Wednesday, November 13, 2002


Science and religion-the romance continues.... (?) Greg Easterbrook has an article in the new issue of Wired about the confluence of science and religion. It is an entertaining read for the lay person-but there are shadings of the truth in his piece. For instance Easterbrook breezes through the past generation in science and characterizes it thus:
Meanwhile, decades of inconclusive inquiry have left the science-has-all-the-answers script in tatters. As recently as the '70s, intellectuals assumed that hard science was on track to resolve the two Really Big Questions: why life exists and how the universe began. What's more, both Really Big Answers were assumed to involve strictly deterministic forces. But things haven't worked out that way. Instead, the more scientists have learned, the more mysterious the Really Big Questions have become.
By intellectuals, does Easterbrook mean the scientists themselves, or the reporters that cover them? Even the term "why life exists" is loaded, for strictly speaking Easterbrook is trying to indicate the problem of abiogenesis, how did life comes from non-life, but it hints at the normative issue of "why," as if science can answer such a question laden with questions of oughts that we have never been able to satisfactorily answer. As for the universe becoming more mysterious, this isn't new. Lord Kelvin thought that science had ended by the end of the 19th century, but soon enough the 20th century exploded in a plethora of new theories and experimental results. Scientists wondered how the sun could generate as much energy as it did, and the paradox of how it could be eons old (the biologists and geologists were pointing in this direction) befuddled physicists who had no knowledge of the strong and weak molecular forces that power fusion. Ignorance, paradox and anomalous data is the seed-bed for new science, not the fertilizer for faith (at least for scientists). Of course, there is the standard soft-peddling of the personal atheism of many scientists. To name a few names, Easterbrook continues:
Science luminaries who in the '70s shrugged at faith as gobbledygook - including E. O. Wilson and the late Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan - have endorsed some form of reconciliation between science and religion.
Wilson was a Southern Baptist as a child, so he knows the importance of religious feeling for most human beings. He is also the doyen of sociobiology and likely accepts that religion is part of our evolutionary heritage. He squares the circle by proposing a humanistic religion to replace our modern shriveling theism. I suspect most religious people would find this patronizing at best, blasphemous at the extremes. Gould did not propose anything so ambitious, but his national status as a science popularizer meant that he worked ever so hard to separate science and religion into two separate fields-not meld them together into one incoherent whole! Gould especially had been prominent in advocating the position that science and religion occupy two exclusive domains, similar to his assertion that biology and sociology should also remain segregated. Sagan's work, and his series Cosmos, almost seemed to offer an alternative to religion, with his ideas about benevolent aliens and the relationship between all living creatures (his later books strayed farther from his background in astronomy and toward social policy and psychology). In any case, Easterbrook can paint whatever ambiguous picture he wants to of these scientists, Wilson is too busy avoiding feminists intent on throwing ice water on him for his "fascism" while Gould and Sagan are gone and so can't set the record straight (Sagan at least was the subject of some death-bed conversion rumors in Christian circles-which his widow Anne Druyan has dismissed). The article doesn't shirk from portraying scientists as petulant either:
About 10 years ago, just as scientists were becoming confident in big bang theory, I asked Alan Dressler - one of the world's leading astronomers, and currently a consultant on the design of the space telescope scheduled to replace the Hubble - what caused the bang. He scrunched his face and said, "I can't stand that question!" At the time, cosmologists tended to assert that the cause and prior condition were unknowable. The bizarre physics of the singularity that preceded the explosion, they explained, represented an information wall that blocked (actually, destroyed) all knowledge of the prior condition and its physical laws. We would never know. The more scientists testily insisted that the big bang was unfathomable, the more they sounded like medieval priests saying, "Don't ask me what made God."....
