TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=92TT2916> <title> Dec. 28, 1992: Science, God and Man </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992 Dec. 28, 1992 What Does Science Tell Us About God? </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> COVER STORIES, Page 38 SCIENCE AND GOD Science, God And Man </hdr><body> New discoveries in physics, cosmology and biology make the universe more explainable, as well as more amazing. Does this undermine religious faith--or reinforce it? By Robert Wright [Robert Wright, a senior editor at The New Republic, is the author of Three Scientists and Their Gods (1988). His second book, The Moral Animal: Darwin and the Way We Live Now, will be published next winter by Pantheon.] "We don't know what the hell it is, except that it's very large and it has a purpose." Dr. Heywood Floyd in the movie 2010 Last spring George Smoot, an American astrophysicist, added a little flourish to standard scientific procedure. After announcing some new findings, he consecrated them. Smoot's team of researchers had detected slight but persistent fluctuations in the universe's "cosmic background radiation"--echoes, he believes, of the Big Bang, the moment of creation. "If you're religious," he told reporters, trying to put things in perspective, "this is like looking at God." If you're religious, you may beg to differ. Apprehending the Almighty and scanning a computer printout may strike you as two quite different endeavors. God as seen from the average church, synagogue, or mosque is an all-knowing, all-powerful creative being--not some faint ripples, but rather the One Who Made the Splash. Besides, if you're religious in a conventional sense, you probably don't seek theological guidance from physicists. Then again, some people are religious in an unconventional sense. They kind of believe in a deity but wouldn't mind seeing some hard evidence; or they believe strongly in some kind of deity, but it's vague in form, open to any tailoring that scientific measurement may dictate. Judging by the attention Smoot's choice of words drew, a lot of people fall into this category: religiously inclined, but reaching for scientific support. Nor is Smoot's celebrity the only sign of interest in the interface between science and religion. This winter the Nobel-prizewinning physicist Leon Lederman will publish a book called The God Particle. And the current documentary A Brief History of Time, like the best-selling book of the same name, ends with physicist Stephen Hawking's uplifting hope that someday humankind will "truly know the mind of God." Of course, when Hawking says God, he doesn't mean God. He isn't talking about a personal deity, any more than Einstein was when he doubted that God would "play dice" with the universe. Similarly, "the God particle" doesn't exactly refer to a giant photon in a white beard and robe, beaming down benignly on all creation. The theological utterances of scientists often turn out to be metaphorical and to fall short of consoling even by the meager standards of the unconventionally religious. Still, some of the epic narratives of contemporary science, ranging from the birth of our universe to the birth of our species, do lend themselves to religious interpretation. Indeed, one hallmark of 20th century science, as it draws to a close, is how much fertile ground it has provided for bona fide theological speculation: speculation about whether the universe is a product of intelligent design, whether the human experience is part of some unfolding purpose, whether we were in any sense meant to be here. There is a giant paradox here. On the one hand, this century has seen the explanatory sweep of science advance relentlessly and encroach on once sacred turf. "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end," says God in the Book of Revelation, seemingly secure in his mystery. But Hawking and other physicists have opened the end points of time to a bracing, somewhat demystifying, inspection. Further, the most ethereal parts of life--the things that once seemed heaven-sent--have fallen steadily within reach of concrete explanation. The mapping of our finer feelings to neurotransmitters and other chemicals proceeds apace. Love itself--the love of mother for child, husband for wife, sibling for sibling--may boil down, in large part, to a chemical called oxytocin. It seems somehow harder to rhapsodize about the universal love many religions prescribe when you know that, if it ever comes, it will rest on the same stuff researchers inject into rats to make them cuddle. Another bit of less-than-inspiring news is the clearer, more cynical, understanding of why love exists--how it was designed by evolution for only one discernible purpose: to spread the genes of the person doing the loving. In short, the works of modern science, taken one by one, seem enough to dampen a person's hopes for higher meaning. If religion's stock-in-trade is the inexplicable, the coming years don't look like boom times. This is half of the giant paradox, and it's one reason the average scientist today is probably less religious than the average scientist of 50 or 100 years ago. The other half of the paradox comes from stepping back and looking at the big picture: an overarching pattern that encompasses the many feats of 20th century science and transcends them; a pattern suggesting, to some scientists, at least, that there is more to this universe than meets the eye, something authentically divine about how it all fits together. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth... One intriguing observation that has bubbled up from physics is that the universe seems calibrated for life's existence. If the force of gravity were pushed upward a bit, stars would burn out faster, leaving little time for life to evolve on the planets circling them. If the relative masses of protons and neutrons were changed by a hair, stars might never be born, since the hydrogen they eat wouldn't exist. If, at the Big Bang, some basic numbers--the "initial conditions"--had been jiggled, matter and energy would never have coagulated into galaxies, stars, planets or any other platforms stable enough for life as we know it. And so on. Some physicists have tried to drain these coincidences of their eeriness with something called the anthropic principle, which dismisses humankind's perspective on the cosmos as inherently biased. It's no surprise, they say, that the universe is conducive to life. After all, if it weren't, we wouldn't be here to argue the point. For all we know there are zillions of other universes that don't have the dimensions for life. Marveling at the exquisite fine-tuning of physical reality is like viewing a winning lottery ticket as proof of God's existence--forgetting about the less blessed tickets lying in trash cans all over town. Argument over the anthropic principle has gone on for decades now, with little progress. Its backers, having accused others of straining to see divinity, are in turn accused of the reverse--harboring a deep-seated aversion to the simple religious idea that the universe was designed for our existence. The physicist Heinz Pagels, who believed life was "written into the cosmic code," once dismissed the anthropic principle as "the closest that some atheists can get to God." And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind... There was a time when the emergence of life wasn't thought too amazing. With Darwin having explained how specks of life became us, the question of where the specks came from seemed minor: such a small step compared with the ensuing big ones. Presumably if you let simple molecules reshuffle themselves randomly for long enough, some complex ones would get formed, and further reshuffling would make them more complex, until you had something like DNA--a stable molecule that just happened to make copies of itself. But more recent, more careful analysis suggests that even a mildly impressive living molecule is quite unlikely to form randomly. Then where did it come from? This is one of the questions that drive an emerging interdisciplinary field known as "complexity" (the subject of two books published this year: Complexity, by M. Mitchell Waldrop, and Artificial Life, by Steven Levy). One of complexity's main buzz words is "self-organization." Drab, lifeless physical systems, such as air and water, faced with increasing disruption, sometimes grow more structured. Air becomes more turbulent until it finally turns into whirlwinds, tornadoes, hurricanes. Water molecules heated from below grow wilder in their gyrations until they finally snap into a sweeping circular motion known as a convection cell. The Russian-born Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel laureate, sees a broad tendency for physical systems that are driven away from stability to regain it at a higher level of organization. A number of complexity theorists think self-organization is so basic a principle as to account for the origin of life. They have sketched out "autocatalytic" scenarios, animated them with computer simulations, published papers. "If I'm right," says one of them, Stuart Kauffman of the University of Pennsylvania medical school, "the probability of life is very much higher than anybody thought." That's a big if. The field of complexity is considered, at best, inchoate but fruitful and, at worst, inchoate and sterile. The field's epicenter, a fledgling think tank called the Santa Fe Institute, has a suspiciously trendy locale; the term self-organization crops up with suspicious frequency in new-age circles; and, suspiciously, Kauffman and Prigogine have reputations for hawking their wares aggressively. But the field is also populated by, and taken seriously by, some people who aren't viewed with suspicion. Various scientists are pondering the prospect that a basic physical law lies waiting to be discovered, a law defining the circumstances under which systems infused with energy become more complexly structured. This law would carve out local exceptions to the general tendency of things to become more chaotic and bland--higher in "entropy"--as dictated by the famously depressing second law of thermodynamics. Charles H. Bennett, of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, who has deeply shaped the modern understanding of the second law, suspects