to the all-important theological distinction between primary and secondary
causality. I think the failure to grasp this distinction is one of the main reasons that
people see a conflict between science and religion. This distinction can be explained
using a simple analogy.
Consider the play Hamlet. In that play, the character Hamlet kills Polonius by stabbing
him through a curtain. Now, ask yourself this question: did Polonius die because Hamlet
stabbed him, or did he die because Shakespeare wrote the play that way? Obviously, it is
a silly question, for both are causes, but at different levels.
Hamlet is the cause within the play of the Polonius’s death, the horizontal cause or what
theologians traditionally termed the “secondary cause”, whereas Shakespeare is the
vertical or primary cause of the whole play and its entire plot, including of course
Polonius’s death. There is no competition or conflict between these two levels of
causality.
By analogy, the natural causes within the universe, which are studied by scientists and
other people, are horizontal or secondary causes, while God as Author of Nature is the
vertical or primary cause. The analogy makes clear just how silly it is to treat evolution
and Creation as alternatives, as both fundamentalists and atheists do: Did this species of
animal arise by natural processes or because God wrote Nature’s script that way? Of
course, both. This is why the Catholic Church never condemned or opposed Evolution.
This also makes clear why scientific materialists are wrong to think that believers in God
do so “without evidence”. For materialists, “evidence” means either directly observing
something with our senses or inferring that something exists as a natural cause of what
we observe (the way we observe a compass needle move and infer that there is a
magnetic field). Obviously, God cannot be seen in these ways, for he is neither a part of
nature, which could be sensed, nor a natural cause. And yet, God is a cause, the ultimate
cause. He is not a cause within nature, but the cause of nature.
Thus, Nature gives “evidence” of God in the same way a play or novel gives evidence of
its author, even if the author does not make an appearance within the book.
Now let us turn to the materialist’s historical critique of religion. The idea that
Christianity, and the Catholic Church in particular, opposed science and tried to hold it
back is called by historians the “conflict thesis”. It has been completely discredited by
historians of science. It is a myth, pure and simple, whose roots lie in the Enlightenment,
and the contempt many of its thinkers had for revealed religion. Its growth was aided in
Catholic countries by anti-clericalism, and in Protestant countries by anti-Catholic
prejudice.
The conflict thesis was popularized by two enormously influential books written in the
late nineteenth century, The History of the Conflict between Science and Religion, by
John William Draper, and A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in
Christendom, by Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University. These
books are dismissed by scholars today as full of errors of fact and interpretation and
historically worthless. One eminent historian calls Draper’s book “a thinly disguised
anti-Catholic rant”.
The scientific revolution, which took place in the 17th century and gave rise to modern
science, did not occur in opposition to revealed religion. In fact, most of its great figures
were devout Christians. Copernicus, whose work sparked the Scientific Revolution, was
an official of the Catholic Church. Johannes Kepler, famous for his three laws of
planetary motion, announced the discovery of one of them with the words, “I thank thee,
Lord God our Creator, that thou hast allowed me to see the beauty in thy work of
creation.” Galileo remained a devout Catholic throughout his life. Descartes, whose
work in mathematics was foundational for modern science, believed in God and the
reality of the spiritual soul. Blaise Pascal was not only a mathematician and physicist of
genius, but a man whose life was transformed by an intense mystical experience and who
wrote in defense of Christian belief and against skepticism. Robert Boyle, the first
modern chemist, left a large sum of money to endow a series of lectures whose purpose
was to combat the ideas of “notorious infidels” (i.e. atheists). And Isaac Newton, the
greatest of them all, spent as much time on theological and scriptural studies as he did on
science. All of them saw their work as showing the beauty of God’s creation rather than
as supporting atheism. And this was true long beyond the 17th century. For example, the
two greatest physicists of the nineteenth century, Michael Faraday and James Clerk
Maxwell, were exceptionally devout Christians even by the standards of their day.