I don't see where Easterbrook gets this analogy-scientists are ignorant of a lot of things, and they probably would rather not speak of things that they have no data on, or no theoretical model for. Easterbrook has covered science long enough to know that some (though not all) scientists would react viscerally to big questions like "what caused the Big Bang" when the answer is already known by the one posing the query (God of course!). I suspect that Easterbrook holds scientists to such high standards because they have had a long track record of being vindicated, on the other hand, would he care to make a bet on the explanatory powers of a medieval priest? The medieval priest believed in a God of History who walked among man, imagine that, the font of all Creation in the flesh! Of course Christ could not tell us everything while on this Earth, most of his message dealt with redemption and the like, but the poor scientist is even lacking in a Book of All Answers. Alas, where is the scientist's Bible? Sometimes I have to think Easterbrook knew what he was doing, look at this passage:
To the late astronomer Fred Hoyle, who calculated the conditions necessary to create carbon in 1953, the odds of this match occurring by chance seemed so phenomenally low that he converted from atheism to a belief that the universe reflects a "purposeful intelligence." Hoyle declared, "The probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make the random concept absurd." That is to say, Hoyle's faith in chance was shaken by evidence of purpose, a reversal of the standard postmodern experience, and one shared by many of his successors today.
If you read this article, you would think that Hoyle showed up at church one day because of the data about God's existence, but he was an atheist to his dying day. Hoyle did promote a kooky idea that life is ubiquitous in the cosmos-panspermia. But Easterbrook doesn't mention this at all. In addition, you'd think that many physicists believe that there is design in the universe according to his last statement and nuggets interspersed through the polemic-oops, I mean piece-but the most recent study of leading scientists indicates that theism is not an overwhelming position in the natural sciences. As Easterbrook progresses, his vision becomes grander and grander:
This web of improbable conditions - making not just life but intelligent life practically inevitable - came to be known as the anthropic principle. To physicist Charles Townes, an anthropic universe resolves a tension that has bedeviled physics since the heyday of quantum theory. "When quantum mechanics overthrew determinism, many scientists, including Einstein, wanted the universe to be deterministic," he points out. "They didn't like quantum theory, because it leaves you looking for a spiritual explanation for why things turned out the way they did. Religion and science are going to be drawn together for a long time trying to figure out the philosophical implications of why the universe turned out favorable to us."
I realized early on that the "Anthropic Principle" would show up at some point. What I didn't expect is that Easterbrook would leave out that there are two major versions: Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP): The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so. Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP): The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history Easterbrook only speaks of the SAP throughout the piece, as if that's the only version. The WAP on the other hand basically says we shouldn't be amazed by the exact requirements for humanity's existence occurring, as if those requirements weren't around to facilitate our existence we wouldn't be asking the question (basically a tautology). Our very existence acts as a constraint on how the universe will be ordered (and I'm not so sure that we're not just not creative enough in our ideas about exobiology when we say that universes with different physical forces would not be conducive to life of some sort). The article then continues cataloging all the wacky ideas out there in science. It might seem sillier than religious assertions via authority, but that's kind of the process of science. Easterbrook seems to imply that all these theories require faith, and probably aren't true, and that we might as well look at the Good Book and the Church Fathers. Well, yes, 99.99% of scientific theories turn out to be a load of crap, more or less so. What's remaining are the accepted models that pop out good predictions. Science more than anything is a methodology, not a beginning or end point. As far as transcendence goes, what has science to do with that? I feel that Easterbrook first puffed up science in all its explanatory glory, as if all scientists were logical positivists out of the 1920s, and then mischaracterized the befuddlement of modern cosmology and evolutionary biology (the two places where God and science seem to intersect). There are unanswered questions our there in their millions, and perhaps science won't get to answering all of them. Overdeveloped apes that we are, I suspect our current level of cognition and sentience precludes our understanding of much that which higher beings, gods or supermen, would find naturally obvious. To me God explains everything by explaining nothing, and is far too small an answer to a cosmic question. Easterbrook has his own opinion, what I object to though is his selective use of quotes and peculiar characterizations to buttress his position (don't I always?).







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