Mashing scientific evidence into a pulpy soup of agenda-laden misinformation seems to be a common theme for the modern GOP. The latest (and arguably most egregious) example is outgoing EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, whose reign has been dominated by a poverty of factual information, with hard science routinely twisted to suit political designs.

In a scathing profile in the Philadelphia Enquirer (via ThinkProgress), writers John Shiffman and John Sullivan delve into the cult of mediocrity that dominated Johnson’s time at the agency. The piece is filled with forehead-slappers like the following:

Perhaps one of the best insights into Johnson’s vision for EPA can be found in written testimony he submitted to a Senate committee this year. In the document, Johnson laid out his top 11 goals.

No. 1 was clean energy, particularly approving drilling for “thousands of new oil and gas wells” on tribal and federal lands. No. 2 was homeland security.

Environmental enforcement and sound science ranked ninth and 10th.

And that’s not even the worst of it:

Johnson approved pesticide testing on human subjects, lowered the monetary value of a human life by $1 million, reduced air pollution reporting requirements for corporate farms, and altered a chemical risk-assessment program that has slowed analysis to a crawl.

To top it all off, Johnson is described as using the following reasoning against his critics:

He believes in the Bush agenda and, like his boss, said his resolve is fueled by his deep Christian beliefs.

It is a faith he developed early in life. Johnson’s strongest association outside the EPA is his relationship with his alma mater, Taylor University, one of the nation’s oldest evangelical colleges…

Johnson majored in biology. At Taylor, that includes discussion of creationism.

When asked to articulate his view on the creationism/science debate, Johnson responded with the following:

It’s not a clean-cut division. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there’s theistic or God-controlled evolution and there’s variations on all those themes.

Sure, there are variations. Unfortunately, none of them are grounded in actual fact. But then, neither are Johnson’s policies.

Related:
RB: Is Bobby Kennedy Really the “Anti-Science” Choice for EPA Head?
RB: Global Warming Denial in the Senate: The Latest Chapter
RB: Rant of the Day: Hitchens Slams Palin on Science

Earlier this month, the Sixth International Conference on Creationism took place in Pittsburgh. Sponsored by the Creation Science Fellowship and the Institute for Creation Research, the week-long event billed itself as a “highly technical, peer reviewed symposium, with planned rebuttals and discussions.” Papers submitted for the conference were put through a “technical review process” that included the following criteria:

Is the Summary’s topic important to the development of the creation model?

Does the Summary’s topic provide an original contribution to the creation
model?

Is this Summary formulated within a young-earth, young-universe framework?

Does this Summary provide evidence of faithfulness to the grammaticohistorical/normative interpretation of Scripture?

Of course, precisely which peers did the reviewing hasn’t been revealed, though it doesn’t take much effort to guess that every one of them is a staunch creationist of the “young-Earth” variety.

Jason Rosenhouse, who writes EvolutionBlog and has been covering the conference in detail, had the following to report:

Sadly, while I have generally been impressed with the personality and temperament of many of the people I have met at these conferences, the fact remains that they are hopelessly ignorant of science. This ignorance is exacerbated by the annoying fact that so many of them fancy themselves highly knowledgeable indeed.

His point is apparent in some of the papers accepted for discussion:

* Big Bang: Fact or Fiction?
* The Beginning of Human Life: Re-Evaluating the Biblical Evidence
* Relativistic String Dynamics Support Biblical Creationism
* Electrodynamic Origin of the Force of Gravity
* Oceanic Circulation Trends … during Noah’s Flood

Relativistic string dynamics? Electrodynamic origins? These titles may be the equivalent of political rhetoric (sound and fury signifying just about nothing) but they certainly sound impressive and “scientific.” At the very least, the CSF and ICR are going to some pretty grand lengths to paint the rubric of “legitimate academic research” on a set of beliefs that are, as Rosenhouse describes it, “a patina of science and calm argumentation, with the revival tent never lurking far beneath the surface.”

Not to be outdone, the Atheist Alliance International Convention will be held on September 25th – 28th, and will feature a Mexican buffet, an awards dinner with a performance by Jill Sobule, and a guest speaker list including Secular Coalition lobbyist Lori Lipman Brown, Skeptic Magazine publisher Michael Shermer, and P.Z. Myers. At least the atheists know how to have a little fun.

