Talk given as part of a panel presentation on “Science and Religion,” sponsored by the Philosophy and Religion Club of Truman State University, October 15 2001.

I think Woody Allen made this joke: “To you, I’m an atheist. To God, I’m the loyal opposition.” I guess I represent the loyal opposition today, so I’ll try to say a few words about how science and religion are compatible or not.

First of all, it seems clear they are compatible at a personal level. Plenty of scientists are devout, and they are not just a few exceptions. Surveys show that college professors are similar to the population at large in their religious commitments. People in science show a slight tendency for disbelief, but nothing to write home about. Only elite scientists are significantly less religious, and this fact is open to many interpretations.

Doing science is also no barrier to faith. My work in atmospheric physics, for example, has nothing to do with religion, unless it offends the beliefs of a sect with a very active sky god.

It also seems clear that as social institutions, science and religion coexist nicely, at least in the modern world. Occasionally there is a conflict of interest in an area like education—as in the creation/evolution wars—but more often than not, science and religion don’t get in each others’ way.

Now, some do claim incompatibility, and a common argument I’ve seen is that in the end, religion must rely on faith and science on reason, and hence they conflict. I don’t think this is convincing. It risks caricaturizing religion, and even if it were true, I’m not sure it would add up to much. Perhaps we can be scientists from nine to five, and a good Christian on Sundays, and appropriately so.

But one incompatibility remains, I think, which cannot be finessed away by negotiating domains of influence or by compartmentalizing our lives. Religions make claims about the nature of our world. I would argue that from the perspective of modern science, these appear false.

Let me clarify. There is always a degree of anthropomorphism in how our religious traditions imagine reality. They invariably postulate a spiritual reality above and beyond the material world. Often this reality anchors traditional supernatural events and entities; at the least it is, for example, the source of creativity in the universe. Reality, down deep, is somewhat mind-like—our Gods are, after all, persons. This anthropomorphism also holds true for the more sophisticated, mystical, totally Other Gods who impress religious studies professors. The ineffable ultimate reality turns out to be humanly significant, and invariably continuous with more concrete notions of spiritual realms.

Science also deals in broad pictures of reality. Even if its daily work typically addresses narrow areas like radiative transfer in the atmosphere, this everyday work takes place in a wider context. We ask broad questions about the nature of reality, and approach these in ways continuous with how we handle any question of fact.

Now modern science, I claim, converges on a strictly naturalistic picture. Our universe is fundamentally accidental, not purposeful. It is completely unanthropomorphic, to a degree not imagined by any religious tradition, Buddhism included. And if this is correct, all religious visions are radically mistaken.

To most everybody, this claim will sound crazy, and for good reason. To support my claim, I need to make a long argument, which I can’t even begin here. For that, I’ll just refer you to my book, The Ghost in the Universe, due to come out in March 2002. I will make sure the campus bookstore has a few copies on hand.

Still, I should try and give you a flavor of my argument. I find it significant that spiritual realities play no explanatory role in modern science. This is not because science operates in a narrow domain; to the contrary, our sciences have something to say about any question of fact, including traditionally religious matters such as the origin of life, cosmology, and the nature of human intelligence. When our Gods do not appear at all in the best of our theories, they begin to look like Santa Claus. Some might argue that a spirit known as Santa works through parents placing presents under trees, but we should not take this seriously. Neither should we waste time with Gods who are superfluous to explanations of our world.

Let me put some more emphasis on how I’d make a more direct case for naturalism. For this, it is important to appreciate the role of randomness in modern physics.

Quantum Mechanics is particularly notorious for the randomness it introduces into the workings of the world. And I don’t mean this as a vague reference to metaphysical “chance,” or as a placeholder due to our ignorance of real causes. Mathematically, randomness is a complete lack of pattern. This means that if we have a truly random process, we can’t even begin our normal procedure of recognizing patterns and building events into a network of causes. It also means we cannot just invent causes—the Bohmian interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, for example, merely displaces the randomness from the dynamics to the initial conditions. When something is random, we cannot infer any cause behind it.

This is not a matter of quantum weirdness, of just one theory. All fundamental physics is infected with randomness. In General Relativity, the boundaries of spacetime introduce randomness—whether in Black Holes or the Big Bang. And we cannot glibly say that randomness is God’s way of doing things. To infer a personal agent responsible for events, we need to identify a specific sort of pattern. In other words, we have to show that what was thought to be random is not really so. This is a strong claim, and one for which supporting evidence is nil.

It gets worse. Randomness is also crucial in explaining our intelligence, our creativity. I have done some work on the role of randomness in the possibility of Artificial Intelligence. Our creativity and intelligence almost certainly depends on Darwinian processes in the brain, where randomness serves as a novelty generator. In other words, it seems very likely that personal agents are part of a material nature awash with accidents. And so, anthropomorphic claims of powerful persons outside of nature are in deep trouble.

There we are. As I said, this is just a taste of a long argument. Still, when we put all the pieces together, I believe we end up with a world which can stand on its own, without Gods and Demons. And I hope you at least find my claim interesting: that if anything looks ultimate these days, it is Chaos, the ancient enemy of the Gods.