The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (61 page)

“You know,” said Port, and his voice sounded unreal, as voices are likely to do after a long pause in an utterly silent spot, “the sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.”

Kit shuddered slightly as she said: “From what’s behind?”

“Yes.”

“But what is behind?” Her voice was very small.

“Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.”

—P
AUL
B
OWLES
,
T
HE
S
HELTERING
S
KY

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” To King David or whoever else wrote this psalm, the stars must have seemed visible evidence of a more perfect order of existence, quite different from our dull sublunary world of rocks and stones and trees. Since David’s day the sun and other stars have lost their special status; we understand that they are spheres of glowing gas, held together by gravitation, and supported against collapse by pressure that is maintained by the heat rising up from thermonuclear reactions in the stars’ cores. The stars tell us nothing more or less about the glory of God than do the stones on the ground around us.

If there were anything we could discover in nature that
would
give us some special insight into the handiwork of God, it would have to be the final laws of nature. Knowing these laws, we would have in our possession the book of rules that governs stars and stones and everything else. So it is natural that Stephen Hawking should refer to the laws of nature as “the mind of God.” Another physicist, Charles Misner, used similar language in comparing the perspectives of physics and chemistry: “The organic chemist, in answer to the question, ‘Why are there ninety-two elements, and when were they produced?’ may say ‘The man in the next office knows that.’ But the physicist, being asked, ‘Why is the universe built to follow certain physical laws and not others?’ may well reply, ‘God knows.’” Einstein once remarked to his assistant Ernst Straus that “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.” On another occasion he described the aim of the enterprise of physics as “not only to know how nature is and how her transactions are carried through, but also to reach as far as possible the Utopian and seemingly arrogant aim of knowing why
nature is thus and not otherwise….
Thereby one experiences, so to speak, that God Himself could not have arranged these connections in any other way than that which factually exists…. This is the Promethean element of the scientific experience…. Here has always been for me the particular magic of scientific effort.” Einstein’s religion was so vague that I suspect that he meant this metaphorically, as suggested by his “so to speak.” It is doubtless because physics is so fundamental that this metaphor is natural to physicists. The theologian Paul Tillich once observed that among scientists only physicists seem capable of using the word “God” without embarrassment. Whatever one’s religion or lack of it, it is an irresistible metaphor to speak of the final laws of nature in terms of the mind of God.

I encountered this connection once in an odd place, in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington. When I testified there in 1987 in favor of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, I described how in our study of elementary particles we are discovering laws that are becoming increasingly coherent and universal, and how we are beginning to suspect that this is not merely an accident, that there is a beauty in these laws that mirrors something that is built into the structure of the universe at a very deep level. After I made these remarks there were remarks by other witnesses and questions from members of the committee. There then ensued a dialogue between two committee members. Representative Harris W. Fawell, Republican of Illinois, who had generally been favorable to the Super Collider project, and Representative Don Ritter, Republican of Pennsylvania, a former metallurgical engineer who is one of the most formidable opponents of the project in Congress:

M
R
. F
AWELL
:
…Thank you very much. I appreciate the testimony of all of you. I think it was excellent. If ever I would want to explain to one and all the reasons why the SSC is needed I am sure I can go to your testimony. It would be very helpful. I wish sometimes that we have some one word that could say it all and that is kind of impossible. I guess perhaps Dr. Weinberg you came a little close to it and I’m not sure but I took this down. You said you suspect that it isn’t all an accident, that there are rules which govern matter and I jotted down, will this make us find God? I’m sure you didn’t make that claim, but it certainly will enable us to understand so much more about the universe.

M
R
. R
ITTER
:
Will the gentleman yield on that? If the gentleman would yield for a moment I would say…

M
R
. F
AWELL
:
I’m not sure I want to.

M
R
. R
ITTER
:
If this machine does that I am going to come around and support it.

I had enough sense to stay out of this exchange, because I did not think that the congressmen wanted to know what I thought about finding God at the SSC and also because it did not seem to me that letting them know what I thought about this would be helpful to the project.

Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for Him. One hears it said that “God is the ultimate” or “God is our better nature” or “God is the universe.” Of course, like any other word, the word “God” can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that “God is energy,” then you can find God in a lump of coal. But if words are to have any value to us, we ought to respect the way that they have been used historically, and we ought especially to preserve distinctions that prevent the meanings of words from merging with the meanings of other words.

In this spirit, it seems to me that if the word “God” is to be of any use, it should be taken to mean an interested God, a creator and lawgiver who has established not only the laws of nature and the universe but also standards of good and evil, some personality that is concerned with our actions, something in short that it is appropriate for us to worship.
1
This is the God that has mattered to men and women throughout history. Scientists and others sometimes use the word “God” to mean something so abstract and unengaged that He is hardly to be distinguished from the laws of nature. Einstein once said that he believed in “Spinoza’s God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.” But what possible difference does it make to anyone if we use the word “God” in place of “order” or “harmony,” except perhaps to avoid the accusation of having no God? Of course, anyone is free to use the word “God” in that way, but it seems to me that it makes the concept of God not so much wrong as unimportant.

