From a netfriend:

Did you hear Ockham’s Razor [ABC Radio National] broadcast Sunday 30 March 2003 with Robyn Williams and repeated Monday 31st March?

Read it: (transcript) http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s816425.htm <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s816425.htm> (or below) Hear it: (15 minutes of .RAM [Real Audio] format audio) http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/audio/ockham_30032003_2856.ram <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/audio/ockham_30032003_2856.ram>

Science, Religion and Conflict

Summary:

Science exists because we are confronted by mystery, but science can never fully answer the question “Why is it there?”. High School teacher Michael Kelly suggests there is no intrinsic opposition between science and theology, but that each illumines and even needs the other. Does science, as an enterprise, exist because humanity is confronted by mystery and naturally tends to explore it? And when science remains incomplete, do we then embark on theology and explore what sort of being the Creator must be?

Robyn Williams: There are two ways that religion collides with science these days. One is the exercise in denial, represented by creationism, a rejection by a very few of evolutionary ideas in favour of a somewhat literal interpretation of the Old Testament. That’s, as I said, a minority view.

But the more interesting interaction is between those who accept that science tells you everything except for first and last questions: why we’re here, and where we are likely to end up.

However, Richard Dawkins, in his new book of essays is unforgiving about the effects of religious belief. But the late Stephen Jay Gould on the other hand (another evolutionary biologist) felt that science and theology occupy different terrains and therefore could coexist quite comfortably.

Today’s speaker, Mike Kelly, teaches maths at Epping Boys High School in Sydney, and he has a personal view of this kind of coexistence.

Michael Kelly: In spite of recent elements of rapprochement, it remains true that many scientists are astonished to meet one of their colleagues who professes any religious belief. It’s my conviction that this is an historical accident, arising from social and intellectual trends in the 18th and 19th centuries; and that there is not only no intrinsic opposition between Science and Theology, but that each illumines and even needs the other.

In order to defend these assertions, two complementary arguments are necessary, one historical and the other philosophical. Of these, the historical is probably the more interesting, but the philosophical is the more fundamental. And today I wish to outline one possible approach to it.

In part, the perceived opposition between religion and science is a matter of ‘image’. Science is seen as solidly based, whereas religion is seen as, if not credulous, at least requiring faith. And so it does, provided it goes beyond the deism of the Enlightenment thinkers. But it’s arguable that science also requires faith, faith in the future progress of knowledge, and in the ultimate openness and conformability of the universe to the human intellect. This faith is far from foolish, but I do not think that its reasonableness can be defended by any argument except, in fact, a religious one.

And that really is the kernel of my whole argument. Nevertheless, I want to approach it mainly from another direction. It is often supposed that science and religion offer explanations of the universe which confront each other as rivals, so that one is forced to choose between them. And certainly some such explanation is indeed part of most religions, but is it really part of science?

This is far from clear, because at the very heart of science, there is a paradox: namely that outside quantum and possibly some animal contexts, science consists mainly in a search for connections which are necessary and allow a sort of deductive inference. But this necessity deserts us when we look at the universe as a whole, which does not at all look as though it must be as it is. This is apparent in at least two ways.

First, as several writers have remarked, the basic constants of physics seem to have a certain ‘brute fact’ quality; there appears no reason why they are what they are. Of course it may be that the speed of light and the charge on the electron and the gravitational constant and Planck’s constant, and so on, will one day be explained as deriving from more basic realities. But then, these explanations will feature new constants, for a constant can only be derived from another constant, surely, and these new ones will be equally brute. We might perhaps hope to evade this result by proposing that this process of deriving one constant from another can proceed indefinitely without end or limit, so that we get an endless chain of dependent constants. But then, the whole chain would represent a definite set of particular values among an infinite number of possibilities, and we would still be entitled to ask, why is it like that? Why does the universe have just this individual shape?

Second, I think that we can make a similar move with the laws of science. We can contemplate the totality of such laws, known and unknown, with all their hierarchical interconnections, and ask could that totality be different? Or to put it another way, could a universe exist with a different shape, not only from the point of view of its physical constants but also from that of the structure of its laws?

Certainly, in this idea there seems nothing illogical. A world in which, say, Newton’s Third Law sometimes did not hold might be less intelligible, but it is hardly unimaginable. Some physical laws, it must be admitted, look almost like necessary truths. For instance, the inverse square law of diminishing light intensity as we travel from the source. But that law assumes the conservation of mass energy as well as a space which is Euclidean. A universe is conceivable, logically, in which neither of these held. And such examples could be multiplied.

It seems, therefore, that the necessity belonging to most scientific laws does not attach to the universe as a whole. This paradox presents us, as a matter of simple logic, with three alternatives.

