How old is the universe?
Let me check on that.
It looks like the answer is about fourteen billion trillion years.
Ok.
There’s our answer.
I come from a very religious family, which means I was raised to believe a literal interpretation
of the Old Testament, where the universe was created in six days,
Moses parted the Red Sea,
and Jonah spent three days in the belly of a whale and lived to talk about it.
Trouble is, I also grew up learning science,
and in science you need evidence to substantiate your claims.
You can’t just take them on faith.
For a long time I thought that, alright, it’s going to be science or Judaism.
It can never be both.
The reason why it’s so hard to reconcile science and religion sometimes is because
you have to go really deep.
I think some of those conflicts may not get resolved in our lifetime.
The war between science and religion
Science versus God
You don’t seem to need a God to create a universe
Scientists do need God
Science vs. Religion: let the opening statements commence.
I’ve often felt my religious and scientific sides to be at odds with one another,
and looking around America today it’s not difficult to see conflict between science
and religion.
Why that is, or even if that is, depends on who you ask.
My friend Bethany, for example, who was raised Christian and is a chemistry major like me
has no idea what I’m talking about.
As far as like creation and things like that, I could easily see God starting the world
with a Big Bang, if scientifically that makes sense.
I think it would fit with the Bible.
I think that some people have a more rigid view of things than I do,
and sometimes they’re not as cool with the science and the religion working together.
Apparently, most scientists aren’t cool with it.
In 2009, the Pew Research Center interviewed members of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science about their religious views.
They found almost half of those interviewed did not identify as religious compared to
only 17 percent of the general population.
Why might that be?
If you had pressed me in going back to my middle school days about some of the strict
things the Bible said about the creatures that populate the Earth and Noah’s Arc,
I would have told you that’s crap.
That’s John Finnerty, a professor of biology.
Finnerty was raised Catholic, but he was never able to reconcile the worldview he learned
from science with the worldview he learned from the church.
It became crystal clear to me that science and religion were largely in conflict intellectually
when you think about faith.
So now in the Catholic church, faith is extolled as the greatest virtue, so belief in something
in the complete absence of evidence.
Belief in something in the complete absence of evidence is a grave moral sin to a scientist.
I mean you can not do that.
Faith is not the absence of questions, it’s dealing with questions and still believing.
That’s Binyomin Abrams, my academic adviser.
Unlike Dr. Finnerty, he doesn’t see a conflict between faith and science.
One of the things I love about teaching chemistry is that for the most part, you really can’t
see it.
You can’t see what’s going on.
Microscopically, you can, color changes, gas evolution, is great, but I’m talking about
the really small stuff like the quantum stuff.
We get all sorts of indirect information that lets us try to understand it.
You can’t prove a mechanism.
You can’t see it.
If you don’t see a parallel with that and Judaism…
Like that’s all Judaism there.
It’s all about looking at, well, there’s something deeper there.
It’s actually not that surprising that neither Bethany nor Dr. Abrams really see a conflict
between science and religion.
That same Pew survey found that scientists in the field of chemistry were the most likely
to be religious.
I also study chemistry, but I feel that conflict every time I step in the lab.
I try to explain this to Bethany.
The biggest conflict would be when people interpret the Bible,
or for me, the Old Testament, the Torah, literally.
And there are certain literal interpretations that outright conflict with what we know about
physics.
For example.
miracles.
Behold His mighty hand.
How can someone who understands the principles of science accept the idea of miracles, which
by definition defy the laws of nature?
I brought that question to Muhammad Zaman, a professor of biomedical engineering and
a practicing Muslim.
I think it’s always going to be there in terms of miracles and how we interpret them.
You have to reconcile them in many ways as a person of faith,
and that reconciliation may not be control.
For me it’s more about the meaning.
It’s the message, whether it is the story of Moses or the story of Abraham or anybody
else.
I think it’s more about, it’s the value that they present as opposed to the miracle
itself.
Because religion is not just about miracles, it’s also about values, it’s about doing
the right thing.
I get that.
I do.
In fact, that stuff, the non-miraculous stuff, is why I like my religion.
Coming to school here, the biggest comfort that I’ve had is the Jewish community.
It’s made me feel safe, having this kind of home away from home has been really important,
and I don’t ever want to lose that.
But it can be hard feeling like you’re 100 percent a part of something, and you can’t
participate in all the conversations.
You’re always holding back a little.
I’ve always had a problem with the spirituality component of the religion.
I’m just not wired that way.
Yeah I think I’ve sort of come to a similar place.
I almost feel like some of the beliefs that are held about spiritual questions become
a real impediment to things that the community as a whole might want to do.
One of the things in the Catholic faith that is always brought up, sometimes there is too
much thinking about the afterlife, right?
So if you’re concerned mainly about the afterlife than maybe you can suffer some serious
problems here and not necessarily do anything about them.
So it gets in the way a lot of times of effective community action that we actually have the
power to solve.
Dr. Zaman on the other hand sees his faith as a call to action, not an impediment to
it.
It’s more about trying to find things that are in need of help, and my faith allows me
to do that.
Sometimes it means taking on problems, which affect poorest of the poor even though there
is no funding for that.
Most importantly, Jeremy, I don’t see myself as being 10 percent scientist, and 10 percent
religious, and 10 percent this.
I think this amalgam of various values that I have are all coming together because of
this integration of religion and science.
The integration of religion and science, this is what I feel like I’m missing.
I want them to work together.
I want to be able to apply a critical thinking lens to Judaism, to science.
I also want to bring some of that comfort to the scientific world.
Science doesn’t have to be cut and dry.
I get very emotional about my experiments.
I get very excited when they work out and distraught when they don’t work.
These are two very important things to me, and I want them to work in unison.
You know just like you pray the morning prayers in the morning, the evening prayers in the
evening,
You do your science in the science lab and not in the Synagogue.
But it doesn’t mean you leave your belief in something greater than you, your excitement
for and passion for Judaism in the Synagogue,
it just means that that looks differently in the science lab.
I think it’s coming to terms with that conflict.
It’s perfectly fine to have conflict.
I mean a little bit of conflict is actually important to create a sense of creativity,
and for me, for example, Jeremy, it’s an opportunity to learn more in both directions.
But as long as you’re going that with the right intention, right, you have to tell yourself
that I’m doing it not because I want to prove one over the other,
but I’m genuinely curious.
I’m going to be open-minded about it.
I think you’ll find it to be more exhilarating than troubling.
So maybe reconciling science and religion isn’t the point.
I wanted to find a way for science and religion to work together.
Maybe this is how they work together.
Here you have two very different ways of being curious and asking questions about the world,
and because you can’t reconcile them, it keeps you curious.
It keeps you asking questions.
Maybe that’s a good thing.
Personally, I’m not convinced there’s a resolution out there for this conflict that
I feel,
but if there is, I’ll believe it when I see it.