TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122892/12289942.000

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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 38

SCIENCE AND GOD

Science, God And Man


New discoveries in physics, cosmology and biology make the
universe more explainable, as well as more amazing. Does this
undermine religious faith -- or reinforce it?

By ROBERT WRIGHT

[Robert Wright, a senior editor at The New Republic, is the
author of Three Scientists and Their Gods (1988). His second
book, The Moral Animal: Darwin and the Way We Live Now, will be
published next winter by Pantheon.]


    "We don't know what the hell it is, except that it's very
large and it has a purpose."

    Dr. Heywood Floyd in the movie 2010

    Last spring George Smoot, an American astrophysicist,
added a little flourish to standard scientific procedure. After
announcing some new findings, he consecrated them. Smoot's team
of researchers had detected slight but persistent fluctuations
in the universe's "cosmic background radiation" -- echoes, he
believes, of the Big Bang, the moment of creation. "If you're
religious," he told reporters, trying to put things in
perspective, "this is like looking at God."

    If you're religious, you may beg to differ. Apprehending
the Almighty and scanning a computer printout may strike you as
two quite different endeavors. God as seen from the average
church, synagogue, or mosque is an all-knowing, all-powerful
creative being -- not some faint ripples, but rather the One Who
Made the Splash. Besides, if you're religious in a conventional
sense, you probably don't seek theological guidance from
physicists.

    Then again, some people are religious in an unconventional
sense. They kind of believe in a deity but wouldn't mind seeing
some hard evidence; or they believe strongly in some kind of
deity, but it's vague in form, open to any tailoring that
scientific measurement may dictate. Judging by the attention
Smoot's choice of words drew, a lot of people fall into this
category: religiously inclined, but reaching for scientific
support.

    Nor is Smoot's celebrity the only sign of interest in the
interface between science and religion. This winter the
Nobel-prizewinning physicist Leon Lederman will publish a book
called The God Particle. And the current documentary A Brief
History of Time, like the best-selling book of the same name,
ends with physicist Stephen Hawking's uplifting hope that
someday humankind will "truly know the mind of God."

    Of course, when Hawking says God, he doesn't mean God. He
isn't talking about a personal deity, any more than Einstein was
when he doubted that God would "play dice" with the universe.
Similarly, "the God particle" doesn't exactly refer to a giant
photon in a white beard and robe, beaming down benignly on all
creation. The theological utterances of scientists often turn
out to be metaphorical and to fall short of consoling even by
the meager standards of the unconventionally religious.

    Still, some of the epic narratives of contemporary
science, ranging from the birth of our universe to the birth of
our species, do lend themselves to religious interpretation.
Indeed, one hallmark of 20th century science, as it draws to a
close, is how much fertile ground it has provided for bona fide
theological speculation: speculation about whether the universe
is a product of intelligent design, whether the human experience
is part of some unfolding purpose, whether we were in any sense
meant to be here.

    There is a giant paradox here.

    On the one hand, this century has seen the explanatory
sweep of science advance relentlessly and encroach on once
sacred turf. "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end,"
says God in the Book of Revelation, seemingly secure in his
mystery. But Hawking and other physicists have opened the end
points of time to a bracing, somewhat demystifying, inspection.
Further, the most ethereal parts of life -- the things that once
seemed heaven-sent -- have fallen steadily within reach of
concrete explanation. The mapping of our finer feelings to
neurotransmitters and other chemicals proceeds apace. Love
itself -- the love of mother for child, husband for wife,
sibling for sibling -- may boil down, in large part, to a
chemical called oxytocin. It seems somehow harder to rhapsodize
about the universal love many religions prescribe when you know
that, if it ever comes, it will rest on the same stuff
researchers inject into rats to make them cuddle. Another bit
of less-than-inspiring news is the clearer, more cynical,
understanding of why love exists -- how it was designed by
evolution for only one discernible purpose: to spread the genes
of the person doing the loving.

    In short, the works of modern science, taken one by one,
seem enough to dampen a person's hopes for higher meaning. If
religion's stock-in-trade is the inexplicable, the coming years
don't look like boom times. This is half of the giant paradox,
and it's one reason the average scientist today is probably less
religious than the average scientist of 50 or 100 years ago.

