This is a really long answer, but bear with me and I'll try to blow your mind in the next few minutes. Allow me to begin by asking a seemingly irrelevant question: have you ever heard of the Ultra Deep Field Experiment by the Hubble Telescope?You see, what happened some years ago was that NASA completed a low-resolution map of the night sky, and they decided they wanted to go deeper. So they picked a little, tiny patch of space--about the size of a pencil tip at arm's length. It was utterly insignificant, really, just another blank patch of space with nothing there, but they decided to point the finely-honed lens of the Hubble telescope at that patch in the hope of detecting whatever lonely photons of light might trickle in from that region of space.Each time the Hubble made its way around the earth, it pointed toward that patch for 20 minutes. After 400 orbits, they took all the data and compiled it to discover not a star, nor a cluster of stars, but ten. thousand. galaxies. Turns out that blank patch wasn't so blank after all. Now, assuming a galaxy is about a 100 billion stars, that's a thousand trillion stars--many of which, much like our own sun, presumably have their own planetary systems, all with the potential to house as-yet unknown forms of biology.I think these results are a really good consciousness-raiser to think about as we contemplate the sheer size of the mysteries that surround us. Hold on to this thought as you read on. :-)
== First, a little on science... ==
I am a scientist by training. By the time I graduated college I'd already poured thousands of hours into procedures, scored publications in peer-reviewed journals, presented my work at national conferences, and in total spent nearly a third of my life working in various research labs. Why? Because I figure if I want to understand what's going on in this strange world around me, there's probably no better method than to directly study the blueprints.You have to admit, science in the last several hundred years has been immensely successful--we've cured smallpox and polio, gotten men to the moon, invented the internet, and tripled life spans.But I think one of the most important experiences you gain from a life in science is that once you walk the pier of what is currently known, at some point, you reach the end of the pier. And beyond that end is everything we don't know--it's all the uncharted waters, the deep mysteries that we don't have insight into yet, like why mass and energy are equivalent, or what dark matter/dark energy are, or why there are multiple spatial dimensions, or how you build consciousness from mechanical pieces and parts. That's the real lesson that science provides--the vastness of our ignorance.Now, rest assured that with every generation, we will undoubtedly continue to add more slats to the pier...but it's a huge ocean, and we have no guarantee how far we'll get, and certainly in our brief twinkling of a 21st century lifetime, we're simply not going to live to see the end. So again: science hammers home the message that what we know is so vastly outstripped by what we don't know.So given all this, I find that this question has at its core a popular misconception that's become increasingly widespread over the last decade, particularly in the political arena: that scientists don't have the capacity to gamble beyond the available data, and they act like they've got it all figured out with various equations that perfectly capture the picture of the whole cosmos.That's actually a very poor description of how science operates.Science is in some ways about disproving other people's hypotheses (including those posited by religion), but it's so much more than that. Science is really about creativity in making up new hypotheses--and part of the scientific temperament is a tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time. What we actually do is we make up new stories in lab every day and then we go and we seek evidence to weigh in favor of some stories over others.But it's often the case that some questions are too far out right now. They're beyond the toolbox of science, and as a result we're unable to gather evidence for them. That's ok--science is fine with holding multiple hypotheses on the table. That ambiguity is accepted as part of the relationship we have with mother nature. It's just part of the vast mysteries around us. == A little on religion... ==
