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Maynard’s overlong rant about Big Questions

What’s this about Stephen Hawking denying God? I guess maybe Maynard ought to step in and settle this issue. No, scratch that. Never mind what I ought do. I want to say something religious. It’s just that there’s a lot of social pressure these days stand silent on such topics. Unless you’re mocking them or evincing a false piety, of course. I feel more than a little awkward touching on the subject with serious intent.

Well, never mind my hesitation. I’m putting on my professional hat. In this discussion, my role is clinician rather than evangelist. Dammit, I matriculated at Starfleet Academy, and I’m qualified to offer my technical comments about the existence or nonexistence of a Creator. If you don’t respect the man (me, that is), then respect the sheepskin. As the wise woman once said, it’s just a thing, I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it.

On second thought, ignore my so-called qualifications. I’m sick of elite snobs pulling rank. I’m going to lay out a technical discussion with some hope of being broadly understood by mortals. The goal is to prove the existence of God. And to do it without getting touchy-feely. (This is not to suggest there’s anything wrong with a touchy-feely approach, which is widely favored. But that’s just not the way we do things at the Academy.)

We begin with the observation of our own existence. This was also the starting point of Descartes: “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”).

We could end on that same question, because our own existence is the only thing we really know for sure. But going down the path of solipsism would make for a very short post, so I’m going to assume that the input of our senses is real rather than some sort of dream or Matrix-like simulation. I’m going to furthermore assume that the other players in our intertwined dramas are also real. Note that these assumptions cannot be tested; it’s just that we can’t prove them to be false. Thus we’re going to move beyond Me for just a moment.

You notice we’ve already strayed into the realm of Faith, and we haven’t even touched on God yet. Even the atheist walks in faith. Unless he’s a solipsist. (Now that I think of it, solipsism is a focused sort of narcissism. There simply isn’t enough room in the universe for both the narcissist and God.)

If we accept the world as being real, then it’s not a great leap to believe in science. That is to say, the universe is governed by consistent physical laws. Again, we can’t prove this, but the assumption seems reasonable. (I guess I should mention that it’s been recently suggested that basic physical laws seem to be changing, albeit slightly, across the universe. If this pans out, it will throw science for a loop. But I’m going to ignore this little diversion.)

Okay, let’s touch on some fundamental science. Isaac Newton laid out the basic laws of motion in 1687. His very first law was this:

A physical body will remain at rest, or continue to move at a constant velocity along a straight path, unless an external net force acts upon it.

Newton is observing that every effect has a cause. This simple statement has grand philosophical implications.

Specifically, a cause-and-effect universe is a clockwork universe. That is to say, every physical event is directly caused by some previous physical event. The universe should thus be viewed as an enormous mechanism, moving endlessly forward through its inexorable motions. Cause, effect, cause, effect, ad infinitum. The entire course of the future was determined from the very beginning of space and time.

In other words, Newtonians believed in determinism. This was not a matter of opinion or philosophy; it was (under the laws of science as they were understood) a provable fact.

Now we get back to Me (or, in your case, to You). Me (or You) inhabits a physical body which is subject to physical laws, just like everything else in the universe. We are therefore merely complicated collections of reactions to complicated collections of causes. We are part of the deterministic clockwork universe.

We are automatons. We do not have free will, and any perception to the contrary is illusory. We do not make choices.

Do you see the materialistic problem with free will? Free will is, scientifically speaking, an effect without a cause. Science cannot account for free will.

I’m still speaking from within the framework of Newtonian physics, which is no longer the final word on the matter. As we moved into the twentieth century, quantum mechanics (that is, the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles) was discovered. You know, electrons, protons, neutrons; that sort of stuff.

The weird thing about subatomic particles is they don’t behave as you would intuitively expect. The difference between particles and “big stuff” is like the difference between a ghost and a man. The particles are indeed weirdly ghost-like…they may be in two places at once, they may appear here or there or anywhere, governed only by statistical probability rather than by cause-and-effect. An electron, for example, isn’t like a little ping pong ball; it exists as a probability wave, impacting the universe by the probability of its placement here or there or wherever it might possibly be.

Again, the foregoing may sound like magic or nonsense or the supernatural, but it’s true. To study quantum physics, you have to throw away what you think you know and wrap your head around a paradigm that defies intuition. It’s a bit like accepting that the world is round, which you know is true even though your commonsense existence would have you believe the world is flat.