Moreover, the scientific revolution did not spring out of thin air. Its foundations were laid
in the universities of Medieval Europe, as has been strongly emphasized by the eminent
historian of science, Edward Grant. It was in those universities that, for the first time in
human history, science was studied and taught on a continuous basis from generation to
generation by a stable community of scholars, that is, where science was first
“institutionalized”, as Grant put it. They produced hundreds of thousands of graduates,
who were introduced to scientific questions and from whose ranks scientific talent could
emerge. The scientific community and scientific public these universities created were
the soil in which the seeds of the Scientific Revolution germinated.
A little-known fact that dramatically illustrates the positive role the Catholic Church has
played in the development of science, is the large number of Catholic priests who made
major discoveries. We Catholic have our litanies. What follows is not a litany of saints,
but a litany of priest-scientists. For reasons of time, I will skip over those of vthe Middles
Ages, and start with the 17th century and mention only a few of the most outstanding.
In the seventeenth century there were many important priest-scientists, including Niels
Stensen, Marin Mersenne, Christoph Scheiner, Giambattista Riccioli, Francesco
Grimaldi, Benedetto Castelli, and Buonaventura Cavalieri.
Stensen, aka Steno, was a Danish Lutheran. He converted as an adult to Catholicism,
became a priest, and eventually was made a bishop. As bishop he was noted for his
asceticism and solicitude for the poor. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II. Stenson
was the greatest anatomist of his time. He made major discoveries in that field --- several
features of the body are named after him, such as Stensen’s duct, Stensen’s vein, and
Stensen’s foramina. But his greatest contribution, for which he is considered a founder of
the science of geology, was developing the correct theory of the origin of sedimentary
rocks (indeed understanding for the first time that the rocks were originally under water
and formed from sedimentation) and the origin of fossils. His theories unlocked the
history of the earth. He is considered one of the principal founders of the science of
geology. [slide] The slide shows Stensen and also a “google doodle” celebrating Stensen.
Mersenne is considered the founder of acoustics, for fundamental discoveries in the
theory of sound and vibrations. His religious house became a meeting place of famous
scientists, and his voluminous correspondence with other scientists was an important
means by which scientists learned of each other’s work. The Dictionary of Scientific
Biography calls him one of the “architects of the European scientific community”. [slide]
Scheiner, Riccioli, and Grimaldi were Jesuits. The Jesuits have a great tradition in
astronomical research, which continues to this day. Christoph Scheiner was one of the
discoverers of sunspots and made the most detailed study of them. Here is a slide
showing Scheiner making observations of the sun. [slide] On the next slide I show a
diagram from his treatise on sunspots, which shows a sunspot observed on consecutive
days moving across the face of the sun. [slide] (There is a gap for one day, which was
undoubtedly a cloudy day on which observations were not possible.)
Giambattista Riccioli among other astronomical achievements discovered the first binary
star. [slide] Together with Francesco Grimaldi he made the first map of the moon’s
surface.
This same Grimaldi discovered the extremely important physics phenomenon of
diffraction of light. [slide] This fundamental discovery shows that light is a wave. Since
we now know that all matter is made up of waves, diffraction is a very important
phenomenon in all branches of physics. On the slide I show some pictures of diffraction
phenomena. Note that the colored bands of light you see on DVDs and CDs are caused
by diffraction. So when you see those bands, think of Fr. Grimaldi.)
Benedetto Castelli, a Benedictine priest, is considered the founder of hydraulics. [slide]
He was a friend and pupil of Galileo and the teacher of two important scientific figures,
Buonaventura Cavalieri and Evangelista Torricelli.
Buonaventura Cavalieri, himself a priest, made important contributions to the
development of integral calculus [slide]: You see on the slide a quote from Leibniz
himself attesting to their importance. (You will recall that Leibniz and Newton are
credited with independently discovering calculus.)
In the eighteenth century, there was Lazzaro Spallanzani, one of the leading biologists of
that century. [slide] His contributions to biology were varied numerous. He was the first
to explain the process of digestion. He showed that fertilization in mammals occurred
through the union f sperm and egg. [He even did experiments trying to breed various
animals, such as dogs with cats.] He studied echolocation in bats and the regeneration of
limbs in lower animals. Among his most important work was a series of experiments
disproving the theory of spontaneous generation of life. These experiments influenced the
famous work of Louis Pasteur a century later.