I was raised by a microbiologist mother who was a very devout Christian who insisted I read the Bible and learn all its stories and go to church. Despite my many years as a scientist I still find comfort in praying to God even though I know He might not exist/care, and I have seen various circumstances that I could attribute to "power of prayer", although my cynical side calls it "placebo" and "coincidence". So I categorize myself loosely as being "religious".Consider this: there are 2000+ religions on the globe, and everyone already knows what it's like to be an atheist, because all you need to do is look at someone else's religion and say "Well it's patently ridiculous that you would believe in that", and of course they're looking back at you and thinking the same thing.Try an experiment: the next time you meet someone new/random, whether it's on an airplane or in a bar, ask them if they've ever heard of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Experiment. I guarantee you the number of people who have will be outweighed heavily by the number who haven't. But everyone will be able to tell you all the details of whatever cultural story they grew up on.You don't need to be an anthropologist to recognize that our nervous systems absorb whatever our cultures pour into us. So if you grew up in Saudi Arabia, chances are you love Islam. And if you were born in Rome, you probably love Catholicism; in Tel Aviv, Judaism; in Springfield, Ohio, Protestantism (apologies for the broad brush strokes here, I'm clearly overgeneralizing, but I think you get the point).So it's not a coincidence that there's not a blossoming of Islam in Springfield, Ohio, and there's not a blossoming of Protestantism in Mecca. It's because we're products of our culture, and we accept whatever's poured into us. If there were one truth, you would expect that it would spread everywhere evenly, but clearly the data doesn't support that. The crazy part is, our cultures pour this stuff into us, and then sometimes people are willing to fight and die over their particular stories.Are you familiar with the creation story of the Bakuba kingdom of the Congo? It goes like this: there was a white giant named Mombo who had a sharp pain in his belly, and he vomited up the earth and the sun and the moon and the stars. Then he had a second pain, and he vomited up the animals and people and trees. Included in that second ejection was the leopard, the anvil, the eagle, woman, the monkey Fumu, firmament, medicine, man, and lightning.If you find the creation story of the Bakuba to be an unlikely explanation as to how we got here, keep in mind that if you were Bakuba, you would find equally bizarre the Western story of the naked couple and the talking reptile and the prohibited produce. AND if you were Bakuba living in Kansas, you would be fighting to get your story into your children's textbooks.The holy books written by the world's religions are often quite beautiful, and crystallize hard-won wisdom, but keep in mind the fact that these were written millennia ago by people who didn't know about the size of the cosmos, or the Big Bang, or bacterial infection, or DNA, or computation, or even very much about neighboring landscapes/cultures. Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out that the religious stories of one generation become the literary entertainment of the next--and indeed, you can see that nobody's fighting over Isis and Osiris anymore, or the Greek/Roman gods. == So how do you combine the two? ==
I'm not suggesting that the Bakuba story is wrong or that the Adam and Eve story is wrong because the two are competing stories...as a scientist, I'm suggesting that they're wrong because all the available evidence weighs against them.For example, the biblical story suggests that the world is 6000 years old while our best science tells us that it's 4.5 billion years old, which means the biblical account has to somehow explain how the Japanese were making pottery 4000 years before the earth existed.For my money, this sort of thing puts me somewhere in the middle. I've felt for a long time that we know too little to commit to strict atheism, yet we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.So what surprises me is the amount of certainty I find out there. When you walk into a bookstore, you'll find books by the neo-atheists and books by the fundamentally religious, and they argue with each other and they polarize each other and they spend all of their energies on that.Maybe there should be another voice here? That seems far too limited for a modern discussion. Because if you think about the space of possibilities...
