Part II
God & Science:
Does God Exist? Follow Me and I’ll Show You.
“Though human reason is, strictly speaking, truly
capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain
knowledge of the one personal God, who watches over and controls the world by
his providence, and of the natural law written in our hearts by the Creator…” [CCC 37]
“Human intelligence is surely
already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence
of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light
of human reason …” [CCC 286][2]
“The biblical and
Judeo-Christian faith has always been convinced, not only that we can and
should believe in a Creator, but also that we are able to understand a great
deal about the Creator with our human reason.”[3]
Classic Philosophy Reformulated as Scientific Theory
Many devout Christian/Catholics will be tempted to say
at this point, OK fine. Intelligent design theory has finally come into its own
in science, the logic is clear enough, the scientific data even quite startling
in its implications. But can’t we really go that further step beyond affirming
intelligent design in general to affirm God as the most likely designer as did
many of the great philosophers of old? Can’t the classical philosophical
arguments for God’s existence, the argument from direct religious experience,
St. Anselm’s argument from necessary existence, William Paley’s design
inference, and St. Thomas Aquinas’ first cause argument for God, be properly
restated as scientific theories? Couldn’t a theory of God’s existence turn out
to be as well-supported as any we now hold true in science? It’s an interesting
thought. So interesting, in fact, that it might be true. Therefore, in
this treatment of the age-old dilemma and historical discussion about proving
God’s existence, I have decided to try something entirely different. I’m going
to tell the truth.
Whether one allows that the (originally Catholic)
conceptual constructs of necessary existence and first cause can properly be
called science as opposed to philosophy or theology may hinge upon one’s
personal preference as to what to include in the scope and charter of science,
and what to keep out of it. I prefer to think that logic is part of science—we
can perform no rational task without it—but realize that I may not be in the
majority on that score. In any case, I do not insist upon converting the
necessary existence and first cause arguments whole from philosophy into
science. They do add explanatory support to the other two arguments, however,
which, as we shall soon see, convert very nicely indeed, thank you.[4] The plain and simple truth of the matter is that the
scientific case for God from design and religious experience has reached a
point that it should be fully compelling to anyone with an open mind.
Fully 4 billion people now belong to a major religion
(roughly two thirds of all the people on Earth), and to dismiss them all as
neurotic is no longer scientifically tenable, if it ever was.[5] Consensus never makes truth, but it should be at
least a default indication of sanity. Yes, the world may be crazy in general,
but to have 4 billion people going crazy in precisely the same way at the same
time entails such a low statistical probability that science cannot defend such
a thing without independent evidence (for which there is none in the case of
viewing religion as merely a neurosis). The great hopes the atheists had for
Freudian theory, that it would ultimately dispel the “myth” of religion and
liberate man from what was falsely held to be mindless “superstition,” have
fizzled much like the neo-Darwinists’ overblown expectation of creating life in
the laboratory. After centuries of debate, we now find ourselves back at square
one in the intellectual tug of war between theists and atheists, and theists
now seem to be once again stepping up to seize the initiative.
In support of that initiative, what we shall see in
this section of the book is that God turns out to be good science after all,
provided only that we can get past our political prejudices long enough to
admit it. The evidence is in God’s favor, though the weight of existing social-political
bias is not. To admit such a thing, however, requires a major paradigm shift in
the personal thinking of most scientists whose default philosophical
assumptions include a staunch belief in materialism, a philosophical worldview
long taken for granted by science as if it were science itself (which it is
not). Materialism is merely a personal preference in worldviews. The
materialist preference, however, has grown to be a bias heavily embedded within
the internal politics of our scientific culture. Society will undoubtedly take
some years to catch up to this new revelation about God and science, but there
is no law that says we have to wait on the slowpokes.
The paradigm shift away from materialism is not one
that is intellectually or practically difficult; the barriers are merely
psychological. To make such a change in the scientific paradigm entails no
alterations whatsoever in the way science works. It does not insert ghosts and
demons back into scientific explanation, as neo-Darwinists, playing off of our
fears, would have us believe. Some of the neo-Darwinists admit that the spirits
may be real, but insist that their proper place is not in science. Even
intelligent design theorists agree on this. Everyone agrees that the integrity
of scientific explanation must be protected against superstition. But there is
nothing of superstition involved in the move to intelligent design theory or in
science merely admitting that the evidence (not faith) suggests God as
the source of our world. The change I am proposing only requires that science
concede that we now have real evidence that the unavoidable mystery that set
everything in motion at the very beginning of things derives from a source that
is both intelligent and nonphysical (ID theory) and that the
Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Sikh (etc.) God is currently the best known candidate
for that ultimate source. The mystery at the beginning must be there in any
case, even for the materialists. There is nothing superstitious or irrational
in allowing that there is evidence for God in science; it merely allows science
to retain its integrity by going where the evidence leads. Let us at
least, then, have the courage to take a closer look at the classic
philosophical arguments for God and see whether they do or do not properly
convert to scientific theory, and how well the evidence for them stacks up in
light of modern data. Tally-ho!
The most popular mainstay in the historical debate about God’s existence has long been the classical philosophical argument from design.[6] This is not without reason. As William Paley became famous for saying, a watch implies a watchmaker.[7] Expanding Paley’s argument yields something like this. The world exhibits not only complex designs, intricate patterns, and fine art, but sophisticated functional machines. Therefore there must be a designer of those mechanisms and a designer of the world that contains them (because accident could never manufacture such machines). As became clear in Part 1, in comparison to what we now know of the nearly incomprehensible intricacies of microbiology and genetics, what the design theorists of Paley’s generation were calling complexity turns out to be simplicity itself. Neither side in the early evolution debate, neither Paley, nor Darwin, nor Wallace, nor George Mivart, nor any of the other experts of their day new or even suspected of the immense biological complexity science has since discovered. If the design argument was convincing then, how much more so should it be today?
Today, after an endless parade of neo-Darwinian “smoke and mirrors,” that is, verbal slight of hand and groundless propaganda, Paley remains unrefuted…and the evidence for design has continued to pile up. The only problem in finalizing the evolution debate in favor of God, or an intelligent designer of some other kind, lies not so much in establishing that a watch implies a watchmaker but in demonstrating the applicability of Paley’s argument to our subject of biological evolution, specifically. Simply put, the neo-Darwinists would have us deny the applicability of Paley to biology. They assert that life is a special case. So, it all hinges on this one question: Is nature, or one or more of its component systems (such as the living systems of biology), a true “watch,” a true machine, or something that just happens to look like one. Is nature, as the neo-Darwinists suggest, a special case in that it can look exactly like a machine without being one? My response to the question “Are the living machines of biology true machines?” is “Why not?” They are ultra-complex; they are functional; they maintain consistency and specificity in what they do; they have many closely matched interactive parts. Our scientists have now begun to create biotic machines out of the same stuff of which life is made. Since the biotic machines of life do everything other machines do, since they have now been demonstrated to be made of materials that are a viable medium for intelligent craftsmanship and engineering, and since they are the most complex machines known, where should the burden of proof lie on this question? With those who say living organisms and their subsystems are machines, or with those who say they are not?
Some things are visibly machines whether we know their history, place, date, and manner of manufacture or not. The intellectual trick that neo-Darwinists have so far gotten away with in grand style is to convince the public that the default answer to any question about design must always be that accident is responsible until fully proven otherwise. Not so. Why would accident ever merit the status of a default explanation for complex machinery (or for anything else except a chaotic mess)? Accident has never been demonstrated to be capable of making any “machine” more complex than a roughly hewn teeter-totter, a shaky one-plank bridge, or a loosely tied rope swing. And those simple creations do not endure; they do not carefully check themselves for errors and scrupulously maintain and repair their system architecture. In fact, everywhere else in science and life calling something an accident equates to admitting that we have no explanation. Thus, the default explanation for complex mechanisms must remain with intelligent design, not with accident. If a new type of car shows up on the street downtown we don’t assume it was constructed by accident just because we cannot identify the manufacturer (at least not until after we drive it); that car is just visibly a machine.
So it is with the human body and those of lower creatures: the brain; the genetic translation, error-checking and repair systems; the DNA code; the heart, lungs, and other organs and tissues; the nervous, circulatory, respiratory, and skeletal systems; the microscopic buzz of activity equivalent to a small city that takes place inside each of the trillions of cells in our bodies. These tissues, organs, and bodily systems are all visibly machines. Neo-Darwinists ask us to believe without proof that the enormously complex living designs of nature just so happen to be the one exception to the two rules that govern our world in all the rest of our experience: 1) accidents don’t make machines (only engineers, craftsmen, and machinists do); and 2) we know machines when we see them. They further ask us to accept that the one exception to these rules just so happens to be more complex than any machine we have ever built. According to the neo-Darwinists, accident does not make the easy stuff, only the supremely difficult. It works intensively on highly complex systems for millions of years but quits the instant we humans look to see what it is doing. In the philosophical discipline of logical analysis this is called the fallacy of begging the question, assuming what is to be proved while giving no evidence. On the street it is called “pulling your leg.”
And, if your other leg is free…many neo-Darwinists say…
No, you have it all wrong. We are
not claiming our world started in chaos as pure accident or disorder. The
universe is known to have been highly ordered, near perfectly homogenous, in
fact. What happened was that something occurred to break the symmetry of
certain elements in the homogenous soup of matter and energy that followed the
Big Bang. Then things just sort of fell together in precisely the right way. A
vast, but random, chain reaction of events followed. For some (unknown) reason
a near perfectly and very simply ordered universe fell into a not fully
chaotic, but just “on the edge of chaos” kind of “random” configuration. It
remained there just long enough to allow (accidental?) recombinations of the
elements that, in an odd stroke of luck, created not only the planetary systems
but the astronomically complex forms of life on Earth. Admittedly, too, the
creation of life required another huge burst of good luck during the Cambrian
explosion to have accidentally achieved most of the major body forms of the
tree of life (and their enormously complex internal cellular and genetic
systems) in a short 5-10 million years, but…well, shit happens! Anything’s
possible with an accidental process and a large amount of time. Right? Nature
has paid for that good run of the cards ever since. Hardly any major life form
evolution at all has occurred since the Cambrian. Some minor evolutionary
alterations have been noted, however, and this is all the justification we feel
our theory of accidental evolution requires because, if the world were
accidental, that’s all the justification there would be.
OK, fine. That is the neo-Darwinist view of things. And that general event scenario, or something very much like it, is what appears to have happened if one takes the accidental element out of it. However, there are three things very wrong with this description of events when used as a defense of neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution:
1. It is not neo-Darwinian evolution that is described here because the event process described is not an accidental process at its foundation. It starts with a high degree of simplified order, moves only partially toward chaos, and then inexplicably achieves highly complex forms of order from “the edge of chaos.” All the while these events are unfolding, not accidentally, but in close accordance with natural law.
2. We have no idea why it happened that way, so a general description of the way our universe unfolded doesn’t comprise a scientific explanation because it is not really an explanation at all.
3. The outcome of our structured universe with its complex life, were it to be hypothesized to be from a truly accidental process, would be so highly improbable as to require dismissal under the probability standards used everywhere else in science.
Some of the intermediate steps in the unfolding of our universe may be mildly random, but they are both closely constrained by natural law and directionally pushed by the very highly ordered matter and energy that flowed into them. The output options from such a process are not unlimited, and in fact appear to be such that life on Earth becomes inevitable. Thus, there is nothing truly accidental at the foundation of the unfolding of our universe and the life forms within it. Yes, there are accidents in the world, but accident is not the cause of the world.
Where random elements occur at intermediate points in any process they may be productively “harnessed,” that is, integrated into the overall function and purpose of the larger system. There is no reason to claim lack of purpose in such a system. (See Appendix 1, Fallacy #1.) But if the neo-Darwinists want to say something stronger, that random elements genuinely comprise the foundation of our world and that our world is fully chaotic in its inception, they are just wrong. That kind of system simply does not match what we know about the origin of our universe.
The neo-Darwinists reach for our trousers yet again when they ask us to ignore the fact that neo-Darwinian theory is not testable (as all scientific theories must be). They say that all the tests one might pose for their theory of accidental evolution that could practicably be carried out are doomed to fail, not because their theory is wrong, but merely because evolution doesn’t happen in brief spans of time. True, it has taken millions of years for life to evolve and therefore any valid test of macroevolution would have to be carried out over millions of years. And agreed, it is impractical for science to carry out such a test. Therefore, the neo-Darwinists say, the absence of any successful tests of evolution should not detract from the credibility of their theory. While apparently quite reasonable on the surface, this evasion of testability only succeeds so far. We must always keep in mind that the neo-Darwinian theory includes an accidental worldview. While the overall event of evolution cannot be directly observed, the underlying concept of an accident creating complex biotic machines on a scale requisite to achieving the known evolutionary timeline can be tested. Why don’t neo-Darwinists bring this to our attention when it would show their theory to be testable after all? They don’t bring this kind of test to our attention because this test has already been inadvertently performed by science and neo-Darwinian theory has visibly failed it.
If nature at its foundation were a genuine fractal-producing randomly chaotic mixing bowl as neo-Darwinists say it is, kicking out every possible combination of the physical elements in due time purely by accident, we should frequently find much simple and small non-living biotic machines being randomly produced in nature. Even the standard reply that bacteria would quickly gobble them up is insufficient here because the accidental production of biotic machine components would have to have been done en masse on a truly enormous scale to accomplish the work of evolution in the available time. The numbers involved would still allow us to frequently encounter freshly made biotic machine components during their short duration prior to biodegradation. So, yes, it is true that we cannot perform a test of the event of the creation of complex life in its full scope due to the enormous spans of time involved and because many of the processes of the unfolding of our physical universe from the Big Bang are unrepeatable; the same conditions are not likely to ever occur again. We cannot recreate the entire event of life’s origin as a test. But much smaller tests of the concept of accidental creation of biotic machines can be done in real time. These tests can be performed either by simply looking to see if nature has anywhere produced such biotic machines in the requisite numbers from random physical sources, or by creating random conditions in the lab and observing the results. If the neo-Darwinian/fractal model were true, there would have to be many thousands of accidentally created biotic machines and components “lying about” at any given moment despite the fact that bacteria would readily consume them. Bacteria consume cow droppings, but we cannot fail to miss their existence. Such a mass production of biotic machine components is required to make the math work for the creation of complex life within the five to ten million year limit set by the Cambrian explosion—unless of course evolution has just stopped, or radically changed its methods since that time. But the cessation of evolution is itself not compatible with neo-Darwinian theory, which says the process of evolution is endless and always driven by the same dynamic: accidental combinations of small random variations preserved by natural selection when they improve the reproductive fitness or survivability of an organism.
Obviously this smaller kind of test of an accidental evolutionary process has already been performed countless times…and each time it has failed. We do not find a myriad of accidentally produced nonliving biotic machines lying around the planet as we should if the theory of accidental evolution were true. We don’t find any, that is, any that aren’t produced by an already living organism. If nature is so constructed as to frequently mix up elements and molecules randomly, and such mixing tends to produce biotic machines as neo-Darwinian theory say it does, why not? The answer is in two parts: 1) we know that nature, governed closely by natural law, is not a fractal machine and that it does very little truly random mixing of anything; and 2) as far as science can presently demonstrate, it takes life to create life: either a living organism must generate a new biotic machine internally, or an intelligent being with a biolab and an expert knowledgebase of biology must make it externally. The accidental theory of the origin and evolution of life is refuted by these two truths of science (and many others). The known facts of biology demand that the chicken must come before the egg. It takes life to create life.
We see one form of this smaller test of accidental evolution being inadvertently performed by neo-Darwinists themselves every day in the laboratory. Thousands of genetic mutation studies have been done to date that use random mutagenesis in hopes of noting some trivial (and probably merely regressive) change to a gene that the neo-Darwinists can then plaster all over the cover of Science and Nature as “proof” of accidental evolution. If the theory of accidental evolution were true, the random mutation of DNA produced in these studies should have produced a plethora of small biotic machines. Some, though perhaps not many, of these would be viable improvements to the design of the organism. But no viable alterations have ever been noted from mutagenesis studies that are non-trivial. No new biotic machines have ever been produced by random mutagenesis. The aggregate of many thousands of past mutagenesis studies constitutes a failed test for the theory of accidental evolution, and the weight of that evidence continues to grow substantially each year. We must conclude than, that, although the larger generic theory of evolution is not testable due to the time scales involved and the inability to recreate the conditions that once prevailed on primeval Earth, the more narrow theory of accidental evolution is testable, and all the tests performed to date have failed.
Whatever one decides on the testability issue of the theory of accidental evolution (see Appendix 3), modern research has clearly moved the design argument fully into the realm of science by revealing that what had always looked like a watch is actually trillions of times more complex than we had ever suspected (and trillions of times more complex than a watch). And, beyond the raw numbers (which in themselves are fully convincing), it is the precise nature of the complexity that clinches the question. Molecular biologist Professor Michael Behe has shown that many of the organelles, systems and subsystems of animal physiology represent a “true watch” as opposed to a superficial approximation of one.[8] There are no watches as functionally complex as a living creature. William Dembski has shown us that, no matter what one considers life to be, a true watch or a false one, nature did not have sufficient resources available through the entire history of the universe to build life by accident (see Appendix 2). Dembski’s argument is comprised entirely of basic physics and simple math. To throw out Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument requires us not only to throw out basic math and physics, but to deny the probabilistic foundations of science itself; it requires us to affirm the vastly improbable over the highly probable.
As if that weren’t enough to establish intelligent design as good science, there is the work of geneticist Dr. Michael Denton. Denton convincingly argues that the achievement of life as we know it, at least in general terms, appears to be intended by nature to the exclusion of any radically different alternative.[9] In other words, the designer wanted this category of watch, one based upon amino acids, proteins, and RNA/DNA, not just any clunky old animated contraption whatsoever. Darwin’s view of animal physiology compared to the modern one equates to just that: an old clunker, something so simple that an accident might indeed have thrown it together. Darwin admitted that, could it be shown that even one component of life was so complex that an accident could not assemble it by a sequence of random variations locked in by natural selection, his theory would be disproved. This has now been done hundreds of times over but mainstream science remains in denial. The truth of the theory of intelligent design cannot be established as a deductive certainty (nor can any of our other scientific theories), but it qualifies as a good scientific theory.
There is a somewhat radical philosophical implication of Denton’s research that is relevant to our inquiry into the scientific evidence for God. Michael Denton’s view that natural law implements predetermined forms in biology has, in my mind at least, unexpectedly resurrected the old, thought to be forever vanquished, view of human centricity in the universe. Granted, it is a very limited type of centricity, limited to nature’s having a goal of human life appearing on Earth. But at least this much centricity now appears to be a defensible philosophy. The achievement of human biology really does appear to be the center and driving purpose of nature.
Thought to be forever vanquished by the “ultra-enlightened” protoplasm era theory of accidental evolution, the theory of a direction or purpose in nature is no longer an outré position. The neo-Darwinists remain in abject denial of this. They are simply dragging their heels in an attempt to delay the inevitable discrediting of the accidental worldview. In large part, the accidental worldview has already been jettisoned from much of science. Evolution textbook writers have for many decades now admitted that the “random mutations” of neo-Darwinian theory are not truly accidental, but only unbiased towards the fitness of the organism. Cutting edge evolutionists such as Simon Conway Morris have pointed out that the phenomena of convergence is ubiquitous in nature, and that known constraints on natural processes make human life inevitable, at least on Earth.[10] Morris, not being an ID theorist, might well shy away from centricity as smacking too much of religion, but the logic goes where it goes: human life is inevitable, and it is most likely inevitable only upon Earth. Centricity, of course, is a bit of a digression for us, as our primary concern is with the merits of the design argument as a scientific theory, but it demonstrates that the neo-Darwinian propaganda campaign against religion as if science itself had disproved God is all a bunch of hooey.
Science can neither replicate the biological machines of life in the lab under random conditions nor observe a random process generating the machines of life in nature. Neither can much smaller biotic machines be generated from random conditions. Paley’s design argument thus becomes not just a coherent theory, but a good scientific theory. This is so because all the “test cases” turn out in its favor. Because life is now scientifically demonstrable to be something an accident cannot produce, Paley’s original design argument can be considered validated by science.
The structure of the original design argument in its standard deductive form went along these lines:
Premise 1: All things that exhibit a specific function, sophisticated structured patterns, complexity of design, and closely matched parts constitute a mechanism (A).
Premise 2: All mechanisms have a designer (B).
Premise 3: Nature (the Earth, or the Universe), and life forms especially, exhibit high complexity, sophisticated structured patterns, and specific functionality, closely matched parts etc. (A).
============================ (Therefore)
Conclusion: Nature and life have a designer (B).
It is apparent at first glance that the argument is valid, i.e., the conclusion must be true if the premises are true. That doesn’t mean the premises are true, however, just that they are logically related to the conclusion. The combination of premises 1 & 2 comprise what some modern scientists and philosophers call the design inference. No one to my knowledge ever disagrees with premise #2, except Charles Darwin himself (and those who followed him in asserting an accidental origin and development of life). Darwin was purported to be, and in fact was, the paradigm of a close observer of nature. However, he did not see what most of the rest of us do see: design inherent in processes of nature. Couldn’t see the forest for the trees perhaps. Whatever the reason, Darwin did not see the indications of purpose or design in nature that were apparent to nearly everyone else.
Darwin saw some mechanisms in nature of course, planetary movements, the water cycle, growth processes, natural selection, specific functions of anatomical design etc., and he was so awed by the vastness of the cosmos and the ability of man to think about it all that he did posit God as the ultimate source of the universe. But he saw no intelligent plan guiding the day-to-day interactive course of natural processes. What Darwin saw, or thought he saw, was the interaction of chance biological form variations and natural selection once they had been created and set into motion. But what else could he see. The science of his day had neither atomic physics, molecular biology, the electron microscope, or genetic science. Darwin’s case is a clear paradigm of theory being limited by the vision and technology available to its time.
Darwin saw no benign governance in nature; he saw only cruelty, chaos, blindness and apparent accident. He saw a natural process set free to run its own blind course. Not having discovered, as we have since, the intricacies of genetics and microbiology, Darwin did not feel compelled to label the universe as a vast machine building machine; he thought things were much simpler. We now know differently. Despite the mystique that has been carefully built up around him, Darwin was not infallible. For example, he believed certain kinds of changes could be induced in an organism by its external environment, or otherwise acquired by life experience, and then inherited by its progeny. This, in the form Darwin believed it at least, has since been disproved. Certainly Darwin was not the near deity modern materialists and atheists have made him out to be. Nonetheless, modern critics of design, citing Darwin, Hume, and other antiquarians who never had the chance to see inside the cell or learn of the complexity of the genomes, assert (erroneously) that Paley’s argument has long been dismissed by science and philosophy as demonstrably false. This is absolutely not so. In light of modern microbiology, genetics, physics and cosmology, the watchmaker argument remains alive and well. If Paley’s work contains no more force and merit than the musings of an elementary school child, as neo-Darwinists describe it, why are there 3,000 books in the current books list at Amazon and Borders bookstores referencing his life and work?
The materialist-atheist-Darwinist camp has been far too casual in dismissing Paley over the years. Immanuel Kant, as great a thinker as the world has produced, said the design argument was the one argument for God that we must always treat with respect, and yet the neo-Darwinists ridicule it as having less merit than the blunder of a child. The American Academy for the Advancement of Science evinces a similar prejudice in refusing to examine intelligent design theory at all. They assume ID must still be a theological or philosophical argument, since it began that way 150 years ago (not that logic, regardless of the source, should ever be considered foreign to science). Unfortunately, the National Academy of Science appears to hold a similarly outdated and prejudiced view of intelligent design theory.[11]
Although Paley couched his watchmaker argument in terms of God’s existence, over the past few decades mathematician William Dembski, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, and molecular biologist Michael Behe, et al., have formally proposed Intelligent Design Theory in a more generalized way. Modern intelligent design theory does not posit God’s existence (or his nonexistence), but only asserts an intelligent designer of life in one form or the other. They explicitly disavow making any claim that God must be the designer (or any other religious claim). Modern ID theorists simply say that life qualifies as a highly sophisticated machine and that all such machines have designers. Both claims are properly scientific, and, on the surface at least, apparently true.
Consider. To say that the information content in natural law (as currently understood) is inadequate to explain the information content in DNA and other features of complex biological machines, as Dr. Stephen Meyer does, is not to say that God exists; it is simply to say that there is a mismatch between the information capacities of the two systems. Meyer thinks that mismatch calls for an explanation by science. I think he is right. Intelligent design provides that explanation, while nothing else does. To say with Meyer that science currently has no explanation of the origin of biological information is only a statement about the current merits/demerits of our scientific theoretical base; it is not religion as the neo-Darwinist propaganda campaign would have us believe.
William Dembski has spent three good long books (The Design Inference, The Design Revolution, and No Free Lunch) teaching us why the design inference is good science. He has gone to great lengths to help both the layman and professional scientist to see that there is an objective threshold of complex specified information that justifiably triggers the design inference. Michael Behe has spent another two excellent books teaching us that the facts of biology, many only recently discovered, show the accidental gradualistic model of neo-Darwinian evolution to be inadequate as an explanation of the origin and development of complex biological systems. Stephen Meyer has now joined the ID book parade with a superbly written tome called Signature in the Cell. Every bit of this is valid science.
Behe has taken the first steps towards a physiological definition of what it is that we intuitively know we are seeing in biological designs when we ascribe intelligent design to such systems. Dembski, on the other hand, gives a primarily mathematical treatment of the same question. While Behe focuses on the perceivable failure of the neo-Darwinian model to account for irreducibly complex biological structures, Dembski makes a more abstract argument for intelligent design from mathematics, probability, and information theory. Stephen Meyer’s argument centers around the lack of explanation for the biological information in DNA specifically, and the large unexplained jumps between radically different types of creatures that evolution somehow accomplished in an amazingly short period of time during the Cambrian explosion. Once again, all of these are proper scientific hypotheses.
One effect of these new works in intelligent design is to make explicit the often subconsciously perceived standard for the design inference. In doing this, they genuinely succeed in pulling the classic design argument into the realm of science. They demonstrate that the term “intelligent design” can be consistently and rigorously applied to biological machines via a scientific analysis.
The design inference as described by these scientists is not merely some whimsical “Gee whiz, that’s an impressive gizmo!” type of subjective feeling that everyone does differently; it is not just popular nonsense, in other words. People agree in amazing fashion as to what qualifies as intelligently designed and what does not. According to Dembski, this amazing consistency occurs because we are actually seeing something there, something objective and perceivable. Among the endless patterns of complexly arranged parts that millions of different designed artifacts display there is something they all have in common: a perceivable threshold of complexity, information, and specificity of function, and this reliably indicates intelligent design.
One might object that these treatments are not rigorous because we cannot yet specify with precision where the ID threshold is in every practical application. But we must remember that intelligent design theory is still in the seminal stage. It is unfair to demand perfection and completeness at the beginning of a theory’s development. In addition, we should not think that the validity of the design inference must be denied simply because we cannot immediately quantify it. This is not a requirement for other valid inferences that we make. We can see that a wall is too high to climb over, or a puddle to wide to jump without being able to give the height of the wall or width of the puddle to centimeter accuracy. We are confident that a threshold has nonetheless been crossed. We can confidently affirm the truth of gravity without being able to specify precisely how much force is being applied to a falling apple or a climbing space rocket. So it is with the design inference. We know it when we see it without being able to give our reasons in precise mathematics. Further scientific investigation will undoubtedly yield precision for design inferences as it has done for estimates of gravity, height and distance. Pending the achievement of that precision, we remain justified in the confidence we have in making everyday inferences to intelligent design.
