Faith and the Scientist

by GEORGE R. HARRISON

1

THIS is the day of the ascendancy of science, for in the past fifty years scientific knowledge and methods have changed our manner of living more than any form of human endeavor has ever changed it in the past. In each decade now we get more new understanding of the processes of nature, and more ability to control them, than became available in any previous century. Science is coming to determine how much men can eat, how comfortable they are, how hard they must work, and even how long they will live. Many people view this dependence on what seems a materialistic and perhaps directionless effort with grave distrust, and feel that scientists should be curbed in their endeavors to set loose little-understood forces which immerse society in problems which they fear may prove insoluble.

Much misunderstanding arises because most of us, through our newspapers and magazines, make contact mainly with the slums of science, the halfworld of such things as flying saucers and water dowsing. Some of us may worry about technological unemployment, for where will the workman find a job when all the factories are operated by machines under the surveillance of foremen servomechanisms? Or we may feel, with some poets and mystics, that science is making living not only less enjoyable, but more dangerous, in giving man new powers without at the same time helping him to choose between good and evil.

Such fears arise, I think, from a limited understanding of what science is and what it can accomplish. Our concern must be, not only with whether it adds to our comfort and safety, our health, security, and enjoyment of life, but also with whether it adds to our dignity and stature as individuals. We must take, as the ultimate measure of scientific progress, its influence on such spiritual values as freedom, integrity, and justice.

I mean here to discuss, not the machines that science provides which enable us to travel faster, to amuse ourselves more distractedly, and generally to increase the speed and anxiety of living, but the effect of science on the whole man. First let us consider man broadly as a physical being who receives sense impressions from the external world; then his mind; then, further, his emotional nature; and finally his spiritual nature—all as affected by science.

The demonstration by science of the unity of all Nature profoundly affects us all. When a spectroscope is used to analyze light from any distant star, it reveals there the same kinds of atoms we find on earth. In this confirmation of a universe, as contrasted with a billion unrelated stars, the scientist shares with the mystic awareness of that Oneness from which springs our most fundamental feeling of security.

To appreciate the implications of this unity, one should understand how even the most complex and diverse things in our world are built up as different manifestations of the same simple, basic elements. Physicists have found only three forces in the universe: electric, magnetic, and gravitational forces; and every push or pull we know is a combination of these. They hope, with unified field theories, to prove that these three kinds of force are really only manifestations of one elementary force, of which matter is another manifestation. In any case, we know that matter is interconvertible with energy, as demonstrated frequently these days in Nevada, and that matter is itself composed of three basic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons.

Now imagine a universe filled with particles of these three kinds flying hither and yon, exerting on each other the three basic forces, without direction or interrelation. This indeed would be chaos. Of what use is such a universe? Where now are freedom, justice, and integrity?

To build the universe as we know it, a directive force is needed. This may come from without, or may even be built into the nature of the particles themselves. We now see pairing of electrons and protons, so that hydrogen atoms are formed. These in turn join in pairs to produce hydrogen molecules, which collect as clouds of hydrogen in space, forming great nebulae. Other protons join with neutrons in more complex groupings to form the nuclei of new varieties of atoms, which soon attract to their orbits their respective quotas of electrons. Eventually we see built up atoms of nearly a hundred sorts, and we have the basic elements of chemistry. The completeness of balancing of the forces in the various groupings of particles differs, so that some atoms, still unsatisfied, tend to join together as molecules, while others move about in space alone. Different residual forces, again, extend from the various molecules. Some types hold firmly together at the temperatures of earth and form solid matter like steel. Others cling loosely and form liquids like water. Still others attract each other so little that they bounce apart when they collide, and make up gases like helium and oxygen. Thus from the three fundamental particles have been formed nearly a hundred kinds of atoms, by an innate tendency to order which we may call “coöperation.” These atoms in turn combine into several hundred thousand kinds of molecules, which further associate to form the millions of objects we can see.

Thus on the unity of our first picture is superposed the concept of order. The universe now is no longer chaotic; each particle moves not alone, but under the combined and ordered influence of its fellows, From only three kinds of particles with limited individual capacities have been produced millions of new entities forming a physical world. About all that a million electrons can do if left to their own devices is to exert a repulsive force on each other, and so in varying degrees with protons and neutrons. But let these three arrange themselves properly in atoms, and these atoms in molecules, and mold and combine these molecules to form substances, and you can make a spark plug that will help carry a plane across the Atlantic. By arranging selected molecules in still more complex ways nature can produce a bee, and then even a swarm of bees. These bees find that if they will coöperate in a hive, instead of living each to himself, they can keep warmer in winter, and so can gather nectar and spread pollen in spring several weeks before a hermit insect dare show his face.

