Excerpt From:

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

STEPHEN M. BARR

University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2003 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu

Printed in the U.S.A. bv Sheridan Books, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ban, Stephen M„ 1953-

Modern physics and ancient faith / Stephen M. Ban.

p.   cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-268-03471-0 (cloth :alk. paper) 1. Physics—Religious aspects —Christianity.    I. Title. BL265.P4B37 2003 291.T75—dc21                                         2002151565

Contents

Acknowledgments                                                                        ix

Part I     The Conflict between Religion and Materialism

1               The Materialist Creed                                                                    1

2               Materialism as an Anti-Religious Mythology                                   4

3               Scientific Materialism and Nature                                                19

The Scientific Materialism's View of Nature    19

Five Plot Twists    22

A New Story and a New Moral    28

Part II    In the Beginning

4              The Expectations                                                                         33

5               How Things Looked One Hundred Years Ago                               36

6              The Big Bang                                                                              38

The Discover)' of the Big Bang    38

Attempts to Avoid the Big Bang    44

The Big Bang Confirmed   45

7              Was the Big Bang Really the Beginning?                                      47

The Universe in the Standard Big Bang Model   48

The Bouncing Universe Scenario    52

 The Baby Universes Scenario    54

The Eternal Inflation Scenario    54

8               What If the Big Bang Was Not the Beginning?                              58

Part 1)1   is the Universe Designed?

9             The Argument from Design                                                                65

The Cosmic Design   65 Two Kinds of Design   69

10           The Attack on the Argument from Design                                          71

Pyre Chance   71

The Law's of Nature   72

Natural Selection   72

11             The Design Argument and the Laws of Nature                                  76

Two Wars to Think about Laws of Nature    76

In Science, Order Comes from Order    79

In Science, Order Comes from Greater Order    80

An Example Taken from Nature: The Growth of Crystals    85

The Order in the Heavens   87

12            Symmetry and Beauty in the Laws of Nature                                      93

B           "What Immortal Hand or Eye?"                                                        105

The Issue   105

Can Chance Explain It?  107

Is Natural Selection Enough?   109

Does Darwin Give "Design without Design”?    IJ1

Part IV   Man's Place in the Cosmos

34           The Expectations                                                                               115

15            The Anthropic Coincidences                                                             118

16            Objections to the Idea of Anthropic Coincidences                           138

The Objections   140

Answers to the Objections    H3

17            Alternative Explanations of the Anthropic Coincidences                149

The Weak Anthropic Principle: Many Domains    151

The Weak Anthropic Principle: Many Universes   152

The Weakness of the Weak Anthropic Principle    153

The Problem with Too Many Universes    154

18            Why Is the Universe So Big?                                                              158

How Old Must a Universe Be? 160

How Big Must a Universe He? 160

Are We Really So Small?    161

Part V    What Is Man?

19              The Issue                                                                                              167

The Religious View    168

The Materialist View    169

Clearing Up Some Confusions    172

20              Determinism and Free Will                                                               175

The Overthrow of Determinism    115

Quantum Theory and Free Will    178

Is Free Will Real?    184

21               Can Matter "Understand"?                                                                190

Abstract Understanding    191

What are Abstract Ideas?    193

Truth    197

If Not the Brain, Then What and How?    204

22              Is the Human Mind Just a Computer?                                             207

What a Computer Does    207

What Gödel Showed    211

The Arguments of Lucas and Penrose    213

Avenues of Escape    215

23              What Does the Human Mind Have That Computers Lack?        220

Can One Have a Simple Idea?    223

Is the Materialist View of the Mind Scientific?    225

24              Quantum Theorv and the Mind                                                       227

The London-Bauer Argument in Brief    229

Going into More Detail   232

Is the Traditional Interpretation Absurd?    242

25              Alternatives to Traditional Quantum Theory                                   245

Modifying Quantum Theory    246

Reinterpreting Quantum Theory: The "Many-Worlds" Idea    248

26              Is a Pattern Emerging?                                                                        253

Appendices                                                                                          257

A.   God, Time, and Creation    257

B.  Attempts to Explain the Beginning Scientifically    268

C.   Godel's Theorem    279

Notes                                                                                                    289

Index                                                                                                    307

 

Part I The Conflict between Religion and Materialism

 

I The Materialist Creed

In recent years there have been a great number of books written on science and religion. Some of these books claim that science has discredited religion, others that science has vindicated religion. Who is right? Are science and religion now friends or foes?

Perhaps they are neither. A frequently heard view is that science and religion have nothing to do with each other. They cannot contradict each other, it is said, because they "move on different tracks" and "talk about different realities." There is something to be said for this point of view. After all, there have been very few if any cases where scientifically provable facts have clashed with actual doctrines of Christianity or Judaism. Few believers any longer interpret the Book of Genesis in a narrowly literalistic way, and religious authorities no longer tres­pass on turf that belongs properly to scientists, as they did in the Galileo case. It is therefore perfectly true to say that science and religion are not in collision.

But while it is true, this viewpoint is too facile. The fact of the matter is that there is a bitter intellectual battle going on, and it is about real issues. However, the conflict is not between religion and science, it is between religion and materialism. Materialism is a philosophical opinion that is closely connected with science. It grew up alongside of science, and many people have a hard time distinguishing it from science. But it is not science. It is merely a philosophical opinion. And not all scientists share it by any means. In fact, there seem to be more scientists who are religious than who are materialists. Nevertheless, there are many, including very many scientists, who think that materialism is the sci­entific philosophy. The basic tenet of so-called ''scientific materialism" is that nothing exists except matter, and that everything in the world must therefore be the result of the strict mathematical laws of physics and blind chance.

The debate between religion and materialism has been going on for a long time —for centuries, in fact. Why, then, the recent increase in interest in the subject? Is there really anything new to say about it? I think that there is.

1

2              THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND MATERIALISM

What is new is that discoveries made in the last century in various fields have changed our picture of the world in fundamental ways. As a result, the balance has shifted in the debate between scientific materialism and religion. Many people sense this, but not everyone is exactly clear what these discoveries are or what they really imply. In this book I am going to give my own view of the matter, as someone who adheres to a traditional religion and who has also worked in some of the subfields of modern physics that are relevant to the materialism/religion debate.

Much of scientific materialism is based on certain trends in scientific dis­cover)" from the time of Galileo up to the early part of the twentieth century. It is easy to see why these trends led many thoughtful people to embrace a materi­alist philosophy. However, a number of discoveries in the twentieth century have led in surprising directions. Paradoxically, these discoveries, coming from the study of the material world itself, have given fresh reasons to disbelieve that matter is the only ultimate reality.

None of this is a matter of proofs. The discoveries of the earlier period did not prove materialism, and one should not look to more recent discoveries to prove religion. Even if religious tenets could be directly proven by science, the real grounds for religious belief are not to be found in telescopes or test tubes. Faith does not need to wait upon the latest laboratory research. What the debate is all about, as I shall explain later, is not proof but credibility.

I have said that the basic tenet of scientific materialism is that only matter exists. At that level, it is a very simple thing. On another level, however, scien­tific materialism is, like religion, a rather complex phenomenon. One can iden­tify at least three highly interwoven strands in the materialist creed. In its crudest form it is a prejudice which looks upon all religion as a matter of primitive super­stition, at best a source of some charming tales, like those of the gods of Olym­pus or Jonah and the whale, but at worst a dangerous form of obscurantism which breeds fanaticism and intolerance. Some religious beliefs, according to this view, may be more sophisticated than others, but none of them has any seri­ous intellectual content.

Scientific materialism also comes in more refined philosophical forms. Here its critique of religion is essential!)' epistemological. It is acknowledged that there are religious ideas which have a certain intellectual appeal and internal con­sistency, but they are rejected as being unsupported by evidence. The assertions made by religion, it is said, cannot be tested and therefore cannot be accepted by a person who wants to be guided by reason rather than wishful thinking.

Finally, there is the "scientific" part of scientific materialism, which argues that religion, however believable it may once have been, has now been dis­credited by science. According to this view, the world revealed by scientific dis­cover}' over the last few centuries simply does not look anything like what we

__________________________THE   MATERIALIST   CREED                3

were taught to believe by religion. It is this claim that I shall subject to critical scrutiny in this book. The question before us, then, is whether the actual dis­coveries of science have undercut the central claims of religion, specifically the great monotheistic religions of the Bible, Judaism and Christianity, or whether those discoveries have actually, in certain important respects, damaged the credi­bility of materialism.

Before taking up this question, which is the main subject of this book, I will spend one chapter looking at materialism in its cruder form of anti-religious prejudice. This means making a brief digression even before I begin. However, I think this is necessary. Centuries of anti-religious myth stand in the way of a fair discussion of the real issues and must be gotten out of the way.

2 Materialism as an Anti-Religious Mythology

To begin with I will state the anti-religious myth in words that I think are quite typical of a great deal of writing on the subject.1

"Religion is the fruit of ignorance. Ignorant people, because they do not know how the world really works or the true causes of things, have always had recourse to explanations based on mythical beings and occult forces. They attribute the unpredictability of nature to the whims of gods and spirits. One sees this in the ancient myths and legends of primitive peoples. For example, in Greek mtfhology, thunder and lightning were the weapons of Zeus, storms at sea were caused by the wrath of Poseidon, and volcanic activity was asso­ciated with the subterranean workshops of Hephaestos, from whose Roman name, Vulcan, the word volcano comes.

"But religion is not just simple ignorance. It is a form of pseudo-knowledge. True knowledge—which is to say scientific knowledge — is based on reason and experience, on testable hypotheses and repeatable experi­ments. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are based on the authority of ancestors or holy men or sacred writings—in other words, on someone's say-so. The fundamental opposition, then, between science and religion is the conflict, inherent and unresolvable, between reason and dogma.

