Science and Religion

[This lecture was delivered at the International Symposium of Abrahamic Unity, Cordoba, February 12-15 1987.]

1. Science as Anti-Religion

It is generally believed that science is anti-religion and that science and religion battle against each other for the minds of men. Is this correct? If there is one hall-mark of true science, if there is one perception that scientific knowledge heightens, it is the spirit of wonder; the deeper that one goes, the more profound one's insight, the more is one's sense of wonder increased. This sentiment was expressed eloquently in a verse by Fayd Ahmad Fayd:



Many a time to satisfy its curiosity,
I dissected the heart of many a particle.
But this eye of wonder;
Its wonder-sense is never assuaged.



Now in this context, Einstein, the most famous scientist of our century, wrote:

"The most beautiful experience we can have is of the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of ... true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -even if mixed with fear-that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. "


Einstein was born into one of the Abrahamic faiths; in his own view he was deeply religious.

Now this sense of wonder leads most scientists to a Superior Being -der Alte, as Einstein affectionately called the Deity, a Superior Intelligence, the Lord of all Creation and Natural Law -as indeed it does the devotees of Abrahamic religions. But then the differences start. The Abrahamic religions speak of a Lord who not only created the Natural Law and the Universe but also (1) created us, the human beings in His own image,endowing us not only with speech, but also with a spiritual life and spiritual longings; (2) the One who answers prayers; (3) the One who endows some humans with spiritual knowledge through revelation; (4) the One who in the eyes of the mystic and the sufi, personifies eternal beauty and is to be adored for this; (5) the One who is also the Guardian of the Moral Law; (6) the Lord who specifies ideal human conduct and (7) the Lord who punishes wrongdoing, either in this world, or in the hereafter.Finally, Abrahamic religions claim to provide a meaning to the mystery of life and death.

Not all scientists would subscribe to all these attributes of the Divinity. Indeed in this respect, the scientists fall into gradations.

Let us start with natural laws, which govern the universe. There are some scientists who would take issue with Einstein in that they would like to deduce the laws of nature such that these laws follow a self-consistency principle through which the universe came into being and evolved spontaneously. This would be something like the doctrine of spontaneous creation of life and its Darwinian evolution, only now carried to the realm of all laws of nature. If successful, this in their view, would lead to an irrelevance of a deity. Man's spiritual dimension, in this view (items 1-3), is nothing but a particular manifestation of the psychological processes occuring inside the human brain. Opposing this is the view of the anthropomorphic scientist who believes that the universe was created purposefully which such attributes and such a manner that sentient beings could arise. I shall return to these conflicting viewpoints later.

Consider the next gradation, for example, Einstein's attitude towards the Lord of Moral Law and to life after death (items 5-7). In one of his writings, Einstein says: "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts..."

"The existence and validity of human rights are not written in the stars. The ideals concerning the conduct of men towards each other and the desirable structure of the community have been conceived and taught by enlightened individuals in the course of history."

Thus if religion is the sense of wonder plus morality plus ideal human conduct, then Einstein was only partly religious. He says: "I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvellous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny of the Reason that manifests Itself in nature."

Note Einstein's silence about the spiritual dimension of religion.

2. Modern Science and Faith

In forming such attitudes towards religion, could it be that the medieval Church was partly responsible? Could it be that these attitudes are a legacy of the battles of yesterday when the so-called 'rational philosophers', with their irrational and dogmatic faith in the cosmological doctrines they had inherited from Aristotle found difficulties in reconciling these with their faith, as well as the over-emphasis in some theological thought on items like (6) and (7)?

