Blogs / Reality Base

Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait has been doing a good job tracking the latest act in the depressingly long disaster flick known as Creationism. While many of the postings I have done here at Reality Base focus on broader views of what humans do in science and what they think of as spiritual endeavor, the ritual burning of science education going on in Texas demands as much illumination as possible.

The details of the situation have been covered in a number of places, but here is the quick overview: The Texas State Board of Education is in the midst of deciding its science education standards. These are the specifications for what should be taught and what students are expected to know in the state of Texas. The board, which has far too many creationists on it, recently included reviews from representatives of the Discovery Institute, a front for the Intelligent Design “movement.” This will ensure another sad attempt to get evolution labeled “just a theory” and present the creationists’ non-science as an “alternative view.”

We have seen all of this before, of course. This case is particularly dangerous because in this review cycle, guidelines and textbook selections are reviewed together. The sad spectacle of a state’s public science education bureaucracy being hijacked by a religious viewpoint is bad enough, but it’s the textbooks that are the real problem. Texas is a big market for textbook publishers. The less scrupulous among them are willing to bend to market forces and downplay those aspects of biology that are considered troublesome (i.e. the foundational theory of evolution).

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On Friday I had the opportunity to record a bloggingheads divalog with A.I. expert Eliezer Yudkowsky. It was a great exchange. While I still need to learn how to deal with the medium (you talk on the phone while recording video of just yourself—I ended up talking over Eliezer a bunch of times; he was very patient) it got me thinking about a variety of topics. One place in which Eliezer and I were strongly in disagreement was the definition of the word “mystery.”

What brought me into science was a strong sense that this whole “life” thing was very weird. As I have gotten older, I have come to respect that strangeness. The bare presence of things just comes to us day in and day out. That is what I mean by mystery. Nothing supernatural, just the irreducible “activity” or presence of being that no explanation, no description will wave away. Rather than write any more myself, let me throw down the words of others on this great subject.

From Albert Einstein:

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.

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Before touching on any new subjects in this ongoing discussion about transcending the traditional science v. religion debate, I thought it would be good to reprise some themes and keep the narrative quasi-linear. A month or so ago, I tried to lay the groundwork for getting past the usual categories in the way we publicly discuss science and religion (what I called the Sullen, the Silly, and the Snarky). The usual debates about creationism/evolution or quantum mechanics/New Age philosophy miss the point: Which direction do we turn now?

A number of alternatives are beginning to emerge as researchers struggle to find some balance. There is, for example, the religious naturalism of Ursula Goodenough and others in which the narratives of science, free of supernatural agents, are seen as an appropriate source of “religious feeling.” There is the reinvention of the sacred of Stuart Kauffman, in which nature’s fundamental non-reductionism allows for a creative universe. Other researchers are exploring other avenues.

Some of these I agree with, and some I do not. But taken as a whole, you can see creative people are thinking creatively and it’s leading in new directions. These perspectives may not all stay with us, but nonetheless their explication is a good thing.

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Seattle may be the most beautiful city in the country (oh New York do not worry—I still love thee). I did my graduate work here in the physics department, and it’s always a little hard to come back because it is just so green and groove-o-tronic (so does everyone here need a tattoo sleeve now?).

In spite of my heartsickness, I have been lucky to have the chance to give a bunch of talks here on science, religion, and many topics in between. The Pacific Science Center holds a vibrant Science Café in a pub near the Seattle Center. I gave a presentation on time and cosmology there to a very engaged, very thoughtful audience on Tuesday. It’s a topic that clearly washes up against the shores of mythology and religion, and we all made the most of it. On Wednesday I spoke with Steve Sher on KUOW, a wonderful NPR station here in the emerald city. In both cases the issue of certainty came up for me. Steve Sher is both funny and insightful. His questions pushed me to spend much of the day reflecting on the role of, and desire for, certainty in both science and religion.

