Interesting article from NY Times on Scientists who are theists...

[Guest guest]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/national/23believers.html?ei=5094&en=09bee

bf92c9b07ae&hp=&ex=1124769600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all

 

By CORNELIA DEAN

Published: August 23, 2005

 

At a recent scientific conference at City College of New York, a student in

the audience rose to ask the panelists an unexpected question: "Can you be a

good scientist and believe in God?"

 

Reaction from one of the panelists, all Nobel laureates, was quick and

sharp. "No!" declared Herbert A. Hauptman, who shared the chemistry prize in

1985 for his work on the structure of crystals.

 

Belief in the supernatural, especially belief in God, is not only

incompatible with good science, Dr. Hauptman declared, "this kind of belief

is damaging to the well-being of the human race."

 

But disdain for religion is far from universal among scientists. And today,

as religious groups challenge scientists in arenas as various as evolution

in the classroom, AIDS prevention and stem cell research, scientists who

embrace religion are beginning to speak out about their faith.

 

"It should not be a taboo subject, but frankly it often is in scientific

circles," said Francis S. Collins, who directs the National Human Genome

Research Institute and who speaks freely about his Christian faith.

 

Although they embrace religious faith, these scientists also embrace science

as it has been defined for centuries. That is, they look to the natural

world for explanations of what happens in the natural world and they

recognize that scientific ideas must be provisional - capable of being

overturned by evidence from experimentation and observation. This belief in

science sets them apart from those who endorse creationism or its doctrinal

cousin, intelligent design, both of which depend on the existence of a

supernatural force.

 

Their belief in God challenges scientists who regard religious belief as

little more than magical thinking, as some do. Their faith also challenges

believers who denounce science as a godless enterprise and scientists as

secular elitists contemptuous of God-fearing people.

 

Some scientists say simply that science and religion are two separate

realms, "nonoverlapping magisteria," as the late evolutionary biologist

Stephen Jay Gould put it in his book "Rocks of Ages" (Ballantine, 1999). In

Dr. Gould's view, science speaks with authority in the realm of "what the

universe is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory)" and

religion holds sway over "questions of ultimate meaning and moral value."

 

When the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted a

session to this idea of separation at its annual meeting this year, scores

of scientists crowded into a room to hear it.

 

Some of them said they were unsatisfied with the idea, because they believe

scientists' moral values must inevitably affect their work, others because

so much of science has so many ethical implications in the real world.

 

One panelist, Dr. Noah Efron of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said

scientists, like other people, were guided by their own human purposes,

meaning and values. The idea that fact can be separated from values and

meaning "jibes poorly with what we know of the history of science," Dr.

Efron said.

 

Dr. Collins, who is working on a book about his religious faith, also

believes that people should not have to keep religious beliefs and

scientific theories strictly separate. "I don't find it very satisfactory

and I don't find it very necessary," he said in an interview. He noted that

until relatively recently, most scientists were believers. "Isaac Newton

wrote a lot more about the Bible than the laws of nature," he said.

 

But he acknowledged that as head of the American government's efforts to

decipher the human genetic code, he had a leading role in work that many say

definitively demonstrates the strength of evolutionary theory to explain the

complexity and abundance of life.

 

As scientists compare human genes with those of other mammals, tiny worms,

even bacteria, the similarities "are absolutely compelling," Dr. Collins

said. "If Darwin had tried to imagine a way to prove his theory, he could

not have come up with something better, except maybe a time machine. Asking

somebody to reject all of that in order to prove that they really do love

God - what a horrible choice."

 

Dr. Collins was a nonbeliever until he was 27 - "more and more into the mode

of being not only agnostic but being an atheist," as he put it. All that

changed after he completed his doctorate in physics and was at work on his

medical degree, when he was among those treating a woman dying of heart

disease. "She was very clear about her faith and she looked me square in the

eye and she said, 'what do you believe?' " he recalled. "I sort of stammered

out, 'I am not sure.' "

 

He said he realized then that he had never considered the matter seriously,

the way a scientist should. He began reading about various religious

beliefs, which only confused him. Finally, a Methodist minister gave him a

book, "Mere Christianity," by C. S. Lewis. In the book Lewis, an atheist

until he was a grown man, argues that the idea of right and wrong is

universal among people, a moral law they "did not make, and cannot quite

forget even when they try." This universal feeling, he said, is evidence for

the plausibility of God.

 

When he read the book, Dr. Collins said, "I thought, my gosh, this guy is

me."

