John Polkinghorne's "Belief in God in an Age of Science"

A book I have been enjoying recently is John Polkinghorne's "Belief in God in an Age of Science." Polkinghorne who died recently was a noted theoretical physicist who was also a theologian. Unlike Polkinghorne I am an atheist, but he makes a good case for why religion, science, poetry, art, literature should all be welcomed as sources for truth about the universe and about human beings. A quote I particularly like from it:

"If we are seeking to serve the God of truth then we should really welcome truth from whatever source it comes. We shouldn’t fear the truth. Some of it will be from science, obviously, but by no means all of it. It will sometimes be perplexing, how this bit of truth relates to that bit of truth; we know that within science itself often enough and we find it outside of science as well. The crucial thing is to be honest.”

I would quibble with the catch-all definition of truth in Polkinghorne's quote (scientific "truth" by its very nature is tentative) but otherwise agree. In my scientific career I have found this as well. Often Tolstoy or the Bhagavad Gita or Bach have taught me deep truths about human beings that I never saw in any physics or chemistry or mathematics textbook. The great thing about human life is its diversity. Science is the most important thing that enriches it, but it's not the only one. That's a good thing. These multiple sources of diversity should keep us busy for as long as there is a human species.

The root of diverse evil

It wasn’t very long ago that I was rather enamored with the New Atheist movement, of which the most prominent proponent was Richard Dawkins. I remember having marathon debates with a religious roommate of mine in graduate school about religion as the “root of all evil”, as the producers of a documentary by Dawkins called it. Dawkins and his colleagues made the point that no belief system in human history is as all-pervasive in its ability to cause harm as religion.

My attitude toward religion started changing when I realized that what the New Atheists were criticizing wasn’t religion but a caricature of religion that was all about faith. Calling religion the “root of all evil” was also a bad public relations strategy since it opened up the New Atheists to obvious criticism – surely not all evil in history has been caused by religion? But the real criticism of the movement goes deeper. Just like the word ‘God’, the word ‘religion’ is a very broad term, and people who subscribe to various religions do so with different degrees of belief and fervor. For most moderately religious people, faith is a small part of their belonging to a religion; rather, it’s about community and friendship and music and literature and what we can broadly call culture. Many American Jews and American Hindus for instance call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Hindus.

My friend Freeman Dyson made this point especially well, and he strongly disagreed with Dawkins. One of Freeman’s arguments, with which I still agree, was that people like Dawkins set up an antagonistic relationship between science and religion that makes it seem like the two are completely incompatible. Now, irrespective of whether the two are intellectually compatible or not, it’s simply a fact that they aren’t so in practice, as evidenced by scores of scientists throughout history like Newton, Kepler and Faraday who were both undoubtedly great scientists and devoutly religious. These scientists satisfied one of the popular definitions of intelligence – the ability to simultaneously hold two opposing thoughts in one’s mind.

Dyson thought that Dawkins would make it hard for a young religious person to consider a career in science, which would be a loss to the field. My feeling about religion as an atheist are still largely the same: most religion is harmless if it’s practiced privately and moderately, most religious people aren’t out to convert or coerce others and most of the times science and religion can be kept apart, except when they tread into each other’s territory (in that case, as in the case of young earth creationism, scientists should fight back as vociferously as they can).

But recently my feelings toward religion have soured again. A reference point for this change is a particularly memorable quote by Steven Weinberg who said, “Without religion good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things, that takes religion.” Weinberg got a lot of flak for this quote, and I think it’s because of a single word in it that causes confusion. That word is “good”. If we replace that word by “normal” or “regular” his quote makes a lot of sense. “For normal people to do evil or harm, that takes religion.” What Weinberg is saying that people who are otherwise reasonable and uncontroversial and boring in their lives will do something exceptionally bad because of religion. This discrepancy is not limited to religious ideology – the Nazis at Auschwitz were also otherwise “normal” people who had families and pets and hobbies – but religious ideology, because of its unreason and reliance on blind faith, seems to pose a particularly all-pervading example. Religion may not be the root of all evil, but it certainly may be the root of the most diverse evil.

I was reminded of Weinberg’s quote when I read about the shocking attack on Salman Rushdie a few weeks ago. Rushdie famously had to go into hiding for a long time and abandon any pretense of a normal life because of an unconscionable death sentence or fatwa to kill him issued by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. Rushdie’s attacker is a 24-year-old man named Hadi Matar who was born in the United States but was radicalized after a trip to Lebanon to see his father. By many accounts, Matar was a loner but otherwise a normal person. The single enabling philosophy that motivated him to attack and almost kill Rushdie was religious. As Weinberg would say, without religion, he would have just been another disgruntled guy, but it was religion that gave him a hook to hang his toxic hat on. Even now Matar says he is “surprised” that Rushdie survived. He also says that he hasn’t even read the controversial ‘Satanic Verses’ which led to the edict, which just goes to show how intellectually vacuous, mindless sheep the religiously motivated can be.

