American Enterprise Institute

May 15, 2008

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

12:15 p.m.	Registration and Lunch
12:30	Introduction:	Henry Olsen, AEI
		Gary Rosen, John Templeton Foundation
	Discussants:	William  D. Phillips, University of Maryland
		Michael Shermer, Skeptic magazine
	Moderator:	Michael Novak, AEI
2:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Henry Olsen:  Thank you for joining us for lunch this afternoon.  I’m Henry Olsen, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute.  I’m glad to be able to say that the American Enterprise Institute is pleased to cosponsor this event with the John Templeton Foundation to help improve the quality and the quantity of the discourse with respect to an ever-burgeoning topic in the public mind and the public square, which is the relationship between science and religion.

The Templeton Foundation is long noted and, in fact, dedicated to exploring the intersection between these worlds and have a number of interesting fellowships and publications and grants that have served to explicate and further the debate in these areas.  One of the topics which they have wanted to pursue, and one of the methods they have wanted to use is to engage a number of leading scientists and thinkers on various questions with respect to this intersection.

Today’s event pertains to the most recent of the publications and advertisements in this series, and it directly addresses the question, “Does science make belief in God obsolete?”

We will be hearing more about this from Gary Rosen who is the chief external affairs officer at the Templeton Foundation.  Gary comes to that job in which he is the primary person in charge of publicizing the Templeton Foundation’s efforts to the world at large as opposed to the academic community.  He comes to that position from many years in journalism as a top editor of Commentary Magazine and previous to that, an editor at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal Magazine.  He holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University and also serves as a speech writer to former New Jersey Governor Thomas Cain.  So, please, join me in welcoming Gary, and he can tell you about today’s event.

Gary Rosen:  Thanks, Henry.  It is very good to be here.  We appreciate AEI’s generous hospitality.  As most of you probably know, the John Templeton Foundation is primarily concerned with funding research - research on what we like to call the big questions.  So our grant-making focuses on fields like cosmology, theoretical physics, evolutionary biology.  We also support a great deal of work in the cognitive and social sciences.

Because we at the Foundation think that a full picture of the human experience must draw on many different sources, we also like to bring together scientists and philosophers and theologians to talk about the most profound issues in their fields and to see where their interests might overlap.  Our session today is part of the Foundation’s big-questions campaign, an effort to go public with this approach.  As all of us know too well, whenever questions about the relationship between science and religion show up in the public square, there is a tendency toward polarization.  The various ideological camps quickly take to the barricades and very seldom do any of us emerge any wiser for that.

Our big-questions campaign is an effort to raise the discussion to a higher plane, to make it more civil, more informed, and we hope more illuminating for everyone on all sides.  We asked 13 distinguished scientists, scholars and commentators to address this provocative question: Does science make belief in God obsolete?  The result is the booklet, which I hope all of you have in your hands by now; more copies of this, by the way, can be ordered online free of charge at templeton.org. 

The response to this big question, which has been advertised in print, media, radio, online, has really been remarkable.  We have had well over 400 comments posted to our website.  It has been widely discussed in the blogosphere and we have had, I think, now close to 2,000 requests for this booklet.  So it seems to have struck a cord out there, and that pleases us a great deal.

To continue the discussion today, we are fortunate to have not only our two distinguished guests, Michael Shermer and Bill Phillips, who have essays in the booklet, but also our moderator, Michael Novak, who holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy here at AEI.

A proper introduction for Michael would take up the better part of our hour, so let me try to give you some highlights.  He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and other top universities.  He has served as an outstanding and effective U.S. ambassador, especially on human rights issues.  And I’m proud to say he is a winner of the Templeton Prize awarded in 1994 for his pioneering work on the theology of freedom and free markets. 

The latest of his many books is due out this summer.  It is called No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers.  I have been reading an advanced copy of this book, and it is a typical Michael Novak performance.  It is eloquent, learned and eager to engage all sides in a spirit of inquiry and mutual respect.  We are very fortunate to have him to preside over our discussion today.  Michael Novak.

Michael Novak:  Thank you all very much.  We would like to conduct this as much as we can as a conversation in part in fulfillment of a general thesis that this is a subject that ought to be a subject of conversation among reasonable people.  Passions get aroused but passions get aroused about all sorts of important things.  My father once told me, “Michael, never argue about religion or politics.  Everybody gets emotional and you cannot reach any conclusion.”  After a little while, I began to think there must be a career in that.

Let me jump right away to introducing the participants in our conversation here, and then I will engage them for a short while back and forth and then turn it over to you, hoping you might have questions to contribute to the conversation.

Let me start with Michael Shermer who is a monthly columnist for Scientific American, which is a wonderful place to appear on a regular basis; the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine; the executive director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology.  He is an adjunct professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University.  He has written many books - The Mind of the Market is one of them, Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics; Why Darwin Matters: The Case against Intelligent Design; and a nice title here, Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown.

Professor Phillips is the Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 1997, which he shares with two others whose names I will mention as I go along, for experiments using laser light to cool and trap atoms.  Twenty years earlier, Dr. Phillips had joined the staff of the National Bureau of Standards — now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) — where he conducted his award-winning research.  Building on the work of one of his colleagues, he developed new and improved methods for measuring the temperature of laser-cooled atoms.  Then in 1988 he discovered that the atoms reached a temperature six times lower than the predicted theoretical limit.  That is always satisfying when you knock out a theory. 

With one of his colleagues, Dr. Cohen-Tannoudji, he refined the theory to explain the new results, and then he and Dr. Phillips further investigated the methods of trapping atoms cooled to even lower temperatures.  His other colleague in his work who helped start him on this was Steven Chu; the two of them shared the prize with him.  He is currently a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland and a fellow at the Joint Quantum Institute, a cooperative venture of the university and NIST.

I’m happy to welcome all of you to the conversation.  I thought it might make sense to begin by asking each of our participants to describe briefly or give highlights of their little contribution to the booklet that was just introduced to us from the Templeton Foundation.  Why do I not ask you, Dr. Phillips?

William D. Phillips:  Thank you very much, Michael.  It is a pleasure to be here.  It is a pleasure to be with the two Michaels.  Reading the things that you have written about this subject really makes me feel that we can have a really good conversation about this and really help to generate more light than heat.

I and other people who responded to this question obviously took it in very different ways.  Some people responded, “Well, no, science does not make belief in God obsolete but it certainly should.”  There is just no accounting for what people will believe, and I believe that this is one of the points that Michael Shermer has made in some of his writing is that there is no accounting for what people believe.

I took a rather different attitude.  I took it to ask, “What do I believe?”  So I gave a very personal response to the question, and my answer was, “Absolutely not!”  I even put an explanation point after the, “Absolutely not.”  The reason I responded in this way, and an idea that I tried to develop in this short essay, was that I see two aspects of modern thinking, both of which I wanted to argue against.

On the one hand, you have scientists or people who speak from a scientific perspective saying that religion is an outdated superstition and that the understanding of modern science basically makes it so that we do not need God to explain the kinds of things that are now explained by science.  On the other hand, you have deeply religious people who believe that the teachings of science are an attack on their religion and that they see this as being something rather evil to be resisted at all costs.

What I wanted to do was to express the idea that neither one of these points of view represents either the typical opinion of scientists or of people of faith, and there are very good reasons for that.  And that in an age of science when you have explanations for many of the phenomena of the universe that in past days were ascribed to supernatural causes, that in such a time, that there is still room for a very deep and personal belief in God that does not have to do at all with the idea that there are some things we cannot explain and therefore must appeal to God in order to explain them but rather has to do with the fact that there is something besides science as a way of looking at the world.

