POINT OF VIEW
By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
Courses that study science and religion together are springing up on campuses around the United States, and professional meetings and books devoted to that combination of fields are multiplying. Is intellectual excitement over profound new ideas responsible for this blossoming of interest? No. Money is.
Sir John Templeton, a multimillionaire financier, has decided that science and religion should be connected more closely, and he has the wherewithal to insure that that happens. First among the carrots he offers academics is the annual Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. At over $1.2-million dollars, it is the largest scholarly prize in the world -- the Nobel is worth $960,000 -- and it is awarded at Buckingham Palace, by Prince Philip.
Templeton's program goes beyond the prize. As the World-Wide Web site of the John Templeton Foundation puts it, "Sir John Templeton is deeply committed to fostering an expanded vision of God that is informed by recent discoveries of science about the nature of the universe." He created the foundation to be a "critical catalyst for progress, especially by supporting studies which demonstrate the benefits of an open, humble and progressive approach to learning." In the belief that "a path of cooperation between the sciences and all religions will lead humanity to a deeper understanding of the universe," the foundation engages in a range of activities -- such as awarding grants and prizes to people and groups, encouraging them to explore the links between religion and science. For example, it gives prizes of $10,000 to academics and institutions that develop interdisciplinary courses in those areas.
At first glance, Templeton's "humble ... approach to learning" seems innocuous and well-meaning. A recent Templeton-sponsored conference in Washington -- hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, no less -- featured largely friendly debates among various eminent scientists and theologians about the common ground between science and religion.
But Templeton's overall program is ill conceived, and so is the field of study that he wants to promote in our colleges and universities. When faced with ready cash to support research and attend conferences, academics -- including this academic, to be fair -- often rush with too little thought to the trough. But it is significant that higher education did not broadly connect science and religion before Sir John's largesse -- and for a good reason: Combining the two fields is an intellectually uninteresting exercise.
Science and religion are on opposite sides of the human experience. Science may enter into theological discussions, but I can attest -- after more than 20 years as a physicist -- that religion never enters into scientific discussions. That fact is reflected in the makeup of many of the Templeton-sponsored programs, which involve prominent theologians and historians, but very few scientists.
I became aware of the Templeton foundation when Paul Davies, a respected physicist and popular-science writer, won its massive prize a few years ago. I had been aware of his popular writing, but I had not seen in it any fundamental new insights into God and man. Like many before him, Davies had -- it seemed to me -- used the notion of the mind of God merely as a launching pad to explore the fundamental principles that govern our understanding of the universe. He has wandered off occasionally into metaphysical musings, and has stated his belief that we are "meant to be here," but his discussions nevertheless have centered on the nature of physical reality.
God is essentially irrelevant to the science that Davies has tried to explain. I mean no disrespect to Davies, who is a very good writer and an accomplished physicist, but when I learned that his popular-science writing had earned him the Templeton prize, it seemed to me that the intellectual pickings at the interface of science and religion must be pretty slim. Subsequent mailings from the Templeton foundation have reinforced that impression. For example, in the list of directors of the 11 regional centers for its programs in science and religion, I could not find a single physical scientist working at a sectarian institution.
Science deals with ideas that are falsifiable. Religion deals with matters of faith. It is of vital importance for both fields that they stick to their separate turfs. In principle, they have virtually nothing in common. Whenever organized religion has attempted to dictate scientific ideas, from Copernicus and Galileo to Darwin, it has risked being proved wrong, and thus has diminished its intellectual standing.
One need not feel as strongly as the Nobel laureate Steven L. Weinberg -- who went against the tide at the Templeton-A.A.A.S. conference, calling religion "an insult to human dignity" -- to recognize that whether or not the earth orbits the sun is a matter to be settled not by theological debate, but rather by observation and experiment. Similarly, the ultimate arbiters of the origin and evolution of life will be biology and perhaps astrophysics, not theology. By the same token, the moment that scientists attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God, or divine purpose, they have stopped being scientists.
