From: Jonathan Davis (jonathan@limbicnutrition.com)
Date: Tue Sep 09 2003 - 09:53:52 MDT
Hot on the heels of the Fred Reed article, here is another tester for
the congregation with a strikingly similar theme...
Remember, no need to attack ME, it is just for fun!
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Science cannot provide all the answers'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1034872,00.html
Why do so many scientists believe in God? Tim Radford reports
Thursday September 4, 2003
The Guardian
C olin Humphreys is a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. That is, he is
professor of materials science at Cambridge. He believes in the power of
science to explain the nature of matter. He believes that humans - like
all other living things - evolved through the action of natural
selection upon random mutation. He is also a Baptist. He believes in the
story of Moses, as recounted in the biblical book of Exodus. He believes
in it enough to have explored Egypt and the Holy Land in search of
natural or scientific explanations for the story of the burning bush,
the 10 plagues of Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea and the manna that
fell in the wilderness -and then written a book about it.
"I believe that the scientific world view can explain almost anything,"
he says. "But I just think there is another world view as well."
Tom McLeish is professor of polymer physics at Leeds. Supermarket
plastic bags are polymers, but so are spider's silk, sheep's wool, sinew
and flesh and bone. His is the intricate world of what is, and how it
works, down to the molecular level. He delights in the clarity and power
of science, precisely because it is questioning rather than dogmatic.
"But the questions that arise, and the methods we use to ask them, can
be traced back to the religious tradition in which I find myself. Doing
science is part of what it means in that tradition to be human. Because
we find ourselves in this puzzling, extraordinary universe of pain and
beauty, we will also find ourselves able to explore it, by adopting the
very successful methods of science," he says.
Russell Stannard is now emeritus professor of physics at the Open
University. He is one of the atom-smashers, picking apart the properties
of matter, energy, space and time, and the author of a delightful series
of children's books about tough concepts such as relativity theory. He
believes in the power of science. He not only believes in God, he
believes in the Church of England. He, like Tom McLeish, is a lay
reader. He has con tributed Thoughts for the Day to Radio 4, those
morning homilies on the mysteries of existence. Does it worry him that
science - his science - could be about to explain the whole story of
space, time matter and energy without any need for a Creator? "No,
because a starting point you can have is: why is there something rather
than nothing? Why is there a world? Now I cannot see how science could
ever provide an answer," he says.
Stannard will be one of a small group of scientists and theologians,
having a go at the question next week in Birmingham. The Science and
Religion Forum, founded by a group of scientists 25 years ago, meets on
Monday to discuss questions such as the place of humans in the universe.
They are not likely to actually come up with an answer, but they will
certainly give the question a bashing. The forum embraces what one of
its begetters, Arthur Peacocke, pioneer of DNA research in Britain,
called "wistful agnostics" and sceptics, as well as Christians and
people from other faiths. "It's about how we can worship a creator God
who is creating now, and still hold on to the scientific world view as
we understand it," says Phil Edwards, who trained in physics but is now
a chaplain to the Bolton Institute.
The subject - the place of humans in the universe - is a challenge. To
the scientific way of thinking, humans no more have a "place" in the
scheme of things than hamsters or harp seals. The universe itself may be
an incomprehensible event, and life a so far unexplained one, but
scientists see no ladder of creation with humans at the pinnacle. They
can see no "purpose" in being. We are here because we are here, a lucky
accident - lucky for us - but there was nothing inevitable about the
evolution of humanity, or its survival. God is not part of the
explanation.
That is how scientists have grown to think, whether they come from a
religious background or not. But modern science did not emerge 400 years
ago to challenge religion, the orthodoxy of the past 2,000 years.
Generations of thinkers and experimenters and observers - often
themselves churchmen - wanted to explain how God worked his wonders.
Modern physics began with a desire to explain the clockwork of God's
creation. Modern geology grew at least partly out of searches for
evidence of Noah's flood. Modern biology owes much to the urge to marvel
at the intricacy of Divine providence.
But the scientists - a word coined only in 1833 - who hoped to find God
somehow painted Him out of the picture. By the late 20th century,
physicists were confident of the history of the universe back to the
first thousandth of a second, and geneticists and biochemists were
certain that all living things could be traced back to some last
universal common ancestor that lived perhaps 3.5bn years ago. A few
things - what actually happened in the Big Bang; how living, replicating
things emerged from a muddle of organic compounds - remain riddles. But
few now consider these riddles to be incapable of solutions. So although
the debate did not start out as science versus religion, that is how
many people now see it.
Paradoxically, this is not how many scientists see it. In the US,
according to a survey published in Nature in 1997, four out of 10
scientists believe in God. Just over 45% said they did not believe, and
14.5% described themselves as doubters or agnostics. This ratio of
believers to non-believers had not changed in 80 years. Should anybody
be surprised?
