Thus at the top of Mount Wilson or in the basement conference rooms of the Washington Hilton, the challenge to sci/religion is the same. The Temple of Einstein is more authoritative and comprehensive than ever. Its spiritual power has eclipsed that of the old-time religions. And yet by and large the public does not appreciate the full mystical dimension of modern science. They certainly understand and admire its practical results, ubiquitous in technological advances such as cable television, GPS-guided maps in cars, and MRI scans for surgery. They generally appreciate the breadth of its explanations as well. These days news about planets around other stars or the mass of the neutrino finds more outlets than ever in the papers, on television, and on the Web. Nevertheless, there is a widespread perception that science is limited. The familiar line is that science has nothing to say about morals or about the purpose of life—in short, that it is not enough like old-time religion. Sci/religion's unfamiliar terminology and specialized tools of research contribute to the view that it is aloof to these human hungers. Interestingly, the scientists themselves often knowingly help foster that impression.
Many researchers applaud the limited definition of the scope of science because it helps maintain the delicate cease-fire that Galileo attempted to strike nearly four hundred years ago when he cited Cardinal Baronius's dictum that the Bible reveals “how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Dividing the world in that manner assures that the Pope will never again attempt to dictate the mechanical workings of the universe. In the years since Einstein's first cosmology paper, the Catholic Church has made peace with scientific explanations of the origin of the universe and with most of evolutionary biology; it has even apologized for censoring Galileo. All that scientists have had to give up in return is a claim to authority on salvation, the afterlife, moral behavior, and other topics that they never presumed to talk about in the first place. This modern line of demarcation also serves as a warning to creationists: Don't interfere with our descriptions of the material world, and we won't interfere with your views on purely theological matters. The one huge problem is that this solution requires abnegating the spiritual dimension of science. It denies the very existence of sci/religion.
Robert Kirshner is an outspoken proponent of this two-worlds interpretation. “I don't see what cosmology has to do with religion, except that it has to do with the beginning of things and the end of things. It certainly doesn't tell you anything about what most people do as religious practice, which has more to do with how to be as a person,” he says. Kirshner considers the trade-off a good bargain: “Since Galileo, the Church has gotten smarter and realized they shouldn't hang religious belief on some particular question about the physical nature of the world. So now it doesn't matter what we do.” The late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, a prominent evolutionary biologist and prolific science popularizer, largely echoed this view. “Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate but can never resolve. . . I propose that we encapsulate this central principle of respectful noninterference. . . ” he wrote in his most recent manifesto on the two worldviews.
Other scientists, especially those on the theoretical edge of cosmology, refuse to abide by that noninterference pact but nonetheless have an acute sense of a boundary between science and traditional religion. They see the expanding domain of sci/religion as theologically significant because it keeps eliminating places where God could hide, or ways in which a willful deity could exert fundamental control over the operation of the universe. In a sweeping sci/religious meditation entitled “Universe, Life, Consciousness,” Andrei Linde states: “The possibility that the universe eternally re-creates itself in all its possible forms does not necessarily resolve the problem of creation, but pushes it back to the indefinite past. By doing so, the properties of our world become totally disentangled from the properties of the universe at the time when it was born (if there was such time at all). In other words, one may argue that the properties of our world do not represent the original design and cannot carry any message from the Creator.” Pressed on his own beliefs, Linde equivocates. “It doesn't mean that there is no place for God, just that there are some new possibilities. I am not a religious person or an antireligious person; I am just trying to figure out what I can say without emotion,” he says.
Stephen Hawking is by far today's most famous proponent of this program to smoke God out of His potential hiding places. Hawking's no-boundary proposal—a ferociously complex argument that there was no first moment in time, even though the universe has a finite age—is explicitly designed to eliminate the usual need for a first cause. “[I]f the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place then for a creator?” he asked in A Brief History of Time. At the end of the book he attempts to answer his own question. He envisions that scientists might figure out a physics theory that brings about its own existence. “Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.” Broadly speaking, he expresses the same sentiment that Einstein voiced when he yearned to know the secrets of the Old One. But Hawking shies away from invoking anything like the “cosmic religious feeling” that Einstein saw as an essential guide to scientific inquiry.
