Knocking on Heaven's Door (11 page)

PHYSICAL CORRELATES

The intrinsic problem is that the contradictions between science and religion run deeper than any specific words or phrasing. Even without worrying about a literal interpretation of any particular text, religion and science rely on incompatible logical tenets when we consider that religion addresses issues in our world and existence through the intervention of an external deity. Divine actions—whether applied to mountains or your conscience—don’t happen within the framework of science.

The crucial contrast is between religion as a social or psychological experience and religion that is based on a God who actively influences us or our world through external intervention. After all, religion is a purely personal enterprise for some. Those who feel this way might relish the social connections that come from being part of a like-minded religious organization or the psychological benefits that come from viewing themselves in the context of a larger world. Faith for people in this category has to do with its practice and the way they choose to live their lives. It is a source of comfort, with a shared set of goals.

Many such people regard themselves as spiritual. Religion enhances their existence—it provides context, meaning, and purpose, as well as a sense of community. They don’t see religion’s role as explaining the mechanics of the universe. Religion addresses their personal sense of awe and wonder, and it might help in their interactions with others and the world. Many such people would argue that religion and science can perfectly readily coexist.

But religion is usually more than a way of life or a philosophy. Most religions involve a deity who can intervene in mysterious ways that go beyond what people can describe or science involve. Such a belief, even for more open-minded religious people who welcome scientific advances, inevitably introduces a quandary about how to reconcile such activity with the dictates of science. Even allowing for a God or some spiritual force that might have exerted influence earlier on as a prime mover, it is inconceivable from a scientific perspective that God could continue to intervene without introducing some material trace of his actions.

To understand the conflict—and better appreciate the nature of science—we need to more fully understand science’s materialist viewpoint, which tells us that science applies to a material universe and that active influences have physical correlates. Built into the scientific view is the idea—introduced in Chapter 1—that we can identify the components of matter at each level of structure. What exists at larger scales is built from material at smaller scales. Even though we can’t necessarily explain everything about bigger scales by knowing all the underlying physical elements, those components are nonetheless essential. The material makeup of phenomena that interest us won’t always suffice to explain them, but the physical correlates are instrumental to their existence.

Some people turn to religion to answer difficult questions that they don’t think science will ever get to. Indeed, the materialist scientific view doesn’t mean we are guaranteed to understand everything—certainly not by simply understanding just the basic components. In dividing the universe by scales, scientists recognize that we are unlikely to answer all questions at once and that even though fundamental structure might be essential, it won’t necessarily answer all our questions directly. Even when we know quantum mechanics, we still use Newton’s laws since they tell us how a ball travels through the Earth’s gravitational field in a way that would be very difficult to derive from an atomic picture. The ball needs atoms to exist, but the atomic picture doesn’t help explain the ball’s trajectory, though it is of course compatible with it.

This lesson generalizes to many phenomena we all encounter in our daily lives. We can often ignore underlying details or composition, even though the material is essential. We don’t need to know the inner workings of a car in order to drive it. When we cook food, we evaluate if fish is flaky, if the center of a cake is dry, if oatmeal is mushy, or if a soufflé has risen. But unless we practice molecular gastronomy, we rarely pay attention to the buried atomic structure responsible for these changes. However, that doesn’t change the fact that food without substance is not very satisfying. The ingredients in a soufflé look nothing like the final product (see Figure 12). Nonetheless, the constituents and molecules in your food that you are happy to ignore are essential to its existence.

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FIGURE 12
]
A soufflé is very different from the ingredients that comprise it. In a similar manner, matter might have very different properties—or even appear to obey very different physical laws—from the more fundamental matter of which it is composed.

Similarly, anyone would be hard-pressed to say decisively what music is. But any attempt to describe the phenomenon and our emotional response to it would almost certainly involve viewing music on a level apart from atoms or neurons. Even though we apprehend music when our ears register the sound waves produced by a particularly well-tuned instrument, music is much more than the individual oscillating atoms of air that generate the sound or the physical response of our ears and our brains.

Yet the materialist view still stands, and the substrate is essential. Music arises from those molecules of air. Get rid of the ear’s mechanical response to material phenomena and you have no more music. (And in space no one will hear you scream.) It’s just that somehow our perception and understanding of music goes beyond that materialistic description. Questions about how we as human beings perceive music won’t be addressed if we simply focus on oscillating molecules. Understanding music involves weighing chords and harmonies and lack of harmony in ways that never mention molecules or oscillations. But music nonetheless requires those oscillations, or at least the sensory impression they leave in our brains.

Similarly, understanding an animal’s basic components is only one step to understanding the processes that make up life. We almost certainly won’t understand everything without a better knowledge of how those components aggregate to produce the phenomena with which we are familiar. Life is an
emergent phenomenon
that goes beyond the basic ingredients.

Most likely consciousness will also turn out to be in this category. Though we don’t have a comprehensive theory of consciousness, thoughts and feelings are ultimately rooted in electrical, chemical, and physical properties of the brain. Scientists can observe material mechanistic phenomena in the brain associated with thoughts and feelings, even if they can’t put it together to see how it works. This material view is essential but not necessarily sufficient for understanding all the phenomena in our world.