I had the same feelings, even more strongly felt, when I looked up the stories of the Boston marathon bomber brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. By any account theirs should have been the quintessential American success story: both were brought to this country from war-torn Chechnya, placed in one of the most enlightened and progressive cities in the United States (Cambridge, MA) and given access to great educational resources. What, if not religious ideology, would lead them to commit such mindless, horrific acts against innocent people? Both Matar and the marathon bombers are a perfect example of Weinberg’s adage – it was religion that led them down a dark path and made the crucial difference.

The other recent development that has made me feel depressed about the prospects for peace between religion and secularism is the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the United States Supreme Court. In doing so, the Supreme Court has overturned a precedent with which a significant majority (often cited to be at least 60%) of Americans agree. Whatever the legal merits of the court’s decision, there is little doubt that the buildup to this deeply regressive decision was driven primarily by a religious belief that considers life to begin at conception. It’s a belief without any basis in science; in fact, as Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan wrote many years, if you factored in science, then Roe v. Wade would seem to have drawn the line at the right point, when the fetus develops a nervous system and really distinguishes itself as a human. In fact one of the tragedies of overturning Roe v. Wade is that the verdict struck a good balance between respecting the wishes of religious moderates and taking rational science into account.

But Evangelical Christians in the United States, of which there has a been dwindling and therefore proportionately bitter and vociferous number in recent years, don’t care about such lowly details as nervous systems (although they do seem to care about heartbeats which ironically aren’t unique to humans). For them, all there is to know about when life begins has been written in a medieval book. Lest there be any doubt that this consequential decision by the court was religiously motivated, it’s worth reading a recent, detailed analysis by Laurence Tribe, a leading constitutional scholar. Lessig convincingly argues that the Catholic justices’ arguments were in fact rooted in the view that life begins at conception, a view on which the constitution is silent but religion has plenty to say.

The grim fact that we who care about things like due process and equality are dealing with here is that a minority of religious extremists continues to foist extremely regressive views on the majority of us who reject those views to different degrees. For a while it seemed that religiosity was declining in the United States. But now it appears that those of us who found this trend reassuring were too smug; it’s not the numbers of the religious that have mattered but the strength of their convictions, crucially applied over time like water dripping on a stone to wear the system down. And that’s exactly what they have wanted.

The third reason why I am feeling rather bitter about religion is a recent personal experience. I was invited to a religious event at an extremely devout friend’s place. I will not note the friend’s religion or denomination to keep the story general and to avoid bias; similar stories could be told about any religion. My friend is a smart, kind and intelligent man, and while I usually avoid religious events, I made an exception this time because I like him and also because I wanted to observe the event, much like an anthropologist would observe the customs of another tribe. What struck me from the beginning was the lack of inclusivity in the event. We were not supposed to go into certain rooms, touch certain objects or food, take photos of them or even point at them. We were supposed to speak in hushed tones. Most tellingly, we weren’t supposed to shake hands with my friend or touch him in any way because he was conducting the event in a kind of priestly capacity. What social or historical contexts in more than one society this behavior evokes I do not need to spell out.

Now, my friend is well-meaning and was otherwise very friendly and generous, but all these actions struck me as emblematic of the worst features of religion, features meant to draw boundaries and divide the world into “us” and “them”. And the experience was again emblematic of Weinberg’s quote – an otherwise intelligent, kind and honest person was practicing strange, exclusionary customs because his holy book told him to do so, customs that otherwise would have been regarded as odd and even offensive. For normal people to do strange things, that takes religion.

Fortunately, these depressing thoughts about religion have, as their counterpart, hopeful thoughts about science. Everything about science makes it a different system. Nobody will issue a fatwa in science because a scientist says something that others disagree with or even find offensive, because if the scientist is wrong, the facts will decide one way or another. Nobody will carry out a decades-long vendetta to overturn a rule or decision which the majority believes as shown by the data. And certainly nobody will try to exclude anyone from doing a scientific experiment or proposing a theory just because they don’t belong to their particular tribe. All this is true even if science has its own priesthoods and has historically practiced forms of exclusion at one time or another. Scientists have their own biases as much as any other human people – witness the right’s opposition to climate change and the left’s opposition to parts of genetics research – but the great thing about science is that slowly but surely, it’s the facts about the world that decide truths, not authority or majority or minority opinion. Science is the greatest self-correcting system discovered by human beings, while religion keeps on allowing errors to propagate for generations and centuries by invoking authority and faith.

Sadly, these recent developments have shown us that the destructive passions unleashed by religious faith continue to proliferate. Again and again, when those of us who value rationality and science think we have reached some kind of understanding with the religious or think that the most corrosive effects of religion are waning, along comes a Hadi Matar to try to end the life of a Salman Rushdie, and along comes a cohort of religious extremists to end the will of the majority. Religion may not be the root of all evil, but it’s the root of a lot of evil, and undoubtedly of the most diverse evil. That’s reason enough to oppose it with all our hearts and minds. It’s time to loudly sound the trumpets of rationalism and the scientific worldview again.

First published on 3 Quarks Daily.

Has Carl Sagan's "Contact" aged well?

I have watched "Contact" several times and was watching it again the other day. Carl Sagan got a lot of things right in it, including the truth that even scientists have "faith" in matters disconnected with science. But one of the key parts of the film hasn't aged well for me.