The first, and probably the most common, is to assert that the universe, with all its law-like texture, is due to ‘chance’ or to some ‘random’ event. This rather makes the word ‘chance’ sound like the name of a blind, unconscious god, but of course it is not that, but merely a shorthand for the absence of any cause whatever, and that explains nothing. As for randomness, it does exist, and large-scale patterns do emerge from many small random events. And given the fundamental importance of quantum theory, we might propose that all laws arise n this way. But each event can be random only in the context of an already existing law-like structure which sets up equally possible alternatives and allows an indifferent choice between them. Radioactive decay may be random, but it happens only in accordance with the laws of energy-emission when an appropriate chemical composition is present. The winner of a lottery is random, because there is no connection between the winner’s identity and the number drawn from the barrel. But this requires a whole set of laws governing marbles in barrels and another governing the buying of tickets. The totality of all laws cannot be random in this sense. Both of these appeals, that to chance and that to randomness, amount to saying that the universe is itself radically inexplicable, that it is in fact without rhyme or reason.

A variation on this speculates that there may be countless random universes, among which ours is antecedently probable and therefore unremarkable, it needs no explanation. But this speculation merely widens the notion of ‘all the laws in the universe’ to read ‘all the laws governing the possibility of all universes’, and it generates the same problem. It does nothing to explain the necessity of most laws in any or all of these universes, and it still falls foul of the point that random events and probability theory itself, exist only within some structured context. It is that context that has to be accounted for.

Moreover, this problem is not lessened by assuming the existence of an endless succession of explanatory principles. For in an infinite chain of laws, all of which depend upon others, the character of necessity which they all, or nearly all, need is not supplied by any one of them, nor by their totality. Similarly that character is not supplied by assuming that the universe has an endless history. A universe of finite depth, or a beginning of time, may dramatise the need for final explanation, but denying those boundaries no more eliminates that need than did the infinite chain of physical constants in the earlier case.

Nor can we explain necessity away by appealing to those neural theories that present all thought, all scientific explanation, as a purely biological activity, working in practice only because natural selection has favoured certain patterns of thought. These theories get us no further, for natural selection itself makes no sense unless it is governed by necessary laws. And neither does a continuing conformity between our brains and the world at large.

A further variation, in some ways more sophisticated, of this whole approach is to forbid us to ask these questions, to claim that there is something wrong-headed in trying to explain the universe as a whole. We may then admit that science as an enterprise only exists because humanity is confronted by mystery and naturally tends to explore it, and that the mystery is basic, there before science begins, and then claim that because science can never fully answer the question, Why is it there?, this is somehow an unreal question.

This assumes, quite gratuitously, that if a question cannot be answered scientifically, then it should not be asked. If we nevertheless adopt the approach, then we can no longer assert that science offers an alternative explanation of the universe to the religious one. For we are denying that such an explanation is either necessary or possible. Our long chain of necessary connections rests on, as we might say, a huge and meaningless accident, though that is a misnomer, even an accident presumes laws; it rests at last on nothing. But this is problematic. Surely, in that case, the ultimate contingency and even gratuitousness of things should percolate through every part, and render surprising the continuing validity of every law. Science itself acquires a certain irrationality as it progresses towards that last denouement that will render its attempt to explain finally ineffectual.

Which leads to the second alternative: namely, to assert that in spite of appearances the universe must indeed be as it is.

This may persuade us to hope some day to expose a few quite fundamental principles from which all others follow. But such principles, if they are to get us any nearer to a necessary universe, must be unlike all other scientific statements, which hold only given certain antecedents. They must necessarily be the case in some quite absolute sense. Of course, we might be unable to understand or even to state them, perhaps the best we can do is to infer their existence. Nevertheless they will be intelligible at least in principle, otherwise they refer to mere matters of intrinsically meaningless fact and we are back in the first alternative. While if we can understand them, then their simple enunciation will reveal to us that they must be true since they are true necessarily.

This alternative posits, therefore, the self-evident truth of some principles which are the ultimate source of all the intelligibility in the universe. These must then describe some reality, some object, some quality in things which is the ultimate source of all necessity, all probability, all that allows inference or understanding.

We must then ask whether this reality is itself an intelligent being.

If it is not, then the whole universe and all of science flow from a necessary but unintelligent source of intelligibility. I am not sure that this makes sense, but if it does, we are at least faced with a coincidence of such magnitude that no scientist would dream of accepting it in any other context than this one.

But if on the other hand we say that the source is intelligent, though somehow inseparable from the rest of the universe, then we are not denying religion, we are, on the contrary, tending towards pantheism.

There is, however, still the third alternative, namely to say that the universe with all its necessary connections and also with its ultimate contingency and its limitations, is a gift, that in fundamental structure it is as it is by a choice of its creator. That is, we give the traditional answer of Judeo-Christian and of much other religion. Of course, we are then faced with a challenge to explore what sort of being the creator must be, but that is to leave science and to embark on theology, without which, it seems to me, science remains incomplete and even, in the last radical analysis, irrational, abandoning in its final philosophical stance that faith in reason which animates it everywhere else.

Robyn Williams: So science needs a belief in God to make it complete. So says Mike Kelly, who teaches maths at Epping Boys High School in Sydney.