Prof. Gerald Gabrielse delivered the lecture "God of Antimatter" on 2nd March 2006 at Queen's Lecture Theatre, Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The lecture was followed by questions from the audience and later a dinner/discussion at St Edmunds College. A transcript of the lecture follows.
God of Antimatter
WELL, it's remarkable how organised this seminar series is. You know there is a problem with speakers, if they don't have enough adrenalin pumping in them the lecture is really flat. So just to make sure that didn't happen we've just been streaking across Cambridge to pick up the computer and the text. And then coming back and all the while I was being assured that there was no problem; that the driver, Ruth, a wonderful person, has only lived in town for about three weeks. And so she was consulting a map as she went so she could make sure she went in the right direction.
So needless to say all the adrenalin I can muster I've sort of used right now so we'll see what happens.
With that introduction it was a great honour to give the Mott colloquium in the Physics department yesterday and to give the Faraday lecture today. Nearly every day I travel to Cambridge – Massachusetts – in the New World to work at Harvard University . And now at last and for the first time I experience the real Cambridge . The university which makes my own seem young, inexperienced and almost without tradition. Now I give many lectures. In addition to my regular lectures at Harvard, in 2004 I gave 37 outside lectures and in 2005 I gave 26. But most all of these were about science. I love to talk about the research that my Harvard students and I have underway. How we listen to the radio signal of a single antimatter particle that we isolate in empty space; how we watch the quantum jumps of a single electron that's suspended by itself in a single artificial atom that we make. How a quantum cyclotron made it possible for us to measure the electron's magnetic moment and the electron's fine structure constant more accurately than they've ever been measured before. How we produce atoms made entirely out of antimatter and hope to use lasers to probe for tiny differences from matter atoms.
This is great stuff and even though I am more than sick of airplanes and hotels I still get a great kick telling an interested audience about our scientific exploits about the tiny part of our intricate reality that we have been privileged to help unravel.
However today's lecture is quite different from my Physics lectures and it's more frightening to me. Today, in this Faraday lecture, I have been asked to reflect upon the relationship between my science, my Christian faith and my God. I am fearful of this topic for several reasons. The first reason is that I fear what this topic tells me about the state of my scientific career. To help you understand this problem I have prepared several slides to show you the progress of my scientific career.
So what I plotted here is career success in some dubious units going vertically and the horizontal axis is time. So we're going to follow how a scientific career goes. Well, we naturally start out as blastocyst or some such. Then comes your first scientific paper. That's a very heady time because man, you're making a contribution to something that's new. Well then you write more papers because the adrenalin is pumping and there's a reward system that kicks in in academics if you write papers. Then you get to be well known for successful research programmes and that sounds like a relatively good thing too. But then the slope changes. You write your first review paper. Now you know that the end is starting to come in sight. And then you become department chair. That really means the slope is headed down. And then finally you are asked to speak about science and religion. So, that's one reason I'm afraid of this topic.
The second reason that I fear today's topic is that I'm an active scientist who is also a person of faith. I practise religion and I do science. I don't study religion and science. And, in fact since college I've read very little of the literature about the relationship of science and faith. I'm not sure exactly why. In part I suppose it was because I found no great difficulty in being a scientist and a Christian. And, in part, I suppose that some of what I read I did not find so illuminating, useful or different from what I had been doing all of my life. In any case the result is that whatever I say today may well have already been said, even in print by some of you and thus may be well known. Conversely, the fallacies of what I say today may also have been pointed out and I may the only one in the room not to recognise them.
The third reason that I fear speaking about science, faith or science and religion is that religious statements are much less easily falsified than Physics statements. Nearly every statement that I made in yesterday's colloquium I made knowing that someone in the audience or some of their friends could help their careers by making a laboratory measurement or a calculation which would show one of my statements to be false. To make a very simple example – suppose I had said that gravity does not pull massive objects toward the centre of the earth. Any of you could have gone to a second storey window and stepped out to test my statement. And as you accelerated towards the centre of the earth you would briefly realise that you had proved my Physics statement to be false.
