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.