Science, Faith, and the Nobel Prize
Phillips, William
I first met Bill Phillips about 11 years ago. I was a brand new, graduate student at the University
of Wisconsin and Bill had come to Madison to give a talk. In those days using lasers to make
atoms cold was really big news, and in the atomic physics world it was almost a revolution.
Everybody thought they knew how you could use light to cool down atoms, as all of you former
and present physical science 100 students know. Motion is defined as temperature, its heat, and
if you make an atom slow down, then you make it cold. Well, if you shine light onto an atom it
will bounce off and give the atom a tiny push, and if you push your atom in the exactly right way
you can slow it down, and you can almost bring it to rest. Well that was the half of the story,
Bill’s work actually showed that the ideas behind laser cooling were much more subtle and the
results were much more dramatic than anybody had really ever expected. And you’re all invited
to hear the rest of that story tonight at 7:30 in the JSB auditorium while Bill Phillips will be
doing liquid nitrogen, and fire, and smoke, and men being chopped in half, and women fainting,
and children crying… or maybe not. But, it will be a free date. You’re all invited to come at 7:30
in the JSB auditorium. So I sat there listening to Bill with stars in my eyes. He was everything
that a young, aspiring, graduate student hoped to be. He was famous; he was a fabulous
speaker; he had all the best toys for doing his research; he got paid for doing his hobby. And I
thought, gee, how could I be like that. A few years later I ended up working for him in his lab. I
learned that Bill was all of these things, of course, and more.
Bill was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He attended college at Juniata College, which is a
small religious school. He earned his PhD from MIT and received the Wiseman fellowship there
for post-doctoral studies and stayed for two more years. He eventually moved to the National
Bureau of Standards where he’s been ever since. He’s published a gazillion articles; he shared
in the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in laser cooling; he leads one of the largest and
most productive atomic physics research groups in the world; he’s a member of the national
academy of science and you know, fill-in-the-blank… blank… blank. But, I don’t think Bill really
cares about any of it. He jokes that when he got the Nobel Prize in Physics everybody said,
“Hey! I should have won it for that,” because it was a big field. I think that if none of this had
happened, if fame had completely passed Bill Phillips by, he would be fundamentally the same
person. He’s a deeply religious person, active in his faith, committed to his family, engaged in all
kinds of Christian service, and a wonderful example for all of us. Please join me in welcoming
Bill Phillips.
Well thanks Scott for that lovely introduction. I do want to correct one thing. The children don’t
cry, they love the things. So if you got kids, they’ll love it too, so do come.
You know, I’m kind of surprised to find myself here. After all, what is a physicist doing, giving
the forum at BYU? Until about four years ago, nobody was interested in my views about
religion, except maybe the 100 or so people that go to my church. Fewer still were interested in
my views about science and religion, and here I am. How did this come about? Well, a little
more than four years ago, I was attending a meeting in Long Beach, California, and in the middle
of the night I got a call from Stockholm. Later that morning they held a press conference to note
the event. And I got a little clip from that press conference and I’ll show you how it all got
started.
Video Playing
Okay, this is someone introducing me.
And here directly on my left is this year’s victim, William D. Phillips, from the National
Institution of Standard and Technology who won the prize for the development of methods to
cool and trap atoms using laser light.
Well that was the first time I’d heard myself referred to as a victim for the Nobel Prize, but the
significance of that become more and more clear to me as time went on. Now, also I did a lot of
smiling that day and I think I didn’t stop smiling for about three days. I never imagined that this
was going to happen.
This is really incredible for me. I never imagined that this was going to happen. It’s just such an
indescribable thrill for me to be able to join the company of people like Bart and Rob. It’s hard
to know what to say. One of the things I want to do is thank a lot of people. To begin with, I think
that God has given us an incredibly fascinating world to live in and to explore, and I’m really
thankful that I’ve had a chance to explore a little bit of that and to have a great deal of fun doing
it.
