Publishers Weekly 10/27/08

Heavens be praised: here is a scientist who respects religion and relates it to the same impulse that drives scientific inquiry—an aspiration to the true and the real. Astrophysicist Frank is a lover of the skies with sufficient experience of awe to understand there's more than one way to tell the truth. His history of ideas is real science braided with myth and metaphor—the titular “constant fire” comes from poet Wallace Stevens. He's an engaging storyteller, as might be expected from someone who has published in Scientific American and Discover magazines. He can explain quantum physics and also dismiss woo-woo votaries who produce movies and books based on spurious science. He can relate mythic creation stories to the development of Big Bang theory. Light years beyond the stale standoff between uninspired scientific materialism and unscientific intelligent design, this vision of coexistence appreciates the heavenly music of the spheres.

The Chronicle of Higher Education 12/10/08

As a boy, Adam Frank would climb onto the roof of his parents' home in New Jersey to stare up at the night sky's "indefinable beauty and perfection." Now a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, Frank is similarly stirred by the "giddy vertigo of recursion relations in the mathematics of electromagnetic fields." Such moments reveal "the world's sacred character," a "universe sensed beyond the senses," he writes in The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate (University of California Press), an elegant reimagining of the relationship between science and spirituality.

Frank challenges the assumption that science and religion are implacable foes. The early practitioners of science in the 17th century, he writes, saw their desire to "know the world more fully as one dimension of their own spiritual ... sensitivities." But by the late 19th century, the schism between science and religion was nearly complete. In 1875, John William Draper, an English chemist, published The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, which blamed the Roman Catholic Church for spearheading opposition to science. The book, a sensation, went through 50 reprintings and was translated into 10 languages. About 20 years later, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, made a similar argument in an influential two-volume work, A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom. Both books played a large role in shaping educated opinion in the West.

In our own time, discussions about religion and science tend to devolve into tired arguments about evolution and the veracity of Genesis. That tendency, Frank argues, fruitlessly pits the claims of science against the tenets of religious doctrine and "misses a deeper and more fecund relationship between science and spiritual endeavor."

Science and religion spring from the ancient desire to understand our world — an urge Frank calls the "constant fire." A moment of transcendent contemplation might lead to a religious life of study and prayer; or it might lead to a life dedicated to the study of the solar system or the human genome. The distinctions between those two paths are "less important than the imperative that precedes them," Frank notes.

His effort to bridge the divide between the universes of science and religion does not entail giving any quarter to the anti-rational and anti-intellectual claims of Intelligent Design or New Age philosophy, which he says "represent a dangerous challenge to the very core of the scientific enterprise." Neither school of thought presents a coherent or plausible explanation of the natural world.

But Frank also faults his fellow scientists for being too dismissive of spirituality's relevance and potential, as if people's desire to understand can be satiated any more satisfactorily by a theory of gravity than a passage of Scripture. "Science and spiritual endeavor are both gateways," Frank writes. "Together they define what is best in us, and, if we can find the will and marshal the effort, they can guide our best efforts."

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