Certainty, I think, is the problem. Not in individual scientific work, of course—I really want to be certain that the massive astrophysics simulation code my research group has been working on for the last 7 years accurately reproduces the physics of stellar blast waves and turbulent star forming clouds (two of the topics we work on). And my colleagues at the University of Rochester want to be absolutely certain that the detectors they developed for the Spitzer Space Telescope function exactly as planned. With each investigation we undertake, and each paper we write, we want and need as much certainty as possible. That is a given.

Certainty becomes a problem when people are looking for some kind of ultimate all-encompassing answer.

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Trying to get beyond the traditional science v. religion debate, we have had quite a bit of discussion here about the relevance and resonance of words: Sacred, Spiritual, Religion, Rationality. Today, I want to throw a new term into the mix, one that I discovered while trolling around in the literature of Religious Studies.

Being a scientist, and untrained in the scholarship on human spiritual endeavor, part of my research for my latest book involved making my way through Religion 101. That is where I encountered the extraordinary writings of Mircea Eliade and the heritage of “hierophany.”

Eliade was the doyen of the “Chicago School” of Religious Studies. He was a prodigious writer (anthropology, religious studies, novels, and plays) and was a controversial figure in both his ideas and his politics. Without doubt though he is considered one of the last century’s great thinkers on religion, its forms, and its relevance.

Separating the sacred from profane was crucial for Marcia Eliade. It guided his thinking about religion, and what he called “religious man.” Eliade points to the numinous, that elusive but illuminating ground of religious experience: “The numinous presents itself as something wholly other, something basically and totally different.” This is how he launches his account of religious man’s confrontation with the sacred.

This sense of the “wholly other” is what appears directly in our experience. What matters is how we encounter the scared. It appears, or erupts, into our lives. Thinking about it or theorizing on it misses its essential, living power. Eliade is explicit about definitions, and the idea that there is a fundamental gap that language cannot cross. The experience cannot be distilled into definitions or analytical concepts. Simply put, words fail. “Language is reduced to suggesting by terms taken from that experience,” he says. The experience of the world’s sacred character can never be wrapped up and contained—it can only be pointed to through metaphor or analogy.

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I will be in Seattle next week doing some work and giving a few talks on the book, but before I left I thought it worthwhile to revisit issues raised by Attorney General Holder’s now infamous “Nation of Cowards” speech. My post on the topic generated a lot of dialogue, some of it about science/religion and some of it about Holder’s topic—our limited ability to talk honestly about race in America.

The New York Times printed an editorial by Stephen Carter a few days ago on the reaction to Holder’s speech. Its point is relevant for our own discussions of science and religion:

The speech itself was more than 2,300 words. The already infamous phrase occurred about 150 words in. Thus we are left with well over 2,000 unanalyzed words—that is, the context for the phrase. For too many critics, the context of Mr. Holder’s remarks…is quite beside the point.

The problem, as Carter rightly points out, is the endless tendency to simplify any and all arguments down to the part where we can get pissed off. The reaction to Holder’s speech left the body of his argument untouched—and that reaction was, as Carter, says,
“plenty of sound bites, but nothing that moves us forward.”

He goes further still:

This difficulty, however, is not limited to race. There are few issues of any importance that are not reduced, in public dialogue, to sloganeering and applause lines. Whether we argue over war or the economy, marriage or religion, abortion or guns, we reduce our ideas to just the right size for the adolescent tantrum of the bumper sticker.

And here the connection to the public debate about science v. religion becomes relevant.

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Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester who studies star formation and stellar death using supercomputers. His new book, “The Constant Fire, Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate,” has just been published. He will be joining Reality Base to post an ongoing discussion of science and religion—you can read his previous posts here, and find more of his thoughts on science and the human prospect at the Constant Fire blog.

I grew up in particularly ratty part of North Jersey. The population was the usual American hodgepodge: Italian, Irish, Polish, African American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican. It was a tough place with a kind of democracy of animosity. In general, everybody was looking to pound the other guy if the opportunity presented itself.

