Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [223]
Feynman’s gift to his coworkers was a credo, accreted over time and disbursed both formally and informally, in lectures and books like the 1965 Character of Physical Law and in a stance, an attitude, that seemed too natural to constitute a philosophy.
He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing. The alternative to uncertainty is authority, against which science had fought for centuries. “Great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance,” he jotted on a sheet of notepaper one day. “… teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed.”
He believed that science and religion are natural adversaries. Einstein said, “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” Feynman found this style of accommodation to be intolerable. He repudiated the conventional God: “the kind of a personal God, characteristic of Western religions, to whom you pray and who has something to do with creating the universe and guiding you in morals.” Some theologians had retreated from the conception of God as a kind of superperson—Father and King—willful, white-haired, and male. Any God who might take an interest in human affairs was too anthropomorphic for Feynman—implausible in the less and less human-centered universe discovered by science. Many scientists agreed, but his views were so rarely expressed that in 1959 a local television station, KNXT, felt obliged to suppress an interview in which he declared:
It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil—which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.
Religion meant superstition: reincarnation, miracles, virgin birth. It replaced ignorance and doubt with certainty and faith; Feynman was happy to embrace ignorance and doubt.
No scientist liked the God of Sunday school stories or the “God of the gaps”—the last-resort explanation for the unexplainable, called on through the ages to fill holes in current knowledge. Those who did turn to faith as a supplement to science preferred grander and less literal gods: “the ground of all that is,” as John Polkinghorne, a high-energy physicist turned Anglican priest, said: “Those who are seeking understanding through and through—a natural instinct for the scientist—are seeking God, whether they name him or not.” Their God did not fill gaps in the sense of particular lacunae for evolutionary theory or astrophysics—how did the universe begin?—but hovered over whole domains of knowledge: ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics. Feynman conceded the existence of genuine knowledge outside the range of science. He admitted that there were questions science could not answer, but grudgingly: he saw a danger in tying moral guidance to unpalatable myths, as religion did, and he resented the common view that science, with its merciless unraveling and explaining, was an enemy of the emotional appreciation of beauty. “Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms,” he wrote in a famous footnote.
I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part… . What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
He believed, too, in an independence of moral belief from any particular theory of the machinery