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The Nature of God and Man
by
Sanborn C. Brown, PhD
Professor of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Prepared in the mid-1960s for a discussion group of the Unitarian Universalist
Church, Lexington, Massachusetts.
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The Nature of God and Man
I Introduction...............................................................1
II The Methodology of Science...................................9
III Cosmic Evolution and the Physical Sciences......19
IV Evolution and the Biological Sciences.................29
V Social and Religious Evolution.............................37
VI God, Man and Immortality...................................45
VII Is a New Religion Necessary?...............................53
VIII Glossary...................................................................65
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I - Introduction
Man's search for the meaning and thepurpose of his life has been one of hismajor concerns since he firstdeveloped as a thinking being, about
100,000 years ago. In the beginning,
religion was an attempt to understand,
to accept, and in a way, hopefully to
control the phenomena of nature
which seemed pressing in about man
on every side and one of thecommon reactions of scientists before
they get deeply committed to
wondering about religion is that this
fear which drove him to ancient
religions surely has been dispelled in
the modern age because of the better
understanding of nature.
Actually, however, I think that what
our modern knowledge does is tomake it absolutely necessary for us to
reassess our understanding of religion
and to try and develop a philosophy
and theology which is agreeable to our
present knowledge of science. Now, of
course, there is more to religion than
man's desire to understand himself,
his origins, and his naturalenvironment. Man, of all the animals,
has the mental power to anticipatecoming agonies. He is inherently an
anxious animal fearful of the threat,
and defense of threats, which Rudolf
Otto termed the "tremendum." This is
a Latin word which translates as "the
source of terror." And the word is aparticularly good one because of its
strange vagueness which best conveys
the most terrifying part of our
predicament and the essence of the
terror within us and without us.
Irwin Goodenough wrote a mostremarkable book, The Psychology of
Religious Experience, and in it he has
an interesting statement about religion
in terms of the tremendum:
"Man throws curtains between
himself and the tremendum andon them he projects accounts of
how the world came into
existence, pictures of divine or
superhuman forces or beings that
control the universe and us, as
well as codes of ethics, behaviorand ritual which will bring him
favor instead of catastrophe. So
has every man protected himself
by his religions."
Now, for myself, I do not believe
either the concept of religion as an
explanation for man's place in the
universe or the image, graphic as it
may be, that religion is a curtain
protecting us from coming face to facewith the "tremendum." I do not think
this gives religion the impelling
necessity which I believe it has.
Perhaps the most spectacular
development in recent history has
been the truly amazing rise of the
importance of science and the effect it
is having on every facet of human life.
As science continues to heighten the
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My only hope is that by discussions of
this sort mankind, as a whole, can
develop a theology which does have
an impelling validity for us as we areliving. Let me remind you that the title
of this discussion is "The Nature ofGod and Man," which implies the
nature of religion.
Let me talk about religion from a point
of view of an anthropologist, and
quote a statement or definition fromAnthony Wallace in a paper given at
the Institute on Religion in an Age of
Science at Star Island in July of 1961.
He introduced into our vocabulary the
general term "revitalization
movement" to denote any conscious
organized effort by members of asociety to construct a more satisfying
culture and he concludes that most
revitalization movements can be
characterized as religious. He points
out that all religions and religious
productions, such as myth and rituals,come into existence as part of a
program or code of religiousrevitalizations, usually originating in
situations of social and cultural stress,
as efforts on the part of the stress-
laden to construct systems of dogma,
myth, and ritual which will serve as
guide to effective rescue.
The essential theme of religion is theconflict between disorganization and
organization. On the one hand, weuniversally observe and are distressed
by disorganization in religious
systems. Metals rust and corrode
wood and cloth rot people sicken
and die personality disintegrates
social grief groups disunite and
disband.
On the other hand we universallylabor at the contrary process of
organization. Great effort is spent toprevent rust, corrosion, decay, rot,
sickness, death and disillusion. And,
at least in local groups, they achieve
gains in organization or revitalization
as the most diverse creeds attempt to
solve the riddle of the relationshipbetween life and death, organization
and disorganization, the ideas of souls,
of God, of Nirvana, of spiritual
salvation and rebirth, of "progress" areall formal solutions to the problem
which seems to be felt intimately by all
of us.
Religion may be said to be a process of
maximizing the quantity of organ-
ization in the matrix of perceived
human experience. A direct expression
of our organization instinct and if I
may again turn to Wallaces usefulterm you will understand I am using
religion in its most general meaning ofa "revitalization movement," whether
it be a revealed religion like
Christianity, or a political faith like
communism. We regard these as
extreme, but both have identical
characteristics of man's apparently
instinctive drive to develop a socio-
political religious order out ofdisorder, integration out of
disintegration, and life out of death.
Now one of the characteristics of the
so-called scientific approach to
understanding is to agree for the
purposes of a discussion and
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argument on the definition of words to
be used within the framework of a
particular study. One does not have to
agree with the validity of thedefinition to use it in discussing a
theoretical construct, but only agree tothe same meaning of the word within
the context of the discussion. This is
probably one of the most
misunderstood facets of the scientific
method. For people who have not
been trained as scientists it worriesthem that they can agree on a
definition to argue about without
agreeing on the definition.
However, this is a powerful advantage
in the scientific analysis of a tentative
hypothesis and it is the one I want to
use throughout this seminar. In otherwords, I am giving you full license to
completely disagree with the contents
of my definition but still to agree that
when I use a word it will be as I define
it.
I will write down the definition in
each case so we will be sure we knowwhat we are talking about, and then
argue about it within that definition.
The misunderstanding of this among
the general public is quite amazing
sometimes and I am always tempted
to tell a story on myself which
involves precisely this. The definitionof a word in one context may be quite
different to a definition in anothercontext.
A physicist who lectures to elementary
physics courses is very used to
defining the word "work" as a force
times the distance in which the force
acts. Some years ago I was giving a
lecture in freshman physics at M.I.T.
and I was talking about the termwork. On the lecture table there was
a large weight which, in theengineering definition of mass, is
called a slug. It weighed 32 lbs. And
when it got to my definition of work I
carried the 32 lb. weight around at
arms length telling the students that I
was doing no work. According to thedefinition, I was not.
The next day when I was unable to
pick up the chalk to write on theblackboard because I had so strained
my back I was able to make quite a
point with my students about the
difference in definitions between thephysical definition of work and what
the normal public thinks work is.
We are going to do this in the process
of this course. In this seminar I would
like to develop a glossary of definedterms, which we must agree on as to
meaning for the purpose of ourdiscussion whether or not we have a
personal commitment to its validity. I
will have a personal commitment to it
but you may not.
The first term I would like to define is
one that I have used a number of times
so far without definition and that isthe word theology. I would like to
define theology here as any criticalintellectual attempt to understand the
beliefs and practices of a religious
community.
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What I will develop in this seminar is
my own belief that the sum total of
everything in the universe, includingman, is the forces of nature.
Now nature has been a common word
used in many times. Let me pick out
two particular examples of what I
mean just to put it into somebody
elses words besides my own. Let me
take T. H. Huxley who in 1872 in hisbook Science and Christian Tradition
wrote:
The term nature covers thetotality of that which is. I am
unable to perceive any
justification for cutting the
universe into half, one natural
and one supernatural.
Or, let me take Santayanas statement
in his Reason and Common Sense:
Nature is the sum total of
things potentially observable.Some observed actually, others
interpolated hypothetically.
