'Explore as much as we can': Nobel Prize winner Charles Townes on evolution & intelligent design

Charles Townes is the Nobel Prize Physics winner whose pioneering work led to the maser and later the laser.

The University of California, Berkeley interviewed him on his 90th birthday where they talked about evolution, intelligent design and the meaning of life.

BERKELEY – Religion and science, faith and empirical experiment: these terms would seem to have as little in common as a Baptist preacher and a Berkeley physicist. And yet, according to Charles Hard Townes, winner of a Nobel Prize in Physics and a UC Berkeley professor in the Graduate School, they are united by similar goals: science seeks to discern the laws and order of our universe; religion, to understand the universe's purpose and meaning, and how humankind fits into both.

Where these areas intersect is territory that Townes has been exploring for many of his 89 years, and in March his insights were honored with the 2005 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. Worth about $1.5 million, the Templeton Prize recognizes those who, throughout their lives, have sought to advance ideas and/or institutions that will deepen the world's understanding of God and of spiritual realities.

Townes first wrote about the parallels between religion and science in IBM's Think magazine in 1966, two years after he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking work in quantum electronics: in 1953, thanks in part to what Townes calls a "revelation" experienced on a park bench, he invented the maser (his acronym for Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission), which amplifies microwaves to produce an intense beam. By building on this work, he achieved similar amplification using visible light, resulting in the laser (whose name he also coined).

Even as his research interests have segued from microwave physics to astrophysics, Townes has continued to explore topics such as "Science, values, and beyond," in Synthesis of Science and Religion (1987), "On Science, and what it may suggest about us," in Theological Education (1988), and "Why are we here; where are we going?" in The International Community of Physics, Essays on Physics (1997).

Townes sat down one morning recently to discuss how these and other weighty questions have shaped his own life, and their role in current controversies over public education.

Q. If science and religion share a common purpose, why have their proponents tended to be at loggerheads throughout history?

Science and religion have had a long interaction: some of it has been good and some of it hasn't. As Western science grew, Newtonian mechanics had scientists thinking that everything is predictable, meaning there's no room for God — so-called determinism. Religious people didn't want to agree with that. Then Darwin came along, and they really didn't want to agree with what he was saying, because it seemed to negate the idea of a creator. So there was a real clash for a while between science and religions.

But science has been digging deeper and deeper, and as it has done so, particularly in the basic sciences like physics and astronomy, we have begun to understand more. We have found that the world is not deterministic: quantum mechanics has revolutionized physics by showing that things are not completely predictable. That doesn't mean that we've found just where God comes in, but we know now that things are not as predictable as we thought and that there are things we don't understand. For example, we don't know what some 95 percent of the matter in the universe is: we can't see it — it's neither atom nor molecule, apparently. We think we can prove it's there, we see its effect on gravity, but we don't know what and where it is, other than broadly scattered around the universe. And that's very strange.

So as science encounters mysteries, it is starting to recognize its limitations and become somewhat more open. There are still scientists who differ strongly with religion and vice versa. But I think people are being more open-minded about recognizing the limitations in our frame of understanding.

You've said "I believe there is no long-range question more important than the purpose and meaning of our lives and our universe." How have you attempted to answer that question?

Even as a youngster, you're usually taught that there's some purpose you'll try to do, how you are going to live. But that's a very localized thing, about what you want with your life. The broader question is, "What are humans all about in general, and what is this universe all about?" That comes as one tries to understand what is this beautiful world that we're in, that's so special: "Why has it come out this way? What is free will and why do we have it? What is a being? What is consciousness?" We can't even define consciousness. As one thinks about these broader problems, then one becomes more and more challenged by the question of what is the aim and purpose and meaning of this universe and of our lives.

Those aren't easy questions to answer, of course, but they're important and they're what religion is all about. I maintain that science is closely related to that, because science tries to understand how the universe is constructed and why it does what it does, including human life. If one understands the structure of the universe, maybe the purpose of man becomes a little clearer. I think maybe the best answer to that is that somehow, we humans were created somewhat in the likeness of God. We have free will. We have independence, we can do and create things, and that's amazing. And as we learn more and more — why, we become even more that way. What kind of a life will we build? That's what the universe is open about. The purpose of the universe, I think, is to see this develop and to allow humans the freedom to do the things that hopefully will work out well for them and for the rest of the world.