Hawking-style efforts to reduce the authority of the old-time Gods don't attract a lot of converts because of this failure to offer a new spiritual prbgram. Perlmutter sees science and religion continuing to run on parallel tracks. “As you go farther back in time and you study more about how the world started, it doesn't displace God because you still have to say, well, what began all these things? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are there these laws rather than no laws? I think for the people to whom God gives an answer for that, it still gives an answer, and for those to whom God doesn't seem like an answer, they still have to ask, where does God come from?” he says. Conversely, he paints a playful picture of how scientists could remain detached in the face of divine revelation: “Even if you were able to show scientists the existence of God, it still doesn't stop the scientific process. Just as knowing more about the world doesn't stop the possibility of there being a God, it doesn't make a difference the other way around either, because you still want to do the science. If you found out that miracles really do happen and God's creating them, probably the immediate response of science would be, well, how does God do that? Is He doing it within the laws of physics, or does he get to change the laws of physics momentarily?”
When scientists are willing to argue on behalf of Einstein's old sense of cosmic religion, they often do so gently, almost apologetically. Asked about his personal faith, Brian Schmidt responds, “My grandparents were very religious and I was always exposed to religion, but it's something that never really took with me. The problem is, to have religion you have to have faith in certain principles. But the principles I adopted were faith in physical law, not faith in a supreme being. My attitudes toward cosmology has been formed by this faith in physical law—which is somewhat religious at some level, but it is not what we think of conventionally as religion.”
Among the many voices, a handful of the sci/religious faithful have spoken out forcefully about the mystical glory of their work. Carl Sagan greatly advanced the cause through his popular books and his television series, Cosmos. His oft-repeated epigram, “we are made of starstuff,” neatly summarizes the sense of cosmic unity that springs from the theories pioneered by Einstein, Lemaitre, and Gamow. From outside the world of cosmology, the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins se
rmonizes on the ability of sci/religion to stir the soul. In 1996 he delivered an electrifying presentation to the American Humanist Association, crisply tided “Is Science a Religion?” His short answer was no, because its methods are so different. His long answer, however, addressed the ability of science to fulfill the human hunger for explanation that old-time religions have long sated: “All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. And it's exactly this feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe—almost worship—this flooding of the chest with ecstatic wonder, that modern science can provide. And it does so beyond the wildest dreams of saints and mystics. . . The merest glance through a microscope at the brain of an ant or through a telescope at a long-ago galaxy of a billion worlds is enough to render poky and parochial the very psalms of praise.”
Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies the formation and evolution of galaxies, offers an unusually trenchant description of the relationship between sci/religion and its wobbly predecessors. “Rather than assuming science and spirit are separate jurisdictions, I assume that reality is one, and that truth grows and evolves with the universe of which it speaks,” he writes. “Every religion is a metaphor system, and like scientific theories, every religious myth is limited. Perhaps progress in religion can occur as it does in science: without invalidating a theory, a greater myth may encompass it respectfully, the way general relativity encompasses Newtonian mechanics. In the next few decades, powerful ideas of modern cosmology could inspire a spiritual renaissance, but they could also be totally ignored by almost everyone as irrelevant and elitist.” If Einstein's cosmic religion fails to find an audience, that will be a terrible loss not just for the devout researchers on a quest for ultimate knowledge, but for everyone seeking a more just and peaceful world.
More than three hundred years ago, the rationalist philosopher and theologian Baruch Spinoza described the dangers inherent in the biblical description of an interventionist God who responds to prayer. This description led people to believe that God acts to bring about certain goals, a notion Spinoza considered inherently corrosive. “Everyone thought out for himself, according to his abilities, a different way of worshipping God, so that God might love him more than his fellows, and direct the whole course of nature for the satisfaction of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice. Thus the prejudice developed into superstition, and took a deep root in the human mind,” he wrote. Because God did not reliably respond to these prayers, worshippers adjusted their superstition and came to believe that the Lord's judgments are beyond human understanding. “Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes,” Spinoza concluded.