When you start populating the possibility space with these 2000+ data points, what you realize is that there are vast landscapes in between these possibilities as well. All of these points are infinitesimally unlikely, but together they add up to this possibility space, and there hasn't been enough discussion about this space as a whole. Instead, the discussion has been limited to what I consider a false dichotomy--God vs. no God....and that's where the conversation has ended. :-(True, there are some people in the middle, and they sometimes describe themselves using the term "agnostic". I don't use that term because it's typically used as a weak term--often when people say they're "agnostic", what they mean is "I'm not sure if the guy with the beard on the cloud exists or doesn't exist".So I call myself a "Possibilian". And the belief behind Possibilianism is an active exploration of new ideas, and a comfort with the scientific temperament of creativity and holding multiple hypotheses in mind. As a Possibilian, anything goes...at first. And then I import the tools of science to rule out parts of the possibility space. For instance, while it would be really cool if ESP existed, to the extent that we can measure things now, we cannot find any evidence to support it.Possibilianism basically picks up where the toolbox of science leaves off, when we no longer have the tools to address the questions we have, and must simply understand the space of possibilities, some of which we can rule out, but others which we are unable to at this time. The reason it is so important to keep that open-mindedness about the parts that we don't know is because we know for certain about the magnitude of things we don't know. In every generation of scientists, people have always felt that they have all the pieces and parts that they need in order to answer what is going on around them in the cosmos. But just imagine trying to explain the Northern lights without an understanding of the magnetosphere, or trying to explain the heart before the concept of a pump was invented, or trying to understand how muscles work before electricity was discovered. You would make theories, but you would be doomed to be incorrect. And that's where, in many instances, people found comfort in religion, superstition, the supernatural, etc. We're in that same position now. Example 1: We've got Newtonian physics, and Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics, and we think, ok, we've sort of got all the pieces and parts. But astrophysicists look at the movement of the planets and galaxies, and they look at the gravitational pull, and they realize...something's missing. There's something out there that we can't quite see or smell or touch, but it must be there to make the equations work. So they call this fudge factor "dark matter"--we don't exactly know what it is, but we require it to make the equations balance out. Some of you may already know: dark matter isn't a small fudge factor; it's 90% of all known matter--that's a lot to sweep under the rug! Example 2: Consider the human brain. It's the most complicated device we have ever found; it's essentially an alien computational material. It is so dense in its connectivity that if you were to take a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, there are more connections in there than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Yet somehow, this wet, mechanical networked system is YOU. It's all your hopes and dreams and aspirations and emotions. If you were to lose a little part of your pinky, you wouldn't really be any different, but if you lost an equivalently sized piece of neural tissue, that would completely change your conscious state.The problem is, we don't know how to take mechanical pieces and parts and build private subjective experience out of that. Imagine if I gave you a trillion tinker toys and told you to start hooking them up. At what point do you add one more tinker toy and say, "Ah-ha! It's experiencing... the taste of feta cheese now"?That's the problem. We don't have any way to apply our equations to determine how we perceive the redness of red or the smell of a fart. Not only do we not have a theory of how the brain works...we don't even know what such a theory would look like. == Conclusion ==
All of this calls for a bit of intellectual humility.While we can't prove the existence of God, being unable to prove He exists doesn't necessarily mean He's nonexistent either--our current tools may simply be insufficient for the task. So I keep both religion and science at my side--in some cases, science gives me the answers I seek; in others, it doesn't, and when the current toolbox of science doesn't allow me to gather data to understand how/why a seemingly miraculous phenomenon occurs, I'm happy to simply chalk it up to the wisdom/grace of an all-knowing force until science steps up its game. If science will never be able to answer, then, eh, I'm ok with that.For the smart-alecks out there who would suggest that not committing to anything is more fitting of politicians, I concede that people like people who can firmly commit to a decision. If you're trying to decide whether you should marry someone, or sell some property, or move to a different city, those things require a firm choice. But what I'm going to suggest is that there are some domains where it's appropriate to be decisive, and some domains where it's not so appropriate. Would you stop a guy on a random ranch in the middle of nowhere and ask him if he thinks there are extraterrestrial civilizations? Do you care what his opinion is? Would you