Religious statements are much less easily falsified. If you claim that some god speaks to you privately whenever you enter a subway tunnel and that this god tells you secrets of the universe as a scientist I do not know how to disprove this claim. Other examples are more relevant and more controversial, at least in my country. For example you could claim that God created a young earth but made it so that it appears old when ratios of radioactive elements are used to date it. You could claim that God filled the universe with a background radiation of photons and gave them a thermal distribution of low energies – just what is needed to fool us into believing that the universe started with the big bang. And some Christians in my country at least do believe these things. You could claim that a complex system whose development you did not understand was irreducibly complex and dress up this weak notion with a catchy name like Intelligent Design. And, however much I may like such claims and assumptions of a god who creates a universe that seems calculated to mislead I do not think I can falsify them either by experiment or by logic. It is logically consistent at least until we figure out how the development of complex things really occurred. And these examples are distasteful to me but logically consistent.
Another example of a contemporary religious claim that is difficult to disprove is quite different. If you are a politically correct atheist (and again, in my country, you could claim that there is certainly no God - that he is manufactured by folks with pressing psychological needs, that you have no such needs and are able to stand above any religious or faith activity) then you can claim that you are religiously neutral and make no assumptions at all. I might strongly disagree with these claims and might instead claim that you have simply adopted some of the un-discussed secular assumptions of our culture. That you substitute God as your self, your work, even the general good of humanity; that your morality is political correctness, etc. As much as I might disagree with such religious claims I do not know often how to falsify them as a scientist.
Parenthetically I note that we Christians have not done a very good job in persuading atheists that they live by faith as much as we do. Lest there be some misunderstanding here let me express that I am using religious claims words to refer to basic pre-logic assumptions that we all make and need. Those by faith assumptions that we logically or illogically make determine how we will live and make life's choices. For my scientific lectures, knowing that my audience could prove my erroneous scientific claims to be false is a powerful constraint on my imagination, my honesty and my arrogance. And because religious claims are so much harder to test and falsify, including those I mentioned today it would be much easier for me to exaggerate here, to use imprecise religious clichés or theological jargon to completely wrong or even to mislead some of you. Everything I say today should thus be regarded as suspect. I am speaking without important constraints to which I have become accustomed.
The fourth reason that today's lecture frightens me is that I will be frequently referring to God. Now why is this frightening? Well, a god worth having and at least the God I read of in the Bible – is a God capable of being responsible for the remarkably intricate and divers universe that we study. Such a God must be much greater, more complicated and more powerful than we can ever imagine or even hope to describe within the limited language of human experience. Imagine with me such a God, intelligent and powerful beyond comprehension, the master of the universe, listening to and evaluating what I claim to know about God. It's a scary thought. I imagine further that this God has long since grown tired, perhaps even a bit numb of overtly religious types who write books, pound pulpits or expound to teleprompters, authoritatively pretending to capture the essence of God by enumerating humanlike characteristics they think that they recognise. For preachers and theologians to make such a mistake, to be so arrogantly certain, is one thing. Physicists should know better! After being awed by the unbelievable vastness and always surprising intricacy of the physical world, physicists should be more humble and respectful of the limitations of our craft and our knowledge whether our religious assumptions are those of a Christian or an atheist. In any case it is for me a fearsome thought – the master of the universe digesting my every word.
I will organise the rest of this lecture just as you might expect from the title, "God of Antimatter" but in reverse order. First, I will give a very brief introduction to antimatter and mention some experiments that we have done. It's an irresistible opportunity to try and teach a little Physics to some of you from other sciences and non-science types. Second, I will direct your attention to the God in whom I believe using the insight that I gained from reading the ancient story from the book of Job. And third I will introduce a hands metaphor that I find useful in connecting my anti-matter science and Job's God. I will then conclude with a personal reflection.
