In the beginning, I sought out people with an overt passion to reconcile science and religion in their discipline and in their person. Sir John Polkinghorne is one of the most prominent of these globally--a Cambridge quantum physicist who also became a Cambridge theologian in midlife and has written eloquently about finding both science and religion necessary to interpret the "rich, varied and surprising way the world actually is." I found his approach revelatory as I was cautiously finding my own way back to religion after Berlin. As a physicist, Polkinghorne sees a universe that is "supple" and "subtle"--a mix of determinism and of freedom--and this informs his imagination about the nature of God, what happens when we die, and what happens when he prays.
But as the years progressed I've been equally intrigued, and driven to new places in my own thinking, by scientists like the theoretical physicist and novelist Janna Levin. She is exploring the shape and finitude of the universe. She is fascinated by mathematical insights into how we can know what is real and true and how free we really might be. She is not a religious person in any sense, but her scientific inquiry is philosophically and spiritually evocative, rich in the raw materials of theology. Albert Einstein was more like Janna Levin than John Polkinghorne. His famous quip that "God does not play dice with the universe" is often wrongly imagined as a statement of faith, when in fact it was a clever barb tossed in a strictly scientific argument. Focusing as he did on the evolution of stars and galaxies and on intangible substances of light, time, and gravity, Einstein seemed to present little to offend religion. But as much as or more than Darwin's natural laws of evolution, Einstein's laws of physics could not tolerate a meddling divine hand.
Einstein approached science itself with a religious awe, as the physicist Freeman Dyson tells us. Yet as a young colleague of Einstein at Princeton, Dyson saw him become more philosophical as he grew older, leaving behind a rich body of reflection on the "mind" and "superior spirit" behind the cosmos. And as the astrophysicist Paul Davies describes in these pages, modern imaginations have yet to catch up to the potential spiritual implications of the way Einstein reframed our understanding of space and time. Einstein's dismissal of a "personal God" might have struck some in his time as heretical, but his self-described "cosmic religious sense" is intriguingly resonant with twenty-first century sensibilities. There has simply been too little space in our public life up to now to hear such echoes.
Here, as in so many other realms of life, a wider lens of perspective can make all the difference. For example, it is important to see--though this basic fact is rarely invoked alongside global characterizations of the "religion versus science" scenario--that only in Christianity were defining battle lines drawn after the Enlightenment between the forms of knowledge that religion and science pursue. Those battle lines galvanize a few of the traditions of Christianity and others inconsistently or not at all. The first presiding bishop of the U. S. Episcopal Church to be elected in this century is a marine biologist by training. The scientist who presided over the Human Genome Project that first mapped human DNA is an evangelical Christian.
Antiscience perspectives are even more marginal in the sweep of the world's great religious and spiritual traditions. There are few strident Jewish voices in the science-centered "moral values" debates of American culture of recent memory, from abortion to stem-cell research. And there are theological, not merely cultural, reasons for this. Religious virtues of "justice" and "healing" weigh heavily in discerning the manifold implications of "the sanctity of life." Islamic theology similarly offers a distinctive approach to issues such as evolution and the moral status of the fetus, hence the lack of famously strident Muslim antiscience voices. The physicist V. V. Raman describes in these pages how Hinduism's overarching regard for beauty and the arts has helped it avoid a point-counterpoint between the different forms of knowledge that science and religion convey. Hinduism's offspring, Buddhism, is in a class of its own. Einstein liked to imagine Buddhism as the religion of the future, capable of embracing the best of scientific and spiritual approaches to life. In recent decades, Buddhist spiritual technologies of mindfulness and meditation have presented themselves with transforming effect in Western lives and Western medicine.
