Since today, 6/6/06, is (granted some typographical latitude) International Number of the Beast Day, I should tell you about my visit on Sunday to the Augustana Lutheran Church near the University of Chicago. (Not to disparage my kind hosts, but I have to say that sacred architecture really took a turn for the worse after the Reformation; give me those Gothic cathedrals any day.) I was invited by Shane Caldwell, a student in my cosmology class, to speak to a group that meets to talk about science and religion. Of course, my take on the matter is that science and religion are in stark conflict. But they understood where I was coming from, and were interested in hearing my spiel on cosmology and atheism. (All practiced academics understand that it’s important to have a small number of spiels that can be adapted to multiple circumstances at the drop of a hat; mine was rather different in this case than Clifford’s.)
Hot dogs and hamburgers were served, and we had a fun time debating the meaning of “knowing” and the existence of God. Robert Smith, the pastor of the church who is also the campus minister of the UofC, was very welcoming, and excited to be starting this kind of dialogue between different parts of the community. Most of the small audience were actually students, some who had taken my classes and some undergrads who were members of the church. There were also a few representatives from the Zygon Center for Science and Society, an organization across the street that is dedicated to studying the relationship between science and religion.
I’ve given my “God does not exist” talk to a couple of religious audiences before, and they’re generally very interested in hearing a different perspective and thinking about the issues in an unfamiliar way. Granted, these audiences were highly selected and undoubtedly academic, not randomly chosen evangelical churches in the heartland. And you may suspect that nothing I might say would ever change anyone’s mind, but that’s not true; I had one professional theologian tell me that I did change his mind. Not about the existence of God, but about the efficacy of the argument from design. And there is a tight (inverse) correlation between age of the listener and willingness to engage with the ideas; the students were interested and ready to tackle my claims on their own terms, while some of the older folks wanted to argue that there were plenty of scientists more famous than me who were religious, so what right did I have?
There are a million things one could talk about concerning science and religion, and the discussions tend to become rapidly unfocused (or individually focused on the concerns of each person in the room, with everyone talking past everyone else). Not to mention that theology is a rich subject with a complex history about which I know only the basics. So I make a real effort to define all the my words very carefully, and limit myself to one extremely specific chain of reasoning: science and religion do overlap in their mutual interest in understanding the basic workings of reality, and therefore it is possible to judge at least some religious claims using the ordinary empirical criteria of science, and that when one does so, a materialistic conception of reality (in which there exist nothing but stuff following unbreakable rules) comes out very far ahead of a theistic one (in which there exists a separate supernatural/spiritual category not bound by the laws of physics). There might be other interesting things to talk about, and there are other things that religion is concerned with besides the workings of nature, and there could be other criteria besides the scientific method that one might want to use in deciding between different pictures of the world. But in the quite specific question I am choosing to address, I think there is a sensible answer.
At the same time, I want to argue that the answer is not inevitable, or it wouldn’t be worth going through the exercise. There are several ways that thinking like a scientist could have led us to believe in God (or the supernatural more generally). The most obvious would be if God just kept showing up in our world and performing miracles; a sensible scientific approach in that case would be to search for the “laws of nature” that were in effect when God wasn’t around, and treat his manifestations as outside that box. More subtly, we might look for evidence of design in nature, or we might look for impassable “gaps” in our understanding (like the beginning of the universe, or the origin of life and/or consciousness) that only God could bridge. I’m perfectly happy to contemplate that such things could be part of a logically possible world; I just strongly believe that, in the actual world in which we find ourselves, there are no such fingerprints of design or unbridgeable gaps, and hence no scientific reason to appeal to the supernatural. We don’t understand everything in nature, but there’s absolutely no reason to think that it’s not understandable (even the beginning of the universe etc.) in terms of purely mechanical laws. So God, as an hypothesis, is discarded along with geocentrism and phlogiston and the Steady State universe and whatnot. Sadly, it’s taking a little while for the discarding to actually sink in, but I suspect it’s just a matter of (perhaps a very long) time.