Now, whenever you start worrying
about the totality of nature, one must
deal with words which cause a great
deal of trouble. To illustrate this
problem, let me quote from another
book which I hope we can get as a
background book for this seminar. Thebook is called Science Ponders
Religion, edited by Harlow Shapley
and published by Appleton Century in
1960. This is a collection of statements
from various people. I would like to
choose one from Kirtley Mather who
is a retired geologist from Harvard.
He writes as follows under a
chapter called The Administration of
the Universe:
The rubric Administration ofthe Universe' may be used as
valid scientific designation. It
simply asserts that there is
something pertaining to the
universe which governs the
manifold operations underinvestigation and makes them
amenable to intellectual
comprehension.
Nothing whatsoever is implied
concerning the nature of that
something, what it may be is left
wide open for further study.Specifically, theologians should
note that administration is not
synonymous with administrator.
The latter term has connotations
that are not necessarily ruled out
of consideration in connectionwith the former but they are
definitely not applied when theformer term is used in a scientific
context.
On the other hand, the
theologian who truly believes
that God is spirit and not a
material entity will find a
significant similarity between his'god of law' and the scientists
administration of the universe.
Now this statement of Kirtley
Mathers brings me to the last
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definition I want to take up tonight.
That is the definition of God.
You will notice that I believe in thescientific approach to words and if
there are useful words you use them.You may have to define them for the
purposes of your discussion but I
think it is silly not to use some
perfectly good words like 'god.' So let
me define God.
My definition of God, for the purpose
of this seminar, is an image of a
unitary system which ordains all that
was and is to be omnipotent,omnipresent, eternal, and infinite,
creator and sustainer of life and source
of all values, goals, duties, and hopes
for that life. You will also discover thatI believe this is also synonymous with
the term nature.
Now as an added statement I would
like to read a statement which is in
line with the definition I have writtendown for God, which comes from a
book (which isn't yet published andIm going to read from the
manuscript) by Ralph Burhoe who is a
professor at the Meadville Theological
School in Chicago:
"Man is completely, one might
say absolutely, dependent upon
this reality this reality beingthe reality of life. No human
thought, feeling or action cantake place apart from it. Such is
the faith of those who have
contemplated those implications
of the scientific world view.
The so-called triumph and
dominance of man over nature
and the doctrine of scientific
knowledge now makes manmore than ever master of his own
fate, is completely superficial anderroneous. We cannot alter one
jot of the cosmic law whether
it be the law of gravity or the
amount of energy available to
support life on earth.
A more exact way of reporting
the human condition is to say
that the cosmos has given to man
his life and his powers to knowand cooperate with the laws of
the cosmos such that man
becomes increasingly an
incarnation of what the cosmoshad decreed for successful and
advancing life patterns.
In his power for life man shares
with all other living forms certain
powers to take from hisenvironment certain elements
needed for his life or to rejectlethal elements. In this process he
may, within limits, mold or
manipulate certain aspects of the
environment to suit his needs.
These are gifts of the cosmos to
man, not powers that man himself
originated. In no case can manadvance his life by any means
which the cosmos has not
implicitly sanctioned already. Any
infringements by man of the
sacred rules of life can only lessenhis powers for life for there is
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no power or capacity for life apart
from the incarnation of those
sacred conditions or patterns
which only the cosmosdetermines. It is only by the grace
of this cosmic reality whichincarnates its laws in the
genotype, the brain, and the
culture of man, that man has any
power of life at all.
Looked at in any depth, the
scientific picture of man is one of
complete dependence on the
cosmos, that man's role,
opportunity, duties, perquisitesand hopes in this scheme maybe
we shall discuss in the future.
But first it is important to recognize
that man is ultimately utterly
dependent for all he was, is and
may be, upon the cosmos.
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II The Methodology of Science and Theology
Idefine science as man's search for theorganization of the universe. I wouldlike to examine the methodology ofscience and see how it is employed in
building up the intellectual structure
that we term scientific knowledge. The
basic assumption that we must make if
such a search is to have any meaning
whatever is that there exists an
organization. And that there is afundamental order and regularity to
nature to be found for the searching.Science, as we know it, cannot exist in
the face of the beliefs that the
operation of natural phenomena are
subject to fickle variation either from a
naturally occurring lack of order or
more anthropomorphized whim of
gods and demons.
Since the assumption of order is so
basic, science could not develop as anintellectual framework until such basic
assumptions were believed to be true
and the acceptance of criteria of
credibility based on observational
predictability became a cornerstone in
the framework of scientific
methodology. I define criteria of
credibility as acceptable tests of agiven hypothesis to check its
agreement with known facts within
the framework of contemporary
knowledge.
The early beginnings of science were
founded directly on ancient mans
search for some indication of rigid
order. The early beginnings of science
are tremendously impressive as
primitive man began to probe the
possibilities of an ordered universe. It
is worth turning back the pages ofhistory and try to capture the immense
intellectual leaps that some keen
minds must have made, first, to
conceive of the concept of order, and
then to lay plans to prove such a
remarkable hypothesis.
If the sun were really a flamingchariot, guided by some god through
the sky, then the god in human image
must surely be susceptible to human
failure. Some days he would sleep
longer than other days, some days in
his enthusiasm he would race across
the sky, and on the days when he had
a headache he would not have the
energy to use the whip on his horses.It all seems so completely logical.
The passage of time is a difficult and
sophisticated concept to consider. Yet
the intellectual geniuses among the
ancient Samaritans not only
recognized the importance of this
concept, but they were brilliant
enough to devise experiments in
which they measured time in terms ofspace coordinates, building great
temple structures so precisely laid out
in terms of the positions of the sun at
the equinoxes that their measurements
of the number of days in the year were
done to an accuracy of about 1%.
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Before the dawn of written history, the
pre-historics conceived of order and
predictability in the universe, and
invented methods to demonstratethese. Perhaps because of these
origins, order and predictability cameto be regarded as a basic element in
the scientific approach to knowledge.
Now the intellectual discipline of
science is not unique in its operation.
To emphasize this point let me point
out its similarity to the acquisition ofknowledge in other fields. The
development of knowledge can be
differentiated into three phases:
Phase I, the acquiring of facts and
basic concepts;
Phase II, the application of these factsand basic concepts for skills to extend
the boundaries of the discipline; and
Phase III, the deep penetration into the
fundamentals which produce a basic
understanding of the inter-relationship of knowledge and the
facts which lead to furtherimplications of this knowledge. These
three phases are typical of many
branches of human endeavor.
Let me draw a couple of illustrations
outside of science. Take for example
the study of language. Phase I consists
of learning the words and grammar;Phase II, the application of this
learning to reading and writing herewe have the tools for communication
and for acquiring further knowledge.
But the real essence of the value of
language does not come until Phase III
where prose and poetry are brought to
bear on the human character, our
hopes, our aspirations, our loves, our
hates and the whole gamut of our
emotions.
Let me take another example from thefield of art. In Phase I, we must learn
to use the materials the paints,
brush, chisel, canvas, metal, the stone.
In Phase II, one learns to form the
drawing, to put the paint together to
express ones art form in a unifiedwhole. However, we do not recognize
Phase II as real art. It is not until the
human aspect or emotions are
transferred to the canvas or the bronzethat we reach Phase III and something
of real value has been contributed.
Now science has the same threephases, Phase I contains the collection
of facts, the laws and postulates, the
mathematical formulation and the
array of basic building blocks which so
often frighten the non-scientist. Phase
II involves the application of thisknowledge to the extension of
knowledge and to the technologicallyuseful devices which unfortunately
the layman often confuse with science
itself. But not until Phase III does the
scientist reach the appreciation of the
understanding of nature, its unity and
its beauty, as well as its impact on
lives and emotions of modern man.
