Paying Attention To The Sky

'Science gives us knowledge, but religion gives us meaning.' – Michael Heller, 2008 Templeton Prize winner

From the Christian Science Monitor: Author of 30 books in Polish and five in English, Fr. Heller, an ordained Roman Catholic priest and a professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Academy in Krakow, Poland, has made the fostering of dialogue between science and religion a priority.

“He’s one of the key contributors in the international scholarly community dedicated to the creative dialogue on science, theology, and philosophy,” says Robert John Russell, founder and director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, Calif. “He’s a great example of someone who bridges these fields.”

For Heller, these seemingly distinct realms of human understanding actually depend on one another for stability. “Science gives us knowledge, but religion gives us meaning,” he says. “Science without religion is not meaningless, but lame…. And religion without science [slides] into fundamentalism,” he says. Heller draws on deep understanding of cosmology, religion, and philosophy to tackle questions such as, “Does the universe need to have a cause?” and “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Those familiar with Heller’s work laud his rigor of thought. “In an era when serious scientists and serious religionists declare themselves at war with each other and claims of connections are often by superficial thinkers, Michael Heller is the exception,” says Philip Clayton, professor of philosophy and religion at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif. “Rigorous thinkers seem to have fled the no man’s land between the two warring factions.”

Heller was born in 1936 in Tarnow, Poland, one of five children. His mother was a teacher, his father a mechanical and electrical engineer. When the Germans invaded in 1939, Heller’s father sabotaged the chemical factory where he worked to keep it out of Nazi hands. The family then fled east into what is now Ukraine.

In 1940, Joseph Stalin ordered 1 million Poles, including Heller’s family, to Siberia to log the forests. The hardships of exile made a lasting impression. “[Heller] knew that many people survived the extreme Siberian situation because they found in prayer both their spiritual force and their will to survive,” writes Joseph Zycinski, archbishop of Lublin, Poland, in the foreword to Heller’s 2003 book, “Creative Tension: Essays on Science and Religion.” “His main dream after coming back to Poland was to become a priest and to help people in finding solutions to the most basic problems of life.”

Heller has a different take. On his return to Poland, “I was too ambitious,” he says, smiling. “I wanted to do what was the most important thing to be done.” In his estimation, that was science and religion. In 1959, at a time when religion was officially discouraged under communism, Heller was ordained a priest. In 1966, he received his PhD in philosophy from the Catholic University of Lublin. And beginning in 1969, Karol Wojtyla, the archbishop of Krakow who later became Pope John Paul II, began inviting scientists, philosophers, and theologians – Heller included – to his residence to discuss how the disciplines interrelated. The group became known as the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Heller also studied Marxist philosophy, primarily so he could rebut it. His time in Siberia had given him an all-too-close view of the reality behind the slogans. “Many young Poles were seduced by Marxism,” he says. “But from the very beginning, I had no illusions.” Navigating these worlds sharpened Heller, says Professor Clayton.

“Michael had to work with the complexities of two very difficult systems – the communist system and the complexities of Vatican politics,” he says. “Instead of being tempted to sell his soul, he used that complexity as a drive, as impetus to do more careful and more subtle work at the level of the science-religion dialogue where enduring connections could be discovered.”

The announcement on March 12 that Michael Heller had won the 2008 Templeton Prize drew wide international news coverage. Media outlets from the U.S. to the UK, from India to Heller’s native Poland, described his achievements and his unusual career as a theoretical physicist, philosopher, and Catholic priest. The story was interesting enough to readers of the New York Times that it climbed to #3 on the paper’s list of the most e-mailed articles. Heller explained to BBC World TV that the link between his scientific research and his work in philosophy and theology is the central role of rationality. As he put it, mathematics serves as a way of “contemplating the work of God.”

Such themes were eagerly taken up by the many bloggers and readers who commented on Heller’s ideas in various online forums. A news article about the Templeton Prize posted on the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education generated more than forty responses. Though several were little more than the familiar name-calling of the culture wars, other comments were much more thoughtful. As one reader remarked, the “richness” of Heller’s contribution lies in his understanding that “science and religion are not methods of either/or.” Another expressed his hope that religious people would not “close their ears to science” and that scientists would “not fall into scientism.”

