The Nature of God and Man
by
Sanborn C. Brown, PhD Professor of Physics Massachusetts Institute of Technology
—Prepared in the mid1960s for a discussion group of the Unitarian Universalist Church, Lexington, Massachusetts.
The Nature of God and Man I
Introduction...............................................................1
II
The Methodology of Science...................................9
III
Cosmic Evolution and the Physical Sciences.......19
IV
Evolution and the Biological Sciences..................29
V
Social and Religious Evolution.............................37
VI
God, Man and Immortality...................................45
VII
Is a New Religion Necessary?...............................53
VIII
Glossary...................................................................65
M
I Introduction and defense of threats, which Rudolf Otto termed the "tremendum." This is a Latin word which translates as "the source of terror." And the word is a particularly good one because of its strange vagueness which best conveys the most terrifying part of our predicament – and the essence of the terror within us and without us.
an's search for the meaning and the purpose of his life has been one of his major concerns since he first developed as a thinking being, about 100,000 years ago. In the beginning, religion was an attempt to understand, to accept, and in a way, hopefully to control the phenomena of nature which seemed pressing in about man on every side – and one of the common reactions of scientists before they get deeply committed to wondering about religion is that this fear which drove him to ancient religions surely has been dispelled in the modern age because of the better understanding of nature.
Irwin Goodenough wrote a most remarkable book, The Psychology of Religious Experience, and in it he has an interesting statement about religion in terms of the “tremendum:” "Man throws curtains between himself and the tremendum and on them he projects accounts of how the world came into existence, pictures of divine or superhuman forces or beings that control the universe and us, as well as codes of ethics, behavior and ritual which will bring him favor instead of catastrophe. So has every man protected himself by his religions."
Actually, however, I think that what our modern knowledge does is to make it absolutely necessary for us to reassess our understanding of religion and to try and develop a philosophy and theology which is agreeable to our present knowledge of science. Now, of course, there is more to religion than man's desire to understand himself, his origins, and his natural environment. Man, of all the animals, has the mental power to anticipate coming agonies. He is inherently an anxious animal fearful of the threat,
Now, for myself, I do not believe either the concept of religion as an explanation for man's place in the universe or the image, graphic as it may be, that religion is a curtain protecting us from coming face to face 1
with the "tremendum." I do not think this gives religion the impelling necessity which I believe it has.
span of the 100,000 years that Homo Sapiens has been a thinking animal roughly 1,000 culturally distinct human communities can be recognized. Furthermore, a religion changes in distinct entity about every 1,000 years. If we pursue the arithmetic we arrive at a figure of about 100,000 different religions produced by man since Neanderthal time.
Perhaps the most spectacular development in recent history has been the truly amazing rise of the importance of science and the effect it is having on every facet of human life. As science continues to heighten the dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural, a gulf is widening between modern man with his increasing sophistication about the nature of the world about him and the traditional tenets of religion – many of which are based on obviously false and disproven facts.
What I would like to propose, therefore, is based on our modern traditional religion. We should generate new concepts which are perhaps more in tune with our present day living than current religions. For example, I believe that our Christian tradition needs some very basic modification. I think if you tried to analyze what the basis of Christian religion is, one could sum it up by the single word "love." In fact, we often hear from the Christian pulpit that God (and I will define this term in a little while) is love, in other words, the concept of brotherly love was the basic change that Jesus introduced when Christianity had its beginning.
For years, liberal thinkers have been trying to patch up the conflict, relegating outmoded theology to the realm of symbolic representations, teaching their children and their congregation the magic and poetry of religious writings based on known fantasies and trying somehow to reconcile the theology of primitive man to 20th century insights. It is, in my opinion, about time we stopped this attempt to compromise the new with the old and start to work toward developing a valid and inspiring theology for the modern world based on our present state of knowledge.
However, from a scientific point of view, one sets up a framework and then does an experiment to see how the hypothesis upon which the experiment is based fits the facts. We all know the facts, unfortunately. Christendom has been at war almost continuously since its rise to political
Now, of course this search is not new. The anthropologists tell us that in the 2
power in the middle ages. Nazi Germany was a Christian culture which decimated the Jews. It is Christian United States that is this evening bombing Viet Nam.
organized effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture and he concludes that most revitalization movements can be characterized as religious. He points out that all religions and religious productions, such as myth and rituals, come into existence as part of a program or code of religious revitalizations, usually originating in situations of social and cultural stress, as efforts on the part of the stress laden to construct systems of dogma, myth, and ritual which will serve as guide to effective rescue.
Now this is just an illustration of the fact that if our current religion is giving us a sufficient motivation to practice its major tenets — then as a scientific experiment it appears to be a failure and a new set of hypotheses needs to be developed which hopefully can have a more compelling validity. I will not for a minute suppose that what I will outline to you as a concept of a theology will be able to do this. My only hope is that by discussions of this sort mankind, as a whole, can develop a theology which does have an impelling validity for us as we are living. Let me remind you that the title of this discussion is "The Nature of God and Man," which implies the nature of religion.
The essential theme of religion is the conflict between disorganization and organization. On the one hand, we universally observe and are distressed by disorganization in religious systems. Metals rust and corrode — wood and cloth rot — people sicken and die — personality disintegrates — social grief groups disunite and disband. On the other hand we universally labor at the contrary process of organization. Great effort is spent to prevent rust, corrosion, decay, rot, sickness, death and disillusion. And, at least in local groups, they achieve gains in organization or revitalization as the most diverse creeds attempt to solve the riddle of the relationship between life and death, organization and disorganization, the ideas of souls,
Let me talk about religion from a point of view of an anthropologist, and quote a statement or definition from Anthony Wallace in a paper given at the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science at Star Island in July of 1961. He introduced into our vocabulary the general term "revitalization movement" to denote any conscious 3
of God, of Nirvana, of spiritual salvation and rebirth, of "progress" are all formal solutions to the problem which seems to be felt intimately by all of us.
misunderstood facets of the scientific method. For people who have not been trained as scientists it worries them that they can agree on a definition to argue about without agreeing on the definition.
Religion may be said to be a process of maximizing the quantity of organ ization in the matrix of perceived human experience. A direct expression of our organization instinct and if I may again turn to Wallace’s useful term you will understand I am using religion in its most general meaning of a "revitalization movement," whether it be a revealed religion like Christianity, or a political faith like communism. We regard these as extreme, but both have identical characteristics of man's apparently instinctive drive to develop a socio political religious order out of disorder, integration out of disintegration, and life out of death.
However, this is a powerful advantage in the scientific analysis of a tentative hypothesis and it is the one I want to use throughout this seminar. In other words, I am giving you full license to completely disagree with the contents of my definition but still to agree that when I use a word it will be as I define it. I will write down the definition in each case so we will be sure we know what we are talking about, and then argue about it within that definition. The misunderstanding of this among the general public is quite amazing sometimes and I am always tempted to tell a story on myself which involves precisely this. The definition of a word in one context may be quite different to a definition in another context.
Now one of the characteristics of the socalled scientific approach to understanding is to agree for the purposes of a discussion and argument on the definition of words to be used within the framework of a particular study. One does not have to agree with the validity of the definition to use it in discussing a theoretical construct, but only agree to the same meaning of the word within the context of the discussion. This is probably one of the most
A physicist who lectures to elementary physics courses is very used to defining the word "work" as a force times the distance in which the force acts. Some years ago I was giving a lecture in freshman physics at M.I.T. and I was talking about the term “work.” On the lecture table there was 4
a large weight which, in the engineering definition of mass, is called a slug. It weighed 32 lbs. And when it got to my definition of work I carried the 32 lb. weight around at arms length telling the students that I was doing no work. According to the definition, I was not.
I would define religion as that activity by which man attempts to find his place in the universe, tries to develop valid goals for himself and his fellow man within the framework of the forces which control his destiny. The thing that I am specifically not saying here is the following: I do not mean by religion that elaborate super structure of myth and magic by which primitive man tried to understand and control the physical world. The attempt to tie the laws of physics to supernatural gods and demons has so confused the development of religion that many thinkers of every age have often denied the validity of rational religious enterprise until they clearly differentiated between bad science and respectable theology.
The next day when I was unable to pick up the chalk to write on the blackboard because I had so strained my back I was able to make quite a point with my students about the difference in definitions between the physical definition of work and what the normal public thinks work is. We are going to do this in the process of this course. In this seminar I would like to develop a glossary of defined terms, which we must agree on as to meaning for the purpose of our discussion whether or not we have a personal commitment to its validity. I will have a personal commitment to it but you may not.
What I really mean by this definition of religion is that it is the activity of man to attempt to find his place in the universe and try to develop valid goals for himself and his fellow man within the forces (whatever they might be) which do control his destiny. The all pervading search of man to include the sacred values with some notion of his destiny or meaning, what duties and hopes they present, and what man must do for his part to cooperate with these natural forces is the basic activity which religion often embraces.
The first term I would like to define is one that I have used a number of times so far without definition and that is the word theology. I would like to define theology here as any critical intellectual attempt to understand the beliefs and practices of a religious community.
5
The doctrine of man’s long range destiny requires a notion not only of his fate tomorrow, but his fate in eternity, a doctrine of the meaning fulness of life in the face not only of more immediate frustration of their cherished goal but also in the face of the absolutely certain death of his only body.
grounded notions will correspond to the essential elements of the great traditional systems of religious belief when certain semantic translations, certain use of this dictionary which I would like to develop as we go along, are applied to the words we use. We will develop a tentative scheme, in other words, for such scientifically grounded religious beliefs throughout the course of this seminar.
The doctrine of the determinance of man's destiny requires a recognition of any pertinent realities outside of man as well as his own role. And the great religions of the world have their beliefs about God or a god or some reality or realities whose power vastly transcends man if they do not ordain all, and actually man not only is ruled and ruled completely by these rules but he must somehow cooperate with them to be saved or redeemed or to have a life better now or sometime hereafter. Religions also have their beliefs about what it is man must do for his part in the program of the general salvation of mankind.
What I will develop in this seminar is my own belief that the sum total of everything in the universe, including man, is the forces of nature. Now nature has been a common word used in many times. Let me pick out two particular examples of what I mean just to put it into somebody else’s words besides my own. Let me take T. H. Huxley who in 1872 in his book Science and Christian Tradition wrote: “The term nature covers the totality of that which is. I am unable to perceive any justification for cutting the universe into half, one natural and one supernatural.”
My belief is that we can describe these matters of religion in the language of contemporary science, and come up with emotionally and motivationally effective as well as realistic belief for renewing man’s sacred values in guiding his salvation.
Or, let me take Santayana’s statement in his Reason and Common Sense: “Nature is the sum total of things potentially observable. Some
Moreover, I think we will be surprised how closely these scientifically 6
observed actually, others interpolated hypothetically.”
note that administration is not synonymous with administrator. The latter term has connotations that are not necessarily ruled out of consideration in connection with the former but they are definitely not applied when the former term is used in a scientific context.
Now, whenever you start worrying about the totality of nature, one must deal with words which cause a great deal of trouble. To illustrate this problem, let me quote from another book which I hope we can get as a background book for this seminar. The book is called Science Ponders Religion, edited by Harlow Shapley and published by Appleton Century in 1960. This is a collection of statements from various people. I would like to choose one from Kirtley Mather who is a retired geologist from Harvard.
“On the other hand, the theologian who truly believes that God is spirit and not a material entity will find a significant similarity between his 'god of law' and the scientist’s administration of the universe.” Now this statement of Kirtley Mather’s brings me to the last definition I want to take up tonight. That is the definition of God.
He writes as follows — under a chapter called The Administration of the Universe: “The rubric ‘Administration of the Universe' may be used as valid scientific designation. It simply asserts that there is something pertaining to the universe which governs the manifold operations under investigation and makes them amenable to intellectual comprehension.
You will notice that I believe in the scientific approach to words and if there are useful words you use them. You may have to define them for the purposes of your discussion but I think it is silly not to use some perfectly good words like 'god.' So let me define God. My definition of God, for the purpose of this seminar, is an image of a unitary system which ordains all that was and is to be — omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal, and infinite, creator and sustainer of life and source
“Nothing whatsoever is implied concerning the nature of that something, what it may be is left wide open for further study. Specifically, theologians should 7
of all values, goals, duties, and hopes for that life. You will also discover that I believe this is also synonymous with the term nature.
“A more exact way of reporting the human condition is to say that the cosmos has given to man his life and his powers to know and cooperate with the laws of the cosmos such that man becomes increasingly an incarnation of what the cosmos had decreed for successful and advancing life patterns.
Now as an added statement I would like to read a statement which is in line with the definition I have written down for God, which comes from a book (which isn't yet published — and I’m going to read from the manuscript) by Ralph Burhoe who is a professor at the Meadville Theological School in Chicago:
“In his power for life man shares with all other living forms certain powers to take from his environment certain elements needed for his life or to reject lethal elements. In this process he may, within limits, mold or manipulate certain aspects of the environment to suit his needs.
"Man is completely, one might say absolutely, dependent upon this reality — this reality being the reality of life. No human thought, feeling or action can take place apart from it. Such is the faith of those who have contemplated those implications of the scientific world view.
“These are gifts of the cosmos to man, not powers that man himself originated. In no case can man advance his life by any means which the cosmos has not implicitly sanctioned already. Any infringements by man of the sacred rules of life can only lessen his powers for life — for there is no power or capacity for life apart from the incarnation of those sacred conditions or patterns which only the cosmos determines. It is only by the grace of this cosmic reality which incarnates its laws in the genotype, the brain, and the
“The socalled triumph and dominance of man over nature and the doctrine of scientific knowledge now makes man more than ever master of his own fate, is completely superficial and erroneous. We cannot alter one jot of the cosmic law — whether it be the law of gravity or the amount of energy available to support life on earth.
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culture of man, that man has any power of life at all. “Looked at in any depth, the scientific picture of man is one of complete dependence on the cosmos, that man's role, opportunity, duties, perquisites and hopes in this scheme maybe we shall discuss in the future. But first it is important to recognize that man is ultimately utterly dependent for all he was, is and may be, upon the cosmos.”
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II — The Methodology of Science and Theology
I
the framework of contemporary knowledge. The early beginnings of science were founded directly on ancient man’s search for some indication of rigid order. The early beginnings of science are tremendously impressive as primitive man began to probe the possibilities of an ordered universe. It is worth turning back the pages of history and try to capture the immense intellectual leaps that some keen minds must have made, first, to conceive of the concept of order, and then to lay plans to prove such a remarkable hypothesis.
define science as man's search for the organization of the universe. I would like to examine the methodology of science and see how it is employed in building up the intellectual structure that we term scientific knowledge. The basic assumption that we must make if such a search is to have any meaning whatever is that there exists an organization. And that there is a fundamental order and regularity to nature to be found for the searching. Science, as we know it, cannot exist in the face of the beliefs that the operation of natural phenomena are subject to fickle variation either from a naturally occurring lack of order or more anthropomorphized whim of gods and demons.
If the sun were really a flaming chariot, guided by some god through the sky, then the god in human image must surely be susceptible to human failure. Some days he would sleep longer than other days, some days in his enthusiasm he would race across the sky, and on the days when he had a headache he would not have the energy to use the whip on his horses. It all seems so completely logical.
