Is Magic Real?

While I’ve greatly enjoyed the Harry Potter series, the inspiration for this blog, and have re-read the series several times, my all-time favorite realm is J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, famous from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I’ve regularly played boardgames based on Tolkien’s book, but have yet to play any of the commercial Harry Potter boardgames. Tolkien’s world and the way magic is displayed is subtle, not overt, and giving it the time it deserves could take volumes of writing and thinking. I’m much too lazy for that – hence, I blog instead of writing detailed articles. Or better yet, I just read and write about someone else’s thoughts.

 

For those who would like a little more meat in exploring Tolkien’s world and, more importantly, the world-view that emanates from the characteristics of Middle-Earth, I highly recommend Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien. I read it probably fifteen or so years ago, but am finding it refreshing to work my way through it once again. Kreeft is a philosopher, so that’s where the emphasis lies, but he’s an excellent and engaging writer with thought-provoking ideas.

 

What makes Tolkien so beloved, argues Kreeft, is that his world seems true, deep and real at its very core. Tolkien’s masterful use of descriptive language certainly helps, and there is something about creative art that so moves us. It’s magical in the deeper non-spellcasting sense. In his chapter on metaphysics, Kreeft distinguishes art and science:

 

Art is very different from science in that it creates worlds; it creates meaning and beauty and forms and structures and natures, while science discovers them. In science, the world is the standard for our ideas about it. If we believe the earth is flat, we are wrong. But in art, it is the reverse: the artist’s ideas are the standard for the world he creates. For example, in Tolkien’s world, Elves are tall and formidable… In art, the world conforms to the creative idea; in science, the idea conforms to the world. Truth in science is the reverse of truth in art. If God created the universe, all science is reading God’s art.

 

Now as a chemist, I beg to differ with Kreeft about his distinction. Chemists delight in both discovery and creation (by synthesizing new molecules and materials). But I agree that chemistry as a science has certain strictures in what can be created (at accessible temperatures and pressures). I also suspect that art – truly great art – has strictures of a sort. There’s something about it that “rings true”. Kreeft will say it better than I can.

 

It is because we look at the things in the universe in this Platonic way that we can rank them. For example, one lion can seem truer, more lenone than another (say, a weak, scruffy, cowardly lion)… [that] is false,, fake, or inauthentic, like counterfeit money. Counterfeit money is as physically real as real money, yet in the most important way it is not real: it does not conform to the [Platonic] Idea of money. In the case of money… it is man-made, temporal and changeable. But in the case of… a real lion… all cultures and all individuals judge a cowardly lion to be less authentic, less true, less real, than he ought to be… and Tolkien’s Elves are more real, more elvish than any other writer’s elves have ever been. We can’t help believing in them.

 

I’m inclined to agree with Kreeft, although I’m likely as biased as he is in that I love the books and continue to enjoy re-reading them over and over again. They have a ring of authenticity that most fiction I’ve read does not. (Admittedly, I don’t read much fiction.) Kreeft will go on to explain why this is, but you’ll have to read his book to enjoy it for yourself. Instead I will move on to the title of today’s blog post, and also the title of a section in Kreeft’s chapter on cosmology: Is magic real? Kreeft begins his argument in the following way:

 

In Tolkien’s cosmology, as in all pre-modern cosmologies, everything is more alive. Where the modern cosmology reduces the life of a dog to the life of a complex machine, Tolkien’s cosmology expands the life of a mountain (“cruel Caradhas”) to something like the life of an animal. Nothing is mere matter. Nothing is ‘mere’ anything. Reductionism is repudiated. More than that: there is so much life in things that we would call it ‘magic’.

 

He’s preaching to the choir, given my growing disillusionment with the reductionist paradigm in the sciences. Not that it isn’t useful, but we’re limiting ourselves as scientists by being locked into the paradigm. But then Kreeft makes a surprising turn:

 

Magic is potency, and power. But there are two very different kinds of magic… not just different, but opposed… and our civilization is in crisis because of the war between these two kinds of magic. One kind of magic, Enchantment, is our healing, and the other – the kind exemplified by the Ring – is our destruction… The magic of enchantment means entering the holy city of beauty, truth, and goodness and letting it conquer you. Ultimately it means letting God conquer you, since beauty, truth, and goodness are divine attributes; they are what God is. But the magic of the ‘laborious, scientific magician’ (that is, technology or, rather, the philosophy that makes ‘Man’s conquest of Nature’ by technology the summum bonum) means playing God, like Sauron.

