The following is an exchange between one of the listeners to the Sufi Reflections podcast and myself in relation to the most recent podcast Commentary on Science and Faith.


On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:45 PM, Anonymous <noreply-comment@blogger.com> wrote:

Assalam Aleikum ,

Dear Anab,

I listened with attention to the latest podcast of Sufi reflexion which is one of my favourites podcasts.

I noticed in this particular episode you touched on so many deep subjects most would probably need hours of treatment to do them justice.

While I was listening to you giving a list of currently unsolved scientific problems, I was waiting with anticipation to find out what the overall point you were making. I have to admit I was left puzzled when you got to the end conclusion which was basically saying that those questions might or might not be answered and for few of them you thought –as a matter of faith- they would not be answers without giving any reasons of that. 

So I guess am not sure what your exact attitude to science is, do you think it is a valid way of gaining knowledge about the world that should be encouraged? If yes, am I wrong in sensing a hint of scepticism and distrust towards the scientific enterprise? 

One could have a drawn a longer list of scientific problem few centuries ago only to find out that many of those questions were answered after all. So I guess what I am saying is that the trend seems to be that science over time tends the bridge the gaps in human understanding. Should then optimism rather than pessimism be the outlook on the remaining questions?

My other comment is with regard to the distinction between ontology of things in physical world and the scientific models that describe the physical reality. I felt this was a trivial point, and if I may, a straw man argument against scientists. I don’t know many serious scientists who claim that mathematical models of physics theories describe the ontological structure of reality.

Many maintain that the best a scientific model can do is give predication of experimental outcomes with as much generality and precision as possible. Asking what is the “real” ontology of time for example is a meaningless question as far as science goes. The only thing science can talk about is the measurement of time.

Finally with regards to evolution I felt that was also –sorry- a straw man, evolutionary biology does not affirm anything about the origins of life, rather it affirms that the notion that species evolving one from another is backed up by overwhelming scientific evidence. This has no bearing on what the initial source of life is which is acknowledged to be a mystery by most scientists. 

My personal view is that there should not be a conflict between faith and science, science is simply attempting to understand God’s way of creation and continuation of the natural world. And I see it as a gift from God that he created the world to be intelligible in the first place, so that we reflect in his creation. So I guess I feel a bit strange when people of faith express suspicion of science rather than embracing it wholeheartedly.

I don’t mean to be critical, this is really in a spirit of curiosity and exchange of ideas. I might have missed to understand some nuances in your ideas, in which case I hope you’d indulge me in pointing that out.

Muhamed 

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Dear Muhamed,

Wa 'alaykum as-Salaam! 

I don't mind that people may be critical of, or disagree with, whatever might be said in any of the Sufi Reflections Podcast.The whole idea of the podcast is to offer 'food for thought' -- and people often digest food in different ways or, sometimes, care more for certain kinds of food tidbits which might be served via the podcast than for other dishes which have been cooked up.

First, I should say, that the latest podcast contained only Part 1 of the, ah-hmm, Briefs Commentary. Part 2 may help to clarify my position and, in the process, answer some of your questions ... or, possibly, not ... we will both have to wait and see what happens on that score.

By way of a mini-preview, however, I will say that toward the end of Part 2, I do indicate that I have a love of both science and spirituality and that each activity constitutes a symmetry group -- which, to a degree, I try to explain in as non-technical a way as I can in that second part of the Commentary. So, the point of the exercise, so to speak, was not to trash science but to lend some perspective in relation to the nature and, yes, very real limitations of science ... at least, as presently conceived. 

I did indicate toward the end of Part 1 that all of the Hilbert-like problems which I was posing in the Commentary might be solved within the next hundred years or so ... just as had been the case, with a few exceptions, in relation to the Hilbert challenge of early last century. On the other hand, I also noted that I had my doubts about the capacity of science -- as presently practiced and understood (which is largely a physical/material set of disciplines) -- to be able to solve the origins problems involving such phenomena as: consciousness, intelligence, language, logic, reason, creativity, or spirituality ... and such problems are much more important to most people than what science actually knows -- and I am not trying to be dismissive of the tremendous accomplishments which have taken place through science over the last 600 or 700 years.

I agree with Shakespeare when he wrote: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophies." The universe is not just a function of material processes ... and, in fact, as more and more is discovered about the universe, it is becoming harder and harder for scientists to even state -- with any clarity and consistency -- what they mean by ideas such as: matter, energy, or force, or what matter, energy, and force have to do with consciousness, intelligence, creativity, spirituality, and the like.

I also indicated in Part 1 -- or maybe it is Part 2 and I am getting ahead of myself -- that while science, as a coping strategy, makes sense culturally, it does not necessarily always make sense individually. And, what I mean by this, is that individuals can't wait for science to produce solutions to the sorts of origins problems I noted in relation to the nature of human beings. 