Since the assumption of order is so basic, science could not develop as an intellectual framework until such basic assumptions were believed to be true — and the acceptance of criteria of credibility based on observational predictability became a cornerstone in the framework of scientific methodology. I define “criteria of credibility” as acceptable tests of a given hypothesis to check its agreement with known facts within
The passage of time is a difficult and sophisticated concept to consider. Yet the intellectual geniuses among the ancient Samaritans not only recognized the importance of this 10
concept, but they were brilliant enough to devise experiments in which they measured time in terms of space coordinates, building great temple structures so precisely laid out in terms of the positions of the sun at the equinoxes that their measurements of the number of days in the year were done to an accuracy of about 1%.
knowledge. These three phases are typical of many branches of human endeavor. Let me draw a couple of illustrations outside of science. Take for example the study of language. Phase I consists of learning the words and grammar; Phase II, the application of this learning to reading and writing— here we have the tools for communication and for acquiring further knowledge. But the real essence of the value of language does not come until Phase III where prose and poetry are brought to bear on the human character, our hopes, our aspirations, our loves, our hates and the whole gamut of our emotions.
Before the dawn of written history, the prehistorics conceived of order and predictability in the universe, and invented methods to demonstrate these. Perhaps because of these origins, order and predictability came to be regarded as a basic element in the scientific approach to knowledge. Now the intellectual discipline of science is not unique in its operation. To emphasize this point let me point out its similarity to the acquisition of knowledge in other fields. The development of knowledge can be differentiated into three phases:
Let me take another example from the field of art. In Phase I, we must learn to use the materials — the paints, brush, chisel, canvas, metal, the stone. In Phase II, one learns to form the drawing, to put the paint together to express one’s art form in a unified whole. However, we do not recognize Phase II as real art. It is not until the human aspect or emotions are transferred to the canvas or the bronze that we reach Phase III and something of real value has been contributed.
Phase I, the acquiring of facts and basic concepts; Phase II, the application of these facts and basic concepts for skills to extend the boundaries of the discipline; and Phase III, the deep penetration into the fundamentals which produce a basic understanding of the interrelationship of knowledge and the facts which lead to further implications of this
Now science has the same three phases, Phase I contains the collection of facts, the laws and postulates, the mathematical formulation and the 11
array of basic building blocks which so often frighten the nonscientist. Phase II involves the application of this knowledge to the extension of knowledge and to the technologically useful devices which unfortunately the layman often confuse with science itself. But not until Phase III does the scientist reach the appreciation of the understanding of nature, its unity and its beauty, as well as its impact on lives and emotions of modern man.
the historical results of using the concept of order and predictability as a basic argument for credibility led the ancients to the concept that self consistency could serve as a basis for truth in the scientific sense. Anyone who has studied the emergence and decline of the formalism of Greek logic, which was based on the self consistency of hypothesis and conclusion, knows that this whole formalism has not proved generally useful as an overall methodology in science.
One could ask the question whether I am implying that the discipline of science can basically be differentiated from that of art and language. The answer is, of course, that there is a difference. But the difference does not lie in the mechanism of acquiring knowledge. But rather that the characteristic which sets the scientific discipline apart from other fields of intellectual endeavors is its particular set of criteria of credibility. A scientist does not know what truth is, but he has developed a remarkably successful attitude of mind which allows him to reach a consensus with his peers, to test what is acceptable as an explanation for natural phenomena and what is unacceptable.
The necessity for change in the criteria of credibility is an inherent feature of scientific methodology and an understanding of its operation is fundamental to an appreciation of science. Let me review the basic operation of the scientific approach to gaining knowledge. What one does is to collect the basic facts in the field one wishes to study, and to create a model. I am using model in the technical sense of an intellectual framework constructed in agreement with the accepted facts, which provide working hypotheses for understanding and implementation.
One of the real difficulties in following the course of scientific development in the historical sense is that the agreed criteria of credibility change as a science develops. For example, one of
Now, what you do then is to invent a model, an intellectual structure, of how facts may be used to explain the observation. Furthermore, such a model may be used to predict further 12
facts to be looked for which may not now be known. Often this is called the process for creating a hypothesis. But my own feeling is that the term hypothesis has come to be used in too narrow a sense. To me, a model is the whole picture, and the hypothesis is a guess in a particular area.
The important thing, however, is that within the framework of the known facts, the criteria of credibility were unable to decide the difference between an unacceptable theory and an acceptable one. And therefore both were used. This is characteristic of the search for knowledge in terms of models which we create and then use in various ways. Let me say again what I’ve just said about this criteria of credibility, because I want you to realize that this is not characteristic only of the scientific approach to knowledge but obviously also is applicable to theology and religion. What makes a model acceptable are the following:
After a model has been put together, a scientist must test it in every way that his imagination can suggest. I would like to take as a single illustration one from the theory of heat. For years and years people believed that heat was a fluid which you could pour into a bar (of metal) and it expanded because it took some space or it went from one place to the other because it flowed down hill, not literally, but figuratively speaking, from hot to cold. In fact, many of the words we still use when we talk of heat are based on this fluid theory.
First, a model must agree with experimental facts to a sufficient accuracy that an acceptable model may be differentiated from a unacceptable one. No agreement is perfect since no model is perfect; disagreement may mean either an imperfect model or an imperfect set of observations, and in general, one may not know which is the case. In very refined models which come from theories which have been tested for a long time the necessary accuracy for credibility may require great precision whereas new models, ones that have just been thought up, very crude agreement may winnow the wheat from the chaff and open new vistas of understanding.
As time went on it became obvious there were some observations which could not be explained easily by a fluid theory of heat and an energy theory was postulated. For 200 years both these theories were taught in universities because there was not enough data to separate one from the other. Subsequently the fluid theory of heat dropped out of sight and the energy theory of heat is the one we now use.
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quality of being, a chronicle of real ethical development, the testimony of a whole culture which has weathered the “hell and high water” of history.
It is true in physics at least that Nobel prizes are more often won for agreement between theory and an experiment within a factor of ten than the highly precise agreement with refined models. This leads to the obvious conclusion that two different models at the same time can explain all the known facts.
It is a model by which to test the criteria of credibility in theology as surely as the similar procedure in science. It is also obvious to all of us that there are other theological models, testaments of other religions against which to validate the goals which we live by and strive for which appear just as credible for large segments of mankind and yet whose basic hypotheses are quite at variance with the tenet of the Christian bible. Thus in theology, as in physics, different acceptable models may be credible for different cultures simultaneously, and within the state of knowledge of these cultures they are equally valid. Now you could ask the question, ”Where does one look for criteria of credibility for a theology?” I believe that these criteria are found in the success of the religious practices based upon the theology in question. And by success I mean, how well does it provide us with valid goals and aspirations as well as a culturally viable medium for living with others.
Intellectual modelmaking as I have described it for science is by no means unique, as I hope you realize, to these disciplines. The search for truth in theology and religion can be cast in the same mold. In theology also we can set up a model and validate the credibility of what we believe to be true in terms of agreement or disvalidate the agreement with the model. Take the case within the Christian tradition of the authority of the bible. We do not have to believe that the bible is an accurate historical statement to appreciate that here is the searching, the struggling, and the thinking of approximately 2,000 years of people in the human race, represented and symbolized for our consideration — here is a testimony to a people who survived about as much travail and anguish as any people could be asked to submit to. But it was more than survival. It was survival with a development of thought and
It was to serve as an illustration of this that I asked you to read Leviticus. Leviticus is an example of a religious model agreed to by the ancient 14
Hebrew nomadic tribes to guide their behavior in conformity with a particular theological concept of a jealous God regulating the behavior of a chosen people. It outlines in great detail the laws, for example, of sexual behavior, what one can or cannot eat, or even touch.
some of these, particularly in terms of your reading of Leviticus. You found that Leviticus was very specific about mediums and wizards. “Do not turn to mediums and wizards.” “A man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard shall be put to death, they shall be stoned with stones.” And yet, if you remember the story of Saul in 1st Samuel when he was in trouble fighting David he went to the witch of Endor and assured her that if she could call up Samuel he would relieve her of any fear of being stoned to death. In other words, he was transgressing some of the specific laws in Leviticus.
It also tells how to atone for transgression of the law, and the incredibly harsh punishment for those who really disobeyed the laws. But more than that, it dictated how commerce shall be regulated, how to thresh and to reap and to breed cattle; it outlined requirements for medical treatment of the sick, and how one was not to cut one’s hair or trim one’s beard.
Or we can take another one. You remember that Leviticus said very specifically that “one must not uncover one’s nakedness,” and if so it meant expulsion from the tribe. Yet perhaps you remember again the story about how David when he was bringing the ark into Jerusalem danced naked in front of the ark and he got away with it. True, Michel (the daughter of Saul — she was his first wife) was very angry at him, but otherwise nothing happened to him at all. It says in Leviticus, if a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. And yet we teach our children about David and Bathsheba. Also it says in Leviticus that “he who
The integration between theology and religions on the one hand, and cultural evolution on the other, is in the direction that theologies grow out of cultures, not cultures out of theologies. So as the ancient Hebrew Bedouin tribe became more agricultural and started moving into cities and towns, the rigid religious model given to us in Leviticus began to change and many of the stories we teach our children in school are the stories of the changing models based essentially on the same theological model. The criteria of credibility were changing and the validity of the ancient religious model called into question. Let me illustrate 15
kills a man shall be put to death,” and in the same story of David and Bathsheba you remember that he sent Bathsheba’s husband into the forefront of the battle so that he would be killed and so that he could have Bathsheba for himself.
nature, so should the theologians be constantly working on their models. If the methodology of science has any relevance to other intellectual disciplines, there is a keystone which must be accepted as central. A model is only good as long as it agrees with all the known facts within the accuracy of observation. When it no longer does this, it must be rejected without sentimentality and a more applicable one sought for.
The purpose for bringing this up is to give you illustrations of changing religious models when the criteria of credibility of an older model were no longer culturally and/or intellectually acceptable. In the overlapping generation both models were possible solutions just as in the case of the theory of heat, the caloric theory and the energy theory were both models which as far as one could tell were acceptable for some period of time. Having brought into focus the concept of model building, let me suggest that orthodox theology has constructed many models which, though passing the test of credibility when they were enunciated, have not kept pace with our knowledge in other fields.
This lack of attachment for no longer credible models is perhaps one of the most misunderstood facets of the operation of science. When in 1958, Yang and Lee received the Nobel prize for destroying one of the main conservation laws of modern physics the general public was amazed that the physicists acclaimed the discovery as a great step forward instead of being defensive and alarmed that their ideas had been incorrect for so long. By contrast, in theology modelsolving is not generally acceptable and I would like to persuade you that it must be.
The strength of a viable theology, as well as a viable religion based upon it, must surely lie in the recognition that model building is a dynamic and evolving intellectual enterprise. Just as scientists are constantly improving, updating, revising, and even rejecting their models in their search for clearer understanding of the operation of
With this as a jumping off place let me point to a few details of the most productive tool which a scientist uses in evaluating his models of nature. One of the most important criteria for a valid theory is that not only must it agree with the data within the limits of observation, but it must predict sensible results everywhere. 16
boundary value problem than was ever made considering the steady state.
This is known technically as a boundary value problem. In most comprehensive physical problems the boundaries can be taken to be the limits of zero and infinity. To illustrate what I mean let me take a case from cosmology. The process going on in the stars, the source of their heat, what makes them expand and contract and how they are constituted in detail can be explained in many ways. Since stars and galaxies are not subject to man’s experimentation and manipulation, for many years cosmology was a highly speculative and, in the strict sense of the word, unscientific, science.
Why not apply this method to theology. Here and now man, as he is and as he has been since the dawn of recorded history, is in a steady state and surely the theologists that have tried to explain his goals and purposes have been many, but have lacked anything like universal criteria of credibility. The details of biological evolution of man are common knowledge, but are our theological theories valid for man as he first emerged at time equals zero — or take prime equal to infinity?
In the steady state, and in the here and now, there appeared to be no acceptable criteria for the credibility of any particular model. As boundary value problems came to be recognized more and more in the scientific world as a powerful tool in suggesting ways to validate a theory, cosmologists turned to testing conflicting models by extrapolating time to zero and infinity.
The physicists and the biologists predict with considerable accuracy when our solar system will have cooled to a point in time when man will no longer be able to exist and he will vanish from the face of the earth. Theology must define man’s goals and purposes of his existence to cover that inevitable tragedy as well. Usually, when we think of the heat death of the universe, we say to ourselves “But that is so many millions of years away that it is unprofitable to spend our time worrying about that when we have so many more pressing problems of the present to solve first.”
The conditions for testing the details of stellar evolutionary theory to include sensible criteria at both the birth and the death of a star or nebula has proved to be a powerful guide in sorting out the true from the false. More progress has been made in this area since it was reduced to a
If you are saying that to yourself now, you have missed my point. Because 17
what I am trying to emphasize is that the methodology of science tells us not only that a solution is more likely to be valid by requiring consistency and validity at the boundaries, but some of the most difficult problems have only been tractable by worrying more about the extremes in time than concentrating on the present.
Let me now point to another example which has a parallelism in theology and religion. Physics, of the 19th century, concentrated on measuring every physical parameter and quantity with ever increasing precision. In fact, they concentrated so specifically on detailed measurements that the reputation of the profession was synonymous with the highest accuracy in every detail in every particle measured. Really, not unlike the rigidity that you discovered by reading Leviticus. A 20th century physicist, in contrast, finds more and more that the interesting problems of nature to be studied are statistically random processes. The older methods of attention to every individual element is no longer not only unprofitable but to deal with the details of each individual particle might actually prevent the arrival at a solution.
Let us look at the boundary value solutions and we may well make more progress toward a reliable theology for the present. Now of course this is not a novel idea at all. Many of the older theologies concentrated attention on the creation or the last day of judgment. In their time they were very successful theological models. It would be hard to argue against the success of a religion based on a creation of man in God’s image and an ultimate retribution of all the trials which beset a good man during his life as his soul received it’s reward for goodness on the last day.
If you think about statistically fluctuating physical phenomena you again can start thinking that it is all very well for me to talk about atoms and electrons, for example, as statistically fluctuating. But when it comes to dealing with human individuals, the importance of the goals and purposes of each person is as important as the next and one cannot reduce the dignity of man to statistical fluctuation.
This model certainly gave men goals to live by, which gave them not only courage and fortitude to “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” but to make them truly work for the benefit of mankind. It was only after the credibility of such a model was shaken by the accumulation of more knowledge that such a theology was discarded as inadequate.
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If you are thinking these thoughts, then I have again failed to make myself clear. Because the real lesson to be learned from the example of physical methodology of statistical fluctuation is that by dealing with the problem as a whole, we understand better the nature of the individual…better even than we do by concentrating on the individual alone.
develop experimentally verifiable models. Even fairly elementary students of physics get very used to dealing with psi functions, six dimensional spaces, and probability density, all of which are literally impossible to conceive of in terms of a picture of anything. One might be tempted to say that this is not basically different from the elementary theological student who is sophisticated enough not to try to picture God, the soul, or the holy ghost. But there is a great deal of difference in the technique of validating the usefulness of these concepts between present day theology and present day physics. The credibility of the theological model built on these suggested abstractions are really not called into question.