Still, I was regularly amazed at the strange friendships that would pop up. “Lippy,” the Italian-Irish small time hood who was a regular at Guys and Dolls Pool Hall, was best friends with a bunch of Puerto Ricans from the other side of town. Nobody got it. Normally these guys would have been at each other’s throats, but somehow it worked. Sometimes people just manage to find each other in the midst of the general warfare and chaos.

Which leads me to the Attorney General of the United States.

Yesterday, Attorney General Holder made the rather stunning comment that we Americans are a “nation of cowards” when it comes to the discussion of race.

Wow, pinch me. Was that a U.S. politician telling us the truth? I wasn’t sure that could happen. That is certainly change we can use.

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Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester who studies star formation and stellar death using supercomputers. His new book, “The Constant Fire, Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate,” has just been published. He will be joining Reality Base to post an ongoing discussion of science and religion—you can read his previous posts here, and find more of his thoughts on science and the human prospect at the Constant Fire blog.

Yesterday, I argued that going beyond the traditional science v. religion debate would require finding an appropriate vocabulary. If we really want a different path beyond the usual “My Religion v. Your Scientific Results” brawl, we need to appropriate wider, older meaning for words. The trick will be to have an ear for the resonance, the poetry inherent in those words that can be of use to us. Then we have to use them, creatively, to rise above the particular meanings pinned on them by our particular historical moment.

Both Sean Carroll and Charles Schmidt argued yesterday that you have to look at the meaning most people would attach to a word—the dictionary meaning, that is. It’s a good point and a relevant point, but for me it’s too narrow. It’s true that in science, we often throw out words that have “failed” (phlogiston is one example). But for the really powerful terms and ideas, we often keep the words and shift their meanings. This was, of course, Thomas Kuhn’s point in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Space, time, mass, and energy are words that we scientists have kept in our tool chests even as their meanings changed radically.

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Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester who studies star formation and stellar death using supercomputers. His new book, “The Constant Fire, Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate,” has just been published. He will be joining Reality Base to post an ongoing discussion of science and religion—you can read his previous posts here, and find more of his thoughts on science and the human prospect at the Constant Fire blog.

You can’t own words, and you can’t specify the changing patterns of their meaning. They are living things, organic and evolutionary. No place is this more eloquently illustrated then in the debate between science and religion.

In one of my earlier posts, there was a flurry of comments about my use of the word “sacred.” Lots of scientifically-minded folks took issue with the word because, for them, it conjures up the dangers of supernaturalism and the enemies of science and their religious intolerance. Last Friday I had the pleasure of speaking about my book at the Harvard Book Store and this subject—the use of words like “sacred” and “spiritual”—came up in more than one question. Clearly, it is a central issue.

I thought a lot about terminology when I was writing my book. I was looking for words that had a history and a resonance lifting them above the particulars of any particular tradition, which spoke to the experience and aspiration that underlie both science and what I call “spiritual endeavor” (a term that will require a separate post I am sure). After considerable reading in the cannon of Religious Studies, “the sacred” was were I landed.

The wonderful thing about the word “sacred” is that it is not really tied to any of the world’s current traditions. It’s got old, old origins in the great society of ancient Rome. According to the Encyclopedia of Religions, the Latin origins of “sacred” relate to “sacrum”—”what belonged to the gods or what was in their power.” Its early usage related to Roman temples and their rites. In that context, the words sacrum and profanum have been frequently paired together.

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Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester who studies star formation and stellar death using supercomputers. His new book, “The Constant Fire, Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate,” has just been published. He will be joining Reality Base to post an ongoing discussion of science and religion—you can read his previous posts here, and find more of his thoughts on science and the human prospect at the Constant Fire blog.

