'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.

Unfortunately, positivism means different things in different areas of expertise. Logical positivism was killed off by Goedel, but historical positivism lives. Positive in this sense is not the opposite of negative but the other, similar-sounding term spelled the same meaning that which is placed or posited. Completely different word even though spelled and pronounced the same, like half our wonderful language.

Everything we attribute to creativity is from sensation, which is all from Nature....

I disagree with this presupposition, RightWhale. As William James wrote, "Great thinkers have vast premonitory glimpses of schemes of relation between terms, which hardly even as verbal images enter the mind, so rapid is the whole process." We are not speaking at all of "sensation" here. He adds to this statement a footnote:

Mozart describes thus his manner of composing: First bits and crumbs of the piece come and gradually join together in his mind; then the soul getting warmed to the work, the thing grows more and more, "and I spread it out broader and clearer, and at last it gets almost finished in my head, even when it is a long piece, so that I can see the whole of it at a single glance in my mind, as if it were a beautiful painting or a handsome human being; in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as a succession -- the way it must come later -- but all at once, as it were. It is a rare feast! All the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beautiful strong dream. But the best of all is the hearing of it all at once. [I added the bolds]

Notice that Mozart uses analogies to vision and hearing in his description of the creative process; but there's not a scintilla of "sense impression" going on here. This creative process is entirely internal to the mind.

You wrote: "Of course we create nothing, not even our society (all attempts are doomed), that is the baliwick of the Divine."

Tell that to Mozart!

Congratulations on your successful job interview, grey_whiskers! I wish you every success with your new engagement!

Hhhmmmmm third-grade level philosophy primer??? Jeepers, I wouldn't know what to recommend! I don't have one of those myself....

If I may offer a suggestion: On the observation that "all of philosophy is but a recapitulation of Plato," I'd recommend reading his dialogues! The beauty of Plato is that he is not a system builder, he does not construct doctrines. He is more interested in the formulation of proper questions than he is in finding answers. His method is not to tell you what to think, but to show you where to look, and bid you to go and see for yourself. My favorites: Timaeus, Apology, Symposium, Gorgias, Critias (which features the Atlantis myth), Republic, and Laws.

There is virtually no issue in philosophy that Plato didn't originally raise in his works. Which explains the statement, "all of philosophy is but a recapitulation of Plato."

...many scientists dig into philosophy when they are more mature and not working so hard on making their nut. Many of the best and most influential philosphers were scientists before. Kant was a physicist.

And in addition to being a world-class philosopher, Leibniz was also a world-class mathematician who independently developed the calculus.

The reverse is also true. It can be demonstrated that both Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr were students of philosophy, and their philosophical understandings deeply influenced their work as scientists.

I think what Coyoteman is describing when he says that no scientists today pay any attention to philosophy at all simply describes the situation of increasing deculturation that is advancing among many if not most Western intellectuals of our time. The education process is failing in its primary mission: To transmit the culture to the rising generation.

But of course that only works if the philosophers and theologians make an effort to understand modern math and science, e.g. Wolfgang Pannenberg.

Oh thank you so much for mentioning Wolfhart Pannenberg, professor of systematic theology at Munich. He has been "dialoguing" with scientists of late! I highly recommend his fascinating work, Toward a Theology of Nature, 1993. It's simply a marvelous read!

Whitehead explained relativity to Einstein. Philosophy was a second career for Whitehead, after he retired from mathematics. He is hard to read, but he has to be read first hand since translations suffer from the usual failure to transmit meaning.

Whitehead's Principles of Relativity - published almost a decade after Einstein's theory of relativity - is based on a fixed geometry of space/time. As Gibbons and Will note in the first article linked below:

The principal motivation behind Whitehead’s alternative to Einstein’s theory was the desire to retain fixed, non-dynamical, background-independent, causal relations between spacetime events which do not depend upon one’s location in spacetime.

IOW, Whitehead was mathematically and philosophically protesting the “observer problem” which Einstein's theory made so clear.

The measurements of the CMB from the 1960's and myriad other observations since show that space/time is not fixed, indeed does not pre-exist, the universe (space/time) is expanding, there was a beginning of real space and real time.

As a philosophy, it retains merit – but as science, it is debunked.

On the Multiple Deaths of Whitehead's Theory of Gravity

Modern Cosmology and Process Philosophy

Responding to this and the precious post:

#283: There is virtually no issue in philosophy that Plato didn't originally raise in his works. Which explains the statement, "all of philosophy is but a recapitulation of Plato."

And that is one of the reasons I can't get excited by philosophy. Philosophers are still batting the same ideas around after 2,500 years, and are no closer to any resolution than Plato was. By way of comparison, just look at what science has done in just the last 250 years.

#284: I think what Coyoteman is describing when he says that no scientists today pay any attention to philosophy at all simply describes the situation of increasing deculturation that is advancing among many if not most Western intellectuals of our time. The education process is failing in its primary mission: To transmit the culture to the rising generation.

Deculturation? No. When you are doing many of the technical sciences studying philosophy is simply a colossal waste of time.

The education process is failing in its primary mission: To transmit the culture to the rising generation.

The education establishment has determined that western culture is not worth transmitting to the next generation. Science is increasingly ignoring "educators" as well.

And so sayeth the Curmudgeon.

Lanza's speculations are very useful to us in our research of God and the Observer Problem - but I still hesitate on quoting him directly because his speculations are often applied to the extreme which would lead to the "reality is illusion" deadend.

We'll have to label him with a "handle with care" tag!!! LOL! But then again, people often take Bohr to extremes, and declare him to be an "Eastern thinker." I think Bohr would be surprised by this, were he still around to hear of it.

Thanks so much for writing, my dearest sister in Christ!

The beauty of Plato is that he is not a system builder, he does not construct doctrines. He is more interested in the formulation of proper questions than he is in finding answers. His method is not to tell you what to think, but to show you where to look, and bid you to go and see for yourself.

Well said - and crucial to remember Plato in this context.

Thank you for all of your beautiful posts, dearest sister in Christ!

The education establishment has determined that western culture is not worth transmitting to the next generation.

I'm afraid you're right about that, Coyoteman.

Yet culture is the center that must hold if society is not to disintegrate.

You evidently do not appreciate that problems of human existence are what inspire the philosophical questions that are still "open questions" after 2,500 years. 2,500 years hence, they will probably still be "open questions" -- assuming the human race hasn't destroyed itself first.

In short, these are questions that it seems eternally persist, which science has no method to address. Man has always been asking them, and probably always will. The sheer persistency of the questions is evidence in favor of the persistency of human nature as a given thing (i.e., something that doesn't "evolve").

Indeed, it is as if public education these days is bent on creating a new culture based on the ideology of the left. "It takes a village" and all that...

Looks that way to me, too, dearest sister in Christ. The problem of "Second Realities" raises its ugly head.... :^) In the end, they can create nothing useful; but they are very good at destroying the public consensus on which free societies rest.

The sheer persistency of the questions is evidence in favor of the persistency of human nature as a given thing

There is a reason why these questions persist and it is nothing spiritual. These things are vital to survival. We choose on the basis of virtue and virtue means 'strength.' The science or philosophy of choosing is called ethics or morals. Choose well. Choose strongly.

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