One must remind oneself that the battle of faith and science was fiercely waged among the schoolmen of the Middle Ages. The problems which concerned the schoolmen were mainly problems of cosmology and metaphysics: 'Is the world located in an immobile place; does anything lie beyond it? Does God move the primum mobile directly and actively as an efficient cause, or only as a final and ultimate cause? Are all the heavens moved by one mover or several? Do celestial movers experience exhaustion or fatigue? What was the nature of celestial matter? Was it like terrestrial matter in possessing inherent qualities such as being hot, cold, moist and dry? When Galileo tried, first, to classify those among the problems which legitimately belonged to the domain of physics, and then to find answers only to those through physical experimentation, he was persecuted. Restitution for this is, however, being made now, three hundred and fifty years later.



At a special ceremony in the Vatican on 9 May 1983, the Pope declared: "The Church's experience, during the Galileo affair and after it, has led to a more mature attitude... The Church herself learns by experience and reflection and she now understands better the meaning that must be given to freedom of research... one of the noblest attributes of man... It is through research that man attains to Truth... This is why the Church is convinced that there can be no real contradiction between science and faith... (However) it is only through humble and assiduous study that (the Church) learns to dissociate the essential of the faith from the scientific systems of a given age, specially when a culturally influenced reading of the Bible seemed to be linked to an obligatory cosmogony."

3. The Limitations of Science

In the remarks I have quoted, the Pope stressed the maturity which the Church had reached in dealing with science; he could equally have emphasized the converse -the recognition by the scientists from Galileo's times onwards, of the limitations of their disciplines -the recognition that there are questions that are beyond the ken of present and even future sciences and that "science has achieved its success by limiting itself to a certain type of inquiry."

We may speculate about some of them, but there may be no way to verify empirically our speculations. And it is this empirical verification that is the essence of modern science. We are humbler today than, for example, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) was. Ibn Rushd was a physician of great originality with major contributions in the study of fevers and of the retina; this is one of his claims to scientific immortality. However, in a different scientific discipline -cosmology- he accepted the speculations of Aristotle, without recognizing that these were speculations, and that future experiments may prove them false. The scientist of today knows when and where he is speculating; he would claim no finality for the associated modes of thought. And even about accepted facts, we recognize that newer facts may be discovered which, without falsifying the earlier discoveries, may lead to generalizations, in turn, necessitating revolutionary changes in our concepts and our world view. In physics this happened twice in the beginning of this century, first with the discovery of relativity of time and space, and secondly with quantum theory. It could happen again; with our present constructs appearing as limiting cases of newer concepts, still more comprehensive and embracing.

Permit me to elaborate on this.

I have mentioned the revolution in the physicists' concepts of the relativity of time. It appears incredible that the length of a time interval depends on one's speed, the faster we move, the longer we appear to live to somebody who is not moving with us. And this is not a figment of one's fancy. Come to the particle physics laboratories of CERN at Geneva which produce short-lived particles like muons, or the laboratories here at Orsay, and make a record of the intervals of time which elapse before muons of different speeds decay into electrons and neutrinos. The faster muons take longer to die, the slower ones die early, precisely in accord with the quantitative law of relativity of time first enunciated by Einstein in 1905.

Einstein's ideas on time and space brought about a revolution in the physicists' thinking. We had to abandon our earlier modes of thought in physics. In this context it always surprises me that the professional philosopher who in the nineteenth century and earlier used to consider space and time as his special preserve has somehow failed to erect any philosophical systems based on Einstein's notions so far!

The second and potentially the more explosive revolution in thought came in 1926 with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This principle concerns the existence of a conceptual limitation on our knowledge. It affirms, for example, that no physical measurements can tell you that there is an electron on this table and also that it is lying still. Experiments can be made to discover where the electron is; these experiments will then destroy any possibility of finding simultaneously whether the electron is moving and if so at what speed. And conversely, there is an inherent limitation on our knowledge, which appears to have been decreed in the nature of things. I shudder to think what might have happened to Heisenberg if he was born in the middle ages -just what theological battles might have raged on whether there was a like limitation on the knowledge possessed by God.

