Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

The question: Is intelligent design bad theology?

You may have caught some of the row that followed Thomas Nagel's recommendation, in the literary pages of the TLS, for 2009 books of the year. He ventured Stephen Meyer's Signature In The Cell: DNA And The Evidence for Intelligent Design. Nagel is one of the most distinguished philosophers living today. And yet, that apparently now stood for nothing. Meyer's book is pro-ID. Everything from Nagel's reputation to his sanity was called into question.

I read the book. It felt a little like creeping behind the bike sheds at school to have a cigarette, as if an ID cancer might seize control of my synapses. The temptation was irresistible. What I discovered was an arresting book about science, which is what drew Nagel. But it is close to vacuous when it comes to the theology. That, it seems to me, is the problem with ID.

To a non-specialist like myself, Meyer seemed to capture very well the depth of the mystery that the origin of life is to modern science – essentially how DNA, as an astonishingly precise and complex information processing system, could possibly have come about. It's analogous to the monkey-bashing-at-a-typewriter-and-producing-Shakespeare problem, except that with DNA it's even more intractable: you've also got to account for how typewriters and language arose too, they being the prerequisites for the possibility of the prose, let alone the prose of the Bard.

That said, it's because of the inscrutable nature of life's origins that I found the book theologically unsatisfying. It proposes, in essence, an argument from ignorance.

The ID hypothesis Meyer conveys is, roughly, that life is, at base, an information processing system, information that is put to a highly specific purpose, and that the best explanation for the source of such a system is one that is intelligent. Only an intelligence could get the system going, as it were. It can't be put down to chance, since by massive margins there hasn't been nearly enough time since the Big Bang for the random encounters of organic compounds to form such highly specified self-replicating systems. Neither can it be put down to self-organisation, since what DNA requires to work is not general patterns, but the fantastically fine-grained and specific activity of proteins and amino acids. Intelligent design is, then, the best hypothesis to date. But that qualification, "to date", is the problem.

A slushy cocktail of water-ice and organic materials has been directly detected on the surface of an asteroid for the first time. The finding strengthens the theory that asteroids delivered the ingredients for Earth's oceans and life, and could make astronomers rethink conventional models for how the Solar System evolved.

It has long been thought that asteroids, which lie in a belt between Mars and Jupiter, are rocky bodies that sit too close to the Sun to retain ice. By contrast, comets, which form further out beyond Neptune, are ice-rich bodies that develop distinctive tails of vaporized gas and dust when they approach the Sun. However, this distinction was blurred in 2006 by the discovery of small objects with comet-like tails in the asteroid belt1, says astronomer Andrew Rivkin of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

To investigate the composition of these 'main-belt comets', Rivkin and his colleague Joshua Emery, of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, turned the infra-red telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, onto the asteroid 24 Themis — the parent body from which two of the smaller comet-like asteroids observed in 2006 were chipped. Emery and Rivkin took seven measurements of 24 Themis over a period of six years, each time looking at a different face of the asteroid as it travelled around its orbit. They consistently found a band in the absorption spectrum of light reflected from its surface that indicated the presence of grains coated in water ice, as well as the signature of carbon-to-hydrogen chemical bonds — as found in organic materials. Rivkin and Emery's work is published in this week's Nature2.

"Astronomers have looked at dozens of asteroids with this technique, but this is the first time we've seen ice on the surface and organics," says Rivkin.

The result was independently confirmed by a team led by Humberto Campins at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He and his colleagues observed 24 Themis for 7 hours one night, as it almost fully rotated on its axis. "Between us, we have seen the asteroid from almost every angle and we see global coverage," says Campins. He and his team also publish their findings in this week's Nature3.

Julie Castillo-Rogez, an astrophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, describes the findings as "huge". "This answers the long-term question of whether there is free water in the asteroid belt," she says.

The previous blog discussed how creationist opinion formers think: given that formal creationism is a belief that must be taught, this seems a sensible line of enquiry. By formal creationism, I mean the belief that most scientists have more or less malevolently misinterpreted the data for the last 200 years to prove that the Bible is not literally true. That survey dealt only with 50 opinion formers, interviewed in depth. But how many people do they represent?

The answer to that comes from an earlier Theos survey, published this spring, which contained truly shocking figures as to the amount of biological ignorance in the country; but at the same time, it suggested that this had nothing much to do with religion. How could it, when the number of people reporting either Young Earth creationism, or ID, at 25% is something like five times as large as the combined Muslim and evangelical population of this country? Twice as many people are confused about what they believe, and only another quarter are convinced of the truth of evolution.

These results were obtained by a fairly sophisticated set of questions, designed to discover what people actually believed, rather than the labels they would attach to it. Much of it, I think, is the result of innumeracy in general: someone for whom all numbers above about a thousand are indistinguishable blur may very well think that the earth is 10,000 years old and mean by this that it is really really seriously, like, old.