We live, on average, 73 years. Many people are on Earth for less time.

We all are faced with the problems entailed by existence. We all have questions about: who we are, and where do we come from, and why are we here, and what is our potential -- questions for which science -- at least at the present time -- has almost no verifiable answers  ... although there is no shortage of psychological, sociological, anthropological, and biological theories concerning such issues.

Moreover - and I say this on the basis of having spent many years working in educational settings, of one kind or another, and on the basis of having read many, many books by scientists, and on the basis of quite a few conversations over the decades -- many (but not all) scientists are quite arrogant and biased when it comes to issues of faith and spirituality ... and to be fair about the matter, maybe such arrogance and bias is a reaction to the considerable arrogance and bias which many people of religion have shown with respect to a variety of topics. Many people of faith often seem to be intimidated by the razzle-dazzle of scientific and mathematical formulae, or scientific theories, and all too many scientists are quite willing to bully such people in an attempt to force the people of faith to cower before the attempts of such scientists to give the impression that the latter group necessarily knows more than it actually does.

I posed my Hilbert-like challenge to let people of faith know that things are not quite so black and white as some scientists would like to give the impression is the case. Among other things, this means pointing out that faith often plays as much a role in science as it does in spirituality.

I touched upon this point to a degree in Part 1. God willing, this will be developed more in Part 2.

Life is a faith-based initiative. This is true whether one is a scientist or just an ordinary individual.

Without having to abandon a cultural, long-term coping strategy of sticking with the scientific method, individuals -- because of their relatively short time here on Earth -- are necessarily required to take some "short-cuts" which might be frowned upon in scientific circles, but in terms of risk-management decision theory can, nonetheless, be justified. This doesn't mean that one should bow down to every piece of theology which comes along, but it does mean that one must go about the evaluative process in a slightly different way.

By citing the origins problems that I do, I am more or less pointing out to listeners that there is, at the present time, a great deal which science and scientists do not know and have not discovered. Moreover, irrespective of whether, or not, science and scientists are actually able to solve any of the origins problems which I very briefly described in Part 1, the fact is that right now, scientists have no answers for those problems, and in the absence of such determinations, people of faith should not be intimidated by science or scientists because in relation to such issues, they are in, more or less, the same boats of ignorance as the rest of us are in. 

The answers to: life, identity, purpose, wisdom, and potential will not be found in science as presently conceived. On the other hand, I do believe there is a science to spirituality and, moreover, as I point out in Part 2, there is, believe it or not, a considerable overlap between the two methodologies when each is properly pursued.

I don't have a problem with anyone being interested in science. Moreover, I have a great deal of respect for the process of science -- especially, when real science permits one to point out the problems with "junk science" that populates all too much  of the landscape in chemical, pharmaceutical, health, and environmental research.

But, one of the thrusts of Part 1 of the Commentary, is that one should not look to science to provide answers for the kinds of questions which are of most fundamental importance to human beings. Not only don't scientists have such answers, but, in almost all respects, they are -- as indicated above -- as much in the dark about such matters as most of the rest of us are.

So, I hope that the foregoing helps put things in, perhaps, a slightly better perspective than may have been the case with the podcast -- although all of the foregoing points do appear, to one degree or another, in Part 1. Moreover, I feel that an even more nuanced perspective on such matters will be forthcoming in Part 2 of the Commentary.

I agree with you that things came to a sort of abrupt halt in Part 1. However, the Commentary was already more than an hour and fifteen minutes long, and I was afraid that all of the listeners who weren't already asleep might just doze off if anything more was said at that time, and, this is why I indicated there would be a Part 2 to the Commentary.

As far as the specific criticisms that you noted toward the end of your posting are concerned, there are a few things which could be said. For example, in relation to your comments about evolutionary biology, I don't reject the idea of population biology in which one can calculate quite precisely how such things as changes in DNA sequence or changes in anatomical/behavioral character can be propagated throughout, or extinguished in, a population in a given set of circumstances and over a certain period of time.

Furthermore, you are quite right to point out that the foregoing has nothing to say about the origins of life issue and, oddly enough, this is just my point. Evolution is not a complete theory in any way near the sense in which the Standard Model in quantum physics is a complete theory ... and even in the latter case, we are playing a little loosely with language because until one can incorporate gravitation into the 'Standard Model' and until one can explain, from first principles, why the physical constants have the values they do, then, in many ways the so-called 'Standard Model' of quantum physics is also incomplete.

Such limitations of the Standard Model for quantum physics notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that the scientific status of evolutionary biology compared to the scientific status of standard model quantum physics is as the babblings of a pre-linguistic child are to the musings of a ten year old. While there may be overwhelming scientific evidence for the truths of population biology, there is underwhelming scientific evidence that life originated through purely random, material processes in a pre-biotic environment.