I'm a Protestant Christian, I would say a very progressive one. This has different meanings for different people. But I'm quite open minded and willing to consider all kinds of new ideas and to look at new things. At the same time it has a very deep meaning for me: I feel the presence of God. I feel it in my own life as a spirit that is somehow with me all the time.

You've described your inspiration for the maser as a moment of revelation, more spiritual than what we think of as inspiration. Do you believe that God takes such an active interest in humankind?

[The maser] was a new idea, a sudden visualization I had of what might be done to produce electromagnetic waves, so it's somewhat parallel to what we normally call revelation in religion. Whether the inspiration for the maser and the laser was God's gift to me is something one can argue about. The real question should be, where do brand-new human ideas come from anyway? To what extent does God help us? I think he's been helping me all along. I think he helps all of us — that there's a direction in our universe and it has been determined and is being determined. How? We don't know these things. There are many questions in both science and religion and we have to make our best judgment. But I think spirituality has a continuous effect on me and on other people.

That sounds like you agree with the "intelligent design" movement, the latest framing of creationism, which argues that the complexity of the universe proves it must have been created by a guiding force.

I do believe in both a creation and a continuous effect on this universe and our lives, that God has a continuing influence — certainly his laws guide how the universe was built. But the Bible's description of creation occurring over a week's time is just an analogy, as I see it. The Jews couldn't know very much at that time about the lifetime of the universe or how old it was. They were visualizing it as best they could and I think they did remarkably well, but it's just an analogy.

Should intelligent design be taught alongside Darwinian evolution in schools as religious legislators have decided in Pennsylvania and Kansas?

I think it's very unfortunate that this kind of discussion has come up. People are misusing the term intelligent design to think that everything is frozen by that one act of creation and that there's no evolution, no changes. It's totally illogical in my view. Intelligent design, as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it's remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren't just the way they are, we couldn't be here at all. The sun couldn't be there, the laws of gravity and nuclear laws and magnetic theory, quantum mechanics, and so on have to be just the way they are for us to be here.

Some scientists argue that "well, there's an enormous number of universes and each one is a little different. This one just happened to turn out right." Well, that's a postulate, and it's a pretty fantastic postulate — it assumes there really are an enormous number of universes and that the laws could be different for each of them. The other possibility is that ours was planned, and that's why it has come out so specially. Now, that design could include evolution perfectly well. It's very clear that there is evolution, and it's important. Evolution is here, and intelligent design is here, and they're both consistent.

They don't have to negate each other, you're saying. God could have created the universe, set the parameters for the laws of physics and chemistry and biology, and set the evolutionary process in motion, But that's not what the Christian fundamentalists are arguing should be taught in Kansas.

People who want to exclude evolution on the basis of intelligent design, I guess they're saying, "Everything is made at once and then nothing can change." But there's no reason the universe can't allow for changes and plan for them, too. People who are anti-evolution are working very hard for some excuse to be against it. I think that whole argument is a stupid one. Maybe that's a bad word to use in public, but it's just a shame that the argument is coming up that way, because it's very misleading.

That seems to come up when religion seeks to control or limit the scope of science. We're seeing that with the regulation of research into stem cells and cloning. Should there be areas of scientific inquiry that are off-limits due to a culture's prevailing religious principles?

My answer to that is, we should explore as much as we can. We should think about everything, try to explore everything, and question things. That's part of our human characteristic in nature that has made us so great and able to achieve so much. Of course there are problems if we do scientific experiments on people that involve killing them — that's a scientific experiment sure, but ethically it has problems. There are ethical issues with certain kinds of scientific experimentation. But outside of the ethical issues, I think we should try very hard to understand everything we can and to question things.

I think it's settling those ethical issues that's the problem. Who decides what differentiates a "person" from a collection of cells, for example?

That's very difficult. What is a person? We don't know. Where is this thing, me — where am I really in this body? Up here in the top of the head somewhere? What is personality? What is consciousness? We don't know. The same thing is true once the body is dead: where is this person? Is it still there? Has it gone somewhere else? If you don't know what it is, it's hard to say what it's doing next. We have to be open-minded about that. The best we can do is try to find ways of answering those questions.

Good luck is one, but also just having a good time. Some people say I work hard: I come in on Saturdays, and I work evenings both at my desk and in the lab. But I think I'm just having a good time doing physics and science. I have three telescopes down on Mt. Wilson; I was down there a couple nights last week. I've traveled a lot. On Sundays, my wife [of 64 years] and I usually go hiking. I'd say the secret has been being able to do things that I like, and keeping active.

