(no subject)
"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."
The New York Times
November 21, 2006
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
By GEORGE JOHNSON
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."
and may in the end be our greatest contribution to
civilization."
The New York Times
November 21, 2006
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
By GEORGE JOHNSON
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."