de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 0:00 This is Episode 43 of Ethics and Culture Cast from the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. Welcome to Episode 43 of Ethics and Culture Cast from Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. I'm Ken Hallenius, the communications specialist at the Center. In this episode, we chat with Steve Barr, a theoretical particle physicist and the president of the Society of Catholic Scientists. In our conversation, we chat about the relationship between science and faith and why people of faith should not be threatened by scientific research. Let's sit down for this delightful conversation. Well, Steve, thank you very much for coming to be with us today. Steve Barr 1:02 Well, thanks for having me on. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 1:03 So tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up? Where did you do your studies? What have you been doing in the intervening years? Those sorts of things. Steve Barr 1:12 Well, I grew up in New York City. I'm from Manhattan, grew up in the Columbia University area. I actually went to Columbia as an undergraduate. I did my PhD at Princeton. And that was 41 years ago, going on 42. So I've been in physics for a long time. Did a postdoc at Penn, spent five years as a junior faculty at University of Washington, was for a time at the Brookhaven National Lab. But for the last 32 years, I've been at the University of Delaware at in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 1:45 Excellent. Well, now you are here on campus and have been on campus kind of this semester. You're the president of the Society of Catholic Scientists. So tell us a little bit about the society, how it got started, what's its mission, and why are you here at Notre Dame, kind of those, those things all together? Steve Barr 2:04 Well, I had long thought that it would be a good idea to have an organization of Catholic scientists, partly to show the world that there are a lot of Catholic scientists. Ther are a lot of religious scientists. And but the actual impetus to do it came in 2016, when a very eminent scientist who is a convert to Catholicism was mentioning that he, his pastor had been suggesting that he start one and I said, Well, I've been thinking of that for years. So he said, Why don't we do it together? So in the summer of 2016, we started from scratch, this organization, the Society of Catholic Scientists. And we now have, I think, as of today, 1140 members in at least 45 countries, though most of them are in the U.S. at the moment. We hope to expand throughout the world. So it's grown quite rapidly and I'm here at University of Notre Dame visiting the McGrath Institute for Church Life because they have a very, very exciting program, a science and religion initiative. And I work a lot with them. And we have a sort of partnership. So our permanent headquarters of our, or our physical headquarters are going to be at Notre Dame from now on. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 3:23 Wonderful. What are the so what's the mission of the society? Steve Barr 3:27 Well, the mission there, it's a four-fold mission actually. So the first is fellowship among Catholic scientists. This is very important because when you go into the academic world, not just science, you often often people keep their personal beliefs quiet, especially if if they think that they might be out of step with most of the people around them. And as a result, and this happens frequently with religious people, and as a result, many people who are Catholics or religious in the academic world in the scientific world are unaware of each other's existence, so they feel isolated. It's not that you face hostility. For the most part, what you face is a sense of isolation because you think, you don't know that there are others out there who are - also have faith. So, fellowship among Catholic scientists is our number one mission. Second is witnessing to the world, that you can be a person of faith, you can be a devout Catholic and also be a scientist. And then we also want to be a forum for discussion among Catholic scientists of we're not just among ourselves, but with theologians and philosophers about science, faith issues. And the fourth is to be an educational resource for the world for laypeople, for journalists, for pastors, for the Catholic high school teachers and so on, about science, faith issues. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:46 Wonderful. What of the makeup of the society? Like are there groups that are very well represented and others that are underrepresented? Steve Barr 4:55 Um, you mean demographically or types of science by field? de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:59 Types of science. Steve Barr 5:00 Well, we are for natural science. Now. So we're not, we don't have social scientists. So natural science, we include the life sciences and the physical sciences. We also include math. And we include computer science, computational science and any fields that are closely related. So biomedical research, some engineering if it has a basic science component to it, but basically, it's natural science rather than social science. We're pretty much equal. I, my sense from looking through our member directory is that we're probably roughly balanced between the life sciences and the physical sciences. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 5:37 Pretty good for a group that just started three years ago. Steve Barr 5:39 It started three and a third years ago and we continue to grow rapidly and and I we haven't even really begun to expand significantly in Europe and Latin America and Asia. 80% of our members are in the, are U.S.