-- John F. Kennedy
Reading: by George Johnson from an article entitled “Hills to Scientific Discoveries Grow Steeper” (The New York Times, Feb. 17, 2014)
Armed with a stopwatch and a perfume atomizer, Robert Millikan embarked in 1909 on a landmark discovery in physics. Squirting out a mist of oil drops and timing how quickly they fell in the presence of an electrical field, he ultimately showed that the world is awash with tiny, identically charged specks of matter — subatomic particles called electrons.
His apparatus could fit on a tabletop, and his findings were recorded in notebooks. One can be read — if you can decipher his handwriting — on the web.
Those were simpler days. By the time a century passed — and protons, neutrons and quarks had been discovered — the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator 17 miles in circumference, was making its first runs. In 2012, after analyzing petabytes of data (the electronic equivalent of billions of notebooks), researchers laid claim to discovering a long-sought particle called the Higgs boson [- a key to understanding why there is diversity and life in the universe]. So many people were involved that together they would constitute the population of a small town.
That is how science has changed in 100 years. As the effort to understand the world has advanced, the low-hanging fruits (like Newton’s apple) have been plucked. Scientists are reaching higher and deeper into the tree. But with finite arms in an infinite universe, are there limits — physical and mental — to how far they can go?
Reading: by Al Gore from The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (p. 204)
In mythology, the lines dividing powers reserved for gods from those allowed to people were marked by warnings; transgressions were severely punished. Yet no Zeus has forbidden us to introduce human genes into other animals; or to create hybrid creatures by mixing the genes of spiders and goats; or to surgically imbed silicon computer chips into the gray matter of our brains; or to provide a genetic menu of selectable traits for parents who wish to design their own children.
The use of science and technology in an effort to enhance human beings is taking us beyond the outer edges of the moral, ethical, and religious maps bequeathed to us by previous generations. We are now in terra incognita, where the ancient maps sometimes noted, “There Be Monsters.”
Reading: by Philip Ball, British science writer, from “Sublime Intervention” (New Statesman, May 7, 2012)
A sense of wonder at the natural world is what drives the quest for scientific knowledge -- but it must provoke curiosity, not passive acceptance of the way things are
The day I realized the potential of the internet was infused with wonder --not at the network itself, however handy it would become for shoveling bits, but at what it revealed as I crowded round a screen with the other staff of Nature magazine on 16 July 1994. That was the day when the first piece of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter, turning our cynicism about previous astronomical fireworks promised but not delivered into the carping of ungrateful children. Right there on our cosmic doorstep bloomed a fiery apocalypse that left an earth-sized hole in the giant planet's baroquely swirling atmosphere. This was old-style wonder, awe tinged with horror, at forces beyond our comprehension.
Aristotle and Plato didn't agree on much, but they were united in identifying wonder as the origin of their profession. As Aristotle said, "It is owing to their wonder that men … first began to philosophize." This idea appeals to scientists, who frequently enlist wonder as a goad to inquiry. …
Yet that is not the only direction in which wonder may take us. To Thomas Carlyle, wonder sits at the beginning not of science, but of religion. That is the central tension in forging an alliance of wonder with science: will it make us curious, or induce us to prostrate ourselves in pitiful ignorance?
Will Science Save Us?
A Sermon Delivered on March 2, 2014
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
Every Monday morning, I have a ritual of calling my mother, who lives in Germany, and hearing her tell me what she has been up to in the past week. I sit on the sofa in my study, with a cup of tea at my side, and my laptop computer balanced on my knee. At the designated time, I boot up Skype, and with the touch of a finger launch our weekly mother-son video conference.
She sits in the living room of the family home I know so well. And we carry on a conversation, as if we were sitting across the same table, sharing a cup of tea.
Our weekly Skype routine has now become a habit I hardly give a second thought. But when I stop to think about it. It is truly amazing. It’s as if I were living in a science fiction world, like the one imagined in “2001 – A Space Odyssey.” I remember, when I first saw the movie years ago, it wasn’t space travel or mysterious aliens that most fascinated me – it was when the hero of the story at one point talked with his family at a pay phone that also included a video screen. Wow… And I remember, it wasn’t so long ago, when my mother and I first tried this new method of connection. I remember we had a hard time carrying on a conversation, because it was simply too baffling, too distracting, to see the person at the other end of the line.
