Two Scientists, Two Souls

Today, I encountered stories about two scientists that both have spiritual relevance.

Charles Townes

First of all, via Michelle Malkin, I learned that Nobel Laureate Charles Townes has won the Templeton Award, which, according to its web site is given to "a living individual who has shown extraordinary originality advancing the world's understanding of God and/or spirituality." According to Malkin, Townes "has spent decades as a leading advocate for the convergence of science and religion."

What does this mean? I'll let Townes clear that up. According to USA Today,

"I don't think that science is complete at all," says the 89-year-old physicist. "We don't understand everything and one can see, within science itself, there are many inconsistencies. We just have to accept that we don't understand."

Within the great unknowns of the universe, Townes argues there is ample room for faith in God and His presence in human experience.

Science is a specific field of human knowledge and is the one that most exemplifies respect for evidence and the most scrupulous adherence to logic. There's a reason that, as the USA Today article so euphemistically puts it,

For centuries, scientists and religious scholars have sparred over questions about the workings of the universe. Galileo's espousal of a sun-centered universe, rather than the earth-centered model widely accepted at the time, landed the 16th-century astronomer in court, accused of heresy. [italics mine]

Wipe your coffee off the screen and collect yourself. Yes. Robert Tuttle, the author of the piece, said "sparred" and neglected to mention that the "trial" was in fact in an ecclesiastical court in the Roman Inquisition. And Galileo's heretical views not only "landed [him] in court", they also "landed" him in house arrest until the day he died! And then there's that silly detail about these views "landing" his books into being banned by several European nations.

So why all the "sparring"? Because, although science, as a delimited field of human endeavor, can't answer philosophical questions (though it can shed light on some of them: take the nature of consciousness), its epistemological approach is the diametric opposite of that of religion. Faith is the acceptance of a belief unsupported by evidence or logic. Many claims made by religion, especially when it has the upper hand in a culture and starts trying to explain ordinary facts, can easily be made mincemeat of by science. And worse, if the light of reason can cast these claims into doubt, all the others become suspect as well. And when people start questioning religious tenets, the power of the church to run things diminishes. This is why the church, when it was the most powerful cultural force, tried its damnedest to, shall we say, "spar" science out of existence.

And that is why the Templeton Award exists today, and why such a big fuss is made whenever some opportunistic "scientist" pretends to have found evidence for some religious claim. Religion is weak as a cultural force today and needs the credibility that "useful 'geniuses'" like Townes can lend it. Don't underestimate the value of someone like him pretending that the limitations of science can be made up for only by faith, as if philosophy doesn't exist. Otherwise, why would religionists -- who always want donations -- be passing out the big bucks?

Francis Crick

Today's second story came by way of Arts & Letters Daily. Here, Oliver Sacks, one of my favorite authors, discusses his late friend, Francis Crick. In contrast with Townes, whose rationality seems limited to the field of physics, Crick's scientific interests knew no bounds. And, when confronted with man's lack of omniscience, Crick saw unlimited potential for further intellectual adventure. What does Townes do? He turns off his mind and lets the mystics tell him what to think. This is the scientific equivalent of pouting, picking up the ball, and going home when you realize that you have 95 yards, one down, and five seconds between your team and the winning touchdown.

But enough of sellouts. The Sacks article is very long and very good. Sacks is an extraordinarily gifted writer who manages to make scientific concepts understandable to the general reader. At the same time, he has a gift for capturing the essence of someone's personality in prose. Before I send you off to meet Francis Crick, let me give you a few samples.

Sacks, in his introductory three paragraphs, somehow manages to convey the immensity and originality of Crick's blazing intellect

I read the famous "double helix" letter by James Watson and Francis Crick in Nature when it was published in 1953 —I was an undergraduate at Oxford then, reading physiology and biochemistry. I would like to say that I immediately saw its tremendous significance, but this was not the case for me or, indeed, for most people at the time.

