From Information to Insight: Toward a Consistent Reading of Science and Faith

By Valerie Miké

This volume is part of the Book Program, a partnership of the Ethics of Evidence Foundation and Herder & Herder. Forthcoming titles include: Chance and Evidence: A Primer of Probability and Statistics, by Valerie Miké, and People’s Capitalism in the United States: A European Observer’s 1953 Report amid the Unexpected Events of the Twentieth Century, by John Madl Miké, edited by Valerie Miké.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crossroad Publishing
• Release date: Jun 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9780824598242

Book preview

PREFACE

The Editor’s Voice

Dr. Gwendolin Herder, publisher of A Christian Cosmology , suggested that I prepare this companion book for the six-volume Pendergast series. In the course of our conversations during the past three years, she learned of my own work in related areas that she thought would be helpful in presenting our material in historical perspective.

I have been a member of the scientific community for over six decades, getting my start at an institution that played a key part in the genesis of the Age of Information. After receiving my doctorate in mathematics, I went on to participate in the introduction of statistical techniques in medicine. My activities included teaching, consulting, collaboration with medical investigators, and the building of a department, work that involved incorporation of evolving computer technology and extensive fundraising for the support of my organization.

I studied ethics and the philosophy of science. My research concerning ethical issues of uncertainty in biomedical science and technology led to the concept of an ethics of evidence, a multidisciplinary approach that addresses both scientific and existential uncertainty. There will always be scientific uncertainty, integral to the scientific method, and there is existential uncertainty, because the question of ultimate meaning is beyond the scope of science.

For decades I taught medical students and served on U.S. government advisory committees. I was asked to be a consultant for ESTE, a new encyclopedia for science, technology, and ethics. I contributed a series of ten articles, presenting the enigma of chance in the framework of the Ethics of Evidence and the context of the history of science. My theme has always been the same: sharing what I know, to offer insight into information.

In 2015, I established the Ethics of Evidence Foundation, with divisions for medicine, social justice, physics, and cosmology, and the mission to support the search for meaning in the Age of Information. I included cosmology to cover the work of the Jesuit scholar Richard J. Pendergast (1927–2012) concerning faith and science.

The Bible, eternal legacy of humankind, needs to be read in the light of what has been revealed about the world by science. The helio centric theory of Copernicus, just turning five hundred, was a challenge, because it is so contrary to human experience. We are today facing a more significant development, the theory of evolution, which involves the origin of the human race.

Richard J. Pendergast devoted his life to the integration of modern science and divine revelation; that is why he became a Jesuit. His aim was to update the Christian synthesis of St. Thomas Aquinas, based on the philosophy of Aristotle and a static worldview, to reflect evolution. Combining notions from science, philosophy, and theology, he would weave a coherent picture of what we know about reality. He sees a living universe, reality as dynamic process, and evolution with purpose in the mystery of love. His ideas appeared in peer-reviewed professional journals, but it was his deepest desire to reach a general audience, especially young people, and that is the aim of our series.

This means interaction with our popular culture, with its oversimplified view of science. The ignoring of transcendental values may lead to the mistaken notion that science and religion are unrelated and that evolution must be a random process.

To clarify this serious issue is the reason for my book. In Part One, I first give a brief account of my personal story. Then in chapter 2 I introduce Richard Pendergast in the context of the Ethics of Evidence, freeing his work from the distractions of popular culture. I provide additional discussion in the chapters of Part Two.

I was planning this volume when I learned that Sir Ronald A. Fisher, founder of modern statistics and genetics and, in my judgment, the greatest scientist of the twentieth century, was caught in the cancel wave sweeping our culture. A response to the charges against him has been published by the trustees of the Fisher Memorial Trust in a careful and thoughtful analysis of his writings. I can add further important information, and do so in chapter 2. It is especially rele vant that Fisher, creator of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, was a lifetime believer.

For over two hundred years, in times of crisis and turmoil, the publishing house of Herder has been providing a platform for strong, independent voices to speak to the issues of their day. I am pleased to add my voice to urge the resolution of this critical problem.

Valerie Miké, President

The Ethics of Evidence Foundation

August 28, 2023

PART ONE

A Personal Story

CHAPTER 1

From Mathematics to Medicine

and a Foundation

When I graduated from college in 1956, the place for a math major to seek employment in New York was said to be Bell Labs or IBM. A recent immigrant with no connections, I had worked part time and summers as waitress, typist, and library assistant, but this would be my first professional position. I went to Bell Labs to inquire, and they offered me a job on the first interview that day. Impressed by how friendly they were, I accepted, and a new world opened up before me.

BELL LABS AND NYU

Bell Labs—Bell Telephone Laboratories—had just won its second Nobel Prize in physics, for the invention of the transistor. It had won the first one in 1937 for demonstrating the wave nature of matter. Seven more Nobel Prizes were to follow, including one in 1978 for the discovery of cosmic microwave radiation, which confirmed the theory of the Big Bang. For the general public, Bell Labs was the highly respected research arm of Ma Bell, the local phone company.