Image: iStockPhoto

Some time between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, something wonderful happened inside the heads of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The light went on. We woke up to a sky full of repeating patterns, to an Earth incessantly shaped by wind and water, to environments shared with a wild abundance of life. Most importantly, we woke up to interior lives that responded to this vast “found” world with an emerging culture of painting, carvings, and music.

An essential aspect of this new human culture was mythological narratives of origins and endings. These grand myth systems set us in context against the backdrop of the experienced universe. Our mythologies created meaning by both explaining the world and interpreting the human place within it. Imagination and observation were braided strands of these narratives. Builders of Neolithic monuments with their multiple astronomical orientations were, in their way, paying attention to the world while simultaneously attending to internal responses to the night sky and the cycle of the seasons.

These were our beginnings. These were the imperatives that would later evolve into the modern forms of science and religion. We have been at this game for a long time.

The reason I, as a non-believing scientist, care about the so-called science and religion debate is because it touches something very deep and very ancient in us. As a passionate advocate for science, I believe the current form of the debate, with its insistence on a narrow choice between faith and reason, misses something elemental in our long march across those millennia. Asking questions about science and spiritual endeavor (as opposed to institutional religion) means going beyond what science explains.

While the tired traditional debate is always about explanations (the sullen arguments for creationism) a broader discussion does not have to keep this focus. In the end, we are asking what science means as cultural endeavor. We are asking how it creates meaning as a background of ideas and stories which sets us against our day-to-day lives. And that is exactly the point at which we might see something simultaneously ancient, new, and full of possibilities.

A different and enlivened perspective on science and religion would remember where we came from over 50,000 years. It would acknowledge the function within us that spiritual endeavor carried for all that time. It would understand how we cannot help but carry on with these traditions of thinking and feeling. Then it would use what we have learned and take us someplace new.

Science is one of the supreme achievements of human culture—it is one measure of the best we are capable of, and the best we can aspire towards. Our lives have been made immeasurably richer through its practice and its boons. What has mostly been missed, however, is the capacity of its worldview to open us up to that character of life that can only be called sacred.

Rather than thinking of this contentious word “sacred” as speaking to some imaginary supernatural realm, we could see it differently. We could see it as that attitude of attention that science asks of us in response to even the smallest thing. Every sunrise, every birdsong, every anthill passed on the way to some errand is worthy of rapt of attention if we are willing to step through that doorway. Science is not a philosophy; it’s an approach to the world with rules which guide our attention and reason. In that approach, it shows us what is sacred in the mundane. It makes the ordinary stand out and speak for itself. Through that attention, science simultaneously connects us with many millennia of spiritual tradition, and turns those traditions on their head. What is sacred is not part of some far-off realm of ideals and angels. It is right before us, always.

There is no doubt that the fruits of science and technology have enriched our lives. There can also be no doubt that our world has become saturated with its poisons as well. From climate change to resource depletion, we face issues so vast and so new that marshaling the collective will to act will require new mythologies of our planetary habitation. Any path forward to get us through this dangerous bottleneck cannot focus simply on the application of science. It must go farther to embrace the wise application of science. That will not be a simple matter of reason. Our response to the challenges we face will also come from what we hold most dear, what overflows with value for us. In a word our response will come from what we take to be sacred. That is why the science and religion debate matters. That is why finding a different perspective on science and spiritual endeavor is about more than echo chamber debates about creationism vs. Darwin.

Fifty-thousand years ago, when we began the radical, ceaselessly creative act of creating culture, the seeds of both science and religion were already present. Now, with a fully mature scientific tradition developed, we come to another turning point in evolution that will likely demand a creativity that is just as radical.

I’ll keep posting on these other topics at www.constantfire.com while starting work on my next book (and continuing with the astrophysics day job of course).

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.

Distasteful as it sounds to some, this explanation may, however, still be true. Or it may be that other levels of explanation are required. These explanations can be scientific and empirical and don’t ask for the “immortal soul” of traditional religions, yet aren’t quite as stridently minimalist as classic reduction.

This is a new domain for me and I knew, when I started writing my book, that I would eventually have to look into the emerging field of “consciousness studies.” My friend in the philosophy department here, Brad Weslake, teaches a course on philosophy of mind, and recommended the now-famous paper by Joseph Levine on explanatory gaps in explanations of consciousness.

