Free Knocking on Heaven's Door by Lisa Randall Page B

seventeenth-century British author Sir Thomas Browne wrote in his Religio Medici, “I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo.” 12 For Browne and others like him, logic and the scientific method are believed to be insufficient to access all truth—which they trust religion alone to address. The key distinction between science and religion might well be the character of the questions they choose to ask. Religion includes questions that fall outside the domain of science. Religion asks “why,” in the sense of the presumption of an underlying purpose, whereas science asks “how.” Science doesn’t rely on any sense of an underlying goal for nature. That is a line of inquiry we leave to religion or philosophy, or abandon altogether.
    During our Los Angeles conversation, the screenwriter Scott Derrickson told me that there was originally a line in The Day the Earth Stood Still (he directed a remake of the 1951 version in 2008) which troubled him so much that he thought about it for days afterward. The Jennifer Connolly character, when talking about her husband’s death, was supposed to have commented that “the universe is random.”
    Scott was disturbed by those words. Underlying physical laws do include randomness, but their whole point is to encapsulate order so that at least some aspects of the universe can be regarded as predictable phenomena. Scott told me that it took several weeks after the line was removed for him to identify the word he had been looking for—“indifferent.” My ears perked up when I heard that exact line in the TV show Mad Men, enunciated by the lead character, Don Draper, in a way that made it sound distasteful.

    But an unconcerned universe is not a bad thing—or a good one for that matter. Scientists don’t look for underlying intention in the way that religion often does. Objective science simply requires that we treat the universe as indifferent. Indeed, science in its neutral stance sometimes removes the stigma of evil from human conditions by pointing to their physical, as opposed to moral, origins. We now know, for example, that mental disease and addiction have “innocent” genetic and physical sources that can shift them into the category of diseases exempt from the moral sphere.
    Even so, science doesn’t address all moral issues (though it doesn’t disown them either as is sometimes alleged). Nor does science ask about the reasons for the universe’s behavior or inquire into the morality of human affairs. Though logical thinking certainly helps in dealing with the modern world and some scientists today do search for physiological bases for moral actions, science’s purpose, broadly speaking, is not to resolve the status of humans’ moral standing.
    The dividing line isn’t always precise, and theologians can sometimes ask scientific questions while scientists might get their initial ideas or directions from a worldview that inspires them—sometimes even a religious one. Moreover, because science is done by human beings, intermediate stages during which scientists are formulating their theories will frequently involve unscientific human instincts such as faith in the existence of answers or emotions about particular beliefs. And, needless to say, this works the other way too: artists and theologians can be guided by observations and a scientific understanding of the world.
    But these sometimes blurry divisions don’t eliminate the distinctions in ultimate goals. Science aims for a predictive physical picture that can explain how things work. 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.

    The separate aims shouldn’t be a source of conflict—in fact they seem in principle to create a nice division of labor. However, religions don’t always stick to questions of purpose or comfort. Many