'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.

Of course there is spiritual evolution! I just take that for granted. I have direct evidence of it in my own life; plus as a student of culture, I know that man from the dawn of human history has been trying to understand the Cosmos and his place in it. In the process, certain great spiritual themes or truths have emerged that are astonishingly durable over time. They are so essentially basic, that each age reimagines them in its own way, building on the past with a view toward the future.

...careful with the definitions there, betty...

e.g. 'Darwinian' evolution refers to distributions of alleles within populations, where by the interplay of a number of factors (random drift, selection / deselection due to fitness, changes in environment) these distributions (*and the populations* themselves) change over time.(*)

You appear to be using the word in terms of development or progression of individuals, or of communities of individuals in association or communication with each other. And presumably, under the guidance or tutelage of divine inspiration and grace. Whether this would be concerned with 'memes' is beyond the scope of the current post ;-)

(*) Is there 'Spiritual' selection ?? -- "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy"; "the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete" etc. Probably beyond the state of the art to inquire...and no "reset" button on history to test it empirically [with a nod to Coyoteman].

Nowadays, all the atheists can do to justify their hope that God does not exist, is to theoretically push the beginning backwards to prior universes, prior causations. This is the plentitude argument, that anything that can happen, did. However, the plentitude argument requires an infinite past (space/time) and thus, these theories are merely obfuscations because whether brane theory or something else, all cosmologies rely on geometry for physical causation!

In sum, without an infinite past, no one can rationalize denying God the Creator. And there can be no existence - spiritual or physical - apart from God's will.

Beautifully stated. "Without an infinite past, no one can rationalize denying God..."

The imponderable proves the existence of God.

Why stop with divine revelation? When you reject science and the scientific method there are so many other sources of "knowledge" to choose from: magic, superstition, wishful thinking, old wives tales, folklore, what the stars foretell and what the neighbors think, omens, public opinion, astromancy, spells, aching bunions, Ouija boards, anecdotes, tarot cards, sorcery, seances, black cats, table tipping, witch doctors, crystals and crystal balls, numerology, palm reading, the unguessable verdict of history, tea leaves, hoodoo, voodoo, and all sorts of other weird stuff.

And if you reject science, just what method are you going to use to differentiate between these sources of "knowledge?"

Couldn't have said it better myself.

The answer is that in doing so, you are moving away from 'all ideas treated equally' where the proof is external, empirical validation, and into the realm (usually) of the personal--where *trust* and *belief* are the currency of the realm.

Three points follow:

1. yes, Yes, YES~~!! It is *TRUE* that people have made and continue to make all KINDS of mistakes by relying on such intuitions, fancies, and the like. However, it is not correct that relying on these rules *MUST* uniformly be false.

2. It is true that for discovering uniformities and trends in physical operations, such insights tend to SUCK. But many of the, umm, err, questions or quandries addressed by those types of knowledge are not primarily insight into regularities in the physical world which may be exploited, but insight into control of one's own impulses or of moral suasion.

3. Both of the points above are something of red herrings. The OTHER objection to using other types of knowledge in preference to the scientific method is that "how do you determine which fairy-tale to believe? Just choosing to play favorites is not logically consistent. So there, QED, neener neener, etc." But the other forms of knowledge never claimed to be based on savoir, but instead on connaître -- they weren't claiming to be logical in the FIRST place.

Long-winded mode off.

Cheers!

That is an awesome list of knowledge sources. I call it all revelation. And all revelation is Divine revelation since we do no creating on our own. Some try, the Progressives and Marxists especially, as well as those who stage military coups, but they only imagine they are creating. They can create nothing but what is anyway.

Another thing: Plotinus seems to favor the idea that the Soul does not move into the body, but that the body occupies the Soul. That is, there is only the one Soul. But, I have read only the first three Enneads, so three to go and who knows what other insights lurk.

Evolution has a perfectly good meaning, with or without association with Darwinian evolution. If Darwinists want to define it a particular way, I don't have a problem with that. But that partial definition does not exhaust all the possibilities of meaning carried by that word. Certainly it appears the universe itself evolves. That may or may not have anything to do with "zoological evolution," as William James calls it, let alone Neodarwinism with its differentiation of genes, alleles, etc.

Thans for your scrupulosity grey_whiskers!

Yes, it seems so. That makes it difficult to think about these things. But everything we know is what we observed in nature, which would include other people and what they appear to do and what they claim they thought up, as well as what our own brains suggest to do which they would do right now if we didn’t sit at the gate and say no! most of the time. It’s neither free will nor determinism: there is this new thing, a third choice. It gets very complex instantly, but we should not imagine complexity means anything special since that is what nature does.

No answer to my post #331:

I do not embrace science as the most certain source of knowledge.
Why stop with divine revelation? When you reject science and the scientific method there are so many other sources of "knowledge" to choose from: magic, superstition, wishful thinking, old wives tales, folklore, what the stars foretell and what the neighbors think, omens, public opinion, astromancy, spells, aching bunions, Ouija boards, anecdotes, tarot cards, sorcery, seances, black cats, table tipping, witch doctors, crystals and crystal balls, numerology, palm reading, the unguessable verdict of history, tea leaves, hoodoo, voodoo, and all sorts of other weird stuff.
And if you reject science, just what method are you going to use to differentiate between these sources of "knowledge?"

