The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 1

After Darwin and Einstein: Is Belief in a Personal God Still Possible?

Fordham Center on Religion and Culture Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus 113 West 60th Street, New York, New York Tuesday, November 6, 2007 6-8 pm

Moderator PETER STEINFELS Co-director, Fordham Center on Religion and Culture

Presenter JOHN H AUGHT Georgetown University, Author of God After Darwin

Speakers B RIAN DAVIES Fordham University, Author of The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil

JOHN H ORGAN Stevens Institute of Technology Author of Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality

PETER STEINFELS: Welcome to this evening’s Headline Forum, “After Darwin and Einstein: Is Belief in a Personal God Still Possible?” I am Peter Steinfels, Co-Director, with Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, which is the sponsor of tonight’s forum.

There is a lot more information about the center and its activities, some of it available in flyers on the table near where you entered the auditorium, and, of course, on our Web site, which is www.fordham.edu/religculture. As always, we urge you to sign up for our email and snail-mail lists, so you can receive announcements of our events and activities.

We are extremely pleased, as in the past, to see so many of you here for a Center event. The topic, of course, is a compelling one: the challenge that the view of the cosmos emerging from natural science poses to longstanding understandings of God. It is a profound challenge that our culture has perhaps intuited, but simultaneously skirted as it has become The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 2 bogged down in First Amendment court battles about creationism and intelligent design.

Before moving directly to the introductions of this evening’s speakers, I want to mention a few things.

First, I think all of us would like this auditorium to be a cell phone-free zone for the duration of the program. So please check your phones and related devices to make sure that they are turned off. I was recently at a lecture, in the middle of which a cell phone went off and the speaker had the wit to say, “If that is Judith Giuliani, please tell her I’ll call back later.” [Laughter]

Second, the final portion of this evening’s program will be devoted to questions from the audience. We will follow our usual procedure. I think index cards and pencils were placed on the chairs where you are sitting. Please write your questions out and then raise your hand with the index card, so that our stalwart student assistants can gather them and bring them forward. Feel free to write out your questions and pass them at any point in the evening’s presentations and discussion. Please make your questions as brief and to-the-point as possible. And we don’t discourage legibility in any way.

We are delighted this evening to have as the main speaker John F. Haught, who would be found on any list of leading thinkers exploring the relationship between science and contemporary religion.

Dr. Haught is Senior Fellow in Science and Religion at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. He was Chair and Professor in the Department of Theology at Georgetown from 1970 to 2005. A specialist in systematic theology, he has a particular interest in science, cosmology, evolution, ecology, and religion. He is the author of many books and articles, both scholarly and popular. Some of these, like Is Nature Enough?: Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science, the book Deeper than Darwin, another book, God After Darwin, another, 101 Questions on God and Evolution are on sale outside the auditorium.

His most recent book is Christianity and Science, and his next one, to be published next year, is God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens.

Following Dr. Haught’s presentation, there will be short responses from John Horgan and Brian Davies.

Brian Davies is a Professor of Philosophy here at Fordham and the author of numerous books on the philosophy of religion and the thought of Thomas Aquinas. His most recent one is The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil. He has been the editor of at least fifty books, some on The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 3 philosophy and Thomism, many in a series on outstanding Christian thinkers, others in another series on great medieval thinkers, and also that includes four volumes of posthumously collected essays by the outstanding theologian and fellow Dominican, Herbert McCabe. Father Davies’ chapters in various books and scholarly articles, his newspaper columns and book reviews number by my count well over 100. They may even reach 200, but I suspect that he has lost count.

John Horgan is a science writer and Director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. A former staff member at Scientific American, he has written for The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, New Scientist, and many other publications — work that has garnered him repeated awards. He is the author of Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality. Before that, he stirred much discussion with a book, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Science in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. Not surprisingly, he has spoken and debated with prominent scientists and writers at MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Dartmouth, McGill, the University of Amsterdam, and dozens of other institutions. With a local clergyman and friend, the Reverend Frank Geer, he also wrote a brief, powerful reflection, Where Was God on September 11?, which I happen to have written about in The New York Times.

Each of these interlocutors will make a ten-minute or less response to Professor Haught, and then all three will engage in conversation about tonight’s topic.

Please now welcome Professor John Haught.

JOHN HAUGHT: Thank you, Peter, for that very generous introduction. Once again I want to thank you and Peggy Steinfels for the wonderful work you are doing. I want to congratulate Fordham University for establishing this terrific Center on Religion and Culture. It is indeed quite an honor to be here with you. I thank all of you for being here as well.

Peter introduced me as a theologian. Some of you might be wondering, what is a theologian? My definition of a theologian is someone who doesn’t make much money, but at least he knows why. [Laughter]

I should also add that for many, many years, I tried instead to become a philosopher. But cheerfulness kept breaking in. [Laughter] So I had to become a theologian. You know, theologians can get by with things that philosophers cannot.

[Slide] Of course, after Darwin and Einstein, certainly it’s possible to believe in a personal God. But is it possible to do so honestly, with intellectual integrity, in an age of science? The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 4

[Slide] Einstein thinks not. Albert Einstein maintains that the main source of the present-day conflicts between religion and science lies in the concept of a personal God. Why? Because the existence of a personal God would interrupt the closed, impersonal continuum of physical causes and effects that constitutes nature, in Einstein’s picture of things. Einstein thinks of nature as deterministic, as not able to be interrupted by anything nonphysical. The laws of science apply absolutely in this realm.

[Slide] So if there were a personal God, this would be a responsive God, a God who can answer prayers. This would be a God who would violate the laws of nature. Any sort of divine action would have the effect of interrupting the closed causal continuum that we refer to as “nature.”

So I suppose that prayer is not possible in an Einsteinian universe. I think that Einstein would probably agree with Ambrose Bierce’s definition of prayer, namely, “To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.” [Laughter]

[Slide] This is as close as I could come to finding Einstein in a posture of prayer. As I just said, Einstein has no room for prayer in his vision of things, and he thinks that the key, then, to resolving the conflict of science and religion is for us to abandon the idea of a personal God. He would say this to me, as a religious teacher, a theologian: “In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of personal God.”

[Slide] Einstein’s thought here is representative of a wider worldview that is sometimes known as “scientific naturalism.” Scientific naturalism is the belief that nature is all that is, all that ever was, and all that ever will be, to use the words of Carl Sagan, the first words in his TV series, Cosmos. Scientific naturalism maintains that the scientific method is the only reliable road to a right understanding of nature and that materialism, the belief that everything is ultimately physical, is the most intelligible worldview. Therefore, there can be no life after death, since there is no spiritual principle in humans, no soul, no possibility of immortality, and that the idea of a personal God, it follows, is also an illusory projection of wishful thinking onto the universe. The cosmos, therefore, has no overarching purpose, since there is no intentional agency that underlies it and that could give it purpose; it’s a purposeless universe that we live in.

When I speak of an impersonal universe and a purposeless universe, I am speaking of a universe which is not grounded in any personal type of agency, as we normally have understood God, in Western culture, to be.

[Slide] So in many ways, the question that I am dealing with tonight, from the point of view of science and religion anyway, comes down to the question of whether we can honestly say, in the age of science, after The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 5

Darwin, after Einstein, that this universe we live in has anything like a purpose to it.

What do I mean by “purpose”? In a very minimal sense, I mean by “purpose” the intentional, conscious actualizing of a goal or a value. For example, we can speak of our lives as purposeful to the extent that they are realizing something that we consider to be ultimately valuable — truth, peace, love, whatever.

The question, then, is whether anything comparable to this is going on in the universe. Is anything of great significance or value working itself out in the cosmos as a whole? A lot of people would say that’s a silly question. “Why should we bother about this question at all?” they would ask. Of course, a lot of people think it is pointless to even ask such a question. But not everybody. W.T. Stace, the famous American who once thought of the universe as purposeless, said that if the whole scheme of things is pointless, then, because of the intricate way in which the lives of each one of us is tied into the cosmos, so also are our individual lives. So it should matter to us, he thought, individually, and not just as an abstract philosophical question.

I found it remarkable that Václav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, would often make statements such as this: The crisis, he said, of a much-needed global responsibility, especially ecological responsibility, is due to the fact that we have lost in the modern world a sense that the universe has a purpose.

Of course, if you ask the religions of the world, especially the Western Abrahamic religions, they would say that of course the whole religious edifice stands or falls on the question of whether the universe has a purpose or not. Most of these religions have thought that it’s important for us to have some sense that something is working itself out in the universe, and this should sustain our aspirations ethically from generation to generation. So it’s a very important question for a lot of people, even today.

The question, however, is, doesn’t science rule out cosmic purpose, and with it, all hints of a divine personal presence underlying the universe, after Darwin and after Einstein in particular? [Slide] Some of you might be familiar with the statement of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Steven Weinberg, who claimed in the last part of his book The First Three Minutes that the more comprehensible — meaning the more scientifically comprehensible — the universe has become, the more pointless it also seems. [Slide] Another twentieth-century physicist, Richard Feynman, says that the great accumulation of understanding as to how the physical world behaves only convinces one that this behavior has a kind of meaninglessness about it. [Slide] Margaret Geller, an astronomer at Harvard University, when asked to comment on Steven Weinberg’s claim, The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 6 says, “What point? It’s just a physical system.”