So we find diversity arising from unity, and complexity from simplicity, through the exercise of a coöperative directing force. Men call this force by different names, but this need not concern us here, for now we are discussing only phenomena which science has revealed.

Physicists have discovered a great rule of nature which they call the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This seems to tell us how to measure our flight from chaos. Boiled down, it says that if you want to do anything especially remarkable in a physical system, you must supply some direction. Molecules left to themselves become chaotic in their motions. A house or a turnip or a man left without orderly control tends to decay; to produce any one of these objects requires directed effort. Every thing we call alive seems to contain such a directing force. A dead seed rots, but a single living seed contains enough directive power to populate — given a few hundred million years — a whole planet, not only with carrots but with men.

This all sounds pretty theoretical, and it is tempting to believe that scientists have really been able to accomplish little in understanding what life is and how to produce and control living things. But the door is being opened, and each day brings new insight. For example, in recent years various molecules have been found, plant hormones and auxins, with which we can cause leaves to drop off plants or to grow larger. Other molecules will make fruit cling more tightly to the branch; still others will start, speed up, or slow down flowering, make stems longer or shorter, induce the growth of roots, or kill one type of plant and not another. Those chemical foremen, like servo-mechanisms in a factory, regulate the interactions of the various parts of the plant, so that it can function as a coöperative cherry tree instead of a rotting pool of independent molecules.

A living plant is a factory for storing the energy of sunlight in the fabrication of such complex molecules as starch, cellulose, and sugar from simple molecules of water and carbon dioxide. Eventually we should be able to regulate such factories as handily as we now control a factory for making tractors. Some of the auxins, superintendent molecules which direct the activities of many foremen molecules in a growing plant, are found to act as they do because they hitch on to other molecules through two coupling links instead of one, and act as keys which fit only certain molecular locks. Such a mysterious molecular key as indole-acetic acid, for example, turns out to be merely a special arrangement of carbon, oxygen, and other atoms.

Though chemists have identified in nature only about 100,000 different kinds of molecules, they have already fabricated nearly twice as many new kinds, from the same hundred original atoms. Many of these new molecules are found to have special powers, and it seems probable that eventually we shall find useful new jobs for almost every one, from freon through nylon and far beyond sulfathiazole.

2

Now, what is a man? His body, “in form and moving” so “express and admirable,” is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons; and he thinks with a brain composed of these and operating with the three fundamental forces of the physical world. To say this is not materialism, for if “God works in most mysterious ways His wonders to perform,” not the least of His works, as we can see, involve protons, neutrons, and electrons. The study of their combinations helps us to understand our five senses, five paths of awareness to the brain, five “windows of the soul,” by which we have our only contact with the external world.

Calling our senses five is an oversimplification, for we have more than five senses; we have at least three types of touch sensation: heat, pressure, and pain; and four types of taste, so that every flavor is a combination of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. (The child who doesn’t mind cod-liver oil and hates spinach is not being ornery; his taste buds merely respond differently from those of his mother.) We also have four types of vision, which all happen to involve the same pairs of eyes. The first type, night-vision, records no color, but paints its images in black and white on the retina; it operates best in faint light and is nearly 500 times as sensitive as the other three types of vision. These combine to give us more than 100,000 different sensations of color.

So sensitive are our retinas to green light — that is, to light whose waves are about one 50 thousandth of an inch long—that they can pick up as little as one 500 thousandth of a millionth of a millionth of a watt of power, and we can see a candle many miles away.

How was this sensitive detecting device developed, which is more elegant than any television camera ? It contains a sharply focusing lens, surrounded by light-sensitive molecules which adjust it automatically to give the clearest image; selfregulating diaphragm, the pupil, and a shutter, the eyelid; and uses two projectors with which it introduced 3-D into vision some millions of years before the movies got around to this in 1953.

The marvelous twin cameras which send sensations to our brain from every object illuminated by even a millionth of the brightness of full sunlight sort out light rays so carefully that we get the fullest impact of reality through seeing. If necessary we can in addition verify the existence of an object by touching it, hearing it, smelling it, or tasting it. Beyond this, nature does not lake us in contacting physical reality. And she has developed many forms of energy, such as cosmic rays and magnetic fields, which we cannot sense at all, yet which are no less real than those we sense directly.

