This is the 6th in the series 'Religion and Science: A Beautiful Friendship.'
"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."
--Albert Einstein
With the idea of God, early humans were imagining someone or something who knows, who understands, who can explain things well enough to build them. Now then, if God knows, then maybe, just maybe, we can learn to do what He does. That is, we too can build models of how things work and use them for our purposes.
The idea of modeling emerges naturally from the idea of God because with the positing of God we've made understanding itself something we can plausibly aspire to. There has probably never been an idea so consequential as that of the world's comprehensibility. Even today's scientists marvel at the fact that, if we try hard enough, the universe seems intelligible. Not a few scientists share Nobel-laureate E. P. Wigner's perplexity regarding the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.
Comprehensibility does not necessarily mean that things accord with common sense. Quantum theory famously defies common sense, even to its creators. Richard Feynman is often quoted as saying, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." But a theory doesn't need to jibe with common sense to be useful. It suffices that it account for what we observe.
Our faith in the comprehensibility of the world around us mirrors our ancestors' faith in godlike beings to whom things were intelligible. Yes, it was perhaps a bit presumptuous of us to imagine ourselves stealing our gods' thunder, but Homo sapiens has never lacked for hubris.
Genesis says that after creating the universe, God created Man in his own image. The proverb "Like father, like son" then accounts for our emulating our creator, and growing up to be model builders like our father figure.
In contrast to polytheism, where a plethora of gods may be at odds, monotheism carries with it the expectation that a single God, endowed with omniscience and omnipotence, is of one mind. To this day, even non-believers, confounded by tough scientific problems are apt to echo the biblical, "God works in mysterious ways." But, miracle of miracles, not so mysterious as to prevent us from understanding the workings of the cosmos, or, as Stephen Hawking famously put it, to "know the mind of God."
Monotheism is the theological counterpart of the scientist's belief in the ultimate reconcilability of apparently contradictory observations into one consistent framework. We cannot expect to know God's mind until, at the very least, we have eliminated inconsistencies in our observations and contradictions in our partial visions.
This means that the imprimatur of authority (e.g., the King or the Church or any number of pedigreed experts) is not enough to make a proposition true. Authorities who make pronouncements that overlook or suppress inconsistencies in the evidence do not, for long, retain their authority.
Monotheism is therefore not only a powerful constraint on the models we build, it is also a first step toward opening the quest for truth to outsiders and amateurs, who may see things differently than the establishment. Buried within the model of monotheism lies the democratic ideal of no favored status.
To the contemporary scientist this means that models must be free of both internal and external contradictions, and they must not depend on the vantage point of the observer. These are stringent conditions. Meeting them guides physicists as they seek to unify less comprehensive theories in a grand "theory of everything," or TOE. (A TOE is an especially powerful kind of model, and I'll say more about them later.)
There's another implication of monotheism that has often been overlooked in battles between religion and science. An omniscient, unique God, worthy of the name, would insist that the truth is singular, and that it's His truth. In consequence, there cannot be two distinct, true, but contradictory bodies of knowledge. So, the idea of monotheism should stand as a refutation of claims that religious truths need not be consistent with the truths of science. Of course, some of our beliefs -- be they from science or religion -- will later be revealed as false. But that doesn't weaken monotheism's demand for consistency; it just prolongs the search for a model until we find one that meets the stringent condition of taking into account all the evidence.
It's said that it takes 10 years to get good at anything. Well, it's taken humans more like 10,000 years to get good at building models. For most of human history, our models lacked explanatory power. Models of that kind are often dismissed as myths. It's more fruitful to think of myths as stepping stones to better models. We now understand some things far better than our ancestors, and other things not much better at all. But the overall trend is that we keep coming up with better explanations and, as more and more of us turn our attention to model building, our models are improving faster and our ability to usurp Nature's power is growing. To what purpose?
Religion offers a variety of answers to this question and we'll examine some of them in subsequent posts. Religion has also famously warned us to separate the wheat from the chaff, and we must not fail to apply this proverb to beliefs of every kind, including those of religion itself.