Perhaps most important, science has discovered absolutely nothing in the past century of remarkable activity that has any spiritual implications. As far as we can tell, simple laws of nature explain every event that has happened since the big bang.
Some people find that a bitter pill to swallow. This year, the Templeton foundation announced a $1-million research program to explore scientific "evidence of universal purpose of the cosmos" -- demonstrating a misunderstanding of the process of science. Indeed, one of the most significant legacies of science in the 20th century has been the recognition that the universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. The onus is on us to adjust our theories to conform to the results of the experiment, rather than vice versa.
The tension between science and organized religion may have reached an all-time high in 1633, when the Roman Catholic Church accused Galileo of heresy and sentenced him to house arrest for promoting the Copernican view of our solar system. Today, the church has accepted the physical realities illuminated by nearly four centuries of science, including the big bang and even evolution. The same is true of many other organized religions, in which theology is now in accord with the words that Galileo once uttered in his own defense: "Though Scripture cannot err, its expounders and interpreters are liable to err in many ways ... when they would base themselves always on the literal meaning of the words." Many scientists and theologians now are able to have polite discussions, and emphasize that they are simply taking different routes on the same human quest for understanding.
In spite of that polite coexistence, however, the current effort to increase the bonds between religion and science can present a problem, because it reinforces scientists' concern about offending religious sensibilities. Some sensibilities need to be offended.
Religious fundamentalists around the United States spout nonsense when they argue that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and that fossils were spawned in the great flood -- yet those fundamentalists are flooded with donations instead of derision. U.S. Presidential candidates make untenable claims about a lack of evidence for evolution, yet the press continues to cover those claims as if they could be well- founded.
Others besides Christian fundamentalists promote beliefs that fly in the face of scientific evidence. For example, some American Indian tribes have managed to delay investigation of Kennewick Man, a 9,300-year-old skeleton that may transform our understanding of how humans populated North America. Preliminary studies of the skull suggest that it has Caucasian features. However, the Indians insist that the bones are those of an ancestor and should be given to them for burial, rather than to scientists for further research.
There is a war going on for the hearts and minds of the U.S. public, and science -- the driving force behind the technology that makes the modern world possible -- is losing because scientists often are too timid to attack nonsense whenever and wherever it appears.
Most of us are reluctant to risk offending others' deeply held beliefs in public. Even the scientists who do agree to participate in public debates, in an attempt to debunk views such as creationism, sometimes muddy the water, by making it appear as if there are actually issues worth debating. But we must not allow public opinion, fundamentalist dogma, or new-age mysticism to replace the scientific method as the chief way of interpreting the physical universe.
Science and religion continue to be antagonists at times. For example, the Grace Dangberg Foundation, established in 1982 to improve history education, announced this year that it was developing a new textbook on the history of Kansas. The book was to begin with the fossil record of the inland sea that once covered the area. After the Kansas Board of Education deleted Darwin from its recommended science curriculum, the foundation said the book will start with the arrival of Native Americans, so as not to offend religious groups. Even more telling, a recent Gallup poll reported that 47 per cent of Americans persist in believing that the human species is no more than 10,000 years old, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.
Scientists must become evangelists, reaching beyond the traditional borders of academe to rebut such nonsense, which is demeaning to both science and theology. They must be prepared to give talks at local high schools and churches, write for newspapers, become members of school boards, and, in general, defend science in public with as much energy as fundamentalists use to promote their beliefs.
Although there is nothing wrong with paying some scholarly attention to whatever marginal common ground science and religion may share, overemphasizing their commonality is dangerous -- especially when the driving force behind the effort is not the strength of ideas, but one man's money, compounded by the misplaced enthusiasm of some religious zealots.
Lawrence M. Krauss is chairman of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University. His books include Quintessence: The Mystery of the Missing Mass in the Universe and The Physics of Star Trek.