The house on Battle Road Circle had nearly emptied out. The four younger daughters were in or already out of graduate school: Dorothy in veterinary school at the University of California at Davis, Emily in medical school at the University of California at San Diego, Mia at the Princeton Theological Seminary, and Rebecca (like her sister Emily) at the UCSD medical school. Grandchildren were starting to arrive.
Imme didn’t have the girls to fuss over anymore. Instead she had flowers. She spent many hours in the garden out back. Her long-distance running became ever more serious. She ran and won. For her age group she came in first at the San Francisco Marathon in 1987 and the Boston Marathon in 1996. Although still a German citizen, she (along with her husband) was interested in political affairs, and often contributed to the campaigns of various Democrat candidates, especially Representative Rush Holt, one of the few physicists in Congress.
George’s boat building continued. But he had also made himself into a writer. In 1986 he published a book, Baidarka, about kayaks, the Aleuts who had built them, and about his own experiences on land and water. He holds the record for building the longest kayak, a craft forty-eight feet long and holding six people. His interest in science and technology history led to his second book, Darwin Among the Machines (1998), about the evolution of computers, particularly John von Neumann’s contributions.
Esther, the oldest of Freeman Dyson’s children, was increasingly coming into the public eye. Having worked as a reporter on investments and high-tech products, she bought out her employer in 1983 and established a company called EDventure. She became interested in business possibilities in Eastern Europe, which was undergoing tumultuous changes before and after the end of the Cold War. She was one of the first to chronicle and champion the rise of the Internet. Her monthly newsletter culminated in a book, Release 2.0, in 1997. She wrote columns for The New York Times and organized a number of notable computer and Internet meetings under the name PC Forum. These forums, usually held in winter in warm places like Arizona, provided the occasion for Dyson family reunions.4 Sometimes all six Dyson siblings would be present, and several grandchildren.5
Freeman’s brood was fairly fledged. He would have even more time to pore over writing projects, especially in areas that had stood outside the purview of the retirement events. Although spread out across two days, “Around the Dyson Sphere” could not examine all of Dyson’s primary interests. Unfortunately, what they left out—Dyson’s expansive writing about the connection of science to social concerns such as religion, art, philosophy, and ethics—had become an essential part of his status as a public figure. How could you slot topics like theology and ethics in with talks about spin waves and quantum field theory? So, to finish the journey around the Dyson sphere, we’re going to look at these overlooked subjects.
NATURAL THEOLOGY
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” There is no better way to look at Dyson’s cultural writing career than to return to Steven Weinberg’s assertion in his book The First Three Minutes, a phrase now raised to the status of an aphorism. Addressing or refuting the alleged “pointlessness” of the universe was going to be one of Dyson’s primary occupations hereafter, part of his effort to reconcile scientific with spiritual knowledge.
Dyson considers that both forms of knowledge provide valuable windows on the world. You can’t really look out of both windows at the same time but both windows allow you to see aspects of the world not visible to the other. Dyson is not a conventionally religious man himself—religion is more a way of life than a set of beliefs he likes to say—but he feels that the great spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or Christianity offer a fruitful way of contemplating the “point” of the universe.
The Gifford Lectures, delivered by Dyson in April and November of 1985 in Scotland, were to be a primary showcase for his thoughts on this matter. Instituted in order to explore the subject of natural theology, the lectures are given intermittently at Scottish universities in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and St. Andrews. Gifford speakers over the years have addressed a variety of circumstances underlying human existence. Notable examples include Hannah Arendt, whose books looked at the nature of evil; Niels Bohr, who presided over the establishment of the quantum description of reality; Roger Penrose, who ventured to relate the wellsprings of consciousness with quantum behavior and with gravity; and William James, one of the founders of modern psychology and whose Gifford Lectures provided a catalog of case histories of exalted mental behavior. Gifford speakers have even included Richard Dawkins, biologist and militant atheist, best known for promulgating the idea that competition among selfish genes, not the unfolding of God’s plan, established and governed the landscape of living organisms on Earth.
In practice, Gifford lectures have taken wide latitude in their interpretation of “natural philosophy.” When it was Freeman Dyson’s turn to lecture, he seized the opportunity as a bully pulpit. He came to Scotland to preach.6
Arriving in Aberdeen in April and November of 1985 he met with foul weather. Still, he paused to notice that the city was covered with daffodils in April and roses in November.7 Free to create his own form of natural theology, and always eager to enlarge the scope of permissible discussion, Dyson spoke of some things he believed but couldn’t prove: “I believe that we are here to some purpose, that the purpose has something to do with the future, and that it transcends altogether the limits of our present knowledge and understanding.”8
Dyson spoke of poetry. The works of Blake and Eliot and Dylan Thomas gave him access to beauty and to the sublime. Many scientists generally view art as a pleasurable and creative way of depicting reality. Appreciating a poem, Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, involved a momentary willing suspension of disbelief.
