Can Scientific Discovery Be a Religious Experience?

Institute of Advanced Insights Study CanCan ScientificScientific DiscoDiscoveveryry BeBe aa RReligiouseligious Experience?Experience? John Hedley Brooke Volume 1 2008 Number 2 ISSN 1756-2074 Institute of Advanced Study Insights About Insights Insights captures the ideas and work-in-progress of the Fellows of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. Up to twenty distinguished and ‘fast-track’ Fellows reside at the IAS in any academic year. They are world-class scholars who come to Durham to participate in a variety of events around a core inter-disciplinary theme, which changes from year to year. Each theme inspires a new series of Insights, and these are listed in the inside back cover of each issue. These short papers take the form of thought experiments, summaries of research findings, theoretical statements, original reviews, and occasionally more fully worked treatises. Every fellow who visits the IAS is asked to write for this series. 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The opinions stated in the Insights papers are those of their respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, or the staff and students thereof. Institute of Advanced Study Insights CAN SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY BE A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE? The exploitation of science in attacks on religious belief is a familiar phenomenon and contributes to the popular but simplistic view that science and religion are necessarily in conflict. But is it possible that the experience of scientific discovery may, in certain respects, resemble a religious experience? This question is introduced by addressing the preliminary issue whether scientists are wise to devote themselves to an offensive against some generalised abstraction called religion. Historically the quest for scientific understanding has often been associated with an appreciation of beauty in nature and elegance in the theories that describe it. For scientists with religious convictions this has permitted a graduation from aesthetic to religious discourse, however problematic this may be for non-believers. The great astronomer Kepler confessed to ‘unutterable rapture at the divine spectacle of heavenly harmony’, having discovered one of his planetary laws. Newton celebrated a deity highly ‘skilled in mechanics and geometry’. Einstein wrote that the emotional state that enables great scientific achievements to be made is ‘similar to that of the religious person or the person in love’. It is therefore appropriate to explore the analogies and disanalogies between moments of disclosure in science and religion. The analysis is also prompted by the observation that in questionnaires on religious belief, a crucial facet of the religious life is routinely obliterated. Those who admit to searching for spiritual meaning are assigned to an agnostic category in contrast to those who may have a definite church affiliation or hold definite convictions. The dynamics of the spiritual life are lost as a consequence. And yet it is the questing spirit that perhaps bears the closest analogy to the scientific quest, understood as a process of enquiry rather than as a set of inviolable results. hould scientists contest religious beliefs? One answer to this blunt question could scarcely Sbe controversial. When religious beliefs (whatever they may be) masquerade as science, as in claims for a creation science, it seems perfectly obvious that scientists committed to the principles of neo-Darwinian evolution should have the right to retaliate and to give the reasons why Charles Darwin’s theory provides a more compelling explanation for otherwise disparate natural phenomena than would recourse to independent acts of creation. Darwin brilliantly summarised those reasons in the last chapter of his Origin of Species. Whether belief in separate creation should be called an intrinsically religious belief is, however, a moot point. Certainly it is a belief sustained by a particular strand of Protestant Christianity. But it is interesting that Darwin called this model a theory of creation and it is a model not required by the classical Christian doctrine of creation, which stresses the dependence of the entire universe, and all processes within it, on a transcendent power. Another response to the question might also be relatively uncontroversial. If a particular religious belief (whatever that may be) can be shown to be both ill-founded and dangerous to others, we would expect responsible people (not only scientists) to contest it. The difficulty, however, is that though we might readily produce specific examples of damaging beliefs from specific religious traditions, this is a long way from showing that there is some essence to religion that makes it the root of all evil, or indeed that in any one faith tradition there is a preponderance of damaging beliefs over others that may be beneficial to those who hold them. 2 Institute of Advanced Study Insights As soon as we start looking for difficulties with the question, they rain down on us. Behind it there lurks the notion that beliefs derived from sacred texts and from faith traditions, or held on the basis of intuition or trust, are inherently suspect compared with those for which scientists can produce empirical evidence. It is easy to forget, however, that for those who choose to live their lives as if something were true that might not be directly verifiable, there can be a coherence between what they believe and their experience, which they find life-enhancing. Notoriously, religious beliefs can reinforce unhealthy segregation, yet few would now deny their role in binding a community together, in reinforcing moral codes and in endorsing particular values. This makes it especially difficult to generalise about the propriety of attacking religious belief because one could find oneself attacking that without which particular societies would be disadvantaged not ameliorated. In Darwin’s own day there was a moral revolt against certain Christian teachings, notably the belief in eternal damnation for those outside the fold. And yet there was also a powerful etiquette, which recognised that to deliberately contest the beliefs of those whose faith was precious to them was decidedly churlish. There are deeper questions. Religions are not just about beliefs, warrantable or not. They are about practices, ranging from prayer and meditation to formalised prescriptions for group and individual behaviour. Christianity has arguably been the exception in being so creedal. Even when belief becomes the principal focus of attention there is still the problem, as I have already hinted, concerning what it is that makes a religious belief religious. Isaac Newton believed that the universality of the laws of nature was a consequence of the fact that

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