Ted Davis: Arthur Compton's Role as a Public Scientist

@TedDavis this article from you is really helpful too.

We are going a little bit off main topic here, but I think this could be helpful. You are a historian, and I’d like to know more about the methodology.

In writing these three articles on Compton, what is the methodological approach you take? How do you guard against misreading or mistelling history?

You say NT Wright’s historical work on the Ressurection was groundbreaking. What did he do with it that made it so strong, from a historians point of view?

I’m asking this because scientists don’t know much about history. I’m convinced history is a key to unlocking many of our current conflicts, explaining why things are the way they are, showing us a way out while offering hope that it didn’t have to be this way. I also wonder if there is more commonality between quality historical work and qaulity scientific work than we might all first appreciate. These questions are meant to draw us closer to these points.

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They just couldn’t accept the possibility of miracles. Very few American scientists of Compton’s generation, including religious scientists, believed that miracles were plausible. That’s not true in 2019. I could name dozens of prominent American scientists today who believe in miracles, including the bodily Resurrection. Some obvious examples would be Francis Collins, Joan Centrella, Ian Hutchinson, or Bill Phillips.

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Well, I can only tell you the view of this particular historian.

IMO, the long section on “Easter and History” in Wright’s tome is simply superb. It’s a frontal assault on Enlightenment historiography that constitutes the only part of any important book I can think of in which I would not have changed a single word, had I written it myself–but I don’t have the specific knowledge to write it. One cannot do it justice in a few hundred words; those who want to see it need to read it carefully for themselves.

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Can you explain what makes it convincing to you as a historian? I want to understand the methodology.

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This is interesting to me, because I thought that it were the European quantum physicists of the early 20th century (Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Dirac, etc.) who were known as renaissance men. For example, David Kaiser remarks in How the Hippies Saved Physics:

Before the war, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger had held one model in mind for the aspiring physicist. A physicist should aim, above all, to be a Kulturträger — a bearer of culture—as comfortable reciting passages of Goethe’s Faust from memory or admiring a Mozart sonata as jousting over the strange world of the quantum. The physicists who came of age during and after World War II crafted a rather different identity for themselves. Watching their mentors stride through the corridors of power, advising generals, lecturing politicians, and consulting for major industries, few sought to mimic the otherworldly, detached demeanor of the prewar days. Philosophical engagement with quantum theory, which had once seemed inseparable from working on quantum theory itself, rapidly fell out of fashion. Those few physicists who continued to wrestle with the seemingly outlandish features of quantum mechanics found their activity shoved ever more sharply to the margins.

Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics, Introduction

The philosophical interests of Einstein and others are what led to the interesting philosophical discussions about quantum mechanics in this early era. In contrast, the post-war generation, mostly American (Feynman, Schwinger, Gell-Mann, Weinberg, etc.), ceased to be interested in philosophical matters related to physics and adopted the infamous “shut up and calculate” approach. In fact, Kaiser argues that such an approach is what led to the marginalization of more philosophical and speculative strands of research in quantum mechanics over the next several decades, such that even Bell’s famous inequality did not attract much attention until the 1980s.

So, how did Compton fit in relative to the European Kulturtrager versus the American verificationist post-war generation? It seems like Compton was fundamentally a European physicist at heart.

What I find most persuasive about Wright is his historical instincts. He wants to understand as well as he can, what “resurrection” actually meant to Second Temple Jews–the audience for the biblical accounts of Jesus and his resurrection. IMO, his book shows very convincingly that (e.g.) when Paul talks about “resurrection,” he can only have meant a bodily resurrection, not an event that took place just in the minds of Jesus’ followers. Now, that doesn’t make those accounts true–one can certainly object to the basic claim that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead. But, I think that Write effectively dismisses the standard liberal theological interpretation of those texts in terms of a “disembodied” Jesus at the heart of Paul’s teaching about the resurrection.

I’m also very impressed with Wright’s assault on the “objectivity” of post-Enlightenment interpretations of the resurrection. He understands that historiography perfectly and engages it at its weak points.

Before taking this theme any further, it would be best to read that section of his book to see if you can find places where Wright does these things. Without quoting him here very extensively, I doubt I can spell out the methodological stuff more clearly or adequately than I just did.

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Thanks @TedDavis. Getting back to our main topic here, what do you think Compton’s most enduring contributions to the public dialogue might be? Which contributions deserve greater recognition?

