In theological discussion with religious leaders, I often ask what their response would be if a central tenet of their faith were disproved by science. When I put this question to the current, Fourteenth, Dalai Lama, he unhesitatingly replied as no conservative or fundamentalist religious leaders do: in such a case, he said, Tibetan Buddhism would have to change.
Even, I asked, if it’s a really central tenet, like (I searched for an example) reincarnation?
Even then, he answered.
However, he added with a twinkle, it’s going to be hard to disprove reincarnation.
Plainly, the Dalai Lama is right. Religious doctrine that is insulated from disproof has little reason to worry about the advance of science. The grand idea, common to many faiths, of a Creator of the Universe is one such doctrine – difficult alike to demonstrate or to dismiss.
Moses Maimonides, in his Guide for the Perplexed, held that God could be truly known only if there were free and open study of both physics and theology [I, 55]. What would happen if science demonstrated an infinitely old Universe? Then theology would have to be seriously revamped [II, 25]. Indeed, this is the one conceivable finding of science that could disprove a Creator -because an infinitely old universe would never have been created. It would have always been here.
There are other doctrines, interests and concerns that also worry about what science will find out. Perhaps, they suggest, it’s better not to know. If men and women turn out to have different hereditary propensities, won’t this be used as an excuse for the former to suppress the latter? If there’s a genetic component of violence, might this justify repression of one ethnic group by another, or even precautionary incarceration? If mental illness is just brain chemistry, doesn’t this unravel our efforts to keep a grasp on reality or to be responsible for our actions? If we are not the special handiwork of the Creator of the Universe, if our basic moral laws are merely invented by fallible lawgivers, isn’t our struggle to maintain an orderly society undermined?
I suggest that in every one of these cases, religious or secular, we are much better off if we know the best available approximation to the truth, and if we keep before us a keen apprehension of the errors our interest group or belief system has committed in the past. In every case the imagined dire consequences of the truth being generally known are exaggerated. And again, we are not wise enough to know which lies, or even which shadings of the facts, can competently serve some higher social purpose, especially in the long run.
16
When Scientists Know Sin
The mind of man – how far will it advance? Where will its daring impudence find limits? If human villainy and human life shall wax in due proportion, if the son shall always grow in wickedness past his father, the gods must add another world to this that all the sinners may have space enough.
Euripides, Hippolytus (428 BC)
In a post-war meeting with President Harry S Truman, J. Robert Oppenheimer – the scientific director of the Manhattan nuclear weapons project – mournfully commented that scientists had bloody hands; they had now known sin. Afterwards, Truman instructed his aides that he never wished to see Oppenheimer again. Sometimes scientists are castigated for doing evil, and sometimes for warning about the evil uses to which science may be put.
More often, science is taken to task because it and its products are said to be morally neutral, ethically ambiguous, as readily employed in the service of evil as of good. This is an old indictment. It goes back probably to the flaking of stone tools and the domestication of fire. Since technology has been with our ancestral line from before the first human, since we are a technological species, this problem is not so much one of science as of human nature. By this I don’t mean that science has no responsibility for the misuse of its findings. It has profound responsibility, and the more powerful its products the greater its responsibility.
Like assault weapons and market derivatives, the technologies that allow us to alter the global environment that sustains us should mandate caution and prudence. Yes, it’s the same old humans who have made it so far. Yes, we’re developing new technologies as we always have. But when the weaknesses we’ve always had join forces with a capacity to do harm on an unprecedented planetary scale, something more is required of us – an emerging ethic that also must be established on an unprecedented planetary scale.
Sometimes scientists try to have it both ways: to take credit for those applications of science that enrich our lives, but to distance themselves from the instruments of death, intentional and inadvertent, that also trace back to scientific research. The Australian philosopher John Passmore writes in his book Science and Its Critics:
The Spanish Inquisition sought to avoid direct responsibility for the burning of heretics by handing them over to the secular arm; to burn them itself, it piously explained, would be wholly inconsistent with its Christian principles. Few of us would allow the Inquisition thus easily to wipe its hands clean of bloodshed; it knew quite well what would happen. Equally, where the technological application of scientific discoveries is clear and obvious – as when a scientist works on nerve gases – he cannot properly claim that such applications are ‘none of his business’, merely on the grounds that it is the military forces, not scientists, who use the gases to disable or kill. This is even more obvious when the scientist deliberately offers help to governments, in exchange for funds. If a scientist, or a philosopher, accepts funds from some such body as an office of naval research, then he is cheating if he knows his work will be useless to them and must take some responsibility for the outcome if he knows that it will be useful. He is subject, properly subject, to praise or blame in relation to any innovations which flow from his work.
An important case history is provided by the career of the Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller. Teller was marked at a young age by the Bela Kuhn communist revolution in Hungary, in which the property of middle-class families like his was expropriated, and by losing part of his leg in a streetcar accident, leaving him in permanent pain. His early contributions ranged from quantum mechanical selection rules and solid state physics to cosmology. It was he who chauffeured the physicist Leo Szilard to the vacationing Albert Einstein on Long Island in July 1939 – a meeting that led to the historic letter from Einstein to President Franklin Roosevelt urging, in view of both scientific and political events in Nazi Germany, that the United States develop a fission, or ‘atomic’ bomb. Recruited to work on the Manhattan Project, Teller arrived at Los Alamos and promptly refused to cooperate -not because he was dismayed at what an atomic bomb might do, but just the opposite: because he wanted to work on a much more destructive weapon, the fusion, or thermonuclear, or hydrogen bomb. (While there is a practical upper limit on the yield or destructive energy of an atomic bomb, there is no such limit for a hydrogen bomb. But a hydrogen bomb needs an atomic bomb as trigger.)
After the fission bomb was invented, after Germany and Japan surrendered, after the war was over, Teller remained a persistent advocate of what was called ‘the Super’, specifically intended to intimidate the Soviet Union. Concern about the rebuilding, toughened and militarized Soviet Union under Stalin and the national paranoia in America called McCarthyism, eased Teller’s path. A substantial obstacle was offered, though, in the person of Oppenheimer, who had become the chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the post-war Atomic Energy Commission. Teller provided critical testimony at a government hearing, questioning Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States. Teller’s involvement is generally thought to have played a major role in the aftermath: although Oppenheimer’s loyalty was not exactly impugned by the review board, somehow his security clearance was denied, he was retired from the AEC, and Teller’s way to the Super was greased.
The technique for making a thermonuclear weapon is generally attributed to Teller and the mathematician Stanislas Ulam. Hans Bethe, the Nobel laureate physicist who headed the Theoretical Division at the Manhattan Project and who played a major role in the development of both the atomic and the hydrogen bombs, attests that Teller’s original suggestion was flawed, and that the work of many people was necessary to bring the thermonuclear weapon to reality. With fundamental technical contributions from a young physicist named Richard Garwin, the first US thermonuclear ‘device’ was exploded in 1952. It was too unwieldy to be carried by a missile or bomber; it just sat there where it was assembled and blew up. The first true hydrogen bomb was a Soviet invention exploded one year later. There has been debate on whether the Soviet Union would have developed a thermonuclear weapon if the United States had not, and whether a US thermonuclear weapon was even needed to deter Soviet use of their hydrogen bomb, since the US by then possessed a substantial arsenal of fission weapons. The preponderance of current evidence is that the USSR, even before it exploded its first fission bomb, had a workable design for a thermonuclear weapon. It was ‘the next logical step’. But Soviet pursuit of fusion weapons was much aided by the knowledge, from espionage, that the Americans were working on them.