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Jim Baggott: What Is the Higgs Boson and Why Does It Matter?
Robert Fuller: The Secret to Science's Success
One of the better arguments I've seen in my lifetime, a bit more elaborate and purposeful than "42".
A better answer is: Uranium/Plutonium lying inside bombs...
Robert Fuller is trying to say something worth listening to about science and religion, so which detractor will say 'nay' to this, and say what?
Are you willing to sit down and actually learn science? If you are, you can come back ten years from now and we can have this discussion, again. I can guarantee that you will not repeat any of what you just said.
from what did the Higgs mechanism emerge?
if we live in a multiverse, what is the mechanism for change between contraction and expansion?
"This means that the imprimatur of authority (e.g., the King or the Church or any number of pedigreed experts) is not enough to make a proposition true. Authorities who make pronouncements that overlook or suppress inconsistencies in the evidence do not, for long, retain their authority. "
If, on the other hand, that's not what the author was trying to say, then he did a really poor job expressing himself. Apart form that the article contains plenty of technical nonsense about e.g. Genesis. The author would have done better asking a theologian, first, before publishing his own, highly naive ideas about what the text means.
:-)
NOUN "proof" is self-referrential - therefore it invites a spray of "Sure, but only after you've proved to me that I need to prove to you anything at all"
Stop doing science any more favors, Mr. Bean!
Mark
The "God" model for reality is what the logically inconsistent and anomalous Philosophy of Metaphysics is all about. If one wishes to read the billions of words of Metaphysical text that have been written, that's their prerogative. All they need is a thousand life times to do it in, and by then there shall be ten billion more words of text added on to this open ended enquiry. This is cuz every logical system requires one of higher order to establish its consistency ad infinitum. Logical systems are also plagued with unresolved anomalies. Mathematicians have known this fact for years. Scientific Empiricism doesn't absolutely trust logic, and uses it with great discretion.
Grand unified theory methodologies is what enabled us to plant crops in the first place (seed, sprout ,water, pick, eat and plant some saved seed for next year) and bring civilisation to the point where we can smash those large hadrons together to see if we’re correct after all but it also caused us to believe the Atun was the one god (well 30 years of pre-jewish monotheism in Egypt deserves to be remembered too), all part of the same thing, soil, seed, rains, floods, plants, cows, people and so on.
Gap god has been squeezed (and revised) into a little bucket of big bang and we don’t know if he’ll be there waving out at us yet but I would not put any money on it.
What led to science was not faith in a creator or a people's divine mission, but curiosity about the natural ORDER = kosmos, in tandem with which men developed the power of reason and its criteria: the evidential, the coherent, and the warranted. A process unthinkable without some form of skepticism. Again, the opposite of an authoritarian, faith- and obedience-based Weltanschauung.
Not the notion of a jealous nation-God, but the concept of ruler [archê] or ground of being led to the first speculation about the substance underlying everything. There is nothing more antithetical to the philosophical [and science was even in Newton's day called "natural philosophy"] than reliance on authority, which is the heart and soul of faith/trust/obedience.
:-)
I like your little Oskar, by the way.
One correction you could make is to clearly differentiate between "trust" and "faith/obedience". Science is, indeed, based on trust (as in "trust but verify"). But it's not trust in authority but in the repetitive and reliable behavior of nature. Of course, we are still requiring our experiments to be repeatable and to be repeated... because we do not take anything for granted without verification. Where the trust piece comes into play is that we do not go all paranoid over nature and the results of our experiments. A couple repetitions with consistent results are usually enough for a scientist to trust nature's answers to experimental questions and we leave it at that until there are inconsistencies further down the road, which make us take a third and even closer look. And at that time, if the inconsistency persists, we are more than willing to go waaaaay back in the way we think about the problem.