value it more than, say, an astrobiologist's? If not, that suggests that there are some domains in which it is not appropriate to commit and act like you have an answer in the absence of having good evidence.I feel that people these days are sick and tired of people acting as though they're certain about things that they can't possibly be certain about. As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position.So whatever. As a Possibilian, I would rather geek out and be creative with new narratives and hold multiple possibilities in mind with comfort. And I always feel free to cite the gospel of science, the most important three words that science ever gave to humankind: I don't know.For anyone struggling to reconcile their seemingly conflicting views on religion and science: try to seek comfort with having multiple narratives and having uncertainty. This is not just a plea for simple open-mindedness, but for an active exploration of new ideas. This is important for our education, for our legislation, perhaps even for the future of our warfare (or lack thereof). In short, be free from dogma and full of awe and wonder. See if you can live a life that celebrates possibility and praises uncertainty. :-)~~~~~
I want to give credit where it's due: the overwhelming majority of this answer came from a talk given by my neuroscience professor David Eagleman a few months ago on the subject. I found myself in complete agreement with him and I thought this question was an appropriate opportunity to share his ideas with even more people, so if you're impressed, I want to say that I'm really just standing on the shoulders of a giant here. :-)
I am a scientist by training. By the time I graduated college I'd already poured thousands of hours into procedures, scored publications in peer-reviewed journals, presented my work at national conferences, and in total spent nearly a third of my life working in various research labs. Why? Because I figure if I want to understand what's going on in this strange world around me, there's probably no better method than to directly study the blueprints.You have to admit, science in the last several hundred years has been immensely successful--we've cured smallpox and polio, gotten men to the moon, invented the internet, and tripled life spans.But I think one of the most important experiences you gain from a life in science is that once you walk the pier of what is currently known, at some point, you reach the end of the pier. And beyond that end is everything we don't know--it's all the uncharted waters, the deep mysteries that we don't have insight into yet, like why mass and energy are equivalent, or what dark matter/dark energy are, or why there are multiple spatial dimensions, or how you build consciousness from mechanical pieces and parts. That's the real lesson that science provides--the vastness of our ignorance.Now, rest assured that with every generation, we will undoubtedly continue to add more slats to the pier...but it's a huge ocean, and we have no guarantee how far we'll get, and certainly in our brief twinkling of a 21st century lifetime, we're simply not going to live to see the end. So again: science hammers home the message that what we know is so vastly outstripped by what we don't know.So given all this, I find that this question has at its core a popular misconception that's become increasingly widespread over the last decade, particularly in the political arena: that scientists don't have the capacity to gamble beyond the available data, and they act like they've got it all figured out with various equations that perfectly capture the picture of the whole cosmos.That's actually a very poor description of how science operates.Science is in some ways about disproving other people's hypotheses (including those posited by religion), but it's so much more than that. Science is really about creativity in making up new hypotheses--and part of the scientific temperament is a tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time. What we actually do is we make up new stories in lab every day and then we go and we seek evidence to weigh in favor of some stories over others.But it's often the case that some questions are too far out right now. They're beyond the toolbox of science, and as a result we're unable to gather evidence for them. That's ok--science is fine with holding multiple hypotheses on the table. That ambiguity is accepted as part of the relationship we have with mother nature. It's just part of the vast mysteries around us. == A little on religion... ==
I was raised by a microbiologist mother who was a very devout Christian who insisted I read the Bible and learn all its stories and go to church. Despite my many years as a scientist I still find comfort in praying to God even though I know He might not exist/care, and I have seen various circumstances that I could attribute to "power of prayer", although my cynical side calls it "placebo" and "coincidence". So I categorize myself loosely as being "religious".Consider this: there are 2000+ religions on the globe, and everyone already knows what it's like to be an atheist, because all you need to do is look at someone else's religion and say "Well it's patently ridiculous that you would believe in that", and of course they're looking back at you and thinking the same thing.Try an experiment: the next time you meet someone new/random, whether it's on an airplane or in a bar, ask them if they've ever heard of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Experiment. I guarantee you the number of people who have will be outweighed heavily