At this point I have a word of caution coupled to a request. As I discuss the harmony that I perceive in my science and in my religion my caution is that no one should believe or discard what I say because of what a wonderful or terrible person I am. I am an intense and driven person. I am aware of an impressive list of personality defects and those around me can likely identify many more. For scientists this is normally not a big problem. I willingly listen to scientists who I know not to be such wonderful human beings, testing their science as I listen on its own merits. My request is that you similarly test what I say about religion and science. Who knows whether what I say may even be useful or even right despite the fact that it comes from someone with my defects.
Now you all know that we're made out of matter particles and what that means is represented here on the screen. There's a little electron and a proton and a neutron and we don't celebrate it often enough that every thing that we see essentially is made out of the same three particles. George Bush and I are made out of the same three particles. I mean how can that be if you think about it? Now the proton and the neutron are the heavy ones; electrons are about two thousand times lighter.
What is anti-matter? Well to each of the three matter particles there's a corresponding anti-matter particle. And so the electron has a counterpart which could have been called the anti-electron but historically it was called the positron. It occurs naturally only in the radioactive decay of nuclei. The proton has a counterpart which is called the anti-proton. It doesn't occur naturally at all in our reality except very occasionally when a high energy cosmic ray hits an atmospheric atom. And then the neutron has the anti-neutron. These particles have the opposite sign of charge and the same mass so far as we know. But that, of course, is a statement that has to be tested experimentally.
Now you may have heard in the popular press about creating atoms entirely of anti-matter. When this happened there was a lot of press coverage. And here is the simplest atom.
So the hydrogen atom which you know has a proton with an electron in orbit. The anti-hydrogen atom has an anti-proton and a positron in orbit. And the challenge is to make atoms which are entirely made of anti-matter and then look at their properties with lasers shining at the atoms and the anti-atoms and see if the structure of the atom and anti-atom are just the same.
Now this has caught the attention of science fiction writers because of what happens when atoms of matter and anti-matter meet. Here is the Gabrielse and the anti-Gabrielse and they're about to shake hands. What happens under those conditions?
What happens is that a lot of energy is released because every proton annihilates with an anti-proton and every positron with an electron and so on. Well, maybe we have to hug each other but we won't get to be too specific about how this happens. If we take a hundred kilogramme anti-Gabrielse - I actually don't weigh quite that much - then I can teach you about Einstein's formula. Now I needn't teach anybody the formula because almost everyone in our culture knows this formula. It's knowing what it means that's the challenge. Einstein wrote this down just so we could do this problem. So E is the energy that's released, m is the mass that disappears (in fact it's 200 kilogrammes of mass) and its sort of like magic that the velocity of light squared (c 2) comes in that relationship. That's why Einstein was a genius. E=mc 2 – I put in different units for the destructive and constructive people in the audience. It's a lot of kilowatt hours. That's what we pay for our power. Now I don't know what you pay for power. But the yearly output of 500 nuclear power plants and it’s the energy for the destructive types of about 4200 megatons of TNT. Now that catches the fancy of the scientific crowd because if you want to make a rocket this is your ideal fuel because all of the fuel turns into energy in the end. Nuclear fuel is about a thousand to ten thousand times less efficient and so you have to carry too much fuel. Of course it also brings up the bomb makers in the crowd and as I told the Physics audience lately when I was early in my career I used to get really incensed because there were a lot of popular articles about trapping anti-matter and storing it. And there was usually a fairly credible article and in the last paragraph a journalist is allowed to say absolutely anything without any constraint. And so there would usually be some sinister suggestions that there was going to be a bomb that was made out of anti-matter and we were going to lob this at all of our enemies. I got really angry about that a number of times. And then I decided I had the wrong approach. And so I've now changed. I'm now an enthusiastic advocate for anti-matter weapons. And there is a reason. An anti-matter weapon because of the containment problem is almost certainly going to blow up the person who owns it. So think of the stabilising effect of anti-matter weapons being spread around earth.
Now having given you a little taste of anti-matter I will try to give you a glimpse of my God. And here I am not very inventive. My God is the God of Job; the epic tale of suffering and triumph. Part of the Bible. I highly recommend this tale to you religious types. I claim the story is more about God and less about heroic Job as is commonly supposed. I also strongly recommend this epic tale to you scientific types. You will not find amore appreciative account of the wonderful way that our universe is put together. Time does not permit much exploration of this wonderful story so I will simply quote some examples of the statements that God makes in the story.