That was what I tried to express in my essay that science and faith were two different kinds of things, both perfectly valid and useful ways of looking at our world, not completely separate but not really addressing in general the same kinds of questions.

Michael Shermer:  Thank you, Michael.  Thanks to Gary Rosen for allowing me to edit the essays in this booklet and participate.  My position in brief, I guess, is that it helps to distinguish between belief and God.  In the question, “Does science make belief in God obsolete,” my answer is--it depends.  It depends whether we are talking about belief or God.

The fact that something like 95 percent of Americans believe in God, and the last survey showed 39% of members of the AAAS working scientists in America believe in God, which replicated James Leuba’s 1916 study of a similar dataset that found 40 percent of American working scientists believe in God.

So obviously, the answer is, no, science does not make belief in God obsolete unless 40 percent of working scientists are all idiots or something.  Obviously, it does not change or alter beliefs necessarily.

But that is separate from the empirical question - if it could be an empirical question - Is there actually a God or not?  Whether you believe in it or not, the question still remains:  Is there actually a God out there somewhere?

So to the extent that you take it seriously as a scientific question, that is, is there some way we can test this hypothesis?  Run an experiment or collect data and reject the null hypothesis that there is no God based on some confidence level of the data.  This, of course, is what the intelligent design advocates want to do; they want to argue it is an empirical question.  It is a testable scientific hypothesis, and they think they can run the experiment and that they have and that you can conclude there is an intelligent designer based on things like the structure of DNA and the bacterial flagellum and things like that.

But even if you do not buy the intelligent-design argument, in principle, they are on the right track if you think that there is something that science can say about God in some empirical thoughtful way.  Or do you just chuck it entirely?

So one way I came at this was mostly tongue-in-cheek on the title; I call it Shermer’s last law because I do not think you should name laws after yourself, and the first shall be last and the last shall be first.  So I can quote the bible, see?

Anyway, it is this.  Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.  That is, if you just take the difference between biological evolution and cultural evolution and the incredibly rapid speed with which cultures and technologies and science develops compared to the glacially slow change in evolution, if we were to encounter an extraterrestrial intelligence somewhere, the chances of them being at the exact same level we are at -- which is, by the way, what all the UFO-logists think; they think the aliens landed at Roswell in 1947 and gave us transistor technology, just slightly better than vacuum tubes -- the chances of aliens being just a few years ahead of us is virtually zip because the chances of finding them are pretty slim. 

Anyway, if we did, they are either going to be way behind us and not sending radio signals in spacecrafts or they will be way ahead of us.  By the way, parenthetically, whatever the aliens look like, they are not going to be bipedal primates with gnarly stuff on their foreheads speaking English with an Indian accent.  That is largely driven by wardrobe budgets of television and film.  So whatever we encounter, they will not be anything like us and they will not be anywhere remotely close to us technologically, scientifically and so on.

How far ahead of us would they be?  Well, this is the kind of question SETI scientists like to deal with.  But on the order of magnitudes of hundreds of thousands or millions of years ahead of us, most likely.  And look at what we have been able to accomplish in just 50 years from discovering the structure of the genome - actually, that there is such a thing as a deoxyribose nucleic acid - all the way to J. Craig Venter’s construction of an artificial genome within the last few months.

Just half a century, just 50 years.  Think of what an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence would be able to do in 50,000 years of technology.  They can surely construct not just entire cells but entire life forms.  If the sci-fi people and theoretical physicists like Freeman Dyson are right, it is only a matter of time before you could reconfigure interstellar gas to collapse into stars and create solar systems and planets and, possibly, even if you want to take this way out and say millions of years of advanced technology caused stars to collapse into black holes, and if it is true that universes are created out of the infinite singularity of a collapsing black hole, perhaps an advanced technological race could even create universes.

So what would we call an extraterrestrial being capable of creating cells, advanced life forms, planets, solar systems and universes?  Well, if you do not know the technology, it looks like a god.  If you do, then it is just like us but more.

Anyway, the long story short is I cannot think of any scientific experiment you could possibly run or any research we could possibly do that could find you anything other than an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence, just sufficiently more advanced than us, it seems God-like but would not be something on the order of what traditional mainstream religions think of when they think of an omniscient and omnipotent being.  Therefore, you are still stuck in the natural world, and any discovery would just become then be part of the natural world and, therefore, what place for God?

Michael Novak:  I think that it matters very much whether science can show that there is a God.  If science shows something, it has to be, in part, matter, and it has to be subject to empirical testing.  So a lot depends when you are looking what you are looking for.  It is like the drunk who is searching under the street lamp in Rome for a silver dollar he has dropped and the cop comes along asking him what is he looking for.  He said, “A silver dollar.”  He said, “Where did you lose it?”  He said, “Down the street.”  “Why are you looking up here?”  “There is more light up here,” he says.

It is important to place the question.  What do you think about that?

Michael Shermer:  It does not matter to me but it matters to a lot of people and that is, in part, what is driving the science-and-religion debate is that there are a lot of religious people that want to use science to bolster religious beliefs.  That is all fine and good if you do not make it dependent on that.  If you hook your religious faith to certain specific arguments, gaps in our scientific knowledge, what are you going to do with your faith when the gaps are filled which they inevitably are or they just disappear?

So for example, let’s take something slightly less controversial but something we deal with in Skeptic Magazine - psychic power, the ability to read minds and things like that.  Let’s say it turns out that people can actually do this, although it does not look like they can, but let’s say they can.  Let’s say it turns out that this theory held by a physicist and an anesthesiologist that the way it works is that inside neurons are these little microtubules that are like the scaffolding of the cell.

 And inside the microtubules are these little vacuum states in which the collapse of the wave function can occur in some sort of pattern wave if you are thinking thoughts.  And if all of us in the room right now think a certain thought, like let’s think peace or something like this, and get all of us to get this thing going.  And that somehow, we cause the collapse of the wave function in all our neurons to happen in that pattern and we cause some effect in the physical environment.  We cause peace to break out or something like that. 

This is the Maharishi’s idea.  You get the square root of one percent of the world’s population to meditate at the same time and cause world peace.  Anyway, it has not worked so far apparently.  But let’s say it turns out that is true and we now understand the quantum physics of telekinesis and psychic power.  That is no longer the paranormal.  Now, that is just whatever you would call it - neurophysics or quantum neurotelephysics or whatever.  It would just become part of the natural world.

So I cannot conceive of -- let’s say, it turned out that prayer does affect a distant healing on people you do not know.  Let’s say that turned out to be true.  And thanks to the Templeton Foundation, actually, for funding the biggest study that showed it is not true, but let’s say it turned out to be true.  Once we understood the mechanism by which we all think a certain thought about somebody getting better from their cancer or heart disease, then they actually do, and we then figured out the quantum physics behind it or whatever is happening when you think thoughts and it goes over there and affects cells and so forth.  That would just become part of medicine, some kind of immune system psychoneuro immunology; something like this.  It would just become part of the natural world. 

That would not be religion.  That would not be part of faith.  That would not be part of the supernatural.  It would just be incorporated into science, and that is the faith of all these kinds of claims.  They are either incorporated into science as something we understand or they are just not part of it at all.

Michael Novak:  Do you want to say a little bit, Michael?

William D. Phillips:  Sure.

Michael Novak:  Bill?

William D. Phillips:  In fact, I agree with what Michael Shermer has said.  I do not believe that one should base one’s faith on gaps in knowledge because, in fact, they are always filled in.  Well, that is not the reason you should not do it.  The reason you should not do it is because it is just a bad idea, but one of the reasons it is a bad idea is because those gaps are always filled in.  And sure enough, if your god is someone who is subject to scientific investigation and your god is just matter and energy, and I agree.  Nothing is separate from what is studied by science.