I provide the link here for others to peruse and think about, too.

So what are you: a computer, a receiver, or an emergent set of dynamical processes that cannot be predicted by just your atoms? What else did I leave out?

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.

With classical physics, things were easy—it was all just billiard balls. Not so with quantum physics. As Feynman famously quipped, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” Interpretations abound, but agreement does not. Given the central role QM plays in understanding what the world is made of, this situation causes a lot of consternation for physicists. The problem boils down to reality, what’s in it, and what access we have to it.

Here at the University of Rochester, we’ve been running seminars on physics and philosophy. Last Friday, Peter Lewis, a philosopher from the University of Miami, visited and gave a great talk on the now famous “Many-Worlds Interpretation” of QM. His argument turned on probabilities in the Many-Worlds Interpretation. Rather than run through his reasoning on that topic, I thought it would be worth a note on the interpretation itself because it speaks so loudly to the central issue of what scientists think we are, ultimately, aiming for.

The problem with quantum mechanics is that the basic entity of its mathematical machinery—the so-called wave function—does not give a single prediction for the outcome of experiments. Instead it provides a description of many outcomes with associated probabilities which all seem to exist simultaneously. It is not until a measurement is made that the wave function gets suspended (collapsed is the term) to yield a single answer. Or, at least, that is the way the standard interpretation of QM tells the story.

This bothers lot physicists who like to take their mathematical descriptions of reality seriously. Why should a perfectly good equation that describes the evolution of the world (the wave function) go away just because someone made a measurement? To deal with this strange state of affairs, Hugh Everett proposed what would become the Many-Worlds Interpretation in the late 1950s (Bryce Dewitt did a lot of development on the idea, too). The Many-Worlds solution is, in a sense, a platonic one. The mathematical physics stays put, but our notion of what constitutes reality changes. Well, that is an understatement—it really, really changes.

According to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, the wave function is never suspended. Every time a measurement is made, the world splits off into as many copies as there are pieces (terms) in the wave functions. If you are the lab technician making the measurement, you split off into multiple copies, as does the entire universe with you. In each copy, a different value of the measurement is recorded. After the measurement, each copy world goes on evolving and splitting as more quantum events occur.

Sounds wacky, don’t it? Why would anyone believe in a universe that is endlessly splitting into (as far as we know) unobservable slightly-different versions of itself? Here is the point at which, as a physicist or philosopher, your biases will likely show themselves.

People will line up behind the Many-Worlds Interpretation because of its consistency. Its advantage is that it keeps the math whole. There is no special pleading about consciousness intruding on the measurement. There is no sense that our access to the world is limited. You have a beautiful equation. It describes the evolution of physical reality, and that is that. People who favor the Many-Worlds Interpretation tend to be Platonists somewhere in their scientific souls. Recall that Plato argued that behind the world we see lies an ideal world made of purely mathematical forms. This idea dovetails with the worldview of many theoretical physicists. Timeless, immutable, mathematical laws govern the world. That is what makes physics so indescribably beautiful. Some people, like Max Tegmark, take their Platonism further—the world is not just governed by that math; it is that math (you can read more about Max’s views in an interview I did with him in the July 2008 issue of DISCOVER).

The Many-Worlds Interpretation seems crazy to a lot of people, physicists and non-physicists alike. Personally, as a theorist of the astrophysical sort, I see its allure but remain suspicious of the enormous commitment it asks. What may be most interesting about it, however, is how, by taking things to an extreme, it raises two of the oldest and deepest questions we can ask:

What truly exists, and what kind of access do we have to it?

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.

Unfortunately, a year later, at an astronomical meeting designed to present new results, Lyne stood before a large audience and announced that he and Bailes had gotten it wrong. With news cameras rolling, Lyne detailed how their analysis of the data had been in error. They were withdrawing their claim of discovery. There was a long pause, and then the audience came to its feet in a standing ovation.

Some argue that science is amoral, and that no inherent ethical conclusions can be drawn from scientific findings. There is, however, one precept that we scientists all take as holy from the time we begin as graduate students: “Tell the truth.” There is no greater sin in science than falsifying data or conclusions. Scientists are asked to let the world speak for itself, to observe without bias or preconceived ideas. In the ideal, scientists are asked to witness the world in its own great pathways of beauty, without the filter of prior desires or demands.