 

I’ve heard this diatribe before. Sauron represents the evils of technology and machinery, and we need to turn away from this to embrace the good. In one sentence, I’ve simplified or reduced it – and Kreeft would argue that I shouldn’t do this so he spends some time clarifying the relationship between the two magics. They have much in common.

 

Both are natural to man. Both can be either good or (when misused) evil. Technology becomes evil when it is turned from a means to an end. Fantasy becomes evil when it is turned into a create-your-own-reality philosophy. The ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy… is the first mark of sanity… The two magics have… a common origin in the power of abstraction that makes possible the invention of the adjective…

 

But their ends are different. Enchantment is surrendering “the soul to the beauty of nature” while Technology seeks “the conquest of nature by power”. Kreeft argues that the key has to do with time.

 

Technological magic works immediately. It attempts to reduce the gap between desire and satisfaction… [but] plunges us deeper into the shadow because time becomes more and more important to us, and more problematic, as we become more technologized… the chief effect… has been to destroy leisure rather than enhance it. No one has any time anymore. But Enchantment makes time irrelevant. The Hobbits lose track of time in Tom Bombadil’s house, as we do when we read The Lord of the Rings…

 

Magic is real. But its effect on us as humans may be quite different depending on which magic we embrace. We’ve built ourselves into a technological system prison from which escape will prove very difficult. Enchantment feels like a waste-of-time in today’s go-getter world, but all that striving may be for a castle built on a foundation of sand rather than bedrock. I’m reminded of the need to slow down. But it’s not just a matter of pace-of-life. Kreeft will go on to argue for the paradoxical philosophy of self-giving choices exemplified by Frodo and Sam, the ringbearers, in contrast to the self-serving Gollum and Sauron – consumed by their own inward desires, they become slaves, inhuman, and lose reality in the process.

Stars and Cherubim

Occasionally, I get invited to give a talk about the relationship(s) between science and religion, usually by a university student group or members of a local church. I try to keep my monologue talk short, and spend most of the time in dialogue responding to questions and comments. Unlike my tip-of-the-fingers knowledge of chemistry (in particular) and science (in general), I don’t always remember some of the finer points in theology, philosophy, literature and history. While I have a reasonable grasp of the overall issues from reading and discussion over the years, I need to read up to refresh myself on details.

In the U.S., the most familiar touchpoint between science and religion is the ‘conflict’ between creation and evolution. The conflict model isn’t the only one out there, but it is the most prominently known, fueled by mass media. The ‘conflict’ that you hear most about is creation versus evolution. I think it’s a false dichotomy from a purely scientific point of view. The two views aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive but it requires some wading into metaphysics. The conflict comes from different metaphysical presuppositions, and most folks who engage in arguing don’t notice when physics slides into metaphysics.

In the creation versus evolution story, the point-of-conflict often centers around how to interpret the book of Genesis in the Bible. There are historical and sociological reasons for why this came about, particularly in the U.S. However, part of the problem today is that the modern reader implicitly assumes a modern ‘scientific’ framework on to the text, and reads origin stories primarily as material origins in space and time, rather than about functional origins. I’ve discussed this briefly in a previous blog post about ontology, referring to John Walton’s book The Lost World of Genesis One. I recommend his book if you’re interested in comparative origins literature from the ancient Near East.

I re-read Walton’s book this past week in preparation for a talk I just gave at a local church. But I also re-read sections from other books, and the one I will discuss in today’s post is The Biblical Cosmos by Robin Parry. The book is subtitled A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Weird and Wonderful World of the Bible, and the front cover is just superb. The sea and a dragon-like chaos creature are prominent in the foreground, with sky and stars in the background. All very appropriate! I highly recommend reading the book in full. It gives you an overview of how ancient cultures conceived the cosmos. Similar to Walton, Parry draws from a range of ancient Near East sources, comparing and contrasting different ideas of creation and the observable cosmos.

