The MIT physicist Jeremy England, whose research concerns nonliving things that act like living things, is also an Orthodox Jew—and the inspiration for a character in a novel by the bestselling author Dan Brown. In an interview with Rachel Scheinerman, he discusses his reflections on the tensions between science and religion:
There are lots of Jews who are very observant and religious . . . who are also highly technically educated and find modern science very credible. But I think that one has to raise the question of how that level of intellectual comfort is achieved.
One possible way that it can be achieved is by creating a kind of divided mind. . . . And I don’t mean to denigrate that, but . . . I don’t want to have a divided mind. It’s necessary to acknowledge that the Tanakh [tries] to make you uncomfortable with the idea of fixed laws of nature. That’s at least one current within [scripture]. There are [also] countercurrents, [for instance], the Psalmist’s idea of “How many are the things You have made, O Lord; You have made them all with wisdom”—the idea that God made everything in His wisdom and it has a natural order and regularity to it. [T]hese currents are in tension with one another.
Papering over that tension and saying, “It’s easy, we don’t have to worry about it”—that can come at a cost. I think it’s possible to be very committed to the Torah in ways that are very authentic and ancient, and still be fully committed to scientific reasoning. . . . [But] there’s [also] a real, serious danger [of] turning science into not just a way of reasoning about what is predictable about the world, but into a full-blown belief system that has a mystical component to it. . . . [I]t can get very doctrinaire.
Here’s an example. Someone might say, “The rules of the universe are fundamentally mathematical and probabilistic. Furthermore, there is a very parsimonious mathematical theory that is the explanation of everything, and we are just trying to refine our understanding of that model. But the universe is mathematical.” That is, in a sense, a mystical claim. It is beautiful and nourishes the souls of people who devote themselves to it. And it’s very common . . . in my line of work. But I staunchly reject that way of talking, because I think the laws of physics are human contrivances.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/3266/torah-and-the-thermodynamics-of-life-an-interview-with-jeremy-england/