So our senses are by no means perfect, and after exclaiming about the wonders of the eye, we must now examine its limitations. First, it is blind to more wave lengths of light than it can see. While insects can see somewhat with short-wave ultraviolet rays, humans cannot. (These insects, incidentally, have eyes consisting of multiple cones especially fixed for judging the direction of the sun for navigational purposes, and sometimes have polarizing filters to help steer by scattered light when the sky is overcast.) Also the sharpness of our vision is limited, and our lenses tend to deform and become cloudy. But now that nature has developed in man the brain needed to think scientifically, he can use this to extend his senses much beyond what nature has done.

Scientists have learned to supplement the sense of sight in numerous ways. In front of the tiny pupil of the eye they put, on Mount Palomar, a great monocle 200 inches in diameter, and with it see 2000 times farther into the depths of space. Or they look through a small pair of lenses arranged as a microscope into a drop of water or blood, and magnify by as much as 2000 diameters the living creatures there, many of which are among man’s most dangerous enemies. Or, if we want to see distant happenings on earth, they use some of the previously wasted electromagnetic waves to carry television images which they re-create as light by whipping tiny crystals on a screen with electrons in a vacuum. Or they can bring happenings of long ago and far away as colored motion pictures, by arranging silver atoms and color-absorbing molecules to force light waves into the patterns of the original reality. Or if we want to see into the center of a steel casting or the chest of an injured child, they send the information on a beam of penetrating short-wave X rays, and then convert it back into images we can see on a screen or photograph. Thus almost every type of electromagnetic radiation yet discovered has been used to extend our sense of sight in some way.

The evolution of the other senses is as interesting as that of vision, which nature has developed to nearly the maximum sensitivity permitted by the structure of light itself. Our ability to hear the commonest sound waves has reached its maximum possible sensitivity also. Some persons even are bothered by noises which arise from the random motions of molecules in the nerve endings of their ears. The threshold of sound awareness is said to be about the same in a human being, a catfish, or a bird, and the long-vaunted greater sensitivity of hearing of dogs and other animals probably arises from their ability to hear higher tones than we, and because they have less to distract them.

In many directions of evolution nature is stopped by limitations in her own materials. There are some things that just take too long to work out with protons and electrons by repeated trial and error, as, for example, to develop a wheel on a living creature. But often man can get around such blocks by taking thought. We fasten wheels to ourselves with automobiles, and our sense of hearing has been extended on radio waves so that we can hear the sound of a dropped pin around the world.

Thus, though we sense directly only a few of the energy manifestations in the external world, science has taught us how to transform many others so as not only to bring them into our ken, but to bend them to our service. And science reveals man’s physical body as a fascinating assemblage of the same protons, electrons, and neutrons that constitute a stone, functioning in an even more remarkable coöperative effort. But not yet is this the whole of Man.

3

LET us now consider the mind. Man has developed the ability to set up a series of images within the brain which produce a reaction as effective as if they were sensations direct from the external world. Thus we learn to supplement sensation with thought, and can gain from many experiences which need occur only within our minds. Again something new is evolved in nature from the profitable coöperation of lesser elements.

All of our feelings and our thoughts appear to be end products of switching patterns in nerve circuits. To visualize this, consider mathematical computation. From counting on his fingers man has progressed through the stage of counting with stones to sliding beads on wires in the abacus; then to counting on the teeth of rotating gears in mechanical calculating machines; and now to the use of electron tubes with which thousands of sums can be carried out in a single second. Such devices are bulky, to be sure, for modern high-speed calculators, such as Whirlwind II at M.I.T., occupy many cubic feet of space and use thousands of tubes.

The best computing machines do not operate in powers of 10, which we first learned to like because of our ten fingers, but in powers of 2. This is because a simple electrical switch can easily express only two numbers, 0 and 1, or two reactions, “no" and “yes,” by being closed to current flow, or open. As few as fifty switches can express 250 numbers or reactions, which is more than a million billion, in terms of various patterns of being open and closed. An electron tube serves as a rapid and reliable switch, for which we need to find a less clumsy substitute. Nature, however, has already succeeded in developing electrochemical switches called synapses to connect nerve endings, which are so small that many billions of them can be squeezed into one human head. Apparently all our thoughts are in terms of remembered sensations and images of the external world, and all we feel or think or dream comes to us as combinations of these electrochemical yeses and noes. It is difficult to think of a colored mental picture as being only groups of stops and starts, until we remember that Technicolor or television images are nothing more than controlled chemical or electrical patterns, and that seeing red is merely a state of mind.

