What Lawrence Krauss wrote about transporters and souls in The Physics of Star Trek is not the only time he’s engaged the subject of how religion and science relate.
His web page has a number of articles that he’s written on religion and science, and–though I don’t agree with him in everything he argues in them–I find it refreshing how respectful he is of religion in these pieces.
One set of pieces in particular jumped out at me, because it was involved in the recent Intelligent Design debate that Cardinal Schoenborn has been participating in.
It seems that Dr. Krauss first wrote a piece for the New York Times that Cardinal Schoenborn then took exception to (without naming it) in his well-known article, following which Dr. Krauss sent a letter to B16 and later published a piece summarizing the situation and defending his letter against secular critics who thought he shouldn’t bother interacting with the Church.
In this post, I’d like to take a look at the text of Dr. Krauss’s letter to B16 and offer a few thoughts. He wrote it in conjunction with two Catholic biologists who were also signatories of the letter.
Here ’tis:
July 12, 2005
His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI
00120 Vatican CityYour Holiness:
In his magnificent letter to the Pontifical Academy [of Sciences] in 1996 regarding the subject of Evolution, Pope John Paul II affirmed that scientific rationality and the Church’s spiritual commitment to divine purpose and meaning in the Universe were not incompatible. The Pope accepted that biological Evolution had progressed beyond the hypothetical stage as a guiding principle behind the understanding of the evolution of diverse life forms on Earth, including humans. At the same time, he rightly recognized that the spiritual significance that one draws from the scientific observations and theory lie outside of the scientific theories themselves. In this sense, claiming that evolution definitely implies a lack of divinity, and/or divine purpose in nature is as much an affront to science as it is to the Church.
This is a pretty good summary of what JP2 said in the letter in question. One could quibble that he’s omitting some nuances JP2 stressed, but in substance it’s a good summary. Particularly to be appreciated is the phrase I’ve emphasized.
The Holy Father also recognized: "It is important to set proper limits to the understanding of Scripture, excluding any unseasonable interpretations which would make it mean something which it is not intended to mean. In order to mark out the limits of their own proper fields, theologians and those working on the exegesis of the Scripture need to be well informed regarding the results of the latest scientific research." Since scientific investigations have repeatedly confirmed evolution by natural selection as a guiding principle for understanding the development of the diversity of life on Earth, theologians who are interested in exploring such questions as human dignity and purpose must take this mechanism into account in their considerations. As he put it, quoting from Leo XIII, truth cannot contradict truth.
The substance of this is also fine, although my Spider Sense goes off at one point because too much weight could be put on the assertion that theologians "must take this mechanism into account in their considerations." If Dr. Krauss means that theologians must agree that evolution is true and incorporate this into their theological explorations then I would have a problem with what he says.
If he means, though, that the evidence for evolution proposed by contemporary science must be taken seriously and in that sense "taken into account" then I would not have a problem. You’ve got to listen to all relevant evidence, though what conclusion you come to based on that evidence cannot be mandated at the outset. You may spot flaws in the argumentation others put on that evidence or you may have additional evidence they are not taking into account. Everyone has to come to his own conclusions on empirical matters.
There is no "scientific Magisterium."
These principles were reinforced more recently in explicit statements by the International Theological Commission, headed by you before your election as Pope. As the Commission document explicitly states, "God is…the cause of causes." As a result, "Through the activity of natural causes, God causes to arise those conditions required for the emergence and support of living organisms, and, furthermore, for their reproduction and differentiation." Finally, referring to evolution as a "radically contingent materialistic process driven by natural selection and random genetic variation", the commission nevertheless concluded "even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation."
Here we run into a significant problem. While the quotations Dr. Krauss gives from the International Theological Commission document are accurate, they are used in a way that is at least somewhat misleading.
First, the Commission does not assert that evolution is a "radically contingent materialistic process driven by natural selection and random genetic variation." It says that many neo-Darwinian scientists and some of their critics have concluded that if that is what evolution is then there is no place for divine providential causality. It then disputes this conclusion and concludes that a "truly contingent natural process" can fall under divine providence.
Krauss correctly points out the Commission’s conclusion on this point, but the way that he has introduced the emphasized phrase makes it appear that the Commission has conceded that this is an adequate and apparently exhaustive description of biological evolution, and it has not.
In fact, in the very same passage that Dr. Krauss is taking his quotations from, the Commission goes out of its way to take note of Intelligent Design critics of neo-Darwinianism, saying:
A growing body of scientific critics of neo-Darwinism point to evidence of design (e.g., biological structures that exhibit specified complexity) that, in their view, cannot be explained in terms of a purely contingent process and that neo-Darwinians have ignored or misinterpreted. The nub of this currently lively disagreement involves scientific observation and generalization concerning whether the available data support inferences of design or chance, and cannot be settled by theology [Communion and Stewardship 69].
In other words: Whether the ID people are right or not is an empirical question that the Church is not intervening to settle (indeed, it says it can’t be settled by theology, which means that science will have to fight it out). As far as the Church is concerned the ID people could be right or wrong.
