Has Science Killed God?

Has Science Killed God?

http://www.victorclaveau.com/htm_html/Essays%20on%20Science/has_science_killed
_god.htm


Has Science Killed God?

http://www.victorclaveau.com/htm_html/Essays%20on%20Science/has_science_killed_god.htm


Has Science Killed God?

http://www.victorclaveau.com/htm_html/Essays%20on%20Science/has_science_killed_god.htm

Has Science Killed God?

NORMAN PODHORETZ

Norman Podhoretz traces, from the time of Galileo, the various
conflicts and connections between religion and science. While it was in
becoming "modest" that the human mind seemed to have grown to
superhuman proportions, it soon forgot, in the headiness of its
accomplishments, the respect for its own limits. Now the idea spread
that reason in the form of science had shown that it, not God, was
omnipotent and was on its way to usurping the divine attribute of
omniscience as well.

http://www.victorclaveau.com/htm_html/Essays%20on%20Science/has_science_killed_god.htm


Has Science Killed God?

http://www.victorclaveau.com/htm_html/Essays%20on%20Science/has_science_killed_god.htm


Has Science Killed God?

Has Science Killed God?

http://www.victorclaveau.com/htm_html/Essays%20on%20Science/has_science_killed_god.htm


Has Science Killed God?

http://www.victorclaveau.com/htm_html/Essays%20on%20Science/has_science_killed_god.htm


Has Science Killed God?

http://www.victorclaveau.com/htm_html/Essays%20on%20Science/has_science_killed_god.htm
Has Science Killed God?
NORMAN PODHORETZ
Norman Podhoretz traces,

http://www.victorclaveau.com/htm_html/Essays%20on%20Science/has_science_killed_god.htm


Has Science Killed God?


NORMAN PODHORETZ



Norman Podhoretz traces, from the time of Galileo, the various
conflicts and connections between religion and science. While it was in
becoming "modest" that the human mind seemed to have grown to
superhuman proportions, it soon forgot, in the headiness of its
accomplishments, the respect for its own limits. Now the idea spread
that reason in the form of science had shown that it, not God, was
omnipotent and was on its way to usurping the divine attribute of
omniscience as well.



The single most important phenomenon of the millennium just ended is
the dog that didn't bark. But the second most important was the dog
that did.

As to the dog that barked. It was, surely, the development of modern
science. This process started not at the beginning of the millennium
but halfway through it getting seriously underway with Copernicus in
the middle of the 16th century and picking up steam in the early 17th.
Yet in the four centuries since Copernicus proved that Earth revolves
around the sun rather than the other was around, more has been learned
about the natural world than was known in all the ages of human
existence that came be fore them.

This seems, when one pauses to reflect on it, very odd. After all,
there can be no doubt that some of the greatest intellects ever to
appear on Earth were active 2,000 years ago and earlier. Among the
ancient Hebrews and the ancient Greeks alone, there were thinkers who
have never been surpassed in profundity, originality, vision and
wisdom.

Some of these ancient peoples even applied themselves to mathematics
and the sciences, and up through the Middle Ages their work continued
to exert a mighty influence on Jewish, Christian and Muslim
philosophers and theologians alike. Thus Scholasticism, the school of
thought rejected by modern science (the "new philosophy," in the
parlance of the time) was almost as deeply rooted in the Greeks,
especially Aristotle, as in the Bible. Indeed, the most formidable of
the Scholastics, St. Thomas Aquinas, dedicated himself to reconciling
reason (equated with Aristotle) and revelation (the Scriptures). And in
the course of pursuing this enterprise, Aquinas had much to say about
the physical nature of the universe.

What, then, can explain why most, if not all, of what these great minds
thought they knew about the nature of the material world was wrong?
Conversely, how did it happen that Copernicus, and then Kepler and
Galileo (the two giants who came right after him), and those who
followed in their footsteps all the way to the present day, got most,
if not all, of it right?