The fact that there are alternative formulas to compute the presence of intelligent design complicates the decision process but does not invalidate the decision. Sheer complexity might be enough in one instance, while a combination of precisely fashioned parts with somewhat less complexity would justify the design inference elsewhere, unmistakable artificiality even when conjoined with simplicity would be sufficient in another case, etc. So the design inference is valid despite the fact that science has yet to complete an exhaustive exposition of all of its applications.
All of this adds up to a solid case for intelligent design theory, if not for God explicitly. To add additional confidence in the design inference we can make a simple version of a scientific type of argument to lend additional support. Properly understood, the design inference is a scientific theory in itself. First, let’s briefly look at how science makes its arguments, and then build an argument of the same type for the design inference. What, then, is the logic of science?[12]
The scientific method of argument, proof or evidence, is based upon what is referred to as inductive logic. Inductive logic essentially reduces to the general rule that when something has been shown to repeatedly happen in a certain way, it is reasonable to assume it will happen the same way the next time because a natural law is assumed to be operating. If an apple is observed to have fallen from a tree in a downward direction a few million times, while never observed to have floated up, then we feel justified in assuming that the next time the apple ripens and disconnects from its branch, it will fall down to the ground. In a sense, the belief that the apple will fall down to the ground and not float up to the clouds is a well confirmed and supported scientific theory, in essence, the assertion that this phenomenon is an instance of a larger natural law. In this case, the natural law is the law of gravity. So far, observation has very substantially confirmed it and never refuted it. The empiric evidence for the law of gravity is a simple scientific argument based upon inductive logic. Inductive logic simply says that the future will be like the past (because natural laws are constant).
Science assumes the existence of natural laws that do not change, that nature is orderly and consistent. Observations of regular patterns in nature are then codified into natural laws and the laws polished and made precise over centuries through further observation and test. Science makes predictions based upon these laws, and has been dramatically successful in doing so. Predictions, tests, theoretical models and mathematical arguments, as well as the overall explanatory power of the theory, all lend additional evidential support for the truth of a theory.
We can now apply this type of scientific logic (in a simplistic way) to the argument from design. When we observe something with intricate functionality or sophisticated structured pattern, a car or a wren’s nest for example, we also discover that there is a designer or creator of that thing. We should note that, many billions of these observations have occurred even within the very process of scientists doing science: ornithologists observing birds building nests, anthropologists studying ancient tools, entomologists observing the construction of bee hives etc. The type of intelligence involved in producing a structured dwelling for a bird or an insect is presumably different than that employed by “higher” beings, that is, unconscious or “hard-wired” as opposed to conscious, but it is intelligence, loosely defined, nonetheless. It is possible that the design inference in humans will turn out to be, in addition to a logically defensible conscious inference and plausible scientific theory, just such a hard-wired instinctive function resident at an unconscious level. This would explain why investigators have such a hard time clarifying what exactly is being done when humans make the design inference: they are confusing two entirely different kinds of processes operating simultaneously on the same data at different levels.
In any case, the inductive evidence base, the number of confirmed observations of the design inference posed as a scientific theory, is huge. Our daily life, alone, is replete with such test cases. All of man’s tools, machinery, and instruments qualify, all of our construction, as well as all of the constructions of wildlife. What refutations, negative test cases, and counterexamples have been given? None. Where is one sophisticated design that we know was made by an accidental process? To say that the design constructions of insects and wildlife do not qualify doesn’t work, for it merely begs the question. The complex information impressed into the neural patterns of these creatures employs a hard-wired computational logic no less than a robotic factory we might ourselves construct to manufacture products of similar complexity. Accidental process are not seen to produce nonliving biotic machines of this level of complexity, therefore, the inductive scientific evidence does not support the accidental creation of the biotic computational networks in lower creatures that otherwise qualify as intelligently designed machines.
A critic might say (as the neo-Darwinists do) that nature itself (all of it taken whole) is the counterexample. The negative test case, is, well, everything. Yes, we have a counterexample, and its a big one! Its really that simple. Nature is just that way, one big accident that just happens to produce complex machinery and consistently maintain them in a very careful way. Walla booby! Accidental evolution proved, right? Not quite.
According to scientific method and procedure, to be a successful negative test case one must have observed an instance of a result contrary to the theory or hypothesis being evaluated: observed. For all of nature to count as a counterexample, one would have to have observed that there is no designer of nature. Who has made such a vast observation? How could such an enormous observation have been made; and where is the documented report for us to consider?
Clearly, no man has accomplished this observation because it is such an enormous task in concept that no man or group of men could do it. (It also would have made the news.) We would first have to have not only scoured the entire known physical universe, but done it in a single instant to preclude God moving to where we were not looking at the time. We would have to have proven that God, the hypothesized designer, could not be nonphysical, i.e., existing in another dimension where we were unable to go and unable to look. Clearly, these things have not been done to the satisfaction of science and logic, and they present what are probably insurmountable physical and logical obstacles to ever being done.
Without an observation to validate the proposed negative result, the critic’s objection that nature has no designer reduces to an unsupported claim. It begs the question, representing a mere assumption as evidence. Therefore, not only is nature not the negative test case, the negative counterexample, it is clear that it cannot be.
Ironically, Darwinists tend to deny the design inference, though the mental operation involved is practically identical to their own bread and butter tools of phylogenetic inference and fossil pattern analysis. We all make pattern-based inferences frequently in the course of a normal day; it is, in fact, the most fundamental operation in the thinking process. Implicitly trusting in our ability to discern patterns, we typically don’t take the trouble to make the mechanics of unconscious design computations explicit. However, lack of awareness of logic does not entail the absence of logic. In the case of the design inference, Dembski has revealed the presence of an epistemologically valid computational logic underlying the design inference. His analysis reveals that the design inference is as valid as any pattern matching inference we make. It is also a matter of simple common sense.
Suppose Sgt. Joe, a retired Air Force noncommissioned officer, gets a job at the CIA identifying rough patterns from aerial reconnaissance or satellite imagery photos. These pictures are taken at long range of various natural and man made objects on earth and in space. He does this five days a week for twenty years until one day, as a now expert interpreter, he sees a system of presumed to be natural canals on Mars. The canals are formed so that they spell out a near perfect English language statement: “George Washington slept here.”
Enter the neo-Darwinists’ supposedly fatal objection to Paley’s watchmaker argument: the design inference isn’t thought to properly apply to natural objects. Joe was out a bit late with some very old friends last night, and the aspirins and caffeine haven’t fully resolved the fog…but yet…that image still says “man made” to him. He simply has to face the truth. What he is seeing is an intelligently designed object—he just knows it.
Over the years his mind has abstracted certain general features from specific equipment and structures, so that as few as three blurry rectangles in a given juxtaposition discovered in certain remote desert areas would indicate a terrorist training camp with confidence. This is a valid mental operation—four really, pattern extraction, pattern matching, recognition of the meaning of context, and elimination of competing alternatives—nothing mysterious. Darwinists do it all the time. The DNA sequences of two “relatives” on the tree of life are not an exact match, but, within the context of Darwinian theory, close enough for them to conclude inheritance. The jawbones of some intermediate fossils in a sequence of twenty conflict somewhat with the overall pattern, but the remaining similarities are enough for Darwinists to confidently place these creatures on the same branch of the tree of life—despite their differences. Patterns don’t have to be identical to be properly considered instances of the same concept.
But this pattern, “George Washington slept here,” is so flagrantly unambiguous that a child could see it. No training needed, no experience, no long years of research, no nothing: these canals are intelligently designed.
“I’d
better show this to the boss.”
“But the
design inference doesn’t apply to natural objects, Joe. Don’t you read Dawkins?”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot.”
Never argue with the boss. Joe is nonetheless reconsidering as he walks away. Assume a minimum of ten points of complexity are required to form each letter properly, times twenty-five letters. To get all those points and lines in rudimentary sequence by accident is improbable to the magnitude of 1025. They are also perfectly aligned and spaced. That adds improbability. They form a meaningful sentence, which is vastly more improbable than twenty-five random letters. That’s too much to be accidental. Joe turns back to his boss.
“What
would the odds be against achieving this by accident?”
“The
design inference doesn’t apply to natural objects, Joe.”
“Right.”
On the way out of his boss’s office Joe notices a wad of paper slightly resembling an airplane on the floor.
“Here
boss, it was on the floor.”
“Oh, yeah,
my kid just left with his Mom; he must have made this.” Joe’s boss
awkwardly tosses the crumpled sheet forward and it tumbles just as awkwardly to
the floor. “Look at that baby fly, Joe. That kid is really somethin’ ”
“Right boss; I’ll be getting back to work now.”
With any luck we are all asking ourselves the same thing Joe is asking himself on the way back to his office: “Why doesn’t the design inference apply to natural objects?” We can make canal systems, sculpt flower beds into Bible verses, plant a stand of trees to conform to geometric shapes, design golf courses and lakes, do rudimentary genetic engineering on simple creatures. We are looking for intelligent signs from other civilizations in outer space, targeting thousands of viable candidate stellar systems some of which might contain advanced civilizations that could do much greater things with biotic engineering—androids even. Why doesn’t the design inference apply to natural objects?
In the example, Sgt. Joe has seen twenty-five letters in a stationary pattern, twenty-five well-constructed letters, with meaning. In the human body we have several trillion cells, each with thousands of optional parts used at various times for different purposes. Each cell is in rapid motion, accomplishing over two million actions per minute. The human genome is a precisely configured 3,000,000,000 nucleotides.[13] There are nine levels of machines built into machines built into machines that compose the vertical hierarchy of the human body. If Joe were to see the equivalent of this level of complexity on Mars it would equate not to the simple statement “George Washington slept here” but a full multi-media showing of War and Peace replete with a cast of thousands, all accomplished by the orchestrated movement of a myriad of natural objects on the surface of the planet.[14] Ironic: we can see design in the simple, but not in the complex. Or perhaps its not ironic; perhaps its political.
A further “irony” is that the evolutionary argument itself strongly supports the reliability of the design inference that mainstream evolutionists rush to deny. Our ancestors had many thousands of years to hone a conditioned response for accurate recognition of intelligently designed objects while gathering discarded tools or weapons from other clans, tribes, civilizations, or individuals, from plundering enemy campsites etc. The ability to recognize a useful tool, perhaps one that had yet to be used by the finder’s tribe, one particularly strong or well made, could be a significant advantage to survival, especially under strong environmental pressures. Neo-Darwinian theory says that such advantages are preserved by natural selection. A skeptic might dismiss this by saying the primitive individual was merely recognizing functionality, not intelligent design. This could be true in many cases, but it is a far stretch to assume that at some point the tribesman would not stumble upon something new that was clearly manufactured for which he was yet unable to assign a function. In such a case he would likely harbor a sneaky suspicion that his opponent tribe had made something new that would be of value if he could only discover its purpose. One can imagine a humorous Tim Conway/Harvey Korman skit where the tribesman first tries every possibility except the correct one before finding its proper use, but he would still have recognized design in the abstract in that object. In any case, our confidence level for premises #1 & #2 is substantial based upon the evidence for the reliability of the design inference generally.
What about premise #3? The living systems of the Earth exhibit clear characteristics of complex design, have many closely matched parts, and reveal very precisely specified functionality. Although we cannot assume the design inference will ultimately apply to nature without begging the question, neither are we required to deny that it could apply to nature for the same reason. We are merely required to take an objective look at the beings, objects, and processes of nature, including life, and see if the design inference is appropriate. Having once done that, the common sense implications of the astronomical complexity of life become undeniable: life warrants the inference to intelligent design.
Every scientist in the world will tell you that much of inanimate nature, especially the nonliving components of the ecosystem, and living organisms in particular, exhibit these functional design characteristics. The ecosystem is a sophisticated, interrelated, highly tuned, structured system of living and non-living subsystems—clearly functional, i.e., configured to promote the survival of animal life. Perhaps the clearest examples are the water and oxygen cycles, without which animal life could not exist on the Earth, and, of course, the genetically based masterpieces of animal life forms. Most, if not all lay persons (nonprofessionals) will say the same thing. When shown the data about natural systems that science has compiled, or simply from his or her own observations of living things, including some generally absorbed knowledge about ecology and the environment, the average guy or gal on the street will agree that a great deal of nature is imbued with intricate functionality or sophisticated structure and pattern. It appears to be designed, and if the neo-Darwinists has not so authoritatively insisted that nature is an exception, most people would simply say that they believe nature to be intelligently designed.
Consequently, we are going to say that it is a safe bet that premise #3 is true, in the sense that a great deal of humanity affirms its truth. We can at least say that premise #3 has an enormous amount of popular and scientific support, perhaps as much as any of our currently held scientific theories. All of our scientific observations to date confirm this, that nature clearly has intricate functionality and sophisticated structured patterns, and no negative observation has been made, no counterexample presented, that is, outside of quantum mechanics. But to affirm as some have on the basis of indeterminacy in quantum physics that order mysteriously comes out of disorder in a fully consistent and reliable way on a daily basis is not to deny creation by intelligent design. Rather, it is merely to affirm an ongoing creation vice a single point in time creation.
We have now examined the support for all three premises and the result is that the scientific form of the argument from design succeeds, at least on the surface, as a scientific theory. It has billions upon billions of positive test cases, and no negative ones. Consequently, we who value intellectual integrity, good science, and logical consistency, should admit that the theory that a designer of nature exists is as good a theory as our other major scientific theories. All of these theories, by the way, include concepts of powerful but invisible forces. Some of our accepted theories also give rise to potential confirming or refuting observations which cannot be accomplished at present due to practical, if not logical, limitations: astronomy’s black holes for example. Care to take a test drive and observe what’s in the center? Evolution itself is too big to be directly confirmed.
One might object that the theory of a designer is unscientific because it invokes something mysterious, a designer whom we know little or nothing about—some have even said a designer whom we cannot know in a coherent way. But the Big Bang theory starts in a complete mystery, [15] as does Darwinian evolution. And, in intelligent design theory, the designer is not said to definitely be God (although it is allowed that God could be the designer). In theory, the designer could turn out to be an extraterrestrial civilization of which we could learn practically everything.
Critics who loudly say intelligent design theorists are simply trying to camouflage religion are not only misreading intelligent design theory as stated, they are revealing that in their own minds they believe God is the only serious candidate for a designer. They are also revealing that they have a certain non-Christian and generally nonstandard view of God in mind; a vague non-personal mystical uninterested and non-interacting force. All of this flagrantly begs the question of the true relationship of God, science and intelligent design theory by assuming things science does not know. It is therefore logically fallacious.
Science currently points to an anomaly that violates the laws of physics as the source of everything at the Big Bang. Putting God’s name on it does not violate the charter of science any more than saying there could be a violation of the laws of physics from which all physical matter and energy has sprung. There is no conceptual difference, no difference in consistency and integrity. The charter of science only rules out using God or spiritual forces as intermediate causes in scientific explanation because they cannot be verified by empiric test and observation. This restriction has no bearing on the very beginning of things where science has already affirmed an event which itself cannot be verified by empiric test and observation: everything coming from nothing in a split second in a gross violation of natural law. As long as the spiritual is ruled out as an intermediate cause in scientific explanation, the affirmation of God at the very beginning of things is not, by definition, unscientific any more than what science has done for the past four decades in affirming the Big Bang.
Modern theories in physics have posited as many as ten dimensions, while not saying much more about them than that they solve certain mathematical problems in the description of physical event processes that arise in their absence.[16] There are no direct observations of these dimensions, no direct empirical evidence for them, only math. This is because they are, by definition, outside the three dimensional space we can perceive. We define these dimensions as physical but we do not experience them, and cannot experience them. An intelligent designer might exist outside the three dimensions we experience as well. However, as a matter of fact, God has been reliably reported to manifest himself in a variety of directly observable ways as well as to be subjectively discernable. In a sense then, the theory of a Judeo-Christian-Islamic God is more closely tied to direct experience than the current versions of extra-dimensional theories in physics.
The theory of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God (JCIG) theory also explains the well-established traditions and professional knowledge base of the Church and the testimony and behavior of millions of reliable witnesses who affirm that they have encountered God. Including religious behavior and witness in the explanatory power of a scientific theory contradicts nothing in science. The personal testimony of the very same people who bear religious witness is elsewhere deemed legally sufficient to warrant taking a man’s life in a murder trial, for crying out loud! Why does it all of a sudden bear no evidential weight at all when the testimony is for God? A material witness walks out of court after testifying against a murderer who was assigned the death penalty largely upon the weight given the testimony of that witness. He is interviewed by a news reporter as a credible witness, and the TV audience agrees that it was a just sentence. The same man then goes down the street three blocks to attend a church service, comes out and testifies that he has had a personal encounter with God, and 95% of the self-proclaimed intellectual elite in the western world, scientists, psychologists, and philosophers, immediately brand his testimony as unreliable and incoherent! The whole thing is laughable.
But what about A. J. Ayer? Didn’t he prove that religious language has no meaning? Doesn’t that justify dismissing all religious witness? No. Even should we grant Ayer’s claim that a statement about an encounter with God can have no meaning just because it has no empiric referent or entailment (and we shouldn’t), that does not justify dismissing testimony of a reliable witness as having no evidential weight. Although much of religious language may not have empiric referents, religious behaviors are empirically definable. Ayer may say that individual witness concerning direct personal encounters with God cannot be formed into meaningful statements with empiric content, but the statements of social scientists about the religious behaviors of the witnesses can be formulated into meaningful statements with empiric content. Another error Ayer makes is to (conveniently) equivocate “empirically supportable” with “empirically provable.” True, we cannot empirically prove God’s existence, but we can give empiric support for it, and, all things considered, the aggregate of that support, theoretical consistency, and overall explanatory power results in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic theory of God (JCIG) being our best supported theory for the origin and development of life and the natural world as we know it.
To grant Ayer’s position is also to be a physical reductionist, to say that statements of all of our internal experiences such as love, loyalty, patriotism have no meaning at all outside a summary of the observable behavior patterns they drive. Nothing could be more ridiculous. To move to reductionism is to bankrupt human experience, to gut it of everything that is meaningful to us in the higher senses and make us mere robots. Even the lower animals live a higher existence than that.
Love has no direct empiric referent, yet to say that I do love or I am in love is to say something meaningful. To report a direct encounter with a God who is the transcendent source of love, that is, to report the experience of divine love, is just as meaningful; it just can’t be empirically proven. Can we empirically prove that we love a family member or a fiancée? No. It can’t be proven. It can be supported by behavioral corroboration, but not given a direct empiric proof. Does that mean that our love is unreal? Nonsense! It is as real as anything we know. An experience of God is very similar, but often even more intense. Therefore, religious language is no more meaningless than is language of the emotions, values and virtues. Furthermore, to say something is largely mysterious is not to make statements concerning that thing meaningless. Something that is completely mysterious cannot be spoken of in a meaningful way, yes, but something only partly mysterious can be referred to with meaningful language, just not with completeness. Recent theories of physics, even at the first moment of their inception were not adjudged meaningless because they posited 10, 26, or more dimensions of which we can have no direct empiric evidence, since humans only experience four dimensions. Those dimensions were almost 100% mysterious at the inception of the multi-dimensional theory; they merely filled a mathematical niche in a formula. God is much less mysterious than that. He is Father; he is Creator; he is counselor; he is priestly intercessor, and many other things, not only in theory, but in our living experience in the Spirit. To dismiss all statements of religious experience as meaningless is therefore simply to assume materialism as a starting point, to say that religious people can’t be having bonafide encounters with God because nothing spiritual exists. But this is simply to beg the question of God and the spiritual dimension outright. Therefore, Ayer’s thesis that religious language is meaningless must be dismissed as a question begging enterprise harboring the hidden premise of materialism.
Religious witness cannot be dismissed so easily. It justifiably serves as the basis for one of the classic arguments for God’s existence that turns out to be surprisingly powerful when honestly examined. Let us turn to that argument now.
Spiritual Perception: The Argument from Direct Religious
Experience
In many ways, the problem of proving God’s existence
is a false dilemma. Historically we have tried much too hard at it.[17] We should go about it exactly as we would for proving
Uncle Bob’s existence, for example, or anyone else’s: we should go look for
him, and see if he’s there. Via logic alone, or conceptual argument, prior to
going and looking, man cannot prove the existence of anything, or anyone, let
alone God. Why have we made God an exception to our procedure for proving the
existence of persons or things?
Seriously, though, the question of the existence of
anything, or anyone, is simply a matter for perceptual confirmation—you have to
go look: perception, observation, or encounter; that is how we prove the
existence of a person. The proof of God’s existence must be treated the same
way. It is not logically necessary that there be a God anymore than that there
be a President Kennedy, or a grocer on the corner. We simply have to go look
for him.
But, the skeptic objects: “How can God’s existence be
established with perception? He’s invisible!” This invisibility objection is
bogus for four reasons: (1) God is not invisible to the heart; (2) God is not
invisible physically when he chooses to be seen; (3) invisible things
can be confirmed to exist with other forms of perception; and (4) it’s
perfectly understandable that he who is all good, all powerful, and perfect
would restrict our access to him until we purify ourselves of our sins. So,
this objection is clearly untenable even on the surface, but in the interest of
thoroughness, let’s dig a little deeper.
The skeptic’s error is to start out looking with the
wrong instrument, the eyes or the mind, for, in this case we must look with our
hearts. We may properly conclude God’s existence through the faculty of reason,
true, but the heart is where the faculty of direct spiritual perception
resides. “ ‘You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord.” (Jeremiah 29:13) “Blessed are the
pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8). God exists in the
spiritual dimension, and our heart is the portal to it. Pope Benedict XVI has
recently reminded us of this: “The organ for seeing God is the heart.”[19]
This concept is not as foreign to science as it may
seem. We all believe in the existence of many things invisible to the eye:
gravity, electricity, wind, atoms, etc.—we don’t see them, we only see their
effects. We have reliable reports that they exist, or we perceive them through
means other than the unaided eye. We can feel wind, gravity, and
electricity (if we are not careful). We use an electron microscope to view
atoms. It is important to note that, with these invisible things, we can still
find them if we earnestly go looking for them. We simply have to use the right
instrument. It’s the same with God: we will find him if we look with the right
instrument. This is even more certain when he comes looking for you.
In addition, where God is concerned, quite a few
people have actually seen him: visually. In other words, he’s not invisible at
all, he’s just not present in a given place at a given time in visible form.
According to the Bible, the Lord God and his angels from Heaven have the
ability to either incarnate, to assume a perceivable psuedo-physical form (the
archangel Raphael in Tobit), or to reveal their radiant glorious luminous form
directly. They can appear as apparitions or give indirect but perceivable
signs, e.g., wiping out the entire Assyrian army in one night. God’s appearance
in the person of his Son Jesus was in fully visible form. Jesus was also
transfigured on Mt. Tabor into a glorious radiant being. In addition, Moses and
Aaron saw God along with Nadab, Abihu and seventy of the elders of Israel on
Mount Sinai. God led many thousands of the Israelites out of Egypt, going
before them in a pillar of the cloud in the day and a column of fire at night.
He appeared to Moses in a miraculously burning bush.[20] He passed by while Elijah was hiding in a crag of the
mountain.
God is only invisible, or more correctly put, unseen,
when he chooses to be. Logically, since God is the source of all things and all
energy, one could justifiably speculate that, when God chooses to manifest
himself in this world, he would turn out to be he who is the most visible
of all: pure radiant power and light itself. The extant scriptural descriptions
are, in fact, very much like that.
Just the same, as visible as God can be, he does not
appear on demand from his own creation. Skeptics should not find this so odd.
The fact that he who is supreme authority elects to restrict and control access
to himself fits perfectly with the behavior patterns of our own earthly
leaders, who are far less authorities. Science cannot, therefore, control and
reproduce spiritual events at will for the simple reason that God is our
superior; he makes the rules. He decides who has access to him, and when. This
is a very natural circumstance.
The atheist and neo-Darwinist arguments that we should ignore the witness reports of billions of otherwise known to be reliable people only when they make a witness report about God is obviously suspect on the surface. But they commit a somewhat more subtle logical fallacy in arguing that the converse of an argument they deny to be valid for theists, is valid for atheists: that the reliable testimony of a billion atheists proves that God does not exist. There are two glaring logical errors here. First if the testimonies of one group are evidence, generally speaking, so are the testimonies of the other. Second, for Mrs. Brown to say that “I have not met Mr. Smith” is not to give positive evidence against Mr. Smith’s existence to the same magnitude that Mrs. Brown’s having said “I have met Mr. Smith” is evidence for his existence. The possibility remains that Mr. Smith is intentionally avoiding Mrs. Brown (and there could be many other reasons they haven’t met), but an actual meeting firmly establishes the existence of Mr. Smith.
Likewise, God could be avoiding the atheists, or they
are not looking for him in the prescribed manner (with their hearts) because
they don’t believe there is anything to find. God’s restricting of our access
to him naturally results in a relatively limited number of encounters (limited
only by people’s faith, however). The resultant scarcity of encounters with
God, therefore, cannot serve as evidence for his nonexistence; it’s a natural
result of his authority, power, and perfection—and the absence of perfection in
us. What it is evidence for is our personal foul-ups, our sins, and failure to
make an honest effort find God in our hearts. Nonetheless, given the affection,
compassion and mercy God has shown his children over the centuries it would be
more correct to say that public encounters are scarce—the number of
private encounters with God is actually enormous.
The invisibility objection also ‘begs the question’,
as philosophers love to say. It assumes, without proof, the answer to the exact
question that has been put up for debate in the first place: can things
invisible to the eye, like God, be perceived in some evidentiary way, nonetheless.
Any blind person can tell you that everything physical, except color and light
itself, can be perceived in an evidentiary way exclusive of sight. So, not only
does this invisibility thing beg the question, it’s just a tomfool thing to
say. Invisibility is not evidence for the nonexistence of anything. Try going
to the bathroom without a flashlight in the middle of the night in a household
full of young children, and you’ll see my point. Unseen things will turn up
everywhere—and beware the stairs.
The success of this endeavor, looking for God, hinges
upon a person’s capacity for spiritual perception. It’s that simple. Do you
have the ability to ‘see’ him when you do find him, or not (or, in some cases,
are you permitted). But, do people really have this ability? Is there such a
thing as a faculty of spiritual perception: something that functions like a
sixth sense in regards to perceiving things spiritual?
Richard Bucke thinks mystics at least have such
abilities.[22] He has written an entire book full of nothing else
but accounts of people describing glorious encounters with God. The Catholic
Church thinks so as well. The writings of the Church are replete with saint’s
encounters with God, angels and the martyrs in Heaven. My thesis here is the
same: people do. I will argue that there is a faculty of spiritual
perception and we have every right to trust its results. I argue that God’s
holiness and divinity are unique and perceivable attributes, true of nothing
else, except the host of Heaven in a lesser derivative fashion, and the bishops
and priests conducting the holy sacraments. Divine attributes can, therefore be
used to establish God’s existence through direct perception.
A casual survey of literature and our own experience
indicates that the presence of this faculty in the population at large is
mixed, the same as it is for sight or hearing: some people have good spiritual
perception, some don’t. Some people have it at some point in their lives, and
not at others.
