MY
GOD PROBLEM
 In
the course of reporting a book on the scientific canon and
pestering hundreds of researchers at the nation's great universities
about what they see as the essential vitamins and minerals
of literacy in their particular disciplines, I have been hammered
into a kind of twinkle-eyed cartoon coma by one recurring message.
Whether they are biologists, geologists, physicists, chemists,
astronomers, or engineers, virtually all my sources topped
their list of what they wish people understood about science
with a plug for Darwin's dandy idea. Would you please tell
the public, they implored, that evolution is for real? Would
you please explain that the evidence for it is overwhelming
and that an appreciation of evolution serves as the bedrock
of our understanding of all life on this planet?
In other words, the scientists wanted me to do my bit to help fix the terrible
little statistic they keep hearing about, the one indicating that many more Americans
believe in angels, devils, and poltergeists than in evolution. According to recent
polls, about 82 percent are convinced of the reality of heaven (and 63 percent
think they're headed there after death); 51 percent believe in ghosts; but only
28 percent are swayed by the theory of evolution.
Scientists think this is terrible—the public's bizarre underappreciation
of one of science's great and unshakable discoveries, how we and all we see came
to be—and they're right. Yet I can't help feeling tetchy about the limits
most of them put on their complaints. You see, they want to augment this particular
figure—the number of people who believe in evolution—without bothering
to confront a few other salient statistics that pollsters have revealed about
America's religious cosmogony. Few scientists, for example, worry about the 77
percent of Americans who insist that Jesus was born to a virgin, an act of parthenogenesis
that defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction. Nor
do the researchers wring their hands over the 80 percent who believe in the resurrection
of Jesus, the laws of thermodynamics be damned.
No, most scientists are not interested in taking on any of the mighty cornerstones
of Christianity. They complain about irrational thinking, they despise creationist "science," they
roll their eyes over America's infatuation with astrology, telekinesis, spoon
bending, reincarnation, and UFOs, but toward the bulk of the magic acts that
have won the imprimatur of inclusion in the Bible, they are tolerant, respectful,
big of tent. Indeed, many are quick to point out that the Catholic Church has
endorsed the theory of evolution and that it sees no conflict between a belief
in God and the divinity of Jesus and the notion of evolution by natural selection.
If the pope is buying it, the reason for most Americans' resistance to evolution
must have less to do with religion than with a lousy advertising campaign.
So, on the issue of mainstream monotheistic religions and the irrationality behind
many of religion's core tenets, scientists often set aside their skewers, their
snark, and their impatient demand for proof, and instead don the calming cardigan
of a a kiddie-show host on public television. They reassure the public that religion
and science are not at odds with one another, but rather that they represent
separate "magisteria," in the words of the formerly alive and even
more formerly scrappy Stephen Jay Gould. Nobody is going to ask people to give
up their faith, their belief in an everlasting soul accompanied by an immortal
memory of every soccer game their kids won, every moment they spent playing fetch
with the dog. Nobody is going to mock you for your religious beliefs. Well, we
might if you base your life decisions on the advice of a Ouija board; but if
you want to believe that someday you'll be seated at a celestial banquet with
your long-dead father to your right and Jane Austen to your left-and that she'll
want to talk to you for another hundred million years or more—that's your
private reliquary, and we're not here to jimmy the lock.
Consider the very different treatments accorded two questions presented to Cornell
University's "Ask an Astronomer" Web site. To the query, "Do most
astronomers believe in God, based on the available evidence?" the astronomer
Dave Rothstein replies that, in his opinion, "modern science leaves plenty
of room for the existence of God . . . places where people who do believe in
God can fit their beliefs in the scientific framework without creating any contradictions." He
cites the Big Bang as offering solace to those who want to believe in a Genesis
equivalent and the probabilistic realms of quantum mechanics as raising the possibility
of "God intervening every time a measurement occurs" before concluding
that, ultimately, science can never prove or disprove the existence of a god,
and religious belief doesn't—and shouldn't—"have anything to
do with scientific reasoning."
How much less velveteen is the response to the reader asking whether astronomers
believe in astrology. "No, astronomers do not believe in astrology," snarls
Dave Kornreich. "It is considered to be a ludicrous scam. There is no evidence
that it works, and plenty of evidence to the contrary." Dr. Kornreich ends
his dismissal with the assertion that in science "one does not need a reason
not to believe in something." Skepticism is "the default position" and "one
requires proof if one is to be convinced of something's existence."