And to make it worse, we can add two other important questions:

How do I know your divine revelation is worth anything? Jim Jones and David Koresh both claimed divine revelation and look where it got them. Sounds like a case of "my divine revelations are always true, but anyone else's divine revelations, if they contradict mine, must be false." (Nice work if you can get it.)

How does one objectively distinguish between a "genuine" revelation and an ordinary hallucination/mental illness? Charles Manson, for instance?

When you abandon rational thinking and objective, measurable reality in favor of "divine revelation," you also abandon any rational way of differentiating between multiple sources of "divine revelation." You are left with opinion and unsubstantiated belief.

And, you are far from science and the scientific method. As I noted above, when you abandon the scientific method and accept divine revelation as your highest authority, you have no business doing science, or even offering opinions on scientific matters.

A most excellent post...I would add this...aside from the most horrid of those folks, as you mentioned, Jim Jones, and David Koresh, claiming to have special divine revelation, there are others not so odious who claim to have special divine revelation, which they claim has directed them to start another religion...

Didn’t Joseph Smith claim divine revelation, when he began the Mormon faith?...I would assume, that all those who started various Christian religions, also claimed that they received some sort of divine revelation...I am quite sure that the folks who began the Christian Science Religion, Jehovahs Witnesses, the 7th Day Adventists, and just about every other religion that calls its ‘Christian’ began, because its founder claimed that they had a ‘divine revelation’ to break with existing traditional religions, and start their own religon...even religions that do not consider themselves Christian, believe in divine revelation...does not the Moslem religion believe that they too, receive divine revelation...what about those of the Bahai Faith...what about all Native Americans who still practice their tradtional religion...I am sure that they believe in divine revelation as well..

Anyone can claim that they have received a ‘divine revelation’...I am sure millions of folks feel that this has happened to them...yet they all have differing conclusions as to what those divine revelations actually mean...

I am sure that they believe these revelations to be true and relevant to their own personal lives...but since these revelations are personal, and known only by the one claiming to have received them, they are irrelevant to anyone else, who may have their own divine relevation, which directly contradicts someone elses revelation..

Receiving a divine revelation is purely a subjective experience, one that cannot be shared by anyone else, nor for that matter proven to anyone else...

So ones experience of a divine relevation is relevant for them, relevant for their lives, relevant for the way they think and perceive things...but for the rest of us, someone elses ‘divine revelation’ is irrelevant...

One can consider it like this:

Connais-tu Minneapolis? :: "Are you acquainted with the Twin Cities?"

Sais-tu les polynomials Legendre? :: "Can you recite the Legendre polynomials?"

One is personal knowledge, acquaintance, "getting to know".

The other is factual, "book-learning", data.

Cheers!

No answer to my post #331:

I replied in post #364. I agreed with the essence of your point and amplified it a bit, before replying.

Am I on your ignore list?

No, no ignore list, but your response was too agreeable!

I was waiting for somebody to make fun of my long list of dubious "knowledge" ("magic, superstition, wishful thinking..., etc.") while defending divine revelation, and then to provide a rational method of differentiating among all of those various sources of "knowledge" -- all the while denigrating science as too uncertain and too limited in scope.

That would have been entertaining to say the least.

Promised reply, more than 1 hour later...

From Dorothy L. Sayers, in her essay Creative Mind:

It is fascinating to watch the never-ending struggle as language and scientific method develop side by side. The process is always the same. The scientist seizes upon a word originally made by the common poet and endeavors to restrict it to a single, definite meaning that shall be the same in every context. The physicist, for instance, takes a word such as force or energy and uses it to denote a particular factor in physics that can be mathematically expressed. To his horror, the general public refuses to restrict the word in this manner, and innumerable misunderstandings occur. Not only does the common man continue to use the words in metaphorical meanings which they cannot bear in scientific contexts, he also reads those meanings into the scientist's exposition of physics, deducing from them all kinds of metaphysical conclusions quite foreign to the physicist's intentions. Or, if the scientist does succeed in capturing a word and restricting its meaning, some other word will arrive and take over all the former meanings of the original word, so that the same pair of words may be used in successive centuries to mean totally different things and may even become substituted for each other, without anybody's noticing what has happened.

She goes on to consider the words reason, imagination, and reality -- all very relevant to the discussion at hand, btw.

Cheers!

Evidently you consider your post at 331 to be a knee-slapper, Coyoteman – but to me it is pitiful because you obviously have never experienced the first and most important divine revelation all Christians have experienced, i.e. when it dawned in us that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Divine revelations are the most certain knowledge for me because I have known God personally for nearly a half century.

We who have experienced the power of God in His revelations - especially the Word of God - also know that the wisdom of men is foolishness by comparison.

When you equate God's words with your litany of absurdities you are insulting Him, not me.

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