In reviewing Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell, Dyson concedes the point that religion is a natural phenomenon. But he goes on to insist that society would be the poorer for losing religion:
As human beings, we are groping for knowledge and understanding of the strange universe into which we are born. We have many ways of understanding, of which science is only one. Our thought processes are only partially based on logic, and are inextricably mixed with emotions and desires and social interactions. We cannot live as isolated intelligences, but only as members of a working community. Our ways of understanding have been collective, beginning with the stories that we told one another around the fire when we lived in caves. Our ways today are still collective, including literature, history, art, music, religion, and science. Science is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe. Religion is another bunch of tools, giving us hints of a mental spiritual universe that transcends the material universe.24
Dyson is thus a sort of transcendentalist. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and other members of the Transcendentalist Club in New England in the 1830s, Dyson wants to employ knowledge gained from a variety of sources—science, literature, nature, and spirituality (not necessarily organized religion) to appreciate and understand the world.
Dyson is not so much seeking religious experience, at least not from traditional denominations, as he is spiritual experience. He and Emerson subscribe to science as a valid route to knowledge, and both feel that science is not enough. Both chafe at the smugness of science and its exclusive reliance on a materialistic viewpoint. Here is Emerson in 1841, from his famous essay on transcendentalism:
The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at the fine-spun theories, at star gazers, and dreamers, and believes that his life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows where he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is to show him that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his sense.25
Dyson’s omnivorous pursuit of this multiplicity motivates some of his most sparkling writing, and brings him invitations to speak at places around the world.
At Cambridge University in September 1992, for example, scientists and philosophers met to discuss the subject of reductionism, the general process of understanding the whole by examining the parts. This approach to knowledge—such as studying atoms in order to understand bulk material or studying cells in order to understand the body—has led to spectacular progress in science. Yet, the meeting was contentious.
Dyson was indignant: “A reductionist philosophy,” he said, “arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction [upward from the parts to the whole rather than from the whole to the parts] makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic beliefs of any kind have no place in science.”26
The announced subject of the Cambridge meeting might have been reductionism, but the argument at times hinged on the relation of science and religion. Chemist and writer Peter Atkins was also indignant: “Only the religious—among whom I include not merely the prejudiced but also the underinformed—hope that there is a dark corner of the physical universe, or of the universe of experience, that science can never hope to illuminate.”27
Dyson embraced science, but felt we needed more: “To my mind the history of science is most illuminating when the frailties of human actors are put into juxtaposition with the transcendence of nature’s laws.28 Atkins: “Religion says that the world is too big for our comprehension. Science says that it can tackle the big questions.”29
Dyson objects to the extreme form of reductionism, a view that seems to say that “all forms of knowledge, from physics and chemistry to psychology and philosophy and sociology and history and ethics and religion, can be reduced to science. Whatever cannot be reduced to science is not knowledge.”30 In Dyson’s opinion, valid knowledge comes in many forms: a perception of good and evil, an appreciation for art, and the appraisal of life through everyday experience or through religious feelings all offer alternative windows for viewing the world.
Like Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle, which says that physical matter can be viewed as collections of particles or as trains of waves—but not at the same time—so the rest of the universe can be viewed in multiple ways. “The final frame of traditional theology and the formal frame of traditional science are both too narrow to comprehend the total of human experience.… Theology excludes differential equations, and science excludes the idea of the sacred.”31
THEOFICTION
Dyson is, like Emerson, a stargazer and a dreamer. Dyson is familiar with many of the sacred books, especially the Hebrew-Christian Bible. Another storehouse of religious ideas for him comes from his reading of certain science fiction authors. Yes, science fiction, that genre so loved by readers and belittled by mainstream literary critics. Flying through the outer reaches of the galaxy, in an imaginative sense, came naturally to Freeman Dyson. “Science is my territory,” he said, “but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.”32 Dyson’s preference among sci-fi books is for those that use the future or outer space settings as occasions for exploring theological themes. Dyson’s name for this subgenre is “theofiction.”33
Dante’s Commedia and John Milton’s Paradise Lost are examples of early theofiction. These works might not at first seem like science fiction. But they do both involve journeys through space, and are works of great artistry and spirituality, and they do take notice of the geologic and astronomical lore of their day.
Undoubtedly Dyson’s archetype for theofictional writing is Olaf Stapledon. When it came time to reissue Stapledon’s masterpiece, Star Maker (originally published in 1937), the editor asked Dyson to write a Preface, which he did.
