Revisiting the Convergence of Science and Religion

Revisiting the Convergence of Science and ReligionYouTube

Introduced by Rosalie Say, Master of Ceremonies: David E. Presti, a neurobiologist and cognitive scientist, has taught in UC Berkeley’s Department of Molecular and Cell Biology since 1991. A former clinical psychologist at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, he teaches neuroscience to Tibetan monastics in India, part of the dialogue between scientists and contemplatives that the Dalai Lama began.

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It is really an honor to have been invited by Dr. Ghosh to this presentation in celebration of your birthday. Happy birthday. And it’s truly a privilege to be part of this really important event and this really renowned group of speakers.

I’m going to be talking about something a little bit different. I know something about chemistry and water, and I’ve been particularly interested in the increasing numbers of weird molecules that we’re putting into water: psychoactive drugs and pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, as well as pesticides and fertilizers and all of that. But I’m not going to do that.

The title of what I’d like to say today is actually “Revisiting the Convergence of Science and Religion.”

Townes’s 1966 Paper

What do I mean by revisiting? Nearly 50 years ago, in 1966, Professor Townes wrote a paper—this was shortly after he received the Nobel Prize for the maser invention—called “The Convergence of Science and Religion.” It was published in an IBM magazine called Think. And in that article, you said this: “Some accept both religion and science as dealing with quite different matters by different methods, and thus separate them so widely in their thinking that no direct confrontation is possible. To me, science and religion are both universal and basically very similar.”

Now, you’ll see, eventually I’m going to bring this back to the water crisis. But we’ll start with this.

And then he went on to describe that there have been, in 20th-century science, several revolutions. Revolutions are big events in our scientific worldview. They don’t happen very often. In the 500 years that we’ve been doing Western science, there have only been a handful of revolutions. Two of them happened in the 20th century: Einstein’s relativity theories, and quantum theory in the 1920s. Prior to that, I would say the previous revolution had been in biology, with Darwin and the evolutionary framework for understanding the interrelatedness of all of life. And prior to that, probably the Copernican revolution: the idea that the Earth was not necessarily the center of the universe, and that things were much more interesting than that.

So, only a handful. And Professor Townes spoke specifically to relativity and quantum physics, and the profound change: those theories—which are, of course, well established in terms of their ability to allow us to interconnect our observations in new and deeper ways—really transformed our view of reality in a very profound way. Space and time were no longer immutable; they changed as a result of the presence of matter. Matter and energy were interconvertible, all of this.

And then quantum physics, in some way even more profound: the idea that as we look more closely at the microscopic aspects of reality, it became more fuzzy, and that there was an inherent uncertainty in our ability to determine what was going on. And also there were a lot of long-distance interactions; it’s like everything in the universe was connected in some really deep way, this idea of nonlocality. And even more profoundly, there was something really weird about the relationship between mind and measurement and physical reality, and folks still can’t agree on what’s going on there. So there’s big stuff happening with that.

Beliefs as Working Hypotheses

Now, then Professor Townes went on to say that science is about trying to appreciate and understand and explain order in nature, and religion is about trying to understand something about the purpose and meaning behind our world, and that maybe those really aren’t such very different things. Understanding the order in the universe and understanding the purpose in the universe are not identical, but they’re also not very far apart. Certainly, scientists are interested in why things are happening, and what the meaning might be beyond that, and so forth.

And he went on to say: “Can religious beliefs also be viewed as working hypotheses, tested and validated by experience? To some, this may seem a secular and even an abhorrent view. In any case, it discards absolutism in religion, but I see no reason why acceptance of religion on this basis should be objectionable.”

And some other interesting people have said similar things. For example, Buddha, who was attributed as saying: “Don’t believe simply based on authority, whether religious teachers or otherwise. Find out for yourself what is true, what is real. Discover that there are virtuous things and non-virtuous things. And once you have discovered for yourself, give up the bad and embrace the good.”

Another one of my favorite people here is William James, one of the real pioneers in the scientific study of the mind, who lived at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century: “Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as philosophy will be ready to begin.” In other words, can we have an empirical approach to questions that are considered fundamentally religious questions?