Video Stopped
Okay, so that was what started it all. That rather innocent statement on my part got me branded
as the religious laureate. So people started asking me about my views on science and religion
even though I didn’t know anything about science and religion. I had never studied the topic, I
hadn’t developed very clear ideas about it, but one of the problems with the Noble Prize is that
people, all of the sudden think that you know something about everything. Now, I know a lot
about laser cooling, but I didn’t know much about science and religion. What you have to do is
understand that even though people think you know something about everything that in fact you
don’t. But people kept asking me about these things, for example, a television crew from Sweden
came to the United States. They wanted to film me in my laboratory, in my home, and in my
church. Here’s a little clip from Swedish televisions that was picked up by CNN.
Video Playing
Reporter: The religious faith that Bill Phillips celebrates at his church is also part of his
scientific work.
Bill Phillips: I believe that God has given us a natural world. That is full of wonder and full of
exciting possibilities to explore. And I really believe that God rejoices with us when we discover
something new about the world He has created. And I believe He created such an interesting
world so that we could have fun.
Video Stopped
Well, in Sweden the Nobel Prizes are kind of a mixture of the Academy Awards and the Super
Bowl, in other words, it’s a really big deal. So they have these interviews with all of the Nobel
Laureates, they’re showing them on television weeks before. It’s like up-close and personal with
the Nobel Laureates. So continuing to the day of the ceremony, which are televised live all
throughout the country, the ceremony, the banquet, the ball afterwards. Just before the ceremony,
the Swedish television ran a clip from the same time. So it’s a little different what Swedish
television decided to show as compared to CNN.
Video Playing
Swedish Reporter: Swedish words
Bill Phillips: Many people have said that Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the
week in the United States. Whereas blacks and whites are often together in the work place and in
other places, but in houses of worship, that very often we don’t have blacks and whites together.
So our church is very special in that way. The history of the joining of these three churches, more
out of necessity, I think, because of the fact that they were too small to survive on their own, has
given us a great blessing. To join together people from other backgrounds, different ethnic and
cultural backgrounds, in this one church.
When I was a child I was in churches that were all white. I never heard the kind of music that I
now sing. For me, it was a wonderful thing, first to be able to hear the kind of music, the style, in
which music from the black tradition is sung, but then to be allowed to become part of the choir,
to sing this music, for me it’s been a great joy.
That’s one of my all-time favorites. Anyway, so after this there’s the ceremony. Well I’m not
going to bore you with this. There are 1,800 people in the concert hall in Sweden. They’ve got a
full concert orchestra. The most important thing is that when the Laureates march in, the
physicists come in first, because physics is the most important thing. It’s because Nobel
mentioned physics in his will first, so the physics is always first. Here come the physicists, I’m
the third one in line.
We have to get up and go and… I was so nervous. I was so glad… alphabetical order. That
meant Chu went first, which was a good thing, because I was so nervous I wanted to get a chance
to see how everyone else did it.
So you get the prize, you bow to the King, you bow to the cabinet, you bow to the audience.
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji from France seemed to just have that European savoir faire, he knew
just what to do. I was just so nervous, I was afraid I was going to drop the stuff on the King’s
toe. Extra bows, make sure I didn’t forget anybody. There’s my family, my sister, my sister-inlaw, my daughters, my wife. It was really an incredible thing. Remember, they have a concert
orchestra there, they got a world-class soprano, it was everything. Afterwards, there’s a banquet,
we’re going to see a little bit of that.
So there’s a banquet procession. The King comes in, the Queen. I’m right behind the princesses.
These are two princesses. Now the woman in the orange dress is my partner. She’s the speaker of
the parliament. The physicists come in right behind the royalty. And when it comes to sit down, I
sit with the Queen. And she’s thinking right now, why does it always have to be a physicists?
Well anyway, so after the banquet, there are more interviews. People are still interested for
reasons that are still escaping me, in my views on science and religion. So here’s one of these
interviews.
Reporter: You are a religions man?
Bill: Well I like to describe myself as a person who has faith.
Reporter: Yes, very good.
I don’t think she understood there was any distinction there because she didn’t bother translating
that for her Swedish audience.
