[Mb-civic] Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science

[Jef Bek]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/national/23believers.html?ei=5090&en=a7fec
44c68be1f25&ex=1282449600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

NEW YORK TIMES

August 23, 2005

Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science
By CORNELIA DEAN

 At a recent scientific conference at City College of New York, a student in
the audience rose to ask the panelists an unexpected question: "Can you be a
good scientist and believe in God?"

 Reaction from one of the panelists, all Nobel laureates, was quick and
sharp. "No!" declared Herbert A. Hauptman, who shared the chemistry prize in
1985 for his work on the structure of crystals.

 Belief in the supernatural, especially belief in God, is not only
incompatible with good science, Dr. Hauptman declared, "this kind of belief
is damaging to the well-being of the human race."

 But disdain for religion is far from universal among scientists. And today,
as religious groups challenge scientists in arenas as various as evolution
in the classroom, AIDS prevention and stem cell research, scientists who
embrace religion are beginning to speak out about their faith.

 "It should not be a taboo subject, but frankly it often is in scientific
circles," said Francis S. Collins, who directs the National Human Genome
Research Institute and who speaks freely about his Christian faith.

Although they embrace religious faith, these scientists also embrace science
as it has been defined for centuries. That is, they look to the natural
world for explanations of what happens in the natural world and they
recognize that scientific ideas must be provisional - capable of being
overturned by evidence from experimentation and observation. This belief in
science sets them apart from those who endorse creationism or its doctrinal
cousin, intelligent design, both of which depend on the existence of a
supernatural force.

Their belief in God challenges scientists who regard religious belief as
little more than magical thinking, as some do. Their faith also challenges
believers who denounce science as a godless enterprise and scientists as
secular elitists contemptuous of God-fearing people.

 Some scientists say simply that science and religion are two separate
realms, "nonoverlapping magisteria," as the late evolutionary biologist
Stephen Jay Gould put it in his book "Rocks of Ages" (Ballantine, 1999). In
Dr. Gould's view, science speaks with authority in the realm of "what the
universe is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory)" and
religion holds sway over "questions of ultimate meaning and moral value."

 When the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted a
session to this idea of separation at its annual meeting this year, scores
of scientists crowded into a room to hear it.

 Some of them said they were unsatisfied with the idea, because they believe
scientists' moral values must inevitably affect their work, others because
so much of science has so many ethical implications in the real world.

 One panelist, Dr. Noah Efron of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said
scientists, like other people, were guided by their own human purposes,
meaning and values. The idea that fact can be separated from values and
meaning "jibes poorly with what we know of the history of science," Dr.
Efron said.

 Dr. Collins, who is working on a book about his religious faith, also
believes that people should not have to keep religious beliefs and
scientific theories strictly separate. "I don't find it very satisfactory
and I don't find it very necessary," he said in an interview. He noted that
until relatively recently, most scientists were believers. "Isaac Newton
wrote a lot more about the Bible than the laws of nature," he said.

But he acknowledged that as head of the American government's efforts to
decipher the human genetic code, he had a leading role in work that many say
definitively demonstrates the strength of evolutionary theory to explain the
complexity and abundance of life.

 As scientists compare human genes with those of other mammals, tiny worms,
even bacteria, the similarities "are absolutely compelling," Dr. Collins
said. "If Darwin had tried to imagine a way to prove his theory, he could
not have come up with something better, except maybe a time machine. Asking
somebody to reject all of that in order to prove that they really do love
God - what a horrible choice."

 Dr. Collins was a nonbeliever until he was 27 - "more and more into the
mode of being not only agnostic but being an atheist," as he put it. All
that changed after he completed his doctorate in physics and was at work on
his medical degree, when he was among those treating a woman dying of heart
disease. "She was very clear about her faith and she looked me square in the
eye and she said, 'what do you believe?' " he recalled. "I sort of stammered
out, 'I am not sure.' "

 He said he realized then that he had never considered the matter seriously,
the way a scientist should. He began reading about various religious
beliefs, which only confused him. Finally, a Methodist minister gave him a
book, "Mere Christianity," by C. S. Lewis. In the book Lewis, an atheist
until he was a grown man, argues that the idea of right and wrong is
universal among people, a moral law they "did not make, and cannot quite
forget even when they try." This universal feeling, he said, is evidence for
the plausibility of God.

 When he read the book, Dr. Collins said, "I thought, my gosh, this guy is
me."

