From: kalki33!system@lakes.trenton.sc.us
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: On God and Science
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Date: Tue, 15 Dec 92 23:22:54 EST
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From Back to Godhead magazine, November/December 1992

ON GOD AND SCIENCE

by Sadaputa Dasa

(c) 1992 The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust
Used by permission.

In a recent book review in Scientific American, Harvard evolutionist Stephen
Jay Gould points out that many scientists see no contradiction between
traditional religious beliefs and the world view of modern science. Noting
that many evolutionists have been devout Christians, he concludes, "Either
half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is
fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs -- and equally compatible
with atheism, thus proving that the two great realms of nature's factuality
and the source of human morality do not strongly overlap."[1]

The question of whether or not science and religion are compatible frequently
comes up, and Gould himself points out that he is dealing with it for the
"umpteenth millionth time." It is a question to which people are prone to give
muddled answers. Definitions of God and God's modes of action in the world
seem highly elastic, and the desire to combine scientific theories with
religious doctrines has impelled many sophisticated people to stretch both to
the limit. In the end, something has to give.

To help us locate the snapping point, let's look at what a few scientists have
said about God.

Dr. John A. O'Keefe, a NASA astronomer and a practicing Catholic, has said,
"Among biologists, the feeling has been since Darwin that all of the intricate
craftsmanship of life is an accident, which arose because of the operations of
natural selection on the chemicals of the earth's shell. This is quite
true...."[2]

O'Keefe accepts that life developed on earth entirely through physical
processes of the kind envisioned by Darwin. He stresses, however, that many
features of the laws of physics have just the right values to allow for life
as we know it. He concludes from this that God created the universe for man to
live in -- more precisely, God did this at the moment of the Big Bang, when
the universe and its physical laws sprang out of nothing.

To support this idea, O'Keefe quotes Pope Pius XII, who said in his address to
the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1951:

        In fact, it would seem that present-day science, with one sweeping
        step back across millions of centuries, has succeeded in bearing
        witness to the primordial Fiat lux ["Let there be light"] uttered at
        the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a
        sea of light and radiation, while the particles of chemical elements
        split and formed into millions of galaxies.[3]

Now this might seem a reasonable union of religion and science. God creates
the universe in a brief moment; then everything runs according to accepted
scientific principles. Of the universe's fifteen-billion-year history, the
first tiny fraction of a second is to be kept aside as sacred ground, roped
off from scientific scrutiny. Will scientists agree not to trespass on this
sacred territory?

Certainly not. Stephen Hawking, holder of Issac Newton's chair at Cambridge
University, once attended a conference on cosmology organized by Jesuits in
the Vatican. The conference ended with an audience with the Pope. Hawking
recalls:

        He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the
        universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big
        bang itself because that was the moment of creation and therefore the
        work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the
        talk I had just given at the conference -- the possibility that
        space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no
        beginning, no moment of creation.[4]

Whether or not Hawking's theory wins acceptance, this episode shows that
science cannot allow any aspect of objective reality to lie outside its
domain. We can get further insight into this by considering the views of Owen
Gingerich of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In a lecture on
modern cosmogony and Biblical creation, Gingerich also interpreted the Big
Bang as God's act of creation. He went on to say that we are created in the
image of God and that within us lies a "divine creative spark, a touch of the
infinite consciousness, and conscience."[5]

What is this "divine spark"? Gingerich's words suggest that it is spiritual
and gives rise to objectively observable behavior involving conscience. But
mainstream science rejects the idea of a nonphysical conscious entity that
influences matter. Could "divine spark" be just another name for the brain,
with its behavioral programming wired in by genetic and cultural evolution? If
this is what Gingerich meant, he certainly chose misleading words to express
it.

Freeman Dyson of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies arrived at ideas
similar to those of Gingerich, but from a non-Christian perspective.

        I do not claim that the architecture of the universe proves the
        existence of God. I claim only that the architecture of the universe
        is consistent with the hypothesis that mind plays an essential role in
        its functioning... Some of us may be willing to entertain the
        hypothesis that there exists a universal mind or world soul which
        underlies the manifestations of mind that we observe... The existence
        of a world soul is a question that belongs to religion and not to
        science.[6]

Dyson fully accepts Darwin's theory of chance variation and natural selection.
But he also explicitly grants mind an active role in the universe: "Our
consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by chemical
events in our brains, but an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to
make choices between one quantum state and another."[7] He also feels that the
universe may, in a sense, have known we were coming and made preparations for
our arrival.[8]

Dyson is verging on scientific heresy, and he cannot escape from this charge
simply by saying he is talking about religion and not science. Quantum
mechanics ties together chance and the conscious observer. Dyson uses this as
a loophole through which to introduce mind into the phenomena of nature. But
if random quantum events follow quantum statistics as calculated by the laws
of physics, then mind has no choice but to go along with the flow as a passive
epiphenomenon. And if mind can make quantum events follow different
statistics, then mind violates the laws of physics. Such violations are
rejected not only by physicists but also by evolutionists, who definitely do
not envision mind-generated happenings playing any significant role in the
origin of species.

