Acclaimed Harvard physicist Lisa Randall will address Furman students April 10 to kick off Furman Engaged!, the university’s annual celebration of liberal arts research and the work students invest into answering questions within their respective academic disciplines.
In her talk, “Religion and Science in the Modern World,” Randall will address questions about belief in the modern world and will likely draw on ideas from her book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World.”
“Science aims for a predictive physical picture that can explain how things work,” Randall writes. “The methods and goals of science and religion are intrinsically different, with science addressing physical reality, and religion addressing psychological or social human desires or needs.”
Randall’s long list of accomplishments include being named as one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People,” as well as being a prominent leader in other top publications, such as Rolling Stone’s 40th Anniversary issue, Newsweek, Seed Magazine, and Esquire.
Randall earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University and held professorships at MIT and Princeton University before returning to Harvard in 2001, where she is currently a professor of science.
Since the scientific revolution, divergent approaches to knowledge of religion and science have spurned numerous questions and much heated debate about how one comes to an understanding of the universe. Human origin and what significance it has for the race as the inheritors of thousands of years of inquiry and study of the natural and supernatural world are major aspects of Randall’s discussion.
According to Randall, the clash of methodologies between religion and science elucidates the central importance of truth for inquiring minds operating according to either methodology, or even both.
Continual attention from scholars in fields such as history, evolutionary biology, philosophy, and neuroscience, in addition to debates such as the recent Bill Nye and Kim Ham debate about creationism, highlight the continuing saga of ideological encounters. But Randall does not think the goals of each need be entirely in conflict.
For many, according to Randall, the goal of religion is not a theory that aims to explain the mechanics of the physical world. It’s a personal or social “spiritual” endeavor that encourages the harmonization of religion and science. Scientific methods of investigating the material world does not guarantee that all of one’s questions and investigations will result in an understanding of all the phenomena that we have put names to by revealing its component parts.
“The key distinction between science and religion might well be the character of the questions they choose to ask,” Randall writes. “Religion asks ‘why,’ in the sense of the presumption of an underlying purpose, whereas science asks ‘how’.”
So for Randall, religious and scientific questions focus on different aspects of the world and one’s experience of it, a notion she will explore further in her talk.
Whether or not students are familiar with Randall’s work in physics — which includes research about multiple dimensions, dark matter, and the Hadron Collider — or her analysis of the relationship of religion and science in modernity, her insights and discussion will provide new insights for students to consider.