One could ask the question whether I
am implying that the discipline ofscience can basically be differentiated
from that of art and language. The
answer is, of course, that there is a
difference. But the difference does not
lie in the mechanism of acquiring
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knowledge. But rather that the
characteristic which sets the scientific
discipline apart from other fields of
intellectual endeavors is its particularset of criteria of credibility. A scientist
does not know what truth is, but hehas developed a remarkably successful
attitude of mind which allows him to
reach a consensus with his peers, to
test what is acceptable as an
explanation for natural phenomena
and what is unacceptable.
One of the real difficulties in following
the course of scientific development in
the historical sense is that the agreedcriteria of credibility change as a
science develops. For example, one of
the historical results of using the
concept of order and predictability asa basic argument for credibility led the
ancients to the concept that self-
consistency could serve as a basis for
truth in the scientific sense. Anyone
who has studied the emergence and
decline of the formalism of Greeklogic, which was based on the self-
consistency of hypothesis andconclusion, knows that this whole
formalism has not proved generally
useful as an over-all methodology in
science.
The necessity for change in the criteria
of credibility is an inherent feature of
scientific methodology and anunderstanding of its operation is
fundamental to an appreciation ofscience.
Let me review the basic operation of
the scientific approach to gaining
knowledge. What one does is to collect
the basic facts in the field one wishes
to study, and to create a model. I am
using model in the technical sense of
an intellectual framework constructedin agreement with the accepted facts,
which provide working hypothesesfor understanding and implemen-
tation.
Now, what you do then is to invent a
model, an intellectual structure, of
how facts may be used to explain theobservation. Furthermore, such a
model may be used to predict further
facts to be looked for which may not
now be known. Often this is called theprocess for creating a hypothesis. But
my own feeling is that the term
hypothesis has come to be used in too
narrow a sense. To me, a model is thewhole picture, and the hypothesis is a
guess in a particular area.
After a model has been put together, a
scientist must test it in every way that
his imagination can suggest. I wouldlike to take as a single illustration one
from the theory of heat. For years andyears people believed that heat was a
fluid which you could pour into a bar
(of metal) and it expanded because it
took some space or it went from one
place to the other because it flowed
down hill, not literally, but
figuratively speaking, from hot to
cold. In fact, many of the words westill use when we talk of heat are
based on this fluid theory.
As time went on it became obvious
there were some observations which
could not be explained easily by a
fluid theory of heat and an energy
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theory was postulated. For 200 years
both these theories were taught in
universities because there was not
enough data to separate one from theother. Subsequently the fluid theory of
heat dropped out of sight and theenergy theory of heat is the one we
now use.
The important thing, however, is that
within the framework of the known
facts, the criteria of credibility wereunable to decide the difference
between an unacceptable theory and
an acceptable one. And therefore both
were used. This is characteristic of thesearch for knowledge in terms of
models which we create and then use
in various ways.
Let me say again what Ive just saidabout this criteria of credibility,
because I want you to realize that this
is not characteristic only of the
scientific approach to knowledge but
obviously also is applicable to
theology and religion. What makes amodel acceptable are the following:
First, a model must agree with
experimental facts to a sufficient
accuracy that an acceptable model
may be differentiated from a
unacceptable one. No agreement is
perfect since no model is perfect;
disagreement may mean either an
imperfect model or an imperfect set ofobservations, and in general, one may
not know which is the case. In veryrefined models which come from
theories which have been tested for a
long time the necessary accuracy for
credibility may require great precision
whereas new models, ones that have
just been thought up, very crude
agreement may winnow the wheat
from the chaff and open new vistas of
understanding.
It is true in physics at least that Nobelprizes are more often won for
agreement between theory and an
experiment within a factor of ten than
the highly precise agreement with
refined models. This leads to the
obvious conclusion that two differentmodels at the same time can explain
all the known facts.
Intellectual model-making as I havedescribed it for science is by no means
unique, as I hope you realize, to these
disciplines. The search for truth in
theology and religion can be cast inthe same mold. In theology also we
can set up a model and validate the
credibility of what we believe to be
true in terms of agreement or
disvalidate the agreement with the
model.
Take the case within the Christiantradition of the authority of the bible.
We do not have to believe that the
bible is an accurate historical
statement to appreciate that here is the
searching, the struggling, and the
thinking of approximately 2,000 years
of people in the human race,
represented and symbolized for ourconsideration here is a testimony to
a people who survived about as muchtravail and anguish as any people
could be asked to submit to. But it was
more than survival. It was survival
with a development of thought and
quality of being, a chronicle of real
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ethical development, the testimony of
a whole culture which has weathered
the hell and high water of history.
It is a model by which to test the
criteria of credibility in theology assurely as the similar procedure in
science. It is also obvious to all of us
that there are other theological
models, testaments of other religions
against which to validate the goals
which we live by and strive for whichappear just as credible for large
segments of mankind and yet whose
basic hypotheses are quite at variance
with the tenet of the Christian bible.Thus in theology, as in physics,
different acceptable models may be
credible for different cultures
simultaneously, and within the state ofknowledge of these cultures they are
equally valid.
Now you could ask the question,
Where does one look for criteria of
credibility for a theology? I believe
that these criteria are found in thesuccess of the religious practices based
upon the theology in question. And bysuccess I mean, how well does it
provide us with valid goals and
aspirations as well as a culturally
viable medium for living with others.
It was to serve as an illustration of this
that I asked you to read Leviticus.
Leviticus is an example of a religiousmodel agreed to by the ancient
Hebrew nomadic tribes to guide theirbehavior in conformity with a
particular theological concept of a
jealous God regulating the behavior of
a chosen people. It outlines in great
detail the laws, for example, of sexual
behavior, what one can or cannot eat,
or even touch.
It also tells how to atone fortransgression of the law, and the
incredibly harsh punishment for thosewho really disobeyed the laws. But
more than that, it dictated how
commerce shall be regulated, how to
thresh and to reap and to breed cattle;
it outlined requirements for medical
treatment of the sick, and how onewas not to cut ones hair or trim ones
beard.
The integration between theology andreligions on the one hand, and cultural
evolution on the other, is in the
direction that theologies grow out of
cultures, not cultures out of theologies.So as the ancient Hebrew Bedouin
tribe became more agricultural and
started moving into cities and towns,
the rigid religious model given to us in
Leviticus began to change and many
of the stories we teach our children inschool are the stories of the changing
models based essentially on the sametheological model. The criteria of
credibility were changing and the
validity of the ancient religious model
called into question. Let me illustrate
some of these, particularly in terms of
your reading of Leviticus.
You found that Leviticus was veryspecific about mediums and wizards.
Do not turn to mediums andwizards. A man or a woman who is
a medium or a wizard shall be put to
death, they shall be stoned with
stones. And yet, if you remember the
story of Saul in 1st Samuel when he
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was in trouble fighting David he went
to the witch of Endor and assured her
that if she could call up Samuel he
would relieve her of any fear of beingstoned to death. In other words, he
was transgressing some of the specificlaws in Leviticus.
Or we can take another one. You
remember that Leviticus said very
specifically that one must not
uncover ones nakedness, and if so itmeant expulsion from the tribe. Yet
perhaps you remember again the story
about how David when he was
bringing the ark into Jerusalemdanced naked in front of the ark and
he got away with it. True, Michel (the
daughter of Saul she was his first
wife) was very angry at him, butotherwise nothing happened to him at
all. It says in Leviticus, if a man
commits adultery with the wife of his
neighbor, both the adulterer and the
adulteress shall be put to death. And
yet we teach our children about Davidand Bathsheba. Also it says in
Leviticus that he who kills a manshall be put to death, and in the same
story of David and Bathsheba you
remember that he sent Bathshebas
husband into the forefront of the battle
so that he would be killed and so that
he could have Bathsheba for himself.
