Science and Religion in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons
Angels and Demons is a best-selling novel by Dan Brown. The movie directed by Ron Howard starred Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer. The theme is a convoluted plot to blow up Vatican City with an antimatter bomb. As in every book that mixes fact and fantasy there is a risk that the truth will be contaminated by the fiction. For this reason, the Vatican balked at allowing the filming of the movie in the churches where the book was set. To help draw the line between fact and fiction with respect to antimatter, the American Physical Society set up a series of lectures around the country. One such public lecture was held here at the University of Alabama on May 22, 2009 . However, a deeper theme of Brown is the tension between science and religion.
In the book, Galileo Galilei, one of the founders of modern physics, was part of a countercultural group of intellectuals, the "illuminati". In one of his treatises on physics, he supposedly encoded four clues to the location of the meeting place of the illuminati. Implausibly, the clues were written in English with the help of master poet John Milton. Whoever succeeded in decoding the clues was deemed worthy of admission to the secret society of the illuminati. According to the book, the Catholic Church reacted by violently suppressing the illuminati culminating in a massacre of the illuminati in which their bodies were branded with the symbol of the Church. To avenge this massacre, the modern remnants of the illuminati determined to destroy Vatican City with a bomb constructed from a sample of antimatter stolen from the European particle physics laboratory, CERN. The book talks about a "war" between science and religion.
All of this, of course, is pure fable. The truth is that the illuminati originated more than a hundred years after Galileo died, they attempted to ally themselves with the masons in Munich without much success, and went out of existence early in the nineteenth century. Their founder ended his years as a respected parish priest.
The notion of a war between science and religion is also pure fable except in the minds of a fanatic fringe in each camp. A friend of mine once told me that there were three types of people: the "theists" who believe in an infinitely intelligent external force who created the universe by an act of his will, the "atheists" who disavow any such being, and the "apatheists" who just don't care or who don't have time to consider the question. My friend admitted to belonging to the third camp.
Galileo belonged to the first camp. His greatest, revolutionary achievement was to explain to society that observational science can reveal truth about the universe that must be incorporated into a unified world view by religious believers. Atheism, on the other hand, is basically an unscientific stance since it is not based on data and provides no alternative theory for the origin of the universe. A more properly scientific stance is agnosticism which just admits ignorance about the cause of the universe and the possible existence of a God. A self-consistent scientist will not declare war on an idea he cannot disprove. A consistent agnostic might expect that the advance of science will gradually eliminate any role for an external God and he is content to wait for this to happen. A theist on the other hand expects that the growth of scientific knowledge will make it increasingly evident that God exists and he is content to wait for this to happen. Both of these points of view remind one of the University of Chicago motto: Crescat Scientia, let knowledge increase.
There is, of course, the Galileo affair. It was not a high point of the Catholic Church and some four hundred years later the Church officially apologized for convicting him and holding him under house arrest in his Tuscan villa. On the other hand, Galileo was not tortured nor excommunicated as one sometimes reads. His treatment by the Church, which was also the civil authority in central Italy at the time, was quite mild by medieval standards and, certainly, more civilized than the standards of the Bush administration at Abu Graib and Guantanamo. His offense was more closely related to the cat and mouse game he played with the dictates of the courts than to the actual science he was propagating. Does the sun go around the earth or the earth go around the sun? We now know that all motion is relative and, if one puts the origin of one's coordinate system on the earth, then relative to this somewhat natural choice the sun certainly approximates a circular motion. The matter largely comes down to a decision of what is mathematically more convenient. The Copernican system was under discussion in the universities of the day and the question of mathematical expedience did not, in the beginning, have the clarity it has today. The real issue for the authorities, of course, was that Galileo, writing in the vernacular instead of in the language of the academy was seen as undermining spiritual authority which, at the time, was based on a literal interpretation of scripture. We now understand, thanks largely to Galileo, that observational science is an independent source of knowledge. Scripture has to be read in terms of the idiom of the day in which it was written and has to be interpreted in a way consistent with scientific knowledge. There is no discussion of particle physics in the Genesis treatment of creation and, apart from its central point, Genesis is largely poetical.
The Catholic Church absorbed the lesson of Galileo in a relatively painless way over the ensuing centuries. Some of the new Christian movements of his day had much more severe problems based, as they were, on the principle of "sola scriptura". Luther railed against the Copernican ideas. Some of his theological heirs have nagging problems even today with issues such as evolution while the Catholic Church is quite comfortable with leaving the "how" to science.