We aren’t guaranteed to understand consciousness in terms of the most fundamental units, but we might ultimately figure out principles that apply on some larger, more composite or emergent scale. With future scientific advances, scientists will better understand the fundamental chemistry and electrical channels of the brain and thereby understand the basic functioning units. Consciousness will probably be explained as a phenomenon that scientists will only fully understand by identifying and studying the correct composite pieces.

This means that not only neuroscientists, who study basic brain chemistry, stand a shot at making progress. Developmental psychologists, who ask how a baby’s thought process differs from our own,
²⁰
or others who might ask how human thought differs from that of a dog, stand a good chance of making progress as well. Just as music is not one thing but has many levels and many layers, my guess is that so too is consciousness. And by asking questions at a larger level we might gain insights both about consciousness itself and about what are the right questions to ask when we do go ahead and study the building blocks—namely, the chemistry and physics of the brain. As with a lovely soufflé we will have to understand emergent systems that arise as well. Nonetheless, no human thought or action will occur without affecting some physical component of our body.

Though perhaps less mysterious than the theory of consciousness, physics advances by studying phenomena on various scales. Physicists ask different questions when studying disparate sizes and different aggregates. The questions we ask about sending a spaceship to Mars are very different from the questions we ask about how quarks interact. Both are legitimate questions to study, but we won’t readily extrapolate one from the other. Nonetheless, the matter that gets sent out into space is made up of the fundamental components that we ultimately hope to understand.

I’ve occasionally heard people mock as reductionist the materialist view that particle physicists employ and point out all the phenomena we won’t—or don’t—address. Sometimes these are physical or biological processes such as brain function or hurricanes, and sometimes they are spiritual phenomena—where I in turn become a little perplexed about what people mean, but which I would have to agree we never address. Physical theories address structure from the largest to the smallest scales that we can hypothesize about or study with experiments. Over time, we build a consistent picture of how one layer of reality proceeds from the next. The basic elements are essential to reality, but good scientists don’t assert that knowledge of them in itself explains everything. Explanations call for further research.

Even if string theory turns out to explain quantum gravity, the “theory of everything” will remain a horrible misnomer. In the unlikely event that physicists arrive at such an all-embracing fundamental theory, we would still have to face lots of questions about phenomena on larger scales that won’t be answered simply by knowing the basic components. Only when scientists understand collective phenomena that arise on larger scales than those described by elementary strings will we hope to explain superconducting materials, monster waves in the ocean, and life. In the process of doing science, we’ll address phenomena scale by scale. We will investigate objects and processes at larger distance scales than we would ever be able to handle if we tried to keep track of each component.

Though we focus on different layers of reality to address different questions, the materialist view is nonetheless essential. Physics and other sciences rely on studying the matter that exists in the world. Science at its core relies on objects interacting through mechanical causes and their effects. Something moves because a force acted on it. An engine functions through its consumption of energy. Planets orbit the Sun through its gravitational influence. According to a scientific perspective, human behavior too ultimately requires chemical and physical processes, even if we are still far from understanding how this works. Our moral choices must also ultimately relate at least in part to our genes and hence our evolutionary history. The physical makeup plays a role in our actions.

We might not address all the vital questions at once, but the underlying substrate is always necessary to a scientific description. For a scientist, material mechanistic elements underlie the description of reality. The associated physical correlates are essential to any phenomenon in the world. Even if not sufficient to explain everything, they are required.

This materialist viewpoint works well for science. But it inevitably leads to logical conflicts when religion invokes a God or some other external entity to explain how people or the world behave. The problem is that in order to subscribe both to science and to a God—or any external spirit—who controls the universe or human activity, one has to address the question of at what point does the deity intervene and how does He do it. According to the materialist, mechanistic point of view of science, if genes that influence our behavior are a result of random mutations that allowed a species to evolve, God can be responsible for our behavior only if He physically intervened by producing that apparently random mutation. To guide our activities today, God had to influence the ostensibly random mutation that was critical to our development. If He did, how did He do that? Did He apply a force or transfer energy? Is God manipulating electrical processes in our brains? Is He pushing us to act in a certain way or creating a thunderstorm for any particular individual so he or she can’t get to their destination? On a larger level, if God gives purpose to the universe, how does He apply His will?

The problem is that not only does much of this seem silly, but that these questions seem to have no sensible answer that is consistent with science as we understand it. How could this “God magic” possibly work?

Clearly people who want to believe that God can intervene to help them or alter the world at some point have to invoke nonscientific thinking. Even if science doesn’t necessarily tell us why things happen, we do know how things move and interact. If God has no physical influence, things won’t move. Even our thoughts, which ultimately rely on electrical signals moving in our brains, won’t be affected.

If such external influences are intrinsic to religion, then logic and scientific thought dictate that there must be a mechanism by which this influence is transmitted. A religious or spiritual belief that involves an invisible undetectable force that nonetheless influences human actions and behavior or that of the world itself produces a situation in which a believer has no choice but to have faith and abandon logic—or simply not care.