Let me again draw your attention to the fact that precisely this concept is a proven methodology in the theology upon which the reputation of Communism is based. Here is a religion that is successfully embraced by millions of people for which it supplies in a satisfying manner the goals, aspirations, values, and desires for service to their fellow men. We may firmly believe that the theological model is wrong, but it should not prevent us from recognizing its importance as an obviously applicable method in this area of human endeavors.
Rather the religious person feels that these concepts must be taken on faith. They are the underlying bases upon which the entire structure is built. Now of course the credibility of the models in science rests basically on faith, the faith of the scientist is that what is experimentally demonstrable is in fact true. But the scientist does not take the abstractions on faith; he uses the abstractions as a tool to develop a model that can be tested. Let me take a very simple example.
The last example I want to take up here is the use of abstract concept as a tool for developing and verifying models. We all know that abstract concepts are very much a part of the arsenal of theological contemplation, but there is a real difference between abstract concepts to develop an abstract theological construct and the scientist’s use of abstract concepts to 19
It is quite literally impossible for anyone to picture sixdimensional space. We live in a threedimensional universe and even the science fiction writers have difficulties conceptualizing a 4th dimension. Six dimensions is a pure abstraction which nobody tries to picture. Nevertheless, the elementary concept of pressure, the atmospheric pressure of the air about us right here, is based on the model that the multitudes of molecules bombarding you from every direction in fact causes the pressure which obeys certain rules depending on the temperature, the volume of the container and so on which when calculated in the detail necessary to pressurize an airplane or pressurize a submarine uses a sixdimensional space concept as the vehicle for the calculation. The model is thus constructed using this highly abstract concept as a tool for devising verifiable theories which may be tested for their credibility.
The basic elements of primitive religions were very real and discernible. For Moses, God was so much of a man that he could talk and argue with him. For Tutankhamen, life after death was so physical that he provided food and drink for himself in his tomb. The Greek gods cohabited with mortals. These highly successful theological models which violated none of the knowledge of the day were not based on indescribable abstractions. The generations of men who set their goals and validated their lives by living by these models carried very clear and credible pictures in their minds of God, Isis, and Zeus. However, as the theological models of today have required modification in the light of man's greater understanding of nature about him, theologians have tended to retreat further and further into the realm of abstraction, making it more and more difficult for the common man to find the basic tenets credible and being required to take more and more on faith.
Now to turn to my main point, however, about abstract concepts for which the human mind may be too limited to comprehend in any kind of a pictorial form, let me emphasize the difference between their place in theology and in science — a difference I should point out which I find very distressing.
I think everybody will agree that really spectacular advances have crowned the efforts of the scientific disciplines in the last 50 100 years and many people believe that this advance coincides with a corresponding shift in 20
scientific methodology toward using highly abstract tools to validate very real physical hypotheses.
forces in his living—that I feel they must be.
I feel strongly that the theologians working to develop a dynamic theology which can be validated by a modern religious society should study this methodological advance which has proved so spectacularly successful in the scientific world. It is not enough to develop highly abstract ideas of God, the soul, and immortality. We should stop worrying about what these concepts mean in the physical world but use them to develop a modern theology which can be validated in the modern world and in the modern idiom and in complete agreement with modern knowledge. Let me conclude by pointing out that I’ve taken only three possible examples from the methodology of science, which could have their counterpart in a new theology. I believe it is vitally important that theology come face to face with modern knowledge. Scientific advances have put an incredible strain on modern society and as man searches for those ideals and aspirations which are of ultimate concern to himself, his knowledge of the real world must be attuned to his theology and his religious belief, if these latter are to be the dynamic 21
III Cosmic Evolution and the Physical Sciences
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order in the universe. One of the fundamental laws of physics tells us that the universe around us is becoming more and more disordered, more and more statistically random. Entropy happens to be defined in such a way that an increase in entropy corresponds to a decrease in the order in the universe. The calculation of entropy is at times complicated but the concept, I think, is very simple. Let me illustrate by two examples.
hat do I mean by a physical science? The easy way would be just to enumerate the various physical sciences that would come to mind when one thought of the term astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, etc. But this does not really serve my purpose because of the popular misconception of these sciences which has so confused science with technology, pure science with applied engineering, and intellectual exercise with practical utility, that you may miss my entire point if I do not make a much more careful definition than just that enumeration. Crudely one could say that the physical sciences are the fundamental studies of dead matter, man’s attempt to understand the nature of the inanimate world about him, particularly in contrast to the biological sciences which are the study of living matter. However, I can be much more precise in this if you will allow me to introduce you to the physical concept of entropy.
If you examine a cigarette in detail, the probability is high that within the paper wrapper you will find tobacco. However, as you smoke it, what used to be tobacco becomes smoke and ashes. The smoke becomes randomly distributed in the air and the ashes, more or less, randomly distributed about the smoker. The probability of your finding a particle of your smoke between your fingers after you have smoked it is vanishingly small compared with your former chances of finding the tobacco in your cigarette before you smoked it. The entropy, in other words, the disorder of the system, has increased and your cigarette has become more random.
Entropy, which I define as a quantitative measure of the disorder of a system, is really a measure of the
A second, and perhaps macabre, example may make the concept of entropy even clearer. Compare the 22
condition of your body now with what it will be 100 years from now. Your body is now in a highly organized state, an expert in anatomy knows just where to look to find your various organs, veins, nerves, muscles, etc. because you are a very orderly array of cells.
Now as a way of clarifying this concept, let me compare the physical sciences with the biological sciences. The life process makes order out of disorder, randomly distributed cells are formed into orderly arrays, more complicated structures are made out of simpler ones, and man grows from a sperm and an ovum in apparent violation of the great principle of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Since, in this biological development, entropy is decreasing, order is being produced.
One hundred years from now you will have returned “dust to dust and ashes to ashes” and your entropy will be greatly increased. Your organization will have disintegrated completely and the chance of finding any order in your structure will be negligible compared to what it is today.
Actually, the energy necessary for life and biological development comes from the sun whose entropy is increasing with time. One can think of living organisms as feeding on the physical world, decreasing their entropy at the expense of the increasing entropy of the rest of the solar system so that the net entropy of the whole system still increases, but the biological development is different from the physical development in this regard.
In every physical process that we know of, entropy is always increasing, the universe becomes more disordered, and incidentally the ultimate death of the universe comes that much closer. Thus by the physical sciences I mean those sciences which deal with processes in which the entropy is always increasing. There is a fundamental law of physics which goes by the complicated title of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that in every physical model that we have so far been able to construct in agreement with our observation, the entropy of every closed system is always increasing. In other words, the physical world is getting more and more disordered.
The consistency of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is maintained by the total increase of the entropy of the universe, but life by itself is an isolated example of a decreasing entropy system.
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Thus, within the framework of this earth itself, the physical sciences deal with increasing entropy systems and the life sciences deal with decreasing entropy systems. If the universe as we know it is running down, heading inextricably to a fate of complete disorder, how did it ever get started?
atoms will gradually pull themselves together under the force of gravity. As they fall together, they gradually acquire speed and when they get into dense regions of other hydrogen atoms they collide and transmit their energy to other ones with which they collide. This process is one in which the gravitational energy is gradually changed into random heat energy and the gas as it collects in clusters due to the gravitational attraction becomes denser and hotter.
Cosmologists are making progress in applying our known physical laws to provide us with a picture of the phenomena which control the birth and the death of the universe. But our model is far from complete at the present time.
There are three recognizable stages in the production of a star. As the hydrogen atoms are brought together by the gravitational force, eventually they will get close enough together so that the electron patterns around the hydrogen atoms will begin to interact.
Let me give you a brief discussion on the evolution of our galaxy; in other words, in terms of the words I’ve been using before, the model of the creation of our universe. You will discover that I can start this discussion at any point and I would like to start it considering space as an enormous cloud of hydrogen atoms, hydrogen atoms moving around in a random fashion and occasionally colliding with other hydrogen atoms.
When they interact, the energy is released in the form of light and we can see a visible star. The first stage in the production of matter is merely to bring these hydrogen atoms together close enough so that their fields of force can interact and light is produced.
One of the basic laws of physics is the law of gravity, which says that any material substance will attract any other material substance according to a very known and tested law. If we consider space to be bathed in a sea of hydrogen atoms, these hydrogen
But this is not the end of this attraction between the hydrogen atoms. As they are pulled together they can get close enough so that nuclear processes are introduced and the heavy hydrogen atoms are fused together into helium atoms in precisely the same 24
phenomenon as occurs in the production of a hydrogen sun.
occurs, the gravitational forces between the nuclei take over again and the star continues to collapse. Because of the fact that these reactions are taking place at the center of the star and it is surrounded on the outside by cooler hydrogen gas, the star, as we observe it in the heavens at the moment in this stage, is red. Astronomers call this the red giant stage of a star.
This produces enormous amounts of energy—so much so that further gravitational collapse of the stars is inhibited. Let me remind you that one of the most productive experiments which physicists have been able to do (despite one’s fear of hydrogen bombs as military weapons) was to be able to predict exactly the phenomenon that I have been discussing as the origin of stars, to such an extent that they could produce a hydrogen bomb and have it go off the first time they tried it because the model which they had produced was accurate enough to predict not only what elements needed to be in the reaction but all the details of this really catastrophic event.
When the hydrogen is exhausted and the gravitational force starts to pull the star together again, the temperature of the star rises remarkably to around 100 billion degrees. At this temperature the helium, which was formed by the hydrogen, starts burning. I should point out that we are unable to make a helium bomb since the energy necessary is very much larger than a hydrogen bomb and we cannot get several hundred billions of degrees by any method that we know.
In the last 50 years we have developed sufficiently accurate models to go from no nuclear reactions at all to a hydrogen bomb. In the stars this process takes several billions of years, the reason being that the statistical chance of these things occurring is very small and therefore one has to wait through a very long time before the chance encounter of the proper elements are all available for such a reaction.
The way we get the temperature for a hydrogen bomb is to explode an atom bomb inside it which is hot enough to set the reaction off, but a hydrogen bomb is not hot enough to set off a helium bomb, though the stars succeed at this very successfully. The helium starts burning and, in the process of burning, it makes carbon, and with the helium and the carbon mixed together, nuclearly speaking, oxygen is formed.
In the process of fusion, the hydrogen nuclei turn into helium. Eventually the hydrogen is all exhausted. When this 25
produced in this catastrophic explosion.
Five or six or more helium nuclei will burn together and make neon, magnesium, silicon, sulfur, and as the process goes on, the red giant stage of the stellar evolution will make all the elements which we know at present in the periodic table. The process continues until the helium is used up and the star collapses again because of the gravitational force. This collapses into what is known as a white dwarf star—a violent rearrangement of the matter in the star results in a tremendous catastrophic explosion into what is called a supernova.
Now let me go from galaxy formation to something much closer to home — namely, our own sun. The sun, as it was produced, started coalescing in the gravitational field with the debris of an exploded white dwarf. As the main cloud condensed, small bits of the cloud were left behind in a statistically fluctuating hydrogen gas. Some particles would come together and little clusters would be formed. These smaller clusters did not involve so much matter as the sun, hence when they were compressed they were not compressed so much, because the matter was a smaller amount, and hence they never got as hot. These formed the planets as we know them which were cooled quite rapidly compared with the sun, condensed into solid rock, and became the planets as we now know them.
Several supernova have been observed in the history of man, and the fact that we have seen several of them is quite a remarkable thing. In the supernova, because of the explosion that takes place, essentially everything collides with everything else with tremendous energy and the rest of the heavy elements as we know them are formed.
Let me now return to my definition of entropy. You will notice that when I started, I started building up universes, galaxies, out of statistically fluctuating hydrogen gas. From our limited knowledge of science, we do not know how big a system is required for the Second Law of Thermodynamics to be valid. But we do know that once we have isolated the sun, as a system, disconnected
The stellar material so formed is hurled into interstellar space, and a "second generation” star starts to be formed in the same process as the first star except the second generation star is now contaminated with the debris of the exploded supernova. Our solar system including our sun is such a second generation star contaminated with all the elements that were 26
from the rest of the galaxy as far as its nuclear burning is concerned, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is definitely in operation; we have formed an isolated system in space and the entropy will keep on increasing.
been presenting is the image of a unitary system which ordains all that was, is, and is to be...the first part of my definition of God. Certainly forces which are capable of both building up and destroying universes, fall within the meaning of the next word which I have in the definition: omnipotent.
Disorder will continue to be the basic concept of the solar system. To put it another way, this means that the hot part of the solar system will cool off, and eventually it will all come to a uniform temperature and it will have arrived at a condition of maximum entropy.
But fully as important as our ability to develop a credible model of all that was, is, and is to be in the physical universe is the homogeneity of absolutely every detail. Perhaps not so remarkable is the fact that the laws of gravity work just as specifically to hold you into your seat as they do to hold the solar system together, to hold the galaxy together; and in fact to draw the hydrogen nuclei together which form the galaxies in their original shape.
These processes are longterm processes, they are so long term that when I give you the numbers it means nothing to you whatever. This unfortunately is a limitation of the human mind which we can do nothing about. I will give you the numbers anyway.
As I say, perhaps this is not so amazing, but what does seem fantastic to a physicist and to an astrophysicist is that as far as we can observe all the elements which we know on the surface of the earth, which we manipulate in our laboratories, are found in the furthest reaches of the universes—not only are the elements the same, but the isotopic abundances, the relative weight of the same elements with slightly different nuclear arrangements are precisely the same whether we observe the light
The life history of the first hydrogen cloud was about 20 thousand million years. The explosion part is 10 billion years and the second generation star which includes our sun in our own galaxy has an age of about 4.5 billion years. The question that really should be in your mind is what has this to do with a theological model which I am discussing in this seminar. What I have 27
coming from the most distant star or create the light in an electric arc in our own laboratory. There is, in fact, no indication that what we observe as the structure of matter in the farthest reaches of space are different in any detail than those that we see in our laboratories or find on the surface of the earth.
Since we cannot postulate life in any other form than we know it, there may be others but there are at least _________________________________
*Today, with better data from
improved telescopes, particularly those orbiting in outer space, astronomers now believe the number of galaxies exceeds 1 billion.
It is this extraordinary universality which leads me to use the word “omnipresent''… (everywhere present)…in my definition of God. Included in this universality of the laws of nature is the almost certain existence of life in other parts of the universe. The statistical probability of finding other forms of life by chance encounter may be terribly small, but you will have discovered by reading Shapley’s book that it is reliably estimated that there are about 100 million other galaxies.* By galaxy, I mean an island universe (one of the words that Shapley uses).
We are in a spiral nebula and we are one little speck off on one side. There are about 100 million other galaxies.* Within our own galaxy there are about one million planetary systems which are capable of supporting life as we know it.
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one million planets which are capable of supporting life as we know it.
every way. I do not expect you to understand the theory and I will not even present it to you, but the scientific community as a whole has agreed that this is a valid theory.
Although the chance of finding a manlike animal living in other celestial bodies may be extremely small, the number of habitable worlds in the known cosmic space may well be of the billions. In the face of numbers like these, the theory of probability tells us that we are almost certainly far from unique.