And finally, back to Professor Townes’s paper: “We must recognize the tentative nature of knowledge. Our present understanding of science or religion is likely, if it agrees with experience, to continue to have an important degree of validity, just as does Newtonian mechanics.” That is, people believe that Newtonian mechanics is not the deepest way of explaining nature; relativity and quantum physics take us to a deeper level. However, Newtonian mechanics still works, and it still works quite well to describe lots of stuff that we encounter in our daily lives. “But there may be deeper things which we do not yet know and which, when discovered, may modify our thinking in very basic ways.” In other words, there’s still stuff we don’t know yet. What a surprise that that would be the case!

“I believe this confluence is inevitable, for they both”—science and religion—“represent man’s efforts to understand his universe and must ultimately be dealing with the same substance. Converge they must, and through this should come new strength for both.”

Now, that was 50 years ago.

Conflict or Convergence?

So, come to the present time, or nearly the present time. Well, first of all, not the present time: the 1600s. Nice costume. Several hundred years ago: Galileo, being called on the carpet by the Inquisition for his defense of the Copernican view of the solar system.

And so the worldview that we have most of the time is that there has to be a fundamental conflict between science and religion. Witness Galileo: this is what happens. And in fact, this has been really reinforced in recent times with bestselling books like Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s book God Is Not Great. These became huge bestsellers, really dismissing and attacking and so forth. So how can you even hypothesize that there could be some kind of confluence or convergence?

So, a few years ago, in 2005, the esteemed journal Science celebrated its 125th anniversary by assembling a list of 125 questions which they thought were the deep questions that scientists could address today. And number one and number two on that list were these.

The number one question was: What is the universe made of? Now, the way that question was framed was in terms of dark energy and dark matter, these relatively recently discovered cosmological phenomena that seem to be representing about 96% of the matter-energy content of the universe. And we don’t know what it is. And so the idea was, can we figure this out? But really, the deeper question is: What is the nature of reality here? What is going on at a very fundamental level? This is considered a very big question in science.

And even though this is a big question, many working scientists believe that the answer will be kind of simple—I mean, straightforward. For example, witness Stephen Hawking’s most recent book, The Grand Design. The last paragraph of the book says this: “The fact that we human beings, who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature, have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph. If the theory is confirmed by observation”—namely M-theory, the latest iteration of 11-dimensional string theory—“it will be the successful conclusion of a search going back more than 3,000 years. We will have found the grand design.”

So the idea is that we’re only this far away. We just need to tweak those equations in the right way, and then we’ll know everything, somehow, about the structure of reality.

The Question of Consciousness

Now, the number two question on this list was: What is the biological basis of consciousness? And here, consciousness means, basically, what the heck is going on with us? I mean, what is our mind? What is our capacity to have mental experience—thoughts, feelings, awareness? And how is that connected to everything else we think we know about reality?

And again, the assumption is that whatever consciousness is, it is an emergent property of the brain. And if we just keep poking the brain and understand the brain based on the known laws of chemistry and physics, eventually it will all pop out of that in some way. That’s the working hypothesis of contemporary neuroscience.

And of course, there’s a huge effort made to better map the structure of nerve cells. These recent pictures are getting a lot of press: being able to label every cell in the brain with different kinds of colors and dyes, and actually figure out the connectivity. There’s, of course, a huge new federally funded program to map the functional connectivity of the brain. And this is all super cool stuff. It’s going to lead to a lot of very neat discoveries. Whether it’s going to actually solve the great question of where our capacity to have experience, where our consciousness, comes from—I wouldn’t put my money on that, just like I don’t think solving the equations of M-theory is going to give us the final answer to the nature of reality.

So, another approach here, that I’ve been involved with the last few years, as was mentioned: about 25 years ago, the Dalai Lama pointed out that his tradition of Tibetan Buddhism has been interested in the nature of the mind and the nature of reality for several thousand years, and that they’ve been thinking deeply about this from their own perspective of introspective analysis of things. And maybe it would be interesting to have some conversations with scientists who are coming from neuroscience and cognitive science and physics, and their perspectives on studying the nature of reality and mind. Maybe some interesting stuff would come from that. And a lot of interesting stuff has come from that.

These conversations have now become institutionalized and take place in a regular way. It’s spawned a lot of research with meditation and brain function and all of that, which is all very interesting. It has spawned programs of teaching science to monastics that I’ve been involved with. This is one of my classes in India: Tibetan monks learning about the brain. I think this will take us to some very interesting places.