"The defining moment in the history of science was the confrontation between Galileo and the Roman Inquisition. In this episode science and reli­gion stood revealed in their truest and purest colors. It was the decisive con­test between the two approaches to the world, the scientific and the religious, and religion lost. Its defeat proved the hollowness of religious authority's claim to special knowledge about the world.

4

M_ATERIAUSM AS AN ANTI-REL1G 10US MYTHOLOGY             5

"Science is the rational approach to reality because it deals with things that can actually be observed. Its statements can be put to the test. Religion, by contrast, characteristically deals with entities —God, the soul, angels, devils, Heaven, and Hell —that are admitted to be invisible. Its statements, because untestable, must be 'taken on faith.' 'Faith' is nothing but the wholly arbitrary acceptance of statements for which there is no evidence, and is therefore the very antithesis of reason: it is believing without reason.

"As science has progressed, religious explanations have given way to scien­tific ones. No evidence of God or of the soul has been forthcoming. Rather, these fictitious entities have less and less room to hide. They were meant in the first place to fill the gaps in our knowledge of the physical world, and consequently they are being steadily and inevitably squeezed out as those gaps are systematically closed. Science is the realm of the known, while reli­gion thrives on the 'unknown,' on the 'unexplainable,' and on 'mysteries'— in short, on the irrational."

It is not too hard to show that most of this fairly standard anti-religious cari­cature is based on misunderstandings and bad history. In the first place, it is important to emphasize that the biblical religions did not originate in pre-scientific attempts to explain natural phenomena through myth. In fact, the Bible shows almost no interest in natural phenomena. It is certainly true that biblical revelation, both Jewish and Christian, has as a central part of its mes­sage that the universe is a creation of God and reflects his infinite wisdom and power. However, the scriptural authors evince no concern with detailed ques­tions of how or why things happen the way they do in the natural world. Their primary concern is with God's relationship to human beings, and with human beings' relationships to each other.

In other words, the religion of the Bible is not a nature religion. Indeed, one of the great contributions of the Bible, which helped clear the ground for the later emergence of science, was to desacralize and depersonalize the natural world. This is not to deny that the Bible is overwhelmingly supernatural in its outlook, but that supematuralism is concentrated, so to speak, in a being who is outside of nature.2 No more were the Sun or stars or oceans or forests the haunts of ghosts or gods, nor were they endowed with supernatural powers. They were mere things, creations of the one God.5 It is not an accident that as tradi­tional Christian belief has weakened in Western society in the last few decades there has been a recrudescence of belief in the "occult."

What is true of the Bible is also true of Jewish and Christian teaching since biblical times: it has been very little concerned with attempts to give religious explanations of natural phenomena. If one looks at authoritative statements of doctrine horn the time of the early church fathers down through the Middle Ages

6              THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND MATERIALISM

and the Renaissance, one does not find pronouncements about botany, or zo­ology, or astronomy, or geology. For example, the most comprehensive statement of Catholic doctrine until just recently was the Roman Catechism, sometimes also called the Catechism of the Council of Trent, published in 1566, not long before the Galileo affair. There is nothing in the Roman Catechism pertaining to natural phenomena at all, The same is true of the doctrines of the other branches of Christianity, and of Judaism as well.

One place where theologians did concern themselves with the natural world was in interpreting the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, often called the Hexahcmeron, meaning "the six days." Even here, however, the central doc­trinal concern was not the details of how the world originated, but the fact that it was created. St. Thomas Aquinas summarized the mediaeval church's attitude toward the Book of Genesis as follows:

With respect to the origin of the world, there is one point that is of the sub­stance of the faith, viz. to know that it began by creation, on which all the authors in question are in agreement. But the manner and the order accord­ing to which creation took place concerns the faith only incidentally, in so far as it has been recorded in Scripture, and of these things the aforemen­tioned authors, safeguarding the truth by their various interpretations, have reported different things.4

The authors to whom St. Thomas was referring were the fathers and theolo­gians of the ancient church, and, indeed, their interpretations of the Hexahe-meron varied widely. In the East, the theologians of Alexandria tended toward very allegorical and symbolic interpretations, while those of Antioch and Cap-padocia tended toward strict literalism. In the West, the greatest of the fathers, St. Augustine (354-430), adopted a very non-literal approach. To take an impor­tant example, St. Augustine held that the "six days" of creation were not to be taken literally as a period of time or a temporal succession. He held, rather, that all things were produced simultaneously by God in a single instant and subse­quently underwent some natural process of development. Much earlier, St. Clement (ca. 150-ca. 216), Origen (ca. 185-ca. 254), and other Alexandrians had held the same view.5

In commenting on this issue, St. Thomas Aquinas said that the idea of suc­cessive creation was "more common, and seems superficially to be more in accord with the letter [of Scripture]," but that St. Augustine's idea of simulta­neous creation was "more conformed to reason," and therefore had his (St. Thomas's) preference.6

This statement of St. Thomas perfectly illustrates another important point, which is that the church has always sought to give empirical reason its due.

MATERIALISM AS AN ANT)-REL)G1QUS MYTHOLOGY              7

Never (even, as we shall see, in the Galileo case) has the church insisted upon interpretations of the Bible that conflicted with what could be demonstrated from reason and experience. In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas cites the teaching of St. Augustine on the principles which should be observed in inter­preting Scripture: "Augustine teaches that two points should be kept in mind when resolving such questions. First, the truth of Scripture must be held invio­lably. Second, when there are different ways of explaining a Scriptural text, no particular explanation should be held so rigidly that, if convincing arguments show it to be false, anyone dare to insist that it is still the definitive sense of the text'n

Indeed, St. Augustine was sometimes quite vehement on this subject, obvi­ously provoked by statements of some of the less learned Christians of his day. In a famous passage in his book De Genesi ad Litteram {On the Literal Mean­ing of Genesis), he wrote:

Usually even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of die years and seasons, about the kinds of ani­mals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. ... If they find a Chris­tian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him main­taining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe our books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren, ... to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture,... although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.8

How then, given these very reasonable attitudes of such high authorities as Augustine and Aquinas, did the Catholic Church end up, in the early seven­teenth century, condemning the scientific theories of Galileo? Part of the expla­nation, no doubt, lies with personal failings of the people involved, but it also had a lot to do with the agitated times in which Galileo lived. The church was

8              THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND MATERIALISM

caught up at that time in the great conflict of Reformation and Counter Refor­mation. The central accusation leveled at the Catholic Church by the Protes­tant reformers was that her teachings and practices were a corruption of the original pure gospel found in the Scriptures. The proper way to interpret scrip­tural passages thus became the major bone of contention. In order to guard against Protestant ways of interpreting Scripture, the church laid down at the Council of Trent certain principles of interpretation. These moderate and sen­sible rules ended up being tragically misapplied in the Galileo case. Ironically, this had the effect of producing an exaggerated literalism that was a departure, as we have seen, from the church's own ancient traditions of scriptural inter­pretation.^

Whatever the historical reasons for the fateful blunder, however, the Catho­lic Church, even at that darkest hour in her relations with science, did not reject the idea that truths about the natural world could be known through reason, observation, and experiment. Nor did she assert that genuine scientific proofs must give wav before literal interpretations of the Bible. The very head o^ the Roman Inquisition, Cardinal Bellarmine, wrote the following memorable words to a friend of Galileo's named Paolo Foscarini:

If there were a real proof that the Sun is in the center of the universe, . . . and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true. But, as for myself, I shall not believe that there are such proofs until thev are shown to me.10

As a matter of fact, such a "real proof was not possible in Galileo's and Bellarmine's time. (Galileo believed he had such proofs, but in fact his proofs were wrong.) Bellarmine tried to avoid the conflict, but, unfortunately, he had died by the time of Galileo's second encounter with the Roman authorities.

Whatever else can be said about this lamentable episode, the following is true: the condemnation of Galileo, rather than typifying the church's attitude toward science, was manifestly an anomaly. For while the Catholic Church has never been afraid to condemn theological propositions — in its long history it has anathematized many hundreds of them11 —only in the single instance of Galileo did the Catholic Church venture to condemn a scientific theory.12 And even in that case it refrained from doing so in its most solemn and formal way, which would have been irrevocable. \            The fact is that the attitude of the church has overwhelmingly been one of

friendliness to scientific inquiry. Long before Galileo, and continuing to the

MATERIALISM AS AN ANTI-REUGIOUS MYTHOLOGY              9

present clay, one can find examples in every century, not merely of church patronage of science, but of important scientific figures who were themselves monks, priests, and even bishops. It is worth mentioning some of the more out­standing examples.