One might imagine that so huge and consequential a question would be
hard to answer. But no. Galileo himself answered it. The Scholastics,
he clearly recognized, were interested only in explaining why things
were as they were, and their explanations (with more than a little help
from Aristotle) took the form of logical deduction from the truths they
already possessed through revelation. Galileo's revolutionary aim, by
contrast, was to discover how things were by observing and measuring
them.

Galileo never claimed that these new experimental procedures could
uncover anything about the cause or the origin of the forces being
measured and observed. But through such procedures, he could and did
find evidence that the Scholastics, and Aristotle before them, were
wildly mistaken about the physical universe. Speaking of phenomena that
he had spotted through the telescope he built - phenomena that were
ruled out by the prevailing Scholastic theory - Galileo declared:
"We have in our new age accidents and observations, and such, that I
question not in the least, but if Aristotle were now alive, they would
make him change his opinion."

Well, Aristotle might, but the professor at Padua was no Aristotle. He
declined even to look through the telescope Galileo had built. Why
bother? So far as he was concerned, nothing he might see could shed
light on the human purposes it served.

Galileo took the opposite tack. It was, he argued, beyond the power of
the human mind unaided by revelation to penetrate those purposes.
Therefore, it would be better for people "to pronounce that wise,
ingenious, and modest sentence, 'I know it not;'" and not (like
the Scholastics) "suffer to escape from their mouths and pens all
manner of extravagance." Even though Galileo, while famously forced
by the Church to recant his belief in the heliocentric cosmology of
Copernicus, held on privately to that belief, he did not reject
Christianity. He also contended that science did not contradict the
Bible as properly understood. But he did, willy-nilly, sever the
connection forged most fully by Aquinas between reason and revelation.

To the great English poet John Donne, who lived in the early days of
this intellectual revolution, it was a disaster:

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it...
Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone...

However, Donne's fellow countryman and near contemporary, Sir Francis
Bacon, saw it all very differently. In Bacon's view, the new
philosophy was no threat - not to religious faith, not to the wit of
man and not to the social order. By separating out "the absurd
mixture of matters divine and human" that the Scholastics had
concocted, all the new philosophy did was to render unto faith the
things that are faith's." To understand the word of God, we now had
to "quit the small vessel of human reason, and put ourselves on board
the ship of the Church, which alone possesses the divine needle for
justly shaping the course." Furthermore, in submitting to the limits
of human reason, we would lay bare the true wonders of God's
creation, and we would thereby ultimately be led to worship him all the
more.

This prediction may have been sincere or, more likely, a clever piece
of apologetics, but in any case it turned out to be wrong about the
effect of the new philosophy on religious belief. As science
progressed, faith in the old sense grew correspondingly weaker, and by
the 18th century - which was not dubbed the Age of Reason for nothing
- it had been diluted into the depersonalized generalities of deism.

In the meantime, the human mind unaided by revelation was showing such
enormous power that even a poet like Alexander Pope (who was a Roman
Catholic) fell into a state of veneration as before a saint in
contemplating the figure of the preeminent scientist of his day, Sir
Isaac Newton:

Nature and Nature's law lay hid in night, God said, 'Let Newton
be,' and all was light

The paradox was that this apparently unlimited power had been unleashed
precisely by the willingness of reason to become (in Galileo's term)
more "modest." In restricting itself to what it was capable of
discovering, instead of presuming to answer the ultimate questions that
were beyond its ken, the human mind had rapidly acquired a vaster store
of knowledge about the physical universe than it had managed to gather
in all the years gone by.

By the 19th century, with the advent of Charles Darwin, the new
philosophy had descended from the planets to the apes. And with this
shift, the so-called war between religion and science, which Bacon had
denied would ever occur, heated up to a veritable frenzy. Like so many
of the scientists who had come before him, Darwin protested that he was
not a nonbeliever and he insisted that his discovery of the descent of
man from the apes did not refute the essential truths of religion.

