Why Science Can't Show Us God
This month, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Charles Townes won the $1.5-million Templeton Prize, an award given out for "progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities." What does it mean that a religious prize is being given to a physicist?
Townes, in fact, is the fifth scientist to have won the award (the world's most lucrative academic prize). Fellow physicist winners include Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., cosmologist Paul Davies, general-relativity expert George Ellis and particle physicist John Polkinghorne.
"Religion," Townes told the journal Physics World, "is aimed at understanding the purpose and meaning of our universe, including our own lives. If the universe has a purpose and meaning, this must be reflected in its structure and functioning, and hence in science." In 1966, in the wake of his Nobel Prize, Townes was even bolder. In an article published in MIT's Technology Review, he wrote that differences between science and religion "are largely superficial
The idea that science and religion coalesce in the structure of the universe has been expressed by a slew of physicists in recent years. Among them are Davies, in his bestselling book "God and the New Physics," and Stephen Hawking, in "A Brief History of Time." In this view, science and religion both find their apotheosis in a Theory of Everything -- a unified account of all the world's forces and particles. Know the final equations, Hawking tells us, and you will know "the mind of God."
There is nothing new about this notion, but there is something fundamentally missing from this portrayal of the religious enterprise, at least from a Christian point of view.
Contrary to widespread belief, religion and science have not always been at odds. The idea that science may illuminate the divine predates Christianity and goes back to the great pioneer of mathematics, Pythagoras of Samos in the 5th century BC. Pythagoras believed that numbers were literally gods, and he associated the numbers 1 through 10 with the major gods of the Greek pantheon.
In Pythagorean science, to find mathematical relations behind physical phenomena was to find the divine harmonia by which the universe had been created. This was the original "music of the spheres," an idea that was to have a profound effect on the evolution of modern physics.