The purpose for bringing this up is togive you illustrations of changing
religious models when the criteria ofcredibility of an older model were no
longer culturally and/or intellectually
acceptable. In the overlapping
generation both models were possible
solutions just as in the case of the
theory of heat, the caloric theory and
the energy theory were both models
which as far as one could tell were
acceptable for some period of time.
Having brought into focus the conceptof model building, let me suggest that
orthodox theology has constructed
many models which, though passing
the test of credibility when they were
enunciated, have not kept pace with
our knowledge in other fields.
The strength of a viable theology, as
well as a viable religion based upon it,
must surely lie in the recognition thatmodel building is a dynamic and
evolving intellectual enterprise. Just as
scientists are constantly improving,
updating, revising, and even rejectingtheir models in their search for clearer
understanding of the operation of
nature, so should the theologians be
constantly working on their models.
If the methodology of science has any
relevance to other intellectualdisciplines, there is a keystone which
must be accepted as central. A modelis only good as long as it agrees with
all the known facts within the
accuracy of observation. When it no
longer does this, it must be rejected
without sentimentality and a more
applicable one sought for.
This lack of attachment for no longercredible models is perhaps one of the
most misunderstood facets of theoperation of science. When in 1958,
Yang and Lee received the Nobel prize
for destroying one of the main
conservation laws of modern physics
the general public was amazed that
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the physicists acclaimed the discovery
as a great step forward instead of
being defensive and alarmed that their
ideas had been incorrect for so long.By contrast, in theology model-solving
is not generally acceptable and Iwould like to persuade you that it
must be.
With this as a jumping off place let me
point to a few details of the most
productive tool which a scientist usesin evaluating his models of nature.
One of the most important criteria for
a valid theory is that not only must it
agree with the data within the limits ofobservation, but it must predict
sensible results everywhere.
This is known technically as aboundary value problem. In most
comprehensive physical problems the
boundaries can be taken to be the
limits of zero and infinity. To illustrate
what I mean let me take a case from
cosmology.The process going on in the stars, the
source of their heat, what makes themexpand and contract and how they are
constituted in detail can be explained
in many ways. Since stars and galaxies
are not subject to mans
experimentation and manipulation, for
many years cosmology was a highly
speculative and, in the strict sense of
the word, unscientific, science.
In the steady state, and in the here andnow, there appeared to be no
acceptable criteria for the credibility of
any particular model. As boundary
value problems came to be recognized
more and more in the scientific world
as a powerful tool in suggesting ways
to validate a theory, cosmologists
turned to testing conflicting models by
extrapolating time to zero and infinity.
The conditions for testing the detailsof stellar evolutionary theory to
include sensible criteria at both the
birth and the death of a star or nebula
has proved to be a powerful guide in
sorting out the true from the false.
More progress has been made in thisarea since it was reduced to a
boundary value problem than was
ever made considering the steady
state.
Why not apply this method to
theology. Here and now man, as he is
and as he has been since the dawn ofrecorded history, is in a steady state
and surely the theologists that have
tried to explain his goals and purposes
have been many, but have lacked
anything like universal criteria of
credibility. The details of biologicalevolution of man are common
knowledge, but are our theologicaltheories valid for man as he first
emerged at time equals zero or take
prime equal to infinity?
The physicists and the biologists
predict with considerable accuracy
when our solar system will have
cooled to a point in time when manwill no longer be able to exist and he
will vanish from the face of the earth.Theology must define mans goals and
purposes of his existence to cover that
inevitable tragedy as well. Usually,
when we think of the heat death of the
universe, we say to ourselves But that
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is so many millions of years away that
it is unprofitable to spend our time
worrying about that when we have so
many more pressing problems of thepresent to solve first.
If you are saying that to yourself now,
you have missed my point. Because
what I am trying to emphasize is that
the methodology of science tells us not
only that a solution is more likely to be
valid by requiring consistency andvalidity at the boundaries, but some of
the most difficult problems have only
been tractable by worrying more
about the extremes in time thanconcentrating on the present.
Let us look at the boundary value
solutions and we may well make moreprogress toward a reliable theology for
the present. Now of course this is not a
novel idea at all. Many of the older
theologies concentrated attention on
the creation or the last day of
judgment. In their time they were verysuccessful theological models. It
would be hard to argue against thesuccess of a religion based on a
creation of man in Gods image and an
ultimate retribution of all the trials
which beset a good man during his life
as his soul received its reward for
goodness on the last day.
This model certainly gave men goalsto live by, which gave them not only
courage and fortitude to suffer theslings and arrows of outrageous
fortune but to make them truly work
for the benefit of mankind. It was only
after the credibility of such a model
was shaken by the accumulation of
more knowledge that such a theology
was discarded as inadequate.
Let me now point to another example
which has a parallelism in theologyand religion. Physics, of the 19th
century, concentrated on measuringevery physical parameter and quantity
with ever increasing precision. In fact,
they concentrated so specifically on
detailed measurements that the
reputation of the profession was
synonymous with the highest accuracyin every detail in every particle
measured. Really, not unlike the
rigidity that you discovered by
reading Leviticus. A 20th centuryphysicist, in contrast, finds more and
more that the interesting problems of
nature to be studied are statistically
random processes. The older methodsof attention to every individual
element is no longer not only
unprofitable but to deal with the
details of each individual particle
might actually prevent the arrival at a
solution.
If you think about statisticallyfluctuating physical phenomena you
again can start thinking that it is all
very well for me to talk about atoms
and electrons, for example, as
statistically fluctuating. But when it
comes to dealing with human
individuals, the importance of the
goals and purposes of each person isas important as the next and one
cannot reduce the dignity of man tostatistical fluctuation.
If you are thinking these thoughts,
then I have again failed to make
myself clear. Because the real lesson to
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be learned from the example of
physical methodology of statistical
fluctuation is that by dealing with the
problem as a whole, we understandbetter the nature of the individual
better even than we do byconcentrating on the individual alone.
Let me again draw your attention to
the fact that precisely this concept is a
proven methodology in the theology
upon which the reputation ofCommunism is based. Here is a
religion that is successfully embraced
by millions of people for which it
supplies in a satisfying manner thegoals, aspirations, values, and desires
for service to their fellow men. We
may firmly believe that the theological
model is wrong, but it should notprevent us from recognizing its
importance as an obviously applicable
method in this area of human
endeavors.
The last example I want to take uphere is the use of abstract concept as a
tool for developing and verifyingmodels. We all know that abstract
concepts are very much a part of the
arsenal of theological contemplation,
but there is a real difference between
abstract concepts to develop an
abstract theological construct and the
scientists use of abstract concepts to
develop experimentally verifiablemodels. Even fairly elementary
students of physics get very used todealing with psi functions, six-
dimensional spaces, and probability
density, all of which are literally
impossible to conceive of in terms of a
picture of anything.
One might be tempted to say that this
is not basically different from the
elementary theological student who issophisticated enough not to try to
picture God, the soul, or the holyghost. But there is a great deal of
difference in the technique of
validating the usefulness of these
concepts between present day
theology and present day physics. The
credibility of the theological modelbuilt on these suggested abstractions
are really not called into question.
Rather the religious person feels thatthese concepts must be taken on faith.
They are the underlying bases upon
which the entire structure is built.