Should we conclude God doesn’t exist because the
reports are not unanimous? No, no more than we would, say, for our own Uncle
Bob in a similar situation. What would Uncle Bob’s status be in the minds of
people in town who have mixed gifts of sight and hearing? A blind person won’t
see him; a deaf person won’t hear him. Does that mean he doesn’t exist? Of
course not. Those who argue that God’s existence has not been firmly
established on a sound evidentiary basis, are committed to saying the complete
nonsense that Uncle Bob doesn’t exist just because a blind man went looking for
him and didn’t see him; or a deaf woman tried to speak to him and didn’t hear
any reply. The simple problem was, of course, they weren’t using all the
faculties at their disposal.
The blind man could have spoken to Bob, and the deaf
woman could have seen him if she had stepped around the corner of the garden
wall from where she was calling. Moral of the story: first, you have to have
spiritual perception, and then you have to make an effort to use it—the same
goes for common sense. By interviewing the devout of all religions and
examining the records of the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and the
other great faiths, it would easily be established that events of spiritual
perception do occur.
Perhaps St. Anselm’s words will help clarify the
primacy of the presence of a faculty of spiritual perception to the capacity to
properly evaluate spiritual claims. “I do not seek to understand that I may
believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe—that
unless I believed, I should not understand.”[24]
Let’s be clear about what we are claiming. Spiritual
perception is a direct mechanism of sensing or knowing things of the spirit,
just as the five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) are for things
of the physical world. Much like a blind man who cannot perceive colors does
not doubt their existence, and who doesn’t challenge all who profess the
existence of colors as being liars or idiots; those without spiritual
perception at any given moment in time have no greater grounds for doubting
God’s existence. It is very much the same kind of situation. In order to see
the similarity, however, it may be necessary to cast aside the ingrained
prejudice against religious knowledge that the modern world teaches us.
Why should we ever expect to succeed at demonstrating
that religious truths are as knowable as scientific truths? Because they are,
in a general but very important sort of way, confirmed by the same means: use
of a faculty of direct perception, the validity of which is confirmed daily by
thousands upon thousands of reliable people—potentially billions if they are
living right.
I grant that spiritual perception is unlike the five
senses in some ways; it does different kinds of things. On the other hand, the
five senses are also different from each other. One cannot see colors with
hearing, or hear sounds with sight. We don’t doubt hearing or vision for that
reason. In the case of seeing our in-laws, for example, when no sound is
present we just consider it a good day. We understand sight is designed to do
one thing, and hearing something else. It is the same with the faculty of
spiritual perception. We should not throw out otherwise reliable reports involving
the use of spiritual perception because they have not been confirmed by one of
our other faculties.
We can advance our understanding of spiritual
perception by further comparing it to the five senses on four points.
1. Why do we believe our eyes and ears to begin with
(they are not perfectly infallible)?
2. How does the evidence for spiritual perception
differ from the evidence for the five senses?
3. What sorts of things are perceived with spiritual
perception?
4. How do you verify questionable spiritual
perceptions?
In other words, let’s anticipate the objection: “You
claim that spiritual perception works, then exactly how does it work?”
To respond to this objection, let’s begin by
addressing the first point. Why do we believe our eyes or ears in the first
place? Answer: They get results and, now in modern times, science can
demonstrate the mechanics of how the bodily organs associated with them
function. Furthermore, thousands of people in the world community of the
sighted and hearing enabled give consistent reports about their use.
Ultimately, at a basic intuitive level, we just know they were put there for
that purpose. They are part of us. We instinctively know what they are to be
used for.
Spiritual perception is no different. One might object
that, no, there are differences, two of them: we are not born with
spiritual perception, and, at present, we cannot explain the mechanics of a
body part that is associated with its use. On closer inspection, however, these
apparent differences go away. We know there are some people born without the
use of their eyes or ears, so that circumstance applies to the five senses as
well as spiritual perception.
We can defend against the claim that we are not born
with spiritual perception on other grounds as well, i.e., there is a reason for
it. Because of the original sins of our ancestors, we are born in sin,
separated from God at birth. Being unreconciled to him, and therefore having
nothing of the spirit in our lives at that point, we have no notable spiritual
faculties for the purposes of this discussion beyond the bare existence of the
soul itself. Nor will we have them until that separation is resolved.
Baptism of the child initially remedies this
separation from God, washing away original sin. Baptism in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, by reconciling the child to
God, first brings the spiritual gifts and faculties that serve as the basis for
spiritual perception: gifts of the Holy Spirit that are later joined by greater
gifts at confirmation.
An adult, not previously baptized, must first seek
baptism. If serious sin follows later in life, they will need to reconcile
themselves to Christ, i.e., confess their sins and ask forgiveness in his name.
In order to receive further gifts of the Holy Spirit, they will need to receive
additional instruction and confirmation in the Church through the Rite of
Christian Initiation of Adults, RCIA.
Matthew 7:7 NAB “Ask and you will receive” is relevant
as well. One can ask for the spiritual gifts that would be proper for them, and
should. One can ask for assistance with spiritual growth generally, and should.
Both will lead to increased faculties of spiritual perception. Unbeknownst to many,
the daily bread we ask for in the Our Father, the Lord’s Prayer, is also bread
from Heaven, spiritual gifts, not just food and material necessities.
The specific gifts of the Holy Spirit are not the same
for everyone, for Christ is the Head and we are the various parts of his
mystical body. However, the person, now born of the spirit, will frequently
possess some general faculty of spiritual perception. For those who rush to
reject this assertion simply because it smacks of evangelism, and for no other
reason, logical or evidential, i.e., reject it automatically, I remind you that
it is not good philosophy or good science to reject anything automatically.
Such behavior reveals a prejudice, not a logical thought process. We should
give the Christian thesis serious consideration, as we would any other claim.
As for the second concern, that we cannot demonstrate
the physical mechanics associated with spiritual perception, by science’s own
assumptions, they can find the bodily processes that are associated with
the events of spiritual perception if they want to; they simply haven’t done it
yet. This is true because materialistic science assumes that all of our
mental states correlate to a brain state. In fact, a new study from the University of Montreal appearing in the scientific journal Neuroscience Letters Volume
405, Issue 3
, 25 September 2006, has made the first step in that direction, indicating that as many as twelve different regions of
the brain are activated during a mystical experience.[25]
The BBC in referring to the University of Montreal
study reports that:
Father
Stephen
Wang, a Catholic priest teaching at Allen Hall Seminary in London, said:
"These brain studies can give us fascinating insights into how the human
body and mind and spirit inter-connect, but they should not make us think that
prayer and religious experience are just an activity in the brain.
“True Christian
mysticism is an encounter with the living God. We meet him in the depths of our
souls.
“It is an experience
that goes far beyond the normal boundaries of human psychology and
consciousness.”[27]
Dr. Mario Beauregard, the lead
researcher said “This does not diminish
the meaning and value of such an experience and neither does it confirm or
disconfirm the existence of God.”
So, there is apparently nothing so simple as a one to
one correspondence between spiritual perception and a single area of the brain,
but rather a much more complex response. To pin down the process precisely
science will have to develop more sophisticated monitoring and observation
techniques than are currently available. Such experiments might not garner
great multitudes of volunteers, however: “How about you, or you? We’d sure like
to know the answers to these questions, and your family will be well taken care
of—just sign here to waiver all liability of the hospital. We’ll do our best,
you can be sure of that. Now, let’s get that skull cap off…attach a few wires…
and just look at all those pretty lights!”
Humor aside, science has every reason to expect such a
demonstration can, in theory, be done. The ability to do it is implied
by our current scientific assumptions. But we must keep in mind that having a
mental, emotional or spiritual experience correlate to a physical state of the
body or brain does not thereby reduce the experience to nothing more than those
physical aspects of the body and brain. Every valid perception of real entities
in the world, chairs, cars, dogs, homes etc. have brain states correlated with
them, brain states that could, in theory, be artificially reproduced to induce
an hallucination of a chair, a dog, a home, or a car. The fact that our
perceptual process involves the intermediate facilitation of the brain does not
mean that perceptions so facilitated are all illusions. Correlating a
particular brain state with the perception of God or other things spiritual,
even a state known to be artificially inducible, no more brings the reality of
God into question than does correlating a brain state with perception of a car
or dog. There is a brain state correlated with all of our genuine perceptions
of reality. The validity of spiritual perception, therefore, is not impugned by
the ability to correlate it to brain activity
or to artificially induce a “religious,” mystical or meditative state of
mind. This is acknowledged in a recent Scientific American article by
David Biello concerning scientific research into the brain states associated
with religious experience, Searching for God in the Brain.[29] All mental activity will of necessity have brain
activity associated with it whether one assumes the existence of the soul or
denies it. Correlation never entails reduction or identity, especially if the
process correlated is known to be a naturally occurring intermediate step in
the larger event process.
It’s interesting to note that, if we were to attempt
to justify our belief in the reliability of the five senses, we would soon
encounter a startling realization: there is no other justification, except the
fact that many people, though not all, use these faculties and report that they
work—they get results, making it easier to navigate our environment.
Furthermore, errors in sense perception and hallucinations do occur, the five
senses are not flawless.
To justify reliance on the senses, one might say it is
consistent with a structured body of accumulated knowledge, in this case
scientific knowledge. Perhaps more importantly, the rigorous quality control
measures built into the scientific method removes much of the risk of error
deriving from the inherent fallibility of the five senses.
There is something to this, of course, but the same is true of spiritual perception: the Church’s vast theological heritage and deposit of faith give extensive corroboration of the validity of spiritual perception. We have ample testimony as to the general viability of the faculty, yet that testimony is routinely dismissed without basis. A flagrant prejudice against God and all things spiritual is revealed in the ludicrous circumstance that the testimony of the faithful can condemn a man to death in court and yet the testimony of the exact same people will be immediately dismissed upon their coming out of church on the exact same day a block down the street from the courthouse simply because they have attested to having met God? This is a clear contradiction and an irrational prejudice.
Furthermore, the rich theology and traditions of the Church
replete with ecumenical councils, centuries of writings of the saints and
Church Fathers, papal encyclicals and addresses, biblical commentaries, Canon
Law, the Catechism, and the Holy Bible, truly qualifies the deposit of faith as
an expert knowledge base. The measures taken by the leaders and experts in the
Church to validate and protect the truths of official dogma rival the care
taken in scientific method.
Unwarranted Materialistic Assumptions
As far as the second difference goes, granted, at the
present time we can’t identify a single physical organ that correlates with the
faculty of spiritual perception. We can’t lay the organ on a lab table, dissect
it, and explain its mechanics; in other words, we can’t say “this is why it
works, because this is how it works.” But there has been a time in man’s
history when he could not do that for the eye or the ear either. During those
times, people still used their eyes and ears and trusted the result. But, to
demand such a mechanical physical explanation for a spiritual faculty involves
a logical fallacy. It unjustifiably assumes that there cannot be anything in
our experience that will not reduce to, relate to, or require verification from
the five senses.
The Limitations of Science
Science itself does not commit this fallacy. To do so,
as noted geneticist Robert Pollack has said, is to make science a religion by
assuming science has no limitations, no boundaries, to assume science can
ultimately bring within its own very limited charter all there is to know.[30] Legitimate science does not argue against the
spiritual, it simply restricts itself to investigation of the physical realm
where controlled experiments are possible.
Methodical disciplined study and investigation are
only possible where control is possible. Thus, science makes no investigations
into the spiritual realm where God is in control. As a result, investigations
into spiritual matters have not been incorporated into the charter of science.
Until that happens (and it is not likely to, for God or his delegate would have
to be the chief investigator to make it viable), science can make no justified
statement about spiritual matters one way or the other because they have made
no investigations upon which to base their statements.
We should say a further word about the concern to
demonstrate the physical mechanics of spiritual perception. It is important to
note that demonstrating the mechanics even of the eye, the ear etc., is not
enough to establish that even sense perception is a purely physical event. Take
sight for example. The physical stimuli of light are received by the eyeball
and nerve ganglia are then affected. They send neurons speeding along their way
to the brain. The brain receives those neurons…and then what? What happens
next? How do we get from gray gooey protein cells processing electrochemical
neuron signals to all of the associated internal events of conscious awareness
that follow?
In the case of
seeing a red traffic light the knowledge of red and green, stop and go, danger
and safety, legal and illegal, concern for fellow drivers and passengers in the
car etc. are all part of the total event of perceiving the traffic light. Is
there nothing more to our concern for our infants in the back seat than gray
gooey protein and electrochemical signals? Of course there is! And a whole heck
of a lot more too! We all know that, we just won’t admit it in public
discussion for fear of being labeled ‘unscientific’—a terrible fate indeed.
What about the appreciation of fine art? Friendship?
Romance? Poetry and music? Love of children? The intense feelings of personal
loss in a tragedy? Do all those things reduce to gooey protein cells? How
could they?
What science has done with these mechanical
explanations, and all that they have done, is to explain the body part associated
with the experience, they have not explained the full experience,
nor the full capacities of the heart, mind and soul (as distinct from the
brain). Perhaps they assume there is no such thing as the mind, while
going about using their mind at a frantic pace all the while. But, we
are fully entitled by the important reality of all of our subjective
experiences to assume that there is a mind, and we are also fully entitled to
use it. Let’s move on, and see what happens when we do decide to use it.
Prejudice in the Definition and Practice of Science: What
is Scientific?
As we have seen, intelligent design theory is not a
religious claim, it is a scientific theory that has valid logical implications
that happen to point to a designer of life based upon the proper interpretation
of empiric evidence, evidence presented in peer-reviewed scientific studies. It
is also logical to offer the hypothesis that the designer is a spiritual being
simply because he has not yet been encountered in the physical dimensions. A
scientific theory confirmed by empirical, logical and mathematical evidence, as
intelligent design theory has been, cannot be considered unscientific in
principle solely because it happens to point to God through a valid chain of
logical deductions from the uncontested empirical evidence.
ID scientists who argue that the complexities of life
present strong evidence for an intelligent designer vice an accidental
evolutionary process rightly point out that the modern definition of science
embodies a prejudice by not allowing for the possibility of a creator of
human life, even in theory, prior to gathering and evaluating evidence.
This is true since modern scientists admit we can see intelligent design in
other things like satellites or robots, but for some odd reason they refuse to
admit that we can see it in life itself (which represents the most
sophisticated design functionality of anything we know). To say that an entire
category of machines (in this case biological ones) for which we do not
actually know the origin could not possibly have been designed by an
intelligent being prior to making an honest effort to collect and evaluate the
evidence contradicts the spirit of science.
In the scientific search for extraterrestrials, (SETI)
scientists admit that receiving a sophisticated pattern of the prime numbers 1
through 101 in a radio signal would indicate the existence of
extraterrestrials. But when shown the much more definitive signs of
intelligence in the sophisticated and complex structure of human genetics and
bodily systems they will not permit the same kind of evidence for the same kind
of conclusion: an intelligent source for the sophisticated nonrandom pattern.
They justify their avoidance of validating the design inference by explaining
that they have based the SETI criteria around artificiality as opposed to
complex design structure or improbability. But why have they done this when the
design inference criteria is more comprehensive and would permit the detection
of a wider range of intelligent life forms.
Although the artificiality criterion is sufficient to
detect human like extraterrestrial cultures, it arbitrarily rules out the more
general criteria of complex functional design structures such as we see in
human biology, in DNA for example, as a potentially valid sign of intelligence.
In SETI, just as elsewhere in science, science is bending over backwards to
avoid any suggestion that design complexity and improbability may, in the
proper context (meaning in the absence of a credible explanation of how chance
could accomplish the same thing), be a valid indicator of intelligence. Why?
We acknowledge design complexity and improbability as
preliminary indicators of intelligence in situations where a question has
arisen as to the natural or human origin of previously unknown types of
artifacts in archaeology. Why deny the validity of the same criteria as
potentially indicating a nonhuman intelligence?
The improbability for evolution as we have seen is
much higher than that for receiving the prime numbers by accident. SETI
scientists may feel the prime numbers may have some nonquantifiable
significance, such as representing mathematics as the foundation of modern science,
a known artificial product of civilization, and so it is. Artificiality works
for SETI in the sense that it is the more strict of the two alternatives, but
it is also the more narrow, ruling out the possibility that an advanced
civilization might choose to send us signals based upon genetic engineering
expertise for example, including potentially even the genetic engineering of
ourselves.
Why use a criterion that could exclude a portion of
the valid range of signals? Politics is the only apparent reason. Adopting the
artificiality criterion allows SETI scientists to avoid stepping on the
political toes of neo-Darwinian biologists (and materialist scientists
generally) by opening a door to the validity of the intelligent design
argument. This would be a major political disaster for mainstream science
because neo-Darwinian evolution has served as the glamorous flagship of the
materialistic worldview for many decades, so much so that chucking the former
would almost certainly result in public rejection of the latter. This is why
the battle lines have been formed firmly around the question of accidental or
materialistic evolution: the entire worldview of our culture is at stake.
Modern materialistic scientists have revealed their
prejudice in the handling of the SETI criterion question. Extraterrestrials are
one of the obvious candidates for the intelligent designer of life on earth.
Materialists will accept the lesser magnitude of evidence for their existence
(the artificiality criterion) because it doesn’t point to God, but only
humanlike civilizations. They automatically reject a greater magnitude of
evidence for the existence extraterrestrials when it is other types (design
complexity, complex specified information, and astronomical improbability of an
accidental source) because evidence of those types allow the possibility of God
as an alternative explanation. Doing this involves a logical fallacy (begging
the question) because they materialists have to unjustifiably assume that
biological machines cannot be artifacts “manufactured” by a civilization, this
even as our own genetic engineering research begins to flower and thrive in
hundreds of new venues each year.
Are All Religious Claims Incoherent and Meaningless?
Some critics of
spiritual perception, notably A. J. Ayer, go even further to say one can’t even
speak coherently of such things as God and the spiritual dimension, that
spiritual talk makes no sense in concept.[31] They
feel that religious language, lacking (they say) consistent, verifiable, and
objective referents, is therefore meaningless.
Others critics of deism claim that one has to beg the
question, that is, assume the truth of the spiritual realm first in order for
religious language to make sense, and to ground the assumption of coherent
referents to the terms of spiritual language. The most radical of these critics
(ontological atheists) claim that as a simple matter of fact there are no
referents to spiritual language, that such things just aren’t out there, and
therefore the language can never be meaningful. What do they use as proof that
there are no spiritual things out there to perceive? Why science, of course.
But science, as we have seen, by its very definition and charter excludes the consideration
of anything nonphysical as evidence. Therefore, the case of these critics of
spiritual perception rests upon a fallacious circular argument; they beg the
question, not the other way around.
Science has never comprehensively looked to prove or
disprove the existence of spiritual things. No large scale, fully funded,
professionally staffed, well-planned and thoughtfully designed scientific
investigations concerning the spiritual realm have ever been undertaken. If
they had been, they would have ultimately encountered the fatal limitations of
the charter of science itself: they could only have accepted the evidence of
the five senses in their investigations, not the evidence of spiritual
perception.
Much worse, when logical analysis of the evidence was
undertaken, if it perchance indirectly pointed to the reality of spiritual
events they would have, based upon a demonstrated historical prejudice, thrown
it out by rewriting operational criteria and rules of the studies, much as SETI
has worked around the necessity of admitting the validity of any signs of
intelligence other than artificiality as defined by past human
civilizations. The deck would have remained stacked against the spiritual and
the result of the investigation locked in before it was even begun—hardly an
objective scientific procedure.
We would think it ludicrous to design a study about
color and accept only the evidence of our ears. Oddly, we have approached the
subject of spiritual truth in this irrational way. For some reason we become
illogical and irrational when the subject of God and the spiritual realm comes
up. This shows a clear prejudice towards spiritual things in the thinking of
mainstream science.
We may have done a few sparsely funded, weakly
staffed, hastily put together, and not fully rigorous looks at spoon bending,
hauntings, and card guessing, but that is not where the credible hypotheses of
the supernatural lie. The credible hypothesis of the supernatural lies in
positing a personal relationship with God the Father Almighty. The one does not
equate to the other. A serious investigation of the spiritual realm would
involve rigorously controlled extensively cross-referenced interviews with the
devout members of the Catholic Church and the other great faiths of the world
and a close analysis of the extensive knowledge bases of each. This has never
been done.
The Catholic Church has records replete with spiritual
visitations and interactions with saints and angels and God himself. This
includes quite a few publicly verified miracles such as the appearance of St. Mary at Fatima, Portugal, the miraculously suspended portrait of St. Mary and baby Jesus at
Genazzano, Italy, and the incorruptible bodies
of St. Sharbel and St. Eustochia.[32] All of the
saints have performed miracles scrupulously verified by the Church. Over 300
saints are described in the concise edition of Butler’s Lives of the
Saints alone. There are hundreds more. “Who
does not know about the great shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupre in Canada, where
miracles abound, where cured cripples leave their crutches, and where people
come from thousands of miles to pray to the grandmother of Jesus?”[33]
During World War I
Pope Benedict XV made repeated but forlorn pleas for peace, and finally, in May
1917, made a direct appeal to Mary to intercede for peace in the world. The
response was Mary's first appearance at Fatima just over a week later. At
this time Fatima was just a small village about seventy miles north of Lisbon;
the three children to whom she appeared were Lucia dos Santos, aged ten, and
her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, brother and sister, aged eight and
seven respectively.[34]
These miracles all have an element of the
scientifically confirmable in them. They involve publicly perceivable and
clearly anomalous events in the natural world for which no alternative
scientific explanation can be found. It would not be difficult to design a
bonafide scientific study around such miracles that would confirm them.
To date science has ignored the obvious, credible, and
voluminous evidence, the evidence most promising of success and focused on only
the categories of evidence relatively much more scarce and incredible—those
which tend to discredit or debunk the entire subject of the supernatural. This
is not an accident. It is also not how science normally or properly operates,
and it, therefore, reveals a prejudice. Modern science clearly does not want to
find the truth about the spiritual for it is looking in all the wrong places
based upon science’s own basic protocols on how to design a credible and
successful study, and even then doing it in a weak and undisciplined way.
As far as the claim that all religious talk is
incoherent, the faculty of spiritual perception provides the bonafide
experience that gives meaningful referents to the language. The fact that a
population is not universally endowed with a faculty is an entirely different
matter to that of incoherence. The various technical objections to religious
language based on cultural and linguistic relativity concerns were solidly put
to rest by John Owens, S.M. in his precise analysis in “The God Whereof We
Speak: D. Z. Phillips and the Question of God’s Existence” appearing in American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Winter 2004.[35]
For those so endowed, the experience provided through
use of the faculty of spiritual perception simultaneously serves as reasonable
evidence for the reality of the phenomena in question and provides coherence to
the language. For spiritual talk to make sense, it is enough that we be so
endowed, that we have the faculty of spiritual perception; nothing more is
needed. Moreover, spiritual talk, even to nonbelievers, is not nonsense
any more than talk of sound to the deaf is nonsense, or talk of sight to the
blind. The congenitally blind man may not get the full meaning, having never
seen a stoplight, for example, but he understands that there is a signal that
can be perceived with a faculty of perception that he happens not to have. Such
talk is not nonsense to him. He simply won’t be able to fully conceive of or
picture the traffic light’s visual characteristics; but he does know where it
is, what it does, and that it is—that it exists. He understands that
much.
In the same way, talk of God is just as coherent and
understandable to those without spiritual perception as talk of a traffic light
is to a blind man. They can be given to understand that God is the Father of us
all whose Son is described in the Bible as our Savior who died on the cross.
God is he who forgives our sins when we are remorseful and repent. He can be
encountered in various ways when he chooses to grant the encounter.
Evidence of his presence such as great holy emotions, tears, peace, joy, bright
light and a visual display of some kind is on occasion revealed to those who
encounter God. Talk of spiritual things, therefore, is not without meaning and
we dismiss this objection as untenable.
Take the case of someone born with significant visual
impairment that is surgically correctable. They have never seen or heard of
such surgery, or even the concept of corrective eye surgery, a tribesman from
the Andes for example. Their visiting optometrist tells them that they can now
have this wonderful new faculty of sight and full use of it, but they will have
to trust the doctor, and do the specific things required to start the process
in motion. They may well be skeptical, even fully so. Rumor has it the process
can be painful, and the question of the surgery highlights the fact that there
is some defect in the tribesman in comparison to his fellows—never a
comfortable thought. What should the tribesman do in regards to the claim that he
could have this new faculty of sight? What should you do regarding the claim I
have made that you can have this new faculty of spiritual perception? What
would the situation be if the whole tribe had the same impairment and then all
of them agreed among themselves that the doctor was irrational—if they achieved
a clear majority consensus that the doctor was “nuts”? They would never take
that critical step, and therefore never gain use of the new faculty of sight.
Science’s treatment of the spiritual has been
inconsistent in another way. It has ignored the entire realm of subjective
experience, unjustifiably assuming that its inability to explain the subjective
does not represent a legitimate shortcoming in scientific explanatory power.
Those who have done some reading in the philosophy of mind, the mind-body
problem, phenomenology, and all that fascinating, but largely unsubstantiated
theorizing, will understand the difficulty of explaining the final stage of
sense perception exclusively in terms of the physical organ itself. This
difficulty has been around a long time. It has never been satisfactorily
resolved.
There are things going on with human understanding
that the bodily organs cannot be coherently demonstrated or ascribed to be
doing. One can even say that in these instances there is indirect evidence of
the spiritual given by science itself because science has examined the entire
physical side of the cognitive and emotional processes while failing to find a
satisfactory explanation for a large portion of our emotional, evaluative, and
cognitive experiences. Even the most basic event of awareness of anything seems
to go well beyond what science can say about it in physical descriptive terms.
Does the love you have for your family reduce to nothing more than a group of
neurons firing electrochemical signals in a certain pattern? Of course not!
What nonsense!
In cognition, that is, the event of knowing something,
the terminal, or final, stage of sense perception is mysteriously translated to
awareness, consciousness, whatever you choose to call it: the “mental” part of
evaluating the raw data received through nerve impulses originating from
physical stimuli. This is the stage of perception and learning that assigns
meaning or knowledge to the raw data. Does the eyeball do that? Do the nerve
ganglia do it? Does the gray matter of the brain do it? How? And where? Where
is awareness? What is it? Where is consciousness? What is consciousness? Do we
know the answers to these questions? No, we do not. “There is no consensus on the correct
concept of consciousness or even whether it is unitary.” The nature and essence of human consciousness
still a mystery to science.[36]
Can
knowledge, meaning, love and morality be reduced to mere bodily processes? Clearly,
from the point of view of common sense and intuition one shouldn’t think so.
But a stronger case can be made. Pure logical entailment from the meaning of
the words seems to say no as well. How can a bunch of protein cells do such
things as the meaning of the words love, morality, knowledge and meaning entail
no matter what kind of chemical electrical soup they are immersed in?
At this point, we can turn the coherency challenge
around on materialistic science. Is the thesis that protein cells can ascribe
meaning, resolve issues of right and wrong, or account for love of family a
coherent thesis? Does it make sense? Why isn’t it the logical contradiction it
appears to be?