The theory is Einstein's general theory of relativity. When Einstein applied this highly mathematical general theory of relativity to a model of the universe he found that to be consistent with this theory it was necessary to postulate not only that space was curved but space also was bounded. The universe, a collection of dust, rock, stars, galaxies, and hydrogen nuclei was spread out uniformly in a spherical volume, spherically symmetric and closed. It actually turned out that his spherical assumption was not necessary. It made the mathematics easier, but as the mathematicians have become more sophisticated they have tried less symmetric solutions — the answer is the same, although the mathematics is much more difficult.
I think some of the most interesting experiments that are being done by physicists these days are attempts to discover other intelligent messages in the light or the radio waves which come to us from other galaxies. These experiments have not been successful so far but this is, I am sure, a result of our own inability to think about how to do the right experiment. What I have been talking about so far has been a boundary value problem applied to the boundary at time equal zero —I have been talking about the origin of the universe up until now. What about the future?
When Einstein and his coworker at the time, Friedmann, first calculated the details of this universe, they firmly believed (and the astronomical data at the time seemed to show) that the universe was in static equilibrium; that is, that the radius had a given value and that it was staying still, however, their solutions as they set them up, predicted a dynamic universe. It said
Here, I want to turn to one of the concepts that I talked about last time, that is the use of highly abstract concepts which lead to very real predictions and which have seen tested by very rigid criteria of credibility and found to be correct in 29
that the universe was either contracting or expanding; it certainly was not staying still. So sure was Einstein and Friedmann that they had made some kind of a mistake in their calculations, that they added what was called for many years a “cosmological term” in their mathematics, the only purpose of which was to fix up the theory to agree with the accepted astronomical evidence of a static universe.
edges of the universe were going away from us. Einstein dropped his cosmological term, returning to the equations of relativity in their original form which had been tested by three famous experiments which astronomers had carried out (the most spectacular of which was to measure the bending of light as it went by the sun). If Einstein had had enough courage to be sure of his original prediction, the great discovery of Hubble would have turned out to be another proof of his theory. But as it was, he dropped this cosmological term and was embarrassed the rest or his life that he had not believed his own theory.
Now you all are familiar with the Doppler effect. If an automobile goes by you honking its horn, the pitch of the horn seems to be going down when it passes, particularly noticeable nowadays when an airplane goes over your head, the sound of the airplane always lowers in pitch after it starts going away from you. This Doppler effect allows you to calculate and to measure the speed with which things are receding or traveling toward you. If you don’t believe it, don’t get caught by a radar used by the police, that is precisely how they tell how fast you are going.
There is no doubt that, if one is to use the accepted model of the theory of relativity, the universe is expanding. Calculations based on the rate or expansion now, which incidentally is not constant but slowing down from its original rate, extrapolated back to time equal zero (in other words, when the universe began) give an age of 1010 years, thus is in agreement with other measurements of the age of the universe.
The astronomer Hubble, after Einstein and Friedmann had worked out their theory, showed that there was irrefutable spectroscopic evidence that the light coming from distant stars was shifted toward the red — which meant that the universe was expanding, the
What the general theory of relativity tells us, furthermore, is that the universe is an oscillating sphere which expands and contracts with a frequency so slow as to be 30
incomprehensible to our imagination but nevertheless goes through this dynamic oscillation.
Even if by then (and still we have some billions of years to work on the problem) we are able to escape the solar system and find some more congenial medium in which to live, the basic expansion and contraction of the universe predicted by the theory of relativity will eventually make all life, everywhere in the universe, absolutely impossible.
This sphere is bounded and, as far as our knowledge extends, there is nothing outside it. This we cannot conceive of. Our whole concept of space must, in our human mind, have something outside a spherical universe, but I suspect that this is our fault, not the universe’s.
You can quite properly ask the question: "Am I bringing this up just as an illustration of a boundary value problem, or as a model which has been successfully tested by our best criteria of credibility?” Now although both of these things are true, it is not for this reason at all, but rather for its deep, theological implications. Let me point out that this theoretical prediction of general relativity has a direct consequence on our definition of God. I have defined God as eternal.
Nevertheless, we also know that this expanding stage, which we are now in, has already begun to slow down. Eventually, the gravitational forces which are always acting to pull together matter will overcome the present expansive phase and the universe will start contracting. The density of matter will gradually rise to fantastic values, the temperature will go up, and up, and up, approaching the immense heat necessary to form new universes, and the process will start all over again. What does this say about the possibility of life in twenty thousand millennia from now? It will be absolutely and literally impossible. You often read that the sun is running down, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the entropy is increasing, eventually the sun will burn its hydrogen out and it will cool down.
The curvature of space predicts with absolute certainty the annihilation of all living organisms of all possible life. It rules out therefore, in my opinion, any image of God which is a projection of human emotions; i.e., love, value, hope, or even life itself. These will all disappear when the environment of the universe will be sufficiently hostile in its contracting phase and therefore any image involving any human projection is not 31
eternal. The laws of nature, however, are eternal, and they are also infinite, if by infinite you mean the furthest you can ever go in space or time. The laws of nature are eternal even when all life has been destroyed.
of the inescapable law in the Old Testament. It is a single integrated system of reality and the law of its operation creates and sustains all that is from everlasting to everlasting. It is more like the deity portrayed in religions where man must serve and obey, rather than like the ones which include JudeoChristian religion where the deity is as man can imagine him, and perhaps even manage him and persuade him.
Now perhaps one of the most misunderstood facets of the God I have been defining is the apparent lack of the adjective “personal.” As a characteristic of that definition, the primitive human brain almost automatically projects its selfimage or animistic characteristic on all it perceives. Early men and their religions, as well as the belief of children, have this very definite characteristic.
The only God that contemporary science allows is an immutable system of reality, so superhuman in character that no human pressure of any kind can avail to change it. All that man can do is to seek the law of this deity and adapt and conform, or else cease to be.
Even highly sophisticated theologians and physicists may be thrown back onto this inherent characteristic of the central nervous system, when a response is elicited largely from the lower brain as happens under duress and stress or even if you stub your toe. If you listen to what people say, it is a very personal affront which they take from the stone—they may even kick it again which does little good to them and certainly no harm to the stone.
Yet, I often wish I were some kind of a poet, to be able to show you what a scientist feels about his science. The scientist, by the nature of his profession, revels in the closeness of the stupendous vastness of the unknown which most of us one way or another define as God. Perhaps few of you in this room have been able to really experience the incredible vastness of the heavens.
Yet, my personal response as a man to these almost incredible laws of nature are as truly a satisfying religious experience as I can imagine. The scientific cosmos is more like the God
But imagine that you were with me when I was young, standing on a moonlight night on the top of a mountain which you never heard of, 32
called EinenSur. The Lebanon mountains 50 miles to the west acted as an impenetrable barrier for the clouds from the Mediterranean. The nearest electric light is in Damascus, 80 miles to the southeast and shielded from us by the foothills of Mt. Hermon. In the early 1920’s automobiles did not travel at night on the dusty unpaved roads far to the south, for a breakdown would surely mean an unpleasant encounter with roving bandits.
Andromeda is the only other one we can see with our naked eye, there are millions of others. Together these nebula form a supergalaxy which we can describe as bounded, though the human mind cannot appreciate this, and there is nothing outside. In these vast reaches of space, all physical laws are identical as we know them. Every element in the cosmic dust deviates not a bit from the elements that we know. The law of gravitation attracts universes as surely as it attracts us.
Stand with me on this isolated peak and look up. The stars are oppressive in their brilliance, the Milky Way is not a dim band which in Lexington, Massachusetts, you sometimes confuse with weak northern lights, but a brilliant band of myriad dancing stars. Mars is like a great red beacon and the Andromeda nebula a mysterious, ill defined, shiny cloud which cannot help but draw your thoughts out beyond the confines of the world. Our solar system is an insignificant dot in the nebula we call our universe. All the stars we see from this mountain of ours are in our universe, except the Andromeda nebula.
Our cosmic view of the supergalaxy lets us realize that there are about 100 million other galaxies, other universes beside our own, and that within our own universe there are about one million planetary systems capable of supporting life as we know it. Now if we come back from our view of the supergalaxy, back to the spiral nebula of our universe, back to the solar system whose very center of existence is the sun, actually indetectably small on a cosmic scale, and finally back to our lonely mountain top, we find ourselves so insignificantly minute in the cosmic scale that we really cannot describe our smallness.
The Milky Way, whose stars are so numerous that we cannot resolve them into separate points of light, are the arms of the great spiral nebula in which we exist. Nor is our universe unique, for although the nebula in
These are the thoughts which make many scientists deeply religious. For my own self, as I spend hours, days, and years, in my laboratory, piecing 33
together the intricacies of one small piece of research, adding one small bit of knowledge to the great discipline we call science—when the answers do come, they show a fundamental simplicity, order, and real beauty of nature which at times becomes almost overwhelming. My science and religion become one, and my reverence for nature is my reverence for God— reverence for my own personal god, because I am a person, because I am a man thinking these thoughts.
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L
IV Evolution and the Biological Sciences (you might almost consider it as drinking orderliness from its environment) is intimately connected with a selfreplicating mechanism, the details of which I hope you learned about in the reading which I assigned for this seminar.
ast week we talked about evolution and the physical sciences, which I characterized as entropy increasing systems. You will remember that I defined entropy as the quantitative measure of disorder of a system, and the physical universe as one in which the entropy is always increasing. That means the disorder in the universe is always increasing.
What I am saying is that the difference between the physical universe and the biological universe is that the physical universe is always becoming more disordered. The biological systems are becoming more ordered, but that is not a sufficient condition. It also has the characteristic of being self replicating, that means it can reproduce itself. It is this concept which I want to dwell on for a little while, because I want to be sure that you understand what I mean. There are actually two ways of producing orderliness. One is called a statistical mechanism which produces order fromdisorder. The second method is called the selfreplicating mechanism which produces orderfromorder. Let me explain what I mean in more detail.
Tonight I want to talk about evolution and the biological sciences, which I will characterize roughly as entropy decreasing systems, that is, systems in which the disorder of the system is becoming less, becoming more ordered rather than more disordered. The characterization of life as an entropy decreasing system is a necessary but not sufficient condition. It is true that living organisms avoid decay by eating, drinking, or in the case of plants, assimilating— what one might call negative entropy. That is, they are continually drawing from their environment what is often characterized as negentropy. the opposite of entropy. An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a stream of order into itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos
There is a perfectly standard method in the physical world of producing order from disorder statistically, when things crystallize, for example. If you take water and you cool it down close 35
to the freezing point, before it freezes the atoms of the water (the hydrogen and oxygen atoms) start collecting statistically in places where they will freeze into the crystal when the temperature becomes sufficiently low. That is a random process, but you can study it by xray analysis and discover that on the average the hydrogen atoms get into one position and the oxygen atoms get into the other — so that before it freezes, the atoms are statistically situated in the condition of a crystal even though they are in liquid. Any one atom is moving around at random but on the average they tend to collect along the crystallographic axis which will be true of the frozen crystal when the temperature gets sufficiently low. This is what I mean when I talk about orderfromdisorder. It is a statistical mechanism.
parental and sperm cells. This code constitutes the genes and, depending upon the species, instructs the developing tissues how to make a fly, a cat, a dog or a person as the case may be. One of the greatest developments of the past decade has been the discovery of the chemical nature of the genes and the nature of their codes. The code is contained in the pattern of selfreplicating molecules of a particular kind of ribonucleic acid which is called DNA for short. The organization and chemical structure of the DNA molecules constitute the blueprint of biological heredity. It directs the orderfromorder characteristic of the particular entropy decreasing system that we call life. As cells divide to form the embryo, the DNA molecules located in the chromosomes of the cell nucleus of the fertilized egg also divides and are distributed ultimately to each of the thousands of trillions of cells that form the body.
The biological case is quite different. The biological case is one in which the order of the final system is dictated by order of a controlling mechanism, which I would like to discuss in some detail. Each of us is what we are today because of information passed on to us from preceding generations. The difference between a fly, a cat, a dog, and a man, and many individual differences between individuals are the result of information passed from parent to offspring by a chemical code of instructions in the nucleus of
These DNA molecular structures are templates or patterns. Through several chemical steps, they are responsible for the production of the thousands of different highly specific proteins of which our tissues are composed. These include the hundreds of enzymes that regulate each cell’s metabolism, its growth and life processes. Every single one of our human characteristics is 36
coded into the DNA molecule and is coded before we start to develop as individuals.
Biological evolution by natural selection is thus a very slow and wasteful way of transmitting progress. Again, I hope you read the first chapter of Hawaii and got the feeling of the tremendous scope of time and waste of attempts which go into the evolutionary process . It has taken over two billion years to produce, from simple viruslike structures, complex species including ourselves, that now inherit the earth. For these species here today, millions have perished in the course of environmental screening by natural selection.
The information contained in the chromosomes of a single human egg has been estimated (and I want just to give you some kind of a picture of this) as being equivalent to 1,000 printed volumes of books, each as large as the Encyclopedia Britannica. So much coded instruction, packed into a space the millionth size of a pin head, is required for transmission from parent to offspring to tell the next generation how to make a person. We share this same type of coded information with all forms of plants and animals.
Let me return for a minute to the boundary between orderfrom disorder, which is like a crystal freezing out, and orderfromorder, a human being produced by its growth from the DNA coded molecule. The line between living and nonliving systems has become increasingly blurred in recent decades, with the discovery that viruses are nuclear protein molecules some of which, like the tobacco virus, can be made to cross the boundary between the statistical and the selfreplicating mechanism almost at will.
Mutations (which is a word I hope you came across in your reading for this week) are chance accidental changes in the alphabet of the code. In the picture of my volume of books, they are sort of typographical errors that are then passed on from parent to offspring and are inherited. Ninetynine percent of all mutations are either lethal or deleterious to succeeding generations. Less than one percent may confer an advantage to its possessor at a given time and in a specific environment. It is such occasional rare beneficial mutations upon which progress in biological evolution depends.
There is a long series of experiments carried out with the tobacco virus which I would like to talk about for just a few minutes. It can take two forms. It can be crystallized as a simple chemical crystal, or, by taking 37
the crystal and putting it into a nutrient solution and keeping the temperature just right, it can be made to turn into a virus. You can do it back and forth. When it is a virus, it is self replicating. It grows. It produces offspring, and it is susceptible to temperature variations which will kill it if you heat it up too much and kill it if you cool it down too much.
carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. Thus life, as we know it, is possible only in the planets attached to the kind of second generation star that we discussed last week. We saw last week that the necessary elements (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen — those three) were developed during the decline of an earlier stellar generation — only hydrogen being available in a first generation star. Thus we know that life, as we know it, is restricted to these second generation stars.
However, if you take this same virus, take away its nutrients, you can crystallize it into an ordinary crystal which you can then heat to tremendous temperatures, you can cool to as cold as you can get it, and nothing happens to it whatsoever. It is not selfreplicating, it can crystallize, you can dissolve it, and recrystallize it and it behaves like an ordinary salt crystal.
