Nobel Scientist: I Place My Faith in Human Gods

[rug]

My faith is in our human nature to work together to improve our existence



James Watson, Nobel Prize of Medicine in 1962 and co-discoverer of DNA, at BioVision forum in Nobel Prizes and Biotechnology Gurus celebrate DNA Discovery's 50th Anniversary in Lyon, France on April 08, 2003. (Lionel Flusin/Gamma-Rapho—Getty Images)

March 25, 2016
James Watson
James Watson is a Nobel Prize winner for his co-discovery of the DNA double helix. He is the author of The Double Helix, and, most recently, Father to Son.

Growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1930s, neither of my parents went to church. My modestly religious Irish Catholic mother had long ago stopped attending because of a rheumatic-fever-damaged heart. While my Episcopalian father said he had won “multiple prizes for youthful church attendance,” he started losing his belief in the existence of a supreme deity as early as his freshman course on the Bible at Presbyterian Oberlin College.

I only followed my mother’s wish to accompany my very religious grandmother to Sunday mass at nearby Lady of Peace Church for a few years. By age 11, just a year after my First Communion, I, too, stopped going to services, rejecting the need for an all-knowing God-like creator of our physical world. Following my dad, I saw the pursuit of scientific and humanistic knowledge as the best route toward successful living on Earth.

Earlier human civilizations created religions to explain how life came into existence and to provide written rules (e.g. the Ten Commandments) for the social interaction between humans. Today, Darwinian evolution and DNA-based genetics provide a very compelling alternative framework for advancing the human condition through science. While science does not yet, and possibly never will, understand how the first forms of life came into existence, most scientists see no need to postulate the existence of God-like entities.

So I was surprised when I was recently asked about the role that faith had played in my life. The obvious sincerity of the questioner demanded more than a reply that I am a lifelong atheist. I answered that faith was essential to my life, but it was not faith in an all-powerful, life-instructions-providing God. Instead, I place my faith in the unchanging, universal aspects of human nature that have allowed us to work together as social animals to constantly improve our existence.

http://time.com/4259269/nobel-scientist-religion/

[Cartoonist]

1. No need

most scientists see no need to postulate the existence of God-like entities.

Why does anybody need that? What do they lack that causes them to make up shit? Why isn't reality enough?

[rug]

2. Probably because science cannot answer all the questions that spring from human minds.

We are a curious species.

[Cartoonist]

4. Curious yes, gullible why?

It's fine to seek answers, but foolish to accept the wrong ones.

[rug]

5. There's gullibility everywhere but that's not the problem.

Framing it as the right or wrong answer doesn't help either. A better standard to unanswerable questions is whether the answer is reasonable. Unless and until the question can be answered, no one knows if it is the right answer.

[Cartoonist]

6. Copernicus

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge

[rug]

8. He was right abot that as well.

He was also a Third Order Dominican.

[Cartoonist]

9. Only because

If you weren't, you were dead.

[rug]

13. In that case, the entirety of Poland would have been Dominicans.

They weren't.

[procon]

3. I can grok that. nt

[edhopper]

7. Sure he would say that

him and his co-conspirator Francis Crick, were doing Satan's work to show evolution worked without any outside, divine intervention.

[struggle4progress]

10. "I place my faith in the unchanging, universal aspects of human nature that have allowed us

to work together as social animals to constantly improve our existence"

This is, of course, an appealing idea. But we might ask whether such a view survives strict scientific scrutiny: is it actually the case that "human nature" has "unchanging universal aspects" that actually lead us "to work together as social animals" for constant improvement?

Watson's language here seems overloaded with untestable metaphysical assumptions. Perhaps that is why he speaks of placing his faith in such ideas

[MisterP]

11. THIS time Cold Spring Harbor has found the right eugenic mix!

[Warren Stupidity]

12. racist homophobe watson says what?

[rug]

14. You're the first I've seen call him that.

Do you have something to share?