Holy Wars An Astrophysicist Ponders the God Question

A virtual sub-industry has blossomed to encourage harmony between science and religion, but there is virtually no common ground. When people have used religious documents to make detailed predictions about the physical world they have been famously wrong. Science, in contrast, works.

At nearly every public lecture that I give on the universe, I try to reserve adequate time at the end for questions. The succession of subjects is predictable. First, the questions relate directly to the lecture. They next migrate to sexy astrophysical subjects such as black holes, quasars, and the Big Bang. If I have enough time left over to answer all questions, and if the talk is in America, the subject eventually reaches God. Typical questions include "Do scientists believe in God?" "Do you believe in God?" and "Do your studies in astrophysics make you more or less religious?"

Publishers have come to learn that there is a lot of money in God, especially when the author is a scientist and when the book title includes a direct juxtaposition of scientific and religious themes. Successful books include Robert Jastrow's God and the Astronomers, Leon M. Lederman's The God Particle, Frank J. Tipler's The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead, and Paul Davies's two works God and the New Physics and The Mind of God. Each author is either an accomplished physicist or astronomer and, while the books are not strictly religious, they encourage the reader to bring God into conversations about astrophysics. Even Stephen Jay Gould, a Darwinian pitbull and devout agnostic, has joined the title-parade with his work Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. The financial success of these published works indicates that you get bonus dollars from the American public if you are a scientist who openly talks about God. After the publication of The Physics of Immortality, which suggested whether the law of physics could allow you and your soul to exist long after you are gone from this world, Tipler's book-tour included many well-paid lectures to Protestant religious groups. This lucrative sub-industry has further blossomed in recent years due to efforts made by the wealthy founder of the Templeton investment fund, Sir John Templeton, to find harmony and consilience between science and religion. In addition to sponsoring workshops and conferences on the subject, Templeton seeks out (among other recipients) widely published religion-friendly scientists to receive an annual award whose cash value exceeds that of the Nobel Prize.

Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion. As was thoroughly documented in the nineteenth century tome A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, by the historian and onetime president of Cornell University Andrew D. White, history reveals a long and combative relationship between religion and science, depending on who was in control of society at the time. The claims of science rely on experimental verification, while the claims of religions rely on faith. These approaches are irreconcilable approaches to knowing, which ensures an eternity of debate wherever and whenever the two camps meet. Just as in hostage negotiations, it's probably best to keep both sides talking to each other. The schism did not come about for want of earlier attempts to bring the two sides together. Great scientific minds, from Claudius Ptolemy of the second century to Isaac Newton of the seventeenth, invested their formidable intellects i n attempts to deduce the nature of the universe from the statements and philosophies contained in religious writings. Indeed, by the time of his death, Newton had penned more words about God and religion than about the laws of physics, all in a futile attempt to use the Biblical chronology to understand and predict events in the natural world. Had any of these efforts succeeded, science and religion today might be largely indistinguishable.

The argument is simple. I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religious document. Indeed, I can make an even stronger statement. Whenever people have used religious documents to make detailed predictions about the physical world they have been famously wrong. By a prediction, I mean a precise statement about the untested behavior of objects or phenomena in the natural world, that gets logged before the event takes place. When your model predicts something only after it has happened then you have instead made a "postdiction." Postdictions are the backbone of most creation myths and, of course, the "Just So" stories of Rudyard Kipling, where explanations of everyday phenomena explain what is already known. In the business of science, however, a dozen postdictions are barely worth a single successful prediction.

Topping the list of predictions are the perennial claims about when the world will end, none of which have yet proved true. But other claims and predictions have actually stalled or reversed the progress of science. We find a leading example in the trial of Galileo (which gets my vote for the trial of the millennium) where he showed the universe to be fundamentally different from the dominant views of the Catholic Church. In all fairness to the Inquisition, however, an Earth-centered universe made a lot of sense observationally. With a full complement of epicycles to explain the peculiar motions of the planets against the background stars, the time-honored, Earth-centered model had conflicted with no known observations. This remained true long after Copernicus introduced his Sun-centered model of the universe a century earlier. The Earth-centric model was also aligned with the teachings of the Catholic Church and prevailing interpretations of the Bible, wherein Earth is unambiguously created before the Sun a nd the Moon as described in the first several verses of Genesis. If you were created first, then you must be in the center of all motion. Where else could you be? Furthermore, the Sun and Moon themselves were also presumed to be smooth orbs. Why would a perfect, omniscient deity create anything else?