But to little avail. There were (and still are) desperate efforts by
many Christians either to refute Darwin or to find a way of maintaining
their faith in the biblical ac count of creation in the teeth of his
work. Great outpourings of religious enthusiasm even occurred here and
there. And yet when the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
proclaimed toward the end of the 19th century that God was dead, he was
expressing a very wide spread feeling, often secretly held, that few
others had the nerve to articulate s boldly,

Nietzsche welcomed the death of God as a necessary precondition for the
fruition of human greatness. But his older Russian contemporary, the
great novelist Foodor Dostoevsky, like John Donne before him, was
appalled by the consequences that the victory of science over religion
were likely to bring with it. If God was dead, he said (through the
mouth of one of his characters, Ivan Karamazov), then everything was
permitted.

At this point in the story, we run into another fascinating paradox.
While it was in becoming "modest" that the human mind seemed to
have grown to superhuman proportions, it soon forgot, in the headiness
of its accomplishments, the respect for its own limits that had made
the gigantic accomplishments of reason possible in the first place. Now
the idea spread that reason in the form of science had shown that it,
not God, was omnipotent and was on its way to usurping the divine
attribute of omniscience as well.

And so it came about that modesty was replaced by the puffed-up pride
the Greeks called hubris. The likes of the Marquis de Condorcet in the
18th century and then Auguste Comte in the 19th asserted that science
need not even be restricted to the physical world; it could be adapted
to the social world just as successfully. "Social science" could
design plans for an ideal society, and in implementing them, it could
at the same time - or so the most utopian of these social engineers
expected - reshape and perfect human nature itself.

If, according to Dostoevsky, the death of God meant that everything
(evil) was now permitted, the new worshippers of reason believed that
everything (good) was now possible. But Dostoevsky was a better prophet
than the utopian rationalists on the other side, as the grisly horrors
perpetrated by the two main totalitarian systems that sprang up in the
20th century would demonstrate.

For both communism and Nazism were forms of social engineering based on
supposedly scientific foundations. The communists who took over in
Russia in 1917 explicitly saw themselves as "scientific
socialists;' carrying out the hither-to hidden laws of History as
unearthed by the mind of Karl Marx and creating as they went along the
"new Soviet man." As for the Nazis, they justified their slaughter
of Jews and others as part of a program of putatively scientific
eugenics that would purify the human race and create the higher breed
foreseen by Nietzsche in his vision of the superman.

To be sure, few worshippers of reason detected in the horrors of
totalitarianism the fingerprints of their triumph in the war between
science and religion, Quite the contrary. Many scientists and other
devotees of what has aptly been described as "the religion of
science" even supported the Soviet "experiment" (the use of this
word was itself significant) and apologized for or denied the crimes it
entailed, Conversely, they placed the blame for Nazism not on anything
connected with reason or science but on the atavistic influence of
religion and forces of irrationality and superstition that allegedly
always accompanied it.

Hence totalitarianism failed to make a dent in the hubris of the
religion of science. But the atom bomb did manage to trigger a recoil
among the physicists who had invented it. In yet another of the
paradoxes that keep cropping up here, this most vivid demonstration of
the seemingly limitless power of science brought about something of a
return to Galileo's modesty. Scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer,
who had supervised the project, took to agonizing over what science had
wrought and were beset by doubts about its role in the total scheme of
things.

In yielding to these doubts, Oppenheimer and others had been preceded
by several scientist-philosophers, of whom the most eminent was
probably Alfred North Whitehead. In Science and the Modern World
(1925), Whitehead, from within a generally scientific worldview, raised
deep questions about the idea that science provided an exhaustive
account of reality. "Religion," he wrote approvingly, "is the
vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the
passing flux of immediate things."

During this same period, there were also literary figures like T.S.
Eliot who carried forward and modernized the tradition of resistance to
the imperialistic claims of reason and science as against those of
imagination and religion. Finally, to Eliot and Whitehead were added
theologians like Jacques Maritain who, resurrecting and reconceiving
lines of argument from St. Thomas Aquinas that had once been thought
dead and buried forever, undertook to show that the truths of science
did not refute or negate the truths of religion.