Such people don't pose any threat to the teaching of science in schools. They just make it look entirely pointless, since they have themselves been "educated". But that is a different and more serious problem than religious creationism. The anti-Darwinians interviewed in the most recent survey are a tiny, articulate and self-conscious minority. The real problem for public understanding, as anyone knows who has done any science writing, are the millions of people whose position is that they don't know, don't care, and don't want to do either.

Vuk Mandic and his colleagues made big headlines in scientific journals last week by finding nothing — nada, zilch, zippo — in their search for gravitational waves.

In order to comprehend why nothing can be something big in astrophysics, we need to look first at the stakes in this quest for gravitational waves.

These mysterious waves were predicted in Albert Einstein's 1916 general theory of relativity. If mass accelerates in some way -- say, you pick up a child or drive a car -- you have these ripples in space and time, the theory goes. But we Earthlings are mere specks on a universal scale, so any waves we make are insignificant.

Instead, scientists are looking for the waves in connection with mega-scale cosmic events: collisions of black holes, shock waves from supernova explosions — and the granddaddy of all, the Big Bang.

Influence has been observed

The gravitational waves' influence on stars has been observed. But the waves themselves never have been directly detected. If they were, it would set off a revolution in physics, opening an entirely new way of looking at the universe.

"Black holes, we can't see at all at this point ... super nova explosions are not understood yet," Mandic said. "So we hope that gravitational waves would allow us to open another window into astronomy."

Scientists also believe that the Big Bang created a flood of gravitational waves that still fill the universe and carry information about the immediate aftermath of that colossal explosion. No one has ever been able to study the full fiery nature of the physics at play in the moments following the Bang. In that sense, gravitational waves would have a unique tale to tell, Mandic said.

influence on cosmology and physics is clearly not what it once was. In the popular realm, too, his star has dimmed. As the Pasadena event testifies, Hawking can still pack a room, but he has lost much of his iconic status. None of his books since Brief History have come close to its runaway success. The master of black holes is himself becoming steadily less visible.

Late last year reports circulated that Hawking would be retiring from Cambridge in 2009 and that he might even leave England to join the Perimeter Institute, an innovative research center just outside Toronto. Hawking, Croasdell assured me, will neither be retiring nor abandoning Cambridge, but this year will bring a significant transition. On September 30 he will relinquish his prestigious post as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position once occupied by Isaac Newton, which Hawking has held since 1979. He turned 67 on January 8, the maximum age for holding the Lucasian chair, and so will continue at the university with a new title, Emeritus Lucasian Professor.

No one should have believed the rumors. Retiring is no more of an option for Hawking than ceasing to think would be. What he is reaching for now is closer to the opposite: a defense and extension of the kind of sweeping cosmological ideas that first shot him to fame. In other words, a capstone to his career—or, to be blunt, a comeback.

It is challenging for any academic in his sixties to reclaim the aura of youthful genius, and especially so for a man whom the popular media routinely likened to Albert Einstein. And then there is Hawking’s most formidable antagonist: his own withered body. “I imagine it has become very difficult for him to work, and that’s been the major cause of his being out of the game, so to speak,” says Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University. “In the last number of years, he has been so incapacitated that it has been very difficult for him to keep up with what is happening in the field.”

Nevertheless, Hawking continues his almost ludicrously grand program. “My goal is simple,” he famously explained. “It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is, and why it exists at all.”

Passover, or the annual celebration of Jews' exodus from Egypt, began Wednesday. This year, it's a once-in-a-generation event.

It coincides with the Birkat Hachamah — the "Blessing of the Sun" — a celebration that occurs every 28 years, when the sun is in a precise location in the sky.

To mark the occasion, a group of religious Jews gathered for a 7 a.m. standing-room-only service at the Chabad Lubavitch house in Gaithersburg, Md. Men wearing prayer shawls chanted from the Talmud before moving outside into the soft early light. It was time for a special blessing.

"Raise your hand if you did this either in 1953 or 1981. Anybody?" asked Rabbi Sholom Raichik.

Raichik surveyed the crowd of 100 men and women, and only a half-dozen hands went up. It's not surprising, since the blessing of the sun is so infrequent. He directed them to face east, punctuating the Psalms with explanations.

According to Talmudic tradition, on Wednesday morning the sun was at the exact position in the skies as it was the moment the Earth was created — 5,769 years ago. It's a complicated calculation. And after some description, the rabbi defaulted to modern technology.

With plumes of gas and stardust reaching up like the fingers of Adam and a purple sun winking back, the “Pillars of Creation” has the high ecclesiastical wattage of a Michelangelo. But this late-20th-century masterpiece wasn’t painted by human hands. It is a digital image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the Eagle nebula, a celestial swarm 7,000 light-years from Earth. While the image is embraced sometimes by Christians to evoke the Garden of Eden or the Pearly Gates, what we are seeing is something real and more inspiring: a cosmic incubator hatching new stars.