 

Today, Dr. Collins said, he does not embrace any particular denomination,

but he is a Christian. Colleagues sometimes express surprise at his faith,

he said. "They'll say, 'how can you believe that? Did you check your brain

at the door?" But he said he had discovered in talking to students and

colleagues that "there is a great deal of interest in this topic."

 

Polling Scientists on Beliefs

 

According to a much-discussed survey reported in the journal Nature in 1997,

40 percent of biologists, physicists and mathematicians said they believed

in God - and not just a nonspecific transcendental presence but, as the

survey put it, a God to whom one may pray "in expectation of receiving an

answer."

 

The survey, by Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia, was intended

to replicate one conducted in 1914, and the results were virtually

unchanged. In both cases, participants were drawn from a directory of

American scientists.

 

Others play down those results. They note that when Dr. Larson put part of

the same survey to "leading scientists" - in this case, members of the

National Academy of Sciences, perhaps the nation's most eminent scientific

organization - fewer than 10 percent professed belief in a personal God or

human immortality.

 

This response is not surprising to researchers like Steven Weinberg, a

physicist at the University of Texas, a member of the academy and a winner

of the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his work in particle physics. He said he

could understand why religious people would believe that anything that

eroded belief was destructive. But he added: "I think one of the great

historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion.

That's a good thing."

 

No God, No Moral Compass?

 

He rejects the idea that scientists who reject religion are arrogant. "We

know how many mistakes we've made," Dr. Weinberg said. And he is angered by

assertions that people without religious faith are without a moral compass.

 

In any event, he added, "the experience of being a scientist makes religion

seem fairly irrelevant," he said. "Most scientists I know simply don't think

about it very much. They don't think about religion enough to qualify as

practicing atheists."

 

Most scientists he knows who do believe in God, he added, believe in "a God

who is behind the laws of nature but who is not intervening."

 

Kenneth R. Miller, a biology professor at Brown, said his students were

often surprised to find that he was religious, especially when they realized

that his faith was not some sort of vague theism but observant Roman

Catholicism.

 

Dr. Miller, whose book, "Finding Darwin's God," explains his reconciliation

of the theory of evolution with his religious faith, said he was usually

challenged in his biology classes by one or two students whose religions did

not accept evolution, who asked how important the theory would be in the

course.

 

"What they are really asking me is "do I have to believe in this stuff to

get an A?,' " he said. He says he tells them that "belief is never an issue

in science."

 

"I don't care if you believe in the Krebs cycle," he said, referring to the

process by which energy is utilized in the cell. "I just want you to know

what it is and how it works. My feeling about evolution is the same thing."

 

For Dr. Miller and other scientists, research is not about belief. "Faith is

one thing, what you believe from the heart," said Joseph E. Murray, who won

the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1990 for his work in organ transplantation.

But in scientific research, he said, "it's the results that count."

 

Dr. Murray, who describes himself as "a cradle Catholic" who has rarely

missed weekly Mass and who prays every morning, said that when he was

preparing for the first ever human organ transplant, a kidney that a young

man had donated to his identical twin, he and his colleagues consulted a

number of religious leaders about whether they were doing the right thing.

"It seemed natural," he said.

 

Using Every Tool

 

"When you are searching for truth you should use every possible avenue,

including revelation," said Dr. Murray, who is a member of the Pontifical

Academy, which advises the Vatican on scientific issues, and who described

the influence of his faith on his work in his memoir, "Surgery of the Soul"

(Science History Publications, 2002).

 

Since his appearance at the City College panel, when he was dismayed by the

tepid reception received by his remarks on the incompatibility of good

science and religious belief, Dr. Hauptman said he had been discussing the

issue with colleagues in Buffalo, where he is president of the

Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.

 

"I think almost without exception the people I have spoken to are scientists

and they do believe in the existence of a supreme being," he said. "If you

ask me to explain it - I cannot explain it at all."

 

But Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary theorist at Oxford, said that even

scientists who were believers did not claim evidence for that belief. "The

most they will claim is that there is no evidence against," Dr. Dawkins

said, "which is pathetically weak. There is no evidence against all sorts of

things, but we don't waste our time believing in them."

 

Dr. Collins said he believed that some scientists were unwilling to profess

faith in public "because the assumption is if you are a scientist you don't

have any need of action of the supernatural sort," or because of pride in

the idea that science is the ultimate source of intellectual meaning.

 

But he said he believed that some scientists were simply unwilling to

confront the big questions religion tried to answer. "You will never

understand what it means to be a human being through naturalistic

observation," he said. "You won't understand why you are here and what the

meaning is. Science has no power to address these questions - and are they

not the most important questions we ask ourselves?"