The 'God' gene, continued

So, let's assume that some lucky scientist actually finds a scientific rather than faith-based proof of the existence of God. Hey, let's go one better and assume that Anne and I are the lucky scientists (we want the Nobel prize money and the appearances on Colbert)! For the moment, let's just say we proved that God is something person-like (whether or not He/She/It has various unmentionable organs, hands to be on the right side of, form to be the image and likeness of, or eyes for us to be pleasing to the sight of.

Now, what would the impact of that be for science?

Of course, the immediate impact would be great relief that we will, after all, have an after life, assuming we don't use our science for greedy or harmful purposes (well, that may exclude a lot of us from the pearly gates).

First, the God we prove might act in a deist way: He/She/It created the Universe, gave it some laws to run by, and let it the go off on its own without further intervention. This, after all, is a concession that some scientists, even Darwin, have made to religion as a possibility. In that case, the nature of science would not change one iota. We would just, for self-praise, newsiness, and grantsmanship, change our rhetoric to say that we propose this or that study to understand God's laws--think of the 'significance' section of our grants!! But novel? Not a bit of it! That was what the greats like Newton were explicitly doing centuries ago.

Alternatively, we might say that God did create things-as-they-are, and that our job is to characterize the mind of God in that way, but that occasionally God intervenes in mundane affairs. He/She/It might do so in answer to a prayer, though it's hard to see how so puny a thing as a single human could have such influence on the Eternal Omniscient, and specific tests of the efficacy of prayer have bombed completely.

Nonetheless, what that means is that when an experiment to characterize the laws of Nature--the same experiments we do anyhow--didn't work, our explanations would have to include the possibility (besides that our theory was wrong) that God altered the pH of our reactions. But in practice, that would just another source of occasional measurement or experimental error in our analysis and interpretation.

Ad hoc interventions by the deity would be singleton events and science usually is not designed to identify cause in those cases, in the same way that one-off lab errors or sample design flaws often can't be identified. That's why we repeat experiments. We already accept that odd occurrences do happen, and our inference about theoretical validity is, and would remain, statistical in the face of occasional divine speed-bumps. Because intervening in that way by definition means that there are laws of Nature to intervene with. So nothing in routine science would change on that account.

Even if God always intervened in the same way if we repeated the same experiment (the wily imp!), that would be just another kind of special case of, or change in, the law of Nature that we're trying to understand.

In any case, the evidence is already prohibitively strong that the universe is law-like, so that such interventions cannot be too common. That's why literal religion has such difficulty with scientists in the first place! Indeed, some physicists speculate that the laws of Nature are no such thing, they are just generalizations about our particular place in the universe, or our particular universe in the universe of universes (i.e., that we could get to if we could sail through black holes).

And what if the proof sees 'God' only, as we've been already warned, through a glass darkly? What if God is not person-like and can't be interpreted as such, or doesn't respond to human events that way? What if He/She/It is something more abstract, like the Oneness of Buddhism, or the varied origin stories of different cultures around the world. Or what if He/She/It is more remote and distanced from us rather than a conductor bothering to steer our puny earth on its daily mundane way? How could even science that proved that He/She/It existed use that knowledge to interpret things any differently than we already do? Again, the world clearly appears law-like, and science is a set of methods to understand those generalities of how-things-are. If science has imperfections in understanding Nature, maybe it's our reliance on current methods and concepts, that we inherited, after all, from the Enlightenment period a few centuries ago and need not be written in stone.

If some clever person suggests a different way to study what we call transcendental or immaterial realities themselves, and showed that your brain really can communicate with He/She/It (or your long-deceased ancestor or pet dog), that would open up a whole new (and extremely exciting) realm for human research. But it wouldn't change how-things-are in the material world that we already know about.

Overall, knowing that God exists might make a big difference to scientists personally, but would not make any major difference to science, except returning its rhetoric to something that goes back to classical times. Just as accepting evolution doesn't make a major difference to creationists, or even many scientists, in their daily work.

These things are at least worth thinking about--they help clarify the true nature of the science-religion debate as a conflict over cultural resources, rather than one about the physical realities of the world.

The Greatest scientific discovery of all times (but naming no names!)

We said yesterday both that Creationist literal claims are clearly bunk and that many advocates for teaching evolution in the schools are not all that sophisticated about evolution. In the latter case, and certainly naming no names!, they may have a over-simplified idea of the role and strength of natural selection in evolution, or may not appreciate the subtle relationships between drift and selection, or have little idea about the sophisticated kinds of evidence coming out of molecular biology labs that so beautifully confirms evolution, and so on.

The blunt fact is that some of what we say in evolutionary biology, especially when dumbed-down for public or textbook consumption is also bunk. The proliferation of Just-So stories in evolutionary biology, even at the highest level, is extensive and well-known. So we're told confidently such things as that our body parts evolved 'for' such-and-such a purpose, and our physiological responses were selected 'for' a reason, and we have genes 'for' all of it.

In fact, anything that's here today can be given such explanations with little in the way of constraint much less testability. Nice, tight stories sell big!

Humility should have a deeper role in science and among us members of the Science-tribe. It seems unassailably true that life today is the result of a history. Darwinian selection also seems undeniably important, though there are other equally important evolutionary forces. And, humans really did come from terrestrial ancestors. We might hope to discover something that refutes such ideas, because it would be so energizing and exciting for science and the public alike! Alas, nothing suggests it will happen.

Still, who knows how much we don't know about life? What factors or forces might be as yet undiscovered but have an effect on biological change? What kind of real 'dark matter', that today is to us what, say, electrons or infra-red radiation were to Aristotle--or real dark matter to astronomists?

When we discuss the evidence for 'evolution', we should be humble enough to acknowledge that that word isn't so clear as it may seem. There are gaps in what we know, gaps in the fossil record, gaps in our theory (e.g., of how to predict phenotypes from complex genotypes, which we assume are causally connected, or how species evolve, or how to know when selection is acting, rather than drift).

We can't let Creationists cower us into asserting more than we know, or simply adopting a party line, as that would be a kind of victory of non-knowledge over knowledge. What sends us to work every day is the pursuit of what we don't yet know. There is likely to be a lot of that out there. It is hard to imagine something that would be so profound as to change our basic view of life as the product of historical evolution, much less anything that could convert us to a theologically literalist view. But we might discover things as new and exciting as the awareness that Darwin and Wallace brought to us about the nature of life. We should remain open to that possibility.

In fact, many scientists are atheists, some (naming no names!) so aggressively so that it is their way of hyping themselves and rolling in the book-sales and TV appearances. Of course, proving a negative is difficult, but science is not likely to prove, using its current set of principles, that God does not exist (even if He was just kidding about a 7-day creation). Many scientists are proud of their atheism, but let's not be hypocrites. And here is a warning to Creationists, who like to trash scientists for their views:

It is hard to imagine a scientist who would not crave being the one who discovered and could truly prove that the source of our hopes and dreams (naming no names!) really does exist. As the scientific discoverer of God, such a scientist would become the most distinguished human being in the history of our species. Darwin would be a puny dustman by comparison. The reason scientists don't take much to religious arguments is not that they'd not like to show them to be true, but simply, and perhaps sadly, because the evidence doesn't suggest that such a thing is even worth pursuing in science.

--Ken & Anne