Robert Grossetesre (ca. 1168-1253), bishop of Lincoln, was the founder of the "Oxford School," to which has been traced the beginning of the tradition of experimental physical science.u Thomas Bradwardine (1290-1349), who became archbishop of Canterbury, was one of the first people ever to write down an equation for a physical process.H Nicholas of Oresme (1323-1382), bishop of Lisieux, made major contributions to both mathematics and physics. He dis­covered how to combine exponents, and developed the use of graphs to repre­sent mathematical functions and prove theorems about them. He showed that the apparent daily motion of the Sun about the earth could be satisfactorily ex­plained by rotation of the earth on its axis. Oresme also made important attempts to give a quantitative description of accelerated motion, and played a major role in developing the physical concept of inertia. His work may have helped to pave the way for the ideas of Galileo and Newton.h Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464), a cardinal and an important figure in mediaeval philosophy, speculated not merely that Earth was in motion, as Copernicus later suggested, but far more boldly that all bodies, including botii Earth and the Sun, were in motion in an infinite uni­verse which had no center.16 (Oresme had had similar ideas.) The great Coper­nicus (1473-1543) was an ecclesiastic, being a canon of Frauenberg Cathedral. He was probably an ordained priest at the time of his death.17

Fr. Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) is a well-known figure in the history of mathematics, and a certain kind of prime number is named after him. Less well known is that he invented the afocal forms of the two-mirror telescope, funda­mental to the modern theory of reflecting telescopes.18

The tradition of Jesuit astronomy is well known.19 A Jesuit contemporary of Galileo, Ft. Christoph Schemer (1573-1650), made important discoveries about sunspots and the Sun's rotation on its axis, and is credited with discovering sunspots independently of Galileo.-" Fr. Francesco Grimaldi (1613-1653) was a pioneer in lunar cartography, and he gave romany of the features of the kmar landscape the names by which they are called today. His published discoveries on the refraction of light preceded Newton's and he discovered both the dif­fraction of light and the "destructive interference" of light.21 Fr. Giovanni Riccioli (1598-1671) discovered the first "binary" or double star.22 Probably the greatest Jesuit astronomer was Fr. Pietro Secchi (1818-1878), one of the founders of astrophysics. He developed the first spectral classification of stars, which is the basis of that still used today; invented the meteorograph; and was the first to understand that nebulae were clouds of gas.2' Not all priest-astronomers were Jesuits, however. A case in point is Fr. Giuseppe Piazzi

10          

(1746-1826), director of the Palermo Observatory, who discovered the first as­teroid, Ceres, in 1801.^

Fr. Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-3799) was one of the leading biologists of his day. He first interpreted the process of digestion, showing it to be a process of solution taking place by the action of gastric juices. He performed experiments that disproved the hypothesis of "spontaneous generation," and did important research on such varied matters as fertilization in animals, respiration, regen­eration, and the senses of bats. Nor was his work confined to biology. He also helped lav the foundations of modern vulcanology and meteorology.'5 Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), an Austrian monk, is universally honored as "the father of genetics'" for his discovery of the basic laws of heredity.26

Abbe Henri Breuil (1877-1962), who has been called "the father of pre­history," was one of the leading paleontologists in the world and for decades the foremost expert on prehistoric cave paintings.2. Abbe Georges LemaTtre (1894-1966) was one of the originators of the Big Bang Theory, along with Alexander Friedmann.28 Fr. Julius A. Nieuwland (1878-1936), a chemistry pro­fessor at Notre Dame, was a co-developer of neoprene, the first synthetic rubber­like compound.29

One could also mention such significant figures in the history of mathematics as Fr. Francesco Cavalieri (1598-1647), whose ideas played a role in the devel­opment of calculus; Fr. Girolamo Saccheri (1667-1733), whose work led up to the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry; and Fr.Bernhard Bolzano (1781-1848), who helped to put the branch of mathematics called "analysis" on a rigorous footing and to clarify mathematical thinking about infinite quantities.'0

Obviously, had the church been hostile to science and reason, or had reli­gious faith been incompatible with the scientific temper of mind, so many eccle­siastical figures would not have been found making major scientific discoveries. (Because it was Catholic authorities who blundered in the Galileo affair, 1 have given only Catholic examples here. But non-Catholic clergymen have also made important contributions to science, from Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the discoverer of the element oxygen, who was a Protestant minister, to John Polkinghorne, a distinguished particle physicist of our own day who became an Anglican clergyman.)

Many will be surprised to learn that so many Christian clergymen have con­tributed so importantly to scientific discovery. The name of Gregor Mendel, of course, is familiar to most people; and those who have studied astronomy will know at least of the role of the earlier Jesuit astronomers. But on the whole, even among scientists, the larger picture of the church's involvement with science is not well known. I he one tragic episode of Galileo has therefore overshadowed ail the rest and come to typify in the mind of the public, educated and unedu­cated alike, the relation of science and religion

MATERIALISM AS AN ANTI-RELIGIOUS MYTHOLOGY             11

Even so, most scientific materialists would concede that to be personally reli­gious is not to be personally hostile to science. Even if they do not always have a balanced view of the history, they do know that many of the great founders of modern science, including Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Ampere, Maxwell, and Kelvin, were deeply religious men. And those scientific materi­alists who are themselves scientists know religious believers among their own scientific colleagues. (They may have heard, too, of the recent survey which showed that roughly half of American scientists believe in a personal God who answers prayers.) However, while admitting that religious people can be and often are good scientists, the scientific materialist nevertheless is convinced that the religious outlook and the scientific outlook are fundamentally at odds. For religion involves dogma, faith, and mystery, all of which, the materialist thinks, are inimical to the scientific spirit.

In fact, the charge is not simply that dogma, faith, and mystery are unscien­tific, but that they are essentially contrary to reason itself. To accept a dogma, it is thought, is to put some proposition beyond the reach of reason, beyond dis­cussion, beyond evidence, beyond curiosity or investigation.

This view of dogma as anti-rational is based on a fundamental misunder­standing of what religious dogmas are. It is thought that the basis of dogma is emotion. Consider the following passage from a recent book: "Nothing could be more antithetical to intellectual reform than an appeal against thoughtful scrutiny of our most hidebound mental habits—notions so 'obviously' true that we stopped thinking about them generations ago, and moved them into our hearts and bosoms."'1 The author here was not specifically discussing religious dogma, but his words well summarize what the word dogma means for many people. To a religious person, however, a dogma is not something that is em­braced from mere hidebound habit or feeling or wishful thinking, rather it is understood to be a true proposition for which there is the best of all possible evi­dence, namely that its truth has been revealed by God.

The believer in religious dogmas accepts that there are two ways that a thing may be known to be true: either empirically, through observation, experience, and the "natural light of reason," or through divine revelation. Accepting the one does not mean rejecting the other. In fact, in out everyday life we recognize that out knowledge does have a double source: there is what we have learned for ourselves and what we have learned from the information of others, whether teachers, friends, books, or common knowledge. Indeed, a little reflection shows that what we have actually derived from our own direct observation of the world without relying upon the word of others is but a very tiny part of everything that we do know. For a person to accept as knowledge only what lie had discovered and proved for himself from direct personal experience would put his knowl­edge at the level of the Stone Age.

12             THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AMD MATERIALISM

Taking something on authority, then, is not in itself irrational. On the con­trary, it would be irrational never to do so. The question is when we should take something on authority, and on what kind of authority, and how far we should trust it. In the case of religious dogma, the authority is said to be God, who, it is claimed, has revealed certain truths —primarily truths about himself—to human beings. Such a claim is not in itself contrary to reason, for it is certainly hypothetically possible that there is a God and that he has revealed himself to man.

On the oilier hand, reason would require that before accepting religious dog­mas we must have some sufficient rational grounds for believing that there is in fact a God, and that he has indeed revealed himself to man, and that this reve­lation truly is to be found where it is claimed to be found. And. indeed, these requirements of reason have always been admitted by the monotheistic creeds of Judaism and Christianity.

It is true that some believers, rinding it difficult to give a satisfactory account of why they believe, have fallen back on the idea that belief is simply something one chooses to do, that it is its own justification, that it is a blind "leap." This is the view called "fideism." However, it is not the view of the traditional faiths.

If we take what is perhaps the most dogmatic faith of all, Catholicism, we find that it utterly rejects fideism, condemning it as a serious religious error. The First Vatican Council, in 1870, made the following declaration:

In order that our submission of faith be nevertheless in harmony with reason, God willed that exterior proofs of his revelation . . . should be joined to the interior helps of the Holy Spirit …The assent of faith is by no means a blind

impulse of the mind."

The same council formally condemned the proposition that "people ought to be moved to faith solely by each one's inner experience or by personal inspi­ration,"35 Rather, the council emphasized that there are objective facts and argu­ments in favor of true religious belief. Indeed, the council declared that the existence of God could be known with certainty without faith and without divine revelation by the "natural light of human reason."3"1

It might be thought that Protestantism, with its doctrine of sola fide ("by faith alone"), its emphasis on the inner light, and its greater distrust of human natu­ral powers, including the "natural light of reason," might embrace fideism. But that is incorrect. For example, in Calvin's monumental summa of Protestant belief, Institutes of the Christian Religion, one of the first chapters is entitled "Rational proofs to establish the belief of the Scripture "'s Protestant's, no less than Catholics, believe that faith in God is a "reasonable service," to use a scrip­tural phrase.

This is not to say, of course, that very many religious believers would be able to give a precisely elaborated account of the grounds for their beliefs, with every

MATERIALISM AS AN ANTI-RELIGIOUS MYTHOLOGY              13

step rigorously justified in the manner of a mathematical proof. But, for that matter, how many people could give such an account for anything they believe? Very few. People are not, as a rule, that methodical or analytical. This does not mean that they do not have, at some level, implicit and not consciously formu­lated, good reasons for believing as they do. As G. K. Chesterton observed, "most people have a reason but cannot give a reason."

It must not be thought, however, that religious faith is simply a matter of proofs and evidence.36 On the contrary, the certitude of faith is claimed to be itself a gift from God, a result of what the passage quoted above called "the inte­rior helps of the Holy Spirit." But unless there were also "exterior proofs" of reve­lation, belief would not be "in harmony with reason."

The first article of religion, of course, which must be believed before any divine revelation can be accepted, is that there is a God. As we have seen, the Catholic Church claims that this can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason. And, indeed, throughout history theologians and philosophers have furnished a wide variety of arguments for the existence of God. The basic outlines of one such argument can be found in both the Old and New Testa­ments. In a famous passage in his Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul asserts that, although God is in himself invisible, his "eternal power and godhead" are "from the creation of the world ... clearly seen, being understood from the things that are made."(Roin. 1:20) St Paul is saying here that one may reason from the exis­tence of an effect (in this case the existence of the world itself) to the existence of its cause (in this case God). The same argument is made by St. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the second century: "Creation itself reveals him that created it; and the work made is suggestive of him that made it; and the world mani­fests him that arranged it"" Calvin in his Institutes puts the same thought in these words: "God [has] manifested himself in the formation ofeverypartofthe world, and daily presents himself to public view, in such manner, that they can­not open their eyes without being constrained to behold him."'8

This basic line of argument has been refined and developed in several forms, which go by such names as the Cosmological Argument, the Argument from Contingency, and the Argument from Design. There are also arguments for the existence of God based on the existence of an objective moral order and on the nature of truth and our capacity to know it.

