God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (34 page)

Alcock's article also has a nice summary of five other well-publicized claims of psychic effects, beginning with the work of the famous Duke University researcher Joseph Banks Rhine, who coined the term “ESP.” In a 1934 book titled
Extra-Sensory Perception
, Rhine wrote: “It is independently established that on the basis of [Rhine's card-guessing experiments] alone that Extra-Sensory Perception is an actual and demonstrable occurrence.”
⁶⁸
Alcock notes, “Methodological problems with [Rhine's] experiments eventually came to light, and as a result, parapsychologists no longer run card-guessing studies and rarely even refer to Rhine's work.”
⁶⁹

Despite a century and a half of failure to demonstrate the existence of psi in the laboratory, a huge literature exists claiming scientific evidence for special powers of the mind that at least hint at something beyond matter that is accessible to humans. This literature suffers from many problems. Much of it is anecdotal, and thus virtually useless scientifically, since we have no way of checking the veracity of such testimony. Only carefully controlled experiments
that provide
risky
empirical tests will convince the scientific skeptics, and until the skeptics are convinced, the hypothesis will remain unproven. Despite the common charge, skeptics in science are not dogmatic. As mentioned several times, they will readily follow where the evidence leads. They always have.

While paranormal studies often involve controlled experiments, few meet the stringent standards found in the basic sciences. For example, positive effects are often claimed at such a low level of statistical significance that a simple statistical fluctuation would reproduce the observation as often as once every 20 times the experiment is repeated (
p-value
= 0.05).
⁷⁰
In this case, one must accept the more parsimonious explanation that the effect was a statistical artifact rather than the occurrence of a miracle. While this low standard is often used in biomedical research, such a weak criterion is unacceptable in those sciences that deal with extraordinary phenomena. In physics, a claimed new effect is not considered too seriously until it is shown that it would not be reproduced as a statistical artifact once in 10,000 cases, (
p
= 0.0001). While we can sympathize with the pressure on medical researchers to publish any promising therapy that might save lives, these researchers would do better and avoid useless effort and the numerous false reports that appear in medical literature by setting their limit to, say, 1 in 100.
⁷¹
Like physicists, researchers of the paranormal are not in the business of saving lives but of seeking out new phenomena. Thus parapsychologists should be subject to the same standard demanded of physicists.

Attempts have been made to use a technique called
meta-analysis
to try to glean statistically significant results from individually insignificant data.
⁷²
This is like the old joke told by Ronald Reagan (blessed be his name) about the kid on Christmas morning digging through a pile of horse manure because “there has to be a pony in there somewhere.” Meta-analysis is totally unreliable and a waste of time in searching for a phenomenon not evident in individual experiments.
⁷³
While the procedure can be useful for discerning trends, it must be applied with great caution. I cannot think of a single major discovery in science that has been made with meta-analysis alone.

No positive claim of psi has ever stood up to the same critical scrutiny applied in the mainstream sciences whenever an extraordinary event is observed. We can safely conclude that psi does not exist beyond a reasonable doubt.

THE PHYSICS OF CHRISTIANITY

If you thought that Frank Tipler's
The Physics of Immortality
described in
chapter 8
was off the wall, you should read his followup,
The Physics of Christianity.
⁷⁴
There he claims to provide Christians with a rational basis for their faith based solely on physics.

Tipler rejects the definition of a miracle as an event that violates natural law. He asserts that miracles are perfectly natural phenomena, just highly improbable or unexpected. He then provides physical mechanisms for all the important miracles associated with the life of Jesus, from his virgin birth to his resurrection. How plausible they are is another matter.

Tipler says that virginal conceptions occur in nature and result in perhaps 1 in 30 human births. He notes that it is easy to induce egg cell division in the laboratory, so why not in a female body? It is thought that virgin births should always result in a female child, since all the genes are from the mother and females have two
X
chromosomes while males generally have the combination
XY
. However, Tipler notes that 1 in 20,000 males have two
X
chromosomes wherein their maleness comes from a key gene that has been inserted into an
X
chromosome. He conjectures that this gene may have been present in one of Mary's
X
chromosomes but inactivated in her case, becoming activated with Jesus. Tipler writes that a DNA analysis of the blood on the Shroud of Turin is
XX
, thus providing empirical verification for the virgin birth of the body that was covered with that cloth.

However, this claim is dubious, to say the least. There could have been contamination from anyone who ever touched the shroud, as the scientist who discovered it in the first place explained. Besides, the so-called blood on the shroud has been identified as paint.
⁷⁵

In Tipler's scenario, the miracles performed by Jesus during his lifetime, such as walking on water and raising the dead, were produced by a single mechanism—the annihilation of protons and electrons into neutrinos and nothing else.
⁷⁶
In the case of Jesus walking on water, protons and electrons in the normal matter in a layer of water under his feet are annihilated. The neutrinos produced go off invisibly downward with high momentum, the upward recoil enabling Jesus to keep from sinking. (Or, he walked on rocks.)

As for the resurrection, the whole body of Jesus is converted to invisible neutrinos, with some heat also released to burn the burial cloth. To reappear before his disciples, Jesus reversed the process, as he did to raise the dead.

Ridiculous? Absolutely. Then why mention it? Tipler is actually a very knowledgeable and accomplished theoretical physicist. I would like to think he is pulling our legs, but an e-mail he once sent me leads me to think that he is serious. Either way, what Tipler has done is to try to provide natural explanations for the claimed miracles that are so central to Christian faith. You can see how hard, if not impossible, that is.