Einstein repeatedly aligned himself with Spinoza's philosophy and concerns, identifying the “religion of fear” as a primitive and destructive stage in the spiritual development of humankind. “I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty,” Einstein wrote in 1932. Nine years later, in a paper contributed to a symposium on science, philosophy, and religion, he expounded on the stunting effects of belief in an all-knowing, personal deity. Such a God conflicts with the demands of science by potentially interfering with the predictable operation of natural law. Such a God also conflicts with the needs of humanity. “If this being is omnipotent, then every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being?” Einstein asked. He concluded that “[t]he further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.”
Dawkins, probably the most outspoken critic of old-time religion among the current generation of scientists, pushes this line of attack much farther. Again, from his classic 1996 speech, words that still have the old-time faithful sputtering: “It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, 'mad cow' disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn't based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion. And who, looking at Northern Ireland or the Middle East, can be confident that the brain virus of faith isn't exceedingly dangerous?”
Fortunately, sci/religion doesn't need to make its case solely by tearing down the ancient faiths. Sci/religion offers a positive and immensely appealing alternative way to look at the world, a religion of rational hope. It covers much more than “how the heavens go,” although that aspect is the foundation on which all its other elements are built. Our current picture of the big bang—fluctuating out of nothingness, filling with particles and radiation, inflating swiftly and then evolving over billions of years, under the guidance of unseen dark matter and dark energy, into its present form—is the most complicated, comprehensive, and thoroughly tested creation story in history. And like all such stories, the big bang tells a lot about who we are and how we think of ourselves. We are no longer content with the revealed truths of Genesis and other ancient mythologies. We want to participate in the origin of the universe by understanding it on our own terms and connecting it to laws and phenomena that we can study. Old-time religion delivers only a single, unchanging version of the creation story. Sci/religion recognizes our human limitations and provides an opportunity to keep challenging, discarding, refining, and updating our cosmological models in the endless search for truth.
Just as sci/religion's picture of creation surpasses that of the ancient mythologies, so its process of revelation takes prayer to a new level. Einstein retraced the scientist's discovery process in poetic, near-ecstatic terms. “His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection,” he wrote in his 1934 book Mein Weltbild. In comparing that feeling to the epiphanies of “religious geniuses” of the past, Einstein made it clear that he saw scientific research as a step forward in the humbling yet hugely elevating search to understand our place in the meaningful order of the universe.
And still that is only part of the redemptive power of sci/religion. Notwithstanding the claims of old-time religion and some logic-toting atheists, the Temple of Einstein does have something to say about how to go to heaven—not as a guide to the afterlife, but metaphorically as a guide to living a moral life. The value system shows up most clearly in cosmology and in sci/religion's other book of the creation story, evolutionary biology. Both disciplines emphasize the unity of our species, with the universe and with each other. Evolution demonstrates that all humans are closely related: Homo sapiens has existed for fewer than 175,000 years and is extraordinarily uniform at the genetic level. Cosmology shows that we are all interconnected at a more glorious and humbling level as well. We share a tiny, fragile, and precious refuge, the only habitable planet that we know of. All of us are made of the same elements, forged in the same stars, governed by the same miraculous physical laws that allow the sun to shine, rivers of water to flow, and atoms of carbon to bond with hydrogen and oxygen in our chemically dynamic bodies.
Sci/religion is a human faith, prone to distortions and misinterpretations, but it naturally inclines toward tolerance and environmental sustainability. It is inherently democratic, holding that cosmic truth is available to all through open inquiry, not just to the few who adhere to one particular theology or ideology. No wonder scientific prog
ress stalled in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. And the sci/religious exploration of the universe unequivocally requires abandoning the idea of a personal God who can be summoned and commanded by prayer. That abandonment again bolsters the cause of unity by undermining the traditional, religious motivations for aggression and hatred.
Sci/religion invokes another kind of belief in its place. “It is the aim of science to establish general rules which determine the reciprocal connection of objects and events in time and space. For these rules, or laws of nature, absolutely general validity is required—not proven. It is mainly a program, and faith in the possibility of its accomplishments in principle is only founded on partial successes,” Einstein wrote. In contrast to the old-time religions, sci/religion has mounds of evidence showing that its assumptions are correct. But the doctrine of falsification through observation forces sci/religion to be honest and admit that it can never state with total certainty that the same physical laws apply in all places at all times. There could always be an unseen exception, or simply one that has not occurred yet.
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