-based people. I think that we will multiply our membership several times once we start having activities in other parts of the world. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 6:03 Now have you done conferences or meetups? Steve Barr 6:05 We have an annual conference. We want, our last one was at Notre Dame as a matter of fact. Our first was in Chicago, then at Catholic U. And our next one is going to be, our 2021, is going to be at Providence College in Rhode Island. But we're hoping to start having conferences at some point in Europe, as I said, and there's going to be regional chapters we're starting to set up. And hopefully they'll be smaller regional conferences too. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 6:30 Wonderful. Well, let's delve a bit into the relationship between science and faith. Many people believe that there's kind of a real battle between the two and that faith is fighting itself a rearguard action. As scientists continue their research into processes and makeup of the physical world, they're able to explain things that maybe to our predecessors would have been considered miraculous, and thereby kind of undermine people's faith. Is that a fair assessment of the situation? Steve Barr 6:59 Well, there certainly is a battle going on. It's not really between science and faith, though there's a widespread perception that science and faith are opposed that they're somehow in conflict or in tension with each other. But that's really not the case. It also has not historically really been the case. There's a lot of misinformation about scientific history. What people don't realize is that most of the great scientists from the beginning of the science of modern science back in the, in the 16th century up until relatively recently, up until say, late in the 19th century, most of the great scientists were religious. I mean, if you look at the great figures of the scientific revolution, of the 1600s, whether it's Kepler, Galileo, or Descartes, or Pascal, or Boyle or Newton, and all the great figures were devout Christians. So the idea that there has been this war between science and religion for centuries, this is nonsense. Now it's true that in more recent times in the last century and a half, especially, you know there's more unbelief appears among scientists. And there are many reasons for that. But it's not really because anything science has discovered is contrary to the faith. As far as science explaining things that might have been considered miraculous, an important thing that people should realize, is that the art, that the the reasons people historically believed in God, were not miracles. The evidence of God, if you go back to the early Christian writings, what the Church fathers and theologians pointed to as the evidence for the existence of God was not the miraculous, it was the orderliness of nature. It wasn't things that were not that it were contrary to the laws of nature or were outside of the natural order. It was the order of nature itself. It was the lawfulness of nature that pointed to God because if there was a law, there was a law-giver. In fact, you know, if you look at the miracles of Jesus, Jesus did not perform miracles, nor did Moses, but Jesus did not perform miracles to convert atheists to believe in God. All the witnesses of his miracles were devout Jews who already believed in God. So that wasn't the function. The miraculous as it were in salvation history is not to be evidences of the existence of God. As I said, the evidence of the existence of God is the very fact that the world is orderly and lawful. That's and the fact that it exists at all so and what modern science shows us. It as, as it proceeds, it's showing us ever more clearly how orderly nature is, it's we now see the lawfulness and orderliness of nature at a far deeper level than it's ever known before. So, in fact, the argument for the existence of God is ever stronger because of the discoveries of science. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 9:47 Is it a lack of evangelization? Steve Barr 9:49 Well, I think yes, I think part, part of, that's part of the problem that is I think there has been not enough done to, well, first of all, to evangelize the culture. Explain to people who are not Catholic, who are not religious believers, to tell them about the history of science and and how to think about the relation of science and faith, but also within the church. I don't think there has been enough catechesis. So, I guess both on evangelization and catechesis, there has not been enough. Now that's changing, I think. I think there's now a number of initiatives, well the Society of Catholic Scientists is one, but the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame, its science & religion initiative is another, but the other is the bishops are aware of this of this issue, and I think you'll find more and more, Bishop Barron is doing things about science and faith and so are other groups. So I think that things are going to get better in this regard. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 10:45 Well, now, you wrote a 2018 essay for the Church Life Journal, which is also out of the McGrath Institute, our friends there, explaining that in physics, there's a type of modeling of the real universe, and you wrote "In physics, one must often make what are called simplifying assumptions, it is necessary to do so because real physical systems are far too complex to study exactly." Now this model that is proposed by physicists is theoretically infinitely perfect, though as you go on to explain that perfection can itself be a limitation, because of our limited ability to measure and even comprehend the infinite factors to make up any given real world object. You talk about a billiard ball, you know, we model a perfect billiard ball even though a real one may have scratches and, and things that would affect its real world kind of existence. Now, as I was reading this essay, I was reminded of the problem of analogy that figured so heavily in medieval theology, the idea that when humans try to explain something about God, no matter how lofty the language we use, the difference between what we can say and what God is really like is itself infinitely vast. Is that an apt similarity for the idea of the ideal world modeling that's done in physics and the language we use in theology? Steve Barr 12:10 There is some analogy there, I would hasten to say one thing. And that is, I would distinguish between the ultimate laws of physics, whatever they may be. And most physicists in my field, most physicists believe that there is some ultimate set of ultimate laws of physics, but that's the whole, that those are the laws of physics. We haven't yet found them, or we're not sure we found them. And those I think, would be exact, that is not just approximations to the world, but they would be an exact mathematical description of the physical world. But in the, in practical terms, when you're trying to describe any actual concrete system or even something like a billiard ball, even a single atom, there's so much complexity there that you, as I said, you have to make simplifying assumptions. And so you know, in reality no human being can can have a complete and accurate and perfect description of anything in the world around them because the world is far, far too complicated. And I suppose you could say there's an analogy there that just as the the actual concrete physical world is far too complicated for us to have a perfect description of it, we can not have a perfect idea of God. Though there with with God, the reason we can't we have to use analogies is that God infinitely transcends our categories of thought. God is not a, you know, all we have direct knowledge of his creatures are things that God created and they're, they're finite and, and so our concepts which are entirely based on created things cannot, cannot aptly, correctly grasp the Divine Essence with God as infinite. There's actually a better even a better analogy from the physical world. I would say as we get deeper into physics, we're getting down to things with which we have no everyday experience. So if you talk about subatomic physics, which is my field of physics, the things go on at the subatomic realm, which are very counterintuitive. You know, quantum mechanics is notoriously counterintuitive. You never, though we have very good equations, and we can calculate things to fantastic accuracy. At the gut level, no one really has an intuitive, really gut understanding of quantum mechanics because the concepts are required are so alien to our everyday experience. And so, but nevertheless, they're still about finite things. Whereas if God is not only alien to our experiences that we can't, but God is infinitely transcends any experience that we could ever have. And so, yeah, so there's a limitation. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 14:52 Yeah. While reading the essay, I will confess my brain was completely completely torn apart? Because I mean, you're talking about, about quantum, what? a field of energy and then and then particles being created in pairs. Steve Barr 15:10 Well, yeah, this, the basic language of our current theory of physics is something called quantum field theory. So, you know, as this is our current level of understanding, so there's sort of the basic things or entities in the world are quantum fields, think of electric fields, magnetic fields, gravitational fields, and so on. And, and so when you do things at the quantum level, you're talking about quantum field, and they're very interesting and mysterious, and do funny things. So yes, you can pop out of seemingly empty space a particle and an antiparticle, or the particle and an antiparticle could quote "annihilate" into various other things. Yeah, so there are strange strange goings on in the this physical world of ours. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:55 And yet like you say it's still, because it exists, it's still finite. Steve Barr 16:01 Everything. Yeah, it's finite. I mean, I'm not talking about finite in the sort of size, it could be. As far as anything we know the universe could be infinitely large. But therefore, it's more it's, they're finite in a different. God is infinite in a different sense. Not a sense that's he's infinitely large, but that he is, transcends our categories of thought. So anything we say about God, who is the great theologian said, anything we say about God, falls short. It can only be true in some analogical sense. Yeah. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 16:32 Well, now you made reference to your own field of study, your own, your own field of research and stuff. Tell us a little bit about what you actually do study and and do research on. You list particle physics, particle cosmology, grand unified theories, there are laws that have your name in them. So tell us a little bit about these things. Steve Barr 16:51 Right. So I'm in a field called, well I am retiring from active duty as a professor actually in January to devote full time to the Society of Catholic scientists. I'm about to turn 66. So it's not too early to retire. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 17:04 Congratulations. Steve Barr 17:04 I'm going to be working harder in retirement than ever before. But when I was doing active research until, you know, a year or two ago, my field was, I had several major areas I worked in, one you mentioned grand unified theories. Those have been around since the early 70s. They're mathematical theories which give a unified description of the three known non-gravitational forces. And there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that these three non-gravitational forces are all deeply connected. In fact, they're fragments if you will, remnants of what at a deeper level is a single force, hence the name grand unified force. And so I've written a lot of papers on that and a couple of them are quite well known. I also work on something that sounds esoteric. It's called CP violation, that actually has to do with the fact that nature, it almost treats particles and antiparticles symmetrically, like they're mirror images of each other, but there's actually a slight asymmetry there. Nature doesn't quite treat them exactly symmetrically and that's called CP violation. And that's very important actually. Because if, if, if nature treated particles and antiparticles, exactly, symmetrically, we wouldn't be here because all the particles and antiparticles would have been existed in equal numbers and would have annihilated and we wouldn't be left and would be no matter left to make things up. So it's a very important subject in particle physics. So I've done work on on on CP violation and what I just mentioned, which is called Baryogenesis. That is, how was it that in the early universe matter got the upper hand over the antimatter, so that there's more matter around, so that there's stuff left to make planets and people and so on? That's called Baryogenesis. And the third thing I guess, you mentioned particle, well, there's other things I work on too. It's not understood there's a lot of particles in our Standard Model of particle physics. And they have various properties. They are, each particle has a mass. Nobody understands the pattern of masses of the fundamental particles. There's clearly a patterns there, but no one understands them. And I've done a lot of work on trying to understand why different particles have the masses that they do. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 19:18 Would you say that your work in research and doing these things, what effect do they have on on you, Steve Barr, the man of faith? Steve Barr 19:28 Well, they don't - I would say if anything, they strengthen my faith. Though my faith, as I said, to the extent that the natural world is, it gives a motive for faith. It's on very basic grounds. The reasons to believe in God are not found in telescopes and test tubes. I mean, because 2000 years ago, there were reasons to believe, and 1000 years ago, they were perfectly adequate reasons to believe before people knew any science. But the, when you see the lawful, how beautiful, how deep the laws of physics are. In my field, we're dealing with the question of what are the deepest laws of physics. That, that's the name of the game in particle physics, what are the deepest laws? And we, the laws that we have on Earth, especially in the 20th century are so profound mathematically, the equations are so sophisticated, beautiful, harmonious, that one appreciates that they have been, they're the work of a great mind. That, as I say, the universe wasn't put together with Tinker Toys or Legos. The architecture is of incredible mathematical depth. And that suggests a mind at work, a very deep mind. Of course, an infinitely deep mind we know as Catholics, but in that sense, I'm constantly, I'm constantly put in awe of the world that God has made. And I should say, that's the traditional attitude. Back in 400 years ago, the great scientist Kepler, one of the first modern scientists, was a devout Lutheran and he said, "I thank thee Lord God, our Creator, that thou hast allowed me to see the beauty in thy work of creation." That was the attitude of scientists for hundreds of years. And it's still the attitude of many today. And it's the attitude of all the members of the Society of Catholic Scientists. In fact, our motto is, I think, "Research with wonder, knowledge with devotion," or something like that. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 21:24 Wonderful. And I know that you also, did I read about an award the the St. Albert the Great Award? Steve Barr 21:30 Yes, at our annual conference we give an award every year, the St. Albert Award. Last conference, our third, we gave it to Maureen Condic of University of Utah, who's a neuroscientist and... de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 21:43 Great friend of the Center. She's one of our Vita Institute professors. Steve Barr 21:46 Right she's she's great friend of the CEC. And, and the year before that we gave it to Juan Maldacena, who's a member of our organization, who may be the greatest physicist of his generation. He's at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In fact, he's in my field, particle physics, and he wrote a paper 22 years ago, that is the most highly cited paper in the entire history of theoretical particle physics. So he's a giant, a truly a giant in the field. He's up there on the level with Hawking and people like that. He's in that, he's in that league? So and he's a member of Society of Catholic Scientists and was gracious enough to accept the award and give a talk at our second conference. So and next, well, so we're giving an award at our next conference to to a professor at Johns Hopkins named Lawrence Principe, who's a chemist, but also a very well known historian of early modern science. So we have an embarrassment of riches, a lot of good people out there, we can give the award to. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 22:55 Wonderful! Well now so for those of us who are laymen, what are some good resources for the interested layperson who, who might be interested in learning more about the relationship between faith and scientific reason? Steve Barr 23:09 Okay, well, there's a whole bunch of things I could mention. I'm going to be egotistical and say, well, if you're, if you are in science, I've written a book that is, well, it's actually aimed both at professional scientists but also at the scientific layman. And it's called "Modern Physics and Ancient Faith." If you have a relative or a friend who's a scientist and wants to understand what religion is all about, this would be a good book to give them. Another book I wrote, which is a collection of essays is called "The Believing Scientist." Another book, which I cannot recommend too highly is by Christopher Baglow, who is here at Notre Dame. He's the head of the science-religion initiative here at the McGrath Institute. He wrote a book which is actually, I believe it is now coming out this month in its Second and much Revised Edition. So the title I think is, I may get it wrong "Faith, Science, and Theology" something like that, but his name is Christopher T. Baglow, Baglow. That is the first and as far as I know, the only book ever written as a textbook on science and faith for Catholic schools. So it can be used in Catholic high schools, but also even at the university level, it's a, it's a brilliant book. Everyone should go out and get a copy of that. We're trying to put more resources on our Society of Catholic Scientists' website. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 24:33 Which is? Steve Barr 24:34 Which is, well just if you google Catholic and scientists, you'll find us but, it's www.CatholicScientists.org. And as in the next few months, we're going to be putting up some educational material there. There are books by non Catholics that I would recommend. There's a book by Francis Collins, who's, though he's not Catholic, but his theology is basically Catholic. And he's a very eminent scientist in that his book is called "The Language of God." And it explains how it is that he as an adult became a believer. I warn you that the appendix has some bioethics that's not acceptable from a Catholic point of view. But who reads appendices? The book itself is a terrific book. So and there's a lot of good books out there. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 25:20 One last question. Are there some emerging areas of scientific research that a person of faith might keep an eye on? Steve Barr 25:27 Well, I probably not that a person of faith has to keep an eye on, a fearful eye on. One thing that Catholics should realize, religious people should realize, so don't live in fear that science is about to discover something radical revolutionary, that's going to overturn the apple cart. Suddenly all the reasons to believe in God are gone. They've explained why the universe exists. They've explained, show that we have no free will or whatever. You will read articles in the media that are hyped. Anything you read in the science media. If you want to know how important the discovery actually was, divide by 10. Because there's an enormous amount of hype. The whole thesis of my book "Modern Physics and Ancient Faith" was that actually a number, I list five, of the really great discoveries in the 20th century brought our picture of the world closer, much closer to a traditional religious view of the universe and our place in it, than the scientific picture had been before the 20th century. So don't imagine that science, every discovery leads us away from faith. Some of them may appear to do that, because the road of scientific discovery is a winding road, and at times the road seems to be veering away from what we believe as Catholics, but you should be confident that in the end, the road will lead back and, and it has, in a number of major areas. As when it seemed to be moving away it before the 20th century, actually changed course and and right now, I can't think of any areas where I'd be worried about anything. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 27:04 Well, that is a great positive message of hope though, too. Steve Barr 27:07 Yeah. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 27:08 Wonderful. Well, Steve Barr, thank you so much for coming to be with us. And thank you for the work that you and the Society do. Steve Barr 27:15 Well, thank you. And thank you for all the work that the CEC does. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 27:23 Thank you to Steve Barr. You will find links to his book and the others that he suggested, as well as a talk that he gave on the myth of conflict in the show notes. Subscribe to Ethics and Culture Cast so that you can always get the latest episodes by visiting ethicscenter.nd.edu/podcast. We would love your feedback. Please review the show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts and email your suggestions to cecpodcast@nd.edu. Our theme music is "I Dunno" by grapes, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. We'll see you next time on Ethics and Culture Cast. Until then, make good decisions. Transcribed by https://otter.ai