Beyond grounds for believing that God exists, there must be some grounds for believing that there has been a divine revelation if dogmatic religious belief is to be truly rational. Again, both Christians and Jews have an array of argu­ments, largely historical in nature, for the fact of revelation.

It is beyond the scope of this book to present or develop either the philo­sophical or the historical arguments in detail. (However, the Argument from Design is discussed at length in chapters 9 through 13, and certain of the other philosophical arguments are briefly discussed in appendix A, where I attempt to

14           THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND MATERIALISM

explain some basic, traditional ideas about God and Creation.) The point that I wish to emphasize here is simply that Jewish and Christian thought have taken very seriously the importance of evidence and argument and the necessity of rational grounds tor belief.

One of the common complaints against religious dogma is that it is a substi­tute for rational inquiry, that it puts an end to thought. However, this is not the actual experience of the Jew or Christian, for whom revealed truths are a source of light in which new things may be seen and new insights arrived at. This is well expressed by the motto of my alma mater, Columbia University: In lumine tito, videbmnis lumen. ("In Thy light, shall we see light.") The ideal of Christian theology has always been summed up in St. Augustine's phrase "fides querens intellectum." "faith seeking understanding," or as he also expressed it, "I believe in order that 1 may understand." ("Credo ut intellegam")

The misconception that faith is opposed to rational inquiry seems to have a lot to do with the word mystery. In the writings of materialists, as we shall see later, the words mystery, mystery-mongering, and mysterianism crop up repeat­edly as bugaboos to be avoided at all costs. The idea appears to be that a mystery is something dark and off-limits, an aspect of reality that is essentially irrational and unintelligible. A mystery is thought to be, one might say, the dark shadow cast by a dogma. This is not only a misconception, but really the opposite of what a religious mystery is to a religious person. Dogmas do not shut off thought, like a wall. Rather they open to the mind vistas that are too deep and broad for our vision. A mystery is what cannot be seen, not because there is a barrier across our field of vision, but because the horizon is so far away. It is a statement not of limits, but of limitlessness.

A religious "mystery" is not a statement that reality is in itself unintelligible. On the contrary, belief in God is bound up with the idea that reality is completely rational and intelligible. This is akin to the scientist's faith that his own questions about the natural world have rational and intelligible answers. This attitude of the scientist is also a form of faith, for the scientist is convinced in advance that the intelligible answer exists, even though he is not yet in possession of it. The fact that he is searching for the answer is proof that he does not have it, but it also attests to his unconquerable conviction that the answer, though presently not in sight, exists. The scientist knows that there is some insight, some act of understanding, which he currently lacks, that would satisfy the rational mind on the particular point he is investigating. The religious believer's faith is an extension of this attitude: he knows that there is some insight, some act of understanding, that would constitute complete intellectual satiety, because it would be a state of complete understanding of reality. However, he realizes, being sane, that such a state of perfect understanding is not achievable by a finite mind such as his own. Rather that insight, that act of understanding, is the state

[WIATER1ALISM AS AN ANT1-RELIG I OUS MYTHOLOGY              15

of being of a perfect and infinite mind, namely God — it is, indeed, what God is. In the words of the Jesuit philosopher Bernard J. F. Lonergan, God is the "unre­stricted act of understanding"39

So, the complete intelligibility and rationality of reality corresponds to the existence of a supreme intelligence, a supreme reason. The last person, there­fore, who would say that there is anything about the world created by God that is inherently irrational is the Jew or Christian. However, the Jew or Christian knows that he is not himself God, and therefore will never be in a state of per­fect understanding about all of reality. And, in particular, he knows that he can never comprehend God as He is in Himself, since God is an infinite mind. As stated earlier, the dogmas of faith concern primarily the nature of God. And it is for that reason that they are mysterious —not because they are not intelligible in themselves, but because they are not intelligible completely to us. They are of course intelligible to God, who comprehends completely all that is real, and therefore completely comprehends his own nature.

The reason that there are mysteries is that God is infinite and our intellects are finite. Thus the divine nature is not "proportionate" to our minds, as the mediaeval theologians would put it. However, the natures of things in the physical world are certainly finite, and therefore are proportionate to our intel­lects. There is consequently no reason whatsoever that comes from Jewish or Christian belief to have any doubt that we are capable of understanding the physical world. It is for that reason religious mystery hardly touches at all upon the matters which the physicist studies. Thus the idea that religion, because it acknowledges mystery, must be the enemy of natural science is unfounded.

Now, while religious dogmas do not in fact limit the kinds of things one is able to think about, materialism obviously does. The materialist will not allow himself to contemplate the possibility that anything whatever might exist that is not completely describable by physics. That is simply a forbidden thought. It is usually not even felt to be necessary to argue against it. Admittedly, many materialists will say that forbidding one to speak of non-material entities is simply a matter of scientific "methodology." Natural science investigates matter, they say, and so anything that might go beyond matter is outside of scientific discus­sion. However, it is hard to see why this should be so. For example, one can imagine investigating human psychology in a perfectly scientific way without prejudging whether the human mind is entirely explicable in terms of material processes. In any event, for most materialists it is not really only a question of methodology. The non-material is considered simply beyond the pale of rational discourse. In short, the materialist's notion of what a dogma is, though quite unfair to religious dogma, exactly fits his own views.

One sees this materialist dogmatism displayed in every field of inquiry from the philosophy of mind, to artificial intelligence, to psychology, to biology. For

16             THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND MATERIALISM

example, the former editor of Nature. Sir John Macklox, in his book What Remains to Be Discovered, describes the immense complexity of the human brain and shows how little we yet know about its neural circuitry and detailed functioning. Avid yet he feels entitled to conclude, "An explanation of the mind like that of the brain must ultimately be an explanation in terms of the way that neurons function. After all, there is nothing else on which to rest an explana­tion."''0 [emphasis mine] One of the facts that is most difficult for materialism to deal with is consciousness. (Though, since it is more a philosophical problem than an issue in physics, I do not discuss it at length in this book.) The phi­losopher David Chalmers, in his book The Conscious Mind, summarizes the various materialist approaches to the problem. One is what he calls "don't-have-a-clue materialism," which he defines as the following view: "1 don't have a clue about consciousness. It seems utterly mysterious to me. But it must be physical, as materialism must be true."41 [emphasis mine] Such a view, he finds, "is held widely, but rarely in print." Materialists regard consciousness as at most a merely "passive" by-product of physical processes in the brain. In surveying current thinking about consciousness, the scientist and philosopher Avshalom Elitzur concluded (disapprovingly), "I think one may talk here about the dogma of passivity.""12

What is most puzzling to the religious person about this materialist dogma­tism is its lack of foundation. The religious dogmatist, after all, accepts certain truths as dogmas onlv because he believes them to have been revealed by God. But the materialist obviously cannot claim divine authority for his statement that only matter exists. On what basis, then, does the materialist's apodictic cer­tainty rest?

Is materialism claimed to be self-evidently true? If anything would appear to be self-evident it would be that there are certain things, such as ideas, concepts, and minds, which are of a different sort than material objects. If materialism were self-evidently true, one might expect it to be the common view of ordi­nary people, and obviously it isn't. Is materialism definitively proven by philo­sophical or scientific demonstration? Are there no respectable arguments that could bring its truth into doubt in the mind of an intelligent person? If so, then how can one explain tire large number of philosophers and scientists who dis­believe in materialism and bring forward arguments drawn from many consid­erations against it? We shall meet some of these people and some of their arguments later in this book.

As we examine some of the arguments for materialism later, we shall see that ultimately all ofthem are completely circular. They all seem to boil down in the end to "materialism is true, because materialism must be true." The fact seems to be that the philosophy of materialism is completely fideistic in character.

Not only is materialism as it is usually encountered more fideistic than the faith of the ordinary religious believer, it is also far more narrow and intellectu-

MATERIALISM AS AN ANTI-RELIGIOUS MYTHOLOGY           V

ally confining. That is because it is essentially a negative proposition. A person who believes that there is something about the human mind that goes beyond matter has a great deal of freedom of thought in this area. How much of the human mind can be physically explained is for him an open question. He may think (like David Chalmers) that all of human behavior is entirely explicable in physical terms but that human subjective experience is not. Or he may believe (like Avshalom Elitzur) that certain aspects of human behavior also go beyond physical explanation. He may (like Chalmers) think that sensation involves a non-material aspect of the mind, or he may believe (with Aristotle) that only cer­tain functions of the human intellect do. He may believe that some ultimate theory will encompass in one scientific framework both material and non-material realities, or he may believe that the divide between matter and spirit is fundamental.

The materialist, by contrast, is in a straitjacket of his own devising. Nothing is allowed by him to be beyond explanation in terms of matter and the mathe­matical laws that it obeys. If, therefore, he comes across some phenomenon that is hard to account for in materialist terms, he often ends up by denying its very existence. For instance, many materialist philosophers deny that there really is any such thing as subjective experience. Philosophers call this view "elimina-tivism." What cannot be explained by the theory is eliminated from considera­tion. Some renowned philosophers, such as W. V. O. Quine, have denied that there are any mental experiences or events at all. Quine says that the existence of mental or conscious processes must be "repudiated.""41 As we shall see later, there are many thinkers who, in order to escape certain anti-materialist argu­ments that are based on human rational powers, are willing to abandon, in effect, a belief in human rationality—including, of course, their own. Almost all materialists deny that free will exists; they deem it an "illusion." And so it goes. Anything that stands in the way of materialism is ignored or denied. The materi­alist lives in a very small world, intellectually speaking. It is a universe of huge physical dimensions, but very narrow, for all that. There is no purpose in this universe. Even human acts are entirely determined by physical processes. Just as the astrologer believes that his life is controlled by the orbits of the planets, the materialist believes that his own actions and thoughts are controlled by the orbits of the electrons in his brain. Our moral or aesthetic judgments are, in the final analysis, just emotional reactions, just chemistry. Even our very "selves" are just convenient fictions; there is no real unitary self that stands behind the welter of images, impulses, drives, and thoughts flickering through our neural circuitry.44

The believing Jew or Christian does not feel the need to be embarrassed when materialists attack religion as "anti-scientific" or irrational. For he regards his own beliefs as not less but far more rational than those of the materialist. He regards them as providing a fuller, more coherent, and more sensible picture

18             THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AMD MATERIALISM

of reality. A picture in which the existence of the universe is not merely some colossal accident, in which human life has both purpose and meaning, in which ideas about truth and falsehood and good and evil are more than mere electro­chemical responses in our brains, and in which the beaut)', harmony, and order of the universe, which science has helped us to see more clearly than ever before, are recognized as the product of a wisdom and a reason that transcends our own.