And there was René-Just Haüy, the founder of crystallography. [slide] Here is a painting
of him holding a crystal and calipers in his hands.
In the nineteenth century, there was Giuseppe Piazzi [slide], who, among his many
contributions, discovered the first asteroid, which he named Ceres. Here is a picture of
Ceres taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
There was Pietro Angelo Secchi, a Jesuit [slide], who is considered one of the founders of
modern astrophysics, for pioneering the use of spectroscopy in the study of stars and the
Sun. He made the first classification of stars based on their spectra, which is the basis of
our present classification. A beautiful symbol of the harmony of faith and science is the
fact that Secchi did some of his ground-breaking research using an observatory built on
top of the Church of Sant’Ignazio, only a few hundred feet from where we are. It is a
couple of blocks east of the Pantheon. Here [slide] is a picture of the remarkable fresco
on the ceiling of that church.
There was Bernhard Bolzano a Czech priest who helped put modern mathematics on a
more rigorous foundation [slide]. Anyone who has studied advanced math has heard of
the Bolzano-Weierstrass Theorem and the Bolzano function. Here is a quote from the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy saying that he is perhaps the greatest logician in the
period between Leibniz and Frege.
And of course there was Gregor Mendel, who founded the science of genetics. [slide]
In the twentieth century, there was Julius Nieuwland, a chemistry professor at the
University of Notre Dame, who did work that led to the development of “neoprene”, the
first synthetic rubber; and last but not least, Georges Lemaître, the founder of the Big
Bang Theory, the central idea in modern cosmology.
What a glorious record of achievement! Prof. Lawrence Principe of Johns Hopkins
University, who is both a chemist and a noted historian of science, has written, “the
Catholic Church has been probably the largest single and longest-term patron of science
in history.”
The rest of my talk will deal with the third strand of the materialists’ critique of religion:
the notion that many of the greatest discoveries of modern science have undermined or
debunked the traditional Christian and Jewish view of the universe, of human beings, and
of our place in the universe.
As things stood 100 years ago, this view had some plausibility, but much has changed
since then. There have been several major discoveries or developments, especially in
physics, that seem more consonant with the Christian and Jewish conception of the
universe and of man than with the materialist’s. I would like to discuss four of them. In
each case, I will mention earlier discoveries that had seemed to favor the materialist’s
view, and then the more recent discovery or development that points the other way.
The first has to do with the structure of the cosmos. We all have heard how Copernicus
overturned the religious picture of the cosmos, by showing that man is not at the center of
it. And how later discoveries demoted us even further, by showing that the earth is just a
tiny speck lost in the vastness of space.
Actually, however, the idea of the earth at the center of the universe did not come from
the Bible but from ancient Greek science, specifically Aristotle and Ptolemy. Nor was
the center a place of honor in Aristotle’s cosmos, but the lowliest, and the farther from it
things were the more noble and exalted things were.
There was one idea about cosmology that did enter Western thought from biblical
revelation. It was not about space and whether it had a center, it was about time and
whether it had a beginning.
The pagan thinkers of antiquity, including Aristotle, conceived of the universe as having
had no beginning. Modern atheists have also tended to prefer this idea. And until about
100 years ago, almost every indication from science seemed to support it.
Physicists discovered that the amount of energy never changes: it “cannot be created or
destroyed”. Chemists found that the number of atoms never changes in chemical
reactions. In Newtonian physics, time extended infinitely into past and future, just as
space extended infinitely in all directions. Almost everything suggested that matter,
energy, space and time had always existed and always would.
The idea of a beginning came to be seen as outdated religious mythology. The Nobelprize-winning chemist, Svante Arrhenius said in 1911, “The opinion that something can
come from nothing is at variance with the present-day state of science, according to
which matter is immutable.” The Nobel-prize-winning physicist Walther Nernst declared,
“To deny the infinite duration of time would be to betray the very foundations of
science.”