there is indeed a law that if known would make life's origin less baffling. Such a law, he has said, would play a role "formerly assigned to God." Some would see things the other way around. They would say that such a law is evidence of God--not a God who created human beings out of dust, but a God with longer time horizons. Certainly, a universe predisposed to create life seems a more likely product of divine design than a universe in which life was a fluke. So God created man in his own image... Still, life itself doesn't strike the average person as all that impressive. Primordial bacteria, though more interesting than the surrounding soup that they called home, don't arouse great religious awe. It is highly intelligent life that seems most to demand divine explanation. If you can show people that the universe was destined to create that sort of life--them, that is--you can get their attention. One little publicized fact is that many, perhaps most, evolutionary biologists now hold this belief. Well, not exactly. They don't believe that any particular human being was in the cards from the beginning, or even that the human species was. But they believe evolution was very likely, given enough time, to create a species with our essential property: an intelligence so great that it becomes aware of itself and starts figuring out how things work. In fact, many biologists have long believed that the coming of highly intelligent life was close to inevitable. But for a while, admitting this was taboo. Ever since Darwin, the idea of "survival of the fittest" as an inexorably "progressive" force has been misused to justify poverty, genocide and suffering in general. Also, the idea of progressive evolution encouraged some spacy thinking that biologists find highly annoying. The French philosopher Henri Bergson believed in an elan vital--a life force, an immaterial essence--pushing evolution ever upward. Biologists insist on a strictly physical scenario: genes that aid survival and reproduction are preserved, and those that don't aren't--natural selection. All told, talking about evolutionary "progress" seemed to yield more pain and confusion than it was worth. But the fact remains that over time evolution has pushed the envelope of complexity and intelligence outward; the trophies for "most intricate species" and "smartest species" have become harder to get. There are various reasons natural selection might favor this trend. Behavioral flexibility, for example, is so often good for survival and reproduction that genes bestowing it flourish. And behavioral flexibility demands complex information processing--smarts. Human beings are the most flexible organisms around. That's why we're still around, and that's why we're smart enough to wonder why. And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good... One of the few biologists to have talked out loud and at length about the growth in organic complexity is John Tyler Bonner of Princeton. In his 1988 book The Evolution of Complexity, Bonner showed how ever more intricate organisms can arise from natural selection alone, without help from spooky Bergsonian forces. For some people, he wrote in the preface, "a religious or mystical explanation is the most satisfying. This is not so for me: the more rational and materialistic the explanation, the better I like it." Spoken like a true scientist. But one person's science is another's religion. Granted, a strictly material account of humankind's evolution may contradict the various creation stories that have shaped humanity's sense of divine design. And, as physicist Bennett suggested, a strictly material account of life's origin, its self-organization, may have the same effect. But now place these two accounts alongside modern physics, and look at the big picture that some people see being painted by 20th century science: a universe all but destined to create platforms for life; a still unknown but increasingly suspected physical law that all but destined some of these platforms to be populated by little living specks; an evolutionary process that was almost destined, given enough time, to turn those specks into thinking, wondering, self-aware beings. Suddenly the universe seems almost designed to yield creatures that read articles about how they came to be here. With a little effort, some people say, you can see the hand of God. Paul Davies, the physicist and writer who has done the most to advance this view (in God and the New Physics, The Cosmic Blueprint and The Mind of God), puts it this way: "The very fact that the universe is creative, and that the laws have permitted complex structures to emerge and develop to the point of consciousness--in other words, that the universe has organized its own self-awareness--is for me powerful evidence that there is `something going on' behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming." This view is reminiscent of deism, the doctrine that attracted some of America's founding fathers, including Washington, Jefferson and Franklin. Deists believed in a clockmaker God; he had built the universe, wound it up and let it run. They also believed we could sense this God through reason, without special revelation, just by inspecting his handiwork--the universe and its laws. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways... Deism is in many ways well suited (as religions go) to an era as scientific as this one. But 20th century science sketches a universe stranger than the one the deists imagined. It is a universe that seems not to run as predictably as a clock, a universe whose innermost workings may not be fathomable. The deeper our insight, the more baffling things become. This sort of claim is typically followed by a lengthy attempt to explain quantum physics. Such attempts are in a way futile; the upshot of quantum physics is inexplicability. The great physicist Richard Feynman once prefaced a lecture by telling his audience not to worry about understanding it. "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," Feynman warned. "Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, `But how can it be like that?'...Nobody knows how it can be like that." This is indeed a good briefing for descent into the subatomic realm, a place where randomness reigns, where two flatly contradictory statements can both be true, where the course that events take depends on their subsequent perception, and other Twilight Zone-ish things happen. Naturally, the quantum world has provoked popular attempts to merge science and spirit, most notably in the new-age classic The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra. And, naturally, physicists complain about facile new-age mergers. Still, a few big-name physicists have stepped cheerfully beyond the bounds of the strictly scientific. In the 1950s, the pioneering quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger, author of What Is Life?, wrote about the hidden oneness of all human minds. More recently, the American physicist John Wheeler has drawn diagrams that depict a symbiosis of mind and matter and look like they came from the scrolls of some occult society. Most physicists haven't gone this far. Still, Wheeler and Schrodinger illustrate an interesting correlation: between eminence and boldness. If you start cornering scientists and ask them cosmic questions that push at the limits of knowledge, you find that some of the most accomplished are the most willing to play the game. One example is John Maynard Smith, the British biologist who has made fundamental contributions to evolutionary theory. A few years ago, he wrote that he had never understood why organisms have feelings. After all, orthodox biologists believe that behavior, however complex, is governed entirely by biochemistry and that the attendant sensations--fear, pain, wonder, love--are just shadows cast by that biochemistry, not themselves vital to the organism's behavior; they are affected by the material world but don't affect it. Well, if that's the case and feelings don't do anything, then why do they exist at all? This is no trivial question. Feelings--the fact that we experience the world as well as respond to it--are what make life meaningful. If this planet were full of robots that looked and acted just as we do but had no sensation, no capacity for pain or pleasure, there would be no reason to care what happened to any of them. Life would have no moral dimension. So if indeed subjective experience is a freebie, an optional feature thrown in at no extra charge by whatever or whoever created the universe, it is the most valuable freebie ever. Indeed, one could--though Maynard Smith didn't--call it another link in the argument for design: This universe seems geared to create not just intelligent life but intelligent, meaningful life. Behold, I make all things new... If you press Maynard Smith on why feelings exist, he'll say that although the existence of subjective experience may have no strictly scientific explanation, it could still have a "metaphysical" one. This is a fairly bold use of words. The term metaphysics long had a bad name in scientific circles, and the taint hasn't quite faded. The idea that there might be any laws beyond the perceivable world, anything opaque to scientific inquiry, was considered by many a quaint relic of a more romantic era. The use of the term by a scientist of Maynard Smith's caliber is a sign that science's brash youth, when no mystery seemed beyond experimental conquest, is ending. (Which isn't to say, of course, that scientists mean by metaphysics what Shirley MacLaine means by it.) With respect for metaphysics comes respect for an idea central to many religions: the unknowable. Agnosticism--reserving judgment about divine pur pose--remains as defensible as ever, but atheism--the confident denial of divine purpose--becomes trickier. If you admit that we can't peer behind the curtain, how can you be sure there's nothing there? Another striking combination of eminence and philosophical audacity can be found in William D. Hamilton of Oxford University, considered by some to be the most important evolutionary biologist of the second half of this century. Hamilton is the author of the theory of "kin selection," a landmark in evolutionary thought. As such, he is considered in some circles a depressing person; the theory depicts