Book Review
Natural Questions
God's Planet by Owen Gingerich
Harvard University Press, 2014
(170 pages, $19.95, hardcover)
Rare are the books that combine brevity with clarity, and delight with instruction. This is one. It is also nicely produced and agreeable to hold and read: a pleasure, therefore, to review. The author, Owen Gingerich, is emeritus professor of astronomy and history of science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The book's arrangement could hardly be simpler: three great scientists in three short chapters. Each chapter preps us with an expert introduction to the scientist's thought and then asks us to consider the question of whether he was right.
We begin and end with astronomers—Nicolaus Copernicus from the sixteenth century and Fred Hoyle from the twentieth. In between we consider the nineteenth-century naturalist and evolutionist Charles Darwin.
The Big Question
So who are we, you may wonder, to be deciding whether Copernicus, Darwin, and Hoyle are right? But that's not exactly our assignment. Instead, Gingerich prepares us to discover on our own a more fundamental question, and to answer it for ourselves. He gets us to see that there is something like faith involved in declaring any one of these scientists to have been right. What I will call Gingerich's "big question," underlying the leading one about rightness, is whether the natural sciences contain within themselves the answers to questions about the history, nature, and significance of our world and of human life. The reply Gingerich expects us to arrive at is no, though even in that negative we have to be careful.
Some Christians, for example, would reply in the negative, but for the wrong reason. These would be Christians who like to keep their religion and their science in separate compartments, so they can be secular during the week and Christian on Sunday. They would say science isn't the full answer, because it doesn't work on Sunday. But this is not what Gingerich is after.
For similar reasons, he disagrees with atheistic scientists who are prepared to agree with the Sunday Christians, if only to get the Creationists off their back. In that connection, Gingerich likes to cite his late Harvard colleague, Stephen J. Gould. Gould was prepared to concede that both religion and science can be regarded as authorities in their own domains, provided these two "magisteria" do not overlap. Let religion have its own authority, Gould thought, as long as it doesn't try to lecture to scientists.
That is a scientist's negative answer to Gingerich's big question, but still not the one he is looking for. Science cannot be self-sufficient, but not because religion is a separate magisterium. Quite the contrary. The two magisteria overlap, and religion, or at least the metaphysical part once called "natural religion," is indispensable to science. Good science, Gingerich argues, must be consistent not only with the convictions of its leading theoreticians but also with those of what he calls a "broader cultural milieu." That milieu holds views that are metaphysical and religious.
Magisterial Approaches
Now this claim is surprising because we have grown accustomed to a different view of the history of science, one in which scientists are depicted as visionaries, embattled by ignorant (often religious) bigots, who do nothing but cling to the religion they learned at their mother's knee and the metaphysics they learned at school. We laymen, who compose that "broader cultural milieu," are intended to learn that scientists are our tutors, and that, when conflict arises between our common prejudices and what "studies have shown," then it is our prejudices that must give way.
Gingerich does not stoop to waging war with this cliché. Instead, he undercuts it by allowing each of his three scientists to show that the magisterium of science cannot even express itself intelligibly without drawing on the religion and metaphysics of the broad cultural milieu.
For example, to assert that the earth was moving at 1,000 miles an hour not only was an outrage to the common sense of most of Copernicus's contemporaries, but also appeared to challenge the truth of the Bible. Does not the Psalmist tell us that "the Lord has fixed the earth on its foundation so that it can never be shaken?" Laymen of the Copernican age were naturally skeptical of the astronomer's claim. But this was not the standoff between learning and ignorance, nor the conflict between separate magisteria in which we have all been taught to believe. As Gingerich shows, Copernicus had to reconfigure bits and pieces from both magisteria to arrive at his new conception of the universe. In inventing a new cosmology, he was guided in part by aesthetic considerations of economy and beauty drawn not from science itself, but from metaphysical and theological conceptions of what was fitting. Without these notions, the broad cultural milieu would never have been persuaded.
The chapter on Darwin draws the same moral, though it concerns questions that are still on the front burner today. A brief and brilliant refresher on the theory of natural selection, as developed by Darwin and improved by his successors, is followed by two points Gingerich makes on his own account. They are, first, that Darwin's theory seems to be "on the right track," and second, that it is also missing something important.
What is most clearly missing in Darwin is an account of "where we (humans) fit." In a charitable aside, Gingerich speculates that Darwin avoided that question in order not to offend the religious and cultural sensitivities of his readers. But, as Gingerich is well aware, the anomaly of man in nature is still the big question today, even among atheist and materialistic philosophers and scientists who have no nostalgia for Victorian sensibilities. Gingerich would approve of the punchy way one such philosopher formulates what he calls "the overriding question in contemporary philosophy." "How," asks Berkeley philosopher John Searle, in Freedom and Neurobiology (2007), "can we square this self-conception of ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free, rational, etc., agents with a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles?"
Obviously, you can't get here from there. You can't get free, rational agents out of brute physical particles any more than you can get apples from oranges. There are only two choices. Either we deny our freedom, consciousness, and rationality, as some science boosters think we should, or we recognize, with Gingerich, that the scientific magisterium cannot entirely explain us to ourselves, but needs to draw on the magisterium of religion and metaphysics.
Gingerich introduces the reader to some of the delicately balanced and finely tuned conditions that had to arise and stay in place for human life to be possible. In light of them, it is hard to resist the observation with which the Darwin chapter concludes: that "the universe knew we were coming."
The last chapter deals with evolution of a different kind: the intellectual development of the British astronomer and cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle (1915–2001). Early in life, Hoyle was famous as a militant atheist and a critic of a theory he derisively called the "big bang." The latter theory, made famous among non-scientists by Stephen Hawking's bestseller A Brief History of Time, was never able to shake that name. But it shook the "steady-state" theory to pieces, eventually winning over even Hoyle himself.
Hoyle's early attachment to steady-state theory was partly connected with his atheism. If the universe had always existed in the same form as we know it, as the steady-state theory demanded, then so had the amazing "coincidences" of fine tuning necessary for the emergence and conservation of human life. This made atheism easier to swallow: what has always been the case is familiar; what is familiar we think to be natural, and what is natural requires no special acknowledgement or explanation.
Ultimately, however, the weight of what Gingerich calls "the atheist's dilemma" overcame Hoyle's resistance. The dilemma says that "either there are monstrous coincidences of fine tuning in nature, or there is purpose in the universe." Both horns of the atheist's dilemma point beyond the magisterium of science, as Hoyle eventually recognized. In 1981 he wrote: "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics. . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."
"Not everyone is as candid as Fred Hoyle," Gingerich remarks near the end of his book. Reading Gingerich will make you strive to be among the ones who are.
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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