Questioner: The religionists proffer ghosts and miracles. The physicists propose equations. What is the fundamental difference between them?
CS: A very good question. How can we tell what's what? One thing we can do is we can check out the explanation in terms of repeatability. Verifiability So, for example, if physicists after Isaac Newton say that the distance that a falling object falls in time t is a constant times t2, and if you are skeptical or dubious about that, you can perform the experiment, and you will find that if it takes twice as long to fall, it goes four times farther, and so on. They will also say that the velocity increases proportionately to the time. You can check that. You can drop boulders off bridges, if it's permitted by the local police, and check out these contentions. After a while you get a sense that, at least in this limited realm, the physicists know what they're talking about. What is more, it is remarkable that Buddhist physicists find just the same regularity. And Hindu physicists, and atheist physicists, and Christian physicists, and so on. All find the same laws of nature. Somehow it doesn't depend on the local culture, on the local training. What the physicists say seems to be true all over the Earth. And then you look at other planets. Other stars. Other galaxies. And the same laws apply everywhere.
Now, this doesn't say that every contention of every physicist has this wonderful degree of regularity. Physicists make mistakes just like anyone else. But the way in which physicists have an advantage is that there is a tradition of skepticism and a tradition of mutually checking out each other's contentions. Whereas in religion there is a practice of great reluctance to challenge what any other member of the professional caste says. That is not true in physics. A physicist is almost as delighted in disproving another physicist's contention as in demonstrating some new principle of physics. And you know Newton's famous remark that if he had seen further it was by standing on the shoulders of giants. What he meant was that there is a continuous progress in science. And through this progression of insights, through this mutual checking, the subject advances mightily. Whereas if you take supposed religious proofs of the existence of God, it is really quite remarkable that no new proof has been offered-never mind the validity-no fundamentally new proof has been offered in centuries. The anthropic principle that I talked about in an earlier lecture is as close as you can come, but it is merely a variant on the argument from design.
So I see methodologically a significant difference between how science proceeds and how religion proceeds. Now, an earlier questioner gave a very good example. He said, "Scientists talk about the expanding universe. What began the expansion?" Now, many astrophysicists would say that's not their problem. Their problem is to tell you what the universe is doing but not to tell you why it's doing it. They avoid that "why" question- and it's not due to modesty, although it's sometimes phrased in a way to suggest that we don't want to mess around with the really big questions. But physicists love to mess around with the big questions. The reason that questions such as "Why did the universe expand?" are considered off-limits is that there's no experiment you can do to check it out.
CS: The question has to do with the Bermuda Triangle. This is certainly not significantly different from UFOs and ancient astronauts. It is as good an example. Here is a case where if you track the mysterious disappearances or sinkings of airplanes and ships, you find, it is alleged, a concentration of these disappearances in a triangular region off Bermuda. And the explanations that have been proposed are many, one of which is that there is a UFO on the Atlantic floor that eats airplanes and boats.
Now, there are several things that might be said about this. Is the statistical evidence as purported? In fact, is there any statistical evidence? Do we compare? Do the proponents of the Bermuda Triangle "mystery" compare the rate of loss of ships and airplanes off Bermuda to the rate of loss of ships and airplanes in some other region of the world with comparable weather and of equal area and traffic frequency? Nowhere do they attempt that. But others have, and found not a smidgen of evidence that the disappearance rate is larger there than elsewhere.
And also I would raise a related question. Why is it that there are no examples of mysterious disappearances of trains? Train sets out from one station, everything looks fine, and then it is supposed to appear at another station. It's not there. They go back to search along the tracks; it's totally disappeared! The thing about the ocean is you can sink in it. It has a natural explanation built in for mysterious disappearances, whereas railroad beds provide awkward opportunities for mysterious disappearances.
There is a famous case that I'll tell and then end. An enormous electrical rotor for a power-generating plant was completed-I've forgotten exactly where this was; let us say in Michigan-to be transported a thousand miles or so on a railway flatbed with the rotor tied down but in a vertical position. It left the factory perfectly all right. The train did arrive at its destination, but with no rotor. Rotor gone. And so, it being a very expensive piece of machinery, the railway detectives (you can imagine this as a change from the usual sorts of cases they have to deal with) go in a small railroad car along every inch of the thousand miles, and there isn't any rotor sitting by the side of the railway bed. So it has disappeared. Supernatural. And insurance companies are involved because it's expensive, so there's a second search. They can't find it. Nobody on the train saw anything amiss.
Twenty years pass, and then about three miles from the railway track a swamp is drained for a housing project, and there, at the bottom of the swamp, is this rotor, which must have broken its moorings and rolled three miles to the swamp. Can you imagine being out for a midnight walk and seeing this apparition rolling by? If anyone had seen it, it surely would have been an impetus to found a new religion.
CHAPTER SIX
Questioner: Well, I'd just like to ask you about your closing remarks. You were talking about possible proofs that God could have left us of His own existence. You don't think that you're making a rather arrogant assumption in that you are assuming that, for example, it could be possible that He has… that God has left in these religious writings the types of statements that you are suggesting, but it was simply that we ourselves have not got to that stage of development. For example, if He'd made statements about special relativity, a hundred years ago those would have been still meaningless. Could there not now be statements that in a hundred years would make sense to us that would not make sense to us now? Secondly, a more specific example, some people at the Hebrew University at Tel Aviv claim that there are in the Torah in Hebrew various words or messages in which were concealed the names of some thirty trees in Hebrew, with the letters of each tree equally spaced within the passages. And their suggestion is that it would have been impossible for anyone, without the use of computers, to have devised such complicated messages.
CS: This is from the Kabbalistic tradition?
Questioner: Uh-huh.
CS: I have looked at it a little bit, and I believe it is an example of the statistical error of the enumeration of favorable circumstances; that is-what's the best way to put it?-there is a stunning correlation between earthquakes in the Andes and oppositions of the planet Uranus. Is this a causal connection or not? First thing you ask is, how many connections had to be looked for before this particular one was derived? Volcanoes in Sicily with oppositions of the planet Mars-think of how many volcanoes there are in the world, how many earthquakes there are, how many planets there are, how many stars. If you start making a specific number of cross-correlations you will, of course, on occasion, come upon a coincidence. And what you have to do in a posteriori knowledge is to add up all those other cases of possible coincidences that you looked at or could have looked at.