[Slide] However, another physicist, Woody Allen, begs to differ. He says, “There’s a kind of intelligence in the universe, except for certain parts of New Jersey.” [Laughter]

[Slide] The great religious and philosophical traditions of the world, however, would have had no difficulty thinking of the cosmos as purposeful. That’s because the cosmos was arranged as a Great Chain of Being, a hierarchy of levels of being, in which each level, beginning with matter and going up through plant, animal, human, on up to ultimate reality itself, receives its meaning by being taken up into the next level, and ultimately into the life of divine.

This scheme operates according to what I like to call the hierarchical principle. The hierarchical principle maintains that a higher level in this Great Chain of Being can encompass or grasp or get itself around a lower level, but a lower level cannot encompass or grasp or comprehend a higher level. That would mean that gaining cognitional competency, say, at the level of matter by way of, let’s say, physics or chemistry, would not qualify you for understanding the more slippery levels of life and consciousness, let alone the divine.

The great traditions in the past — the wisdom traditions, as you might call them — of humanity, for the most part, maintain that for us to become adequate or competent to understand the higher levels, each one of us has to undergo a personal transformation. Just being smart is not enough to put you in touch with the deepest and most important levels of reality. The Latin word for this is sometimes called adaequatio, which we can translate as “adequacy” or “competency.” We simply can’t assume that by mastering the level of material reality, we can understand life, consciousness, and God. That’s because in this scheme, the more important something is, the more value, the more reality it has, the more elusive and slippery it is, the more unavailable it is to our cognitional control.

So what this would mean, then, is that if there is an ultimate meaning or an ultimate purpose to the universe, an overarching purpose, it would lie beyond the comprehension of human consciousness. We might, however, if we had attained the level of adaequatio, have an awareness of being grasped by ultimate meaning. The name that theology has given to that state of awareness of being grasped by and surrendering to a higher meaning is “faith.” But faith can only express itself in symbolic expression, because ultimate reality can never be grasped clearly and distinctly. The language of religion and philosophical faiths has often been that of symbol, analogy, and metaphor. We never had to apologize, in the traditional way of thinking, for using symbolic expression, because that was a sign of the eminence, or excellence, of that which we are trying to probe or trying to The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 7 get in touch with.

One of the symbols that has been paramount, especially in the Abrahamic traditions, is that of a personal God. Ultimate reality has to be at least personal. It has to be at least a “thou” rather than an “it,” if it’s going to grasp hold of us in our personal existence as well. But even personality is not enough to grasp what the ultimate is, and so most of our traditions have been willing to tolerate a moment of silence or a negative theology in which we recognize that whatever we say symbolically about ultimate reality, it’s not going to be adequate. Nevertheless, the point I am making here is that the traditional view of things was that ultimately this universe that we live in is grounded in something ultimately personal and purposeful.

[Slide] After our religious traditions became literate, our great religious thinkers and some of our sacred books understood the universe on the analogy of a book. A book is something that can be read at many different levels. Suppose you have, for example, a classic novel, and a monkey comes in and plays with it, opens it up. What will the monkey see there? Let’s say the novel is Moby Dick. The monkey will see black marks on white pages.

Take a child who has just learned the letters of the alphabet, a four- or five-year-old child. The child will open up the book and will see something the monkey didn’t — namely, a treasure trove of letters. The monkey and child are not wrong, but the book can mean more.

Take an adolescent. I think I was about thirteen or fourteen years old when I first read Moby Dick. I had to write a book report on it. I said something like, “It was a tedious sea story,” or something like that. An adolescent can grasp the narrative structure. But the book can mean more. Later on, as an adult, I read Moby Dick, and I was blown away by the depth of wisdom, pathos, and sense of life that Melville had written.

So the process of learning to understand a book requires adaequatio. You have to go through a personal life experience to become adequate to the content of a book.

Why wouldn’t that be the case, our religious ancestors asked, with respect to the cosmos as a whole? They would wonder whether modern science is really wired to detect the deeper meanings in the universe and whether physicists and others, like Weinberg and Feynman, who hold forth on the question of purpose, are perhaps out of their depth in dealing with that question.

[Slide] Maybe today one book is not nearly enough to represent the new picture of the universe that science has given us. As I picture the 13.7 million-year cosmic story that we have been given after Darwin and after The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 8

Einstein, which most scientists accept today as the cosmological context of life and human existence, the way I like to represent it, to get some sense of the scale, the enormity, spatially and temporally, of this universe, is to suppose that I have on my bookshelf thirty big books. Each of these volumes is 450 pages long, and each page stands for 1 million years in the story.

The Big Bang takes place on page 1 of Volume 1. The first two shelves and part of the third consist of what seems to be essentially lifeless and mindless processes and cosmic dust. Life is not in a hurry, it seems, to come into this universe.

The earth appears in Volume 21, four and a half billion years ago. Life flames up, rather unenthusiastically, a billion and some years later, but still doesn’t do anything terribly complex, until you get to almost the end of Volume 29. There, the Cambrian explosion takes place, 600 million years ago, and life begins to complexify and evolution seems to accelerate.

Even so, dinosaurs don’t come in until after the middle of Volume 30. They go extinct on page 385. That leaves only the last sixty-five pages for the development of mammals, primates, our hominid ancestors, who come in three, four, five pages from the end of Volume 30; and modern humans, endowed with intelligence, ethical aspiration, and a longing for purpose and meaning, we don’t arrive until the last tenth, perhaps the last fifth or so — the very last page of the very last volume.

If you are a thoughtful person today, you can’t help but ask, what’s going on here? Bertram Russell, when he was presented with this specter, commented that if the point of it was to produce intelligence, then why did it take so long to produce so little? [Laughter]

If there is going to be some sort of purposive aspect to this, it would have to be something that would have to have a kind of narrative structure, such that the narrative thread would run continuously from page 1 of Volume 1 to page 450 in any future volumes. For all we know, we are very early in the full unfolding of the cosmos. There has to be some narrative thread that ties together these volumes, if we are going to see some sort of meaning or purposive aspect to it all.

Last evening, at the Rose Hill Campus, I commented on how the impersonality of the Darwinian recipe for life has discouraged many, many sincere thinkers from ever again looking at the universe as something that could be in any way conceivably purposeful.

Tonight I want to bring the other volumes into the picture and talk about this whole story. What strikes me about it, more than anything else, is how the classic hierarchy, which was the skeletal framework for our understanding of a meaningful, purposeful universe in the past — this The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 9 classical hierarchy has been pancaked or smashed or “horizontalized” — or, as Arthur Lovejoy says, the Great Chain of Being has now been temporalized, so that the lines of discontinuity that we saw between life, matter, and mind in the classic hierarchy have been blurred. Life seems to come very gradually, without any sharp breaks, out of the material background, and mind shows up as a kind of cosmic afterthought, it seems, at the very end.

Notice this: The level of matter which was the lowest level in the traditional hierarchy now becomes the dominant feature, it seems, in the modern cosmography, the picture of the cosmos. Life comes in very unenthusiastically; mind, as an afterthought. Meaning, which was the highest level of all, now seems, in postmodern consciousness perhaps, to be little more than the projection of a forlorn human personality back onto what is really a universe that is indifferent and purposeless as well. So meaning itself seems to be human construct, for many contemporary intellectuals. Therefore, the universe remains purposeless.

[Slide] Not only has the universe been “horizontalized,” or pancaked, so that the hierarchy seems to have been flattened out by the chronological picture of the cosmos; at the same time, it has been atomized, or been forced to crumple into dust, by the method of understanding known as atomism. Atomism is the method of trying to understand complex things by breaking them down into their subordinate particulars or atomic components. Atomism has always been a temptation for humans, going back to the pre-Socratics. But it sort of went underground for a number of centuries because of the dominance of Platonic and Aristotelian thought, both of which thought that thinking of the universe only in terms of atoms is kind of silly; you need to understand the pattern or form that organizes the atomic units as well.

But atomism began to return, almost with a vengeance, with the emergence of classical physics, with the Newtonian billiard-ball universe, where everything is composed of inert particles, large and small. So by the time Darwinian theory came along in the nineteenth century — just to portray this in very broad strokes of the brush — it became possible for many people to understand evolution simply as a kind of reshuffling of basically mindless and lifeless atomic units.

Then, when molecular biology came along, we began to understand life itself as composed of basically two kinds of molecules, amino acids and nucleic acids, which are both, in turn, resolvable into chains of atoms. Thirty or forty years ago, another science, sociobiology and its derivatives, came onto the scene. They proposed that not only animal behavior, but human behavior, too, can be understood in terms of the migration of populations of genes — genes being the new atomic unit — from one generation into the next. This has had a great deal of influence on contemporary thinking. Neuroscience also tries as far as possible to specify The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 10 what we call “mind,” which was, in the traditional hierarchy, something that we could not comprehend, in terms of atomic and molecular activity as well.