Now of course the credibility of themodels in science rests basically on
faith, the faith of the scientist is that
what is experimentally demonstrable
is in fact true. But the scientist does
not take the abstractions on faith; he
uses the abstractions as a tool todevelop a model that can be tested. Let
me take a very simple example.
It is quite literally impossible for
anyone to picture six-dimensional
space. We live in a three-dimensional
universe and even the science fiction
writers have difficulties
conceptualizing a 4th dimension. Six
dimensions is a pure abstractionwhich nobody tries to picture.
Nevertheless, the elementary conceptof pressure, the atmospheric pressure
of the air about us right here, is based
on the model that the multitudes of
molecules bombarding you from every
direction in fact causes the pressure
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which obeys certain rules depending
on the temperature, the volume of the
container and so on which when
calculated in the detail necessary topressurize an airplane or pressurize a
submarine uses a six-dimensionalspace concept as the vehicle for the
calculation. The model is thus
constructed using this highly abstract
concept as a tool for devising
verifiable theories which may be
tested for their credibility.
Now to turn to my main point,
however, about abstract concepts for
which the human mind may be toolimited to comprehend in any kind of
a pictorial form, let me emphasize the
difference between their place in
theology and in science a differenceI should point out which I find very
distressing.
The basic elements of primitive
religions were very real and
discernible. For Moses, God was somuch of a man that he could talk and
argue with him. For Tutankhamen, lifeafter death was so physical that he
provided food and drink for himself in
his tomb. The Greek gods cohabited
with mortals.
These highly successful theological
models which violated none of the
knowledge of the day were not basedon indescribable abstractions. The
generations of men who set their goalsand validated their lives by living by
these models carried very clear and
credible pictures in their minds of
God, Isis, and Zeus.
However, as the theological models of
today have required modification in
the light of man's greater
understanding of nature about him,theologians have tended to retreat
further and further into the realm ofabstraction, making it more and more
difficult for the common man to find
the basic tenets credible and being
required to take more and more on
faith.
I think everybody will agree that
really spectacular advances have
crowned the efforts of the scientific
disciplines in the last 50 - 100 yearsand many people believe that this
advance coincides with a
corresponding shift in scientific
methodology toward using highlyabstract tools to validate very real
physical hypotheses.
I feel strongly that the theologians
working to develop a dynamic
theology which can be validated by amodern religious society should study
this methodological advance whichhas proved so spectacularly successful
in the scientific world.
It is not enough to develop highly
abstract ideas of God, the soul, and
immortality. We should stop worrying
about what these concepts mean in the
physical world but use them todevelop a modern theology which can
be validated in the modern world andin the modern idiom and in complete
agreement with modern knowledge.
Let me conclude by pointing out that
Ive taken only three possible
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examples from the methodology of
science, which could have their
counterpart in a new theology. I
believe it is vitally important thattheology come face to face with
modern knowledge.
Scientific advances have put an
incredible strain on modern society
and as man searches for those ideals
and aspirations which are of ultimate
concern to himself, his knowledge ofthe real world must be attuned to his
theology and his religious belief, if
these latter are to be the dynamic
forces in his livingthat I feel theymust be.
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III - Cosmic Evolution and the Physical Sciences
What do I mean by a physical science?The easy way would be just toenumerate the various physicalsciences that would come to mindwhen one thought of the term
astronomy, physics, chemistry,
mathematics, etc. But this does not
really serve my purpose because of the
popular misconception of these
sciences which has so confused sciencewith technology, pure science with
applied engineering, and intellectualexercise with practical utility, that you
may miss my entire point if I do not
make a much more careful definition
than just that enumeration.
Crudely one could say that the
physical sciences are the fundamental
studies of dead matter, mans attemptto understand the nature of the
inanimate world about him,particularly in contrast to the
biological sciences which are the study
of living matter. However, I can be
much more precise in this if you will
allow me to introduce you to the
physical concept of entropy.
Entropy, which I define as aquantitative measure of the disorder
of a system, is really a measure of the
order in the universe. One of the
fundamental laws of physics tells us
that the universe around us is
becoming more and more disordered,
more and more statistically random.
Entropy happens to be defined in such
a way that an increase in entropy
corresponds to a decrease in the order
in the universe. The calculation of
entropy is at times complicated but the
concept, I think, is very simple. Let meillustrate by two examples.
If you examine a cigarette in detail, the
probability is high that within the
paper wrapper you will find tobacco.
However, as you smoke it, what used
to be tobacco becomes smoke and
ashes. The smoke becomes randomlydistributed in the air and the ashes,
more or less, randomly distributed
about the smoker. The probability of
your finding a particle of your smoke
between your fingers after you have
smoked it is vanishingly small
compared with your former chances of
finding the tobacco in your cigarette
before you smoked it. The entropy, inother words, the disorder of the
system, has increased and your
cigarette has become more random.
A second, and perhaps macabre,
example may make the concept of
entropy even clearer. Compare the
condition of your body now with what
it will be 100 years from now. Your
body is now in a highly organizedstate, an expert in anatomy knows just
where to look to find your various
organs, veins, nerves, muscles, etc.
because you are a very orderly array
of cells.
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One hundred years from now you will
have returned dust to dust and ashes
to ashes and your entropy will be
greatly increased. Your organizationwill have disintegrated completely
and the chance of finding any order inyour structure will be negligible
compared to what it is today.
In every physical process that we
know of, entropy is always increasing,
the universe becomes moredisordered, and incidentally the
ultimate death of the universe comes
that much closer. Thus by the physical
sciences I mean those sciences whichdeal with processes in which the
entropy is always increasing.
There is a fundamental law of physicswhich goes by the complicated title of
the Second Law of Thermodynamics,
which says that in every physical
model that we have so far been able to
construct in agreement with our
observation, the entropy of everyclosed system is always increasing. In
other words, the physical world isgetting more and more disordered.
Now as a way of clarifying this
concept, let me compare the physical
sciences with the biological sciences.
The life process makes order out of
disorder, randomly distributed cells
are formed into orderly arrays, morecomplicated structures are made out
of simpler ones, and man grows froma sperm and an ovum in apparent
violation of the great principle of
physics, the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. Since, in this
biological development, entropy is
decreasing, order is being produced.
Actually, the energy necessary for lifeand biological development comes
from the sun whose entropy isincreasing with time. One can think of
living organisms as feeding on the
physical world, decreasing their
entropy at the expense of the
increasing entropy of the rest of the
solar system so that the net entropy ofthe whole system still increases, but
the biological development is different
from the physical development in this
regard.
The consistency of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics is maintained by the
total increase of the entropy of theuniverse, but life by itself is an isolated
example of a decreasing entropy
system.
Thus, within the framework of this
earth itself, the physical sciences dealwith increasing entropy systems and
the life sciences deal with decreasingentropy systems. If the universe as we
know it is running down, heading
inextricably to a fate of complete
disorder, how did it ever get started?
Cosmologists are making progress in
applying our known physical laws to
provide us with a picture of thephenomena which control the birth
and the death of the universe. But ourmodel is far from complete at the
present time.
Let me give you a brief discussion on
the evolution of our galaxy; in other
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words, in terms of the words Ive been
using before, the model of the creation
of our universe.
You will discover that I can start this
discussion at any point and I wouldlike to start it considering space as an
enormous cloud of hydrogen atoms,
hydrogen atoms moving around in a
random fashion and occasionally
colliding with other hydrogen atoms.