    The other half of the paradox comes from stepping back and
looking at the big picture: an overarching pattern that
encompasses the many feats of 20th century science and
transcends them; a pattern suggesting, to some scientists, at
least, that there is more to this universe than meets the eye,
something authentically divine about how it all fits together.

    In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth . .
.

    One intriguing observation that has bubbled up from
physics is that the universe seems calibrated for life's
existence. If the force of gravity were pushed upward a bit,
stars would burn out faster, leaving little time for life to
evolve on the planets circling them. If the relative masses of
protons and neutrons were changed by a hair, stars might never
be born, since the hydrogen they eat wouldn't exist. If, at the
Big Bang, some basic numbers -- the "initial conditions" -- had
been jiggled, matter and energy would never have coagulated into
galaxies, stars, planets or any other platforms stable enough
for life as we know it. And so on.

    Some physicists have tried to drain these coincidences of
their eeriness with something called the anthropic principle,
which dismisses humankind's perspective on the cosmos as
inherently biased. It's no surprise, they say, that the universe
is conducive to life. After all, if it weren't, we wouldn't be
here to argue the point. For all we know there are zillions of
other universes that don't have the dimensions for life.
Marveling at the exquisite fine-tuning of physical reality is
like viewing a winning lottery ticket as proof of God's
existence -- forgetting about the less blessed tickets lying in
trash cans all over town.

    Argument over the anthropic principle has gone on for
decades now, with little progress. Its backers, having accused
others of straining to see divinity, are in turn accused of the
reverse -- harboring a deep-seated aversion to the simple
religious idea that the universe was designed for our existence.
The physicist Heinz Pagels, who believed life was "written into
the cosmic code," once dismissed the anthropic principle as "the
closest that some atheists can get to God."

    And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living
creature after his kind . . .

    There was a time when the emergence of life wasn't thought
too amazing. With Darwin having explained how specks of life
became us, the question of where the specks came from seemed
minor: such a small step compared with the ensuing big ones.
Presumably if you let simple molecules reshuffle themselves
randomly for long enough, some complex ones would get formed,
and further reshuffling would make them more complex, until you
had something like DNA -- a stable molecule that just happened
to make copies of itself.

    But more recent, more careful analysis suggests that even
a mildly impressive living molecule is quite unlikely to form
randomly. Then where did it come from? This is one of the
questions that drive an emerging interdisciplinary field known
as "complexity" (the subject of two books published this year:
Complexity, by M. Mitchell Waldrop, and Artificial Life, by
Steven Levy).

    One of complexity's main buzz words is
"self-organization." Drab, lifeless physical systems, such as
air and water, faced with increasing disruption, sometimes grow
more structured. Air becomes more turbulent until it finally
turns into whirlwinds, tornadoes, hurricanes. Water molecules
heated from below grow wilder in their gyrations until they
finally snap into a sweeping circular motion known as a
convection cell. The Russian-born Belgian chemist Ilya
Prigogine, a Nobel laureate, sees a broad tendency for physical
systems that are driven away from stability to regain it at a
higher level of organization.

    A number of complexity theorists think self-organization
is so basic a principle as to account for the origin of life.
They have sketched out "autocatalytic" scenarios, animated them
with computer simulations, published papers. "If I'm right,"
says one of them, Stuart Kauffman of the University of
Pennsylvania medical school, "the probability of life is very
much higher than anybody thought."

    That's a big if. The field of complexity is considered, at
best, inchoate but fruitful and, at worst, inchoate and sterile.
The field's epicenter, a fledgling think tank called the Santa
Fe Institute, has a suspiciously trendy locale; the term
self-organization crops up with suspicious frequency in new-age
circles; and, suspiciously, Kauffman and Prigogine have
reputations for hawking their wares aggressively.

    But the field is also populated by, and taken seriously
by, some people who aren't viewed with suspicion. Various
scientists are pondering the prospect that a basic physical law
lies waiting to be discovered, a law defining the circumstances
under which systems infused with energy become more complexly
structured. This law would carve out local exceptions to the
general tendency of things to become more chaotic and bland --
higher in "entropy" -- as dictated by the famously depressing
second law of thermodynamics. Charles H. Bennett, of IBM's
Thomas J. Watson Research Center, who has deeply shaped the
modern understanding of the second law, suspects there is indeed
a law that if known would make life's origin less baffling. Such
a law, he has said, would play a role "formerly assigned to
God."