Angels and Demons portrays both a brilliant scientist who is driven by a search for a clear synthesis of science and religion and a shadowy lunatic fringe out to "take the gloves off" and destroy religion. The former was Leonardo Vetri, a priest physicist at CERN, who supposedly was the first to isolate antimatter in significant quantities. He was killed by a hired assassin working for the illuminati, he was branded with the illuminati ambigram, and his eye was plucked out to get through the required retinal scan allowing admission to the lab where the antimatter was kept. Thus Brown puts physicists on both sides of the angels and demons divide. The female lead in the book is Vittoria Vetri, the illegitimate daughter of Leonardo, who herself is portrayed as a brilliant scientist. "Recently she disproved one of Einstein's fundamental theories by using atomically synchronized cameras to observe a school of tuna fish. " She is also portrayed as a believer: "Science tells me God must exist. " The book fails to further explain her thinking. Science can provide clues that point to God but it cannot prove his existence. Faith is not an abdication of reason but an intuitive answer to questions that cannot be addressed by science. On the way from CERN to Rome in the laboratory's ficticious X33 space plane Vittoria engages the male lead in a probe of his stance toward religion. Robert Langdon, the Harvard professor of "symbology", played by Tom Hanks in the movie is a searching agnostic professing a deep respect for religion: "'I want to believe' he heard himself say." Unfortunately, the intuition does not come by wanting it per se. It is here, perhaps, that the high points of Brown's skill as an author emerge, in his exploration of the interface between science and religion, belief and unbelief.
Thus the forces for good in the book and the movie, the "angels", are represented by a brilliant and believing female physicist and a semi-agnostic Harvard professor. Together they save untold thousands of Romans and tourists from annihilation at the hands of a demonic band of scientists supposedly out to avenge a centuries old massacre of the illuminati. The "demons" are typified by the stereotypical CERN director in a white lab coat ranting about the injuries inflicted on science by religion through the ages. (In fact you would be hard pressed to see a physicist in a white lab coat at CERN especially in the director's office. ) The case is also strong that the Church has always supported science from the medieval universities to the work of the current Vatican Observatory. Even in the cases where she seems to have slowed the march of science as in her disapproval of grave robbing to study anatomy and in her disapproval of embryonic stem cell research, her attitude has been that there is always an ethical way to obtain the knowledge we need.
The assassin hired by the illuminati is not portrayed with any nuanced redeeming qualities. He viciously kills four cardinals in line for the papacy and brands them with the four ancient scientific elements: earth, water, air, and fire corresponding closely to the modern notion of four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. The portrayal is one of a total war between science and religion. The illuminati hide the antimatter time bomb in the tomb of St. Peter for motives of pure revenge with no attempt to extort a ransom and spare the city. This uncompromising stance toward religion is typified by the physicist escorting Langdon to the director's office at CERN: "Physics is the religion around here. Use the Lord's name in vain all you like . . just don't slander any quarks or mesons." It is mirrored in the book and movie by an equally exaggerated war mentality in some quarters of the Church.
Presumably I have not spoiled a surprise ending by telling you that, in the end, the forces of moderation led by Robert Langdon and Vittoria Vetri foil the illuminati plot and save the city. The book ends on a light-hearted note. Vittoria says "for your information, professor, my next experiment will make scientific history. I plan to prove that neutrinos have mass. 'Neutrinos have mass?' Langdon shot her a stunned look. I didn't even know they were Catholic."
In the book, Galileo Galilei, one of the founders of modern physics, was part of a countercultural group of intellectuals, the "illuminati". In one of his treatises on physics, he supposedly encoded four clues to the location of the meeting place of the illuminati. Implausibly, the clues were written in English with the help of master poet John Milton. Whoever succeeded in decoding the clues was deemed worthy of admission to the secret society of the illuminati. According to the book, the Catholic Church reacted by violently suppressing the illuminati culminating in a massacre of the illuminati in which their bodies were branded with the symbol of the Church. To avenge this massacre, the modern remnants of the illuminati determined to destroy Vatican City with a bomb constructed from a sample of antimatter stolen from the European particle physics laboratory, CERN. The book talks about a "war" between science and religion.
All of this, of course, is pure fable. The truth is that the illuminati originated more than a hundred years after Galileo died, they attempted to ally themselves with the masons in Munich without much success, and went out of existence early in the nineteenth century. Their founder ended his years as a respected parish priest.
The notion of a war between science and religion is also pure fable except in the minds of a fanatic fringe in each camp. A friend of mine once told me that there were three types of people: the "theists" who believe in an infinitely intelligent external force who created the universe by an act of his will, the "atheists" who disavow any such being, and the "apatheists" who just don't care or who don't have time to consider the question. My friend admitted to belonging to the third camp.
Galileo belonged to the first camp. His greatest, revolutionary achievement was to explain to society that observational science can reveal truth about the universe that must be incorporated into a unified world view by religious believers. Atheism, on the other hand, is basically an unscientific stance since it is not based on data and provides no alternative theory for the origin of the universe. A more properly scientific stance is agnosticism which just admits ignorance about the cause of the universe and the possible existence of a God. A self-consistent scientist will not declare war on an idea he cannot disprove. A consistent agnostic might expect that the advance of science will gradually eliminate any role for an external God and he is content to wait for this to happen. A theist on the other hand expects that the growth of scientific knowledge will make it increasingly evident that God exists and he is content to wait for this to happen. Both of these points of view remind one of the University of Chicago motto: Crescat Scientia, let knowledge increase.
