The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics a few hours ago, and one of the three men sharing the prize is Professor Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology:
“Press Release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017”
Dr. Thorne was born in Logan, Utah, in 1940, to two active Latter-day Saint professors at Utah State University. He was raised in the Mormon faith, but he now describes himself as atheist.
He’s long been well-known, even beyond scientific circles. For one thing, he resigned his Richard Feynman Professorship of Theoretical Physics at Caltech in 2009 in order to involve himself in writing and movie making, and his first film project was Interstellar, on which he worked with Christopher Nolan.
The fact that he’s an ex-Mormon atheist has led some critics to cite him as an illustration of Mormonism’s supposed incompatibility with science.
This seems to rest upon a fairly clear non sequitur. The fact that Kip Thorne is an ex-Mormon atheist who has won a Nobel Prize no more demonstrates that his ex-Mormonism contributed to winning the Nobel than Richard Feynman’s occasional bongo-drumming in Pasadena nightclubs proves that playing the drums secured his status as a Nobel laureate in 1965.
But let’s hear what Kip Thorne himself has had to say on the subject.
On 21 June 2013, The Guardian published a profile of Kip Thorne titled “Kip Thorne: physicist studying time travel tapped for Hollywood film: Film will splash one of Thorne’s big ideas – traversable wormholes through space and time – across popular culture.” Here’s a passage from that article:
“Thorne grew up in an academic, Mormon family in Utah but is now an atheist. ‘There are large numbers of my finest colleagues who are quite devout and believe in God, ranging from an abstract humanist God to a very concrete Catholic or Mormon God. There is no fundamental incompatibility between science and religion. I happen to not believe in God.'”
I find it regrettable that Professor Thorne left the faith of his family and his childhood, but I congratulate him on today’s recognition of his accomplishments and I doubt that he would say that having having left Mormonism contributed in any significant way to his scientific abilities or, now, to his winning the Nobel Prize in Physics.
I’m reminded, in this context, of an article written several years ago by Dr. Guy Consolmagno, the director of the Vatican Observatory. Dr. Consolmagno, a prominent planetary scientist educated at the the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona as well as a Jesuit brother, told — as I remember the article — of his experience hosting a group of scientists at the Vatican to discuss the relationship of religion and science. Some of them, at one point, began to laugh about the idiocy of Mormonism; no Mormon, they said, could be a serious scientist. Dr. Consolmagno listened for a few moments and then told them about his own teacher, Dr. John Lewis, who was both a convert to Mormonism while on the faculty at MIT and one of the finest scientists he knew.
I haven’t been able to find that specific article, but Dr. Consolmagno paid tribute to Dr. Lewis at the beginning of his (excellent) remarks to the Interpreter Foundation back on 12 March 2016:
“Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ – Keynote Address: Astronomy, God, and the Search for Elegance”
And you can hear Professor John Lewis himself in this beautiful four-minute video from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:
Or, if you’re interested, you can listen to the remarks that Dr. Lewis delivered to an Interpreter Foundation conference on 9 November 2013 from Auckland, New Zealand, where he and his wife were then serving as Church Education System missionaries:
“John S. Lewis on ‘The Scale of Creation in Space and Time'”
(In his introduction to Dr. Lewis’s remarks, Dr. Jeffrey Bradshaw, a computer scientist and a vice president of the Interpreter Foundation [now serving a mission with his wife in the Democratic Republic of the Congo], relates a somewhat different version of the story that I recall above.)
Moreover, Dr. Lewis’s testimony is available at Mormon Scholars Testify. (Simply click on the link to read it.)
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