Now, there is nothing problematic, scientifically, about atoms. Science has to be reductive. Science has to break things down into their component parts. But what is interesting is that this atomism, along with mechanism, which has run parallel to it, has taken place against what I would call the modern expulsion of mind from the natural world. This was given its start, or at least its official formulation, in the philosophy of René Descartes, who thought it wise to divide reality into two completely different kinds of stuff, mind stuff and material stuff, thinking substance and extended substance. What this implies logically is that if mind is over on that side of the divide and matter is over here, then matter is fundamentally mindless.

As the modern age progressed, the idea of mind itself tended to dissolve as not having any real substantial reality to it, and we are left with the substrate of modern science, especially of modern scientific naturalism, mindless and lifeless material stuff. This became the material for the natural world to come into existence, in the minds of modern people. Since matter is essentially mindless, then nature also must be essentially mindless and pointless as well.

I can’t emphasize enough how this dualistic division made it possible for us to have the whole notion of matter as essentially mindless. This became, in the words of E.A. Burtt, an intellectual historian, the foundation of modern science. Then, to add salt to the wound, Darwinian theory emphasizes the randomness, the competitive struggle, and the impersonality of natural selection. This leaves us with a very impersonal, it seems, and purposeless universe. All these ideas have fed into a worldview that Alfred North Whitehead, early in the twentieth century, referred to as “scientific materialism,” which is probably the most extreme version of what I earlier called “scientific naturalism.” Much of what philosophers refer to as “cosmic pessimism,” which was Bertram Russell’s basic vision of things — which is the view that the universe is fundamentally pointless and purposeless — was built upon the assumption that scientific materialism gives the truest and most intelligible version of reality.

[Slide] William James thought a lot about scientific materialism and felt the sting of it. He thought the rest of us should not be too cavalier about embracing it without first looking carefully at what scientific materialism implies: It implies, he said, “the vast driftings of the cosmic weather, tho many a jeweled shore appears” — such as life and consciousness, civilization, science, and art — “yet when these transient products are gone, nothing,” he says, “absolutely nothing remains...Dead and gone are they utterly from the very sphere and room of being...This utter final wreck The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 11 and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood.” So if you are interested in theological language after Einstein and after Darwin, in many ways you have to deal with this very difficult question: Is materialism really true? If it is, then I think, with James, we would have to draw out those conclusions that I just read. But is it true?

What I am going to try to do in the rest of the talk is point your attention toward three thinkers, scientifically educated, three thinkers who are quite familiar with Darwin and quite familiar with Einstein, but who question whether we have to accept the idea that scientific materialism is true, and along with that, the idea that the universe is necessarily pointless or purposeless.

[Slide] Let me start, very sketchily, by referring to a fellow who has had a great deal of influence on my own thinking, Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian- born physical chemist, who came to the University of Manchester in England as a kind of refugee from Hungary. He became there one of the great philosophers of science in the modern world. One of the questions that he became interested in and that drove him from science to philosophy was this question of whether materialism is true, whether the materialist worldview has, in fact, flattened out the cosmic hierarchy, so that it is no longer possible for us to entertain a sense of purpose. Polanyi thought that if the universe is to be purposeful, it has to have something like a hierarchical structure. You don’t have to imagine the structure in a strict vertical way. You can think of circles nesting in other circles or dimensions nesting in other dimensions. I am just using the kind of vertical thing for the sake of simplicity.

Has science really flattened the cosmic hierarchy? In principle, Polanyi wrote, there is still room for a hierarchical ordering of the cosmos in a scientific age. From the point of view of physics, chemistry, and evolution, there are no sharp breaks as you move from matter through plant, through animal, and human life. Atoms and molecules and evolutionary rules cut across these boundaries, so that, from a certain point of view, it seems, the hierarchy has been flattened, and there is no room for purpose. It’s all kind of undifferentiated material — smudge.

But he was very sensitive, Polanyi was, to the emergence of talk about information in science, starting in the twentieth century especially. He thought the notion of information — by which he means organizing letters of a code in a particular meaningful sequence — has challenged the purely materialist notion of the universe. He is speaking here especially of how the DNA molecule consists of the letters A, T, C, and G, arranged in a specific sequence, and that it is the sequence that is all-important. So there is something informational about the universe. The universe is not just matter, nor is it matter plus energy. It’s matter plus energy plus information. He thinks that that can make a difference, in principle at least, in terms of the question we are dealing with tonight. Informational The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 12 differences can arise between matter, plant, animal, and humans, so that evolutionary and atomic continuity doesn’t rule out informational — and, he would say, hierarchical — discontinuity.

[Slide] He is speaking specifically about DNA as the carrier of information. We know that the DNA molecule consists of letters of a code, four letters. What is important is not so much the chemistry; the chemistry is important, of course, but even more important is the specific sequence in DNA. It is that informational sequence that makes all the difference between whether the organism is going to turn out to be a rat, a monkey, a leaf, a tree, or a human being. That is the important thing. The specific sequence in the DNA molecule is extraneous, he [Polanyi] says, to the chemistry, meaning that, as far as we know, there is no chemical law that specifies the specific sequence of the DNA molecule. If there were a chemical law that specified that, then there would be only one DNA molecule, one kind, and we would all be trilobites or something like that. There would not be the tremendous variety that we have in the biosphere. What he wants to emphasize also is that the introduction of information into the universe with the coming of life does not violate in any way the laws of chemistry and physics.

On that analogy, in his book entitled Meaning, Polanyi suggests that perhaps, for all we know, the universe may be a carrier of a meaning, and this meaning would not be accessible to science because it would come in very quietly and unobtrusively, like information does, and would not violate any laws of physics.

So Einstein, he would think, is wrong in insisting that the influence of God on the universe would in any way involve the rupturing or violation of the laws of physics and chemistry.

[Slide] I found a Far Side cartoon, in which two scientists are standing at the blackboard, and one of them says to the other, “No doubt about it, Ellington, we’ve mathematically expressed the purpose of the universe. Gad, how I love the thrill of scientific discovery!” As I read it, the incongruity — because it is the common element in that — is our own personal intuition, common-sense intuition, that science is really out of its element in trying to answer the question that we are dealing with tonight, the question of whether the universe is purposeful or not.

[Slide] But wait a minute, a lot of scientists would say today, let’s look at astrophysics. Hasn’t astrophysics, in the last thirty or forty years, found the purpose that we have been looking for? Astrophysics is a science. Maybe science can find purpose after all.

The thinking goes something like this: Let’s start with the fact that we all have minds, and we all have minds because we have brains of sufficient complexity to have made the leap into thought. We have brains only The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 13 because the process of evolution has complexified our primate ancestors’ brains to the point where human types of consciousness can become possible.

But we can’t have evolution, of course, without life, and we can’t have life without planets with just the right composition to give rise to life. Among the set of chemical elements that are necessary for life, carbon is the most important — carbon and the other heavy elements that are necessary for life. But we can’t take carbon for granted anymore, unless there existed massive stars which could cook up the primordial hydrogen and helium into the heavy elements necessary for life. We wouldn’t have these massive stars or the free hydrogen that fuels these stars unless we go all the way back to the first microsecond of the universe (page 1 of Volume 1 of our thirty volumes) and recognize there that at this time, at the first microsecond of the universe’s existence, certain values — such as the expansion rate and the gravitational coupling constant, the ratio of electrons and proton mass, the ratio of weak and strong nuclear forces — were established in such a way and with such precision that if they had varied only infinitesimally from these values, we would not have this cascade of events that would eventuate in the production, eventually, of life and mind. So the existence of mind, it turns out, is exquisitely sensitive, as scientists now say, to conditions that came into existence at the time of the Big Bang.

One interpretation of this is to say that the conditions for mind, the intellectual conscious kind of life that we all exemplify, were loaded into the universe at the very beginning. So there is a much closer tie-in than we ever thought in the previous ages of the modern period between the physics of the universe — between matter, let’s say — and mind.

Has science, therefore, itself, some people are asking today, uncovered hints of a personal and purposeful universe? My own view is that theology should not try to jump into this and get too happy about this too quickly. But what I do think is worth considering — and I am offering this for your consideration — is that this new way of thinking seems to have dissolved, or at least made more permeable, that strict barrier that Descartes had earlier put between mind and matter, and which, in turn, had allowed us to think of matter as essentially mindless.

Can we now, perhaps, think of the cosmos as being essentially mindful, and mind, therefore, can be released from its imprisonment in our own craniums and be allowed to ooze back into the whole cosmos, so that there is a kind of mindful principle that pervades the whole? That would be essential for a purposeful universe. This is not enough to prove it, but the idea that matter is essentially mindless, which was the foundation of modern cosmic pessimism and scientific materialism, seems to be at least somewhat challenged by this new physics. This way of thinking is sometimes referred to as the “anthropic cosmological principle,” meaning The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 14 that somehow the conditions which bring about anthropos, or humans, are already there at the time of cosmic origins.

