Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Albert Einstein died more than half a century ago, but there’s still a raging debate over what he thought about religion. He once said Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. In this excerpt from To the Best of Our Knowledge, what exactly did Einstein conclude about religion?

Steve Paulson speaks with several scientists, religious scholars and atheists about Albert Einstein’s religious beliefs. We hear from Richard Dawkins, Elaine Pagels, and Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson who debate what Einstein meant by “god.”

Evolution remains the thorniest issue in the ongoing debate over science and religion. But for all the yelling between creationists and scientists, there’s one perspective that’s largely absent from public discussions about evolution. We rarely hear from religious believers who accept the standard Darwinian account of evolution. It’s a shame because there’s an important question at stake: How can a person of faith reconcile the apparently random, meaningless process of evolution with belief in God?

The simplest response is to say that science and religion have nothing to do with each other—to claim, as Stephen Jay Gould famously did, that they are non-overlapping magisteria. But perhaps that response seems too easy, a politically expedient ploy to pacify both scientists and mainstream Christians. Maybe evolutionary theory, along with modern physics, does pose a serious challenge to religious belief. To put it another way, how can an intellectually responsible person of faith justify that faith—and even belief in a personal God—after Darwin and Einstein?

I’ve always been obsessed with the mind-body problem, says philosopher Renee Feuer Himmel. It’s the essential problem of metaphysics, about both the world out there and the world in here.

Renee is the fictional alter ego of novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. In her 1983 novel, The Mind-Body Problem, Goldstein laid out her own metaphysical concerns, which include the mystery of consciousness and the struggle between reason and emotion. As a novelist, she’s drawn to the quirky lives of scientists and philosophers. She’s also fascinated by history’s great rationalist thinkers. She’s written nonfiction accounts of the 17^th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the 20^th-century mathematician-philosopher Kurt Gödel.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Goldstein would end up living with Steven Pinker, a leading theorist of the mind. He’s a cognitive psychologist at Harvard; she’s a philosopher who’s taught at several colleges. Although they come out of different disciplines, they mine much of the same territory: language, consciousness, and the tension between science and religion. If Boston is ground zero for intellectuals, then Pinker and Goldstein must rank as one of America’s brainiest power couples.

In October, Malaysia’s first astronaut will join a Russian crew and blast off into space. The news of a Muslim astronaut was cause for celebration in the Islamic world, but then certain questions started popping up. How will he face Mecca during his five daily prayers while his space ship is whizzing around the Earth? How can he hold the prayer position in zero gravity? Such concerns may sound absurd to us, but the Malaysian space chief is taking them quite seriously. A team of Muslim scholars and scientists has spent more than a year drawing up an Islamic code of conduct for space travel.

This story illustrates the obstacles that face scientists in Muslim countries. While it’s always risky to draw generalizations about Islam, even conservative Muslims admit that the Islamic world lags far behind the West in science and technology. This is a big problem for Muslims who envy the economic and military power of the United States.

What’s so striking about the Muslim predicament is that the Islamic world was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. During Europe’s Dark Ages, Baghdad, Cairo and other Middle Eastern cities were the key repositories of ancient Greek and Roman science. Muslim scholars themselves made breakthroughs in medicine, optics and mathematics. So what happened? Did strict Islamic orthodoxy crush the spirit of scientific inquiry? Why did Christian Europe, for so long a backwater of science, later launch the scientific revolution?

Forget science fiction. If you want to hear some really crazy ideas about the universe, just listen to our leading theoretical physicists. Wish you could travel back in time? You can, according to some interpretations of quantum mechanics. Could there be an infinite number of parallel worlds? Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg considers this a real possibility. Even the big bang, which for decades has been the standard explanation for how the universe started, is getting a second look. Now, many cosmologists speculate that we live in a “multiverse”, with big bangs exploding all over the cosmos, each creating its own bubble universe with its own laws of physics. And lucky for us, our bubble turned out to be life-friendly.

But if you really want to start an argument, ask a room full of physicists this question: Are the laws of physics fine-tuned to support life? Many scientists hate this idea—what’s often called “the anthropic principle”. They suspect it’s a trick to argue for a designer God. But more and more physicists point to various laws of nature that have to be calibrated just right for stars and planets to form and for life to appear. For instance, if gravity were just slightly stronger, the universe would have collapsed long before life evolved. But if gravity were a tiny bit weaker, no galaxies or stars could have formed. If the strong nuclear force had been slightly different, red giant stars would never produce the fusion needed to form heavier atoms like carbon, and the universe would be a vast, lifeless desert. Are these just happy coincidences? The late cosmologist Fred Hoyle called the universe a put-up job. Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has suggested that the universe, in some sense, knew we were coming.

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice tells the White Queen that she cannot believe in impossible things. But the Queen says Alice simply hasn’t had enough practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. That human penchant for belief—or perhaps gullibility—is what inspired biologist Lewis Wolpert to write a book about the evolutionary origins of belief called Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

Wolpert is an eminent developmental biologist at University College London. Like fellow British scientist Richard Dawkins, he’s an outspoken atheist with a knack for saying outrageous things. Unlike Dawkins, Wolpert has no desire to abolish religion. In fact, he thinks religious belief can provide great comfort and points to medical studies showing that the faithful tend to suffer less stress and anxiety than nonbelievers. In Wolpert’s view, religion has given believers an evolutionary advantage, even though it’s based on a grand illusion.

As almost every child knows, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus, selling his life for 30 pieces of silver. If there’s an arch villain in the story of Jesus, it’s Judas Iscariot. Or is it? The newly discovered Gospel of Judas suggests that Judas was, in fact, the favorite disciple, the only one Jesus trusted to carry out his final command to hand him over to the Romans.