I think where we differ is that I believe that there is something extremely valuable to be understood that is in fact outside of science, and I do not think that faith is the only example of such things.  I think there are plenty of things that we all affirm as part of our daily lives that we do not treat scientifically, that we should not treat scientifically and we certainly do not want to treat scientifically.  It may very well be that a lot of aspects of our personal relationships can be understood in terms of biochemistry and neurology, but I do not think any of us on a moonlit walk with a loved one would want to think of it just that way.

So I think that we are all comfortable with the idea that there are plenty of things in our lives that we will deal with outside of the scientific paradigm.  While I think faith is a particularly important part of our lives that we should deal with outside of the scientific paradigm, it is certainly not the only one.

Michael Novak:  What is it like for you and those others - a minority but a small minority of scientists, according to these studies - that both are believers and in part of their lives and at the same time function as physicists or biologists?

William D. Phillips:  Well, it is not such a small minority as Michael pointed out.  There is this 40 percent number which keeps coming up from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the 20th century that on the order of 40 percent of working scientists answered “Yes” to questions that were quite rigorous.

For example - I do not remember the exact phrasing of the question but maybe you can help me - people were asked, “Do you believe in a God to whom you could pray with an expectation of an answer?”  That is not Einstein’s God.  That is not Spinoza’s God.  That is a very tough definition.  A lot of scientists complained.  They said, “If you’d broadened your definition of ‘God’ a little more, then I could have answered yes to that.” But, no, the idea was to ask the same questions at the end of the 20th century that they asked at the beginning of the 20th century to get consistent results.

So this is a hard definition of God.  So 40 percent is not a very small number.  Had the definition been broadened, there would have been a higher percentage of people who would have answered yes.  But to get to your question, “How does that work,” it works just the same way as anything else works.  I’m a scientist.  I also love my wife and my children and I also enjoy music and art and these are things that I approach in a way that I do not think about my scientific way of thinking when I approach these kinds of things. 

I do not see a conflict.  I do not see, for example, that because I read the Bible and I read in Genesis that the earth was created in six days, I do not see this as conflicting with my understanding of the way in which cosmology has developed and the earth is, in fact, 14 billion years old and that the evolutionary process is the way in which all of the different species that we see today have come to be.  I do not see it as a conflict because I do not see that literal meaning of Genesis as being the important meaning.

The things that I take as being important from Genesis are the constant repetition, “And God saw that it was good,” the idea that creation is, in fact, just that; it is the work of God rather than God itself as perhaps more primitive forms of religion had thought that creation itself was God.  But perhaps the radical idea of the Hebrew Scriptures was that the world was the creation of God rather than being God itself.

So these are the important lessons that I learned from the scriptures, and I do not see the package in which those lessons come as being the important part.  That package I think of as being poetry and metaphor, and in a sense it makes the message even stronger because poetry is capable of conveying even stronger messages than prose.  But I do not see the conflict there.  So when you ask me, “How does it work,” well, it is not that big of a problem.

Michael Novak:  Do you have Jay Gould’s view of the two magisteria?  I do not like the word “magisteria” either.

William D. Phillips:  Yeah.  So Stephen Jay Gould said, “Well, science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria.”  Each of them goes into their own little box and never shall there be any connection between them.  The answer is “Not quite” for me.  It is a very neat little package to say then I do not have to talk about the question of science and religion at all because they never have anything to say to each other. 

Well, that is not quite right because, after all, science has to inform the kinds of choices we make in a religious context.  So how could somebody trying to make moral choices in the context of their religious understanding ignore what science has told us? 

On the other hand, fundamentally, I think that science and religion ask different kinds of questions.  Science asks and attempts to answer questions about how do things work, how do things come to be the way they are, whereas religion asks and answers questions, “How should we behave to each other?”  I do not think science has good answers to that, although science -- once we have decided what kind of results we want, science may be able to help us to decide what the details are about how we should go about doing that.

Michael Shermer:  I want to hit this point a little harder.  It still seems to be gap-filling.  So we do not need God anymore for explaining the origins of the solar system and it did not happen 6,000 years ago.  Yeah, okay.  That is poetry from Genesis or something like that.  But we still need God to evoke aesthetic appreciation of a sunset, love between two people and poetry.

Why do we need God to explain those things?  We have perfectly good explanations for why people are nice to one another.  We know all about oxytocin and dopamine systems that cause social primates to attach and bond to one another in reciprocal exchanges.  We know about attachment theory and how family members and genetic relations are deeply attached to one another through these evolved brain mechanisms.

That does not detract at all from the appreciation emotionally you have but even emotions could be studied scientifically.  Why should we have emotions at all?  What is the purpose of feeling guilty about hurting somebody’s feelings?  Well, because in the social primate species if you violate social norms a lot, you are not a good reliable group member.  We cannot really trust you and therefore the sense of guilt - on one side and joy and pride in the other side of having done the right thing - are evolved emotions that help conflict resolution in primate groups and so on.

There is one explanation.  I have written two books about this; maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe it is not an evolutionary model that best explains that, but it is a model.  It is a testable hypothesis.  So when we solve all that, everybody is pretty satisfied with why emotions are there, why people love one another, attachment and so on, then what?  Well, we are left with poetry and aesthetic appreciation of sunsets or something like that.  Well, even there -- you see where I’m going.

It seems to me you are still filling gaps and wanting to evoke the God hypothesis for something, and I just do not see any reason to do that.  It is just okay to say, “We do not know this yet.  We are not quite sure what consciousness is.”  We do not need to say God gave us consciousness.  Let’s just say we are not sure yet.  We have three or four theories and we are going to test those.

William D. Phillips:  I want to make sure that I do not leave with a misunderstanding.  I certainly was not implying that we need God to understand love or appreciation for poetry or for music.  I was really only trying to say that this is an analog activity that human beings are happy to pursue without invoking the scientific method and the scientific approach.  You could, of course, invoke it but it would be far less satisfying to do that in lots and lots of situations that we are very happy to be involved in.

Like personal relationships; I do not think we want to invoke biochemistry and neurology in understanding our personal relationships.  We just want to do that the way human beings have always done that on the basis of love and understanding and all these emotions.

So I’m not saying that we need God to understand those things.  I was trying to use it as an analogy to say there are lots of things that we value that, in fact, we do not want to look at just from a scientific point of view.  If you are willing to accept that, then why not be willing to accept that there is something else called faith, called religion that you would also be willing to look at without appealing to a scientific investigation to understand it and think that it is valuable to do so?

Michael Shermer:  Because specific claims are made about the deity that he - well, he -- gender, whatever - is omniscient, omnipotent, answers prayers, creates things, creates genomes and life forms and universes.  These are very specific claims.  At some point if you believe in God, you just really have to believe that the deity sticks his finger into the cosmic ointment and stirs it up and does things; stirs up the particles and somehow interacts with our world. 

If he does not interact with our world, then what is he?  Just a deistic prime mover, maybe; a first cause.  I would be willing to go along with that, I suppose, but it still seems like a gap-filler to me.  Why not just say, “We do not know how the universe got created?”  Maybe Hawking and the guys will figure this out, but maybe not.  We will just see how it goes.  But why invoke some deity that does it?

At some point, if you believe in God you just have to believe that he is coming in and entering our world.  If he is entering our world, is he not doing it in some measurable way? And now we are back to the natural world.