I Scientific Materialism and Nature

Though I have spent some time discussing them, it is not the historical preju­dices of some scientific materialists that are the main subject of this book, but rather the interpretation given by materialists to what science has actually dis­covered in the last four centuries about the natural world. To use the political language of our day, what I wish to discuss is not the "spin" which some mate­rialists have put on religion or history, but the spin they have put on scientific facts and theories.

Passing, then, beyond the bias and bad history which often accompanies it, one finds that scientific materialism has a case to make against religion that is based upon the discoveries of science itself. Again, let me state this case in words that might be used by a typical materialist:

The Scientific Materialist's View of Nature

"The world revealed by science bears little resemblance to the world as it was portrayed by religion. Judaism and Christianity taught that the world was cre­ated by God, and that things therefore have a purpose and meaning, aside from the purposes and meanings we choose to give them. Moreover, human beings were supposed to be central to that cosmic purpose. These comfort­ing beliefs can no longer be maintained in the face of scientific discoveries. "The universe more and more appears to be a vast, cold, blind, and pur­poseless machine. For a while it appeared that some things might escape the iron grip of science and its laws —perhaps Life or Mind. But the processes of life are now known to be just chemical reactions, involving the same ele­ments and the same basic physical laws that govern the behavior of all matter. The mind itself is, according to the overwhelming consensus of cognitive scientists, completely explicable as the performance of the biochemical

19

20            THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND MATERIALISM

computer called the brain.' There is nothing in principle that a mine] does which an artificial machine could not do just as well or even better. Already, one of the greatest creative chess geniuses of all time has been thrashed by a mass of silicon circuitry.2

'There is no evidence of a spiritual realm, or that God or souls are real. In fact, even if there did exist anything of a spiritual nature, it could have no influence on the visible world, because the material world is a closed sys­tem of physical cause and effect. Nothing external to it could affect its opera­tions without violating the precise mathematical relationships imposed by the laws of physics. The physical world is 'causally closed,' that is, closed off to anv non-physical influence.

"All, therefore, is matter: atoms in ceaseless, aimless motion. In the words of Democritus, everything consists of'atoms and the void/' Because the ulti­mate reality is matter, there cannot be anv cosmic purpose or meaning, for atoms have no purposes or goals.

"Once upon a time, scientists believed that even inanimate objects did have purposes or goals: 'ends' which they sought or toward which they tended. For example, heavy objects were said to fall because they sought their proper place at the center of the earth. That was the idea in Aristotelian physics. It was precisely when these ideas were overthrown four hundred years ago that the Scientific Revolution took off. With Galileo and Newton, science definitively rejected 'teleology' in favor of 'mechanism.' That is, sci­ence no longer explains phenomena in terms of natural purposes, but in terms of impersonal and undirected mechanisms. And, of course, if there are no purposes anywhere in nature, then there can be no purpose for the exis­tence of the human race. The human race can no longer be thought of as 'central' to a purpose that does not exist.

"Science has dethroned man.-1 Far from being the center of things, he is now seen to be a very peripheral figure indeed. Every great scientific revo­lution has further trivialized him and pushed him to the margins. Copernicus removed Earth from the center of the solar system. Modern astronomy has shown that the solar system itself is on the edge of a quite ordinary galaxy, which contains a hundred billion other stars. That galaxy is, in turn, one of billions and perhaps even an infinite number of galaxies. Earth is an insignifi­cant speck in the vasmessofspace: its mass compared to all the matter in the observable universe is less than that of a raindrop compared to all the water in all the oceans of the world.5 All of recorded human history is a fleeting moment in the eons of cosmic time. Even on this cozy planet, which we think of as ours, we are latecomers. Homo sapiens has been around at most a few hundred thousand years, compared to the 4 billion years of life's his­tory. The human species is just one branch on an ancient evolutionary tree,

SCIENTIFIC   MATERIALISM   AND   NATURE              21

and not so very different from some of the other branches—genetically we overlap more than 98 percent with chimpanzees. We are the product not of purpose, but of chance mutations. Bertrand Russell perfectly summed up man's place in the cosmos when he called him 'a curious accident in a backwater.'"6

One can see that what we have here is a fairly coherent and consistent story. It is the story of science as seen by the materialist. The main plotline is what may be called the "marginalization of man." Man starts with the religious view that he is in the center of things, and science rudely disillusions him.

There are at least two things wrong with this story: its beginning and its end. The beginning is not quite right. It is not really true that religious man saw him­self at the center of the world, at least if we mean by religious man Jews and Christians. The idea of the world having a center entered Western thought not through Judaism or Christianity but through Greek astronomy and philosophy. The Greek picture, and more precisely the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian picture, was that the universe was arranged as a series of concentric spheres, with Earth at the center. However, the ancient Jewish picture of the world was vertical, not radial. God was above and the "abyss" was below. The human race was in between, both in place and in value. Among created things we were lower than the angels and higher than plants, animals, and inanimate objects. In no sense were we at the center. Indeed, having once been closer to God, human beings had been cast out. Man is an exile.

And even in the Greek picture of the cosmos, the central place was not the most exalted. On the contrary, the farther from the center things were the more sublime and beautiful they were, while the closer to the center the baser and grosser. More refined substances, like fire, tended upward, while heavy, earthy things tended toward their natural place at the center of the earth.

So the beginning of the stow is really not right. Nevertheless, there is a ker­nel of truth in it. To the Jews and Christians human beings are certainly spe­cial among the visible creation, since we are "made in the image of God." However, this did not necessarily translate into a physical centrality.

What is more fundamentally wrong with the story, however, is its ending. If science had ended in the nineteenth century, the story would have some claim to accuracy. However, science did not end at that point. Instead, in the twentieth century it made discoveries even more profound and revolutionary than those of Copernicus and Newton. And, as a result, the story has become much more interesting. Like many good stories, the plot now has an unexpected twist at the end. It has not come out at all the way it was supposed to.

In fact, there has not been just one plot twist at the end, there have been at least five. In this book, I am going to tell these last and most interesting parts of

22            THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND MATERIALISM

the story. But it will be helpful tor the reader to have some idea of the wain story line before getting deeply involved in the various details and subplots, and so 1 will present here a brief outline or preview of the rest of the book.

Five Plot Twists

The First Plot Twist

The first plot twist is similar to the standard man-no-longer-at-the-center-of-the-universe story in one respect: it has to do with our picture of the universe as a whole. However, it is not about space and whether it has a center, it is about time and whether it had a beginning.

We have already seen that it is at best an oversimplification to say that Jews and Christians placed man in the center of the cosmos while atheists and mate­rialists placed man at the margins. But there is one contrast between the reli­gious and materialist conceptions of the cosmos that has far more historical validity: Jews and Christians have always believed that the world, and time itself, had a beginning, whereas materialists and atheists have tended to imagine that the world has always existed. The very first words of the Bible, indeed, refer to a Beginning. By contrast, the pagan Greeks generally believed that the world was without beginning. (Among ancient thinkers, a few neo-Platonists believed that time had a beginning, but those who did were generally monotheists.)

Modern atheists and materialists have generally followed the pagan Greeks in this regard. The idea of a beginning of time was associated with religious con­ceptions, not with scientific theory, and those scientists who believed in a begin­ning did so for religious, not scientific reasons. Indeed, as we shall see, by the nineteenth century almost all the scientific facts seemed to point toward a uni­verse without beginning. For this reason, the discover)' of the Big Bang in the twentieth century came as a profound shock.

It is not that the Big Bang in itself proves the Jewish and Christian doctrine of Creation. Nevertheless, it was unquestionably a vindication of the religious view of the universe and a blow to the materialist view. It was as clear and as dra­matic a beginning as one could have hoped to find. This is the story that is told in the next part of this book (chapters 4 through 8). The story is an ongoing one. Scientists are hoping to understand the Big Bang itself and to learn what, if any­thing, existed before it. I shall discuss some of these recent ideas as well.

The Second Plot Twist

In the standard materialist story of science, the world was found to be governed not by a personal God but by impersonal laws. Whereas religion had spoken of the earth and stars being fashioned by the hand of God, we now know that they

SCIENTIFIC   MATERIALISM   AND   NATURE              23

were formed by blind and impersonal forces. Science looked not to God to explain events in the world but to physical "mechanisms" and processes. And this certainly remains true. It is still what the physical sciences are all about. But there has been a subtle and gradual shift in perspective that has become quite noticeable in the last century, especially in the more fundamental branches of physics.

Physics begins by trying to describe and explain various phenomena or effects observed in nature or in laboratory experiments. Empirical laws are discovered which these phenomena obey. As understanding progresses those empirical laws are found to follow from deeper laws and principles. For example, chemists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century discovered rules that govern the reac­tions of chemicals with each other, and formulated them in terms of such con­cepts as valency and chemical bond. In the early twentieth century those rules were discovered to be the consequence of the more fundamental laws of atomic physics. The laws of atomic physics, in turn, were found to flow from the laws of "quantum electrodynamics." And so it has proceeded as deeper and deeper levels of law have been uncovered.

