Part I: The Problem of Faith in the Modern World (cont.)

The Role of Science in Western Culture (cont.)

Science and God’s Place in the Universe

We have reached the point where the material world is more real to us than any spiritual dimension, and the scientific worldview has come to dominate how we approach the world. In modern societies, even among those who are most religious, our assumption is that any new insights into the way the world works will come through the scientific process, not through supernatural revelation. We explain things that happen around us by using scientific, not religious, concepts. The sun doesn’t rise because some divine power is moving it, but because the sun comes into view as the earth spins on its axis. Whether or not God created the earth and the sun and sent one spinning in an orbit around the other isn’t very relevant to a perspective that describes the sunrise in terms that come from scientific observation instead of divine revelation. We know that the sun rises because of events that occurred billions of years ago, not because of anything that God is doing today.

Because of this, even religious people find it hard not be drawn into what’s called a deistic view of the universe, the belief that the universe was created by God at the dawn of time, wound up like a clock, and then left to run on its own with little or no further involvement by God. We don’t see God as an active force intimately involved in the second-by-second operation of the universe, necessary to its very functioning. Instead, we have demoted God to the role of creator emeritus. As much as we want to believe that our prayers can somehow change the course of events, we reluctantly accept that any divine intervention would be so extraordinary that it would be very much unexpected. And so we usually find ourselves reduced to using the term miraculous for events that are everyday occurrences, like the birth of a child or the flight of a bumblebee.

The crisis of faith that is shaking the modern world is not so much a failure of spirituality than it is a growing awareness that the picture of God that we were raised with no longer makes sense in a world that we see through filters colored by science. These filters keep us from seeing anything that we might have otherwise thought to be supernatural or even the ordinary result of God’s action. Instead, they let us see only the explanations that fit the scientific worldview, and so we no longer really expect God to disturb our everyday lives.

Even if we don’t reach the point where we deny or even just doubt the existence of God, we at least end up leading our lives pretty much the same way that agnostics do. Our faith in God has become both shallow and hollow, so that our belief in God no longer shapes our attitudes or actions except in special circumstances. When we pray, we don’t really expect our prayers to make any real difference, or maybe even worse, we learn to water down our prayers to make sure that we won’t be disappointed when God seems to ignore our expressed desires. Instead of praying for a change in our circumstances, we pray for the ability to accept them. We move through life thinking that nothing we do makes any difference to God, that nothing we do might affect how God deals with us or the world around us. Our belief in God has become not much more than a matter of intellectual assent instead of something that actually shapes how we behave or what we expect.

This declining power of religion has been noticed by certain elements that have a vested interest in how we may or may not be controlled by religion. The result is a rising tide of religious fundamentalism that tries to reverse this trend by attacking its root, the scientific worldview itself. Believers who are swept up by this fundamentalist tide are required to accept revelation from narrowly authorized sources as the only source of truth. Ultimately, fundamentalism’s limitations restrict its ability to spread its influence throughout the general population. More importantly, fundamentalism is regressive by its very nature, and the powerfully progressive forces at work in the scientific worldview remain overwhelmingly persuasive as science continues to improve its ability to make our lives longer and more comfortable, and to explain the universe around us.

Mainstream religion, then, finds itself caught between two irreconcilable forces: religious fundamentalism and scientific fundamentalism. It must find some way to integrate the spiritual zeal of religious fundamentalism with the progressive influence of science. As a crucial part of this process, mainstream religion must avoid the trap of allowing either set of fundamentalists to control the religious agenda. The recent fixation on Darwinian evolution and, by extension, the paleontology and geology that contradict the so-called young earth theories of creationism doesn’t confront the more basic challenge that physics poses to religious belief. Evolution is really just a side show, a mere byproduct of the way that physics has pushed God’s role in the universe to the margins of our lives and of our minds. It’s not biology or geology, but physics that has forced God off of the stage. As a result, we must be able to reconcile our belief in God with physics more than with any other area of science.

Part I: The Problem of Faith in the Modern World (cont.)

The Role of Science in Western Culture (cont.)

Material Realism

So science has taken over Western culture by infiltrating itself through the technology that saturates our experience. But how, exactly, has science shaped our belief systems in a way that undermines our belief in God?

At the heart of the scientific view of the world is a philosophy known as material realism. I call it a philosophy because even though its ideas are the basis of science, material realism is basically a religious claim that cannot be proven by any method, scientific or otherwise. Instead, the scientific method starts with material realism and creates its rules assuming that material realism is true. More to the point, as we shall see later, when scientists happen to stumble upon results that challenge material realism, those results (and often the scientists who discover them) are almost automatically dismissed as being unscientific.

Material realism is the belief that reality is just the physical (material) world and that all you need to know to understand everything is the physical laws that govern the material world. According to material realism, talk about a “higher” reality is not only unnecessary, it’s a useless distraction that gets in the way of scientific progress.

As Amit Goswami explains in his book, The Self-Aware Universe, there are five dominant principles that form the basis of the philosophy of material realism, principles that just about everyone with any sort of modern education accepts to some degree or other. These five principles are strong objectivity, causal determinism, locality, physical (or material) monism, and epiphenomenalism. I’ll try to translate.

Strong objectivity is the belief that reality is, well, real. That is, it’s the belief that reality does not need someone to observe events for them to happen. It is a belief system that answers the question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” with an emphatic Yes! Strong objectivity says that the structures and processes of reality don’t have to be observed to exist and affect each other. They are not subjective (dependent on the viewpoint of an observer), but rather objective (independent of any observer). When you get down to it, this is the whole reason scientists follow the scientific method in the first place, to find out what is really real, not just what they expect to see. Scientists believe that, to quote The X Files, “the truth is out there,” waiting to be uncovered. According to strong objectivity, that’s all that science does: uncover the truth that is there but hidden. This belief has been such a basic part of the worldview of scientists that most have not even considered the possibility that it might be wrong, even when—as we will see in Part II—some of the discoveries of quantum physicists have challenged it. In a way, it’s easy to understand why that might be the case. Strong objectivity is such a basic part of the way scientists look at the world that to question it is to challenge their entire worldview. Pretty scary stuff.

Causal determinism is another basic belief that is essential to the scientific worldview. At heart, it is the assumption that things don’t just happen spontaneously, that every event has a finite set of causes that would produce the same result every time so long as you could exactly reproduce those causes. Of course, every event in the real world is the result of a very complex combination of preconditions that is practically impossible to recreate, but this fact is thought to be just due to our human limitations, not a flaw in the belief itself. A logical consequence of this view, of course, is that there’s no such thing as true randomness, so that even events that look random—like a coin toss or a throw of the dice—can be explained by the conditions and forces that produce what seems to be a random event. In other words, it’s not really a matter of chance that a coin lands heads up, for example. Instead, in theory you could explain it by the amount and direction of the force you used to flip the coin, any imbalances in the weight of the coin, the influence of air currents, and the surface that the coin lands on. According to causal determinism, then, if you could exactly reproduce those conditions, the coin would land heads up every time. Of course, this is how the scientific method is supposed to work: The scientist controls all of the conditions of an experiment except one. By changing that one condition (called thevariable) and seeing the differences in outcome that result, the scientist can figure out how changes in the variable produce different outcomes. This makes sense only if the scientist believes that each outcome is exclusively the result of the events and conditions that lead up to that outcome, that the result is no more and no less than the sum of the parts that produced it. Again, however, the discoveries of quantum physics challenge the idea that this principle applies at all levels of reality.

Locality means that everything is, well, where it is. While that might seem ridiculously obvious, it really isn’t. Not only does this mean that things are bound to their particular location, more importantly, it means that the influence that one thing—be it a material object or an energy field—has over another thing is limited to its place and time.

In some ways, this might actually be harder for us to believe than it would have been a hundred years ago. In this age of telecommunications, we constantly encounter experiences that make it seem that events can affect other events far away. For example, we watch TV, seeing things that are happening hundreds of miles away. What isn’t apparent, though, is that even though a television set can display an image captured far away from us, this happens because that image is turned into radio waves that travel between the TV station and the TV set. The distance in space (and time) is spanned by events that are set in motion at the TV station and, in effect, spread as a series of events (radio waves) that eventually reach the TV set and cause the picture to be displayed there. So the appearance that an event causes a result at a distance is really an illusion, the product of a chain of events extending unbroken from the original cause to the eventual result.

The principle of locality is essential to the scientific worldview because we need it to understand the chain of cause and effect of causal determinism. If an event at location A causes something to happen at location B, the principle of causal determinism means that you have to be able to explain the chain of events that take place between A and B. The principle of locality is so essential to the scientific method, in fact, that when theories of quantum mechanics showed that—at the subatomic level, at least—events in one location can affect events at a distance without things happening in between, Albert Einstein spent much of his later years trying unsuccessfully to prove that those theories were wrong.

Physical monism is the idea that the physical (material) world is all that there is, that there’s no reality apart from the physical processes that we are a part of. By definition, this rules out anything metaphysical, from the human soul to God himself, at least to the extent that either the soul or God can affect or even be seen from the physical world. Everything that does happen can (and must) be explained by the laws of physics. Anything that doesn’t play by those rules is, well, unthinkable. If we admit that the metaphysical might be possible, we also must admit that science cannot give us a satisfactory explanation for everything. Most of us can live with this incongruity, but the scientific fundamentalist is horrified by this possibility. And yet, on this point, we might be able to find a way of affirming physical monism in a way that embraces (and explains) notions of reality that would usually be described in metaphysical terms. In fact, this is what this book is all about.

Epiphenomenalism tries to apply the other scientific principles to the fact that we human beings are conscious, a fact that is extremely hard to explain using those scientific principles. Even though we experience our own consciousness as the essence of who we are, scientists usually conclude that consciousness is only a byproduct (epiphenomenon) of the biological processes of our nervous systems. To a certain extent, we accept this conclusion. We see that when someone’s brain is injured, that person’s consciousness can be reduced or even wiped out. We count on having our consciousness suppressed when we are given anesthesia for surgery, and we are glad when we awake afterwards with no memory of what happened. And yet we have the unshakable feeling that there is something more primary, more durable at the center of our consciousness than anything that can be explained by anatomy and physiology. This actually may provide the best explanation for our persistent belief in a supernatural level of reality that can’t be explained away by science. Even scientists who insist that there’s no other explanation can’t help but act as though they are motivated by something beyond the principles of material realism, as though they have freedom of choice and that their choices are meaningful, that Why? really is as important as How?.

Despite this very personal experience of a metaphysical reality that goes against the principles of material realism and the rest, we in Western cultures have become so completely programmed with the ideas and values of science that they have come to control how we think, even if we’re not scientists ourselves. Indeed, to a certain extent, material realism has become one of the fundamentals of Western religion because Western religion describes God first and foremost as the one who created the material world. Of course, Western religious traditions insist that a metaphysical dimension does exist, but they also consider the physical realm to be highly significant, very much real. This is in contrast to Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism that insist that the material world is just an illusion. In the West, though, we believe that the material world that God created is, to a certain extent, self-sufficient. And so we live out our lives firmly convinced that the physical world is what is truly real.

Of course, most of us still believe in miracles, but even there, our belief in miracles is based on the idea that the material world is pretty much self-contained and governed by laws that make it predictable. Miracles occur when the unpredictable happens, when God intervenes from outside to suspend the laws of nature that make the world stable, that make it an acceptable reality. It’s exactly because God so rarely interferes with the material world that we can count on it to be trustworthy and constant.