    Some would see things the other way around. They would say
that such a law is evidence of God -- not a God who created
human beings out of dust, but a God with longer time horizons.
Certainly, a universe predisposed to create life seems a more
likely product of divine design than a universe in which life
was a fluke.

    So God created man in his own image . . .

    Still, life itself doesn't strike the average person as
all that impressive. Primordial bacteria, though more
interesting than the surrounding soup that they called home,
don't arouse great religious awe. It is highly intelligent life
that seems most to demand divine explanation. If you can show
people that the universe was destined to create that sort of
life -- them, that is -- you can get their attention.

    One little publicized fact is that many, perhaps most,
evolutionary biologists now hold this belief.

    Well, not exactly. They don't believe that any particular
human being was in the cards from the beginning, or even that
the human species was. But they believe evolution was very
likely, given enough time, to create a species with our
essential property: an intelligence so great that it becomes
aware of itself and starts figuring out how things work.

    In fact, many biologists have long believed that the
coming of highly intelligent life was close to inevitable. But
for a while, admitting this was taboo.

    Ever since Darwin, the idea of "survival of the fittest"
as an inexorably "progressive" force has been misused to
justify poverty, genocide and suffering in general. Also, the
idea of progressive evolution encouraged some spacy thinking
that biologists find highly annoying. The French philosopher
Henri Bergson believed in an elan vital -- a life force, an
immaterial essence -- pushing evolution ever upward. Biologists
insist on a strictly physical scenario: genes that aid survival
and reproduction are preserved, and those that don't aren't --
natural selection.

    All told, talking about evolutionary "progress" seemed to
yield more pain and confusion than it was worth. But the fact
remains that over time evolution has pushed the envelope of
complexity and intelligence outward; the trophies for "most
intricate species" and "smartest species" have become harder
to get.

    There are various reasons natural selection might favor
this trend. Behavioral flexibility, for example, is so often
good for survival and reproduction that genes bestowing it
flourish. And behavioral flexibility demands complex information
processing -- smarts. Human beings are the most flexible
organisms around. That's why we're still around, and that's why
we're smart enough to wonder why.

    And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it
was very good . . .

    One of the few biologists to have talked out loud and at
length about the growth in organic complexity is John Tyler
Bonner of Princeton. In his 1988 book The Evolution of
Complexity, Bonner showed how ever more intricate organisms can
arise from natural selection alone, without help from spooky
Bergsonian forces. For some people, he wrote in the preface, "a
religious or mystical explanation is the most satisfying. This
is not so for me: the more rational and materialistic the
explanation, the better I like it."

    Spoken like a true scientist. But one person's science is
another's religion. Granted, a strictly material account of
humankind's evolution may contradict the various creation
stories that have shaped humanity's sense of divine design. And,
as physicist Bennett suggested, a strictly material account of
life's origin, its self-organization, may have the same effect.

    But now place these two accounts alongside modern physics,
and look at the big picture that some people see being painted
by 20th century science: a universe all but destined to create
platforms for life; a still unknown but increasingly suspected
physical law that all but destined some of these platforms to be
populated by little living specks; an evolutionary process that
was almost destined, given enough time, to turn those specks
into thinking, wondering, self-aware beings. Suddenly the
universe seems almost designed to yield creatures that read
articles about how they came to be here. With a little effort,
some people say, you can see the hand of God.

    Paul Davies, the physicist and writer who has done the
most to advance this view (in God and the New Physics, The
Cosmic Blueprint and The Mind of God), puts it this way: "The
very fact that the universe is creative, and that the laws have
permitted complex structures to emerge and develop to the point
of consciousness -- in other words, that the universe has
organized its own self-awareness -- is for me powerful evidence
that there is `something going on' behind it all. The impression
of design is overwhelming."

    This view is reminiscent of deism, the doctrine that
attracted some of America's founding fathers, including
Washington, Jefferson and Franklin. Deists believed in a
clockmaker God; he had built the universe, wound it up and let
it run. They also believed we could sense this God through
reason, without special revelation, just by inspecting his
handiwork -- the universe and its laws.

    For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your
ways my ways . . .

