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Selections From Dismissing God by Donald D. Hoffman

September 29, 2010

Donald D. Hoffman is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, University of California Irvine, California. If you are like me, you may be a little tired of the Steven Pinker neuroscientists and their broad claims at having discovered the Soul or God in the human brain. Dr. Hoffman makes a clear case here as to what neuroscience knows and doesn’t know.

DEBATES BETWEEN THEISTS AND ATHEISTS often hinge, naturally enough, on advances in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Here I contend that such advances, though relevant to the debate, cannot license deductively valid arguments for or against theism. I contend further that the central role of probability in evolutionary theory grants no inductive strength to arguments for or against theism. The Kolmogorov axioms of probability and the mathematical definition of a stochastic process suitably model mutation and selection; using this fact to conclude for or against theism requires, in either case, a leap of faith.

Neuroscience and God
In 1961 the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, while making history as the first person to orbit the earth, also became the first person to discuss theology from space with the famous comment, “I don’t see any god up here.” Nothing was settled, of course, by this observation, and substantive debate between science and religion continues to this day. But Gagarin’s comment raises a wider question. As science advances it probes, with an increasingly powerful array of tools, all aspects of nature from the submicroscopic to the cosmological. As new vistas of nature open to the advances of science, it appears each time that the scientists exploring the new vistas can say, with Gagarin, “I don’t see any god up here.” The unexplored gaps in nature where God might be hiding are rapidly vanishing. Will God suffer the same extinction as species whose habitat vanishes?

Or has neuroscience already dealt the extinction blow? Normal activity of the human cerebral cortex can be altered by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a magnetic field that can be applied directly and noninvasively outside of the human skull. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Canada has found that appropriate application of TMS to the temporal lobes of the brain will cause many people to experience the presence of God. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) to image the brain activity of nuns and monks who meditate to experience oneness with God, found that when the meditation reached its goal, certain regions in the parietal lobe decreased their activity. Is the experience of God simply an artifact of brain activity?

And didn’t evolutionary theory deal the extinction blow long ago? God is no longer needed to explain the origin of species. Chance operating with natural selection seems to do just fine. I will not try here to argue for or against the existence of God. I will simply observe that the three dismissals of God just scouted, despite their psychological appeal, do not survive a sober understanding of the scope and limits of science, the nature of human perception, and the modern theory of chance.

The Nature Of Human Perception
I begin with the nature of human perception, and in particular human visual perception, which will illuminate the scope and limits of science. Most of us think pretheoretically that human vision operates much like a camera. There is an objective physical world out there that exists independently of whether we perceive it or not, and our eyes, like a camera, faithfully record this world. In part this is true. Our eyes do focus an image, as does a camera, and the retinas of our eyes record this image, as does the film or CCD (charge-coupled device) chip of a camera.

But our eyes are just the first stage of visual processing. Behind the eyes the optic nerves transport filtered versions of the retinal images to the brain’s cortex. And here there is a big surprise: Roughly half of the brain’s cortex is engaged in vision. About 50 billion neurons, and tens of trillions of synapses, are engaged each time you simply open your eyes and look around. This is far more computational power than is necessary to simply record an image. What is going on?

Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has made clear that our visual systems are not simply passive recorders of objective reality, but instead are active constructors of the visual realities we perceive. Each of us has within us a reality engine, which takes the images at the eyes and constructs three-dimensional worlds of objects, colors, textures, motions, and depth. What we see with each glance is not the world as it is objectively and as it would be even if there were no observers. Instead what we see is entirely our own construction. Our process of construction proceeds so rapidly and confidently that we are misled by our own prowess into thinking that we are not constructing at all, but simply reporting what is there independent of us. In short, our belief that we see the world as it objectively is, unadorned, is an illusion made possible by the very brilliance and efficiency of our reality creating process.

Reality As We Construct It According To Our Rules
What we see at any moment is the best theory our visual system can come up with to explain the images at the eyes. The visual system is much like a scientist, in creating theoretical explanations for the evidence at hand. The big difference is that the theory building process of the scientist is usually conscious, while the theory-building process of our visual systems is for the most part conducted without our conscious awareness. The visual system does not just create its theories at random, but instead is guided by many rules of visual construction, rules that are the subject of much current investigation by vision researchers. Rules have been uncovered for our constructions of color, depth, motion, objects, shapes, and edges. A visual example of our constructive processes at work is the “subjective Necker cube” first devised in 1977 by psychologists Bradley and Petry:

Perhaps you see a cube floating in front of black disks when you view this figure. If you look for a while you might notice that the cube flips, and that a corner of the cube that was in front suddenly is behind, and vice versa. So you actually construct two different cubes floating in front of the black disks. You might feel that you see the edges of the cubes quite clearly, even where they pass between the black disks. But if you cover up the black disks with your hands, you’ll see that there is no edge between the disks. You construct the edge you see, just like you construct the two cubes.

But you can do even more. Imagine that the black disks are holes in a sheet of paper, and that you are looking through the holes, and behind the paper you see a cube. Notice that now you see the cube not floating in front of the black disks, but sitting behind them. And the edges of the cube, that look ghostly when the cube floats in front, now look solid when the cube is behind. If you keep looking at the cube behind the holes, you’ll again see that it can flip, so that you can actually see two different cubes behind. In total, then, you construct four different three-dimensional cubes from this flat drawing, and you construct illusory edges which you make to be either ghostly or solid. That is a lot of construction, and just a hint of what your visual system is doing all the time. Space here does not permit going into more examples, but I have placed some interactive visual demonstrations online, where you can explore for yourself how you create color, motion, and objects.

The demonstrations are at this URL: http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/Applets/index.html

What is true for vision is true for all of our senses, including touch, smell, taste, and hearing. In each of these senses, what we perceive is not reality unadorned, but reality as we construct it according to our own internal set of rules. We are adept creators of all the sensory realities we experience.

Insight Into The Nature Of Objective Reality
Philosophers studying perception distinguish two senses of perceiving: the phenomenal and relational. The phenomenal sense of perceiving refers to our visual experience, the way that things seem to us. If I am dreaming about an elephant, the elephant I am experiencing in the dream is being perceived in the phenomenal sense. The relational sense of perceiving refers to the objective reality that we interact with in an act of perception. For me to perceive something in the relational sense, that thing must exist independent of whether I perceive it or not.

Now clearly none of my sensory experiences exist independent of whether I perceive them or not. Therefore objects in the relational sense are not in my sensory experience, but must be inferred from my sensory experience. The situation, then, is that the world we experience as our perceptual reality is in fact an elaborate construction on our part. It is something we perceive in the phenomenal sense, not the relational sense. And what we construct is critically dependent on the rules we employ in the reality creation process. Realities that are not licensed by our rules are realities that we are not equipped to experience. What can we say then about an objective reality that does not depend on our sensory experiences for its existence? Do our sensory experiences give us secure grounds to make inferences about this reality, about the objects we might be perceiving in the relational sense?

One might be tempted to say this is so based on an evolutionary argument: Creatures whose perceptions in the phenomenal sense were too divergent from reality in the relational sense were at a competitive disadvantage, and natural selection has made sure that those of us who have survived have a good match between our phenomenal perceptions and the relational reality.

But this is not a valid argument within the structure of evolutionary theory. What natural selection secures, according to this theory, is survival to reproduction, not perceptual truth. Roaches, like humans, are the result of natural selection. But we have little confidence that roaches have deep insights into objective reality. They don’t need such insights in order to survive just fine. The same may be true of us. We have cognitive and perceptual apparatuses that allow us to survive long enough to reproduce, but we have no guarantees on evolutionary grounds that these apparatuses give us deep insight into the nature of objective reality.

Phenomenal Worlds And The Relational Realm
Indeed it is highly unlikely that objective reality resembles in any way the worlds of our phenomenal construction. It would be luck beyond belief to find that the human species, of the millions of species on earth, happens to be the one whose phenomenal worlds resemble the relational realm. It is a certain anthropocentrism that would lead us to assert otherwise, the same anthropocentrism that led us to assert that the earth is the center of the universe, about which all else revolves. What may be unique to humans as a species is a perceptual and cognitive apparatus which, for the first time in evolutionary history, can rise above the assumption, whether tacit or explicit, that our perceptions in some way resemble objective reality.

What view does this give of the scientific enterprise? Science walks on two legs: observation and logic. The success of science has been its care in arranging detailed observations, and its care in the logical interpretation of the results of these observations. But what the study of perception has uncovered is that, no matter how careful our observations are, we will always be limited to observing only what our internal rules of construction allow us to perceive. Even if we extend our senses with telescopes, microscopes, and various high-tech devices, we can never step outside our senses and see reality unadorned. We cannot get perceptual data that is independent of our own rules of perceptual construction.

The very rules that enable us to see also blind us to the infinity of other possibilities that do not conform to our rules. Evolution is not done yet. There is no reason to believe that we have arrived at the set of rules of construction that give deep insight into the nature of objective reality. There is every reason to believe that we are simply another species, like spiders and termites, that has developed an idiosyncratic perceptual system to fit the idiosyncrasies of the niches we happen to inhabit. This is, of course, no denigration of science. Science may be the best our species can do given the limits of its perceptual and cognitive endowments.

What this does make clear is that the ability of science to understand objective reality is limited by the perceptual and cognitive endowments of our species. Those endowments have not evolved, according to neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, to give us truth, just to give to us, as also to the roach, survival to reproduction. We can point to the many successes of science to suggest that our species might be special, that our perceptual apparatus might just give us true insights into the nature of reality independent of our perceptions. But we can also point to these same successes to tell the opposite story.

The Matter And Energy We Can Perceive Is A Mere 4% Of The Total
One stunning success of science is the discovery of dark energy and dark matter, which together constitute something like 96% of the energy and matter in the universe. The matter and energy we can perceive is a mere 4% of the total, the light frosting on the cake. We have no current way to discover any properties of this dark matter and energy. We can only postulate its existence because without it the behavior of the 4% we can see and measure would not make sense. So our best science tells us that there are serious limits to how deeply our perceptual and cognitive endowments allow us to penetrate the nature of objective reality. The same message appears repeated many times elsewhere in science, for instance in the uncertainty principle and the measurement problem of quantum theory.So the story outlined above, in which science is systematically uncovering all the secrets of nature, and leaving less and less room for God to hide, is not only immodest, but a complete misunderstanding of the scientific enterprise.

Unprovable Truths
Science is a species specific enterprise, which proceeds under the restrictions of the cognitive and perceptual endowments of one species among millions on earth. The most striking results of this enterprise appear to inform that species of some of its own limitations. These results crop up not only in science but also in mathematics, where we have discovered hard limits to our methods of proof: there are unprovable truths.

If science isn’t eliminating places where God might hide, hasn’t it at least made God unnecessary, replacing the creative role once assigned to God with the creative power of chance? This is a common assumption, but one that fails to understand the modern theory of chance. This theory is modeled by a series of axioms, among them the Kolmogorov axioms of probability theory, and various axioms for stochastic systems. In the case of probability theory, for instance, these axioms define the properties of a probability measure: It must be an additive function on events whose maximum sum is 1, and so on. Any process in nature that can be modeled by these axioms is taken to be a probabilistic process, a work of chance. But this leaves completely open the interpretation of these axioms. Subjectivists claim that the indeterminacies modeled in probability theory simply reflect our own epistemological limitations; objectivists claim that the indeterminacies are not merely in our heads, but in the objective world itself. Neither interpretation precludes a God orchestrating the probabilistic process. All the mathematics can do is describe the essential properties of such a process, regardless of its origin, and without constraining the nature of its origin.

Indifferent Neural Facts
If modern theories of chance do not preclude the possible agency of God behind random processes, surely at least the recent brain imaging and TMS studies show that God is simply a figment of our brains, not to be taken seriously. But this conclusion is by no means dictated by the neural facts. Every one of our perceptions, not just our perceptions of God, can be correlated with neural activity. Surely it is a mistake to take none of our perceptions seriously. To do so would lead to quick and certain death. We must be careful, then, in sorting through which perceptions to take seriously and which not. And the neural facts don’t a priori tell us which way to treat God. If there were no God, and God was simply a figment of our imagination, then we might expect to find the neural correlates of God perception that we do. On the other hand, if there were a God, and God wanted us to perceive God, then one might equally expect to find the neural correlates of God perception that we do. The neural facts are indifferent to the conclusion we should draw here.

