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 n settings as different as the Vatican Observatory in Italy, Silicon Valley, California and Cambridge, England, the Humble Approach Initiative has been bringing together the world’s finest minds to discuss the most pressing issues arising from the convergence of science and religion.
In May 2004, at the “Innovations in Material and Spiritual Cultures” symposium in Les Eyzies, France, archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood announced to his peers that he had something for them. With that, he placed his hand inside the breast pocket of his blazer, effectively traveling back 700 centuries in time. In the company of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and theologians, Henshilwood revealed an ancient bead only recently discovered by his team on the southern tip of Africa. The bead, one of 41, was 75,000 years old and gave a tantalizing glimpse into the spiritual nature of the material culture that had created it. Was it a prayer bead? Or a piece of primitive jewelry?
Lord Colin Renfrew, Chair of the “Innovations in Material and Spiritual Cultures” symposium, and Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University, believes this changes our understanding of the emergence of symbolic thinking. “Until recently, modern behavior-like cave art, and the use of beads, were recognized as coming about in Europe 40,000 years ago. Now we see many of these things being documented to some extent in Africa 70,000 years ago,” he says.
Henshilwood’s discovery exemplified one of the primary purposes of the Humble Approach Initiatives, that scientists and scholars might bring their most recent findings, often not yet published, to share with peers from a range of disciplines. Among other topics discussed at the symposium were early rock art in Australia and the French cave paintings.
Participants included anthropologist Margaret Conkey from the University of California, Berkeley; prehistorian Francesco d’Errico from the University of Bordeaux; Director of the Prehistory Laboratory of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, Henry de Lumley-Woodyear; Professor and Chair of Psychology at Queen’s University, Ontario, Merlin Donald; Christopher Henshilwood, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Bergen in Norway and Director of the African Heritage Research Institute in Cape Town, South Africa; Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Archaeology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, David Lewis-Williams; Professor of Prehistory and Human Evolution Paul Anthony Mellars from Cambridge University; Professor of Early Prehistory and Head of the School of Human and Environmental Studies at the University of Reading, Steven Mithen; archaeologist and palaeoethnobotanist Jane Renfrew from Cambridge University; research scientist Paul S.C. Tacon from the anthropology department of the Australian Museum; the James I. McCord Professor of Theology and Science, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, from the Princeton Theological Seminary; retired Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, Keith Ward.
“It was a great privilege to be sitting in a room with a small group, all of them leading authorities, to discuss in a fresh way, the significance of these first artistic expressions,” says Lord Renfrew. www.templeton.org/science_and_religion/humbleapproach.asp
MULTIVERSE AND STRING THEORY SYMPOSIUM
There is an extraordinary challenge underway to develop and define a new theory of physics called superstring theory. In March 2005, the “Multiverse and String Theory” symposium was chaired by leading cosmologist and 1995 Templeton Prize winner Paul Davies at Stanford University. (For a full list of participants click here)
Davies says the gathering was important because of the new theory’s implications. “The concept of a multiverse has split the scientific community more sharply than any cosmological controversy since the big bang challenged the steady state theory. Passions are running high. The consequences are profound, because the ramifications include whether the universe is designed for life, or is life-encouraging merely as a result of a fluke, or is seen by us to be life-friendly only as a result of a selection effect. For string theorists, a major issue is whether their theory will yield a unique description of the universe, or permit a vast array of possibilities. The latter conclusion is seen as dangerously undermining of the whole enterprise.”
The concept of a multiplicity of possible universes is an ancient one. In recent years, however, advances in physics and cosmology have given the “multiverse” idea a plausible scientific basis. Its new lease on life can be traced to the theory of inflation, which in its original form, suggested by Alan Guth, held that a split second after the big bang the universe abruptly jumped in size by a huge factor. Most theorists agreed that inflation could explain many puzzles about the structure and evolution of the universe. In the variant introduced by Andrei Linde, inflation spawns a network of branching “bubble” universes with different laws of physics operating inside of them. It has become fashionable to invoke some species of the multiverse theory to account for the well-known examples of parameter fine-tuning associated with the emergence of life in the observable universe where Earth has its home.
In 2003, a small group of physicists and philosophers met at Stanford University to examine various conjectures spawned by multiverse theories. In the two years since the original gathering, scientific work on the subject, particularly in the context of string theory (the best candidate for the “theory of everything”), has expanded rapidly. This made the “Multiverse and String Theory” symposium even more important.
But what exactly did some of the brightest minds in contemporary science talk about during the three-day symposium? “The discussion was dominated by the problem of how to calculate which observed physical parameters might vary from one universe to another and over what range of values,” says Davies. “Because string theory is mathematically intractable, the question boiled down to which approximation schemes and toy models most reliably encapsulated the properties of the full theory.”
The 2005 Stanford meeting was the second of two meetings supported by the Foundation on this topic. “Taken together, they fulfilled my expectations,” says Davies. “They took us to the very forefront of thinking in string theory, the most developed foundation for a multiverse, and tested its predictions against a well-defined philosophical and theological agenda.”
www.templeton.org/multiverse4/index.htm
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