Michael Novak:  You know I wrote a book review -- you reminded me as we began just conversing up here about atheists, not only, but largely--that our first crossing was -- I reviewed that book and opposed it.  I have been looking for that review for a year and I haven’t been able to find it.

Michael Shermer:  I have it.

Michael Novak:  It is a funny thing.  Authors remember their book reviews much more plainly than the reviewers.  One of the points you made in that was even about the variety of beliefs among atheists -- I wish that you would expand on that just a little bit.

Michael Shermer:  This is how [audio glitch] Michael’s review.  He accused me of scientism to which I called a badge of honor -- almost scientism.  He wrote this final little paragraph about how I’m a free writer and I’m free to do whatever I want because I do not believe in God.  Well, first I thought, “Yeah, I’m a free writer,” but then I thought, “Well, no.  Actually, I’m not.”  I really have a lot of social and moral and personal obligations to family members and friends and my colleagues and so on.  I cannot just do anything I want.  So we all answer to somebody.

But in terms of atheism, yes -- well, okay.  I guess I make the distinction as I did in the opening comment about our Templeton question here, a distinction between belief and God that is I would say as a statement about the universe.  Agnosticism, I suppose, would have to be the right phrase or the right term.  I once saw a bumper sticker that said, “Militant agnostic.  I do not know and you do not either.”  I guess, maybe, that is my position currently.

The strong atheist position “I believe there is no God” I think, is untenable.  Weak atheism - just lack of a belief in God - that is perfectly fine and defensible, I think.  So there are varieties of these.  Of course, once we start down the road of talking about different approaches - Dawkins’ approach versus Harris’ approach versus my approach, whatever - that is just a marketing question.  What is the best way to market an idea that is not really an empirical question in terms of what we are addressing here?

For me, the larger and more important thing is since I do not think we are going to change everybody’s minds one way or the other, to have a pluralistic society you need some set of rules by which we can get along and believe radically different things.  Therefore, I do believe in separation of church and state and the American experiment seems to be working pretty good so far on that question as long as we “build up that wall, Mr. Jefferson,” as Hitchens like to say. “Keep that wall up and strong.”

Michael Novak:  Any comments?

William D. Phillips:  Well, I’m certainly a strong believer in separation of church and state.  I think that when they get too mixed up, it is bad for the church and it is bad for the state.  So I’ll go along with that.  That does not mean that one should not allow one’s religious perspectives to inform one’s political perspectives.  But that would be true of any moral or ethical perspective that you had.  You would want it to inform your political perspective.  So I’m pretty sure we will agree on that.

Michael Novak:  Do you think it is a little bit odd that those who study evolution closely now argue so much about cooperation and even love for one another and, in general, altruistic views, which, in the course of science, no doubt this happens, which is so strongly opposed to that earlier interpretation of Darwin that it was all the jungle?

Michael Shermer:  Yeah.

Michael Novak:  The survival of the fittest.

Michael Shermer:  It is a great question because I think one of the reasons so many Americans do not accept evolution is because they equate it with nature red in tooth and claw, and it just means we are brutish, nasty, selfish, greedy animals and nothing more.  And it was not okay from, say, World War I through the ‘70s to apply an evolutionary model to explaining why people are nice to one another.  The reason it was not was because Darwinism had become equated with eugenics and social Darwinism and Nazism and so forth, and Ben Stein wants to revitalize that ridiculous notion, as if that is what all evolutionary biologists think.

Well, in the last 20 years, starting with E. O. Wilson in 1976, it is now okay to apply evolutionary thinking to why we are a social primate species who are often altruistic, cooperative, pro-social and so on.  That is just a history-of- science issue.  I do not think there is any religious or scientific reasons why not to do it.  I think it was just politically why it was not okay.  But now it is okay.

I think that science is fairly far along now.  We have a really good understanding of conflict resolution in primate species and why we have to be fairly nice to one another most of the time in order to get along.  Actually, the Templeton Foundation has funded much of this research on the good qualities, the virtues of humanity which have long been lacking in these scientific studies.

Michael Novak:  What do you think about the niceness or oddness of the fact that science is here taking a turn which makes rather more sense of the commandment to love one another?  It is not a description; it is not a law what we do all the time.  But it is a suggestion that we should look in that direction for something very creative for building societies, building communities, building nations, et cetera.  Is this a case in which it was useful to have the Bible reflected on critically as a guide to thinking or as a stimulus to thinking?

Michael Shermer:  My take on that is that we evolved these moral emotions - what Adam Smith called the moral sentiments - long before there was religion.  As hunter-gatherers hundreds of thousands of years before civilization, and long about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, populations just got too large.  Bands and tribes coalesced into chiefdoms and states such that these informal meanings of conflict resolution did not work; too many opportunities for defecting on the rules and cheating and so on.

So we needed some formalized institution to codify the rules of getting along and those two institutions were government and religion.  So it is not that all governments are bad like libertarians think, or all religions are bad like atheists think.  In fact, I think religions and governments have experimented now for 6,000 years, and they have a fairly refined and fairly good accurate view of human nature.  So the list of sins, I think, fairly and accurately reflects our human nature simply by trial and error and 4,000 years of rabbinical debate was not for naught.  It produced a lot of useful information that we can now start testing.

Michael Novak:  What about the rabbinical view that the significance of there being a creator is that it means everything has been understood in its detail?  The text that you brought out that everything is good -- it seems to me there are two fruitful lessons in there.  Alfred North Whitehead said that without the first, there would be no such thing as modern science.  Without 500 years of instruction in the intelligibility of all things, and that might mean a lot of sacrifice and a lot of asceticism to find it all out and a lot of years to find out as much as we could. 

But it was a worthwhile effort even if you yourself kept running into brick walls.  So my question is is this another -- I’ll lead it into a more practical direction, maybe.  As I remember in your book -- but I may be misremembering -- as I remember, at least one of the lessons I learned in it -- I believe there was a scene at Chartres if I’m not mistaken.

Michael Shermer:  Yes, that is right.  Yeah.

Michael Novak:  You used that as a way of describing the awe and the kind of gratitude you felt.  You went on to say that, if I remember it right, something like 70 percent of all people who call themselves atheists actually believed in the power of intelligence in all things, the kind of unified field theory or whatever you want to call it.  There is a certain dovetailing with religious fields.

Michael Shermer:  I think the idea that the universe is rationale or at least it behaves in a way we can understand it -- it is one of those curious things why mathematics seems to match so well with the actual physical universe.  Yet, another -- one of those gaps that we do not fully understand but it is an interesting problem. 

I think more to your point that science and religion have evolved together historically in mostly cooperative ways -- yes, there are conflicts and many of these stories are highly exaggerated - Galileo and the church, for example, come down to us in cardboard, potted stories of good and evil.  It just was not that way.  Much of modern science comes out of certain religious traditions with Aquinas -- from Augustine to Aquinas and so forth. 

But that is just an interesting historical sidelight.  On some level with science, we want to know how the world actually is regardless of how we came to ask the question in the first place, bottom line.

Michael Novak:  Yeah, but think about mind a little bit.  The mind does not only ask questions about “how to” but “why.”  Why do we have these abilities?  Why do we think they are worth pursuing?  Why is there anything at all?  It is a different sort of question.

Michael Shermer:  Yes.  Well, I’m sure we can resolve this one today.  Why not ask, “Why should there be nothing?”  Maybe something is the default state of the universe, and nothing would be really weird, and we would have a hard time explaining why there would be nothing.  Well, we would not be here to explain it, I suppose, but we just assume this.  This is one of those kinds of mysteries that I think may not be resolvable like free will and determinism; I mean the universe is determined.  How can you be free?  Why even bother writing about it which everybody does because you have to? 