It certainly appears to involve a contradiction in
conceptual categories. By the extant definitions of ‘protein’ and ‘emotion’ and
‘abstract conceptual meaning’, proteins cannot do those kinds of things—by
definition. Materialistic scientists would like to change the definition of
all terms to the point that they have purely physical referents, to reduce
meaning and love to physical reactions alone. However, even if they were to
succeed in doing that, it would constitute only a change to our current
linguistic conventions, a change to the dictionary; it would not be a
demonstration of scientific truth. It would be an absurd change too, one
involving the contradiction of assigning the job of one conceptual category to
another category fully incapable of doing that job.
The initial definitions assigned to terms applicable
to emotional, moral, and subjective experience in our language clearly set
these things apart from the physical. If we permitted these terms to be
redefined as merely referring to physical events, we would have defined away
the spiritual, moral, emotional and subjective realms of our bonafide personal
experience (all the good stuff) by an arbitrary assignment of meaning to
words through linguistic convention. Having done that there would no longer be
any point in sharing our feelings or values with friends and family, no point
in political action or moral crusades etc. All they would amount to is a
statement that certain brain states were occurring: whoop de do! Such events
may as well be avoided altogether for they would add nothing of significance.
This, of course, is precisely the devil’s agenda in promoting physical
reductionism.
Major tragedies, important determinations of right and
wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice would fully lose the ability to
compel us to act for resolution. A moral or patriotic call to arms would be
reduced to nothing more than a cerebral neuronal and glandular process
description. Without the conceptual underpinnings of a morality based legal
system, society would dissolve into anarchy and chaos. There would be no
foundation for law except self-interest. Clearly, our current definitions of
the words that describe our moral, religious, emotional and cognitive
experience point to more than mere physical bodily processes.
The initial mind-body question or physical-spiritual
question was historically posed in terms that assumed at least the possibility
of the existence of two radically different kinds of substance, mind and body,
spirit and matter, that could potentially interact. The modern definition of
science, on the other hand, rules out ever resolving that issue. It implies
that the entire prolonged and distinguished academic debate on the subject by
some of our best thinkers was based upon elementary error and fantasy. This
ludicrous implication remains unless and until science can bring itself to
admit that a combination of scientific evidence and logic can in theory point
to the reality of things beyond the physical elements. Without some bridge
between the empirical and the spiritual, logical inference at a minimum, there is
no point in discussing evidence for the mind-body problem or the
physical-spiritual debate at all because there can be no evidence.
An example of such an inferential bridge is the
mathematical analysis of the improbability of neo-Darwinian (accidental)
evolution as the explanation of life’s origins. We establish by valid
scientific evidence that random chance could not have produced the life forms
on earth. Logical inference takes us the next step to conclude that an
intelligent designer is the only alternative. Since the designer is not
immediately present in physical terms, we must conceptually allow for the
possibility that he is a spiritual being.
And what is spirit anyway? Why should science be so
afraid of it? Modern physics has been regularly discovering new elementary
particles and extra dimensions for many decades now and proposing variations in
our understanding of the basic nature of matter and energy all the while,
giving the public precious little background information (and having little more
themselves). No one has become paranoid about that. We snap up any radically
new conceptual framework readily as long as the popular names in the scientific
establishment give their seal of approval. Given our willingness to except the
existence of multiple new mysterious dimensions to reality about which we know
precious little at the drop of a hat, why should we arbitrarily rush to rule
God out as a viable hypothesis, one unscientific by definition, as the American
Academy for the Advancement of Science has recently done? Why couldn’t God be
construed to represent a form of “matter” or “energy,” albeit nonphysical by
our current definition, that simply has yet to be discovered because it
originates in yet one more new mysterious dimension to reality?
Furthermore, the AAAS position that religious claims
can have no scientific implications is far from the truth. Christianity, among
other religions, proposes that God is the creator of all matter. This implies
that he can interact with it. The existence of miracles implies the ability of
spirit and matter to interact. Therefore, some religions imply that a bridge
must exist between God and physical matter. There is nothing in the statement
of modern religions that makes at least rudimentary evidence for the existence
of that bridge undiscoverable.
If there is a concrete bridge between the energy and
substance of God and the physical world we have no justifiable reasons to rule
out evidence being found through scientific inquiry that reveals that bridge and
points to the reality of some mysterious energy source at the other end of it.
While admitting that we would be forever unable to say anything very precise
about the energy source on the other side of the bridge, we could at least
gather sufficient indirect evidence to say that it causes the events we can
detect on this side. This, of course, is precisely what we have done in the
case of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe!
The situation with quantum/particle physics is also on
an exact par with such a scenario. We don’t know why elementary particles
behave erratically on an individual basis because we can’t observe all the
antecedent events that cause them to do it (assuming for the moment that there
are any such events), but we know their group or statistical behavior is
orderly within certain probabilistic limits. We can only scientifically
describe what happens on this side of the “bridge” of quantum particle
behavior, and some of the information regarding quantum systems is defined as
forever out of our reach. That does not keep us from accepting quantum theory
as scientific. In theory, we could encounter a similar phenomenon in nature
that would undeniably point to the bridge between God and the world (and
apparently have in the case of the Big Bang).
For example, at some future time when man had expanded
his horizons and traveled to other planets, we might find that peculiar things
happened whenever a particle accelerator was set up within certain parameters
conveyed by a well known religious mystic. Every Christmas morning at sunrise,
for example, and every Good Friday at 3 P.M., a text message might be portrayed
on the particle collector screen and its associated computer displays. Let’s
say that this message is a perfect rendition of the scriptural accounts of the
birth of baby Jesus and his later death on the cross.
Further collector screen messages give a complete and
consistent description of a grand unification theory that actually works and
further defines a new “particle” or sub-quantum physical entity, called
“superduper strings,” as the ultimate end of the line beyond which there will
never be any further scientific explanation. All confirmatory tests work out to
perfection and then, over the course of many decades, scientific knowledge and
power grows exponentially as a result. The subsequent advanced design particle
accelerators built around superduper strings begin to render scriptural verse
on their collector screen displays continuously without exception. Let’s further
imagine that every encounter with the superduper string messages is accompanied
by great spiritual blessings and miracles.
One wants to say that this kind of evidence would
render the hypothesis that superduper strings were the bridge between God and
the world not only a scientific hypothesis, but more nearly an indisputable
fact than is neo-Darwinian evolution today (as is most everything else we
believe).
Contrary to what the AAAS asserts, theories of an
intelligent designer or of God’s existence are not unscientific by definition.
They simply require indirect evidence, and generally evidence on a grand
scale. Granted, we can never prove the Christian God as God exists
with certainty because some of his defining attributes, his size, holiness
etc., are not fully observable. God’s conceptual “size” is vastly larger than
our range of cognition by definition; plus most faiths attribute to God an
undefined, and therefore unverifiable, type of nonphysical substance. However,
it is interesting to note that through history men have worshipped idols,
totems, animals, the sun etc. Based upon human history, science is not really
justified in its assumption that God must be nonphysical at all. They have
merely conveniently assumed one of the historical definitions of God that they
feel is most easy to dismiss. As we shall see, however, dismissing God as a
scientific hypothesis is not so easy.
Holiness and other divine attributes such as charity
and love are subjective and therefore not directly confirmable, although
we can have personal testimony to corroborate their presence. In a sense, we
can observe on a smaller scale these attributes in human behavior. No one
questions attributions of holiness, charity or a loving nature to good people,
particularly famous ones like the popes and evangelists or celebrity
philanthropists.
Freudian psychoanalytic theory, of course, is an
accepted theory among others in the discipline of psychology. All of the
theories of psychology tell us that we can be justified in making inferences to
the existence of things unseen or even unobservable in theory based upon
observed behavior. The existence of the Id, Ego, and Superego of Freudian
psychology, none of which are directly observable even in theory, has been established
in this way, by inference from behavior. Therefore, if God were to become
active in the world on a consistent basis by moving physical objects around in
notably kind and charitable acts, acts predominantly associated with the
Church, we would have behavioral justification in attributing charity, holiness
and love to the entity who was so behaving, although we had not seen the
entity’s body. If God identified himself verbally in these transactions, we
would have further reason to attribute the behaviors to this specific unseen
person. In somewhat less consistent or more sporadic form, though fully as
dramatic, this is exactly the situation documented by Church records concerning
God’s intervention in the lives of men.
Therefore, the attributes of holiness, love and
charity could be evidence for an unseen person to the satisfaction of the
current standards of psychological science. H. G. Wells classic story The
Invisible Man comes to mind. Those who have seen the movie can easily
visualize this inference of psychological attributes from observed behavior
minus the presence of an observed body. The invisible man, in fact, underwent a
major personality transformation “before our very eyes.” But we never saw him,
only objects he moved or affected. However, we did see his personality change,
and in a dramatic way. Therefore, God’s psychological attributes can, in
theory, be similarly established through behavioral inference in an equally
sound scientific manner, thus implying his existence.
So, what is it about God that is thought to be
untestable? Perhaps it is his “all-ness.” God is defined as all-knowing,
all-powerful, omnipresent, all-good etc. He’s really big. He is so big,
in fact, that critics will object that we cannot verify such things scientifically
because they are too big to observe. But that is exactly the defense
neo-Darwinists give for their not having observed macroevolution! They claim we
can have convincing scientific evidence for accidental evolution despite its
being too big to be observed.
We have no direct observations of macroevolution, and
Darwinists say we cannot have any. Yet the theory is claimed to be an
unquestionable fact. Purely indirect evidence is found to be fully acceptable
in this case, but is forever ruled out where God or intelligent design is
concerned. This is inconsistent and reveals a prejudice.
If God were to “behave” as we have just described,
moving things around while claiming he was God in the process, what should we
do? Suppose that he moved to bigger and bigger frames of reference, changing
the heavens before our very eyes (telescopes), moving galaxies and solar
systems around instantaneously into radically different configurations. If no
alternative physical explanation for the vast unnaturally rapid astronomical
changes could be offered, we would have a reasonable scientific basis to affirm
the existence of a God with at least the range of extension of power and
distance that had actually been demonstrated. Would we be justified in making
the inference to a being with abilities beyond the range demonstrated, at least
as a probable if not forgone conclusion?
If we rigidly restrict ourselves to only what has
actually been demonstrated in such cases, to be consistent we must similarly restrict
neo-Darwinian theory to microevolution alone. In other words, the inference
from enormous power to all-powerful would be as warranted as the inference from
microevolution to macroevolution.
The logic of neo-Darwinian theory says that what we
observe on a small scale can be justifiably extended to a much larger scale,
even where a true difference in kind is involved. Microevolution is not fully
the same kind of thing as macroevolution. Infinite power is not exactly the
same kind of thing as enormous power. Yet, as a rational hypothesis, one may
arbitrarily choose to make the evidential connection between such related but
different kinds of phenomena until the hypothetical assumption has been
literally contradicted by the actual evidence. It isn’t necessarily a good
hypothesis, but it remains a scientific one of a kind evolutionary science has
already defended.
If we allow as scientific the inference from mere
color and size changes in a moth or a bird to the much larger inference of a
whale evolving from a hyena, or man from a lizard, we can allow the inference
from enormous power without detectable limits to unlimited power. Science has
further admitted this exact category of inference from the finite to the
infinite in admitting the theory of an infinite universe as a scientific
hypothesis. The infinite range of an hypothesized attribute does not then in
itself make the hypothesis of an entity possessing an infinite attribute
unscientific by definition.
This scenario gains even more force and clarity when
one considers that superstrings are hypothesized by science as potentially
being the ultimate foundation of all matter. If science were to firmly adopt
that position and also develop instruments or calculations that could verify
“what the superstrings were doing” at any given point in time, we could
definitely prove miracles in real time. We could demonstrate that nothing
physical down to the ultimate levels of matter was causing a given event.
When an event occurred that could not be tied to
string behavior we would be forced to call it a nonphysical singularity as we
have called the first instant of the Big Bang from which the entire universe
has sprung. Having a nonphysical singularity of monumental size associated with
a voice claiming to be God would then provide a rational scientific basis for
hypothesizing God’s existence.
If science advanced to a point where it could maintain
real-time indicators of the exact quantity of matter in the universe, or at
least an estimate that was scientifically justifiable, a sudden doubling of the
mass of the universe would have to be attributed to a nonphysical singularity.
If that doubling were accompanied by a voice claiming to be God, there would be
few doubters in the scientific community. Here we see a verifiable religious
claim that no other conceivable hypothesis would plausibly explain.
Science, then, has already admitted all of the
prerequisite component inferences and concepts needed to establish the
existence of God as a potentially scientific hypothesis or theory. Behavioral inference from personality traits to the
existence of an invisible person is possible minus a perceived body ala The
Invisible Man. To a lesser extent, the presumed validity of psychoanalytic
interviews conducted behind an opaque screen or by phone argues the same.
Although such interviews may be nonstandard or even discouraged as less
productive and less accurate, they would not be devoid of all grounds for valid
inference. Many invisible forces have been admitted into scientific theory,
including gravity, superstrings, the strong and weak nuclear forces,
electromagnetism etc.
Inferences to the infinite are possible ala the theory
of an infinite universe. Inferences from the small scale event of
microevolution to the nonobservable large-scale phenomenon of a related but
potentially different kind (macroevolution) are permitted as scientific in
Darwinian evolution. Science has also admitted that positing the existence of a
nonphysical singularity (unexplainable mystery) is a scientific hypothesis viz
the Big Bang theory. Therefore, a scientific case can be made for God as
well.
Whether the evidence presented for God at a given
point is fully convincing or not is a different matter from the hypothesis of
God being unscientific. If we admit Darwinian evolution, an infinite universe,
and Freudian psychology as scientific theories, we must also admit the theory
of God’s existence as scientific as well.
Artificial Intelligence
As with the mind body problem, the question of
artificial intelligence highlights shortcomings in the modern scientific view.
It has been demonstrated that our brains can function like computers.
But what about the other way around. Has it been demonstrated that computers
can function like our minds? No, that has not been demonstrated.[37] Does a robot coming to the edge of a cliff perceive
and understand the threat to its existence, the impact its loss would have on
friends and family, does it feel fear the same way we do? Does it have a
special protective affection for small robots? Can it? Of course not! What
nonsense!
Can computers ‘understand’ and experience love, friendship,
romance, holiness, laughter and joy? Of course not, it’s ridiculous.
Intuitively, we all know this. Laughter, friendship and joy are not physical
things. Our language reflects this knowledge; otherwise, there would be no
linguistic and conceptual distinction between animals and computers to begin
with. We would have called them both a life form or both a machine from the
beginning. Physical things can enhance or be associated with emotions:
hormones, adrenaline, tears etc., but they are not those emotions in their
entirety.
Why should we ever expect the subjective experiences
of the mind and heart of man, emotions, values, and abstract concepts, to ever
reduce to physical brain events? That is equivalent to saying the subjective is
the objective, which is a contradiction. We know what ‘subjective’ means. We
know what ‘objective’ means. We know that they exclude each other by
definition. We all agree on the application of the word ‘subjective’ to our
emotions and personal judgments. We all agree on the application of the word
‘objective’ to the physical event of electrochemical activity in the brain.
Therefore, we overtly contradict ourselves when we assert that our emotions can
be brain events alone. Are all the languages of the world wrong about this—not
likely.
Materialistic scientists would have us redefine these
words for the subjective and reduce everything in our experience to nothing but
physical elements. They would then go further and say that all the interactions
of those elements are random, meaning non-purposive. As we have seen, by
reducing everything to random physical elements we lose all hope of scientific
explanation of the origin of life (not to mention the important subjective
elements of our experience) because the origin of natural law upon which
Darwinists ground their explanation of life is itself unknown, mysterious and
inexplicable. Therefore, the origin of life has not been demonstrated to be
random, because the origin of natural law has not been demonstrated to be random—it
has not been demonstrated to be anything. Being based upon an unknown, the
origin of life has not been explained at all. Randomness cannot explain
anything, least of all our deepest feelings and values.
Moreover, why should we deny an immediate and
authentic awareness of love, friendship, or God any more than we deny our
immediate awareness of red or green? Why should we? We have perceived it. Why
isn’t that perception valid? To deny some kinds of direct perceptions and not
others involves a prejudice. We perceive our emotions, values, spiritual
qualities, and for those so blessed, spiritual beings, as surely as we do
color. Granted, they are different in nature from color, but so is sound. We
don’t deny sound for that reason.
The truth of the matter is that science doesn’t
understand a darn thing about awareness and emotion to begin with—not the
subjective aspects of it. We can’t explain it, can’t say what it is, where it
is, or how it is associated with physical brain cells, or to what exact extent
it is consistently associated with brain cells. We have no grounds upon which
to confidently assert the materialistic reductionist thesis. We only know
that destroying certain areas of the brain with drugs, surgery, electricity or
traumatic injury has emotional and cognitive consequences. This same result
would obviously occur given the Christian hypothesis of the unity of the body
and soul. Therefore, it does not justify physical reductionism.
Science has not studied awareness, science has studied
the bodily processes which are merely hypothesized to be either directly
associated with, or causative of events of awareness. Until we fully understand
and we can confidently say what awareness or consciousness is, it begs the
question to say that a physical organ is required for awareness to occur. The
Christian conceptual framework makes clear that the mind or spirit is tied to
the body for a while, they are in fact a unity; but they are not tied forever.
While that bond exists, and only while it exists, physical injury to the brain
can rationally be expected to reduce or alter the ability to enjoy certain
subjective experiences, while not constituting evidence for the nonexistence of
a soul or spirit inextricably tied to that brain.
Why do scientists, so greatly devoted to seeking the
truth, ignore the most important and meaningful experiences they have in their
personal lives when the topic of discussion turns to evidence for the
spiritual. Science is supposed to be founded upon experience—and honesty. Love
of family, moments of tragic loss, judgments of good and evil, right and wrong,
holy moments and blessings, the fact that we all turn to God for comfort and
protection when we are truly threatened and scared: we acknowledge the validity
of these important events when they occur. But, as professionals, we later
insist these events reduce to nothing but a handful of mushy gray protein in an
electrochemical soup. This reveals a prejudice in our thinking, and in that
sense, makes purely materialistic science a hypocritical enterprise because it
unjustifiably ignores a whole facet of bonafide experience. Elsewhere in life,
even in academia, in poetry, music and literature, for example, we celebrate
the subjective without feeling the need to apologize for having indulged in a
superstitious fantasy.
Furthermore, the inability to immediately explain an
event of awareness and then reduce it to a known physical process is
insufficient reason to deny the validity of the event. If we had consistently
done that throughout history, science would not have advanced at all. New
unexplainable experiences would have been ignored and invalidated out of hand.
Magnetism would have been ruled out, gravity, nuclear science and so on.
Medical hypnosis for pain reduction is another example
of science ignoring a flaw in the materialistic theory. How is it that, under
medical hypnosis, when, during dental surgery, or child delivery for example,
although the pain signals are presumably being sent through the nerves, the
usual event of pain awareness doesn’t take place normally? If the physical
brain is all there is to consciousness, and all the physical events are
otherwise the same as when people would feel pain, why no pain, or less pain,
in these hypnosis cases?[38] Medical hypnosis, or hypnotic anesthesia, is a
counterexample to the thesis that we can identify our perceptual experience
very strictly and exclusively with the physical organs alone. Something else is
going on there. The experience of hypnosis for pain relief suggests that the
mental/spiritual side of the awareness process is, in fact, the primary side of
that process, taking priority over the physical in these cases and vetoing the
nerve signals as it were.[39]
Species Level Egotism
Species egotism is the unwarranted assumption by
members of a species that their particular species is the highest form of life
in creation. We would not admit that dolphins or monkeys were justified in
their belief should they come to believe they are the highest sentient beings
in creation merely because they cannot demonstrate to themselves with their
rudimentary language and conceptual skills that man as a higher life form
exists. They can never prove man as man exists because we are so much more
complex than they—they can’t grasp the higher things we do. They therefore can
have no concepts big enough to handle the job of fully explaining us. They can
encounter us, but they can never conceive or discuss us with full understanding
because there is more to us than their minds can grasp.
Similarly, we cannot prove God’s existence as God
with conceptual argument alone because, by definition, our concepts cannot
reach far enough to grasp what we are trying to prove. We can, however,
encounter him and, therefore, know that he exists, as certainly as dolphins and
monkeys know that man exists. We can know something further: his general
superiority. I would not be surprised to learn that dolphins and monkeys have
some rudimentary conception about man’s superiority to them, particularly in
the circumstances where we have become their caretakers. They can sense
that we are controlling the encounter in some ways, and that we offer an
affectionately condescending friendship to them. God of course, provides us
with very similar cues as he cares for us, if we permit ourselves to notice
them.
On the other hand, dolphins may be smarter than man in
at least one thing: they do not deny our total existence. They can’t
explain us, can’t logically prove humans exist fully “as humans.” But, when
offered, they accept our love and care; they acknowledge us and know we are
real. They are grateful for our affection and help: they love us back. This is
something man too often denies to God.
Miscellaneous Objections
Of course, for those of us with spiritual perception,
the mind-body problem has long since gone away. Encounters with spiritual
persons prove the reality of the spiritual dimension. Interactions between such
spiritual beings and we who are in part physical, interactions that have direct
effects on our bodies, demonstrate the possibility of the spiritual and
physical interacting. Healings, blessings, and demonic attacks all can have
noticeable effects on the body.
While we are considering possible objections to our
thesis of there being such a thing as a faculty for spiritual perception, we
should point out that to be born without a major faculty or ability and to then
acquire it later in life is not so novel a concept. We are all born stupid,
emotionally immature, and physically uncoordinated—though very, very cute. In
fact, most of our important capabilities are developed sometime later in life.
Vision itself, is not very well developed at birth—and we can’t even feed
ourselves. Therefore, you can throw out the objection that because we are not
all born with the faculty of spiritual perception, it can’t be real.
Further, we don’t doubt sight, hearing, touch, taste,
and smell because we happen to be temporarily lacking in that gift ourselves,
or because reports from others in the community are mixed. We understand that
different people have different abilities, but these abilities when present
function in a reliable way. It’s no different with spiritual perception. If
many people consistently report the results of their spiritual perception, and
it is as functional within the community of those who have it as the five
senses are in the communities of those who have them, we have no grounds for
rejecting the one, while accepting the other.
Imperfections, flaws, mistakes, hallucinations and
intentional obstructions, are all common to the five senses and spiritual
perception. We don’t reject the former for such flaws, and should not reject
the latter. What then is the critical evidentiary difference between the
five senses and spiritual perception? Simply stated: none. The difference is
only political: it’s a prejudice. Politics do not constitute a critical
evidentiary difference (generally no difference at all) and prejudices do not
equate to sound thinking.
If we are to accept such flagrant prejudices, we may
as well define science as including only reports from four senses, not five,
excluding the evidence of sight because members of the blind community happen
to control Congress this session. As a result of recent elections, they now
hold the purse strings for the nation and they cannot be convinced to spend
money on art, traffic control devices, or scientific research involving visual
evidence of any kind. They have moved all related funds to guide experiments
based upon four senses. All would acknowledge that their thinking in such an
instance would embody a clear prejudice, with no reason or logic involved.
I submit to you that the case is the same with spiritual
perception. Those with a prejudice towards it have held sway politically, but
there aren’t the slightest logical or evidentiary grounds to reject spiritual
perception as a valid means of perceiving things. Why do the great members of
our blind community have a vastly better track record of trusting the sighted
than atheists and agnostics have of trusting the community of the faithful?
Because sight is not a politically loaded subject, one that might point to God.
But, “Wait just a minute,” the materialists will
shout. “There is one very important difference: objective or public
verifiability, the very cornerstone of science itself. One can verify sense
perceptions with others who perceive the same thing at the same time. This cannot
be done with religious experience or so called spiritual perception.”
Believe it or not, although practically every
scientist, philosopher and even most theologians will initially agree with this
apparently innocent and obvious statement, it is not technically true as
stated. It is not true that this cannot be done with spiritual perception, it
is only true that it is infrequently seen. It has at times been done, at Fatima
for example.
To understand why the materialist objection is invalid
here we have to consider not only what they have said but why they have said
it: what conclusion do they wish us to draw from their objection. They wish us
not to conclude only that there are some superficial, that is, minor,
differences between science and spiritual perception, both of which are
otherwise valid, but that spiritual perception is truly invalid and unreliable
as a means of obtaining truth.
As may come as a surprise to many, although the
superficial difference cannot be denied, the epistemological validity of spiritual
perception is not impugned. Consider first that sense perceptions are not truly
publicly verifiable. Some people are colorblind for example and see green in
place of red and vice versa. If a colorblind person wished to conceal his
abnormality he or she might assent to seeing red when they were really seeing
green. Three things can be concluded. The most obvious is that sense perception
is imperfect and not universally consistent among people. The second is that
empiric observation, usually described as an objective method of verification
is really subjective, for not only are some individuals going to “see”
radically different things in the same event, but no two individuals are going
to see exactly the same thing owing to minor differences in their perceptual
bodily mechanisms. These facts are well known but do not impugn the reliability
of sense perception generally because the ability of the majority of “normal” observers to perceive accurately is
substantiated by the ability of science get its work done with consistent
success.
But the third conclusion is more important: the
ability of the empiric method of science to proceed successfully fully depends
upon the assumption that the majority of people have the intention to tell the
truth about what they have perceived. The success of science so far
demonstrates that scientific observers have been so far usually willing to tell
the truth concerning their observations, but the point is that there is nothing
compelling them to tell the truth. We have to make the assumption that typical
human observers are both honest and rational in order to justify the empiric
method of science as reliable. Materialist scientists are therefore making that
same assumption.
But if one makes that assumption, the epistemological
validity of spiritual perception holds as well because there are arguably
billions of historical incidents of spiritual perceptions. There are close to a
billion Catholics at present. They are routinely blessed at Mass; they are
periodically blessed by God, their guardian angels and patron saints. These
blessings are often palpable events, undeniable moments of spiritual awareness.
Historically there have also been frequent events of visitations and miracles.
If one discounts them all as psychological manifestations without basis, lies
or hallucinations, science’s assumption that typical observers are honest,
rational and physiologically sound goes away, and the scientific method based
upon empiric observation (and reporting) becomes unjustifiable.
Both the empiric method of science and spiritual
perception then fully depend upon the veracity of personal testimony. To assume
that the same people are reliable when doing science, but suddenly become
unreliable when reporting spiritual perception reveals a stark prejudice
against God and cannot be defended. One could say that theists, perhaps
especially Christians, are so biased in favor of their worldview that their
reports cannot be trusted, but as we saw in the discussion of the fallacies in
Part 1, the majority of the very fathers of science were Christian. We cannot
throw out the veracity of Christian observation and reporting generally without
invalidating the historical foundations of science.
There is another reason the validity of spiritual
perception holds up under the criticism that sense perception is public and
spiritual perception is private: the criticism falsely assumes that spiritual
perceptions occur within environmental parameters held in common by collocated
observers much as occurs with routine and generally trivial empiric
perceptions. This is hardly the case.
The encounter with or access to what is actually an
objective spiritual reality (the Kingdom of God) is controlled differently for
different persons. The criticism also falsely assumes that all potential
observers are equally grown, equally capable, equally gifted, and equally
mature such that they are able to perceive spiritual things to the same extent
at a given moment. Again, not so.
The most cursory investigation into the deposit of
faith clearly reveals a conceptual framework of spiritual perceptions as gifts,
warnings and the outcome of personal growth. Spiritual gifts are based upon
individual merits and other differences not likely to be identically present in
any two people at the same time. Warnings may not apply to multiple persons who
just so happen to be collocated. Personal growth varies from individual to
individual. God or his servants in heaven are in control of such events so that
the situation in no way parallels a free encounter with empiric data that is
equally available to all at the same time and who generally have the same
capacity to perceive it based upon physical maturity and a standard set of
physiological “gifts” or capabilities.
However, when individual capacities or access to the
data does vary science readily recognized the varied results as a most natural
and expected occurrence that does not invalidate the sense perception
mechanisms or the empiric method of science. However, science hasn’t made the
slightest effort to recognize that such bonafide variables routinely occur in
religious situations as well. The spiritual perception faculty itself should
not be considered impugned by the mere appearance of inconsistent results when
those results are fully consistent with known parameters made fully explicit in
the Church’s deposit of faith.
The Catholic Church has a well-developed professional
knowledge base on the subject of spiritual perception and many well-documented and
publicly verifiable cases of interaction with spiritual persons. It is well
established that greater compassion, holiness, and purity yields more access to
the Kingdom of God, closer communion with Christ and the communion of saints
and so on. Conversely, serving the devil yields more warnings.
Given the known parameters of religious experiences
then, spiritual perception is no more inconsistent than the five senses, it
simply meets with circumstances amenable to concurrent perception less often.
There is also the matter of the gatekeeper, God. Access to his Kingdom is
controlled by him. The criteria he uses to grant access is his own, and his
wisdom will likely remain somewhat mysterious to us. His personal grace,
individual merit, justice, love and mercy are all likely candidates for access
criteria.
The point is that the variability of perceptual
opportunities does not establish that spiritual perception is private by nature
in its very essence; quite to the contrary, the Kingdom of God is not relativistic.
Of all places, a consistent truth is to be found there. But in addition to the
rarity of opportunities for two observers two perceive the same spiritual event
at the same time because of the reasons already cited, there is also the matter
of the vastness of the Kingdom of God to consider; it is infinite.
Considering the infinite size and that God can permit
a person access to any point in his Kingdom, one should not expect personal
spiritual experiences to frequently coincide. The mere fact that they do not
often coincide, therefore, does not mean they are private and unverifiable by
their very nature. Granting that the term “private revelation” occurs
frequently in religious literature, it is there precisely to distinguish it
from “public revelation,” which contains the core truths of the faith revealed
by God to man from the time of Adam up to Christ’s death on the cross.
If everyone were a clone of each other and on the same
point of the track in terms of direction and rate of spiritual growth one might
expect God, who wishes to do what is best for our spiritual progress, to grant
the same or closely similar experiences to many at the same time. Events of
spiritual perception would then coincide more often. But our struggles to
defeat sin and grow in friendship with God have turned out to be highly unique
and variable, and therefore the assistance we get from God varies accordingly.
Under these circumstances, for science to reject the
validity of spiritual perception is like saying vision is invalid because
children reporting to the group of parents on walkie-talkies on what they see
at the McDonalds playground can never seem to come out of the same tunnel at
the same moment and are therefore always reporting seeing different things.
Denying the reliability of their eyesight would be a fallacious inference
because the variable conditions of their individual observations are known and
well documented. The deposit of faith reliably and consistently documents
similar variability in the environment of the spiritual observer. The materialists’ conclusion that spiritual
perception is invalid is therefore fallacious for the same reason.
Two other perhaps surprising points must be considered
in comparing the relative epistemological merits of empiric observation and
spiritual perception: basic sense perception prior to adding the filtering,
cross checking and confirming procedures of scientific method, is not truly a
public event as commonly believed, and spiritual perception is not truly a private
event as commonly believed. If two people see a stop light at the same moment,
the perception of its being red is not automatically a public event because it
depends upon both having normal color vision. It is never a public event in the
sense that the one truly knows for certain what the other person saw—false
reporting remains a possibility for any number of reasons.
Consequently, events of sense perception are not
public in the sense that the two observers actually know that the other saw the
same thing they saw at the time of the observation. They are not “public
events.” Rather, science has gotten into the habit of calling them “publicly
verifiable events.” Through a standardized process of crosschecking additional
witnesses, technical measurements with specialized equipment, following a
precise protocol honed through years of experience, and especially through the
investigation of trained professional observers whose honesty and competence is
well established, the details of the observed events are not infallibly
confirmed, but confirmed beyond reasonable doubt. It is important to note that,
even when this has been done, the confirmed result may differ significantly
from what one or more of the witnesses thought they saw. This shows the events
not to have truly public events in the strict sense, else no difference in
perception among the observers would be possible.
Ironically, spiritual perception is precisely the
reverse situation. Because the Kingdom of God has no impurities, no vaguities,
and no inadvertent opportunities for error or deception in it, as does the
material world, and because God’s gifts of truth are pure, uncompromised, and
inerrant, the perception a person has of God’s kingdom through his gifts are
potentially infallible. Therefore, any two persons having the same spiritual
experience will potentially “see,” or as is more often the case, know, exactly
the same thing. In this sense, spiritual perception has the capacity of being
truly public in the strictest sense, and of yielding absolute truth, whereas,
ironically, sense perception does not. The core truths of the Church, the
infallibly proclaimed articles of faith, are in the purest sense, publicly
revealed to those who have been given the grace to see them.
As Kant rightly noted, we always interpret what we see
with our eyes through the filters of our culture, language, and personal
experience. And, again, no two persons ever truly know what the other is seeing
with certainty. With spiritual perception however, at least as regards the
infallible core of the faith, both of these limitations potentially go
away. People from all cultures, of all
ages, with varying languages and personal experience can through the grace of
God, come to understand the reality of God as Father and creator, Christ’s gift
on the cross, and the Holy Spirit’s gift of comfort and guidance in exactly the
same way, fully and in truth.
Thus, the superficial difference between sense
perception and spiritual perception, that people infrequently have the same
spiritual perception at the same time, does not invalidate spiritual perception
as merely a private experience with no epistemological significance. Quite the
opposite is true. The real differences between them tend to validate the basic
event of spiritual perception more than sense perception because genuine
spiritual perception is inherently less fallible. Granting that there is the
possibility of psychological self-deception, hallucination or demonic
counterfeit in the realm of spiritual perception, the same possibilities exist
in the realm of sense perception.
Before the reader turns me in to the thought police as
having violated the “holy” grail of the reliability of science, I will
acknowledge this much. It is the addition of the rigorous validation techniques
of the scientific method to the raw sense perception that adds so much
reliability to the perceptions of the five senses. However, that level of
reliability does not attach to the basic sense perception itself, which is
somewhat fallible. That has been my point. The basic spiritual perception prior
to addition of confirming methodologies and procedures is at least as reliable
as the basic perception of the five senses prior to the addition of the same.
The Church has a correspondingly rigorous
professionally maintained set of validation procedures that guarantee the
truths of the faith and authenticate proposed miracles. These professional
validation measures take all or most of the opportunity for error out of the
officially confirmed religious truths just as the scientific method does for
empiric observations validated by science. In the case of the infallibly
proclaimed truths of the faith, all of the possibility for error is
removed. Thus, I stand on my assertion that the epistemological differences
between sense perception and spiritual perception are minor in comparison to
the fundamental similarities that overwhelmingly validate them both.
Given that both routes to truth are so heavily
corroborated in a visible and professional manner, and on evidential grounds
that are epistemologically quite similar at the most fundamental level, it is
revealing to note that the Church recognizes the validity of science, but that
many materialistic scientists loudly dispute the validity of the Church. This
reveals a prejudice in the scientific community against God and the truths of
the spirit. It is not a universal prejudice, but it is common enough to pose a
threat to an unbiased education of our students, and to doom any search for the
truth by an interested nonprofessional who naively trusts his scientific
establishment to be objective.
Let that suffice to cover the first two questions: we
believe in our five senses because they work, and there is no
significant difference between the evidence for the validity of the five senses
and the evidence for spiritual perception at the most fundamental
epistemological level. Let’s move on to the third question: what sorts of
things are perceived with spiritual perception?
There are at least five classes of things which can be
perceived with spiritual perception:
spiritual, i.e., non-physical persons,
spiritual “objects”
moral events
spiritual qualities of persons: holiness,
goodness, the virtues, evil etc.
spiritual truths
The class of spiritual persons is composed of God the
Father Almighty, Jesus Christ our Savior, the Holy Spirit, angels, demons
(fallen angels), saints and martyrs who have died and gone to Heaven, and the
souls of the faithful departed in Purgatory. The throne of God and the tongues
of fire of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost are examples of spiritual objects.
Spiritual qualities are easy enough to understand. We
all take for granted that in some cases at least we can tell the difference
between a good or an evil person. We will grant, even if we are not very good
at it, that others have the faculty of discerning the goodness or evilness of a
person, their kindness, generosity,
charity etc.
Moral perceptions: we intuitively acknowledge that
some people have better moral perceptions than others, and that those people
who are fully lacking moral conscience or awareness of right and wrong are to
be avoided. Some people act morally better than others at any given
moment in time, and some people see morally better than others at any
given moment in time. They can see the good or evil in a situation (moral
events) more sharply while some of the rest of us may overlook it and stumble
into an impropriety even while prepared to act for the good and the right when
we can see it. Kindergarten and Sunday-school teachers for example, are a
likely group to have enhanced spiritual perception regarding the moral value of
events because they must remain constantly on the lookout for a chance to
instruct the child—and to correct us should we make a faux pas in a
child’s presence.
Spiritual truths include the primary tenets of the
faith: God as creator, Christ as savior, and the ten commandments, which
through Christ have now been written on our hearts etc. All the moral and
religious truths of the Bible fall into this category, as do the general
principles of wisdom it teaches: “Charity covers a multitude of sins,” “Ask and
you will receive,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Now we come to the last of the four questions we asked
at the beginning as a guide to clarifying the nature of spiritual perception:
how do you verify questionable spiritual perceptions? How do you resolve
differences of spiritual perception? Given satanic deception, how do you judge
between candidates for the truth even in matters of church doctrine?
First, there is a specific means given in scripture at
1 John 4 for verification of the nature of the spirit that is influencing a
person’s speech or actions at any given moment in time. The test of spirits
involves a determination of whether that spirit will acknowledge or deny that
Jesus as Christ has come to earth in the body. If the person whose speech or
actions are under evaluation acknowledges Christ, the spirit influencing them
is of God, if not the spirit is of Satan or the antichrist.
Spirits who intervene in our lives overtly can be
tested directly using the same test, but only safely if the test is offered in
prayer because of the danger of confronting demons directly minus the Church’s
permission to do an exorcism. Only Bishops and priests appointed as exorcists
should do this. Bishops and priests can also hear the demons speak through the
possessed individual in an exorcism. Thus, we have two ways to resolve
questions concerning difference of opinion about spiritual persons: the test of
spirits of 1 John chapter 4, and the Bishop or his delegate exerting power over
an evil spirit in the holy Rite of Exorcism.
Disputes about the perception of spiritual qualities
of persons can be resolved by using a criterion, given by Christ: know them by
their fruits. A good person produces good fruit in action and speech and good
things and feelings tend to happen around them. Evil people tend to have the
opposite effect.
To resolve differences of opinion regarding truth in
all other spiritual matters one consults the Holy Bible in conjunction with the
Church’s accumulated “Deposit of Faith,” and the bishops themselves who have
apostolic teaching authority, including the Pope. The standard method of
resolving spiritual disputes is to consult a priest, after a reasonable effort
to find the answer in scripture, the Catechism, decrees of the ecumenical
Church councils, writings of the Church Fathers or the saints.
Having a professionally managed knowledge base and
standardized procedures to determine spiritual truth renders the spiritual
faculties coherent and useable. Spiritual perceptions can therefore yield truth
in predefined, systematic and verifiable ways just as the five senses do in
matters of empirical investigation.
We should note the obvious: the presence of God and
spirits of God, angels and saints, are truly unmistakable. The holiness, the
righteousness, the sense of reverence, the authority, the peace, love and joy
clearly mark an event or encounter as being of God. Such encounters are a
blessing, and they feel like one. Satan does offer counterfeits, even of holy
encounters, but they fall far short by comparison once one has experienced a
genuinely holy moment. Prior to having had such a blessing, of course,
deception remains possible.
Messages from God may be symbolic and may therefore
need interpretation skills and gifts. Differences of opinion on prophetic as
opposed to the core theological issues require prayer and study of the
scriptures and the deposit of faith to ultimately resolve. The fact that some
questions of the faith are complex or vague enough to require resolution over
time is not so odd, certainly not invalidating. Einstein and his colleagues in
theoretical physics did not always immediately come to agreement on complex and
obtuse issues minus periods of further study, analysis and deep contemplation.
Why is it then that intellectuals, scientists and philosophical
experts holding the materialistic perspective casually challenge the validity
of spiritual perception as if it should be clear to everyone (without study and
analysis) that the whole enterprise is nothing more than ungrounded folklore
and superstition: the equivalent of a collection of children’s ghost stories!
The answer is in the question. It is a debating tactic, a trick. This tactic
suggests to the uninformed person that they needn’t bother closely studying the
issue as we have done in this book, but to merely take the materialist’s word
for it. Thus they direct a portion of the public who are naïve enough to
believe them away from the truth without ever had to give any concrete reasons
to support their belief in materialism: the argument from presumed or
self-appointed “authority.” Posh!
The truth of the matter, of course, is quite
different. Close study reveals that we have exactly the same sort of
fundamental epistemological justification for the reliability of spiritual
perception as we have for the use of the five senses:
1. It
works: utility
2. Consensus among reliable witnesses that it works
3. Consistency with an accumulated body of technical knowledge managed by
professionals
4. Intuitive understanding of its purpose
5. A well-delineated and understood scope of application
6. A method of confirmation to resolve disputes, questionable perceptions and
differences of opinion
Granted, the average guy or gal on the street doesn’t delve into the intricacies of science and philosophy as closely as we have done here. They have that excuse. Our academic experts, in this case, materialistic and neo-Darwinist scientists, however, do not have that excuse. The well known spokespersons for the neo-Darwinian and materialist philosophies, all impliedly of astute minds, pure hearts, and unblemished intellectual integrity, could not possibly be exhibiting a raw prejudice—or, could they?
Given the validity of the faculty of spiritual perception we have here demonstrated, there are only three possible answers: they are prejudiced against spiritual perception, they are politically intimidated by a culture dominated by those who are prejudiced against it, or they are not giving rigorous thought to the matter (or some combination of the above).
The
First Cause: A Cosmological Argument
Let us turn now to another great saint and theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas has an interesting argument for God’s existence that we must look at not only because practically everyone who can read has heard of it, but because it appears to literally succeed. I am going to refer to it here as the first cause argument, while actually combining three of his arguments into one: necessary existence, prime mover, and first cause. I combine them because they all invoke the same (valid) logic that any chain of events must have a beginning in order to come into being at all, that is, as opposed to having an infinite regression with no starting point.
My contention is that the first cause argument remains the simplest and most clearly valid truth in the world: a series of events with no starting point never starts. If A is the sole causative source for B, and A has not occurred, B does not occur either. An infinite regression of events, by definition, does not provide for A’s occurrence. In the context of the first cause argument, A is the first cause, the causative source of all creation, all existence, causation, and movement. B, in this case, represents the entirety of the world’s history, which, without A, never follows.
Here even the literal sense of St. Thomas' argument goes beyond the definition of words to the actual nature of God. “It is necessary to assume something which is necessary of itself, and has no cause of its necessity outside itself but is rather the cause of necessity in other things. And this all men call God.”[40]
By looking closely at the exact words St. Thomas uses, applying a little common sense, and then taking care to define terms, the structure of what many consider to be the strongest argument for God’s existence can be seen. Let’s look again: “It is necessary to assume something which is necessary of itself, and has no cause of its necessity outside itself but is rather the cause of necessity in other things. And this all men call God.”
To begin, we’ll need to pin down the different uses of the word ‘necessity’ in this passage; otherwise, confusion may result. By “necessary to assume,” St. Thomas apparently means, required by reason, i.e., the only rational course of thought. Substituting this definition into his statement we get, “Reason requires us to assume something which is necessary of itself…”
On the other hand, the concept of necessity Aquinas employs when he says “necessary of itself” and “necessity in other things” apparently means something different. He is referring here to the reason for, or cause of, the existence of a thing. In other words, the necessity of a thing has to do with there being a reason for its existence, or perhaps a cause of it. If it has no reason, no cause to exist, its existence is then not necessary. Conversely, if there is a reason or cause for its existence, then its existence is necessary. Restated based upon this interpretation Aquinas argument would read “Reason, or rational thought, requires us to assume something which is in some sense necessary in itself, has no cause or reason for its existence outside itself, but is itself the source of necessity for, the cause of, or the reason for, the existence of all other things. And this all men call God.”
It is possible that St. Thomas intended some vague third or even a fourth sense of necessity in addition to causal necessity and necessary because there is a reason for it (prime mover, something which gives necessity to something else in an undefined way etc.). However, as we can see in the symbolic representation of his argument that follows, the argument remains equally valid regardless of which sense of the term ‘necessity’ one employs.
A simple diagram helps to make the argument clear. For the sake of discussion, let’s assign everything in the world a letter to stand for it—no, on further consideration let’s not. For practicality’s sake, we’ll pretend it’s a small world and abbreviate the list, using only A through I:
A→B→C→D→E→F→G→H→I
Combining Aquinas’ arguments and terminology we will say ‘→’ stands for “is the reason for, the cause of, the mover of, or that which gives necessity to” that which follows.
It is then clear, as St. Thomas says, that we must assume something that of its own nature requires no other thing as the source of its necessity, its reason or cause, if we are to follow reason or rational thought. This is true because, if ‘H’ has no reason for, or cause of, its existence, no necessity in any sense, it cannot properly ground the existence of ‘I’. If ‘H’ has no cause for its existence, it literally won’t exist and therefore can’t cause ‘I’. If ‘H’ has no reason for its existence, it cannot provide a reason for the existence of ‘I’. If ‘H’ does not have the property of necessity (in any sense), it cannot transfer that which it does not have to ‘I’. Therefore, ‘H’ must either have derived its necessity from ‘G’, or simply have it within its own nature, otherwise it has nothing to impart to ‘I’.
Following the same logic back the chain to ‘A’ we arrive at the point where we must concede St. Thomas' point. Reason requires us to assume something eternal and necessary in itself, something that simply is by virtue of its own nature.[41] Otherwise, there is no cause, no reason, no necessity, no mover for anything. The entire chain is ungrounded, and therefore it never gets off the ground.
I think most people will find this argument intuitively very convincing. I have always considered four of St. Thomas “Five Ways of Proving God’s Existence”[42] good arguments: first cause, prime mover, necessary existence and the design argument. Nonetheless, we have to ask ourselves why they are convincing. Are they convincing on purely logical grounds, or on scientific grounds?
Surprisingly, after such a convincing demonstration, it can be shown that, on grounds of pure logic alone, the first cause argument fails as a proof of God because we can produce a counter-example. There might be multiple instances of something necessary in itself, multiple eternal movers, or multiple “first” causes. In theory, current scientific knowledge aside for the moment, each of the physical elements might be eternal, and if natural law were also eternal, the problem of the source of all things in the physical world would be solved.
Why, on the grounds of logic alone, must we assume there is only one such thing; no logical contradiction results from assuming many? On purely logical grounds, then, St. Thomas’ argument fails as a proof of God because it can be shown that it is not logically necessary for there to be only one eternal primary cause—there could be many. However, his logic is still sufficient to establish the requirement for something eternal at the beginning of things, either a single eternal first cause or a group of them.
Time for a sanity check: modern science and our everyday observations tell us that nothing we perceive (God excepted) is a “first cause.” This is because science, or our own eyes, can produce a cause for the things we see. These things come into existence and then disappear all the time. We even have good scientific reasons to profess the origination of all things in the Big Bang and, much later, the ultimate physical disintegration of all physical things over time, the collapse of the entire universe in the Big Tear or Big Rip.
As a matter of fact, we know a good deal about what causes many of the things we observe in the world each day. What we actually observe to be happening then are causal chains of events, and very many of them. Clearly all things are not then first causes and necessary in themselves because we actually see them being caused by other things, and later going out of existence. So, St. Thomas’ argument is seen to still be strong and alive on the basis of first hand and scientific observations, though it can’t be defended on purely logical grounds alone.
We are currently unable to trace all the causal chains back to just one single cause without any perceptual break through the use of scientific instruments, but this is perhaps only due to the immense complexity of the problem, the enormous size and content of the universe. There remain many distinct causal chains of events that have yet to be fully shown to originate in the same source by direct observation. However, theoretical science, specifically the Big Bang theory of cosmology, asserts that we can in theory trace everything back to one event, an event that is absolutely mysterious at the first fraction of a second of its beginning.
Therefore, if we view the first cause argument as a scientific argument, a scientific theory in fact, it appears fully supported. We observe things being caused each day all day long, and all according to science. We can explain, though not fully predict, the weather, our health, earthquakes, the behavior of atoms, planets, traffic accidents etc., based upon causality. These things have causes, usually visible ones. We can rule out an infinite regress of causes on a scientific basis because we are dealing with real physical events that require some minimum amount of time to occur. Modern science says the age of the universe is not infinite, it is only around 20 billion years old.
In fact, our current science tells us that, in theory, using all of our science together, though primarily physics and cosmology, we can trace a chain of causality all the way back to the big bang origin of the universe—where we can explain no further. There could be no closer description of a first cause scenario than what science has currently provided us. We can conclude that St. Thomas’ cosmological argument for God’s existence, succeeds when presented in scientific form, i.e., when proposed as a scientific theory.
St. Thomas, of course, is one of the foremost thinkers in the history of the Catholic Church as well as the history of philosophy. His version of the first cause is the Judeo-Christian-Islamic version: God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth is his first cause. Aquinas’ version of the first cause argument tells us why the big bang is not traceable further: God did it and he is beyond our ability to grasp fully, and not of physical or material substance. According to the big bang theory, prior to 10-43 fraction of the first second of this world’s existence (the Planck time) natural law did not exist. Therefore, whatever was at the source of this world’s beginning prior to that first fraction of a second was apparently not physical because all physical things comport to natural law. Nor did time itself as we know it exist beyond that threshold.[43] In a very real sense, then, science’s view of the Big Bang shows the antecedent phenomenon or world that precedes the Planck time to be an eternal one. This corresponds perfectly to Aquinas concept of an eternal first cause.
As an aside, although Intelligent design theory is accused of being unscientific, we can now see that it poses less of a mystery than the Big Bang theory, allowing that the designer could be a superior physical being as opposed to simply an anomalous nonphysical question mark. So here we have materialistic science caught in the hypocrisy of claiming that the implications of intelligent design are not scientific due to being mysterious and incoherent, while readily accepting the Big Bang theory, which is arguably more mysterious and incoherent.
A startling logical
implication of the Big Bang theory, is that it refutes the primary theoretical
assumption of most modern scientists: materialism! It is not so difficult a
thing to see. All material things exist in space and time by definition, but
normal space/time did not exist on the other side of the Planck time in Big
Bang theory. Material things decompose and pass out of existence; they are not
eternal. Science also tells us that all physical things had a beginning in
time. The beginning of every physical thing is, in theory, traceable to some
point after that first mysterious fraction of the first second of the
universe’s existence. No physical
thing, therefore, is the first cause: that anomalous beginning point of the Big
Bang is nonphysical.
Therefore, the materialist’s habit of adding the materialistic assumption that all things are physical to science as if it were part of the definition and charter of science itself is an invalid procedure because it produces a contradiction. The big bang theory says all things came from a nonphysical singularity. The existence of a contradiction refutes a theory until that contradiction is removed.
The problem with simply overlooking such misleading statements is that those who promote materialism as their “religion” abuse them in presenting them as absolutely unquestionable truths. Materialists employ the statement that all things are physical in its literal meaning, not the one with the important exception for the source of the Big Bang. This intentional oversight is intended to mislead our students and anyone else gullible enough to believe it, that the world can be fully explained by reference to physical entities and a fully accidental process alone. The intelligent design argument shows that accidents cannot explain life, and the Big Bang theory shows that purely physical entities cannot explain the universe.
St. Anselm’s Necessary Existence: A Valid Argument or a
Logical Fallacy?
After such an exhausting analysis, I suppose I should close the book now and allow the reader a much deserved break. You can take one anyway if you like, run off to browse the library for the true gems of philosophy. For example there is Professor Irwin’s profound analysis of how the Simpson’s cartoon has irrevocably altered our understanding of metaphysics, The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer.[44] Be sure not to miss that one! But, when you get back cappuccino in hand, we still have the ontological argument of St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas’ cosmological argument to consider. I’m sure you can spare just one more moment.
St. Anselm offers the classic ontological argument[45] for the existence of God. I consider it as having succeeded—but only given spiritual perception as a faculty available to one who is evaluating the argument. This faculty is needed to establish the truth of the premises on independent grounds.
The following version of St.
Anselm’s argument from Proslogium[46] is forceful because substituting the definition of God given in
premise 1 into the term’s use in premise 2 appears to establish that any denial
of God’s existence will create a very literal contradiction: undeniable proof
by reductio ad absurdum.
(1) God is that than which no greater
can be conceived.
(2) If God does not exist then there is something greater than God that can be
conceived (namely the same conceptual entity that does exist)
Therefore:
(3) God exists.
Making the substitution of the definition of ‘God’ into its use in premise 2 yields a contradiction: If that than which no greater can be conceived does not exist then there is something greater than that than which no greater can be conceived that can be conceived (namely, the same thing which does exist). St Anselm seems to have us at this point because if we deny God’s existence we cause a contradiction.
However, claiming that existence is an aspect of ‘greatness’ is both the strength and the weakness in St. Anselm’s argument. Closer examination reveals this assumption as a hidden premise, built into premise 2. Making this sneaky premise explicit reveals premise 2 to actually be
(2) Existence is an aspect of
divine greatness. Therefore, if God does not exist there is something greater
than God that can be imagined (namely, the same thing which does exist).
Let’s break this down into two sub-premises for clarity.
(2a) Existence is an aspect of
divine ‘greatness’.
(2b) If God does not exist then
there is something greater than God that can be imagined (namely, the same
thing which does exist).
Rewritten the argument, correctly
stated, becomes
(1) God is that than which no greater can be conceived.
(2a) Existence is an aspect of divine greatness.
(2b) If God does not exist then
there is something greater than (God), that than which no greater can be
conceived, that can be conceived (namely, the same thing which does
exist); but this is a contradiction.
Therefore:
(Since assuming God does not exist leads to a contradiction,) God must exist.
It is easy to see that the argument is valid. The conclusion must be true if the premises are true. But are the premises true? Premises 1 and 2a are the problem. Here St. Anselm has simply defined the words ‘God’ and ‘greatest’ to include existence. By virtue of doing this, however, we have not discovered God in the real world; we have merely discovered the words ‘God’ and ‘greatness’ in St. Anselm’s private dictionary.
Using St. Anselm’s linguistic form of argument, defining a word, any word, to include existence, leads to obvious absurdities, thus proving the argument form unsound. If you invent a new word, add it to the dictionary, and you define this word to include existence, does it mean the thing referenced by the word must exist? No, it clearly doesn’t.