In other words, for horoscope fans, the burden of proof is entirely on them,
the poor gullible gits; while for the multitudes who believe that, in one way
or another, a divine intelligence guides the path of every leaping lepton, there
is no demand for evidence, no skepticism to surmount, no need to worry. You,
the religious believer, may well find subtle support for your faith in recent
discoveries—that is, if you're willing to upgrade your metaphors and definitions
as the latest data demand, seek out new niches of ignorance or ambiguity to fill
with the goose down of faith, and accept that, certain passages of the Old Testament
notwithstanding, the world is very old, not everything in nature was made in
a week, and (can you turn up the mike here, please?) Evolution Happens.
And if you don't find substantiation for your preferred divinity or your most
cherished rendering of the afterlife somewhere in the sprawling emporium of science,
that's fine, too. No need to lose faith when you were looking in the wrong place
to begin with. Science can't tell you whether God exists or where you go when
you die. Science cannot definitively rule out the heaven option, with its helium
balloons and Breck hair for all. Science in no way wants to be associated with
terrifying thoughts, like the possibility that the pericentury of consciousness
granted you by the convoluted, gelatinous, and transient organ in your skull
just may be the whole story of you-dom. Science isn't arrogant. Science trades
in the observable universe and testable hypotheses. Religion gets the midnight
panic fêtes. But you've heard about evolution, right?
So why is it that most scientists avoid criticizing religion even as they decry
the supernatural mind-set? For starters, some researchers are themselves traditionally
devout, keeping a kosher kitchen or taking Communion each Sunday. I admit I'm
surprised whenever I encounter a religious scientist. How can a bench-hazed Ph.
D., who might in an afternoon deftly purée a colleague's PowerPoint presentation
on the nematode genome into so much fish chow, then go home, read in a two-thousand-year-old
chronicle, riddled with internal contradictions, of a meta-Nobel discovery like "Resurrection
from the Dead," and say, gee, that sounds convincing? Doesn't the good doctor
wonder what the control group looked like?
Scientists, however, are a far less religious lot than the American population,
and, the higher you go on the cerebro-magisterium, the greater the proportion
of atheists, agnostics, and assorted other paganites. According to a 1998 survey
published in Nature, only 7 percent of members of the prestigious National Academy
of Sciences professed a belief in a "personal God." (Interestingly,
a slightly higher number, 7.9 percent, claimed to believe in "personal immortality," which
may say as much about the robustness of the scientific ego as about anything
else.) In other words, more than 90 percent of our elite scientists are unlikely
to pray for divine favoritism, no matter how badly they want to beat a competitor
to publication. Yet only a flaskful of the faithless have put their nonbelief
on record or publicly criticized religion, the notable and voluble exceptions
being Richard Dawkins of Oxford University and
Daniel Dennett of Tufts University. Nor have Dawkins and Dennett earned much
good will among their colleagues for their anticlerical views; one astronomer
I spoke with said of Dawkins, "He's a really fine parish preacher of the
fire-and-brimstone school, isn't he?"
So, what keeps most scientists quiet about religion? It's probably something
close to that trusty old limbic reflex called "an instinct for self-preservation." For
centuries, science has survived quite nicely by cultivating an image of reserve
and objectivity, of being above religion, politics, business, table manners.
Scientists want to be left alone to do their work, dazzle their peers, and hire
grad students to wash the glassware. When it comes to extramural combat, scientists
choose their crusades cautiously. Going after Uri Geller or the Ra‘lians
is risk-free entertainment, easier than making fun of the sociology department.
Battling the creationist camp has been a much harder and nastier fight, but those
scientists who have taken it on feel they have a direct stake in the debate and
are entitled to wage it, since the creationists, and more recently the promoters
of "intelligent design" theory, claim to be as scientific in their
methodology as are the scientists.
But when a teenager named Darrell Lambert was chucked out of the Boy Scouts for
being an atheist, scientists suddenly remembered all those gels they had to run
and dark matter they had to chase, and they kept quiet. Lambert had explained
the reason why, despite a childhood spent in Bible classes and church youth groups,
he had become an atheist. He took biology in ninth grade, and, rather than devoting
himself to studying the bra outline of the girl sitting in front of him, he actually
learned some biology. And what he learned in biology persuaded him that the Bible
was full of . . . short stories. Some good, some inspiring, some even racy, but
fiction nonetheless. For his incisive, reasoned, scientific look at life, and
for refusing to cook the data and simply lie to the Boy Scouts about his thoughts
on God—as some advised him to do—Darrell Lambert should have earned
a standing ovation from the entire scientific community. Instead, he had to settle
for an interview with Connie Chung, right after a report on the Gambino family.