This should be kept in mind as we proceed.
The Commission goes on in the next section to state that, because the human soul has to be specially created by God:
Catholic theology affirms that that the emergence of the first members of the human species (whether as individuals or in populations) represents an event that is not susceptible of a purely natural explanation and which can appropriately be attributed to divine intervention [op. cit. 70].
So it would not be theologically acceptable to look upon naturalistic evolution (under secondary causation) as an adequate explanation for the emergence of all life forms including man. The latter required a special intervention of God on at least the spiritual level.
Dr. Krauss continues:
Scientists have been pleased to see a convergence between the views of the Catholic Church and the scientific community on these issues, in particular on the compatibility between the results of scientific investigation and Church theology. One of us recently wrote an essay in the New York Times, for example (see attached), praising precisely the Church’s understanding of the compatibility of scientific investigation and religious belief, even when the process being investigated, like Evolution, appears completely contingent.
This is all fine, and most welcome.
Now we get to the controversial point . . .
This week, Cardinal Christoph Schšnborn, archbishop of Vienna, however, appeared to dangerously redefine the Church’s view on Evolution. In an essay, also published in the New York Times (see attached), he claimed that "Evolution in the Neo-Darwinian sense… is not true".
Okay, but he wasn’t speaking as a representative of the Church but as a private individual, and so his remarks are incapable of redefining anything on behalf of the Church. It is his right as a private individual to hold either that neo-Darwinian evolution is true or that it is false (per the ITC’s statement that theology cannot settle this question, see above), and as long as he makes it clear that he is speaking for himself and not for the Church then he would also seem to have a right to air his opinions on this matter in public.
That being said, I don’t see any evidence in Cardinal Schoenborn’s piece that makes it clear in what capacity he is writing in (in fact, he talks like he’s speaking for the Church), and in an age of global communications, this is something that can be faulted. Most readers of the popular press do not have a sense for when a cardinal is representing the Church and when he is representing his own theological and scientific opinions, and in view of this fact, high churchmen have a responsibility to make clear to the public the capacity in which they are speaking.
I also should point out that there seems to be a terminological problem here. Cardinal Schoenborn included in his definition of neo-Darwinian evolution the idea that it is "unguided" and "unplanned." I suspect that by stressing the compatibility of evolution with divine providence that Dr. Krauss and his colleagues are not incorporating these features into their understanding of neo-Darwinism and thus that part of the disagreement may be based on the term "neo-Darwinism" being used in different senses.
I also have to raise a concern about the way Dr. Krauss has quoted the cardinal, because there is no string in the cardinal’s article that can be elided to form "Evolution in the Neo-Darwinian sense… is not true." What the cardinal said was: "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but
evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process
of random variation and natural selection – is not."
Dr. Krauss appears to have taken part of this phrase and combined it with an earlier occurrence of the phrase "is not true." Although this seems to be what the cardinal believes, it violates the rules of what can be put in quotation marks and thus misleads the reader regarding what the cardinal actually said.
As a scholar, Dr. Krauss no doubt understands the importance of quoting people exactly when you use quotation marks, and hopefully this was an accidental violation. Since he didn’t misrepresent the cardinal’s meaning, though, I won’t dwell on the matter further.
Dr. Krauss continues:
Moreover, he argued that if divine design was not "overwhelmingly evident" then the associated claims must be viewed as ideology, and not science.
I must confess that I’m having some trouble parsing this sentence, though it does not seem to correspond to what the cardinal said, which was: "Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science." This assertion seems fairly straightforward: The cardinal believes that the evidence for design in biology is so overwhelming that it cannot be denied or explained away without the result ceasing to be science and becoming an ideological construct.
One could agree or disagree with the cardinal on this point, but I have trouble squaring this with the representation of the remark in Dr. Krauss’s letter, so there may have been a typo or a drafting problem.
He attacked not only Neo-Darwinism, but also the multiverse hypothesis of modern cosmology, both of which he claimed were "invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science".
I think that the cardinal has a fair point here. It is arguable that many neo-Darwinists shape their theories in order to avoid evidence for purpose and design in nature, and it is very arguable that this is a key motivator behind the multiverse hypothesis.
Physicists have proposed mathematical models that would allow for the existence of a multiverse, but as yet nobody has actual evidence for other universes, and if you listen to discussions of why one might want to believe in a multiverse, the subject of avoiding design inevitably comes up.
For example, in Dr. Krauss’s book The Physics of Star Trek, he notes that a very large number of features of our universe seem to be calibrated to allow the existence of life. In other words, it looks like our universe was set up to allow life to exist. Dr. Krauss then goes on to raise the consideration that this may be an illusion caused by the fact that there are many universes in existence and that they have different features and that we just happen to be living in one of the universes that is so configured that intelligent life can exist. So of course this universe has the features for life. That doesn’t mean that it was designed to have life. . . . if there are bunches of other universes that are inhospitable to life and don’t have any.