As Dr. Larry Colter has shown,[47] we could invent the word ‘radiocorn’ for a unicorn with yellow and purple spots, having a transistor radio in its rump, and define it as having existence. But, does that mean such a unicorn exists? Could we then go find one? No. Language itself is insufficient to do the job of creating something in the real world of physical objects. We would only find radiocorns in our newly revised dictionary.
Professor Colter would likely render St. Anselm’s argument something like this, having explicitly unpacked his definition of terms:
(1) God is commonly defined as that than which no greater can be
conceived.
(2a) Existence is arbitrarily defined by me as an aspect of divine greatness.
(2b) If God does not exist then
there is something greater than (God), that than which no greater can be
conceived, that can be conceived (namely, the same thing which does
exist); but this is a contradiction.
Therefore:
(Since assuming God does not exist leads to a contradiction) God must exist.
We may safely conclude with Professor Colter that a merely linguistic definition of the word ‘God’, defined by way of including existence as part of the meaning of the word ‘greatness’ and ‘greatness” as part of the meaning of the word ‘God’, is insufficient to prove God’s existence outside the dictionary. Or in even simpler terms, just because we can imagine something in our minds by recombining modular concepts in novel ways, doesn’t mean that thing exists in the world. The world may have no such conceptual hybrids in it. Using Anselm’s logic, all possible things would have to be actual things.
As a matter of fact neither “greatness” nor “God” nor “divinity” is defined to include existence in our standard dictionary. But even if it were, it would not mean that any ‘great’ or divine being we might be able to conceive of in our imagination existed. The “great” creatures of mythology and other literary inventions need not be found in the real world: unicorns, dragons, wizards and so on. Not all words have referents in the real world—and need not have one just because someone had the imagination to invent the word. That is precisely what ‘imagination’ means.
On the surface then, St. Anselm’s classic ontological argument commits the obvious fallacy of trying to define something into existence. But we should stop to consider for a moment: St. Anselm was an archbishop, a very profound and learned man. It is therefore likely that more was going on in St. Anselm’s mind (and heart) than just these few lines of text hastily extracted by us from his larger writings. We should place the summary form of his argument back into context. That context includes the fuller context of all his writings as well as the entirety of his learned devout life. Then, perhaps, we can obtain a more accurate picture of what the argument truly represents.
Given his saintly life, perhaps it would be more correct to say that St. Anselm claimed “God exists because I perceive it,” rather than “God exists solely because we have defined the word ‘God’ that way.” In other words, what appears to be an arbitrary definition, is actually first grounded in a veridical perception. The form in which I first rendered St. Anselm’s argument did not reveal Anselm to be defining the word ‘God’ and the word ‘greatness’ as in Professor Colter’s analysis. Rather his linguistic modality was one of asserting a perceived fact, not one of constructing a definition: he said “God is that…” not “God is defined as that…”
Professor Colter’s response would be that, although the modality of asserting a fact saves Anselm from the Radiocorn fallacy, without evidence for the facts he asserts (the first two premises), Anselm is guilty of a more basic fallacy: begging the question. He simply gives no logical evidence for God’s existence. This is true because semantic analysis of the first two premises yields the propositional equivalent of “God exists.” In this view of the argument, St. Anselm has placed the conclusion of the argument into the premises and given no evidence to support the truth of those premises. He therefore begs the question—on the surface, looking at the words alone.
While not denying Colter’s analysis as far as it goes, my suggestion is that the worst error St. Anselm has likely made is not to have explicitly stated all of his premises. It may well be that his evidence for the first two premises is a direct perception of the truth of them based upon the spiritual gift of discernment, or spiritual perception. If we grant that much, Anselm escapes both the Radiocorn fallacy, and question begging, but is left with the burden of demonstrating how spiritual perception can be admitted into evidence when it is almost universally acknowledged to be a private faculty having no value to resolve public disputes. I hope to have satisfied that burden in the preceding section on spiritual perception by having established that there is a (nonscientific) sense in which spiritual perception can be a “public” event and therefore can ground valid proofs, albeit only for those blessed to enjoy use of the faculty.
If we can see the absurdity of trying to arbitrarily define something into existence, wouldn’t the Archbishop of Canterbury be likely to see it as well. In other words, it is more likely that the correct reading of St. Anselm’s argument is that the truth of the premises is established by perception, specifically by use of the faculty of spiritual perception. Premise 2a is then modified to read “One can directly perceive that, in the case of God, existence is a necessary aspect of his greatness.”
I grant the possibility that Anselm has fallen into the fallacy of trying to offer a strictly logical/linguistic proof, one not explicitly grounded in spiritual perception. Anyone can make a mistake. Nonetheless, this does not negate the obligation of historical critics and commentators to closely consider the entirety of his personally devout life, and place the argument into the full context of the entirety of his works and the socio-historical milieu of his time. As an archbishop and a saint, his life certainly yielded many fundamental spiritual perceptions, including a direct awareness of the greatness and necessary existence of God. Therefore, whether or not Anselm intended to explicitly offer only a Socratic like derivation of God’s existence in Proslogium based upon language and logic alone, his devout life fully entitles us to ascribe to him the more defensible alternative form grounded in spiritual perception. It would only being doing Anselm justice. This alternative version of St. Anselm’s ontological argument then becomes sound, not on grounds of the definition of words alone but upon the truth of the premises as established by spiritual perception.
Skeptics may object that we are helping St. Anselm too much here by extrapolating beyond his literal words. But those who translate St. Anselm’s argument only with linguistic literalness, cutting it out of the larger context of his total writings and the glaring fact of his supremely devout life, are perhaps being ungenerous for that reason—if not somewhat disingenuous given the time honored tradition of interpreting authors within the total context of their larger works and the cultural milieu of their life. Critics and learned commentators have routinely been more generous on many occasions throughout the history of literary exposition particularly with poets and novelists. They have gone to great lengths to place specific lines of an author’s work properly back into the larger context of the conceptual framework implied by their total writings, cultural background, historical timeframe and social position. This procedure is, in fact, nothing less than an axiom of literary criticism. Are we therefore wrong to do as much for St. Anselm? The entirety of the voluminous writings of the saints gloriously proclaims the reality of spiritual perception. Is Anselm the sole exception?
Books abound on such presumed profundities as Nietzsche, Sartre, Marx, Hume and Machiavelli. These go to exorbitant lengths to make sense out of sentences clearly incoherent, shallow or mistaken on the surface. Christian philosophers, however, less often meet with such charity in the exposition of their works.
Those of us with spiritual perception, of course, easily grant the Archbishop’s contention that premises 1 and 2a are true and that the total argument succeeds as a result. Of course, we must also grant that, from our point of view, the entire argument, and any argument for God’s existence, is unnecessary because we can directly perceive that God exits, we have met him.
No less than we, St. Anselm had certainly perceived God, perceived his existence, perceived his perfection, and perceived that there is no alternative, no possibility for his nonexistence—he had truly perceived that God’s nature entails the penultimate of greatness and that divine greatness entails existence. This, of course, leaves the recipients of Anselm’s argument at God’s mercy to ensure its success: they must be granted the grace of spiritual perception. But, this is not a defect. Being at God’s mercy is both an extraordinarily good place to be, and a place from which none of us can ever truly escape. We need the same grace to appreciate scientific proofs as well: we must first be given the faculties of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell in order to evaluate empiric proofs.
Therefore, to say that some people can confirm the truth of the premises while others cannot is not such an odd form of argument as one might suspect. We make such arguments ourselves all the time. A blind person is missing the prerequisite visual perception to acknowledge the truth of the driver’s contention that he must stop at the corner because there is a red light. The driver’s argument for stopping remains both valid and sound but it cannot be demonstrated to be so until they have come back from the optometry clinic following surgery for removal of the passenger’s cataracts.
One last point of social equality must be made in favor of theistic arguments such as St. Anselm’s. They also qualify as examples of the expert witness form of argument. Expert witnesses are much heralded in our system of criminal law, and, ironically, most especially in evolutionary science where a layman can hardly recognize the true value of the total mass of phylogenetic data as expertly analyzed by professionals with decades of intensive disciplined study behind them. Expert witnesses are often called upon to sort out obtuse technical issues that ultimately determine the life or death of the defendant in a criminal case. The life of the defendant is felt to be secure in the hands of these expert witnesses even though no one else in the court, including the judge and jury is capable of performing or validating the technical work involved. Why take the expert’s word with such confidence? After all, they are human and do make mistakes.
Expert witnesses are trusted in science, engineering technology, ballistics, DNA tests, fingerprint analysis etc. because they have developed knowledge, skills and abilities the average person does not have and have come to be recognized as the best in their field. Giving St. Anselm the same consideration as an archbishop and accomplished theologian with well honed and disciplined spiritual perception should in fairness put his ontological argument on a stronger footing. In a sense, to avoid prejudice and inconsistency in the treatment of expert testimony, Anselm’s perception that God has necessary existence should be held reliable in the same sense that we hold DNA tests performed by experts whom we cannot independently validate to be reliable in a murder trial.
The genetics lab technician is saying the equivalent of “I have performed an operation that you, the judge and jury, are incapable of performing, and seen something you would not know the meaning of when you saw it.” Nonetheless, the judge and jury take the technician’s word because he is an expert with presumed good intentions, and a defendant’s life may well hang in the balance.
There is no denying the correlation in epistemological form of the ontological argument grounded in spiritual perception and the expert witness argument. Critics of this now successful argument for God’s existence have only one option: they must simply say that there is no such thing as spiritual perception and/or people cannot become expert in the use of it. But this objection merely begs the question; it provides no evidence while flying in the face of a faculty that millions of reliable and highly educated people claim and use each day. Indeed, martyrs and those threatened by persecution have historically had such confidence in spiritual perception as to stake their very lives upon it. Is it more likely to be a mistaken fantasy or a valid faculty that thousands of martyrs refused to deny under horrible torture, even unto death? Would you hold onto a fantasy under torture if denying it could save you such an ordeal? I don’t think so. Torture, if permitted, would undoubtedly be the most surefire cure for neurosis ever found. Psychologists will tell you it is hard enough to hold onto the truth under torture, let alone fantasy. No way! It is much more reasonable to hold that the martyrs were certain of the truths of their faith because they had met God; their spiritual perception was a valid faculty (not to say infallible).
In conclusion, what might be
called the strict version of Anselm’s argument for God from necessary
existence, being concerned solely with a priori truth, in this case,
truth by definition of words alone, says nothing at all about the world and for
that reason cannot be a scientific tool. It therefore does nothing to help our
case for God in science. Also by definition, necessary existence cannot be purely
a component of a world that is fully contingent, as our physical universe is
presumed to be. A thing having necessary existence, by definition, must be
beyond the contingent world. There is nothing forbidding it from interacting
with our world, however.
On the other hand, combining
the faculty of direct spiritual perception offered by religious experience with
the arguments from first cause and necessary existence makes the contribution
of Anselm’s necessary existence argument towards the scientific case for God’s
existence something less than trivial. Now we have reliable witnesses saying,
“I can perceive that such a thing exists.” This moves the claim of an entity
with necessary existence from the realm of the a priori to the realm of
contingent truth. The inclusion of a thing with necessary existence adds
certain benefits to science. It both increases the explanatory power of the
overall theory of God by removing the endless regress problem that occurs in a
string of events that are wholly contingent, and it adds integrity to science
by allowing science not to have to beg the question of the size of the
universe.
Adding a first cause with
necessary existence gives science more flexibility in constructing cosmological
theory by allowing for the universe to be either finite in size or infinite.
Otherwise, science must assume in advance of the empiric data that the world is
infinite. This is because a finite world of wholly contingent events and
entities is a contradiction. Under the classic concept of causation upon which
much of science depends, contingency entails an endless regress of events and
an endless regress entails an infinite size. To assume an infinite world in
advance of the data is not scientific. The addition of an element with
necessary existence that can stop the endless regress of cause and effect
allows science to work in the proper way, moving from the empiric data to the
conclusion, in order to arrive at the size of our world.
If we assume an infinite
universe in advance of the data, the investigation of other scientific
questions that are affected by the answer to the size question must proceed
minus a firm foundation. Science risks missing the truth in these related areas
and by arbitrarily assuming an infinite universe must rule out a priori
entire regions of potentially very fruitful inquiry. Granted, it would be
supremely hard to prove an infinite universe, but it would be less problematic
to establish a case for a finite universe.
Should the universe in fact be finite, and should we discover its limits, science would be in a much stronger position to gain mastery over the physical elements by virtue of having more certitude in its physical resource calculations and in its working assumptions, theories and hypotheses by virtue of being able to more readily rule out a vast multitude of possible countervailing factors. Scientific theory confirmation soon becomes vastly more economical in a finite universe. Progress is achieved more rapidly because there are fewer potentially relevant variables in a finite world. In an infinite world, such as the recently proposed (and untestable) multiverse theory represents, the potentially relevant variables are endless and they are potentially of a type that would remain forever inaccessible to science (if the physical laws in other universes interacting with ours were radically different). Attempts to reveal and track the influence of all factors in such a infinite multiverse would entail a broad and expensive span of tests. A finite universe is much easier for science to manage. Having once identified the finite limits of the Universe, the unknown becomes more and more rapidly vanquished in favor of the known due to the increase in science’s confidence in its hypotheses and tests and the more affordable economy of carrying out such tests in a simplified universe. Progress then begins to increase exponentially. The very impressive record of modern science is itself a substantial argument that our universe is not infinite, at least in complexity, or science would likely not have progressed so far so fast as it has. Ultimately, the harvest of practically useful knowledge that allows mankind to exploit the valuable resources of the Universe can be expected to be vastly more successful in less time in a finite universe than in an infinite one. Thus, it is very much to the advantage of science not to prematurely eliminate the possibility that the Universe is in fact finite.
God as First Cause is Good Science
Having established a plausible case for the existence of a first cause having necessary existence that is the designer of life and the ordered structures of the Universe, the question arises as to whether God should be considered to be that first cause. We can say at least this much: adding God as the first cause does add explanatory power to our theoretical base. And explanatory power is one of the primary criteria for evaluating the strength of a scientific theory. Without God we cannot explain the behavior of nearly a billion respectable Catholics and fully twice as many millions of others in the great God fearing faiths of the world.[48]
Since Aquinas, absolutely everyone graduating the fourth grade who has heard the first cause argument (except the members of the AAAS) has admitted the power of it, at least in the private space of his or her own heart where social politics and political peer pressures are excluded. The observation of intelligent design in nature is equally universal. We all know, as does science, that explanations of life and the universe must ultimately start in a mystery. The trail of causation goes back, and back, and back…and…let’s face it, it either has to stop somewhere in complete mystery, the First Cause, or it offers another kind of mystery by providing no starting point to the chain of explanation and the universe runs out of time. That dilemma is known to apply equally to all of science generally because the nature of scientific explanation is reductive or regressive, that is, event processes are explained by referring to smaller, more fundamental, or earlier processes.
What is the difference in epistemological value between an explanation referring to a complete “physical” mystery that by definition of materialistic science should not be one, a singularity, such as the Big Bang, and an explanation referring to a “nonphysical being,” intelligent, coherent, articulate and communicative—one who essentially says, “I did that”—a being having the ability to interact with the physical world and give visible manifestations in it? Once we grant the fact that they are both on a comparable epistemological footing because one mystery is no better than another, we can proceed to ask the next logical question: which explanation is otherwise the better one? One requires the universe to run out of time (infinite regression of events), the other does not (first cause). One provides no information about the first cause (the Big Bang theory), the other provides some information (Judeo-Christian-Islamic God as first cause).
If the same situation occurred at an intermediate level in the physical event processes of this world, which of the alternative kinds of explanation would we prefer? There is no doubt that we would prefer the alternative that was not shown to be impossible in the available time, and the partial explanation of the intelligent being to a complete mystery. It is an axiom of evaluation of explanations generally and scientific theories in particular that we should prefer the one that, other things being equal, is more informative. That is the primary purpose of an explanation or theory, to provide information related to the subject.
Remember when Allen Funt of the television series Candid Camera used to hide and secretly manipulate the physical environment of unsuspecting citizens in bizarre way? The victims of his practical jokes were only shocked, resorting to superstition for a brief moment, before ultimately coming around to a rational point of view and suspecting a setup. They soon rejected the mystery explanation and went looking for an affectionate old guy commonly known to be the cause of such things—in this case, a guy with a hidden camera, Allen Funt. Candid Camera reveals that people intuitively acknowledge that fully mysterious physical phenomena are less acceptable as explanations than even hidden beings otherwise properly evidenced. With billions of well-educated morally upright citizens testifying to the reality of God through history, God similarly qualifies as a properly evidenced hidden being.
Thoroughly investigated miracles and well-documented encounters with the supernatural (Church records of exorcisms, for example[49]) further evidence God. Being the more explanatory version of first cause than the Big Bang theory, and avoiding the contradiction inherent in the materialistic view that all things are physical but the source of all things is a nonphysical anomaly, adding God to our theoretical base constitutes good science.
Squirrelly
Veterinarians
One of the technical problems we encounter in
discussions about proving God’s existence has to do with his ‘size’, i.e., both
the fact that it is infinite and that it is so much greater in relation to our
own. Hence, the trouble we have in giving a full definition of God, or a
complete set of criteria to be used to identify him. In other words, if we
happened to encounter God on the street, how would we know it was God whom we
had met? Perhaps it would be obvious if he chose to put on a dramatic display
of supernatural signs, for example. But, even then, does that prove him God, or
just a magician able to do those specific signs. How, in fact, could it be
established that it was actually God. A full definition of God would do it. We
could then refer to the definition and compare it to the person we had met.
But how can we fully grasp, understand, explain or
define something/someone so much greater than ourselves—how can anyone or
anything fully understand that which is greater than they who are attempting to
understand it? Could we, in theory, ever achieve a full definition of
God for that reason? I submit to you that this is a logical impossibility, true
simply by definition of the terms ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’ as applied to beings
whose minds are limited in their capacity to grasp ideas commensurate to their
own level of existence. To assume otherwise is to commit the fallacy of species
level egotism again, to assume that humans are able to understand absolutely
everything there is, including things that are by definition greater than
themselves.
No matter how egotistical we choose to be, when it
comes to God we simply cannot do it. The larger concepts pertaining to the
greater being can find no room on the thin mental storage shelves of the lesser
mind. They are too big and too different; no proper home can be found for them
there.
God can do things we can’t understand, go places we
can’t go, operate in ranges and dimensions we cannot extend to. To define God
fully we would have to mentally expand to his size, become his equal. Barring
that, we simply cannot grasp all the aspects of divinity—they are beyond us.
A concrete example might help to make this clear. A
squirrel encountering a veterinarian knows it has encountered something, a
being perhaps. But what kind of being? Does it know it has encountered a
veterinarian, per se: literally a degreed, scientifically trained veterinarian?
Can it know that? Can a squirrel fully comprehend the concept of ‘veterinarian’
so that when it goes ‘home’ it can somehow communicate to it’s squirrel friends
the equivalent of “Hey, guess what? I encountered a veterinarian today. How
about that boys!”
He, the squirrel, has encountered a veterinarian. He
knows he has encountered something, someone. However, does he know that he has
encountered a veterinarian, in the highest or fullest connotation of the term?
No, not fully: the mind and conceptual capability of the lesser being is simply
inadequate to the task.
The squirrel can make some progress though. Over time,
and following repeated encounters, he may come to distinguish those kinds of
things a veterinarian does that others do not do. The squirrel then creates a
place in his mind for such persons; but even then does he fully know that he
has encountered a veterinarian at the highest level of what there actually is
to know on the subject? No, of course not; he still doesn’t understand science;
he doesn’t understand human beings as self-conscious, rational thinkers. He
can’t grasp the details of sophisticated medical technology, and so on.
Should the squirrel then deny the existence of the
veterinarian simply because he can’t become his intellectual equal? No. He has
every right to believe the veterinarian exists—he just can’t fully define one.
He has as good an evidentiary basis within his own experience to acknowledge
the existence of the veterinarian as he does for acknowledging the existence of
anything else in his experience. We can conclude, then, that a full definition
is not a requirement to establish existence on an empirical or perceptual
basis. Therefore, our inability to fully define God is not fatal to the
endeavor of establishing his existence.
Let’s pursue the example a bit further to see if it
can yield any additional clarification. How much of his evidentiary basis for
the vet’s existence is the squirrel able to communicate to others? What happens
when the squirrel, recently treated by the vet, is healed of his injuries and
released back into his own community? Let’s assume for the sake of discussion
that squirrels can talk, other things remaining the same. What sort of
interactions might occur on the subject of his encounter with the veterinarian?
“Well what exactly was it?”
“Something different, higher.”
“Higher? In what way?”
“I was injured, and he healed me. I think he cares
about us.”
“That’s not possible. You’re nuts.”
“No, no it’s real, it happened. My leg is healed, see
for yourself. In fact, your leg is hurt too, maybe you should go meet him.”
“Not until you prove it to me.”
Another squirrel, says, “I just got ran over on the
road. I’m hurt. I wish you could prove it, I need help.”
After exhausting all the alternatives in his mind, the former patient just says, “Follow me and I’ll show you.”
In the case of God, as with the squirrels, it turns out to be impossible to explain even that much which we do have under our conceptual belts, a partial experience based definition, unless the person we are speaking to has had the same experience. Otherwise they will see no referent to the words we are using, themselves either not having the faculty of spiritual perception, or not having used it. They see no referent to the word ‘God’. Our language is literally meaningless to them, though not meaningless generally.
Despite our inability to establish a full definition of God, there remains a real hope for establishing some less comprehensive criteria that would be, nonetheless, sufficient to adequately identify him. Having the capability to merely identify, as opposed to fully define, God would be enough to provide a basis for presenting evidence for his existence.
One doesn’t have to fully define something to be able to identify it. What is required is to find something truly unique about God, something that pertains to no one else but him. Then we would be able to know it was God when we had met him. We need not only some unique characteristic or attribute, or set of characteristics or attributes, but one that is within man’s ability both to perceive and to understand. To ‘prove’ God’s existence one then need merely give sufficient evidence to establish that those unique attributes had been perceived—not all of him, which would be too much for us, but only something unique which would point to him and nothing else. I argue that, given spiritual perception, this much can be done.
Now let’s take the squirrel story a little further
into the future. At this point, several injured squirrels have gone out, met
the veterinarian, and returned healed. Some detailed reports are given of the
shots, the splints, hospital food, the knife, the medicine etc.—all from the
limited perspective and mindset of a squirrel, mind you, but detailed and
reliable reports nonetheless. They now have a reasonably clear set of criteria
with which to identify a veterinarian.
The squirrels can’t fully explain, define, or
understand the vet, but they can identify him. He is the
being which does these kinds of things: temporarily restricts you’re freedom, causes
you some painful experiences, gives you the best food every day, has a nice
caring touch, handles certain special kinds of objects, heals you completely,
makes you feel wonderful, then sets you free to live a happy life. Sound
familiar? It should; this is precisely what we know about God.
Of course the squirrels would be fools at this point
to deny the existence of the veterinarian simply because they don’t know
everything there is to know about him. They have sufficient grounds to believe
in his existence. That is something, in itself. But, can they prove to another
who hasn’t had the same experience that the vet exists: no. They can only
‘say’, “Follow me and I’ll show you.”
Nonetheless, the squirrels “in the know” have
found out something both unique and significant about the veterinarian. They
can pick him out of a crowd by the things he does. This is important to
understand in discussing the history of arguments about God because it is often
said that since we can’t fully understand God, we shouldn’t talk about him at
all, i.e., our attempts are all doomed to be useless and incoherent, having no
specific understandable referent, providing no concretely useable information.
The situation with the squirrels at this point shows
such concerns and claims to be false. The squirrels know who they are referring
to because what he does is unique: hawks don’t do it, bears don’t do it, only
veterinarians do it—and it is mightily important to their lives. They can now
‘discuss’ the vet coherently within the subgroup of those who have met him,
although the discussion will lose its meaning outside that group. Group limited
coherence is not unique to religious experience; it applies to sports,
professions, hobbies etc., anywhere a specific set of experiences and private
knowledge base is required to provide the meaningful referents for a subset of
our language.
The situation with humans and God is the same, even to the point of being reticent to visit the “doctor.” As we begin to learn the faith we first find our freedom somewhat restricted (by the Ten Commandments). We have some painful experiences (acute moral awareness and the pangs of guilt at confession). As we begin to actively seek the Kingdom of God we discover that God is very actively caring for us and providing our daily bread as he promised in the scripture. Over time, we are fully healed and then set free to be happy. Afterwards, we will always be able to pick God out of the crowd as he who does these uniquely wonderful things; and what he does has become mightily important to our lives.
Putting our experience of God in a nutshell: as far as specific and unique characteristics and attributes are concerned, God’s holiness is one uniquely identifying characteristic that is perceivable to man by the mechanism of spiritual perception. Divine love is another. Just as color can be perceived by sight, divine love and holiness can be perceived by spiritual perception. On this basis alone, one knows God as God when he is present.
How do I know this? How do you know light and color are the proper province of sight: you have sight, you use it, and that’s the way it works. That’s the way I know this. I have spiritual perception, I use it, and that’s the way it works. Others who have it verify my experience and there is even a community of technical experts on such things, bishops and theologians, who further explain and certify its truth, much as scientists do for sight. It is the same kind of confirmation process at a fundamental level.
We, now have a proper means to establish God’s existence: direct contact, an immediate awareness achieved through the mechanism of spiritual perception. We have established a set of unique and perceivable attributes he has that no one else has—not a complete set, but a unique set. This is as fully legitimate as the means we use to establish the existence of anything or anyone else. We first perceive that there is something or someone there. We then employ a means to uniquely identify what or who it is, to distinguish it/them from the other things we encounter. We are not required to know and understand everything about that which we have identified; the unique attributes are sufficient. Nothing is different in the case of God except that he, God, is so much greater than man. Squirrels shouldn’t pretend veterinarians don’t exist, and we shouldn’t pretend God doesn’t exist either.
Of course, in the case of the squirrels, no new faculty of perception is required to be installed, as is the case with spiritual perception in humans. We should also note this important difference between God and a veterinarian: all things are possible to God, though not to the veterinarian—all things. God (our creator) can, if he chooses to, reveal himself to us and at the same time increase our capacity to grasp the meaning of what he has revealed. In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 52) teaches that God intends to do exactly that. Paradoxically to human science, this is still true be the revelation outside the normal range of human comprehension or not—God can do it. He can miraculously expand our cognition, either temporarily in a mystical experience or as a permanent spiritual gift of spiritual discernment, through a gradual process of growth or as an instant change.
If squirrels had a rudimentary science, say a GPS navigation and geographical mapping (3/4 mile by 6 inches deep) system for nut finding, water location and orientation to the nest etc., they would find our capacities equally baffling, at least in a few decades when we (if we) finally come to know what we are doing with genetic engineering. In the meantime we could bring in a popcorn tray, put it in the campfire and certainly elicit a round of “How’d he do that!”
Components of a spiritually imbued increased understanding that fall outside man’s normal cognitive range will then only be communicable to others similarly gifted. In “Squirrelsville,” this situation would be comparable to, say, a genetic engineering experiment where some of the squirrels are altered to increase their brain capacity and function. Three of four of them now play the stock market each quarter and have happily progressed to become major shareholders in Planter’s Mixed Nuts. Still, the expanded capacity for perception and ‘understanding’ that has comes about as a result of the experiment is only communicable between those squirrels having similar alterations. The others “don’t get it,” so to speak. Nor do they understand why security guards drive off all the other squirrels when Planters truck arrives at the park for weekly deliveries, leaving only those same five odd squirrels with reading glasses and calculators to eat their fill.