I might point out that, in theory, there is nothing wrong with postulating life as we do not know it. In other words, postulating life which is not made of these elements, does not require the kind of metabolic transformation that we find on Earth. But there is a serious question with our present state of knowledge that we would recognize life as we do not know it since the only definitions of life as we have them now are in terms of the kind of life we find on the surface of the earth, the kind of life that is restricted to the second generation stars.
But still, after you have treated it as a crystal, you can then put it back into its living form and it behaves like a virus. Perhaps it is not at all surprising that these boundary cases should be found. We are discussing a sort of continuous development of the evolution of life, and eventually of man, out of the primitive stuff of the universe, and it would be surprising if we did not find some intermediate forms.
It is only in cooler places in the universe that atomic nuclei can hold electrons so that they can form complete atoms. It is only after one has formed a complete atom, that it is possible for atoms to combine with others to form molecules. With elementary particles, one is in the
Living organisms are composed almost entirely of four elements: 38
realm of what physicists call the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that with such small structures one cannot simultaneously specify both their location and their motion.
incomprehendingly long time scale through which such statistical encounters can occur, even exceedingly improbable events of the “oncetooccur” variety may become a virtual certainty given enough time to wait.
This means to a physicist that elementary particles have no definite size or shape, and one does not know where they are except statistically. On the other hand, with molecules one enters the determinant world with matter acquiring definite size and shape and positions.
Now there is a wide difference of opinion as to what particular course in the development of life actually happens. But here again there is near unanimity on the essential points. Virtually all biochemists agree that life on Earth arose spontaneously from nonliving matter and that it would almost inevitably arise on sufficiently similar young planets anywhere in the universe. This confidence which the biochemists have is based on their chemical experience.
During the first billion years on this planet, the molecules accumulated, interacted with one another, and eventually aggregated to give rise to the first living organisms. All complex plants and animals have descended from much simpler forms. Students of the origin of life have amassed convincing evidence that life on Earth began some two or three thousand million years ago from the chance formation of large organic molecules — some of which, like those of ribonucleic acid, were selfreplicating. If such an unlikely event as the spontaneous generation of such molecules occurred even once, evolution by natural selection could send life down through the ages.
If atoms of hydrogen and oxygen come together under certain simple and common conditions of energy they always combine to form water. Formation of more complex molecules require correspondingly more complex circumstances, but it still seems to be comparatively simple in its chemistry. In fact, this has been demonstrated in laboratories many times. If energies, such as would be available on a young planet, are put into a mixture of the simplest possible compounds of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, such as also
Because of the tremendous variety in chance statistical encounters, and the 39
could well occur on a young planet, aminoacids and other building blocks of essential complex organic molecular are formed and have been formed in the laboratory.
mutations), and the struggle for existence which is the competitive element. The outcome is called, as Darwin called it, the survival of the fittest — a continuous elimination of whatever functions are not well adapted, permitting those that work the best to go on.
Now the further synthesis of the building blocks into the macromolecule, especially nucleic acids and proteins essential for life, had not yet been accomplished under realistically primitive conditions although they had been accomplished under special conditions. Nevertheless it is reasonable to assume that these steps too could occur, and that in the near future (actually in the laboratory) we can make these as well as the basic aminoacids which have so far been synthesized.
Without going into the details of the creation of man from a virus, I think we are quite sure that man was produced as a natural outcome of the operation of these natural processes. For this reason, I have included in my definition of God a new phrase “creator and sustainer of life.'' Actually, I am inclined to supplement my original definition that I gave at the beginning by adding the words “and death” so it will read “creator and sustainer of life and death” — because I think one of the real differences between my theological model and, for example, the Christian model, is that in this model I am presenting to you, death is a good thing.
There is nothing unnatural or supernatural about this formation of life. Its generation clearly falls within the field of biochemistry as we know it today. Once having started, then we know that it is an intrinsic property of living organisms to have the capacity for passing on their particular forms and, in fact, having them change by mutations in a direction which is called “optimization” of the organism. The mechanism of this process is called natural selection. It involves the interplay of three factors — a mechanism of inheritance, a continuous production of random inherited variations (which are the
I am going to talk about this in my last two seminars in considerable detail, but I want to set the stage for this by pointing out that in normal theological models we talk about the “valley in the shadow of death.” We talk about death as if it were an evil thing. The model based on natural selection will 40
tell us quite the opposite. Death is an essential part of the process of natural selection. Evolution could not occur without it, and we are created as humans because death occurs as part of our development. Thus death, as an evolutionary necessity, is one of the important positive steps which this theological model will postulate.
of a living cell system starts to increase faster than it ever decreases. Let me explain what I mean. If you start with human development, one finds that under the orderfrom order building of a human being from the original sperm and egg, the organism grows by feeding on the entropy of the universe and becomes a more and more ordered array of cells. The number of cells which are in an orderform in the human body when it is born is much greater than when it started from its DNA coding in the beginning. This continues in mankind as he uses food as a way of decreasing his entropy.
Now let me change what I find is a misconception about life and death. One often hears that death is inevitable to all living things. This is false. Death is a relatively late invention even in the process of evolution. Right up to the portals of vertebrate life there is no need for death. There are many organisms, which include such organisms as sea anemone, planaria, and many of the single cell animals, which never need to die.
Actually the organism can be said to be feeding on negative entropy and its entropy continues to decrease. Eventually what happens, and this happens about between the ages of 25 and 35, the organism no longer decreases its entropy but gradually increases its entropy, being more disordered every day.
They can separate, they can form new offspring, and their living material continues on forever. Death comes into the picture in association with sexual reproduction, and in this mechanism as it has developed through the evolutionary process, death for bisexual forms of life is necessary. But it is not the antithesis of life. And there are many living things which never need to die.
When you eat you decrease your entropy. Between the times that you are eating and assimilating your food, your entropy is increasing Eventually the organism gets to a point where even feeding on negative entropy of the universe can no longer sustain its increasing entropy and death is the result. Death is a dissolution of the orderly structure of the body, and can
Before I go on, let me define death. Death is the point where the entropy 41
be calculated on the basis of a discontinuous increase in the entropy content.
fact that there are many different definitions of death and to emphasize that biological evolution is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of the nature of man, as we will see next week.
The definition of death that I have given you is a technical one for my particular model. What I am saying is that death is the point where your body increases its entropy at a rate faster than it is decreasing... in a remarkable way. It is a discontinuous increase in your entropy. Your disorder is so great that it is an obvious change to everyone around you. Now actually you can define death another way if you like. You can, for example, define death as far as biological evolution is concerned as the point when you are no longer able to produce offspring; you are no longer able to pass your DNA molecules on.
Having defined death, this brings up the problem of immortality. It is clear, I think, from the discussion which I have already given to you, that the models which I am presenting include immortality as one of its main tenets. We have in ourselves, and we pass on to our offspring, the coded information which makes a human, makes us as individuals with all our drives, images, personalities, and everything else. Not only that, we have inherited this in an unbroken line from the time life first started.
There are many animals that arrange for death as part of the sexual act. The praying mantis is a much studied case. The male praying mantis can copulate after the female has eaten the upper part of his body away — his head and everything but the necessary organs. The salmon, in the process of getting ready for mating, has lost its ability to eat. As it goes up stream to mate it loses its alimentary canal; it no longer has a stomach; it no longer can decrease its entropy by eating and lasts only long enough to reproduce. So, in this respect, it is already dead. I only bring this up as an illustration of the
Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about human immortality in terms of its germ plasm is the fact that the germ plasm is a very sensitive group of cells of macromolecules, which must be kept at a constant temperature. If you think about it, we have kept our germ plasms at a constant temperature ever since man first evolved and had a temperature of 98.8˚, and this has been going on through every generation since the origin of mankind. We all realize that we are made up of two parts. We have this immortal part, 42
which is our DNA molecules, the germ plasms, and we have a very mortal part which dies off very quickly in terms of evolutionary time — and this is called the soma. The soma, as defined in the Oxford Collegiate Dictionary, is all of any organism except the germ cells (the egg and the sperm cells), except the part that contains his immortality. Our genes never die, they are immortal. They will keep going unless all of us are annihilated, and thus we are immortal. Now the genes are not the only part of man that is immortal. There is another type of evolution which I will talk about next time, and I will get back to this concept of the immortality in subsequent discussions, but surely the genes form a part of what I will eventually define as man's immortal soul.
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V Social and Religious Evolution climate may not be right for its acceptance, and many ideas are harmful and may be even lethal to the individual and to society; for example, Nazism, Fascism, militant communism, and other forms of chauvinistic nationalism in our time. Just as many mutant genes may be lethal for a species, so idenes, such as those that might produce a nuclear war, could be lethal to the human race.
here is an interesting analogy between the biological evolution by genes, and the social evolution by ideas. This has been pointed out by many people. New ideas are analogous to new mutations of the genes. Henry Murray has coined a term “idene” for social evolution parallel to genes in biological evolution.
One of the big differences between biological and social evolution is in the operating time scale. In the case of social evolution, the impact of the idenes is measured in years, or at most centuries, while in biological evolution the time scale for viable mutant genes to establish new forms is more nearly measurable in millions of years. Social evolution is a very recent phenomenon compared to time scales characteristic of biological evolution, starting roughly a million years ago with our hominoid ancestors, and accelerating in the last hundred thousand years with the emergence of Homo Sapiens.
The definition of an idene is: the element which structures man’s cultural heritage analogous to the genes which structure biological heritage. To dwell on the parallelism for a minute, most genetic mutations are lethal and harmful and worthless Very few constitute the basis for advancing biological evolution by appearing at a time when the environment happens to confer an advantage to the organism possessing that particular mutant gene. There is environmental selectivity, not only to favor the exceptional viable gene mutation producing biological progress, but also social environmental selectivity to favor certain ideas contributing to social progress. Like mutant genes, an idene can be before its time, the social
The human cerebral cortex has doubled in size in the last million years. We have developed a bipedal posture, the latter freeing our hands for the purpose of manipulation so that we could develop evolutionary 44
advantage accruing from weapons and tool making. The former, giving man the capacity to invent language and symbolic communication. This gave man an advantage over other animals, in spite of his nakedness and helplessness, which made his evolutionary progress very rapid indeed.
The environmental testing of genes and idenes must have stability and continuity to maintain stables species and stable societies, to resist the effect of lethal genes and lethal idenes. Since we are well on our way to producing an optimum biological environment which will minimize the evolutionary mutation of our genes, the full responsibility falls on the behavioral and social sciences to test the values we live by, and to be wise enough to do it in a time scale which is a million times faster than the biological evolution which produced us.
Roughly ten thousand years ago, agriculture was discovered. Five thousand years ago, the city state came into being. The whole history of invention is the core of the social evolution. In the last three hundred years, the accelerated developments through science are a continuation of this amazing social evolution which is as much faster as biological evolution in its rate, as biological evolution is faster than cosmic evolution which I talked about in the third lecture.
Societies are built by ideas and, within limits, the more new ideas to compete with each other for social acceptance, the more effective social evolution is likely to be. Freedom of individuals to express and develop many ideas is necessary for progress in social evolution, just as many mutations must be screened by natural selection for the development of an improved or a new species of plant or animal. While novelty in the form of mutations and new ideas is necessary for biological and social progress, the environmentally tested genes and idenes must have stability and continuity to maintain stable species and stable societies to resist the effect of lethal genes and idenes.
To put it more dramatically, if we think of a time scale for measuring life on earth as equal to one year instead of two billion years, then modern man has lived on the earth less than a single hour, he has been civilized for about two minutes, has practiced science for about one second and has lived in the nuclear age for about 1/10th of a second. This lends a sense of time urgency to the testing of mutant idenes which was never present for mutant genes.
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Now one must not go too far in drawing the parallelism between biological and social evolution, without taking care to emphasize that the two are very closely intertwined since the roots of the idenes are, of course, in the biological functions of the brain.
The idenotype, that is the type of behavior that is controlled by ideas, is administered by the surrounding society and provides a semi independent reservoir of information for life, transmitted from generation to generation by means only semi independent of the genotype. Man is the first creature in the evolution of life on earth to possess this kind of heritage to any high degree. It is what makes man unique among the species of life on the earth.
One can think of idenes as patterns in the central nervous system, produced by certain interactions of that genetically operated system with a particular cultural output which produces their characteristic behavior patterns including those very complex fields of dynamic association which we call subjective experience or self consciousness. Idenes are not in the nervous system, but are the culturally structured presentations, or stimulus patterns, which are presented to it. Yet idenes are in the brain and its behavior.
The idenotype, like the genotype, is immortal. Each individual receives his or her heritage from it, and contributes his small increment to it. Actually, the idenotopic immortality is much more readily discernible than man's contribution to the gene pool (I define the gene pool as the sum total of our genetic material). Some of us do not contribute in any positive way to the gene pool if we have no children. But it is hard to conceive of anyone who does not make a specific impact on the idene pool.
Our genes come already structured from the outside, but become incorporated within, to mold the general structures and behaviors from within. In parallel with this, idenes may consist of the customary patterns of the language or the culture, together with the customary gestures and related signs that accompany these linguistic patterns. The transmission of idenes and structuring and restructuring of behavior that they produce, are an extension of biology.
Let me emphasize that I only said that the immortality of idenes was “more readily discernible,” not that it was any more effective because, in genetic history, negative contributions to the gene pool are just as important for the future of the genotype as are positive contributions. 46
in the Eugenics Quarterly and part of his statement is the following:
This is also an extension of my statement last week of the positive nature of death. Whereas in biological evolution, death is important to clear the way for more statistically variable organisms to be tried in the balance of the survival of the fittest, it is not absolutely required as long as the organism is not competing for nourishment and space. However, with the idenotype, this is different.
Death in this respect is an important process in the cultural evolution. To emphasize further the interdependence of the biological and social evolution.
“The diversity of the personality would seem to be as great and surely more telling than the diversity of skin colors or other physical traits. and though the biological basis of both kinds of diversity is the same in principle, it is different enough in its outward manifestations that the difference constitutes a genuine problem.” (Incidentally this problem is often found, perhaps in your reading, as the naturenurture problem). “The confusion which has beset this problem for a long time has been due in part to the problem having been wrongly stated: Which human traits are due to heredity and which to environment? No trait can arise unless the heredity of the organism makes it possible and no heredity operates outside the environment. A meaningful way is to ask what part of the diversity observed in a given calculation is conditioned by the genetic differences between persons composing the calculation and what part is due to the upbringing, the education, and other environmental variables?
Let me quote at some length from a paper by the noted biologist Theodore Doszhansky of the Rockefeller Institute in New York. He was writing
“Furthermore, the issue must be investigated and solved separately for each function, trait, or characteristic that comes under
The human brain has evolved; as we age we become less willing and less able to entertain new ideas at the very time when our cultural evolution makes us leaders in the society. This, of course, provides one of the important stabilizing influences on the society which allows it to function in a responsible way. But it inhibits the fair trial of idenotopic mutations and, therefore, the evolutionary development of societies as a whole is necessarily served by the periodic removal of the leaders of the culture.