So has science itself, then, found that narrative thread that we were looking for that will tie together what’s going on on page 1 in Volume 1 with what’s going on on page 450 in Volume 30?

[Slide] Could we say that, at least minimally speaking, cosmic purpose is orientation toward life and mind, that something of great consequence has been working itself out in the universe, and would that, perhaps, fulfill the definition of “purpose” given earlier? Should we, perhaps, flood with a little bit more vitality and mentality those gray volumes which I had up there earlier and picture the cosmos as always pregnant with life and mind? Just a question.

[Slide] Still, you might want to restore mindlessness to the universe. There are some scientists who want to do this and think it’s possible to do this. One of them is Martin Rees, who says, as far as our Big Bang universe is concerned, we have to admit that the existence of life is extremely improbable. It depends on the coincidence of six numbers which are themselves not intrinsically connected to one another, but have to have been there at the start if this universe was ever to bring about life and mind:

• The number you get when you divide the strong nuclear force by the very weak force of gravity. If you take away or add one zero to that number, there will be no life, no supernovae, no carbon, no minds.

• The density of material of the universe has to be just so.

• The expansion rate has to be just so.

• The amplitude of ripples in the expanding universe would have to be just so in order for, eventually, galaxies and stars that cooked up hydrogen and helium into carbon and made life possible. The amplitude had to be just exactly what it is, or we wouldn’t be here and life would not have come about in this universe.

• The number of spatial dimensions.

Just six numbers. They have to be just right. So the question — Rees asks this himself — is how to account for this set of coincidences.

Paul Davies, another physicist, has the most elegant response to it: It is in terms of divine design at the very beginning. But Rees, being more naturalistic in his thinking, would say, let’s not jump into theology too quickly here. Perhaps this universe is one of countless, countless many universes, and statistically it’s a deviation from the ordinary trend of The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 15 things, which is to have lifeless and mindless universes. If you have enough tries, though, enough possibilities, maybe once or twice you will get a universe that has put these six coincidental elements together in such a way as to bring about life. If you look at things that way, perhaps, then, you can still have your essentially lifeless and mindless universe — or, rather, a multiverse.

[Slide] Let’s bring in another figure. Here we have somebody who thinks about purpose much more broadly and widely than in terms of the question of mind and mindlessness. This is the great philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead taught mathematics at Cambridge. He was about to retire from teaching when he was sixty- three years old and he was invited by Harvard University to come to this country.

This gives hope to all of us: It was only after the age of sixty-three that his publication career really got going. He produced books like Process and Reality, Science and the Modern World, Adventures of Ideas, and rapidly became one of the great intellectual figures on the American scene as well. If you asked Whitehead the question, “Is anything of significance working itself out in the universe?” at least in his later period, he would have said yes. It seemed to him that what is in the works in this universe is the intensification of beauty. Since beauty is an undeniable value, then any process which is actualizing that value could be called purposeful. By beauty he meant, very quickly, the synthesis of novelty, on the one hand, and order, on the other; of contrast, on the one hand, and harmony, on the other. If you have too much novelty or too much contrast, that is going to produce chaos. If you have too much order and not enough novelty, that is going to produce monotony. Neither one of those is pretty; neither one of those is beautiful.

Beauty walks the razor’s edge between the two extremes of chaos and monotony, synthesizing novelty and order into ever more intense configurations in the process, in the cosmic process. Whitehead calls this aiming toward beauty which he sees going on — which is not always successful, but, overall, there has been a net increase in ordered novelty in our universe — he calls this “adventure.” The universe is an adventure. We have learned this from people like Darwin and Einstein. We have learned from them and other scientists that the universe has always been discontent with the status quo; it has always been restless.

That needs an explanation. Why is the universe not just order, but order plus novelty? He is not loath to using the idea of God. But we need to think of God, not just as a source of order, as God was often thought of in the pre-scientific world, but God has now to be thought of, in the world after Darwin and Einstein, as a source of novelty as well.

If God is the God of love, as religions understand God to be, God does not The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 16 forcefully stamp these new possibilities on the world, but offers them as possibilities. Love persuades; it doesn’t coerce. So the universe is not compelled to follow a particular direction. There is going to be lots of room for meandering around, for indeterminacy, for accidents, for freedom, and for Darwinian evolution in this kind of universe.

But in all of this, God’s will, the purpose of things in God’s mind, is the maximizing of beauty. This is what God wills. This, Whitehead says, is the kind of universe that we see displayed before us, by science, after Darwin and Einstein. I like to refer to Whitehead’s thought as the aesthetic cosmological principle. It’s much broader than the anthropic cosmological principle and includes a lot of things that the notion of mind itself leaves out.

In this universe, there is a risk of evil, tragedy, and perpetual perishing, of course. But there is also — I can’t go into all the reasons why Whitehead posits this — there is also something redemptive, something that “reaps tragic beauty,” that reaps what is happening in the cosmos and keeps things from vanishing into absolute nothingness. He refers to this as God — technically, the consequent nature of God. So the cosmic story, with all its struggles, its triumphs, its pain, its joys, is taken everlastingly into this God, who is not only the source of novelty and order, but also the ultimate repository of what happens in the cosmos. The meaning of our own lives in such a universe is to see our lives as contributing whatever we can to the ongoing intensification of beauty, of bringing about more and more intense forms of ordered novelty.

[Slide] The final figure I want to talk about is the Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I simply cannot leave him out when asked the question of whether you can believe in a personal God after Darwin and after Einstein, because this was a chief preoccupation of this man’s life. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, if you are not familiar with him, was a famous Jesuit priest, geologist, and paleontologist, who was sent by his superiors to study these sciences at the Sorbonne and elsewhere. As he became acquainted with these evolutionary disciplines, the thought arose in his mind as to how he was going to integrate his Christian faith — or any religious faith today, for that matter — with science after Darwin and after Einstein. He started writing essays on this. His superiors thought them a bit too adventurous for the time, and so they shipped Teilhard off to China, which is the wrong place to send people who like to dig up old bones, because while Teilhard was there, he developed a sterling scientific reputation and became one of the top two or three geologists of the Asian continent.

He died very much alone — I guess in another form of exile — here in New York in 1955. He was accompanied only by a few fellow Jesuits to his burial place in upstate New York, in Poughkeepsie, at what is now the American Culinary Institute. (It shows how culture can evolve as well.) The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 17

His religious writings, which he could not get published in his own lifetime, were taken by his lay friends and distributed to various publishers, including Harper & Row, who published his book The Phenomenon of Man, which became one of its top sellers in religious studies in the twentieth century. After his death, his thought exercised enormous influence on religious thought and political thought, and culture in general. In the twentieth century, he became one of the top religious thinkers of the modern period. Throughout all this, he was asking this question: Is a personal, purposeful universe conceivable after Darwin and Einstein?

So bear with me as I try to sketch his thought in a very, very introductory sort of way.

[Slide] If the universe is to be personal and purposeful, it has to be more than just aimless meandering around. It has to be working out something important. It has to have some kind of at least loose directionality to it. Teilhard thought that we can’t miss this. If we look at those thirty volumes carefully, we can’t miss the fact that there has been, over the course of those volumes, a gradual increase in organized physical complexity. Pre- atomic matter has been taken up into atoms; atoms into molecules; molecules into cells; cells into organisms; organisms become more complex when they become vertebrates, with the evolution of more and more complex nervous tissue; eventually primates and human persons — one of the most, if not the most, complex physical phenomena that the universe, at least in the terrestrial precincts, has yet produced. But he wanted to point out also that there is no reason for us to think that this process of complexification is anywhere near its end. Over our heads, behind our backs, and under our feet, something very interesting is going on in the history of the universe: A new kind of complexity is being born on a planetary scale, due to the developments in technology, information technology included, communications, economics, political science, natural sciences, and culture in general. What is happening now is that the earth that we live on is clothing itself, he thought, in something like a brain.

It’s an analogy, and perhaps not the best analogy. But it is an analogy which illustrates his main point: The process of complexification is still going on, and we can contribute to that. That’s interesting enough. But what is more interesting to Teilhard is that, all along, this gradual increase in organized physical complexity has been paralleled by a corresponding increase in what he calls consciousness, awareness, inwardness, the sense of having feelings and being able, eventually, as the process continues, to know.

This turns out to be a pretty good universe that we are living in, one that is realizing such a tremendous value as consciousness. We can’t deny consciousness is a value, because even in denying it, we are valuing our The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 18 consciousness to make that denial. So a universe which is working itself toward consciousness realizes his understanding of purpose. When this consciousness takes the form of personality, it reaches a very high point in the evolution of value. So a universe which can produce persons is, by definition, for him, a purposeful universe.