But in 1916, Einstein proposed his theory of gravity, called General Relativity, and
everything changed. In the 1920’s, the Belgian theoretical physicist Georges Lemaître
(who was also a Catholic priest) realized that the equations of Einstein’s theory could
describe a universe whose space was expanding. Combining this with the observation by
astronomers that distant galaxies were receding from us, Lemaitre proposed what is now
called the Big Bang theory. It took a long while to gain acceptance, partly because of
philosophical prejudice against the idea of a beginning, but in time the evidence grew
overwhelming that the hypothesized Big Bang did occur about 14 billion years ago. In
the standard Big Bang theory, everything began at that point: matter, space, and time
itself.
It is possible that something preceded the Big Bang, and it wasn’t the absolute beginning
of the universe, but only the beginning of some phase of its history. There are, however,
very strong theoretical reasons to think that the universe did have an absolute beginning a
finite time ago, if not at the Big Bang then at an earlier point.
So science now strongly supports an idea that came from biblical revelation and was
dismissed both by the pagans of antiquity and modern materialists and for a long time
seemed contrary to science.
The second development I will speak about has to do with evidence of design in nature.
Religious believers have always seen such evidence. The starry heavens, the forms of
living things, and the other wonders of nature were seen as having been fashioned by the
hand of God. Modern science seemed, however, to undercut this idea, by showing that
they were the result of mechanisms that depended upon a combination of impersonal
laws and blind chance.
Whereas Genesis spoke of God placing the sun and moon in the firmament, astrophysics
showed that they condensed from swirling clouds of gas and dust under the attraction of
gravitational forces. Darwin showed how the intricate structures of living things could
arise from natural selection operating upon random mutations. When Napoleon asked the
physicist Laplace why God never was mentioned in his great treatise on celestial
mechanics, Laplace famously replied that he “had no need of that hypothesis”. The laws
of physics had displaced God.
This was a new way of looking at the laws of nature. From ancient times it had been
argued, as we’ve seen, that the lawfulness of nature pointed to a Lawgiver. But now it
was argued that the laws of nature in and of themselves constituted a sufficient
explanation for the order of nature.
And this does seem to make a certain amount of sense if one thinks about the shapes or
patterns that we see in tangible objects or collections of objects, such as crystals, or
seashells, or sunflowers, or the motions of heavenly bodies. Consider, for example, the
solar system. It exhibits many striking mathematical patterns, three of which were
discovered by Johannes Kepler. He found that each planet follows an elliptical path, with
its speed varying in such a way that the line from planet to sun “sweeps out equal areas in
equal times”. He also discovered a simple algebraic relation between the period of a
planet’s orbit and its distance from the sun.
All these and many other patterns in the solar system can be explained by the laws of
Newtonian physics. Does that mean, however, that the laws of Newtonian physics
explained the existence of cosmic order? No, quite the reverse.
For how did Newtonian physics explain the order of the solar system? It did so by
appealing to a deeper mathematical order that holds throughout the whole universe. It
showed that Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion follow from Newton’s more
fundamental laws of mechanics and gravity. But Newton’s laws describe an order far
grander and more impressive than the laws of Kepler. There was more cosmic order to
explain after Newton than before.
And where does the greater order discovered by Newton come from? Newton’s law of
gravity comes from yet more fundamental laws, namely the equations of Einstein’s
theory of gravity. And, lo and behold, the mathematical order described by Einstein’s
laws is even more splendid, beautiful and profound than that found by Newton! And the
process continues: It is believed that Einstein’s laws, in turn, can be derived from yet
more beautiful and profound laws --- very likely those of so-called “M-theory” or
“superstring theory”.
This is what the progress of physics, especially in the twentieth century, has shown with
ever greater clarity. The deeper we probe into the hidden workings of the physical world,
the richer, more intricate, and more magnificent the mathematical structure we find. And
we find this beautiful structure in the mathematical laws themselves.
All of this has changed the context in which we think about design in nature. When the
questions that scientists asked were simply about shapes or patterns seen in tangible
things, however beautiful, it may have seemed naive to speak of them as fashioned by the
hand of God. They could be accounted for by the operation of the laws of physics. But
now that the deepest laws of physics themselves have been found to form a magnificent
mathematical edifice of great subtlety, harmony and beauty, the question of a cosmic
designer has returned with greater force than ever.
In 1931, the great mathematicians and physicist Hermann Weyl gave a lecture in which
he said the following:
“Many people think that modern science is far removed from God. I find, on the
contrary, that it is much more difficult today for the knowing person to approach God
from history, from the spiritual side of the world, and from morals; for there we
encounter the suffering and evil in the world, which it is difficult to bring into
harmony with an all-merciful and almighty God. In this domain we have evidently
not yet succeeded in raising the veil with which our human nature covers the essence
of things. But in our knowledge of physical nature we have penetrated so far that we
can obtain a vision of the flawless harmony which is conformity with sublime
reason.”
Minucius Felix spoke of the “providence, order and law in the heavens and on earth”.
The deeper we have penetrated into the structure of the universe the more order and law
we have seen. So that the ancient argument for God from the order of nature has been
strengthened, not weakened, by scientific progress.
The third development I will speak of has to do with whether there is purpose in nature.
It is easy to regard natural things as having purposes. For example, the Sun seems to
exist to provide the energy that plants need to grow, and rain to provide the water. From
this it is a short step to ascribing such purposes to a plan existing in the mind of God.
And the pre-modern science of Aristotle was based on “teleology”, the idea that natural
processes and entities are directed toward “ends” or goals. Heavy objects fall in order to
reach the center of the earth. Living things heal from injury in order to reach the goal of
bodily health and wholeness.
But this teleological approach to science was set aside by the Scientific Revolution --especially in physics --- and replaced by a “mechanistic” approach. Events were no
longer seen as drawn toward future goals, but as driven blindly along by past and present
causes. Modern physics explains how the Sun formed and generates energy without any
reference to “ends”. In the perspective of modern science, neither the Sun nor its energy
are “for” anything, such as supporting life on earth; rather, life on earth takes advantage
of the energy that happens to be there. Darwinian evolution has pushed this mode of
explanation further. To put it simply: trees do not exist so that monkeys can climb them;
but rather, some creatures adapted to the presence of trees by evolving the ability to
climb.
But the idea of purpose in nature has staged a revival --- and again, it is not so much at
the level of tangible things and their structure, but at the level of the laws of physics
themselves.
Over the last forty years or so, physicists have become increasingly aware that many
features of the laws of physics seem arranged just so as to make life possible. These are
sometimes called “anthropic coincidences”. One could give many examples. I will
mention just a few.
(1) If the world did not obey the principles of quantum mechanics, atoms and molecules
would not be stable building blocks with well-defined properties out of which living
things could be built.
(2) If the down quark were lighter than the up quark instead of heavier, then ordinary
hydrogen, on which all life depends, would be radioactively unstable.
(3) If the so-called “strong force”, which holds nuclei together, were even a small fraction
weaker than it is, a crucial nucleus called deuterium could not exist, and the nuclear
reactions that power the Sun and similar stars would not take place --- depriving earth of
the energy needed for life. Moreover, the fusion processes that occur in stars, and which
were required to form all the elements of the Periodic Table besides hydrogen, would not
have been possible.
(4) We live in a universe that has three macroscopic space dimensions. If the number of
macroscopic dimensions of space were greater than three, gravity would act differently
and not allow planets to orbit stars --- they would either plunge into the stars or fly off
into space.
One could go on and on giving examples of such anthropic coincidences. The most
obvious way to explain them is to say that whatever Mind is behind the laws of physics
conceived of them with the purpose that life should arise. There is an alternative
explanation called the “multiverse” idea, which I haven’t time to explain, though I could
discuss it after the talk. If the universe is a multiverse, as it well may be, it would
explain some, though not all, of the anthropic coincidences. But it wouldn’t dispose of
the evidence for purpose in the fundamental structure of nature’s laws, since a multiverse
must itself have very special laws. Thus, one way or another, the laws of physics have to
be special for life to arise.
By the way, the vast size of the universe, which some people see as a sign of human
insignificance, is actually one of the things which makes the life possible in our universe.
