Valentine to science

Interview, Feb, 1996 by Lynda Obst

CS: Actually, some religions have no trouble with science. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, buys into the big bang, buys into the origin of life by chemical processes on the early earth, buys into evolution, including the evolution of human beings.

LO: They just don't buy into women priests.

CS: I don't say that I agree with everything. But it shows that a widely popular religion can be comfortable with science. Other religions, of course, are more inflexible.

LO: It's clear that people have the feeling that science has an authoritarian face, because it is a search for absolutes, and we don't believe in them anymore. The world is changing too quickly to believe in absolutes, and science doesn't seem to reflect our personal experience of constant radical change. What would you say to that - to the general sense that any religion can comfort us in our sense of failure?

CS: Science, much more than religion, understands human fallibility and does not consider any of its doctrines to be impervious to revision.

LO: It seems astonishing to me that in the 1990s, school boards elected by the Christian Coalition are pushing creationist schoolbooks - the denial of evolution. The fundamentalists are still clinging to the strongest antiscience position - and I know that you address the dangers of this exhaustively in your new book, The Demon-haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. In that book, you caution against religious zealotry and anti-intellectualism seeping into the political culture. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the tolerant view of science by Buddhism. Tell me about your meeting with the Dalai Lama.

CS: Well, when I talk to religious leaders, one thing I always ask them is: What would you do if a fundamental tenet of your religion was definitively disproved by science? And, at least in the West, and especially among fundamentalist religions, the tendency is to say, "Science couldn't possibly," or, "My religion is an absolute truth, and if science gets different answers, too bad for science." The Dalai Lama's answer was: "If science found a serious error in Tibetan Buddhism, of course we would change Tibetan Buddhism." So I tried to push him on this issue. Suppose it was something basic? Suppose, for instance, it was reincarnation? And the Dalai Lama said to me, "If science can disprove reincarnation, Tibetan Buddhism would abandon reincarnation." And then he said, "But it's going to be mighty hard to disprove reincarnation."

LO: [laughs] This is why I am so attracted to Buddhism: the intellectual flexibility, the struggle against self-deception, the search for enlightenment. And clearly all this is also why so many other people these days are drawn to Buddhism. It doesn't demand blind faith. I know you find blind faith fearsome.

CS: It is very dangerous, because human beings have a large talent for self-deception and for being deceived by others.

LO: Carl, tell me about things you've experienced as an astronomer that really knocked your socks off; that gave you a sense of true grandeur and "beauty" on the scale of, say, Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci?