AGNOSTIC MARCELO GLEISER AND CONNECTING THE DOTS

Agnostic Marcelo Gleiser, a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College, has won this year’s Templeton Prize. Although he is not a theist, he has problems with atheistic extremism:

·       I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that” … on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that. This positions me very much against all of the “New Atheist” guys.

However, Gleiser acknowledges the profound and necessary design he observes regarding our home planet:

·       I’m a “Rare Earth” kind of guy. I think our situation may be rather special, on a planetary or even galactic scale. So when people talk about Copernicus and Copernicanism—the ‘principle of mediocrity’ that states we should expect to be average and typical, I say, “You know what? It’s time to get beyond that.” When you look out there at the other planets (and the exoplanets that we can make some sense of), when you look at the history of life on Earth, you will realize this place called Earth is absolutely amazing…right now what we know is that we have this world, and we are these amazing molecular machines capable of self-awareness, and all that makes us very special indeed. And we know for a fact that there will be no other humans in the universe; there may be some humanoids somewhere out there, but we are unique products of our single, small planet’s long history. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atheism-is-inconsistent-with-the-scientific-method-prizewinning-physicist-says/

Gleiser reasons that since we and this planet are so special, we should strive to preserve them. While I appreciate his stance, I also wonder whether he is connecting the dots of the evidences, which strongly point in the direction of theism. Besides, Gleiser is opposed to such closure:

·       I don’t want to discourage people from looking for unified explanations of nature because yes, we need that. A lot of physics is based on this drive to simplify and bring things together. But on the other hand, it is the blank statement that there could ever be a theory of everything that I think is fundamentally wrong from a philosophical perspective. This whole notion of finality and final ideas is, to me, just an attempt to turn science into a religious system, which is something I disagree with profoundly.

Gleiser doesn’t seem to realize that his dismissal of finding “finality” in a “unified explanation” (God) is not a scientific position (or finding) but a religious one – a product of his own agnosticism. Therefore, he defines research and science wrongly:

·       …research is not about the final answer, it’s about the process of discovery.

While science is a “process of discovery,” there is nothing in science that rejects the possibility of finding a “final answer.” Instead, the only thing that empowers the search is the hope that there are meaningful answers. Perhaps Gleiser and others already intuit that the one unifying and satisfying answer can only be found in a Creator.