'Faith is necessary for the scientist even to get started, and deep faith is necessary for him to carry out his tougher tasks. Why? Because he must have confidence that there is order in the universe and that the human mind — in fact his own mind — has a good chance of understanding this order.'

-Charles Townes, writing in "The Convergence of Science and Religion," IBM's Think magazine, March-April 1966

A Nov. 18-21, 2004 New York Times/CBS News poll on American mores and attitudes, conducted with 885 U.S. adults, showed that a significant number of Americans believe that God created humankind. UC Berkeley's Office of Student Research asked the same question on its 2005 UC Undergraduate Experience Survey, results for which are still coming in. As of June 8, 2,057 students had responded.

You continue to astonish. First, in an earlier message you admit that there is a lot of “leftist politically-motivated drivel” in our schools, and go on to excuse “the science/math/engineering communities” as being the least politically corrupted of the disciplines. But then you acknowledge enough exceptions to take the sting out of your observation. With me, the point is who controls the money in academia? Scientists of impeccable virtue? Not hardly. Marxist/Socialists who intend, with increasing force, to continue to push their “leftist drivel”? I believe so. Don’t you think your passion is misplaced by quite a wide mark? That was my point when I expressed my astonishment at the intense passion Scientists bring to their arguments with Conservative Christians, in contrast to the marked indifference with which they seem to view the Marxist/Socialist garbage which infests our schools and universities. I would think that you would be engaged mightily against those who intend to become your Marxist/Socialist masters. But you’re so focused on your little Evo War with the “Fundies” that apparently you’re blind to anything else. So far, you’ve entirely missed my points. Don’t be so intensely focused on your Evo War when you’re crossing a street. You’ll never see that delivery van.

Now, you confess that most kids read and write poorly (and do math badly as well); a point that departs from your earlier remarks. The point being . . . what? That they really don’t need to read and write better than poorly (although one might wish they would do better in math)?

The astonishment just doesn’t end. In your latest epistle you also confess that you “stuck in” the dehumanizing humanities bit just to be provocative. Word-manipulation, you call it, which you describe, including your own manipulations, as a fairly low level of human thought. Yeah, I think you’re right; spin is about as low as you can get, at least in terms of human communication. Dr Goebbels was its most ardent practitioner, although he has many equally ardent rivals today. Spin might sometimes actually require a fairly high level of thought, but only to produce the same very low product. Then, you recant and again describe the humanities as dehumanizing. More spin? It looks like I wasn’t very far off when I questioned your sincerity. Outside the natural sciences and math, you apparently can conceive of no communication above spin, including your own.

May we take you at your word and assume everything you have to say is essentially spin?

” I don't know what it is about these evolution things that cause people to go all nonlinear and start making snide insinuations about one's bona fides as a normal patriotic American.”

I don’t know what it is about these discussions with science-types that they seem to think it’s always exclusively about them and evolution. Maybe it’s because they can conceive of nothing else that could possibly be of some degree of importance. Do you have a context? Might it have anything to do with a statement something like, “in the absence of experimental proof science can accept nothing.”? If that is the case, the response had nothing to do with being nonlinear or snide. Try to think of some other possibility. That’s all the help you get.

Regarding post 185, by fundamental, I didn't mean in the sense of "first people who tried to do something." I meant as in, what's needed in a course of study.

With a science like physics, roughly speaking, you have four years to get the students from Newton to the Standard Model (1970's basic understanding of physics, which is nowadays taken as a departure point for any variant theories, hence the name). Yes, there's stuff from before Newton and after the Standard Model, but that's the bulk of it, about 300 years of work of really smart people, packed into 4 years. That's about a 75:1 compression ratio between how long it took to figure the stuff out and how long you have to learn it. So only the essential stuff gets included; anything non-essential gets at best a footnote.

How the students demonstate knowledge is by doing it: working problems with numerical answers, proving derivations mathematically, and reproducing the fundamental experiments in lab classes. Wordy explanations count for diddley.