One of the basic laws of physics is the
law of gravity, which says that any
material substance will attract any
other material substance according toa very known and tested law. If we
consider space to be bathed in a sea of
hydrogen atoms, these hydrogen
atoms will gradually pull themselvestogether under the force of gravity. As
they fall together, they gradually
acquire speed and when they get into
dense regions of other hydrogen
atoms they collide and transmit their
energy to other ones with which theycollide. This process is one in which
the gravitational energy is graduallychanged into random heat energy and
the gas as it collects in clusters due to
the gravitational attraction becomes
denser and hotter.
There are three recognizable stages in
the production of a star. As the
hydrogen atoms are brought togetherby the gravitational force, eventually
they will get close enough together sothat the electron patterns around the
hydrogen atoms will begin to interact.
When they interact, the energy is
released in the form of light and we
can see a visible star. The first stage in
the production of matter is merely to
bring these hydrogen atoms together
close enough so that their fields offorce can interact and light is
produced.
But this is not the end of this attraction
between the hydrogen atoms. As they
are pulled together they can get close
enough so that nuclear processes are
introduced and the heavy hydrogenatoms are fused together into helium
atoms in precisely the same
phenomenon as occurs in the
production of a hydrogen sun.
This produces enormous amounts of
energyso much so that further
gravitational collapse of the stars isinhibited. Let me remind you that one
of the most productive experiments
which physicists have been able to do
(despite ones fear of hydrogen bombs
as military weapons) was to be able to
predict exactly the phenomenon that Ihave been discussing as the origin of
stars, to such an extent that they couldproduce a hydrogen bomb and have it
go off the first time they tried it
because the model which they had
produced was accurate enough to
predict not only what elements
needed to be in the reaction but all the
details of this really catastrophic event.
In the last 50 years we have developed
sufficiently accurate models to gofrom no nuclear reactions at all to a
hydrogen bomb. In the stars this
process takes several billions of years,
the reason being that the statistical
chance of these things occurring is
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very small and therefore one has to
wait through a very long time before
the chance encounter of the proper
elements are all available for such areaction.
In the process of fusion, the hydrogen
nuclei turn into helium. Eventually the
hydrogen is all exhausted. When this
occurs, the gravitational forces
between the nuclei take over again
and the star continues to collapse.Because of the fact that these reactions
are taking place at the center of the
star and it is surrounded on the
outside by cooler hydrogen gas, thestar, as we observe it in the heavens at
the moment in this stage, is red.
Astronomers call this the red giant
stage of a star.
When the hydrogen is exhausted and
the gravitational force starts to pull the
star together again, the temperature of
the star rises remarkably to around
100 billion degrees. At thistemperature the helium, which was
formed by the hydrogen, startsburning. I should point out that we are
unable to make a helium bomb since
the energy necessary is very much
larger than a hydrogen bomb and we
cannot get several hundred billions of
degrees by any method that we know.
The way we get the temperature for ahydrogen bomb is to explode an atom
bomb inside it which is hot enough toset the reaction off, but a hydrogen
bomb is not hot enough to set off a
helium bomb, though the stars
succeed at this very successfully. The
helium starts burning and, in the
process of burning, it makes carbon,
and with the helium and the carbon
mixed together, nuclearly speaking,
oxygen is formed.
Five or six or more helium nuclei willburn together and make neon,
magnesium, silicon, sulfur, and as the
process goes on, the red giant stage of
the stellar evolution will make all the
elements which we know at present in
the periodic table. The processcontinues until the helium is used up
and the star collapses again because of
the gravitational force. This collapses
into what is known as a white dwarfstara violent rearrangement of the
matter in the star results in a
tremendous catastrophic explosion
into what is called a supernova.
Several supernova have been observed
in the history of man, and the fact that
we have seen several of them is quite a
remarkable thing. In the supernova,
because of the explosion that takesplace, essentially everything collides
with everything else with tremendousenergy and the rest of the heavy
elements as we know them are
formed.
The stellar material so formed is
hurled into interstellar space, and a
"second generation star starts to be
formed in the same process as the firststar except the second generation star
is now contaminated with the debrisof the exploded supernova. Our solar
system including our sun is such a
second generation star contaminated
with all the elements that were
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produced in this catastrophic
explosion.
Now let me go from galaxy formationto something much closer to home
namely, our own sun. The sun, as itwas produced, started coalescing in
the gravitational field with the debris
of an exploded white dwarf. As the
main cloud condensed, small bits of
the cloud were left behind in a
statistically fluctuating hydrogen gas.
Some particles would come together
and little clusters would be formed.
These smaller clusters did not involveso much matter as the sun, hence
when they were compressed they
were not compressed so much,
because the matter was a smalleramount, and hence they never got as
hot. These formed the planets as we
know them which were cooled quite
rapidly compared with the sun,
condensed into solid rock, and became
the planets as we now know them.
Let me now return to my definition ofentropy. You will notice that when I
started, I started building up
universes, galaxies, out of statistically
fluctuating hydrogen gas. From our
limited knowledge of science, we do
not know how big a system is required
for the Second Law of
Thermodynamics to be valid. But wedo know that once we have isolated
the sun, as a system, disconnectedfrom the rest of the galaxy as far as its
nuclear burning is concerned, the
Second Law of Thermodynamics is
definitely in operation; we have
formed an isolated system in space
and the entropy will keep on
increasing.
Disorder will continue to be the basicconcept of the solar system. To put it
another way, this means that the hotpart of the solar system will cool off,
and eventually it will all come to a
uniform temperature and it will have
arrived at a condition of maximum
entropy.
These processes are long-term
processes, they are so long term that
when I give you the numbers it means
nothing to you whatever. Thisunfortunately is a limitation of the
human mind which we can do nothing
about. I will give you the numbers
anyway.
The life history of the first hydrogen
cloud was about 20 thousand million
years. The explosion part is 10 billion
years and the second generation star
which includes our sun in our owngalaxy has an age of about 4.5 billion
years.
The question that really should be in
your mind is what has this to do with
a theological model which I am
discussing in this seminar. What I
have been presenting is the image of a
unitary system which ordains all that
was, is, and is to be...the first part ofmy definition of God.
Certainly forces which are capable of
both building up and destroyinguniverses, fall within the meaning of
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the next word which I have in the
definition: omnipotent.
But fully as important as our ability todevelop a credible model of all that
was, is, and is to be in the physicaluniverse is the homogeneity of
absolutely every detail. Perhaps not so
remarkable is the fact that the laws of
gravity work just as specifically to
hold you into your seat as they do to
hold the solar system together, to holdthe galaxy together; and in fact to
draw the hydrogen nuclei together
which form the galaxies in their
original shape.
As I say, perhaps this is not so
amazing, but what does seem fantastic
to a physicist and to an astrophysicistis that as far as we can observe all the
elements which we know on the
surface of the earth, which we
manipulate in our laboratories, are
found in the furthest reaches of the
universesnot only are the elementsthe same, but the isotopic abundances,
the relative weight of the sameelements with slightly different
nuclear arrangements are precisely the
same whether we observe the light
coming from the most distant star or
create the light in an electric arc in our
own laboratory. There is, in fact, no
indication that what we observe as the
structure of matter in the farthestreaches of space are different in any
detail than those that we see in ourlaboratories or find on the surface of
the earth.
It is this extraordinary universality
which leads me to use the word
omnipresent'' (everywhere present)
in my definition of God.
Included in this universality of thelaws of nature is the almost certain
existence of life in other parts of theuniverse. The statistical probability of
finding other forms of life by chance
encounter may be terribly small, but
you will have discovered by reading
Shapleys book that it is reliably
estimated that there are about 100
million other galaxies.* By galaxy, I
mean an island universe (one of thewords that Shapley uses).
We are in a spiral nebula and we are
one little speck off on one side. There
are about 100 million other galaxies.*
Within our own galaxy there are about
one million planetary systems which
are capable of supporting life as weknow it.
