A curious but very good piece in the New York Times today: a review of the movie “Angels & Demons” by the science writer Dennis Overbye. Overbye takes to task the popular attitude that scientists are geekish upstarts who think they have the truth but don’t:
This may seem like a happy ending. Faith and science reconciled or at least holding their fire in the face of mystery. But for me that moment ruined what had otherwise been a pleasant two hours on a rainy afternoon. It crystallized what is wrong with the entire way that popular culture regards science. Scientists and academics are smart, but religious leaders are wise.
These smart alecks who know how to split atoms and splice genes need to be put in their place by older steadier hands.
It was as if the priest had patted Einstein on the head and chuckled, “Never mind, Sonny, some day you’ll understand.” . . . .
. . . But I can’t help being bugged by that warm, fuzzy moment at the end, that figurative pat on the head. After all is said and done, it seems to imply, having faith is just a little bit better than being smart. . . .
. . . And they are still patting us on the head.
Why should wisdom and comfort inhabit a clerical collar instead of a lab coat? Perhaps because religion seems to offer consolations that science doesn’t.
The late physicist John Archibald Wheeler once said that what gives great leaders power is the ability to comfort others in the face of death. But the iconic achievement of modern physics is the atomic bomb, death incarnate.
Moreover, since the time of Galileo scientists have bent over backward to restrain their own metaphysical rhetoric for fear of stepping on religious toes. Indeed, many of them were devout believers convinced they were exploring the mind of God. Stephen Jay Gould, the late paleontologist and author, famously referred to science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria.”
The lament, voiced often in the movie and even more in the book, is that science, with its endlessly nibbling doubts, has drained the world of wonder and meaning, depriving humans of, among other things, a moral compass.
The church advertises strength through certitude, but starting from the same collection of fables, commandments and aphorisms — love thy neighbor; thou shalt not kill; blessed are the meek for they will inherit the Earth — the religions of the world have reached an alarmingly diverse set of conclusions about what behaviors, like gay marriage, are right and wrong.
If science drains the world of certainty, maybe that is invigorating as well as appropriate. The cardinal is free to revel in the assurance of his absolutes, while Tom Hanks and I can be braced by the challenge of being our own cosmologists, creating our own meanings.
Meanwhile, America is not so young and innocent anymore, and science has its own traditions and, yes, wisdoms, stretching back to antiquity.
In science the ends are justified by the means — what questions we ask and how we ask them — and the meaning of the quest is derived not from answers but from the process by which they are found: curiosity, doubt, humility, tolerance.
Those fatherly pats on the head sound comforting, but as an answer to life’s struggles and quests, they lack something.
To me, this piece is one more sign that it is no longer off limits for the public media to criticize religion or its ludicrous claim that it has possession of the “truth”. (The NYT has had a curious attitude to the faith and science debate. Their editorial pages often publish accommodationist or even intelligent-design tripe, like pieces by Michael Behe and Cardinal Schönborn. On the other hand, their science staff is resolutely pro-science and pro-evolution. Go figure.)
Thanks to Lawrence Krauss for calling this to my attention.
Fairly good review. If you haven’t seen Roger Ebert’s review of Ben Stein’s atrocity, Expelled, it is certainly worth a read.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind.html
Here’s the closing line:
—-“Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.”—-
psst Jerry, long = longer
What a terrific paragraph:
Unfortunately, this critical thought writing had to come while reviewing a movie based on Dan Brown’s nonsense books.
People have moral myopia. They can’t see past the holy image of religious leaders to the hollow core, and they can’t see past lab coats and Hiroshima to vaccines, the Haber process, etc., to which most people owe their lives. Science as an oppressive orthodoxy is a popular caricature, too, mainly because people don’t like their pet intuitions to be confidently contradicted by scientists with evidence.
“…popular culture regards science. Scientists and academics are smart, but religious leaders are wise.”
popular culture’s purpose is to find cleverness and call it wisdom.
There is really very little dichotomy between true faith and reason. The progress of the existing artifical dichotomy is well documented in Francis Schaeffer’s “Escape From Reason.”
Interesting that science has for the most part abandoned the idea of the genesis of the universe as “space-time + chance” no doubt because the statistical improbability of this hypothesis.
The solution has beent to invent a primitive god called “Natural Selection” (of course N.S. is not referred to as a god or even a force, it’s just “how the universe is”) that supposedly guides the process of evolution.
Sorry, gang, my reason is intact but I’m not buying.