It’s great when your school assignments promote your blogging. I’m taking undergraduate evolution. It’s not that my religious private school where I did my undergrad didn’t teach it (what respectable biology department wouldn’t?) but rather that you won’t find it on any transcript as a course named such. And thus, I’m taking it as a leveling course in graduate school.
The professor has really been doing a great job of trying to tell the students that evolutionary theory doesn’t mean you have to throw your faith away, and that there are evolutionary biologists of various faiths. I appreciate him for bringing up these subjects, and I think it’s wise. Any teacher in west Texas that would stick their head in the sand and not realize that at least of few of the students probably resist the theory isn’t doing his students any favors in educating them.
So, we’ve briefly hit upon intelligent design, and what it’s implications for science are. The professor assigned a reading, The Perimeter of Ignorance by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson is a astrophysicist and is the director of Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. The article’s excellent, and I’ll be going through it shortly, but I can sum it all up with one line and a cartoon — When scientists reach the limits of their understanding, they can either invoke a higher power, or keep searching for natural causes.

I thought that Tyson did a better job in the first of his article than the last.
He starts out by noting that many past scientists believed in a higher pattern but notes a pattern in their invocation of God.
But a careful reading of older texts, particularly those concerned with the universe itself, shows that the authors invoke divinity only when they reach the boundaries of their understanding. They appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance. They call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.
He notes Newton’s difficulties with his theories of gravity and planetary motion.
Newton feared that all this pulling would render the orbits in the solar system unstable. His equations indicated that the planets should long ago have either fallen into the Sun or flown the coop—leaving the Sun, in either case, devoid of planets. Yet the solar system, as well as the larger cosmos, appeared to be the very model of order and durability. So Newton, in his greatest work, the Principia, concludes that God must occasionally step in and make things right:
“The six primary Planets are revolv’d about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun,
Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”
But here’s the result of not simply throwing up our hands, saying “God did it”, and forgoing our search for answers.
A century later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton’s dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece, Mécanique Céleste, the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces. According to an oft-repeated but probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. “Sire,” Laplace replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
Tyson hits upon the fact that the same scientists who invoked God for areas they didn’t understand, also didn’t throw out their findings when they conflicted with the prevailing religious doctrines of the day.
As reverent as Newton, Huygens, and other great scientists of earlier centuries may have been, they were also empiricists. They did not retreat from the conclusions their evidence forced them to draw, and when their discoveries conflicted with prevailing articles of faith, they upheld the discoveries. That doesn’t mean it was easy: sometimes they met fierce opposition, as did Galileo, who had to defend his telescopic evidence against formidable objections drawn from both scripture and “common” sense.
He then discusses Galileo’s views on science and religion. It seems that Galileo really got it, and the part below that I’ve highlighted is just right on the money.
Galileo clearly distinguished the role of religion from the role of science. To him, religion was the service of God and the salvation of souls, whereas science was the source of exact observations and demonstrated truths. In a long, famous, bristly letter written in the summer of 1615 to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany (but, like so many epistles of the day, circulated among the literati), he quotes, in his own defense, an unnamed yet sympathetic church official saying that the Bible “tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”
The letter to the duchess leaves no doubt about where Galileo stood on the literal word of the Holy Writ:
“In expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. . . .
Nothing physical which . . . demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. . . .
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. ” [emphasis mine]
A rare exception among scientists, Galileo saw the unknown as a place to explore rather than as an eternal mystery controlled by the hand of God.
Next, the author notes that theologians took a turn in the 17th and 18th centuries and put forth the view that the laws of nature themselves were evidence of the wisdom of God. But then the author points out that basically, the Earth and universe are trying to kill us.
Turns out that some celestial bodies give off more light in the invisible bands of the spectrum than in the visible. And the invisible light picked up by the new telescopes showed that mayhem abounds in the cosmos: monstrous gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, matter-crushing gravitational fields, matter-hungry black holes that flay their bloated stellar neighbors, newborn stars igniting within pockets of collapsing gas. And as our ordinary, optical telescopes got bigger and better, more mayhem emerged: galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other, explosions of supermassive stars, chaotic stellar and planetary orbits. Our own cosmic neighborhood—the inner solar system—turned out to be a shooting gallery, full of rogue asteroids and comets that collide with planets from time to time. Occasionally they’ve even wiped out stupendous masses of Earth’s flora and fauna. The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo.
Of course, Earth can be bad for your health too. On land, grizzly bears want to maul you; in the oceans, sharks want to eat you. Snowdrifts can freeze you, deserts dehydrate you, earthquakes bury you, volcanoes incinerate you. Viruses can infect you, parasites suck your vital fluids, cancers take over your body, congenital diseases force an early death. And even if you have the good luck to be healthy, a swarm of locusts could devour your crops, a tsunami could wash away your family, or a hurricane could blow apart your town.
I think Tyson’s view is a little pessimistic here, but I think he’s on the money. If people like to view nature as something that proves God, you have a hard time doing that scientifically. Tyson’s right, that nature is not simply built for our pleasure. It is a dangerous world out there, with lot’s of uncertainty about our futures. As a religious person myself, I feel very comfortable with God as the creator and sustainer of scientific laws (or the way we observe nature behaving). But you run into rocky places if you turn around and claim that these laws which bring us good things don’t also bring us bad things.
It’s after this that Tyson takes a turn I’m slightly uncomfortable with. He basically points out how poorly the human body is “designed” if that’s the way we want to look at it. The reason I’m uncomfortable with this is that you can use arguments like this (and lots of people have) to claim there’s no God. This becomes an extension of science into the realm of metaphysics. Science oversteps its bounds.
Indeed, I will agree with Tyson that people who make the claims that humans are “designed” are cherry-picking their data, to show how “wonderful” our bodies are. And in that sense, I think Tyson has fair game to point out that this is an illogical view, as there are evolutionary leftovers in our bodies that cause discomfort, poor health, etc.
But as a Christian, it makes perfect sense to me that we have these things. I have an appendix not because a “designer” gave me an organ which serves no purpose other than putting me in the hospital on a moment’s notice, but rather because I share an evolutionary history with the rest of creation.
Tyson then gets around in a lengthy way to concluding his article. Once again, he gives sound reasoning.
Another practice that isn’t science is embracing ignorance. Yet it’s fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design: I don’t know what this is. I don’t know how it works. It’s too complicated for me to figure out. It’s too complicated for any human being to figure out. So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.
What do you do with that line of reasoning? Do you just cede the solving of problems to someone smarter than you, someone who’s not even human? Do you tell students to pursue only questions with easy answers?
There may be a limit to what the human mind can figure out about our universe. But how presumptuous it would be for me to claim that if I can’t solve a problem, neither can any other person who has ever lived or who will ever be born. Suppose Galileo and Laplace had felt that way? Better yet, what if Newton had not? He might then have solved Laplace’s problem a century earlier, making it possible for Laplace to cross the next frontier of ignorance. [emphasis in original]
If anything though, I think Tyson makes his points and makes them well in the first 2/3 of the article. The last third of the article seems to trickle out, less cohesive and more “frustrated” than the beginning. (Kind of like my posts!)
Still, it’s a great article, one that’s worth reading and reflecting on. Like the cartoon above points out, I think the general public needs to understand how we scientists pursue this endeavor we call science.