Since we cannot postulate life in any
other form than we know it, there maybe others but there are at least_________________________________
*Today, with better data from
improved telescopes, particularly
those orbiting in outer space,
astronomers now believe the number
of galaxies exceeds 1 billion.
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one million planets which are capable
of supporting life as we know it.
Although the chance of finding amanlike animal living in other celestial
bodies may be extremely small, thenumber of habitable worlds in the
known cosmic space may well be of
the billions. In the face of numbers like
these, the theory of probability tells us
that we are almost certainly far from
unique.
I think some of the most interesting
experiments that are being done by
physicists these days are attempts todiscover other intelligent messages in
the light or the radio waves which
come to us from other galaxies. These
experiments have not been successfulso far but this is, I am sure, a result of
our own inability to think about how
to do the right experiment.
What I have been talking about so far
has been a boundary value problemapplied to the boundary at time equal
zero I have been talking about the
origin of the universe up until now.
What about the future?
Here, I want to turn to one of theconcepts that I talked about last time,
that is the use of highly abstract
concepts which lead to very real
predictions and which have seentested by very rigid criteria of
credibility and found to be correct in
every way. I do not expect you to
understand the theory and I will noteven present it to you, but the
scientific community as a whole has
agreed that this is a valid theory.
The theory is Einstein's general theoryof relativity. When Einstein applied
this highly mathematical generaltheory of relativity to a model of the
universe he found that to be consistent
with this theory it was necessary to
postulate not only that space was
curved but space also was bounded.
The universe, a collection of dust,rock, stars, galaxies, and hydrogen
nuclei was spread out uniformly in a
spherical volume, spherically
symmetric and closed. It actuallyturned out that his spherical
assumption was not necessary. It
made the mathematics easier, but as
the mathematicians have become moresophisticated they have tried less
symmetric solutions the answer is
the same, although the mathematics is
much more difficult.
When Einstein and his co-worker atthe time, Friedmann, first calculated
the details of this universe, they firmlybelieved (and the astronomical data at
the time seemed to show) that the
universe was in static equilibrium; that
is, that the radius had a given value
and that it was staying still, however,
their solutions as they set them up,
predicted a dynamic universe. It said
that the universe was eithercontracting or expanding; it certainly
was not staying still. So sure wasEinstein and Friedmann that they had
made some kind of a mistake in their
calculations, that they added what was
called for many years a cosmological
term in their mathematics, the only
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purpose of which was to fix up the
theory to agree with the accepted
astronomical evidence of a static
universe.
Now you all are familiar with theDoppler effect. If an automobile goes
by you honking its horn, the pitch of
the horn seems to be going down
when it passes, particularly noticeable
nowadays when an airplane goes over
your head, the sound of the airplanealways lowers in pitch after it starts
going away from you. This Doppler
effect allows you to calculate and to
measure the speed with which thingsare receding or traveling toward you.
If you dont believe it, dont get caught
by a radar used by the police, that is
precisely how they tell how fast youare going.
The astronomer Hubble, after Einstein
and Friedmann had worked out their
theory, showed that there was
irrefutable spectroscopic evidence thatthe light coming from distant stars
was shifted toward the red whichmeant that the universe was
expanding, the edges of the universe
were going away from us.
Einstein dropped his cosmological
term, returning to the equations of
relativity in their original form which
had been tested by three famousexperiments which astronomers had
carried out (the most spectacular ofwhich was to measure the bending of
light as it went by the sun).
If Einstein had had enough courage to
be sure of his original prediction, the
great discovery of Hubble would have
turned out to be another proof of his
theory. But as it was, he dropped this
cosmological term and wasembarrassed the rest or his life that he
had not believed his own theory.There is no doubt that, if one is to use
the accepted model of the theory ofrelativity, the universe is expanding.
Calculations based on the rate or
expansion now, which incidentally is
not constant but slowing down from
its original rate, extrapolated back to
time equal zero (in other words, when
the universe began) give an age of 1010
years, thus is in agreement with othermeasurements of the age of theuniverse.
What the general theory of relativity
tells us, furthermore, is that the
universe is an oscillating sphere which
expands and contracts with a
frequency so slow as to be
incomprehensible to our imagination
but nevertheless goes through thisdynamic oscillation.
This sphere is bounded and, as far as
our knowledge extends, there is
nothing outside it. This we cannot
conceive of. Our whole concept of
space must, in our human mind, havesomething outside a spherical
universe, but I suspect that this is our
fault, not the universes.
Nevertheless, we also know that this
expanding stage, which we are now
in, has already begun to slow down.
Eventually, the gravitational forces
which are always acting to pull
together matter will overcome the
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present expansive phase and the
universe will start contracting. The
density of matter will gradually rise to
fantastic values, the temperature willgo up, and up, and up, approaching
the immense heat necessary to formnew universes, and the process will
start all over again.
What does this say about the
possibility of life in twenty thousand
millennia from now? It will be
absolutely and literally impossible.You often read that the sun is running
down, the Second Law of
Thermodynamics tells us that the
entropy is increasing, eventually thesun will burn its hydrogen out and it
will cool down.
Even if by then (and still we havesome billions of years to work on the
problem) we are able to escape the
solar system and find some more
congenial medium in which to live,
the basic expansion and contraction of
the universe predicted by the theory ofrelativity will eventually make all life,
everywhere in the universe, absolutelyimpossible.
You can quite properly ask the
question: "Am I bringing this up just
as an illustration of a boundary value
problem, or as a model which has
been successfully tested by our best
criteria of credibility? Now althoughboth of these things are true, it is not
for this reason at all, but rather for itsdeep, theological implications. Let me
point out that this theoretical
prediction of general relativity has a
direct consequence on our definition
of God. I have defined God as eternal.
The curvature of space predicts with
absolute certainty the annihilation of
all living organisms of all possible life.It rules out therefore, in my opinion,
any image of God which is aprojection of human emotions; i.e.,
love, value, hope, or even life itself.
These will all disappear when the
environment of the universe will be
sufficiently hostile in its contractingphase and therefore any image
involving any human projection is not
eternal. The laws of nature, however,
are eternal, and they are also infinite, ifby infinite you mean the furthest you
can ever go in space or time. The laws
of nature are eternal even when all life
has been destroyed.
Now perhaps one of the most
misunderstood facets of the God I
have been defining is the apparent
lack of the adjective personal. As a
characteristic of that definition, theprimitive human brain almost
automatically projects its self-image oranimistic characteristic on all it
perceives. Early men and their
religions, as well as the belief of
children, have this very definite
characteristic.
Even highly sophisticated theologians
and physicists may be thrown backonto this inherent characteristic of the
central nervous system, when aresponse is elicited largely from the
lower brain as happens under duress
and stress or even if you stub your toe.
If you listen to what people say, it is a
very personal affront which they take
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from the stonethey may even kick it
again which does little good to them
and certainly no harm to the stone.
Yet, my personal response as a man to
these almost incredible laws of natureare as truly a satisfying religious
experience as I can imagine. The
scientific cosmos is more like the God
of the inescapable law in the Old
Testament. It is a single integrated
system of reality and the law of itsoperation creates and sustains all that
is from everlasting to everlasting.
It is more like the deity portrayed inreligions where man must serve and
obey, rather than like the ones which
include Judeo-Christian religion
where the deity is as man can imaginehim, and perhaps even manage him
and persuade him.
The only God that contemporary
science allows is an immutable system
of reality, so superhuman in characterthat no human pressure of any kind
can avail to change it. All that man cando is to seek the law of this deity and
adapt and conform, or else cease to be.