Job in great pain expresses some doubts about God's justice. This provokes a strong response from the master of heaven and earth. The fierce response shows just how proud and involved God is with his universe, his earth, his creatures and his anti-matter. Out of the storm God thunders, "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations? Tell me if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know. Who stretched out a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set? Or who made its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy. Who shut up the sea behind the doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness? When I set limits for it and set its doors and bars in place. When I said, "This far you may come and no further." Here is where your proud ways halt. Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water. Do you send the lightening bolts on their way? Do they report to you? 'Here we are.'?" Page after page of passionate prose pours from the proud maker of heaven and earth leaving no doubt of God's fierce pride in a creation that clearly gets his close attention. And Job gets the message. One does not doubt or question the master of the universe. Humbled he offers God his apology and his repentance silence.
Faced daily by a wonderful reality with layers within layers of unbelievably intricate structure I find it easy to ghost-write extra verses for God's use when he must next confront my doubt. "Where were you when I crafted the anti-protons you play with? When I bound the quarks within and ordered them never to venture out alone? Who decreed that particles and forces be invariant under c, p and t while none of these symmetries are separately conserved?" Likely you have to be a certain type of physicist to appreciate that verse. And before the Big Bang who presided? Who seeded the explosion that defies the imagination? And who steered the way to a world friendly to life from this unlikely beginning?
The great master of the universe still has innumerable reasons to be proud of the intricacy of the universe. Much of which – most of which – perhaps we do still not yet understand. If the epic tale of Job were to be written today many of the words and images would be different but I think the point would be exactly the same.
Now how can we reconcile the common notion of deterministic, natural law with the picture we get of Job's God? A God who seems intimately connected to all of reality. One old answer is that God made the rules of Natural Law and then left reality to evolve as it would. God made a toy, wound it up and let it go and severed the connection. I have difficulty with this picture. Now, as a scientist I have difficulty understanding the involved passion of Job's God from this point of view. I also have trouble reconciling a God who is clearly pleased to consider the requests that we bring to him in prayer with this static deterministic picture. Before presenting my reconciliation of Natural Laws and Job's God something more should be said about the laws of Physics, those prototypes of all Natural Laws.
Life is particularly simple in introductory Physics courses and philosophers rarely make it beyond them. And I know introductory Physics can seem hard to the uninitiated because calculus is used to provide tremendous simplification and economy and not everybody is ready for this wonderfulness. But the first class is generally classical mechanics - not exciting but the study of motion. The world of classical mechanics is inhabited by mass points, a mass that we imagine is concentrated at a point in space. When we describe a thrown ball we really describe the motion of its centre point, the centre of mass. And we let these mass points interact only in very simple ways. When we describe the collision of my hybrid car, a Toyota Prius, with a gas guzzling sports utility vehicle one possibility that we consider is that the mass point that represents my Prius bounces harmlessly off the mass point that is the sport utility vehicle. This we call an elastic collision. Alternatively we describe the unpleasant case where the two mass points merge as a completely inelastic collision. In all of classical introductory mechanics the mass points follow simple mathematical formulas, the laws of Physics and that is the end of the whole deterministic matter.
More Physics study reveals that reality has more freedom than the study of only introductory classical mechanics might suggest. For example, the behaviour of a quantum system, and all objects in the universe are made of quantum systems, the behaviour of a single quantum system is completely random.
It is not generally possible to predict the exact behaviour of a particular quantum system at a particular time.
In my lab we are able to isolate a single electron for months at a time, once for more than 10 months, and observe its quantum mechanical behaviour. The quantum jumps of an electron in a magnetic field are illustrated in the movie just as we observe them in real time. You see the electron jumping from the ground state of its motion to its first excited state. One nifty feature that you are seeing is in an artificial atom that we made in the lab. There is no nucleus except the apparatus that we built around on the outside.