This indifference of facts holds more generally. There is no evidence from the sciences or elsewhere that logically compels belief or disbelief in God. It is elementary in the philosophy of science that no matter how much data one collects, there will always be infinitely many theories compatible with that data, and that make contradictory predictions about the outcomes of new experiments. It is because the theories of science are not logically dictated (although surely influenced) by the facts that scientific theory building is such an interesting and nontrivial enterprise. The atheist, then, can marshal an array of evidence that there is no God, and the theist that there is. In neither case can the evidence logically prove the claim. Both choices are, equally, a step of faith.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged Dismissing God, Donald D. Hoffman, Objective Reality, Unprovable Truths | 1 Comment »

Memo to Hawking: There’s Still Room for God By Roger Scruton

September 28, 2010

Roger Scruton

Mr. Scruton, a philosopher, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, is a writer, philosopher and public commentator. He has specialized in aesthetics with particular attention to music and architecture. He engages in contemporary political and cultural debates from the standpoint of a conservative thinker and is well known as a powerful polemicist. He has written widely in the press on political and cultural issues. This is a short article that was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal.

Neither Kant nor Einstein thought physics explained everything. I have another scientist who will weigh in on that thought for tomorrow’s post. In the meantime, Roger Scruton’s wonderful reply to Stephen Hawking…

How did the universe begin? Some think the question has no answer — that it lies beyond the limits of human reason. Others think the question has an answer, but that the answer depends not on reason but on faith.

What almost no one believes is that there is a single, rational scientific theory that tells us how the universe emerged from the primeval nothingness. How could there be such a thing?

When Isaac Newton proposed his laws of gravity, he did so in a spirit of awe and reverence before the simplicity and beauty of the physical world. He did not doubt that so perfect a design implied a yet more perfect designer.

Immanuel Kant, who believed that Newton’s laws of gravity are not merely true but necessarily true, argued that we humans lack the ability to comprehend the universe as a whole, and thus that we can never construct a valid argument for a designer. Our thinking can take us from one point to another along the chain of events. But it cannot take us to a point outside the chain, from which we can pose the question of an original cause.

Indeed the question of how the universe began does not make sense. The concept of cause applies to the objects of experience, linking past to future through universal laws. When we ask about the universe as a whole we are attempting to go beyond possible experience into a realm where the concept of cause has no purchase, and where the writ of reason does not run.

All physicists since Kant have been influenced by this argument. Some admit the point, like Albert Einstein, Others, like Stephen Hawking, express the point in a language of their own.

But Mr. Hawking now wishes to break with this consensus and to argue that science actually does have an answer to the question of origins. We can know how the universe was created, he suggests, since the laws of physics imply that there are limiting conditions, in which universes come into being by the operation of those very laws. There is no room for the creator, since there is no need for Him. The laws of physics do it all by themselves.

Mr. Hawking, of course, dazzles us with his scientific discoveries. Einstein broke with the common-sense view of the world when he decided to treat time as a fourth dimension, on a par with the three dimensions of space. Mr. Hawking gives us dimension upon dimension, assuming that because every continuum can be squeezed into the axioms of a geometry there is no limit to the number of dimensions in which we humans find ourselves suspended. Nor is there a limit to the number of universes, even though we happen to inhabit only one of them and the others may be forever inaccessible to us.

The laws of physics are fast ceasing to be laws of the universe and are becoming laws of a “multiverse” instead. By the time people absorb all of these shifts, they have little strength left to dissent from the view that “the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing” or to question Mr. Hawking’s conclusion that therefore there is no need for God.

But what exactly has changed? Have we really moved on from the position that Kant presented? Have we really lifted ourselves outside of everything and everywhere, and achieved the view from nowhere that tells us how things began?

If Mr. Hawking is right, the answer to the question “What created the universe?” is “The laws of physics.” But what created the laws of physics? How is it that these strange and powerful laws, and these laws alone, apply to the world?

There are those who will say that the question has no answer —that it lies at or beyond the limits of human thought. And there are those who will say that the question has an answer, but that it is answered not by reason but by faith.

I say that perhaps, in the end, they are the same position. That is what Kant believed. You find out the limits of scientific understanding, he said. And beyond those limits lies the realm of morality, commitment and trust.

Kant, who destroyed all the systems of metaphysics and dug a grave for theology, was also a believer, who, as he put it, “attacked the claims of reason in order to make room for those of faith.” It seems to me that he was right.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged Immanuel Kant, Roger Scruton, Stephen Hawking | 2 Comments »

Reading Selections from “Fearful Symmetries” by Stephen M. Barr

September 17, 2010

Dr. Steven M. Barr

Science seeks the elegant, elusive simplicity of the universe itself but suffers from the propensity of many of its adherents to flatten and trivialize the world by reductionism. In yesterday’s post C.S. Lewis wrote:

Christianity claims to give an account of facts — to tell you what the real universe is like. Its account of the universe may be true, or it may not, and once the question is really before you, then your natural inquisitiveness must make you want to know the answer. If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.

I wonder which facts would affect the atheist more. I think of the atheists who deny the historicity of the New Testament or retreat to the narrowness of the scientific method, for whom the inability to pull God from a test tube is prima facie evidence of his lack of existence. I think Steven Barr’s latest writings might come close. Dr. Stephen M. Barr is professor of physics at the University of Delaware and author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith and A Student’s Guide to Natural Science. Reading selections from Fearful Symmetries here:

Reductionism
Since the time of Newton, science has advanced by a strategy rightly called “reductionism.” This method, which explains things by analyzing them into smaller and simpler parts, has yielded a rich harvest of discoveries about the natural world. As a means of analysis, then, reductionism has certainly proven its value. But many wonder whether science is reductive in a more radical and disturbing way — by flattening, collapsing, and trivializing the world. For all its intellectual accomplishments, does science end up taking our sense of reality down several notches? One could well get that impression from perusing the writings of certain scientists. Francis Crick famously asserted that human life is “no more than the behavior of . . . nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, once described people as “machines made of meat.” Neuroscientist Giulio Giorelli announced that “we have a soul, but it is made up of many tiny robots.” And biologist Charles Zuker has concluded that “in essence, we are nothing but a big fly.”

A Metaphysical Tendency Accompanying Reductionism
This tendency to downgrade and diminish reflects a metaphysical prejudice that equates explanatory reduction with a grim slide down the ladder of being. Powerful explanatory schemes reveal things to be simpler than they appear. What simpler means in science is much discussed among philosophers—it is not at all a simple question. But to many materialists it seems to mean lower, cruder, and more trivial. By this way of thinking, the further we push toward a more basic understanding of things, the more we are im-mersed in meaningless, brutish bits of matter.

The philosopher Georges Rey has written, for example, that “any ultimate explanation of mental phenomena will have to be in non-mental [i.e., sub-mental or material] terms or else it won’t be an explanation of it.” Of course, the logic of this could be turned around. One could just as well say that any ultimate explanation of the material world must be in nonmaterial terms. But for materialists the lower explains the higher; and lower does not just mean more fundamental but instead suggests a diminished ontological status. The presumption is that explanations move from evolved complexity to primitive stuff.

At first glance, the history of the cosmos seems to bear this out. Early on, the universe was filled with nearly featureless gas and dust, which eventually condensed to form galaxies, stars, and planets. In stars and supernovas, the simplest elements, hydrogen and helium, fused to make heavier ones, gradually building up the whole periodic table. In some primordial soup, or slime, or ooze on the early earth, atoms agglomerated into larger and more intricate molecules until self-replicating ones appeared and life began. From one-celled organisms, ever more complicated living things evolved, until sensation and thought appeared. In cosmic evolution the arrow apparently moves from chaos to order, formlessness to form, triviality to complexity, and matter to mind.

Dennett Theory Of Religion
And that is why, according to philosopher Daniel Dennett, religion has it exactly upside down. Believers think that God reached down to bring order and create, whereas in reality the world was built — or rather built itself — from the ground up. In Dennett’s metaphor, the world was constructed not by “skyhooks” reaching down from the heavens but by “cranes” supported by, and reaching up from, the solid ground.

The history to which the atheist points — of matter self-organizing and physical structures growing in complexity — is correct as far as it goes, but it is only part of the story. The lessons the atheist draws are naive. Yes, the world we experience is the result of processes that move upward. But Dennett and others overlook the hidden forces and principles that govern those processes. In short, they are not true reductionists because they don’t go all the way down to the most basic explanations of reality.

As we turn to the fundamental principles of physics, we discover that order does not really emerge from chaos, as we might naively assume; it always emerges from greater and more impressive order already present at a deeper level. It turns out that things are not more coarse or crude or unformed as one goes down into the foundations of the physical world but more subtle, sophisticated, and intricate the deeper one goes.

An Example
Let’s start with a simple but instructive example of how order can appear to emerge spontaneously from mere chaos through the operation of natural forces. Imagine a large number of identical marbles rolling around randomly in a shoe box. If the box is tilted, all the marbles will roll down into a corner and arrange themselves into what is called the “hexagonal closest packing” pattern. (This is the same pattern one sees in oranges stacked on a fruit stand or in cells in a beehive.) This orderly structure emerges as the result of blind physical forces and mathematical laws. There is no hand arranging it. Physics requires the marbles to lower their gravitational potential energy as much as possible by squeezing down into the corner, which leads to the geometry of hexagonal packing.

At this point it seems as though order has indeed sprung from mere chaos. To see why this is wrong, however, consider a genuinely chaotic situation: a typical teenager’s bedroom. Imagine a huge jack tilting the bedroom so that everything in it slides into a corner. The result would not be an orderly pattern but instead a jumbled heap of lamps, furniture, books, clothing, and what have you.

Why the difference? Part of the answer is that, unlike the objects in the bedroom, the marbles in the box all have the same size and shape. But there’s more to it. Put a number of spoons of the same size and shape into a box and tilt it, and the result will be a jumbled heap. Marbles differ from spoons because their shape is spherical. When spoons tumble into a corner, they end up pointing every which way, but marbles don’t point every which way, because no matter which way a sphere is turned it looks exactly the same.

These two crucial features of the marbles—having the same shape and having a spherical shape—should be understood as principles of order that are already present in the supposedly chaotic situation before the box was tilted. In fact, the more we reduce to deeper explanations, the higher we go. This is because, in a sense that can be made mathematically precise, the preexisting order inherent in the marbles is greater than the order that emerges after the marbles arrange themselves. This requires some expla-nation.

Both the preexisting order and the order that emerges involve symmetry, a concept of central importance in modern physics, as we’ll see. Mathematicians and physicists have a peculiar way of thinking about symmetry: A symmetry is something that is done. For example, if one rotates a square by 90 degrees, it looks the same, so rotating by 90 degrees is said to be a symme-try of the square. So is rotating by 180 degrees, 270 degrees, or a full 360 degrees. A square thus has exactly four symmetries.

Not surprisingly, the hexagonal pattern the marbles form has six symmetries (rotating by any multiple of 60 degrees: 60, 120, 180, 240, 300, and 360 degrees). A sphere, on the other hand, has an infinite number of symmetries—doubly infinite, in fact, since rotating a sphere by any angle about any axis leaves it looking the same. And, what’s more, the symmetries of a sphere include all the symmetries of a hexagon.

If we think this way about symmetry, careful analysis shows that, when marbles arrange themselves into the hexagonal pattern, just six of the infinite number of symmetries in the shape of the marbles are ex-pressed or manifested in their final arrangement. The rest of the symmetries are said, in the jargon of physics, to be spontaneously broken. So, in the simple example of marbles in a tilted box, we can see that symmetry isn’t popping out of nowhere. It is being distilled out of a greater symmetry already present within the spherical shape of the marbles.

Spontaneous Symmetry
The idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking is important in fundamental physics. The equations of electromagnetism have a mathematical structure that is dictated by a set of so-called gauge symmetries, discovered by the mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl almost a century ago. For a long time it seemed that two other basic forces of nature, the weak force and the strong force, were not based on symmetries. But about forty years ago it was found that the weak force is actually based on an even larger set of gauge symmetries than those of electromagnetism.

Because the symmetries of the weak force are spontaneously broken, however, they do not manifest or express themselves in an obvious way, which is why it took so long to discover them. (The strong force is based on a yet larger set of gauge symmetries, but this fact was obscured by a quite different effect and also was not discovered for a long time.)

This history illustrates a general trend in modern physics: The more deeply it has probed the structure of matter, the greater the mathematical order it has found. The order we see in nature does not come from chaos; it is distilled out of a more fundamental order.

Symmetry is just one kind of order. In the case of the marbles in the box, other principles of order were also at work, such as the principle that caused the marbles to seek out the configuration of lowest energy. This is an aspect of a beautiful mathematical principle, called the principle of least action that underlies all of classical physics. When physicists investigated the subatomic realm, however, they discovered that the principle of least action is just a limiting case of the much more subtle and sophisticated path integral principle, which is the basis of quantum mechanics, as Richard Feynman showed in the 1940s. The lesson is the same: The deeper one looks, the more remarkable the mathematical structure one sees.