Reproduced on calendars and book jackets and in coffee-table books, “Pillars of Creation” belongs among the iconic images of modern times — right up there with the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima and Ansel Adams’s “Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park.” More than an artifact of technology, “Pillars of Creation” is a work of art. As John D. Barrow, a professor of mathematical sciences at Cambridge University, writes in COSMIC IMAGERY: Key Images in the History of Science (Norton, $39.95), pulling such an arresting canvas from the digital signals beamed by Hubble required aesthetic choices much like those that went into the great landscape paintings of the American West.

There is no reason, for example, why the plumes had to be shown standing up. There are no directions in space. More important, the scientists processing the bit stream chose the color palette partly for dazzling effect.

“If you were floating in space you would not ‘see’ what the Hubble photographs show in the sense that you would see what my passport photo shows if you met me,” Barrow writes. Following a suggestion by an art historian, Elizabeth Kessler, he juxtaposes “Pillars of Creation” with Thomas Moran’s “Cliffs of the Upper Colorado River, Wyoming Territory.” Both works “draw the eyes of the viewer to the luminous and majestic peaks,” Barrow writes. “The great pillars of gas are like a Monument Valley of the astronomical landscape.”

Through dozens of short essays, each prompted by one of science’s visual creations, Barrow conducts his own personal tour of the universe. A picture of the Whirlpool Galaxy, with its double spirals, sets him to wondering whether it was the spark for van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” The Crab nebula, the remnant of an exploding star viewed by Chinese astronomers in 1054, leads into a short discussion of pulsars, distant lights that blink so rhythmically that astronomers once wondered whether they were semaphores from L.G.M.’s — “little green men.”

Much of the genius of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) lay in a mix of audacity and exactitude. His boldest leaps of insight sprang from laborious plodding. Years of careful computation, based on sporadic stargazing with the crudest of instruments, lay behind his astonishing discoveries: Our earth was not the fixed center of the universe, nor did the sun and the stars move around us in perfect epicycles, as Ptolemy had argued more than a millennium earlier; in fact, our earth not only revolved around the sun but rotated on its axis. Nor were the heavens themselves static: They moved as well.

When his "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" finally appeared in 1543, after decades of delay — he saw the first printed copy on the very day of his death — he not only turned human beings out of the cozy nest of their fondest assumptions, but rejoiced in the eviction. In the first book of his great work, he states, "Indeed, the Sun as if seated on a royal throne governs his household of stars as they circle around him." A heliocentric cosmos demonstrated to him "the marvelous symmetry of the universe."

As Jack Repcheck demonstrates in his excellent "Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began" (Simon & Schuster, 255 pages, $25), the Polish astronomer and mathematician is not simply the pure empiricist we might recall. Born as Mikolaj Kopernik in the town of Torun on the Baltic coast, Copernicus combined religious fervor with scientific rigor in almost equal measure.

Of course, this wasn't unusual in the 16th century: Virtually all scientists then were believers, but most of them looked to nature only

No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed.

Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years. But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down.

Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”

The trouble with time started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny). Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler- DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in

part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.

“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”

PARIS (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, elaborating his views on evolution for the first time as Pontiff, says science has narrowed the way life's origins are understood and Christians should take a broader approach to the question.

The Pope also says the Darwinist theory of evolution is not completely provable because mutations over hundreds of thousands of years cannot be reproduced in a laboratory.

But Benedict, whose remarks were published on Wednesday in Germany in the book "Schoepfung und Evolution" (Creation and Evolution), praised scientific progress and did not endorse creationist or "intelligent design" views about life's origins.

Those arguments, proposed mostly by conservative Protestants and derided by scientists, have stoked recurring battles over the teaching of evolution in the United States. Some European Christians and Turkish Muslims have recently echoed these views.

"Science has opened up large dimensions of reason ... and thus brought us new insights," Benedict, a former theology professor, said at the closed-door seminar with his former doctoral students last September that the book documents.

"But in the joy at the extent of its discoveries, it tends to take away from us dimensions of reason that we still need. Its results lead to questions that go beyond its methodical canon and cannot be answered within it," he said.

"The issue is reclaiming a dimension of reason we have lost," he said, adding that the evolution debate was actually about "the great fundamental questions of philosophy - where man and the world came from and where they are going."

It‘s called the anthropic universe: a world set up so that human beings could eventually emerge. So many physical constants, so many aspects of our solar system, so much seems to be finely tuned for our benefit. But was it? We hear from Professors Martin Rees, Paul Davies, and Frank Tipler, as well as many others, about one of the ultimate questions.