The range of options open to the electron is limited. Its lowest energy state, its first excited state here. It is possible to measure and predict how much time the electron will spend in each of the two possible states on average. However, it is not possible to ever predict when the electron will jump up or down in energy. In this sense a reality has randomness at its very core. The completely static deterministic picture of Natural Law is not right.
Now, we Christians have struggled for centuries to remove any randomness from our view of the world. This gives us some problems which outsiders appreciate. Such as, how can an all-powerful God in direct control of the motion of every atom, how can it be that he allows evil in the world? Contrary to the way we all live our lives we Christians sometimes confidently assert that God had a fore-ordained plan for every detail of everyone's life and the movements of everything. In strange ways God then just becomes responsible for evil. Now, it's hard to deny that bad things happen and in a sense every thing happens in accordance with God's detailed plan. He must have somehow planned the evil thing as well but for his purposes of course we often add.
A well-meaning Christian tried to comfort me once by telling me that God must have had good reasons for giving cancer to my teenage son, cancer that appeared at the time to be certainly fatal. A God who promised to turn even the effects of real evil to our profit is thus sometimes transformed into the deterministic planner of all that was good and evil to come.
What does quantum mechanics teach us? Well, it’s a big stretch from quantum mechanics to real things. But at a fundamental level I think we should take seriously that our reality has an element of randomness. The fundamental particles that make up our universe have randomness built into their behaviour. Who would have thought that God would make a universe at its core? With a chuckle, I imagine, God uses his quantum mechanics to escape the deterministic box in which we try to cram him.
Now I am ready to explain the way that I reconcile Natural Law, the flexible kind that we have just discussed, with the intense passionate care of Job's God. The God revealed in the Bible. Let's start at the beginning of the Bible record. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. From a dark and formless mass God made light. He separated the sky, land and water. He filled the sea with fish and put animals and people on the land. He looked over all he had made and he said, "That's good." The sky was good, the land was good, the water was good. The fish were good, the animals and people were good. God was clearly proud as he looked over his creation and pronounced it all, "very good."
Now for years some Christians, probably more in my country than yours, have quarrelled about how God created the world. Did he use six days or was it longer? How did he manage to have lights and plants growing on earth before he made the sun, the source of all of our light? And it's amazed me for a long time how certain some of us can be about amazing events that happened so long ago and in our absence. I think the quarrellers miss the whole point of the creation story. The point to me is that God breathed the whole of creation. God made his creation for his own enjoyment. Everything that came into being did so because he wished it.
I visualise God as holding the world in God's hands and the world's a metaphor of course, it could be the universe. Except for his faithfully holding the world together it simply would come apart and cease to be.
I am fascinated by the notion that God may even steer reality in subtle ways by steering the quantum choices of the non-linear dynamics that I did not discuss. I am not sure if this is a completely sensible position. It's certainly a big extrapolation but I like it. And since evil corrupted God's beautiful creation it has become harder for us to see that it is God's hands that are faithfully holding our reality together. Whether we are Christians or not, however, we are perceive some of the same ways that God holds things. One way that God holds things together we call gravity. Atoms, rocks, planets and stars all attract each other. God's gravity makes the sun attract the earth so the earth orbits the sun. And we are grateful because we always stay approximately the same distance from our source of heat and light. We never need freeze and never need fry. God's gravity also attracts us to the earth. With every step I return to earth and I am grateful. How different life would be if I feared that any step would launch me into orbit outside the atmosphere.
Now some of the ways that God holds our reality together, the ways that God holds most tightly we call laws: Newton 's Laws and Coulomb's Laws are familiar to Physics students. God's gravity we typically simply call the Law of Gravity and whether I am a Christian or not doesn't change the result. All are pulled to earth by God's gravity whether or not we recognise God behind the phenomenon. If God did not faithfully and continually keep his gravity in force imagine what would happen. Today in Washington senators voted along straight party lines to slightly strengthen the power of gravity. Shortly after earthquakes were detected in the vicinity of the world's largest mountains, etc, etc. I doubt that we human beings could sustain life on earth if God did not hold physical reality so tightly.
