Of course, there are innumerable articles espousing such a viewpoint and there are numerous that insist on the fundamental schism between science and religion. When religion begins to concern itself with the known rather than the imagined (or "revealed" if you prefer to speak of those who absorb their religious beliefs through that method), then it will more properly be described as being in the province of science rather than of transcendentalism.
HAS SCIENCE FOUND GOD?
A Talk by Dr. Norman F. Hall
Given on September 15, 1996 at a meeting of the Humanist Fellowship of San Diego at the Thomas Paine Coffeehouse
Good morning. I am Dr. Norman Hall, a scientist. My doctoral training was in molecular genetics, and I have worked professionally as a cardiac biochemist and a physical oceanographer.
When I tell you that I am a scientist, one among the many things that means is that I won't knowingly lie to you. When I give you my opinions, I will take responsibility for them. I will not, as do many religious believers, attribute my own ideas to God, implying that they are timeless and universal truths.
Although I will endeavor to speak the truth, as I see it, neverthless, nothing I say should be taken for the Truth (with a capital T). Everything that I believe, as a scientist, everything I say, is provisional, and the possibility exists that it may be mistaken. I wouln't say it, however, if I did not believe it to be very probably true. That's the best I can do, and I firmly believe that is the best anyone can do.
Being a scientist also means that I have great faith in science as a system of obtaining communicable knowledge that is very likely to be true. Not only is it the best system I know of, it's the only system. When people tell me that they have some way of obtaining true knowledge that is outside the realm of competence of science, and that I should believe that knowledge to be true, I am not only doubtful, I become suspicious, wary, and concerned.
I don't mind people believing in things that I think are untrue, and living their lives according to their own esoteric beliefs. But when they tell me that I ought to allow them to dictate how I should live my own life in conformity to those unscientific beliefs, and that I am somehow a bad person for not doing so, I become angry.
And when these same people, who I believe are basing their own lives on lies, use specious reasoning to try to argue that science itself supports their beliefs, I become defensive. It's time to take action, circle the wagons, defend the ramparts. It's time to tell these people, strongly and clearly, that they are mistaken. Not only does science provide no support for the notion of an intelligent creator-God, it does supply us with strong evidence that the existence of such an entity is highly unlikely.
Religious believers have a name for my belief in the universal competence of science. They call it "scientism, " and imply that it is a misuse of science. While I do believe that it is possible to misuse science, insisting on its recognition as the only practical standard for public knowledge and discourse is not a misuse; I believe it is the most important legitimate use to which science can be applied. If stating that belief makes me a proponent of scientism, then I will wear that label proudly.
But if science is going to be useful as such a standard, it must be defended when palpable nonsense begins to masquerade as science, as is currently happening when claims are made that new revolutionary findings and theories in science give support for the religious concept of God as the intelligent author and creator of the universe.
Sometimes it must seem to believers as though the goal of science is to eliminate God. Woody Allen once wrote a little Raymond Chandler detective spoof -- "Mr. Big" -- in which our hero, Kaiser Lupowitz, is hired by a philosophy student to find God for her. (She needs an "A" in her Western Religions course.) Well, when the First Cause of All Things turns up on a slab at the morgue, Kaiser is stumped, until he learns that his pretty philosophy major is actually a scientist.
We join him as Kaiser returns to his client's apartment. "Something seemed to be troubling her."
"God is dead." she says, "The police were here. They're looking for you. They think an existentialist did it."
"No, sugar, it was you."
"Don't make jokes, Kaiser."
"It was you that did it, ... You, baby, Dr. Ellen Shepherd, professor of physics at Bryn Mawr. You got stuck on a jazz musician who's heavily into philosophy... But it didn't work, because something came between you -- GOD. Y'see, sugar, he believed, or wanted to, but you with your pretty little scientific mind, you had to have absolute certainty..."
"Kaiser," she said, suddenly trembling, "You wouldn't turn me in?"
"Oh, yes, baby. When the Supreme Being gets knocked off, somebody's got to take the rap."
Woody Allen wrote that 25 years ago. Today, when science is accused of theocide, it's often with the proviso that it was an older, positivistic, determinisitic, reductionist science that once tried to knock off the Supreme Being -- but it missed! (Of course, the inventors of that old scientific mechanical determinism thought of themselves as the Almighty's own bodyguards -- Newton considered the patterns he found in nature to be overwhelming evidence of God's creative powers.)