Two things jumped out at me this past week reading The Biblical Cosmos. (Subconsciously, I was likely influenced by having recently seen the preview to the Fantastic Beasts movie sequel.) The first has to do with the nature of cherubim. These strange creatures are described as four-in-one chimeras. Their heads have four faces: lion, human, ox, and eagle. These four creatures correspond to “the four Babylonian seasonal constellations: Leo (the lion), Scorpio (who had a human face), Taurus (the bull), and Pegasus (the thunderbird/eagle). In Babylonian astrology these four constellations depict the four directions of the sky, being about 90 degrees from each other.” I discussed chimeras in conjunction with fantastic beasts in a previous blog post. They aren’t just imaginary unicorns or Potterverse hippogriffs. We are chimeras of a sort. Thank you, multitudes of bacteria.

In the Bible book of Ezekiel, when these four strange-looking chimera are mentioned, they are also described as being full of eyes. That sounds really creepy, and I have trouble imagining exactly what this looks like. Why “full of eyes”? That’s where Parry comes to the rescue. In the ancient Near East, stars were thought to be celestial beings and thus associated with eyes. (The subsection is Parry’s book is amusingly titled “The Eyes in their Stars”!) If the four creatures represent constellations, the allusion to eyes now makes sense. The cherubim then, like stars, represent the celestial host. The famous Assyrian guardian statues (Lamassu) are human-faced, bull-legged, winged creatures. The lion may be represented somewhere too, possibly the body and/or head, although I’m not sure. I suppose they are cherubim-like or cherubim-lite.

Parry makes the case that just because scientists can describe a star materially, this does not necessarily discount interpretations of what stars represent. He quotes three excellent contemporary examples. The first is from The Lion King. Simba, Pumba and Timon, looking at the night sky, are speculating on the nature of “the sparkly dots up there”. Timon speculates they are “fireflies that got stuck on that big bluish-black thing.” Pumba says “I always thought they were balls of gas burning billions of miles away.” Timon and Pumba then needle Simba, who tries to hedge his answer, then finally admits: “Somebody once told me that the great kings of the past are up there watching over us.”

The second example comes from Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. A gap in the wall separates the realm of Stormborn from magical Faerie. The main protagonist Tristan travels between realms, and meets a star in the form of a beautiful maiden, Yvaine. In one of their meetings, Tristan apologizes for not bringing Yvaine back into the village in Stormborn. She replies that Tristan was right not to bring her because “I live as long as I am in Faerie. Were I to travel to your world, I would be nothing but a cold iron stone fallen from the heavens, pitted and pocked.” (I have not read Stardust. Maybe I should.)

The third example come from C.S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader when “the travelers encounter an old man with long silvery hair and a long silver beard.”

“I am Ramandu. But I see that you stare at one another and have not heard this name. And no wonder, for the days when I was a star had ceased long before any of you knew this world, and all the constellations have changed.”

“Golly,” said Edmund under this breath. “He’s a retired star.”

“Aren’t you a star any longer?” asked Lucy.

“I am a star at rest, my daughter,” answered Ramandu.

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

As a chemist, I’m immersed in the paradigm that (material) structure determines function. Our curriculum reinforces this paradigm. We first teach the students about molecular structure, and then discuss the properties that arise from structure. Function comes from structure. This reductionist approach has borne much fruit in science, although it is limiting when it comes to complex systems. Reductionism needs to be coupled to Emergence. In chemistry, the myriad relationships between molecules may give rise to new ‘functions’ that would have been nigh impossible to predict or imagine by just knowing molecular structure.

Perhaps that is why Life is difficult to define clearly in scientific terms. Our material structure-function language may be limiting. To our fancy models and theories in origin-of-life research, Ramandu might say: “Even in your world, my child, that is not what Life is but only what it is made of.” What about cosmic life? Life writ large? Centaurs of the Potterverse claim that the cosmic narrative is written in the stars. Are the stars cosmic beings? A celestial host? Are they god-like-beings that determine how things will proceed in large brushstrokes? If such a being came through the gap-in-the-wall into a realm that only conceives within a materialistic metaphysical framework, would it look like iron pitted and pocked? It may speak, but we do not listen.