 Today, Dr. Collins said, he does not embrace any particular denomination,
but he is a Christian. Colleagues sometimes express surprise at his faith,
he said. "They'll say, 'how can you believe that? Did you check your brain
at the door?" But he said he had discovered in talking to students and
colleagues that "there is a great deal of interest in this topic."

 Polling Scientists on Beliefs

 According to a much-discussed survey reported in the journal Nature in
1997, 40 percent of biologists, physicists and mathematicians said they
believed in God - and not just a nonspecific transcendental presence but, as
the survey put it, a God to whom one may pray "in expectation of receiving
an answer."

 The survey, by Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia, was intended
to replicate one conducted in 1914, and the results were virtually
unchanged. In both cases, participants were drawn from a directory of
American scientists.

 Others play down those results. They note that when Dr. Larson put part of
the same survey to "leading scientists" - in this case, members of the
National Academy of Sciences, perhaps the nation's most eminent scientific
organization - fewer than 10 percent professed belief in a personal God or
human immortality.

 This response is not surprising to researchers like Steven Weinberg, a
physicist at the University of Texas, a member of the academy and a winner
of the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his work in particle physics. He said he
could understand why religious people would believe that anything that
eroded belief was destructive. But he added: "I think one of the great
historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion.
That's a good thing."

No God, No Moral Compass?

 He rejects the idea that scientists who reject religion are arrogant. "We
know how many mistakes we've made," Dr. Weinberg said. And he is angered by
assertions that people without religious faith are without a moral compass.

 In any event, he added, "the experience of being a scientist makes religion
seem fairly irrelevant," he said. "Most scientists I know simply don't think
about it very much. They don't think about religion enough to qualify as
practicing atheists."

 Most scientists he knows who do believe in God, he added, believe in "a God
who is behind the laws of nature but who is not intervening."

 Kenneth R. Miller, a biology professor at Brown, said his students were
often surprised to find that he was religious, especially when they realized
that his faith was not some sort of vague theism but observant Roman
Catholicism.

 Dr. Miller, whose book, "Finding Darwin's God," explains his reconciliation
of the theory of evolution with his religious faith, said he was usually
challenged in his biology classes by one or two students whose religions did
not accept evolution, who asked how important the theory would be in the
course.

 "What they are really asking me is "do I have to believe in this stuff to
get an A?,' " he said. He says he tells them that "belief is never an issue
in science."

 "I don't care if you believe in the Krebs cycle," he said, referring to the
process by which energy is utilized in the cell. "I just want you to know
what it is and how it works. My feeling about evolution is the same thing."

For Dr. Miller and other scientists, research is not about belief. "Faith is
one thing, what you believe from the heart," said Joseph E. Murray, who won
the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1990 for his work in organ transplantation.
But in scientific research, he said, "it's the results that count."

 Dr. Murray, who describes himself as "a cradle Catholic" who has rarely
missed weekly Mass and who prays every morning, said that when he was
preparing for the first ever human organ transplant, a kidney that a young
man had donated to his identical twin, he and his colleagues consulted a
number of religious leaders about whether they were doing the right thing.
"It seemed natural," he said.

 Using Every Tool

 "When you are searching for truth you should use every possible avenue,
including revelation," said Dr. Murray, who is a member of the Pontifical
Academy, which advises the Vatican on scientific issues, and who described
the influence of his faith on his work in his memoir, "Surgery of the Soul"
(Science History Publications, 2002).

Since his appearance at the City College panel, when he was dismayed by the
tepid reception received by his remarks on the incompatibility of good
science and religious belief, Dr. Hauptman said he had been discussing the
issue with colleagues in Buffalo, where he is president of the
Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.

 "I think almost without exception the people I have spoken to are
scientists and they do believe in the existence of a supreme being," he
said. "If you ask me to explain it - I cannot explain it at all."

 But Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary theorist at Oxford, said that even
scientists who were believers did not claim evidence for that belief. "The
most they will claim is that there is no evidence against," Dr. Dawkins
said, "which is pathetically weak. There is no evidence against all sorts of
things, but we don't waste our time believing in them."

 Dr. Collins said he believed that some scientists were unwilling to profess
faith in public "because the assumption is if you are a scientist you don't
have any need of action of the supernatural sort," or because of pride in
the idea that science is the ultimate source of intellectual meaning.

 But he said he believed that some scientists were simply unwilling to
confront the big questions religion tried to answer. "You will never
understand what it means to be a human being through naturalistic
observation," he said. "You won't understand why you are here and what the
meaning is. Science has no power to address these questions - and are they
not the most important questions we ask ourselves?"