This was a tiring weekend. Saturday was the day of the planning meeting for the annual SLAC and Fermilab Users’ trip to Washington D.C. I have a leadership role in the trip this year, and I got only about 10 hours of sleep between Thursday and Saturday. This trip is critical, and we all want to make certain that it’s well-organized and executed, to have maximal impact on the opinion Congress has about science and high-energy and astrophysics.
Jodi returned from the Soudan Mine yesterday, and was also exhausted after her 10 hours of travel needed to get home. We decided to eat out last night, and wanted something a little lighter. Sushi was on the menu, so we headed to Akasaka in Menlo Park for a nice meal.
Dinner was great, as usual. However, the two people at the table next to us made dinner particularly interesting. The woman and the man were discussing science, faith, and presumeably intelligent design. She was arguing that science was just another religion, while he was trying to demonstrate that it isn’t. Among her many arguments were the classics: science has things that you just have to accept, and science can’t really explain the past because people weren’t there in the past.
These kinds of discussions always make me think about whether this is really true. Is science just another religion? What distinguishes religions is faith, faith that certain things are true or happened. They require no proof, and in fact tend to deny or defy proof. For instance, the existence of a god or gods, the tripartite nature of the Christian God, and the existence of purpose in human life are all things which really can’t be addressed with facts or evidence. You accept them, and from them draw a kind of guidance for your life.
What about science? Science makes claims, just like religion. What distinguishes science from religion is that science **demands** evidence. Claims – hypotheses – must be subjectable to experimental tests. If they cannot be so subjected, they are tossed aside from science because no progress can be made from them. Science is a method, a process, to drawing connections between seemingly disparate effects in the natural world. Without proof, you cannot make progress in science. That’s also fundamentally why there really cannot be a contradiction between religion and science.
As to the woman’s claims about knowledge, such as knowledge of the past, the man tried his best to explain. I think his arguments were good, but she was not to be swayed. She made the argument that we cannot *know* the past, since we were not there. In fact, we are never really certain of the past. However, if we have a theory that describes the past, such as the big bang theory, we can ask it to make predictions about what the universe should be like now. The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation is such an example – the big bang didn’t have to be right, but it predicted this energy field and, in fact, such a field was discovered after the prediction was made.
If you carry the woman’s claims to their conclusion, then of course we can never make progress. What if God created us all 20 seconds ago, and placed the illusion of memory in our heads? You can’t prove or disprove it, so it’s not science – but this is basically where her arguments lead. If she denies prediction and experiment as a means to make sense of the past, she opens the door to all kinds of crazy philosophical arguments that cannot lead to understanding about the natural world.
Jodi was about to burst throughout this whole conversation. We don’t spy on people at dinner, but this conversation was so appealing to our brains that we couldn’t prevent our ears from listening. It was a blessing when the waitress finally brought the bill, because one or both of us were about to jump in and help this guy out.
That conversation was a stark contrast to one I had a few nights ago with some colleagues of mine over another dinner. This was a deep and intellectual discussion of faith and science. One of my friends said that science and its discoveries only serve to daily affirm his deep love for Jesus Christ, and constantly reaffirm his devotion to his beliefs and his love for the meaning of Biblical scripture. When people out there call all scientists godless atheists, they are not only insulting the diverse science community, but also their own religious siblings, many of whom are lovers of God’s word and his work.
I’m vastly more spiritual than religious, but I too entered into this study as a means to better understand the mind of God. I don’t know whether there is or isn’t such a mind, or even such a being, but what I do know is that the universe is beautiful and ordered, simple and yet diverse, and I am humble and proud to be able to contemplate it.
