Scientists’ Dilemma: Factoring in Faith

Albert Einstein once remarked that there were more clergymen than fellow physicists interested in his theory of relativity. Like many of his colleagues, he knew well that the theories scientists cook up in their labs can seep into the broader society, influencing the way people think about everything from the origins of the universe to the nature of God.

Recently, the slim barriers still keeping many scientists at arm’s length from religion have been going the way of the Berlin Wall. Cosmologists think they’re on the brink of pinning down the physics of creation to the first instant of time. Particle physicists create matter out of nothing--ex nihilo, just as the Bible says. The recent discovery of evidence suggesting ancient life on Mars questions the central place of Earth in God’s thoughts. One physicist even says he has proved mathematically that God must exist.

“Modern cosmology is closing in on the real story of what happened at the beginning of the universe,” said UC Santa Cruz physicist Joel Primack. “The traditional distance has broken down.”

But although Primack and other spiritually inclined scientists see their attempts to reconcile with faith as a great opportunity to put the soul into science--and perhaps even to chart a new path to salvation--other scientists are extremely wary.

Science and religion are mutually exclusive, according to Case Western Reserve University astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss. “And when they aren’t, it’s to the detriment of both.”

Confirmed atheists and true believers agree that the territory between science and faith is a place where most scientists fear to tread. “For scientists to talk about religion is really dangerous,” said Rochester University astrophysicist Adam Frank.

Scientists base their work on claims to knowledge that they can prove, he said, but faith “isn’t amenable to proof. . . . Science and religion are two different world systems bashing heads together.”

To deal with the conflict, many scientists with a spiritual bent have historically tended to keep their faith in the closet, pursuing a policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” But others say a marriage of the two is not only inevitable but imperative--and the way to do it comes straight from physics. As it turns out, they say, the subatomic world has provided just the recipe to deal with mutually exclusive forces like science and religion.

‘God Is a Mathematician’

It’s not that scientists never speak of God. Einstein, who considered himself spiritual but not religious, was famous for referring to God in his conversations about science. “I want to know how God created this world,” he said. He spoke often about learning the secrets of “the old one.” His colleague, Sir James Jeans, was so impressed by the mathematical precision of the universe that he concluded: “God is a mathematician.”

Today, physicists routinely invoke the name of God to describe discoveries. Recently, UC Berkeley astronomer George Smoot compared the first glimpse of the earliest structure in the universe--a “lumpiness” in the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang--to seeing “the face of God.”

But when these scientists talk about God, Krauss said, “they don’t mean it; they’re being metaphorical.” Scientists often use “God” as a shorthand description for awesome revelations or moving experiences.

College of William and Mary physicist Hans Christian van Baeyer spoke for many of his colleagues when he said: “I subscribe to Einstein’s religion. It’s an oceanic feeling; there’s that great big thing out there that’s pretty marvelous.”

When it comes to plying their trade, however, scientists stick to tools that have worked for them in the past--and that does not, in general, include anything from the spiritual realm. “If I thought the Bhagavad-Gita would give me insights, I would read it, in the original Sanskrit,” said former altar boy Rocky Kolb, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, referring to a philosophic dialogue from a sacred Hindu text. But religion, he said, has never been a useful guide to scientific inquiry.

“The purpose of Scripture is to teach how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes,” he said, quoting a cleric who defended the Italian astronomer Galileo against the Catholic Church for insisting that the sun was the center of the solar system.

Science Like a Calling

Ironically, science has the flavor of a religious calling, complete with moral codes, perseverance in the face of adversity, and passion for total commitment. It attracts people--like Kolb--who had once thought of becoming priests. It stems from the same root: an attempt to make sense of the world around us. And it asks similar questions.

“A lot of people become scientists because they’re interested in questions like: Is there a soul? Is there a god? How does the universe work?” said University of Michigan astrophysicist Katherine Freese. While scientists can’t really answer such questions, she says, unraveling the mysteries of the material world is “the next best thing.”

But while science and faith may ask the same questions, they have very different ways of getting answers. Religion is based on revealed truth and accepted dogma; science on proven facts and continual skepticism toward evidence.

“Science has ways of verifying its knowledge that has led us to truths we can agree on,” said Frank. “You can go to a conference and sit next to someone who is a Buddhist or Islamic and we all agree on the science.”

To keep spiritualism in its place, most religious scientists place God at a distance from their daily work. God may have created the laws of nature, but since creation, “He or She has left them pretty much alone,” said Frank. “God doesn’t come in and tweak them anymore.”

For scientists who subscribe to this “dualist” philosophy, science and faith are separate but equal spheres--not connected, but not mutually exclusive. “I work with astronomers who are Christian fundamentalists,” said Mount Wilson Observatory Deputy Director Sallie Baliunas, “and they do very good science.”

But there is another side, Baliunas said. Some astronomers, for instance, are highly suspicious of colleagues with religious leanings. After all, the Catholic Church persecuted Galileo and others for purely scientific ideas--something akin to “putting Einstein in prison,” said Primack. And Baliunas said she wouldn’t want someone running her observatory on fundamentalist principles.

Indeed, a good many scientists are worried about the mixing of science and spiritual belief. Religious figures have used the Big Bang theory--which posits that the birth of the universe was a single, huge explosion--as scientific evidence that God created the universe in a unique event. To astronomers like University of Hawaii’s Victor Stenger, such talk is a misuse of science. “It contributes to a big misunderstanding of what science is about,” he said.