Yet, I often wish I were some kind of a
poet, to be able to show you what a
scientist feels about his science. The
scientist, by the nature of his
profession, revels in the closeness ofthe stupendous vastness of the
unknown which most of us one wayor another define as God. Perhaps few
of you in this room have been able to
really experience the incredible
vastness of the heavens.
But imagine that you were with me
when I was young, standing on a
moonlight night on the top of a
mountain which you never heard of,called Ein-en-Sur. The Lebanon
mountains 50 miles to the west actedas an impenetrable barrier for the
clouds from the Mediterranean. The
nearest electric light is in Damascus,
80 miles to the southeast and shielded
from us by the foothills of Mt.
Hermon. In the early 1920sautomobiles did not travel at night on
the dusty unpaved roads far to the
south, for a breakdown would surely
mean an unpleasant encounter withroving bandits.
Stand with me on this isolated peak
and look up. The stars are oppressivein their brilliance, the Milky Way is
not a dim band which in Lexington,
Massachusetts, you sometimes
confuse with weak northern lights, but
a brilliant band of myriad dancing
stars. Mars is like a great red beaconand the Andromeda nebula a
mysterious, ill-defined, shiny cloudwhich cannot help but draw your
thoughts out beyond the confines of
the world. Our solar system is an
insignificant dot in the nebula we call
our universe. All the stars we see from
this mountain of ours are in our
universe, except the Andromeda
nebula.
The Milky Way, whose stars are sonumerous that we cannot resolve them
into separate points of light, are the
arms of the great spiral nebula in
which we exist. Nor is our universe
unique, for although the nebula in
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Andromeda is the only other one we
can see with our naked eye, there are
millions of others. Together these
nebula form a super-galaxy which wecan describe as bounded, though the
human mind cannot appreciate this,and there is nothing outside. In these
vast reaches of space, all physical laws
are identical as we know them. Every
element in the cosmic dust deviates
not a bit from the elements that we
know. The law of gravitation attractsuniverses as surely as it attracts us.
Our cosmic view of the super-galaxy
lets us realize that there are about 100million other galaxies, other universes
beside our own, and that within our
own universe there are about one
million planetary systems capable ofsupporting life as we know it.
Now if we come back from our view
of the super-galaxy, back to the spiral
nebula of our universe, back to the
solar system whose very center ofexistence is the sun, actually
indetectably small on a cosmic scale,and finally back to our lonely
mountain top, we find ourselves so
insignificantly minute in the cosmic
scale that we really cannot describe
our smallness.
These are the thoughts which make
many scientists deeply religious. Formy own self, as I spend hours, days,
and years, in my laboratory, piecingtogether the intricacies of one small
piece of research, adding one small bit
of knowledge to the great discipline
we call sciencewhen the answers do
come, they show a fundamental
simplicity, order, and real beauty of
nature which at times becomes almost
overwhelming. My science and
religion become one, and myreverence for nature is my reverence
for Godreverence for my ownpersonal god, because I am a person,
because I am a man thinking these
thoughts.
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IV - Evolution and the Biological Sciences
Last week we talked about evolutionand the physical sciences, which Icharacterized as entropy increasingsystems. You will remember that Idefined entropy as the quantitative
measure of disorder of a system, and
the physical universe as one in which
the entropy is always increasing. That
means the disorder in the universe is
always increasing.
Tonight I want to talk about evolutionand the biological sciences, which I
will characterize roughly as entropy
decreasing systems, that is, systems in
which the disorder of the system is
becoming less, becoming more
ordered rather than more disordered.
The characterization of life as an
entropy decreasing system is anecessary but not sufficient condition.
It is true that living organisms avoiddecay by eating, drinking, or in the
case of plants, assimilating what one
might call negative entropy. That is,
they are continually drawing from
their environment what is often
characterized as negentropy. the
opposite of entropy. An organism's
astonishing gift of concentrating astream of order into itself and thus
escaping the decay into atomic chaos
(you might almost consider it as
drinking orderliness from its
environment) is intimately connected
with a self-replicating mechanism, the
details of which I hope you learned
about in the reading which I assigned
for this seminar.
What I am saying is that the difference
between the physical universe and the
biological universe is that the physicaluniverse is always becoming more
disordered. The biological systems are
becoming more ordered, but that is
not a sufficient condition. It also has
the characteristic of being self-
replicating, that means it can
reproduce itself. It is this concept
which I want to dwell on for a littlewhile, because I want to be sure that
you understand what I mean. There
are actually two ways of producing
orderliness. One is called a statistical
mechanism which produces order-
from-disorder. The second method is
called the self-replicating mechanism
which produces order-from-order. Let
me explain what I mean in moredetail.
There is a perfectly standard method
in the physical world of producing
order from disorder statistically, when
things crystallize, for example. If you
take water and you cool it down close
to the freezing point, before it freezes
the atoms of the water (the hydrogen
and oxygen atoms) start collectingstatistically in places where they will
freeze into the crystal when the
temperature becomes sufficiently low.
That is a random process, but you can
study it by x-ray analysis and discover
that on the average the hydrogen
atoms get into one position and the
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Mutations (which is a word I hope you
came across in your reading for this
week) are chance accidental changes inthe alphabet of the code. In the picture
of my volume of books, they are sortof typographical errors that are then
passed on from parent to offspring
and are inherited. Ninety-nine percent
of all mutations are either lethal or
deleterious to succeeding generations.
Less than one percent may confer anadvantage to its possessor at a given
time and in a specific environment. It
is such occasional rare beneficial
mutations upon which progress inbiological evolution depends.
Biological evolution by natural
selection is thus a very slow andwasteful way of transmitting progress.
Again, I hope you read the first
chapter ofHawaii and got the feeling
of the tremendous scope of time and
waste of attempts which go into the
evolutionary process . It has takenover two billion years to produce,
from simple virus-like structures,
complex species including ourselves,that now inherit the earth. For these
species here today, millions have
perished in the course of
environmental screening by natural
selection.
Let me return for a minute to theboundary between order-from-
disorder, which is like a crystal
freezing out, and order-from-order, ahuman being produced by its growth
from the DNA coded molecule. The
line between living and non-living
systems has become increasingly
blurred in recent decades, with the
discovery that viruses are nuclear
protein molecules some of which, like
the tobacco virus, can be made to crossthe boundary between the statistical
and the self-replicating mechanismalmost at will.
There is a long series of experiments
carried out with the tobacco virus
which I would like to talk about for
just a few minutes. It can take twoforms. It can be crystallized as a
simple chemical crystal, or, by taking
the crystal and putting it into a
nutrient solution and keeping thetemperature just right, it can be made
to turn into a virus. You can do it back
and forth. When it is a virus, it is self-
replicating. It grows. It producesoffspring, and it is susceptible to
temperature variations which will kill
it if you heat it up too much and kill it
if you cool it down too much.
However, if you take this same virus,take away its nutrients, you can
crystallize it into an ordinary crystalwhich you can then heat to
tremendous temperatures, you can
cool to as cold as you can get it, and
nothing happens to it whatsoever. It is
not self-replicating, it can crystallize,
you can dissolve it, and re-crystallize it
and it behaves like an ordinary salt
crystal.
But still, after you have treated it as acrystal, you can then put it back into
its living form and it behaves like a
virus. Perhaps it is not at all surprising
that these boundary cases should be
found. We are discussing a sort of
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continuous development of the
evolution of life, and eventually of
man, out of the primitive stuff of the
universe, and it would be surprising ifwe did not find some intermediate
forms.
Living organisms are