Reporter: What about the conflict between religion and science?
This always seems to be the focus of what people want to talk about.
Bill: Well, I don’t find a conflict. I know that some people see conflicts. But for me, I see the
lessons of religion telling us about how we should live our lives in relationship to other people.
And I see the lessons of science telling us the way in which God has constructed our universe. So
I don’t see a conflict between the two areas.
Video Stopped
Well, I can probably imagine all sorts of better answers I could have given. But the point that I
want to make is, that this seems to be the focus of a lot of people’s question, “what about the
conflict between science and religion?” “How do you reconcile science and religion?”
It makes me think of an incident that happened some years ago, when my older daughter was in
high school, and she was having a conversation with one of her good friends. And the fried said,
“Well, my mother is a scientist, so of course, she is an atheist.” And my daughter said, “You
can’t walk across the fellowship hall of our church without tripping over six physicists.”
And this misconception, which seems to be very prevalent in the public and even among lots of
scientists, is something that I think needs to be addressed, and people need to stand up and say
“no, this is not a problem.” So if there’s nothing else that you remember from what I’m telling
you this morning, here is the basic message. That an ordinary scientist with ordinary religious
faith is nothing unusual. I’m a physicists, I study how the universe works. I see in that universe
beauty, order, simplicity. I see everything played out according to a few simple rules. When I
look at all that, it is very difficult for me, and very difficult for many scientists to escape the
conclusions that an intelligent creator is behind all this. Now, does that make my belief in God
scientific? No, it doesn’t. And I’ll explain that in a moment. But neither does it make by belief in
God irrational. By belief in God is completely consistent with, I believe, everything I know about
science. But it is not based on science. Why do I say that? Scientific statements are falsifiable.
That means, if I make a scientific statement, I could also tell you what kind of experiment you
could do, where if the outcome turned out a certain way, I would then have to give up believing
in that statement. For example, let’s say that I say that plants need light to grow. What you do is
you take the plant, you put it in the dark, and if it grows, then I’m wrong! When you take some
green, leafy plant and put it in the dark and it doesn’t grow, then I say, “Gee, that’s good, you
haven’t proved me wrong.” And then when you finally take a mushroom and put it in the dark,
and it grows, I say, “Oh, I guess that was wrong.” We’re going to have to refine the statement.
Then I’ll say, “Green plants need light to grow.” If you keep doing that kind of thing, that’s
science. You learn all about photosynthesis and how green plants work. The point is, if you’re
going to make a scientific statement, it has to be coupled with some kind of understanding of
what you would do to show that the statement is false. Now, if I say, “God created the Heavens
and the Earth,” I can’t tell you anything that you’re going to do, that if it turned out a certain
way, that I would cease to believe that that was so. And that’s why I say that my belief is not
scientific, but it’s absolutely rational. Let me play you another tape.
This is Brazilian television.
Video Playing
Bill: I know that people find it difficult to reconcile the understandings of science and the
insights of faith. But, I guess it’s just a matter of how you approach it. *Sparkling sound effect*
Wouldn’t it be great, if in real life, whenever you said something, no matter how inane, that there
were these lights from heaven that would come down and affirm what you had just said?
Through the magic of television editing that can happen, apparently on Brazilian television.
Okay, let me explain what’s going on here. This is a lecture given by Steven Hawking at the
White House. Now, I think most of you know that Steven Hawking suffers from neurological
disease. He cannot speak. He cannot move anything except his right thumb. With that he can
compose things on a computer, he can answer questions. But if someone asks him a question, it
takes him a few minutes before he can compose the answer. So in order to avoid any dead time
on television, they planted a few scientists in the audience to answer questions that had been sent
in by students beforehand. So this is me responding to one of those questions.
Reporter: University of Maryland student Daniel Manila, which I’d like to direct to Dr. William
Phillips, 1997 Nobel Laureate in physics. Dr. Phillips, why does the universe obey any laws at
all?