But now, a new, holistically open science, it is said, is not only happy to have God back in his heaven, but it is providing some real glimpses of the All Powerful at work, making sure that all's right with the world.
Both viewpoints are nonsense. Science has no need to send out hitmen after God (it would make as much sense as calling in a priest to exorcize Maxwell's demons). Neither do the modern findings or theories in cosmology, quantum physics, chaos and complexity, evolution and consciousness, provide any royal road to the infinite that was not already present in (F=ma).
Has science found God? Easy question: NO! It hasn't, it won't, it can't. But there's another question to be asked: Have scientists found God? Yes, many have. Do these scientists find God in science? some do; but I want to suggest to you that these sightings are as substantive as finding a bunny rabbit in the clouds. It tells us much more about the observer than it does about the observed.
First, I need to explain why I believe science has not, will not, and cannot find God. To do so, I must provided a working definition of both science and God, emphasizing first what they have in common, and then where they differ.
Many people like to claim that science and religion are so different that they can't conflict -- there are the affairs of science on the one hand, telling us the facts about how the physical universe operates, while religion on the other tells us what science cannot, the answer to the question "why." The "brute facts" of science still require religion and its notion of God to provide the ultimate answer and to explain the meaning behind existence. Science's story may seem to answer "why" questions, but it always does so with another set of material facts in a chain of causation that may tell us "how," but still leaves unanswered the question "why."
So, under this view, there can be no conflict, and, indeed, no reason in principle why the facts of science might not help provide a rational framework for observing the ultimate accomplishment of God's will.
And that is, of course, religion's answer to the question, "why." But that answer -- the will of God -- can never be applied without competing with science. Perhaps there might be some legitimacy to the application of that answer, if science could be shown to have really come to the end of its chain of material causal answers; but historically it has turned out to be awfully difficult to find an area of science that has really come to a dead end for which there is no further physical answer.
So we find God being given as the reason why the planets stay in their orbits; why plants and animals have come to populate the earth in such abundance; why the order apparent in living things has emerged from the disorder of the pre- biotic physical universe; and why intelligence and consciousness have arisen to contemplate and try to understand the whole of it.
Too often, the religious answer has been applied while science still has had much more to say about the "how" of these and other questions. And when the religious answer is applied, and an area of inquiry is declared to be best understood as fulfilling "the will of God." it forces premature closure to the subject, because it invokes what Jacob Bronowski called the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not question.
Science and religion conflict because they are competing for the same territory. Both want to inform humans of how they relate to the universe in which they find themselves: where they come from, where they are going, and, yes, both have strong and differing implications for what it all means, and how best to go about finding that meaning.
Now, the characteristics of science on the one hand, and religion on the other, that I believe are crucial to an understandig of their relationship, may be contested by some of you. Some may feel that my view of science is faulty. Others may complain that I've invented a straw-man characature of religion. But I believe that most of you should be able to recongnize that the notion of God that I will describe, while it may not be everyone's interpretation of Gospel, does have a sizeable following, and does conflict with the concept of science that I wish to defend.
And that concept of science will not be to everyones taste, and, like all theories in and of science, it will be open to criticism and further development. But I think that it does embody some features which are essential to any concept of science. What I will want to show is that, if this concept of science can be taken seriously at all, it serves to confine religion and God to an area where it not only presents little danger to science, but little remains of it that can even be said to be of much interest.
Both science and religion make claims about truth. The crucial difference is that religion claims to have it, and wants to tell us all about it. Science, honestly put, never claims to have it, but only to have discerned something of the direction in which the truth may lie.
Not So! (I hear someone say.) Of course they will say, there are some parts of science, like evolution, that are merely theory, as opposed to scientific fact (and should jolly well be taught as mere theory, along with opposing theories.) But much of science, they will say, is a different kind of animal, comprising a body of tested and established fact, about which we can be as certain of its truth as we are of the fact that the world is round.
But, of course, the world is not round. It bulges at the equator, making it an oblate spheroid.
But that's not quite right, either. It's larger in the southern hemisphere, making it somewhat pear shaped. Ok, the champion of scientific facts will say, so there are facts of science that we know as well as we know the shape of the world, whatever that shape is.