Hi Sean,
It’s really great that you engaged in such a conversation at the church. As I said in the posts that you refered to, I think that it is so important that scientists actually show up to Churches and have these conversations. The Churches are important foci for a lot of communities, and regardless of what we may or may not think about why they exist, we should recognize that they are a great way of getting the message out to the general public that they should engage in more critical thinking about their world, and that science is a vital way of going about doing that. Also, it’s a great opportunity to remind people how much science plays a vital positive role in almost every aspect of their everyday lives. Finally, sometimes, as in the case of the church at which I spoke, a church can be one of the *very few* ways of letting parents and their children know about valuable career options that exist through science, which ultimately have an extremely long term positive effect on their lives and communities.
Best,
-cvj
I’m afraid there has been another instance of data manipulation. It’s not 6/6/6, but 06/06/06.
Three [yes or no] questions if I may?
1)Do/Can you Know everything there is to Know?
2)At what time [relative to GMT] did the Universe begin?
3)Can science explain/answer, every question posed to it?
😉
Here is my attempt:
1) No
2) Yes….ummm….No….Hmmm…roughly 13.7 billion years ago?
3) Not every question is a scientific question, therefore I say no. In fact, the very question you just asked cannot be answered by science. Therefore, the question necessarily leads to the answer no.
So two No’s and a ..maybe !
“) Not every question is a scientific question, therefore I say no. In fact, the very question you just asked cannot be answered by science.”
But some scientists insist this non-scientific question can be answered, I mean just ask Sean! and I state this not as a rebutal to Sean, but merely as a query?
I am inclined to believ that Sean’s great post and Answers, is based on a personal level, rather than scientific reasoning?
But then I may be way off the mark?
If we knew everything there was to know there would be no need for science. Science’s purpose is for continued discovery. Also, since its easier for me to say that the universe has simply existed forever (rather than adding a god into the mix that has existed for ever and just recently decided to poop out existence since he was bored) it is also possible for me to accept that there is infinite amount of information to learn, but I also think every fact (not opinions) is discoverable, if given infinite amount of time (kind of like that monkey/type writer thing).
I don’t see why we always have to fall on god when things become infinite
Spatulated wrote:
I don’t see why we always have to fall on god when things become infinite
We don’t. When something becomes infinite, we can either break out the surreal number theory or we perform an analytic continuation on the Riemann zeta function and make 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + … equal to minus one over twelve.
Not quite. The naturalism (intelligibility of the reality) assumed by science conflicts with supernaturalism assumed by most religions.
But religions need not involve supernatural assumptions.
Instead of defining God as a “supernatural designer” existing “outside the box,” I would define God as a “natural designer” that exists “inside the box.” Hypothetically, I would depict this designer as simply the bath of afterglow emerging from the last scattering surface. In turn, I would characterize this designer as the bath of afterglow which is homogenous and isotropic. In turn again, I would describe this designer as the bath of afterglow existing on a level playing field. In summary: this designer of nature – who is both universal and democratic – is redshifting asymptotically towards an infinite horizon…
I’m happy at embracing both. To quote from the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science, religion is not founded on science, nor is science an extension of religion.
(Way off topic, but what the heck…)
So what’s the deal with 1 + 2 + 3 + … = -1/12 ? In what sense is this supposed to be true, and under what conditions?
Say Lee, your belief is quite untenable, unless you interpret religion or God, as an extra axiom which does not have any observable effect on the material universe around us. Religion is not founded on science, but it is in direct contradiction to science. I can not speak for every established religion, but at least the major ones have seriously flawed cosmology which can be easily disproved. Religion, at most, is a social or ethical code which is socially constructed, and completely irrelevant to the search for explanations of the phenomena in the natural world. Unless religion gives up all pretensions to explaining the natural world, science would always be opposed to religion and logically and empirically, it is very obvious which side is correct.
