Science, Religion, & the Edge of Knowing

I listen to On Being on podcast when I have an hour to clean the kitchen (I'm a perfectionist... it takes me an hour, OK?). It's the most substantive program on religion in the contemporary media. It's open-handed and intelligent; I rarely listen without getting something to chew on.

Recently, I heard "Cosmic Origami," an interview with Lord Martin Rees, a cosmologist and astrophysicist and former president of Britain's Royal Society (TED talk here). The interview explored some of today's frontiers in science--the limits of knowledge.

In a day when a fundamentalist presidential candidate can challenge the science of climate change (and find popular support), the Christian religion has acquired a reputation as deeply anti-science.

I've never experienced any incongruity between my Christian faith and science. Don't both dwell at the edge of knowing? Aren't both urged on by some strange admixture of audacious and pragmatic human questions? Don't both engage awesome mysteries that render the bold explorer prostrate and speechless? Don't both depend, in the end, not solely on what happens outside of us, but what happens in the uncharted processes of human cognition? Both lean hard into the limits of what we can know.

My religious faith needs science; they flatter one another--they don't fear one another. Here are my favorite quotes from the program, some of which will make you dizzy at the heights:

On the mysteries of space:

[T]here is also a deeper mystery, which is related to the nature of space itself. There's evidence... that even empty space, when you take away all the dark matter and all the atoms, still exerts a kind of force. It exerts a sort of push or tension on everything. And this therefore means that even empty space has a kind of structure, and we don't understand that at all. In fact, most of us would guess that empty space does have a structure but on a tiny, tiny scale, a scale a billion, billion times smaller than an atomic nucleus....

On the possibility of "other" dimensions:

We're used to the idea of three dimensions of space, backwards and forwards, left and right, up and down. But if you look at space on a tiny scale, you would find evidence for extra dimensions. There's another idea... which is that there may be... other universes, other regions of space/time, which are separate from ours because they're embedded in a common higher dimension. To give an analogy of this, if you imagine a whole lot of bugs crawling around on a big sheet of paper. They may think of that as their sort of two-dimensional universe. They can just go in two directions on it. Then if you imagine another sheet of paper parallel to the first one and other bugs on that, then they think they are in a separate two-dimensional space and they're not aware of the third dimension. So they wouldn't know that there is the other parallel sheet. And some people think that one dimension up we are in that sort of predicament. They think that there may be, as it were, another universe maybe just a few millimeters away from ours. But if those millimeters are measured in a fourth spatial dimension and we're imprisoned in our three we wouldn't know about it.

On evolution and human complexity:

[T]he time lying ahead is at least as long as the time that has elapsed up till now. The Sun is less than halfway through its life. The Earth has billions of years ahead of it, and the universe may go on forever. And I think this is very important to everyone because this makes me very skeptical about any claim that humans are in any sense the culmination of evolution. We are, of course, the most complex organism that has evolved, but since the time lying ahead is just as long, then post-human evolution here on Earth and far beyond could be far more complex and wonderful than the biosphere we have here under which we are a part.

On human power:

[I]t was his obligation to control the power he had helped unleash.

On humility and the limits of knowledge:

[I]f science teaches me anything, it teaches me that even simple things like an atom are fairly hard to understand. And that makes me skeptical of anyone who claims to have the last word or complete understanding of any deep aspect of reality.... I think the most we can hope for is some incomplete and metaphorical understanding and to share the mystery and wonder whether we are believers or not.

On the natural alliance between scientists and believers against fundamentalism:

Many nonbelieving scientists, like myself, do not wish to attack and deride religion.... I regard fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic, and New Age as being a real danger to the world. And I therefore, think we need all the allies we can muster against it. And I would see the mainstream religions, religions that have no problem whatever with science, as being our allies.

On how knowledge advances:

Science doesn't advance in a very systematic way. It advances with sometimes two steps forward and one step back.... [M]ostly what happens in science is that new ideas are refinements and extensions of the old ones.

 On the relationship between general and particular knowledge:

[W}hen you understand nature in increasingly general ways, then the number of separate things you have to remember goes down not up.

 On Divine purpose:

I just don't understand what could be meant by purpose. I think if there was a purpose, I wouldn't expect human brains to be able to understand it. I think it is clear that humans are just a stage in the emergence of amazing complexity in the universe. And I just think it's far too anthropomorphic to actually use the word purpose.

On the human mind:

[T]he brain is the most complicated thing we know about in the universe. And we are just beginning to understand it. [It is] the sort of Everest problem, as it were — the highest summit in studying the complexions of our world. And how far we will get in solving that I don't know, but there are many mysteries still obviously. But again, the point I want to emphasize, is that we should not be surprised that there are many mysteries, because we are just beginning and the world is very complicated and our brains may not be up to solving all of them.