The debate about the teaching of evolution in public schools is unique to the US among Western countries. 1 Murray Peshkin’s admonition to the scientific establishment to engage in mature discussions of the issues involved must be taken seriously. But such endeavors need careful preparation.
First, several facts should be taken into account explicitly. Most religions are focused on the human being, with the universe—prime target of the physicist’s professional dedication—relegated to playing a supporting role. In religion, spatial and temporal dimensions are those familiar to human experience, information about the universe is that which can be acquired through our senses, and relevant causal interconnections between events are those whose consequences directly affect us. It is then quite natural that phenomena extending over a few hundred human lifetimes and images like the Earth orbiting around the Sun—which we never actually see happening—were met with resistance for a long time. Even today, the scientifically uninformed public has little comprehension of astronomical and geological scales; everything that invokes them is perceived as “just a theory.” The same applies to the fact that order can emerge out of chaos and purposeful behavior out of random events without any outside intervention except for some available energy and the action of a few universal physical laws. Scientifically uninformed people sense, based on subjective experience, that purposeful complexity cannot just emerge but must be designed—without being aware that self-organization occurs in so many everyday phenomena.
Second, we should recognize that coexistence, even cooperation, between faith and science is possible, though it does require some compromises. People of religious faith should recognize that one cannot challenge scientific facts with ideas alone and that many more unforeseen natural phenomena revolutionizing previously held worldviews may still be discovered. Scientists, in turn, should recognize that some people—including some scientists—will always need religion for spiritual guidance and comfort and will always have questions concerning the “why of things” to which the scientific method cannot provide answers. Religion should turn away from a literal interpretation of its sacred scriptures by recognizing when they were written, by whom, for whom, and for what purpose. Science should turn away from the easy way out offered by the anthropic principle and recognize that natural points of contact between science and religion do exist. Those points include some questions concerning the values of the universal constants; the actual form of physical laws; and the key fluctuations that gave rise to the Big Bang, the appearance of the first living organisms, and the emergence of self-consciousness.
Third, we should be aware of what some influential personalities have declared about the matter. Pope John Paul II stated, “Science can purify religion from error and superstition, and religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes,” and “The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its makeup, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise but in order to state the correct relationships of man with God and with the universe.” 2 And Werner Heisenberg wrote,
Science deals with the objective, material world. … Religion, on the other hand, deals with the world of values. It considers what ought to be or what we ought to do, not what is. In science we are concerned to discover what is true or false; in religion with what is good or evil, noble or base. Science is the basis of technology, religion the basis of ethics. 3
As a physicist, I like to view scientific thought and religious faith as “basis states” of the human brain: They are mutually orthogonal, but at any given time the actual state of the brain can be a superposition of the two without violating the principles of either. Any attempts to force a collapse into one or the other, like the so-called scientific creationists and some agnostics would wish to do, go counter to the very nature of human brain function. In fact, predisposition for religious beliefs and the search for scientific knowledge may even have a common evolutionary origin: 4 the human brain’s conception of time, its unique capability of creating images of the future and making long-term predictions, the innate urge to do so, and a feeling of satisfaction when it is done.
