On Religion and Science and Money’s Power to Corrupt

Abstract

I read with interest Mark Friesel’s letter on the Templeton Prize 1 1. See http://www.templeton.org. (Physics Today, February 2001, page 82). However, there are, I believe, some misconceptions therein, so I write to agree and disagree.Most of Friesel’s assertions are clear, and his reasons weighty. Science is ill equipped to discover the truth of religious belief, owing to the paucity of experimental, objective evidence. Scientists do settle on cardinal facts (for example, new species appear in the fossil record over wide expanses of time, atoms exist, the position and conjugate momentum of a quantum particle cannot be known simultaneously); this settling is not to be confused with religious faith. I wish more people of religious faith understood how this difference matters: What a scientist does to arrive at certainty is quite different from what a believer, who is taught to care more for assurance than for certainty, does. And I think religious believers would disbelieve just how provisionally scientists accept their cardinal facts. It is because of this vast difference in modus operandi that the two camps are suspicious, dismissive, and uncomprehending of each other. For my part, if the Templeton Prize can help the two genuinely know each other better, then the money is well spent.Scientists will have met many more common corrupting influences before they come to the potential of the Templeton Prize, and with the same consequence in the event of moral failure, namely, that the credibility of science is weakened. Think of what the dissertation committee at the university offers the young candidate: the possibility of having a professional scientific life at all. What a trial it is to deal fairly and impartially with one’s own research data when one’s entire professional life is on the line! And the trial repeats later, with the first grant, or the first big grant, that keeps that life going and secures the possibility of tenure and promotion. Are scientists tempted to set aside “conventional morality” to secure the life they want? Of course. Scientists are no less susceptible than others. But the Templeton Prize isn’t the problem: Life is the problem.Certainly Galileo succumbed to such temptations. Passionate to defeat scientific assent based on authority as well as to prove the mobility of Earth, he relied finally on his theory of the tides. It is ironic that he would choose to browbeat his opponents into accepting his arguments. And those arguments, given what he knew, must have seemed even to him to fall short of a valid demonstration. Whether they fell short or not, the exercise was a high-stakes gamble with the credibility of science.Finally, Friesel is too dismissive of miracles. To use his example of the virgin birth of Christ: No religious person disputes the science of sexual reproduction as the letter alleges. The question is whether something beyond Nature can act. Can the probability of a miracle even be calculated using the laws of Nature? I don’t think so. Friesel and I agree that the question of miracles goes to deeper truths, metaphysical things not easily treated by scientists or believers.REFERENCESection:ChooseTop of pageREFERENCE <<1. See http://www.templeton.org. Google Scholar© 2001 American Institute of Physics.