This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Apart from being my sister’s birthday, today sees the coincidence of two important occasions.
Muslims will begin the holy month of Ramadan in which attention is paid – individually and collectively – to examining the soul, and fasting confronts them with mortality.
But, today also sees the launch of SPHEREx, the new NASA telescope which it says will “create the most colourful map of the cosmos ever made”. It is intended to map the entire sky in 3D, in wavelengths invisible to the human eye. According to the blurb, it will tell us something about the origins of the universe, the growth of galaxies across time, the location of water and life-forming molecules in our own galaxy. The point of this is to help us to understand how the universe came into being and how life came to be.
Pretty ambitious – which it needs to be at a cost of 488 million dollars.
Now, there are going to be some religious people who say it’s a waste of money because holy scriptures tell us all we need to know. And there will be scientists who think all that’s discovered will ultimately debunk the fairy stories of faith. Both are misguided.
One of the problems we face in these – largely fruitless debates – is that the creation and evolution of the universe is subject to certain very different questions. As I said in a conversation with one of our most prominent UK scientists – an agnostic cosmologist: you look at the universe and go, “Wow, how did that happen?” … whilst I look at the universe and go, “Wow, why did that happen?” They are two different questions and therefore shouldn’t be confused.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that the mere existence of something does not allow us to derive from it any moral imperative. “You can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’” is a very crude summary of his point. So, learning about the mechanics of how the universe came to be – and continues to be – matters enormously; but, it can’t tell us what life might mean in terms of the soul or human meaning.
Equally, faith can address the existential and spiritual questions that human beings live with – and their material consequences – but has little to say about astrophysics itself.
And scriptures? Well, Genesis accounts of creation address the question of ‘why’, not ‘how’. The poetry of scripture does not ask scientific questions – although it might address the meaning of what the scientific questions throw up.
So, we can celebrate the stuff of the soul without confusing it with the mapping of the sky.