Not only has there been an increase in complexity, in consciousness, there has also been an increase in freedom. All this takes place because of what he calls “centration,” by which he means simply the tendency of matter, from the beginning, to organize itself around a center. You see this happening already at the level of the atom, with its nucleus which organizes the subatomic elements. You see it in the eukaryotic cell — the nucleus with the nuclear DNA. You see it in the development of a central nervous system in invertebrates; with an incipient sense of consciousness and awareness in primates. When you get to persons, you have the emergence in the universe of self-awareness, at a very white-hot temperature. Here you have an organism which, in its nervous system, has trillions of synaptic connections, all being able to come together and converge in that ability each one of has to utter the first-person pronoun, “I.” This is centration. But evolution is not over, as far as we know. So what is the form that centration, the search for the center, will take, now that the “noosphere” is just beginning to form? Teilhard locates here, characteristically, the evolutionary place of religion.

We can talk about religion in a lot of ways — psychologically, historically, even theologically. But let’s think about religion cosmologically. What is religion in terms of the evolution of the universe? For Teilhard, religion is the way in which the universe, through us, at the level of the noosphere, continues its ageless search of the center. Religion is the way in which the cosmos looks and continues to look for a supreme personal center.

Here is the main point I wanted to make tonight about Teilhard: The universe looks impersonal only if we look back in time and downward in complexity. It’s true that the universe dissolves atomistically into incoherence of multiple particles, the further back you go. If you want to detect whether the universe is personal or not, you have to reverse your direction and look toward the future. Place yourself at any point in this cosmic process. If you look back, you see the universe falling into the multiple. If you look forward, you find it reaching toward richer and richer syntheses, eventually consciousness, personality. Can we look beyond that?

[Slide] So the universe, then, for Teilhard, becomes intelligible, it becomes coherent to us, only as we look from the past toward the future. Science itself is not accustomed to looking at the universe that way. Science looks toward what is earlier and simpler. This is perfectly okay, for science to do this. But there are going to be other ways of looking at things, other than science. Here Teilhard sees the evolutionary role of faith, faith in the The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 19 future, which opens us to the possibility that in the future coherences may emerge that we only have the slightest inkling of at the present.

So his picture generally is that of a world which is being drawn toward unity, as he puts it, from up ahead. Matter comes into existence first, then life, then mind, and then what he calls spirit. So you have, then, both the horizontal — the thirty-volume picture — and a kind of vertical, hierarchical approach sort of mapped onto each other. This is how Teilhard thinks it’s possible, theoretically and in principle at least, to see the modern universe, after Einstein and after Darwin, as a purposeful one.

But you have to think of the world as resting on the future as its foundation or its sole support. This is a new way of thinking. Science looks toward the past to try to find the foundation of things. But the further you go into the past, the more matter dissolves into fragments. That’s not enough of a foundation for the universe to hang on. The universe hangs, for its consistency, for its coherence, on the future, on being drawn from the past toward the future.

Matter, therefore, is not something separate from mind and spirit. Matter is mind and spirit in the stage of dispersal. Mind and spirit are matter in the stage of unity. So matter and spirit are two tendencies in the cosmos, rather than two separate kinds of substance. The ultimate pole of attraction for a universe of persons, Teilhard concludes — and here is where he would differ with Einstein — cannot be less than personal itself.

[Slide] Let me just close with some quotes from Teilhard on this point. There is much, much more that needs to be said, but this is all I will have time for tonight. “What is most vitally necessary to the thinking earth is a faith — and a great faith — and ever more faith.” That faith, evolution, will come to an end.

“To know that we are not prisoners,” prisoners of the past, in particular. “To know that there is a way out” — by which he means, a way out up ahead — “that there is air, and light, and love, somewhere, beyond the reach of all death. To know this, to know that it is neither an illusion nor a fairy tale — that, if we are not to perish smothered in the very stuff of our being, is what we must at all costs secure.”

“And it is there that we find,” he says, “what I may well be so bold as to call the evolutionary role of religions.”

Thank you very much.

PETER STEINFELS: Thank you very much, Professor Haught. We will now have the first of our responses from Father Brian Davies.

The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 20

BRIAN DAVIES: The British prime minister in the Victorian period, Benjamin Disraeli, once said, “My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.” [Laughter]

So I hope that Professor Haught will think of me as being a very agreeable person, because I agree with so much that he has been saying to us this evening, and I thank him for it.

For example, I think that he is right to say that the notion of a hierarchy in the universe survives anything that science has shown us. The late arrival of people on our planet does not for a moment imply that we can’t take ourselves to be somehow superior to many other things. My desk does not move by itself, so it lacks something that, say, my cat has — an ability to be a self-mover. I would therefore say that my cat is superior to my desk, and, I like to think, I am superior even to my cat. I, for example, can know what cats are, while my cat can only be a cat and cannot, in a serious sense, know what I am.

I also agree with Professor Haught when he says, as did Aristotle, that there is purpose where there is a tending to a good. I agree that in the universe there is much tending to what is good. We aim for goods, whether real or imaginary, but so do other things. Perhaps we are not plausibly to be thought of as an accidental byproduct of a world that is essentially mindless.

Contemporary science, as summarized by Professor Haught, seems to suggest that people are, so to speak, woven into the fabric of things, that the universe was, in a serious sense, pregnant with us long before we emerged. This picture seems to me to allow for plenty of room for talk of purpose in the world. It allows us, if you like, seriously to think of ourselves as part of a story, as arising in a context of meaning, intelligibility, and structure. But what does all this imply when it comes to the existence of God? Are we, for example, to say that it amounts to a set of reasons for believing in God?

If I understand him correctly — and, quite possibly, I may not be doing that — if I understand him correctly, though, Professor Haught veers to the conclusion that it does, that somehow all this points towards the existence of God, that the purposefulness in the universe and the value of people in it somehow entails, or at least suggests, that there is a God.

Here, at last, I suspect, I part company with him and begin to fear that he might find me to be just a bit disagreeable, though maybe not quite so much as certain bits of New Jersey. [Laughter]

People use the word “God” in various senses. That’s obvious. But orthodox Judaism and Islam and Christianity, and especially with an eye on idolatry and anthropomorphism, repeatedly tell us that God is the The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 21

Creator — not that God has to be this, but that this, in fact, is what he really is. Let’s pause for a moment to reflect on what is involved in that claim.

I take it to mean that God is the reason why there is any universe at all, not just in the sense that God got the universe started, if it started, but that God brings it about, that everything, other than God, continually depends on Him for its very being. On this account, God’s characteristic effect, as it were, is that there is something rather than nothing. On this account, God is in no sense a part of the universe. He transcends what composes it by constantly calling it into being in all its many forms. On this account, God is as much involved in the barking of a dog as he is in there being or beginning to be a solar system. On this account, God is making everything to be, regardless of what it is. On this account, any real thing is being creatively made to be by God for as long as it exists.

If that’s so, then it seems to me hard to see how any feature of the universe could clearly indicate that God exists. Here I stress the word “feature.” We often infer the presence of something because of a feature that something else of a particular kind displays. We infer, for example, that a certain sort of germ is at work given that Fred is running a fever. Or we conclude the presence of alcohol, given that the president of Fordham is running around Manhattan singing, “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Insofar as we are thinking about the God the Creator, however, there seems nothing comparable to the normal business of detecting the presence of something particular, given certain features. For God the Creator would have to account for all features, no matter what they are. As the philosopher Wittgenstein once put it, not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.

Let’s suppose that there are examples of non-human purpose within the universe. Then God the Creator, as people have traditionally understood him, most certainly — most certainly — must be active and present in them. But He would be just as active and present where no obvious purpose could be discerned, where, for example, things are frustrated and thwarted, where tending to a good seems to be obliterated, as seems often to be the case in our world. In other words, if we are concerned with God the Creator, then we can’t appeal specifically to Him to explain why the universe is this way rather than that way. God the Creator would be just as much at work even if the universe were vastly, maybe unimaginably different from the way it is.

What God as Creator accounts for is the fact that the universe is there instead of nothing. That the universe has the features it has is no special reason for believing that God is working in it and is behind it. One might, of course, suggest that where there is purpose, there is intelligence, and that purpose in the universe must therefore ultimately derive from The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 22 intelligence, as the famous British former atheist, Anthony Flew, now says. Notice, though, that accepting this suggestion will not obviously commit you to the conclusion that God the Creator exists.

Let’s suppose that there is some vastly intelligent being who accounts for purpose in nature, something nonmaterial who is somehow interested in the world and enormously influential when it comes to what goes on in the world. In that case, we should without a doubt have reason to say that, for example, materialists are wrong, but surely not that God the Creator exists. For that to be true, there has to be more than just a hugely intelligent and amazingly powerful agent. There has to be a source of the being of all things, visible and invisible, as the Nicene Creed puts it.

With an eye on the claim that God is personal, you might reply that an agent responsible for purpose has to be personal, that only God can be responsible for purpose in the world, and therefore that purpose in the world is evidence for God.