But what shape are we talking about, anyway? The shape that includes all the mountains and valleys, every boulder and pothole, every footprint and pebble? It can't be. Measuring that would be a never ending job, requiring more vigilance that the entire human population could muster. We must be talking about the geoid, the gravitometric shape of the earth, defining what we call sea-level.
NASA has measured the shape of the geoid, calculating it from satellite tracking data. But it is known only to a certain precision: about 10 centimeters, or the width of 6 dimes placed side to side.
Pretty good, huh? But radar tracking of the shape of the ocean surface has also been done, and by comparing the two, and accounting for tides and other known factors, a lot of information about sea surface air pressure and surface currents can be derived. It so happens, we know the surface shape of the ocean to a precision of about 3 1/2 centimeters, about the width of 2 dimes placed side to side.
So maybe we know the shape of the earth; but we don't know it as well as we would like to know it; not even as well as we have use or need to know it. And our knowledge of that shape will never be perfect, but will always carry with it an important assessment of precision. We know it, but only within a certain tolerance.
All scientific knowledge is like that. It is knowledge within a tolerance. Bronowski expressed the sentiment that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would have better been called the principle of tolerance. Surely almost everyone is aware, by now, that quantum mechanics puts a limit, of a kind, on the precision with which we can measure and know any of the attributes that define the physical state of a particle. The limits don't express a hard and constant precision, but are somewhat uncertain themselves, coupled together in a way that leads to some counter-intuitive conundrums generally referred to as "quantum wierdness." We will get back to this a bit later (allthough a full discussion of the source, truth, and meaning of this wierdness is far beond the scope of this talk).
But even outside quantum considerations, scientific knowledge is only approximate. Although many different methods of reasoning are used in science, one method that is often considered characteristic is induction, which is often expressed as an extrapolation from limited observations to make statements about a far more general case. But induction is far more than hand waving.
Those of you who recall high school geometry may remember the mathematical rule of induction, which states that any proposition that can be proved to be true for the integer 1, and, when assumed to be true for N, can be proved to be true for N+1, is true for all integers. Its rigorous truth depends on the homogeneity of the integers, and a faith that each integer is going to be just like the last, except that it is larger by one.
The logical induction that is used in science is similar, in that it depends on a certain amount of faith in the homogeneity of whatever is being investigated. Sometimes, such a faith is completely unwarranted, and inductive reasoning is inappropriate, and can be dead wrong. But, even under the best of conditions, where we have high confidence in an assumption of uniformity, and where we might all agree to give induction the benefit of the doubt, there is still a difference. While mathematical induction leaves us highly confident that we know how our proposition will behave with numbers we would encounter only after counting for millenia, inductive reasoning leaves us with somewhat less confidence, depending on how much observation has been done.
Let's take an example. I have here two empty cans, and some quarters. One of the quarters has, at some point in its travels, been painted red. Most of the paint has worn off, but you can still see the color in the low points on both sides. I take two quarters, one of them the red one, and drop one into each can, and then mix up the cans.
Now, we take one of the cans, and ask the question "Does this can contain a red quarter?" We answer the question by doing an experiment, we shake the can, draw out a quarter and look at it, and return it to the can.
There were two possible outcomes -- we could have drawn a red quarter, or a plain quarter (as it happens, we drew a _____ quarter.)
Now we have an answer -- the can in question contains (0 or 1) red quarter.
We haven't done any induction yet. This is more akin to the Cat In The Hat's "Calculatus Eliminatus." But let's complicate things a bit, by adding another plain quarter to each can, mixing them up once again, and performing the same experiment.
[If it had / Since it did] come out red, we [would] know the answer -- it does contain a red quarter.
But when our experiment comes up with a plain quarter, things aren't so simple. We know our can contains a plain quarter -- but we already knew that both cans contain at least one plain quarter. Have we learned anything?
If you answer "no," then consider this: Suppose we repeat the experiment several times and still keep coming up with a plain quarter -- have we learned anything? Suppose I keep at it for the rest of the day, and I still keep coming up with plain quarters?
By then, you might begin to think that what we have here is a can with only two plain quarters in it, and the red quarter must be in the other can. But when did you come to that conclusion? How many experiments did it take? Which one was the critical experiment? Or did they all contribute to the conclusion?
Well, they all contributed, including that first draw that came up with a plain quarter.