In addition to vast numbers of switches, a good high-speed computing machine must have a means of storing switching patterns and numbers, and this our brains have in countless cells which can be charged or discharged. Thus we have memory. By substituting for immediate sensation mental images of things we have previously sensed, we can perform all sorts of interesting internal mental experiments. Thus Newton, his optic nerve stimulated by an apple, thought not merely of apples but of planets, and had no need of a space ship to work out his law of universal gravitation.

The process we call learning consists of setting up mental switching patterns over and over, to train certain circuits and groups of switchboards to function together. The circuits of the mind improve vastly with use and exercise. Of course, if need arises nature can add billions of cells to the brain, though this requires a few thousand years. For us this is now unnecessary, however, because most of us are like the Vermont farmer who objected to coming to the lecture sponsored by the Board of Agriculture, on the ground that he already knew how to farm twice as well as was his custom. We have many more switchboards and trunk lines in our heads than we ever use, and spend much of our lives determining how many central exchanges we want to bother to set into operation, and how many we will relegate to the back room.

Cowling and Davidson have listed seven essential qualities which it is the function of a true education to develop. The first is ability to concentrate, which merely means learning to keep stray sensations from messing up the circuits among our mental switchboards. Then comes accuracy of observation, which means learning to connect the nerve endings bringing in sensations with the proper mental circuits. Then comes retentiveness of memory, which involves exercising of the brain’s condensers and storage mechanisms so that their charges won’t leak out prematurely, keeping their contacts bright so that they will give sharp impulse patterns after many years, and bringing circuits into association. Then comes logical reasoning, which is the exercising of switching patterns in great groups so that currents emerge which will coincide with what the external world reveals. Then improvement in judgment is listed, an even higher faculty that depends on predicting in advance, as a result of experience, which circuits will best lead to a correct set of images. Then we have sensitivity of association, which involves developing the faculty of interconnecting vast swarms of switchboards without confusion, so that each on demand can be made sensitive to useful currents flowing in any others. Last of all, and most important, conies creative imagination. One of our highest faculties, this involves putting into operation vast new assemblages of switchboards and central stations in the untapped stockrooms of our minds, so that new circuits can learn to conduct merely as a result of the experience of other circuits.

Besides revealing the structure of our brains, science furnishes one of the most effective disciplines for improving our minds. It trains us in conserving the flow of mental current and in discriminating between emotional and intellectual processes. One of the great defects of modern education, especially of progressive education, is its diffuseness. It lacks insistence that the student learn to focus his attention in trains of thought which produce sharp, clear patterns in the brain, instead of a chaotic opening and closing of mental switches at random, governed by the feelings of the moment. Much of this fault comes from our methods of teacher training; the poorest education for an educator, it seems, is the study of education. He should first have interest in a specific discipline with which he can deeply engrave his own mental circuits.

4

LONG before man learned to think, animals had developed emotions like fright and anger, tones of feeling which pervade the organism and produce responses in it. Higher emotions, like response to beauty, appeared later, and new ones are still appearing. Science is making progress in revealing the origins and structure of our emotions, which, affected by sensation and by thought, like them are embodied in electrochemical reactions, and can be profoundly affected by molecules which we call drugs and hormones.

Hazlitt wrote: “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.” Science is the greatest agency yet discovered for changing things to what they ought to be. Even more important, science can help us decide what they ought to be, for we learn from experience, and science is the systematic production and analysis of experience.

This applies even to such concepts as beauty. The poet, painter, and musician have no monopoly on beauty, for the ardor of the creative artist also fills the scientist when he pursues a discovery. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” said Keats, and science is the systematic search for truth. What tremendous emotions must have surged through Galileo when he saw for the first time through his telescope four tiny moons circling about Jupiter! Immediately his creative imagination saw demonstration of the lofty concept that the earth revolves around the sun, and therefore need not be considered the center of the universe.

This sweep and play of beauty extends throughout the whole of science. Consider the course of evolution. This concept, now well proved, has nothing to do with belief or absence of belief in God, though it has been upsetting in the past to some who were pained by the cracking of the carapace of inflexible theological dogma. The sublime prospect of the upward progress of life over millions of years stirs emotions equal to those produced by the most sublime poetry and art. Scientists who have seen the great paintings in the Sistine Chapel and the Louvre, and have felt that tingling in the spinal cord which comes from observation of truly great art, have received the same inner thrill from the realization that when a bird sits on a bough a tiny locking bone in his foot clamps his claws around the perch so that his muscles can relax without danger of his falling when asleep. The God who notes each sparrow’s fall also built something into a proton that keeps the sparrow from falling.