Brutal honesty about the character of the conclusions drawn in the investigations is a hallmark of sincere scientific practice. The scientist has to be honest with herself about the integrity of the result, and the possibility of error. That is why the audience saw Lyne and Bailes as heroes to be honored, not as failures to be shunned. Their narrative becomes part of the mythos of science, by calling its practitioners to a set a core of values that includes absolute honesty.

This “ethic of investigation,” as I call it, is, I believe, another living parallel between scientific practice and authentic human spiritual endeavor. Such a parallel can only be seen, however, when the emphasis in the comparison shifts. I have argued many times that when religions attempt to force science to fit their belief systems, they invariably lose. Much of the history of the science and religion debate for the last 400 years has consisted of some religion trying to figure out how to deal with the scientific truths being laid at its doorstep.

There are more than enough examples of religions attempting strange (and sometime dangerous) mental gymnastics to hold both views at once. The creationists are one example, and the Pope’s incredible opinions on condoms and HIV/AIDS is another. But, as I and many others have argued, people feel themselves to be religious for many reasons. To ignore the imperatives in religious experience that push some people towards a greater, more compassionate, more open view of the world because of others’ prejudices seems like wearing blinders. That is the reason to invoke the ethic of investigation.

In the aspiration to know the world (including one’s interior response to it ), we have to adhere to the ways it presents itself to us. Any understanding of the world’s truth, or the meaning of our response to it, must be approached with great effort and the willingness to accept what the investigation demands.

Scientific investigation is hard work and demands honesty and a willingness to shy away from easy answers. Is there a flip side in the domain of spiritual endeavor? From what I have seen and think, at its best, the answer is yes. When experiences, and the aspirations which flow from them, force individuals to re-examine their own biases and take actions that are anything but comfortable, you can find that same ethic. Gandhi and Martin Luther King are famous examples, but there are many others.

The religious scholar Huston Smith claims one can evaluate the depth of a person’s attainment in any religious practice by the change it brings in their behavior, meaning the way they live their lives. An enlarged circle of compassion is a hallmark of such change. Of course, you don’t have to be engaged in some form of spiritual pursuit to have this happen—humanist perspectives will do fine. But it seems silly to brush away how often aspiration, based on encounters with a personally-experienced sense of sacred, leads to a “strenuous life” of commitment and compassion.

This is an important point because recognizing these kinds of parallels might bring us to a communal application such as an “ethic of investigation.” As we face the vast and challenging truth of issues like climate change, a truth revealed through scientific practice, we will need to be determined in our willingness to let the world speak for itself. Once those truths are acknowledged, we then have choices in our response. Marshaling the compassionate, determined action that flows from different forms of spiritual practice—practice embodied by Gandhi, King and countless others—is one possible response.

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 find these lines describing “religious experience” in Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. This slim volume is part of the cannon of academic religious studies programs across the world. The book was published in 1917, and Otto, a liberal German theologian, used it as an attempt to direct discussion about religion away from theoretical gymnastics and focus instead on experience. With typical German precision, he uses a razor-thin scalpel of analysis and metaphor to understand the character of these experiences. In one potent example, he invokes being overwhelmed by great music as a cousin of “religious experience,” be it a Bach etude or Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” (hey, it works for me).

Otto wants to make clear that awe is not simply appreciation, but something much deeper and elemental. Religious experience is, in his words, “awe-ful.” It is exactly at that point that we can step away from Otto’s ultimate concern with the metaphysics of deity (not my thing) and find a powerful and potent path to think about science and human spiritual endeavor.

Time and again, when people encounter the universe revealed through the power of science, they will use the term “awe” to describe their experience. It’s a common reaction to Hubble images of dying stars, electron microscopy of viral nano-worlds, or even enveloping descriptions of evolution’s elegance in the development of new species. I know people have this reaction because they tell me about it. After giving numerous talks on science, I can count the people who come up afterward and describe their reactions with the word “awe.” Something, for them, has happened.

Awe can mean overpowering or overflowing. That makes sense to me in this context. Sometimes it will be defined as “dread.” That seems too negative for my tastes, but from these same talks some people tell me that the grand scales revealed by astrophysics make them feel uncomfortable and displaced. So perhaps, for them, dread was a part of the experience, too. Definitions aside, the point here is simple—you know it when you feel it. And there lies the crux of the biscuit.

