Broca's Brain: The Romance of Science

suppressed, the history of religion in the West might have been very different-or at any rate we would have seen less of the pretension that theological doctrine can be convincingly demonstrated by rational argument to those who reject alleged divine revelation, as Aquinas attempted in the Summa Contra Gentiles.

When Newton explained the motion of the planets by the universal theory of gravitation, it no longer was necessary for angels to push and pummel the planets about. When Pierre Simon, the Marquis de Laplace, proposed to explain the origin of the solar system-although not the origin of matter-in terms of physical laws as well, even the necessity for a god involved in the origins of things seemed profoundly challenged. Laplace is said to have presented an edition of his seminal mathematical work Mecanique celeste to Napoleon aboard ship in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt, 1798 to 1799. A few days later, so the story goes, Napoleon complained to Laplace that he had found no mention of God in the text. [19] Laplace’s response has been recorded: “Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.” The idea of God as a hypothesis rather than as an obvious truth is by and large a modern idea in the West-although it was certainly discussed seriously and wryly by the Ionian philosophers of 2,400 years ago.

It is often considered that at least the origin of the universe requires a God-indeed, an Aristotelian idea. [20] This is a point worth looking at in a little more detail. First of all, it is perfectly possible that the universe is infinitely old and therefore requires no Creator. This is consistent with existing knowledge of cosmology, which permits an oscillating universe in which the events since the Big Bang are merely the latest incarnation in an infinite series of creations and destructions of the universe. But secondly, let us consider the idea of a universe created somehow from nothing by God. The question naturally arises-and many ten-year-olds spontaneously think of it before being discouraged by their elders-where does God come from? If we answer that God is infinitely old or present simultaneously in all epochs, we have solved nothing, except perhaps verbally. We have merely postponed by one step coming to grips with the problem. A universe that is infinitely old and a God that is infinitely old are, I think, equally deep mysteries. It is not readily apparent why one should be considered more reliably established than the other. Spinoza might have said that the two possibilities are not really different ideas at all.

I think it is wise, when coming face to face with such profound mysteries, to feel a little humility. The idea that scientists or theologians, with our present still puny understanding of this vast and awesome cosmos, can comprehend the origins of the universe is only a little less silly than the idea that Mesopotamian astronomers of 3,000 years ago-from whom the ancient Hebrews borrowed, during the Babylonian captivity, the cosmological accounts in the first chapter of Genesis-could have understood the origins of the universe. We simply do not know. The Hindu holy book, the Rig Veda (X:129), has a much more realistic view of the matter:

Who knows for certain? Who shall here declare it?

Whence was it born, whence came creation?

The gods are later than this world’s formation;

Who then can know the origins of the world?

None knows whence creation arose;

And whether he has or has not made it;

He who surveys it from the lofty skies,

Only he knows-or pernaps he knows not.

But the times we live in are very interesting ones. Questions of origins, including some questions relating to the origin of the universe, may in the next few decades be amenable to experimental inquiry. There is no conceivable answer to the grand cosmological questions which will not resonate with the religious sensibilities of human beings. But there is a chance that the answers will discomfit a great many bureaucratic and doctrinal religions. The idea of religion as a body of belief, immune to criticism, fixed forever by some founder is, I think, a prescription for the long-term decay of the religion, especially lately. In questions of origins and ends, the religious and the scientific sensibilities have much the same objectives. Human beings are built in such a way that we passionately wish to answer these questions-perhaps because of the mystery of our own individual origins. But our contemporary scientific insights, while limited, are much deeper than those of our Babylonian predecessors of 1,000 B.C. Religions unwilling to accommodate to change, both scientific and social, are, I believe, doomed. A body of belief cannot be alive and relevant, vibrant and growing, unless it is responsive to the most serious criticism that can be mustered against it.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution encourages a diversity of religions but does not prohibit criticism of religion. In fact it protects and encourages criticism of religion. Religions ought to be subject to at least the same degree of skepticism as, for example, contentions about UFO visitations or Velikovskian catastrophism. I think it is healthy for the religions themselves to foster skepticism about the fundamental underpinnings of their evidential bases. There is no question that religion provides a solace and support, a bulwark in time of emotional need, and can serve extremely useful social roles. But it by no means follows that religion should be immune from testing, from critical scrutiny, from skepticism. It is striking how little skeptical discussion of religion there is in the nation that Tom Paine, the author of The Age of Reason, helped to found. I hold that belief systems that cannot survive scrutiny are probably not worth having. Those that do survive scrutiny probably have at least important kernels of truth within them.

Religion used to provide a generally accepted understanding of our place in the universe. That surely has been one of the major objectives of myth and legend, philosophy and religion, as long as there have been human beings. But the mutual confrontation of differing religions and of religion with science has eroded those traditional views, at least in the minds of many. [21] The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves-without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster. We cannot begin with an entirely clean slate, since we arrive at this problem with predispositions of hereditary and environmental origin; but, after understanding such built-in biases, is it not possible to pry insights from nature?

Proponents of doctrinal religions-ones in which a particular body of belief is prized and infidels scorned-will be threatened by the courageous pursuit of knowledge. We hear from such people that it may be dangerous to probe too deeply. Many people have inherited their religion like their eye color: they consider it not a thing to think very deeply about, and in any case beyond our control. But those with a set of beliefs they profess to feel deeply about, which they have selected without an unbiased sifting through the facts and the alternatives, will feel uncomfortably challenged by searching questions. Anger at queries about our beliefs is the body’s warning signal: here lies unexamined and probably dangerous doctrinal baggage.

Christianus Huygens wrote a remarkable book around 1670 in which bold and prescient speculations were made about the nature of the other planets in the solar system. Huygens was well aware that there were those who held such speculations and his astronomical observations objectionable: “But perhaps they’ll say,” Huygens mused, “it does not become us to be so curious and inquisitive in these Things which the Supreme Creator seems to have kept for his own Knowledge: For since he has not been pleased to make any farther Discovery or Revelation of them, it seems little better than presumption to make any inquiry into that which he has thought fit to hide. But these Gentlemen must be told,” Huygens then thundered, “that they take too much upon themselves when they pretend to appoint how far and no farther Men shall go in their Searches, and to set bounds to other Mens Industry; as if they knew the Marks that God has placed to Knowledge: or as if Men were able to pass those Marks. If our Forefathers had been at this rate scrupulous, we might have been ignorant still of the Magnitude and Figure of the Earth, or that there was such a place as America.”

If we look at the universe in the large, we find something astonishing. First of all, we find a universe that is exceptionally beautiful, intricately and subtly constructed. Whether our appreciation of the universe is because we are a part of that universe-whether, no matter how the universe were put together, we would have found it beautiful-is a proposition to which I do not pretend to have an answer. But there is no question that the elegance of the universe is one of its most remarkable properties. At the same time, there is no question that there are cataclysms and catastrophes occurring regularly in the universe and on the most awesome scale. There are, for example, quasar explosions which probably decimate the nuclei of galaxies. It seems likely that every time a quasar explodes, more than a million worlds are obliterated and countless forms of life, some of them intelligent, are utterly destroyed. This is not the traditional benign universe of conventional religiosity in the West, constructed for the benefit of living and especially of human beings. Indeed, the very scale of the universe-more than a hundred