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consideration. Suppose one collects good data on the genetic and environmental components of the observed diversity in intelligence quotients, or in the resistance to tuberculosis. It would not tell us anything about the diversity of temperament, or the resistance to cancer.
the developmental processes involved. “Mankind’s singular and singularly powerful adaptive instrument is culture. Culture is not inherited through genes, it is acquired by learning from other human beings. The ability to learn and thus to acquire a culture and to become a member of a society is, however, given by the genetic endowment that is mankind’s distinctive biological aptitude. In a sense, human genes have surrendered their primacy in human evolution to an entirely new nonbiological or superorganic agent culture. However, it should not be forgotten that this agent is dependent on the human genotype.”
“All too often forgotten, and yet a most basic fact, is that the genes determine not traits or characters but the ways in which the organism responds to the environment. One inherits not the skin color and the intelligence, but only genes which make the development of certain color and intelligence possible. “To state the same thing with a slightly different emphasis, the gene complement determines the path which the development of a person will take, given the sequence of the environment which this person encounters in the process of living.
Now let me bring up one of the very real dangers which are everpresent both in biological and social evolution. This is a danger which is called “over specialization.” There is a law of biological development formulated by Edward Drinker Cope which states that “the highly developed or specialized types of one geological period has not been parents of the types of succeeding periods. But the descent has been derived from the less specialized of preceding ages.” To put it in less formal language, it is the more adaptable and generally the smaller forms of life that are best able
“Any developmental process, whether physiological or psychological, can be influenced or modified by genetic as well as by environmental variables. The realization of heredity is manageable within limits by physiological and social engineering. What the limits are depends upon our understanding of 48
to meet new conditions which destroy the already dominant and successful type. The highly and narrowly adapted flourish, their proficiency may increase, their numbers may grow, but their perfected adaptation so necessary for their survival in general dooms their continued existence as climates change, enemies perfect their weapons, continental icefields advance. etc. It becomes the creatures which have maintained generalized adaptability which survive and from which evolve succeeding forms.
of its survival value in the face of attacks from other cultures. Even the visions of human brotherhood characteristic of the great religions have too often been at least passively restricted to the members of a particular group. In extreme cases, salvation becomes tied to some specialized form of sacrifice and the Lord's work becomes identified with obliterating those who prefer to sacrifice in another way. Perhaps the crucial Darwinian question for our time of crisis now is whether or not man can broaden his culture, his concept of human brotherhood and tolerance for variation, so that it becomes co extensive with his gene pool. For, important though the evolution of culture has been for the advancement of human welfare, it can only work with the biological stuff of which man is made.
Cope’s law has been amply demonstrated as valid for biological evolution, and should serve as something of a danger signal in viewing part of our social and religious evolution as we look around society as it is formed today. For example, the highly integrated totalitarian societies may be spectacularly successful for a while, but the rigid specialization of function within the society entails too great an atrophy of individual ability, and the equally rigid overall structure prevents adaptation to change external conditions.
This, in turn, is all contained in the few milligrams of genetic material spread throughout the entire human race that we discussed last week. Until this moment in history, the composition of genetic material and its development were entirely controlled by the impersonal forces of natural selection. But it now seems to stand, at least in part, to the mercy of man himself
Another more subtle danger in the evolution of cultures is their tendency to specialize on meeting the desires of but a limited fraction of the human species. A specific culture has always been cherished at least in part because 49
The specific idene, to return to Henry Murray’s word, which centralized and organized the direction of social evolution is the acceptance of what could be called The Establishment, to use a word in current vogue. The Establishment represents and acts for the will of the society and thereby guides social evolution. The Establishment is really plural; in our modern world it is bifurcated in its simplest form into the church and the state.
organization for worship where ritual, myths, and dogmas are enacted and expounded to inspire revitalization and provide meaning and purpose for life of the individual. But rather it is the central establishment which provides both leadership and a form for mankind to guide his evolutionary direction both socially and biologically. Now I hope it is obvious that I am using the term church not in any Christian connotation, but as a name for the establishment which guides religious enterprise.
Thus, to return to Wallace’s definition which I gave you in the first lecture of revitalization movement, those organized efforts by members of society to construct a more satisfying culture, are polarized about, and administered by, an Establishment.
One must realize also that since religions are intimately interwoven with the fabric of the culture in which they arise and grow, there are very many churches performing their necessary guiding functions which can be utterly different in their dogma and mythology and still provide the necessary inspiration and goals for the social evolution of the species .
The one which we must discuss a little more is the church. The church is the administrative unit which provides the focus and catalyst for the religious enterprise, and therefore those who accept the responsibility for church leadership in a very real sense are accepting the responsibility for helping to guide the evolutionary development, not only of our society but of our species as well.
Actually, of course, within any one culture such as our own, since there is a tremendous variation in intellectual, emotional, and educational aptitudes and susceptibility, if the church is to perform its guiding function it must have real and basic meaning to the tremendously wide statistical spread inherent in Homo Sapiens as he has evolved.
Looking at the church in this perspective, it is in a much more central position than the general public image supports. It is not just an 50
With this view in mind one is led to the unavoidable conclusion that the religious establishment must take many forms to be relevant to such a variety of human temperaments as have resulted from our evolution. It must avoid, at all costs, the danger of overspecialization which I have mentioned to have a real meaning for mankind as a whole.
the ministers , the priests, the commissars , the swamis, the heiggs , and the rabbis — will focus operational actions to lead their constituents in a direction that they feel right. The great unknown for the future is whose ideas will guide our destiny; and in what direction will we be headed? Obviously, we are not going to answer these questions in this seminar; on the other hand, an understanding of social evolution and the forces which shape its direction surely is a first step for finding what directions these might be.
The church leaders, the leaders of the establishment, which have taken on the job of guiding the values by which we live, are those upon whose shoulders the burden must fall, for all the development of methodology for coping with the ever more rapid evolution which has caught up with us in the area of the social and behavioral sciences. We have wrested from nature that produced us in the evolutionary process much of the further development of our own species. We have now come face to face with the absolute necessity for developing a meaning, a purpose, and a goal for our social and behavioral evolution so as to properly guide our biological evolution, which means, incidentally, our very existence on earth. The church, as the socially evolved establishment for guiding this area of our behavior, will lead the way for our future development; and the professionals within the churches — 51
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VI God, Man, and Immortality scientific culture or cosmology forces upon modern theologians as they begin to feel disenchanted a half century battle to defend the sacred core of Christianity by appeal to values of myths and symbols arbitrarily asserted to be true even when not grounded in scientific reality. But this laudable integrity of admitting their God to be dead is no more likely to preserve Christian faith than a declaration that the stars do not determine human destiny is likely to preserve faith in astrology.
n this chapter I want to revise and draw together my view of the present state of God, man and immortality, and in the next chapter I want to take a look at the future. With the rise of our new cosmology in science, the attributes of a Christian deity (and let me talk about this briefly since it is in the tradition in which my ideas have been nurtured) appear increasingly to be in conflict with the newer notions of reality. In the past century, the Christian God was pronounced dead by the philosopher Nietzsche, who seemed to represent an opinion shared by most of the intellectual leaders of the culture. In the past decade, Christian theologians themselves began more openly to declare that their God is dead and began to agree with the general culture that what you might call “God talk” had best be abandoned as it carried no meaning to modern man. A similar fate seems to apply to all other Gods or sacred realities of all cultures in the new light of science.
What we want and probably must have is a firm conviction of what it is, in fact, that does control our destiny. When theologians cut themselves off, or are by other elements of the culture cut off, from the credibility or reality of the critical entity of their raison d’etre, then their theology becomes dead with the culture. I am taking the exactly reverse direction from "God is dead" and I assert that the contemporary sciences are a new revelation of the transcendent powers which are the ground of all being. The sciences tell us that there are superhuman forces which create man’s world and man. The best course for theologians is not to declare the death of God, but the
The new "God is dead" movement seems to represent a new attempt at intellectual integrity which the 53
rebirth of God in a new form. Part of the problem of theology today is the unwillingness of religionists to accept new definitions.
incredible myths. Theists became atheists. But atomists did not become “tomists.” The ability of the scientist to forget the seeming logical contradictions of their words or symbols lies in their capacity to define their symbols operationally rather than logically. For the scientific community, the reality or meaning of an entity does not lie in its name but in its behavior or operation which links the name with an empirical experience that we share.
Let me give you an illustration from physics. The word atom means unsplitable particles. The word was taken up in modern science over a century ago from the Greek science or philosophy to denote hypothetical, unsplitable particles of physics or chemistry which characterize the various kinds of substances or elements of the material world. A few decades ago it became apparent that the unsplitable atomic particles were not unsplitable, but on the contrary they were quite splitable and not atomic.
Names or symbols have no inherent or intrinsic meaning. In the 19th century the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach pioneered in clarifying this philosophy of science which shows how the models of science are tied to common sensory elements of experience by statements that connect sensory experience to a linguistic symbol in the most correct way. This clarification of the meaning of terms by operations made it possible to weed out of the language the many ambiguities and irrelevancies that it otherwise would contain. It made it possible for us to communicate more precisely to one another what it is that we are talking about.
But physical scientists have no problem in declaring their continued belief in atoms even though literally they are not now, in the light of new scientific knowledge, “atoms.” They were able to use the word in both its earlier and its new meaning and did not have to declare that the atom was dead. Theologians as well as the general public, however, have had such a fixation on previous connotations of a word, term, or symbols that when some attributes of the entity no longer were credible, they had to declare the whole business dead. Credible notions became
As a result, the scientific community can attain a consensus, coherence, and integration between their statements and the world of universal human 54
experience far transcending that of any other language.
century A.D. up through Galileo and finally to Newton. It is an expression of the attempt of people to define words with sufficient clarity so that they can be used universally and have everybody understand what the word means.
To understand this point of view you should read P. W. Bridgeman’s book Reflections of a Physicist. Bridgeman has written for his whole life on what we now call “operational analysis” and he pioneered the link between sensory experience and words or symbols. This book, a collection of his writings, is one you will find gives you a much better picture of this way of looking at the meaning of words than any short statement that I might make.
If you are not a physicist it will be difficult for you to read but it is worth looking at just to show how hard it is to define terms even in the scientific meaning of the term. Surely in theology this will be even more difficult. Nevertheless, this is what I would like to try to do.
One thing one must be aware of is that the attempt to derive precise meaning of words is a very long and hard thing to do. I believe that theologians have not yet begun to appreciate the possibility of redefining many of their terms, and I would not expect in any short length of time that new definitions would be either accepted or understood.
First, I would like to present to you an operational definition of God. The term "God” was thrown out of the book of sciences by the early positivists because the theologians and metaphysicians involved in the argument insisted in refusing to allow the term any tie to empirical experience...any operational meaning, and hence any meaning at all for the language of science.
Again, if I would suggest that you do some more reading, let me draw to your attention a more difficult book, which is by Irwin Herbert. It is a book which is entitled Historical Roots of the Principles of Conservation of Energy. It is a study of the attempt to define the single word “energy” in physics starting with Aristotle going through Philo in the 3rd century B.C. through Hero of Alexandria in the 1st
The only way to get entry of the term "God” into the world of contemporary sciences is to show how it may be defined operationally. If we establish such a definition of God, there can be no atheists. That is, if we define some entity whether its name be God or Atom, in a way that we more or less universally know to which of their 55
experiences that term is properly tied, then no one can deny it since one cannot deny one’s own experience.
concepts I introduced in our second meeting—of discussing highly abstract concepts without trying to visualize any particular model—then as long as the operational definition is clear, it is as much a waste of breath to discuss whether to refer to God as he, her, or it, as it is to talk about the death of God. I believe both of these things are a waste of time.
Although in such a case there may be no atheists, it may be that theists will no more be like the earlier concept of theists than the present concept of atom is like an earlier one. Let me at this point make an aside to those particularly among you who might be called militant Unitarians. I have tried this experiment a number of times. I tried it on you the other night and I now know which of you I would define as a militant Unitarian.
What is significant in all this is that the newer scientific concepts for verbal formulations or symbolic systems do not so much deny or destroy the earlier ones as to build more validly upon them. For most practical purposes of applied physics and chemistry, the atom still possesses the attributes connoted by unsplitable. I expect that in an operationally derived God this will also share in discontinuity with earlier values of the term as we clarify its meaning in accordance with scientific cosmology.
The way you find this out is to refer to God with the pronoun Him, and then people will start jumping. If you analyze this reaction it does not make very much sense. You talk, for example, of your country as “her” and sing “My Country ‘Tiz of Thee,” you talk about death as “Him” and you even sing a hymn “Death, Where Is Thy Sting?”
I have already indicated that the scientific community will have no trouble with faith in a hypothesis concerning an essentially integrated system of forces or powers far transcending mankind and man’s ordinary perceptions which is, in fact, our most reasonable and validated explanation of what brings all things into being, which created the heavens and earth, which brought forth life upon the earth, sustains it, and lays
Without trying to commit yourselves to anthropomorphic imagery, one can just as well use the English pronoun as any other way to refer to an operational definition of an entity which I have defined as God. Here again, I think that if the general public will take the time to under stand the scientific methodological 56
down requirements and possibilities for its future. This conceptual system is the determiner of human and all destiny. For the scientific community, it is not a dead concept but a living and dynamic one.
at the definition which I have written down, it will be valid for every definitional picture that you can imagine for God to be, in the light of our scientific knowledge. Let me discuss some of the theological problems, however. First, what about prayer? I have defined prayer as the revitalization activity of the individual. Many theologians fear that the scientific picture of reality does away with the credibility in the effectiveness of prayer which has been a ritual and belief of religions for a long time.
Now theologians are quite aware of this picture of the cosmos, but they are loathe to admit it as the new model for their Gods for various reasons, such as its nonhuman or impersonal character which seems to rule out all sense in ritual or petitionary prayer, forgiveness, love, and redemption. It seemingly does not operate to sanction, in the human community at least, the rules of life that theologians felt as essentially sacred in their tradition. It raises the problems with religious doctrines of man, his freedom and responsibility, doctrines of good and evil, and the nature and immortality of his soul.
Now it is true that the effectiveness of petitionary prayer, asking private or collective favors from the deity, depends on the presumption that the deity is anthropoid or has characteristics like human parents or kings. This I do not believe. But this does not mean that I disregard or even feel the less important, the idea of prayer.
Let us discuss the validity of these interpretations. The scientific cosmos is more like the God of the Old Testament. As I pointed out before, it is, according to my definition, a single, integrated system of reality and the law of its operation creates and sustains all that is, and operates from everlasting to everlasting. It is more like the deity which man must serve and obey than one which man can manage. But I believe that if you look
There is an everincreasing body of biochemical knowledge which points to a very real, physiological as well as psychological, benefit to prayer, as a necessary stimulus to the biochemical reaction in the body for stress relief. It is somewhat similar to the adrenaline reaction in the body at times of fear, in which tremendous 57
activity and strength can be suddenly given to the body as a result of the release of adrenaline. To talk about prayer, one must talk about two kinds of prayer. There is private prayer and social prayer. First let me define “social.” It is: “All those interactive relations between individuals or groups in which needs are satisfied. It is the process of interaction between organisms during which they confer survival benefits upon each other."
worship as “prayer carried on as, and stimulated by, group activity.”. The importance of worship is that it can stimulate an activity of group dynamics which is technically called amplification. You can define amplification in many ways, but one way is to say that it is "the multiplication of effectiveness of a function or activity.” We can see the importance of amplification as soon as we consider how, in the biological world, the brain directs the activities of an animal or a person. The brain is a small organism which receives information from the senses and makes decisions that are amplified and carried through the metabolizing pathways of the nerves until they are amplified again in the muscles and serve as a trigger to release the full physical powers of the body in achieving what the brain decided was needed.