In review, we have argued that the use of direct spiritual perception is the most proper method to establish God’s existence. On that basis, we are as entitled to believe in God as we are in any other person we know—the same methods of proof are available to us. The soundness of this argument rests firmly on the secondary argument that many people have a capability we have called ‘spiritual perception’. We argue that we have every bit as good a set of reasons for accepting the existence and reliability of spiritual perception as we do the existence and reliability of sight, hearing etc. We condemn people to death in criminal court each day on less reliable testimony.
We can be as certain of God’s existence as we can of Uncle Bob’s. On the other hand, when facing a skeptic or someone who hasn’t met God or Uncle Bob, we can only respond as the squirrel did, and much the same as Jesus life and teachings also implied: “Follow me, and I’ll show you.”
And what about Bob? Historically, Uncle Bob, like God, has gotten very little respect from philosophers and religious skeptics.
Skeptic: “Prove to me your Uncle Bob is real.”
Christian: “Well I just spoke with him this morning.”
Skeptic: “No, you can’t use that, it doesn’t count.”
Christian: “Well, I could introduce you to him.”
Skeptic: “No, I’m afraid that won’t do. All the experts agree with me, you’ll have to ‘prove’ it.”
Christian: “Oh, well, if the experts agree—but just how do I do that?”
Skeptic: “It has to be logical, you know, indisputable evidence.”
Christian: “OK, I’ll try to be logical. But first give me an example of how to provide a logical proof of a person’s existence—like what?”
Skeptic: “I don’t know, he’s you’re uncle. I’ve been to his house twice, I can’t see him—he’s just not there. If you want me to believe he exists, you will just have to give me some ‘logical proof.’ Otherwise, I simply won’t believe it; and, since I’m an expert,” (the axe falls) “you won’t be justified in believing it either.”
Christian: “But I’ve known Uncle Bob for years!”
Skeptic: “Sorry, your belief in Uncle Bob remains fully unjustified, even irrational, until you can produce a satisfactory ‘logical’ argument that he actually exists.”
Christian: “Can I still take him to lunch on Sunday?”
Philosophy of Science: Explanatory Power & Theoretical
Consistency
Evidence of design
and the high improbability of accidental evolution are not the only reasons to
add God to our scientific theories. Adding God explains something very
anomalous that we cannot otherwise explain: the ordered structures of the
universe. The NASA website on Big Bang Cosmology indicates that science has
no definite answer as to how order in the form of the structure of the galaxies
came into existence after the Big Bang. However, we do have an idea of how much
order it contains. According to famous mathematical physicist, Sir Roger
Penrose,[50]
the Big Bang event was precise to the magnitude of 10 to the power of 10123.
10123 is only the exponent![51]
(Also see Structure
in the universe, Fluctuations
in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and The
inflationary universe.[52]
Penrose computed the odds of our present orderly universe appearing by accident, given the 2nd Law, as one chance in 10300. Computing the improbability of neo-Darwinian evolution in sequence with the accidental origination of the universe raises the magnitude of improbability for the accidental origination of life to well less than one chance in 10774. The only alternative to adding these probabilities for the sequential achievement of the physical structure of the universe and then life, is to assume that the order impressed into the structures of the universe that is included in the Penrose’s first figure, 10300, is sufficient, in combination with natural law, to generate life more or less directly without any substantial random interference. If we make that assumption, however, we have admitted that evolution is a largely directed process and neo-Darwinian accidental evolution must be considered refuted. In either case we are talking about immense improbabilities since there are only 10150 particle events available in the entire history of our universe. Such a huge improbability in explanation is significant anywhere else in science. We should, therefore, consider it significant here. The theory of a designer closes this improbability gap essentially by 100%. The further addition of the theory of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God as the designer increases the explanatory power much further, while bringing no new problems with it, other than the fact that we cannot produce God on demand. But neither can we produce the momentum and position of a quantum particle in a given instant, yet we know they are real.
Prejudiced Investigations
Restricting evidence to the objectively verifiable empirical realm, that is, the material, is a good rule because it provides the opportunity for the level of precision and rigorous control science requires to proceed securely and rapidly. However, in the Design Revolution, William Dembski reminds us that we cannot properly limit the conclusions of our investigations to the physical in the same way we limit evidence, lest we prejudice our investigations. Where properly admitted evidence points we must follow, even when that evidence suggests things invisible or “immaterial.” Scientists shouldn’t be afraid of the dark. They are not afraid of the mystery prior to the Big Bang; why are they only afraid of the dark when it points to God. The scripture says to fear God, but this is not what is meant.
Science has long before now argued the existence of things not immediately observable: undiscovered planets, comets and asteroids, gravity, electromagnetism, the atomic force, extra dimensions etc. Had we arbitrarily ruled out those things as we are now trying to do with an intelligent designer we would not have discovered the primary objects and forces in the universe.
But, even granting the well-known prejudice in mainstream science against the nonphysical, strictly speaking, nothing in intelligent design theory implies the designer to be either immaterial or not empirically verifiable—but only yet to be empirically verified. Therefore, not even a prejudice against the nonphysical has any real bearing on the intelligent design issue. The prejudice displayed against intelligent design theory by Darwinian evolutionists and materialist scientists generally must then be grounded in something else. Since many of these ID critics affirm materialism and ridicule biblical creation, the opposition to intelligent design theory is apparently grounded in a prejudice against God and religion and the false belief that there cannot be genuine scientific evidence for God.
The assumption that the designer is nonphysical belongs to the AAAS alone, not to intelligent design scientists. ID scientists have proposed no specific concept of the designer, such as a particular version of God. They have, in fact, gone to great lengths to loudly proclaim that they make no such assertions. In ID theory, the designer could be an extraterrestrial being or group of them. Why do well known Darwinian evolutionists make the flagrant error of misrepresenting the claims of intelligent design theory? Knowing that the public strongly identifies the design argument with God, those with a prejudice against God and religion cannot afford to see God so effectively, albeit inadvertently, promoted.
Materialist scientists apparently use the transparent debating tactic of misrepresenting ID theory as disguised religion in order to bring into play the existing prejudice against the nonphysical in science (a prejudice that has also become heavily engrained in segments of the public, even religious segments, where scientific questions are concerned). They unfairly attempt to direct the force of that prejudice against intelligent design theory by misstating what intelligent design theory is about.
But even if ID theory did say God was the designer, it would not automatically become unscientific for that reason alone. Most religions posit that God, though not material himself, can take material form or produce material emanations. The Holy Bible is replete with occurrences of his having done so. In theory, indirect empiric evidence could still be available for an intelligent designer even if the designer was God. Therefore, the AAAS’ claim that intelligent design theory is unscientific in principle is unfounded even under their own mistaken/misrepresented version of the theory.
As far as the concern about the nondemonstrability of God goes, there is a good deal more evidence for God than for quantum particles and superstrings. Billions of reliable witnesses attest to the reality of God, and some in conjunction with public miracles that do provide direct empiric evidence. As noted above, the testimony of these same witnesses is reliable enough to put a man to death in criminal court. It therefore should carry significant evidential weight.
But our entire historical discussion of dualism, materialism, God and science is largely founded upon one major conceptual error, a mistaken assumption that God cannot interact with the physical world by definition. No such stipulation has been made in the major religions of the world. God, properly understood, is simply in another dimension. Nothing that we know or have set down in our religious precepts precludes that dimension interacting with the physical dimensions in which we live. Again, science’s current cosmological theory, the Big Bang, has the entire universe springing out of a nonphysical dimension. This coincides strikingly with the creation stories of the world’s religions. The reader will recall that in the introduction I cited Pope Pius XII as having enthusiastically proclaimed that the Big Bang theory constituted nothing less than scientific proof of the creation story.
There is no true barrier that precludes interaction between God and the physical world posited by the Christian religion, after all, God is the creator of all things. Contrary to the loud objections of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, God is not defined as being composed of a type of substance that cannot produce empiric results. Therefore the prejudice against God in mainstream science is revealed in their having made two transparent misrepresentations in order to misdirect the public away from the fact that there is strong scientific case for God: (1) the lie that intelligent design theory must be disguised religion, and (2) the lie that by definition God cannot interact with the physical world or be evidenced by empiric data.
We see evidence for God in the design and glory of his creation, in well documented and rigorously analyzed religious experience, in billions of reliable reports of spiritual perception, in verified miracles, in the overwhelming evidence against an accidental process achieving the amazing designs of living organisms and the structure of the physical universe, and in the Big Bang theory itself. To not only ignore evidence of this magnitude, but to dismiss it flippantly, reveals a clear prejudice.
People may differ in their opinion as to how much evidence is enough but it should be clear to everyone that we do have some bonafide scientific evidence for God. The current prejudice in society against anything that points to the spiritual precludes modern science from officially admitting this, but it is so.
The Big Bang theory points to a complete mystery as the source of everything physical, a mystery that does not conform to the laws of science. That mystery is held to be scientifically acceptable. But if we call that mystery God without changing any other assumptions, that is, if we admitted we didn’t know one other thing about it, it would automatically become unscientific in the minds of mainstream modern science. This while being the identical conceptual construct previously held to be scientific under the label Big Bang. This reveals a prejudice.
We have thousands of reliable people who have reported contact with God, saints or angels, including voice communication—including thousands of fully documented contact with fallen angels, demons, in the exorcisms of the Catholic Church. Oh yes, many thousands of exorcisms have been performed. The miraculous event at Fatima, Portugal in 1917 involved a communication that was publicly confirmed in the sense that a crowd returned with the children who witnessed the first two apparitions and they two were witness to a supernatural event. This was public verification, but it is cast aside by materialist scientists due to a prejudice against anything spiritual.
I am not proposing that we accept the veracity of individual reports of spiritual experience as if they were publicly verifiable empiric observations, but only that the hypothesis of God be admitted generally. I concede that spiritual perception will never be a practical scientific tool the way vision and hearing are. Nonetheless, admitting God as a good scientific theory does not require the existing rules of scientific evidence to change; it only requires the removal of a prejudice that restricts the kinds of conclusions we are permitted to validly draw from the evidence. The operational integrity of science would be affected in no way by admitting God as a valid scientific hypothesis, or even as the favored scientific theory.
Darwinists and materialist scientists loudly express their fear that admitting the hypothesis of God as scientific would somehow destroy the integrity of science. They do not demonstrate how this would happen, however. Instead they pull a bait and switch trick, ignoring the fact that the proposal has to do only with the conclusions drawn from valid evidence, and suggesting to the public that what is involved is that the rules of evidence would change to permit ghost stories to assume equal evidentiary value to work in the chemical laboratory and observations of the microscope. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Admitting God as a scientific hypothesis does not affect scientific method in any way and protects the integrity of science by admitting the theory that best explains the scientifically validated evidence.
Permitting the singularity at the start of the Big Bang to be called God resolves a huge explanatory failure in psychology and sociology. We would no longer have to consider the God-fearing half of the 6,000,000 people on the planet as suffering from the same benign neurosis. That such a consistent neurosis could occur across an enormous spectrum of widely divergent cultures is an astronomical improbability. If the ability to propagate mass neurosis across cultural boundaries is a feature of human psychology, where are the other planet-wide examples? Why is religion the only one?
The Moslem countries do not share the West’s mass neuroses, i.e., obsessions with sex, drugs, and alcohol (thanks be to God). Fear of death cannot be considered a neurosis, by evolutionary science at least, because it is an advantage to survival fitness; plus it is not clear that all cultures share it. For psychologists to poke their nose into the arena of intellectual belief systems minus some independent evidence of behavioral pathology is to exceed the valid boundaries of their discipline and contaminate their science with political prejudice.
If God-fearing people are not neurotic, then, unless their claim for God is true, they must either all be mistaken in the exact same way or lying. But three to four billion of them? Please…
I suppose, since we are all mistaken about some things, it is conceivable that billions of people could make serious mistakes of one form or the other about their worldview. However, in the absence of any substantial and proper evidence for God (as the materialists would portray the situation), what would there be to guide them all to the same conclusion?
Where else has a mass error endured in a highly educated population of a scientific culture? That three quarters of the population would persist in the exact same error even after postdoctoral education is simply not the most plausible hypothesis. Recent polls have indicated as many as 87% of Americans believe in God. As Peter Augustine Lawler says in concluding his learned article in the journal Society for the 2008 Neo-Darwinism and Its Discontents symposium, a realistic approach is to consider religious behavior as pointing to a real and personal God.[53]
Misconceptions in Science:
Can Order Come from Disorder, Can Design Come from Accident?
There is an elementary logical problem involved in assuming chance processes as the cause of complex organized life forms. As regards natural processes, entropy, disorder, randomness, and chance essentially all mean the same thing. Entropy is disorder or randomness of physical energy that has reached a state of disorder so extreme that it can no longer be recaptured to do any additional work: useless random heat energy. By our current scientific assumptions, to the extent that a system or force is random or entropic it cannot produce complex ordered results at all.
Therefore, it has always been a contradiction to say that accidental processes or forces could give rise to complex life forms. For that reason neo-Darwinian theory has always been in conflict with the definition of entropy in thermodynamic law. To be clear, it is not the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics that conflicts with Darwinian evolution, as has been previously debated ad nauseam, it is the definition of entropy that causes the conflict. Thermodynamic law is not likely to be thrown out, however, as it is the most basic of all natural laws. Einstein said the laws of thermodynamics, of which the definition of entropy is a primary component, are the only laws he believed would never be refuted.[54]
Modern Darwinists will renew their objection that I am mistakenly ascribing to them the claim for an accidental process in evolution when they have said no such thing. They feel evolution is so strongly controlled by natural law and guided by natural selection that, with these elements added, they are not positing a truly accidental process. While agreeing that evolution is in fact not accidental and that Darwinists do not have to call it accidental, an honest analysis of the evolutionary debate nonetheless reveals points of concern.
The first point is that Darwinists only call the evolutionary process nonaccidental when put on the spot. At all other times, they are content to let the historical comments contained in the seminal writings of the fathers of evolution, about a purposeless, unguided, chaotic, and yes, accidental process continue to mislead the public into believing they have claimed the process is indeed accidental. In my heart of hearts, although I would prefer to continue to laud the integrity of science as I was taught to believe in it as a child, I cannot call this tactic anything better than bait and switch.
To be precise we should distinguish between the very recent writings of Darwinists where accident is explicitly disavowed and early statements that do include the terms ‘accidental’ and ‘chaotic’. But, even the modern theorists who disavow accident still deny purpose. They rule out chaos as precluded by the order inducing influence of natural law, but leave the origin of natural law unexplained as a mysterious occurrence deriving from a nonphysical singularity in a fraction of the first second of the world’s existence. To merely leave the question there without further comment leaves the layman free to make his own mistakes and “fill in the blank,” as it were, assuming the Big Bang event was chaotic. The chaos must creep in somewhere; after all, the experts have said so. Indeed, an explosion such as the Big Bang might otherwise be reasonably presumed to be chaotic minus a scientific statement to the contrary. Of course, science has made a (very quiet) statement to the contrary. We know that the immediate result of the Big Bang was the appearance of both natural law and a very highly ordered state of matter and energy, more highly ordered in fact than the one we see today, though less differentiated.
I suggest that here it is the withholding of information that manifests the prejudice against God. What we know of natural law at present is insufficient to demonstrate that natural law could generate either living designs or the organized structures of the universe without the addition of a very complex and substantial magnitude of order being somehow impressed upon the energy/matter first present at the very beginning of the universe, in other words, a very highly ordered initial state of the universe.
The magnitude of order in the initial state of the matter and energy at the beginning of the universe (in addition to the governing influence of natural law that subsequently guided the matter and energy transactions) must have been enormous. Such an ordered beginning would be essential to produce the ordered results of life and planetary systems that eventually followed. This is supported by the fact that natural law in itself seems no longer capable of regenerating life from chemicals or of reaccomplishing major jumps in macroevolution (on Earth). This in turn is evidenced by the fact that we are unable to produce even the simplest life forms in the laboratory and that we see no major evolutionary changes being accomplished since the events of the origination of the major body types many millions of years ago.
The conclusion we can draw from this is that natural law alone provides insufficient order to generate life. Therefore, we are left with the mystery of how an enormous amount of order was imparted to the whole of the initial mass of the universe in a fraction of a second in an enormous explosion. It could not have happened by accident, that is, by chaotic or entropic motion inadvertently forming quickly into order because by virtue of the very definitions of our current scientific theories of thermodynamic law this is impossible (the definition of entropy as being an irrevocably unsalvageable state of disorganization). Therefore, science knows full well that the initial state of the universe was not chaotic, but rather very highly organized.
In answering the challenges about accidental evolution, however, Darwinists do not volunteer any of this information. Is this because it is outside their field of biology or because it might suggest there is in fact a mystery further back in the process that accident cannot explain? They readily venture into thermodynamic discussions to refute old creationist arguments from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, but suddenly develop amnesia when similar evidence will refute their political prejudice against intelligent design. The only way to restore integrity to evolutionary theory is to state all of these related considerations explicitly so that it is clear to scientists and laymen alike that life originates primarily from the highly ordered components of the larger evolutionary/cosmological process, components that science knows are not derivable from chaos or accident.
A certain logic corroborates Meyer’s position. If we definitely knew that natural law could generate life forms without aid of intelligent design because we knew the specific form and content of the information contained in the laws, and could concretely extrapolate that information one step at a time to demonstrate the spontaneous evolutionary process in total, we could also replicate the achievement of life in the laboratory. This science have been unable to do, however.
Currently, we can only demonstrate the spontaneous production of a few amino acids. This is a relatively simple task compared to generating a large inventory of complex folded protein structures and DNA sequences running into the billions along with thousands of intricate biological machines stacked into eight hierarchical levels of system integration—not to mention generating something that is truly alive. Structuralism merely assumes biological information can be derived from natural laws; it has not given a demonstration of it. Therefore, it remains ungrounded speculation until a derivation is given, i.e., it remains bad science.
We cannot explain the highly ordered initial state of the universe required to compliment natural law sufficiently to allow the generation of living systems and ordered planetary systems. Certainly randomness in the sense of accident, chaos or entropy, did not generate all of the order inherent in the initial ordered state of matter and natural law, atomic force, electromagnetic force, gravity and chemical element structure in the first 10-43 fraction of a second of the universe. Randomness per se cannot generate any order at all. So, what did? Science does not know.
I submit to you that where you have no explanation, you have no science. “I don’t know” would be a preferred answer to the one science is now giving, or rather implying by their silence: “laymen fill in the blank.” Because the Big Bang is known to be an explosion, Darwinists know that laymen are most likely to fill in the blank with “accident” or “chaos.”
To say, as Darwinists and many mainstream scientists now do, that science has ruled out the need for a creator/designer or God by offering only silence, mystery, or an accidental hypothesis improbable to the magnitude of 10-774, is to forsake both the search for rational explanation and scientific integrity. To do this, while disavowing the plausibility of a God hypothesis to explain an event that science itself describes in a manner that might have been excerpted directly from a William Blake creation poem, is a contradiction.
Here is the logical analysis of the current position of our scientific establishment: “We (the AAAS) are ruling out the (mistakenly) presumed to be nontestable intelligent design theory (which we refuse to evaluate closely) because we (mistakenly) assume it refers to an entity that cannot be empirically evidenced. We rule out empirically nontestable mysteries for the very good reason that our science, which is wholly grounded in an empirically nontestable mystery, the Big Bang, requires it.”
Of course, modern cosmologists and astronomers feel that the Big Bang theory is clearly empirically testable. This is because the empiric data leads back to a single point in time where everything can actually be “seen” to be condensed into a single point in space. In the next moment beyond that, the empiric data seems to corroborate a mysterious phenomenon beyond time and space: the “nothing” from which something, that is, everything, apparently came into being in a mere fraction of a second. Empiric data seems to corroborate such a mystery for the simple reason that the data leads up to that point and then abruptly stops: the end of the signs, and thus, apparently, the end of the road.
Granting that the empiric data takes us that far, we must still ask, where it is, exactly, that we have been taken? We are taken to a point where we cannot explain where the highly ordered structure impressed upon energy and matter at the very beginning of the universe and all the orderly laws of nature that govern the interactions of energy and matter have come from. Big Bang theory says that they literally have come out of nowhere. This is not a scientific explanation because it is no explanation at all. To say that matter and energy has come from a nonphysical nothing is no more testable that to say it came from God because one has to prove the nonexistence of God and all other nonphysical candidates for that source in order to establish that nothing is truly where the matter and energy came from. A theory of the nonexistence of God is no more testable than a theory for his existence because the same criteria of identification must be used in either case.
In addition, the materialist God exclusive Big Bang theory carries the additional burden that the thesis of the nonexistence of something is always much harder to establish than one for its existence, generally impossible. This is because one must exhaustively review all things in all places to prove that something does not exist, while stumbling upon a single instance of it suffices to prove its existence. As the popular maxim goes, “Its impossible to prove a negative.”
Adding God to Big Bang theory explains where all the ordered information in matter and energy and the complex system of natural laws came from. Otherwise, the Big Bang theory gives us no real explanation at all for the origin of design structures in nature, not for any of them! But the origin of order is the only really hard question science has ever had to answer concerning the universe’s origins! Otherwise, science could simply say that the world has always been composed of this mess of disorganized stuff, and there it is, still as disorganized as when it all started. But, how did we get al.l these fantastically complex designs and structures, planetary systems, living beings, fragile and highly tuned ecosystems that are precisely tuned to support life? Those are the meaningful questions science must answer, and science has no answer for any of them.
The conclusion to draw from all of this is that we truly have no origins science at all. We simply cannot explain the origin of ordered structures in the universe, the origin of the designs of life, or the origin of complex biological information: we don’t know. To say confidently (and vacuously) as many materialist scientists do these days, that there is absolutely no need for God to explain the world is therefore sheer intellectual bunk.
Modern science has been grossly inconsistent in another way. When physicists and cosmologists noticed there was no way to explain certain aspects of the behavior of the several larger forces of nature in a consistent unified way they went looking for something new that was not previously known to exist: superstrings. We already had a substantially complete, consistent and explanatory theory for gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and electromagnetism separately. Nonetheless, since there were some unanswered questions and no unified explanation of all these forces together we were willing to hypothesize that something new might be out there that would provide a synthesis, a unified explanation. In this case science was perfectly willing to admit that that something might be invisible, albeit deducible from empiric data.
In the Big Bang we have a much greater need to look for a new source of explanation (a total one) than we do with the fundamental forces because the Big Bang is the source of everything, including all the order, complex information and design structures. Currently our best explanatory effort for the source of all that is significant in the universe is that it all came out of nowhere in no time. Yet here amidst the most dramatic failure of scientific explanation (possible) we refuse to entertain the possibility of a new theoretical entity that can explain the primeval energy source at the start of the Big Bang for no other reason than that the whole thing smacks too much of God. Such irrational prejudices are what have given rise to talk of the materialist religion. Materialists take it as a matter of faith that there is no God and they therefore feel justified in casually dismissing any bonafide evidence that may point in his direction.
For a large part of the twentieth century, even until today, large segments of the population have assumed a worldview that integrates a firm materialistic ontology: they simply do not believe, or purport not to believe, that anything nonphysical exists. Whether it be from a sense of scientific enlightenment, fear of superstition, or worse, Satanism, it doesn’t matter. These groups, materialists, humanist, atheists etc, actively crusade at times against the perceived to be false claims of religion. Science has had its share of such people, being no more immune to politics than any other human endeavor. Since the scientific justification for both accidental evolution of life and materialist cosmology is lacking and the political motivation is present, one can justifiably assume political bias.
The only thing achieved by science’s assuming such irrational positions in contravention to good scientific principles of theory construction is to take away the possibility of an inference to God, to pull the rug out from under the design argument and theistic religion. Those of the materialist religion would risk contradicting thermodynamic law in saying that order can come from disorder. They would even discard the basis for all rational thought, the law of contradiction, in saying that something can come from nothing, in order to desperately fend off the public's acceptance of the intelligent design argument and the realization that God is, in fact, good theoretical science.
Darwin’s New Clothes: A
Case for Humility in Science
An argument might be made for humility as a basic
tenet of scientific method, along with empiric observation, hypothesis and
test. Science absolutely does not know with certainty the nature of the origin
of the universe, the origin of the form, order, and structure that is in it, or
the origin of life.[56]
Professor Michio Kaku, author of Hyperspace, and one of my favorite
authors, reveals in a fascinating online article, “Escape from the Universe,” that physicists and cosmologists
are still grappling with the very basic questions and theoretical components of
the universe, things quite fundamental in nature, such as the type and number
of extra dimensions, and even regarding what comprises the fundamental stuff of
which the universe is made. As late as 2003 we were finalizing confirmation of
the discovery of dark matter and dark energy—we still don’t know what it
is. These substances make up over 90% of the entire universe, yet we know very
little to nothing, about the nature and characteristics of either.[57]
The hypothesized Higgs particle (boson) may turn out to be the “explanation” for dark matter, but the Higgs particle itself remains largely a mystery. The full explanation of the Higgs particle is held to require something outside the standard model of physics. Physicists are not yet sure what that something is, but the existence of extra dimensions is one of the candidates that might finally account for the Higgs’ behavior. The newly built Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva Switzerland is expected to shed light on this question now that it has begun operation, but it is also expected to reveal totally new phenomena. A golden age of physics is expected to accrue from the LHC discoveries. Physicists’ minds are completely open to what they might find in the terascale of high energy particle physics (the trillion electron volt, TeV, range). The terascale has never before been explored. One real possibility is that they will find a grand unifying force that will tie together our understanding of all of the forces in nature in a single explanation. Physicist are practically certain of finding new particles or confirming those particles until now merely hypothesized. The discovery of evidence of extra dimensions is another plausible outcome from LHC projects.[58] However, even if we eventually come to fully understand the structure of matter, this does not provide an explanation of the origins of that structure, or the origins of matter. These are entirely different and potentially irresolvable questions. Similarly, we now know much of the structure of life without being able to demonstrate its origin.
While a revolution in particle physics is predicted to occur over the next few decades, a revolution has already been occurring in and around evolutionary science in the new fields of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics etc.[59] An avalanche of new and substantive data has recently poured fourth that dwarfs the information available at the time neo-Darwinian evolution was conceived—literally dwarfs it. This is even true as of the latest update to the new evolutionary synthesis in the 1980’s. The flow of new biological research data is simply awesome. New information continues to rush past the floodgates and in no way can all of it be said to have been fully understood and integrated into the theoretical base of evolutionary science. Complexity, specifically, as an evolutionary issue in its own right, seems to have been largely brushed aside for what can only be political reasons.
One trend in the new data relevant to the intelligent design debate that does seem clear is that more and more directional constraints upon what was initially conceived as a predominantly random process are being found, and they all strongly favor the formation of complex life. This is precisely what intelligent design theory asserts and predicts: a system of physical constraints embedded into natural law and the physical constants of the universe that give guidance and direction to the evolutionary process far beyond the threshold of randomness.