by the number who haven't. But everyone will be able to tell you all the details of whatever cultural story they grew up on.You don't need to be an anthropologist to recognize that our nervous systems absorb whatever our cultures pour into us. So if you grew up in Saudi Arabia, chances are you love Islam. And if you were born in Rome, you probably love Catholicism; in Tel Aviv, Judaism; in Springfield, Ohio, Protestantism (apologies for the broad brush strokes here, I'm clearly overgeneralizing, but I think you get the point).So it's not a coincidence that there's not a blossoming of Islam in Springfield, Ohio, and there's not a blossoming of Protestantism in Mecca. It's because we're products of our culture, and we accept whatever's poured into us. If there were one truth, you would expect that it would spread everywhere evenly, but clearly the data doesn't support that. The crazy part is, our cultures pour this stuff into us, and then sometimes people are willing to fight and die over their particular stories.Are you familiar with the creation story of the Bakuba kingdom of the Congo? It goes like this: there was a white giant named Mombo who had a sharp pain in his belly, and he vomited up the earth and the sun and the moon and the stars. Then he had a second pain, and he vomited up the animals and people and trees. Included in that second ejection was the leopard, the anvil, the eagle, woman, the monkey Fumu, firmament, medicine, man, and lightning.If you find the creation story of the Bakuba to be an unlikely explanation as to how we got here, keep in mind that if you were Bakuba, you would find equally bizarre the Western story of the naked couple and the talking reptile and the prohibited produce. AND if you were Bakuba living in Kansas, you would be fighting to get your story into your children's textbooks.The holy books written by the world's religions are often quite beautiful, and crystallize hard-won wisdom, but keep in mind the fact that these were written millennia ago by people who didn't know about the size of the cosmos, or the Big Bang, or bacterial infection, or DNA, or computation, or even very much about neighboring landscapes/cultures. Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out that the religious stories of one generation become the literary entertainment of the next--and indeed, you can see that nobody's fighting over Isis and Osiris anymore, or the Greek/Roman gods. == So how do you combine the two? ==
I'm not suggesting that the Bakuba story is wrong or that the Adam and Eve story is wrong because the two are competing stories...as a scientist, I'm suggesting that they're wrong because all the available evidence weighs against them.For example, the biblical story suggests that the world is 6000 years old while our best science tells us that it's 4.5 billion years old, which means the biblical account has to somehow explain how the Japanese were making pottery 4000 years before the earth existed.For my money, this sort of thing puts me somewhere in the middle. I've felt for a long time that we know too little to commit to strict atheism, yet we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.So what surprises me is the amount of certainty I find out there. When you walk into a bookstore, you'll find books by the neo-atheists and books by the fundamentally religious, and they argue with each other and they polarize each other and they spend all of their energies on that.Maybe there should be another voice here? That seems far too limited for a modern discussion. Because if you think about the space of possibilities...
- Take the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions--bam! That's one point in the possibility space.
- Take the eastern religions--bam! That's another point.
- The idea that we're just mechanical pieces and parts and we shut off when we die, that's yet another.
- We were planted here by space aliens...sounds absurd, but heck, it's still a possibility.
When you start populating the possibility space with these 2000+ data points, what you realize is that there are vast landscapes in between these possibilities as well. All of these points are infinitesimally unlikely, but together they add up to this possibility space, and there hasn't been enough discussion about this space as a whole. Instead, the discussion has been limited to what I consider a false dichotomy--God vs. no God....and that's where the conversation has ended. :-(True, there are some people in the middle, and they sometimes describe themselves using the term "agnostic". I don't use that term because it's typically used as a weak term--often when people say they're "agnostic", what they mean is "I'm not sure if the guy with the beard on the cloud exists or doesn't exist".So I call myself a "Possibilian". And the belief behind Possibilianism is an active exploration of new ideas, and a comfort with the scientific temperament of creativity and holding multiple hypotheses in mind. As a Possibilian, anything goes...at first. And then I import the tools of science to rule out parts of the possibility space. For instance, while it would be really cool if ESP existed, to the extent that we can measure things now, we cannot find any evidence to support it.Possibilianism basically picks up where the toolbox of science leaves off, when we no longer have the tools to address the questions we have, and must simply understand the space of possibilities, some of which we can rule out, but others which we are unable to at this time. The reason it is so important to keep that open-mindedness about the parts that we don't know is because