I appreciate that both belief/faith and trust relate to what one comes to depend upon as reliable. I just don't think what scientists do with corroborated results is to "trust" them in the way believers in revelation "trust," or have confidence in, God's promises. Or that one trusts in the insights one gains theoretically, whatever the discipline.
Not just because trusting a person seems distinct from trusting a result or method in its emotional valence, but because it connotes not entertaining doubts so long as trust is in effect. Whether or not one subscribes to Popper's notion of disproof or empirical falsification, a degree of skepticism regarding results is always warranted and defines the empirical approach [understood as a philosophy]. A fundamental openness to the possibility of disconfirmation is essential to both research and theoretical extrapolation, but not for those who, while talking about the necessity of faith, of needing to trust what cannot be known, proceed to speak on the basis of a positive authority [the Bible as word of God].
So I would say it is one thing to trust in a personal savior [which, interestingly, seems to turn faith qua confidence into complete certitude] and feeling warranted in building upon corroborated results. I maintain that such an evaluation [feeling warranted] only makes sense with reference to possibly disconfirming future results, while in trusting one is committed to disallowing the possibility of doubt.
The separation from the natural world that characterizes modern, and especially Western, thinking didn't exist for early humans. They neither needed a "God" nor would they have accepted the concept - the inherent divinity of the world around them was self-evident - and their myths didn't need "explanatory power" because that wasn't their purpose. Their function was to integrate the individual to his place in the social group and to reconcile the conflicts that arise between the mind and the body, i.e; the horrific reality and mystery of life, which exists by feeding on itself. The concept of the willing sacrifice was around long before it was hijacked by Christianity.
Monotheism is a recent invention, historically, and comparing it's basic premise to the aims of modern science is a weak argument. Science doesn't need monotheism as a model to level the playing field - the scientific method already does that.
If God is omniscient and omnipotent, then "God" = "Reality"
'He' can't be MORE than reality, because that would imply that part of God is NOT real. Is 'He', or isn't 'He'?
'He' can't be LESS than reality, because that implies something exists that God is separate from, i.e., something not of God. But that can't be, because he created everything and knows and controls everything, so whatever IS is part of God.
The concept of God simply becomes all of reality, whatever that is. I'm not sure how much extra that provides to our (poor) understanding of reality? Same thing, another name.
Another corollary of an 'Omnipotent God' who created everything is that God is guilty of ALL sin, ALL that is bad, ALL evil (all good, too). After all, (a) 'he' created it, and (b) 'he' can change it any time 'he' likes. So the whole concept of human 'guilt' about anything at all is instantly and completely blown away.
It's all God's fault.
To claim otherwise it to put constraints on that 'omniscience' and 'omnipotence'. Is 'He', or isn't 'He'?
Actually, it is, but only for people who can and like to think logically. I take it that this is an admission that you can't or don't want to?
:-)
Kinda screws up the god thing huh?
But ultimately a pretty weak argument.
Yes, monotheism would suggest a consistent universal truth, but so does the fact that the universe appears to be consistent. There's no need to bring religion into it. Sure, it would be nice if believers treated religious belief in the manner scientists treat observable data, but if they did so, we wouldn't be talking about belief any more (we'd be talking about theories and hypotheses), and those people would no longer be considered religious (they'd be scientists). Sort of a silly idea really.
Belief and faith are defined as assertions made without satisfactory evidence. To apply evidence to a belief, and to approach a belief as a hypothesis, means we are no longer talking about a belief. They are mutually exclusive ideas.
Really? What answers would that be?
:-)
Answers.
I can provide those, too!
:-)
Of coarse our sense of being, all things measurable, perceivable and experienced with our sense of being exist. But as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has said, knowledge is different in different states of consciousness. A child looks at a box of toys and experiences it as a box of individual toys, where as his mother simply experiences it as a box of toys.
Without concepts that accompany higher states of consciousness, talk of things not existing at all when not being perceived regrettably for the most part become platitude.
Name and Form emerge from thought. The possibility of diversity in name and form are only limited by the thinker. Unlimited thinker, unlimited Universe.