God holds his world less tightly in other ways. For example, the Bible makes it clear that for a family to live in the most satisfying way, in keeping with the way God holds his world together certain principles should be respected. God gives a husband and wife invigorating sex as a gift that they are free to share with each other but not with others. The children God gives are to be enjoyed, to be respected, not angered. Children in turn are to respect, honour and obey their parents. And following these directions is the way to be in harmony with the way God holds families together in the universe.
Now, it's a lot easier to violate God's wishes for families than to violate God's wish that all things be attracted to the centre of the earth. Most everyone in this room knows pain and damage from family problems. Some of us right now are suffering terribly at the separation of parents we love. Some have witnessed and been hurt by the unfaithfulness of one we love and admire. Some of us are screwing around ignoring God's clear warnings about the damage we can do to ourselves and others. Some of us trash the parents and siblings we are supposed to respect, thereby destroying the secure refuge God intends our families to be. The pain we feel is a continuing reminder that there are always unpleasant consequences if we do not conform to the faithful way that God holds reality together.
When I was an undergraduate; a student of science and a Christian my friends and I spent a lot of time wondering if our Christianity meant that we should do our science differently. Over my many years in Physics I have found that my non-Christian friends and I generally have no trouble agreeing about what constitutes the Physics. I now understand this to be because God holds the reality described by Physics so tightly in his hands, so faithfully, that none of us is able to mess it up much however whacky and mistaken is our view of the world. I'm glad for this state of affairs. It seems to me that similar agreement between Christians and non-Christians is not always this easy for other parts of reality that God holds less tightly. From the point of view that I have been outlining wherein the universe is in the hands of its proud, caring and faithful master it is easy to understand the reason to do science. It is simple. We do science, even pure science with no evident application, to make God happy. And if God is happy then he sends sun and rain and other things that all of us need to live. OK, even to you non-science types I actually mean this in a way that's not trivial. Job's God clearly takes great pride in his masterpiece – a universe of unbelievable intricacy and scale. And I think he gets a huge kick out of watching as we unravel the intricate way that he crafted things.
The flip side is that he is sometimes amused, I imagine, when we get sunk for a while. I imagine him chuckling as my students while thinking that our experiments have finally made it possible to understand the quantum mechanics of our electron system blunder upon yet another clever twist of reality built into creation. Just as there are many things that I do not understand about my science and just as there are many things that I do not understand about my Christianity there are also still many things that I do not understand about the way that my science and my Christianity fit together. For example, I do not understand how God could become human and live on earth. I do not understand and even find somewhat distasteful that Jesus would need to die so that I could live forever. But when in Physics I do not understand something this generally does not tempt me to abandon the framework and the methodology of Physics. Instead, I look on the unknown as a challenge to direct my Physics efforts to maximise the likelihood that one day I will understand. I take the same approach to these matters. Some day I hope to understand. In fact one important component of my notion of heaven – the new heavens and the new earth as the Bible speaks of it – is an environment where we can much more readily obtain answers to these questions.
I imagine heaven to be a place where we can pursue science with more clarity of purpose and without the distractions we now suffer. There will no grant proposals to write in heaven.
As I near the end of what I have to say about the relationship of my science and my Christianity I have no illusion that I have persuaded all of you. For those of you who are not Christians I do not think that logical argument will be persuasive. We would agree on the logic but would disagree on the starting assumptions. If the arguments and proofs for the existence of God were truly persuasive then we should all share the same religion by now.
Now, given the current controversies in the US perhaps I'm misjudging. I feel that I must deal at least a bit with Intelligent Design – the movement – either now or in the questions. To be honest I am very dubious about the usefulness of the Intelligent Design movement. And for the most part it does not seem to be testable science at all despite the claims of its founders.
I doubt that many have ever been persuaded by proofs for the existence of God nor that "God is in the gaps" and I expect that the same will be true of these modern versions of these old arguments.