>So I make a real effort to define all the my words very carefully, and
>limit myself to one extremely specific chain of reasoning: science and
>religion do overlap in their mutual interest in understanding the basic
>workings of reality, and therefore it is possible to judge at least some
>religious claims using the ordinary empirical criteria of science,
That’s exactly what the Jesuits who work at the Vatican Observatory do. In their perspective, they want to understand the mind of God, so they use their extensive scientific tools to do that. If someone claims that they are not scientists, then the simplest answer is to point them to NASA ADS to see their hundreds or thousands of papers in the highest quality journals.
I consider the Vatican astronomers excellent bridges between the fundamentalist (i.e. extreme) religious people and scientists (any kind). The scientists understand the need for studying the big picture while fundamentalist regilious people don’t understand the need for science. That’s where the Jesuits can be a bridge: they can help the strongly religious people see the value of science.
Amara, as much as I admire the Jesuits for their pursuit of knowledge– and I am not being sarcastic here; I come from India where some of the best schools are run by Jesuits– I still find the idea of upholding science as a “tool” to understand the Mind of the God, slightly problematic. I do not deny that the Jesuits are practicing good scientific methods and as such are excellent scientists, but to what end are they doing it? Merely to understand the “mind” of an ill-defined, logically and empirically untenable notion! Do we really want people to think science is necessary only so that we could better interpret religion? If fundamentalist religious people do not see the value of science, it is because they have been indoctrinated to ignore it’s obvious importance, and/or we as scientists have failed to connect to them and disabuse them of their mistaken beliefs about Nature. I do not see why theological nitpicking should be the main conduit of science to anyone.
That said, it is possible that you are right– perhaps what you are saying is a more pragmatic way of disseminating the scientific spirit and I am being an ideological purist. It is just that, all my life I have seen religion is brilliant at subverting rationalism and I am sort of wary of it. May be I am being too much of an ideologue here!
Proposition number 666: If, as a religious believer, I could be guaranteed of becoming a brilliant scientist if and only if I forswore any religious belief and publicly denounced religion any chance I could get, would I do it?
Pyracantha, what you have is a question, not a proposition. A proposition, by definition, must pose a (dis)provable statement and then one can prove or disprove it within a logical system.(I am ignoring all pathologies of set theoretic logic!!)
Besides, your question is not answerable as it does not lend itself to logical considerations at all. Such guarantees do not exist, except perhaps in totalitarian systems where the word “brilliant” has new meanings. Scientists are not created American Idol style through a popular vote limited to atheists only.
This a rather bizarre comment. What exactly did you have in mind? I can not decide whether you are being facetious or sarcastic at Sean and Mark!!
Hehe, if we’re talking of the God of Gaps, then he exists in quantum mechanics. Either everything that can happen happens in infinitely branching and disconnected universes, and God is the only entity that spans them all, or else out of several possibilities, only one happens, and quantum mechanics says there are no hidden variables or anything else that will ever enable us to know which one is going to happen in a particular measurement; God is then the Decider.
🙂
AR: “Do we really want people to think science is necessary only so that we could better interpret religion?”
No, and I don’t think the Vatican astronomers would agree either. To answer better of the Jesuits’ perspective, though, I should let them speak for themselves. The person who is most vocal and published in the press is Guy Consolmagno. Here is him speaking to young people about science, and here he is speaking to Astrobiology Journal. He also did an excellent job on the BBC Radio 4 science programs. They are all good, but I like this one the best because he successively circumvented the Vatican rules for recording at the Vatican Observatory. Apparently images are subject to control, but sound is not, so the sounds you hear at the Observatory and the Castel Gandolfo piazza in front of the entrance to the ‘papal palace’ are as they are ‘on-location’. Another thing I can point to from the Vatican Observatory is their series of summer astronomy schools. This link is for VOSS 2005, the course taught last summer. No religion is taught, only astrophysics.