How so? Well, lets consider the possibilities:
1/2 1/2
Universe of possibilities: P R P P
draw 1 P 1/4
2 R 1/4
3 P 1/4
4 P 1/4
So, if we see a plain quarter, we know that possibility #2 did not happen. Our new universe is made up of possibilities 1, 3, and 4, and the probability that we have a can with a red quarter in it has gone down from 1/2 to 1/3:
1/3 1/3 1/3
P R gave P P P gave P P P gave P
draw 1 P 1/6
2 R 1/6
3 P 1/6
4 P 1/6
5 P 1/6
6 P 1/6
After the second round of drawing, we know that possibilty #2 did not happen, and our new universe is made up of possibilities 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6, and the probability that our can has a red quarter has gone down once again, to 1/5, while the probability that we have all plain quarters is 4/5.
We can continue this as many times as we want, and the probability of a can with two plain quarters will continue to go up, and the probability of a can with a red quarter will continue to go down.
We can also spice things up by adding more plain quarters. The principle remains the same: every draw that comes up with a plain quarter reduces the probability that the can we are holding contains a red quarter, and increases the probability that our can has only plain quarters.
When does it all end? When to we call a halt and conclude that we have a can with all plain quarters? Well, you tell me. The probabilities for the more simple case (two quarters per can) are as follows, with increasing numbers of experiments, all coming up with plain quarters:
X Probability of can with 2 plain quarters after X experiments
-- ----------------------
0 1/2 0.500
1 2/3 0.666
2 4/5 0.800
3 8/9 0.888
4 16/17 0.941
5 32/33 0.970
6 64/65 0.985
7 128/129 0.992
8 256/257 0.996
The cutoff for a significant result in science is often placed at 95% confidence, so perhaps we could quit after 5 experiments. But perhaps we want the results to be very significant, at 99%, so we should do at least 7 experiments. It depends on how important the results are to us, and how important it is that our conclusion be correct. For a bar bet carrying even 50:50 odds, one experiment may be plenty for a winning long-run betting strategy. On the other hand, if the red quarter is radioactive, and is going to spend a lot of time in our pocket, we may want to know where it is with extreme confidence. In that case, we may want to do 20 or 30 runs.
Is this really the kind of problem that comes up in science? Yes it is. When I taught undergraduate genetics, this kind of thing came up all the time. A woman's brother has died from a genetic disorder that is carried on the X chromosome and shows complete penetrance in males. She has another brother with no sign of the disorder. She has given birth herself to one normal son. What is the chance that, if she has another son, he wll be affected by the disorder? The situation is analogous to our problem with the quarters. From her family history, we know that her mother must have carried the disorder on one (and only one) of her X chromosomes. This means our woman's probability of being a carrier is 1/2. But the fact that she has had one normal son alters that probability, just as drawing one plain quarter did in the previous problem. The new probability that she carries the disorder is 1/3, so the chances of her second son being affected is 1/3 X 1/2 = 1/6.
This kind of mathematical treatment of what is essentially an inductive problem is called Baysian probability. It differs from the general case of induction in one important aspect: to do the calculations, you must know an initial probability. That is, besides knowing how probable it is to draw a red quarter, given that you have one red one and one plain one in your can, you must have some idea, before you draw any quarters, how probable it is that your can actually does contains a red quarter. If you don't know, you can make an estimate, or even a guess. In that case, you can report your results by saying something like, "If red quarters are present in the population at an average frequency of q, then the probability of one being in this can containing N quarters, after X number of experiments have revealed nothing but plain quarters, is p."
If you have no basis at all for a guess, then you are in the territory of classical induction, and all you can really say is that, with every plain quarter you draw from a can with a large number of quarters, or every normal son born to a woman for whom we have no family history, the probability becomes less and less that any quarter in the can is red, or that either of her chromosomes carries a defective gene.
Another essential characteristic of science is that it must make a critical assumption about the very nature of the universe. Since science is based on experimentation and observation, it must assume that the universe is not out to trick us, and that it will not lie to us; indeed, we assume that it cannot lie to us. The biochemist Jaques Monod had a name for this assumption -- the postulate of objectivity. Note that this says nothing about human observers being objective. What it refers to is the universe itself. If the universe has an axe to grind, an agenda, a set of chosen people, a story we are supposed to believe even if it is not evident to our senses, an elite priesthood to which it will reveal itself, and to no others, then science is impossible.
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