    Deism is in many ways well suited (as religions go) to an
era as scientific as this one. But 20th century science
sketches a universe stranger than the one the deists imagined.
It is a universe that seems not to run as predictably as a
clock, a universe whose innermost workings may not be
fathomable. The deeper our insight, the more baffling things
become.

    This sort of claim is typically followed by a lengthy
attempt to explain quantum physics. Such attempts are in a way
futile; the upshot of quantum physics is inexplicability. The
great physicist Richard Feynman once prefaced a lecture by
telling his audience not to worry about understanding it. "I
think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum
mechanics," Feynman warned. "Do not keep saying to yourself, if
you can possibly avoid it, `But how can it be like that?' . .
. Nobody knows how it can be like that."

    This is indeed a good briefing for descent into the
subatomic realm, a place where randomness reigns, where two
flatly contradictory statements can both be true, where the
course that events take depends on their subsequent perception,
and other Twilight Zone-ish things happen.

    Naturally, the quantum world has provoked popular attempts
to merge science and spirit, most notably in the new-age
classic The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra. And, naturally,
physicists complain about facile new-age mergers. Still, a few
big-name physicists have stepped cheerfully beyond the bounds
of the strictly scientific. In the 1950s, the pioneering quantum
physicist Erwin Schrodinger, author of What Is Life?, wrote
about the hidden oneness of all human minds. More recently, the
American physicist John Wheeler has drawn diagrams that depict
a symbiosis of mind and matter and look like they came from the
scrolls of some occult society.

    Most physicists haven't gone this far. Still, Wheeler and
Schrodinger illustrate an interesting correlation: between
eminence and boldness. If you start cornering scientists and ask
them cosmic questions that push at the limits of knowledge, you
find that some of the most accomplished are the most willing to
play the game.

    One example is John Maynard Smith, the British biologist
who has made fundamental contributions to evolutionary theory.
A few years ago, he wrote that he had never understood why
organisms have feelings. After all, orthodox biologists believe
that behavior, however complex, is governed entirely by
biochemistry and that the attendant sensations -- fear, pain,
wonder, love -- are just shadows cast by that biochemistry, not
themselves vital to the organism's behavior; they are affected
by the material world but don't affect it. Well, if that's the
case and feelings don't do anything, then why do they exist at
all?

    This is no trivial question. Feel ings -- the fact that we
experience the world as well as respond to it -- are what make
life meaningful. If this planet were full of robots that looked
and acted just as we do but had no sensation, no capacity for
pain or pleasure, there would be no reason to care what
happened to any of them. Life would have no moral dimension.

    So if indeed subjective experience is a freebie, an
optional feature thrown in at no extra charge by whatever or
whoever created the universe, it is the most valuable freebie
ever. Indeed, one could -- though Maynard Smith didn't -- call
it another link in the argument for design: This universe seems
geared to create not just intelligent life but intelligent,
meaningful life.

    Behold, I make all things new . . .

    If you press Maynard Smith on why feelings exist, he'll
say that although the existence of subjective experience may
have no strictly scientific explanation, it could still have a
"metaphysical" one. This is a fairly bold use of words. The term
metaphysics long had a bad name in scientific circles, and the
taint hasn't quite faded. The idea that there might be any laws
beyond the perceivable world, anything opaque to scientific
inquiry, was considered by many a quaint relic of a more
romantic era. The use of the term by a scientist of Maynard
Smith's caliber is a sign that science's brash youth, when no
mystery seemed beyond experimental conquest, is ending. (Which
isn't to say, of course, that scientists mean by metaphysics
what Shirley MacLaine means by it.)

    With respect for metaphysics comes respect for an idea
central to many religions: the unknowable. Agnosticism --
reserving judgment about divine pur pose -- remains as
defensible as ever, but atheism -- the confident denial of
divine purpose -- becomes trickier. If you admit that we can't
peer behind the curtain, how can you be sure there's nothing
there?

    Another striking combination of eminence and philosophical
audacity can be found in William D. Hamilton of Oxford
University, considered by some to be the most important
evolutionary biologist of the second half of this century.
Hamilton is the author of the theory of "kin selection," a
landmark in evolutionary thought. As such, he is considered in
some circles a depressing person; the theory depicts brotherly
love as genetic selfishness.