An Underlying Order
The mathematical order underlying physical phenomena is most easily observed in the motions of the heavenly bodies. Even primitive societies were aware of it, and it inspired not only feelings of religious awe (many expressions of which are found in the Bible itself) but also the earliest attempts at mathematical science. And when scientists began to study the solar system with more precision, they discovered unsuspected patterns even more beautiful than those known to the ancients.

Four hundred years ago, for example, Johannes Kepler discovered three marvelous geometrical laws that describe planetary motion. So impressed was he by the beauty of these laws that he wrote this prayer in his treatise Harmonices Mundi (The harmonies of the world): “I thank thee, Lord God our Creator, that thou hast allowed me to see the beauty in thy work of creation.” Decades later, Newton succeeded in explaining Kepler’s laws — but he did not explain them down, if by down we mean reducing what we observe and experience to something more trivial or brutish.

On the contrary, he explained them by deriving them from an underlying order that is more general and impressive, which we now call Newton’s laws of mechanics and gravity. Newton’s law of gravity was later explained, in turn, by Einstein, who showed that it followed from a more profound theory of gravity called general relativity. And it is now generally believed that Einstein’s theory is but the manifestation of a yet more fundamental theory, which many suspect to be superstring theory. Superstring theory has a mathematical structure so sophisticated that, after a quarter of a century of study by hundreds of the world’s most brilliant physicists and mathematicians, it is still not fully understood.

It is true that science seeks to simplify our picture of the world. An explanation should in some sense be simpler than the thing it explains. And, indeed, there is a sense in which Einstein’s theory of gravity is simpler than Newton’s, and Newton’s theory of planetary motion simpler than Kepler’s.

As physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek notes, however, Einstein’s theory is “not ‘simple’ in the usual sense of the word.” Whereas Kepler’s laws can be explained in a few minutes to a junior-high-school student, Newton’s laws cannot be fully explained without using calculus. And to explain Einstein’s theory requires four-dimensional, curved, non-Euclidean space-time and much else besides. And yet, once we know enough, Einstein’s theory does have a compelling simplicity greater than Newton’s theory. The simplicity to which scientific reductionism leads us, then, is of a very paradoxical kind. It is a simplicity that is by no means simpleminded. It is not at all jejune, but deeply interesting and intellectually rich.

Paradoxical Reductionism In Chess
The same paradox can be found in many fields. The chess world champion Capablanca was admired for the purity and simplicity of his style. But to understand his moves one must have an understanding of the game that can be acquired only by years of experience and study. A later world champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, wrote of him, “In this simplicity there was a unique beauty of genuine depth.” Another world champion, Emanuel Lasker, observed that “[in Capablanca’s games] there is nothing hidden, artificial, or labored. Although they are transparent, they are never banal and are often deep.” Wilczek had just the right term for this kind of simplicity, which is also found in the fundamental laws of physics: profound simplicity.

Profound Simplicity
Profound simplicity always impresses with its elegance, economy of means, harmony, and perfection. This perfection, as Wilczek notes, is such that one feels that the slightest alteration would be disastrous. He quotes Salieri’s envious description of Mozart’s music in the film Amadeus: “Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.” Applying this to physics, Wilczek says, “A theory begins to be perfect if any change makes it worse. . . . A theory becomes perfectly perfect if it’s impossible to change it without ruining it entirely.”

Symmetry is one of the factors that contribute to profound simplicity, both in the laws of physics and in works of art. Paint over one petal of the rose window of a cathedral, remove one column from a colonnade, and the symmetry is destroyed. Each part is necessary for the completion of the pattern.

The symmetries that characterize the deepest laws of physics are mathematically richer and stranger than the ones we encounter in everyday life. The gauge symmetries of the strong and weak forces, for example, involve rotations in abstract mathematical spaces with complex dimensions. In other words, the coordinates in those pecu-liar spaces are not ordinary numbers, as they are for the space in which we live, but complex numbers, which are numbers that contain the square root of minus one. Grand unified theories—which combine the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces into a single mathe-matical structure—posit symmetries that involve rotations in abstract spaces of five or more complex dimensions.

Supersymmetries
Stranger and more profoundly simple are supersymmetries. There is much reason to think that supersymmetries are built into the laws of physics, and finding evidence of that is one of the main goals of the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland, which has recently begun to take data. Supersymmetries involve so-called Grassmann numbers, which are utterly different from the ordinary numbers we use to count and measure things. Whereas ordinary numbers (and even complex numbers) have the common-sense property that a × b = b × a, Grassmann numbers have the bizarre property that a × b = -b × a. A simple enough formula, but hard indeed for the human mind to fathom.

Esoteric symmetries also lie at the heart of Einstein’s theory of relativity. These Lorentz symmetries involve rotations not just in three-dimensional space but in four-dimensional space-time. We can all visualize the symmetries of a sphere or a hexagonal pattern, but Lorentz symmetries, supersymmetries, and the gauge symmetries of the weak, strong, and grand unified forces lie far outside our experience and intuition. They can be grasped only with the tools of advanced mathematics.

Physicists have found beauty in the mathematical principles animating the physical world, from Kepler, who praised God for the elegant geometry of the planets’ orbits, to Hermann Weyl, for whom mathematical physics revealed a “flawless harmony that is in conformity with sublime Reason.”

Some might suspect that this beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or that scientists think their own theories beautiful simply out of vanity. But there is a remarkable fact that suggests otherwise. Again and again throughout history, what started as pure mathematics — ideas developed solely for the sake of their intrinsic interest and elegance — turned out later to be needed to express fundamental laws of physics.

Starting As Pure Mathematics Later Needed For Fundamental Laws Of Physics
For example, complex numbers were invented and the theory of them deeply investigated by the early nine-teenth century, a mathematical development that seemed to have no relevance to physical reality. Only in the 1920s was it discovered that complex numbers were needed to write the equations of quantum mechanics. Or, in another instance, when the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton invented quaternions in the mid-nineteenth century, they were regarded as an ingenious but totally useless construct. Hamilton himself held this view.

When asked by an aristocratic lady whether quaternions were useful for anything, Hamilton joked, “Aye, madam, quaternions are very useful — for solving problems involving quaternions.” And yet, many decades later, quaternions were put to use to describe properties of subatomic particles such as the spin of electrons as well as the relation between neutrons and protons. Or again, Riemannian geometry was developed long before it was found to be needed for Einstein’s theory of gravity. And a branch of mathematics called the theory of Lie groups was developed before it was found to describe the gauge symmetries of the fundamental forces.

Indeed, mathematical beauty has become a guiding principle in the search for better theories in fundamental physics. Werner Heisenberg wrote, “In exact science, no less than in the arts, beauty is the most important source of illumina-tion and clarity.” Paul Dirac, one of the giants of twentieth-century physics, went so far as to say that it was more important to have “beauty in one’s equations” than to have them fit the experimental data.

At the roots of the physical world, therefore, one does not find mere inchoate slime or dust but instead a richness and perfection of form based on profound, subtle, and beautiful mathematical ideas. This is what the famous astrophysicist Sir James Jeans meant when he said many decades ago that “the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” Benedict XVI expressed the same basic insight when in his Regensburg lecture he referred to “the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality,…the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature.”

A Greater And More Impressive Order
Modern science does not directly imply or require any particular metaphysical theory of reality, but it does suggest to us that the picture presented by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins is false because the picture is only partial. In the terms of Dennett’s meta-phor of cranes constructing complexity, one sees what is built from the ground up; but delving beneath the surface, one finds an astonishing, hidden world — the underground mechanisms of the cranes, as it were.

It is true that the cosmos was at one point a swirling mass of gas and dust out of which has come the extraordinary complexity of life as we experience it. Yet, at every moment in this process of development, a greater and more impressive order operates within — an order that did not develop but was there from the beginning. In the upper world, mind, thought, and ideas make their appearance as fruit on the topmost branches of an evolutionary tree. Below the surface, we see the taproots of reality, the fundamental laws of physics that shimmer with ideas of profound simplicity.

To describe people as machines made of meat is as scientifically unsophisticated as to think of the sun as a heat-emitting machine made of swirl-ing gas. It ignores the reasons why the machines function as they do—reasons that the explanations of modern physics reduce to simplici-ties as elegant as they are elusive. Peering into the hidden depths, we see that matter itself is the expression of “a great thought,” of ideas that are, as Weyl said, “in conformity with sublime Reason.” And we begin to discover that matter, although mindless itself, is the product of a Mind of infinite profundity and infinite simplicity.

Posted in Aesthetics, Science And Religion | Tagged Daniel Dennett, mathematical order, physics, spontaneous symmetry, Stephen M. Barr | 2 Comments »

Michael Novak On Two Radically Different Ways Of Living In The World

September 15, 2010

Another set of reading selections from Michael Novak’s 2008 bestseller, No One Sees God. Here we see a contrast between atheism and Catholicism: one where the inner horizon offers no answering personal presence (because the unbeliever thinks God is an illusion) and the other where a central light and energy and love lives within us. Both can be pretty awesome at times.

The Experience Of Insight
In coming to my own views, I have been much helped by Bernard Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Lonergan treats the experience of insight as an empirical datum. An insight (getting the point of a joke, for instance, or seeing at last the solution to an algebra problem) is not quite a sense datum, but it is an experience at least equally vivid. A more complex form of insight, also experienced vividly, is to conclude reflection by making a judgment; for instance: “Having heard the evidence, I conclude that your story is demonstrably false. I conclude that witness number one is a good man — but his associate is not to be trusted.”

The experience of insight and the steps involved in reaching a sound judgment are important to recognize in one’s own mental life. Beyond that, based on evidence we recognize in our own inner life, these steps offer important evidence for the judgment, Who do I understand myself to be? A mistake in this judgment deeply affects our judgments about God, his nature, his existence.

Our acts of insight are different in kind from acts of sensation. This difference suggests that our inner life goes beyond sense knowledge. It also suggests that what the ancients meant by “spirit” or “soul” appears most clearly today in a virtually unlimited drive within us — the drive to raise questions to have insights, and to reach sound judgrnents about what is true, what false. These common human drives instruct us about our true nature, who we really are. They also aim us in the direction of what an acceptable idea of God’s nature is. At the very least, He must be capable of insight and judgenent. He is nonmaterial and may be outside of the space-time continuum.

These are not matters of Christian faith or theology; they appertain to the branch of secular Philosophy called “metaphysics,” by which I mean considerations of reason, apart from faith. I mean the “background assumptions” about nature and history that are implicit in everything each person thinks and writes. I mean competing conceptions of God, some of which are to be judged better than others. In such explorations, the Greeks and Romans of old were far braver and more persistent than all but a small band in modern times

Among the chief participants in Plato dialogues, such differences in metaphysics are starkly drawn. If the participants in these dialogues are to make progress in their this-worldly arguments, it is necessary to bring their underlying metaphysical differences to light. Plato found that the artful presentation of a back-and-forth conversation is the best way to bring out these differences. Bringing these differences to light is a work of reason, even if it is not exactly empirical reason.

A Commitment To Reason
Catholics hold that other Christian communities share with Catholics many affirmations of Christian faith, but not all. We cherish this community of beliefs, but pray that the shared circle of belief will grow larger. We hold that our Catholic faith does not make sense unless the Jewish faith is also true. We share with some atheists their clear commitment to reason. Truth is indeed crucial to Christian faith. But it does matter to our consciences which church is closest to the truth. As the aphorism puts it, faith does not take away from reason, but brings it to completion (gratia noi tollit sed perficit naturam). A quite imperfect analogy is how eyeglasses, microscopes and telescopes do not demean eyesight, only carry it where it could not go alone. For Catholics and some other Christians, reason is to be honored. Which church is true is a crucial judgment of reason.

The Tension Of The Absurd Is Crucial To Our Truthfulness
Albert Camus pointed out an unavoidable duality in human experience, which gives rise to what he calls the Absurd. On the one hand, we feel the undeniable longing for truth, beauty, goodness, justice, wholeness, love, that rushes powerfully within us, even under the most unpromising conditions (as in the Gulag, under torture). On the other hand, these aspirations cannot avoid crashing head-on with the cruel randomness, desolation, and emptiness that we are often forced to confront. We can evade this unhappy duality for a long time by distracting ourselves with pulsating music, card playing, ceaseless activity shopping.

Yet sooner or later we are driven to ask: Why are we here? Why are so many abandoned children crying in the night? Why the everlasting boredom, and the incessant rain of nothingness upon the windowpanes of our consciousness? Why so many jading daily routines, such petty strife, such pointless quarrels, such office pretenses?

Without both these sides of our consciousness, Camus taught us, we would not come to rest on the razor’s edge of the Absurd. Keeping the two sides in contact is crucial to our truthfulness. The Absurd arises from our longing for meaning and beauty held in contact with the absurdities we meet every day. Remove one or the other, and the tension falls limp.