Here’s one of my favorite ones: I’m teaching these guys about the blind spot. The blind spot is this place in our retina where, because of the nerve fibers exiting the retina to go to the brain, there aren’t any photoreceptors there. And so we actually have no vision. There’s a piece of the world where we don’t see anything, but we’re completely unaware of it; our brains have filled in that information. So you really have to trick yourself to be able to see the blind spot. And it’s a profound thing, that there are these kinds of gaps in our awareness that we’re completely oblivious to. These guys were very impressed by that. They didn’t know that they had these kinds of blind spots.

Poised for a Revolution

So I believe that science, the scientific worldview, is actually poised for a revolution. There hasn’t been one since quantum physics. And the revolution will embody new ways of appreciating connectivity.

Already, at every level, conventional science—pre-revolution, right now—is teaching us more and more about how interconnected things are. And the latest iteration of this, one late development of this, is the fact that we are symbiotic with gazillions of bacteria. By the most recent estimates, we have more cells in our own body—trillions of cells in our own body—that are bacterial cells living symbiotically with us. And we’re only scratching the surface of this.

This is an article that was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine several weeks ago, written by our own Michael Pollan here on campus, speaking to the complexity of what’s called the human microbiome: all of these trillions of bacteria, most of which have not been identified, that are symbiotically related to our functioning in some way. They really are part of us. And some of them have no doubt been developing over millions of years of connection.

So it’s an appreciation of these deeper levels of connection which will allow us to better tackle these problems like the water crisis. Because inevitably, hopefully, as we move toward places of deeper awareness of this connectivity, it will also promote us to develop ethics that respect that connectivity. And this is one of many places where there is a kind of convergence between science and religion, because religion is a lot about ethics.

A Global Worldview Crisis

So there is this global water crisis, and I believe that our conventional trajectory of more deeply appreciating these interconnections will allow us to better tackle that. However, in addition to that, I think there’s a global worldview crisis. And by a global worldview crisis, I mean that we have a number of different competing worldviews.

I’ve been talking about the scientific worldview. The scientific worldview is the idea that you can observe and describe and understand nature in more and more sophisticated ways that allow us to make predictions and invent things and deal with problems and so forth. And that worldview works really well. A lot of people adopt that worldview, either explicitly, like working scientists, or implicitly, because nearly everyone enjoys the benefits of science. You can have whatever kind of fundamentalist, whatever religion, in the middle of nowhere in the world: that person probably still has a cell phone. And that cell phone came from the scientific worldview. So there is that worldview, which is very powerful.

There are also a number of different religious worldviews, some of which are in competition with one another and are often cited as reasons for tensions between people, some of which go back millennia, and so forth. So there’s all this different worldview stuff.

And really, to go back to Professor Townes’s paper of 50 years ago: the idea that there might be a convergence—a coming together of different worldviews—and a new worldview that came out of that, that would truly allow the human spirit to flourish. I think this is something for which there’s a deep hunger among humans, and there’s every reason to believe that we can continue to move that way.

So, to finish up, going back to what I was talking about with the revolution in science: I believe that we’re actually on the cusp of whatever that next revolution is. And there are hints already, maybe, with all of these inexplicable things about physics. There are huge hints from my own field of cognitive science and neuroscience, because we don’t know stuff about the nature of mind. And the idea that by probing the brain more and more we’re going to actually get the final answer to where our consciousness comes from, and how that aspect of who we are is related to everything else in the universe—I don’t think this is going to happen. I think that it’s going to take a complete shift of paradigm in some way. I mean a true paradigm shift, in the Thomas Kuhnian sense, that we haven’t had since quantum physics.

And whatever this next big thing is in science, it will involve some kind of greater connectivity between fundamental physics and cognitive science, the science of mind and consciousness. And it will allow for an even deeper appreciation of connectivity in nature. And that deeper appreciation of connectivity will include a more sophisticated, nuanced understanding of the relationship between mind and matter, between the psyche and physical reality: a deeper appreciation of the fact that nature is somehow truly psychophysical, and that there is an intimate connection between who we are and what the rest of the universe is. And with that, hopefully, will come an ethic of more sophisticated understanding of the other kinds of environmental crises and so forth.

I really think that the biggest challenge of this century will be this emerging and deepening dialogue between science and religion, and between worldviews, and the fostering of a worldview that will truly allow us to flourish.

With that, I’ll end. So thank you, Professor Townes.

Transcribed from the video and lightly edited.