God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (37 page)

CONSCIOUSNESS

Most people associate consciousness or self-awareness with something spiritual. They think that when we perform a deliberate action, such as lifting a spoon to our lips at the dinner table, some “ghost in the machine” is telling our arm and hand what to do. However, laboratory experiments pioneered in the 1980s by physiologist Benjamin Libet have shown that before we are aware of making a decision, our brains have already unconsciously made that decision for us.
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While the interpretation of Libet's original results was controversial, continuing research has strongly confirmed the phenomenon.
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We will see below the impact these observations have on the questions of free will.

Only recently have new data appeared that make the material option a far more plausible alternative to spiritual consciousness. Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has reported that after twelve years of using every tool available to probe the brain, he and his colleagues now have a working hypothesis for how consciousness arises in the brain. Here is his summary of their results:

In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information (say a word, a digit, or a sound).

Furthermore, when we render the same information nonconscious, or “subliminal,” all the signatures disappear. We have a theory about why these signatures occur, called the global neuronal workspace theory. Realistic computer simulations of neurons reproduce our main experimental findings: when the information processed exceeds a threshold for large-scale communication across many brain areas, the network ignites into a large-scale synchronous state, and all our signatures suddenly appear.
²⁶

If these results hold up under subsequent, independent replication, we may be able to say that we have achieved the “smoking gun” connecting consciousness and the brain.

The theory of consciousness Dehaene talks about has actually been around for almost two decades. It is called the
consciousness access hypothesis
and is presented within global workspace theory. As brain scans show, information is widely distributed within the brain. In the theory, the nervous system is viewed as a massive distributed set of specialized networks. Coordination, control, and problem solving take place by way of a central information exchange, allowing some regions, such as the sensory cortex, to distribute information to the whole. A similar architecture is used in large-scale computers. Evidence is growing that consciousness is the primary agent of such global access functions in humans and other mammals.
²⁷

Here is another example of how religious belief does more harm than good. If neuroscientists relied on faith and the traditional teachings of their churches to inform them that consciousness was immaterial, that is, was a part of the human system that exists in another world inaccessible to science, then they would have no motivation to understand consciousness. It would simply be beyond their ken. The result then would be that humanity would not enjoy the benefits of the research that are bound to come. Dehaene and his coworkers are already applying their ideas to noncommunicating patients in comas, vegetative states, or locked-in syndromes. A patient with locked-in syndrome is aware and awake but cannot move or communicate verbally. Unlike quadriplegia, which is caused by spinal injury, locked-in syndrome generally is caused by brain injury.

So neuroscience finally seems to be making progress toward a fully material understanding of consciousness. The reason for this is that brain imaging and other technologies have advanced to the point where direct hypothesis testing of models is available. The gap for God and the immaterial that for a long time was provided by consciousness is rapidly closing.

FREE WILL

As described above, experiments have shown that a network of high-level control areas in the brain begins to shape upcoming decisions long before they enter awareness. This would seem to challenge the whole notion of free will and the associated religious teachings about sin and redemption. If our brains are making our decisions for us subconsciously, how can we be responsible for our actions? Is free will an illusion?
²⁸

While “conscious will” may be an illusion, it can be argued that our material selves do still possess a kind of free will. Every decision we make is the result of a complex calculation made by our individual conscious and unconscious brains working together. That calculation relies on input from our immediate circumstances and our past experiences. So the decision is uniquely ours, based on our specific knowledge, experience, and abilities. That seems pretty free to me. While others can influence us, no one has access to all the data that went into the calculation except our unique selves. Another brain operating according to the same decision algorithms as ours would not necessarily come up with the same final decision, since the lifetime experiences leading up to that point would be different.

Let us look at free will from a physics angle. As we have already discussed in
chapter 3
, two centuries ago French physicist Pierre Laplace argued that Newton's mechanics implies that the motion of every particle in the universe could be predicted, in principle, from the knowledge of its position, momentum, and the force acting on it. This is the Newtonian world machine. Since, in the atomic model, everything in the universe, including human bodies and brains, is made up of particles, this would seem to do away with free will. However, as we saw in
chapter 6
, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics rendered the Newtonian world machine inoperable at very small distances. Let us ask if this provides a source of free will for humans.

THE QUANTUM BRAIN

The highly respected mathematician Roger Penrose has argued forcefully that the brain cannot be regarded simply as a mechanical computer. In his 1989 book
The Emperor's New Mind
, he argued, based on the incompleteness theorems of mathematician Kurt Gödel,
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that the human thinking process cannot be reduced to computer algorithms and that some quantum process was involved.
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Using mathematics as the exemplar, Penrose applied Gödel's theorem to demonstrate that mathematicians are aware of mathematical truths that cannot be proved by any algorithmic process. He then joined with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff in proposing that certain structural components of cells called
microtubules
are the seat of quantum effects in the brain, enabling humans to perform tasks no computer will every be able to do.
³¹

Penrose's and Hameroff's ideas were discussed in my 1995 book
The Unconscious Quantum
.
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It is safe to say that Penrose and Hameroff have not persuaded a consensus of experts in neuroscience, mathematics, philosophy, or computer science.
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A 1995 issue of the journal
Psyche
contains a number of critical reviews,
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accompanied by a detailed response from Penrose.
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But he is not convincing. As physicist Taner Edis has shown, nonalgorithmicity can be accommodated within the mainstream of machine intelligence research.
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It is easy to show that the moving parts of the brain are large by microscopic standards and move around at relatively high speeds because the brain is hot. Furthermore, the distances involved are also large by
macroscopic
standards. Although you might need a microscope to see them, they are still in the realm of classical physics. I have used the term “submicroscopic” to refer to distances where quantum mechanics is important.

Let me make this quantitative. The entity that carries signals across synaptic gaps is called a “neurotransmitter.” Its mass is typically 10
^–25
kilogram. Its typical speed is 358 meters per second, the average speed of a body of this mass in thermal equilibrium at body temperature, 37 degrees Celsius. Suppose that a neurotransmitter is initially located within a synaptic gap, which is about ten nanometers (10
^–8
meter) wide—about two hundred times the size of a hydrogen atom. The uncertainty in the speed of the neurotransmitter from the uncertainty principle is only 0.05 meter per second, or 0.014
percent. It follows that we can use classical Newtonian mechanics to describe the motion of the neurotransmitter with reasonable precision.

This conclusion agrees with a detailed calculation by physicist Max Tegmark, who showed that the coherence between states that is necessary to maintain a quantum system is lost in a tiny period of time in the brain, far too short for any quantum effects to have a role.
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Hameroff and two collaborators have challenged Tegmark's and my conclusions.
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As mentioned, Penrose and Hameroff proposed microtubules in cells as the source of quantum effects in the brain.
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A quantum mechanical model for microtubules has been worked out in detail by Travis John Craddock and Jack A. Tuszinski.
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They found that while quantum effects were possible at low temperatures, below 30 degrees Kelvin (–243 degrees Celsius), thermal vibrations of the environment at ambient temperatures are more than sufficient to remove any form of collective excitation. While mechanisms have been proposed to shield the microtubules from the environment, no experiment has produced any evidence for quantum effects in microtubules or, indeed, anywhere in the brain.

Hameroff has pointed to a paper in
Nature
in which quantum effects are reported to have been observed in photosynthesis in marine algae at ambient temperature.
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Now, nothing in physics prevents quantum effects at room or body temperatures. The warm quantum effects that are reported in photosynthesis involve photons, which are quantum objects. Hot photons are just as quantum as cold photons. The basic process of getting energy from light involves photons exiting electrons in atoms, a quantum process. So these results are not surprising or in violation of any known physics. Furthermore, the quantum coherence observed in the photosynthesis experiment lasted only on the order of 10
^–13
second. This is, as with Tegmark's calculations, far too short to produce quantum effects in the brain.
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A quantum brain is not required by either theory or experiment. Now, this does not mean that quantum mechanics cannot play any role in the brain. Ultimately, everything is quantum mechanical. The brain is made up of the same subatomic particles as a rock, and they all obey the rules of quantum mechanics. There simply is nothing special about the quantum mechanics of the brain that is any different from that of a rock.

However, quantum effects can still involve brain processes by another route. The brain is bathed in electrically charged particles from cosmic rays (muons) that reach Earth and beta-rays (electrons) from the radioactive potassium isotope K40 in our blood. These are energetic enough to break atomic and molecular bonds, unlike the radio waves from power lines and cell phones that people worry so much about.
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And they are ultimately quantum mechanical.

Although the brain is a Newtonian machine, its complexity and nonlinearity put it in a category where deterministic chaos can play a role. As we saw in
chapter 6
, deterministic chaos is a purely classical phenomenon in which a complex system becomes extremely sensitive to initial conditions. We can imagine someone's brain carrying out a classical algorithm, like a computer, but a high-energy muon or electron breaks up a bit or two in either the code or the data and changes the outcome. This would result in the person making a random decision. But it would give the appearance of free will.

Now, that is not to say that all our decisions are random. An
Australopithecus
brain that decided at random whether to run from a leopard would not have left many descendants. So the brain must be mostly deterministic and perhaps an occasional random event is what provides us the creativity that Penrose argues is not possible if it is a purely algorithmic computer.

Either God is everywhere present in nature or He is present nowhere.

—Aubrey Moore
¹

The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.

—Arturo Rosenbluth and Norbert Wiener
²

A METAPHORICAL GOD

T
he Christian apologists who write about science and religion try to tell us that science flourished because of Christianity. In
chapter 3
, we saw that after a good start in ancient Greece and Rome, science in fact did not flourish in Europe for more than a millennium, at least in part because of Christianity. Islam preserved much of Greek and Roman science and developed it further, but then saw it fade to the point where science is hardly practiced in Muslim nations today.
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As we have seen, science took hold in seventeenth-century Europe only after the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was challenged by the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Still, apologists argue, the great founding fathers of science—Bacon, Descartes, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton—were devout, albeit unconventional, believers. True enough, but they lived in an age when no clear separation existed between nature and supernature. It was not until that separation was made explicit during the following Enlightenment that atheism became associated with science and materialism.

While the greatest physicists of the nineteenth century, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, were believers, most of the important physicists of the twentieth century, including Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Dirac, and Feynman did not believe in a personal God. The best-known physicists alive today, Steven Weinberg and Stephen Hawking, are outspoken atheists. Notable other atheist scientists of recent times include Carl Sagan, Francis Crick, James Watson, Steven Pinker, Alan Turing, Jacques Monod, Richard Leakey, Linus Pauling, Claude Shannon, and Stephen Jay Gould.

As mentioned, Einstein and Hawking often used the word “God” metaphorically to represent the order of nature. Heisenberg, himself apparently a practicing Christian, wrote about how at the legendary 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels, he, Dirac, Pauli, and some younger attendees stayed behind one day in the lounge of the hotel.
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One of them said, “Einstein keeps talking about God; what are we to make of it? It is extremely difficult to imagine that a scientist like Einstein should have such strong ties with a religious tradition.” Heisenberg quotes Dirac as commenting,

I dislike religious myths on principle, if only because the myths of the different religions contradict one another. After all, it was purely by chance that I was born in Europe and not in Asia, and that is surely no criterion for judging what is true or what I ought to believe. And I can only believe what is true. As for right action, I can deduce it by reason alone from the situation in which I find myself: I live in society with others, to whom, in principle, I must grant the same rights I claim for myself. I must simply try to strike a fair balance; no more can be asked of me. All this talk about God's will, about sin and repentance, about a world beyond by which we must direct our lives, only serves to disguise the sober truth. Belief in God merely encourages us to think that God wills us to submit to a higher force, and it is this idea which helps to preserve social structures that may have been perfectly good in their day but no longer fit the modern world. All your talk of a wider context and the like strikes me as quite unacceptable. Life, when all is said and done, is just like science: we come up against difficulties and have to solve them. And we can never solve more than one difficulty at a time; your wider context is nothing but a mental superstructure added a posteriori.
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As mentioned, a 1998 study found that only 7 percent of the members of the American National Academy of Sciences believe in a personal God.
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More up-to-date data were provided in 2007 by sociologists Elaine Howard Ecklund and Christopher Scheitle.
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They asked thirty-six questions of 1,646 randomly selected natural and social scientists from twenty-one top research universities and found that 31.2 percent were atheists (do not believe in God); 31.0 percent were agnostics (no way of knowing); 15.5 percent believed but had doubts; 9.7 percent were sure there is a God, 7.2 percent believed in a higher power that is not God; 5.4 percent believed in God “sometimes.” Disbelief is greatest among physicists and biologists, each with about 70 percent atheists or agnostics and only 6 or 7 percent “true believers.”

SPIRITUAL ATHEISM

In 2010, Ecklund published a book, titled
Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think
, that received considerable media attention because of its conclusion that scientists are more “spiritual” than we have been led to assume.
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While based on the same study of elite universities just mentioned, Ecklund seems to contradict her own data when she writes: “Much of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. The ‘insurmountable hostility’ between science and religion is a caricature, a thought-cliché, perhaps useful as a satire on groupthink, but hardly representative of reality.” On the next page, however, she says many academic scientists practice a “
closeted faith
” because of the hostility of their colleagues. She provides no data, just a personal impression from her interviews. Many more scientists, she says, are “
spiritual atheists
who practice a new kind of individual spirituality—one that has no need for God.”
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Ecklund asserts, “The institutional infrastructure of the academy has changed to allow more of a place of religion.”
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This is misleading because she fails to make the important distinction (although she does so later) that is made in these institutions themselves between “religion” and “religious studies.” I have visited many religious studies departments around the country and find a common story. The majority of religious studies professors
in secular universities are nonbelievers, to the great distress of students who enroll in these courses expecting to have their faiths strengthened—only to be taught what the Bible really says and how it really came to be written. Many atheist scholars, notably philosopher Daniel Dennett, have urged that religion should be studied scientifically as an important social phenomenon.
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But as far as I can tell, it already is in these vibrant religious studies departments.

