The Los Angeles Times has a long interview with Frank Wilczek, polymath and physics Nobel Laureate who recently nabbed the $1.3-million Templeton Prize. As I wrote a couple of days ago, Wilczek doesn’t fit the mold of those who’ve won the Prize over the past decades, as he professes no belief in a personal god (he’s a pantheist), and emphasizes the power of science versus faith. It is the case, though, that the prize, which used to go to believers like Mother Teresa and Billy Graham, is increasingly being conferred on scientists.
My main impression of the article is that the paper is subtly pressuring Wilczek to admit to some belief in the numinous, but Wilczek won’t bite. He does say a few strange things, but on the whole Wilczek seems to be one of us “nones”: a “pantheist” who rejects the idea of a personal God. Instead, he sees the whole of nature as “God”. Well, I could say that, too, professing that I see all the panoply of evolution as God. Does that qualify me for the Templeton Prize?
Originally I saw no harm in giving the prize to someone who is, in effect, an atheist in the sense of being an “a-theist”—someone who rejects any conventional notion of gods. But several readers noted that giving Wilczek the Templeton Prize enables the Foundation to enfold him into their stable of faithheads and, to some extent, justify their aim, which the L.A. Times says involves extols “the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.” The very notion of a “purpose” for humankind immediately conjures up the notion of God. And those readers may be right: Wilczek’s acceptance harms science.
Click to read:
Here are some statements by the Times and by Wilczek that struck me. First, the paper tries to draw a connection between Wilczek and belief in God:
As a theoretical physicist, Wilczek has been peeking under the hood of our perceived reality for more than 50 years. His insights and ideas have led to several revolutionary scientific discoveries, as well as an almost theological perspective on the nature of the world and our role in it that he shares in his myriad articles, books and talks for a general audience.
And yet, Wilczek has said some stuff that can be used to claim that he believes in a God, even though he’s a pantheist (in my view, a humanist). Here’s a quote from him given by the paper:
You’ve written that “in studying how the world works, we are studying how God works, and thereby learning what God is.” So, what do you think God is?
Let me lead into that by talking about two of the greatest figures in physics and their very different views of what God is. Sir Isaac Newton was very much a believing Christian and probably devoted as much time to studying Scriptures and theology as he did to physics and mathematics.
Einstein, on the other hand, often talked about God — sometimes he used that word, sometimes he said “the old one” — but his concept was much different. When he was asked seriously what he meant by that, he said he believed in the God of Spinoza, who identified God with reality, with God’s work.
That was Einstein’s view and that is very much closer to my spirit. I would only add to that that I think God is not only the world as it is, but the world as it should be. So, to me, God is under construction. My concept of God is really based on what I learn about the nature of reality.
Now I think that the quote in bold (from the Times’s question) is poor, and clearly leads to misinterpretation. The “God” of Wilczek is not the kind of God that nearly any believer accepts. Later on in the article, he emphasizes that. I’m still symied, though, by Wilczek’s statement that “God is not only the world as it is, but the world as it should be.” What does he mean by that? Even as a pantheist, how can you take as God a reality that doesn’t even exist? And how should the world be?
But here again, the L.A. Times tries to imply that there’s a more conventional religious cast to Wilczek’s views. From the paper:
In addition to groundbreaking discoveries, Wilczek’s work has also led him to some of the same conclusions shared by mystics from all religions: the myth of separateness and the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.
As he wrote in “Fundamentals,” “Detailed study of matter reveals that our body and our brain — the physical platform of our ‘self’ — is, against all intuition, built from the same stuff as ‘not-self,’ and appears to be continuous with it.”
Other spiritual insights from his decades of scientific study include the idea of complementarity — that different ways of viewing the same thing can be informative, and valid, yet difficult or impossible to maintain at the same time, and that science teaches us both humility and self-respect.
The quote given by Wilczek is far from “spiritual”: it argues that the stuff of our body and brain obeys the laws of physics, be they deterministic or indeterministic. That’s NOT “spiritual! (He also more or less rules out a “soul.”)
And the idea of “complementarity” clearly refers to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: an electron can behave as a particle and a wave at the same time. We don’t understand quantum mechanics at its most basic level—does it correspond to any reality?—but our lack of understanding doesn’t promote spirituality, any more than our failure to understand what dark matter or dark energy are constitute “spiritual insighta.”
The Q&A with Wilczek tells us more about him. The stuff in bold is the paper’s questions (my comments are flush left):
Do you consider yourself an atheist, agnostic? Do you have a definition you’re comfortable with?