For those who haven't seen it or read the book, Ellie Arroway, a brilliant astronomer played by Jodie Foster, is on a shortlist of people selected to be passengers on an interstellar machine constructed according to blueprints received by radio transmission from the Vega constellation. As earth's first ambassador to space, she is interviewed by a panel on her views on different topics. What would be the most important question she would ask the alien civilization?

An old flame who is on the panel - and who has a personal vested interest in not having her go since he still has romantic feelings for her - asks her squarely if she believes in God. The other members of the panel think that it would be unwise to pick as earth's first interstellar ambassador, someone who does not believe what 95% of the world's population believes. They think that one of the foremost questions Ellie should ask the aliens, should she meet them, is, "What God do you worship?". Elie being a scientist naturally says that she can't believe anything without demonstrated evidence. Candidate rejected.

It seems to me that Sagan really had an opportunity here, if not in the film then in the book, to showcase the theological and intellectual debates and problems concerning religion. The first question Ellie should have asked the panelists is: "When you ask whether I believe in God, I would ask you, *What* God? Those 95% of people you are referring to worship a zillion different Gods, from Jesus to Brahma. But there's even more, now-extinct Gods that their ancestors believed in, including Odin and Huitzilopochtli. Which God am I supposed to believe in? And do we think the aliens wouldn't ask me which one of these many Gods I believe in? What if I say the wrong name?". That would have driven home the central dilemma with believing in God right there.

But there might have been another, much more important question regarding religion that Arroway could have asked, and it would have been one that is independent of specific Gods. Religion clearly serves an important biological and evolutionary purpose, one explicated by numerous scientists. Instead of asking what God the aliens worship, the scientifically relevant question would be, "What are your deepest beliefs and how do you satisfy them?". This would have been a relevant question that is science, and yet one that would have provided an important answer about religion as, in Daniel Dennett's words, a "natural phenomenon".

As it turns out, the answer Arroway gives regarding the question is one I would have given myself: she says she would have asked the aliens how they did it; how they avoided blowing themselves up while developing such advanced technology. Especially in our present circumstances, asking a technologically advanced civilization that seems to have lasted much longer than us how they prevented self-extinction would be perhaps the most question we can ask.

But I can understand why Sagan had his character ask that question: it sets her up for the climax. After being transported to another world, Arroway sees and has a conversation with her loving father, one who had done everything he could to develop her interest and skills in science before tragically dying of a heart attack when Ellie was ten. When Ellie comes back after having that heartrending conversation, she comes to know that from the point of view of people here on earth, she was gone for only a short time, and her audiovisual equipment recorded nothing but noise. She is kept holding on to her vision of what is effectively an out-of-body experience and conversation with her father by the same slender thread which she had rejected before - faith. Sagan's point is that even scientists can have powerful experiences which they have to take on faith because there's no other way to explain them.

But upon watching that part again I still wasn't convinced of what Sagan was trying to say. If he was trying to propose reconciliation between science and religion, he was picking the wrong argument based on faith here. A scientist's "faith" that the sun will rise tomorrow is very different from faith that Jesus was born of a virgin. The former is predicated on well-understood laws of science that result in a probabilistic model which we can believe with high confidence; if the sun indeed failed to rise tomorrow, not just common sense but much of our understanding of physics, astronomy and planetary science would suddenly be called into question. That means that other phenomena that depend on this understanding would also be called into question. A scientist may take some things on "faith", but this is not really faith so much as it is informed judgement based on confidence limits and well-constructed models of reality.

Ultimately though, as much as I think Sagan could have done a much better job with these matters, I think the most important point he makes is still valid: that point simply is that, as monumentally useful and important science is, holding on to it is very hard and needs a lot of rock-solid conviction. That's a message we can all be on board with

Science and faith in a ceremonial cave

The hour was late, but it was still hot. Frijoles Canyon loomed to my right, showcasing its surfeit of stratigraphic tuff and igneous ash layerings and ponderosa pines. I was about a hundred and fifty feet up on the mountain face in a reconstructed cave with a ceremonial kiva or well. The cave was accessible by climbing a series of narrow steps and four ladders inclined against the steep rocks: not recommended for those with a fear of heights. On this particular day I was alone there; it was a hot weekend, and not too many hikers and tourists had scattered themselves around Bandelier National Park where the cave’s located.

It’s tough not to fall in love with the American Southwest. There is no other part of the United States which combines so uniquely and generously Native American, Spanish and Anglo-American culture with spectacular desert and mountain expanses as far out as the eye can see. Our trip had started with the Grand Canyon, whose first display of infinite recesses and a blaze of colors is sufficient to stop almost any conversation for a few seconds. It had then continued through Indian reservations spread across three states – albeit still crammed into nooks and crannies relative to their original seemingly limitless expanse – which took us through the incredible towering structures of Monument Valley to New Mexico.

