Science versus religion

Lecture series invitees discuss implications for scientific progress to support or suppress faith

By: Nathan Ball

Posted: 3/25/08

Francis Collins, the director of the human genome project, and Stephen Weinberg, a Nobel Prize recipient for physics, came to Texas A&M to discuss the interplay between science and religion.

Both men received 2008's Trotter Prize, awarded by the College of Science in conjunction with the Dwight Looke College of Engineering.

Collins and Weinberg took opposing viewpoints Thursday evening as they discussed the "ultimate question": How can science and religion be reconciled?

Collins said they are complementary. He said he sees God as an intelligent, caring being who made the universe, created the laws of mathematics and physics and programmed the DNA of all living things.

"I can find God in a church, and I can find him in a laboratory. I can read about him in the Bible or in the genome," Collins said.

Stephen Weinberg agreed that science and religion can co-exist. Weinberg said they have for all of human history and he had no reason to believe that God and science were mutually exclusive, but he has not seen sufficient evidence to believe in God.

There is a tension between religion and science, Weinberg said. "Scientific discoveries make religious explanations increasingly unnecessary."

"Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative," said Collins, quoting G. K. Chesterton, an early 20th century Christian writer.

Collins said that he came to believe in God in his late 20s after he finished his doctorate degree in physical chemistry from Yale. Collins was an atheist and had come to faith through questioning and searching religion for answers to life where science had left him with only questions.

"The Bible makes sense," he said. "Historically, we know as much about the life of Jesus Christ as a human being as we know about the life of Julius Caesar.

"Science is the only reliable way to understand how the natural world works, but it is powerless to answer the ultimate questions of existence, and of death.

"If reproductive fitness is to be the ultimate driving force for human behavior, then much of our behavior does not make sense. A man such as Oscar Schindler, who saved thousands of lives at great risk to his own, is an evolutionary scandal, but there is something we find admirable in him which can only be explained by the existence of a moral law."

Collins said that moral law is evidence for the existence of a good God who cares about his creation because he gave humans a conscience to discern good and evil.

Collins summed up his viewpoint with a quote from Immanuel Kant: "Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the moral law within."

"Science has weakened people's view of God," Weinberg said. "The universe used to be much more mysterious, but we know more now."

Weinberg drew from history to describe the ancients' ideas of supernatural forces holding the sun in the sky. "We now understand gravity which holds planets in their place," Weinberg said. "And we do not need to attribute their movements in the heavens to a god.

"None of these explanations ruled out the existence of God, but the spread of religious tolerance is evidence of the weakening of religion."

Though he is not a believer, Weinberg said he did not think that the loss of belief was a good thing.

"When people stop worshipping God, they tend to start worshipping each other, and secular religious substitutes have done the most harm," he said.

Weinberg explained that fascism, Stalinism and Maoism were secular substitutes for religion focused on a charismatic human figure. He said hundreds of millions have died as a result of these worldviews in the past century, more than in all of the religious wars in human history combined.

"The best thing might be for us to stop worshipping altogether," Weinberg said.

"The presentations tonight were very well attended," said Ide P. Trotter Jr., class of 1954. He endowed the Trotter Prize and Lecture Series in honor of his father who had established a similarly styled graduate lecture during his tenure as A&M's dean of graduate studies. Trotter Jr. was involved at A&M as an undergraduate. He served as president of the Student Senate, Corps staff and copy editor for The Battalion. Trotter Jr. is an active supporter of A&M through the Trotter Prize and Lecture Series.

Recipients of the Trotter Prize have included Sir Francis Crick, Nobel Laureate for discovering DNA structure, Charles Townes, Nobel Laureate and "Father of the Laser" and other Nobel Prize and Templeton Prize Winners.

"Professor Marlan Scully deserves a lot of credit for bringing the lecturers to Texas A&M," Trotter Jr. said. "Marlan was the first man to earn entry into the National Academy of Sciences based on work he has done at Texas A&M, and he is well recognized throughout the scientific community."