Not affiliated with any specific recognized church is certainly part of it, but I’m more comfortable saying that I’m a pantheist. I believe that the whole world is sacred and we should take a reverential attitude toward it.
What, exactly, does he mean by saying the “whole world is sacred”? We can have a “reverence” towards it because it’s amazing and yet still comprehensible, but that’s not the same thing as believing in God. It would have helped had Wilczek defined what he means by “reverential” and “sacred”. In fact, I’d love to interview him myself. These answers, of course, involve words that would put him into the running for the Templeton Prize.
Are science and religion in conflict with each other?
No, they are not in conflict with each other. There have been problems when religions make claims about how the world works or how things got to be the way they are that science comes to make seem incredible. For me, it’s very hard to resist the methods of science which are based on the accumulation of evidence.
On the other hand, science itself leads to the deep principle of complementarity, which means to answer different kinds of questions you may need different kinds of approaches that may be mutually incomprehensible or even superficially contradictory.
He’s just admitted that they ARE in conflict with each other! For there are very few religions—none of them Abrahamic—that don’t at bottom rest on certain empirical assumptions about the world and Universe. He’s also admitted that science is based on evidence (but omits the obvious addendum: “and religion is based not on evidence but on faith”). The “deep principle of complementarity”, by which I assume he means quantum complementarity, is baffling but doesn’t show there’s anything wrong with science, much less that the answer involves the numinous. By saying “on the other hand,” though, he implies that “complementarity” is immune to scientific evidence.
You’ve written that “in studying how the world works, we are studying how God works, and thereby learning what God is.” So, what do you think God is?
Let me lead into that by talking about two of the greatest figures in physics and their very different views of what God is. Sir Isaac Newton was very much a believing Christian and probably devoted as much time to studying Scriptures and theology as he did to physics and mathematics.
Einstein, on the other hand, often talked about God — sometimes he used that word, sometimes he said “the old one” — but his concept was much different. When he was asked seriously what he meant by that, he said he believed in the God of Spinoza, who identified God with reality, with God’s work.
That was Einstein’s view and that is very much closer to my spirit. I would only add to that that I think God is not only the world as it is, but the world as it should be. So, to me, God is under construction. My concept of God is really based on what I learn about the nature of reality.
Here again Wilczek admits that he sees God as “reality”, not as something supernatural. The Gods of Einstein and Spinoza were not goddy gods, but simply physical reality, and wonder before reality is not religion. Einstein, of course, rejected the idea of a personal God, and I don’t believe ever said that “reality” is “God’s work” (but I’m willing to be corrected). As far as I know from my reading of Einstein, he was a straight-up pantheist, and any palaver about what God did or wanted (like “not playing dice”) were mere musings about the nature of reality.
Does that God have a will?
Not a will as we would ascribe to human beings, although I’m not saying that’s logically impossible. I would say it’s really a stretch, given what we know. The form of the physical laws seems to be very tight and doesn’t allow for exceptions.
The existence of human beings, as they are, is a very remote consequence of the fundamental laws. One thing that [the physicist] Richard Feynman said really sticks in my mind here. He said, “The stage is too big for the players.” If you were designing a universe around humans and their concerns, you could be a lot more economical about it.
Of course a god with a will is not logically impossible, but it’s clear that Wilczek doesn’t buy it. And of course he must know that Feynman was an atheist, and appears to share Feynman’s view that the universe doesn’t look as it it were constructed with humans in mind.
There is more Q&A, but I’ll just give one last exchange:
While I was preparing for our interview, I came across a statement by the Catholic Bishops of California that said science cannot answer our deepest and most perplexing questions like, “Why am I here?” “What is the purpose of my life?” “Why have I suffered this loss?” “Why is God allowing this terrible illness?” They said these are religious questions. Do you agree?
Science doesn’t answer those questions. On the other hand, you ignore science at your peril if you are interested in those questions. There’s a lot you can learn from science by expanding your imagination and realizing the background over which those questions are posed. So, saying that science doesn’t have a complete answer is a very different thing than saying, “Go away, scientists; we don’t want to hear from you, leave it to us.”
Now here Wilczek missed a shot, but it’s a shot that would have made Templeton revoke its Prize. What he should have said is this: “Science doesn’t answer those questions (though it can inform them), but religion doesn’t either.” He’s cleverly avoiding dissing religion.