Religion, however, is another matter. It involves a fervent, permanent belief in supernatural things. In general scientists are suspicious. Richard Dawkins, for example, argues that religion is founded on superstition and that religious thinking is antithetical to rationalism and scientific thinking. He cites a 1998 U.S. National Academy of Sciences study of its own members showing that only 7 percent believed in a God.9
Can science and religion coexist peaceably? Dyson says yes. To support his claim, he looks at five test cases, a thicket of quarrelsome issues over which science and religion would seem to scrape roughly up against each other. Together, Dyson’s lectures on these subjects form yet another of his manifestos. They are the heart of his Gifford presentation and the centerpiece of his book, Infinite in All Directions. Here are the five areas of possibly intractable confrontations. Let’s see what Dyson and those who disagree with him have to say.
1. The origins of life. Dyson’s own escapades as a biologist illustrate the issues involved. Whether they were loose confederations of chemicals (Dyson’s view) or more disciplined blobs governed by replicating nucleotides (the majority view), the earliest living entities were subject to chance chemical encounters. At the even deeper level of atoms, matter is subject to quantum uncertainty—think of that sea of virtual particles splashing about inside every atom.
What kind of God would stand behind such an indeterminate universe, one in which every microscopic fork in the road was, in effect, governed by statistical likelihood rather than exactitude? Dyson was no theologian, he protested, but an appropriate God for the job would be one that was himself (or herself or itself) in doubt as to the outcome of these micro-branchings of history. So, to reconcile science and religion on the origin of life, Dyson says, imagine a God who is not omniscient but who learns as he goes along, just as we humans do.10 Instead of adapting our scientific views to a fixed idea of divinity, Dyson cheerfully offers to devise a theology that fits in with the observed properties of nature.
2. Free will. The traditional conundrum of human choice—how can we freely decide things if God has decided for us in advance—might well be eased if (on the theological front) God were to be bound (on the a
tomic front) by the fuzziness in knowledge imposed by Heisenberg’s principle of quantum uncertainty. In order to believe both in God and in free will Dyson suggests that God was less than omnipotent.11
For those who prefer a scientific, and not a theological, explanation of free will, Dyson is ready. He holds that the psychological appearance of free will, the feeling that at least for part of the time we’re in charge of the thoughts that come into our minds, stems from the intrinsic quantum uncertainty of atoms. Our minds are associated with brains made from atoms. Our brains are machines for processing “free will” at the atom level into free will at the human level. Consciousness, Dyson argues, is not merely an emergent state arising passively from chemical reactions. In effect, mind invades matter, at least the matter in our brains. Does this make Dyson an animist—one who believes that brute matter is filled with some kind of animating spirit? Yes, it does. And Dyson is proud to say it:
I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process we call “observation” in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another.12
Lawrence Krauss, who jousted with Dyson about the prospects for life in the late universe, also disagrees with him about free will. Krauss, and many other scientists, see free will as an illusion, a useful illusion for the sake of our self-esteem. True, our knowledge of atoms as reflected in the measurements we make seems to be subject to uncertainty, Krauss says. We don’t know precisely what goes on inside an atom. But he insists that the electron is still subject to the exact equations of quantum reality. Scientists might not know where the electron is but the quantum rules do.13
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MAN
3. Teleology. Aristotle said that earthly matter consisted of four elements. Earth, water, air, and fire each had a sort of disposition of its own. Each wanted to be in its proper location in the cosmos. This was a teleological explanation: an object moved because it had an inherent purpose to move there. Meaningfulness was at the heart of his scheme.
Modern scientists don’t think this way anymore. They now explain that matter moves because some inanimate force, such as gravity, nudges it along. Objects are not alive. They don’t have volition. There is no “meaning” in the fact that Venus’s orbit around the sun lies outside Mercury’s orbit.
The essence of science is to be impartial and unimpassioned. Account for facts. Other than this, there is no right or wrong. “Any mingling of knowledge with values is unlawful, forbidden.” So says Jacques Monod as quoted by Freeman Dyson.14 Dyson is impatient with this dogma. “Monad was one of the seminal minds in the flowering of molecular biology in this century,” said Dyson. “It takes some courage to defy his anathema. But I will defy him and encourage others to do so.”15
The anathema against value judgments in science, Dyson believes, began with the struggle over the Darwinian revolution, especially as it pertained to the place of humans in the hierarchy of the world. On one side were evolutionary biologists such as Thomas Huxley, who sought to limit the role of religious sentiment in scientific argument. On the other side were the forces of moralism, led by Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce. This battle was won eventually by those who, lamentably in Dyson’s view, battle against any value judgments in science. The result of this science-religion conflict, he believes, soured the intellectual life of the nineteenth century and still, in our time, impedes a freer exploration of the universe.
It wasn’t always so. Some of the greatest scientists, such as Isaac Newton, were deeply religious and allowed their religious impulses to guide some of their best scientific research even if, when it came time to publish that research, spiritual motivations were often left unsaid. Another example Dyson offered was Thomas Wright, who, in 1750, proposed the basic structure of the Milky Way that we know today. Wright said that the faint smudges in the sky known as nebulae might actually be clumps of stars, now called galaxies, like the Milky Way. Some decades later William Herschel added much more observational evidence for Wright’s findings.