I have tried to argue that a more enlivened perspective on science and religion could begin with experience. The experience of awe is a good place to start. Why? Because there are many open-minded and thoughtful individuals who come from different perspectives. Some call themselves atheist, some are agnostics, and some are believers. Finding a common ground for these folks would be a good thing. Building a language that goes beyond easy antagonism and touches something true about human experience would free us all to think more creatively and in new ways about our place in a world saturated with the fruits of science.

So if Otto identifies awe as the defining characteristic of experiences traditionally called religious, and if that same sense of awe is characteristic of encounters with science’s grand vision, why not start exactly at this point? Why not use this kind of experience, freed from metaphysical speculation, to identify a new axis around which discussions of both science and human spiritual endeavor can turn? This capacity for awe is ancient. By focusing on it, we might learn more about ourselves, our response to the world, and the real context of the science we cherish.

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.

In my day job, I spend a lot of time thinking about how stars form. The assembly of stars (and planets) constitutes one of the great frontiers of modern astronomy. With the discovery of hundreds of planets orbiting other stars, the co-joined questions of how solar systems form and evolve has taken on a new urgency. Life will form on planets and planets will form around stars. But where, and how, do stars form? That is a question you can now explore directly in the finest and oldest tradition in science—by playing around.

From a very unusual collaboration between DISCOVER, the University of Rochester, the National Science Foundation, and my good friends at Second Avenue Software, we are happy to bring you “Star Formation: The Game.”

Over the last three decades, astronomers have worked hard to develop an accurate picture of single star formation as the gravitational collapse of large interstellar clouds. This was a huge achievement, but it was only the first step. With better telescopes operating at longer cloud-penetrating wavelengths, it became clear that star formation was a family affair. Worse still, the families can be pretty dysfunctional. That is what “Star Formation: The Game” is all about.

In many star-forming wombs, the collapsing cloud will produce thousands of stars. A few of these will be massive giants that are 10 times heavier than the sun. These high-mass stars live fast and die hard, producing torrents of UV radiation, powerful stellar winds and, finally, apocalyptic self immolation in the form of a supernova. All this energy is dumped back into the same cloud from which the massive star formed—a process called “feedback.”

Feedback can be good news or bad news for sibling stars. It can tear the cloud apart, short-circuiting any new star formation, or it can sweep cloud gas together to form new stars. No one is sure yet which process is more important. It’s all about a competition between cloud destruction and new star formation. What better place to build a competitive science based-video game?

The point of “Star Formation: The Game” is to let people learn about a specific astronomical process in a very different, very non-traditional way. The game lets you drop new stars into a cloud that then goes supernova. Your job is to try and corral the cloud gas with these blast waves, sweeping gas together so that it becomes dense enough to form new stars before the whole cloud is blown away. Of course, if you want your science served in a more traditional manner, you can shoot over to a story I wrote about star formation and feedback in DISCOVER’s February issue that accompanies the game.

We very much hope you enjoy it. Tell your friends (including your video game playing kids), and we would love to hear your feedback.

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 first encountered his work as an undergraduate after I came out of Intro to Quantum Mechanics wondering who had just mugged my sense of reality. I went straight to the physics library to wrap my head around what I was learning, and ran into his books.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, quantum physics is the theory of the atomic realm. It is extraordinary in its predictive capacity, and exasperating in its inability to tell us what, exactly, we are studying. When asked directly about quantum mechanical descriptions of, say, the electron, my professor said: “The electron is that to which we ascribe the properties of the electron.” That nicely summarizes where quantum leaves us in terms of thinking about what is really out there. The world is full of interpretations of the math, but no one knows which view of reality is correct.

D’Espagnat has spent his career looking deeply into the structure of the quantum physics and working with leaders in the field like John Wheeler. For the issues we have been taking on in these posts, it is his views on the relation between science and ideas of reality that are of interest. He has spoken of a “veil” that hides the view of ultimate reality from us. In his thinking, science provides a glimpse behind that veil—but there are limits.

For your reading pleasure, I include links to two articles on this subject. The first is a description, in his own words, about quantum mechanics and its implications. The second is a piece from the BBC on the “meaning” of physics.

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.

Ok, ok—it was none of those things. Still, it was great fun, and I really enjoyed participating, and learned a great deal. It’s possible that we might do it again. There were so many topics left on the table.