As I said, there are two kinds of prayer — the private prayer and the social prayer. Private prayer is, in my view, the process of getting one's self in order. Sometimes it is talking to oneself. Sometimes it is talking to the outside, talking, if you like, to the administration of the universe. Those of you that have really prayed realize that you can do this without praying to anyone. You do not have to have an anthropomorphic God to pray to. You can wander through the meadow or through the woods, you can get yourself in order by thinking your own thoughts and feeling that you are being revitalized by this process of putting yourself, if you like, at the mercy of nature.
Likewise, for society, the decision making group in the society is frequently an individual or a small group which can often channel the entire power of a whole community or society into one direction, sometimes with and sometimes without the full consent of the individual.
The second kind of prayer is more involved. The second kind of prayer, the social prayer, often goes by the term of worship, and I have defined
Amplification, as I am using it here, is a social type of chain reaction. The chain reaction point of view gives us 58
an especially clear understanding of the relation between the role of the individual and the role of determinism in history. A stabilized chain reaction system has within its limits of stability a certain unstoppable character, a certain inevitability, about its operation.
It is through the stimulus of worship that society provides the mechanism of both negative and positive feed back and it is therefore one of the most important factors to provide a mechanism for both controlling, stabilizing and providing effective mutations for social and religious evolution.
There is an inevitability of a different kind in the explosion or decay of an unstable chain reaction. We see this in such social instances as the decline of kings, or the rise of an industrial revolution, or the growth of belligerence between competing powers, or in the rise and fall of great religions.
This whole subject has been brought to the fore with the invention by Norbert Wiener of cybernetics. For those of you, again, that would like to do some more reading, let me suggest that you read Norbert Wiener’s book, The Human Use of Human Beings. This is a book which has a subtitle Cybernetics and Society, which, in my opinion, is a discussion of the operation of worship in the society, in terms of how ideas are fed into society and how society reacts to these ideas.
There are two different kinds of chain reactions. One is represented in society by selfstabilizing organizations and selfstabilizing situations. These are characterized by internal or external (and I’m using a technical term now) negative feed back. That is, they return to their previous equilibrium when disturbed.
How about such concepts within the theological sphere of discussion as the dignity of man, good and evil, and finally, man’s immortal soul. These can clearly be discussed within the framework of the theological model I have seen presenting.
The second category is represented by selfamplifying organizations or situations. These are characterized by positive feed back, so that they run away from equilibrium either in one direction to the point of indefinite growth or in the other direction to the point or vanishing destruction.
First, let me talk about the dignity of man. Do we, for example, have a free will to guide own behavior? The answer here is, it depends on what level you look at man. If you look at him as individuals, and give us the 59
boundary value that we must behave as humans, then the answer is "Yes, we have free will.” On the other hand, on the average, our behavior is totally determined by the evolutionary forces that produced us.
specific that we will not, on the average, do anything which will prevent us from living and from helping the evolutionary process to develop. This does not mean we cannot get on the top of a building and jump off. People do so every day. But, on the average, humans do not, and if they did, we would not survive as a race. Therefore, our individuality is truly at our own mercy within our ability to react to the stimuli about us, but on the average our behavior is totally determined by the evolutionary process which produced us.
This seeming contradiction is perhaps made clearer if you will remember a principle which I enunciated some weeks ago, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle says (in physics now) that one cannot simultaneously specify both the location and the motion of a body within certain very narrow limits. The statement I made was that elementary particles had, as far as a physicist was concerned, no shape and they occupied no particular place because if you tried to look at them too specifically you would not be able to see that they were there. On the other hand, that as you look at larger groups of particles, particularly large enough to be molecules, then they behave as the laws of physics predicted they should behave in terms of being able to measure them both in time and in space. An individual person is something like this.
This brings me to another concept which theologians like to talk about....that of good and evil. What is good? In the model which I am presenting to you, good is defined as that which has survival value in both biological and social evolution. Evil is the reverse. Lastly, let me talk about the soul. I defined the soul as that which persists and evolves and remains in being even though the body disintegrates. I doubt if anybody could argue with this definition...it seems to me agreeable to most theological concepts of the soul as well as the ordinary understanding of the word.
An individual has the statistical freedom to do what one will. On the other hand, the evolutionary forces which produced us make it very 60
The picture of man presented by the sciences is a picture of an immortal program transcending the life of the individual’s four score or possibly five score years by perhaps a billion times. Anyone who thinks that the here and now of his existential feeling, the life of his body from birth to death, is the beginning and the end is not scientifically informed about his own nature and his own inherent values. Nor does a tale told by an idiot signify nothing.
individual to another. My primary suggestion is that the scientist offers us a realistic conceptualization of both God and soul if we can wrench ourselves away from the traditional stereotype and formulate the functional analogue in the very heart of the language of the sciences. To me, the concept of God and soul, which I have been formulating, stands out as valid realities in the light of sciences and as religiously and motivationally relevant and quite analogous to the ancient religious formulations. I do not assert that these are the only or the best formulations, but I find them presently credible, coherent and, to me, religiously moving.
The picture of each individual, which one may derive from the sciences, is one of an immortal reality that persists and develops an even more marvelous pattern of increasing order from age to age in unbroken continuity for several billions of years.
To me, and I think for anyone who shares this perspective with me, the word salvation also becomes a meaningful term. What we must do to be saved in the light of the progress of modern science and theology is the subject for my next chapter.
The soul, as I have formulated it on the basis of the scientific picture of life, is that which persists and evolves and remains in being even though the body disintegrates. In plant and animal systems of life such an entity has been verified in the gene pool of the species where is stored most of the information which determines and structures the behavior of successive generations.
I believe we have arrived at a point in evolution when we ourselves can control our own salvation as human beings and as the product of our evolutionary processes. What we do with this ability is to me a grave concern, and it is for this reason I have entitled my final talk "Is a New Religion Necessary?”
In man, a special culture has been structured by previous generations and is transmitted through non biochemical media from one 61
H
VII Is a New Religion Necessary? There is no doubt about the fact that if we get into nuclear warfare the destruction of human life and property will assume catastrophic proportions, and for many millions of people the explosion of nuclear warheads will be terminal. However, the real threat to the race will not be the initial annihilation but the clouds of radioactive waste that will be swept up into the high atmosphere and then rained down on us in subsequent generations. I cannot see that this will spell the doom of the human race.
uman destiny can be viewed in many perspectives, both longrange and shortrange. Do we mean by human destiny, the destiny of the human race, or do we mean civilization, or do we mean human culture? Is our time scale historical, anthropological, or geological? First, let me look at the immediate destiny of the human race and its relation to what is uppermost in many people’s minds —nuclear warfare.
It is a fact of present geography that if the war should start that people are now contemplating, the bombs would be distributed almost exclusively in the northern temperate latitude. I think you all may be familiar with the general circulation of the atmosphere, but let me review it for you. Circulation begins at the equator where solar radiation is most intense and the air rises. The air cools gradually as it rises and eventually at a high altitude some of the air heads northward and some southward. Along the earth’s surface, winds move toward the equator and replace the rising air.
It is, of course, impossible to be a prophet, and assuming this role leaves one open to error and also to ridicule. But I do believe that we are not going to annihilate ourselves. If we are not wise enough, we may well destroy our present civilization and culture. But to me it is the height of vanity to assume that other civilizations and other cultures cannot rise from any shambles we create, to produce, hopefully, a better and certainly equally satisfactory human civilization. Actually, I do not think things are nearly that ominous. This belief is based on science and not on emotions. Let me share with you my thoughts for a few minutes. 62
If the earth were not rotating, and if no complicating continental masses were present, simple convection motion would result; air would rise at the equator, sink near the poles, and move horizontally between the two areas.
miles of the surface of the earth for Homo Sapiens to live and breed. You have probably all seen maps plotting the radioactive dust clouds as they sweep around the earth and notice that they circulate across lines of longitude and not latitude; they do not go north and south, but would travel from east to west or west to east depending on which side of the equator they are detonated. If man must hide for his survival in the polar sides of the Arctic and Antarctic circles to await the decay of the folly of his ancestors, he is clever enough to do so.
However, due to the earth’s rotation, much of the air which rises at the equator and starts northward or southward is deflected eastward so that our winds in these latitudes slow in an eastwest direction. The equatorial belt is characterized by variable winds and calms and serves as a buffer between. Solid dust material produced in the northern hemisphere will not mix readily with the air masses in the southern hemisphere. Even if the northern hemispherians doom themselves to a radioactive rain, many, many millions of human beings in the southern hemisphere are much less affected.
My own opinion is that I am painting much too grim a picture. As far as my biological and medical colleagues tell me, radiation exposure produces no new diseases over those which occur naturally, although the incidence of them may be greatly changed. Our success with biological and chemical therapy has been so spectacular that I can see no reason why, in the long run, we cannot look forward to as successful antidotes for the group of diseases generally lumped under the heading of "radiation sickness" as we have for poliomyelitis and bubonic plague.
This is, of course, only a short range argument based on the present political struggle. If we are successful in avoiding conflict in this century, it is obviously possible and in fact probable that the dominant political centers of gravity will move south of the equator in the future. On the assumption that they will be no wiser than we, and find it expedient to fill their cyclones with radioactive dust, although considerably more limited in extent, there will still be millions of square
Great concern has been voiced in many quarters about the genetic effects of radiation. Here again, in the framework of the survival of the 63
human race, I do not believe that there is a real problem, even granting that there is a genetic effect. There are many who claim that a person has to receive more than a lethal dose before it can be proven statistically that there has been a radiation effect on the person’s genes.
but I am trying to look beyond it to the future destiny of mankind. What I have just been discussing is a section which might be entitled T he B omb . It is a discussion of short range destiny. Within the next few years, perhaps the next century, we will either resort to nuclear warfare or we will find some other way of discussing our social and political problems. In either case, I think mankind as an animal will survive.
While I’m on this subject let me comment relative to the theory of genetic degradation resulting from civilization tampering with the evolutionary elimination of unsatisfactory mutations. I am rather convinced by those biologists who tell us that there is nothing inherent in the problem which rules out a yet to be discovered biochemical therapy of the genes similar in principle to the many other controls that we now use on many other parts of the human organism.
In looking to his future as a boundary value problem, it is his future from the origin of man to the present that I am discussing. I do believe that if we stoop to settling our conflicts by nuclear warfare our present civilization and culture may well be destroyed. This may then result in a shift in our time scale From 1,000 to 10,000, perhaps 100,000 years, backwards. But eventually man will survive and will arrive at the same origin in time as I am now going to consider him to be.
The problems we are now creating for ourselves, in a historical perspective, are of only temporary concern, and before I leave this discussion let me remind you of the perspective with which I am viewing human destiny. I am trying to view it in the indefinite future in an anthropological time scale, if you will. When I sound as if I am dismissing, for example, all human life in the northern temperate zones, it is not that I am unaware of the unimaginable horror of such an event,
Let us now look at the future development: first, of the physical sciences as it affects man’s own future. One of the most significant directions which the practical application of physical sciences is taking is in the direction of environmental control. There has been a consistent
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progression of this development to a larger and larger scale.
technological applications as the geophysics of the atmosphere begins to be understood.
It started with man’s early attempt at individual temperature and humidity control to cover his nakedness with clothing. He then studied the basic principles of mechanics and applied this knowledge to the construction of houses so that he would not have to be restricted to naturally occurring caves and caverns. He gained knowledge in the field we would now call chemistry and applied it to heating his house with fire and controlling his local agricultural environment with fertilizers so that he would not have to move on every few generations when he had exhausted the nutrients of his soil.
One of the real excitements of this age is our first look at the earth from the outside. Although it seems to be an unfortunate political necessity to tie our socalled "space research" to military expediencies, its longrange advantages to mankind should ease our consciences. As a matter of fact, we have made so little progress in our social and political evolution that I suspect that the first houses were built more for fortification against man’s enemies, including other men, than with any conscious incentive toward environmental control.
Today, we have our local temperature and humidity environment under control. The roof over our head and the furnace in the basement and the air conditioner in the window assure us of such a constant temperature that we really have completely supplanted the necessity of wearing clothes in our artificial environment.
For all our grumbling about the costs, space research is here to stay, not because satellites can hover nuclear warheads, like Damoclesian swords over the heads of wouldbe aggressors, nor because they can provide convenient communication links, but for a much bigger and longrange reason. Man is after controlling the weather.
However, we are just beginning to realize that we can greatly enlarge the control of our environment to the entire globe. The painstaking, highly theoretical and at times abstruse sciences of thermo and fluid dynamics are finding undreamed of
Our most modern ability, which at the moment is only a glimpse of our earth from an external coordinate system, will develop in the future to a full scale ability to gather the facts about the weather and with this fundamental knowledge will come the 65
technological development of weather control. Hand in hand with our control of the weather will come our control of water, so that it will be perfectly possible, and in my own opinion probable, that complete climate control will be achieved, certainly in chosen areas of the globe in which man has selected to flourish.
In connection with the problem of moving, it is worthwhile considering whether man is really going to travel out into space or whether there are some recognizable boundary conditions within which his future activities must take place. Here again, since I am going to foretell the future, I open myself not only to arguments but to ridicule. But, hopefully, I also open the door for fruitful discussion.
It does not seem to me difficult to find man’s aim in searching for the control of his environment. He is seeking, and I believe he is finding, an optimum biological medium for the present human organism to live and breathe and have its being. The evolutionary consequences of this are of primary importance. But before I expand on this let me continue to look into the future development of the physical sciences under some such title as "The Elimination of Onerous Activities"— and by these I mean specifically: moving and thinking.
By traveling out into space, I do not mean visiting members or our own solar system. First of all, these are sufficiently local so that some of us here may well live to see it an accomplished fact, and secondly, it will have no real significance as far as the destiny of man is concerned since none of the planets can boast of a hospitable biological medium in which man can exist. It might well be important to man’s future if he could find other planets sufficiently like the earth so he himself could survive and hopefully compare his development with other creatures sufficiently close to his own evolutionary development to help him shape his own destiny.
The elimination of the necessity of man moving himself has in principle been already solved. True, there are technological problems which have not been solved to our satisfaction and these, in fact, may take some generations to solve. But from a theoretical point of view, man can accomplish all his physical works and move anywhere on the earth with no more effort than pushing buttons or speaking into a microphone.
To do this he must travel outside the solar system. Assuming he is lucky enough to find suitable life on one of the first ten or dozen nearer stars, he must reach out a distance of about 20 light years, that is a distance that it 66
would take light 20 years to traverse. Such a trip is inconceivable at presently known techniques by many, many orders of magnitude. But let us examine the possibility from fundamental physical concepts rather than be bound by any technological problems.
A calculation of this effect comes out with the result that if a rocket ship with sufficient power to fly very close to the velocity of light were to take thirty years for the crew of the rocket ship to get to Orion and back, then the elapsed time on earth (not for this rocket crew, but on earth) between their departure and their return would be about 3,000 years.