Dyson was particularly pleased by Wright’s mixing of knowledge and values. Wright, having spoken of the many stars, worlds, and galaxies making up the cosmos, went on to ponder the grander scheme at work in the sky:
In this great celestial creation, the catastrophe of a world, such as ours, or even the total dissolution of a system of worlds, may possibly be no more to the great Author of Nature, than the most common accident in life with us, and in all probability such final and general Doomsdays may be as frequent there as even Birthdays or mortality with us upon the earth. This idea has something so cheerful in it, that I own I can never look upon the stars without wondering why the whole world does not become astronomers.16
Dyson weighs Wright’s wondrous pondering of the heavens against Monod’s unlawful mixing of knowledge and values or Weinberg’s sense of the universe seeming to be pointless. If Monod and Weinberg speak for the twentieth century, Dyson would prefer to be of the eighteenth century.17
4. Argument from design. Does the universe have a design? Does it have an author? Dyson regards this as another polarizing issue dividing those who deem either faith or reason to be all-important. Science mostly ignores the “authorship” question and looks for facts around which to build richly structured explanations. For the layout of the cosmos as a whole, there is big bang cosmology. For the makeup of ordinary matter, there are physical and chemical theories about quarks, protons, atoms, molecules, and the forces that bind them among each other. The centerpiece of modern geology is the idea of immense crustal tectonic plates floating about and banging together on an underlying sea of heavier mantle material within the Earth. In biology, the overarching framework is Darwin’s theory of evolution, supplemented in more recent decades with observations from molecular biology, including the study and manipulation of DNA. In all these branches of science “design” is an inanimate impulse that emerges from the messy commerce among observable things—galaxies, atoms, continents, molecules, bacteria.
Dyson isn’t forsaking the grand frameworks of conventional science, is he? Of course not. Looking through the scientific window at the universe has brought incalculable benefits to our lives and our understanding. What Dyson says is: don’t forget that other windows are available for viewing the universe. Other people, those who avidly look at the world through the window of religion, are very much interested in the question of authorship. For them design is not serendipitous but the deliberate creation of a divine author.
5. Final aims. The same year Dyson gave his series of lectures in Aberdeen another American scientist offered rival Gifford Lectures on the diagonally opposite side of Scotland in Glasgow. Carl Sagan, in his Gifford Lectures, allowed that science and religion needn’t be in conflict. But he didn’t necessarily admit that he, Carl Sagan himself, felt a need for religion. He remained, occupationally and intellectually, firmly on the side of traditional science. He steadfastly argued that he could not prove the existence or nonexistence of God and neither could anyone else. Until he was shown some palpable proof that could pass scientific scrutiny, then he would not be persuaded. Firmly but enthusiastically he argued that the mighty achievements of science and the knowledge of the universe, applying to things from microbes on up to the size of galaxies, gained by scientific means afforded all the edifying sense of wonder that he could hope for. He had no need of metaphysical speculations. The more we know of the cosmos, Sagan said, the more puny our gods and religion seem: “And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology, in my view, is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe.”18
Dyson, in Aberdeen, said something different. Although no less scientific than Sagan in the pursuit of facts in support of well-reasoned hypotheses, Dyson argued that the f
inal aim or the ultimate purpose in the cosmos, if there is one, lies beyond our intellectual reach:
The choice of laws of nature, and the choice of initial conditions for the universe, are questions belonging to meta-science and not to science. Science is restricted to the explanation of phenomena within the universe. Teleology is not forbidden when explanations go beyond science into meta-science.19
Why do this sort of recalibration? So that we can rescue the idea of purpose. Dyson freed himself of having to explain the seeming favoritism that God might have toward the human race—entailing the tuning of the circumstances of the big bang and the laws of nature to just the right levels to favor the advent of living organisms, and later of thinking organisms—by locating those circumstances and those laws outside the universe in some absolute elsewhere, outside the purview of science.
The 1902 book that came out of William James’s Gifford Lectures was entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience. It became a classic text on the subjects of psychology and spiritual thinking. Dyson has owned a copy of this book since he was fifteen years old, and James is probably the greatest influence on Dyson’s thinking about religion.20 James was the Oliver Sacks of the early twentieth century. A physician, philosopher, and writer, James didn’t take theology seriously, but he did take seriously the accounts of individual religious experiences. This was his summary view: the religious life is “having the belief that there is some unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting thereto.”21
Sagan also made use of James. He adapted James’s title, calling his Gifford presentation “The Varieties of Scientific Experience.” Science was enough for Sagan. His commandment was “Thou shalt understand the world. Figure things out.”22
COMPLEMENTARITY
The philosopher Daniel Dennett and others have argued that religion is a natural aspect of human existence, a belief system that competes with other belief systems in helping human societies to survive. These beliefs, or at least the belief in belief as Dennett says, can evolve over time and can be assessed as to how successful they are in making the society flourish or not.23 As such, religion is a spell with powerful influence over human culture. When the articles of religious faith are put to a more rationalistic test—for example, is a man walking on water in accord with the known laws of gravity?—they exercise less power.
Maverick Genius Page 29
