Wesley Clark on Science & Faith

There was a big blogging conference last week in Las Vegas. It was called YearlyKos and it was sponsored by one of the largest liberal bloggers: DailyKos. You can read more about the conference here.

But what caught my attention was an address given by retired General Wesley Clark on science and faith to the Science bloggers. After talking about his own experience growing up in the south and being turned on to science by his school teachers and the rapid advances made in science because of the space race, he turned his attention to the current political atmosphere about science:

And today, I'm sorry to tell you, all that is at risk today. And the distinguished members of this panel are going into it in a lot more detain than than I will. They'll tell you about the cutbacks in basic research and science. They'll talk to you about the politicization of scientific findings, whether it's in the federal Food and Drug Administration or the office of the White House Science Advisor, whether it has to do with the Morning After pill or stem cell research or global warming. It is shocking that the political party that professed to believe in freedom and liberty is trying to impose it's political will on the province of science. It's absolutely turned its own principles in its head in the purest demonstration of political hypocrisy you can see in the American stage today. And that is the Republican Party.

(applause)

But what particularly worries me is the conflict that's out there between faith and reason, between faith and science. There's nothing new about this conflict. It's as old as Christianity and even older. It's always been there as men sought to reason their way into an understanding of the world around us, and women sought to reason their way into an understanding of the world around us, and others sought to prevent it. Whether it was the Copernican theory of the solar system or Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas in trying to merge faith and reason, it's a long-standing conflict.

You know when I was growing up in Arkansas, everyone read about the Scopes trial in Tennessee in, in 19, 1924. And, and that was considered for the 1950s as the height of, of lunacy. And now, what do I find across my beloved South in the United States? I find teachers throughout the area who cannot use the dreaded 'E' word. I'm not talking about e-mail.

(laughter)

I'm talking bout E-volution. They can't use it. It's like they're (inaudible) a science teacher from my home state in, in a, in a newspaper, and he says, "Well, I got these rocks in the classroom, and I'm teaching science. And these rocks, they're, they're, they're pretty old, you know. They palea-" It's, it's, I don't know what, "Mesozoic rocks, you know 200, 300, 400 million years old," and so forth. He says, "But I can't say that in the classroom." They say, "Well, what do you say?" He says, "I say. "these rocks, they're very old."'

(laughter)

He says, "Because if I say it, one of these students may go home and say, 'Daddy, that, that teacher he's teaching us something. He's saying stuff's older than, older than the, the Book of Genesis. He's saying it started before 4004 BC, and he's teaching us stuff that it conflicts with our faith. And he's trying to keep us from having our faith."' And across America, well-meaning teachers are running scared. They're running scared because we haven't built for them the kind of support network that lets them fully engage the young minds in their charge, fully deal with natural human curiosity and provide them access to the facts that the, our own hard work and labors have created.

I mean, imagine Isaac Newton is relaxing under the apple tree, and you know the story, right? There's an apple and it falls off the tree, and (pop). And he says, 'Gee, I wonder why that apple fell.' And from that comes, you know, the formula for gravity. I think it was like, S=½AT², when I was taking physics-

(drowned out by laughter)

You know, gravity works at like 16 feet per second, per second, and Newton figured all this out, you know, in, in the 17th century, but he didn't have to. What he could have said is, 'I was sitting under the apple tree, and God punished me (laughter) for relaxing. And so, he made an apple fall on my head.'

(laughter)

And Roy Chapman Andrews , who was one of the real early Paleontologists - I was one of those kids, I read "All About Dinosaurs". Did you ever read that book in the Landmark series for, for youngsters. I'm, I'm dating myself. I know.

(laughter)

So, Roy Chapman Andrews goes to China in the 1930s and is picking up rocks and he's looking, and he's seeing bones sticking out. And it was when we really began to discover the full extent of the, of the Jurassic Era. And Roy Chapman Andrews could have said, 'I see a bone sticking out, but it's not really a bone. It's actually, it was put there by God to test my faith in the Book of Genesis.' He could have said that, but he didn't.