In Monument Valley, our guide had made us lie down on the cool, hard bed of a sandstone cave while gazing up at the giant outline of an eagle carved out by water, wind and time into the ceiling of the cave. An older Native American had sung an ancestral song while his nephew who accompanied us played a trifurcated flute, the sounds reverberating through the cavernous structure. It couldn’t have been much different thousands of years ago, when men and women not very different from us made such rituals part of their lives, when they must have silently held communion with dead and living kin looking out across a blanket of stars and red desert.

The stunning mountain wonders of New Mexico are always a treat for the eyes, but nothing evokes a sense of awe and beauty for me as much as Valles Caldera. As you drive past Los Alamos into the Jemez Mountains, you are taken completely by surprise as you navigate a switchback and are suddenly greeted with what looks like a huge African Savannah, an immense grassy expanse reaching out across the horizon with a considerable hill jutting out in the middle; you half expect to see herds of zebras or bison stampeding across the plains. If you didn’t know better, you would think you were the first humans to emerge from the wilderness into this giant volcanic field, formed by a massive eruption about 1.2 million years ago. The hill is a lava dome, formed by the violent ejection and slow outflow of hot magma; time has carpeted the dome and the surrounding field with vegetation since its creation. It used to be a lake once. Mountains dotted with ponderosa pines and Douglas Firs rim the caldera. The floor of this giant bowl is spread across over fourteen miles, and the sheer size became clear when, unaided by binoculars, what looked like ants turned out to be herds of hundreds of grazing elk. Ten thousand years ago the natives wandered over this expanse, grazing their own livestock and looking for hard, black obsidian for their arrow and spear heads. Given how much the region has remained constant for thousands of years, even as geothermal activity and hot springs have gently but firmly caused local deformations, it’s hard not to feel a connection with those who came and went here over the years; their eyes saw what ours did.

The same sense of shared kinship strikes one in that cave in the Bandelier tuff which might have held twenty five Anasazi, or Ancestral Puebloans. Eight hundred years ago the place was a beehive of activity, with the peak population predicted to be about five hundred. Between the 12th and 13th century the Anasazi departed, dispersed and largely disappeared; for what reasons it’s still debated, although a mix of climate change – especially drought – and economic instability seems to be our best bet. While they lived in regions like Bandelier and Chaco Canyon they created a flourishing culture, both primitive and enlightened in parts. Economic trade with neighboring tribes was widespread, and animal skins, gems, pottery were exchanged extensively at key commercial sites like Chaco Canyon. The natives pioneered novel methods of harvesting and storing corn, of insulating their ground and cliff homes from excessive heat and cold, of waging war and brokering peace. But perhaps no other creation of the human mind infused their culture as much as religious belief.

It was everywhere. From dictating what directions to build their caves in to how to harvest their grains to elaborate rituals for burying their dead, religion filled every nook and cranny of their thoughts and emotions. It was pagan worship writ large, and no other relationship exemplified its intensity as much as their connection with nature. It was a connection that I especially pondered in the ceremonial cave, and one that was by no means unique to Native Americans. But seen from the eyes of a native, everything that I was seeing – the pines and firs and medicinal plants in the canyon, the mountain lions and bears and rattlesnakes lurking (fortunately far), the wind howling through the trees, the rough grains of cave wall tuff – imbibed special and essential spirits, good and evil. You went through elaborate rituals to please the good spirits and appease or drive away the evil ones, and you could not imagine a life without them.

Every living and non-living thing was a religious symbol of sorts, and the random motions of nature and life – an eagle jousting with a snake, a mountain lion choosing not to eat you, a trifecta of pines silhouetted against the dimming sunset – were pregnant with meaning and prediction. Nothing just existed, and surely nothing was the result of blind chance and the vagaries of geological and biological events. If I closed my eyes and took it all in, I could almost fancy myself at night in this hollow; wearing elk skins, beating drums, chanting, drawing geometric figures on the walls, reassuring myself that I was appeasing my favorite spirit with my actions.

Dusk was approaching, so I took in the view one last time and climbed down the ladders and single-file steps, quickly attaching and detaching my hands from the still hot rungs. The path to the visitor center at Bandelier runs through a pleasant tree-lined corridor intertwined with a stream, a stream that was muddy and wet then but which always runs the risk of sustaining unexpected flash floods. And as I walked and pondered my time during the previous few days in the cave and in the Jemez mountains and among the red sandstone monuments, I was suddenly struck by two thoughts. First: Thank God for modern science. And second: it’s not that simple. With its overabundance of sprits and essences with their own agency, the world which the natives inhabited was a world full of wonder, but it was also a frightening world. Even if I were the smartest Native American in Frijoles Canyon, I could not have possibly figured out why there was lightning, why fire worked, how I could prevent or cure disease, why my crop failed this year, why my niece was carried off by a mountain lion or by pockmarks on her face. I would have been miserable in the face of misfortune and had scant recourse except for trial and error to stave it off. Everything in the universe was haunted, blessed, cursed, and that was the only way to explain life and death in my little settlement.

