Calling God “obsolete” can be considered fightin’ words, especially if by obsolete you mean “disproved by science.” But a recent panel of scientific thinkers in Washington had a civil and at times even humorous discussion on whether science really renders God a failed hypothesis.
The two main speakers approached the topic from opposite angles. Michael Shermer, who writes a column for Scientific American and publishes the magazine Skeptic, was a proselytizing, born-again Christian in high school and college but now describes himself as a non-believer and congenial skeptic. William D. Phillips (left), who won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1997 for developing methods to trap atoms with lasers, practices Methodism and believes God can and does intervene in human affairs. (The panel was moderated by Michael Novak, a scholar on religion and philosophy at the American Enterprise Institute, which cosponsored the event with the Templeton Foundation.)
At bottom Phillips and Shermer disagreed whether science and theology investigate fundamentally different questions and whether each, therefore, should leave the other in peace. Phillips agreed that scientists can explore some claims about God but felt approaching God through science is “far less satisfying” than religion because science ignores or strips away meaning. He drew an analogy to sterile scientific studies of love: “On a moonlit evening ... we don’t want to evoke neurology and biochemistry to understand our personal relationships.”
Phillips also argued that God can intervene in human life. Quantum mechanics, he says, shows that atoms are chaotic and that humans cannot, even in theory, know how subatomic processes play out. That leaves a crack open for God to slip his finger in and stir up space-time in undetectable ways. When an audience member afterward suggested that miracles no longer take place, Phillips said he wasn’t so sure.
Shermer (left) challenged the idea of separate domains. He suggested that religions historically invoked deities to explain gaps in knowledge, but that science tends to fill those gaps with natural, causal explanations. Even if God existed, he added, no matter how the divine chose to make itself known it would have to use a physical medium to do so—at which point you’d be right back to investigating natural phenomena.
Shermer also coined a cheeky “law” to illustrate this: “Any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence would be indistinguishable from God.” (It echoes the dictum that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”) Even humans are on the verge of creating new life forms, he noted, a power traditionally attributed to God. And suppose that advanced civilizations need extra power and therefore engineer the cosmos by collapsing space dust into stars. With enough dust, they could form stars massive enough to implode into black holes. And if, as some cosmologists suggest, black holes give birth to new universes, an advanced civilization would have created a new cosmos.
“What would we call something who could do that?” Shermer asked. “God.”
The panelists discussed religious belief as a human phenomenon as well. They mentioned a recent poll that found that nearly 40 percent of working scientists believe in God, the same percentage that did in the 1910s. Strikingly, those scientists professed belief in not just a tepidly deistic god—a general “something out there”—but believed in a personal god that answers prayers.
The speakers wrapped up the panel by taking questions—including one on whether science-versus-religion debates even matter, since they mostly generate only more arguments. Both panelists averred that they do matter, a lot. Shermer said, “You’d have to be made of wood not to be interested; these are the biggest, most important questions.”
Sam Kean is the associate editor of Science & Spirit.