Because you see, I think this is an artificial, it's an artificial, manufactured crisis. It's designed by some in authority to maintain authority over spheres in which they are not competent. I believe there are incredible mysteries in the universe, mysteries that the mind of man doesn't understand and may never understand. And I see in no way in which the advancement of science and the pursuit of knowledge by mankind is in any way threatening to the idea of a supreme being or a greater creator.

Read Leonard Suskind's new book, called "The Cosmic-" It's called "The Cosmic Landscape And Intelligent Design" if you want to see something that's overpowering. Suskind is the inventor of cosmic string theory, and what he does is he takes cosmic- he takes the idea of the universe. He says the universe is- see, what's happening in intelligent design is people are saying, 'Ah well, you see, the, the, the wavelength of, of, of the electron and Planck's Constant and all these numbers are so odd. They don't- they're not even numbers, you know. They, they, they don't balance each other. It's sort of 1.- It's like the figure of pi, 3.14159... Why would it be such an odd number? Why, why wouldn't God make the universe, you know, symmetrical?'

(laughter)

Then they said, 'well, because, you know, it's like there's only one on 10 to the 50th chance that the universe could have worked out in a way that mankind could survive. Therefore, you know, this must have been an intelligent designer who created this universe especially for us.' What Suskind does is he turns it on its head. He says, "You know, if you look at string theory and the 9+1 dimensions" or 10+1 dimensions, and I'm not sure how he knows that time only has one dimension, but he does. (inaudible) would say I'm very arrogant for questions questioning this.

(laughter)

But what Suskind does is he turns it upside down. He says, "Look there are- there is an infinite number of universes." He calls it a multiverse, and he says that however the motive forces, and nobody understands why quarks pop in and out of existence. Nobody understands it, but apparently they do. And apparently there are many, many universes, and we're here in this one. And maybe there are others in which Planck's Constant has a different number, in which the speed of light is not 186,200 miles per second. Who knows? We don't know.

There is incredible mystery out there, and what I believe is that God did create us and put us on this earth to use what he gave us, which is our imagination, our intelligence, our hands, our minds, our ears to study, to learn, to create, and we must do that. We must do it, because it's in our nature as human beings to push beyond the frontier, to ask the impossible questions. We can't be any other way. We're no different than our ancestors a thousand generations ago who gnawed on the bone of the woolly mammoth, threw it into the fire, stumbled out of the cave, laid on their back and looked up at the stars and said, 'What are those specks of light?' And I think that we're closer and closer to finding out, and I think that's our destiny, and I think God wants it that way.

Thank you

(applause)

If you believe like I do, you got to fight back on this. You've got to seek more improvements in the quality of education. You've got to write in to your newspapers. You've got to speak out on talk radio. You've got to have the nerve to call up and argue, and I know you do.

(laughter)

And you've got to help us put this together into a new national strategy of competitiveness, because there are big problems ahead for this country if we don't create a new national strategy of investing in our young people in science and technology. We simply have to do it, and we need your support and your leadership to make it happen. We can do it. We can take this country forward again. We can create a new Golden Age of innovation and science and technology in America.

There are whole worlds of knowledge waiting to be discovered in nano-science, in human science, in physics, in material science and in all of the applications that can make life better and safer and more convenient for all of us, but only if we open our eyes, only if we acknowledge the reality of the condition we're in, only if we beat back the challenges that come from well-meaning people of faith who argue against the very kind of exploration that God gave us the power to do. We have to take back our world and advance the frontiers of knowledge. That is our destiny. That's why you're here at this panel. And now that we're talking about it, we're going to get a lot more information out. We expect you all to get out and help us do it. This is about action, not just talk.

As a Christian, I don't think there is anything more disheartening than seeing the conservative Christian attack on science. In one way or another it is happening in every school district in the country. And it is crippling the minds of children, hurting the competitiveness of our country, and making a travesty of the faith tradition I belong to and care about. And a special pox on the shameless politicians who pander to it.

Update: Someone sent me an e-mail regarding my very last sentence about shameless politicians wondering if I was referring to Wesley Clark. He is most definitely not who I had in mind. I was referring to the kind of politician who is smart enough to be a physician or surgeon but desperate enough to be President that they will pander to right wing Christians even if it means they have to pretend that the science they use to save lives doesn't exist.