Knocking on Heaven's Door (12 page)

This incompatibility strikes me as a critical logical impasse in methods and understanding. Stephen Jay Gould’s purportedly “nonoverlapping magisteria”—those of science, covering the empirical universe, and religion, extending into moral inquiry—do overlap and face this intractable paradox too. Though believers might relegate the latter to religion, and even though science has yet to answer some deep and fundamental questions of interest to humanity, once we talk about substance and activity—be it in and of the brain or in reference to celestial objects—we are in the domain of science.

RATIONAL CONFLICTS AND IRRATIONAL ESCAPE CLAUSES

However, the incompatibility doesn’t necessarily trouble all believers. It so happened that when I was on a plane ride from Boston to Los Angeles, I was seated next to a young actor who had trained as a molecular biologist, but who had some surprising views about evolution. Before embarking on his acting career, he had coordinated science teaching for three years in urban schools. When I met him, he was returning from the inauguration of President Obama, and he was brimming over with enthusiasm and optimism, and wanting to leave the world a better place. Along with continuing his successful acting career, his ambition was to open schools worldwide to teach science and scientific methodology.

But our conversation took a surprising turn. The curriculum he planned would include at least one course on religion. Religion had been a big part of his own life, and he trusted people to make their own judgments. But that wasn’t the biggest surprise. He then went on to explain his belief that man descended from Adam as opposed to ascending from apes. I didn’t get how someone trained as a biologist could not believe in evolution. This inconsistency goes further than any violation of the materialist universe through God’s intermediate intervention of the sort I’ve just discussed. He told me how he could learn the science and understand the logic but that these are simply how man—whatever that means—puts things together. In his mind the logical conclusions of “man” are just not the way it is.

This exchange reinforced to me why we will have a tough time answering questions about the compatibility of science and religion. Empirically based logic-derived science and the revelatory nature of faith are entirely different methods for trying to arrive at truth. You can derive a contradiction only if your rules are logic. Logic tries to resolve paradoxes, whereas much of religious thought thrives on them. If you believe in revelatory truth, you’ve gone outside the rules of science so there is no contradiction to be had. A believer can interpret the world in a non-rational way that from his perspective is compatible with science, which is to say accept “God magic.” Or—like my neighbor on the plane—he can simply decide that he’s willing to live with the contradiction.

But although God might have a way of avoiding the logical contradictions, science does not. Religious adherents who want to accept religious explanations for how the world works as well as scientific thinking are obliged to confront a tremendous chasm between scientific discoveries and unseen, imperceptible influences—a gap that is basically unbridgeable by means of logical thought. They have no choice but to temporarily abandon logical (or at least literal) interpretations in matters of faith—or simply not to care about the contradiction.

Either way, it is still possible to be an accomplished scientist. And indeed, religion might well yield valuable psychological benefits. But any religious scientist has to face daily the scientific challenge to his belief. The religious part of your brain cannot act at the same time as the scientific one. They are simply incompatible.

LOOKING FOR ANSWERS

I first heard the phrase “knockin” on heaven’s door” when listening to the Bob Dylan song at his 1987 concert with the Grateful Dead in Oakland, California. Needless to say, the title of my book is intended differently than the song’s lyrics, which I still hear Dylan and Jerry Garcia singing in my head. The phrase differs from its biblical origin as well, though my title does toy with this interpretation. In Matthew, the Bible says, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”
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According to these words, people can search for knowledge, but the ultimate object is to gain access to God. People’s curiosity about the world and active inquiries are mere stepping-stones to the Divine—the universe itself is secondary. Answers might be forthcoming or a believer might be spurred to more actively seek truth, but without God, knowledge is inaccessible or not worth pursuing. People can’t do it on their own—they are not the final arbiters.

The title of my book refers to science’s different philosophy and goals. Science is not about passive comprehension and belief. And truth about the universe is an end in itself. Scientists actively approach the door to knowledge—the boundary of the domain of what we know. We question and explore and we change our views when facts and logic force us to do so. We are confident only in what we can verify through experiments or in what we can deduce from experimentally confirmed hypotheses.

Scientists know a remarkable amount about the universe, but we also know that much more remains to be understood. A great deal remains beyond the reach of current experiments—or even any experiment we can dream of. Yet despite our limitations, each new discovery lets us advance another rung in our ascent toward truth. Sometimes a single step can have a revolutionary impact on the way we see the world. While acknowledging that our ambitious aspirations are not always satisfied, scientists steadfastly seek access to a richer understanding as advancements in technology make more of the world’s ingredients accessible to our gaze. We then search for more comprehensive theories that can accommodate any newly acquired information.

The key question then: who has the capacity—or the right—to look for answers? Do people investigate on their own or trust higher authorities? Before entering the world of physics, this part of the book concludes by contrasting the scientific and religious perspectives.

WHO’S IN CHARGE?

We’ve seen that in the seventeenth century, the ascent of scientific thinking splintered the Christian attitude to knowledge—leading to conflicts between different conceptual frameworks that continue to this day. But a second source of division between science and religion was about authority. In the eyes of the church, Galileo’s claim to be able to think for himself and presume the capacity to independently understand the universe deviated too far from Christian religious belief.