The astrophysical and biological processes by which life arose, require billions of years
to unfold. And according to Einstein’s theory of gravity, a universe which lasts for
billions of years must attain a size of at least billions of light years across. A universe
that never got larger than a human scale of distance, say thousands of miles across, would
last only a small fraction of a second.
The fourth development I will discuss has to do with the issue of determinism and free
will.
For three hundred years all indications were that the mathematical laws of our universe
are “deterministic”. That is, given the state of the universe at one time, the equations
would determine its whole future development uniquely, as was famously stated by
Laplace 200 years ago. This was a powerful objection to the idea of free will and greatly
disturbed religious thinkers.
And if anything seemed solidly supported by science 100 years ago, it was physical
determinism. But then, to the astonishment of physicists, determinism was overthrown by
quantum mechanics in the 1920’s. For it turned out that a fundamental feature of
quantum mechanics is that its equations do not, generally speaking, predict what will
happen, but only the relative probabilities of various future outcomes.
That has seriously weakened the physics objection to the possibility of free will. To
quote Hermann Weyl’s 1931 lecture again:
“We may say that there exists a world, causally closed and determined by precise
laws, but … the new insight which modern [quantum] physics affords … opens
several ways of reconciling personal freedom with [the laws of nature]. It would be
premature, however, to propose a definite and complete solution of the problem. …
We must await the further development of science, perhaps for centuries, perhaps for
thousands of years, before we can design a true and detailed picture of the interwoven
texture of Matter, Life, and Soul. But the old classical determinism of Hobbes and
Laplace need not oppress us longer.”
There are other important discoveries of the twentieth century that seem to undermine
scientific materialism rather than religion. For example, it has been argued by some
eminent physicists, such as Eugene Wigner and Rudolf Peierls, that quantum mechanics
is not compatible with the materialist view that the human mind is entirely reducible to
the physical brain. And it has been argued that Gödel’s Theorem in mathematics implies
that the human mind is more than a mere machine, as materialist’s believe. But there is
no time to discuss these developments here. They are discussed, however, at length in my
book, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith.
I would like to conclude with a few general remarks and suggestions for you as
journalists.
(1) Beware of scientific hype. With obvious motives, scientists frequently hype their
own work, in conference talks, in abstracts of research papers, in grant proposals,
and in conversations with science reporters. When you hear, as you often will,
that some new development is revolutionary, and will overthrow our most
cherished beliefs about ourselves or our place in the universe, in 99 cases out of a
100 --- at least --- it is hype. Revolutionary developments in science do happen.
Quantum mechanics is a prime example. But they happen very infrequently. And
they do not generally overthrow our cherished ideas about ourselves or our place
in the universe. I have given you several examples where they arguably did just
the opposite.
(2) The vast majority of scientific discoveries --- almost all of them, in fact --- have
no theological implications whatever, at least for Catholics. The Catholic faith
leads us to expect that the universe is lawful --- indeed, that expectation very
likely played a role in the emergence of modern science --- but it does not tell us
what those laws are. It tells us that God is the source of existence, but does not
tell us what kinds of things exist in the natural world. It tells us that a human
being is more than just an arrangement of atoms, but does not tell us how our
atoms are arranged or how they got to be arranged in that way. It tells us that the
story of the universe had a beginning, but does not tell us the physical processes
that happened at the beginning.
(3) A vast body of misinformation and mythology about the historical relation of the
Church to science has built up over the last 200 years. The big myth is that the
Church and Science have historically been at war. This is built out of many small
myths: for example, that the Catholic Church once forbade human dissection; that
the early Christians burned the library of Alexandria and destroyed much of the
scientific legacy of the ancient pagan world; that Giordano Bruno was burned at
the stake for his scientific ideas; that a Cardinal refused to look through Galileo's
telescope; that Christians condemned lightning rods, and so on, and on, and on.
Historians of science have refuted the big myth and the many small ones, but they
live on as strong as ever among both the general public and among scientists. So,
here is a practical suggestion. If you hear some juicy fact illustrating the Church's
supposed opposition to science, phone or e-mail a historian of science who is
expert on such matters, such as Ronald Numbers or Lawrence Principe. The
overwhelming probability is that you will find the juicy fact to be an oft-refuted
falsehood.