Here, though, a lot turns on what you take “personal” to mean. You and I are persons. Among other things, I take this to mean that we use a language, and therefore think; that we undergo certain emotions; that we intentionally intervene or interfere in certain situations; and that we pursue projects, as creatures of space and time. Yet we clearly can’t seriously think of God the Creator in such terms. As the maker of space and time, He can’t occupy them, and therefore can’t literally undergo emotions or plan with respect to what is future to Him. As the cause of there being any world at all, He can have nothing that we would normally, naturally think of as a life story, and He can’t literally interfere or intervene in the world. I mean here that in order, literally, to interfere or intervene, one must enter a scene from which one was previously absent. But God the Creator must be always wholly present to everything. In that case, however, evidence of purpose and the existence of what is personal is not automatically evidence for God.

I have been told to be brief. Let me just stress, in conclusion, that I am not suggesting that God is impersonal, and I am certainly not denying that what we can say of human persons can truly be said of God, in the light, say, of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.

The position I have been sketching, which, you will note, abstracts from uniquely Christian things, is a religiously very traditional one. I have basically only been summarizing what, for example, people like St. Augustine of Hippo or St. Anselm of Canterbury or St. Thomas Aquinas — all of them Christians, of course — elaborate on at length.

I have, I suppose, been trying to remind you of teachings such as that of the Fourth Lateran Council, according to which God the Creator is eternal, infinite, and unchangeable, incomprehensible, almighty, and ineffable. The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 23

Yet teachings like this one are, I think, relevant when it comes to the issues to which Professor Haught has been so ably introducing us. Confronted by purpose in the universe, it’s possible to forget them and to think of God as if He were literally a top person working alongside us, albeit invisibly, to think of Him as being, so to speak, the ultimate scientific discovery.

If you take the notion of creation seriously, though, then, so it seems to me, you just have to reject that line of thinking. The existence of God the Creator is not something that science could ever establish. By the same token, of course, it’s not something that science can disprove either. If God the Creator exists, then He must continually account for there being any world for scientists to investigate in the first place. In this sense, God is a necessary condition of scientific research, not something that can be threatened by it.

PETER STEINFELS: Thank you very much. Our next response will come from John Horgan.

JOHN HORGAN: Thanks, Peter. Thank you for inviting me to this forum. This is really fascinating. I only wish we could get this kind of turnout for the events that I organize at Stevens. This is really an impressive audience.

What I would like to do in my talk is also provide some points of agreement with John’s talk, and I think with what Brian just said. Then I will point out some areas where our thinking diverges pretty dramatically.

The first point of agreement is that science is limited. You would expect someone who wrote a book called The End of Science to say this. The theme of my book was that science is limited. I think science can’t rule out the possibility of a creator or of some divine purpose to the universe. Actually, there are lots of very good scientists who believe in God and believe that there is a divine purpose. Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, is a very obvious example.

By the way, I spoke to Richard Dawkins a couple of years ago. I met him at a fellowship in Cambridge. He described himself not as an atheist, but as an agnostic. He conceded that science can’t rule out the possibility of God.

Science also, in my humble opinion, can’t solve the riddle of the universe. In fact, I think most scientists concede this point. The one really dramatic exception to that is the British chemist, Peter Atkins, who is such a hardcore atheist that he makes Richard Dawkins look like Jerry Falwell. [Laughter]

Atkins actually believes and has written — and he told me to my face over a couple of glasses of wine — that one day science will completely solve the riddle of the universe: Why there is something rather than nothing, why The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 24 the universe has this structure rather than some other structure, why life began, why we emerged out of evolution. Any question that we can conceive of will be answered by science, which I find a worldview even stranger than Catholicism has become for me. By the way, I am a lapsed Catholic.

I also agree with John that simple reductionism and materialism are very unsatisfying. They just don’t work for explaining lots of things that we want to understand. The most striking example of that is consciousness, the human mind. One of the arguments in my book The End of Science was that science is becoming a victim of its own success. Some of our theories just work so well that they do answer a lot of questions that scientists put to them. The obvious example of that is particle physics. The obvious exception is the human mind.

There are certain philosophers and scientists who call themselves Mysterians, to reflect the idea that there is something about the mind that will never be fully reduced or captured by science. I think I am a Mysterian, a reluctant Mysterian.

I also agree that reality seems awfully designed and, in some ways, too good to be here through pure chance. In my last book, Rational Mysticism, I called this “the problem of fun.” But it also is the problem of beauty and friendship and love and everything that makes life worth living.

John mentioned Steven Weinberg, who is one of my favorite scientists, because he is so gloomy and he is really good at expressing his gloominess. You mentioned his famous quote: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Weinberg also wrote, “I have to admit that sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.” [Laughter]

Isn’t that a great quote? So there is a little crack in Weinberg’s gloominess.

John, I think your idea of beauty as possibly the purpose of creation is really compelling. You didn’t mention in your talk here what you did mention in the paper that you sent to us, Freeman Dyson’s idea of the principle of maximum diversity, which also is sort of the idea that existence makes itself as interesting as possible. That is sort of the purpose of existence. Often things are just hanging by a thread, and you have cataclysms and so forth. This idea also, at least in my understanding, is part of process theology, the notion that God is not omnipotent or omniscient, but is constantly evolving. I actually played with those ideas at the end of The End of Science.

Now for my points of disagreement.

The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 25

My concept of a personal God — and I guess I am still Catholic on some level (you will see what I mean) — is not just a God that is creating beauty. I don’t see where the personal aspect comes in there. It’s a God with which we have a personal relationship, an emotional relationship. It’s a relationship that involves love or justice, these sorts of very human concepts and emotions. It’s a God with which we can have a personal relationship. When you have that sort of God, you confront the problem of evil, which you touched on, John, but you didn’t wrestle with.

The reason I am not religious is not because of Darwin or Einstein; it’s because of the problem of evil. My objection to religion is a religious objection, not a scientific objection.

Another problem that I have with a personal God — and this isn’t something that you addressed in your talk, John, but it’s something that obviously arises in the world in the way that religions play out — is something that Huston Smith, who is one of my favorite religious thinkers, calls “the scandal of particularity.” It is the notion that when you have a personal God with which you have a personal relationship, God likes some people more than others or some groups more than others. The term “Chosen People” — every religion has that idea of some people being chosen and some not favored by God. I think it’s true of the Eastern traditions, too. Their concept of karma and reincarnation implies that God plays favorites in the way that we are treated after death. The scandal of particularity, I think, is the source of all the evil that religion does in the world. It seems to me to be a natural consequence of belief in a personal God. I also think that belief in a personal God as protector or judge — these are the conventional notions — lets us off the hook. It lets us avoid responsibility for taking control of our own destiny and righting wrongs in the world.

I also think — and here is one area where science really does undermine religious belief — belief in a personal God clearly reflects our kind of natural narcissism and our tendency to project our own values onto the world. In fact, there is a great anthropologist here at Fordham named Stewart Guthrie, who wrote a wonderful book called Faces in the Clouds, which is about how we project ourselves onto reality. There is actually a thriving field of scientific study trying to explain the origins of religion in these terms.

John, you said that you think that recent science makes life and consciousness seem less probable and accidental. I know there are some scientists who are saying these sorts of things. They are invoking the multiverse theory and the anthropic principle. To me, those are pseudoscientific concepts. They are not nearly rigorous enough to pass muster as real science.

I happen to think that the great realization that science has given us — it’s The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 26 kind of a paradox. Science has told us so much about how the world works. At the same time, the more it tells us, the more improbable our existence seems. So Weinberg says the more we understand, the more pointless things seem. I think the more we understand, the more improbable we seem. The universe is almost infinitely improbable. The origin of life is improbable. People can sit around wondering about the probability of it all. We are the most improbable things of all.

I don’t think the answer is to try to seize on theories or theologies that try to make the sense of improbability go away. I think we should revel in our own improbability. If you want to put a positive spin on it — I don’t believe in miracles. I don’t believe in divine intervention in the natural world. I think science has ruled out that sort of personal God that performs miracles. But I believe in one big, big miracle. If you want to define a miracle as an infinitely improbable event, then we are the miracle; life is a miracle; our existence is a miracle.

I am dying to know what you think. I have some more points I could make, but I think I will stop there. I am eager to hear your questions and comments.

PETER STEINFELS: Thank you very much. There has been a whole series of questions raised, many of them around the question of the real implications of purpose and whether Professor Haught has drawn out more there than he should have, and around the nature of person and personal, what it means.

I will give him a few minutes to respond. Then maybe we will move on to the questions from the audience. I will trust the skill of the respondents here to manage to work in, in answer to any question from the audience, other things that they want to say.

John, you have the floor.

JOHN HAUGHT: I want to thank both of the respondents. I know it’s not easy to do this. You had so much less time than I did that you are in a disadvantageous position compared to me as far as being able to articulate your perspectives. So I appreciate your being such good sports about all of this.