I didn’t get asked any of these strange and interesting questions in my recent talk at the church. Then again, I did not talk about cherubim and stars. I was quite prepared to go into interpretative details of the Genesis text, biological evolution, the scientific age of the earth, and the Intelligence Design movement. These are topics I normally get asked about, but oddly enough I wasn’t asked about them. (I touched on the Genesis text in my talk.) I guess every group is different. I did get asked about bioethics, the Big Bang, consciousness, black holes, and the nature of energy, among other things. One person asked me about the details of my research so I had the pleasure of explaining some details albeit in simpler terms. Folks were interested to know about books or articles written by scientists who discuss issues of faith, so I provided some references. Quite a number of people thanked me after the discussion, which was very nice. I suspect science and religion is a topic they don't hear discussed very often in church, and apparently I made a good impression.

It’s refreshing to think about bigger and broader questions, and how science intersects with other disciplines – in this case, theology, philosophy, history and some sociology. As a teacher in a liberal arts institution, I hope my students do think about these broader connections in their classes. I try to sprinkle bits and pieces across the semester. Some students pick up on this, but many are focused on learning the chemistry content for the upcoming exams, and think of these connections as extraneous. So, without confusing students further, I need to do a better job weaving in the connections while ensuring the core chemical concepts remain clear.

Scopes version 2.0+

In preparation for being part of the Faith and Reason living learning community (LLC) next semester, I’ve resumed reading about issues related to science and religion. The political circus surrounding the run-up to the U.S. presidential elections motivated me to re-read The Creationists. This key book, by historian Ronald Numbers, first published back in 1992, does an excellent job tracing the strange situation that has evolved in the United States. Since much has happened in the last 25 years, I was looking for the updated (and expanded) 2006 version at the library. They didn’t have it, but they did have the e-Book Intelligently Designed: How Creationists Built the Campaign Against Evolution by Edward Caudill published in 2013.

Like the earlier classic by Numbers, Caudill traces the rise of antievolutionism, its entanglement with the rise of Fundamentalism. (This word has a narrower meaning, but has widespread colloquial use that strays from its original definition. We have a similar situation for the word Evolution.) The usual suspects are present: George McCready Price and the Genesis Flood authors Morris & Whitcomb. But with the rise of the Intelligent Design movement in the last quarter-century, the book also covers Philip Johnson, Michael Behe, and the events of the 2006 Dover Pennsylvania legal proceedings. Caudill however situates his narrative to the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. The actual events, personalities, and key moments, in the historical version are much obscured because of the popular classic 1960 movie Inherit the Wind. The movie is based on the 1955 play (of the same name written) at the height of the McCarthy proceedings.

Our LLC watched the movie the previous Fall semester. It was amusing to observe the students who seemed somewhat bored for the first 30-40 minutes – these old classics seem hokey to them – but when the trial started, you could see them put down their cellphones and start to pay attention. The scenes are quite dramatic! The historical trial pitted three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan against famed American lawyer Clarence Darrow. In the movie, these characters are given different names, Matthew Harrison Brady and Henry Drummond. The stand-in for the famed acerbic journalist and critic H. L. Mencken is E. K. Hornbeck. (I think the parallels of the real and fictional names are interesting.) Brady is portrayed as a buffoon, and one gets the impression that in the battle for “reason”, that science triumphs over antiquated religion.

Who won? And is this even about winning and losing? Historically, Scopes was found guilty (of violating the Butler Act) and fined $100, which he ended up not having to pay due to a court technicality. But the aftermath was that more antievolution laws or guidelines were proposed. Did Inherit the Wind succeed in convincing the public that the folksy backward religious townspeople and their champion Brady were plain silly? The caricature might be fodder in scientific circles, but Caudill argues in his book that the Scopes trial, and in particular the flawed movie, were a watershed for many subsequent instances of Scopes version 2.0. Played out in courtrooms across the country, antievolutionists lost legally but won publicity. If anything, the simple-minded strawman ridiculing of religion had the effect of catalyzing the banding together of “creationists” (another slippery label). A parallel “science” (or perhaps pseudoscience) has developed into a multi-million dollar industry. A massive theme park, Ark Encounter, is being built in Kentucky and scheduled to open in July courtesy of Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis.