Star Maker begins in down-to-earth fashion with a narrator sitting on a hill contemplating his life and gazing at the night sky. Then, by dreaming or by some unexplained form of disembodied flight, he finds himself out with the stars. Through the further technological mechanism of radio-based telepathy, the narrator acquires the ability to listen in on the minds of human-level creatures and indeed co-inhabit their consciences. After some initial awkwardness, the narrator—while recurringly speaking to us as an individual—gradually takes on the mental attributes of a succession of alien beings. Some of these beings join him in his journey, and they constitute a collective mind of growing experience and perspective.
Star Maker is impressively ambitious but almost impossible to read as a piece of fiction. Except for the narrator, the book contains no characters in the conventional sense and no story line other than the incessant journeying through the cosmos in search of more experience and the prospect of glimpsing the Star Maker, the putative creator of the universe. The book’s scope gets wider and wider at a dizzying rate. Centuries, millennia, and eons go by. We are shown myriads of world civilizations, then empires of worlds, then civilizations on the galactic scale, then intergalactic organizations. Worlds, stars, galaxies, even primordial gas nebulae possess consciousness. These “minded” worlds and stars themselves form federations and conduct wars.
The book culminates in a meeting between the narrator and the Star Maker, the maker of all that is. The narrator has by this point appropriated to himself essentially the mindedness of all creatures in the cosmos, and yet he is not equal to the majesty and awfulness of the deity. Although worthy of being worshipped, the Star Maker is capricious, interested (selfishly, we might say) in creating universe after universe in experimental fashion, each time trying out a different configuration of physical and biological laws, with a consequential spectrum of intelligent creatures and their respective inevitably ephemeral civilizations.
In his Preface to this visionary theological saga, Dyson compares Stapledon’s fictional panoply of alternative universes, each with its own
attributes (for example, one universe might have space but not time, another has extra dimensions) with some current scientific cosmology theories. For instance, physicist Lee Smolin has explained the apparently fine-tuned aspects of our universe—the laws of nature, such as the strength of interactions inside the sun, seem to be just right for fostering life on Earth—by suggesting that ours is just one of many universes, maybe an infinite number, each with its own set of physical laws. In a very loose analogy with Darwin’s process of natural selection, some universes in Smolin’s scheme survive longer than others, and some are therefore hospitable (or hostile) to the presence of living or intelligent creatures.34
Dyson compares Star Maker with that classic theofiction poem of 700 years ago, Dante’s Commedia. Like Dante, Stapledon offers an inferno (the part of the book devoted to the ceaseless cycles of warfare in world after world), a purgatorio (the era when the worlds and galaxies begin to put aside their petty feuds and learn to coexist), and a paradiso (when the narrator meets and is overawed by the deity).
Freeman Dyson is Stapledon’s greatest fan. From Stapledon, Dyson borrowed ideas of scientific interest (such as Dyson spheres), visions of gliding through space (motivating Dyson’s work on Orion), and an appreciation for the diversity of life in the cosmos. Dyson’s greatest borrowing from Stapledon seems to be the idea of a Star Maker–like deity, one who doesn’t know everything and who learns as he goes along. This type of generic god is not unlike the one Dyson had in mind in laying out his five-step exploration of natural theology in his Gifford Lectures.
Dyson later learned that exactly such a theology, one featuring a non-omniscient, non-omnipotent god—had been promulgated by a sixteenth-century Italian-born theologian named Faustus Socinus.35 Socinus, who spent most of his writing career in Poland, was a sort of Unitarian (disbelieving in the essential divinity of Christ). He promoted reason over superstition and was against war and killing of all kinds. The Catholic Church of Poland made things difficult for him.
Although Dyson admits to being only an amateur theologian—indeed, most of the time he seems to have very little patience for the subject—he has taken care to formulate a working hypothesis about what a grand spirit could be like, if such a thing exists at all. He combined Socinus’s idea of a less than mighty experimental god with Stapledon’s idea of a growing intergalactic, sympathetic, collective consciousness, a sort of adult version of his youthful Cosmic Unity idea:
I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be considered to be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. We are the chief inlets of God on this planet at the present stage of development. We may later grow with him as he grows, or we may be left behind.36
Emily Dickinson anticipated (in Poem 632) this kind of meta-scientific theology in just a few lines of poetry:
The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and You — beside —
The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As Sponges — Buckets — do —
The Brain is just the weight of God —
For — Heft them — Pound for Pound —
And they will differ — if they do —
As Syllable from Sound —
SOCIAL JUSTICE
For Freeman Dyson, religion is not a body of beliefs but a way of life—a literary and an ethical thing. Combine this with his adage that with knowledge comes responsibility, and you arrive at Dyson’s motivation for working in the public interest.
