A Blog With No Name

I was asked a while back to say something about my religious beliefs. It's hard to know where to start, so I thought I'd start somewhere that's particularly important to me and which relates to things I've already been blogging about...

A lot of people believe there's a fundamental incompatibility between science and religious belief. I believe that they're fundamentally wrong

Is there a conflict?

There are scientists who reject religion. I suppose the most famous of these is Richard Dawkins, who has almost made attacking religion into a religion of his own. And there are religious people who reject science: for example those who treat the Bible utterly literally and insist that the world was created in six days as (supposedly) described in Genesis 1.

Cleearly there can be a genuine conflict. Someone who believes God does not exist, and someone who believes God created the world in six days, will never agree with each other. There is a fundamental disagreement between them. But is that the only kind of believer and the only kind of scientist? No--it's an extreme variety of religion and only one kind of scientist. In fact there is no reason why scientific thinking has to reject God, or why religious belief has to reject the scientific understanding the earth's history and of our origins. I think the debate typically takes place between people one of whom understands science but not religion, and the other understands religion but not science. And sometimes, I fear, there are religious people who don't understand religion... though that might be a bit more contentious.

My starting point

In my first year at university, startled by my first encounter with biblical literalists, I made a conscious decision which I've followed ever since: anything which I believe as a consequence of my religion must be compatible with what I believe as a consequence of science.

There is only one reality, whether you're looking at it through religious or scientific eyes. Science and religion both try to discover some truths about it. Truth can't contradict itself; so if they do discover truth, it must be consistent. It's no good to believe during the week that we eveolved by natural selection, only to believe on Sundays that we were specially created out of the blue 6,000 years ago. Science and religion must both live in the same real world. Theology and science must both adapt in response to known evidence, as we make more sense of the world we are in. Otherwise we're disconnecting ourselves from the world and our beliefs are simply attractive ideas which have nothing to do with reality.

Do we want reality, or fantasy? I think that if we're basing our lives on it, we should go for reality. Or at least, the closest we can get to reality.

Some misconceptions...

A number of misconceptions seem to be lurking in the background whenever science and religion come into conflict. So here are some things I don'tbelieve:

... about religion

• Religion claims infallible truth
  
• Religion is a set of beliefs
  
• Scripture is an infallible, divinely dictated book containing those beliefs
  
• All religious people see it that way, or should do
  
• All religious people reject science and rational thinking
  
• Faith is intellectual acceptance of [impossible] ideas despite evidence
  
• Religious ideas are arbitrary.

... about science

• Science claims infallible truth
  
• Science works by proving things true
  
• All true scientists are atheists and reject religion
  
• Science is merely opinion
  
• Scientists seek to control the world
  
• Science starts out with a particular view of things, which it then seeks to justify in a biased way.

... about both

• Religion and science are based on conflicting "facts" (e.g. the claim that the world was made 6,000 years ago, versus the scientific evidence that it is much older).

Sometimes some of the misconceptions are agreed on by both sides, and then the trouble starts. Copnsider a scientist and a Christian fundamentalist who both think it's essential for a Christian to believe in six-day creation. They will argue forever over whether the world was created in six days. They'll almost certainly never question the assumption that it's an essential part of religion. So they're doomed never to get anywhere...

Some definitions of my own

To answer all those misconceptions properly would turn this blog post into quite a long book chapter (last time I checked it was over 1500 words long as it is), so forgive me if I don't do that in detail just yet. Instead, here are some attempted definitions which reflect my approach to it all:

RELIGION: Religion is the response of human beings to the divine.
THEOLOGY: Theology is the attempt to make sense of that response and produce a logically consistent set of ideas: about the encounter, and about what we're encountering.
SCIENCE: Science is the attempt to make sense of the physical world by testing ideas against careful (ideally repeatable) observation.
THE BIBLE: The Bible is a set of writings, accumulated over many centuries, providing a record of around two thousand years of religious experience and reflection on it. The experience was that of human nature encountering God and the world; the reflection is influenced by how writers at the time saw the world, and is expressed in many different genres.

It should be fairly obvious that the things on my Misconceptions List are incompatible with those ideas. I'm worried about the length of this post so I won't go into that in detail now--maybe in another post if needed. Instead, here are

Some consequences

Religion as a response
What is a reasonable response to being loved by someone, or falling in love with them? Is it to come up with a set of rigid beliefs and theories about them, and put all your effort into intellectually accepting those theories? No--your response is "Wow!" or "I want to be with this person" or to love them back or to want to join in with their activities. Similarly with our response to God: it's not a set of ideas, and it probably can't even be put into words because God is so far beyond what our language can describe. But after a while we feel the need to understand what's going on, and that's where theology comes in, so we try to describe it anyway. The beliefs aren't the starting point.