When Galileo pioneered the scientific method, he rejected a blind allegiance to authority in favor of making and interpreting observations on his own. He would change his views in accordance with observations. In doing so, Galileo unleashed a whole new way of approaching knowledge about the world—one that would lead to much greater understanding of and influence over nature. Yet despite (or more accurately because of) the publication of his major advances, Galileo was imprisoned. His openness in his conclusion about the solar system saying that the Earth is not the center was too threatening to the religious powers of the time and their strict interpretation of scripture. With Galileo and other independent thinkers who precipitated the scientific revolution, any literal biblical interpretation of the nature, origin, and behavior of the universe had become subject to refutation.

Galileo’s timing was especially poor since his radical claims coincided with the heyday of the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church’s response to its Protestant offshoots. Catholicism felt itself seriously threatened then by Martin Luther’s advocacy of independent thought and interpreting scripture by looking directly to the text, rather than through an unquestioning acceptance of the church’s interpretation. Galileo supported Luther’s views and went even a step further. He rejected authority and furthermore explicitly contradicted the Catholic interpretation of religious texts.
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His modern scientific methods were based on direct observations of nature that he then tried to interpret with the most economical hypotheses that could account for the results. Despite Galileo’s devotion to the Catholic Church, his inquisitive ideas and methods were too similar to Protestant thinking in the clergy’s eyes. Galileo had inadvertently entered into a religious turf war.

Ironically, the Counter-Reformation might nonetheless have inadvertently precipitated Copernicus’s espousal of a heliocentric universe. The Catholic Church had wanted to ensure that its calendar was reliable so that celebrations would occur at the right time of year and its rituals would be properly maintained. Copernicus was one of the astronomers asked by the church to attempt to reform the Julian calendar to make it more compatible with the motion of the planets and the stars. It was this very research that led him to his observations and ultimately to his radical claims.

Luther himself did not accept Copernicus’s theory. But neither did most anyone else until Galileo’s advanced observations and ultimately Newton’s theory of gravity validated it later on. Luther did, however, accept other advances made in astronomy and medicine, which he found consistent with an open-minded appreciation of nature. He wasn’t necessarily a great scientific advocate, but the Reformation created a way of thinking—an atmosphere where new ideas were discussed and accepted—that encouraged modern scientific methods. Thanks also in part to the development of printing, scientific as well as religious ideas could rapidly spread and diminish the authority of the Catholic Church.

Luther held that secular scientific pursuits were potentially as valuable as religious ones. Scientists such as the great astronomer Johannes Kepler felt similarly. Kepler wrote to Michael Maestlin, his former professor at Tubingen, “I wanted to become a theologian, and for a long time I was restless. Now, however, observe how through my effort God is being celebrated in astronomy.”
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In this view, science was a way of acknowledging the spectacular nature of God and what he created and the fact that explanations for how things worked were rich and varied. Science became a means of better understanding God’s rational and orderly universe, and furthermore helping humankind. Notably, early modern scientists, far from rejecting religion, construed their inquiry as a form of praise for God’s creation. They viewed both the Book of Nature and the Book of God as paths to edification and revelation. The study of nature in this view was a form of gratitude and acknowledgment to their creator.

We occasionally hear this viewpoint in more recent times as well. The Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, during the speech he gave when receiving the 1979 Nobel Prize for his role in creating the Standard Model of particle physics, asserted, “The Holy Prophet of Islam emphasized that the quest for knowledge and sciences is obligatory upon every Muslim, man and woman. He enjoined his followers to seek knowledge even if they had to travel to China in its search. Here clearly he had scientific rather than religious knowledge in mind, as well as an emphasis on the internationalism of the scientific quest.”

WHY DO PEOPLE CARE?

Despite the essential differences the last chapter described, some religious believers are happy to apply the scientific and religious parts of their brains separately and continue to view understanding nature as a way of understanding God. Many who don’t actively pursue science too are happy to allow scientific progress to proceed unfettered. Still, the rift between science and religion nonetheless persists for many in the United States and other parts of the world. It occasionally expands to the point where it causes violence or at the very least interferes with education.

From the point of view of religious authority, challenges to religion such as science can be suspect for many reasons, including some that have nothing to do with truth or logic. For those in charge, God can always be invoked as the trump card that justifies their point of view. Independent inquiry of any kind is clearly a potential threat. Prying into God’s secrets might furthermore undermine the moral power of the church and the secular authority of the rulers on Earth. Such questioning could also interfere with humility and community loyalty, and might even lead one to forget God’s importance. No wonder religious authorities are sometimes worried.

But why do individuals align themselves with this point of view? The real question for me is not what the differences are between science and religion. Those can be reasonably well delineated as we argued in the previous chapter. The important questions to answer are these: Why do people care so much? Why are so many people suspicious of scientists and scientific progress? And why does this conflict over authority erupt so often and even continue to this day?

It so happened that I was on a mailing list for the Cambridge Round-table on Science, Art and Religion, a series of discussions among Harvard and MIT affiliates. The first one I attended, on the topic of the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert and the New Atheists, helped shed some light on some of these questions.

Stanley Fish, the literary scholar turned law professor, was the principal speaker at the event. He began his remarks by summarizing the views of the New Atheists and their antagonism toward religious faith. The New Atheists are those authors, including Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, who have countered religion with harsh and critical words in bestselling books.

After his brief report of their views, Fish proceeded to criticize their lack of understanding of religion, a perspective that seemed to fall on a receptive audience since I think as a nonbeliever I was in the minority at the discussion. Fish argued that the New Atheists would have a stronger case if they had considered the challenges to self-reliance that religious faithful have to contend with.