As it was, battles were fought, but within the twentieth century physics community. Heisenberg's revolutionary thinking -supported by all known experiments -has not been accepted by all physicists. The most illustrious physicist of all times, Einstein, spent the best part of his life trying to find flaws in Heisenberg's arguments. He could not gainsay the experimental evidence, but he hoped that such evidence may perhaps be explained within a different theoretical framework. Such framework has not been found so far. Will it never be discovered?

4. Faith and Science

But is the thinking of today really on a collision course with metaphysical thinking? The problem, if any, is not peculiar to the faith of Islam. The problem is one of science and faith in general, at least in the Abrahamic religions. Can science and faith, at the least, live together in "harmonious complementarity"? Let us consider some relevant examples of modern scientific thinking.

My first example concerns the metaphysical doctrine of the creation from nothing. Today, a growing number of cosmologists believe that the most likely value for the density of matter and energy in the universe is such that the mass of the universe adds up to zero, precisely. The mass of the universe is defined as the sum of the masses and energies of the electrons, the protons, photons and neutrinos which constitute the universe minus an expression for their mutual gravitational energies. If the mass of the universe is indeed zero -and this is an empirically determinable quantity -the universe shares with the vacuum state the property of masslessness. A bold extrapolation made ten years back then treats the universe as a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum -of the state of nothingness. What distinguishes physics from metaphysics however is that by measuring the density of matter in the universe we shall know empirically whether the idea can be sustained in the physicist's sense. If it cannot be, we shall discard it.

My second example is the principle of the anthropic universe -the assertion by some cosmologists that one way to understand the processes of cosmology, geology, biochemistry and biology is to assume that our universe was conceived in potential conditions and with physical laws which possess all the necessary ingredients for the emergence of life and intelligent beings. "Basically this potentially relies on a complex relationship between the expansion and the cooling of the universe, after the Big Bang, on the behavior of the free energy of matter, and on the intervention of chance at various levels", as well as a number of coincidences which, for example, have permitted the universe to survive a few billion years.

Consider some of the elements of this story as told by Carr, Rees and Reeves. The universe started with the Big Bang; as it expanded and thereby cooled, quarks bound themselves through the well known physical forces into nucleons, these with electrons into atoms, and the atoms into galaxies and stars.

"It is of interest to note that stars can form only if they can emit light and heat and emission of light and heat can only take place in a cold universe. This is guaranteed by the expansion itself. If the universe were to stop expanding all structure -including living structures -would be dismantled. If the night were not dark, there would be no one to notice it".


Now nuclear binding energy should proceed by reaching for the lowest possible stable state. "Nuclear binding -on a cosmic scale- however stops short of reaching this lowest state. In principle Big Bang nucleosynthesis could have yielded a world of iron. In fact we hardly go past helium in the table of nuclei. Why? Because the number of relativistic particles created per unit volume was not high enough." Equilibrium ceased before nuclear evolution reached its lowest state. Did this happen because iron is hardly an appropriate element to promote life?

"Next we come to a second chapter of organization of matter. The first chapter, from the Big Bang to the birth of the first stars, is a chapter of global organization following the decline of cosmic temperature. The second chapter witnesses the rise of complexity in a local scale around the multitude of stars, with their hot interiors and warm surroundings."

The stars formed according to standard cosmological laws: they exploded whenever they were larger than a certain size. This time however heavier nuclei were formed, "generating ices, ammonia, methane, water, complex molecules, and grains of dust of iron-magnesium silicate. And around a later generation of stars these grains and ices gave birth to planets with atmospheres and oceans into which chemical evolution pursued its course."


"Is the future of the universe, and in particular the course of events, leading to this organization, implicitly written down in the laws of physics from the very beginning?" It appears not; the chemist and the biologist tell us that the "physical processes have not always been in equilibrium -we have a large number of energetically equivalent states, and it is between these states that the game of organization takes place, largely through the effect of chance," chance, presumably guided and driven by the biologists' principle of "need for survival."

Howsoever the biochemist and the biologist may understand the role of chance in the evolution of the universe, the equilibrium physicist tries to understand the coincidences that I mentioned, in terms of the twin principles of 'self-consistency' and 'naturalness'. This I will illustrate through a third example, through something I am currently working on myself.