Inherit the Wind portrayed Brady and Christianity as being old-fashioned, close-minded, and stilted in reason. It is ironic to see the same strategy employed by the antievolutionist movement. The claim made is that the scientists are the close-minded ones, and not open to new possibilities at the frontier opened up by the Intelligent Design movement. The creationists may have lost in the court skirmishes, but they have fared much better on the political warfront. Caudill writes that William Jennings Bryan was not in Dayton primarily to engage in reasoning about science or faith. He was there as part of a political campaign. The event was staged for a media circus, and it certainly succeeded on that front. Scopes v2.0 plays out repeatedly as the media feels obliged to cover with “equal time” both sides of the story. That’s what you do in political media journalism. It’s not about the science.

Caudill has an excellent summary chapter if you don’t have time to read the whole book. Here is the first paragraph of Chapter 8:

“The Scopes trial was the first public performance of modern America’s science-versus-religion drama. Its high visibility and dramatic quality gave it a special place in the subsequent fight because the trial defined terms and tactics that have endured into the twenty-first century for the antievolution movement. Creationists still use Bryan’s arguments against evolution and his appeals to American myths and democratic values. His lessons in practical politics and using the press to promote one’s agenda have not been lost on the modern antievolution movement. First, putting the fight in court meant a public argument. Even without the impetus of sensation and the bizarre, news media were obligated to cover courts, much as they did legislatures, school boards, and other public bodies. Those were familiar venues, facilitating coverage and making the issue easier to follow. Second, defining belief in evolution as a test of one’s faith brought large numbers of religious people into a fight they otherwise might have ignored. Eradicating nuances helped enlist adherents, as it would in any campaign. People, by nature, will shun the effort required to sort through, perhaps to unsatisfactory conclusions, the complexities of a topic such as the impact of modernism on theology, or the place of materialistic science in one’s faith, or if science even has a place in faith.”

That last sentence is scary. If there’s something I’ve learned over the years, and I hope my students learn this as part of their education, it is that real issues bedeviling our world are complex and require nuanced discussion. There’s a lot of grey (aptly, the color of our LLC). As discussed in a previous post on Foxes and Hedgehogs, nuance requires a lot of hedging (which interestingly is what the fox does, rather than the hedge-hog). In another post a while back, I mentioned Randy Olson’s book Don’t Be Such a Scientist, where unfortunately accuracy is not the most important thing in communication; story-telling is. Many of us scientists are bad at story-telling and we throw a bunch of facts at the public as if we should obviously be believed because of our erudite data dump. Two months ago I attended a seminar where Olson had analyzed the communication of politicians past and present. Donald Trump, to his horror (and possibly to most of us academics in the audience), scored far, far better on communication than anyone else, especially on TV and video.

In his book, Caudill refers to Mencken and Darrow as elites, at least this was the company they kept back in the days of the Scopes trial. Bryan however identified with the people of Dayton, backwater as it might seem according to an elite (and certainly portrayed that way). In today’s version, academics (and scientists) are part of the new elite. There is much head-scratching and hand-wringing as to why Trump seems so popular to the “working-class white folks” even when he himself is clearly not one of them. Does Trump have policies and proposals that are realistic and practical? I would say no, but maybe that’s because I much prefer nuance to bluster. But Trump isn’t trying to convince academics or the political elite, he is running a campaign – much like Bryan did in Dayton. He might not ultimately win the presidency (Bryan did not) but he knows how to communicate to his constituency regardless of accuracy or substance.