One point we raised that I think could use more discussion is the persistent metaphor of the Map and Terrain. It came it up during our dialog, and Eliezer has made use of the image in some of his writings. Remarkably, and for entirely different reasons, I employed the same image in my book. Not surprisingly, we have very different ideas of what composes the Map, the Terrain, and their proper relationship. The idea we share is that the terrain is reality—what is out there. What we don’t share are assumptions about what we can assume about that reality, what kind of access we have to it, and what one should include in it.

My first reason for thinking about the map and the terrain with a more expanded sensibility is the activity of science itself. The coolest thing about science is that, in its essence, it’s an open exploration—an honest appraisal of what we know and what we do not know. If you have already assumed the terrain has a certain form, then there’s a good chance you will blind yourself to what you did not expect. I am suspicious of any attempt to box up the fruit of scientific exploration with preconceived ideas of reductionism or anything else. Nature is invariably more creative than we are.

My second reason for taking a different tack on the map and the terrain is that I take the questions quantum mechanics raises seriously. It’s been 100 years since the invention of this remarkable, and powerful, theory of the microworld, and we still do not have a common interpretation for its ontology. We don’t know what it tells us about what is, actually, out there. There remain a variety of ways of interpreting the foundational equations (the wave function, etc.) and they range from the semi-mundane (GRW) to the wacky-sounding (many-worlds) to the very wacky-sounding (John Wheeler’s “It from Bit“). As an example, tomorrow Christopher Fuchs will be speaking here at the University of Rochester, advocating a “Bayesian” view. In this perspective, quantum mechanics tells us just as much about what we can know about the world as what actually exists independent of us.

In light of all these interpretations, making grand a priori assumptions about the nature of the terrain seems more than unwarranted—it seems like an act of faith. The world is out there kicking back for sure, but what kind of access we get to it remains an issue of contentious debate.

Finally, I believe we are worth including in the terrain. I like the idea of a fully objective, fully accessible reality as much as the next guy, and as a practicing scientist I strive towards articulating its shape every day in my research. The truth is, I have never had a direct experience of it, and most likely never will. I am trapped behind these two eyes. I am trapped with a perspective, trapped in time with all the joy and sorrow that entails. I don’t have a God’s eye view of Space and Time, and neither does anyone else. We can believe, for example, in a platonic realm of pure mathematical form and beauty, but we don’t experience it directly. We only argue philosophically over its existence. That is why human experience is worth including in the terrain.

Thinking broadly, I take seriously our response to the world as it is revealed by scientific practice, poetry, art, music, and finally by the domains of experience embracing the sense of what we have always called sacred. For me, these are all part of our terrain.

The world will always surprise us with its ceaseless creativity, and it seems like a bad idea to limit it, or us. The terrain always gets the last word, and it can only be known by exploration.

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.

So why, if I am trying to work out a new approach to science and human spiritual endeavor, would I spend 600 words in my last post jumping up and down about Texas, their school board, and creationists? That was the question some people had for me, so I think it’s worth reflecting for a minute on what’s at stake in all this.

I have argued that the traditional debate in science and religion takes three forms: the Sullen (creationism/Intelligent Design), the Silly (New Age quantum enthusiasm), and the Snarky (out-of-hand dismissal of all sentiment associated with spirituality/religion). These three options define the edges of the debate. But because each one takes an absolutist position on issues that are really pretty fuzzy, it affords them a soapbox from which to yell loudly and with great vehemence. In the midst of the yelling, it can and will be difficult to trace out the outlines of a more nuanced position that speaks to the broad concerns of human being.

What we seek is a stance that honors the integrity of scientific practice, but allows the full measure of our humanity and human response to the world (both interior and exterior). Tracing out those positions becomes particularly critical as we come to face harsh choices about a future which will, inevitably, demand that choices be made involving science, technology, and values.

I spent an entire chapter in my book exploring the traditional debate and why it had exhausted itself. That does not mean, however, that its potential to cause real problems has gone away. Of the three traditional positions, it is the Sullen who, through well-funded and well-defined political activity, are most intent on forcing their views on others.

This is why, from time to time, we are all going to have to turn around and deal with the urgencies forced on us by the traditional debate. As an astrophysicist, I am particularly sensitive to the state of the American scientific enterprise. It is impossible not to see what is happening in Texas as a fundamental threat to the health and vibrancy of this great national treasure. That means it’s imperative for all who can speak out to do so when the need arises.