There really is no way I can respond to all the specific points that you made. I am familiar with most of these points. But I will just try to point out something that both respondents have in common with respect to their questions about my approach. They both have pointed out the dangers of taking the notion of a personal God too literally, too tangibly, too carelessly. I don’t want to be too much in disagreement with that point. I come to this whole business of science and religion not as a philosopher nor as a scientist, but as a theologian. A theologian is someone who stands The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 27 within a particular faith community. In my case, it’s the Roman Catholic Christian tradition. I am moved and touched, and I believe that that vision of Roman Catholicism is essentially true — although the word “truth” itself has to be nuanced very carefully.

What I want to do, then, is ask, what can I learn about the God that I believe in by looking outward from my faith community into the way in which the world seems to philosophers and scientists? But there is one thing that is not negotiable from the point of view of theology, and that is the belief in a God who makes and keeps promises.

When I think of a personal God, the first thing I think of is not the anthropomorphic qualities that Professor Davies was talking about, so much as the biblical sense that what underlies all of reality — and this is the central motif that ties what would otherwise be an incoherent set of books that we call the Bible together — is the motif of promise. From start to finish, the Israelite experience was that there is something about the universe, something about reality, something about our existence that has the quality of being able to open up a new future to us. The way in which that was expressed, narratively and symbolically, in both the literature of the Hebrew Scripture and Christian Scriptures is that God is one who makes and keeps promises. That means that fidelity is the essence of God.

Fidelity is one theme. Promise is one theme. But there is another theme that is fundamental in the biblical experience of God, or ultimate reality, and that is that we should not think about God without first thinking about the theme of liberation. The Hebrew experience was that they found themselves, miraculously, in a situation where they had been rescued from genocide and the threat of slavery. They found themselves open to a new future, with new possibility. So they could never ever again disassociate their notion of ultimate reality from something that opens up a new future.

So as a theologian, when I come to look at the natural world as science has presented it to us, I want to ask whether there is some way in which, especially, this new cosmic story, the story of the evolution of life, but also the story of the evolution of the cosmos, can somehow be contextualized by the fundamental sense, which I picked up as a believer and as a theologian, that ultimately reality, at the very bottom, wants life to flourish, wants the universe to be open to new possibilities.

So it is in that light that I experimented with philosophers like Polanyi and Whitehead. I don’t think that either one of them presents me with an adequate theology. Nor does Teilhard. But when I get to Teilhard, I get to a scientist who was both a religious believer and a scientist with an impeccable scientific reputation, expressing this theme that the universe has this future, that it leans on the future as its foundation. I found that to be a very good way of synthesizing what seems to be a biblical insight.

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I am not saying that science in any way proves the biblical insight. I am not in the business of looking to science to try to support my theological vision. That can lead to all sorts of problems, trying to prove God’s existence by looking at the Big Bang or by looking at intelligent design.

In my own life — in fact, recently — I have spent a great deal of time distancing myself theologically from anything like the intelligent-design approach. That is because “design” is a deadly idea. I don’t in any way want to think of God as establishing some sort of blueprint for the universe. If you think of God as a designer, a designer conjures up the idea of perfection. We look around us, and — I agree with John very much — we live in a very, very imperfect universe, a universe which is ambiguous at best, which is riddled with evil and suffering. I don’t find “design” — if you think of God the Creator as a designer — in any way compatible with the universe in that sense.

But the idea of promise is something different. Promise is something that can live with the ambiguity of the present. You don’t expect perfection from a promise, at least here and now. Maybe you expect perfection from the fulfillment of such a promise.

I think what, as a Christian, I look for and what I hope for is the eventual conquering of evil and the wiping away of all tears, as the Book of Revelation puts it. But right here and now, I don’t expect the universe to provide me with unambiguous evidence of some sort of cosmic designer.

To come back and connect this with John’s point about the fact of evil, evil is the open wound of theology. Theology simply cannot provide a speculatively satisfactory answer to that. In fact, some theologians today would say if we had a speculatively satisfactory response to the problem of evil, we would thereby be theoretically justifying the existence of evil. The approach to evil is not to theorize or find a place for it in the world; the approach to evil is to work against it, to try to conquer it, and to hope for its eventual vanquishing. But we should not try to think that we can ever come to some sort of satisfactory theodicy — that is, some explanation of how to reconcile the fact of suffering and evil with the existence of God.

But I do think that it makes a difference now — this will be my last point — if we think about the fact that we live, you and I, in an unfinished universe. This is the first thing that evolution logically implies. It seems to me that in terms of Professor Davies’ points, it really makes very little difference whether Einstein or Darwin ever existed, as far as his own philosophy of God is concerned. But what I think is very important that we should listen to from Darwin and Einstein is that we live in a universe that is still coming into being. Brian talked a lot about creation. But traditionally theology has talked not just about initial creation, or creatio originalis; it has also talked, as Brian mentioned, about creatio continua, God’s continuous sustainment of the world. The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 29

What he left out was that theology has also talked about creatio nova, that new creation is constantly happening, that the world is continually coming into being. As Teilhard puts it, each day the universe rises a little further out of nothingness. We live there between the poles of nothingness and the future. We live in an ambiguous universe. But that at least allows us to think of our existence within this universe as being able to contribute something to the coming of this future. Once we realize that the universe is still in the process of becoming, it gives us a new reason for moral aspirations. As Teilhard puts it, if we look carefully at what Darwin and Einstein have told us, we all are born as part of a cosmic stream of becoming. We should feel that in ourselves and in our lives, and realize that our own existence can contribute something significant — however small it is — to the larger scheme of things that is still in the process of coming into being, and look at the ambiguity around us as something that follows necessarily from the fact of a universe that is still coming into being. If the universe is still unfinished, by definition it is incomplete. If it’s incomplete, it’s imperfect. If it’s imperfect, it has a dark side to it.

What is the alternative? The alternative would be a universe that was created fully and completely, once and for all, in the beginning. But that sort of universe would have no future. It would allow for no freedom, since it would be fixed, once and for all. That would be a universe which I don’t think would allow for life, as well. So I think what we learn from Darwin and Einstein and other scientists, who have given us this marvelous new sense of the cosmic story — a universe that is still coming into being — provides theology with a great opportunity, which we need to take advantage of.

Thank you.

PETER STEINFELS: I am going to beg the speakers in all that follows, since they have had a good chance, to be as brief in answering questions as they possibly can be.

I want to, however, begin that by giving Brian Davies just a very quick shot at this question of why it seems to be better to frame this discussion around the question of why there is something rather than nothing — rather than, for example, around creatio nova.

BRIAN DAVIES: The short answer is, I just don’t understand the notion of creatio nova. It seems to me that something either is or it is not. It may, of course, be in a stage of development. It may be getting better or improving. Nonetheless, it certainly is, and is no less creatively made by God for that. My dog or my cat may be in the process of recovering from an illness, so it is progressively getting better. Nonetheless, I think my dog or my cat would think ill of me if I describe it as not really existing at the time that it was suffering from its germs. The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 30

The fact is, things may improve, but whatever improvement we are going to witness is going to be something that is creatively made to be by God.

What I was trying to stress was the only causality of a God who is just not part of the spatiotemporal universe, a God who is not one more item, a God who does not have a particular character in the way in which I have a character or my cat has a character or a cabbage has a character. What I am talking about is a source of being who calls everything from nothingness into being. That calling of everything from nothingness into being is what, traditionally, Christian theologians have called Creation — insisting, by the way, that Creation is not some kind of a change or a modification in something.

Both, for example, St. Augustine and St. Thomas ask — it may seem, rather boringly — is Creation a change? The question is significant. To say that God, by creating, changes something is to put God precisely on a level with Michelangelo, who “creates” the picture of the Last Judgment by moving bits of paint around, by acting on something which preexists his causal activity. The Creator God doesn’t act on anything; He causes everything to be, in all its diversity and at every stage of its existence.

That’s my short answer. [Laughter]

PETER STEINFELS: I know it’s unfair to leave it there, but for the moment we will leave it there. The first question is, “Is that Christopher Hitchens sitting in the last row, right of the center aisle, on the main floor?”

I can answer that question. The panelists don’t have to. No.

The second question that I think we could address — there is actually a series of questions that cluster around thinking of God in non- anthropomorphic terms, questions of the nature of talking about a personal God, as raised, on the one hand, by John Horgan, where he talked about that in terms of emotion, relationship, et cetera, and on the other hand, by Brian Davies, in which he talks about a God who does not have any particular character. This relates, I think, to our question of Scripture. There is a question or two here about how this relates to our biblical language.

I, myself, would like to throw in the question: If tonight’s session had been called “After Darwin and Einstein, Is the Worship of a God Possible,” how do all those terms that we use — father, caretaker, protector, savior — fit into the general framework and tone of the discussion this evening? I think those things cluster around — from anthropomorphism to biblical language, to the language of person and prayer and caring and so on.

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I will give each one of the speakers, if they want to take it, a few moments. Those are very big questions. You have only a few moments for some comments.