Very early on, like first or second week of a freshman physics class, gravity will come up. Aristotle gets a mention - as how not to do science. Aristotle comes in as the guy who says heavy things fall faster than lighter things. Galileo comes in as the guy who says things fall at the same rate, aside from possible influence of air resistance. (Yes, there's dispute over whether he really tried it with wood vs metal spheres. I'm betting he did.) Then they show the film clip of the astronaut standing on the moon, dropping the hammer and feather in vacuum. They fall at the same rate. Galileo is confirmed, Aristotle is disconfirmed. That bit lasts about 90 seconds, then it's on to the next thing. As I say, there's a lot to cover in very little time.

Which is not to say Aristotle was a dope, although that's certainly the impression a lot of physics students take away. The point of the lesson is, do the experiment to settle the question, rather than just yakking about it. With yakking, you can convince yourself of anything. Experiments disabuse people of wrong ideas.

And biology is even more experimentally-focused than physics. There is very little theorizing. It's mostly wet, yukky, smelly experiments at a lab bench. Aristotle's notions of biology are irrelevant to modern biology students, they probably spend even less time on him than physics students.

The idea that arguing things out with word-discussion can "help" is part of the philosophy of lawyers, etc. In reality (the physical world) it's useless, because the physical world doesn't pay attention to our words. (When I think of words interacting with the world, I think of stories of witches casting spells by means of incantation, like on one of those shows from the old WB or UPN network or whatever it is now.) It also doesn't settle anything between people. If it did, these threads would come to some sort of agreement. They don't. They just spin endlessly.

The idea that arguing things out with word-discussion can "help" is part of the philosophy of lawyers, etc. In reality (the physical world) it's useless, because the physical world doesn't pay attention to our words. (When I think of words interacting with the world, I think of stories of witches casting spells by means of incantation, like on one of those shows from the old WB or UPN network or whatever it is now.) It also doesn't settle anything between people. If it did, these threads would come to some sort of agreement. They don't. They just spin endlessly.

Good afternoon omnivore! RE the above:

All words are, are articulations of reality as we have experienced it. They allow us to “fix” our experiences in consciousness (memory), and to communicate them to others. Do not disparage words: Even scientists use words to think and communicate. True, the physical world does not heed them directly. But that’s not the point: Humans hear them. And words can be enormously powerful in transforming the way people think about reality, and engage in it — which certainly has an impact on human cultures, and beyond that, may affect the way people relate to the physical world in ways that can actually affect it. This is hardly the same thing as the disputations of lawyers.

You referenced witches’ incantations, the magic words that supposedly can change reality. It’s clear that the German transcendental idealist philosopher Hegel put great stock in the die Zauberworte, the “magic words” that can transform reality. He basically wanted to “end history” as we know it, and start over with a new history in which man would “save himself,” who would therefore have no further need of God.

Here's a sample of Hegelian "magic words": “Every single man is but a blind link in a chain of absolute necessity by which the world builds itself forth. The single man can elevate himself to dominance over an appreciable length of this chain only if he knows the direction in which the great necessity wants to move and if he learns from this knowledge to pronounce the magic words (die Zauberworte) that will evoke it shape.”

Well guess what — Even though this statement strikes our ear as preposterous, Hegel was right: His system of “dialectical science” was taken over and “improved” by Marx, to become the system of dialectical materialism. Which in turn gave rise to communist ideology. And that has certainly had a profound effect on human societies and on the physical planet itself.

You wrote that words don’t “settle anything between people. If [they] did, these threads would come to some sort of agreement. They don't. They just spin endlessly.”

So am I to gather that it is impossible for human beings to reason together, using words? How else could they reason together? What causes the “spin” you notice is the fact that people are using words to speak “past” each other, because the participants to the discussion do not share a common perspective, or worldview.

The worldview of science is methodological (metaphysical) naturalism. The scientific method is predicated on observation and measurement — it depends on direct observables, or things which sense perception directly perceives. It is an amazing tool in its proper sphere of inquiry. But outside its sphere, in areas of experience that cannot be directly observed, measured, and quantified, science really has nothing to do.

Which is why it troubles me to see so-called “scientific methods” being used for subject areas outside the competence of science. As Christophe Cardinal Schoenborn has written,

If the Darwinist, taking up Descartes’ and [Sir Francis] Bacon’s project of understanding nature according only to material and efficient causes, studies the history of living things and says that he can see no organizing, active principles of whole living substances (formal causes) and no real plan, purpose or design in living things (final causes), then I accept his report without surprise. It is obviously compatible with the full truth that the world of living beings is replete with formality and finality. It comes as no surprise that reductionist science cannot recognize those very aspects of reality it excludes — or at least, seeks to exclude — by its choice of method….
[T]he modern biologist … is free to define his special science on terms as narrow as he finds useful for gaining a certain kind of knowledge. But he may not then turn around and demand the rest of us, unrestricted by his methodological self-limitation, ignore obvious truths about reality….