But at some point, it depends on how you define free will and how you define determinism.  What do you mean by the universe and a first cause and something versus nothing?  These are just words.

Michael Novak:  I wonder.  I want to turn to you in just a second.  You mentioned awhile ago that humans existed long before there was religion.  If you mean Judaism and Christianity, yes.  Religion, I’m skeptical as far as I can see, as far back as there were human beings.  In fact, the anomaly is atheism.  Even today in the world, as according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, out of the six-point-some billion people on earth, if I remember right, 250 million or some number like that are atheists.  Certainly, in history, that seems to be the truth.

Michael Shermer:  If I can only get all of them to subscribe to Skeptic.  Two hundred and fifty million - wow.

Michael Novak:  [Inaudible].

Michael Shermer:  Yeah.  Obviously, we have some impulse toward religiosity.  Yeah, but that does not mean there is a God.

Michael Novak:  No, it does not but it suggests something about human self-reflection that is not quite satisfied.  How-to questions are awfully important and civilization does not begin unless you do that.  But it is very important for people to go on to have meaning in their lives, too, and to see a purpose in it and a point in it.  My own view is this is a practical weakness of atheism in the world for most people.

Michael Shermer:  Mm-hmm.

Michael Novak:  If you are a very scientifically trained and so on person, perhaps not.  Tocqueville made the same point.  Philosophers can lead you to the Ten Commandments.  You do not need the God of the Hebrews for that.  On the other hand, having their ten points that everybody can remember is very useful politically.

Michael Shermer:  The shadow of [audio glitch] it is called.

William D. Phillips:  Well, there are certainly incredibly deep questions to address here; one hardly knows where to start.  These huge questions -- why is there something rather than nothing?  Why do we ask questions like that?  What is the evolutionary advantage in asking questions like that?

I do not want to say that because there are such questions that seem to be so imponderable, this means there must a deity.  No.  That would just be, as you have pointed out, another extension of the god of the gaps, which I certainly do not buy into.  But, nevertheless, these are huge questions and they point to a kind of spirituality about human beings that is, perhaps, from your point of view, accounts for why so many people have a religious point of view and make me wonder whether the reason why there is this tendency is not because there is, in fact, a God and this was the way God wanted us to be.

But let me make it perfectly clear I do not believe that science is ever going to prove the existence of God, nor do I believe that science is ever going to disprove the existence of God.

In answer to an earlier question of yours about how God might end the world, I do believe that God does work in the world.  I’m not a deist.  I’m a theist.  I do believe that God works in the world but I have this hunch that God chooses to do this in such a way as to make it undetectable.  Now, of course, that is a really easy thing to say because it basically wipes away all possible ways of testing it scientifically.  But remember, my original thesis is that belief in God is not a scientific question.

You might say, “Well how are you going to account for all that stuff?”  Well, there are a number of ways.  I admit I do not know how God does it.  But, for example, let’s say there was such a thing as miracles.  I’m doubtful but let’s say that there were.  Science is about reproducible stuff.  If you have some singular event that you do not reproduce, any good scientist is going to say, “Unreliable data.  Let’s just throw that out and we will go with all the stuff that we can reproduce every time we do it.”

So it is not logically impossible that there could be some irreproducible events that would have been reported as miracles.  I do not know.  But there are lots of other ways in which these kinds of things might happen.  Physicists know that there is almost nothing that is impossible; there are things that are really improbable but they are not really impossible, according to the laws of physics.  Laws of physics - well, except for some really tiny issues that we will not go into - are time-reversible.  But we never see a glass dropped onto a concrete floor reassemble itself and pop up, but it is not impossible.  It is really unlikely.

Again, I do not know that is the way things happen and miracles that are reported in the Bible -- I suspect that, really, what happened was that stories got embellished over time and these things do not really represent miracles - floating ax heads and the sun stopping during a battle that Joshua took part in.  But on the other hand I do believe that God affects our - shall I use the term? - “souls”; you would probably want to use the term “brains.”  I think there is a distinction but how could that happen?

Well, we know that according to our understanding of classical chaos that extremely small changes in initial conditions could result in macroscopic changes and results, and we know quantum-mechanically that such really tiny differences in initial conditions could never even in principle be predicted and understood from measurement because of the fact that it is below the quantum radar, the uncertainty principle.  So from what I know about physics, it is not impossible to imagine a world in which God acts but we never can prove it.

Michael Shermer:  Then what is the difference between an invisible God and a nonexistent God?

William D. Phillips:  Well, for you, none.  But for me I claim that I can feel God’s presence in my life.  You are going to say, “It is just what you ate last night.”

Michael Shermer:  Well, maybe.

William D. Phillips:  I cannot give you a scientific argument against that.

Michael Shermer:  Okay.

William D. Phillips:  It is a belief.  Some people will say, “Look, if you could prove God what would be the use of faith?”

Michael Novak:  What would you say about the idea that anything you can show by science cannot be God because it would be bound by space and time and matter?

Michael Shermer:  That was my first statement:  There is nothing that science could prove that would satisfy what most people who believe in God mean by God, something outside of space and time.

So Bill, if you want to say “I believe there is an entity outside of space and time that affects the world somehow,” or whatever it is he does,  okay.  In a way, it is the end of the conversation.  There is not much more to say about that.  I believe it.  I do not.  You believe it.  I do not.  Okay.  Well, now what?  Let’s go have a beer or something.

Again, back to these words.  The soul, what is the soul?  Well, gosh.  On a slightly less controversial subject, let’s say when cosmologists talk about dark energy and dark matter to explain why galaxies are structured in a certain way and they rotate a certain way; there is not enough matter that we can see so, therefore, we have to evoke this concept of dark energy and dark matter to explain it.  That is not an answer and they do not mean it to be an answer. 

It is just a linguistic placeholder for, “We do not know what it is,” and that is the beginning of research.  But when religious folks invoke things like the soul or a miracle or whatever - or in the case of intelligent design, it was an intelligent designer - that is the end of the quest.  It is like that is the answer.  The story is over.  We do not have to think about it anymore.

William D. Phillips:  So the problem here is that you are thinking quite legitimately that the whole question is about whether or not God exists.  But for me that is not what the question is about at all.  I already have an answer to that.  It is not a scientific answer.  My question is, “What does God want me to do?” 

That is what the whole fabric, the whole activity of my faith is about, is trying to figure out how I should do the kinds of things that God wants me to do.  I’m sure that that in a very different language occupies a lot of your life as well.  How should I act so as to spread the maximum amount of good in the world?  Because I think you are a good person and that is probably what you want to do.

I’m not saying that you do not do it well; I suspect you do it very well.  I’m quite sure that I would not do it as well if I did not have faith.  I’m not sure that is true for you but for me that is what it is about.  It is trying to figure out what God wants me to do.  The scientific question -- it is not a scientific question.

Michael Shermer:  Okay.  Fair enough.  But how do you know what he wants you to do?  Do you talk to him?  Do you pray and you listen for that small voice?  Do you look for cues in the environment that, “Oh, I see.  That happened so he wants me to do that.”  Or an impulse comes to you: “I should donate to Oxfam or World Vision or whatever” because -- why?

William D. Phillips:  Yeah, all those things.  The other thing that I find to be particularly helpful is that I talk it over with other people who have a similar perspective about God.  I’m sure that is the way it works for you, too.

Michael Shermer:  Right.  Well, sort of.  Yes, Dawkins and Hitchens and I were just talking about this the other day.  What should we do about this disaster relief?  Yeah.  Speaking of which, to push another hot button, if God is acting in the world why is he not in China and Southeast Asia and Darfur and so on?  If he is acting in the world, what’s with that?  He seems to have missed the boat on a few important things here.