As we bring this debate closer to the ground, in fact, and expose it to the plain light of the everyday, the suggestion that science and religion are incompatible makes no sense at all. In the vast middle of modern Western culture, scientific and religious insights coexist and intertwine for the most part peaceably. We encounter and respond to the fruits of science in our doctors' offices; through experiences of birth, illness, and death; in the ever-evolving technology at the center of ordinary life. Opinion polls promote hyperbole and false dichotomies. Ask Americans to choose between God and Darwin and they'll opt for God. But generations of Christian Americans have also grown up learning about evolution in scientific textbooks and about a God behind creation in the biblical book of Genesis-and intuitively reconciling them, instinctively imagining that both might simultaneously be true.
As both John Polkinghorne and the Darwin biographer James Moore describe in these pages, Genesis is in fact a compelling example of how treating sacred text seriously, reading it respectfully on its own terms, is the surest, strongest antidote to our polarized religio-cultural debates. This is a text infused with purpose, but that purpose was not to narrow our pursuit of understanding the natural world. For centuries, until the medieval period and the Reformation, great Christian theologians knew this and honored it. To treat Genesis as a commentary on science is to ignore its cogency as text and teaching, just as to read a poem as prose is to miss the point. It is more complicated than that, but it is also that simple.
And just as a more three-dimensional approach to the Bible can provide new starting points for an old conversation, so can a more three-dimensional look at the history of science. Even when they struggled against bitter religious resistance to their ideas, the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton believed that their discoveries would and should widen human comprehension of the nature of God. The more we could understand about the world around us in all its intricacy, their reasoning went, the better we would understand the mind of its maker.
Charles Darwin belonged to that lineage. The Origin of Species was not the first text to break from religion, as our cultural narrative has come to assume. It was the last classic scientific text to engage theology directly. James Moore lays this out forcefully. And for the religious scientists in these pages, no intellectual compromise is needed to embrace evolution as ingenious--to understand creation as an ongoing, inborn capacity of a world endowed with independence rather than as the one-act invention of a puppet-master God. James Moore also makes the compelling suggestion that in documenting the freedom of the world to define its own fruitfulness in and through chaos and struggle, Darwin liberated humanity from belief in a God who preordained every cancerous cell and shifting tectonic plate, every social and physical injustice. Even the creationists of our time have been liberated-in part by Darwin--from belief in this kind of God.
This post is excerpted from my book Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit (pp.3-7).
Here's how some kept out of the hands of religious institutions with great secular power, by shying away from controversy, by hiding their true opinions, by double-think, and by the refined art of hypocrisy.
Galileo -- wrote in Italian (should have stuck with Latin), alleged that in Starry Messenger the Pope was depicted as "Fool", hauled before Inquisition, languished in house arrest until death.
Spinoza -- twice branded a heretic by jewish leaders, declined all teaching positions for concern over claims that he was atheist, his Ethics published only after death, espoused "heretical" doctrine of pantheism: God=Nature=Necessity.
Gassendi / Descartes -- branded as Epicureans (materialists) -- D. forced to live and publish outside France; G. appears to be an adroit practitioner of double-think.
Newton -- held Unitarian views of divinity of Christ, kept views in his notes, would have lost his Chair and status as Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Paine / Jefferson -- both accused of atheism, defended themselves as deists.
Not until late in the 19th century could anyone but a confessing Anglican attend Cambridge or Oxford.Thus thwarted many became leading scientists and entrepreneurs.
Alan Turing was pilloried for being a homosexual -- does that count? England had no problem ruining Wilde and the gifted Aubrey Beardsley.
Xian secular power expressed in hatred knows no bounds -- as the US tea-party, fundies, and Dominionists demonstrate daily -- here in Ameristan.
You said: "" just considering the amazing structure of the double helix is enough to convince ME (not that I have a great mind!! HAHAHA!!!) that there must have been a divine spark somewhere along the line....."
Why don't you simply say: just considering the amazing structure of the double helix is enough to convince ME (not that I have a great mind!! HAHAHA!!!) that I am ignorant?
The fact is that Einstein, the "great mind", was modest and believed in the supernatural only "as far as our science can reveal it".
Ninety five percent of our finest biologists, those in the National Academie of Science, reject the Delusion - but not 100%.