Many op-eds hearken to the older days where one could build bridges across camps for the common good in the political arena. Today, ideology rules. We live in an “us versus them” world where the polarized battle lines are drawn as starkly as possible. (This also makes it easier for the media to write an engaging story – perhaps emphasizing the engagement, a term that is used in warfare.) Scopes version 1.0 and its descendants, thanks to Inherit the Wind, helped catalyse the drawing of battle lines between “creationists and evolutionists”. Who gets the dominant media coverage? Those willing to spout extreme (and sometimes bizarre) views.

I close this post with a sober observation by the British theologian N. T. Wright. In a chapter on politics (in his book Surprised by Scripture), he writes:

“Meanwhile the major ethical and public/political issues of our day rumble on – global debt, the ecological crisis, the new poverty in our glossy Western society, issues of gender and sex, stem cell research, euthanasia, and not least the complex questions of the Middle East – and as long as the debates are carried out in terms of fundamentalism and secularism, they will never be anything other than a shouting match. At this point, ironically, the Enlightenment dream has begun to eat its own tail, as its greatest strength – the emphasis on reason as a means to peaceful coexistence – has been undermined by its greatest weakness, the dualistic division between God and the public world, with human public discourse collapsing into spin and emotivism.”

Free Your Mind Friday

It is Friday the Thirteenth. Did you see a black cat walk past you? Did you see the same thing a second time? Déjà vu. Maybe it is a sign that something has changed in the Matrix.

Are we living in a simulation? That’s the question I’m thinking of posing for the first meeting of a discussion group in the residence halls next semester. Once again, I will be part of the college Living Learning Community program aimed at first-year new students. (Yes, my semester hasn’t quite ended yet and I’m already excited for the next one! Last month I had a wild idea for my class final project – Imagining New Elements.) I signed up to be in the same theme as last semester, Faith and Reason. The first movie in the Matrix trilogy provides all manner of interesting fodder for discussion related to the theme. It also has great special effects (for 1999) and lots of action (my kind of movie).

I’m thinking of calling this activity “Free your mind Friday”. To check if this might work, I consulted a student who will be an RA (resident assistant) in the residence hall that will house the Faith and Reason community. She was enthusiastic (I think) and thought that Friday afternoons would work well. (The fact that she is a chemistry major and will be in my Quantum class next semester might have helped!) Part of my impetus is to have something for students who aren’t interested in off-campus partying and might want to participate in a community co-curricular activity that has an intellectual component on a Friday afternoon. Apparently Thursday evening doesn’t work as well because the non-partiers are usually studying for Friday exams or working on papers. This is why it helps to have a student consultant as a partner-in-crime. She also suggested that she could organize a movie night ahead of the discussion event – apparently because a number of students may not actually have watched the Matrix. I guess 1999 was a long time ago – although the movie is still fresh in my memory

It's not easy to get students to come to “dorm events”. When I was in college and worked as a house adviser, this wasn’t a problem because we actually just had ten people living in a house so the community was in-built. However when I had an appointment as a resident faculty member, the student RAs or staff resident coordinators would sometimes have a hard time getting students to meetings or events. And that was over ten years ago. If anything there might actually be less hanging out in community spaces today (as observed by Rebekah Nathan when she went undercover). I had mixed success – I organized some movie and documentary viewings plus discussion. Participation was scant (handful of students showed up) even though good snacks were provided. Two things I organized that worked very well, were a session on careers and graduate school (lots of seniors attended, not surprising) and the surprise hit “How to Plan a Wedding on a Budget”. Having planned my own wedding on a budget that we paid for ourselves in grad school, I was at least slightly knowledgeable in this area. The resident coordinator even brought the top tier of a wedding cake for dessert – the students loved it! (The event earned rave reviews. It was a nice contrast to Bridezilla news in pop culture at the time.)

But I digress. My wild idea to lure students to Free Your Mind Friday is for the advertising of the event too be less obvious, perhaps even intriguing – like how Neo is invited to a secret meeting with Morpheus to learn the answers to his questions. I’m thinking that in the first few weeks we could put up some cryptic signs or symbols. My suggestion was to have White Rabbit stickers posted strategically. Students who Follow the White Rabbit will be led to the meeting time and place. Clearly it should not be too cryptic otherwise no one will show up. I’m also thinking of putting posters of Morpheus in his fancy shades holding out the red pill and the blue pill without quite explaining why. Maybe intrigue will serve as a hook for students. My partner-in-crime thought that this strategy could work although we would have to flush out the details. I am no master of intrigue, so I assigned her homework this summer: (1) to think of an intrigue campaign, and (2) to watch the movie – since she wasn’t familiar with the plot of the movie and the references I was making (although she remembered the blue and red pill).