AT&T—American Telephone and Telegraph Company—was established by Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone in 1875. With its network of telephone operating companies, with Western Electric as its manufacturing component and Bell Laboratories as its research subsidiary constituting the Bell System, AT&T was the world’s largest corporation, a legally sanctioned, regulated monopoly. Its stock was the most widely held in the market, the bluest of blue-chip stocks, called the stock of orphans and widows. In periodic offerings, employees could buy stock at a discount through a payroll deduction program, in which, like everyone around me, I participated. That is how, not long after fleeing Soviet Communism, I would become an American capitalist.

Bell Labs had over ten thousand employees at four major locations: the New York site in Lower Manhattan, and three in northern New Jersey—in Murray Hill, Whippany, and Holmdel. Its technical library, with a branch at each location, held some one hundred thousand volumes and subscribed to nearly two thousand journals. There were lectures and in-house courses both during and after hours, and the company paid the tuition of employees studying for advanced degrees in science.

Concurrent with my work at Bell Labs, I became a graduate student at nearby New York University at its Institute of Mathematical Sciences, to be named after Richard Courant, its founder. Courant, a refugee from Nazi Germany who had been the director of the illustrious Mathe matical Institute in Göttingen, was still active at the time, and I attended some of his lectures. I also knew that he was the cousin of the philosopher and Carmelite nun Edith Stein, who died at Auschwitz. I heard that, when investigations began to have Edith Stein declared a saint, Courant, who had been profoundly affected by her death, was pleased and most cooperative.

The Courant Institute had a large graduate program, with hundreds of students, and most classes were held in the late afternoon or evening to allow attendance by people with daytime jobs. There was a wide selection of courses taught by an outstanding faculty and also lectures and courses by prominent visiting professors. I recall looking forward to going to class after work a couple of times a week, walking through Greenwich Village to Washington Square munching a sandwich. Leaving the pulsating life of an industrial research laboratory, where science was harnessed daily in technological innovation, I was drawn to what I then perceived as the snowcapped peaks of the world of mathematics. Although nearly always physically exhausted, in the exhilaration of those early years I could not conceive of giving up either.

My work at Bell Labs was in systems engineering, one of three areas in research and development of the company’s scope of activities. I was in the department of communication traffic studies, where teams of mathematicians and engineers were studying the flow of telephone traffic and its server systems in the vast network. It was all about communication. Direct distance dialing was coming in, and transatlantic cables were being laid on the ocean floor.

The office I shared with six engineers had a conference table in the center that was frequently used for meetings about details of ongoing work or new developments. I met other members of the department and visiting staff from AT&T and was getting a general idea of what was going on, but the technical terminology was entirely new to me.

Then an unexpected solution came when I received a call to see Estill I. Green, the vice president for systems engineering. An engineer with nearly one hundred patents to his name, Green was chairman of the committee of the American Standards Association (ASA) that was planning an updated edition of the dictionary of the standard definitions of electrical terms, the section on communication, to be published by the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE).¹ I was to be his editorial assistant for the project.

How could this come about? I had just completed a course in technical writing, taught by an English professor from Columbia University, who was asked by the company to assess the abilities of each student. I was shown the professor’s rather glowing remarks about me, and I assume his report had something to do with my being recommended to the vice president.

Our association continued beyond the close collaboration on the dictionary when Green became executive vice president of Bell Laboratories. He would call on me from time to time to help him find information for speeches, for me always a stimulating experience.

The engineers with whom I shared the office used slide rules, and on my desk there was a large electromechanical Monroe calculator. But I heard that there were computers in the mathematics department in Murray Hill, and I called to inquire if this was true. They said yes, come and see. And so I went, using the daily shuttle van that connected the two locations. I was received by a Ph.D. staff member who showed me around the facility and then took me to see the computer, actually two units of a computer called the IBM 650, two tall black structures with flickering lights standing in the middle of the room. My guide said that these computers were free to be used by anyone in the company and that staff were there to help. He explained that the computer had a rotating magnetic drum in its interior with 2000 registers on which were stored the data and the instructions for what to do with the data. Input and output was by means of IBM punch cards. He gave me samples of the cards and coding forms and some literature, including a manual of a programming language written by Bell Laboratories. He suggested that I look these over and, if interested, return for further discussion. But I found that I could understand the material on my own, and, working feverishly, I wrote a computer program of a few dozen instructions for some formulas in my work that had taken me several hours of manual computa tion. Then I took my program and the data with my computations and returned to Murray Hill. My host had the data and the program keypunched into IBM cards. As I watched, he entered the assembled deck into the computer, which responded by instantly producing a deck of its own. My host took the output deck and printed it on a tabulator; then we compared the two sets of results, mine and the computer’s. They were identical.

The next morning I told my supervisor about my Murray Hill adventure and showed him the results. Without comment, he took the sheets of paper and had me follow him into the office of the subdepartment head for a second demonstration. The latter picked up the phone and told the department director that I had something to show him. So within a few minutes I was demonstrating for the third time. I was the first member of my department to venture a personal encounter with an electronic computer, and my management recog nized the significance of the event. Clearly pleased, the director suggested that there might be a computer course I would like to take.

I called IBM and learned that three courses were available, and I signed up for all three.