Will we find an interested God in the final laws of nature? There seems something almost absurd in asking this question, not only because we do not yet know the final laws, but much more because it is difficult even to imagine being in the possession of ultimate principles that do not need any explanation in terms of deeper principles. But premature as the question may be, it is hardly possible not to wonder whether we will find any answer to our deepest questions, any sign of the workings of an interested God, in a final theory. I think that we will not.

All our experience throughout the history of science has tended in the opposite direction, toward a chilling impersonality in the laws of nature. The first great step along this path was the demystification of the heavens. Everyone knows the key figures: Copernicus, who proposed that the earth is not at the center of the universe; Galileo, who made it plausible that Copernicus was right; Bruno, who guessed that the sun is only one of a vast number of stars; and Newton, who showed that the same laws of motion and gravitation apply to the solar system and to bodies on the earth. The key moment I think was Newton’s observation that the same law of gravitation governs the motion of the moon around the earth and a falling body on the surface of the earth. In our own century the demystification of the heavens was taken a step farther by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble. By measuring the distance to the Andromeda Nebula, Hubble showed that this, and by inference thousands of other similar nebulas, were not just outlying parts of our galaxy but galaxies in their own right, quite as impressive as our own. Modern cosmologists even speak of a Copernican principle: the rule that no cosmological theory can be taken seriously that puts our own galaxy at any distinctive place in the universe.

Life, too, has been demystified. Justus von Liebig and other organic chemists in the early nineteenth century demonstrated that there was no barrier to the laboratory synthesis of chemicals like uric acid that are associated with life. Most important of all were Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who showed how the wonderful capabilities of living things could evolve through natural selection with no outside plan or guidance. The process of demystification has accelerated in this century, in the continued success of biochemistry and molecular biology in explaining the workings of living things.

The demystification of life has had a far greater effect on religious sensibilities than has any discovery of physical science. It is not surprising that it is reductionism in biology and the theory of evolution rather than the discoveries of physics and astronomy that continue to evoke the most intransigent opposition.

Even from scientists one hears occasional hints of vitalism, the belief in biological processes that cannot be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. In this century biologists (including antireductionists like Ernst Mayr) have generally steered clear of vitalism, but as late as 1944 Erwin Schrodinger argued in his well-known book
What Is Life?
that “enough is known about the material structure of life to tell exactly why present-day physics cannot account for life.” His reason was that the genetic information that governs living organisms is far too stable to fit into the world of continual fluctuations described by quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. Schrodinger’s mistake was pointed out by Max Perutz, the molecular biologist who among other things worked out the structure of hemoglobin: Schrodinger had ignored the stability that can be produced by the chemical process known as enzymatic catalysis.

The most respectable academic critic of evolution may currently be Professor Phillip Johnson of the University of California School of Law. Johnson concedes that evolution has occurred and that it is sometimes due to natural selection, but he argues that there is no “incontrovertible experimental evidence” that evolution is not guided by some divine plan. Of course, one could never hope to prove that no supernatural agency ever tips the scales in favor of some mutations and against others. But much the same could be said of any scientific theory. There is nothing in the successful application of Newton’s or Einstein’s laws of motion to the solar system that prevents us from supposing that every once in a while some comet gets a small shove from a divine agency. It seems pretty clear that Johnson raises this issue not as a matter of impartial open-mindedness but because for religious reasons he cares very much about life in a way that he does not care about comets. But the only way that any sort of science can proceed is to assume that there is no divine intervention and to see how far one can get with this assumption.

Johnson argues that naturalistic evolution, “evolution that involves no intervention or guidance by a creator outside the world of nature,” in fact does not provide a very good explanation for the origin of species. I think he goes wrong here because he has no feeling for the problems that any scientific theory always has in accounting for what we observe. Even apart from outright errors, our calculations and observations are always based on assumptions that go beyond the validity of the theory we are trying to test. There never was a time when the calculations based on Newton’s theory of gravitation or any other theory were in perfect agreement with all observations. In the writings of today’s paleontologists and evol tionary biologists we can recognize the same state of affairs that is so familiar to us in physics; in using the naturalistic theory of evolution biologists are working with an overwhelmingly successful theory, but one that is not yet finished with its work of explication. It seems to me to be a profoundly important discovery that we can get very far in explaining the world without invoking divine intervention, and in biology as well as in the physical sciences.

In another respect I think that Johnson is right. He argues that there is an incompatibility between the naturalistic theory of evolution and religion as generally understood, and he takes to task the scientists and educators who deny it. He goes on to complain that “naturalistic evolution is consistent with the existence of ‘God’ only if by that term we mean no more than a first cause which retires from further activity after establishing the laws of nature and setting the natural mechanism in motion.”