It was only in 1962, when Francis Crick came to talk at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, where I was interning, that I started to realize the vast implications of the double helix. Crick's talk at Mount Zion was not on the configuration of DNA but on the work he had been doing with the molecular biologist Sidney Brenner to determine how the sequence of DNA bases could specify the amino acid sequence in proteins. They had just shown, after four years of intense work, that the translation involved a three-nucleotide code. This was itself a discovery no less momentous than the discovery of the double helix. [emphasis added]

But Crick's mind was always moving forward, and clearly he had already moved on to other things. There were, he intimated in his talk, two "other things," great enterprises whose exploration lay in the future: understanding the origin and nature of life, and understanding the relation of brain and mind—in particular, the biological basis of consciousness. Did he have any inkling, any conscious thought, when he spoke to us in 1962, that these would be the very subjects he himself would address in the years to come, once he had "dealt with" molecular biology, or at least taken it to the stage where it could be delegated to others?

And this intellect personally awed the famous neurologist.

It was not until May of 1986 that I met Francis Crick, at a conference in San Diego. There was a big crowd, full of neuroscientists, but when it was time to sit down for dinner, Crick singled me out, seized me by the shoulders, sat me down next to him, and said, "Tell me stories!" I have no memory of what we ate, or anything else about the dinner, only that I told him stories about many of my patients, and that each one set off bursts of hypotheses, theories, suggestions for investigation in his mind. Writing to Crick a few days later, I said that the experience was "a little like sitting next to an intellectual nuclear reactor.... I never had a feeling of such incandescence."

The article is, of course, replete with such, and it also discusses some fascinating aspects of the neurobiological basis of perception that Sacks and Crick corresponded about off and on for nearly twenty years. These are all interesting in themselves, but also I said that Sacks captured the essence of Crick, the human being, so I'll provide some samples.

I didn't know that Crick's wife lent her artistic hand to his endeavors from time to time, or that they were together for over 50 years.

Though she did not join the conversation, I knew how closely Odile, an artist, followed all of Francis's work, if only from the fact that it was she who had drawn the double helix in the famous 1953 paper, and, fifty years later, a frozen runner, to illustrate the snapshot hypothesis in the 2003 paper that had so excited me.

And this I found this passage, in which Sacks discusses Crick's mentorship of the young scientist, Christof Koch, touching.

Francis's closest relationship, besides Odile, was clearly with Christof, his "son in science," and it was immensely moving to see how the two men, forty or more years apart in age, and so different in temperament and background, had come to respect and love one another so deeply. (Christof is romantically, almost flamboyantly, physical, given to dangerous rock climbing and brilliantly colored shirts. Francis seemed almost ascetically cerebral, his thinking so unswayed by emotional biases and considerations that Christof occasionally compared him to Sherlock Holmes.) Francis spoke with great pride, a father's pride, of Christof's then-forthcoming book The Quest for Consciousness, [footnote omitted] and then of "all the work we will do after it is published." He outlined the dozens of investigations, years of work, which lay ahead—work especially stemming from the convergence of molecular biology with systems neuroscience. I wondered what Christof was thinking, Ralph [M. Siegel, a neuroscientist] too, for it was all too clear to us (and must have been clear to Francis too) that his health was declining fast, and that he would never himself be able to see more than the beginning of that vast research scheme. Francis, I felt, had no fear of death, but his acceptance of it was tinged perhaps with sadness that he would not be alive to see the wonderful, almost unimaginable, scientific achievements of the twenty-first century. The central problem of consciousness and its neurobiological basis, he was convinced, would be fully understood, "solved," by 2030. "You will see it," he often said to Ralph, "and you may, Oliver, if you live to my age."

Crick, the intellectual adventurer who, even in his eighties, went in to the lab, faced life with a sense of adventure, and death with equanimity.

Go. Read this fantastic article. We live in an amazing universe that science enables us to appreciate more fully all the time. But remember that it is great souls like Crick's who will pay if, through lack of vigilance, we allow religionists to "spar" with them on the wrong terms. And if they pay, we all pay.

-- CAV