I am very uncomfortable with labelling something as irreducible complexity rather than complexity that I do not yet understand. I expect that if you believe in the intelligent designer you will then see the intelligent design. If you do not you will be less likely to do so.
Now, what causes me some pain is the way some Christians in my country are jumping on the Intelligent Design band wagon as if their faith depended on it. Christianity does not need this crutch. If Intelligent Design as technically defined would be convincingly refuted by scientific studies (and I doubt that it can be despite the claims of its founders) my faith would continue just fine.
Christianity has survived those who insisted on a flat earth, those who insisted on Crusades, those who insisted that the earth must be the centre of the universe, those who insisted that the earth was made in six days and those who insisted that God's existence could be proved. Christianity will also survive the convincing scientific proof, if it ever comes, that it's unnecessary to invoke Intelligent Design to scientifically understand reality.
In my view we should not set up Christianity for a fall by insisting on this notion. Let me hasten to add that I fear any rabid fundamentalism which seeks to impose, to presume a monopoly on truth upon others, whatever its source. And we scientists are typically very well aware of the dangers of rabid religious fundamentalism. That is why most of us in the US are properly dismayed about efforts to force the teaching of Intelligent Design as a scientific alternative to biological evolution. However, I think that we should also fear and resist rabid scientific fundamentalism that also seeks to force its views on others. Richard Dawkins' stimulating book "A Devil's Chaplain" comes to mind, especially the section in which he takes the late Stephen J. Gould to task for being unwise enough to claim that there is even a small place for both science and religion.
The rabid scientific fundamentalist claim that science necessarily excludes God and religion is not only wrong by my experience it is also inappropriate, counter-productive and dangerous at least in US culture, although perhaps not here. The citizen tax-payer voters in my country do not understand science very well. However, when they hear from scientific fundamentalists that science necessarily excludes God and religion, that religion is the delusion of the weak, their guts tell them that they must be against science and suspicious of the seeming undemocratic effort to prevent students from facing the controversy. So even if we scientists continue to insist that no Intelligent Design be taught as an alternative to biological evolution we should honestly admit that we have no detailed understanding of how many complex organisms evolved. We should be extremely careful as well to ensure that people of faith clearly hear our respect for faith and religion at the same time. Such folks take much more kindly to Ken Miller's "Finding Darwin's God" than to "A Devil's Chaplain".
Let me finish my illustration of the unification of science and faith with a personal story. And I hope you will forgive the indulgence. This story has a happy ending and no exploitation of difficult circumstances already alluded to is intended. Some years ago my teenage son was told that he had no more than a 5% chance to survive his cancer. Cancer that CT and bone scans had showed had spread throughout his body. I reacted as any scientist parent would, seeking second and third opinions about the diagnosis, about the treatment plans and grilling the medical doctors as only a scientist could. And as some of you know first hand its hard to watch one you love undergo rather barbaric therapies like chemotherapy and radiation treatment, still the best medical options. I am delighted to report that my son did survive and that he is still free of cancer, newly married and teaching science in an inner-city school to which he was connected as part of the "Teach for America " programme. I am very grateful to his doctors.
But why tell the story here? The reason is is that in parallel with my relentless insistence upon the best medical solution I repeatedly asked of God that my son would be cured, that all the cancer cells would die and that the chemo and radiation damage to his body would be minimised. I relied upon a deep and long held faith and a God who is not only the master of the universe, maybe the master of the multiverse too, but who remarkably was willing to listen to me. I saw no contradiction or inconsistency in dealing with this awful situation as a person of science and as a person of faith. A God worth having it still seems to me must be so imaginably more clever and more powerful than we limited human beings can ever comprehend. That I could seek his help even if my science did not comprehend how he would provide it. I believe in a God who is beyond the reach of science. I believe in a God who is delighted when we scientists finally unravel his reality.
And in conclusion, for me, I find that Christianity offers the most simple and most economical explanation of reality as I encounter it. I have tried as honestly and openly as I can to expose myself to you, to expose my starting points, my religious roots. If you disagree I hope this lecture will at least prompt you to examine your own starting points, the set of basic assumptions which you believe without proof.