Case Western’s Krauss, who is the author of the book, “The Physics of Star Trek,” recently denounced the lack of reaction from the news media and scientific community to the “nonsense” science of creationists who believe that God created the Earth and people just as they are today, without evolution.

“I do think there are big dangers which have to be fought aggressively,” he said. “If we begin to believe fairy tales, we are in danger of not being able to distinguish truth, and then it can have huge social consequences.”

Along with many of his colleagues, Krauss says that much of modern science argues against the existence of God. “As far as we can tell,” said Krauss, “there is no need to invoke a spiritual hand of God since t = zero [the beginning of the universe]. Every one of the miraculous aspects of the universe appears to have a rational basis.”

It used to be that the “god of the gaps” filled in the mysteries that scientists couldn’t explain. Now, those gaps have narrowed considerably. Physicists can describe exactly how space and time might have appeared out of nothing and nowhere, how the unpredictability of the subatomic world can mimic free will, and how order evolves out of chaos.

Some scientists welcome this convergence. UC Berkeley physicist Charles Townes thinks new findings in astronomy have opened people’s minds to religion in a new way. Before the 1960s, the Big Bang was just an idea that was hotly debated. Today, there is so much evidence supporting the idea that most cosmologists take it for granted. To some, the Big Bang is almost a literal interpretation of God’s own creation: “Let there be light.”

“The fact that the universe had a beginning is a very striking thing,” said Townes. “How do you explain that unique event [without God]?” But either science or religion can have “wrong ideas,” he said, which need to be revised in the face of new evidence. “One has to be flexible.”

Baliunas, who is also an astronomer at Harvard, has already modified her religious beliefs to agree with science. The Judeo-Christian, she pointed out, has always held that God had a special relationship with homo sapiens. But if evidence for fossil life on Mars is confirmed, she said, “that changes everything. That means that life will start anywhere it can.” And she doesn’t believe that God would have ruled out the possibility of life elsewhere.

“I’ve always been a believer,” she said, “but as science has gained more knowledge, I’ve had to move back the border [between science and religion] a bit.”

From Physics to Metaphysics

At the extremes of the debate are scientists like Frank Tipler, who think they have proved the existence of God through logic. Tipler, author of the 1994 book “The Physics of Immortality,” argues in short that Einstein’s view of the universe as a four-dimensional structure combining space and time implies that the future already exists.

Because it is still very early in the history of the universe, and life has already engulfed Earth and probably other planets, he predicts that life will engulf the universe. At the end of time, he says, life will become omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. “And what does that sound like?” he asks. The answer is: God.

And since the future exists, he argues, God exists.

Tipler was raised as a Southern Baptist, but says he became an atheist at the age of 16 and “came back to religion through physics.” He doesn’t take the Bible literally, and argues that even the Bible demands empirical tests. He has provided half a dozen “predictions” that he says could prove (or disprove) his idea.

More in the mainstream are scientists like Primack, whose ideas often echo the philosophy of Einstein’s contemporaries. The late physicist Max Born, who won the Nobel prize in 1954 for his theory of the quantum mechanics of the motion of an atomic particle, said: “The physics of one era is the metaphysics of the next.” He meant that what physicists tell us about the nature of reality has a huge impact on the broader culture.

Another physicist, the late Frank Oppenheimer, who founded the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco, called these ideas the “sentimental fruits of science,” because they affect the way people think and feel about emotional matters such as their place in the cosmos and their relationship to other living things.

The “sentimental fruit” that Primack has seized on, curiously enough, comes from both modern cosmology and medieval Jewish mystics. It is the idea of inflation, or exponential growth.

Galaxy a Role Model for Humanity?

The current theory of the Big Bang produces the galaxies and structures we see around us only if one assumes that the universe underwent a period of violent inflation shortly after its origin. When the inflationary period stopped, the universe slowed down and continued to expand at its present stately pace.

The human population, Primack says, is exploding exponentially as well, rapidly running out of space and resources in our finite physical world.

“If humanity is going to survive,” he said, “it’s going to have to change. We need to have a new vision, and nothing can give us the kind of long-term perspective as cosmology.”

In other words, he is saying what humanity needs is a new role model--the universe itself. If the universe stopped inflating, so could its inhabitants.

Primack likes the fact that Jewish mystics also subscribed to a version of this Big Bang cosmology. And he doesn’t see anything wrong with mixing insights from religion and science.

On the contrary, he says, his scientist colleagues are “some of the most spiritual people I know.”

As it turns out, science and religion can complement each other in a model spelled out by the father of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr. One of the central tenets to come out of the new picture of the atom was that two mutually exclusive ideas can both be right. Or, as Bohr put it: “The opposite of a profound truth is also profound.”

In physics, that means that a particle can also be a wave, and a wave can be a particle. Oppenheimer liked to say this so-called “complementarity” principle explained how humans can be at the same time “ashes and dust” and also unique beings. Victor Weisskopf, an MIT physicist who played a key role in the Manhattan Project, used the principle to explain why one cannot simultaneously experience the emotion of a Beethoven sonata and also worry about the neurophysiological processes going on in the brain. “But,” he said, “we can shift from one to the other.”

To Primack, it merely means accepting the limitations of any given viewpoint. Religion and science both inform our thinking in different ways. But “whenever you get to profound concepts,” he said, “simple concepts fail.”

Or, as Kolb put it: “If you want to find God, look in the human heart, not in a telescope.”