Also, he believed evolution was “divinely guided.” As a person who did not believe miracles, how did he believe God guided evolution?

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Your point is well taken, Daniel. I think I over-generalized and wrote that comment too quickly. I should have thought of books such as Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy or Schrodinger’s What Is Life?, as well as the great Einstein-Bohr debates about the metaphysical foundations of physics.

I haven’t read Kaiser’s book, so I won’t say very much about his specific point. I do agree that the people he names seemed far less inclined to be Comptons or Bohrs or Schrodingers. Maybe it was more of a generational thing, which could in fact connect with my point about a liberal arts education. Neither Feynman nor Gell-Mann nor Weinberg attended a liberal arts college; perhaps CUNY was such a place when Schwinger was there, I just don’t know. At least in the US, many of the best scientists born in the 19th century did graduate from liberal arts colleges, and in turn many of those schools then were closely tied to individual Christian denominations that required them to study broad subjects like theology and history and philosophy. For example, if you made a list of the scientists who were deeply engaged as public intellectuals in the period between the world wars, it would certainly include AHC, Michael Pupin, Kirtley Mather (who continued that role far beyond WW2 when he was book review editor for both American Scientist and American Scholar), Edwin Grant Conklin, and Robert Millikan. Indeed, according to a study done a number of years ago, Pupin and Millikan were among the most widely known scientists in the nation at that time, b/c they wrote so much about science and its social/religious dimensions for ordinary Americans.

All of them except Pupin graduated from liberal arts colleges–Wooster (AHC), Oberlin (Millikan), Dennison (Mather), Ohio Wesleyan (Conklin), and Columbia (Pupin), and Pupin appears to have been very broadly educated at Columbia (as one still can be today, given their curriculum). And, when Millikan became the first important president of Caltech (not long after it had changed its name from Throop College of Technology), he brought with him a vision of the importance of the liberal arts for engineers and scientists. I have no particular knowledge of the history of Caltech’s curriculum in the many years since then, so I won’t comment further on Caltech.

Thanks for paying attention to that questionable comment, Daniel. Have you read any parts of my essay on Compton? If so, do you have anything to say or ask about it?

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Well, I keep saying the same things–his emphasis on the fact (IMO) that science is done by human beings, for human benefit, and his basic belief that humans make free moral choices, despite the reigning orthodoxy at the time (and perhaps still, if you read Coyne or Provine or Sam Harris).

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This is very encouraging to me as I start a new semester next week teaching chemistry and physics at a Christian liberal arts institution.

We’ve been taking a hit the last few years in the media (which can influence upper administration) with the emphasis on career readiness and professional studies, which is often seen as antithetical to a liberal arts education. One would think, based on all the ink spilled and hand wringing, that all these years liberal arts colleges have been doing nothing but producing baristas and hipsters :slight_smile:

So thanks, it did my heart good to read your insight, even if it could be a little biased :wink:

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A very good question, and a propos to the ongoing controversy about Darwinian evolution today. Proponents of ID love to push “theistic evolutionists” for clear answers on this very question. That’s fair, as far as it goes, but sometimes IMO it’s not fair to expect too much. I am reminded of what Whewell wrote about divine action in his famous Bridgewater Treatise, in that very same part of the book quoted briefly by Darwin opposite the title page in the Origin of Species. Immediately before the words Darwin famously quoted, we find this:

“We are not to expect that physical investigation can enable us to conceive the manner in which God acts upon the members of the universe. The question, “Canst thou by searching find out God?” must silence the boastings of science as well as the repinings of adversity. Indeed, science shows us, far more clearly than the conceptions of every day reason, at what an immeasurable distance we are from any faculty of conceiving how the universe, material and moral, is the work of the Deity.”

Any theist (at least) who wants to know exactly how guides evolution, IMO, needs first to ask herself what she’s asking, in light of Whewell’s thoughts here.