"A lot of people are surprised. I think people have grown up to believe
that science and Christianity are at loggerheads, and that is what the
average man in the street believes," says Colin Humphreys. "I think you
can explain the universe without invoking God at all. And you can
explain humans without invoking God at all, I think. But where I differ
from the people who say, OK, the universe started with a big bang - if
it did, it's not too sure but let's say it did - and everything else was
chance event, then I would say that God is the God of chance and He had
His plan and purpose, which is working out very subtly, but through
these chance events."
He, like most scientists do in this debate, mentions Richard Dawkins,
the Oxford zoologist and professor of the public understanding of
science, whose rationalist stance is well known, and vigorously argued.
The real argument here is not about the importance of science, or its
value to humanity. "You have to recognise that science is enormously
powerful in going for the jugular, reducing complexity to its simple
structures," says Tom McLeish. "But it puts it back together again, and
that is important to stress, because, from Keats onwards, we have been
accused of unweaving the rainbow, and never weaving it back again. That
is not true."
Doubt, expressed most potently 3,000 years ago in the biblical book of
Job, is the greatest scientific tool ever invented, he says. To do good
science, you have to doubt everything, including your ideas, your
experiments and your conclusions. "People like Richard Dawkins
characterise religion as doubtless, tub-thumping, blind certainty. But
it isn't like that; he knows it is not like that. There is Job, on his
ash-heap, doubting everything, but wondering where the light comes from,
and how the hail forms."
Russell Stannard says that when he became a reader in the Church of
England 40 years ago, he was considered a bit of an oddball. But things
have changed. "You get a few scientists like Richard Dawkins and Peter
Atkins [professor of chemistry at Oxford] who at least talk as though
they cannot understand how a scientist could possibly be religious. But
I would say that, generally speaking, throughout the scientific
community there is considerable acceptance that, OK, although one might
not be a religious person oneself, one's fellow scientist can be."
Colin Humphreys says that quite a number of his colleagues at Cambridge
are also believers. "My impression is - and it is just an impression -
that there are many more scientists on the academic staff who are
believers than arts people."
Tom McLeish says something similar. He cheerfully offers several reasons
why that might be so, one of which might be called the postmodernist
effect. "Our dear friends in the humanities do get themselves awfully
confused about whether the world exists, about whether each other
exists, about whether words mean anything. Until they have sorted out
whether cats and dogs exist or not, or are only figments in the mind of
the reader, let alone the writer, then they are going to have problems
talking about God."
Within biology itself, there is an intense argument about evolutionary
origins of qualities such as altruism -the sacrifice of self for others
- and the enduring belief in God or gods, and an afterlife, with the
possibility of some kind of calling to account. Robert Winston, the
fertility pioneer, Labour peer and professor at Hammersmith Hospital is
Jewish. This represents a huge tradition of values that are important to
him. At the age of 30 he went back to the synagogue because, he felt, he
needed the discipline of Judaism, although this is not quite the same as
believing in God, and he confesses to having been through various phases
of observance. In the last chapter of his book The Human Instinct he
said he felt it was very likely that spirituality - the feeling of
something beyond mortal life - had been important in survival during the
Ice Age, and through periods of great deprivation.
"The great question is whether or not that spirituality is God-given, or
whether it actually evolved because it was needed," he says. "I'm still
sitting on the fence."
Stannard has fewer doubts. "I would say that God does take a personal
interest in us. If you were allowed one word to describe God by, that
word would be love. That does not come from evolution by natural
selection, it seems to come from somewhere else, and the whole idea of
morals does not naturally arise out of evolution. Biologists will talk
about altruism, but they are using it in a very technical sense, which
is not the religious idea of altruism. It is more a case of you scratch
my back and I will scratch yours."
Richard Dawkins, however, remains unmoved. Is there a limit to what
science can explain? Very possibly. But in that case, what on earth
makes anyone think religion can do any better? "I once reached this
point when I asked the then professor of astrophysics at Oxford to
explain the origin of the universe to me," he says. "He did so, and I
posed my supplementary: 'Where did the laws of physics come from in the
first place?' He smiled: 'Ah, now we move beyond the realm of science.
This is where I have to hand over to our good friend the chaplain.' My
immediate thought was, 'But why the chaplain? Why not the gardener or
the chef?' If science itself cannot say where the laws of physics
ultimately come from, there is no reason to expect that religion will do
any better and rather good reasons to think it will do worse."
The place of humans in the universe - world faith perspectives, at the
University of Birmingham Selly Oak campus, September 8-10.
www.srforum.org
Further reading
A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love by
Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin 2003) ISBN 0618335404
The Miracles of Exodus: A Scientist's Discovery of the Extraordinary
Natural Causes of the Biblical Stories by Colin J Humphreys (Continuum
2003) ISBN 0826469523
The God Experiment: Can Science Prove the Existence of God? by Russell
Stannard (Hidden Spring 2000) ISBN 1587680076
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Regards
Jonathan
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