Julia C. Keller, "Dawkins drops bombs on religion " (2004)

By Julia C. Keller

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Though science sometimes has the trappings of religious fervor, modern science cannot be considered religious in nature. A better word for the “mystic feeling” scientists sometimes experience, according to biologist Richard Dawkins, should be “Einsteinian wonder.”

“Much unfortunate misunderstanding is caused by failure to distinguish what might be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion,” Dawkins said during his Nov. 20 lecture, “The Science of Religion and the Religion of Science.”

Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, spoke about the differences between science and religion and what he calls their “supposed convergence” to more than 400 audience members during the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Harvard University last month.

“A huge number of scientists who give the impression they’re religious turn out to be religious only in the Einsteinian sense,” he continued.

Though Einstein is often quoted as being a religious person — “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” — he was in fact a profound atheist, said Dawkins. “Einstein must have been quite annoyed at the way religious apologists continually misused his name in their support,” he said.

Dawkins went on to list many other scientists who, despite their exuberant descriptions of the universe, claim no religious affiliation, like biologist Ursula Goodenough, cosmologist Stephen Hawking and astronomer Sir Martin Rees.

Dawkins said he could consider himself religious in the Einsteinian sense, but prefers not to, calling it “destructively misleading” to use the word in that way. He encouraged other scientists to “refrain from using the word ‘God’ in their special physicist, metaphorical sense.”

“The metaphorical god of the physicist is light-years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the theists and of ordinary language,” he said. “Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.”

Dawkins continued his staunch defense of scientific inquiry as separate from religious revelation, quoting heavily from his new book, A Devil’s Chaplain.

Dawkins spoke about the differences in the ways religion and science understand the world, saying the division is often reductively posited with science asking “How?” questions and religion asking “Why?” about the universe.

“Scientists tell us the way the universe is and how things work; religion has nothing to say on this, but it has its own equally important domains: morals, values and ultimate questions,” Dawkins said.

The problem lies, Dawkins said, in how religious questions supersede scientific ones. “There’s something maddeningly silly about the complacent assumption without further discussion that ‘Why?’ questions have some sort of universal, ultimate legitimacy,” he said.

Dawkins told a story he related in the chapter, “The Great Convergence,” about an astronomy colleague who explained the big-bang theory to him, but conceded his explanation of physics’ origins to the realm of the chaplain.

“But why the chaplain?” Dawkins shouted from the podium. “Why not the gardener or the chef?”

Dawkins listed revelation as one among the five attributes comprising religion, including tradition, faith, authority and evidence. Though Dawkins spoke at length about how each of the five aspects were present in some form in science — hence the confusion with Einsteinian wonder — he said none of these aspects is greater than evidence.

“Experiments with evidence ultimately trumps mathematical beauty, in what T.H. Huxley lamented as, ‘the Great Tragedy of Science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact,’” Dawkins said.

After Dawkins’ presentation, Keith DeRose, a professor of philosophy at Yale University, responded to the lecture. “If we’re trying to explain religious beliefs, faith’s role shouldn’t be overplayed,” said DeRose.

Some in the audience also found a lack of depth to Dawkins’ treatment of religion. Jerry Crystal, a teacher at the Learning Corridor school in Hartford, Conn., wondered, “Why is it that conservative religious theological belief is much more prevalent if in reality the one that’s ‘truer’ is the scientific belief?”

Though Dawkins had no direct answer to these questions, he did summarize his position about the nexus of science and religion.

“I am not expressing confidence that humanity will succeed in answering the deep questions of existence. But in the possibly unlikely event that we do succeed, I am very confident that it is more likely to be through scientific than religious ways of thinking,” said Dawkins. “However unlikely it may be that science will one day understand everything about the cosmos and the nature of life, it is even less likely that religion will.”

Julia C. Keller is a freelance writer living in Boston.