Similar and different
Theology and scientific theorising are in some ways very similar activities. Both try to make sense of human experience. In the case of science, this is the experience of doing certain experiments and getting certain results; in the case of religion, it's our subjective, yet shared, experience of being conscious beings, of relating to the world, and of relating to what we perceive to be its creator. Science has a distinct advantage in its area, because it deals as much as it can with things which can be made objective and measurable and repeatable.

Yet science can't handle God at all, for a very good reason. The only way we can experience God is subjectively, in our consciousness, within ourselves. Yet the whole idea of science is to remove everything subjective and personal as far as we can, in order to be objective and repeatable. It works by letting us stand back from what we are studying. (The physicist Schroedinger expressed this well; I'll try to find the quote.)

I believe that good theology must behave in a similar way to good science. It must take account of the real world we live in, and the real evidence we see. Its job is to make sense of the world and our religious experience as they are, not as we say they should be. It's not a matter of taking some pre-existing belief in, say, the infallibility of the Bible and forcing ourselves to believe all the consequences; it's about taking what we see and experience and trying to fit it all together.

Also it seems clear to me that neither theology nor science is in a position to claim absolute knowledge of the truth. They're each a search, hoping to get nearer to the truth as they progress. Both need humility and the willingness to change if a new piece of evidence comes in. Their "truths" are always provisional: the best we can come up with so far, but open to change and refinement.

The Bible
OK, this is the bit which you won't like if you're a fundamentalist...

What's special about the Bible is not that "God wrote it", but that it contains all those centuries of experience and reflection. Human nature is universal. God is universal. So, if the biblical writers encountered God, they encountered the same God we do. They sometimes interpreted the encounter differently from us; and sometimes had some odd ideas. For example a lot of the Old Testament assumes that God's love for us must mean God hates our enemies and wants to wipe them out. The idea of God loving them too didn't seem to occur to the writers. Yet even that horrible and blatantly unchristian idea came from the belief that the God they had encountered was a loving one. Just not one whose love extended to other people too... And certain aspects of the encounter are consistent through all those centuries of experience; we connect with them in our experience too.

This is all scene-setting, really. I've not even started on basic things like what sort of God I believe in! But I hope it helps you to see my starting point.

A plea

I know that if you're a particular kind of atheist, or a fundamentalist Christian, you'll disagree strongly with what I've written. That's fine--but please respect what I'm doing here: I'm simply setting out my beliefs for some people who've asked about them, and I haven't the energy to launch into heated debate. Gentle disagreement is OK though

Sorry this is a bit long--I'm trying to cram quite a lot of science into a rather small space--but not at anything like the speed of light
Wednesday was the "start-up" of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. As I'm sure you all know...

Encouraging the insanity

What should have been an exciting day was marred for me by all the persistent "end-of-the-world" hype in the media and on the Internet. There was a news report of a teenage girl in India who believed the stories enough to kill herself: she thought that when it was switched on, the Earth would be swallowed up by a black hole. It makes me angry that there's so much misinformation around, both about what is/was being done and about the "likely" effects.

It makes me particularly angry to hear that small children, who one would hope would be getting excited about science in the same way that we as children got excited about space when we saw the moon landings, have instead been going around terrified of the end of the world.

Now, not everyone understands particle physics. But surely simple explanations are possible which address people's fears. And one would hope that the media would search these out and pass them on.

OK, maybe that was a reckless statement, because I now have to try to write a simple explanation myself. And I'm not a particle physicist, just someone who did a physics-related subject at university. But here goes. [Edit: someone has now helpfully pointed out that as a blogger, I am one of the media. Hmmm...]

What are they doing?

Eventually (but not on Wednesday): trying to bash protons together at very high speeds, i.e. with a lot of energy. A proton is the heavy bit in the middle of a hydrogen atom. If you do this hard enough, the actual energy of the collision is converted into extra particles. One hope of the experiment is that these will include the famous Higgs Boson which everyone wants to find. Being a particularly heavy particle if it exists, it needs a lot of energy to make it, which means incredibly high speeds.

Wednesday: simply tests to check that a beam of protons, going at speeds that have been in use for years--not at the colossal speeds hoped for in future--could make it all the way round the 27-km circuit in a clockwise direction. Then a similar test to see if another beam could get round in the anticlockwise direction. No ultra-high energies. Not even two beams colliding with each other. Lots of very relieved engineers who'd spent years of their lives working on the project finally getting some indication that the machine might work. Bottles of champagne.