I’ve decided not to plan other topics in detail, although I’d like to do one related to whether or not a Wizarding community does exist unbeknownst to us Muggles. And then perhaps the usefulness of learning Potions, a.k.a. Chemistry!

Private Doubt, Public Dilemma

Private Doubt, Public Dilemma – Religion and Science since Jefferson and Darwin, is the title of Keith Thomson’s book based on his 2012 Terry Lectures. Thomson is an emeritus professor of natural history at the University of Oxford. He has written a number of books that delve into the history of Charles Darwin and the formulation of the theory of evolution. Since I’m participating in a college-sponsored living learning community on Faith and Reason, I have been reading a number of books that address the relationship between science and religion.

Given my interest in history, I enjoyed Thomson’s approach to the topic. In ten short and very readable chapters, he covers the social milieu, both scientific and religious in the nineteenth century where various upheavals were taking place – in geology, biology, philosophy and theology. Thomson weaves a story spanning the U.S. and the U.K., starting with Thomas Jefferson but concentrating mainly on Darwin. The Aggasiz-Gray and Wilberforce-Hooker-Huxley debates in both countries are described with historical quotes and letters of the day.

The crux of Thomson’s argument comes in the ninth chapter “The Decline of Authority”. Starting with a personal experience of flip-flop instruction he received on Alfred Wegener’s continental drift, and following up with the discovery (and initial discounting) of Sherwood Roland’s connection between CFCs and the ozone hole, Thomson argues for the importance of context of what else was changing in the pivotal years close to 1860. (As an aside, the Karlsruhe conference that same year was pivotal for chemistry! For the historically-inclined, here's a translation of the session accounts.)

Thomson writes: “… with each [change in authority], new doubts arose as well as new certainties. Whatever conflicts may have risen or been acerbated between elements of science and religion in, say, 1860, they were part of a much wider picture of change. And in the process of change, leaders of both religion and science have had to think seriously about what their new roles should be. Perhaps not enough.”

He goes on: “Individual opinion always changes before authority. It is in the nature of authority to change slowly; society would be unstable otherwise. And religious authority may change slowest of all. The dilemma comes when change can no longer be put off.” Thomson thinks that the way forward is in areas where both science and religion have “joint ownership” and can benefit from cooperation for the public good. He provides one example: environmental stewardship. One wonders if there are more. Thomson also points out the weaknesses of the conflict avoidance approach by separating religion and science into two non-overlapping spheres of influence. The problem, he says, is that the “claims of authority of science and religion, do in fact, overlap, intersect, and compete with each other.” Therein lies the crux of the public dilemma – the issue of authority, when politics and power come into play, which has become to some extent farcical in the U.S.

In my first day of class on atomic theory, we discuss the issue of where we gain knowledge and the role of trustworthy authority when we cannot “check certain things with our own physical senses”. While there isn’t much about chemistry in Thomson’s book, I enjoyed a small section in one of his early chapters about atomic theory. He quotes the Greek atomist Democritus: “Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.” In class we discuss how this might sound crazy from the sensory perspective, but I didn’t have time to discuss why, as Thomson puts it, “such a philosophy was dangerous; atoms, chance, and necessity neither explained nor required free will.”

There’s a great Cicero quote (who probably drew from Aristotle), prescient of today’s monkey-typewriter-Shakespeare probability argument, against the atomists: “Must I not marvel that there should be anyone who can persuade himself that there are certain solid and indivisible particles of matter borne along by the force of gravity, and that the fortuitous collision of these particles produces this elaborate and beautiful world? I cannot understand why he who considers it possible for this to have occurred should not also think that, if a countless number of copies of the one-and-twenty letters of the alphabet, made of gold or what you will, were thrown together in some receptacle and then shaken out on to the ground, it would be possible that they should produce the Annales of Ennius. I doubt whether they could possibly succeed in producing a single verse.”