Atheists would like to shift onto Christian shoulders the burden of explaining the evil and absurdity in the world, which their reason discerns steadily enough. Yet even when they have eliminated God from the scheme of life as they see it, they have not diminished by one iota the evils, sufferings, and injustices both Christians and atheists alike see around us. Atheists do not explain how they fit into their fairly rosy view of human progress, reason, and hopefulness. A faith they dare not express seems to tell them that this progress is indefinitely upward, ennobling, worth contributing to, quite enough purpose for a good life.

Yet, irony of ironies, meaninglessness squared, what if our visible “progress” is hurtling us toward the most awful end of history any apocalyptic writer has ever imagined? What if progress is not progress at all, but ultimate madness? (The atheist may well hold this darker assumption, not the rosy one.) I am not trying to diminish the glory of modern progress; without certain new pharmaceuticals, I would be dead. On the contrary, I am trying to make myself conscious of the underlying metaphysics on which progress depends — the vision behind it of the upward direction in which history tends, its underlying dynamism, and its ultimate kindliness toward humankind, Atheists seems to share this vision when they write of human reason and progress as benevolent. Atheists themselves suggest that the true problem before us is not the problem of evil but the problem of good. Why is there so much good?

In my experience, however, the problem of evil does in fact bother Jews and Christians, because it goes contrary to what faith teaches about the goodness of God. Evil may not be a problem for my atheist friends. For them, the evil of the world is just there. Insofar as evil matters metaphysically, it destroys arguments for the existence of a good God. To their minds, absurdity forms the backdrop for their heroic human Sisyphus who, against all odds, keeps rolling progress up the hill, only to watch it slide back down into meaninglessness.

Religion Recognizes Two Contrary Forces In The Human Soul
Here Professor Harvey Mansfield of Harvard, who has known more than enough suffering from the irrationality of life, seems wiser than most:

In the contest between religion and atheism, the strength of religion is to recognize two apparently contrary forces in the human soul: the power of injustice and the power, nonetheless, of our desire for justice. The stubborn existence of injustice reminds us that man is not God, while the demand for justice reminds us that we wish for the divine. Religion tries to join these two forces together.

The weakness of atheism, however, is to take account of only one of them, the fact of injustice in the case of Epicurean atheism or the desire for justice in our Enlightenment atheism. I conclude that philosophy today — and science too — need not only to tolerate and respect religion, but also to learn from it.

Unbelievers And Believers Must In The End Submit
In real life,’ what we see seems sometimes ugly. We do not understand how mad the world then appears. We protest against evils that cause us revulsion. Yet, no matter what we do, welcome them or hate them, the facts remain the same. To a world of fact, where “randomness rules:’ unbelievers and believers must in the end submit. At this point, the unbeliever submits to randomness, while the believer submits to the inscrutable will of the Creator. Both must submit. The latter shows more confidence both in intelligence and in the intelligibility of all things.

A World In Which Free Agents Act Freely
God wills a world in which free agents act freely. He doesn’t only “permit” things to happen. He empowers free agents to act, even with less attention than they ought, or against His laws, or simply without common sense. Free agents acting freely, despite the frequently resulting irrationality, is what He now wills and has always willed. He does not command irrational (or evil) action. But He certainly brought into being, consciously and (I think) beautifully, a world in which free acts can occur, and evils and misfortunes are frequently transformed by courage, generosity of spirit, and charity into occasions of great human beauty.

God Wills And Approves The Whole
More profoundly, as Stephen Barr has pointed out:

“The really more relevant metaphysical point here is that God wills and approves the whole. He does not will the death of the unfortunate man at the railroad crossing for its own sake, as an end in itself, and as something good in itself. Considered in themselves some events are obviously not good, but horribly tragic.

But before we condemn God, consider this: We ourselves set up, and approve as good, systems that have as necessary consequences the occurrence of painful and tragic events… for example, educational systems and economic systems. When the professor flunks a student and dashes his life’s hopes, is he doing evil? Does he want the student to fail? Is any system unjust in which that happens? That it contains much tragedy is not an argument for the badness of the world.

Jewish and Christian faith do allow for trusting in God’s mysterious ways. Jews and Christians hold that the inscrutable workings of God always lead to an ultimate good, though the individual believer may be unable to see that himself.”

Is Freedom Worth The Price?
Professor Gelernter comments with great learning:

“All we know is that the evil and pain of this suffering world force us inward, onto the one path that leads to knowledge of self and God. What we don’t know: Would true self-sacrifice compassion exist without misery and suffering? Could moral heroism and concomitant strength and depth of character exist without it? Now we face a good question from doubters: even granted that we owe the existence of compassion in this world to suffering, is the gain worth the price? Or: granted, the price for human freedom is human suffering; is freedom worth the price? Or, in the words of a famous question posed in the Talmud: would man have been better off had he never been created? The two famous schools of Hillel and Shammai argued the point (as usual), and reached a conclusion: Man would have been better off had he never been created. But the rabbis know that their vision is limited, and their task is to take the world as God made it.”

We Ought Really To Thank God At Every Moment Of Our Existence
Professor Barr offers a richer and more lyrical response:

“Why do we thank God for good fortune but not blame Him for bad fortune? We ought really to thank God at every moment of our existence for our very existence at that moment, for all the blessings that we enjoy — the ability to think, to see and to hear, to taste and to touch, to move and to act, to know and to understand, to love and to be loved. Everything we have at every moment comes from God, and we should be thanking Him at every moment.

But being as we are, we forget and largely take things for granted. It is when we have a “near miss” and almost lose something important, that we remember to thank God that we have it in the first place. When the car swerves and narrowly misses the oncoming traffic, we say “Thank God?’ We are really just remembering to thank God for all of the life He has given us up to that point, and for allowing us some time more to live. If, however, something happens that takes away our health or wealth or even life, we have no legitimate claim that God has “robbed” us of anything. What we have lost was His free gift to begin with, not something to which we had a right.”

The Desire To Express Gratitude
Theodore Dalyrimple describes himself as an atheist but he is an unusually congenial, fair-minded, and discerning critic. A psychiatrist, he faults the new atheists for depriving billions of human beings of a crucial civilizing agency, the desire to express gratitude:

“The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality.

If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement, Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.”

For those who know God, by contrast, life is a conversation They are never far from raising their affections toward the Almighty directing their will to Him: “Thy will be done.” For them the world is personal, through and through. It is about friendship, and staying in close touch with our one closest Friend. Prayer is like breathing, like easy conversation with one’s Beloved. Even to love another human being, spouse or child, is to love them in and through and with the divine origin of all love: Deus Caritas Est. God is that particular form of love called Caritas.

Two Very Different Horizons
The logic in deciding whether to link one’s identify to atheism or to God is sui generis (vocab: unique, of its own kind). The argument is not whether there is one more object in the world (God), or one less (atheism). The center of the argument concerns whether I should think of the universe as impersonal and indifferent to me, and ruled by randomness and chance. Or whether I should interpret it as personal through and through, in such a way that all things that are (and have been, and will be) dwell in the presence of God, a Person (not in a literal but in an analogous sense) who understands and chooses all that He brings out of nothingness into existence. “Existence” here means being “alive in the presence of” our Creator. I apply the term now to conscious human persons, not to all existents.

For the believer, this world is personal. All of human life is an interior conversation with our Maker. Personality — whose defining traits are understanding and deciding (or creative insight and choice) — is the inner key and dynamic force in all things.

To the atheist, all this seems hot air. Solipsism. Fear of death. Illusion, delusion, poison. The unbeliever’s universe (say they) is far more bracing, invigorating, and challenging. Each brave spirit is like Prometheus, snatching a burning stick of justice from the nothingness of the night. The atheist believes that human beings put into a random, purposeless universe all the good that has ever been, is now, or ever will be. Using Ockham’s razor, the unbeliever slices off God: “We have no need of that hypothesis” The unbeliever holds that the most elegant, most economical, and most chaste explanation is likely to be best. Ockham’s razor seems to be in tune with the way things are. Into the bucket below the guillotine drops the head of God.

The believer, however, does not regard God as a “hypothesis:’ an “explanation:’ or even an “entity.” Rather, in the horizon of the believer, God is the inner dynamism of inquiry, understanding, and love in his (or her) own life, but also in the lives of all others. Dante Alighieri described God as “the Love that moves the sun and other stars.” The believer sees God as the inner mathematical and creative light — and the inner, dynamic striving — of all things. Yes, that special sort of love that is proper only to the divine: Caritas.

In short, unbelief and belief are not two rival theories about phenomena in the universe. They are alternative “horizons.” A horizon describes all that an intelligent, inquiring subject can experience, imagine, understand, and judge to be real, from the point at which that subject is currently situated. A horizon is defined by two parts: the attentive, conscious subject, and the range of all that that subject can experience, imagine, understand, and judge. Human horizons are “systems on the move?’ The horizon you now have has changed by a great deal — in range and in intensity –since you were ten, twenty, or forty, or even sixty. Ideally, one hopes one’s horizon will keep reaching out and growing until death.

The horizon of the unbeliever has within it no answering personal presence (because the unbeliever thinks God is an illusion). By contrast the horizon of the believer is permeated by an obscure sense of living within the presence of Another. Thus, if the believer strives mightily not to cooperate with the Lie, even under torture, even in prison with no possibility of escape, pain leads one to see that the inner light to which one tries to be faithful comes from beyond one’s pain or one’s own strength, burning Insight that fires one’s whole being. In being faithful to the truth, one is being faithful not only to oneself, but also to the One who is the central light and energy and love within us.

These are two radically different ways of living in the world. Two very different horizons.

Posted in Catholicism For Atheists, Michael Novak, Readings, Templeton Prize Winners | Tagged Albert Camus, Catholicism, David Gelernter, Harvey Mansfield, Insight, metaphysics, Michael Novak, No One Sees Go, religion and atheism, Stephen Barr, Theodore Dalyrimple | Leave a Comment »

The Teachings Of The Church, The Teachings Of The Bible

August 3, 2010

It’s amazing how reading one thing answers a question to another or gives an interpretation to a third. I spend some of my time on religious forums and from time to time run across atheists whom I engage in dialogue. You get used to the things they say and I have spent not a small amount of time on these pages digging up answers to their questions (accusations).

A familiar charge I run across is the Jesus-against-Christianity game, as Bottum refers to it. To whit (he explains): Critical scholars often explain the overlay of Christological affirmations in the gospel by recourse to a theory that, to a great extent, St. Paul theologized Jesus, and, under his influence, there emerged the doctrinally rigid faith of the Church.

R.R. Reno has explained the rationale for theological exegesis by way of this syllogism:

The true Church of Christ teaches the gospel.
The Bible is the sacred and canonical witness to the gospel.
Therefore, the teachings of the Church accord with the teachings of the Bible.

The above would appear to be simple and straight forward, were the teachings of the Church to accord so easily with the teachings of the Bible. But recall the Catholic doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the bodily Assumption of Mary to see the problems that occur between doctrine and scripture. “Difficulties stimulate the mind,” as Reno puts it, and the assumption that Scripture and doctrine teach a single, unified truth is simply one of the challenges of being a thinking Christian. Needless to say, atheists enjoy exploiting some of these difficulties to form a rationale for undermining of faith by establishing the general unreliability of the gospels.

Theological exegesis is a legitimate activity and a perfect example of it can be seen in the early Church Fathers seeking to explain The Easter Faith and Its Meaning in History, the post that precedes this one.

Joseph Bottum, the editor of First Things, was reviewing a particularly nasty book by the man who poses as an anti–C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman. I had never heard of the fellow but it appears he is the author of the Dark Materials Trilogy, a set of children’s books written between 1995 and 2000 with the express purpose of undoing Christianity for the young, and to refute what he called, in Lewis’ Narnia books, “one of the most vile moments in the whole of children’s literature.” Let me take up Bottum’s review here:

Then, in 2004, Pullman ran across the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who observed that Pullman’s children’s books may be a reasonable attack on religious abuses, but they lacked any sense of Jesus. The gentle attention flattered the fantasist, who, in response, has now published his answer: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ — an adult novel that begins, “This is the story of Jesus and his brother Christ, of how they were born, of how they lived and of how one of them died.”

Ah, me. In Pullman’s novelistic version, a naive young woman named Mary delivers two boys. The first of the twins turns out to be Jesus, a wise preacher of moral truths who comes to realize the lack of God from those truths only on his way to crucifixion. The other twin is Christ, a darker, smarter boy who grows up to become the founder of the Church based on his brother and who negotiates power with the Romans and the priests. He is also his brother’s Judas — Christ betraying Jesus to get him out of the way so Christ can go on to establish Christianity.