As this deepening occurred, it had several consequences. First, physicists began to look not only at the physical effects and phenomena themselves, but increasingly at the form of the mathematical laws that underlie them. They began to notice that those laws exhibit a great deal of highly interesting mathe­matical structure, and that they are, in fact, extraordinarily beautiful and elegant from a mathematical point of view. As time went on, the search for new theo­ries became guided not only by the detailed fitting of experimental facts, but also by these notions of mathematical beauty and elegance. A famous example is the discovery of the Dirac equation in 1928. The physicist Paul Dirac was seek­ing an equation to describe electrons in a way that would be consistent with the principles of relativity theory. In this search he was guided primarily by mathematical beauty. "A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give," he said. In this case, as he was playing with some equations he found something "pretty." "[It] was a pretty mathematical result. I was quite excited over it. It seemed that it must be of some importance." Notice that it was the "prettiness" of the mathematics that convinced him that he was on the right track. Soon after, he found the great equation that has been called among the highest achievements of twentieth-century science."'

A second result of the deepening of physics has been the increasing unifica­tion of physics. Whereas in the early days of science the world seemed to involve many different phenomena with little apparent connection, such as heat, light, magnetism, and gravity, it later became increasingly clear that the laws of physics make up a single harmonious system. As physicists have gotten closer to find-^ nig the "unified theory" they have uncovered a great richness and profundity of mathematical structure in the laws of nature.

24           THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND MATERIALISM

A consequence of these trends is that it is no longer just particular substances, or objects, or phenomena that physicists ask questions about, it is the universe itself considered as a whole, and the laws of physics considered as a whole. The questions are no longer only, "Why does this metal act this way?" or "Why does this gas act this way?" but "Why is the universe like this?", "Why are the laws of physics like this?" When it was just this or that effect or phenomenon, it was easy to say that physical laws were a sufficient explanation. It seemed out of place to talk about things being "fashioned by the hand of God." But when it is the laws of nature themselves that become the object of curiosity, laws that are seen to form an edifice of great harmony and beaut)-, the question of a cosmic designer seems no longer irrelevant but inescapable.

Psychologically speaking, atheism and materialism come from the natural tendency to '"take things for granted," in particular to take the existence of the world itself for granted: the universe does not need to be created, it just is. It is taken to be a brute fact. But in the last century, physicists have learned to take less and less for granted. What could be more an unquestionable fact, for example, than the number of dimensions of space? And yet physicists now rou­tine!)' study hypothetical universes that have only one or two dimensions of space, or that have dozens of dimensions. Indeed, the leading candidate for the ulti­mate unified theory says that there are in reality ten space dimensions. In the nine­teenth century few people, if any, would have asked, "Why are there three space dimensions?" It was so much taken for granted that it was not even noticed as a fact that could be or ought to be explained. Today it is a central issue in physics.

Physicists even speak now about there being many universes, and suddenly the very' number of universes is something one cannot take for granted either. It therefore becomes harder to avoid asking, "Why is there any universe at all?"

In the second main section of this book (chapters 9 through 13) I will look at the ancient Argument from Design for the existence of God. I will show how modern discoveries in physics, far from undermining that argument, have greatly strengthened it.

The Third Plot Twist

Perhaps nothing is so central to the materialist's story of science as the "de­throning of man." Not only did religion supposedly put human beings in the center of the universe, but it made us the very point or purpose of the universe. 1 he universe was designed with us in mind. However, now, it is said, science has shown us that we were not "meant to be here." We were a fluke, our existence merely the result of "a fortuitous concourse of atoms." If science taught us any­thing, it seemed to be that. Except that, all of a sudden, science is telling us something very different.

SCIENTIFIC   MATERIALISM   AND   NATURE              25

In the 1970s, starting with some work of astrophysicist Brandon Carter, people started to talk about "anthropic coincidences." What they meant by this was that certain features of the laws of physics seem —just coincidently—to be exactly what is needed for the existence of life to be possible in our universe. The universe and its laws seem in some respects to be balanced on a knife-edge. A little deviation in one direction or the other in the way the world and its laws are put together, and we would not be here. As people have looked harder, the number of such "coincidences" found has grown.

Of course, this is exactly what one might expect if human beings were meant to be here, and if the universe was created with us in mind. And so, if nothing else, the discovery of these anthropic coincidences completely vitiates the materialist's claim that science has taught us otherwise.

This does not mean that the anthropic coincidences have ended the debate on the issue of man's place in the universe. In fact, there are ways that one can imagine explaining at least some of the anthropic coincidences without invok­ing the idea of a cosmic purpose. In other words, there is a "way out" for materi­alism. The way outgoes by the name of the "Anthropic Principle," an idea that I shall explain later in the book. It is an idea that must be taken seriously. It is the explanation of the anthropic coincidences that seems to be preferred by most scientists who have written about them—and a considerable number of eminent scientists have. However, I shall argue later that the Anthropic Principle is itself problematic, and probably cannot completely explain away all the anthropic coincidences that have been found.

In any event, what is clear is that the moral that materialists have drawn from the story of science was prematurely jumped at. It looks very much like the story may turn out the other way.

The Fourth Plot Twist

If, as the materialist thinks, only matter exists, then the human mind must be a machine. The invention of the computer has made this idea appear more plau­sible to a great many people. Indeed, the intelligent robot or android has become a staple of popular science fiction entertainment. The defeat of the chess world champion Garry Kasparov by the computer program Deep Blue only confirmed for many the belief that it is merely a matter of time before computers become intelligent in every sense that human beings are. This seems to be the regnant orthodoxy in the field of artificial intelligence, or AI, and the professionals in that area have little patience with anyone who doubts it. Of course, if materi­alism is correct, and if the human mind is itself just a machine —a "wet com­puter" or "machine made of meat" as some have called it—then this confidence would have a great deal of justification.

26             THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND MATERIALISM

However, there are many strong philosophical arguments against the notion that the human mind is no more than a physical machine. If it were, it would be very difficult to account for certain abilities of the human intellect, in particular the human abilities to think abstractly, to understand what philoso­phers call "universal terms/' to know some truths with certainty, and to know of some truths that they are true "of necessity." We shall present these anti-materialist arguments later in the book. These arguments have an old pedi­gree. Some of them go back, at least in substance, to Aristotle, Augustine, and Descartes, although they have been developed further by many modern phi­losophers.

Unfortunately, scientific materialists seem to not pay much attention to such philosophical arguments. One reason for this is that many people who regard themselves as scientific tend to disparage the whole field of philosophy as futile and barren. They remember that physical science only began to make progress when it became divorced from metaphysics in the Renaissance.

But there has been a remarkable turn of events. In the twentieth century a powerful argument has been developed against the idea that the human mind is a computer, and this argument has come not from philosophy but from the science of computation itself. Specifically, the argument is based on a brilliant and revolutionary theorem proved in 1931 by the Austrian logician Kurt Godel. Godel himself regarded the idea that the human mind is a computer as merely a modern "prejudice/' However, he did not develop the Godelian argument against it in any detail, at least in print. That was done in the 1960s by the phi­losopher John Lucas, and in the 1980s and 1990s by the mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose. Both Godel's Theorem, and the Lucas-Penrose argu­ment that is based on it, are extremely subtle. But the gist of it can be summa­rized as follows. One consequence of Godel's Theorem is that if one knew the program a computer uses, then one could in a certain precise sense outwit that program. If, therefore, human beings were computers, then we could in prin­ciple learn our own programs and thus be able to outwit ourselves; and this is not possible, at least not as we mean it here.

It's interesting to observe the lengths to which some people have been will­ing to go to avoid the conclusion of the Lucas-Penrose argument. Godel's Theo­rem only applies to computers that reason consistently. The Lucas-Penrose argument can be defeated, therefore, by saying that the human intellect reasons m a way that is inherently inconsistent. Not just that human beings sometimes make lapses in logic, but that the human mind is radically and inherently unsound in its reasoning faculties. Many have been willing to say this. That any­one to-maintain a certain belief-in this case that he himself is a machine-would be willing to argue against his own mental soundness is startling. It seems to go beyond hdeism and verge on fanaticism.

SCIENTIFIC   MATERIALISM   AND   NATURE              27

The Fifth Plot Twist

If the human mind is indeed a machine, and no more than that, it is clear that there can be no free will as that is normally understood. That is why most mate­rialists simply deny that free will exists. And, in so denying, they once had what seemed an almost unanswerable argument from physics. The argument is that the laws of physics are "deterministic," in the sense that what happens at a later time is uniquely determined through the laws of physics by what happened at earlier times. If that is so, then all of human history, including every human thought and deed, could have been calculated (in principle) in advance from a knowledge of the way the universe was in the distant past—even before human beings appeared. And, for over two hundred years, from at least the time of Isaac Newton, every indication from physics was that the laws of physics are com­pletely deterministic. Free will was, theoretically speaking, in a great deal of trouble. And that, in turn, created a painful difficulty for Judaism and Chris­tianity, since human free will is a central tenet of those creeds.

However, a truly astonishing reversal came in the 1920s with the advent of quantum theory. Quantum theory was the greatest and most profound revolu­tion in the history of physics. The whole structure of dieoretical physics was radi­cally transformed. And in that revolution physical determinism was swept away. The shock that this produced was immense. The ideal of physical science is pre­diction. Predictions are how theories are tested. To be able to explain the physical world is to be able to predict it in detail. Those ideas were deeply engrained in the minds of scientists. That complete knowledge of the present state of a physical system would not, even in principle, be enough to predict everything about its future behavior—which is what quantum theory showed — was a result that took the world of physics totally by surprise. The implications for the debate on free will were immediately and universally recognized. No longer could one simply argue from the deterministic character of physics that free will was an impossibility.

