CULTURE & COMEDY

Salk Institute Forum On Religion And Science
Almost Grasps The Obvious

Recently, there was a forum on religion and science at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, attended by a number of brilliant people who have obviously walked by the philosophy section of their campus bookstores without picking up a copy of anything.

The meeting was, expectedly, weighted toward skepticism, with the vocal Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist from Oxford, who wrote “The God Delusion,” in attendance to inform us, ““I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion.”

Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientists Presents Evidence for Belief,” was invited but could not attend, or decided the better part of wisdom was to absent himself.

Amid all the contention, Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, suggested, in a defensively jocund way, the founding of an alternative church, with one of the attendants, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, as its first minister, because, she decided, his celebration of scientific discovery was like a good sermon.

She did almost get somewhere herself when we said, “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty.” It was, at least, an adumbration of Wordsworth’s rickety “natural piety.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist from Case Western Reserve University, while noting he is a nonbeliever, said that the existence of God is “a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

Maybe on one of his passes by the philosophy section, he happened to chance on William James’ The Will to Believe, where, we advise Mr. Dawkins, James observes that it takes as much information not to believe as it takes to believe.

Dr. Tyson noted toward the end that scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, but history reveals that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” For instance, he noted, when Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that “an intelligent and powerful being” was propping it up.

But we need not go back to Newton to go beyond brilliant people being conspicuously amateurish philosophers.

The enormous question we can all deal with credibly is not whether or not there is a God, as we currently choose to define such a being, but whether or not we have life? And, since we do, what should we do with it?

In regard to, as the handle goes, the God question, we may also credibly postulate that the care of life is the surest way to worship whatever may be the ultimate source of it.

What was that phrase we just mentioned? Yes, we may define a God that is scientifically credible, as the ultimate source of all that is – and let the mystery abide and inspire.

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