THE REMATERIALIZATION OF MATTER

As we have seen, religious apologists and quantum spiritualists claim that relativity and quantum mechanics have “dematerialized” matter, replacing the classic form of reductionist materialism with a new holistic paradigm in which body and spirit form a united whole. However, the facts are that twentieth-century physics has replaced classical physics with something even more materialist and reductionist. The classical physics of the nineteenth century still had some continuous fields such as the electromagnetic field. Quantum physics has only discrete particles like photons all the way down. Quantum, after all, means “discrete.”

Twentieth-century physics did not dematerialize the universe—it rematerialized it. As we saw in
chapter 5
, at the end of the nineteenth century, electromagnetic waves were thought to be vibrations of an invisible, continuous medium called the ether that supposedly pervaded holistically throughout all of space. In 1905, Einstein did away with the need for the ether with his theory of special relativity. In the same year he showed that light was composed of particles that later were named photons.

Apologist Ernan McMullin interprets relativity to imply that energy can be transformed into what he calls “massless” energy and the reverse.
⁷⁷
This is a gross misunderstanding of the meaning of Einstein's famous equation
E = mc
²
, which equates mass with the energy a particle has in the reference frame at which it is at rest. The massless energy he refers to is the kinetic energy carried
by photons. While photons are indeed massless, they are still
matter
since they carry momentum and energy and can impart a force on an object by colliding with it, the same as an electron or quark does. Photons are particles. The processes McMullin refers to, the creation of electron-positron (antielectron) pairs by the collision of two photons and the reverse annihilation of pairs into photons, are totally particulate—two particles in, two particles out.

Furthermore, photons are affected by gravity, another defining property of matter. For example, in famous experiments that verified Einstein's general theory of relativity, photons were observed to be deflected gravitationally by the sun.
⁷⁸

A PERSONAL REMEMBRANCE

I was raised as a Catholic in Bayonne, New Jersey, and was surrounded by Catholics in my family and in the neighborhood. Although I attended public schools, I had catechism training and was fully confirmed as a Roman Catholic. Childhood memories are weak, but I don't remember ever being taught that I had to await the Second Coming to reach heaven. It certainly was the belief of every Catholic I knew that when we die, our disembodied souls go
immediately
to heaven. Few Christians then, and none now, figured on going to hell—even temporarily in what is called purgatory.

I always imagined my dead grandparents looking down on me when I did something bad. My parents, aunts, and uncles all believed that their departed loved ones, especially deceased children, were already with Jesus. And their priests certainly never dissuaded them from that view.

Yet the official doctrine of the Catholic Church remains one in which only Jesus, Mary, and a small number of already spiritually perfected souls such as the apostles and saints go straight to heaven upon death. Those with mortal sins on their souls go immediately to hell to be tortured forever with no hope of mercy.
⁷⁹
The rest, even the most pious nuns who spend a lifetime reciting the Hail Mary and whose thoughts have little time for anything else, but who do not quite achieve spiritual perfection, must have their souls purified in the hell-like fires of purgatory.
⁸⁰
Their time in purgatory can be mitigated by
friends and family offering masses (at a price), lighting candles (at a price), and praying. When their souls are sufficiently purified, after perhaps a thousand years of torture, God releases them into heaven. But some may have to await the final judgment associated with the Second Coming, which has not yet occurred two thousand years after Jesus promised it would come in a generation.
⁸¹
That could still be a billion years away.

During my life I have gone to countless Catholic funerals and to funerals in many Protestant denominations. I have never heard a Catholic priest or Protestant minister tell the bereaved that their departed loved one was suffering in purgatory awaiting the last judgment. The grieving were uniformly assured that their loved ones were right at that moment in paradise, though few that I recall had achieved “spiritual perfection.”

I also have the memory that most of these believers did not really think in terms of a full body resurrection, complete with hangnails and sexual organs. They imagined some kind of spirit, like a ghost, who might still come down from heaven and walk among us, along with angels and demons, who were also invisible and not made of matter. Anyway, the point is that there is a huge gap beween what the average Christian believes and what Christian theologians teach.

SCIENCE AND EASTERN MYSTICISM

We have seen how physicist Fritjof Capra and others have tried to draw parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. Mysticism is associated with all religions, but Eastern religions, in particular Hinduism and Buddhism, are more deeply based on the mystical experiences obtained during meditation. While we have been primarily concerned with the conflict between science and the Abrahamic religions, in order to be complete, at least a brief discussion of science and Eastern mysticism is called for. Do science and mysticism conflict? Are science and Eastern mysticism compatible? Here I arrive at perhaps an unexpected conclusion. Science and Eastern mysticism do not conflict, but they are still incompatible.

I need to make clear that the mysticism discussed in this section is the
real thing, not the phony variety I have referred to as “quantum spirituality.” While some genuine mystics have been bamboozled into thinking quantum physics somehow confirms their beliefs, traditional Eastern mysticism predates science and has only an indirect connection with it today. That connection essentially just involves imaging studies of the brains of meditating mystics by neuroscientists (see
chapter 11
) and other observations, and not any sharing of insights about reality.

Empirical evidence seems to exist that meditation has some physical and psychological benefits, but this does not imply any supernatural elements. Meditation is not necessarily a transcendent spiritual experience.

Let us first see why genuine mysticism does not conflict with science. In his 2010 book
Piercing the Veil: Comparing Science and Mysticism as Ways of Knowing Reality
,
⁸²
religious historian and philosopher Richard H. Jones notes that science uses sensory experience to divide the world into distinguishable structures in order to see what things are and how they work. That is, science reduces everything to its parts. But more than that, as we have emphasized, those parts are described in terms of mental concepts that need not have any direct one-to-one correspondence with whatever reality is out there.