Does guide need miracles to guide evolution? Compton said NO, and I sense that Asa Gray would have said the same thing, even though Gray unquestionably didn’t question the reality of the Incarnation, Resurrection, and other miracles associated with Jesus. They both understood that God can govern the world by working through natural processes to produce desired results. Now, perhaps that’s not a coherent view; perhaps God must do at least some miracles in natural history in order to govern evolution. I’m not here to argue for or against that notion. I will say simply, that when AHC learned science (prior to 1920), a majority of evolutionists believed in that evolution was in fact goal-directed. Darwin didn’t think so, and therein lies an irony: although Darwin did persuade the next generation of biologists to accept evolution (in the sense of common ancestry), he failed to persuade the next generation to accept “Darwinian” evolution (in which evolution is “unguided” by God or any other mind). That didn’t happen until after the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Julian Huxley later called this historical fact the “eclipse of Darwinism.” Some of the scientists who held teleological views of evolution were orthodox Christians (Gray fit into this category), others were modernist Christians (AHC), and still others were theists of some sort that is even harder to map onto Christianity than modernism (Joseph LeConte). They expressed their belief in teleology in various ways. For Gray, God led evolution “along certain beneficial lines,” apparently by guiding “variations” (mutations and other things producing phenotypical changes). I don’t know if I could pin down Compton even as vaguely as this: like many of his fellow modernist Protestants, he marveled at how life had advanced to produce persons, and he believed that God had devoted so much time and care to that process that God would preserve those persons in existence after death–also without miracles, incredibly (my editorial comment).

Compton was very active in the same Hyde Park church attended by theologian Shailer Mathews, whose definition of God was, basically, the personality-producing process of the universe. Compton’s theism was certainly more robust than Mathews’ theism–I sometimes wonder whether Mathews thought God was any more than a social construction–but, it was certainly also no less than Mathews’ theism. For the modernists, the production of personalities was the ultimate goal of the universe, and (at least for many of them) there had to be personality behind the universe, whether or not we should capitalize the “P”. Compton didn’t hesitate to capitalize it, by praying to “God” regularly and seeking personal guidance from a personal God. For Kirtley Mather (who as a student attended the same church), on the other hand, “God” was not necessarily the best word for what he preferred to call “the administration of the universe,” and he explicitly declined to capitalize the “a.”

Sorry for a long, rambling answer, but I don’t think a simple one is possible, either for Compton or many other scientists of his generation or Gray’s.

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I suppose that the quality of the question is different if directed to a scientist like me, who affirms the Resurrection, versus a scientist like Compton, who does not because he doubts all miracles.

I don’t know how God providentially guides evolution, partly because I can envision so many possible ways he might do so.

Compton doesn’t know either, but it is harder to envision any ways how God might guide evolution under his understanding of miracles.

It seems the question of “how” is more pointed, then, when directed towards a Christian like Compton.

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OK, here we are after a couple of days of “office hours,” and no one other than Joshua has said anything/asked anything about the articles that we were supposed to be discussing. I won’t respond to additional comments by anyone, unless they are directly related to the articles. That was the basis of my agreeing to do this…

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One quick question from the previous discussion (feel free to ignore if you want) and one from Prophet of Science: Part 1

I’m curious if you see any connection between this and the racial aspects (eugenics, human zoos, outright racism) of what was going on at the time. It seems logical to me, that if one things of evolution as being goal-directed, then it may be tempting to think of some populations as closer to that goal than others.

OK, in your paper you mention:

At the height of his scientific career in the early
1930s, Compton used Werner Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty to defend human freedom and
responsibility, paralleling the views of Arthur Eddington and Robert Millikan.

I’m curious if you could expand on that just a little bit. In particular, I find a large disconnect between uncertainty that is only really uncertain at the atomic level to uncertainty in larger scale things (the body) or in abstract things (mind). I wonder what Compton’s strategy was to argue for human freedom from Heisenberg.

Yes, that’s on target. However, a teleological view of evolution need not be part of such a picture. All that’s needed is belief in common ancestry itself, from which some have inferred that certain human groups are more advanced than others. If humans are continuous with other primates, so the reasoning sometimes goes, and not all humans have the same characteristics, then we ought to be able to assign various humans groups to different stages of development. Bertrand Russell (e.g.) put it like this: “If men developed by such slow stages that there were creatures which we should not know whether to classify as human or not, the question arises: at what stage in evolution did men, or their semi-human ancestors, begin to be all equal?” He saw tension between evolution (in the sense of common ancestry) and democracy.

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I expand on this greatly, on pp. 182-8 in Part Two. If you follow up, be sure to pay close attention to the way in which AHC drew on the work of his colleague at Chicago, physiologist, Ralph Lillie, who showed that uncertainties in “ultramicroscopic” phenomena could be magnified in living organisms to have macroscopic consequences; and, he suggested that QM might perhaps be related to human freedom. The citations in that part of the article might help you see the line of reasoning more fully.

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