JOHN HORGAN: I am just going to use that as an excuse to make a point that I wanted to make. I will try to make it very briefly. I think that humanity made some primordial mistake, and we are still suffering from the consequences of that. It seems to me that you have truth on the one hand — and I am not a postmodernist; I believe in such a thing as absolute, universal, objective truth that can be discovered through science — and then you have meaning on the other, which is, I think, whatever gets you through life, gets you through the night, if you want to put it that way. Meaning is completely subjective and idiosyncratic and as diverse as people are. So sports or love or sitting in a cave meditating — there are millions of ways to find meaning in life.

The mistake that we have made is in thinking of meaning as in the same category as truth, which is universal. Meaning is not universal. Religions insist that it is. To me, clearly it isn’t, and if we could just accept that, we wouldn’t have all these wars over science and religion.

PETER STEINFELS: I think other speakers may have something to say to that, as well as the earlier question.

BRIAN DAVIES: I am just going to reply to the earlier question, actually. I think it’s very instructive that, having argued that we must take the world as something created, having argued for what he calls the existence of God, St. Thomas Aquinas, typically, immediately says, “Now, of course, we can’t know what God is.” He means this most sincerely. He means we can literally form no concept of God, because our intellectual equipment has evolved in order to form concepts of things within the universe, of things we can imagine, of things we can quantify, of things which are different, some things belonging to one class, some things to other classes. God can’t be one of those things, so, in a serious sense, we can’t know what God is.

Having said that, Aquinas, typically, says, “But we had damn well better have a good try at trying to articulate what we can know of God and also relate it to what we can’t know of God, but believe on the basis of faith.”

I wasn’t very happy with the way Professor Haught used the term “faith,” in what seems to me a rather loose sense. The medievals were a bit more precise. They would distinguish between knowledge and faith and regard faith as what we must certainly hold to be true, but can’t know to be true. That is a fairly traditional Catholic line on faith. There are things of God that we can know. There are things which are true of God that we can believe in faith, because God gives us a certain supernatural disposition to do so. Aquinas calls it “the grace of faith.” The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 32

What we can do when it comes to what we can know concerning God is at least try to express what can tangibly and defensibly be regarded as truths concerning God. There are different kinds of statements expressing truths. Some are metaphorical. Some are analogical. For me and for writers like St. Thomas, analogy is just a little mode of discourse. To say that God is good and that I am good and that good is here being used analogically is to speak literally in each case. It is literally true for St. Thomas that God is good. It is literally true for St. Thomas that I am good — well, maybe he wouldn’t have said that, but he might have conceded the point at some level. What we have to do is ask what reason we have for ascribing a certain predicate term to God literally, the same term that we ascribe to a creature literally.

I would say that there are a whole lot of terms that we can ascribe to God and to ourselves and to other creatures literally, without it therefore following that we have to go down a kind of anthropomorphic path which ends up with us talking as though God basically is the guy who lives in the next street, only a lot more powerful, a lot more knowledgeable, and a lot better behaved. [Laughter]

PETER STEINFELS: John?

JOHN HAUGHT: Let me just say, I find it very interesting. Both Brian and I come from the Roman Catholic tradition. I think what you are seeing is that Catholicism is a very pluralistic religion.

BRIAN DAVIES: That goes without saying.

JOHN HAUGHT: If anybody asked me, “What is there about Catholicism, say, that differentiates it from other forms of Christianity?” the thing that has always impressed me about it is the sacramental quality. The experience of Catholics is that somehow we are touched by God, almost in a physical sort of sense. I realize there is a danger to that. But I think sacramentality is fundamental to the tradition.

What is a sacrament? A sacrament is a symbol, and a symbol is something which, by saying one thing directly, says something else indirectly. A symbol is of something revelatory. The Catholic tradition has always been close to nature, in the sense that it has used elements from nature — the luminosity of bright sunshine, the fertility of the soil and of life, the cleansing experience of fresh air and water — as analogizing or symbolizing for us the way in which God does intervene or God does underlie our existence.

I have a different reading of Aquinas. I see Aquinas as a very sacramental type of thinker. For example, in the Summa, when Aquinas asks himself the question of why God creates so many things, his answer was — and this The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 33 is kind of a basis for ecological theology — so that what is lacking in one thing, as far as manifesting the greatness and goodness and infinity of God is concerned, can be supplied by something else, and what is lacking in that can be supplied by something else.

But here you get the sense of a thinker who wants us to feel and touch the natural world. To me, as science unfolds for us this natural world, I want to hold on to that sense that, in some way, the divine is revealed, is made manifest, not just in the historical traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but, in some sense, that whole thirty-volume history of nature that I showed is, from start to finish, a revelation or unfolding of the meaning of God.

Theologically, this is why I have no problem with the multiverse either. I realize there is no scientific evidence for it. But a God who is extravagant enough to bring about the diversity you see in our ecological environment here would very easily be understood as one who could bring about an infinite number of universes. That would be completely consistent with the sacramental, symbolic, revelatory understanding of my tradition that I have.

PETER STEINFELS: I have so many good questions. But I am going to ask one, because it was related to the ending of Professor Haught’s presentation, and it may be the ending of our discussion here tonight. Why is Teilhard, who was so popular in Catholic intellectual circles in the 1960s, so neglected, and even forgotten, in those circles today? Again, that could be the discussion of a whole evening. Maybe we could have a brief observation from one or two of the speakers tonight.

JOHN HORGAN: You probably weren’t expecting me to come in on this, but I just have to interject. A friend of mine, a journalist named Robert Wright, who is very enamored of Darwinism, has written a book called Nonzero, which tries to show that if you look at it the right way, Darwinism can provide a very upbeat view of existence. He sees progress in evolution. He says evolution is obviously not just competition, “nature, red in tooth and claw,” but there is this process that leads to more and more symbiosis and cooperation, and even compassion and sharing and all those sorts of things. [Wright] cites Chardin very tentatively, because he thinks of him as sort of being a little bit beyond the fringe of respectable scientific discourse. But he obviously sees him as somebody who was very prescient in talking about a basic compatibility between Darwinism and a kind of spiritual vision of life.

BRIAN DAVIES: Chardin was a famous Jesuit. Another famous Jesuit was Karl Rahner, a twentieth-century theologian. Karl Rahner, I believe, was on one occasion asked what he thought of Teilhard de Chardin. He said, “Ah, de Chardin, that’s the man whom all the theologians think is a scientist and all the scientists think is a theologian.” I suspect that might The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 34 partly answer the question as to why Chardin is not so much read these days. And to be blunt, another answer, I think, is the fact that he is just not much republished. I think the fate of great thinkers these days, lamentably, lies in the hands of people whose job is to make money for themselves and to publish books and let them go out of print in accordance with the cash-flow value to them. Why is Chardin not read today? Well, why are the Cambridge Platonists not much read today? And so forth. The other answer to the question is, I simply don’t know.

JOHN HAUGHT: Well, I can understand why the Cambridge Platonists are not being read today. [Laughter]

Incidentally, Robert Wright sent me those chapters in his book — I am glad you mentioned that; I had forgotten about that — on Teilhard, because he does see some value there. But, in general, from a theological point of view, I am very discouraged at the fact that theologians don’t pay much attention to him. I think it goes back to the fact that at the beginning of the modern age, theology decided, “We’ll let science have the natural world, and theology will take over the world of spiritual existence, the big quest for meaning, social justice, and so forth. That will be the theological territory or franchise.” We are still suffering from that separation of theology from the natural world that is really a very provincial and, I think, historically contingent thing. If you go back to ancient religions, even including the ancient Israelite and Christian religion, there is a deep cosmological sense upon which the whole is woven.

We don’t have that cosmological sense. We have very few people trying to weave a theological sense on the new cosmology. That is something that I am trying to do. I think Teilhard sets a heroic precedent for us there. Like every thinker, he is flawed. He didn’t have the opportunity to get the kind of scholarly feedback that is necessary for refining one’s thought. But in spite of all that, I think there is just something terribly, terribly precious and accordant about this man. The problem is, as you said, that publishers are just not republishing his work. However, there is a good new English translation of The Phenomenon of Man, called The Human Phenomenon. But it is terribly expensive to buy, so not many people are reading it. There are sites on the Internet where you can read his book, The Future of Man. You can go to that and get the whole text, as well as Hymn of the Universe. That is very cheap.

PETER STEINFELS: Thank you. We have arrived at the end of our allotted time, although we have hardly even begun to attack the stack of questions, nor have we begun to attack the many questions that I think are still in your minds, which I hope you continue to discuss further among yourselves.

I would like to remind you that books by John Haught are available The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture 35 outside. I also want to call your attention to the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture’s next public event, the headline forum on December 5 on “Secularization: The Myths and the Realities.” Then, on January 16, 2008, amid the returns of the early primaries, four panelists at a Center forum will give a fresh look at what is probably the most frequently quoted, and often misquoted, speech in American arguments about church and state, and the nature of presidential leadership, namely the speech that John F. Kennedy gave in 1960 to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.

I think there is a flyer about these events. Again, for announcements and information, please sign on to our email or snail-mail lists.

In closing, I would like to thank our student helpers, our program manager, Patricia Bellucci, you, a very attentive audience, and especially this evening’s three distinguished speakers.