William D. Phillips:  Well, look.  This is a question about which we are certainly not going to find the answer today any more than we are --

Michael Shermer:  We might.

William D. Phillips:  -- to the one about why there is something rather than nothing.  People have been struggling with the issue of, “If God is good, why is there evil in the world” long before Job was written.  But I do not think much progress has been made since Job and we still study Job and we still come up with, perhaps, a clearer understanding of what the questions are but no clear understanding of what the answers are.  But my answer to that is what God expects us to do is to do everything we can to relieve the suffering of those people.

Michael Novak:  I think the problem of evil is a really interesting one in itself.  Already in the 12th century, Maimonides and Aquinas had written about the fact that if you wanted a world of freedom in which freedom is possible, you are going to have to have a world of contingency.  And if you have a world of contingency, you are going to have to have a world in which bad things happen.  Nonetheless, this meets the whole design of building a world of freedom but I do not think we should go on that way.

I think what we should do is face the question here: Does science make belief in God obsolete?  The question is not, “Does God make Judaism and Christianity obsolete,” but belief in God obsolete.  I do not think we should take belief in God here in a tone of voice different from belief in atoms or any other such phenomena.

In other words, let’s just stay in the realm of the natural and not jump to the world of the supernatural.  Is there evidence in the way we live in the world?  Have human beings seen this that suggests, yes, there is both - what shall I say? - a force for mind and a force for good and so forth, more than meets the eye of whatever level of science we have attained?

Michael Shermer:  Certainly here, I diverged quite far from my fellow atheists.  I think religion is a great force for good, probably maybe even slightly more good than evil.  But anyway, who is counting?

Religious people give more money.  They donate more and so forth.  But in a way religion is privatized social help.  I think one reason Americans are more religious than Europeans is Europe has a fairly well-developed safety net to help poor people and people in need, and so you do not really need religion if the government is doing it.  If the government is not doing it, you need religion to do that.  I think religion does it better than government.

Michael Novak:  I would say religion is actually a socialized form of private help.

Michael Shermer:  Yeah.  I agree.  It is.

Michael Novak:  It gives you all kinds of encouragement to do it.

Michael Shermer:  The private sphere is more efficient.

William D. Phillips:  I would like to address your question even though I have already said that I do not like its premise because, basically, what you have asked us, I think, is, “Is there objective evidence that would support belief in God, given our modern and scientific understanding?”  I have said, I hope, clearly enough that I do not think that is a proper basis for a belief in God, and it is not the basis for my belief in God.

But having said that, there is an awful lot out there that would make a reasonable person say, “It looks like something is going on.”  So let me give a couple of examples.  Fred Hoyle, a 20th century cosmologist and an atheist and a great believer in what was called the steady state theory of the universe - the universe has always been, always will be in pretty much the same way - was just appalled by this ridiculous theory of the Big Bang and in fact called it the Big Bang derisively.  And one of the reasons, I believe, why he did not like it much is because it sounded too much like creation.  But in the end the evidence built up and he had to accept it. 

And for some people -- I mean Hoyle carefully looked at the universe and said from his position as an atheist, “It looks like it is a put-up job.”  I do not think it ever made him into a believer, but he was honest about the fact that it just looks like a put-up job.  Other people have taken that.

There is a philosopher named Antony Flew.  He has recently written a book called There is a God, in which it says there is no God and the “no” has been crossed out because he styles himself as being the world’s most famous atheist.  Well obviously, getting religion did not bring him any humility [cross-talking] but it is not.  He freely says, “This is deism.  This is not theism.”  But nevertheless, what he was saying was that scientific evidence convinced him that he should believe in God.

Like I said, that is not where I am coming from.  But let me also say that where some people - maybe the intelligent design people and the creationists - have looked at the world and said, “Look at all this wonderful complexity.  There must be something behind that,” I take a very different point of view.  I look at the world and I say, “Look at all this marvelous simplicity.  There must be something behind that.”  So I have a very different view of that but I do not find that to be solid evidence, not the kind of thing that would allow you to write a physical review letter saying that I have found proof for God.  On the other hand, it is awfully suggestive.

Michael Shermer:  Good.  Well, I guess one of my intellectual heroes is Martin Gardner, who is the skeptic’s skeptic, who is himself though a believer of sorts.  He calls himself a fideist.  It is a William Jamesian version of certain things it is okay to believe in if they are big questions that are ultimately unanswerable and they are important to me which way [audio glitch]  I believe.  It is just okay to just go with whatever works for you.  It is a pragmatism thing. 

So Martin Gardner, for example, says, “I believe in God.  I’m a fideist,” and he prays.  He says he prays.  He says, “I think the atheists have slightly better arguments than the theists.”  But nevertheless, he says, “It is a close call so I’m going to go with what makes me feel good.”  So I respect that, and I respect Martin a lot for that.  But, of course, we are off the page of science there and we are into the psychology of belief which is interesting but it is still getting away from the empirical question.

Michael Novak:  I think you are missing a third alternative here, which is a perfectly reasonable natural view of the signs of the presence of God in the world in which we live in which the vast majority of human beings have been led to.  I do not think it is likely that they are entirely wrong.  How that happens, why that happens, I’m not so sure but it keeps reemerging.  There are thinkers who have done a good deal of work in this - Jewish and Christian and Islamic conspicuously - and have ways of talking about this that are really quite interesting.

This reminds me.  Let me just -- what tipped this off in my mind is Steven Pinker’s opening sentence when he answered the same question.  He said, “Does science make belief in God obsolete?  Yes, if by science we mean the entire enterprise of secular reason and knowledge, including history and philosophy, not just people with test tubes and white lab coats.”  That is a very expansive definition of science.

I think you can show without too much difficulty that there are lots of philosophers - historians, too - who just raise other questions beside scientific questions and who are not satisfied with pragmatism as an answer, but they are not necessarily Jews or Christians.  I would call something like that faith.  That is a different matter from the knowledge that there is God.

Michael Shermer:  Occasionally, I think about [audio glitch] and the power of belief.  I think the way it normally works is that we come to our beliefs; not just religious beliefs; political attitudes, social attitudes, economic beliefs and so on.  First comes the belief, second comes the justification for it - the rational reasons, the arguments for it and so on.  And that we are raised to believe a certain thing; our culture dictates the way we believe at our cohort, our colleagues, our mentors and so forth.  And then we back into it with when you were asked, “Why do you believe?”  “Okay.  I have to give some good reasons here.”  And so we do.  We concoct good reasons.

So when I’m saying this, I’m not just picking on religion.  All of us do this for all of our political and social attitudes and so forth.  The confirmation bias kicks in.  You look for and find confirmatory evidence for that belief system.  You ignore the disconfirmatory evidence.  Conservatives do it, liberals do it, and theists do it.  We all do it. 

So that complicates it by the fact that the number one predictor of anybody’s religious beliefs is where they happen to be born, which to me goes a long way to saying this really looks like -- he says it looks like a put-up job.  It looks like the whole belief in a system of a belief and religion is a put-up job by culture, by history, by circumstances.

Michael Novak:  Is that true?  Take any culture you want.  For the vast and longest time of human history, people believed in God.  They were not Jews or Christians or Buddhists or Hindus.  I’m willing to say there are traditions which nourish a way of thinking and a set of habits that are diverse.  But there is also free movement between those; maybe not as big fractions do but rather remarkable.  Especially Judaism and Christianity make the appeal to reason when you think about that.

Michael Shermer:  They do.  Well, I think part of it is the way belief systems work.  I think our brains evolved to infer design and top-down controls or top-down formations of things.  The idea of self-organized emergent properties like evolution is counterintuitive.  This is why intelligent design I think got legs.  It is such a great marketing term.  Everybody gets it just like that.  You do not have to know anything about biology.  Wings look like they were designed to fly.  Eyes look like they were designed to see.  There must be a designer.  It is a simple argument.  It fits intuitively with how our folk science brains how we evolved. 

That is why science is so counterintuitive.  All of quantum physics is counterintuitive; global general relativity, completely counterintuitive.  Yet, we accept those simply because the evidence is there.  So I think often we have to combat our intuitive way of thinking.  Sometimes it is right, sometimes [audio glitch].

William D. Phillips:  So maybe physicists are wired a little bit differently but what you say is true.  We do tend to see order where there is none; that is why there are constellations.  Stars are randomly distributed in the sky and yet we see constellations.  But let me return to this idea that the thing that really impresses physicists is not the complexity but the simplicity.  You just again and again -- and the historical development of physics has always been in this direction.  Well, you encounter this fact that the more you learn about things, it seems like the less you need to know in order to figure out why things are the way they are.  Why would that be?  That is just really astounding.

Let me say something about belief too because, in general, I have to agree with you that -- look, the reason that I’m a Christian, the reason I’m a Methodist is because I was born into a Christian-Methodist family.  But what about all those people who were born to -- I wish Francis Collins was here.  I’m sure you have read Francis’ book.  So he was born into an agnostic family, and as he goes along he becomes a determined atheist.  At some point in his life, he becomes a Christian.  How did that happen?  I do not think it follows your model.  I do not think it follows a model of deciding what the belief is and then coming up with the evidence.  It certainly was not true for Antony Flew.  He had a really firm belief in atheism, and the evidence led him toward deism.

Michael Shermer:  Yeah, the Flew case is really complicated by the fact that somebody else wrote that book.  He had a ghost -- well, not a ghost writer.  He is on the cover.  We think he got pushed toward that although I’ll give him credit for deism, whatever that means.  It is innocuous.

In the case of Collins, he had a personal experience.  He says in the book [audio glitch] he was out in nature in the waterfall and so forth and he had an epiphany.  What does that mean?  I do not know.  Maybe he had a temporal lobe seizure.  There are lots of ways to try to explain these things.  I do not think it needs to be explained.  People have interesting anomalous psychological experiences that they attribute to all sorts of things.  It is as interesting as all get out but I do not know what you really need to infer from that.

Michael Novak:  It is not just personal, though.  It is intersubjective.  There are centuries of thinking about these things.  So when Flew makes this step, if he did, that is not just an anomalous odd step.  That step has been made by lots of people over time.  I’m not going to start down that one but you see the point.

Michael Shermer:  Yeah, I see the point.  My answer would be these are all good reasons to believe if you already believe.  These are good arguments to bolster faith that you already have.  If you do not have the faith, the arguments I do not think are going to sway you.  Yes, okay, occasionally this happens in case of Flew, maybe, and Collins for sure, I guess.  Collins rested it on, two, what I just would call gaps -- Immanuel Kant’s The Starry Heavens Above and The Inner Law Within.

Well I already explained where the inner law within comes from from our evolutionary heritage as social primate species and the starry heavens above; that is, the fine-tuneness of the universe and all that.

Steven Weinberg -- referring to your simplicity, he thinks that maybe there is just a really simple underlying principle that explains all of these odd configurations and the fine-tuneness and this and that and the other.  Well, who am I to judge?  He has a Nobel Prize; you have a Nobel Prize.  So you two fight it out.  But that is what he thinks.

Michael Novak:  I have been delinquent and not turning to all of you earlier but I just thought it was so engaging.  I did not know where to interrupt.  So may I just turn over to you and see if there are -- that was a four-way tie.  Yes, sir?  The microphones are coming.

Male Voice:  I think the God we are talking about is a personal God.  That is the one we are talking about.  I think Bill has already answered my question.  My question is really for Michael.  If God were to reveal himself to you, what would he or she have to do to make you say, “I believe in God?”

Michael Shermer:  Good question.  What would God have to do to convince me?  Well, in the case of Woody Allen, a large cash deposit in a Swiss bank account under my name, and I’ll even give you the figure - $10 million will do it.  That will cover it.

Male Voice:  Mike, it is a serious question.

Michael Shermer:  My serious answer is the one I opened with.  I cannot conceive of anything that I would not as a psychologist, for example, think I wonder if I was having a temporal lobe seizure like Constantine probably did and Joan of Arc.  I wonder if maybe I just had an anomalous sleep paralysis experience like the alien abductees have.  I would probably doubt myself because I know too much about how people come to their beliefs as a social scientist.

I’m not sure there is anything that would do it because -- and as I said, if we encountered an extraterrestrial that could make cells and whatnot and life forms, I would think, “Well, that is it.  It is just the technology.”

William D. Phillips:  Maybe I could just add to that.  You could also have asked the question, “What would it take me to give up my belief in God?”  There is nothing.  And that is why it is not a scientific question.  If it were a scientific question, I could define what experiment, what observation would make me abandon that hypothesis.  But I contend it is not a scientific question, and there is nothing.  At least I hope there is nothing.  Who really knows?

Male Voice:  It is a half-comment, half-question, which is -- there is something troubling to me about this discussion that it seems that it is centering around the question, “Does science make belief in Zeus obsolete” as opposed to “Does science make belief in God obsolete,” which, to me, is -- one answer to that question is the first, the Zeus thing.  It is a very contentious question, but the God thing obviously known to me.  I do not know.  That is my impression of it.

So I guess that is my way of saying it.  It seems to me that science -- there is this idea and even within this conversation that there are two competing moral views between religion and science and that there is an equal weight and where these crossroads where they are apparently contradictory and don’t know exactly which belief system to pursue.  Whereas, I think that if you were to talk to somebody who has spiritual sophistication, they rather would regard science as like a baseball game where you go and you enjoy watching it and you enjoy following it.  But when all is said and done, it is really just not that meaningful.  It is meaningful in terms of metaphor maybe, but not that meaningful, which is another way of saying they see science like a primitive religion.

Hence, if you were to talk to somebody who is spiritually sophisticated, the reason that they would say that is the case is because science is the pursuit of truth through the understanding and the exploration of the physical world.  To a spiritual person, the physical world is the most superficial aspect of our beings and of our lives.

So when you talk about these, I guess, more inherent concepts that are spiritual concepts, you talk about explaining things like love or truth or God or things of that nature; beauty, meaning.  A spiritual person thinks that is an intrinsic part of the postulate rather than the theorem.  Do you see what I’m saying?

Michael Shermer:  Yeah.  I think it has to do with how you define this word “spiritualism,” and I think, obviously, anybody can find spirituality in any number of ways.  Religion does not have a monopoly on that.  For me, it just means a form of transcendence, that is, the awareness on a deep, intellectual and emotional level that there is something grander than me.  Although religion can do that as can a number of New Age beliefs, I think science does that in spades in terms of making us feel humble about our place in the cosmos and how lucky we are to be here.  I think science gives us the grandest story of all time.  If I were religious, I would embrace science at every possible moment as the best tool ever devised for revealing that spiritual nature of the cosmos.

William D. Phillips:  Amen.

Michael Shermer:  Amen, brother.  Okay.

William D. Phillips:  I certainly agree with that because the wonder is just magnificent.  But, also, I agree with what Matthew said about the kind of God that science might be making obsolete.