Of course, this has not ended the debate. Quantum theory certainly did not prove that there is free will. It simply showed that the most powerful argument against free will was obsolete. In the words of the great mathematician and physi­cist Hermann Weyl, "the old classical determinism ... need not oppress us any longer."8

But this was only one of the remarkable reversals produced by the quantum revolution. In the opinion o^ many physicists —including such great figures in twentieth-century physics as Eugene Wigner and Rudolf Peierls —the funda­mental principles of quantum theory are inconsistent with the materialist view of the human mind. Quantum theory, in its traditional, or "standard," or "or­thodox" formulation, treats "observers" as being on a different plane from the

28          T||prnj^[^^               RELIGION AND MATERIALISM

phvsicil svstcms that thev observe. A careful analysis of the logical structure of Lmtum theorv suggests that for quantum theory to make sense it has to posit the existence of observers who lie, at least in part, outside of the description pro­vided bv physics. This claim is controversial There have been various attempts made to avoid this conclusion, either by radical ^interpretations of quantum theory (such as the so-called "many-worlds interpretation'') or by changing quan­tum theory in some way. But the argument against materialism based on quan­tum theory' is a strong one, and has certainly not been refuted. The line of argument is rather subtle. It is also not well-known, even among most practic­ing physicists. But, if it is correct, it would be the most important philosophi­cal implication to come from any scientific discovery.

A New Story and a New Moral

G. K. Chesterton once compared his own intellectual development to the voy-aoe of an English yachtsman "who slightly miscalculated his course and dis­covered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas." The yachtsman of his story "landed (armed to the teeth and talking.by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton/'

Those who manage to pass through intellectual adolescence all follow a jour­ney that is somewhat like that. They are taught some simple truths as children, only to discover as teenagers or young adults that those truths were far too simple and that thev themselves were embarrassingly simple to have accepted them. They strike off on their own, leaving the comfortable mental world of their child­hood to find a wider and stranger world of ideas. They may experience this world as disturbing or as liberating, but in any event it is more exciting. If they are for­tunate, however, they may come to rediscover for themselves the truths they were taught as children. They may return home, as T. S. Eliot put it, and know it for the first time. If so, they may see that, although they first learned these truths as simple children, neither the truths themselves nor the people who taught them were quite as simple as they supposed.

This requires, however, the difficult feat of questioning twice in one's life — of undergoing two revolutions in one's thinking. It requires being critical even of the ideas that one encountered in the first flush of critical thinking in one's youth.

The story of science has turned out to have involved such a double revolu­tion. The revolutions of Copernicus and Newton have been followed by the revolutions of the twentieth century. Many have assumed that these further revo­lutions were just more of the same. Many have been misled by the name which

SCIENTIFIC   MATERIALISM   AND   NATURE              29

Einstein gave his theory into the absurd notion that his theory had something to do with "everything being relative." Many have been misled by the strangeness of modem physical ideas, such as quantum theory, into thinking that the les­son again was simply that all traditional notions should be jettisoned. However, a closer look at the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century reveals a very different picture. We find that the human mind is perhaps, after all, not just a machine. We find that the universe did perhaps, after all, have a beginning. We find that there is reason to believe, after all, that the world is the product of design, and that life is perhaps part of that design. This is the story that will be told in the rest of this book.

I should emphasize that this book is not about proofs. The materialist's story had a moral, but it did not constitute a proof of materialism. There was no experiment that proved that only matter existed, nor was there any calculation that proved that the universe had no purpose. Nor did the materialist really ever claim that there was. What he claimed was that there were two pictures of the world, the religious and the materialist, and that the progress of science has revealed a world that looks more and more like the materialist picture, and less and less like the religious picture. It was a question, in other words, not of proofs but of expectations. Science, it was claimed, had fulfilled the materialists expec­tations and confounded the religious believer's. In this book I am making the same kind of claim, but in reverse. I am claiming that on the critical points recent discoveries have begun to confound the materialist's expectations and confirm those of the believer in God.

Is a Pattern I Emerging?

Religion is sometimes attacked by materialists as a realm of make-believe and speculation in which untestable assertions are made about things that cannot be observed. It is true that the things that are of most concern to religion are things that cannot be smelled, or touched, or tasted—such as freedom and ratio­nality, good and evil, truth and falsehood, love and beauty. It is true that these will never register in the devices of experimentalists, or appear as quantities in the equations of theorists. But as we have seen, religion does make claims even about the physical world. One would be quite justified in calling these claims predictions.

One of these predictions is that the physical world cannot be "causally closed." One hundred years ago this prediction seemed well on the way to being falsified. Everything in the history of physics up to that time pointed toward a most rigid determinism. And vet that determinism did in fact give way in the face of new discoveries. Whv shouldn't this be counted as a successful prediction?

Not only was classical physics deterministic, but it left no room for anything but matter. It is not simply that classical physics was solely about the behavior of matter—that, of course, is what physics is supposed to be about. It was that there was no way for anything else to enter the physicist's picture of reality. The formulation of classical physics was in terms of material systems, and the coor­dinates or "variables" that completely describe those systems, and the laws that completely govern those variables. To be brought within the discussion at all was to be brought within the realm of matter.

How could mind possibly have entered such a framework? The mind could only have been conceived of as yet another physical substance or phenomenon, describable by variables and governed by laws. This is the problem that be­deviled Descartes, who was both a physicist and philosopher. In his theory of physics matter could only be influenced by being pushed on by other matter that was touching it. How could the mind do anything, therefore, unless it too was a kind of matter that could touch things and push them around? Descartes.

253

254            WHAT  IS   MAN?______________________________________

who rejected materialism, could not resolve this problem. The details ot New­ton's theory of physics were different from Descartes's, but it too portrayed a world of matter and motion and forces —a nuts-and-bolts world.

And yet, again, physics made a surprising turn. Suddenly the theories of phvsics could not even be formulated, it seemed, without reference to observers. Suddenly—as Heisenberg said—knowledge entered the picture, and —as Peierls said—"someone who knows" entered with it. Remarkably, this knower did not enter as just another physical system, with just another set of variables. The knower appears in the framework of the theory in a logically different way, on a different level, as it were. Is this not what the non-materialist view would have led one to expect? Is it not totally contrary to what the materialist view would have led one to expect? Is the materialist entitled to carry on as though his world-view were marching from triumph to triumph? Of course, no one knows what the future of science will bring. Perhaps quantum theory will itself be overturned. We can only talk about the implications of the science that we have.

From another direction, the direction of mathematics and logic, and at about the same time, the mechanical view of the human mind suffered at least as great a blow. The things that mathematicians understand can always be reduced to symbols and formulas and mechanical rules for manipulating them. But the very acts of "understanding" which are needed to create these formalisms cannot themselves be reduced to a formalism; they cannot be explained as mechanical processes of symbol manipulation, as mere algorithms. The whole mind of the mathematician cannot be reduced to mathematics. Mathematicians invent and use formalisms, but there is always something—the intellect—that remains out­side the formalisms and judges truth, has insights, and applies the standards of rationality. Mathematical symbols can "mean" something, but there must be someone to whom they mean something. Arguments can be valid or invalid, but there must alwavs be a mind to understand the arguments. To bring all the mental processes of a reasoning being within some finished mathematical de­scription proves to be impossible. This seems to be the lesson of Godel's Theorem.

How strikingly parallel this is to what is found in physics! The things that physicists know can always be reduced to equations and laws. But the very acts of "knowing" that give rise to these theories cannot be described by them. The observer cannot be absorbed into the systems he studies. There is always some­thing that remains outside the system to "observe" it. There is knowledge, but there must be someone to know it. To bring all the processes of a knowing being within a closed physical description proves to be impossible, at least within the traditional framework of quantum theory.

Can this parallelism be entirely without significance? Is there not a lesson here? These are the most profound discoveries in mathematics and physics. Each deals with aspects of what it is to know; in one case to know through pure

______________________IS   A   PATTERN   EMERGING?            255

reason, and in the other to know through physical observation. In each case the totalistic dream of describing everything by a mathematical formalism or a law of physics runs into a contradiction: the contradictions pointed out by Lucas on the one hand and by von Neumann on the other.

The natural conclusions —as some people see them —of these great discov­eries can be avoided. But in each case they can be avoided only by denying one's own status as someone who knows. In the Godelian case, one can deny the con­sistency of one's own mind, and claim to be nothing more than an "inconsistent machine/' In the quantum case, one can claim that what one knows by obser­vation is not really the truth, but only that which is true in one branch of reality. The materialist seems to be forced to assert of himself not only that he is a machine, which for most people is absurd enough, but that he is really an infi­nite number of inconsistent machines dividing and subdividing into more and more realities as the universe unfolds.

Why should anyone prefer these alternatives to the straightforward belief that there is such a thing as an intellect? The reason is simple. In the eyes of many people, to accept the idea that the mind is something which cannot be reduced to mathematical description is to accept irrationalism. This comes out over and over again in the writings of materialists. Penrose, who in spite of his rejection of the "computational" view of the mind cannot bring himself to reject materi­alism, brands the idea that there is something immaterial about the mind as "the viewpoint of the mystic," and writes: "I reject mysticism in its negation of sci­entific criteria for the furtherance of knowledge."1 Chalmers, who rejects materi­alism but cannot accept that the mind can have any actual effects in the physical world, defends his theories as showing that "to embrace dualism is not nec­essarily to embrace mystery."2 In his view, to deny the possibility of a reductive explanation of the mind is "mysterianism."' Ernest Nagel and James R. New­man, who were among the first to argue that Godel's Theorem implies a dif­ference between the human mind and calculating machines, warned readers that "Godel's proof should not be construed as . . . an excuse for mystery-mo nge ring."4

What lies behind this terror of "mystery" is the idea that to understand some­thing rationally is the same thing as to understand it through laws and equations and quantities. This identification, however, is far from being self-evidently jus­tified. To some it came as a surprise that it is even justified in physics. Wigner, in a famous essay, wondered at what he called "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in understanding the physical world. He wrote, 'The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve."5 Many other physicists have echoed these feelings/1 Whatever the reason for it, experience has certainly shown the enormous power of mathematics in the

256            WHAT   IS   MAN?______________________________________

realm of physics. But what gives us the right to expect that all of reality is re­ducible to such mathematical treatment? How often are the questions we ask in life answerable bv equations? And vet, if the answers cannot be reduced to equa­tions, are they for that reason to be regarded as irrational? Is all of wisdom, all of morality, all of beauty, all of understanding a matter of numbers and laws?