Bill: Well, that’s a really good question, and I really wish I had a really good answer for it. It’s
the kind of question that has intrigued and vexed scientists and, I suppose, philosophers and
theologians for a long time. It’s really quite remarkable. All of the wonderful things that
Professor Hawking talked about can actually be described in a very small number of relatively
simple equations, and then a lot of complicated mathematics. Why is it that the universe is so
simple? Why is it that it follows mathematical laws? Well people have speculated about this, and
one possible answer is, that if the universe had been any different from what it is, we wouldn’t be
here. That is, if the laws of the universe hadn’t been what they are, or if there were no laws at
all, it would have been impossible for life to have evolved; it would have been impossible for us
to have evolved to the point where we could ask that question. That’s sometimes called the
anthropic principle, not, perhaps, to put too much emphasis on people. But it probably applies to
amoebas as well, that they wouldn’t have been able to evolve either. On the other hand, there is
another answer, which isn’t actually that far from that answer. And if you’re a person with
religious faith, as I am, you could answer that the reason we have a universe that follows laws is
because God decided to make the universe in that way. Because God wanted us to develop the
way we have, and to evolve the way we have. This is of course a philosophical and theological
answer and it has more to do with one’s faith than one’s scientific conclusions, but it’s an
answer I like very much and that I don’t find very different from the first one.
Video Stopped
This idea about the anthropic principle is an illustration of how completely rational a belief in
God is. The odds against having the universe that we have are absolutely astronomical, and most
of the other universes that one could imagine, there’s no reason to believe that the universe
couldn’t have been different. Most of the other universes one could imagine would never even
have produced planets, let alone life. So why is it that we live in a universe that seems so
remarkably fine-tuned for the development of life? If the amount of matter in the universe had
been different by some incredibly tiny fraction, then stars never would have formed and planets
never would have formed and we never would have come into being. So why is it that we live in
such a universe that seems so remarkably fine-tuned for life? One answer is, “Well what do you
expect? Here we are, of course we have to be in a universe like that.” But that’s not a very
satisfying answer, and a lot of people have come to the conclusion that a good answer to this is
because God wanted it to be that way. Now other people have come to different conclusions and
they’ve presented possible alternatives that there are a gazillion other universes that are all doing
something else and don’t have any life in them, and we have no communication with those
universes. Well, that appeals to some people but it’s an idea that’s completely without any
support scientifically, it’s just an alternative idea. And so a lot of people, a lot of scientists, have
decided that it makes perfect sense to believe in God, and many have come to the opposite
conclusion. And some of these scientists have taken this orderliness of the universe, its design,
as a place that is suitable for life, its simplicity and its regularity as a kind of definition of God,
God as a sort of cosmic intelligence. Sometimes people call this Einstein’s God. Einstein
affirmed a belief in a creative intelligence, but without personality and without will.
Well, I believe in an intelligent creator, but I also believe in a personal God, a God who wants a
personal relationship with each one of us, a God who infuses our lives with joy, a God who
wants good things for us, and who wants us to love one another as he loves us. Why do I believe
that? Where is the evidence? And the answer is this is not a scientific belief, it’s faith. What
does the book of Hebrews say about faith? Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen. That’s the kind of evidence I have for that kind of a belief in God.
Faith is a way of knowing that is different from the way of science.
The great physicist Freeman Dyson has said that science and religion look through different
windows at the same reality. I love that image because in life we are always looking through
different windows at the same life. We look at life through all kinds of different windows.
When we appreciate art, or music, or food, we’re not generally being scientific. The fact that I
prefer French Impressionist painters to French Romantics is not something that I arrived at by a
scientific procedure. That doesn’t make this any less important to me than a scientific choice
that I make like preferring the kinetic theory of heat over the Phlogiston theory. It’s just
different. And the fact is that I do not want to be scientific about my taste in art, or music, or
food. How dull life would be for a scientist if he only looked at life through the window of
science. Even those highly trained biologists walking in the moonlight hand in hand with a
beloved companion does not want to appreciate that experience through the window of
biochemistry. A hard-nosed physicist who demands empirical evidence to back up any physical
idea will not want to experience love using the scientific method. So if I as a scientist am
willing, and even eager, to commit an important part of my life to something as non-scientific as
love, then why should anyone be surprised that I’m willing to make a similarly unscientific
commitment to God? You’ll hear some people say, “How can you believe in a personal God.