It’s easy today for us to underestimate the emotional reassurance that science has provided, even as it has paradoxically revealed a universe without design. Today we no longer feel that light and dark are governed by battles between gods and demons or that we must simply please a deity rather than calculate the coming and going of the seasons using a calendar to figure out the best times and practices for crop rotation. Perhaps most significantly in terms of emotional amelioration, we now no longer believe that diseases are caused by malevolent forces beyond our control and have found countless ways of understanding, preventing and treating them; even if we cannot cure every disease, the mere fact of rational understanding provides comfort. We have sculpted and reworked the material world to our own uses, to build towering structures and weapons glistening with metal and fire that would keep mountain lions at bay. And we no longer fear lightning and have harnessed similar forces of electricity for heating and cooling our houses, for connecting us to people around the planet, for being the candle that lights up both the dark and our ignorance. In that sense, there’s no getting around the fact that we have evolved many fold over the ancients.

And yet it’s clear that in many ways we have also fallen behind, and that was the second thought I had as I made my way back. The physicist Niels Bohr once said that one of the cardinal principles ruling the behavior of the physical world was one he called the principle of complementarity. The principle says that a physical system embodies one or more qualities, all of which are essential for its description but none of which are visible at the same time. For instance, an electron can behave like a wave and particle, and it will behave like one or the other depending on the experiment you set up, but never both at the same time. But Bohr also extended his principle of complementarity to mean something bigger, a principle of paradox. Bohr loved paradoxes and always tried to explore them in science, but he also explored them in human affairs. During the Second World War, he found a much bigger hook to hang that hat on – nuclear weapons. He realized that the same weapons which can annihilate much of humanity can also bring an end to war. The destructive and pacifist nature of nuclear weapons can thus not be separated from each other.

In one sense it’s this principle of paradox that governs the supposedly unscientific religious beliefs of the natives. For in their fear and respect for the spirits of nature is their respect for nature itself. Native Americans had a far better relationship with their natural environment that one we can even dream of, especially in developed capitalist countries. Their worship of the rain, animals and plants went hand in hand with their sustainable use of these entities. They usually took from the earth only what they needed, and they almost never hunted animals for sport but only for their skins and meat; whenever they killed an animal they offered an invocation thanking the creature for its service. They were acutely aware of climate change, especially droughts, even if they may have been largely powerless to act against it. Their religious ethos led to a great ethos of environmentalism, and it’s not possible to separate the two.

In my opinion, the greatest value of Native American culture to our own modern sensibilities stems from its intimate and productive relationship with the environment. We seem to have lost that ethos of responsible environmental stewardship and sustainable practices even as we have largely and rightly cast aside the trappings of both pagan and organized religion. Westward expansion fueled in part by racial beliefs has further downplayed important values of ancient cultures. We have largely cloistered ourselves away from the forests and streams in our malls and cities, and most of us grow up without having any idea of how fragile ecosystems are because we were never forced to depend on them the way the natives did.

And yet we still do. Deforestation and climate change and ocean acidification don’t stop just because we enclose ourselves in our air-conditioned cubicles. Unlike the ancients, we certainly have the technological wherewithal to withstand the adverse impacts of the environment, but we cannot insulate ourselves from our own adverse impact on key ecosystems like glaciers, forests and oceans for too long. The center has to give in someday. But the solution, at least in principle, is not too difficult to comprehend. It’s Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity applied to Native American cultures, with a twist. We can respect their religious traditions without believing in their literal meaning, because the same traditions that make us believe in a holy spirit in nature can also make us respect nature independent of that literal meaning.

In that sense we can again be the Anasazi looking on toward the horizon in an alcove high up in the mountains, but this time armed with rational scientific skepticism and a fundamental faith in a complementarity meld of man and environment. The same scientific tradition that helped us to cast off primitive beliefs now has the power to help us protect the environment. Let us use it wisely. We don’t have to pick and choose between the two.

This is my latest monthly column for 3 Quarks Daily.

Jesuits, science, and a pope with a chemistry background

In 1915, an exceptionally bright Italian youngster walked the two miles from his home to the Campo dei Fiori in Rome to hunt for science books in the weekly market fair. His step was determined and his face was grim. His countenance hid the fact that he was trying to recover from a great tragedy, the sudden death of his brother who had been his closest companion. Science would provide respite from his grief.

The Campo dei Fiori was the same place where the 16th century friar Giordano Bruno had been burnt for his heretical beliefs regarding multiple universes and Copernican astronomy. The boy mostly found books on theology and other topics which did not interest him, but tucked away in the heap was a two-volume compendium on physics by a Jesuit priest named Andrea Caraffa. Written in 1840, the volume expounded on all the classical physics that had been known until then. It was better than nothing and the boy bought it with the meager allowance he had saved. Taking it home he devoured it, not even noticing that it had been written in Latin.

Thus was launched Enrico Fermi's momentous career in physics. There is something exceedingly poignant about the fact that Italy's most famous scientific son found his life's bearings in a book written by a member of the Catholic Church, the same institution which three hundred years earlier had sent a scientific heretic to his death in exactly the same location.

Pope Francis might particularly appreciate this story. He has held favorable views on evolution and on the Big Bang and seems to be an ardent environmentalist. He listens to scientists and is open to their views, even when they might not strictly conform to his religious views. The fact that he has a technical degree in chemistry and is a Jesuit might have something to do with his take on science.