Chris Herlinger, a reporter and blogger for the Religion News Service, was struck by Heller’s impatience with the advocates of “intelligent design.” Calling their views “a grave theological error” (a phrase taken from his formal Prize statement), Heller told Herlinger that the “mind of God” allows the “collaboration of chance and laws.” Taking out a pen during the interview, he held it up and let it drop to the table, saying that we know the pen will fall but cannot know precisely where. “Physics,” he explained, “leaves room for random events.” Heller’s critique of what he called “the intelligent design ideology” was also noted with approval by the National Center for Science Education.

Larry Arnhart, a professor of political theory at Northern Illinois University, praised Heller for setting out a position too often missing in the heated debate over Darwin. As he wrote on his own blog, “Whether God works through the ordinary laws of nature or through extraordinary miracles, it’s all an expression of His intelligent design. From the point of view of Christian theology, Darwinian evolution is intelligent design.”

Blogging for the New Scientist, Amanda Gefter admitted to being won over by Heller despite her own commitment “to the idea that science and religion don’t mix.” In a phone interview, Heller came across to her “as a contemplative, kind, and brilliant man with an impressive intellectual range, flitting easily between talk of complex philosophical ideas and sophisticated mathematical physics.” He is “the kind of physicist,” she noted, “who is so awestruck by the mathematical order of the universe that he sees God lurking in equations.”

The following are some comments Fr. Heller made in a speech at a news conference announcing his reception of the 2008 Templeton Prize:

“The seventeenth-century German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is my philosophical hero. I am proud (but not quite happy) that I share with this great philosopher at least one feature. He was a master in spreading, not to say dissipating, his genius into too many fields of interest. If he had a greater ability to concentrate on fewer problems, he would have become not only a precursor but also a real creator of several momentous scientific achievements. But in such a case, the history of philosophy would be poorer by one of its greatest thinkers. This is not to say that in my case the history of philosophy would lose anything. This is only to stress the fact that I am interested in too many things.

Amongst my numerous fascinations, two have most imposed themselves and proven more time resistant than others: science and religion. I also am too ambitious. I always wanted to do the most important things, and what can be more important than science and religion? Science gives us Knowledge, and religion gives us Meaning. Both are prerequisites of a decent existence. The paradox is that these two great values seem often to be in conflict. I am frequently asked how I could reconcile them with each other. When such a question is posed by a scientist or a philosopher, I invariably wonder how educated people could be so blind as not to see that science does nothing else but explore God’s creation. To see what I mean, let us go to Leibniz.

In a copy of his Dialogus, in the margin we find a short sentence written in his own hand. It reads: “When God calculates and thinks things through, the world is made.” Everybody has some experience in dealing with numbers, and everybody, at least sometimes, experiences a feeling of necessity involved in the process of calculating. We can easily be led astray when thinking about everyday matters or pondering all pros and cons when facing an important decision, but when we have to add or multiply even big numbers everything goes almost mechanically. This is a routine task, and if we are cautious enough there is no doubt as far as the final result is concerned. However, the true mathematical thinking begins when one has to solve a real problem, that is to say, to identify a mathematical structure that would match the conditions of the problem, to understand principles of its functioning, to grasp connections with other mathematical structures, and to deduce the consequences implied by the logic of the problem. Such manipulations of structures are always immersed into various calculations, since calculations form a natural language of mathematical structures.

It is more or less such an image that we should associate with Leibniz’s metaphor of calculating God. Things thought through by God should be identified with mathematical structures interpreted as structures of the world. Since for God to plan is the same as to implement the plan, when “God calculates and thinks things through,” the world is created.

We have mastered a lot of calculation techniques. We are able to think things through in our human way. Can we imitate God in His creating activity?