No one can emerge from a consideration of religion without thanking William James.
—Ursula Goodenough

Last week we poked around trying to define the contours of the traditional debate on science and religion. I used terms like the Sullen, the Silly, and the Snarky to lay out the ways we have become conditioned to seeing Science and the domains human spirituality discussed in public. These debates often turn around familiar poles of evidence vs. scripture or faith vs. reason. The problem with the traditional debate, especially its creationism/intelligent design vs. evolution version, is that it sucks all the air out of the room. The debate has been going on for so long and with such vehemence that it appears nothing else could possibly be said on the subject. Today I want to begin discussing alternative approaches that don’t orbit the burnt-out sun of the creationism vs. atheism debate.

The first step is to recognize that some very talented people have tread some of this ground before. The need to focus on faith in the religion and science debate seems to be taken, ironically, as an article of faith. This, however, ignores some vibrant lines of scholarship on religion and human spirituality over the last century. In particular, it ignores William James.

William James was one of the founders of modern psychology and also an influential philosopher, which contributed to him being known as “that adorable genius” during his time. Though religion was an essential part of his childhood, as an adult he turned to science as the basis for his investigations. But as he reached middle age, his interest shifted to more philosophical issues, including religion. He was suspicious of academic theology, saying the systematic “block universes” they created were sterile creations of the Mind and never touched the real importance of spiritual feeling. So James stayed away from grand overarching theories that tried explaining everything under a single rubric. From this perspective he wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience, a tremendously influential book that forms a staple of religious studies classes. In it James offers his now famous definition of religion:

Religion… shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude; so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine… The problem I have set myself is a hard one: … to defend … “experience” against “philosophy” as being the real backbone of religious life.

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Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester who studies star formation and stellar death using supercomputers. His new book, “The Constant Fire, Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate,” has just been published. He will be joining Reality Base to post an ongoing discussion of science and religion—you can read his previous posts here, and find more of his thoughts on science and the human prospect at the Constant Fire blog.

Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?

—John Calvin

This was my favorite quote. I discovered it at age 16 in Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, and have been using it in my Intro to Astronomy lectures for years. It seemed like the perfect embodiment of blind religion ignoring the fruits of understanding that scientific progress was willing to offer. Then, in writing my book on science and religion, I found a problem with Calvin’s words: He never said them.

The quote can traced to the 1899 work A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University. This book had enormous impact, setting attitudes for years within the scientific community about the proper attitude in the science v. religion debate. Now, a spate of literary sleuthing by historians leads them to conclude the quote must be considered suspect.

While White’s mistake is likely an honest one, the book has other flaws that point to the rigidity and inherited biases on the other side of the traditional science v. religion debate. Too often, scientists can seem so casually dismissive of the entire domain of human religious experience that it appears that not much study or scholarship lies behind the attitude. This approach we will call (thanks to the Occasional reporter) “The Snarky.”

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Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester who studies star formation and stellar death using supercomputers. His new book, “The Constant Fire, Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate,” has just been published. He will be joining Reality Base to post an ongoing discussion of science and religion—you can read his previous posts here, and find more of his thoughts on science and the human prospect at the Constant Fire blog.

It was all I could do to keep from hurling my jumbo buttered popcorn at the screen. A friend had taken me to see the new age hit “What the Bleep do We Know,” and a moment comes when one of the interviewees says, “Every morning I get up and change the quantum fields around me.” That was when the impulse to scream or laugh or throw the popcorn hit me. In the end, I just had to shake my head: It was just too silly.

In yesterday’s post, I identified what I called “The Sullen” as a dominant mode of talking about science and religion. The Sullen are the religious fundamentalists who angrily reject those scientific findings (evolutionary biology, physical cosmology, etc.) that conflict with their interpretation of scripture. Today, I will briefly touch on the other well-traveled road in public discourse on science and religion, which, for alliterative reasons, I call “The Silly.”

In the 1980s, two books, The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, permanently changed the popular conception of science and spirituality. These books sparked widespread interest in the confluence of science with eastern religious worldviews (Yogic and Buddhism). Quantum mechanics, the physics of subatomic phenomena, took center stage. Now the terms like “quantum healing” and the “observer phenomenon” have entered the lexicon of popular consciousness.