Later this week, I will do a post on Intelligent Design and its problems. For now, it is enough to reaffirm the imperative to search for a language that can describe science and its context in a human world that includes a sense of what is sacred. At the same time, we can also acknowledge that effort does not exclude a confrontation with intolerance. At times, it will be demanded of us all.

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.

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).

I have written before about the schizophrenia of the creationists. They are willing to accept the fruits of science that ensure their quality of life and health, but feel free to reject those parts that conflict with their particular interpretation of their particular religion. Perhaps we should demand some consistency and ask that they hand in their cell phones and relinquish the use of antibiotics. The self-imposed blindness is maddening.

These creationists are practicing religious intolerance in a nation founded on the opposite principle. The part of the story that does not get enough press, however, is the damage this does to the scientific and, hence, economic enterprise of our country. Students in countries we are bound to compete against are not being subjected to this pruning of the scientific tree. A 12-year-old interested in biology in India, China, or Germany is not being given half the story because some bullies in the community made it onto a school board.

Worse, by striking at the roots of science education, they threaten the scientific enterprise of the nation—our greatest resource and the engine of our strength. These school board charades are a threat that must be confronted.
In 1955 the federal government stepped into the long battle for racial equality in education, and the desegregation of schools began. That was a good idea. Maybe it’s time for mandatory national standards of science education (which include evolution) to be determined by scientists, and not bullies.

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.

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.

From the biologist Ursula Goodenough:

We are all, each one of us, ordained to live out our lives in the context of ultimate questions such as:

Why is there anything at all rather than nothing?

Where do the laws of physics come from?

Why does the Universe seem so strange?

My response to such questions has been to articulate a covenant with mystery. Others of course prefer answers, answers that often include a concept of God. These answers are by definition beliefs because they can neither be proven nor refuted…. The opportunity to develop personal beliefs in response to questions of ultimacy, including the active decision to hold no beliefs at all, is central to the human experience. The important part, I believe, is that the questions be openly encountered. To take the Universe on—to ask Why Are Things As They Are—is to generate the foundation for everything else. [Emphasis added.]

Why does the Universe feel so strange? The more I learn about it through science, art, and all the other ways human beings come to know, the more delightfully strange it feels. And that, as the poets say, is a mystery to be lived, not a question to be answered.

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.

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.

My own direction has been to look to aspiration. Aspiration is what I call the Constant Fire. The aspiration to know what is true and what is real is, I believe, an ancient imperative in us. We stumbled into self-consciousness a hundred thousand or so years ago and slowly awakened to our interior responses to the external world. When an experience of the world took us beyond concerns about mere survival, when an experience made the world’s elemental presence, its Being, stand out on its own, then we encountered life’s “sacred” character. These experiences were hierophanies: gateways to that sense of the world’s innermost luminous nature. The aspiration to draw closer to the barely expressible content of those experiences is the source of the strenuous effort that can manifest as a scientific investigation, the creation of art, poetry, music, or perhaps an engagement in some form of “spiritual life.”

The aspiration, born of experience, to know and draw closer to the immediate and intimate cosmos is the root of it all. Make no mistake: Science and spiritual endeavor are not the same. They function differently, ask very different questions, and demand different kinds of attention. But in a common aspiration we can find them drawing into an active, parallel complementarity. That, I believe, is a different and better way of thinking about science and religion than endlessly throwing mud pies over evolution, creationism, and some group’s definition of deity.

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.

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.

That is where the science v. religion debate becomes important. When religious institutions demand rigid adherence to dogmas and creed in the name of certainty, scientists like me—used to open-ended discourse and discovery—rightly cringe. But when, in the name of science, the argument is made that all truth must follow from a narrow reductionism, others with broader views cringe.

When science becomes scientism in the name of certainty, some essential creative response to the world is lost, just as it is in the rush to religious dogma. In both cases, certainty can be seen as reaction. It can be really scary out there, and in response, people want to something “Big” to hold on to.

As a species, I think we have a choice bearing down us, and which choice we make will likely determine our fate. The harder we clamp down in the name of certainty, the more likely we are to end up with unyielding intolerance in one form or another—which is not likely to help much with the large, looming and potentially lethal challenges we face.

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.