It’s worth quoting from the Bible book of Ecclesiastes (1:9): “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Fine-Tuning and Natural Theology

This new academic year I’m participating in one of those academic-residential “live and learn” communities that have been quite popular at colleges and universities in the United States. In my college, the program manifests itself by grouping several small first-year student classes under a broad theme. Students in the program live in the same residential space, and several activities are organized throughout the year to build community and have students connect what they’re learning in (at least one of) their classes with a broader theme. The college started piloting this program approximately five years ago with a few linked courses and quickly ramped up to 100% participation of all incoming students. My first-year chemistry class (with only incoming first-year students) is one of six classes linked by the theme “Faith and Reason”. Three of the classes are in the sciences; three are in the humanities.

Since the General Chemistry curriculum is very tight, I won’t be able to give up too much class time to exploring the intersection of faith and reason. We will certainly have some discussions about the “scientific method”, how science approaches trying to answer questions about the natural world (particularly in the context of chemical discovery) and compare/contrast this to how faith-based approaches get at knowledge. I look forward to including a little bit of philosophy, and a little more history into my classes, in lieu of the theme. However, I’m hoping that much of the interesting discussion will take place outside of class-meeting times through online blogging and discussion. I’ve had students write blogs in two of my classes prior, using the university’s Learning Management System (LMS) platform. I must admit that I don’t like the way our LMS handles blogs and so this time around I’ve created a Blogger group for multiple authors. I hope this works more robustly.

To prepare for class I’ve been doing some reading last semester and this summer at the intersection of faith and science (since science is my domain, and I don’t have as much philosophical training). I’ve read maybe five books in the last six months, the latest of which is Alister McGrath’s A Fine-Tuned Universe, subtitled The Quest for God in Science and Theology. Given my interests in Origin of Life research, I was looking forward to chapter 10 where the author addresses the origins of life. I was a little disappointed. There is the usual broad sweep from nucleosynthesis to biological life stopping at anthropic signposts such as the carbon resonance (Hoyle and Fowler), the uniqueness of phosphate in life (Westheimer), the “curious chemistry of water” (the subtitle to chapter 11), and examples of convergent evolution (Conway Morris). The phrase biological fine-tuning is used in a number of places to knit together a range of phenomena.

Alister McGrath has an interesting background. An atheist who became a Christian, he has doctorates in molecular biophysics, theology and intellectual history. He currently holds a professorship in Science and Religion at Oxford. I was expecting a book that would focus on arguments related to the anthropic principle but instead I got a very thoughtful treatise about the intellectual history of natural theology.

Most discussions I have come across about natural theology or the anthropic principle seem limited (at least to me) in terms of building some sort of a bridge between scientific and philosophical approaches. But McGrath’s broadening of this area, by considering the many contributors to its intellectual history, is enlightening. The most enlightening part was for me to learn how Paley’s (in)famous watchmaker argument (usually assumed as the archetype whenever the word “natural theology” is mentioned), is actually a narrow slice of Enlightenment (the era) influence on intellectual ideas at that time in history. McGrath traces a variety of natural theology approaches over different eras, back to Augustine’s rationales seminales. The other very helpful principle that McGrath reminded me is that fine-tuning “arguments” do not have to be made deductively – and he lays out a vision using an abductive argument. Consonance rather than proof seems to be the goal.

I appreciated McGrath’s approach of using abductive reasoning (“inference to the best explanation”) since I approach science as a pragmatist. I’m no philosopher, but I’m happy to broaden my reading interests – and as a practicing scientist and teacher, it’s a good thing for me to think about the intellectual history and philosophy of science. I don’t know if fine-tuning will come up in a discussion with my students (I’m not teaching a physics or biology class) but we’ll most likely have some interesting and lively discussion when we hit a unit on radioactivity, and therefore radioisotope dating methods related to the age of the earth). I’m also reading up in this area to prepare myself. I’m certainly enjoying learning new things – I hope the students do too!