Wikipedia has a list of Jesuit scientists going back to the 17th century. The Jesuits were probably the first Christian sect who really emphasized institutions of learning and study. Jesuit scientists delved into topics across the spectrum of science, although astronomers seem to be especially prominent among them. There's Giovanni Zup who discovered the orbital phases of Mercury, Giovanni Saccheri who wrote on Non-Euclidean geometry, Benito Vines who was known as 'Father Hurricane' and Pierre Chardin who was involved in the discovery of Peking Man. 

But perhaps the most prominent Jesuit scientist is the Belgian priest Georges Lemaitre who in 1927 first came up with the idea for the Big Bang theory through his vision of a "cosmic egg". In doing this Lemaitre went against both Einstein and the Pope; the Pope because he was uncomfortable with Lemaitre's implications for a "first cause" that excluded God, and Einstein because for once his intuition failed him. When Einstein first saw Lemaitre's theory he is said to have said, "Your ideas are correct but your physics is abominable". In this case, quite simply, Lemaitre was correct and Einstein was wrong, no small feat for an obscure "amateur" from a country removed from the mainstream of mid-twentieth century physics.

Among the most prominent recent Jesuits is Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno. Many of these Jesuits studied at prominent universities and later occupied faculty positions themselves. Their contributions to and study of science would be consistent with the Jesuit emphasis on scholarship. In their missionary work Jesuits often took the message of science to people on other continents. For instance it was a Jesuit who helped found the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science. Jesuits also introduced Western astronomy to China during their travels there and in turn brought back original Chinese research back to the West. Most prominently, Jesuits have founded many influential schools and colleges - including Georgetown University and Boston College - which emphasize teaching and research in science. Compared to other members of the Church, Jesuits' record on science is not bad at all.

The long Jesuit association with science demonstrates that it is very much possible for science and religion to co-exist in harmony and for one to inspire the other. Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno sees both science and religion as instruments allowing us to explore the universe and our role in it. Both spark debate and dialogue, and both shed light on human nature and thought. The website of the Jesuit society of the United States says that

"From the early days of the founding of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits have been engaged in various intellectual enterprises. These have included teaching, research, and writing. The Jesuit thrust to "find God in all things" has had the result that these efforts were not solely confined to the more "ecclesiastical" disciplines (like philosophy and theology), but were extended to the more "mundane" or "secular" disciplines. In the areas of science and technology many Jesuits have made, and continue to make, contributions. These contributions range from astronomy and algebra to natural history and geography."

In their quest to "find God in all things" the Jesuits are voicing an opinion similar to what Newton voiced when he said that for him, God was in the essential nature of the universe. For Newton God was the name of the entity that sowed the deep mysteries of the cosmos for us to reap. You don't have to believe in any kind of supernatural God to appreciate how such a view might not just be consistent with scientific inquiry but might even greatly encourage it, obsessively so in Newton's case. Einstein too used God as a metaphor for the mysteries of the universe that could be uncovered through playful inquiry. Einstein and Newton both shared the Jesuits' emphasis on finding their chosen objective in scientific investigation and they both saw scientific inquiry as a great game. It's a view that Consolmagno clearly relishes:

"Doing science is like playing a game with God, playing a puzzle with God. God sets the puzzles and after I can solve one, I can hear him cheering, "Great, that was wonderful, now here's the next one." It's the way I can interact with the Creator. 

Consolmagno seems to have perfectly reconciled his scientific and religious views.

The new Pope is a Jesuit with an appreciation of science, but he is also a human being who has to conform to the opinions of more than a billion of his followers around the world, so it's unlikely that he will turn into an outright atheist or agnostic any time soon. We will have to wait to hear his opinions on the various scientific topics with which the Church has wrested, as well as new ones which confront us today: for instance what does he think about CRISPR and germline gene editing? And what are his view on fusing humans with machines to give rise to an unprecedented form of artificial intelligence?

But whatever the new Pope has to say, I find satisfaction in the fact that a Jesuit with a science background - an intellectual descendant of Andrea Caraffa and Pierre Chardin - is far from the worst that the Church can do when it comes to science.

Can a religious person head the National Institutes of Health?

Francis Collins is an unusual scientist. A physical chemist and doctor who rose to prominence as the leader of the Human Genome Project, he has recently been appointed by President Barack Obama as head of the NIH, the largest biomedical funding and research organization in the country. Collins is unusual because along with this undoubtedly distinguished scientific credentials he brings another kind of background to the job; that of a pious, church-going Christian. A few years ago Collins published a book that argued for a scientific basis for belief in God, and not just a theological one. Needless to say, his views have caused concern among a number of atheist scientists and secular scientists in general.

