Physics / Philosophy / Spirituality
Of Science, Gods & Consciousness
Moving Beyond Simplistic False Dichotomies
Recently someone I follow on Twitter, an academic scientist, “came out” on social media as an atheist. Her announcement carried a dramatic tone, as if this revelation is something over which she has agonized for some time. Of course, the Tweet was celebrated by fellow atheists as the obvious sensible choice, while professed religious fundamentalists either insulted her, foretold her eternal damnation by an angry God, or promised that they’d pray for her.
All rather predictable, isn’t it? Boring, even. Our social media culture wars are nothing these days if not well-rehearsed and repeated ad nauseam.
Atheism As the Modern, Smart Default Position?
A public profession of atheism isn’t the shocking or revolutionary act that it once was. An atheist/agnostic stance has become the lazy default position for many well-educated people in western democratic nations over the last decade or more. Heck, I was reading and quoting Bertrand Russell on atheism when I was in middle school in the NYC metro area in 1975, and nobody tried to burn me at the stake. Since that time, “New Atheism” authors like Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett and Sam Harris have provided significant intellectual heft and cachet to a thoroughly materialistic worldview that seems to have no need or role for gods or design in it.
And there’s sadly never a shortage of stories of religious fanatics doing bigoted, violent, hypocritically corrupt or just insane things. Such examples (in stark contrast, say, to a Gandhi or Martin Luther King) seem to only drive many educated folks further away from any form of theism.
So atheism — and a purely materialist view of the universe and of the emergence of life and of consciousness — has, for many, become the thinking person’s metaphysics. Intelligent young people are led to believe that they must choose between science and spirituality, between facts and ancient superstitious dogma. But are things really so simple?
Scientifically Informed Challenges to Naive Materialism
For me, the intellectually interesting task isn’t simply to reject the most easily caricatured, simple-minded variants of ancient tribal mythologies — such as Young Earth Creationism. Rather, it is to wrestle with the actually intelligent challenges to naïve materialism posed by recent findings and speculations from the sciences themselves, and from intellectually respectable corners of philosophy.
I’ll touch on just a few of these challenges in this essay, in hope of deeper exploration in subsequent articles. Interested readers may also enjoy some of the cited references.
Biocentrism
In their Biocentrism books, noted biologist Robert Lanza, MD and astronomer Robert Berman carefully lay out a number of experimental results, observations and arguments that tend to undermine the assumption — underlying classical physics and most 19th and 20th Century science — that our world has an objective, observer-independent existence. Combining scientific observations with human interest reflections on life, love and death, the Biocentrism authors organized their arguments around seven Principles:
(I’m shortening and paraphrasing a lot here….)
- Their Second and Third principles state that “our external and internal perceptions are intertwined” and that the behavior of particles “is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer”.
- The Fourth principle suggests that consciousness must exist and that without it “matter dwells in an undetermined state of probability.” These principles are derived largely from the bizarre results of quantum mechanics (QM) experiments and some of the “spooky” (Einstein’s term) interpretations required to make sense of them.
- Lanza’s and Berman’s Fifth Principle points to the structure of the universe itself, suggesting that the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be fine-tuned for the eventual appearance and support of life.
Of course, dedicated Materialists will have an answer for each of these conundrums. The responses range from denial (“Shut up and calculate!”) to the Multiverse and the Anthropic Principles (“Our universe seems fine-tuned for life because we wouldn’t be here to observe it if it weren’t” — an interesting implicit use of posterior probabilities and Bayesian reasoning).
The Multiverse idea is championed by atheists/materialists because it is presumed to be a more parsimonious explanation for the obvious observed fine-tuning than the idea of a god or of consciousness playing a role; a better fit for Occam’s Razor. But is it, though? As theories go, it’s rather baroque— an infinity of universes! And it appears unfalsifiable, untestable, at least with any currently envisioned methods. And even if we assume it’s true, it begs the next question of where did this universe of universes come from…..
I cite Biocentrism as a jumping off point for this discussion because those authors collect several threads together in a fairly coherent way; but they are far from alone in noticing these modern challenges to classical Materialist assumptions.