Male Voice:  [Speaks off-mike] There is no question about whether God is there or not.  Of course, God is there.  I believe in God, and when you pray he answers your prayers.  If people are suffering I think it is because of their karma.  If you do good, good will come back to you.  There is no question about it.  Science cannot do everything.  Science cannot bring rain or stop rain.

Michael Shermer:  Well, we are working on that.  Not very well but --

Male Voice:  [indiscernible].  My question is that there are many scientists who believe in science; they think that they are God or they are everything.  But I think there is somebody there, some super power you can call or a great grandfather who is running this universe.  Something is there we can call God or something else.  It does not matter.  Anywhere we go - in a temple or a church or a synagogue or anywhere - the prayers are going through only one super man or super person.

The question is [inaudible] somebody running even science or this universe.  So can you tell people who do not believe in God what is that super power who is running this [inaudible] everyday and why people are suffering in Darfur, why people are doing great in the U.S. or why are there so many poor people in India, rich people in India?  [Inaudible] because they must be paying for their crimes they have committed or they have done something bad in their past life or today.  Because many people believe hell and heaven; heaven is right here on this earth [inaudible] because you can see one person is suffering right in front of our eyes, and another person is enjoying life.  Why is it happening - all these?

Michael Novak:  So many people still believe in hell except they locate it here with global warming. 

Sally Quinn:  I’m Sally Quinn from the Washington Post.  I have a website called On Faith that I co-moderate with Newsweek editor Jon Meacham.  For the last year and a half I have sat in on many of these discussions.  Hitchens, I have to say is more amusing.

Michael Novak:  Than anybody.

Sally Quinn:  He is quite funny with science versus religion.  In the end, I always walk away thinking what you, Michael, said about the person with the bumper sticker; “I do not know and you do not either.”  Sometimes, I wonder whether these discussions are worthwhile because in the end I do not know and you do not either.  I would love to hear both of you on that question.

Michael Novak:  Can I say a word first but I’ll turn to them immediately?  Agnosticism is what you are saying.  You can pretend to be an agnostic but when you live, you are going to live either as a believer or a nonbeliever at certain places -- not at all.

Sally Quinn:  If one calls oneself an agnostic --

Michael Novak:  Well, it is not about calling oneself but if you take that bumper sticker seriously, “You do not know and I do not know either,” still, we have to get from now until tonight and from tonight until tomorrow and the next day and for our whole life.  And there you are making choices by the way you live.  You are showing what you believe by the way you live.

While I’m not promoting agnosticism or atheism or for that matter a belief in saying this.  I call the subtitle of my own book, the dark night of the believer and the atheist, or the atheist and the believer.  We are in the dark but that is not that we are without signals.  I would like to close and ask each of you to make a final comment - Bill and Michael - but I would like to close with this.  Some unresolved questions in what we said are: What is mind?  What do we really mean by mind?  What do we really mean by science?  What do we really mean by God?

I have a feeling that Michael tends to think of God in terms of intelligence mainly; designer, et cetera.  If you are trying to see is there a God, it is rather important to begin to  get some idea what it is you are looking for.  Anyway, all these questions are underlying our discussion and would have to be made -- you are not going to solve this problem without drinking a case of brandy.

William D. Phillips:  Right.  Thank you.  I do not know and you do not either - absolutely right on a certain level.  I do not know and it is not like I’m without my doubts but I’m comfortable with those doubts.  At the same time, what do we mean by “know?”  There are ways in which we know things scientifically and there are ways in which we know things spiritually, emotionally, and they are not the same kind of knowing.  So even such a simple statement as, “I do not know” is not so obvious what that means.

What is mind?  What is God?  What is science?  I think science is the easiest one to describe.  It is a way of knowing things that we pretty much agree about what the rules are for it.

Michael Novak:  Instrument or world view?

William D. Phillips:  I’m not sure I understand the question.

Michael Novak:  Michael described it a bit earlier as pretty much a world view, a substitute for religion or a better alternative to religion.  I’m not quite ready to go there.

William D. Phillips:  No.

Michael Novak:  I would be willing to say it is a tremendous instrument, and it is of extreme importance, too, and utility to religion.

William D. Phillips:  Okay.  So I’m just going to go with it is a great instrument.  It is a great way of learning about the natural world.  Yeah, it is useful to religion as it is useful to lots of other activities in human life.

Mind?  Boy, I do not have a clue.  We use it in a way that distinguishes it from “brain.”  Part of it is because of the fact that we do not have a clue what consciousness is.  Michael suggested that maybe we have a little problem with consciousness.  No, we have a huge problem with consciousness.  That does not mean that, automatically, because we do not understand something that we have to resort to religion to understand it.  But we are very far away from understanding consciousness or, for that matter, free will.  So I do not have a clue what mind is.  What is God?  God is love.

Michael Shermer:  Well, Sally, I hate to have you write yourself out of a column or a blog, but what is the point?  Gosh, I think you would have to be made out of wood to not be interested in these questions.  These are the biggest most interesting questions there are.  And regardless of how you come out on it, it is good to at least have thought about it, whatever you end up answering.

I pretty much said what I had to say in 2000 in my book, How We Believe, and then The Science of Good and Evil, and the morality question which we are not really addressing here.  I have been amazed that this whole thing has taken off starting particularly with Dawkins’ book - Harris first but Dawkins.  One and a half million copies of The God Delusion in America.  It is unbelievable.  It is a market indicator of something happening that was not there before. 

Richard and I have the same literary agent and John Brockman who shopped at -- he told me he shopped that book around in the late ‘90s and could not sell it.  No one wanted it.  They thought there would be no market for it.  But seven years of Bush and the war and the evangelical right -- we can speculate on different cultural things that would make a book popular at one time and not another.  But in any case, here it is and we are talking about it.  I think it is great fun, not to mention important.

Michael Novak:  I do not know who the other half million were but I know at least a million preachers who read it and started writing books and sermons on it.

Michael Shermer:  The Dawkins Delusion.  It is all good.  Atheism and agnosticism -- it is not even a thing to be.  It is just a starting point.  It is like a default position that you build upon.  There is no positive set of planks that we -- these are the six things we believe in as atheists or whatever.  Something else has to fill that in so secular humanism or humanism -- the American Humanist Association is here today.  Well, anyway, it is a liberal democracy or you believe in this kind of economic form or people should help one another or whatever.  These are things that really have nothing to do with atheism or agnosticism.

Mind -- I think it is just an emergent property of neural firings and patterns.  I think it is a self-organized emergent property that we will come to understand from the bottom up through neuroscience.  It is just a word.  It is like dark matter.  “Mind” is just a word.  It is not anything.  It is just a word to describe behaviors that people do and thoughts that they think.  We just have to refine and get rid of the word and refine it as something else to objectively describe patterns of behaviors and thoughts; something like that.

Science is mostly is an instrument, although those of us that spin off from something like a world view are in search of something else, I think, and not really science but probably secular humanism or something to build upon to fill the gap that we do not have.  In that sense, I miss not being religious only to the extent that I’m a social being like everybody else and I like to have friends and family and people that I like to hang around with.  So I hang around scientists and secularists and so on just because that is what we all do.  So whatever you fill that in with, it is not really science.  It is something else.

Then, God, I think is just the ultimate source of explanation that we evoke that I just do not have a need for.  I understand why lots of people do, and I think it is an interesting question why we fill in certain gaps with that concept, but I do not think there is anything like a god.

Michael Novak:  I think we really need to close, but there has to be a parting shot.  Will you allow me?  What if God is not an explanation?  What if there is another way entirely of thinking about it?

Anyway, I really want to thank all of you for being --

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