On Science, Mysteries, And God-Belief – OpEd

We’re at a historical juncture where it’s fashionable and almost banally impressive to defy God and ridicule believers, demonstrating a putatively rational mind with the right set of logical and reasoning capabilities. Faith and religion are seen as mere coping mechanisms enduring through time, a system of terror management (Vail, et al, 2019) for the simple, weak and impressionable minds. The terror is, of course, the impending reality of death and oblivion. 

This is accepted to almost a truistic extent that any normative conception or faith in God at this point will appear absurd, even outright ‘sacrilegious.’ For today, the sacred is no longer the Divine or the Good, but the production of goods (which also includes ideas, information, entertainment, etc.) that are consequential to atomistic pockets of social life. This sacred production of course includes distorted conceptions of God(s) and dictates by ‘Godly men,’ which reinforces parasitic, heteronomous conventions. 

If one espouses ideas that have no direct functional and pragmatic utility to the prevailing order, or if one’s ideas threaten the state-of-affairs, then one is indeed committing a sacrilegious act. The punishments for such acts often appear to be mild, infantile insults, which conceals the underlying metaphysical preferences that are accepted as truisms today. The new-atheist wave is essentially such a popular, vapid crusade against the faith in God, seeking to infantilize the convictions of believers.  

To be fair to the earnest atheists (who are driven by genuine moral and philosophical concerns), the concept of God has certainly been deployed by psychopathic forces to plunder, destroy and subjugate humans throughout history. What they forget, however, is that it was the fossilization of moral precepts underpinned by instrumentalization of aberrant conceptions of God, that resulted in such oppressive and authoritarian propensities. The genesis of the great religious imaginations have been marked by the will to reform social practices in history and to emancipate subjugated masses. As such, moral awakening and dogmatic slumbers can both be found within the history of religious development and God-conceptions. It is not entirely wrong to say that the Crusades marked a sort of putrefaction of the Christian spirit much like how the jihadists and extremists today are aberrations of the Islamic spirit. (Chevedden, Paul 2018). Unsurprisingly, this might seem rather old-fashioned and even “proto-fascistic” to postmodern minds stuck in a vortex of meaningless academic acrobatics. 

However, to lay out the normative distinction in religious and historical definitions of God is beyond the scope of this article and therefore, I shall focus only on particular spaces within our secular-scientific world where God (as a hypothesis) retains some explanatory power and plausibility. 

God’s place in science

Science and faith did co-exist historically, and quite a lot of scientific investigations were propelled by the yearning to understand God’s marvelous creation more deeply (Numbers, 2010; Ferngren, 2017). One can verify this just by looking at the history of proto-scientific figures of ancient and medieval periods as well as the scientists of the modern scientific revolution. Newton, Pascal and others weren’t mere anomalies in the development of science as new-atheists would like to believe. Their faith was intrinsically tied to their spirit of discovery. It is also true that the Laplacean move of delineating speculations and faith from scientific inquiry into natural causal mechanisms, has provided much impetus to the development of scientific temper as we understand today. This co-existence of faith and skepticism has been characteristic of scientific investigations for the longest time in history. 

Today, however, if you question the certitude of an implicit metaphysics of atomistic physicalism, or earnestly propose any other explanatory scheme that doesn’t conform to it, you’ll be accused of naively holding on to a fairy tale or new-age drivel. Even in such a cultural milieu, God hasn’t really disappeared from the realm of human imagination entirely. Examining some of the philosophical reasons for such an enduring belief-structure will illuminate this discussion. 

Philosophy of course has to address possible socio-psychological factors in its explanation of God-belief. However, I am not focusing here on the typical Freudian explanations of human belief in God: It is rather too easy to dismiss the God-belief by appealing to purely psychological motivations, and painting God as a projection of our innate need for approval and security – a sky-daddy hypothesis, as some would derisively characterize this line of explanation. For a more fruitful discussion detached from pseudo-scientific and ideological camps, it will be better to shift our attention to issues in the sciences and metaphysics. 

God of mysteries and gaps?

God is generally regarded as a placeholder, a final explanation for a set of mysteries where there is no hope of achieving any epistemic closure: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the universe perfectly fine-tuned for life to exist? Why is order and harmony maintained in a cosmic environment of entropy, death and destruction? Why does unconditional love and compassion exist in a world of ruthless atrocities and evil? Why does conscious, subjective experience exist in a world of dead matter? 

God is often understood as the face of all such mysteries (Kaufman, 2008), an omnipotent entity that provides a convenient explanation, while also offering a sense of coherence and purpose. For the scientists (and for some pantheists), God is precisely this: that which is epistemically (and experientially) transcendent, but ontologically immanent (Bhaskar, 2000). In other words, God is born out of an epistemic gap. Conversely, for theists (and specifically monotheists), God is ontologically transcendent, but experientially immanent (directly manifest through experiences of love, compassion, forgiveness, etc.). 

The alternative answer to all the mysteries, from the atheistic camp, is quite straightforward: evolutionary contingencies. The cosmos, organic life and human societies are all subject to a law of evolution which is essentially impersonal, gradual and devoid of transcendent purposes (reasons that are beyond the intrinsic nature of entities, which determines their immediate goals/future states). According to this view, the apparent harmony of the cosmos, moral principles, conscious experiences and other mysteries, are all products of gradual, impersonal mechanisms rather than divine intervention. 

It is quite hard to imagine a solid refutation of this metaphysics, other than through a slew of typical theological argumentations in defense of God, extending from ontological and cosmological arguments of various kinds, teleological arguments, presuppositionalist arguments and so on. The logical import of these have been questioned by many and theologians are often accused of couching their apologetics in seemingly reasonable philosophical parlance while being ultimately speculative. 