There is a circularity about the materialist position that becomes obvious whenever its logic is carefully examined. The idea that everything may not be reducible to physics or mathematics is said to be mysticism, mysterianism, or mystery-mongering because it supposedly involves a rejection of rational expla­nation. That, in turn, follows from the supposition that all rational explanation must be explanation in terms of equations and quantities. This supposition is based on the fact that such quantitative explanations have been found to be suf­ficient in the realm of physics and on the assumption that what is true in physics must be true of all of reality. But what justifies that last assumption? Why, simply the idea that all of reality is nothing but physics!

So we come full circle: it is said that materialism is true because materialism is true, because it must be true. We saw the same circular reasoning applied to the origin of the human soul: human beings must be reducible to matter, it is said, because anything non-material about human beings could not have arisen by physical processes; and if it cannot have arisen physically, it cannot have arisen at all — certainly it cannot have been created by God. And this, finally, follows from the fact that only physical processes exist. In other words, materi­alism is true because materialism is true. It is certainly conceivable, if to many of us not credible, that materialism is true, but surely it is not irrational to ask for somewhat stronger arguments on its behalf.

Notes

Chapter!.    Materialism as an Anti-Religious Mythology

1.   I am summarizing in my own words views that can be found expressed in count­less books and articles.

2.   Stanley L. Jaki, Bible and Science (Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 1996), 57,71.

3.  Joseph Card. Ratzinger, In the Beginning, trans. Boniface Ramsey, O.P. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 13-14. For an excel­lent discussion of the stark contrast between the religion of ancient Israel and the pagan religions of neighboring peoples and of the ancient Near East generally, see Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis (New York: Schocken Books, 1970).

4.   St. Thomas Aquinas, II Sententiarum 12,3, J.

5.  The views of the church fathers on the Hexahemeron are reviewed in appendix 7 of volume X of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd., 1967), 203-4.

6.   St. Thomas Aquinas, II Sententiarum 12,3,1.

7.   St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia,68,1. St. Thomas is citing St. Augus­tine's De Genesi ad Litteram 1,18,19,21 (Patrologiae Cursus Completes, Series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, 34,260-62).

8.   St. Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad Litteram), hans. John Hammond Taylor, in Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Trans­lation, no. 41 (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 1: 42-43.

9.  Jerome J. Langford, Galileo, Science and the Church (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971).

10.   Quoted in Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 99-100.

11.  The most important of these can be found in the standard compendium of doc­trinal statements of the Catholic Church, the Enchiridion Symbolontm, Declarationem, et Definitionemt ed. Heinrich Denziger and Adolf Schonmetzer (Barcelona: Herder, 1976). This edition is hereafter abbreviated as DS.

12.   There is a long history of ideologically motivated attempts to find other theories or other scientists persecuted by the Catholic Church to place as exhibits alongside of Galileo. Some leading examples: (a) Roger Bacon (1214-1294). Bacon was a Franciscan monk, philosopher, and man of science. For some period of time between 1277 and 1292 he was imprisoned by his order, for reasons that are not entirely clear, but which,

289

290  

according to the 1957 edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, "could not have been of a scientific nature" and may have been largely caused by "his obnoxious attacks on his contemporaries." (b) Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). Bruno was burned at the stake on February IS. 1600. Although he advocated the Copernican system and held the bold view for that time that there are an infinity of inhabited worlds, it appears to have been his philosophical and theological teachings that led to his condemnation, rather than his sci­entific speculations, (c) Bernhard Bolzano (1781-1848). Bolzano, one of the pioneers of nineteenth-century mathematics, was deposed from the chair of the philosophy of reli­gion at the University of Prague on December 24( 1819. However, it was the state not the church that was behind his deposition, and this was not for his mathematical, scientific, or even theological ideas but for his political and social views. The imperial government in Vienna objected to Bolzano's views on war, social rank, and civic obedience, and ordered therefore that he be charged with heresy. However, the ecclesiastical authorities consistently defended Bolzano as "an orthodox Catholic." Nevertheless, Bolzano even­tually was deposed by imperial decree. See the biographical introduction by Donald Steele, S.J.. in Bernard Bolzano, Paradoxes of the Infinite (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950). (d) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Teilhard was a paleontologist and Jesuit priest. On June 30, 1962, the Vatican issued a monitiim which warned against uncritical acceptance of his theories (Acta Apostolicae Sedis 54 [ 1962] 526). Some have claimed that it wasTeilhard's belief in biological evolution that brought him under sus­picion by the church. The truth is that it was his theological and philosophical specula­tions. For a penetrating analysis of Teilhard's theology, which makes a strong case that he was indeed heterodox in his religious views, see the appendix of Trojan Horse in the City of God, Dietrich von Hildebrand (Manchester, N.Y.: Sophia Institute Press, 1993). It should be noted that at no time did the Catholic Church ever express disapproval of the theorv of evolution. The only official statements have been by Pope Pius XII in 1950, in Humani Generis, stating that biological evolution, even the evolution of the human bodv from the bodies of lower organisms, as a scientific hypothesis was not in itself con­trary to Catholic teaching, and by Pope John Paul II acknowledging that evolution is now more than merely a hypothesis.

13.  A.C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (Ox­ford: Clarendon Press, 1953). See also A.C. Crombie, The History of Science from Augus­tine to Galileo (New York: Dover, 1995), 2: 27-38.

14.   Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 178-80; Crombie, The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo, 2: 69-72; Carl B. Boyer, A Histow of Mathematics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1968), 288-89.

15.   Crombie, The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo, 2: 87-97, 102-7; Marshal! Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959); Boyer, A History1 of Mathematics, 289-95; New Catholic Ency­clopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).

16.  Thomas P. McTighe, "Nicolas of Cusa as a Forerunner of Modern Science," Pro­ceedings: 10th International Congress on the History of Science (Ithaca: Cornell Univer­sity Press, 1962), 619-22; Charles W. Misncr, Kip S. Thorne, and John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973), 754; Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 3, II. ch. 15.

17.  New Catholic Encyclopedia.

291

18.   R. N. WiJson, Reflecting Telescope Optics, vol. [, Basic Design Theor)' and Its His­torical Development (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1996), 3-4, 469.

19.   Johann Schreiberand William F. Rigge, "Jesuit Astronomy," in Popular Astronomy 12(1904).

20.   Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribners, 1970); Catholic Ency­clopedia (New York: Encyclopedia Press, Inc., 1913).

21.   Ibid.

22.   Ibid.

23.   Peter Doig, A Concise History of Astronomy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), 298; New Catholic Encyclopedia.

24.   Anton Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy (New York: Interscience Publishers, 1961), 352-53; Harlow Shapley and Helen E. Howarth, Source Book in Astronomy (Gam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 180-82.

25.   Dictionary of Scientific Biography.

26.   Robin Marantz Henig, The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius o} Gregor Mendel (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2000).

27.  A. H. Broderick, Father of Prehistory, the Abbe Henri Breuil: His Life and Times (New York: Morrow, 1963).

28.   Andrei Deprit, "Monsignor Georges Lemaitre/' in The Big Bang and Georges Lemaitre, ed. Andre Berger (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984), 363-92; Misner, Thome, and Wheeler, Gravitation, 758.

29.   Ralph F. Wolf, "Rich Man, Poor Man," Scientific Monthly (Feb. 1952): 69-75; New Catholic Encyclopedia; J. A. Nieuwland, "Synthetic Rubber from a Gas," Scien­tific American (Nov. 1935) 262ff.

30.  Boyer, A Histor)' of Mathematics; Bolzano, Paradoxes of the Infinite.

31.   Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books, 1996), 28.

32.  Enchiridion Symbolorum, Declarationem, et Definitionem, DS 3009, 3010.

33.   Ibid., DS 3033.

34.  The First Vatican Council formally condemned the proposition that "the One true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty with the natural light of human reason through the things that are created." Enchiridion Symbolorum, Decla-rationem, et Definitionem, DS 3026.

35.  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publications, 1928), bk. I, ch. VIII.

36.  Avery Dulles, S.J., The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Chapter 10 deals with the grounding of faith. John Henry Card. Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame, Ind.-, University of Notre Dame Press, 1979); Catechism of the Catholic Church (Vatican City-: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994), sees. 150-60; Pope John Paul II, encyclical letter Fides et ratio ("Faith and Reason").

37.   St. lrenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haeresis 2,9,1, English translation in William A. Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1970), 86.

38.   Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 58.

39.   Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1967), 639-77.

292   

40.  John Maddox, What Remains to Be Discovered: Mapping the Secrets of the Uni­verse, the Origins of Life, and the Future of the Human Race (New York: The Free Press, Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1998), 2S1.

41.   David ). Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 162.

42.  Avshalom C. Elitzur, "Consciousness and the Incompleteness of the Physical Explanation of Behavior," The Journal of Mind and Behavior 10 (1989): 1-20,

43.  W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1960), 264; W. V. O. Quine "Minds and Verbal Dispositions," in Mind and Language, Wolfson Col­lege Lectures, 1974 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 83-95.

44.  The idea that the "self" does not exist goes back at least to David Hume, A Trea­tise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Maty J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford Uni­versity Press, 2000), 164-71. It can be found expressed or implied in many recent books about the mind written from a materialist point of view, where the self is regarded as a kind of fictitious actor in the internal "scenarios" that make up what we call consciousness.