This is not an uncommon story – the-Jesus-had-a-brother-who-died-on-the-Cross-while-he-escaped has been told before. I think John Updike referred to it somewhere and the Japanese have even cashed in on the retellings . I always wonder where these stories come from, and, for that matter, where the thought “Paul invented Christianity.” or “The only true Christian was Jesus.” Well I found a wonderful little exposition on this in Bottum’s review of the Pullman book:

“[For] this is, after all, pretty tired, old stuff — very tired, and very old. Over the last century and a half, the impulse has often found root in the gardens of critical history, sifting through the gospel stories with the promise of identifying the “real Jesus,” as distinct from the figure so thoroughly embedded in the Church’s account.

In 1892 the Lutheran theologian Martin Kähler gave this project its most influential expression, distinguishing between the “Christ of faith”– the figure found in the Church’s belief in his saving death and resurrection — and the “Jesus of history.” The idea is to come up with a critical principle that allows a scholar to determine when the New Testament authors are reading later theological formulations back into the remembered stories of Jesus’ life and ministry. And the purpose is to allow the modern commentator to filter out the dogmatic content of Scripture.

The problem is that we tend not so much to discover the historical Jesus as to create a blank spot on which to project our spiritual fantasies, as Albert Schweitzer recognized when he surveyed the nineteenth century’s efforts to get back to the “real Jesus” in his famous 1906 book The Quest for the Historical Jesus. The historical Jesus turns out to be whatever the questing historian wants to find: a moral teacher or revolutionary prophet or kind preacher of love (see, for example, Marcus Borg’s picture of Jesus as a 1960s anti-establishment activist).

Critical scholars often explain the overlay of Christological affirmations in the gospel by recourse to a theory that, to a great extent, St. Paul theologized Jesus, and, under his influence, there emerged the doctrinally rigid faith of the Church. F.C. Bauer, for example, speculated in the nineteenth century that Paul was in conflict with the disciples. Nietzsche and others latched onto the idea, boldly declaring that Paul had “invented Christianity” and thereby betrayed the real Jesus.

In fact, in the Jesus-against-Christianity game, it’s usually the inauthentic Paul who gets played off against the authentic Jesus. You can see it from Ernest Renan’s nineteenth-century “The writings of Paul have been a danger and a hidden rock, the causes of the principal defects of Christian theology,” to George Bernard Shaw’s “No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus,” to the Episcopal Bishop John S. Spong’s “Paul’s words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul — a vast difference.”

There is, of course, an intrinsically anti-dogmatic and anti-ecclesial undercurrent to all these readings of the Bible. D.F. Strauss set aside the miraculous and supernatural dimensions of the New Testament in The Life of Jesus to achieve the effect, and Reimarus, whose On the Intention of Jesus and His Teaching was published posthumously in 1778, expressed a historical skepticism about the reliability of the gospels that was shocking in its day.

The key here is that phrase in its day. The frisson of blasphemy has grown too thin in all this stuff; it’s worn down to nothing. Nothing, except the author’s self-congratulation at his own bravery — a feature with which Philip Pullman’s comments about his novel abound. The slow, patient work of scholars has undone this goofy storyline so many times, and still it comes creeping back every twenty years or so. Pullman’s Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ mostly proves that no idea dies, no matter how soundly defeated.”

So it seems all of this was wrapped up together: My struggles with a Christologically pure Gospel teaching; Fr. Jose Granados’ story of the Easter Faith and Its Meaning in History; and the taunts of atheists telling me that Paul “invented” Christianity. Talk about three birds with one stone…

Posted in Catholicism For Atheists, The State of the Catholic Church, Theology, Understanding Paul | Tagged St. Paul theologized Jesus, theological exegesis | Leave a Comment »

Evolution Topics by Dr. Francisco Ayala

April 27, 2010

2010 John Templeton Foundation Prize winner Dr. Francisco Ayala

These topics were written by Dr. Francisco Ayala, Professor of Biological Sciences and Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a member of the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, and has been President and Chairman of the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Ayala is a highly respected evolutionary biologist who has received the 2010 Templeton Prize, an award issued each year by the John Templeton Foundation to a person “who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.” He is perhaps best known scientifically for his research into the evolutionary history of the parasite scientists have associated with malaria, with an eye toward developing a cure for the disease. He also pioneered the use of an organism’s genetic material as molecular clocks that help track and time its origins.

But for the past 30 years, he has been at the forefront of battles to keep creationism and its more-sophisticated offshoot, intelligent design, out of public-school biology classes, noting that they actually represent religion masked as natural science. At the same time, he has vigorously argued that religion is a vital pillar in American life, thereby confusing those who confuse religion with being anti-science.

The US scientific enterprise is the envy of the world, he says, and the country is the most religious of any nation in the western world. “It is nothing short of tragic to see these two pillars of society are often seen as in contradiction with each other,” he said during the award’s presentation Thursday at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. “Properly understood, there can be no contradiction because they deal with different subjects,” he said.

Although he has been reluctant over the years to describe his own religious leanings, Mr. Ayala argues that religion and science are “different windows” for looking at the world. Only when each tries to make “assertions beyond their legitimate boundaries” do the two appear to clash.

“Science gives us an insight on reality which is very important; our technology is based on our science,” he says. “But at the end of the day, questions important to people, questions of meaning, purpose, moral values, and the like” are not answered through science.

Beyond championing the roles science and religion can play in their respective domains, he also has argued that “scientific knowledge, the theory of evolution in particular, is consistent with a religious belief in God, whereas the tenets of creationism and the so-called intelligent design are not.”

While intelligent-design advocates point to the complexity of many biological processes as too intricate to have emerged from a random evolutionary process, Ayala points to many of biology’s flawed designs as evidence of a lack of intelligence behind them. “Any engineer who would have designed the human jaw bone would be fired the next day,” he says. Instead, he terms biology’s flawed products as “a consequence of the clumsy ways of nature and the evolutionary process.”

Ayala, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, began his dual journeys into science and religion during his formative years in Spain, where he graduated from college with a bachelors degree in physics. After graduation, he studied theology there, and five years later became an ordained priest. But during his theological studies, two geneticists took him under their wing, and in 1961, Ayala moved to New York to take up graduate studies in evolutionary biology and genetics at Columbia University. And he left the priesthood. Over the course of his career, he has won awards for his scientific work and has served on several high-level science advisory panels in the US. In 2001, President George W. Bush awarded Ayala the National Medal of Science.

In a prepared statement, John Templeton Jr., the president and chairman of the John Templeton Foundation said, “Ayala’s clear voice in matters of science and faith echoes the Foundation’s belief that evolution of the mind and truly open-minded inquiry can lead to real spiritual progress in the world.” Ayala has donated the $1.42 million prize to charity.

I advance three propositions. The first is that Darwin’s most significant intellectual contribution is that he brought the origin and diversity of organisms into the realm of science. The Copernican Revolution consisted in a commitment to the postulate that the universe is governed by natural laws that account for natural phenomena. Darwin completed the Copernican Revolution by extending that commitment to the living world.

The second proposition is that natural selection is a creative process that can account for the appearance of genuine novelty. How natural selection creates is shown with a simple example and clarified with two analogies, artistic creation and the “typing monkeys,” with which it shares important similarities and differences. The creative power of natural selection arises from a distinctive interaction between chance and necessity, or between random and deterministic processes.

The third proposition is that teleological explanations are necessary in order to give a full account of the attributes of living organisms, whereas they are neither necessary nor appropriate in the explanation of natural inanimate phenomena. I give a definition of teleology and clarify the matter by distinguishing between internal and external teleology, and between bounded and unbounded teleology. The human eye, so obviously constituted for seeing but resulting from a natural process, is an example of internal (or natural) teleology. A knife has external (or artificial) teleology, because it has been purposefully designed by an external agent. The development of an egg into a chicken is an example of bounded (or necessary) teleology, whereas the evolutionary origin of the mammals is a case of unbounded (or contingent) teleology, because there was nothing in the make up of the first living cells that necessitated the eventual appearance of mammals.

I conclude that Darwin’s theory of evolution and explanation of design does not include or exclude considerations of divine action in the world any more than astronomy, geology, physics, or chemistry do.

The Darwinian Revolution
The publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin ushered in a new era in the intellectual history of humanity. Darwin is deservedly given credit for the theory of biological evolution: he accumulated evidence demonstrating that organisms evolve and discovered the process, natural selection, by which they evolve. But the import of Darwin’s achievement is that it completed the Copernican revolution initiated three centuries earlier, and thereby radically changed our conception of the universe and the place of humanity in it.

The discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had gradually ushered in the notion that the workings of the universe could be explained by human reason. It was shown that the earth is not the center of the universe, but a small planet rotating around an average star; that the universe is immense in space and in time; and that the motions of the planets around the sun can be explained by the same simple laws that account for the motion of physical objects on our planet. These and other discoveries greatly expanded human knowledge, but the intellectual revolution these scientists brought about was more fundamental: a commitment to the postulate that the universe obeys immanent laws that account for natural phenomena. The workings of the universe were brought into the realm of science: explanation through natural laws. Physical phenomena could be accounted for whenever the causes were adequately known.

Darwin completed the Copernican revolution by drawing out for biology the notion of nature as a lawful system of matter in motion. The adaptations and diversity of organisms, the origin of novel and highly organized forms, even the origin of humanity itself could now be explained by an orderly process of change governed by natural laws.

The origin of organisms and their marvelous adaptations were, however, either left unexplained or attributed to the design of an omniscient Creator. God had created the birds and bees, the fish and corals, the trees in the forest, and best of all, man. God had given us eyes so that we might see, and He had provided fish with gills to breathe in water. Philosophers and theologians argued that the functional design of organisms manifests the existence of an all-wise Creator. Wherever there is design, there is a designer; the existence of a watch evinces the existence of a watchmaker.

The English theologian William Paley in his Natural Theology (1802) elaborated the argument-from-design as forceful demonstration of the existence of the Creator. The functional design of the human eye, argued Paley, provided conclusive evidence of an all-wise Creator. It would be absurd to suppose, he wrote, that the human eye by mere chance “should have consisted, first, of a series of transparent lenses … secondly of a black cloth or canvas spread out behind these lenses so as to receive the image formed by pencils of light transmitted through them, and placed at the precise geometrical distance at which, and at which alone, a distinct image could be formed … thirdly of a large nerve communicating between this membrane and the brain.” The Bridgewater Treatises, published between 1833 and 1840, were written by eminent scientists and philosophers to set forth “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation.” The structure and mechanisms of man’s hand were, for example, cited as incontrovertible evidence that the hand had been designed by the same omniscient Power that had created the world.

The advances of physical science had thus driven humanity’s conception of the universe to a split-personality state of affairs, which persisted well into the mid-nineteenth century. Scientific explanations, derived from natural laws, dominated the world of nonliving matter, on the earth as well as in the heavens. Supernatural explanations, depending on the unfathomable deeds of the Creator, accounted for the origin and configuration of living creatures — the most diversified, complex, and interesting realities of the world. It was Darwin’s genius to resolve this conceptual schizophrenia.

Darwin‘s Discovery: Design without Designer
The strength of the argument-from-design to demonstrate the role of the Creator is easily set forth. Wherever there is function or design we look for its author. A knife is made for cutting and a clock is made to tell time; their functional designs have been contrived by a knifemaker and a watchmaker. The exquisite design of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa proclaims that it was created by a gifted artist following a preconceived purpose. Similarly, the structures, organs, and behaviors of living beings are directly organized to serve certain functions. The functional design of organisms and their features would therefore seem to argue for the existence of a designer. It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent. The origin and adaptation of organisms in their profusion and wondrous variations were thus brought into the realm of science.

Darwin accepted that organisms are “designed” for certain purposes, i.e., they are functionally organized. Organisms are adapted to certain ways of life and their parts are adapted to perform certain functions. Fish are adapted to live in water, kidneys are designed to regulate the composition of blood, the human hand is made for grasping. But Darwin went on to provide a natural explanation of the design. He thereby brought the seemingly purposeful aspects of living beings into the realm of science.

Darwin’s revolutionary achievement is that he extended the Copernican revolution to the world of living things. The origin and adaptive nature of organisms could now be explained, like the phenomena of the inanimate world, as the result of natural laws manifested in natural processes. Darwin’s theory encountered opposition in some religious circles, not so much because he proposed the evolutionary origin of living things (which had been proposed before, and accepted even by Christian theologians), but because the causal mechanism, natural selection, excluded God as the explanation for the obvious design of organisms.

The Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to Galileo in the seventeenth century had been similarly motivated not only by the apparent contradiction between the heliocentric theory and a literal interpretation of the Bible, but also by the unseemly attempt to comprehend the workings of the Universe, the “mind of God.” The configuration of the Universe was no longer perceived as the result of God’s Design, but simply the outcome of immanent, blind, processes. There were, however, many theologians, philosophers, and scientists who saw no contradiction then nor see it now between the evolution of species and Christian faith. Some see evolution as the “method of divine intelligence,” in the words of the nineteenth century theologian A.H. Strong. Others, like the American contemporary of Darwin, Henry Ward Beecher (1818-1887), made evolution the cornerstone of their theology. These two traditions have persisted to the present. Pope John Paul II has recently (October 1996) stated that “the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis. It is … accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge.” The views of “process” theologians, who perceive evolutionary dynamics as a pervasive element of a Christian view of the world, are well represented in this volume.

Natural Selection as a Directive Process
The central argument of the theory of natural selection is summarized by Darwin in The Origin of Species as follows:

As more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. … Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favorable variation and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.

Darwin’s argument addresses the problem of explaining the adaptive character of organisms. Darwin argues that adaptive variations (“variations useful in some way to each being”) occasionally appear, and that these are likely to increase the reproductive chances of their carriers. Over the generations favorable variations will be preserved, injurious ones will be eliminated. In one place, Darwin adds: “I can see no limit to this power [natural selection] in slowly and beautifully adapting each form to the most complex relations of life.” Natural selection was proposed by Darwin primarily to account for the adaptive organization, or “design,” of living beings; it is a process that promotes or maintains adaptation. Evolutionary change through time and evolutionary diversification (multiplication of species) are not directly promoted by natural selection (hence, the so-called “evolutionary stasis,” the numerous examples of organisms with morphology that has changed little, if at all, for millions of years, as pointed out by the proponents of the theory of punctuated equilibrium). But change and diversification often ensue as by-products of natural selection fostering adaptation.

Darwin formulated natural selection primarily as differential survival. The modern understanding of the principle of natural selection is formulated in genetic and statistical terms as differential reproduction. Natural selection implies that some genes and genetic combinations are transmitted to the following generations on the average more frequently than their alternates. Such genetic units will become more common in every subsequent generation and their alternates less common. Natural selection is a statistical bias in the relative rate of reproduction of alternative genetic units.

Natural selection has been compared to a sieve which retains the rarely arising useful genes and lets go the more frequently arising harmful mutants. Natural selection acts in that way, but it is much more than a purely negative process, for it is able to generate novelty by increasing the probability of otherwise extremely improbable genetic combinations. Natural selection is thus creative in a way. It does not “create” the entities upon which it operates, but it produces adaptive genetic combinations which would not have existed otherwise.

The creative role of natural selection must not be understood in the sense of the “absolute” creation that traditional Christian theology predicates of the Divine act by which the universe was brought into being ex nihilo. Natural selection may rather be compared to a painter which creates a picture by mixing and distributing pigments in various ways over the canvas. The canvas and the pigments are not created by the artist but the painting is. It is conceivable that a random combination of the pigments might result in the orderly whole which is the final work of art. But the probability of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa resulting from a random combination of pigments, or St. Peter’s Basilica resulting from a random association of marble, bricks and other materials, is infinitely small. In the same way, the combination of genetic units which carries the hereditary information responsible for the formation of the vertebrate eye could have never been produced by a random process like mutation. Not even if we allow for the three billion years plus during which life has existed on earth. The complicated anatomy of the eye like the exact functioning of the kidney are the result of a nonrandom process — natural selection.

Natural Selection as a Creative Process
Critics have sometimes alleged as evidence against Darwin’s theory of evolution examples showing that random processes cannot yield meaningful, organized outcomes. It is thus pointed out that a series of monkeys randomly striking letters on a typewriter would never write The Origin of Species, even if we allow for millions of years and many generations of monkeys pounding at typewriters.

This criticism would be valid if evolution would depend only on random processes. But natural selection is a nonrandom process that promotes adaptation by selecting combinations that “make sense,” i.e., that are useful to the organisms. The analogy of the monkeys would be more appropriate if a process existed by which, first, meaningful words would be chosen every time they appeared on the typewriter; and then we would also have typewriters with previously selected words rather than just letters in the keys, and again there would be a process to select meaningful sentences every time they appeared in this second typewriter. If every time words such as “the,” “origin,” “species,” and so on, appeared in the first kind of typewriter, they each became a key in the second kind of typewriter, meaningful sentences would occasionally be produced in this second typewriter. If such sentences became incorporated into keys of a third type of typewriter, in which meaningful paragraphs were selected whenever they appeared, it is clear that pages and even chapters “making sense” would eventually be produced.

We need not carry the analogy too far, since the analogy is not fully satisfactory, but the point is clear. Evolution is not the outcome of purely random processes, but rather there is a “selecting” process, which picks up adaptive combinations because these reproduce more effectively and thus become established in populations. These adaptive combinations constitute, in turn, new levels of organization upon which the mutation (random) plus selection (nonrandom or directional) process again operates.

The manner in which natural selection can generate novelty in the form of accumulated hereditary information may be illustrated by the following example. Some strains of the colon bacterium, Escherichia coli, in order to be able to reproduce in a culture medium, require that a certain substance, the amino acid histidine, be provided in the medium. When a few such bacteria are added to a cubic centimeter of liquid culture medium, they multiply rapidly and produce between two and three billion bacteria in a few hours. Spontaneous mutations to streptomycin resistance occur in normal (i.e., sensitive) bacteria at rates of the order of one in one hundred million (1 x 10-8) cells. In our bacterial culture we expect between twenty and thirty bacteria to be resistant to streptomycin due to spontaneous mutation. If a proper concentration of the antibiotic is added to the culture, only the resistant cells survive. The twenty or thirty surviving bacteria will start reproducing, however, and allowing a few hours for the necessary number of cell divisions, several billion bacteria are produced, all resistant to streptomycin. Among cells requiring histidine as a growth factor, spontaneous mutants able to reproduce in the absence of histidine arise at rates of about four in one hundred million (4 x 10-8) bacteria. The streptomycin resistant cells may now be transferred to a culture with streptomycin but with no histidine. Most of them will not be able to reproduce, but about a hundred will start reproducing until the available medium is saturated.

Natural selection has produced in two steps bacterial cells resistant to streptomycin and not requiring histidine for growth. The probability of the two mutational events happening in the same bacterium is of about four in ten million billion (1 x 10-8 x 4 x 10-8 = 4 x 10-16) cells. An event of such low probability is unlikely to occur even in a large laboratory culture of bacterial cells. With natural selection, cells having both properties are the common result.

As illustrated by the bacterial example, natural selection produces combinations of genes that would otherwise be highly improbable because natural selection proceeds stepwise. The vertebrate eye did not appear suddenly in all its present perfection. Its formation requires the appropriate integration of many genetic units, and thus the eye could not have resulted from random processes alone. The ancestors of today’s vertebrates had for more than half a billion years some kind of organs sensitive to light. Perception of light, and later vision, were important for these organisms’ survival and reproductive success. Accordingly, natural selection favored genes and gene combinations increasing the functional efficiency of the eye. Such genetic units gradually accumulated, eventually leading to the highly complex and efficient vertebrate eye. Natural selection can account for the rise and spread of genetic constitutions, and therefore of types of organisms, that would never have existed under the uncontrolled action of random mutation. In this sense, natural selection is a creative process, although it does not create the raw materials — the genes — upon which it acts.

Posted in Science And Religion, Templeton Prize Winners | Tagged Dr. Francisco Ayala, Science And Religion, Theory of Evolution | Leave a Comment »

The Church And The Scientists

March 15, 2010

The Trial of Galileo

Another view of this story was recounted by Steven Barr here. While both Dr. Barr and David Bentley Hart see the stuff of a mythology here, Dr. Barr supports a thesis that the opposition of the Church to science is part of a myth eagerly passed on to us by the scientific materialists whose narrative supports an atheist world view.

One of those historical myths that enjoy popular currency, even though they cannot survive the scrutiny of serious historical study, is that, at the dawn of the Christian era, there was a thriving Hellenistic scientific culture that Christianity — through some supposed hostility to learning and reason — methodically destroyed; and that this Christian antagonism to science persisted into the early modern period — as is evident from Galileo’s trial in Rome — until the power of the Church was at last broken, and secular faculties of science began to appear.

This story is impossible to reconcile with the historical evidence, ancient, Medieval, or modern. It misrepresents the characters both of Hellenistic science and of early Christianity as well as that of Medieval intellectual culture; and it entirely belies the fascinating reality that, in the 16th and 17th centuries, Christian scientists educated in Christian universities and following a Christian tradition of scientific and mathematical speculation overturned a pagan cosmology and physics unchallenged since the days of Aristotle

Ancient And Medieval Science
There never was a particularly advanced culture of Hellenistic science — at least, not in the sense the word has now: a systematic and analytic use of experiment and observation to correct and refine hypotheses. Careful astronomical observation had led to the invention of the astrolabe, some of the remedies prescribed by medical ‘science’ were effective (or, at least, not harmful), some fine work in the geometry of optics was achieved by Ptolemy (c.100-c. 170), and a few clever mechanical inventions had appeared by the end of the first century Ala; hut Greek science had never been much interested in concrete experiment and as a \%hole had declined towards encyclopaedism and commentary before the Christian age. But research of a sort did persist in Alexandria, and was pursued during the Christian period as avidly by Christian scholars as by pagan.

Cosmology was at once the most elaborately developed and the most static area of scientific erudition. From antiquity through the late Middle Ages, almost all scientists — pagan, Christian or Muslim — accepted some version of the Aristotelian model of the universe, and some version of Ptolemy’s attempt to describe a geocentric universe mathematically. According to the former, the stationary earth is surrounded by a series of revolving concentric crystalline planetary spheres, the lowest of which contains the moon; the ‘sublunar’ realm is the region of change and decay, of the elements of air and fire, earth and water; the ‘superluna’ realm, however, is composed of the ‘quintessence’ or ‘aether’, and there all is changeless. Beyond the farthest planetary sphere lies the sphere of the fixed stars. And the whole machinery of the cosmos is driven by the outermost sphere of the ‘prime mover’.

Ptolemy’s exquisitely complex model of the heavens was an attempt to make this model of reality somehow consonant with the observable movements of heavenly objects — including the apparent ‘retrograde’ movement of certain planets — but this., iii the end, was impossible. Ptolemy was forced to introduce such bizarre devices as ‘eccentrics’ (extraterrestrial axes for certain planetary orbits), ‘equants’ (imaginary secondary axes that allowed orbits to be measured as mathematically uniform) and ‘epicycles’ (small local orbital axes located within the planetary spheres) into his calculations. Nor did Ptolemy trouble overly much about empirical observation (one could disprove his description of the lunar cycle, for instance, simply by looking at the moon several nights in succession). None of his mathematical devices, moreover, was compatible with Aristotelian physics, but — while scientists occasionally attempted to improve upon the model thus produced — few ever thought to reject it outright.

One exception to this rule was the sixth — century Christian scientist John Philoponus, who speculated that heavenly bodies are in fact mutable, that above the atmosphere there was perhaps a vacuum, that the stars were not (as pagan scientists believed) spiritual intelligences, but merely masses of fire, and that the planets might move by an ‘impressed’ impetus. A few later Muslim astronomers addressed Philoponus’ ideas, without adopting them, and by that route they entered into Western Christian scholastic science, where they were taken up and explored by men like Thomas Bradwardine (c. 1290-1349), Richard Swineshead (fl. 1348), Jean Buridan (1300-58) and Nicholas Oresme (c. 1320-82).

The heliocentric revolution Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a beneficiary of this tradition; but be was the first Christian theorist explicitly to argue for a heliocentric cosmos, in his treatise De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (published 1543). His argument was not particularly compelling, as it happens; his mathematical models were defective and almost as complicated as Pto1emy’s (and as fraught with ‘epicycles’). His basic model did seem to explain why Mercury and Venus remain always near the sun, but so did the later system of Tycho Brahe (1346-1601) according to which all the planets above revolve around the sun, while only the sun revolves directly around the earth. By the time of the trial of the most famous defender of the Copernican theory Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), many of the best astronomers (a great many of whom were Jesuits) had adopted the ‘Tychonic’ model.

Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler (1571- 1630) was a brilliant astronomer natural scientist, theorist of optics and mathematician, but was also a metaphysician, an astrologer and something of a mystic; in his youth, he had intended to become a theologian and to the end of his life he regarded his scientific endeavourers a sacred vocation, which allowed him to discover the sublime harmonies informing creation, and the ways in which the Trinity is reflected in them.

In Copernicus’ heliocentrism — which he encountered in the early 1590s — Kepler believed he had found (if only in intuitive form) a model of the cosmic order that adequately mirrored the divine governance of the universe, the sun’s centrality being as it were, a physical symbol of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit ruling over and guiding all things; And even in his discovery of the elliptical shape of planetary orbits (in which he was aided by Tycho Brahe’s meticulously precise astronomical observations) he believed he could discern depths of geometric perfection in which the divine archetypes of all things shone forth.