An example of “an obvious truth about reality” — obvious to me at least — is that there is more to nature than material and efficient causes. (We may have to agree to disagree about this, omnivore.) There are also formal and final causes, just as Aristotle said. But formal and final causes do not seem to be within the reach of the scientific method.

With formal and final causes, we are dealing with the why (“ultimate cause”) and the wherefore (“ultimate purpose”) of things. And these are philosophical, religious, i.e., spiritual questions. Not all scientists are blind to questions of this nature; but some nowadays do seem to deny their validity. I suspect in certain “hard cases,” the questions are being denied for the precise reason that science cannot treat of them (e.g., Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker, Lewontin, et al.). Still, the fact that science cannot deal with them does not make the questions “go away”: Human beings have been asking precisely this type of question from the dawn of recorded history, and probably before. It is our nature to ask such questions!

Nowadays, it is commonly thought that there is a great divide between faith and reason, between the humanities and the natural sciences. I consider this the most persistent illusion of our time.

As Albert Einstein wrote in 1941: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” This was in answer to a person who asked him what spiritual or religious views Einstein actually held. He said, “A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation.” Einstein recognized himself as a deeply religious person in this sense. For Einstein, faith and reason were not separable, let alone mutually exclusive.

A hundred years after Einstein’s pioneering work on the light-quantum (for which he won the Nobel prize) and special relativity, his sense of the inseparability of faith and reason has been almost entirely lost, supplanted by materialist, positivist, and rationalist dogmas that together comprise a doctrine of philosophic materialism that has penetrated to the very heart of modern-day science, which is particularly evident in orthodox Neo-Darwinism. The essential complementarity of faith and reason that Einstein recognized has been recast as the triumph of the rational (reason) over the irrational (faith).

Yet if Einstein is right, there really are superpersonal objects and goals “which neither require nor are capable of foundation by means of reason alone.” Any attentive student of human history can tell you that such objects and goals have informed the conduct and progress of human life from time immemorial. Indeed, these objects and goals refer primarily to nonsensory modes of human experience that are “superior in rank and worth” to the objects of sense experience — the domain of the scientific method. As Ellis Sandoz put it, “Inasmuch as such nonsensory experiences are constitutive of what is distinctive about human existence itself — and of what is most precious to mankind — a purported science of man unable to take account of them is egregiously defective.”

As we said, such nonsensory modes of experience lie entirely outside the reach of the scientific method as presently constituted: methodological naturalism. But the fact that science cannot reach them does not mean they do not exist in Reality.

Anyhoot, FWIW, I consider faith and reason, philosophy and the natural sciences to be complementarities. They appear to be mutually-exclusive contraries, yet the fact is both are necessary to the life of man and to his exploration of the natural world.

Evidently this was something that Einstein and Bohr could agree on (though Bohr was scrupulous to avoid philosophizing in his science, in a way that Einstein was not).

Late in his life, the Danish government conferred the Order of the Elephant on Niels Bohr — an honor normally reserved for royalty and heads of state. So he had to create a coat of arms. The coat of arms he chose featured the famous Yin-Yang symbol of the Far East, the Tao, denoting the essential complementariety implicit in the structure of the reality. He chose as his motto the statement “contraries are complementary.”

For Bohr, the complementarity principle had profound ramifications outside the physical sciences (e.g., in the humanities) as well as within it (e.g., superposition, indeterminacy, the correspondence principle, etc.). You don’t get “a complete description of the system” -- variously in nature, the universe, reality -- without both terms of the complementarity.

Well I’ve probably run on too long, omnivore, but I just wanted to make clear my own view WRT these so-called “evo-crevo” debates, which seem to leave us “spinning” to no fruitful purpose.

Then again, it might be useful for people to understand where their debate partners “are coming from” (this ought to be mutual IMO), hopefully to be able to speak with each other in ways that are meaningful to both partners. People who are hermetically sealed within a particular worldview often have difficulty understanding others, whose worldview is different. That’s where all the “spinning endlessly” comes from, IMHO, FWIW.

Thanks so very much for your thoughtful essay/post!

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