Where is he? Where is the evidence that such a being exists and interacts with us?” Even some
theologians have concluded that in the age of science a traditional understanding of God must be
abandoned. I go to a monthly meeting about science and religion, and one time we had a local
theologian. He wrote a book about “How do you understand God in the scientific age?” And he
gave a description of his new understanding of God as a kind of a symbol of the unity of all of
nature, and during the question period someone said to him, “Well, what you’re describing
sounds an awful lot like Atheism.” And he said, “Well, I guess most people would say I’m an
Atheist.” Now, consider the irony of this. This is a theologian, and ordained minister, who has
come to the conclusion that in an age of science, the only reasonable response is to be an Atheist.
I’m standing before you as a scientist, telling you that’s nonsense. To insist on applying
scientific methods for religious questions is just as inappropriate as trying to use religious
scripture as scientific text. Some of the same scientists who point out, as they should, that the
Bible is not a science book, fail to recognize that it is just as inappropriate to demand scientific
methods of religion.
Well, there are a lot of other things I could say about science and religion, about the differences
in the kinds of questions that science and religion ask. Science answers questions like, “How did
things come to be the way they are? What was the sequence of events that led to our world, the
organisms that populate our world being the way they are?” Religion asks questions like, “What
is the relationship between us and our creator? What does God want for us? What does God
expect for us? What should be the relationship between us and our fellow creatures?” Now,
these are very different kinds of questions, and they require different kinds of methods to answer
those questions. Sometimes these questions overlap. I believe that the Bible teaches us that all
of us are brothers and sisters. Science tells us that our DNA is all the same, that if we look in
any human population, that we will find within that isolated human population 80% of all the
genetic diversity that exists throughout the whole human family. Well if that isn’t evidence of
the fact that we are all brothers and sisters, I don’t know what is. So here is an instance where
science reinforces the insights that have been given to us by religion. But, by and large, science
and religion are addressing different kinds of questions and are using different kinds of methods.
But even the methods are sometimes not all that different. I was brought up in the Methodist
church, and I was taught that we are to have as the foundation of our religious understanding four
pillars, sometimes called the Methodist Quadrilateral: scripture, tradition, reason, and
experience. Now if you think about that, that’s really not that much different from science. In
science we rely very much on received knowledge. We have our textbooks, we have the lectures
of our professors, and that’s an awful lot like scripture and tradition. Now there’s a difference.
In science we can do experiments and we can test the things that are told to us in our textbooks.
Very often we don’t, but we could in principle, so there is a difference. And reason and
experience, that’s what science is all about, theory and experiment. So, there’s not all that much
difference between the kinds of things that we use. We use our minds; we use the intellect that
God has given us when we search the scriptures for understanding about religion. And so these
areas, while they are certainly different, are not completely separate.
I could also talk about how important the study of religion is, to me in particular, and this may
surprise you to say that when it comes to science and religion, I don’t really think it’s that
important a topic. I don’t expect when I have to face judgment that anybody is going to be
asking me about my views on science and religion. I mean, after all, what does the prophet
Micah say? “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with your God.” So here’s the message that I’ve got for you today: An ordinary
scientist with ordinary faith is no anomaly, and I stress the ordinary part. As a scientist I’m not
seen as some kind of a nutcase, I am very conventional. As a person of faith, my beliefs are not
much different from the others in my congregation or in the wider church, no weird or wild
unorthodoxies. Ordinary faith, ordinary science. I don’t bring any great insights on the relation
of science and religion, I don’t have some imaginative and compelling argument, and I don’t
have some imaginative and compelling argument to convince the Atheists to believe. What I
bring is a simple witness: Ordinary faith and ordinary science are neither enemies nor strangers.
Thank you very much.