There is, of course, the Galileo affair. It was not a high point of the Catholic Church and some four hundred years later the Church officially apologized for convicting him and holding him under house arrest in his Tuscan villa. On the other hand, Galileo was not tortured nor excommunicated as one sometimes reads. His treatment by the Church, which was also the civil authority in central Italy at the time, was quite mild by medieval standards and, certainly, more civilized than the standards of the Bush administration at Abu Graib and Guantanamo. His offense was more closely related to the cat and mouse game he played with the dictates of the courts than to the actual science he was propagating. Does the sun go around the earth or the earth go around the sun? We now know that all motion is relative and, if one puts the origin of one's coordinate system on the earth, then relative to this somewhat natural choice the sun certainly approximates a circular motion. The matter largely comes down to a decision of what is mathematically more convenient. The Copernican system was under discussion in the universities of the day and the question of mathematical expedience did not, in the beginning, have the clarity it has today. The real issue for the authorities, of course, was that Galileo, writing in the vernacular instead of in the language of the academy was seen as undermining spiritual authority which, at the time, was based on a literal interpretation of scripture. We now understand, thanks largely to Galileo, that observational science is an independent source of knowledge. Scripture has to be read in terms of the idiom of the day in which it was written and has to be interpreted in a way consistent with scientific knowledge. There is no discussion of particle physics in the Genesis treatment of creation and, apart from its central point, Genesis is largely poetical.
The Catholic Church absorbed the lesson of Galileo in a relatively painless way over the ensuing centuries. Some of the new Christian movements of his day had much more severe problems based, as they were, on the principle of "sola scriptura". Luther railed against the Copernican ideas. Some of his theological heirs have nagging problems even today with issues such as evolution while the Catholic Church is quite comfortable with leaving the "how" to science.
Angels and Demons portrays both a brilliant scientist who is driven by a search for a clear synthesis of science and religion and a shadowy lunatic fringe out to "take the gloves off" and destroy religion. The former was Leonardo Vetri, a priest physicist at CERN, who supposedly was the first to isolate antimatter in significant quantities. He was killed by a hired assassin working for the illuminati, he was branded with the illuminati ambigram, and his eye was plucked out to get through the required retinal scan allowing admission to the lab where the antimatter was kept. Thus Brown puts physicists on both sides of the angels and demons divide. The female lead in the book is Vittoria Vetri, the illegitimate daughter of Leonardo, who herself is portrayed as a brilliant scientist. "Recently she disproved one of Einstein's fundamental theories by using atomically synchronized cameras to observe a school of tuna fish. " She is also portrayed as a believer: "Science tells me God must exist. " The book fails to further explain her thinking. Science can provide clues that point to God but it cannot prove his existence. Faith is not an abdication of reason but an intuitive answer to questions that cannot be addressed by science. On the way from CERN to Rome in the laboratory's ficticious X33 space plane Vittoria engages the male lead in a probe of his stance toward religion. Robert Langdon, the Harvard professor of "symbology", played by Tom Hanks in the movie is a searching agnostic professing a deep respect for religion: "'I want to believe' he heard himself say." Unfortunately, the intuition does not come by wanting it per se. It is here, perhaps, that the high points of Brown's skill as an author emerge, in his exploration of the interface between science and religion, belief and unbelief.
Thus the forces for good in the book and the movie, the "angels", are represented by a brilliant and believing female physicist and a semi-agnostic Harvard professor. Together they save untold thousands of Romans and tourists from annihilation at the hands of a demonic band of scientists supposedly out to avenge a centuries old massacre of the illuminati. The "demons" are typified by the stereotypical CERN director in a white lab coat ranting about the injuries inflicted on science by religion through the ages. (In fact you would be hard pressed to see a physicist in a white lab coat at CERN especially in the director's office. ) The case is also strong that the Church has always supported science from the medieval universities to the work of the current Vatican Observatory. Even in the cases where she seems to have slowed the march of science as in her disapproval of grave robbing to study anatomy and in her disapproval of embryonic stem cell research, her attitude has been that there is always an ethical way to obtain the knowledge we need.
The assassin hired by the illuminati is not portrayed with any nuanced redeeming qualities. He viciously kills four cardinals in line for the papacy and brands them with the four ancient scientific elements: earth, water, air, and fire corresponding closely to the modern notion of four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. The portrayal is one of a total war between science and religion. The illuminati hide the antimatter time bomb in the tomb of St. Peter for motives of pure revenge with no attempt to extort a ransom and spare the city. This uncompromising stance toward religion is typified by the physicist escorting Langdon to the director's office at CERN: "Physics is the religion around here. Use the Lord's name in vain all you like . . just don't slander any quarks or mesons." It is mirrored in the book and movie by an equally exaggerated war mentality in some quarters of the Church.
Presumably I have not spoiled a surprise ending by telling you that, in the end, the forces of moderation led by Robert Langdon and Vittoria Vetri foil the illuminati plot and save the city. The book ends on a light-hearted note. Vittoria says "for your information, professor, my next experiment will make scientific history. I plan to prove that neutrinos have mass. 'Neutrinos have mass?' Langdon shot her a stunned look. I didn't even know they were Catholic."