The basic problem is that of time. If we must travel distances of 20 to 100 light years, we must achieve speeds close to the velocity of light, to be in any way practical for mankind. We must, therefore ask: Is it theoretically possible to accelerate a rocket ship to say 1/5 the velocity of light? The answer is "Yes."
Therefore, there is a question as to whether going there and back would be worthwhile, although certainly going there might be good for the rocket crew. There really is a very interesting problem when one looks to the future which lies in the area of artificial intelligence. Can we devise computers which will do our thinking for us?
If we achieve control of thermonuclear fusion, for example, this kind of power could get a rocket ship up to 1/5 the velocity of light and, calculating the possible accelerations and decelerations, we could make the round trip to the nearest star in about 200 years. Of course, if you went slower than this it would take much longer.
Here we must define three degrees of possibility. A solution is logically obtainable if it can be described free of contradiction. It is physically possible if it does not violate any of the laws of physics. It is practicably possible if it can actually be achieved by known techniques and materials.
The obvious direction we should work for is to go faster, not slower. If we go much faster, that is, if we go very close to the velocity of light, a curious relativistic effect takes place.
It is certainly logically and physically possible for a digital computer to do any sort of information processing that humans can do. By the technical term "information processing" I mean what might be termed "thinking.” Certainly
The flow of time for the rocket crew becomes different from that on earth. 67
most of the thinking we normally do falls into this category.
alarming rate as we try to build into it anything approaching human versatility. My own personal opinion is that long before we approach the totality of human intelligence in all its ramifications, the parts of our thinking machine will begin wearing out faster than they can be replaced, the entropy of the system will increase faster than the human tenders can compensate for. The device falls into practical impossibility, not because each operation by itself is impossible, but that the integrated operation is too complex for an increasing entropy system to cope with.
A machine learns by being fed information in the form of a code, and it can operate on this information to draw conclusions and arrive at solutions which are both novel and inventive. What is not clear at the moment is whether machines with artificial intelligence will be able to generalize or philosophize. This appears to be a different kind of intellectual exercise from information processing, and one which we understand so poorly at present that little progress has been made even theoretically in this direction. Therefore, standing at our origin of time, the present, we cannot say whether these areas of intelligence, the ability to generalize and philosophize, can be duplicated by machines.
Let me define the term ”cybernation” as the name which is given to our devising of electronic and other artifacts which have certain properties of living systems. These systems are negative feedback systems (that is, left alone they will return to their equilibrium) with built in purposes and powers to fulfill the duties prescribed in those purposes.
I have only discussed so far the logical and physical possibility of artificial intelligence. There is, of course, the practical possibility which must be based on what can actually be achieved and here I must remind you that I am discussing the physical sciences, characterized by increasing entropy, or in much simpler language, characterized by systems which perpetually are wearing out.
We are already engaged in devising cybernetic mechanisms that are capable of learning and advancing their own systems in part by their own efforts. They can learn to play checkers and chess, at which they beat their human makers at the game.
The fundamental complexity of an intelligence machine increases at an
They can explore the moon, and they are on probes which are wandering 68
into the far reaches of outer space doing our exploration for us. As a matter of fact, they are much better adapted to this work than humans.
produced by the sciences. Science has altered the restraints that have operated in confining population size by disease and starvation. And science has opened the door to possibly better ways of genetic selection than those that have prevailed in the past.
It is quite clear that we have the technological capacity already to develop cybernetic systems to carry on most of the work of supporting human life as well as the life of the cybernetic systems themselves.
Man has been made conscious of his own genetic process and is, so to speak, asked to enter into the conscious devising of better ways of developing the genotype. The system of idenotopic information made possible first by the human genotype has now come full circle and is charged with at least some partial supervision of the advancement of the genotype itself.
This means, that within a relatively few decades, it is theoretically possible for us to put almost every one of us out of our present jobs, replacing humans with a system of cybernetic mechanisms which could leave us so free from productive work of society as to raise the very real question of the value of our existence.
This is one of the great and radically new conditions which have emerged in the history of evolving life on earth in our time. The great concern of many people arises from our inability to predict the results of our tampering with the evolutionary process which has produced us. The whole reason that the evolutionary process was successful in the past was that the unfit did not survive.
As a matter of fact, we are already well on our way to doing this in the area which used to be a human function, namely, our memory, which is very much better done by a computer. Also man's correlation of facts is now done better by cybernetic systems in routine function than man by himself. This raises some very real questions about the value of man as an individual in society.
We are becoming more and more successful at changing this pattern, and as we do so more and more geneticists are raising the question whether the human race may not have serious problems due to stopping the
The ancient religious doctrine of “be fruitful and multiply” comes into considerable question under the new environmental circumstances 69
process of purifying the genes which have taken millions and millions of years in the evolutionary control to perfect. This actually lends urgency to the realization that the intellectual progress which has removed one control must now face the vital problem of discovering or inventing some other kind of heredity control.
high end by 100%. Furthermore, there is every reason to suppose that various other characteristics of individuals, such as their tendency toward adjustments, both psychological and emotional, have determinants of a genetic nature. As you are all aware, we know enough now so that we could, by artificial insemination, produce a genetically "superior” group of people which would improve the species.
Let me illustrate by an example. There is good evidence that the intelligence of mankind is genetically determined within certain broad limits; the so called "IQ” can be modified and varied by conditioning up to a certain point, but only within limits which are fairly well known. Most of the progress of mankind is due to exceptional individuals who are exceedingly able in various fields.
The deep freeze of human sperm has been demonstrated to be a workable scheme in which the sperm can be kept, as far as our experimental evidence is now, forever. One can imagine a sperm bank collecting sperm from particularly desirable men, and these could make their genes available for guiding the evolutionary process of future man, breeding attributes which society recognizes as being good. This is practical; this has been tried in limited ways and we know it works. Man is now made aware that he is responsible for the genetic health and conditions of his descendants, and this presents an ethical problem of great magnitude.
There are relatively few people with an IQ of 160 or over, and many of these people have been those that have made great contributions to society. It is a statistical fact that if we could increase the IQ of the population at large by 1.5% (that is, instead of having the average IQ be 100, we could arrange to have the average IQ at 101.5) we would thereby double the number of people whose IQs are over 160. This is a remarkable fact.
It is clear that few parents would want to procreate if they knew in advance that there was a high probability that a large fraction of their children would be either badly distorted or deficient in body and mind. But the solutions of
By shifting the peak of our intelligence distribution curve ever so little, we could modify the distribution at the 70
this problem are not as simple and obvious as many people have suggested. Many genes that may give rise to regrettable deficiencies at the same time may be responsible in other combinations for highly desirable advantages.
starvation becomes the control to keep the size down. However, there is a much more serious and as yet not understood problem and it is a consideration which very few people have taken seriously—it is the question: "What is the optimal population size for man?” For example, the marvelous human cultures of Greece and Rome came into flower with the world population much less than that in the United States at the present time.
The problem is not only that of quality, but perhaps even more pressing at the present time is the problem of quantity. Here the problem is not so much the already understood problem of overpopulation, brought about by the scientifically produced reduction in death rate without a corresponding reduction in the birth rate. Here the fear is that the ceiling on the energy sources available on earth will hit the population boom in the head as the number of heads hits the ceiling, causing tragic problems of starvation and social disorder.
This raises the question of how many people we need for great advances in the genotype and the idenotype with new understanding of the problem of how to manage them. It may be that even a smaller population is necessary now to produce all the variations needed for an optimum genotype and idenotype society.
But this ceiling is one that has been on all populations in the past. Often these populations have adapted in the past by letting starvation keep the population within bounds of the energy supplies. So this is really not a new threat. It might be mentioned that some human societies, as well as societies of animals, have either through rules established in their idenotype or their genotype, limited the size of the population before arriving at the threshold where
Besides the problem of food and other energy supplies per capita, we must really consider the problem of how much living space on the surface of the earth per capita is optimal for man. With the advances in cybernetics making the need for large numbers of people less important, it seems to me that the central question is: "What is the optimal size for the advancement of human life?" Conceivably it could be much lower than our present world population. 71
array. However, you cannot develop a religion without a theology upon which it is based, and it is the theology which must be firmly based on our modern scientific knowledge if it is to be able to cope with the problems of mankind, both at present and in the future.
In any case the problem of the human values of both the genotype and idenotype are obviously tied both to the absolute numbers of population size and to what we do in our advertent or inadvertant roles in seeking our own genotype and idenotype.
It takes three steps. First, you have to develop the theology. My own feeling is that the scientific theology has been developed, it has developed in the scientific culture of modern man. It is very little understood, but I think the basic concepts have been illuminated and we can base our current thinking on a theology based on modern science.
We have been raised up to a new level of responsibility for conscious participation in our own natural selection. This is a task, indeed, on which the theologians must stay in close contact with the sciences for a realistic view of modern and future man. This brings me now to the place, essentially, where I began this seminar. I began it essentially with a definition of theology, and it is theology that I have been trying to discuss all this time. Theology, you will remember, is the theoretical structure upon which such things as religion are built. We keep talking about religion when we want to be practical, when we want to apply the theory to the practice of society.
The next step, and this has not yet been started, is to develop a religious activity which is based on the theology and made viable in modern cultural terms. The third step is a State administering religious policy in tune with the modern theology. There is a very interesting article in the November 19, 1966, issue of The Saturday Review written by Emmanual Mesthene entitled “What Modern Science Offers the Church.” Let me quote from it:
Religion is the place where policy for society is formed. The State (the political organization which is the basis for civil government) is the administrative structure which sets the behavior of mankind into an orderly 72
“Religion is in crisis today because it has largely lost its old role, and has yet to find a new one. After 20 centuries of doing man's work, the churches are now having to learn to do God’s. In the era just before Christ, man gave up the hope of bliss in this world, saw values only in the next, and attributed power only to God. They left their work undone.
“Are the churches also completely out of work? They have served throughout their history as man’s crutch. Is their history at an end now that man can walk again? These are the questions, if I see clearly, that animate the present theological debate and lead to the religious restlessness that we observe. “They moved the German theologian, Bonhoeffer, to plead that man has come of age and must be recognized as having done so. They led the English R. A. Buchanan to note that it takes men, not sheep, to change the world and warns that
“The churches, if only by default at first, sought to fill the void and do men's work for them...their knowing, their building. their ruling, and their moral judging. Opinions differ and disputes have raged about how well or how ill they did, but there was never a question of their relevance to man’s concern—for it was men’s concern that they made their own.
‘if the clergy are going to treat their parishioners like sheep they need not be surprised if their number of parishioners continues to decline.'
“The Churches were doing men’s work. Man’s renewed confidence in himself means that he takes up his own burden once again. That is what is really new about our age. It means that the churches are out of men’s work because man now chooses to do his own and has the knowledge and skill and the will to do it. It is idle to tell him he cannot because he is ignorant, or weak, or a sinner—he just will not listen.
“It is the same questions and worry they express that lead our clergymen to Alabama, our theologians to shock us into thought by announcing that ‘God is dead.’ “The crisis of the church is in the fear of irrelevance borne of man's new confidence in the power of his tools. It is an agonizing crisis because there is nothing so dead as 73
irrelevance which leaves not even a memory.”
on science which I have been trying to describe to you.
You will find that many people are turning to this theme of man’s concern with his own future, guided by some basic principle which must be, in my opinion, based on a theology which is in tune with our knowledge.
Another very typical case of the way things are out of tune with our understanding is the concept of asocial behavior and the treatment of criminals. It has been known for a long time that asocial sexual behavior can result from abnormal prenatal hormone activity, and yet when an individual is apprehended for asocial sexual behavior it is the police that are called, not the doctor. The man is sent to jail, not to hospital.
The reason the problem is serious is because there are many things which we now tend to do which basically are out of tune with what is dictated by the state. Let me illustrate just a few of them to point out the kinds of problems which modern society in its formal structure disapproves of, and yet the theology of science says a new light should certainly be shone on these problems.
The law assumes that his behavior is a result of miseducation, and yet science can show in many cases it is a result of unbalance of his gonadal hormones.
Take the case of selective breeding and artificial insemination—these could clearly be advantageous. We do this for dogs, we do it for cattle, but we do not do it for people—it is quite illegal! We cannot now direct our genotypic evolution under any laws which modern civilized man is operating under.
For over 100 years we have been very sure as scientists that the Negro is as good a Homo Sapiens as any white. Yet we are only just beginning, from the point of view of the state, to even recognize it. It probably will take some generations before people really believe it. There is a danger that the political structure of society may dictate a policy based on modern technology which will take into its hands these kinds of things, do selective breeding, do all the various other things I have
Another example is the problem of euthanasia and the prolonging of the life of the dying. In fact, the whole attitude concerning death is one which is not in tune with the theology based 74
suggested can now be done, in a way which we as individuals would not think was advantageous. This is the danger that a religion based on a theology in tune with scientific knowledge will not develop soon enough to guide man's future development in the direction we would define as good. I do believe that eventually it will come, the evolutionary process seems to be statistically valid even in this kind of a development. But I hope that people can see the problems clearly enough to start this development toward an understand ing of the operation of society based on its knowledge of the world about it quickly, and as soon as possible—a religion based on this new theology will truly help us find our place in the universe, will truly help us find valid goals for ourselves and our society within the framework of the natural forces that control our destiny.
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VIII Glossary Amplification the multiplication of the effectiveness of a function or activity. A social chainreaction with positive feedback.
God an image of a unitary system which ordains all that was, is, and is to be; omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal, and infinite; creator and sustainer of life. And the source of all values, goals, duties, and hopes for that life.
Church the establishment which guides the religious enterprise. Criteria of credibility acceptable tests of a given hypothesis to check its agreement with the known facts within the framework of contemporary knowledge.
Good that which has survival value in both biological and social evolution. Heisenberg uncertainty principle: One cannot simultaneously specify both the location and the motion or a body within certain very narrow limits.
Cybernation man’s devising of electronic and other artifacts, which have certain properties of living systems.
Idene the element which structures man’s cultural heritage analogous to the genes which structure our biological heritage,
Death discontinuous increase of the entropy of a body. Entropy a quantitative measure of the disorder of a system — the natural tendency of things to approach the chaotic state.
Idenotype the type of behavior that is controlled by idenes.
Life a selfreplicating, entropy increasing system.
Gene pool the sum total of all the genetic material.
Model an intellectual framework constructed in agreement with the accepted facts which provide a working hypotheses for understanding and implementation.
Genotype a type determined by the genetic character common to a group, hence a group of organisms of such a type.
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Prayer revitalization activity of the individual. Protoplasm the material which contains the sperm cells. Religion a revitalization movement — that activity by which man attempts to find his place in the universe; tries to develop valid goals for himself and his fellow man within the framework of the forces which control his destiny.
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Science man’s search for the organization of the universe. Society that complex of fundamentally cooperative interactions or interrelations which exist between and among the members of a group.
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Soul that which persists and remains in being even though the body disintegrates. State the political organization which is the basis of civil government. Theology a critical intellectual attempt to construct a theoretical system consistent with the beliefs and practices of a religious community. Worship prayer carried on as, and stimulated by, group activity
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