It took scientists a long time to accept how weird the world of particles was. They simply couldn’t believe the results of their experiments. Even Einstein didn’t accept it at first. (Einstein’s comment, which turned out to be wrong: “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘old one’. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” It would seem Einstein was a determinist.)

The philosophical importance of quantum mechanics is that it destroyed the model of the universe as a deterministic machine. Cause-and-effect is the dominant force with respect to big stuff. But at its foundation, reality is unpredictable.

If the building blocks of the universe are ghostly, then how can the universe itself be in any way reliable? That question is answered by statistics. Subatomic particles are governed by laws of probability. To cite a real-world example… On a school day, it’s very unlikely that all the children are in their classes. Certainly a few are absent or not in place for any of countless reason. But school proceeds because, on the whole, a reliable percentage of children will be in their classes. On the whole, the school is a predictable place, even though the individual children may wander from their designated orbits. This illustrates how the big stuff — collections of large numbers of particles — are predictable, whereas individual particles are mysterious.

Have I lost you? This is a good moment to pause and make sure we’re clear on why I’m talking about physics. Physics is the discovery of natural law, right? And those of us that don’t live in The Matrix accept that natural law is real. Materialism is tangible. We can prove it. As opposed to God, which is something that would seem to be intangible, or at least at a high enough level of abstraction so as to be less tangible than, for example, your keyboard.

So we’ve been reviewing the building blocks of materialism and also contemplating the human creature, as exemplified by ourselves. And the question to answer is: Can the human condition, as we observe and experience it, be completely explained by natural law? Can we get from the material foundation (subatomic particles and/or waves) to the pinnacle of Creation (Mankind)?

There are two possibilities. Either our lives can be completely explained by nature (with the understanding that not all of nature is known to us, but we can nevertheless reasonably speculate about the parameters of any shadowy bits), or our lives cannot be completely explained by nature (meaning that we have solid reason to believe that nature, known or unknown, cannot completely explain life). In the former case, God would perhaps be (as has been famously suggested by the French mathematician Laplace) an “unnecessary hypothesis”. But in the latter case, if we are not 100% natural — even if we’re fully 99.44% natural and only a tiny smidgen of our existence defies natural law — then there is necessarily a supernatural aspect to our existence.

So what is it that makes Man as we observe him? Is it nature alone, or is it nature plus a dash of (to coin a word) supernature?

I will make a couple of critical technical assertions, which are the summary of what I’ve said here. Nature cannot account for:

• Human consciousness — Consciousness is a complete mystery, and is undetectable and unmeasurable by any equipment, either existing or anticipated, nor can it be artificially reproduced. (We can detect brain activity, but that merely reveals electrical discharge, rather than the phenomenon of consciousness itself. We could likewise monitor electrical activity within a CPU chip, which would reveal whether the computer is on or off, but says nothing about its (presumably absent) state of consciousness.) As I said, we have no way of even knowing whether other people are conscious; it’s all just an assumption. If we should ever build a machine that we think might be conscious, there is no way we can know whether this is in fact the case. We apparently observe that consciousness is attached to a complex neurological system, but we have no idea why this should be. Why should atoms “come awake” when arranged in a complex configuration?
• Free will — Physical law allows for cause-and-effect, and for quantum uncertainty. Physical law cannot account for free will, which would constitute an effect with neither causal nor statistical governance. To assert that human free will exists is to assert a supernatural force.

Some atheists with technical savvy acknowledge the foregoing. Such people will tell you that free will is an illusion and consciousness a mystery.

Thus I have made two fundamental assertions here:

• The human characteristics that we subjectively observe are, in part, of mysterious origin and/or a contradiction of natural law. This indicates a supernatural element that is a component in the human equation.
• By acknowledging the reality of his fellow humans, even the atheist is expressing his faith in a thing unproved and unprovable.

So I’ve asserted physical evidence of a supernatural force; that is, a force which transcends the material world. At this point I can use the word “God”, perhaps in its vaguest sense.

I’d like to go on and try to connect this transcendental force to the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And I also have some odd theories about the mechanical interactions between the soul and the body. But this post is already far too long, so we must end here and withhold further enlightenment for another day.

Oh, and as a final note, feel free to take issue with any of the foregoing. I have no need to compel agreement on such abstractions. I just lay out the chain of reasoning that makes sense to me, and you can follow along to the same conclusion or you can decide I’ve gone off the rails. The question isn’t who is right but what is right. Together we shall figure all this out, time permitting.