As an extension of the recent excitement in physics -that is of our success in unifying and establishing the identity of two of the fundamental forces of Nature, the electric and the weak nuclear -we are now considering the possibility that space-time may have ten dimensions. Within this context we hope to unify the electroweak force and the remaining two forces, the force of gravity and the strong nuclear force. Of the ten dimensions which we have postulated, four are the familiar dimensions of space and time. The other six dimensions are supposed to correspond to a hidden internal manifold -hidden because these six dimensions are assumed to have curled in upon themselves to fantastically tiny dimensions of the order of 10^-33 cm. We live on the surface of a cylinder in the ten dimensional space-time: our major source of sensory apprehension of these extra dimensions being the existence of familiar charges, electric and nuclear, which in their turn produce the familiar electric and nuclear forces.

Exciting idea, which may or may not work quantitatively. But one question already arises: Why the difference between the four familiar space-time dimensions and the six internal ones? And why ten dimensions in the first place, and not a wholesome number like thirteen or nineteen? Were all the ten dimensions on par with each other at the beginning of time? Why have the six curled in upon themselves, while the other four have not? At present, we may make this plausible by postulating a self-consistency principle. But there will be a price to pay. There will be subtle physical consequences of this hypothesis, for example, in the form of remnants, like the three degree radiation which we believe was a remnant of the recombination era following on the Big Bang. We shall search for these remnants. If we do not find them, we shall abandon the idea.

Creation from nothing, an anthropic universe, extra dimensions -strange topics for late twentieth century physics, which appear no different from the metaphysical preoccupations of earlier times. But so far as science is concerned, mark the provisional nature of the conceptual edifice, the insistence of empirical verification at each stage and the concept of driving self-consistency.

For the agnostic, self-consistency (if successful) may connote irrelevance of a deity; for the believer, it provides than an unravelling of a small part of the Lord's design; its profundity, in the areas it illuminates, only enhances his reverence for the beauty of the design itself. In this context let me remark that I find the creationist creed insulting in that while we are willing to ascribe subtlety to ourselves in devising these self-consistency modalities, the only subtlety we are willing to ascribe to the Lord is that of the potter's art -kneading clay and fashioning it into man. I do not see why once having created certain attributes within matter, and the laws which govern the operation of the fundamental forces, the path we follow in physics is not creationism in the wider sense.

Heinz Pagels recounts the following story about Feynman, one of the great physicists of our times, perhaps the greatest physicist alive. "He was in a sensory deprivation tank and had an exosomatic experience -he felt that he 'came out of his body' and saw the body lying before him. To test the reality of his experience he tried moving his arm, and indeed he saw his arm on his body move. As he described this, he said he then became concerned that he might remain out of his body and decided to return to it. After he concluded his story, I asked him what he made of his unusual experience. Feynman replied with the observational precision of a true scientist: 'I didn't see no laws of physics getting violated."

I have myself never seen any dichotomy between my faith and my science, since faith was predicated for me by the timeless spiritual message of Islam, on matters on which physics is silent. It was given meaning to by the very first verse of the Holy Quran after the Opening:

This is the Book, Wherein there is no doubt, A guidance to the God-fearing, Who believe in the Unseen.

"The Unseen", "beyond the reach of human ken", "the Unknowable". The original Arabic words are yu-minuna bil ghaib.

As my last thought, I would like to quote again from the Holy Book -a Book, the very sounds of which, in the words of Marmaduke Pickthall, "move men to tears and ecstasy". More than anything else I know of, it speaks of the eternal wonder and the cognizances of the spiritual dimension which I believe is the true message of Abrahamic faiths and their true glory:

And if all the trees in the earth were pens,and the sea, with seven more seas to help it, (were ink), the words of Allah could not be exhausted. Lo! Allah is Mighty, Wise. (31:27)