Any Christian not doing this is considered, by fundamentalist Christians, to not be a real Christian. And we will always have fundamentalist Christians. So we will always have Christians who believe that those who think rationally and logically are at war with Christianity--because those who think rationally and logically threaten their own "beliefs" and threaten to turn others away from them as well. So deeply entrenched are many in these "beliefs" that they find it impossible to conceive of the fact that science isn't about belief at all--that in fact, many people spend very little of their time "believing" (suspending disbelief).
The difference you are detecting in Judaism is not solely due to the mitzvah you mentioned of saving life. It has more to do with the fact that a Jew doesn't have to "believe" (suspend disbelief) in anything . That fact makes it a whole lot easier to get along with science, as well as to participate in it. Einstein's attitude was an example of that.
Thanks for denigrating dogma but you unfairly singled Christians out.
Contrary to your assertions, fundamentalists Jews are not less dogmatic than Christians. Surely Muslims are not any less dogmatic than Christians either.
And please do not abuse Einstein’s memory by claiming he is an example of how Judaism is more flexible and friendlier to science than Christianity. Einstein made it crystal clear he was able to be a successful scientist only after, at the age of twelve, he rejected the religion, the “lies” inculcated in him as a child by the “government”.
Einstein was Jewish only “by heritage”. He rejected the Jewish religion and all other religions as “an incarnation of the most childish superstitions”. He warned society against promoting a belief in the supernatural, in “a personal God” as a “fatal” concept for human progress.
Neither one of those are incompatible with science or scientific inquiry. Of course, there are the "fundamentalists", but they're the same in every religion and they hated Jesus and his teachings from the beginning, and they still do today...
Respect and best of health.
********(Einstein writing:)
I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.
- Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945, responding to a rumor that a Jesuit priest had caused Einstein to convert from atheism
**********
It IS possible to reconcile religion and science, and the recipe is quite simple: convert every supernatural claim in the religion to a metaphor.
---mission accomplished.
Einstein is not here saying that he was an atheist. He is only saying that from the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest he was an atheist. Einstein believed in Spinoza's pantheistic god or the god of math and physics. Which is still a religion by the way.
Spinoza's conception does not constitute a religion under any meaningful definition of the term. There are no institutions, rituals, practices, traditions, or observances in Spinoza. What Spinoza provides is a philosophy, which is entirely distinct from "religion".
Btw, Spinoza's conception pretty much entirely fulfills the condition I named elsewhere in this thread, which is to remove all supernatural claims.
Are you daft?
Who is this "god of math and physics" you speak of? Why was I not informed?
I think of His presence as being like some "thing" that can't be seen, heard, or felt under normal circumstances, but nevertheless is there, and one day someone finds a test to show he exists (or does not). Like oxygen, or radio waves or other "discoveries."
Christopher Columbus utilized the Nina, the Pinta, and Santa Maria to discover that already there and give it a name it already had……….prior to discovery by a foreign discoverer of things existent elsewhere.
Religion/a spiritual life utilizes the sense that is the soul (the spiritual heart) to interact with existence and thereby discover existence, the good, the bad, the true, and the false… the same as science and also…with the aid of science, as tool. I have ruled out much that is not the truth by a rigorous analysis and verification of results in the laboratory of my own life. No more definitive or empirical source can be found for the answer or the question that presses in any moment. Science cannot die for me. Science can extend life and that is a blessing, but in so doing never seek to say that extending life -- is life, versus simply being an echo from an original source – as yet, and still – undefined.
To stand at either dogmatic and fundamentalist extreme in this discussion simply seems so small to me. To try to find a balance is so much more expansive and gratifying, in my humble opinion.
His famous remark "God does not play dice" referred to quantum mechanics and the role of chance in physics—but was widely misinterpreted—as this first quote—a response to a letter from a worried atheist, indicates:...
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
“[Religion is] an attempt to find an out where there is no door.”-- Albert Einstein
apparently the author of this article is not aware that Darwin was an atheist, he didn't believe in ANY type of god
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin#Religious_views
Just because science and religion COEXIST does not imply that they are COMPATIBLE.