By Design: Science and the Search for God

299 Pages·2004·3.91 MB·English

by  Larry Witham

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CONTENTS
Preface
Rethinking Science
1 Darwin Triumphant
2 Science in the Dock
Intimations of Design
3 The Cosmic Center
4 Looking for Light
5 The Dialogue
6 Life’s Origin
7 The Movement
8 By Design
The Human Dimension
9 The War of Words
10 The Tree of Life
11 Mind and Brain
12 Leaps of Faith
Acknowledgments
Bibliographical Essay

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PREFACE
F
or the past twenty years, new curiosity has arisen
about an age-old question: Does nature point to
something beyond itself—toward a God, per-
haps, or a transcendent order? Since the demise
of natural theology in the 1800s, there have been strong taboos
against using science—the measuring of physical matter—as a
gauge of God or a higher reality. But in our time we have seen
that stigma slowly fall away, allowing a renewed interest in what
used to be called “reading the Book of Nature,” a metaphor sug-
gesting that there is either an Author or, at the least, a text imbued
with meaning.
One survey of well-educated Americans, conducted by Skeptic
editor Michael Shermer and MIT professor Frank Sulloway, found
that the strongest reason for believing in God was seeing “good
design, natural beauty, perfection, [or] complexity” in the world.
The journal Science wondered recently about a “thaw in the ice
between science and faith,” and Scientific American reported that
four in ten ranking scientists can investigate nature and believe
in a personal God. Though the legacy of late-nineteenth-century
science is antagonistic toward the concept of a deity, God-talk has
nevertheless come back into favor at the beginning of the twenti-
eth-first century.
What is the modern-day believer to make of this turn of
events? Well, the issue at stake rarely entails claims of proof or
disproof of God, except when the most ardent skeptics and evan-
gelistic ministries engage in battle. A truer picture of the situation
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is this: slowly, almost imperceptibly, science may be giving believers
more ways to argue that God’s existence is a better explanation of
the cosmos than atheistic materialism. Even that qualified asser-
tion, needless to say, is quite sufficient for raucous controversy and
a lively story.
In this book, I summarize the new mood in a series of
sketches, venturing descriptions of the events, ideas, people,
institutions and controversies that are part of this ongoing debate
between science and belief. Another goal is to give the reader a
condensed overview of those areas of contemporary science that
impinge on the ultimate questions: the origin of the cosmos, of life
on Earth, and of humanity especially. Evolution theory, genetics
and neuroscience are of course central to the biological issues.
The new interest in a possible rapprochement between God
and scientific rationality is manifested in two recent developments.
The first can be traced to the dialogue between the Catholic
Church and the science establishment. With beginnings in mid-
twentieth-century discussions, it became prominent on the world
stage with Pope John Paul II’s celebration of Einstein’s birthday
in 1979, and with the establishment of the John Templeton
Foundation, which in the 1990s poured millions of dollars into
such projects as research on “evidence of universal purpose in the
cosmos.”
The second movement goes under the portmanteau name
“intelligent design.” A very distant cousin of modern creationism,
it has become flag-bearer in the debate about natural theology and
the limits of science: under its banner are gathered a motley war
party of credentialed scientists and thinkers who ardently wish to
loosen the grip of what they view as dogmatic naturalism. What
marks this coalition is its ability to put aside the Bible as an issue,
revisiting instead the design arguments and the evidence from
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physics and biology that, according to the Shermer/Sulloway sur-
vey, are still quite persuasive as reasons for belief.
According to public opinion surveys in the United States,
belief in God or a universal spirit is the rule, not the exception,
so this book is not offered as an antidote to religious doubt. And
the American people’s strong tendency toward metaphysical belief
arises from a vast array of motives and experiences; persuasion by
the evidence of science can be one reason for belief, but perhaps a
relatively minor one.
Yet this is a scientific age, and believers willing to acknowl-
edge the power of science will want to reconcile their convictions
with the latest findings. For atheistic materialists, the “scientific
naturalism” promulgated by Thomas Huxley still holds sway—a
stance that either denies God’s existence or relegates the question
itself to irrelevancy. At the opposite pole are the biblical creation-
ists: hoping to harmonize nature and science with a literal reading
of Genesis, they are willing, in cases of conflict, for revelation to
trump factual discoveries.
In the following pages, the champions of the materialist