In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote down his famous equations of the gravitational field. The road leading to them was painful and laborious a combination of deep thinking and the tedious work of doing calculations. From the beginning, Einstein saw an inadequacy of Newton’s time-honored theory of gravity: It did not fit into the spatio-temporal pattern of special relativity, which was a synthesis of classical mechanics and Maxwell’s electrodynamical theory. He was hunting for some empirical clues that would narrow the field of possibilities. He found some in the question, Why is inertial mass equal to gravitational mass in spite of the fact that, in Newton’s theory, they are completely independent concepts? He tried to implement his ideas into a mathematical model. Several attempts failed. At a certain stage, he understood that he could not go further without studying tensorial calculus and Riemannian geometry. It is the matter distribution that generates space-time geometry, and the space-time geometry that determines the motions of matter. How to express this illuminating idea in the form of mathematical equations? When finally, after many weeks of exhausting work, the equations emerged before his astonished eyes, a new world had been created.

In the beginning, only three, numerically small, empirical effects corroborated Einstein’s new theory. But the world newly created by Einstein soon became an independent reality. Yet, in his early work, the field equations suggested to Einstein the existence of solutions describing an expanding universe. He discarded them by modifying his original equations, but in less than two decades it turned out that the equations were wiser than Einstein himself: Measurements of galactic spectra revealed that, indeed, the universe is expanding. In the subsequent period, lasting until now, theoretical physicists and mathematicians have found a host of new solutions to Einstein’s equations and interpreted them as representing gravitational waves, cosmic strings, neutron stars, stationary and rotating black holes, gravitational lensing, dark matter and dark energy, late stages of life of massive stars, and various aspects of cosmic evolution. In Einstein’s time, nobody would have even suspected the existence of such objects and processes, but nearly all of them have been found by astronomers in the real universe.

Perhaps now we better understand Leibniz’s idea of God’s creating the universe by thinking mathematical structures through. We should only free the above sketched image of creating physical theories from all human constraints and limitations, and take into account a theological truth that for God to intend is to obtain the result, and to obtain the result is to instantiate it. Einstein was not far from Leibniz’s idea when he was saying that the only goal of science is to decode the Mind of God present in the structure of the universe.

And what about chancy or random events? Do they destroy mathematical harmony of the universe, and introduce into it elements of chaos and disorder? Is chance a rival force of God’s creative Mind, a sort of Manichean principle fighting against goals of creation? But what is chance? It is an event of low probability which happens in spite of the fact that it is of low probability. If one wants to determine whether an event is of low or high probability, one must use the calculus of probability, and the calculus of probability is a mathematical theory as good as any other mathematical theory. Chance and random processes are elements of the mathematical blueprint of the universe in the same way as other aspects of the world architecture.

Mathematical structures that are parts of the composition determining the functioning of the universe are called laws of physics. It is a very subtle composition indeed. Like in any masterly symphony, elements of chance and necessity are interwoven with each other and together span the structure of the whole. Elements of necessity determine the pattern of possibilities and dynamical paths of becoming, but they leave enough room for chancy events to make this becoming rich and individual.

Adherents of the so-called intelligent design ideology commit a grave theological error. They claim that scientific theories that ascribe a great role to chance and random events in the evolutionary processes should be replaced, or supplemented, by theories acknowledging the thread of intelligent design in the universe. Such views are theologically erroneous. They implicitly revive the old Manichean error postulating the existence of two forces acting against each other: God and an inert matter; in this case, chance and intelligent design. There is no opposition here. Within the all-comprising Mind of God, what we call chance and random events is well composed into the symphony of creation.

When contemplating the universe, the question imposes itself: Does the universe need to have a cause? It is clear that causal explanations are a vital part of the scientific method. Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one. If we look deeper at such processes, we see that there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back to the Great Blueprint of God’s thinking the universe. The question of ultimate causality is translated into another of Leibniz’s questions: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (from his Principles of Nature and Grace). When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.

When thinking about science as deciphering the Mind of God, we should not forget that science is also a collective product of human brains, and the human brain is itself the most complex and sophisticated product of the universe. It is in the human brain that the world’s structure has reached its focal point the ability to reflect upon itself. Science is but a collective effort of the Human Mind to read the Mind of God from the question marks out of which we and the world around us seem to be made. To place ourselves in this double entanglement is to experience that we are a part of the Great Mystery. Another name for this Mystery is the Humble Approach to reality the motto of all John Templeton Foundation activities. True humility does not consist in pretending that we are feeble and insignificant, but in the audacious acknowledgement that we are an essential part of the Greatest Mystery of all of the entanglement of the Human Mind with the Mind of God.”