It is one thing to be a deist, namely someone who believes in the kind of abstract God embodied in the laws of nature who could have set the universe in motion and then let it run its course without interfering, but quite another to be a proper theist, a person who believes in the kind of material God that most people who believe in God invoke, one who helps out or doles out punishment in daily life and personal matters. Collins seems to be more of a theist. And therefore his appointment to the NIH again raises a question which has fomented reams of arguments, and sometimes almost violent argument, on blogs and in books. The central question is; can a scientist truly be religious? Since this question immediately gets you into a morass of conflicting views and definitions, I will simply state my one line answer to the question in this specific context; from an empirical standpoint of course you can be religious and a scientist, as demonstrated by the existence of many religious scientists like Collins. But from a philosophical standpoint, you then have to accept that there is some very strange compartmentalization in your mind that allows you to essentially sustain two opposite and clearly conflicting paradigms simultaneously, one paradigm in which faith without evidence is positively eschewed and another in which faith without evidence is positively extolled. As an aside, it is a fascinating scientific question how such compartmentalization can occur.

Collins has come under fire from, among others, one of my favorite writers Sam Harris, whose controversial book The End of Faith made a compelling case against religious faith. In a piece in the New York Times, Harris criticizes Collin's views, best enumerated in his book, which essentially proclaim that God must exist since some things are beyond the scope of science. Both Harris and me find this kind of reasoning remarkably simple-minded. How does someone know that things that are beyond the scope of science today would always be so? For instance Collins quips that God must have adjusted the values of the so-called fundamental constants of nature (such as Planck's constant, the speed of light etc.), since life seems to depend on an incredibly precise fine-tuning of their values. But how do we know that science is never going to provide an answer for their origin? If "God" is simply a place card for "we don't know" then it sounds fine, but Collins seems to actually imply some kind of interventionist God here.

More importantly, does such a belief in God mean that we should automatically stay away from certain things and not apply critical questioning to them because they have been declared by religions to be supernatural by definition? Even Collins will admit that pushing any question under the rug by default by declaring that it is beyond the purview of science is completely antithetical to rational inquiry.

Harris is particularly concerned about Collins's enunciations about neuroscientific research. The last few decades have provided spectacular and remarkable insights into attributes that were for many years considered almost mystical, things like human emotions, love and the nature of faith itself. But in recent years, science is gradually opening a window into these attributes, answering questions like; What happens when someone is praying? How does the brain look when it is experiencing intense emotion? Studies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are making significant headway into answering such questions and detecting common patterns of neuronal activity that are at play. Collins essentially says that there is something special about faith and human emotions and that God injected these qualities into human beings at some point in our evolution. Would Collins then have us not explore the scientific basis of such human attributes by assuming that they are beyond scientific inquiry? These questions worry Harris and some others like evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, and they worry me. Some of Collins's statements from a set of slides that are cited by Harris and Coyne really sound preposterous.

Is it dangerous to have a bona fide Christian heading the most important biomedical research agency in the country, and one of the most significant of its kind in the world? In spite of the above concerns I would say not per se. I would say that Collins should be given the benefit of doubt. After all, there does not seem to be a shred of evidence that his religious leanings have affected his capacity for objective scientific judgement. The NIH is a scientific organization and Collins's leadership of it should be judged purely based on his handling of the science. We should not care as much about what he says as about what he does. In the absence of evidence that his religious views are affecting his ability to allocate funding for specific kinds of research, he should be closely watched but not condemned.

At the same time, I share Harris, Coyne and others' sense of unease for a totally different reason; Collins's appointment might unfortunately have the disastrous side effect of enabling creationists and proponents of intelligent design to clamor and push their agenda for turning science and religion into convenient bedfellows. Creationists might make Collins's appointment a case for asserting that not only is religion compatible with science but it's even necessary, as purportedly exemplified in the highest echelons of science policy and research. Collin's appointment may sadly make it easier for the creationists to weasel their way into sensible scientific debate. For this reason the appointment may cause problems, and we will have to make sure that Collins is constantly watched and criticized wherever appropriate. The price of scientific freedom, it seems, is indeed eternal vigilance.

The mystical Sir Isaac

One of the favourite tactics of religious people who want to use science as firepower for their arguments, is to proclaim that both Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton were religious. They think that marshalling the tacit support of two dead scientists who are among the greatest in history would help them fight for their cause.

However, there are a number of points that help to refute such disingenuous arguments. In the first place, such an argument is an appeal to authority, which by itself does not provide any 'proof' whatsoever for its justification. Now, as far as Einstein is concerned, it's quite clear that he used 'God' as a metaphor for the ultimate mysteries of the universe, for those awe-inspiring truths in the cosmos which we can't yet comprehend. Uses of the word God or something similar galore in Einstein's famous and oft-quoted phrases and writings, yet to my knowledge, there is not an iota of evidence that he believed in the personal deity which most people associate with the word 'God'. In his later years, Einstein was a strong supporter of Zionism and the creation of Israel, yet, it's clear that even these concerns of his were more humanitarian than religious, and did not attest to any deep deistic Jewish faith inside himself. So, for religious people to claim Einstein as their own is dishonest, and shows a simple ignorance of historical facts. At most, Einstein can be called a spiritual philosopher, but not a religious person by the common definition of the term.

