Steven Weinberg: Without God

At the risk of sounding repetitive, the majority of emails that I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan's petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells are being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September "Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding") – except a few out-of-office autoreplies; and, presumably, the two or three emails I send immediately before; which could explain why we get a signature now and again. Take Wednesday: when I finally got to email 148 scientists from Cambridge University (see previous blog), all I got were 6 autoreplies. Two came from the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre (out of a total of 26) – from 2nd, and 4th emails. Yesterday didn’t fair better: 120 emails to scientists, mainly from the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute and University College London, which resulted in 4 autoreplies – from 15th, 19th, 77th, and 80th emails.

Half the computers at our local council's Idea Store Whitechapel library have been out of action for many weeks now and, as I correctly predicted in the blog of 26 August “Fighting for the Right to Clone”, competition for the remaining ones is hotting up – in addition, on 29 January the library imposed on both our membership cards a maximum of 3 hours of PC access per day despite that for several months previous we were given "additional time" subject to computer availability in accordance with the council's "Idea Stores PC Usage Policy". Anyway, yesterday afternoon I found no computer available for today on floor 1, so I had to book one on floor 3. Clearly I look forward to having a laptop again and working undisturbed as I build a website in support of human embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning. Nonetheless, I don’t complain: our campaign has increasingly taken shape as result of all the research I do prior to the writing of a blog.

For example, I decided to add a section called “Science and Religion” after reading that scientists such as Nobel prize winners Sir Harry Kroto (NAC Honorary Associate) and Sir Richard Roberts look with horror upon the spread of faith schools; the growing influence of bodies such as the Templeton Foundation; and the prospect of creationism being taught in science classrooms (see blog of 16 September “Royal Society's stance on religion under fire”). The Science and Religion home page will cite Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg’s four sources of tension between science and religion, especially in the West, where science has been most advanced. This home page will look very much like Greenpeace UK’s section “Climate change”. The four sources of tension come from an essay by Weinberg, an American physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics and the National Medical of Science, published this week in The New York Review of Books under the title “Without God” (see below).

The Large Hadron Collider will look at how the universe formed

Weinberg begins his essay by pointing out that the idea of a conflict between science and religion has a long pedigree. According to Edward Gibbon, it was the view of the Byzantine church that “the study of nature was the surest symptom of an unbelieving mind.” Perhaps the best-known portrayal of this conflict is a book published in 1896 by Cornell's first president, Andrew Dickson White, titled “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom”, says Weinberg.

In recent times there has been a reaction against talk of warfare between science and religion. According to Weinberg, White's “conflict thesis” was attacked in a 1986 paper by Bruce Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, both well-known historians of science, who pointed out many flaws in White's scholarship. The Templeton Foundation offers a large prize to those who argue that there is no conflict between science and religion. “Some scientists take this line because they want to protect science education from religious fundamentalists,” writes Weinberg. “Stephen Jay Gould argued that there could be no conflict between science and religion, because science deals only with facts and religion only with values. This certainly was not the view held in the past by most adherents of religion, and it is a sign of the decay of belief in the supernatural that many today who call themselves religious would agree with Gould.”

Weinberg continues: “Let's grant that science and religion are not incompatible - there are after all some (though not many) excellent scientists, like Charles Townes and Francis Collins, who have strong religious beliefs. Still, I think that between science and religion there is, if not an incompatibility, at least what the philosopher Susan Haack has called a tension, that has been gradually weakening serious religious belief, especially in the West, where science has been most advanced.” In his essay, Weinberg traces out some of the sources of this tension, and then offers a few remarks about the very difficult question raised by the consequent decline of belief, the question of how it will be possible to live without God.

For Weinberg, the tension between science and religion is not primarily a result of contradictions between scientific discoveries and specific religious doctrines. “Contradictions between scripture and scientific knowledge have occurred again and again, and have generally been accommodated by the more enlightened among the religious,” he writes. “But if the direct conflict between scientific knowledge and specific religious beliefs has not been so important in itself, there are at least four sources of tension between science and religion that have been important.”

The first source of tension arises from the fact that religion originally gained much of its strength from the observation of mysterious phenomena – thunder, earthquakes, disease – that seemed to require the intervention of some divine being. But as time passed more and more of these mysteries have been explained in purely natural ways. “Explaining this or that about the natural world does not of course rule out religious belief. But if people believe in God because no other explanation seems possible for a whole host of mysteries, and then over the years these mysteries were one by one resolved naturalistically, then a certain weakening of belief can be expected,” Weinberg agues. “Of course, not everything has been explained, nor will it ever be. The important thing is that we have not observed anything that seems to require supernatural intervention for its explanation.”

The problem for religious belief is not just that science has explained a lot of “odds and ends” about the world. There is a second source of tension: that these explanations have “cast increasing doubt on the special role of man, as an actor created by God to play a starring part in a great cosmic drama of sin and salvation”, says Weinberg. We have had to accept that our home, the earth, is just another planet circling the sun; our sun is just one of a hundred billion stars in a galaxy that is just one of billions of visible galaxies; and it may be that the whole expanding cloud of galaxies is just a small part of a much larger multiverse, most of whose parts are utterly inhospitable to life. Most important so far, says Weiberg, has been the discovery by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace that humans arose from earlier animals through natural selection “acting on random heritable variations, with no need for a divine plan to explain the advent of humanity”. This discovery led some, including Darwin, to lose their faith. Weinberg comments that it is not surprising “that of all the discoveries of science, this is the one that continues most to disturb religious conservatives”.

A third source of tension between science and religious belief has been more important in Islam than in Christianity. Around 1100, the Sufi philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, argued against the very idea of laws of nature, on the grounds that any such law would put God's hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smolder because of the heat of the flame, but because God wants it to darken and smolder. Al-Ghazzali is often described as the most influential Islamic philosopher. Weinberg: “I wish I knew enough to judge how great was the impact on Islam of his rejection of science. At any rate, science in Muslim countries, which had led the world in the ninth and tenth centuries, went into a decline in the century or two after al-Ghazzali. As a portent of this decline, in 1194 the Ulama of Córdoba burned all scientific and medical texts.”

There is a fourth source of tension between science and religion that may be the most important of all, says Weinberg. Traditional religions generally rely on authority, whether the authority is an infallible leader, such as a prophet or a pope or an imam, or a body of sacred writings, a Bible or a Koran. “Perhaps Galileo did not get into trouble solely because he was expressing views contrary to scripture, but because he was doing so independently, rather than as a theologian acting within the Church,” writes Weinberg. “We have our heroes in science, like Einstein, who was certainly the greatest physicist of the past century, but for us they are not infallible prophets. For those who in everyday life respect independence of mind and openness to contradiction, traits that Emerson admired – especially when it came to religion – the example of science casts an unfavorable light on the deference to authority of traditional religion. The world can always use heroes, but could do with fewer prophets.”

According to Weinberg, the weakening of religious belief is obvious in Western Europe, but it may seem odd to talk about this happening in America. “No one who expressed doubt about the existence of God could possibly be elected president of the United States. Nevertheless, though I don't have any scientific evidence on this point, on the basis of personal observation it seems to me that while many Americans fervently believe that religion is a good thing, and get quite angry when it is criticized, even those who feel this way often do not have much in the way of clear religious belief. Occasionally I have found myself talking with friends, who identify themselves with some organized religion, about what they think of life after death, or of the nature of God, or of sin. Most often I've been told that they do not know, and that the important thing is not what you believe, but how you live. I've heard this even from a Catholic priest. I applaud the sentiment, but it's quite a retreat from religious belief.”