Logic and Mystery in Science and Religion

I went to a lecture tonight at Harvard by Charles Townes. He won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on masers and lasers. His talk was entitled "Logic and Mystery in Science and Religion". He thinks both science and religion are qualitatively similar and will eventually converge. Science tries to explain how the universe works and religion tries to explain the meaning and purpose of the universe which must involve how it works. He then described a survey of thoughts on this.

Science started out assuming the universe was deterministic which would suggest that there isn't a god in control, but then came along quantum mechanics and that threw determinism out the window. He said Bell's Theorem (which I don't understand) proved there wasn't an unknown force involved that could make quantum mechanics deterministic. Science represents faith as postulates, you believe in them until they are proven or something better comes along. Religion represents experiments as observations of people and what helps them in their lives. Revelations, the spontaneous generation of ideas, happen in both science and religion and logic is also used in both. Science has proofs but also inconsistencies (he mentioned two: the dark matter problem and zero point fluctuations which went over my head). Science can't explain free will, and no one knows what consciousness is.

He said Bob Wilson was in the audience and helped formed theories about the Big Bang. I think he was referring to Robert Woodrow Wilson, yet another Nobel Prize winner. He mentioned how there are a few constants in the universe that need to be quite precise or things wouldn't work (see the book Just Six Numbers, of which I still have to write a review). Fred Hoyle took this to mean there must be a greater intellegence orchestrating it, Freeman Dyson thought otherwise. The one that stuck in my head was can we understand ourselves? Do you have to be more complex than a thing to understand that thing, and if so, no we can't understand ourselves.

Trying to wrap things up he said even though we know Newtonian Mechanics are philosphically wrong (quantum mechanics again) we still teach it because it's a very good approximation. A Harvard study proved that prayer is effective in treatment of illness, though the patients knew they were being prayed for and further experiments will remove that condition. And in explaining evil, he said god created us with free will, and things are still a puzzle.

People looking for answers to "life the universe and everything" (obviously) weren't going to get them at this lecture, but it was an interesting ride. Though after going to several lectures that covered such topics at high levels, I'm wanting something more in depth.