Given that what happened on Wednesday wasn't even really new, it's hard to see why so many people thought it was going to end the world. Unless maybe THE MEDIA didn't bother to find out the facts properly and report them responsibly... Perish the thought.

Is it going to destroy the world, then?

We've heard a lot about various speculative ways for this to happen. Sadly we've heard a lot less about why nobody in the physics community thinks they're the least bit likely. I suppose "nothing will happen" and "science fiction is fiction" aren't really news. They're not even particularly exciting. So they don't get reported. I also suspect that to the physicists, who are intimately familiar with the science, the idea seems so fatuous that it barely seems to need explaining. Would you expect someone to come and ask you to explain why sailing over the horizon won't make you drop off the edge of the world? No, because you'd have to change your whole view of the world you deal with every day.

CERN has produced a quite informative Safety page. What follows is a summary of that, with some additions from other sources. The CERN page also includes links to various safety reports and relevant scientific publications.

The experiment has happened already

In fact, it happens all the time. I'm talking about cosmic rays.

These are particles from space which routinely hit the earth, some at extremely high energies--considerably higher than the LHC is aiming for. So, in fact, the LHC experiment (and more energetic ones) is effectively happening in the Earth and its atmosphere every day. But at random and mostly without any fancy detectors to observe it. The LHC safety page points out that the Earth has already been hit by the cosmic-ray equivalent of about a million LHC experiments. Oddly, it still hasn't been destroyed.

Is it really like cosmic rays, though? After all, cosmic rays don't arrive all bunched together in a very thin beam. Might this make a difference? After all, we've got lots of collisions happening close together... Well I asked someone at the LHC about this and it turns out that the collisions are still WAY too far apart to have any effect whatever. So yes, it's like cosmic rays.

Ways the world won't end

Black holes: Could the LHC produce an earth-swallowing black hole? Well...

• Standard theory says it can't produce black holes at all. But if that's wrong, then
  
• the theories that think it can all say that the black holes would disappear in a tiny instant and have no chance to start growing.
  
• a black hole that could grow and swallow its surroundings would need to start off as heavy as Mount Everest anyway. (Imagine trying to stuff a whole mountain into the machine and accelerate it to almost the speed of light...)
  
• If the LHC could swallow up the earth in a black hole, then so could the cosmic rays which keep hitting us. Not only haven't they succeeded, but there's no sign that its happened anywhere else in the universe either.

Vacuum bubbles: As I understand it, these are part of a speculative theory where regions of the universe could "flip" into a different state, where matter would have different properties and we could not exist.

• If the LHC could cause this, then high-energy cosmic rays would already have done it. The LHC is quite weedy in comparison
  
• and actually there's no evidence of ANYTHING having caused it anywhere in the observed universe.

Strangelets: the idea here is that the LHC produces a tiny lump of an exotic kind of matter, which then converts ordinary matter to strange matter when it comes in contact with it.

• This is the opposite of what strange matter would be expected to do. If it can exist, it's expected to convert itself immediately to ordinary matter.
  
• The "possibility" was however explored before the start-up in 2000 of another machine, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider or RHIC, which was far more likely than the LHC to produce strangelets. Eight years on, it still hasn't managed to produce any.
  
• The particles to make strangelets can only stick together if they're travelling slowly enough; the LHC simply bashes things together too fast. If the RHIC couldn't do it, the RHC hasn't a chance.

Magnetic monopoles: These are hypothetical particles a bit like magnets with only one end. (I have trouble imagining them!). Some theories think they could do nasty things to the protons in ordinary matter. However,

• the theories that say they can do this also say they're too heavy for the LHC to produce.
  
• if the LHC could make them, then the cosmic rays that hit us are already making them, and have been for billions of years, with no ill effect.

So they're either impossible for the LHC to make, or safe and here already.

Links

• BBC news story about the suicide: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7609631.stm or http://is.gd/2zQS
  
• BBC article on children's fears picked up from adults, with suggestions for addressing them: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7610413.stm or http://is.gd/2zR2
  
• Blogs by US scientists at the LHC: http://blogs.uslhc.us
  

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Seth Zenz at the LHC for answering my question about the concentrated beam, and for taking the trouble to read through this post to check I'd represented the science accurately.

I like to keep up with what's going on in the world of science, and my favourite online source is http://www.sciencedaily.com , which gives press releases of the latest research. You can see the latest five on my links page. I've not yet found out how to get them onto this page, but then it is the middle of the night.

Oh, and I'm posting this from my phone, using Opera Mini

EDIT: Well it should be the latest five, but it's not refreshing... see comments below