Unfortunately -- and I have had considerable experience in this regard -- anyone today who claims that evolutionary theory does not explain the origin of life will often be met with a wall of ridicule and sarcasm which seeks to bring into question the sanity and rationality of such an individual. And, yet, when I begin to raise questions about problems with evolutionary theory in connection with the origin of life, people just want to talk about neo-Darwinian theory in conjunction with population biology. 

There was a documentary movie called "The Fog of War' which was, among other things, about Robert MaNamara -- Secretary of Defense for Lyndon Johnson -- who said that one of the rules for controlling a discussion is to never answer the question that you are asked, but rather, answer the question that you wished you had been asked. Every evolutionist to whom I have ever talked wants to make every question a function of neo-Darwinian ideas about population biology, and none of them wants to talk about pre-biotic chemistry and the considerable set of mysteries concerning how biological systems arose out of non-biological precursors.

My "straw dog" as you would have it is a Rottweiler that won't let go of the meat in the issue. The bite goes to the bone of things -- namely, evolutionary biology has absolutely no plausible account for how life began ... in fact, evolutionary biology has no plausible account for how human beings are capable of consciousness, intelligence, reasoning, insight, inventiveness, creativity, or spirituality ... in fact, evolutionary biology only really works if one presupposes the existence of a set of functional genes and cannot explain how that set of genes came to be functional in the first place.

As far as your concerns about the issue of ontological models is concerned, one needs to search no further than Stephen Hawking's most recent book: The Grand Design which claims that one doesn't need anything more than the appropriate form of M-theory (first proposed by Ed Witten, and some people think that the 'M' symbolizes an upside down W) to account for the universe. Many other approaches to string theory are very ontologically oriented, as well, and believe -- without a lick of evidence one might add to support their hypothesis -- that string theory explains the universe. 

While I have read about scientists -- such as Richard Feynman, and I mentioned this in Part 1 of the Commentary -- who have quite candidly stated that nobody really understands what is going on on the quantum level and that one should just do the calculations necessary to solve specific problems, nonetheless, there are a great many other scientists, such as Hawking, who believe that their theories are not just theories but are reflections of the structural nature of the universe. In fact, there are even some theoretical physicists who believe that the ultimate nature of reality is mathematical and not necessarily physical.

Why do you think physicists were in near panic mode prior to people like Gerard t'Hooft, Julian Schwinger, and others came up with a mathematical technique for getting rid of infinities for quantum electrodynamics, and are still uncomfortable that a similar technique has not been devised for getting rid of the infinities associated with calculations in quantum chromodynamics? They were concerned because they believe the mathematical model should reflect the structure of reality, and when this is not the case, it usually leads to anomalies that create pressure for a new theory to be developed.

When the Dirac equation suggested that a particle -- latter to be known as a 'positron' -- should exist, and, then, people went out looking for evidence of such a particle, and, then, a few years later uncovered experimental evidence that, indeed, the particle did exist, this was taken as confirmation of the ontological properties of the Dirac equation. Although, at the same time, Dirac's ontological explanation for why the positron exists -- and this has to do with his theory about the structural character of space -- has its problems.

When people talk about the weird properties that ensue from special relativity, they are not talking mathematically, but ontologically. In fact, they have come across data confirming that the decay rate of certain particles or the readings on atomic clocks are affected in a way that is related to the strength of the gravitational field and the velocity of the frame of reference in which they exist. 

I believe, that the latter observations are not reflective of the ontology of time but are a reflection of the manner in which measuring devices record such phenomena. Nonetheless, that difference in interpretation is about the ontological character of what is going on. 

Many, if not most, scientists believe that the importance of special relativity is not just that it provides a way to translate calculations from one frame of reference to another via the Lorentz transformation but that it tells us something about the ontological character of time -- namely, that time is something which is capable of being altered such that people in inertial frames of reference will experience time and space differently depending on the kind of forces of gravity and/or velocity that are acting on them.

I don't believe this. I believe that all that is being altered is the means of measuring temporal duration and that such methods say absolutely nothing about the ontological character of time except that it can be differentially engaged by a variety of measuring devices that are sensitive to the physical conditions in which they exist.

So, I would respectfully disagree with you that the foregoing sorts of consideration don't matter or that they don't figure into the ontological perspective of many scientists. Consequently, I don't believe the issue is a straw dog at all but one which points out very real differences in ontological perspectives and world views.

I hope the foregoing has been helpful, and I am happy that you like the podcast. I hope you still like it after the next podcast and that some of your questions will be answered then. 

I agree with you that there need not be a conflict between science and faith. However, I would stipulate that the kind of science and the kind of faith one has will go a long way toward either eliminating such conflicts or creating them.

Anab