Bridging the Cam
It's a three-hour hop from Reykjavik to Heathrow and another 90 minutes to Cambridge by chauffer-driven Volvo (or, for the commons, 50 minutes by train). Ask the locals upon arrival, "Where's the University of Cambridge?", and you're bound to get a confused look. I know this first-hand. It's not because the university has a small presence. It basically is the town. But rather, because nobody really speaks of Cambridge as a university. Instead, it's a loose collection of colleges, each with its own admissions requirements, governing body, storied tradition, and distinguished faculty. Americans are obviously familiar with the rivalry between the two oldest universities in the English-speaking world, Oxford and Cambridge. And that rivalry stands to reason: Cambridge was founded early in the 13th century by protesting Oxford scholars. But there seems to be greater angst among the Cambridge colleges themselves – Trinity, Queens', King's, Peterhouse, St John's, and Clare, among many others – which plays itself out in the form of weird, funny, and sometimes cruel pranks, often administered by students on unwitting and hopelessly outnumbered porters (more on that wackiness and the very British notion of porters in a subsequent post, perhaps).

It's humbling to walk the cobblestone streets and narrow alleyways of the same intellectual breeding ground that gave the world Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Stephen Hawking -- not to mention C.S. Lewis, Sylvia Plathe, E.M. Forster, Salman Rushdie, and Vladimir Nabokov. (I've left out so many accomplished alumni and Nobel winners, it's absurd.) Studying here is doubly so. Just walking through a door that says, PRIVATE NO ENTRY, in a place like this is pretty intimidating. But, of course, in real life I'm paid to trek in the footsteps of those far smarter than me and even confront them on occasion. There's the rationalization I've used to keep myself from paralysis. Couple it with the surprising realization that some of the scientists addressing the fellows seem more nervous than we do, and I've so far been getting through the days just fine.

Why would they be nervous? Maybe it's because we have them all to ourselves -- that in any given session we outnumber the presenting scientist like so many students on a hapless porter. Or maybe the scientists feel like they're under pressure to perform, that they have to earn their speaker's fee, or that they're after something more from the Very Rich Foundation (almost like they're auditioning). Maybe it's because the other journalists I'm with have incredible resumes -- each one more accomplished than the next, all incredibly bright and perceptive. (I'm intimidated, and I only have to sit near them.) Or maybe it's just because journalists just plain make people uncomfortable. But now I'm just speculating, and clearly getting ahead of myself. Let me back up and say a bit about the mission, the itinerary, and all the bad food that the English caterers have been jamming down our throats like corn pellets into the gullets of a flock of Sonoma County ducks.

Sir John Templeton made billions on Wall Street (you know his name from what's now called the Franklin-Templeton family of mutual funds). He is, from what I've read, an open-minded, 93-year-old Christian who has made it his mission late in life to encourage the scientific study of religion -- its ramifications, manifestations, basis, evolution, etc. -- which he's funding through the auspices of the Templeton Foundation. The foundation puts $1 million a year into the program I'm part of, along with another $2 million+ that goes every year to the one scientist deemed to be making the greatest contribution to the study of religion (the award is deliberately adjusted upward to keep it just slightly grander than the prize given by the Nobel committee). On top of all that, the foundation offers many grants and doesn't seem to censor the findings. Witness last spring's collosal study on intercessory prayer, which found that praying for the ailing may, in fact, hinder the chances of recovery from a terminal illness. Gah! Of course, there's a harsher take on the foundation, and in that view, it looks something like this: a Christian-centric, anti-Semitic, male-dominated organization run by Sir John's evangelical son, Jack, a man with a clear directive to promote faith and little patience for his father's more altruistic quest for truth.

It's early to tell if there's a real agenda that goes beyond the stated one -- to get journalists to think critically about whether science and religion are a) inherently at odds, or b) in the words of Stephen Jay Gould, 'non-overlapping magesteria' that have little to do with each other, or c) complementary. So far, I haven't felt any pressure to move away from my pre-existing conceptions about religion. We've had atheists speak to us about the weaknesses of the religious argument -- including the brilliant English director Jonathan Miller and FSU professor and author Michael Ruse (Richard Dawkins was scheduled, but bowed out, we were told, because he was unhappy about how one of the fellows criticized his recent TV series on religion. Another speculation was that he was afraid to debate one of the theologian speakers, Keith Ward). Likewise, there have been several devout believers, most of whom subscribe to a malleable type of sci-ligion that's uncommon in the U.S. -- where the religion cedes to scientific evidence, and yet refuses to ever give way entirely. We've had several women speakers and a few Jews. Tomorrow is Islam day (albeit a half day), and in late July, upon our return, Buddhism. We've also had two Templeton Prize winners, John Barrow, an accomplished (but rather boring) cosmologist and theoretical physicist, and John Polkinghorn, president emeritus of Queens' College, where we're studying, as well as a professor of mathematical physics and an ordained minister (and a knight). To their credit, the speakers haven't blanched at exhanges that go something like this:

Polkinghorn: When it comes down to it, theism just has more answers than atheism.
Me: That's a tautological argument. Theism is always going to have one more answer, because when theists come upon a question they can't answer, they just say 'God did it.' Why don't you apply the scientific method to your faith?

More on the fellows, the speakers, the topics, the bad food, that exchange -- and anything else you're interested in -- in subsequent logs. It's late here, and I have to turn in. But my last thought before I do: The mission of this program is to examine whether it's possible to build bridges between two intractable, antagonistic masses. I have real doubts about whether this is possible without one body destroying -- or completely colonizing -- the other. And yet, I can't think of a better place to sequester a dozen journalists in the name of figuring it all out. I mean that in both an intellectual and methaphorical sense. Clearly, this place is steeped in a history of conceptual giants connecting disciplines that once seemed worlds apart. But it's also steeped in physical structures spanning the River Cam. Cambridge is about bridges.