brotherly love as genetic selfishness. Specifically, altruism toward kin--the kamikaze flight of a bee defending the hive, the fearless defense of a younger brother on the playground--has evolved because the genes that produce this altruism may reside not only in the animal that exhibits it but also within his kin; thus the genes get saved by the act of altruism, even if it is suicidal. Some find this reduction of love to selfishness deadening--another assault by science on spirit. But kin selection has a seldom mentioned flip side that is more upbeat. The very same logic explains why cells first got together to form multicellular organisms. Because nearby cells tended to be related, they shared genes, so increasing cooperation among them made evolutionary sense, and this trend eventually led to utterly cooperative communities of cells, such as ourselves. Hamilton, then, is the biologist who first clearly discerned the force that propelled life over the chasm between single celled and multicelled. And this force is a primary reason that the first little living specks were likely to beget big thinking, feeling machines. Kin selection is a vital link in the argument that the evolution of intelligent life was very probable all along. And on earth peace, good will toward men... To put the two implications of kin selection together: affinities among closely related organisms tend to evolve, given enough time, regardless of whether the organisms are cellular or multicellular. And in humans, at least, the subjective correlates of this affinity--the emotional freebies thrown in for reasons that baffle Maynard Smith--are affection, compassion, love. Love, in this sense, seems to have been in the cards from the beginning. This is arguably good news, a welcome antidote to the obvious fact that hatred too is a likely fruit of natural selection's war of all against all. Apparently that august religious theme--good vs. evil, love against hate--has been in the script longer than one might have guessed. The spirit of Christmas, the extension of brotherly love well beyond the compass of kin, may face an uphill battle against human nature, but at least evolution gave it a foothold. Hamilton, pressed to wax philosophic, readily agrees that the evolution of complex and intelligent life was very likely from the beginning, given enough time. To be sure, it was hardly inevitable that the first highly intelligent creature would descend from an ape. "It might have been the descendant of a squirrel-like creature or a dolphin-like creature," he says. But the chance of something very brainy eventually emerging from a process of natural selection is so high that he is "quite favorably inclined to search for signs of intelligent life on other planets." Speaking of extraterrestrials: "There's one theory of the universe that I rather like," says Hamilton. Suppose our planet is a "zoo for extraterrestrial beings"; they planted the seeds of evolution on earth hoping to create interesting, intelligent creatures. "And they watch their experiment, interfering hardly at all. So that almost everything we do comes out according to the laws of nature. But every now and then they see something which doesn't look quite right." For example: "This zoo is going to kill itself off if they let you do this or that. So they insert a finger and just change some little thing. And maybe those are the miracles which the religious people like to so emphasize." Hamilton stresses that this free-form speculation isn't to be taken too seriously; he discusses it in an "almost joking spirit." Still, "I think it's a kind of hypothesis that's very, very hard to dismiss. I mean if I were setting up an aquarium or something, this is virtually the way I would do it. I'd try to make as interesting an aquarium as I could. And I'd try to make sure that this big fish didn't molest this little fish too much. And I would occasionally insert a finger and try to stop him." An extraterrestrial zookeeper may not strike everyone as the ideal deity. But that's beside the point. Hamilton didn't say he buys this scenario or any other theological scenario; he is an agnostic. The point is simply that one of the great scientific minds of our era believes that the ultimate questions remain unanswered, that science may be unable to answer them, and yet that science does help us mull them over, by illuminating the epic trajectory of cosmic and biological evolution on whose end we sit. "The theological possibility," Hamilton says, "is still certainly alive." This may seem meager nutrition for the spiritually hungry. But 100 years ago, with Darwin having shown how a long chain of tiny accidents had happened to yield the human species, with metaphysics in retreat and the clockwork laws of classical physics ascendant, and with the universe's deft conduciveness to life as yet unfathomed, one might have thought "the theological possibility" an unlikely survivor of the next century's science. That it should survive in such robust form would have seemed less likely still. This holiday season the unconventionally religious can join the conventionally religious in counting their blessings. </body></article> </text>