Scientists have ample cause to feel they must avoid being viewed as irreligious,
a prionic life-form bent on destroying the most sacred heifer in America. After
all, academic researchers graze on taxpayer pastures. If they pay the slightest
attention to the news, they've surely noticed the escalating readiness of conservative
politicians and an array of highly motivated religious organizations to interfere
with the nation's scientific enterprise—altering the consumer information
Web site at the National Cancer Institute to make abortion look like a cause
of breast cancer, which it is not, or stuffing scientific advisory panels with
anti-abortion "faith healers."
Recently, an obscure little club called the Traditional Values Coalition began
combing through descriptions of projects supported by the National Institutes
of Health and complaining to sympathetic congressmen about those they deemed
morally "rotten," most of them studies of sexual behavior and AIDS
prevention. The congressmen in turn launched a series of hearings, calling in
institute officials to inquire who in the Cotton-pickin' name of Mather cares
about the perversions of Native American homosexuals, to which the researchers
replied, um, the studies were approved by a panel of scientific experts, and,
gee, the Native American community has been underserved and is having a real
problem with AIDS these days. Thus far, the projects have escaped being nullified,
but the raw display of pious dentition must surely give fright to even the most
rakishly freethinking and comfortably tenured professor. It's one thing to monkey
with descriptions of Darwinism in a high-school textbook. But to threaten to
take away a peer-reviewed grant! That Dan Dennett; he is something of a pompous
leafblower, isn't he?
Yet the result of wincing and capitulating is a fresh round of whacks. Now it's
not enough for presidential aspirants to make passing reference to their "faith." Now
a reporter from Newsweek sees it as his privilege, if not his duty, to demand
of Howard Dean, "Do you see Jesus Christ as the son of God and believe in
him as the route to salvation and eternal life?" In my personal fairy tale,
Dean, who as a doctor fits somewhere in the phylum Scientificus, might have boomed, "Well,
with his views on camels and rich people, he sure wouldn't vote Republican!" or
maybe, "No, but I hear he has a Mel Gibson complex." Dr. Dean might
have talked about patients of his who suffered strokes and lost the very fabric
of themselves and how he has seen the centrality of the brain to the sense of
being an individual. He might have expressed doubts that the self survives the
brain, but, oh yes, life goes on, life is bigger, stronger, and better endowed
than any Bush in a jumpsuit, and we are part of the wild, tumbling river of life,
our molecules were the molecules of dinosaurs and before that of stars, and this
is not Bulfinch mythology, this is corroborated reality.
Alas for my phantasm of fact, Howard Dean, M. D., had no choice but to chime,
oh yes, he certainly sees Jesus as the son of God, though he at least dodged
the eternal life clause with a humble mumble about his salvation not being up
to him.
I may be an atheist, and I may be impressed that, through the stepwise rigor
of science, its Spockian eyebrow of doubt always cocked, we have learned so much
about the universe. Yet I recognize that, from there to here, and here to there,
funny things are everywhere. Why is there so much dark matter and dark energy
in the great Out There, and why couldn't cosmologists have given them different
enough names so I could keep them straight? Why is there something rather than
nothing, and why is so much of it on my desk? Not to mention the abiding mysteries
of e-mail, like why I get exponentially more spam every day, nine-tenths of it
invitations to enlarge an appendage I don't have.
I recognize that science doesn't have all the answers and doesn't pretend to,
and that's one of the things I love about it. But it has a pretty good notion
of what's probable or possible, and virgin births and carpenter rebirths just
aren't on the list. Is there a divine intelligence, separate from the universe
but somehow in charge of the universe, either in its inception or in twiddling
its parameters? No evidence. Is the universe itself God? Is the universe aware
of itself? We're here. We're aware. Does that make us God? Will my daughter have
to attend a Quaker Friends school now?
I don't believe in life after death, but I'd like to believe in life before death.
I'd like to think that one of these days we'll leave superstition and delusional
thinking and Jerry Falwell behind. Scientists would like that, too. But for now,
they like their grants even more.
[First published in The
American Scholar 72, no. 2,
Spring 2004] |