The problem with softball interviews like this is that nobody ask Wilczek the really hard questions, or at least questions that would lay his disbelief out clearly. Example: “what exactly did you mean when you said that “the world is ‘sacred'”? And so on. What’s clear is that Wilczek doesn’t adhere to the notion of God shared by the vast majority of religious believers around the world. Instead, he sees God as physical reality, pure and simple.
The only remaining question is, “With Wilczek’s views, why did Templeton give him the Prize?” There are many possible reasons, but, thank Ceiling Cat, I’m not on the board of those who have to weigh the factors.
He’s a pantheist. Santayana said it best: “Pantheism, or religion and morality abdicating in favour of physics” (The Life of Reason, “Reason in Science,” 1906). Spinoza, the famous naturalist-pantheist, considered power the same as goodness, hence Physics was his Theology. Nietzsche felt the same. As a naturalist, I cannot understand how any human sense of justice can see Biology with good eyes. As George C. Williams thought, “Mother Nature Is a Wicked Old Witch” (cf. http://nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/williams-george.pdf). Peter Ward writes in his last book (The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?, 2009):
“My thesis is that the inherent property to evolve is also the source of the inherent “suicidalness” of life—a facet of what I will define as the Medea principle, to be posed and referred to here as a hypothesis.” Mother Nature is better seen as the killer mother Medea. Okay, I’ll read the article now.
Yep, Mother Nature is a wicked old witch. And evolution qua theory is your friend, but evolution the process is not, at least if you care about the future of humanity and have fairly typical human values.
Obviously, this physicist has no sense of justice. Any pantheist is like that. The All is as “it should be.” Divine. Perfect. As they see Physics occupying the place of Ethics and Morals, good and bad are not only relative to the observer, but inexistent and therefore unreal. Spinoza suffered from the same human nihilism. Stoics did the same. The infinite swallows the finite. These minds seem to feel happy that the All is perfect while the entities suffer in horrible ways to survive and pass their genes. Matter, that bitch. In fact, matter has no morals. It just is. Why blame it? Indeed. But do not divinize it either, please. It is shameful to listen to pantheism’s postulates from a human (empathic) point of view; from any life form point of view with decency.
That was my take as well. It seems Wilczek should be simply a humanist, but gets bogged down by Physics as a distraction – a substitute God. Money maybe?
While I fully agree that purpose readily connotes Purpose which connotes God’s Purpose, I would say as a biologist that lower-case purpose is a defining attribute of all living beings, all selves; all pursue the aims of self-maintenance, self-repair, self-protection, and self-reproduction. In present-day critters, aims are pursued in the context of other organisms in the ecosystem; in social lineages they are pursued in the context of con-specifics.
So I would read the Templeton statement — “the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it” — to say that humankind’s place, as an inhabitant of the planetary matrix, defines its purpose: to aim for its flourishing so that life can continue to flourish.
I get the impression a fair amount of the time that Wilczek is basically mild mannered and doesn’t really want to hurt anyone’s feelings if he can help it, so he avoids being too openly dismissive of fuzzy-minded nonsense. And, hey, that attitude was worth a lot of money, it turns out, not that I think he’s strongly focused on that. Feynman would have been much more derogatory of many of these questions. But I like Wilczek. I think he just doesn’t much care about the nonsense outside his realm of interest.
I must say, I think it would be wonderful irony if PCC(E) got the Templeton Prize and then afterwards made it clear that he thought it was nonsense, but thanks for the dosh.
Take the money and run.
As far as the laws of physics, the world as it “should be” is clearly “in a state of maximum entropy”. And the good news (the gospel, if you will) is that this is exactly where everything is headed, inevitably. As Frankie Boyle said once, “We will all be forgiven by the heat death of the universe.” L’dor v’dor, V’imru, Amayn.
“What he should have said is this: ‘Science doesn’t answer those questions (though it can inform them), but religion doesn’t either.’”
Actually, religion does answer those questions. For example, the first question in the Catechism under “Concerning God the Creator” is “What is the chief end (purpose) of man?” and the answer is “Man’s chief end (purpose) is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” The problem is that religion’s answers can be neither verified nor falsified.
No, it makes up answers to those questions but has no way to verify whether they’re correct. Further, different religions give different answers, so even if one were right, how would we know?
That is true; it does; they do. Anyone can answer questions about purpose and reason. The issue is if the various answers given by religions are human constructions. If we say they are not, then we are back to the central question, the source of our answers.
There are also questions of meaning: for example, what is versus how one ought to live; or whether ‘why’ and ‘what’, words which suggest implicit premises, make sense.