we know for certain about the magnitude of things we don't know. In every generation of scientists, people have always felt that they have all the pieces and parts that they need in order to answer what is going on around them in the cosmos. But just imagine trying to explain the Northern lights without an understanding of the magnetosphere, or trying to explain the heart before the concept of a pump was invented, or trying to understand how muscles work before electricity was discovered. You would make theories, but you would be doomed to be incorrect. And that's where, in many instances, people found comfort in religion, superstition, the supernatural, etc. We're in that same position now. Example 1: We've got Newtonian physics, and Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics, and we think, ok, we've sort of got all the pieces and parts. But astrophysicists look at the movement of the planets and galaxies, and they look at the gravitational pull, and they realize...something's missing. There's something out there that we can't quite see or smell or touch, but it must be there to make the equations work. So they call this fudge factor "dark matter"--we don't exactly know what it is, but we require it to make the equations balance out. Some of you may already know: dark matter isn't a small fudge factor; it's 90% of all known matter--that's a lot to sweep under the rug! Example 2: Consider the human brain. It's the most complicated device we have ever found; it's essentially an alien computational material. It is so dense in its connectivity that if you were to take a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, there are more connections in there than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Yet somehow, this wet, mechanical networked system is YOU. It's all your hopes and dreams and aspirations and emotions. If you were to lose a little part of your pinky, you wouldn't really be any different, but if you lost an equivalently sized piece of neural tissue, that would completely change your conscious state.The problem is, we don't know how to take mechanical pieces and parts and build private subjective experience out of that. Imagine if I gave you a trillion tinker toys and told you to start hooking them up. At what point do you add one more tinker toy and say, "Ah-ha! It's experiencing... the taste of feta cheese now"?That's the problem. We don't have any way to apply our equations to determine how we perceive the redness of red or the smell of a fart. Not only do we not have a theory of how the brain works...we don't even know what such a theory would look like. == Conclusion ==
All of this calls for a bit of intellectual humility.While we can't prove the existence of God, being unable to prove He exists doesn't necessarily mean He's nonexistent either--our current tools may simply be insufficient for the task. So I keep both religion and science at my side--in some cases, science gives me the answers I seek; in others, it doesn't, and when the current toolbox of science doesn't allow me to gather data to understand how/why a seemingly miraculous phenomenon occurs, I'm happy to simply chalk it up to the wisdom/grace of an all-knowing force until science steps up its game. If science will never be able to answer, then, eh, I'm ok with that.For the smart-alecks out there who would suggest that not committing to anything is more fitting of politicians, I concede that people like people who can firmly commit to a decision. If you're trying to decide whether you should marry someone, or sell some property, or move to a different city, those things require a firm choice. But what I'm going to suggest is that there are some domains where it's appropriate to be decisive, and some domains where it's not so appropriate. Would you stop a guy on a random ranch in the middle of nowhere and ask him if he thinks there are extraterrestrial civilizations? Do you care what his opinion is? Would you value it more than, say, an astrobiologist's? If not, that suggests that there are some domains in which it is not appropriate to commit and act like you have an answer in the absence of having good evidence.I feel that people these days are sick and tired of people acting as though they're certain about things that they can't possibly be certain about. As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position.So whatever. As a Possibilian, I would rather geek out and be creative with new narratives and hold multiple possibilities in mind with comfort. And I always feel free to cite the gospel of science, the most important three words that science ever gave to humankind: I don't know.For anyone struggling to reconcile their seemingly conflicting views on religion and science: try to seek comfort with having multiple narratives and having uncertainty. This is not just a plea for simple open-mindedness, but for an active exploration of new ideas. This is important for our education, for our legislation, perhaps even for the future of our warfare (or lack thereof). In short, be free from dogma and full of awe and wonder. See if you can live a life that celebrates possibility and praises uncertainty. :-)~~~~~
I want to give credit where it's due: the overwhelming majority of this answer came from a talk given by my neuroscience professor David Eagleman a few months ago on the subject. I found myself in complete agreement with him and I thought this question was an appropriate opportunity to share his ideas with even more people, so if you're impressed, I want to say that I'm really just standing on the shoulders of a giant here. :-)