Poets and other creative artists are intuitive, and the mystic is likely to feel superior to the scientist in his reliance on intuition. But the scientist must be intuitive as well. Intuition is the ability to integrate previous experience, without detailed analysis, to produce new awareness. Much of what is commonly called intuition involves merely a confusion of emotion and prejudice with thought, but true intuition consists of that leap forward in the dark, with no solid ground beneath, in which you end up in balance on your feet. Every scientific generalization is intuitive, for while the scientist may see a phenomenon just by looking, as at Newton’s apple, he must use creative imagination and intuition to relate this apple to the moon and so discover the universal law.

Even this sketchy picture seems to me to indicate that we live in a universe which is progressing, and I hope it conveys a sense of the endless possibilities of this progress. The accumulation of experience results in an uneven but definite increase in the spiritual qualities which are of most importance to man — truth, justice, love, humility, integrity, and all the rest. Spiritual values distill slowly from the interaction of sensation, emotion, and thought, which we have seen depend in turn on man’s physical body, which again is formed by his environment, which depends ultimately on the properties of matter. Science affects all of these. Even if you wish to picture the eternal verities as abstract concepts superposed on the character of man from without (and I do not quarrel with this, though I feel that it detracts from the beauty and integrity of the unified picture), man has demonstrated the power of developing them, and they are basically affected by his physical experience. This is codified and illumined by science, as by religion and art.

The phrase “You can’t change human nature” springs from a short-range view. The shape of the human jaw and the size of the human brainpan change quite markedly in a hundred thousand years. The speed with which a thoroughbred can run a mile has been dropped from two minutes to one minute and thirty-six seconds in less than fifty years, by selective breeding. The patterns governing a young man’s operation of his mental switches can be changed quite markedly in a few months. Human nature is not a static thing, for we live in a universe that is dynamic, which offers unlimited opportunity for change. Science teaches us that we can progress from being slaves of our environment to becoming masters of our destinies.

Two thousand years is only a flick of time in which to look for changes in man’s intellect, but it is not too short a time to look for changes in his spirit. Take so fundamental a quality as empathy, the ability to put oneself in the other fellow’s place. A century ago, even in America, one of the fundamental freedoms was the right to starve to death; a beggar could lie dying in the gutter and people would walk by unconcerned. Today, at least in lands where the standard of living has been raised by science to the point where the scramble to keep alive does not take up most of everyone’s effort, empathy has developed to the point that no one is refused food or hospitalization. Over the ages, man’s stimuli change, and gradually these change his thought processes and emotions, and through them his spiritual vigor.

The grandeur of human destiny becomes really manifest only when man is released, to some extent, from the battle for physical existence and learns that on a constantly widening scale he can become a small creator. “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul” sang Holmes, and science aids religion and art in making this literally possible. The League of Nations was an example of a new kind of attempt at political coöperation, which had a type of experience probably not unlike that of the first swarm of bees. But a later swarm of bees had learned a little by experience, as has the United Nations. Social and political evolution, like that on all other levels, is continually going on, and those who do not believe that the progress is upward use too short a yardstick.

This brings me to the $64 question. Of what use is all this building of coöperative entities from simpler ones if the simplest materials of all are not stable? If scientists can arrange their protons and neutrons so that any man can blow us up, what becomes of progress? This view does not take into account the remarkable stability of nature, of science, and of man. Though evil things do happen, any individual evil, being destructive, eventually destroys itself. So there are many checks and balances on the release of nuclear energy, and I am confident that this will emerge as a great new beneficent force when its present political implications are forgotten. It is natural for man to be fearful in the presence of any great new power given him, but he has demonstrated in the past that he has an inherent stability which enables him to win through to ever higher levels of spiritual achievement. Remove science and you remove one of the principal factors in this stability.

The basic tenets of all great religions, the distilled spiritual wisdom of humanity (as distinguished from minor theological details, regarding which many thousands of existing creeds differ), represent closely what science is revealing. The universe is based on ordered progress, not on chaotic change. Man can improve his environment, his own nature, and his opportunities. Through cooperation new entities can be formed from lesser entities which give greater purpose and achievement to existence. There is direction to living, which gives stability in the midst of change. These things the ancient sages knew; science helps to make them apparent to us all.