The influence of this perspective can be seen in any catalogue from an adult learning center where classes linking quantum physics with everything from past-life regression to crystal energy channeling can be found. It is remarkable how widely buzzwords from “quantum spirituality” have diffused. I once had the distinctly unreal experience of being told that I should purchase a “magnetic bed” (a bed with magnets glued to the frame) because quantum physics proved it would increase my well being.

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Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester who studies star formation and stellar death using supercomputers. His new book, “The Constant Fire, Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate,” has just been published. He will be joining Reality Base to post an ongoing discussion of science and religion—you can read his previous posts here, and find more of his thoughts on science and the human prospect at the Constant Fire blog.

I asked the bartender, what do you see?

Part man, Part Monkey.

Definitely

—Bruce Springsteen

Last week, I started laying down an argument that it was time to leave the traditional science v. religion argument behind. There were, I said, far richer and more compelling ways of thinking about these great human endeavors than tired combat between tired polarities. Now it’s time to get specific. I can’t go any further, though, without defining who and what the “traditional debate” means.

We begin with the most well known, vocal, and pointless promulgators of the traditional debate—those I call the Sullen. The Sullen are biblical literalists of one sort or another, and their descendants are in the Intelligent Design movement. They are “the Sullen” because of their anger at science for ignoring their imagined urgencies, and its continual ability to trash their arguments. It is the Sullen who have turned the metaphor of warfare between science and religion into a political reality.

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Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester who studies star formation and stellar death using supercomputers. His new book, “The Constant Fire, Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate,” has just been published. He will be joining Reality Base to post an ongoing discussion of science and religion—you can read his previous posts here, and find more of his thoughts on science and the human prospect at the Constant Fire blog.

Not surprisingly, I managed to piss off a few people with my last post , as well as generate some thoughtful responses (including Sean Carroll’s highly relevant thoughts). What I was thinking out loud about is the need for a different perspective on science and religion. The times demand both it, and our creativity. But getting anywhere new requires getting away from those ways of thinking that stopped being useful or interesting a long time ago.

The public debate on science and religion has two dominant forms: the Sullen and the Silly. The Sullen are the snarly legions of Fundamentalists, Creationists, and Literalists who have clogged the courtrooms and airwaves for decades. They drive the endless, pointless debate about evolution vs. scripture. We’ll push that rusted hulk an argument off a cliff in the next post.

The other mode of public debate—the Silly—focuses on new age enthusiasms for “quantum” spirituality. I’ll be happy to dance on that grave after we deal with the Sullen.

But before we get any further, we have to make sure we properly spread the blame, like manure, where it belongs. In case anyone thinks the goal is here is a snarkfest about the ignorance of the scientifically unsophisticated I’ll remind you of sciences’ own prejudices.

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Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester who studies star formation and stellar death using supercomputers. His new book, “The Constant Fire, Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate,” has just been published. He will be joining Reality Base to post an ongoing discussion of science and religion. You can read more of his thoughts on science and the human prospect at the Constant Fire blog.

If the change-fest in Washington last week taught us anything, it’s that we are long overdue for transcending rickety old categories and rusty old polarities. A particularly urgent place to start, given the dismal history of the last eight years, would be the traditional Science v. Religion debate, which is exhausted, ossified, and no longer speaks to the challenges we face as a species.

I am a practicing scientist (astrophysics) and, after writing for DISCOVER and other popular science magazines for a decade, I consider myself something of an evangelist of science’s methods and worldview. I have always been in love with science and, for the record, do not hold a belief in a supernatural deity. But, in a cosmic twist of fate, it was science that gave me a profound respect for the character of experience people have always called “sacred.” Through my scientific practice, I have gained respect not for religion as a means of social organization and control, but for what happens beneath the institutions where individuals encounter the world through their own, inmost experience.

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