I understand the purists perspective, but if I were that way living and working here (Rome/Frascati, Italy), then I would be willfully wearing blinders. I’ve visited Guy a few times at the Vatican Observatory and consider him a colleague and a friend. My group are planning to do a spectral analysis of some of the meteorites in his collection. I’m also surrounded with history and see the science embedded in religious places, and as a (former) Astronomy 100 teacher, if I didn’t point out the various contributions to astronomy by the Jesuits and other religious people (too), then I wouldn’t have done my job well. I can’t be so black-and-white in my field. You can see from my old syllabus that it is necessary to show everything. This includes Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit who invented spectrocsopy (whose lab was inside of a Roman church), Giovanni Cassini, another Jesuit, who discovered the moons of Saturn, the gaps in the rings and who confirmed with his Jesuit colleagues Kepler’s version of the Copernican theory using his requested modifications to the Basilica of San Petronio church in Bologna for its meridian line.
(See John L. Heilbron’s, The Sun in the Church for how the Jesuits historically used churches as solar observatories, which were higher in their precision than any other astronomical tool until the telescope was invented.)
That said, I’m far from immune about the damage done by the Vatican since I see it close up. I am little consoled by the fact that the Vatican astronomers do not interact with the Pope on a daily or weekly basis, it is more like once every few months. I have alot of topics I would like to discuss further with Guy about how he resolves some of the Vatican positions, such as on Italy’s assisted reproductive technology laws, the western world’s most draconian view on women’s and family’s choices. I could go on a rant on that topic alone. so I wil stop here.
It’s very nice to read a post by an atheist interacting comfortably and peaceably with religious believers. Speaking as someone who has moved back and forth between these camps, it’s refreshing to see the reality reflected that many believers can also be careful critical thinkers.
I will comment on Sean’s acceptance that it could be “logically possible” that there are “impassable “gaps” in our understanding (like the beginning of the universe, or the origin of life and/or consciousness) that only God could bridge.”
As an occasional believer, I think that religious believers who also are willing to accept what science tells us about the world should think very carefully before they embrace a “God of the Gaps”. The problem with this formulation of God is that the experience of science is that gaps are filled in over time, and if you make your religious belief dependent on the existence of a gap in our scientific understanding of the world, then religious belief will eventually lose.
Commenter AR (not me 🙂 seems to find it unlikely that religion might be willing to give up on trying to explain the “material world”. To me, any religion that is *not* willing to sacrifice most or all of its role in explaining nature will find itself superseded as our scientific knowledge expands — or will end up turning its adherents away from scientific understanding and towards various forms of willful ignorance.
Amara, there are certainly plenty of religious people who are great scientists, and vice-versa. I just disagree with those people about the existence of God, in the same way that I disagree with other people about the anthropic principle or astrology or supply-side economics. Likewise, religious belief has inspired some people to do some very good things, as well as inspiring some people to do some very bad things. In fact, the situation seems exactly as it would be if religious beliefs were a set of somewhat arbitrary myths that led to both good and bad actions — which I think they are. There’s certainly no reason to hide the contributions of religion to science or history, nor disparage the personal character of religious believers — and neither of those should that have any effect on our judgment about religion’s truth.
Nobody has explained why a changing understanding of religion is, in of itself, a bad thing.
Secondly, either QM is incomplete, or there is a permanent gap there that will never be filled, that leaves room for things like Amit Goswami’s “The Self-Aware Universe”.
Quantum theory in not incomplete: The probabilistic nature of the theory does not imply that there is something more to know than the predictions of quantum mechanics. (Note that I am not talking about possible theories superseding QM.)
A God of the Gaps that hides in the uncertainty in quantum mechanics occupies a gap of width zero. I guess that’s a god I can live with…
Scary thought… In this theoretical God of the Gap, this quantum God might to performing acts of entanglement and superpositioning! 😉
In my limited experience of this world, if not the next, I have found that people tend to believe in what works for them. This might even be true of the anthropic principle, astrology and supply side economics.
So God, as an hypothesis, is discarded along with geocentrism and phlogiston and the Steady State universe and whatnot. Sadly, it’s taking a little while for the discarding to actually sink in, but I suspect it’s just a matter of (perhaps a very long) time.