This wasn’t science fiction. It was science fact.
* * *
I am most vividly aware of the amazing powers of science every time I visit someone in the hospital. I visit the man who suffered a heart attack just a few days earlier. His heart stopped while he was exercising. But thanks to some attentive helpers, and thanks to a handy defibrillator, he was jolted back to life, rushed to the hospital, where skilled surgeons performed open-heart surgery, a triple bypass operation. When I see him, just two days later, he is sitting up in bed, with a computer in front of him, working away.
Every time I go to the hospital and hear about the medical tests and treatments now being put to good use, easing chronic pain, setting broken bones, replacing worn out joints, and addressing a multitude of medical issues, I invariably remark how fortunate we are to live in the year 2014, rather than 1914, or even 1994.
* * *
We look to science for answers, because in the past 100 years especially, the scientific method has proven to be a remarkable source of understanding. We look to science for answers, even if we barely understand the questions science is asking, or the answers that are being offered.
For instance, I can’t claim to understand much about the dynamics of sub-atomic particles – whether electrons, quarks or Higgs bosons. The energies expended to pursue these lofty areas of science seem just about as mind-boggling as the puzzling truths about our universe they reveal.
The Large Hadron Collider, for instance, with a 17-mile circumference, buried deep beneath the French and Swiss Alps, is the largest machine in the world. It is a series of superconducting magnets, so powerful they need to be cooled to -271 degrees Celsius – colder than outer space – which also makes the collider the world’s largest refrigerator.
What it does is this:
“Two particle beams no thicker than a human hair make their way around the collider in opposite directions. The magnetic fields coax the beams to go fast and faster, until they approach the speed of light. And then the two beams smash into each other in front of a particle detector. It’s like shooting two needles at each other from a distance of 6 miles. [When they meet] the particles… break into subparticles, which exist for just a fraction of a second before they… disappear… When it’s running at peak speed, the [Hadron Collider] can produce as many as 550 million collisions per second.” (The Writer’s Almanac, Sep. 10, 2013)
This is an amazing achievement for the hundreds of scientists working on this experiment. But what difference does it make for the rest of us?
The results of a survey conducted by the National Science Foundation that were released last month showed that a quarter of Americans think the sun goes around the earth – rather than the earth around the sun. And only a minority of Americans know that the universe began with a huge explosion.
The problem with science is that - for all its power and promise – on some very basic level we really don’t know what we are doing.
Science does a spectacular job shedding light on some very specific and some very useful aspects of the world in which we live. But in other ways science leaves us completely in the dark.
As the bioethicist and physician Leon Kass sees it, science – despite its promise and its power - has real limits. “Despite its universality, its quest for certainty, its reliance on reason purified from all distortions of sensation and prejudice by the use of mathematical method, and the reproducibility of its findings, science does not—and cannot—provide us with absolute knowledge.” (“Science, Religion, and the Human Future,” Commentary, Apr. 2007)
Science sets itself limits, in what it considers legitimate objects of study. Science strives to be rational, and so it examines only those aspects of the world, and of human experience, that yield to rational inquiry. It’s a very specialized kind of rationality. Science “seeks to know how things work and the mechanisms of action of their workings; it does not seek to know what things are, and why… Science can give the histories of things but not their directions, aspirations, or purposes”
“In a word, we have a remarkable science of nature that has made enormous progress precisely by its metaphysical neutrality and its indifference to questions of being, …[of] purpose… [and of] the goodness or badness of things, scientific knowledge included.”
Science has its limits.
