24. Can Science and Religion Coexist in One Person?

May 15, 2021

A comparison of my parents' science interests and their hopes to make me a scientist.  A comparison of parental religious philosophies.  How can science and religion coexist in one person when science negates religion?

Late 19th and early 20th centuries--when Cartesian thought no longer applied and mystery caused a significant rapprochement of science and religion.  Role of Darwin in creating more mystery.  The Big Bang Theory:  how can we be living inside an explosion?  It seems the more we know the more mystery there is.

What does religion provide?  Anti-hubris.  We will never reach the level os gods, no matter how many apples we eat.  Science requires hubris;  religion demands anti-hubris.

PHF:  Announcement of our fundraiser in September.  I hope to raise enough money to buy a second melangeur for David.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 3:15

That was the beginning of The Fantasy Impromptu by Frederick Chopin. Today, this is podcast number 24. This is Tom Newhouse, and we have a podcast today about whether science and religion can coexist. I was born to a couple of scientists. Dorothy, my mother, is of Swedish Lutheran heritage. From an early age, she showed a facility with mathematics and with scientific thinking. Her maternal grandfather taught chemistry. Otto, my father, was of German Catholic heritage. Also from an early age, he showed the sort of inquiring mind that is typical of a scientist. His father was an engineer. Dad told me on numerous occasions about the time he boiled a dead rat to remove its bones and reassemble the skeleton on a board, just like a small dinosaur in a natural history museum. And then there was the time he was shooting his showing his brother how to make hydrogen, and he had the not-so-smart idea of shooting a nail across the basement by lighting an alumbic, that is a distillation flask, full of hydrogen with the nail inserted in the alumbic's tip. The result was a basement full of glass shards, a blackened ceiling, and the nail sitting pertly on the bench. Although my mother did not blow up her parents' basement, during her college years at Case Western Reserve, my mother worked for an aircraft company testing valve integrity with highly explosive sodium metal and highly corrosive hydrofluoric acid. Both parents ended up as biochemistry graduate students at the University of Michigan, and that's where they met. Otto was a graduate student and head TA, and Dorothy an undergraduate and newly minted teaching assistant. Growing up with two biochemists did not turn me into one. Neither of my parents insisted that I follow in their footsteps. I ended up straddling the arts and sciences. I took piano lessons and dutifully took science and math. But when it came to parenting, both mom and dad showed a science bias. In ninth grade, I was volunteered to participate in a science show. That is, I did not volunteer, I was volunteer. My project was probably the dream child of my mother. It consisted of planting grass seedlings, feeding them various fertilizers, and then embedding the leaves of grass in wax, slicing them on a microtome, dissolving away the wax with xylene, and preparing slides. The result was a study of plant cell sizes and shapes as a function of what the cells have been fed. Not every mother would dream of such a project, but mom spent her days at receiving hospital in downtown Detroit embedding human tissue in wax and then slicing and mounting on slides, that is, for so that doctors could talk to their patients about what kind of cancer they had. My father did another project with me, this time not for a school project, but just for fun. He had spent his graduate and young faculty years separating rat urinary proteins using various chromatographic methods, sometimes using blocks of cells of uh potato starch, other times various gels. One day he came home with a flask of ether, a long glass tube, and a stopper with a Hoffman clamp. We ground granulated sugar in a mortar and pestle, then suspended the sugar in the ether and poured it down the column. Then we dried spinach, ground, and then mixed it with more ether. First, we applied a centimeter of spinach juice to the top of the sugar column, and then we opened the clamp at the bottom and allowed the spinach juice to permeate the sugar while we trickled more ether at the top of the column. The result was a glorious rainbow of chlorophyll and carotenoid pigments with multiple shades of green, yellow, and orange. From this experiment, I learned about photosynthesis and the pigments that capture light and convert it into the carbohydrates in flowers, stems, leaves, and roots. Of course, I feel blessed for having had two parents like this. What kid wouldn't be? But there was another side to my parents. Both were Lutherans. My mother was born in a family of Swedish Lutherans, going back to Saint Olaf, who converted Sweden to Christianity a thousand years ago, and then to Martin Luther a few hundred years later, who during the Reformation converted Sweden and half of Germany from Catholicism. My father, having come from a Catholic family, was more adamantly Lutheran than my mother. He despised the Catholic hagiographic traditions, the love of saints, and the idea of intercession whereby a saint intercedes on behalf of the worshipper. Just a little too polytheistic for my father's tastes. My father preferred the Lutheran Calvinist emphasis on simplicity and scoffed at the notion that sculptures and paintings could represent a deity. Although he would be shocked by this, uh I think both Protestantism and Islam have iconoclastic streaks. That's not really a um uh a statement that you could refute. Speaking of iconoclasm, Dad was a bit of an iconoclast. As a Sunday school teacher, he enjoyed asking troubling questions of his students, such as what is the nature of heaven and hell? Do they really exist? Uh what he asked about whether Jesus was really divine or was he part human and partly divine. And of course, the classic Lutheran question about justification by faith versus justification by works. My father was a great admirer of Isaac Asimov, a biochemist and one of the greatest writers of science fiction in the League of Arthur C. Clarke, as well as a great science communicator in the League of Carl Sagan. My father is no longer alive, but of one thing I'm sure, while he admired Asimov for his tremendous facility with a multitude of subjects in the arts and sciences, he did not agree with Asimov about God. Asimov, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson would have been great fishing buddies, as not one of them believed in a theistic god, that is a god who works through history. Asimov, like Franklin and Jefferson, was a humanist, a believer in the enlightenment, that it's man's responsibility to make his own way without the benefit of divine intervention, if that even existed. So over the years, the clashes between religion and science have really been eating at me. If neurological evidence points to humans as victims of their own biochemistry, where emotions and thoughts are merely the ghost in the machinery, subject to levels of