school will appear frequently; after all, they voice the orthodoxy
of establishment science. The Bible creationists make only cameo
appearances as part of the historical background. My interest
is situated in the middle ground between the atheists and the
fundamentalists: this is where the dialogue emerging from the
science-and-religion and the intelligent design movements truly
takes place.
Among the occupants of this territory are the “Spinozans,”
named after the formidable Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spi-
noza, the hero of Einstein, who himself acknowledged a “cosmic
religious feeling.” For these thinkers, God is mysteriously one with
the laws of nature. This pantheistic view of deity has been labeled
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by proponents the “God of the philosophers,” and by more tradi-
tional theists “no God at all.” But that is part of the debate. Enter-
ing the science-and-religion dialogue with zeal, Spinozans reject
what they regard as the humdrum reductionism of the materialists.
Instead, they prefer to talk about “emergent properties”—qualita-
tive changes that manifest in unforeseeable phenomena. And they
are not afraid of using words like purpose, meaning and design.
Another party inhabiting the middle ground are the classic
monotheists, who differ on how a personal God may actually oper-
ate in nature. One faction—comprising modernist Christians and
theistic evolutionists—prefer to see God in the Big Bang origin of
the universe and in its perfection of fine-tuning; but they don’t see
God as intervening directly and miraculously in nature. Alongside
them—and frequently rivals in the fiercest arguments about God
and science—are the design advocates themselves.
These people accept that God may actively intervene in
nature, in addition to working through natural processes. They
search for “marks of intelligence” in the universe. And, as in the
boisterous days of Victorian natural theology, they argue that a
sufficiently complex signature must point to a Signer. Design
arguments today are usually made with an accompanying attack
on Darwinism, doubling the emotional level of an already intense
debate.
The modern search for God has another, age-old component:
the classic question of evil. Many have used the existence of moral
and natural evil—torture and genocide, or catastrophes such as
plagues and earthquakes—as arguments against God’s existence.
In similar fashion, God has been persuasively defended by compar-
ing such realities with the overwhelming goodness that arguably
is necessary, not only for unforced acts of individual generosity,
but for the existence of the cosmos in the first place. This great
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enigma lurks in the wings, and I have no intention of elaborating
on it here.
A century ago, the American psychologist William James, in
his Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, stressed that evil is an
inescapable fact of human life, and that people who tend toward
a morbid or melancholy view of life have a more realistic response
than people who are inattentively sunny and optimistic. His point
was that temperament often determines one’s belief system.
As a conclusion for this book, James is apropos. He has
received much attention of late for the centennial of his famous
1902 lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience. While his views
remain controversial, some of his enduring insights will provide
touchstones for the contemporary fanfare over science and faith.
But we begin with another one-hundredth anniversary, the Dar-
win Centennial of 1959, a time when science was feeling far more
certain of its victory over God than it is today.
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RETHINKING SCIENCE
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1
DARWIN TRIUMPHANT
T
he East African midday calm was shattered
by Mary Leakey’s scream, “I’ve got him!” She
had just brought the Land Rover to a rattling
halt, sending a swirl of dust through the base
camp. Her cry shook her husband, Louis, the white-haired fossil
hunter, from a feverish nap: “I’ve got him! I’ve got him!” This was
in July 1959.
Since 1935, when Mary left England to follow Louis to
Africa, they had been repeatedly scouring the Olduvai Gorge in
Tanzania. This earthen gash, which reveals two-million-year-old
hardened sediments, as yet had yielded only animal fossils, stone
axes and snakes. But now the “long quest had ended,” said Louis, a
Cambridge-educated scientist and adventurer. “After all our hoping
and hardship and sacrifice, at last we had reached our goal—we
had discovered the world’s oldest known human.”
That morning, Mary had gone alone to the gorge with
their two Dalmatians, wearing her broad-brimmed straw hat and
crawling among the lowest rocks of the three-hundred-foot walls.
The noon heat usually signaled quitting time, and Mary had her
epiphany just before that when she came face to face with a bulky
cranium, jaw and molars. When Louis went to the dig with her,
he too felt exultation. “The teeth were projecting from the rock
face, smooth and shining and quite obviously human,” he later