The psalmist and the astronomer

Originally published 11 November 1991

“Ancient reli­gion and mod­ern sci­ence agree: We are here to give praise. Or, to slight­ly tip the expres­sion, to pay attention.”

So says novelist/critic John Updike in a new book on The Mean­ing of Life com­piled by David Friend and the edi­tors of Life mag­a­zine. Among mod­ern writ­ers, Updike is well qual­i­fied to com­ment on the nexus where sci­ence and reli­gion meet.

Oth­er writ­ers some­times dab­ble in fash­ion­able sci­en­tif­ic con­cepts such as entropy or rel­a­tiv­i­ty. Updike dab­bles in all of sci­ence. He is equal­ly at home with plan­ets and neu­tri­nos. Best of all, he under­stands the spir­it of sci­ence — its wit, its metaphor­i­cal rich­ness, its dumb­struck awe — bet­ter than many scientists.

When he says that sci­ence is praise, I lis­ten. When he says that sci­ence means pay­ing atten­tion, I nod in agree­ment. When he sug­gests that we are here to praise (which first sup­pos­es pay­ing atten­tion), he has stat­ed a truth that both sci­en­tists and reli­gious folks might com­fort­ably share.

Sci­ence and reli­gion have a long his­to­ry of antagonism.

Amer­i­can cul­ture, espe­cial­ly, in these last years of the mil­len­ni­um shows every sign of frac­tur­ing along the fault line of rea­son vs. rev­e­la­tion. The bat­tle over teach­ing evo­lu­tion in the pub­lic schools is one symp­tom of the ten­sion. The phe­nom­e­nal pro­lif­er­a­tion of pseu­do­science and New Age reli­gions may also spring from the lack of accom­mo­da­tion between sci­ence and tra­di­tion­al faiths.

Science as praise

Updike’s earnest attempts to find some com­mon ground are welcome.

Sci­en­tists know a lot about pay­ing atten­tion; they may be less com­fort­able with the notion of sci­ence as praise. Biogra­phies of the great sci­en­tists amply con­firm that reli­gious awe is often the motive that sparks the sci­en­tif­ic search for truth. The uni­verse is appar­ent­ly vast beyond our know­ing, and filled with pat­terns of order that move us to admi­ra­tion. What is more nat­ur­al than to speak of the beau­ty we see, and what is awestruck speech but praise?

Stand­ing beneath the star-tent­ed sky the psalmist prais­es the Cre­ator: “When I behold the heav­ens, the work of your fin­gers, the moon and the stars which you set in place, what is man that you should be mind­ful of him?”

Are the psalmist and the astronomer so dif­fer­ent? The astronomer hon­ors the heav­ens with atten­tion to detail and exact descrip­tion. John Ruskin wrote in Mod­ern Painters, “The great­est thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see some­thing, and to tell what it saw.” Hon­est descrip­tion is the high­est praise.

And there is more that likens the astronomer to the psalmist.

Cos­mol­o­gists and quan­tum physi­cists have begun to talk about the role of the observ­er in bring­ing real­i­ty into exis­tence. Cos­mol­o­gists speak of the anthrop­ic prin­ci­ple, which sup­pos­es that the uni­verse would­n’t exist at all if we were not here to observe it. Quan­tum physi­cists sug­gest that the human obser­va­tion of atom­ic-scale events caus­es those events to be select­ed from a plen­i­tude of pos­si­bil­i­ties. All of this is spec­u­la­tive, but it hints that pay­ing atten­tion may be more than praise; it may allow us to par­tic­i­pate in creation.

All of which gives a new and aston­ish­ing answer to the ques­tion: What is man that the uni­verse should be mind­ful of him?

So per­haps there is com­mon ground. Sci­ence and tra­di­tion­al reli­gion spring from the same gape-jawed won­der that the world exists at all, and from the same breath­less urge to praise what we see.

Of course, sci­en­tists will remain skep­ti­cal of the effi­ca­cy of prayer, of claims of mir­a­cles, and of the exis­tence of an all-pow­er­ful Per­son who inter­venes at whim in the world. Adher­ents of tra­di­tion­al reli­gions will ques­tion the sci­en­tist’s claim that every­thing hap­pens accord­ing to fixed math­e­mat­i­cal laws that are at least poten­tial­ly knowable.

The chasm of dis­trust between hard-nosed sci­en­tists and reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists may be unbridge­able. But for the rest of us — awestruck, gape-jawed, skep­ti­cal of absolutes — some mea­sure of accom­mo­da­tion may just be pos­si­ble, some com­mon rit­u­al of atten­tion and praise.

Praise for the spirit

Ein­stein was once asked if sci­en­tists pray. He respond­ed: “Sci­en­tif­ic research is based on the idea that every­thing that takes place is deter­mined by laws of nature, and therefore…a research sci­en­tist will hard­ly be inclined to believe that events could be influ­enced by..a wish addressed to a super­nat­ur­al Being…But, on the oth­er hand, every one who is seri­ous­ly involved in the pur­suit of sci­ence becomes con­vinced that a spir­it is man­i­fest in the laws of the uni­verse — a spir­it vast­ly supe­ri­or to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our mod­est pow­ers must feel humble.”

Ein­stein’s work was praise for the spirit.

As for myself, I think I rather agree with John Updike: “What we cer­tain­ly have is our instinc­tu­al intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty about the uni­verse from the quasars down to the quarks, our delight and won­der at exis­tence itself, and an occa­sion­al surge of sheer blind grat­i­tude for being here.”