And that’s true. If there are a large number of universes (let’s say that there are an infinite number, just to make it easy) and if their relevant physical properties vary randomly then surely some of them will randomly have the right combination of features to allow the existence of life, and so any species arising in such a universe would see around itself a universe that looked designed to have life even though it was actually random chance that produced these results.
But none of this gives us evidence for other universes or for the idea that their features vary randomly.
In fact, one could argue that postulating the existence of such universes to avoid the appearance of design in this way would be to appeal to evidence that you don’t have. One could argue that, until we have evidence that other universes with random physical properties exist, one should stick with the appearance of design that this universe displays and infer the existence of a Designer.
Or one could argue that the apparent design of this universe is equally consistent either with the random multiverse hypothesis or with the design hypothesis and that science is not (at least presently) capable of distinguishing between the two.
(One could also say that there is a multiverse and that it is designed. Personally, that’s the one I’m hoping for, but only because I like parallel universe stories.)
In any event, we don’t have evidence for the existence of other universes. Mathematical models are not evidence. One can just as well construct mathematical models of the cosmos that incorporate a Designer. Until a model produces a prediction that is subject to falsifiability, Karl Popper won’t want to call it science.
As long as that is the case, the multiverse hypothesis cannot claim greater scientific legitimacy than the design hypothesis, and the point is fair that the multiverse hypothesis frequently seems to involve a motive of avoiding the idea of design.
Equally worrisome, in his effort to claim a line between the theory of evolution and religious faith, Cardinal Schšnborn dismissed the marvelous 1996 message of Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy [of Sciences], calling it "rather vague and unimportant".
Yeah, that was a mistake.
It was, in places, not as precise as one might want, but to dismiss it in this way is not cricket, particularly for a cardinal.
Neither is what Schoenborn went on to do, which was to appeal to various papal audiences of John Paul II in an apparent attempt to neutralize the 1996 letter. He appeared to describe these audiences, in contrast to the 1996 letter, as containing "the real teaching of our beloved John Paul."
From an exegetical point of view, this is quite problematic. Neither papal audiences nor messages to the pontifical academy of sciences have a high level of magisterial authority. They’re both pretty low on the totem pole (compared, for example, to encyclicals). Indeed, if I had to decide which has more authority than the other, I’d go with the message over the audience since it represents a more extraordinary form of communication and thus carries greater weight and presumably had greater thoughtfulness go into it. (Audiences, by contrast, occur every week.)
However that may be, the proper approach is to seek whenever possible to harmonize what a given pope said in a message with what he said in his audiences, and it is a mistake to be dismissive of the former in favor of the latter.
I would note, though, that Cardinal Schoenborn is a native speaker of German rather than English, and so describing the letter as vague and unimportant may have had a different resonance and force in his linguistic community than it does in English.
It is vitally important, however, that in these difficult and contentious times the Catholic Church
not build a new divide, long ago eradicated, between the scientific method and religious belief.
This is the language of diplomacy. While it is welcome to have scientists stating that the divide between scientific method and religious belief was "long ago eradicated," and while this is substantially true, there are particular areas–most notably on the question of origins and on medical ethics–where some are advocating a version of scientific method that will clash with religious belief because it would either (a) refuse a priori to acknowledge evidence for a Designer even if overwhelming evidence of design were amassed or (b) insist on conducting the scientific enterprise in ways that are immoral (e.g., experimenting on humans in immoral ways, up to an including creating and destroying human beings for purposes of medical experiments).
As long as that is the case, there will continue to be a tension between religious belief and at least those articulations of the scientific method that make these two mistakes.
We are writing to you today to request that you clarify once again the Church’s position on Evolution and Science, that you reaffirm the remarkable statements of Pope John Paul II and the International Theological Commission, so that it will be clear that Cardinal Schšnborn’s remarks do not reflect the views of the Holy See.
B16 may or may not make substantive clarifications on these points (if he does, he won’t cite Cardinal Schoenborn by name and give him a public spanking), but it is important to point out here that–while he was speaking in a private capacity–Cardinal Schoenborn’s views do not seem to fall outside of permitted Catholic opinion and (if he takes reasonable steps so that people will not think he is speaking for the Church) he is free to argue them in the marketplace of ideas.
As are his critics.
Dr. Krauss and his colleagues conclude:
We thank you for your consideration to this request, and wish you continued strength and wisdom as you continue to lead the Catholic Church in these difficult times.
Sincerely,
on behalf of:
Lawrence M. Krauss (Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy, and Director, Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics, Case Western Reserve University)
Prof. Francisco Ayala (University Professor and Donal Bren Professor of Biological Sciences, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of Calfornia, Irvine)
Prof. Kenneth Miller (Prof of Biology, Brown University)
If I may add my own postscript to this, I’d like to give my compliments to Dr. Krauss and his associates for being willing to engage this issue in a thoughtful and positive way, and in particular they deserve compliments for even knowing about the ITC document (which didn’t make world headlines the way the 1996 message on evolution did, and so which most folks aren’t even aware of).
I hope other scientists will follow their example of positive engagement on such questions.