The humbling discoveries of recent cosmology, genetics and microbiology reveal the pomp, puff and bluster of neo-Darwinian theorists for what it is: premature conclusions and overconfidence grounded in political bias. Far up past the more humble realms of logical analysis and common sense that you and I inhabit, up much higher into the thin heady air of social Marxism masquerading as natural science, the imagined to be scientifically omniscient neo-Darwinists and their self-appointed emperor of science “Neo-Darwin,” (the real Darwin would not endorse such foolishness) feel a draft sneak past their thought to be royal attire (what turns out to be a scanty little ensemble indeed). Back down here on earth, where the rest of us mere mortals must do our science, philosophy, and theology the hard way, conclusions don’t come so quick and easy. Over the past fifty years the estimates of the number of currently living species have varied from 4 million to tens of millions to 100 million or more, depending upon whom you read.[60] In other words, we don’t even know that! The currently favored estimate seems to hover around ten to fifteen million, with many times that assumed to have become extinct (probably thousands as many).
We don’t know how many distinct proteins exist in nature. We have done relatively complete descriptions at the biochemical level of only a very small fraction of cellular processes. Biological science has only identified and described some 1.5 million of the living species in rough fashion, that is, in basic taxonomic and anatomical data. Achieving a full biochemical process description with a complete genome map linked to phenotypic character sets and regulatory functions for even this fraction of the biosphere is still a long way off. For the few species with completed gene maps, those maps have not been linked thoroughly to the cellular and developmental processes they govern.[61] This is not likely to happen anytime soon as Dr. Anton Nekrutenko informs us that a single gene can generate several thousand expressed sequences that provide unique instructions to the cell.[62] Thus, Dr. Stephen Meyer’s emphasis on the difficulty level of finding a useful gene sequence by accident, already a forceful point, takes on a whole new meaning. How hard is it to accidentally find a sequence of DNA 5,000 nucleotides long that can do from 500 to 3,000 different useful things for the human body in hugely complex ways, including using alternate splicing and reading frame mechanisms? This is still a lot of data critical to this debate that we don’t know.
Even if most of the extant evolutionary articles were not substantially hypothetical and unconfirmed, they would describe statistically too few pieces of the larger puzzle of life to give reliable indication of what the final picture of life’s origin and development will be: three or four pieces of the border, that’s all we have, and one of the most knowledgeable men in the field, Henry Gee, argues convincingly that it is not likely to get much better in terms of a reliable basis to hypothesize the historical process of evolution with confidence. Three or four pieces of the border and we are parading around with complete confidence in the neo-Darwinian theory of accidental evolution? Our own puzzle-building grandmas know better than this! My own beloved Mom, for example, (may God rest her soul) was a genius with 2000 piece jigsaw puzzles (and crosswords), but even she would not hazard a guess at the complete design with only a few pieces of the border. Yet neo-Darwinian evolution is loudly proclaimed to be, not just a theory, but a long confirmed, undisputed, scientific fact (by some Darwinists, not all). Its just nonsense! Overconfidence is always bad science, bad thinking, and…bad news.
The observation that it is an awareness of our relative ignorance, not the grounds for confidence in our knowledge, that increases steadily with additional research is not merely an abstract philosophical nicety that goes well with a nice coffee and Danish in a comfy armchair (though it certainly does). This principle has now become a hard physical reality of genetics, microbiology, physics and cosmology. The increase in complexity we have seen with each additional decade of research has so far outpaced a ballooning analogy as to be more properly described as an explosion.
The books in the library of the human genome have turned out, contrary to the original speculations of early geneticists, not to be “See Dick run!” at all. As of the year 2000 we were just gearing up to apply nuclear transfer technology to the cloning of laboratory mammals (rats) in an attempt to enhance our ability to trace out some of the connections between genes and phenotypic processes. It is a horrendously complex job, considering the entire taxonomic inventory, with major hurdles and critical unanswered questions remaining.[63] Only in the past few years we have discovered that this task will be much more difficult than anticipated as the content of a single gene turns out to be scattered all over the chromosome. The simple straightforward information of DNA, which we felt confident represented the secret of life, has given way to six different interacting genome related systems: the basic genome (DNA/RNA and genes), the gene regulatory system, the genomic translation system, proteomics (and associated systems of the phenotype), the developmental genome, and the transformational genome. Compare this to what Darwin based his theory upon: some protoplasm, a nucleus, some chromatin and very little else. And that’s just the information revolution in biology. Physics is very likely sitting on the verge of a new data explosion as well. The eventual import of the discovery of dark matter in physics combined with LHC results and continued work on string theory can only be imagined.
Whence comes the confidence of the neo-Darwinists that they have all the answers, that it can all be attributed to one big happy accident? Quantum physics remains incomplete in regards to the most fundamental question of all, how to get the ordered macroscopic world from apparently random individual quantum particles. Even the Big Bang theory is incomplete in that it “explains” the origin of the matter of the universe, but not how matter came to form the structures of the universe. Nonetheless, the late neo-Darwinian evolutionist Ernst Mayr assures us that science can see no room for cosmic purpose in nature.
Amidst the deluge of new biological data, the most basic mysteries of biology have endured. In a brief page and a quarter length science news summary article (to all appearances politically neutral to our question of accidental evolution), Elizabeth Pennisi has quietly delivered what I view as a serious blow to the neo-Darwinian propaganda campaign, specifically the incessant and often arrogant overconfidence. The simplified view of the genome that has underpinned the false hopes of accidental evolution for decades is finally and irrevocably burst with her article in the premier journal, Science, 15 June 2007.[64] Its just not that easy to accidentally stumble upon a living genome. This is not her point, but mine, working logically from the increased complexity of the genome that her article reveals.
Michael Behe’s new book, Edge of Evolution, confirms the same principle, that the complexity threshold attainable by an accidental process has now been indisputably breached, not only in genetics, but in several other areas of biological structure and function. The same trend has become evident in the other primary branches of science. Contrary to neo-Darwinist’s effusive overconfidence that the new data fits perfectly into their theory, the only clear trends in the new data are that the physical processes of the natural world are monumentally biased towards life and that they are so horrendously complex that “accidental” becomes an indefensible misnomer when applied to the origin of life and the larger part of evolutionary development.
What both Behe’s book and Pennisi’s article show us is that to date we have not even accurately understood the basic concept and construction of a gene, let alone the other five primary systems needed to turn genes into life.[65] All the while of course, over the past six decades or so, the neo-Darwinists, have been confidently proclaiming that genetics and microbiology had things so well in hand as to unquestionably confirm their view of an accidental process of evolution. Please…
Multiverse
I say again, humility in science! At a Harvard symposium as recent as 2003 our leading scientists were still asking the same basic questions man has always asked, the same questions we all (rightly) asked in the 2nd grade: “Did God make this? Is this the only world? Does the world have to be this way?”
As Art Linkletter used to say, kids say and do the ‘darndest’ things. When I was a kid I used to love to ask questions—endless questions. The joy of philosophy unfettered by academic sophistication and social prejudice! It was fun! Even now in 2010 science and philosophy have more questions than answers. Those basic philosophical questions kids have always loved to ask remain valid today. The new theory of multiverse opens up reams of new questions. Noted cosmologist Paul Davies:
Davies said the universe is perfect for life to flourish.
Every little thing — from the chemical composition of the atmosphere to the
existence of gravity — fits together. "If there were no ripples in the
universe," he said, "there would be no
lectures of this sort."
"We are in a Hubble
Bubble," and the universe does not end at the telescope, he said. Other
universes, if they exist, could work according to different rules. Though
Davies said he liked the multiverse hypothesis the best, all three options are
ultimately unsatisfactory. "The reason we see a universe so fine-tuned for
life is that life will only emerge in life-encouraging regions," he said.[66]
I put theory in quotes because it is merely a philosophical thesis, not a scientific one, due to the fact that the theory of the existence of other universes cannot be tested.[67] Do I know there are no such things as multiverses? No, I don’t; nor does anyone else, nor do they know the contrary. But consider for a moment, how much greater does our overall ignorance and humility factor become with a “multiverse.” Additional universes of which we know absolutely nothing? Universes presumed to follow completely different laws…and we don’t know what those laws are! Please. The concept of multiverses is not even tractable to science, which cannot operate except within a set of laws that make human life and consistent behavior of the physical world possible. Our science cannot reach into those universes at all unless they are identical to ours, or very closely similar. As discussed in fallacy #41 at Appendix 1, if we allow that our universe interacts with others, the laws of thermodynamics, which are a major cornerstone of science, must be considered invalid, for they assume our universe is a closed system. Ironically, if we were to allow that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics holds in open systems, then intelligent design is immediately proven because the 2nd Law says that order never increases by natural spontaneous processes in systems to which it applies. The multiverse hypothesis is not testable if we assume our universe does not interact with the others, and it is incompatible with our current theoretical base of natural laws if we assume that our universe does interact with others.
Ultimately, the hypothesis of multiverses does not get us past the old maxim of “Is the glass half empty or is it half full?” The concept of multiverses leaves us with an arbitrary choice of whether we wish to view the universe as accidental or designed. Even if all possibilities are realized in an infinite series of component universes, then God could actually create a highly complex design structure by way of a fully accidental process. All possibilities would be realized, including the astronomically improbable ones of complex functional design. This alternative could not be proved by science because we cannot go into universes with different laws or based upon full chaos to explore them and we would never be able to explore an infinite number of universes due to lack of time. Yet another reason multiverse is not testable. The multiverse theory is therefore mere philosophical speculation, not science at all. But the startling fact remains, that even this view of the universe does not rule God out. Nor does it defeat the intelligent design argument from probability theory and resource exhaustion, as its proponents would like us to believe. Even if there are as many universes as there are possibilities entailed by the alternative event sequences available in a random construction of something so complex as human life the improbability that our world would be the one where life was made by accident remains exactly the same as the probability life was created by accident in this single universe: well beyond the threshold of scientific credibility. Just because something could happen by accident doesn’t mean that the most reasonable position to take is that it did happen by accident. Yes, an infinite or nearly infinite number of universes, if they were randomly formed, would make it highly probable to the point of certainty that some one of those infinite universes would accidentally form life. But why should we assume that one would be ours? The odds against it would be well beyond the threshold of scientific credibility. The only way to establish that our world is that world is to first assume that random or accidental creation is the only option as the starting point of our analysis, but that merely begs the question, assuming the answer without proof before looking at the evidence.
The next thing to note about Davies comment that life will only emerge in life encouraging regions is that he merely states the obvious: if life exists the world it inhabits must be compatible with life. This does not advance the inquiry into why the world is as it is. To say that a world must be compatible with life for a question to be asked by a living being is not to invalidate the question. If this is so, all of our questions in science and philosophy are invalidated! To say that life (or any other event) can only occur under conditions conducive to its occurrence is not to prove the event in question accidental, but merely to state the obvious and the trivial. This statement applies to absolutely everything, including the products of intelligent design. It therefore does not establish that intelligent design is not the source of our world.
In my opinion, Davies too casually dismisses the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle says that the universe is biofriendly for the purpose of making life possible.[68] To refute the anthropic principle, neo-Darwinists and their occasional intellectual allies among eclectic searchers for the truth, such as Paul Davies, say that we could imagine a person waking up in an accidental universe where it must appear designed whether it is designed or not. Otherwise the person could not exist at all. This only implies the trivial, however: if a universe compossible with life could come about by accident, then the mere existence of intelligent beings who could note how finely tuned the world was for life would be insufficient to establish that the universe came about on purpose. This hypothetical proposition is unimportant because it fails to answer the core question of the intelligent design debate: “Could a universe compossible with life ever come about by accident?” The question is not “If a universe compossible with life did come about by accident, what would occur?” but “Could a universe compossible with life be achieved by accident in the first place?” Thus the IF, THEN argument that is implicit in the story of someone waking up in a world that appeared designed is merely a sneaky way to beg the question. We first have to assume that it is possible to accidentally make such a world as our own and the life forms it contains in order to proceed with the story. This approach doesn’t get us anywhere; it only restates the question and invites us to assume the answer before we begin to look at the evidence.
Davies’ argument here must therefore be deemed a non sequitur, a bad argument. Unless we first assume an infinite multiverse, it fails as a rebuttal of the intelligent design probability and resource exhaustion argument because there has not been sufficient time and physical resources in our universe’s history to create life by accident. The problem with assuming an infinite multiverse is that it is not a testable theory. It solves problems for philosophers, whose models don’t have to be tested, but it creates problems for scientists whose models must be testable to qualify as scientific.
Getting Smart about Chaos:
What Did Einstein Believe?
Why were the assumptions of chaos and accident made by neo-Darwinists in the 1970’s when the very father of the modern evolutionary synthesis, Theodosius Dobzhansky, was willing to admit the determinism of natural law as early as the 1950’s? Perhaps they merely reinvented the words “chaos” and “accident,” using them in some innocent technical sense, as modern Darwinists sometimes do. Admittedly, in referring to “random” mutations, they were referencing only the genetic processes, as opposed to the whole of physics.
Perhaps it was a technically more limited use, but to rule out purpose, which they clearly affirmed had been done, a truly chaotic process is necessary. After all, any mechanism, including all of the laws of physics and chemistry, could be the chosen instrument God or an intelligent designer uses to accomplish his purpose.
Perhaps Peters and Gutmann only intended that the events of genetic variation were “chaotic” but that the fundamental laws and event processes of physics generally were not. Nevertheless, in going further to deny purpose they clearly threw the authoritative weight of science behind a worldview of atheism, materialism, and meaningless accident.
Perhaps the evolutionary scientists of the ‘70’s fell victim to the same misconception that befell the public during the heyday of particle physics. From the ’50’s on through the ’70’s at times it seemed that new subatomic particles were being discovered every month (hundreds are now known).[69] In those days, there was a lot of talk about “indeterminacy,” “probabilistic behavior” and “uncertainty” and even “chaos” in the realm of elementary particles. Many mistakenly came to believe that these terms implied real chaos and truly random motion at the most fundamental levels of matter, when they only meant that at the fully insignificant level of a single minute particle, indeterminacy ruled, but the particles as a group were fully orderly and no surprises of any consequence were in store for the predictability of the macroscopic events of the universe. Only forty years later the public finds this out, when the damage to our previously God centered society has been done.
Once again, confused language, not scientific fact, has been at the heart of the materialist campaign against society’s belief in God. This leaves us with yet another tedious job of clarifying language that is both technical and heavily politicized, language chosen not to clarify understanding of the physical processes so much as to lead listeners and readers to the politically favored worldview of the materialist author.
There is a great deal of logic supporting Einstein. The elementary particles are clearly behaving in consistent orderly ways as a group because all of physics and observed natural processes reflect that order and consistency. Obviously, then, some constraint has been place upon quantum particles that can enable the generation of the consistent group behavior. This constraint holds them into parameters so precise as to foster the continuation of the finely tuned processes of the natural world without known exception in 15 billion years!
There are only two reasonable hypotheses to explain this, only two that are logically possible, in fact. Either, as Einstein predicted, a physical constraint will be discovered that explains why the "indeterminate" behavior of quantum particles consistently translates to the ordered laws of nature, or there is a nonphysical constraint that does the same job. So, either Einstein was correct and there is no chaos at the heart of physical processes at all, or materialism is refuted in affirming that a nonphysical constraint is imposed upon quantum particle behavior. One might call this Bohr's Dilemma: confirm Einstein or refute materialism.
I contend that scientific integrity obliges us to admit that casual determinacy still applies to quantum particles in a meaningful or common sense kind of way, even though we cannot at present say what the specific ordered constraints on particle behavior are. This is evidenced by the fact that we can predict the group behavior of elementary particles within the range of certain highly useful probabilities, that is, as well as we can predict absolutely anything else. Quantum systems are, in fact, orderly enough to reliably translate into the macroscopic events of everyday life described by Newtonian physics, which events are absolutely orderly and consistent. It is precisely because quantum particle events underlie everything else we see, which is orderly, that we can affirm quantum (group) particle behavior to be as orderly as well.
One might compare the statistically predictable behavior of quantum particles to water flowing out of the nozzle of a garden hose. Most of the force of the water is dead center, and therefore is predictable and useful to the gardener. Some of the water, however, is lost in a finer, seemingly chaotic, mist around the edges of the stream. These misty areas may seem random and chaotic, but the laws of physics tell us that if we were to examine each molecule of water from the beginning of the flow at the faucet unto the release of the water at the nozzle end of the hose, the behavior of each molecule, given sufficient information, could be predicted fully. The flow of the molecules is therefore not chaotic in the sense of uncaused or unconstrained to follow natural law. Just because all the molecules don’t visibly, to human inspection, fit the same pattern, does not mean that there is no pattern to the strays whatsoever.
Similarly, with subatomic particles, because we don't have full information about the "beginning of the stream," we can't say which particles will be dead center in the main stream of an event process and which out on the unpredictable fuzzy fringe, but we can say that most will be in the main stream, and therefore that physical events that build upon these small particles will proceed in an orderly way that is, in practice (though not in theory), fully predictable by science. Therefore, true chaos or full randomness, that is to say a genuinely accidental universe, is not implied by the theory of quantum physics.
Some writers seem to weave in and out between Einstein’s view and Bohr’s view when using the term ‘chaos’, perhaps because science has yet to decide between them. ‘Chaos’ is also applied to wholly different kinds of systems outside quantum mechanics and means something different there. The behavior of planetary systems and weather phenomena are typically given as examples of chaotic systems.
In the foregoing, we have asserted first that ours is a
strictly deterministic world and second that ours is mostly a chaotic world, an
interesting but perhaps confusing juxtaposition of assertions. Upon reflection,
a reader pondering whether determinism and chaos are contradictory terms will
surely welcome a definition of chaos more precise than that conveyed by the
vague words ‘erratic’, ‘irregular’, ‘disordered’, or ‘seemingly unpredictable’,
so commonly used in the current literature.[70]
He finally resolves the definition of chaos into a matter of high complexity, with the lack of full information about that complexity leading to unpredictability. Ford also notes that systems can be so complex that they are humanly indistinguishable from truly random systems, meaning that although they are governed by natural law, and orderly in that sense, we don’t have the slightest hope of ever sorting them out.
It is not lack of order in the physical systems underlying weather phenomena that makes weather "chaotic." Rather it is the fact that we have insufficient information about the impossibly numerous and minute variables involved to fully predict them. The unique circumstance in the case of quantum/particle physics is that some of the needed information is not merely yet to be discovered, but theoretically defined as being forever out of our reach. This is a big difference. Confusion and error should not be encouraged by using the same term for both.
To be consistent, since orderly patterns are discernable in quantum systems (natural law) and an even more fundamental level of matter/energy has been posited that might conceivably explain their behavior (causation), that is, superstrings, science should admit that the common sense notions of causation and natural law are likely to ultimately be shown to hold as firmly in the realm of quantum physics as much as anywhere else, despite our significant deficit in information concerning a complete description of “chaotic systems,” or the uncertainty principle and general mystery that precludes our explaining why an individual particle behaves the way it does. The public’s understanding of this matter, however, seems to have been occasionally misguided to a somewhat different view.
An example is the interesting 1991 video “Mind and Matter” about the search by Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli and psychologist Carl Jung for a link between mind and matter, the statement is made that quantum physics is a radical departure from causality itself.[71] This is by far an overstatement, although Bohrist physicists may believe it to be true. Because a cause has yet to be found does not mean there is no cause. Therefore, the departure may well be only a temporary one. But even at that, it is not a full or far departure because the correspondence principle of Niels Bohr says quantum events translate effectively to the visible events of Newtonian mechanics.
From the brief unclarified language in the “Mind and Matter” film, the typical viewer may well conclude that the world is fully accidental or truly chaotic. They could be led to believe that because causality has here been said not to govern at the most fundamental levels of matter, causality itself is an illusion, that the world is merely an accidental flash in the chaotic pan and therefore could not be the purposeful creation of God.
In “Mind and Matter” Pauli’s last assistant, Professor Charles Enz, compares the behavior of subatomic particles to the situation of a roulette wheel without further explanation. Technically, he is correct. The absence of the minutia of physical data needed for a full description of the initial state of the wheel, ball, toss and environmental variables is the only reason one cannot predict the outcome in the spin of a roulette wheel. There is therefore nothing truly chaotic about the result in roulette. Unfortunately, not all laymen understand this either. When people here “roulette wheel” they may assume the elementary phenomena underlying the physical world are truly chaotic in the strict sense because roulette to them is a game of chance.
To make matters worse the film claims that atomic particles do not follow inviolable laws, suggesting to the casual listener that subatomic particles are not governed by natural law at all, which, again, might imply true chaos. But statistical laws or probabilistic laws do hold in quantum physics, laws as firm as actual stencils or patterned filters that ensure standardized results in natural processes.
The coup de grace of conceptual confusion comes when Enz says that the revolution sparked by quantum mechanics has caused the final separation of science and religion and made God superfluous. The separation of science and religion had long been underway, and though the division is entirely proper at the level of applied science, the conclusion that God (or intelligent design) is superfluous to explanation at the purely theoretical level is not grounded in fact and logic, or even precedent.
We don't deny intelligent design and order in the plumbing of our home simply because the individual water molecules are randomly straining in all directions to get out of the pipes. Given the startling order in nature as a whole, the apparently random behavior of individual quantum particles poses no greater evidence against God and intelligent design. The stencils of the natural world, in fact, have created such majestic designs as to go far beyond clear evidence of intelligence, animal life and the astronomical systems of the cosmos being the premier cases in point. The mere fact of these stencils being in place to constrain quantum particles to highly ordered results shows Einstein to have been correct in his dispute with Bohr. Bohr wittily responded that who was Einstein to tell God what to do. But, of course, that response was unfair because Einstein was merely saying that we can observe the "water" to be fully constrained inside the pipes, and the plumbing is beyond fully functional, it is magnificent!
Although, with Einstein, we can confidently say that many stencils are in place sufficient to constructively harness any chaotic elements, we cannot yet fully say that the stencil of natural law is sufficient to explain all the ordered results we see. NASA scientists acknowledge that we cannot fully explain the origin of ordered cosmological structure. Dr. Stephen Meyer echoes this limitation in his refutation of structuralism in saying that the information form and content of natural law has in no way been shown to be sufficient to entail the majestic designs of biology.
If further research suggests that the order achieved in the cosmos is more extensive than the "stencils" of natural law can explain it will constitute a scientific argument against materialism itself. In other words, in such an event, at least some of the stencils that impose the order onto the chaos of individual quantum particles will have been shown to have been nonphysical. In Chaos and Harmony, Professor Thaun says that the inability of science to explain the eloquent and beautiful way nature has harmonized the chaotic elements by reference to purely physical constructs reveals that materialism has failed as a system of scientific explanation. In acknowledging that a scientific case can, even in principle, be made against materialism, Thaun is well ahead of his time. Other first rate thinkers have been breaking the same ground. Noted philosophers of religion William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland make a cogent case against naturalism in their 2000 vintage offering, Naturalism: A Critical Analysis.[72]
Despite such (nearly heroic) attempts at clarity and understanding, over dramatized claims about the failure of causality and prediction at the most fundamental levels of matter have long been made and continue to be made in the media, sometimes from authoritative scientific sources. The wording in these discussions is often technically correct, but nonetheless highly misleading. First time exposures of this kind to quantum physics for laymen and others who are only casual students of the subject will likely result in their coming away with the mistaken conclusion that the world is accidental or truly chaotic. Since such cursory overviews are of no real value to experts, their sole effect is to add to the confusion and misunderstanding of the subject in the laity.
Perhaps we, the public, just got it wrong when the revelations of quantum mechanics and particle physics first came to light decades ago, and no political deception was intended in the evolutionary summary of Peters and Gutmann. If so, we shouldn’t feel too badly. A recent discussion in Physics Today reveals that the physicists are still debating the correct understanding of quantum theory. There were undeniably some in the scientific community who truly felt quantum events had no ties to causality or natural law in any significant sense (some apparently still do). But such a position is indefensible because it destroys the bridge between the observable events of Newtonian mechanics and the underlying foundation of quantum/particle physics, causing order to come from disorder in a completely inexplicable mystery before our very eyes each day. To my mind, such an event scenario rather more suggests the need for God in explanation than makes him superfluous.
Joseph Ford explains that the strict definition of a chaotic system is that the system description includes or entails no constituent or component patterns whatsoever. It is safe to conclude that there is no order within such a system, and the system can generate no ordered result. If quantum events were strictly chaotic in this sense, the bridge from elementary particles to the observable events of classical physics (the correspondence principle of Niels Bohr) would fail. We would be left with both a mystery and a contradiction where the fundamental constituents of physical events were held to be incapable of producing those same events. Obviously a fully chaotic system will never correspond to a highly ordered one.
Since no one is prepared to throw out classical physics and most of our useful science along with it, it is safe to say that modern physics has not adopted a view of the underlying processes of quantum physics as being chaotic in the strict sense. Enough order is assumed present in quantum events such that when passed across the correspondence principle bridge to the observable events of everyday life via probabilistic laws, the visible world we encounter will be coherent and orderly enough to permit science to publish its laws and make consistently successful predictions.
Although Chaos Theory remains a branch of modern physics, most of science has never subscribed to a truly chaotic process at the foundation of physical events. Rather, they have used the word “chaos,” and still do, in a technical way to identify systems that behave erratically in the sense of being hypersensitive to minute changes,[73] and unpredictable in the aforementioned sense of insufficient information being available to describe their originating states. The Bohrists, of course, feel that the input side of quantum particle behavior is chaotic (that is, that there is no input, the particles are, in their view, genuinely spontaneous and without bias to ordered behavior), while, inexplicably, maintaining that the output side of quantum particle behavior is not chaotic but reliably underwrites our entire physical universe.
In any case, we now have a theory of quantum/particle physics that purports to reveal “chaos” at the foundation of all things, but when pressed the physicists admit that probabilistic natural laws do govern quantum events making them statistically orderly enough to provide a foundation for all of the observable physical events that conform so nicely to the classical laws of nature. When pressed—herein lies the problem in objectively informing the public’s worldview. Everyone hears the misleading press releases, news bites and public documentaries: they hear the word ‘chaos’. However, hardly anyone hears the corrections and clarifications that are offered only “when pressed” in the more technical venues of the evolution and cosmology debates that admit the complete and reliable orderliness of the quantum particles’ group behavior. Thus, just as with evolution, misconceptions have come to abound in the public consciousness on the issue of an accidental universe that are fully unjustified by scientific fact.
To avoid acknowledging Bohr’s Dilemma, as science has heretofore done, is to forsake explanation entirely by, in effect, saying, that's just the way it is: the particles are truly chaotic but their group behavior is consistent and orderly and we have no idea of how to get from one to the other and really don’t care. This is epistemologically no better than a resort to magic or superstition as it involves an outright contradiction. If every component of a machine behaves chaotically, the behavior of the machine must be similarly chaotic.
Here Einstein is saying that, when a more fundamental
level of explanation underlying quantum mechanics is later achieved, the laws
then seen to apply will not be merely statistical but universal. There would be
no exceptions, no aberrant particles that refuse to “play ball” or behave
erratically as some now do in quantum mechanics. Thus, we will know it when we
hit true bottom in the vertical structure of matter because everything will be
explained and there will be no loose ends. Thus Einstein and the many noted
scientists who even today continue the search for a more fundamental unifying
theory in physics do not share the quantum chaos theorists view that no causal
explanation of quantum behavior will be found, or that quantum behavior will
turn out to be chaotic even in a technical sense.