In this respect, his career resembles that of the British scientist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane. Like Dyson, Haldane was precocious at mathematics, loved the arts, but made his name in science. Both worked on bombs: Haldane devised gun-launched grenades during World War I, while Dyson worked for Bomber Command in World War II. Both were government advisors: Haldane working with the Royal Navy on how to escape from sunken submarines, Dyson with the Royal Air Force on how to escape from falling airplanes. Both wrote essays about the future of science, especially biotechnology. Haldane predicted, for example, that someday many human births would come about by means of ectogenesis, meaning fertilization and even gestation outside the mother’s body. He was much criticized for these daring predictions, which he published in 1924 in a booklet called Daedalus; or Science and the Future.
Although a notable genetic biologist, J. B. S. Haldane had by the 1930s become better known for his writing popularizing science and showing how it benefits society. As for Freeman Dyson, he too has become better known, by the public, for his essays and books than for his scientific research. His two books most in the Haldane spirit are Imagined Worlds (1997) and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (1999).
Imagined Worlds, like many of Dyson’s works, began with a specific occasion, a series of lectures given in Jerusalem in 1995 about science and ethics. Many of the essays in this book show how science and technology can help or hinder the goal of arriving at a just society, one in which poor people have a chance to catch up to rich people.
Must science benefit the race? Isn’t it enough that scientists are driven by curiosity to explore the unknown? If this results in practical benefits, so much the better. But surely we shouldn’t insist on science being useful, much less requiring that it help in the moral task of telling right from wrong. Dyson disagrees. He believes science can play such roles. Science and values should not, as Jacques Monod desired, be held apart.
Steven Weinberg, siding with Monod, doesn’t like mixing fact finding—which science does well—with fault finding. “Science can never explain any moral principle,” said Weinberg. “There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between ‘is’ questions from ‘ought’ questions.”37
Jacob Bronowski sides with Dyson. Like Dyson, Bronowski was a Cambridge-educated mathematician interested in poetry who later turned to biology and became better known for his writing and lecturing than for his research. Bronowski actually edited a Cambridge literary magazine in the 1930s. In Bronowski’s book Science and Human Values he tried vigorously to undo the compartmentalization of science away from the rest of society:
There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field—a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it.… Scientific facts are never discovered by an individual, but by a community of instrument makers, theorists, engineers, and editors of journals where results are published. Scientists continually exercise value judgments—they subscribe to a social convention of truthfulness that is something like the Hippocratic oath.… Science is not a mechanism but a human progress, and not a set of findings but the search for them. Those who think that science is ethically neutral confuse the findings of science, which are, with the activity of science, which is not.38
It would be nice if we had the social equivalent of adaptive optics, analogous to what astronomers do to make celestial images sharper. This would allow us to take human problems and, with a clever momentary adjustment of lots of tiny mirrors, make a sequence of corrections that bring lives into ethical focus. We don’t have such a process, but people like Bronowski and Haldane urge us to give it a try.
Dyson has practical suggestions to make. The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet has as its subtitle Tools of Scientific Revolutions. Here Dyson updated his Haldane-like short list of technologies most likely to help society. In the early 1980s Dyson’s troika had consisted of genetics, space, and artificial intelligence. By the end of the 1990s this threesome had been replaced by biotechnology, solar energy, and the Internet. The book’s tone is generally moralistic: market forces aren’t enough to create a better society. Ethical considerations must drive technological decisions. The emphasis in this series of articles is on a q
uicker-smaller-cheaper approach to technology, whether in designing new medicines or in propelling spacecraft to distant planets. He wants to bring profitable industry to small towns, not in the form of heavy machines and energy-intensive factories, but in the form of small-scale but significant enterprises. Dyson hopes that society can exploit mobile, quickly advancing, economical technologies to level the playing field in life, to slow or reverse the migration from villages to overcrowded cities. He hopes that rural Mexican villages can become as wealthy as Princeton.39 He knows this won’t happen overnight.
Dyson’s crusading zeal is long-standing. Another anonymous entry in the “Chamber Annals,” the ledger where schoolboys at Winchester College could write about their fellow students, said of Dyson (then seventeen years old): “He never did anything unless it would (ultimately of course) benefit the race.”
THE PRODIGAL SON
The year after the retirement festival event at the Institute for Advanced Study, Winchester College also held a Dyson event. This was appropriate, since in terms of years spent in residence, the place with the greatest claim on Dyson, after Princeton, New Jersey, was his hometown of Winchester, England. Winchester was the place where he blossomed in mathematics and where in fell in love with literature.
In May 1995 Dyson received the highest honor for a Wykehamist, the name for a graduate of Winchester College: he was met Ad Portas (at the gate) of the school’s central courtyard. There, on the cobbled square amid fourteenth-century brick walls, surrounded by the assembled robed students and faculty of the college, the Prefect of Hall—the senior student—commended Dyson, first in Latin and then in English, for his wide-ranging career. Dyson responded with a speech of his own.
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