Then, too, within the realm of science itself, new discoveries were
made, particularly in cosmology (where the whole thing had started)
that further encouraged a return to Galileo's modesty. In 1992 the
distinguished astronomer Robert Jastrow, while describing himself as an
agnostic, wrote a book entitled God and the Astronomers concluding that
"it is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another
measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though
science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of
creation."

But the very last sentence of Mr. Jastrow's book was even more
astonishing: "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the
power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the
mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he
pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of
theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Evidently, as with the death of Mark Twain, reports of the death of God
have been greatly exaggerated. Against all expectation, that dog did
not in the end bark. I am not here referring to the fact that in the
United States approximately 95% of the population professes to believe
in God. No doubt this is impressive, but its impact is somewhat
lessened by the highly secularized way of life that so comfortably
coexists with it.

What strikes me as more impressive is the almost complete disappearance
in recent years of any talk about the war between science and religion.
We do talk of a "culture war," but that battle has been raging on
an entirely different front. As for science and religion, these two
formerly passionate enemies have for the moment reached an
accommodation on the ground. It is an unwritten armistice, based
(perhaps unconsciously) on the conception of the relations between the
two that was advanced by Galileo and Bacon, who rendered unto each its
own sphere of truth: to science the how of material things, and to
religion the why of them.

As Mr. Jastrow sees it, this is where the story ends. But alas, he is
correct only for the older breed of natural scientists. A new breed,
which did not yet exist in the 17th century, has come along in the
latter part of the 20th and seems likely to reignite the war between
science and religion. This new breed, made up of geneticists, molecular
biologists and biotechnologists, is in the only the early stages of its
work. Like their predecessors in other scientific fields, they have
gone very far very fast, but they have neither begun with nor yet
acquired any sense of the limits of what they can do.

A good illustration is provided by two leading pioneers of the "new
philosophy" of our own day, Francis Crick and James D. Watson, who
jointly won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. So
confident were these men of their powers that in the early 1970s they
entertained the idea of administering genetic tests to newborn infants
who, if they failed, were to be put to death. At the time this idea was
so shocking that Mr. Crick prudently refused to allow publication of
the BBC interview in which he had floated it, while Mr. Watson confined
his endorsement to private conversation (with me, among others).

Of course they defined "failure" as a likely predisposition to
certain diseases, so that the infanticide it entailed wore a reassuring
therapeutic mask. Yet what was to prevent the future inclusion of
standards of height or beauty or intellectual potential as necessary
qualifications for the right of a newborn to go on living?

By now, even with this terrible question still hanging in the air, we
have a philosopher like Peter Singer throwing all caution to the winds
and developing a rationale for an allegedly benevolent program of
infanticide. Mr Singer's reward for his brazen outspokenness has been
an appointment as professor of bioethics at the Princeton University
Center for Human Values (!). In response, the resistance within the
religious community is heating up at a rapid clip.

But wait. Thanks to the progress of genetic engineering, which assures
us it can rectify defects in advance, infanticide may prove
unnecessary. This sounds wonderful, but wait again. As the political
theorist Francis Fukuyama has written, the biotechnical revolution is
"on the brink" of being able to custom-design creatures who will
resemble humans but will not be governed by human nature as we have
always known it.

Unlike his namesake Francis Bacon, who greeted the first stage of
modern science with hope and enthusiasm, Mr. Fukuyama looks forward
with fear and trembling to this next stage. "To the extent that
nature is not something given to us by God or by our evolutionary
inheritance, but by human artifice, then we enter into God's own
realm with all of the frightening powers for good and evil that such an
entry implies."

I tremble even more violently than Mr. Fukuyama, but I cannot believe
that the new scientists will succeed in replacing God any more than
their predecessors managed to kill him off. The dog didn't bark in
the millennium just ended, and my guess - or perhaps I should say my
prayer - is that it will also fail to bark in the one just begun.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Podhoretz, Norman. "Has Science Killed God?" Wall Street Journal
(February, 2000).

Reprinted with permission of the Wall Street Journal.


THE AUTHOR

Norman Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary, a senior fellow of
the Hudson Institute and author, most recently, of Ex-Friends (Free
Press, 1999)