neuropeptides and g proteins, how can we speak of free will? How can we actually believe in it? How can science and religion exist in one person's consciousness when belief in neurobiology logically negates belief in a supreme being who controls your behaviors and who judges you on the day of judgment? So, how can two opposites be simultaneously true? How can you have science and religion both existing at the same time and being true? Most scientists believe that everything has an explanation, and what limits our knowledge is merely our ability to frame a question. For example, Rene Descartes saw the world as plaudible, that everything can be described on a chart with axes, classically the x and y axis. Such a frame is fine for describing a right triangle with the Pythagorean theorem, uh, which the Pythagorean theorem describes as C squared equaling a squared plus b squared. But uh in the uh post-Cartesian world, uh, which has discovered that uh reality is far more complicated than determining the length of the hypotenuse. The Pythagorean theorem is indeed nifty, and Newtonian physics is fine for shooting cannonballs or bullets and predicting where they will land. But what about asymptotes, which assume that a curve gets closer and closer to a line without ever touching it? This uh r introduces an element of mystery that our brains simply cannot comprehend. Well, at least not in my brain. But accepting the asymptotes and a few other mysteries such as square roots of negative numbers, uh for a couple thousand years science seemed to explain everything. But this all changed in the late 19th and early twentieth when a flood of new observations perplexed the pants off of the theoreticians. One theoretician, an obscure clerk in a German patent office, uh, Albert Einstein, predicted that time and space are bent by gravity. His reasoning was impeccable and irrefutable despite a generation of attempted measurements afterward to prove otherwise. Light could be bent, and time is dependent on how fast you are going. More mystery soon followed. The concept of the atom as solar system was shredded by experiments that showed electrons behaving as though they're both waves and particles simultaneously. And again, after thousands of years of feeling comfortable that tables and stones are solid, we learn that the woody atoms that we bang our heads on, or the stony atoms that we drop on our feet, are mostly just space. Funny thing, they don't feel like space. In the fields of biology and physiology and biochemistry, plant and animal cells, while fixed images on paper in textbooks, are hardly that in real life. They're more like the subjects in Harry Potter photographs, in constant motion, vibrating and trembling. Life-giving reactions are dependent on brownie Brownian motion, whereby asymmetric water molecules bang into enzymes and proteins, causing all sorts of mayhem that we label as life. In the mid-19th century, a preacher named Dick Darwin, who vowed to keep his discoveries secret, really uh split the God determined world wide open. Sorry, I said that wrong. He uh split the God determined world wide open when he introduced the notion that species are created by a driving force that takes eons, and that we supposedly superior humans are just a branch of the ape and monkey family. The universe provides more evidence for the in reinterpretation of reality. For example, how do you get to the moon? Not by aiming at it and shooting a rocket there. No, no, Suri, that does not work. Uh when we send rockets to the moon or beyond to other some other world like Mars, the rocket goes straight up off the Earth's surface, but at about 20 miles up, it turns sideways and accelerates to escape velocity. For a straight line that's quite bent. Our pr our brains love straight lines, but space travel is anything but and calculus invented by uh Isaac Newton and abhorred by countless high school and college students, is de rigueur for maneuvering around heavenly bodies. Edwin Hubble, for whom the telescope was named, used a spectrometer to determine how fast heavenly objects are moving toward or away from the observer. He discovered the red shift, a Doppler effect, in which the wavelength of light emitted by distant galaxies is lengthened as they move away from us. The same effect we observe when an ambulance or a train whizzes past and the sound waves are lengthened, causing the drop in pitch. Hubble found that the galaxies that are farthest away have the biggest red shifts, which supported the Big Bang theory about the origins of the universe. That it all started at a single point. And over a period of about 13.7 billion years, the initial explosion has expanded to a universe at its current size. And eventually it will expand to the point that you will no longer see stars in the sky because we will be so far away from everything. So now not only are solids mostly space and electrons are both waves and particles simultaneously, but we're all just living inside a giant explosion that had been going on for a very long time. All these scientific notions add up to one giant fact. The universe and its machinations are just too complicated for our pea brains to intuit. In other words, we're just super limited. And that brings us back to religion. Because at its very foundation, it's not just about the spooky stuff, pearly gates floating in the sky, a hierarchy of angels and archangels keeping track of everything you do. Religion provides something more, something that science does not provide, and that is anti-hubris, the notion that we know that we will never be gods. The tree of knowledge was just a myth, after all. We will never be gods, no matter how many apples we eat. And so back to the question can science and religion coexist? Well, uh I think maybe the answer is maybe. I suspect that for the two to coexist, we have to have the humility to recognize that each conceptual framework has something to contribute. Science contributes the hubris that allows us to smash the balls, throw away the theories, and engage in revolutionary thinking. Religion contributes the anti-hubris that keeps us from demolishing the planet either through environmental or nuclear annihilation. So I guess the answer is maybe. I really don't know. And that's the end of today's uh podcast. Um, I wanted to also mention that in September, somewhere around the 20th to the 23rd, not sure which day yet, I'm planning on renting the Performing Arts Center, um, the Miosi Performing Arts Center, uh, for a couple hours to play the pipe organ and have a fundraiser. Um, the pipe organ at Cal Poly is um a very fine instrument, and I'm going to be playing three Bach pieces and one per cell. And uh so I'll I'll tell you more about that as uh I learn more because uh I have to find out all the details. But um anyway, just to just think about that. I'm looking for having a big audience and uh and earning enough money so that um I can buy another chocolate grinding machine for David so that he has two chocolate grinding machines uh and uh and that will be a very good thing. All right, so now that's the end and uh of today's podcast, and we finish with the end of the fantasy impromptu by Frederick Chopin.