Though a devout Lutheran, Kepler had no interest in sectarian disputes; he was on good terms with many Calvinists and Catholics (with many friends and protectors among the Jesuits). He was content to labor under Catholic or Lutheran princes; he was not, however, shown comparable tolerance. At one point, he was expelled form the Lutheran communion; at another, Catholic authorities confiscated his books and told him to end his children to mass.

Kepler though, labored on inspired to the end by his vision of cosmic order or intricate beauties and delicate concords. The work that probably best expresses his vision of reality is his Harmonices Mundi of 1619, in which he gave free rein to his Christian Platonist and semi-Pythagorean tendencies. He described there the structure of the cosmos in terms of a ‘universal music’, found in all the geometric rations of the natural order; and especially in the subtle consonances – and spiritual influences – between heavenly bodies and the human soul.

Galileo
When challenged by theologians, Galileo quite correctly appealed to the Church Fathers to defend the claim that the scriptures ought not to be mistaken for cosmological treatises. In the 17th century, though, under the pressure of Protestant criticism, the Catholic Church had become much more diffident in the latitude with which it read scripture, and had begun to incline towards greater literalism. That said, in the years leading up to his trial, Galileo had enjoyed the esteem of many prominent churchmen; several Jesuit astronomers helped to confirm many of his telescopic observations; and even when his Copernican sympathies became clear in 1613 he was not censured by ecclesial authority Galileo’s most important admirer and ally in the Church, in fact, was Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (1368-1644), who in 1623 became Pope Urban VIII — the very man who would ultimately command Galileo to recant.

Galileo, however, was a frequently unpleasant man, who often refused to give other scientists credit for their own discoveries, belittled those he saw as rivals (such as Johannes Kepler), and insisted on provoking disputes. His demands for unconditional acceptance of his theories led to an ecclesial consultation in 1616. When he failed to produce a single convincing proof for his position, the consultation admonished him against teaching Copernican theory as a fact. Even so, Urban himself encouraged Galileo to write the book that became the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632), enjoining only that it include a statement to the effect that Copernican theory was only an unproven hypothesis. Galileo did include such a statement in his dialogue, but placed it on the lips of a clownishly obtuse character named Simplicio.

This seemed an unwarranted insult of a generous friend; Urban took offence and resolved upon a trial. Moreover, as it turned out, Urban was quite right about the unproven nature of the Copernican theory For all his brilliance as a physicist, Galileo was an amateur astronomer at best, and seemed unaware ho\v mathematically and empirically incoherent Copernicus’ book was. The only evidence he provided for the Earth’s movement was a theory about the tides that was completely irreconcilable with observable tidal sequences. He could have defended heliocentrism better if he had been willing to adopt Kepler’s theory of elliptical planetary orbits — of which he was aware — but he was loath to do so.

The ultimate effect of Rome’s authoritarian meddling was to make the Church hierarchy appear ridiculous. The case was, though, an aberration, and not a true indicator of the relation between the Catholic Church and the sciences. In fact, the Church was a generous patron of the sciences, while the Jesuits fostered many of the most original scientific minds of the age. But the embarrassment created for the Catholic Church by Urban’s outraged pride has never entirely faded.

Read on (this is a series);

http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/05/23/annals-of-atheism-ii-mechanism-over-teleology/

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged Ancient And Medieval Science, Christian antagonism to science, Copernicus, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, John Philoponus, Pope Urban VIII, Ptolemy | 1 Comment »

Fr. Michael Heller

November 3, 2009

'Science gives us knowledge, but religion gives us meaning.' – Michael Heller, 2008 Templeton Prize winner

From the Christian Science Monitor: Author of 30 books in Polish and five in English, Fr. Heller, an ordained Roman Catholic priest and a professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Academy in Krakow, Poland, has made the fostering of dialogue between science and religion a priority.

“He’s one of the key contributors in the international scholarly community dedicated to the creative dialogue on science, theology, and philosophy,” says Robert John Russell, founder and director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, Calif. “He’s a great example of someone who bridges these fields.”

For Heller, these seemingly distinct realms of human understanding actually depend on one another for stability. “Science gives us knowledge, but religion gives us meaning,” he says. “Science without religion is not meaningless, but lame…. And religion without science [slides] into fundamentalism,” he says. Heller draws on deep understanding of cosmology, religion, and philosophy to tackle questions such as, “Does the universe need to have a cause?” and “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Those familiar with Heller’s work laud his rigor of thought. “In an era when serious scientists and serious religionists declare themselves at war with each other and claims of connections are often by superficial thinkers, Michael Heller is the exception,” says Philip Clayton, professor of philosophy and religion at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif. “Rigorous thinkers seem to have fled the no man’s land between the two warring factions.”

Heller was born in 1936 in Tarnow, Poland, one of five children. His mother was a teacher, his father a mechanical and electrical engineer. When the Germans invaded in 1939, Heller’s father sabotaged the chemical factory where he worked to keep it out of Nazi hands. The family then fled east into what is now Ukraine.

In 1940, Joseph Stalin ordered 1 million Poles, including Heller’s family, to Siberia to log the forests. The hardships of exile made a lasting impression. “[Heller] knew that many people survived the extreme Siberian situation because they found in prayer both their spiritual force and their will to survive,” writes Joseph Zycinski, archbishop of Lublin, Poland, in the foreword to Heller’s 2003 book, “Creative Tension: Essays on Science and Religion.” “His main dream after coming back to Poland was to become a priest and to help people in finding solutions to the most basic problems of life.”

Heller has a different take. On his return to Poland, “I was too ambitious,” he says, smiling. “I wanted to do what was the most important thing to be done.” In his estimation, that was science and religion. In 1959, at a time when religion was officially discouraged under communism, Heller was ordained a priest. In 1966, he received his PhD in philosophy from the Catholic University of Lublin. And beginning in 1969, Karol Wojtyla, the archbishop of Krakow who later became Pope John Paul II, began inviting scientists, philosophers, and theologians – Heller included – to his residence to discuss how the disciplines interrelated. The group became known as the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Heller also studied Marxist philosophy, primarily so he could rebut it. His time in Siberia had given him an all-too-close view of the reality behind the slogans. “Many young Poles were seduced by Marxism,” he says. “But from the very beginning, I had no illusions.” Navigating these worlds sharpened Heller, says Professor Clayton.

“Michael had to work with the complexities of two very difficult systems – the communist system and the complexities of Vatican politics,” he says. “Instead of being tempted to sell his soul, he used that complexity as a drive, as impetus to do more careful and more subtle work at the level of the science-religion dialogue where enduring connections could be discovered.”

The announcement on March 12 that Michael Heller had won the 2008 Templeton Prize drew wide international news coverage. Media outlets from the U.S. to the UK, from India to Heller’s native Poland, described his achievements and his unusual career as a theoretical physicist, philosopher, and Catholic priest. The story was interesting enough to readers of the New York Times that it climbed to #3 on the paper’s list of the most e-mailed articles. Heller explained to BBC World TV that the link between his scientific research and his work in philosophy and theology is the central role of rationality. As he put it, mathematics serves as a way of “contemplating the work of God.”

Such themes were eagerly taken up by the many bloggers and readers who commented on Heller’s ideas in various online forums. A news article about the Templeton Prize posted on the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education generated more than forty responses. Though several were little more than the familiar name-calling of the culture wars, other comments were much more thoughtful. As one reader remarked, the “richness” of Heller’s contribution lies in his understanding that “science and religion are not methods of either/or.” Another expressed his hope that religious people would not “close their ears to science” and that scientists would “not fall into scientism.”

Chris Herlinger, a reporter and blogger for the Religion News Service, was struck by Heller’s impatience with the advocates of “intelligent design.” Calling their views “a grave theological error” (a phrase taken from his formal Prize statement), Heller told Herlinger that the “mind of God” allows the “collaboration of chance and laws.” Taking out a pen during the interview, he held it up and let it drop to the table, saying that we know the pen will fall but cannot know precisely where. “Physics,” he explained, “leaves room for random events.” Heller’s critique of what he called “the intelligent design ideology” was also noted with approval by the National Center for Science Education.

Larry Arnhart, a professor of political theory at Northern Illinois University, praised Heller for setting out a position too often missing in the heated debate over Darwin. As he wrote on his own blog, “Whether God works through the ordinary laws of nature or through extraordinary miracles, it’s all an expression of His intelligent design. From the point of view of Christian theology, Darwinian evolution is intelligent design.”

Blogging for the New Scientist, Amanda Gefter admitted to being won over by Heller despite her own commitment “to the idea that science and religion don’t mix.” In a phone interview, Heller came across to her “as a contemplative, kind, and brilliant man with an impressive intellectual range, flitting easily between talk of complex philosophical ideas and sophisticated mathematical physics.” He is “the kind of physicist,” she noted, “who is so awestruck by the mathematical order of the universe that he sees God lurking in equations.”

The following are some comments Fr. Heller made in a speech at a news conference announcing his reception of the 2008 Templeton Prize:

“The seventeenth-century German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is my philosophical hero. I am proud (but not quite happy) that I share with this great philosopher at least one feature. He was a master in spreading, not to say dissipating, his genius into too many fields of interest. If he had a greater ability to concentrate on fewer problems, he would have become not only a precursor but also a real creator of several momentous scientific achievements. But in such a case, the history of philosophy would be poorer by one of its greatest thinkers. This is not to say that in my case the history of philosophy would lose anything. This is only to stress the fact that I am interested in too many things.

Amongst my numerous fascinations, two have most imposed themselves and proven more time resistant than others: science and religion. I also am too ambitious. I always wanted to do the most important things, and what can be more important than science and religion? Science gives us Knowledge, and religion gives us Meaning. Both are prerequisites of a decent existence. The paradox is that these two great values seem often to be in conflict. I am frequently asked how I could reconcile them with each other. When such a question is posed by a scientist or a philosopher, I invariably wonder how educated people could be so blind as not to see that science does nothing else but explore God’s creation. To see what I mean, let us go to Leibniz.

In a copy of his Dialogus, in the margin we find a short sentence written in his own hand. It reads: “When God calculates and thinks things through, the world is made.” Everybody has some experience in dealing with numbers, and everybody, at least sometimes, experiences a feeling of necessity involved in the process of calculating. We can easily be led astray when thinking about everyday matters or pondering all pros and cons when facing an important decision, but when we have to add or multiply even big numbers everything goes almost mechanically. This is a routine task, and if we are cautious enough there is no doubt as far as the final result is concerned. However, the true mathematical thinking begins when one has to solve a real problem, that is to say, to identify a mathematical structure that would match the conditions of the problem, to understand principles of its functioning, to grasp connections with other mathematical structures, and to deduce the consequences implied by the logic of the problem. Such manipulations of structures are always immersed into various calculations, since calculations form a natural language of mathematical structures.

It is more or less such an image that we should associate with Leibniz’s metaphor of calculating God. Things thought through by God should be identified with mathematical structures interpreted as structures of the world. Since for God to plan is the same as to implement the plan, when “God calculates and thinks things through,” the world is created.

We have mastered a lot of calculation techniques. We are able to think things through in our human way. Can we imitate God in His creating activity?

In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote down his famous equations of the gravitational field. The road leading to them was painful and laborious a combination of deep thinking and the tedious work of doing calculations. From the beginning, Einstein saw an inadequacy of Newton’s time-honored theory of gravity: It did not fit into the spatio-temporal pattern of special relativity, which was a synthesis of classical mechanics and Maxwell’s electrodynamical theory. He was hunting for some empirical clues that would narrow the field of possibilities. He found some in the question, Why is inertial mass equal to gravitational mass in spite of the fact that, in Newton’s theory, they are completely independent concepts? He tried to implement his ideas into a mathematical model. Several attempts failed. At a certain stage, he understood that he could not go further without studying tensorial calculus and Riemannian geometry. It is the matter distribution that generates space-time geometry, and the space-time geometry that determines the motions of matter. How to express this illuminating idea in the form of mathematical equations? When finally, after many weeks of exhausting work, the equations emerged before his astonished eyes, a new world had been created.

In the beginning, only three, numerically small, empirical effects corroborated Einstein’s new theory. But the world newly created by Einstein soon became an independent reality. Yet, in his early work, the field equations suggested to Einstein the existence of solutions describing an expanding universe. He discarded them by modifying his original equations, but in less than two decades it turned out that the equations were wiser than Einstein himself: Measurements of galactic spectra revealed that, indeed, the universe is expanding. In the subsequent period, lasting until now, theoretical physicists and mathematicians have found a host of new solutions to Einstein’s equations and interpreted them as representing gravitational waves, cosmic strings, neutron stars, stationary and rotating black holes, gravitational lensing, dark matter and dark energy, late stages of life of massive stars, and various aspects of cosmic evolution. In Einstein’s time, nobody would have even suspected the existence of such objects and processes, but nearly all of them have been found by astronomers in the real universe.