Rumors about the gospel have circulated for centuries. Early church fathers called it a very dangerous, blasphemous, horrendous gospel, according to historian Elaine Pagels. We now know that the manuscript was passed around the shadowy world of antiquities dealers, at one point sitting in a safe deposit box in a small town in New York for 17 years. Pagels herself was once asked by a dealer in Cleveland to examine it, but he only showed her the last few pages, which revealed little more than the title page. She assumed there was nothing of significance. Finally, the manuscript was acquired by the National Geographic Society, which hired Pagels as a consultant to study it.

Controversial scholar Tariq Ramadan explains why Mohammed had progressive views of women, why the Quran is a prescription for peace—and why he is banned from Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

Why are there so few moderate Muslims speaking out against Islamic terrorism? That’s a common complaint heard in the West, but in truth, plenty of Muslims are critical of suicide bombers. What’s harder to find are Muslim leaders who condemn terrorism while also maintaining credibility among disaffected Muslims, and intellectuals who can appeal to both secular Europeans and Middle Eastern imams. That’s why the Swiss-born Tariq Ramadan is such a compelling figure.

Ramadan has been called the Muslim Martin Luther King, and he’s often described as Europe’s most important Muslim intellectual. He has no shortage of charisma—a quality that serves him well as he reaches out to various constituencies. There’s no doubt that Ramadan commands a large following. Hundreds of young Muslims turn up at his public talks, and tapes of his lectures are widely circulated. He travels frequently throughout the Islamic world, trying to build bridges between European Muslims and conservative clerics.

Despite massive scientific corroboration for evolution, roughly half of all Americans believe that God created humans within the past 10,000 years. Many others believe the “irreducible complexity” argument of the intelligent design movement—a position that, while somewhat more flexible, still rankles most scientists. This widespread refusal to accept evolution can drive scientists into a fury. I’ve heard biologists call anti-evolutionists idiots, lunatics… and worse. But the question remains: How do we explain the stubborn resistance to Darwinism?

The Big Questions:

1. Science or religion?
2. Are We Alone in the Universe?
3. What Does God Look Like?
4. Do You Believe in Evolution?
5. What’s Your First Memory of God?

In the roiling debate between science and religion, it would be hard to exaggerate the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins. The British scientist is religion’s chief prosecutor—Darwin’s rottweiler, as one magazine called him—and quite likely the world’s most famous atheist. Speaking to the American Humanist Association, Dawkins once said, I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

In the roiling debate between science and religion, it would be hard to exaggerate the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins. The British scientist is religion’s chief prosecutor—Darwin’s rottweiler, as one magazine called him—and quite likely the world’s most famous atheist. Speaking to the American Humanist Association, Dawkins once said, I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Can we actually see God in the brain? Well, not exactly. But a few enterprising neuroscientists have found ways to detect and measure the varieties of our religious experience. Using brain scanning technology, researchers have been able to pinpoint which parts of the brain are activated during prayer and meditation. While they can’t answer the biggest question of all—does God exist?—they are probing one of the deepest mysteries in science: the nature of consciousness.

They’re also wading into a thorny issue in the science and religion debate: the connection between brain and mind. Most neuroscientists assume the mind is nothing more than electrochemical surges among nerve cells in the brain. But neuroscientists who study spirituality tend to be open to the possibility that the mind could exist independently of the brain. Some even question the materialist paradigm of science—the idea that the only reality worth studying is what can be tested, quantified and reproduced. They wonder whether current scientific methods will ever be able to explain consciousness. But others are skeptical. Stephen Heinemann, president of the Society for Neuroscience, recently told the Chronicle of Higher Education, I think the concept of the mind outside the brain is absurd.

As the longtime head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins is one of America’s most visible scientists. He holds impeccable scientific credentials—a medical degree as well as a Ph.D. in physics—and has established a distinguished track record as a gene hunter. He’s also an evangelical Christian, someone who has no qualms about professing his belief in miracles or seeing God’s hand behind all of creation. The cover of his new book illustrates this unusual mixture: The book’s title, The Language of God, is superimposed on a drawing of the double helix. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome, he writes. He can be worshiped in the cathedral or in the laboratory.

Three-quarters of all Americans believe the Bible is God’s word, according to a recent Pew poll. Numbers like that make an outspoken atheist like Sam Harris seem either foolhardy or uncommonly brave.

Two years ago, when the 39-year-old launched a full-scale attack on religious belief in his provocative book The End of Faith, he was an unknown. That changed overnight when his book shot up the New York Times bestseller list and later went on to win the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Since then, The End of Faith has earned an avid following among atheists and lapsed churchgoers; it’s the kind of book that gets passed around from one friend to another to another. Here, finally, was someone willing to do the unthinkable: to denounce religious faith as irrational—murderous, even.

Karen Armstrong is a one-woman publishing industry, the author of nearly 20 books on religion. When her breakthrough book “A History of God” appeared in 1993, this British writer quickly became known as one of the world’s leading historians of spiritual matters. Her work displays a wide-ranging knowledge of religious traditions—from the monotheistic religions to Buddhism. What’s most remarkable is how she carved out this career for herself after rejecting a life in the church.

For a man who’s obsessed with tiny critters, Edward O. Wilson has a strange knack for stirring up controversy about life’s biggest questions. The Harvard biologist is a renowned expert on insects, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Ants. But it was his seminal 1975 book Sociobiology, which laid the groundwork for the new field of evolutionary psychology, that made Wilson a scientific luminary—and a major intellectual force in America. That book, along with its Pulitzer Prize-winning sequel, On Human Nature, argued that many human behaviors—including aggression, altruism and hypocrisy—are shaped by evolution. Wilson’s tilt toward nature in the age-old nature/nurture debate may have put him on the map, but it also made plenty of enemies.