But among all the scientists in history, the genius who appears the most mystical to future generations is Newton. This is partly because of the sheer and astonishing breadth of his imagination, which still defies comprehension. He single-handedly laid the foundations for all future physical science, and also invented the mathematical tools necessary to describe nature. Inspite of the two great achievements of twentieth century physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, we still live in largely a Newtonian world. Purely as a scientist, Newton's abilities do appear mystical and almost magical to all of us. This image of Newton is cemented by the way he lived his life, as a solitary and obsessed man who toiled for months in his laboratory and rooms without once appearing in front of the outside world, as a recluse who was so paranoid about his creations- pinnacles of human thought- that he sought to keep them secret for years, deciding to publish them years later in a burst of revelation. As Alexander Pope said, 'God said, let Newton be, and all was light'.
Religious people's fascination for Newton and their tendency to claim him as their own cannot be entirely disparaged, however. Newton in fact saw himself less as a scientist whose job was to document facts about nature and weave them into elegant theories, and more as a solver of puzzles, puzzles whose clues were laid by God for man to unravel. He saw God as the ultimate riddler, and man as the being whose duty was to lay bare His conundrums. He was a Unitarian, who believed in the oneness of divine existence. All these beliefs of Newton explains his later intense forays into theology and alchemy.

Yet, Newton's life cannot belie the facts. The first fact is, the laws of nature which Newton discovered don't need a divine explanation to justify their elegance, power, and use. The world is governed by the laws that he discovered, and it makes as much sense to ask for the 'laws behind the laws' as it does to ask what was before time happened. Even if we do discover some ultimate laws behind these laws, there is no reason to suppose that those laws would not be mathematical.

The second fact may be harder to digest, but it is also true. Newton's later obsession about alchemy and theology was largely crackpot and nonsense. His reams of writings on religion and theology seem more like figments of a magic kingdom constructed by the mind of a deluded person, although just like in the writings of a deluded person, there are some interesting conlusions that he draws. It is difficult to imagine what made Newton give up his spectacular study of natural law, and start searching for cryptic clues in the Bible. But one thing is for sure, whatever the driving force, it is the products of his scientific studies that have survived the test of time, and guide the behaviour of science in the modern world. Just because Newton was a great scientist does not automatically give him authority over deciphering ancient texts, as some religious people would have themselves believe. One can be exalted in one field, totally misguided in the other, and history has many examples which demonstrate this. Newton the natural philosopher was invaluable to mankind, but Newton the alchemist and theologian was at worst a deluded mortal, and at best an amusement of interest to historians, not to mention psychologists.

The third and most important fact that needs to be kept in mind when we talk about Newton, is to accurately guage the times in which he lived. This is perhaps the greatest fallacy which religious people commit, that of analyzing Newton outside the context of his times. We cannot forget that this was the seventeenth century. It was a time when religion did provide the best 'explanation' of many perplexities in the world. Apart from astronomy and mathematics, no other science was well-developed, and both astronomy and mathematics needed the spark of differential and integral calculus that Newton breathed into them to come to life. Newton may have been an extraordinary thinker, but he was probably awed as much as anyone else by the astonishing diversity and workings of life. Biology was not even a formal science then, and absolutely nothing was known about cells and organelles, although Newton's contemporary Robert Hooke would soon coin the term 'cell'. We knew nothing about microbes and their role in disease, about genes, about the transmission of hereditary characteristics. Most importantly, the world had no inkling of the great revolution that would lead us to redefine our origins and existence- the theory of evolution by natural selection, another gigantic intellectual revolution fomented by Newton's fellow Englishman two hundred years later. It is easy, even today, to look at life around us and think that a supernatural being created it. In the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton was as ignorant and smitten by all these mysteries as anyone else, and it was much easier for him and everyone else to believe in a divine provenance for all things in the world.

This was also a time when the grip of religion was very strong, and one also needed courage to make contrary views known. In fact, Newton's views on the oneness of God would have been heretical if he had made them public. The liberal King Charles II made a special concession and allowed Newton to become a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in spite of these views. Newton kept his side of the bargain and never published his religious views. That of course did not stop him from poring over ancient texts in private. He believed that theology, alchemy, and the laws of physics, all were manifestations of the divine power of God. But because he said so, that doesn't make them so. Within the context of his times and his genius, one can be sympathetic towards Newton's beliefs, but that says nothing about the facts, which prove that the laws of physics do not need to be combined with theological views in order to attain consistency.

Lastly, the most important and simplest truth about both Newton and Einstein cannot be forgotten; they might have even had beliefs akin to religious ones, but they chose to marshall their intellect and energies to unraveling the mysteries of the universe through science and not religion. Newton may have turned to religion in his later life, but as noted above, for him, his religious excursions were a natural extension of his scientific excursions. As for Einstein, he never gave up his scientific pursuits, although God continued to be a common metaphor in his writings.

Einstein and Newton; the stature of both these men was such and their creations were so lofty, that one cannot help apply religious or spiritual connotations to them. But it should never be forgotten that they looked towards science, not religion, as a means to understand the universe and our place in it.

As for being in awe of the universe, the one fact that the atoms that you and I are made up of were manufactured billions of years ago in furnaces in the innards of blazing and dying stars is much more profound and spiritual for me than contemplating a deity whose existence is questionable by any standards.