Wheeler’s Physics and the Role of the Observer
For example, John Archibald Wheeler was a serious physicist who worked with the likes of Bohr, Feynman and Kip Thorne and as part of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. To the Weak and Strong Anthropic Principles, Wheeler added his Participatory Anthropic Principle. Based in part on his famous “Delayed Choice” QM experiments, Wheeler posited a critical role for the Observer not just in measuring, but in creating the specific outcomes of quantum wave function collapse.
As Wheeler put it,
“We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what’s happening in the distant past why should we need more?”
Now this is not exactly an endorsement of the concept of the bearded old man in the sky who punishes us for eating the wrong seafood. But it is arguably a rejection of a naïve materialism that presumes a universe unfolding like Newtonian clockwork independent of life and consciousness.
Moving Beyond the “Dumb Universe” Concept
But how did we arrive at this religion vs. materialism impasse in the first place? I believe that our basic mental conception of the universe subtly influences what kinds of theory and evidence we seek out and accept about it. Western philosophy and science (in contrast to several Eastern traditions) have somehow been stuck for millennia with a Dumb-as-a-Rock universe conception that seems to force a simplistic (and, I would argue false,) dichotomy:
On one side are the traditional theists who claim that there must be a Sky Dude to create this dumb universe and move things around so that planets, life and Netflix eventually appear. On the other side are the atheists who insist that this dumb universe is perfectly capable of accomplishing all of that by “chance” alone.
More compelling to me is the idea of a universe somehow infused with “intelligence” of some sort; or at least enfolded with creative processes of exactly the type that Dawkins and other scientists study when they research complex systems, self-organization, evolutionary computation, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics and such. It is not at all clear to me — nor is it a requirement for good science to assume — that a universe bursting with such emergent, complexity-generating, life-giving processes is doing it utterly without any underlying intelligence or connection to conscious observers.
Consciousness — More Than Just Neural Processing?
And, on the subject of consciousness, Australian philosopher David Chalmers makes a strong case for it as a fundamental component of reality. He argues persuasively that mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems. It is not enough, say Chalmers and other modern dualists, to point to mere correlations of neural activity (say from fMRI readings) with cognitive states; a critical explanatory gap persists between the objective observations and the very subjective experience of perception, thought and consciousness. The broad subject of consciousness — what it is, what it means and how it arises — remains a very active area of multidisciplinary research and debate.
Is there more to consciousness than the physicalist explanations of brain structure and activity? Does it play a role in shaping physical outcomes, at the quantum level or otherwise? Is there an intelligence that predates and/or infuses our observable material universe?
God & Spirit: Is there a Signal Amidst the Noise of Religious Nonsense?
My take, for what it’s worth: Finding the truth here is like the signal vs. noise problem in interpreting telecommunications transmissions. It’s clear that much religion is “noise” — the folktales, poems and tribal taboos of ancient pre-scientific peoples as translated and re-interpreted through centuries of cultural and political baggage. So while religious folks claim that their favorite chosen myth is the true “signal”, atheists see all the obvious noise and claim that therefore there is no underlying signal at all. I am not convinced.
None of us has a monopoly on truth or wisdom. None of us can “prove” our chosen metaphysical beliefs as if they are mathematical theorems. (Though, Lanza and colleagues are now publishing testable biocentric hypotheses and will follow up this year with numerical simulation experiments on huge compute clusters). But I am suggesting that there is a vast, intellectually fertile middle ground between hardcore atheistic materialism on the one extreme and dogmatic religion on the other. Indeed, as science (especially neuroscience, cosmology and quantum physics) push into areas traditionally reserved for religion and philsophy, so too are there theistic and agnostic viewpoints less inimical to reason and to human scientific and social progress, including Process Theism. This middle ground isn’t the easiest or most popular place to be — you’ll attract more Followers and “Likes” by screaming “Read your Bible!” or “Belief in God is stupid!” But I find it to be the more interesting space.
I look forward to exploring that space together.
(Article updated January 8, 2021)