This answer is some distance from verification or falsification. Is it grammatically correct nonsense? Unless it has a concrete meaning, it does not come close to being falsifiable. Remember that one can construct concrete statements that are not easily falsifiable: for example, a theory with arbitrarily tunable parameters.
In their search for meaning, are theologians losing sight of meaning altogether?
…& note the ‘him’ – obviously the religious bigots know that god is male because their male priests & male prophets told them.
Pah…
Absolutely. And it is entirely possible that mirandaga completely agrees with you.
And regarding the point that the catechism answers the purpose question, but the answer is not falsifiable nor verifiable: it is hardly the main issue with religious statements of that nature.
Anyone can answer the purpose question: The purpose of this life is to be a brave warrior and hog as many pairs of lavender socks as you possibly can without having to steal from other people.
It seems like a directive about how one ought to live; how does falsifiability apply?
If we say that it is natural law, we have to figure out what the hell it means to say that it is natural law; after all, there are people who don’t live a pious life.
If we say that it was not made up by men but by the man-god, we are back to the central question of religion.
To say that religious statements like this are not falsifiable, while being true, is a bit of a complement.
It is true that religion answers the question; but it is utterly trivial to answer such questions.
What is the purpose of god?
Put that in your pipe & smoke it.
The Los Angeles Times interview sounds like an article in the old forgotten Reader’s Digest.
The guy’s big on Deepities, isn’t he? Like “Detailed study of matter reveals that our body and our brain — the physical platform of our ‘self’ — is, against all intuition, built from the same stuff as ‘not-self,’ and appears to be continuous with it.” Yup, atoms. Star stuff, if you like, Carl Sagan having said it much more poetically. Actually, I don’t find that observation “against all intuition” at all — what else would our bodies be made from?
And as for those tough questions from the bishops at the end, “why am I here?”, “what is the purpose of my life?” — science can certainly answer them, it’s just that the bishops don’t like the answers.
If he started to say things openly dismissive of religion/faith they would perhaps revoke the Prize. Can they claim the money that’s already given though?
Slippery dissimulations! And for that he gets a lot of do$h. Life ain’t fair.
I will just pin him into my collection of people who experience fleeting moments of reverential feeling about reality, and who call that reverential feeling “god”. Meanwhile the goddies of course will see him as one of them, but that’s only bc they are good at seeing things that aren’t really there.
Why is it so difficult to say something like “I think the universe is wonderful, and I respect life in all its forms” without using loaded terms such as “sacred” and “reverential”? I guess the hovering presence of Templeton has something to do with it; but maybe this is actually how Wilczek feels. On the one hand, it seems not to affect his work; but on the other, it’s an intellectual cop-out.
Jane Goodall, Martin Rees, and even David Deutsch have aligned with Templeton in similar fashion. It’s extremely disappointing and I find myself never reading or watching anything of theirs again, unless necessary.
Templeton absorbs scientists in its gross pursuit to usurp science; and it’s incredibly icky that such great minds square that circle for money, an increased audience, or some petty vanity.
Or worse, that underneath their demonstrable affinity for Nature and science, there’s a fear and thus a sincere accommodation for unsubstantiated woo.
[Even Quanta Magazine, a fantastic vehicle for science, syndicates with Nautilus Magazine (https://www.quantamagazine.org/about/) — which is itself nothing more than a shiny, Trumpian LLC behind which Templeton “inspires”. It’s coat-tailing with the long-term aim to steal the coat.]
For me, if the money for Jane Goodall goes toward charitable causes, like saving any chimpanzees and preserving their habitat, I will gladly forgive a lot more than money from a source that I personally don’t care for.
To get that money she’s undermined science. She’s dismissed it. From her institute’s website:
“I can identify closely with the motto that Sir John Templeton chose for his foundation, How little we know, how eager to learn — and I am eternally thankful that my curiosity and desire to learn is as strong as it was when I was a child,” she added. “I understand that the deep mysteries of life are forever beyond scientific knowledge…”
“Dr. Goodall receives the 2021 Templeton Prize in celebration of her remarkable career, which arose from and was sustained by a keen scientific and spiritual curiosity. Raised Christian, she developed her own sense of spirituality in the forests of Tanzania, and has described her interactions with chimpanzees as reflecting the divine intelligence she believes lies at the heart of nature.”
There are better ways to fundraise than to hock one’s credibility at the expense of real science.
I’m glad the interviewer asked “Does that God have a will” because that really brought out how watered down Wilczek’s “God” is.
yeay – Jerry qualifies!
I propose when he wins, he takes us all to Antarctica… & leaves us there!