Speculations are precisely what I like to focus on, and it is very useful to taxonomize the speculative underpinnings of different scientific theories and hypotheses, to make proper sense of their philosophical foundations. I want to touch upon just two profound mysteries within the sciences, and examine how God bears upon the speculations within these two : Consciousness and Time.  

Consciousness

Consciousness is indeed an intriguing and troubling problem for scientists at this point, which has led to the famous hard problem of consciousness (coined by David Chalmers). To put it simply, the physicalist paradigm of science (which is the dominant metaphysics) assumes that consciousness is emergent from neuronal processes in the brain, but there is no way, even in principle, to explain why or how is it that phenomenal subjective states accompany purely mechanistic physical processes (Chalmers, 1995). To avoid certain dualistic undertones in formulation of the problem, it is better to state that one cannot derive qualitative states of subjective experience via a purely quantitative vocabulary (Goff, 2020). 

However, consciousness should not be understood as an objection to materialism/physicalism. It is better to understand it as a problem entailed by the nebulousness of the metaphysical schema of physicalism itself (Chomsky, 2013). There is no consensus on what the physical is and for all we know, all matter could potentially have ghostly properties, as Chomsky puts it, following Bertrand Russel. So, consciousness is the problem that materialism invariably runs into, as long as matter is understood as particles with quantifiable properties (or conventionally understood as spatially localized entities possessing properties like mass, charge, acceleration, momentum, etc.) 

The only viable alternative metaphysical schemas are dualism and idealism, both of which ascribes a certain fundamentality to consciousness or qualia itself. We can see triadic systems emerging within the metaphysics of mind and the various theories posited tend to fall within the broad classification of physicalism, dualism and idealism, with enough space to accommodate a spectrum of different variations within this triadic taxonomy. There are also nominal differences in theoretical formulations, like in eliminativism, illusionism, emergentism, constitutive panpsychism, cosmopsychism, subjective and objective idealism and so on. But we can still, in principle, inscribe this multiplicity within the three frameworks of substance-metaphysics mentioned above. For example, some materialist strands of emergentism argue that life and subjectivity slowly emerged out of dead matter, which tacitly assumes a discontinuity in kind between dead matter and living, conscious matter. However, this goes against core scientific intuitions such as Leibniz’s idea that nature does not make sudden leaps or the Darwinian view that discontinuities are absent in nature (Koch, 2021). This impasse is remedied by panpsychist emergentism, for example, which takes consciousness as a fundamental property of all matter, sometimes committing itself to a sort of methodological dualism (implying that you can investigate the mental and physical properties separately).  

 But here too, God remains a concept that resists disclosure and yet persists adamantly. If physicalism is no longer a viable option, we’ll have to consider the other two schemes and accept consciousness as an ontological primitive, which naturally opens us up to questions like “is there a universal consciousness?”, “Are we the instantiations of a conscious, intelligent mind?” “Was the universe intelligently/consciously designed in the mind of God?” and so on. A pragmatist would dismiss such questions as pseudo-problems (Quine, 1951) with no possible empirical means to investigate, but then, the desultory, pragmatist hand-waving need not foreclose our desire to know and the freedom to believe. After all, we are not claiming that God is an entity amenable to scientific investigation. We’re only stating the fact that the mysterious gap opened up by the hard problem of consciousness does indeed bear on our God-conceptions at this point.

Time

Time is another mystery within science that has considerable import on theological discussions around God, albeit not apparent at first. One main concern from theological camps is regarding the finitude of the past, which would point to the genesis of our universe that must have had a cause transcendent to itself (interestingly, the Big Bang theory was originally proposed by a Jesuit priest). This transcendent cause is typically portrayed as God, the necessary being (that which exists and could not have been otherwise) that grounds the existence of all other contingent beings (that which exists, but could easily have not existed). But the Big-bang model is now challenged by alternative cosmological models, like Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC), which posits the existence of other universes prior to the big bang.  

Closely tied to this debate is the question of the ontological status of time itself. Kurt Godel, for example, was known for being obsessed with the implication of Einstein’s relativity theory on the notion of time. He came to the conclusion that the intuitive notion of time is simply not real (this was a result of him discovering that Einsteinian equations permitted a universe in which spatial paths looped backward in time, which he considered ridiculous).  He came to believe that “time, like God, is either necessary or nothing; if it disappears in one possible universe, it is undermined in every possible universe, including our own” (Holt, 2005). 

Godel’s anti-realism about time was in consonance with many philosophers, from Parmenedes to Kant, who believed that the flow of time (from past to future) was just an illusion.  Whether time is in fact illusory (or merely an experiential phenomenon) or if it has some mind-independent reality of its own is still an open question, albeit confusing to our common-sense notions about time. 

This debate about time is still quite active in the scientific community today. Some physicists have argued for an anti-realist view of time (Carlo Rovelli, for example) while others are realists about time. There are those who consider time to be more fundamental than space (like Tim Maudlin), and then there are those who consider space-time itself to be some sort of simulation (Donald Hoffman).  All this mystery surrounding time is bound to bear on our God-beliefs and even potentially lend credence to popular philosophical conceptions of God as the necessary being, the first-cause, the unmoved mover, the ultimate observer and the designer of space-time itself.

In any case, it will suffice to pay attention to the metaphysical and speculative underpinnings of scientific theories, to realize that the rather simplistic atheist intuitions need to be refined and thoroughly examined. Natural sciences have only the limited conception of nature (that which can be observed and studied) to boot-strap itself to vindicate its commitments, but human intelligence and creativity has always been drawn to explore further and beyond the world of appearances. God keeps waiting for us at the crevices and edges of natural investigations.