[A
dramatically truncated version of this appeared in Prospect.]
If
you’re a non-believer, it’s easy to mock or even despise efforts to bridge
science and religion. But you don’t need to be Richard Dawkins to sense that
there’s an imbalance in these often well-meaning initiatives: science has no
need of religion in its quest to understand the universe (the relevance to
scientific ethics might be more open to debate), whereas religion appears
sometimes to crave the intellectual force of science’s rigour. And since it
seems hard to imagine how science could ever supply supporting evidence for
religion (as opposed to simply unearthing new mysteries), mustn’t any
contribution it might make to the logical basis of belief be inevitably
negative?
That doesn’t stop people from trying to build bridges, and nor should it. Yet
overtures from the religious side are often seen as attempts to sneak doctrine
into places where it has no business: witness the controversy over the Royal
Society hosting talks and events sponsored by the Templeton Foundation.
Philosopher A. C. Grayling, recently
denounced as scandalous the willingness of the Royal Society to offer
a launching pad for a new book exploring the views of one of its Fellows,
Christian minister and physicist John Polkinghorne, on the interactions of
science and religion.
The
US-based Templeton
Foundation has been in the middle of some of the loudest recent
controversies about religion and science. Created by ‘global investor and
philanthropist’ Sir John Templeton, it professes to ‘serve as a
philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life’s biggest
questions, ranging from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to
questions on the nature of love, gratitude, forgiveness, and creativity.’ For
some skeptics, this simply means promoting religion, particularly Christianity,
from a seemingly bottomless funding barrel. Templeton himself, a relatively
liberal Christian by US standards and a supporter of inter-faith initiatives,
once claimed that ‘scientific revelations may be a gold mine for revitalizing
religion in the 21st century’. That’s precisely what makes many scientists
nervous.
The Templeton Foundation awards an annual
prize of £1million to ‘outstanding individuals who have devoted
their talents to those aspects of human experience that, even in an age of
astonishing scientific advance, remain beyond the reach of scientific
explanation.’ This is the world’s largest annual award given to an
individual – bigger than a Nobel. And scientists have been prominent among the
recipients, especially in recent years: they include cosmologist John Barrow,
physicist Freeman Dyson, physics Nobel laureate Charles H. Townes, physicist
Paul Davies – and Polkinghorne. That helps to explain why the Royal Society
has previously been ready to host the prize’s ceremonials.
I must declare an interest here, because I have taken part in a meeting
funded by the Templeton Foundation. In 2005 it convened a gathering of
scientists to consider the question of whether water seems ‘fine-tuned’ to
support the existence of life. This was an offshoot of an earlier symposium that
investigated the broader question of ‘fine tuning’ in the laws of physics, a
topic now very much in vogue thanks to recent discoveries in cosmology. That
first meeting considered how the basic constants of nature seem to be finely
poised to an absurd degree: just a tiny change would seem to make the universe
uninhabitable. (The discovery in the 1990s of the acceleration of the expanding
universe, currently attributed to a mysterious dark energy, makes the cosmos
seem even more improbable than before.) This is a genuine and deep mystery, and
at present there is no convincing explanation for it. The issue of water is
different, as we concluded at the 2005 meeting: there is no compelling argument
for it being a unique solvent for life, or for it being especially fine-tuned
even if it were. More pertinently here, this meeting had first-rate speakers and
a sound scientific rationale, and even somewhat wary attendees like me detected
no hidden agenda beyond an exploration of the issues. If Templeton money is to
be used for events like that, I have no problem with that. And it was rather
disturbing, even shameful, to find that at least one reputable university press
subsequently shied away from publishing the meeting proceedings (soon now to be
published by Taylor & Francis) not on any scientific grounds but because of
worries about Templeton involvement.
So while I worry about the immodesty of the Templeton Prize, I don’t side with
those who consider it basically a bribe to attract good scientists to a
disreputable cause. All the same, there is something curious going on. Five
of
the seven most recent winners have been scientists, and all are listed in the Physics
and Cosmology Group of the Center
for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS), affiliated to the
Graduate Theological Union, an inter-faith centre in Berkeley, California. This
includes the latest winner, announced on Monday: French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat,
‘whose explorations of the philosophical implications of quantum physics have’
(according to the prize announcement) ‘cast new light on the definition of
reality and the potential limits of knowable science.’ D’Espagnat has
suggested ‘the possibility that the things we observe may be tentatively
interpreted as signs providing us with some perhaps not entirely misleading
glimpses of a higher reality and, therefore, that higher forms of spirituality
are fully compatible with what seems to emerge from contemporary physics.’
(See more here
and here.)
Others might consider this an unnecessary addendum to modern quantum theory, not
so far removed from the vague and post hoc analogies of Fritjof Capra’s The
Tao of Physics (which was very much a product of its time).