May 10, 2008

Dear Colleague:  

   In 1950, I listened over the radio a debate on "Science and Religion" between the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, an agnostic, and classicist Dorothy Sayers, a Christian. Although my sympathy lay with Sayers, I thought Hoyle had the better argument. So imagine my surprise when I learned later that Hoyle came close to accepting Intelligent Design. He was forced to that view by the delicate beauty of stellar nuclear reactions. How could a process so remarkable be just a happy accident? In exasperation, Hoyle is reported to have said, "The universe is a put up job." Hoyle's astonishment is the rule rather than the exception among great physicists of our time. Einstein spoke of the regularities of nature, mathematically precise, as "reason incarnate." He threw around the words "spirit" and "God" rather freely in his philosophical and popular writings. "Every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men." Spirit? What spirit? Stephen Hawking wrote: "If we find the answer to [why it is that we and the universe exist], it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we should know the mind of God." To Max Planck, originator of quantum theory, "There can never be any real opposition between religion and science...They are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition...[and therefore] 'On to God!'"

    Isn't there something strange and counter-intuitive in the views of physical scientists? They, after all, study inanimate matter and forces. What room is there in their work for life, much less intelligence, mind, and God? So why do they keep introducing these metaphysical, quasi-religious ideas? Why aren't they all aggressive atheists? Now, if I didn't know better, I would say that biologists are inclined to favor religion and use freely the words "spirit" and "God." They, after all, study life, something that is extremely rare and rather mysterious in the universe. But no. With the exception of Charles Darwin himself, the militant atheists of his day and ours are biologists. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, is an outstanding example.

    I find this difference between physicists and biologists puzzling. The only explanation I can come up with hinges on "beauty." Physicists are struck by the beauty—the mathematical elegance—of natural laws. Biologists, so far as I know, never see anything beautiful in what they study: not only is ecology messy, even the DNA is complicated, untidy stuff. Life is ugly because it is a product of evolution. A lot of redundancy is built into life's functions to ensure its survival. The "God" of biologists—if biologists ever get to postulate such a being!—is an engineer, not a mathematician. The engineer, having just designed a bridge that perfectly adapts to a specific set of conditions, then more or less arbitrarily adds a factor of ten to its tensile strength, just so that it can survive a once-in-fifty-year blizzard! No wonder bridges are so clunky and ugly. No wonder, dear colleague, we—built by nature or God the engineer—are so ugly. Such uglinesses don't require that we postulate "intelligence" or "God."

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu