God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (8 page)

The eminent contemporary mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose has argued that mathematics has a “robustness that goes far beyond what any individual mathematician is capable of perceiving” and that this provides evidence for a Platonic world.
²⁹
I have not seen any surveys, but my personal observations after more than fifty years of academic life leads me to guess that most mathematicians and theoretical physicists are unacknowledged Platonists,
³⁰
while most experimental physicists, including myself, see no way of using the tools of our trade—observations and measurements or reflection and logic—to decide what is ultimate reality.

EPICURUS AND LUCRETIUS

Usually discussions on ancient Greek philosophy follow Plato with his even more influential student, Aristotle. However, a more continuous narrative contrasts Plato's focus on divine agency, which we can safely label as religious in nature, with the natural philosophy of the atomists, which we can safely label as scientific. Plato's
Demiurge
suggests the single creator god of the Abrahamic religions; however, it is not personal and does not interfere in human events, and it fits in better with deism than with theism. On the other hand, the atoms of Leucippus and Democritus are a reasonable facsimile to the quarks and leptons of the current standard model of particles and forces.

Atomism was elaborated by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (died 270 BCE), who lived just a generation after Plato. While some of his writing has survived,
³¹
his ideas were passed down by other authors, in particular the Roman poet Lucretius (ca. 99–55 BCE), whose epic poem
De Rerum Natura—On the Nature of Things—
has reached us complete.

In a 2011 article in the
New Yorker
titled “The Answer Man,” literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt tells how Lucretius's poem was “attacked, ridiculed, burned, or ignored” as the Roman Empire collapsed, since it was “so incompatible with any cult of gods.” Luckily, a copy survived.
³²

When Greenblatt was a student at Yale he stumbled upon a translation of
De Rerum Natura
in the university bookstore on sale for ten cents. (I similarly found a cheap paperback translation in a used bookstore). Greenblatt describes the core of Lucretius's poem as “a profound, therapeutic meditation on the fear of death.” He movingly relates how it helped him come to grips with the family problems brought upon by his mother, who “brooded obsessively on the immanence of her end.” Although she lived to almost ninety, “she had blighted much of her life” and cast a shadow on Greenblatt's own by her constant harping over death.
³³

Greenblatt quotes lines from
De Rerum Natura
translated by seventeenth-century poet John Dryden (died 1700), which I repeat in part:

So when our mortal frame shall be disjoin'd
The lifeless lump uncoupled from the mind,
From sense of grief and pain we shall be free;
We shall not feel, because we will not be.

Nay, though our atoms should revolve by chance,
And matter leap into the former dance;
Though time our life and motion could restore.
And make our bodies what they were before,
What gain to us would all this bustle bring?
The new-made man would be another thing.
³⁴

In a 2010 book titled
The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence
, historian and philosopher Alison Brown writes how during the Renaissance, Lucretius was rediscovered and widely influenced Florentine thinkers on three “dangerous” themes: “Lucretius' attack on superstitious religion; his pre-Darwinian theory of evolution; and his atomism, with its theory of free will and the chance creation of the world.”
³⁵
This may have helped pave the way for the scientific revolution that followed.

Greenblatt tells how the Church tried to suppress
De Rerum Natura
while Niccolò Machiavelli made his own copy and Thomas More (died 1535) openly engaged in Epicurianism in his
Utopia.
Lucretian materialism can be found in Shakespeare, Donne, Bacon, and others. Newton declared himself an atomist. Thomas Jefferson owned at least five copies of
De Rerum Natura
, in Latin and translations into English, French, and Italian. He wrote to a correspondent, “I too am an Epicurean.”
³⁶

Epicurus's universe was eternal and so lacked a creation, divine or otherwise. It was also boundless, with an unlimited number of atoms moving about in a void. There was no ruling mind or force and no life after death. Gods exist, but they are made of atoms like everything else.
³⁷

Epicurus rejected the idea that the gods punish the bad and reward the good. As philosopher David Sedley puts it, “Belief in divine creation brings with it, according to Epicurus, intolerable religious consequences, compelling us to assume that our own lives are under divine surveillance, and to live in terror of the threat this poses.”
³⁸
Atomism frees us from that threat by posing a universe whose contents are the products of accident. This does not mean gods do not exist. According to Epicurus, gods simply do not concern themselves with human beings.

As we have seen, atomism anticipated much of modern science, from Darwinian evolution to elementary particle physics. It also anticipated modern cosmology and the now commonly believed, although admittedly unproved, view that our universe is just one of many.
³⁹
The atomists saw that if our world was but an accident, then many worlds could also arise by accident. This explained how one world, ours, happened to be congenial to human life. With an unlimited number of universes and chance, every permutation is allowed.
⁴⁰
However, as we will see, another mechanism is suggested by both modern physics and biology: the evident capability of matter to assemble itself; that is, the natural growth of complexity from simplicity.

Epicurus and Lucretius also questioned the motivations for a supremely happy divine being to create a world in the first place:

What novelty could have tempted hitherto tranquil beings, so late on, to desire a change in their earlier lifestyle? For those who are obliged to delight
in the new are plainly those who are troubled by the old. But where someone had no ill befall him up to now, because he had lived his life well, what could have ignited a passion for novelty in such a one?
⁴¹

Besides, it is inconsistent for a perfectly good being to commit the impious, immoral act of bringing misery down on lesser beings. This disproof of a perfect God has been placed on a firm, logical foundation by contemporary philosophers Richard LaCroix
⁴²
and Nicholas Everitt.
⁴³

The Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero (died 43 BCE) raised another interesting issue in his work
De Natura Deorum
(
On the Nature of the Gods
), asking “why the world-builders suddenly appeared on the scene after infinitely many centuries.”
⁴⁴
Saint Augustine of Hippo (died 430) provided sort of an answer: time did not begin until the creation. Another related major area of disagreement between science and theology today is whether the universe had a beginning or is eternal. We will see that, while there is no serious disagreement that
our
universe began with the big bang, nothing forbids, and indeed modern cosmology suggests, an eternal
multiverse
containing many universes besides our own. In
chapter 7
, a scenario will be discussed in which our universe “tunneled” from an earlier one.

In any case, the proposal that time did not exist until it was created is incoherent. Creation has the concept of time embedded in it. Something that did not exist “before” now exists “after.” You can't have a creation if you have no time.

ARISTOTLE

While I have no trouble placing Plato in the religion camp, I see Aristotle with a foot in both camps. Certainly he was a scientist, having made observations of animals, especially sea life. His writings on physics are almost completely wrong, but this was not the last time a scientist got physics wrong. Here, unlike his biology, Aristotle does not seem to have relied on observations but on philosophical reasoning. Many of his claims, such as heavier bodies falling faster than lighter ones, could have been easily checked empirically, as Galileo
did centuries later. However, unlike his mentor Plato, who argued that ultimate reality was far removed from sensory experience, Aristotle gave primary reality to the objects of sensory experience.
⁴⁵

Aristotle's greatest contribution was to provide the foundation for formal logic that remains in use today in philosophy, mathematics, and science.

At the same time, as we will discuss further in the
next chapter
, Aristotle had enormous influence on the theology of Thomas Aquinas (died 1274), which set the standard for the Catholic Church. The great universities of medieval Europe, which were essentially run by the Church, taught Aristotelian Scholasticism, in which Aristotle's word was virtually dogma. Scholasticism continued to dominate European universities well into the scientific revolution, which, as we will see, developed outside of Church-controlled academia.

This does not mean to imply that Aristotle's notion of the divine much resembles the Christian God. (In this book, as in my others, I will capitalize God when referring to specific deities such as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, while generic gods will appear in lower case). Aristotle and Plato shared the conviction that god is the ultimate explanatory principle. However, his supreme deity is an unmoved mover detached from the world and engaged in self-contemplation, whose activity is “pure actuality.” Everything else in the world functions by striving, in its own way, to emulate that actuality.
⁴⁶

Aristotle identified two states of things: potentiality and actuality. A state moves from potentiality to actuality by the action of one of four causes:

1. Material cause, or the elements
   out of which
   an object is created
   
2. Efficient cause, or the means
   by which
   it is created
   
3. Formal cause, or the expression of
   what
   it is
   
4. Final cause, or the end
   for which
   it is.
   

I will rely on the peer-reviewed
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
to explain:

Take, for example, a bronze statue. Its material cause is the bronze itself. Its efficient cause is the sculptor, insofar as he forces the bronze into shape. The formal cause is the idea of the completed statue. The final cause is the idea of the statue as it prompts the sculptor to act on the bronze. The final cause tends to be the same as the formal cause, and both of these can be subsumed
by the efficient cause. Of the four, it is the formal and final which are the most important, and which most truly give the explanation of an object. The final end (purpose, or teleology) of a thing is realized in the full perfection of the object itself, not in our conception of it. Final cause is thus internal to the nature of the object itself, and not something we subjectively impose on it.
⁴⁷

Final cause was adopted by the Scholastics in Europe during the Middle Ages as an argument for a divine purpose behind all things, and this remains today a bone of contention between science and religion, since science sees no evidence for purpose (see
chapter 8
).

The one and perhaps only characteristic of Aristotle's god that Aquinas gave to the Christian God was his status as the ultimate first cause. Aquinas enumerated five ways that the existence of God can be “proven.” The first two rest on the notion that the chains of causes and effects cannot be extended back indefinitely but must terminate in a first cause to which everyone gives the name of God. I will not repeat all the arguments, but note the caveman logic.

Furthermore, all Aquinas's proofs automatically fail for the simple reason that any logical argument already has its conclusion built into its premises. Barring supernatural revelation, premises must be based on observations.

However, I am not writing a treatise on theology, the logic of god, or for that matter, atheology, the logic of no god. My subject is the contrast of science and religion. That issue does arise in this case since the first cause argument rests on the assumption that everything must have a cause. Darwinian evolution and most interpretations of quantum mechanics suggest that this is
not
the case, that there is no first cause—a lot of stuff happens by accident, as the atomists proposed millennia ago. While Aristotle allowed a role for accident (or “luck”) in the lives of humans and animals, he saw no place for it in the workings of the cosmos:

Some say that although each animal is and comes by nature, the heaven has been formed in the way it is from luck and the fortuitous. Yet nothing whatsoever in the heaven appears to be the result of luck and disorder.
⁴⁸

Of course Aristotle was unaware of the cosmic background radiation composed of very low-energy photons left over from the big bang. These
photons outnumber the atoms in the universe by a factor of a billion, and they are random to one part in one hundred thousand. In short, the universe is mostly random motion. Nearly everyone is unaware of this fact and, because we happen to live in a tiny pocket of complexity, wrongly assumes the universe is highly ordered.

EARLY CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY

In the second and third centuries, the Christian church developed its own intellectual tradition designed to defend the faith against learned opponents, a pursuit that continues today and is referred to as “apologetics.” Greek philosophical methods were applied. Plato's teachings of divine providence, a monotheistic creator god, and the immortality of the soul fit in well with Christian beliefs, although, as we have seen, such a god is not personal.