Perhaps now we better understand Leibniz’s idea of God’s creating the universe by thinking mathematical structures through. We should only free the above sketched image of creating physical theories from all human constraints and limitations, and take into account a theological truth that for God to intend is to obtain the result, and to obtain the result is to instantiate it. Einstein was not far from Leibniz’s idea when he was saying that the only goal of science is to decode the Mind of God present in the structure of the universe.

And what about chancy or random events? Do they destroy mathematical harmony of the universe, and introduce into it elements of chaos and disorder? Is chance a rival force of God’s creative Mind, a sort of Manichean principle fighting against goals of creation? But what is chance? It is an event of low probability which happens in spite of the fact that it is of low probability. If one wants to determine whether an event is of low or high probability, one must use the calculus of probability, and the calculus of probability is a mathematical theory as good as any other mathematical theory. Chance and random processes are elements of the mathematical blueprint of the universe in the same way as other aspects of the world architecture.

Mathematical structures that are parts of the composition determining the functioning of the universe are called laws of physics. It is a very subtle composition indeed. Like in any masterly symphony, elements of chance and necessity are interwoven with each other and together span the structure of the whole. Elements of necessity determine the pattern of possibilities and dynamical paths of becoming, but they leave enough room for chancy events to make this becoming rich and individual.

Adherents of the so-called intelligent design ideology commit a grave theological error. They claim that scientific theories that ascribe a great role to chance and random events in the evolutionary processes should be replaced, or supplemented, by theories acknowledging the thread of intelligent design in the universe. Such views are theologically erroneous. They implicitly revive the old Manichean error postulating the existence of two forces acting against each other: God and an inert matter; in this case, chance and intelligent design. There is no opposition here. Within the all-comprising Mind of God, what we call chance and random events is well composed into the symphony of creation.

When contemplating the universe, the question imposes itself: Does the universe need to have a cause? It is clear that causal explanations are a vital part of the scientific method. Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one. If we look deeper at such processes, we see that there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back to the Great Blueprint of God’s thinking the universe. The question of ultimate causality is translated into another of Leibniz’s questions: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (from his Principles of Nature and Grace). When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.

When thinking about science as deciphering the Mind of God, we should not forget that science is also a collective product of human brains, and the human brain is itself the most complex and sophisticated product of the universe. It is in the human brain that the world’s structure has reached its focal point the ability to reflect upon itself. Science is but a collective effort of the Human Mind to read the Mind of God from the question marks out of which we and the world around us seem to be made. To place ourselves in this double entanglement is to experience that we are a part of the Great Mystery. Another name for this Mystery is the Humble Approach to reality the motto of all John Templeton Foundation activities. True humility does not consist in pretending that we are feeble and insignificant, but in the audacious acknowledgement that we are an essential part of the Greatest Mystery of all of the entanglement of the Human Mind with the Mind of God.”

Posted in Science And Religion, Templeton Prize Winners | Tagged 2008 Templeton Prize, Fr. Michael Heller, Fr. Michael Heller bio, Heller's Templeton Prize speech | 4 Comments »

A Spiritual Reality Veiled From Us

September 8, 2009

quantum Quantum physics, which originated in work conducted by Max Planck and Albert Einstein at start of 20th Century, is a hugely successful theory: the predictions it makes about the behavior of subatomic particles are extraordinarily accurate. And yet, it raises profound puzzles about reality that remain as yet to be understood. Niels Bohr once said if quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.

In quantum mechanics any situation is a blend of every possible option of what might happen and this blend is called a wave function. This seems to work for light. Sometimes light can act as a particle and sometimes as a wave. Atoms, it has been found, seem to follow the same rules. As the world is made of atoms, the world must follow the rules of quantum mechanics. Obviously in the real world life doesn’t spend its time sitting on the fence, things just happen. But in quantum mechanics things happen only when this wave function collapses and only one possibility is left.

At some point a situation has to stop having every possible outcome. When an event is observed then all the other possibilities suddenly disappear. It’s like saying that the universe is based on chance. One enormous casino. What happens next is based on chance not on an absolute certainty. Imagine the universe as a horse race with lots of evenly matched horses. Until the race is over you can’t tell which horse is going to win. With quantum mechanics the idea is that the race isn’t over until someone decides to check on the result. This is where the science fiction idea of ‘parallel universes’ comes from. If every possible outcome is waiting to happen perhaps it really does happen in another quantum universe. Every horse wins in some reality.

Erwin Schrödinger was the man who first discovered the equations that quantum mechanics relies on. Even he couldn’t believe the idea that nothing happens until someone looks to check it. He invented the most famous cat in science – Schrödinger’s cat. If nothing happens until it is observed then imagine the following. A cat is put in a box with a small gadget that will release poison. This poison will be released by something that is controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics, for example radioactive decay. Radioactive atoms are ones that are unstable and spontaneously break down into smaller atoms. So there is a lump of radioactive material and a device to detect if an atom has broken down. This atomic break-up has a 50:50 chance of happening in one hour. According to quantum mechanics, until the box is opened an hour later both outcomes should co-exist. The cat should be both dead and alive at the same time until someone observes the result.

Despite what some people think, this story was meant to show how Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics was wrong. It was just an interpretation. There is an easier way of thinking about this. Quantum mechanics does seem to explain a lot of things about atoms and light. This craziness of a cat that is both dead and alive only applies if you stick to the idea that everything happens until it is measured by a person. There is no paradox if you just change to the idea that a quantum event happens when the result interacts with anything. When the radioactive atom in the box decays, the cat will only die when the radioactivity detector in the box detects it. When a particle that follows quantum mechanics interacts with anything it has to commit to being one thing or another. So a quantum mechanic event can set up a sequence of events that end up with a cat that is dead or alive without needing it be both at the same time.

All this cat really tells us about quantum mechanics is that trying to use quantum mechanics to explain normal day-to-day life doesn’t work. Understanding atoms doesn’t help you understand a whole cat, but then again understanding cats doesn’t help you understand atoms, so it works both ways (no matter what cats say). Einstein’s problem with quantum mechanics was summed in the idea that ‘God doesn’t play dice’. Everyone seems to remember that but do you know not what Niels Bohr said in reply: “It is not the job of scientists to prescribe to God how he should run the world.” (Some excellent advice, were that more of his fellow scientists followed it instead of penning best sellers on atheism.)

At the end of the day quantum mechanics does make sense in its own realm and offers explanations for strange effects that have no other explanation. In the traditional interpretation of quantum theory –sometimes also called the “Copenhagen,” “standard,” or “orthodox” interpretation — one must, to avoid paradoxes or absurdities, posit the existence of so-called “observers” who lie, at least in part, outside of the description of the world provided by physics. That is, the mathematical formalism which quantum theory uses to make predictions about the physical world cannot be stretched to cover completely the person who is observing that world. What is it about the “observer” that lies beyond physical description? Careful analysis suggests that it is some aspect of the rational mind.

This has led some eminent physicists to say that quantum theory is inconsistent with a materialistic view of the human mind. Eugene Wigner, a Nobel laureate in physics, stated flatly that materialism is not “logically consistent with present quantum mechanics.” Sir Rudolf Peierls, another leading twentieth–century physicist, said, on the basis of quantum theory, “The premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being…including its knowledge, and its consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing.”

Admittedly, this is a highly controversial view. That is only to be expected, especially given the materialist prejudice that affects a large part of the scientific community. Moreover, the traditional interpretation of quantum theory has aspects that many find disturbing or implausible. Some even think (wrongly, in Dr. Steven Barr’s opinion) that the role it assigns to observers leads to subjectivism or philosophical idealism. Dissatisfaction with the traditional interpretation has led to various rival interpretations and to attempts to modify quantum theory. However, these other ideas are equally controversial. The controversy over quantum theory will not be resolved any time soon, or perhaps ever. But, even if it is not, the fact will remain that there is an argument against materialism that comes from physics itself, an argument that has been advanced and defended by some leading physicists and never refuted.

Recently the Templeton Prize, awarded for contributions to “affirming life’s spiritual dimension”, has been won by French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat, who has worked on quantum physics with some of the most famous names in modern science. d’Espagnat says a spiritual reality is veiled from us, and science offers a glimpse behind that veil. The bizarre nature of quantum physics has attracted some speculations that are wacky but the theory suggests to some serious scientists that reality, at its most basic, is perfectly compatible with what might be called a spiritual view of things. Some suggest that observers play a key part in determining the nature of things. Legendary physicist John Wheeler said the cosmos “has not really happened, it is not a phenomenon, until it has been observed to happen.”

D’Espagnat worked with Wheeler, though he himself reckons quantum theory suggests something different. For him, quantum physics shows us that reality is ultimately “veiled” from us. The equations and predictions of the science, super-accurate though they are, offer us only a glimpse behind that veil. Moreover, that hidden reality is, in some sense, divine. Along with some philosophers, he has called it “Being”.

The deeper questions in physics are bound to interact with the religious/philosophical assumptions of the physicist. So how do scientists investigating the fundamental nature of the universe assess any role of God? Mark Vernon, who writes science articles, did a little research and came up with the following:

1. THE ATHEIST

Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg is well-known as an atheist. For him, physics reflects the “chilling impersonality” of the universe. He would be thinking here of, say, the vast tracts of empty space, billions of light years across, that mock human meaning. He says: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”

So for Weinberg, the notion that there might be an overlap between science and spirituality is entirely mistaken: “I have to admit that, even when physicists will have gone as far as they can go, when we have a final theory, we will not have a completely satisfying picture of the world, because we will still be left with the question ‘why?’ Why this theory, rather than some other theory? For example, why is the world described by quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics is the one part of our present physics that is likely to survive intact in any future theory, but there is nothing logically inevitable about quantum mechanics; I can imagine a universe governed by Newtonian mechanics instead. So there seems to be an irreducible mystery that science will not eliminate.

But religious theories of design have the same problem. Either you mean something definite by a God, a designer, or you don’t. If you don’t, then what are we talking about? If you do mean something definite by ‘God’ or ‘design,’ if for instance you believe in a God who is jealous, or loving, or intelligent, or whimsical, then you still must confront the question ‘why?’ A religion may assert that the universe is governed by that sort of God, rather than some other sort of God, and it may offer evidence for this belief, but it cannot explain why this should be so.”

2. THE SKEPTIC

The Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, shows a distinct reserve when speculating about what physics might mean, whether that be pointlessness or meaningfulness. He has “no strong opinions” on the interpretation of quantum theory: only time will tell whether the theory becomes better understood. “The implications of cosmology for these realms of thought may be profound, but diffidence prevents me from venturing into them,” he has written. In short, it is good to be humble in the face of the mysteries that physics throws up.

3. THE PLATONIST

Oxford physicist Roger Penrose differs again. He believes that mathematics suggests there is a world beyond the immediate, material one. Ask yourself this question: would one plus one equal two even if I didn’t think it? The answer is yes. Would it equal two even if no-one thought it? Again, presumably, yes. Would it equal two even if the universe didn’t exist? That is trickier to contemplate, but again, there are good grounds for a positive response. Penrose, therefore, argues that there is what can be called a Platonic world beyond the material world that “contains” mathematics and other abstractions.

4. THE BELIEVER

John Polkinghorne worked on quantum physics in the first part of his career, but then took up a different line of work: he was ordained an Anglican priest. For him, science and religion are entirely compatible. The ordered universe science reveals is only what you’d expect if it was made by an orderly God. However, the two disciplines are different. He calls them “intellectual cousins”. “Physics is showing the world to be both more supple and subtle, but you need to be careful,” he says. If you want to understand the meaning of things you have to go beyond science, and the religious direction is, he argues, the best.

5. THE PANTHEIST

Brian Swimme is a cosmologist, and with the theologian Thomas Berry, wrote a book called The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era. It is avidly read by individuals in New Age and ecological circles, and tells the scientific story of the universe, from the Big Bang to the emergence of human consciousness, but does so as a new sacred myth. Swimme believes that “the universe is attempting to be felt”, which makes him a pantheist, someone who believes the cosmos in its entirety can be called God.

The simple explanations of quantum theory come from a kids’ science blog called “journeybystarlight.”

The final post from Dr. Barr is here:

http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/05/27/annals-of-atheism-v-the-scientist-debunking-himself/

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged 'God doesn't play dice', Being, Bernard d'Espagnat, Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, John Wheeler, journeybystarlight, Mark Vernon, materialistic view of the human mind, Niels Bohr, quantum mechanic events, Quantum physics, Schrödinger's cat, Sir Rudolf Peierls, spiritual reality, Templeton Prize | 4 Comments »

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A Spiritual Reality Veiled From Us

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