    Specifically, altruism toward kin -- the kamikaze flight
of a bee defending the hive, the fearless defense of a younger
brother on the playground -- has evolved because the genes that
produce this altruism may reside not only in the animal that
exhibits it but also within his kin; thus the genes get saved by
the act of altruism, even if it is suicidal. Some find this
reduction of love to selfishness deadening -- another assault by
science on spirit.

    But kin selection has a seldom mentioned flip side that is
more upbeat. The very same logic explains why cells first got
together to form multicellular organisms. Because nearby cells
tended to be related, they shared genes, so increasing
cooperation among them made evolutionary sense, and this trend
eventually led to utterly cooperative communities of cells, such
as ourselves.

    Hamilton, then, is the biologist who first clearly
discerned the force that propelled life over the chasm between
single celled and multicelled. And this force is a primary
reason that the first little living specks were likely to beget
big thinking, feeling machines. Kin selection is a vital link
in the argument that the evolution of intelligent life was very
probable all along.

    And on earth peace, good will toward men . . .

    To put the two implications of kin selection together:
affinities among closely related organisms tend to evolve, given
enough time, regardless of whether the organisms are cellular
or multicellular. And in humans, at least, the subjective
correlates of this affinity -- the emotional freebies thrown in
for reasons that baffle Maynard Smith -- are affection,
compassion, love. Love, in this sense, seems to have been in the
cards from the beginning.

    This is arguably good news, a welcome antidote to the
obvious fact that hatred too is a likely fruit of natural
selection's war of all against all. Apparently that august
religious theme -- good vs. evil, love against hate -- has been
in the script longer than one might have guessed. The spirit of
Christmas, the extension of brotherly love well beyond the
compass of kin, may face an uphill battle against human nature,
but at least evolution gave it a foothold.

    Hamilton, pressed to wax philosophic, readily agrees that
the evolution of complex and intelligent life was very likely
from the beginning, given enough time. To be sure, it was
hardly inevitable that the first highly intelligent creature
would descend from an ape. "It might have been the descendant
of a squirrel-like creature or a dolphin-like creature," he
says. But the chance of something very brainy eventually
emerging from a process of natural selection is so high that he
is "quite favorably inclined to search for signs of intelligent
life on other planets."

    Speaking of extraterrestrials: "There's one theory of the
universe that I rather like," says Hamilton. Suppose our planet
is a "zoo for extraterrestrial beings"; they planted the seeds
of evolution on earth hoping to create interesting, intelligent
creatures. "And they watch their experiment, interfering hardly
at all. So that almost everything we do comes out according to
the laws of nature. But every now and then they see something
which doesn't look quite right." For example: "This zoo is
going to kill itself off if they let you do this or that. So
they insert a finger and just change some little thing. And
maybe those are the miracles which the religious people like to
so emphasize."

    Hamilton stresses that this free-form speculation isn't to
be taken too seriously; he discusses it in an "almost joking
spirit." Still, "I think it's a kind of hypothesis that's very,
very hard to dismiss. I mean if I were setting up an aquarium
or something, this is virtually the way I would do it. I'd try
to make as interesting an aquarium as I could. And I'd try to
make sure that this big fish didn't molest this little fish too
much. And I would occasionally insert a finger and try to stop
him."

    An extraterrestrial zookeeper may not strike everyone as
the ideal deity. But that's beside the point. Hamilton didn't
say he buys this scenario or any other theological scenario; he
is an agnostic.

    The point is simply that one of the great scientific minds
of our era believes that the ultimate questions remain
unanswered, that science may be unable to answer them, and yet
that science does help us mull them over, by illuminating the
epic trajectory of cosmic and biological evolution on whose end
we sit. "The theological possibility," Hamilton says, "is still
certainly alive."

    This may seem meager nutrition for the spiritually hungry.
But 100 years ago, with Darwin having shown how a long chain of
tiny accidents had happened to yield the human species, with
metaphysics in retreat and the clockwork laws of classical
physics ascendant, and with the universe's deft conduciveness
to life as yet unfathomed, one might have thought "the
theological possibility" an unlikely survivor of the next
century's science. That it should survive in such robust form
would have seemed less likely still. This holiday season the
unconventionally religious can join the conventionally religious
in counting their blessings.