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<\/div>\nBy GEORGE JOHNSON (NYT)<\/p>\n
Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that \u201cthe world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,\u201d or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for \u201cprogress in spiritual discoveries\u201d to an atheist \u2014 Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book \u201cThe God Delusion\u201d is a national best-seller.<\/p>\n
Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects \u2014 testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.<\/p>\n
Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.<\/p>\n
Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.<\/p>\n
She was not entirely kidding. \u201cWe should let the success of the religious formula guide us,\u201d Dr. Porco said. \u201cLet\u2019s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome \u2014 and even comforting \u2014 than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.\u201d<\/p>\n
She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.<\/p>\n
There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of \u201canti-Templeton\u201d), the La Jolla meeting, \u201cBeyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,\u201d rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)<\/p>\n
A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is \u201ca mustard seed of DNA\u201d) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as \u201cbad poetry,\u201d while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is \u201cbrainwashing\u201d and \u201cchild abuse\u201d) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had \u201cnot a flicker\u201d of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.<\/p>\n
After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called \u201cpop conflict books\u201d like Dr. Dawkins\u2019s \u201cGod Delusion,\u201d as \u201ccommercialized ideological scientism\u201d \u2014 promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.<\/p>\n
That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, \u201cBlind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,\u201d was written to counter \u201cgarbage research\u201d financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.<\/p>\n
With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of \u201cThe Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,\u201d were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. \u201cThe core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,\u201d said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of \u201cThe End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason\u201d and \u201cLetter to a Christian Nation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery religion is making claims about the way the world is,\u201d he said. \u201cThese are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.\u201d<\/p>\n
By shying away from questioning people\u2019s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. \u201cI don\u2019t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, \u201cThe First Three Minutes,\u201d that \u201cthe more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,\u201d went a step further: \u201cAnything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n
With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are six billion people in the world,\u201d said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. \u201cIf we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming \u2014 it is like believing in the fairy godmother.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople need to find meaning and purpose in life,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think we want to take that away from them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. \u201cI think we need to respect people\u2019s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Earth isn\u2019t 6,000 years old,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.\u201d But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being \u2014 Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever \u2014 is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. \u201cScience does not make it impossible to believe in God,\u201d Dr. Krauss insisted. \u201cWe should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. \u201cI am utterly fed up with the respect that we \u2014 all of us, including the secular among us \u2014 are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,\u201d he said. \u201cChildren are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of \u201ca den of vipers.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWith a few notable exceptions,\u201d he said, \u201cthe viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?\u201d<\/p>\n
His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. \u201cI think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,\u201d he said, \u201cand that you generate more fear and hatred of science.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Tyson put it more gently. \u201cPersuasion isn\u2019t always \u2018Here are the facts \u2014 you\u2019re an idiot or you are not,\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cI worry that your methods\u201d \u2014 he turned toward Dr. Dawkins \u2014 \u201chow articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, \u201cI gratefully accept the rebuke.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the end it was Dr. Tyson\u2019s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that \u201cthe most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.\u201d When Isaac Newton\u2019s \u201cPrincipia Mathematica\u201d failed to account for the stability of the solar system \u2014 why the planets tugging at one another\u2019s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun \u2014 Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was \u201can intelligent and powerful being.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton\u2019s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat concerns me now is that even if you\u2019re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops \u2014 it just stops,\u201d Dr. Tyson said. \u201cYou\u2019re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn\u2019t have God on the brain and who says: \u2018That\u2019s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cScience is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,\u201d he said. \u201cSomething fundamental is going on in people\u2019s minds when they confront things they don\u2019t understand.\u201d<\/p>\n
He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words \u201calgebra\u201d and \u201calgorithm\u201d are Arabic.<\/p>\n
But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. \u201cRevelation replaced investigation,\u201d he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.<\/p>\n
He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.<\/p>\n
Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she\u2019s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,\u201d he lamented. \u201cWhen she\u2019s gone, we may miss her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Dawkins wasn\u2019t buying it. \u201cI won’t miss her at all,\u201d he said. \u201cNot a scrap. Not a smidgen.\u201d<\/p>\n
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