Ecklund's book does not spend any time dissecting the data reported in her paper with Scheitle mentioned above. Rather, Ecklund is more interested in whatever significance she can glean from her 275 anecdotal personal interviews. She concludes that scientists are more spiritual than we think while admitting that “spirituality” is a difficult term to define.

Ecklund notes, “Religion scholars think that Americans tend to link spirituality to interaction with
some
form of higher being.”
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She refers to a study reported by sociologist Robert Wuthnow in his 1998 book,
After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s
. Wuthnow asked Americans to define spirituality: they mentioned near-death experiences, unseen spirit guides, belief in angels, meditation, and prayer groups.
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That is, the general public associates spirituality with the supernatural.

Presenting data from a 1998 General Social Survey (she gives no exact reference), Ecklund reports that nearly 29 percent of Americans say they are “very spiritual,” compared to only 9 percent of scientists. On the other hand, 32 percent of scientists consider themselves “slightly spiritual” compared to 21 percent of the general population. Ecklund calls this “thin spirituality.”

The thin spirituality of scientists is clearly poles apart from the thick spirituality of the general public. As we saw above, two out of three are still atheists or agnostics and only 6–7 percent are committed believers. The spirituality Ecklund attributes to some scientists is not supernatural. A biologist's response is typical: “I get my spirituality…from being in nature. But I don't really believe there's a God, so I don't consider it's necessary for what I do or how I behave.”
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I was looking in Ecklund's book for some evidence of the New Age quantum spirituality that was discussed in
chapter 6
. Apparently there is little among scientists. The word “quantum” does not even appear in Ecklund's index. Evidently quantum spirituality lives outside the mainstream scientific
community and is found mainly on the pseudoscientific fringes under designations such as “parapsychology” or “neuroquantology.”

Behavior, rather than belief, seems to be the defining factor of the spiritual atheist. Those who call themselves spiritual are engaged in helping others, caring for the environment, enjoying the outdoors, and generally spending time discussing and pondering central themes. We can't fault that.

In any case, my assertion that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible is not based on the opinions of individual scientists or even on some statistical distribution of a large sample. We have already seen that many are happy with Stephen Jay Gould's model of nonoverlapping magisteria, despite its disagreement with the observed fact that science and religion overlap considerably. Again I need to reiterate: the incompatibility being claimed here is not between the majority of religionists and scientists. It is between the worldviews and methods of science and religion as systems of thought.

THE MODERNIST VIEW OF RELIGION

Ian Barbour has made a heroic attempt to reconcile religion with science, fully justifying his £1 million Templeton Prize. We have already covered much of what he wrote about the history of the religion-science conflict in his book
Religion and Science
.
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Now let us discuss the theological proposals that he argues reconcile the two worldviews. In what follows I will quote freely from Barbour's book.

The traditional view of God as a kind of supernatural king of the universe is still held by most believers as well as by evangelical Christian theologians such as William Lane Craig. Barbour and other contemporary liberal protestant theologians have moved theology a long way from that image. What Barbour calls the “modernist” view of God is based on evolution. He says that after Darwin, “divine creative action must be depicted not as external and once for all but as within the process and continuous in time. God's principle attribute is immanence in nature rather than transcendence.”
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That is, rather than the familiar picture of God existing outside of nature and outside of time and space, the modernist deity pervades the universe.

Barbour writes:

Religion is rooted in human experience, and theological interpretations are secondary. [Isn't this a theological interpretation?] Human effort, not some special divine action, will bring in the Kingdom. Jesus was not the divine savior but the great teacher of high ideals. Human salvation comes through increased knowledge and noble goals, not through supernatural aid or any basic reorientation of the self.
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Barbour does not mention any of the “great teachers of high ideals” of many of the other religions on Earth, such as Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Muhammad. And what about others who more recently have been regarded by some as “great teachers,” such as Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, and David Koresh?

Barbour refers to the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (died 1834), whom he calls “the father of liberal theology.” According to Barbour, Schleiermacher held that

the basis of religion is not revealed doctrine, as in traditionalism, or cognitive reason, as in natural theology, or even ethical will, as in Kant's system, but a distinctive religious awareness. Religion is a matter of living experience, not formal beliefs; it is not reducible to practical ethics or speculative philosophy but must be understood on its own terms.
¹⁸

Barbour is keen on
process theology
, which is based on the metaphysical
process philosophy
of Alfred North Whitehead that strips the reality off matter and puts it into events.
¹⁹
Barbour views process theology as

a theological program in which the “hard core” of the Christian tradition is taken to be belief in God as a creative love, revealed in Christ, while divine omnipotence is treated as an “auxiliary hypothesis” that can be modified to allow for the data of human freedom, evil and suffering, and evolutionary history.
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