It would seem that O'Keefe, Gingerich, and Dyson are advancing religious ideas
that are scientifically unacceptable. Unacceptable because they propose an
extra-scientific story for events that fall in the chosen domain of science:
the domain of all real phenomena.

To see what is scientifically acceptable, let us return to the remarks of
Stephen Jay Gould. In his review in Scientific American, Gould says, "Science
treats factual reality, while religion struggles with human morality."[9] We
can compare this to a statement by the eminent theologian Rudolph Bultmann:
"The idea of God is imperative, not indicative; ethical and not factual."[10]

The point Gould and Bultmann make is that God has nothing to do with facts in
the real world. God is involved not with what is but what ought to be, not
with the phenomena of the world but people's ethical and moral values.

Of course, a spoken or written statement of what ought to be is part of what
is. So if God is out of what is, He cannot be the source of statements about
what ought to be. These must simply be human statements, and so must all
statements about God. As it is put by Don Cupitt, Cambridge philosopher of
religion, "There is no longer anything out there for faith to correspond to,
so the only test of faith now is the way it works out in life. The objects of
faith, such as God, are seen as guiding spiritual ideals we live by, and not
as beings."[11]

This may sound like atheism, and so it is. But we shouldn't stop here. Human
religious activity is part of the factual world, and so it also lies within
the domain of science. While religious people "struggle with morality,"
inquisitive scientists struggle to explain man's religious behavior -- unique
in the animal kingdom -- in terms of the Darwinian theory of evolution. This
was foreshadowed by a remark made by Darwin himself in his early notes: "Love
of the deity effect of organization, oh you materialist!"[12] Religious ideas,
including love of God, must arise from the structure and conditioning of the
brain, and these in turn must arise through genetic and cultural evolution.
Darwin himself never tried to develop these ideas extensively, but in recent
years sociobiologists such as Edward O. Wilson have.[13]

So is the science of Darwinism fully compatible with conventional religious
beliefs? That depends on one's conventions. If by God you mean a real
spiritual being who controls natural phenomena, even to a slight degree, then
Darwinism utterly rejects your idea -- not because science empirically
disproves it, but because the idea goes against the fundamental scientific
program of explaining all phenomena through the laws of physics. Religious
beliefs are compatible with Darwinism only if they hold that God is simply a
human idea having something to do with moral imperatives. But if this is what
you believe, then instead of having religious beliefs, you have "scientific"
beliefs about religion.

Judging from the theistic ideas of O'Keefe, Gingerich, and Dyson, many
far-from-stupid scientists do believe in God and Darwinism. But in their
efforts to combine truly incompatible ideas, they succumb to enormously
muddled thinking. And so they commit scientific heresy in spite of themselves.
If one is at all interested in knowledge of God, one should recognize that
such knowledge is not compatible with mainstream science, and in particular
not with Darwinism.

REFERENCES

[1] Gould, Stephen Jay, "Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge," Scientific
    American, July 1992, p. 119.
[2] Jastrow, Robert, God and the Astronomer, NY: Warner Books, Inc., 1978, p.
    138.
[3] Jastrow, Ibid., pp. 141-2.
[4] Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time, NY: Bantam Books, 1988, p. 116.
[5] Gingerich, Owen, "Let There Be Light: Modern Cosmogony and Biblical
    Creation," an abridgement of the Dwight Lecture given at the University of
    Penna. in 1982, pp. 9-10.
[6] Dyson, Freeman, Disturbing the Universe, NY: Harper & Row, 1979, pp.
    251-52.
[7] Dyson, Ibid., p. 249.
[8] Dyson, Ibid., p. 250.
[9] Gould, Ibid., p. 120
[10] Cupitt, Don, Only Human, London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1985, p. 212.
[11] Cupitt, Ibid., p. 202.
[12] Paul H. Barrett, et al., eds., Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1844,
     Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987, p. 291.
[13] Wilson, Edward O., On Human Nature, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
     Press, 1978.

END OF ARTICLE

Sadaputa Dasa (Richard L. Thompson) earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from
Cornell University. He is the author of several books, of which the most
recent is Vedic Cosmography and Astronomy.

Posted by Kalki Dasa for Back to Godhead

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