The philosopher and theologian Keith Ward puts it this way. He writes,
“One of the things a scientific approach to the world does is to remove [the] rich texture of personal [experience] and response and construct a model of a depersonalized world of “pure objectivity,” without purpose, passion, meaning, or value. This is not meant as a critical comment. It is simply an attempt to [explain] what science does to the richly interactive world of human experience in order to turn it into a value-neutral… world of measurable, predictable processes….” (The Big Questions in Science and Religion, p. 168)
I always liked the way Douglas Adams concisely captured the limitations of science, in his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In it, an enormous supercomputer is built in order to calculate “the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” Over a period of 7.5 million years the computer works on the question, and then indeed finally comes up with the definitive answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. The answer is 42.
* * *
Science does a spectacular job shedding light on some very specific and some very useful aspects of the world in which we live. But in other ways science leaves us completely in the dark.
And moving forward in the dark, when we can’t see a thing, is dangerous. We can’t see where our path will lead us. We can’t anticipate the consequences of our actions. We can’t predict the pitfalls of the powers we have discovered, and which we try to harness.
The quote by John F. Kennedy on the cover of our bulletin speaks to this dilemma. Scientific discovery has given us the power to create and to annihilate, he says. It has provided us with a supreme challenge and a supreme testing.”
The quote is from a speech Kennedy delivered on October 22, 1963, at a convocation of the National Academy of Sciences. When he speaks of a “supreme testing,” he is alluding to the nuclear test ban treaty that scientists and policy makers were debating at the time. The Cold War was in full swing, and the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse was on people’s mind. And while today we are relieved the Cold War is history, the nuclear arsenals around the world continue to haunt us. And the radioactive fallout from long ago nuclear tests will continue to affect us for hundreds of thousands of years.
* * *
The dangers Kennedy identified fifty years ago are still with us. But the advances of science, industry and technology have led us down a path with ever increasing dangers. Al Gore speaks of the unprecedented ethical dilemmas of genetic engineering. But we also know of the ever-growing dangers of climate change, the consequence of our long-standing habit of environmental exploitation, and the careless use of fossil fuels.
How can we deal with these dangers? What should we do? These are the critical questions we need to answer. And these are the kind of questions science cannot solve for us.
Science does a fine job providing us with certain kinds of objective information, about the world as it is. But science has little to tell us about the meaning and purpose of our lives. Science has little to say about the ethical implications of our actions and inactions. Science tries to tell us what is, but doesn’t tell us what should be, how we should live, how we can tell the difference between good and bad, and how we can find the courage to do good.
This is an arena of human experience better understood through other forms of knowledge. One important candidate is religion.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it,
“Science is the search for explanation. Religion is the search for meaning… Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. The difference between them is fundamental and irreducible. They represent two distinct activities of the mind. Neither is dispensable. Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity.” (The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning, p. 37)
* * *
Science has been the source and engine of unprecedented human progress. But science cannot answer all our questions. It can tell us where we have come from and where we are. It cannot tell us where we should go from here. The paths ahead are uncharted, the dangers, the monsters around us, are real. To navigate the uncharted unknown, we need both the insights of science and the wisdom of religion.
At their best, both are rooted in a deep sense of wonder. A sense of wonder that inspires within us a sense of curiosity, and a spirit of adventure. A sense of “old-style wonder” that instills within us a sense of “awe tinged with horror, at forces beyond our comprehension.” Wonder is the beginning of wisdom, Socrates said. A wonder that instills within us a deep sense of humility, reverence and awe. A wisdom tinged with a healthy dose of “fear and trembling,” because the powers around us and at our finger tips are indeed dangerous.
I would like to conclude with words by John F. Kennedy, what he said following our earlier quote. He said, “If the challenge and the testing are too much for humanity, then we are all doomed. But I believe that the future can be bright, and I believe it can be certain. [We are] is still the master[s] of [our] own fate, and I believe that the power of science and the responsibility of science have offered [us] a new opportunity not only for intellectual growth, but for moral discipline; not only for the acquisition of knowledge, but for the strengthening of our nerve and our will.”
Science cannot save us. But we can save ourselves, if we muster the wisdom and the will to use the knowledge science has provided us to serve a greater good.
May all our inquiries be guided by a spirit of wonder.
May wonder lead us from ignorance to understanding.
And may we muster both the will and the wisdom
To choose the path to a better – a more wonderful - world.
Amen.
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