Does God Exist? Some Scientists Think They Have Proof
Robert H. Nelson
The question of whether
a god exists is heating up in the 21st century. According to a Pew
survey, the percent of Americans having no religious affiliation reached 23
percent in 2014. Among such “nones,” 33 percent said that they do not believe in God—an 11
percent increase since only 2007.
Such trends have ironically been taking place even as, I would
argue, the probability for the existence of a supernatural god have been
rising. In my 2015 book, “God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about
the Question of a God,” I look at physics, the philosophy of human
consciousness, evolutionary biology, mathematics, the history of religion and
theology to explore whether such a god exists. I should say that I am trained
originally as an economist, but have been working at the intersection of
economics, environmentalism and theology since the 1990s.
Laws
of Math
In 1960 the Princeton physicist—and subsequent Nobel Prize
winner—Eugene Wigner raised a fundamental question: Why did the natural world always—so
far as we know—obey laws of mathematics?
As argued by scholars such as Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh, mathematics
exists independent of physical reality. It is the job of
mathematicians to discover the realities of this separate world of mathematical
laws and concepts. Physicists then put the mathematics to use according to the
rules of prediction and confirmed observation of the scientific method.
But modern mathematics generally is formulated before any
natural observations are made, and many mathematical laws today have no known
existing physical analogues.
Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, for example, was
based on theoretical mathematics developed 50 years earlier by the great German
mathematician Bernhard Riemann that did not have any
known practical applications at the time of its intellectual creation.
In some cases the physicist also discovers the mathematics.
Isaac Newton was considered among the greatest mathematicians as well as
physicists of the 17th century. Other physicists sought his help in finding a
mathematics that would predict the workings of the solar system. He found it in the
mathematical law of gravity, based in part on his discovery of calculus.
At the time, however, many people initially resisted Newton’s conclusions
because they seemed to be “occult.” How could two distant
objects in the solar system be drawn toward one another, acting according to a
precise mathematical law? Indeed, Newton
made strenuous efforts over his lifetime to find a natural explanation, but in
the end he could say only that it is the will of God.
Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics,
little has changed in this regard. As Wigner wrote, “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in
the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no
rational explanation for it.”
In other words, as I argue in my book, it takes the existence
of some kind of a god to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe
comprehensible.
Math
and Other Worlds
In 2004 the great British physicist Roger
Penrose put forward a vision of a universe composed of three
independently existing worlds—mathematics, the material world and human
consciousness. As Penrose acknowledged, it was a complete puzzle to him how the
three interacted with one another outside the ability of any scientific or
other conventionally rational model.
How can physical atoms and molecules, for example, create
something that exists in a separate domain that has no physical existence:
human consciousness?
It is a
mystery that lies beyond science.
This mystery is the same
one that existed in the Greek worldview of Plato, who believed that abstract
ideas (above all mathematical) first existed outside any physical reality. The
material world that we experience as part of our human existence is an imperfect
reflection of these prior formal ideals. As the scholar of ancient Greek
philosophy, Ian Mueller, writes in “Mathematics And The Divine,” the realm of such ideals
is that of God.
Indeed, in 2014 the MIT physicist Max Tegmark argues in “Our Mathematical Universe” that mathematics is the
fundamental world reality that drives the universe. As I would say, mathematics
is operating in a god-like fashion.
The Mystery of Human Consciousness
The workings of human consciousness are similarly miraculous.
Like the laws of mathematics, consciousness has no physical presence in the
world; the images and thoughts in our consciousness have no measurable
dimensions.
Yet, our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide the
actions of our physical human bodies. This is no more scientifically explicable
than the mysterious ability of nonphysical mathematical constructions to
determine the workings of a separate physical world.
Until recently, the scientifically unfathomable quality of
human consciousness inhibited the very scholarly discussion of the subject.
Since the 1970s, however, it has become a leading area of inquiry among philosophers.
Recognizing that he could not reconcile his own scientific
materialism with the existence of a nonphysical world of human consciousness, a
leading atheist, Daniel Dennett, in 1991 took the radical step of denying that consciousness even exists.
Finding this altogether
implausible, as most people do, another leading philosopher, Thomas
Nagel, wrote in 2012 that, given the scientifically
inexplicable—the “intractable”—character of human consciousness, “we will have
to leave [scientific] materialism behind” as a complete basis for understanding
the world of human existence.
As an atheist, Nagel does not offer religious belief as an
alternative, but I would argue that the supernatural character of the workings
of human consciousness adds grounds for raising the probability of the
existence of a supernatural god.
Evolution
and Faith
Evolution is a contentious subject in American public
life. According to Pew, 98 percent of scientists connected
to the American Association for the Advancement of Science “believe humans
evolved over time” while only a minority of Americans “fully accept evolution
through natural selection.”
As I say in my book, I should emphasize that I am not
questioning the reality of natural biological evolution. What is interesting to
me, however, are the fierce arguments that have taken place between
professional evolutionary biologists. A number of developments in evolutionary
theory have challenged traditional Darwinist—and later neo-Darwinist—views that
emphasize random genetic mutations and gradual evolutionary selection by the
process of survival of the fittest.
From the 1970s onwards, the Harvard evolutionary
biologist Stephen Jay Gould created controversy by positing a
different view, “punctuated
equilibrium,” to the slow and gradual evolution of species as
theorized by Darwin.
In 2011, the University
of Chicago evolutionary
biologist James Shapiro argued that, remarkably enough, many
micro-evolutionary processes worked as though guided by a purposeful
“sentience” of the evolving plant and animal organisms themselves. “The
capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable,” he wrote. “Our current ideas about evolution have to
incorporate this basic fact of life.”
A number of scientists,
such as Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes
of Health, “see no conflict between believing in God and accepting the
contemporary theory of evolution,” as the American Association for the
Advancement of Science points out.
For my part, the most recent developments in evolutionary
biology have increased the probability of a god.
Miraculous Ideas at the Same Time?
For the past 10,000 years at a minimum, the most important
changes in human existence have been driven by cultural developments occurring
in the realm of human ideas.
In the Axial Age (commonly dated from 800 to 200 B.C.),
world-transforming ideas such as Buddhism, Confucianism, the philosophies of
Plato and Aristotle, and the Hebrew Old Testament almost miraculously appeared at about the same time in India,
China, ancient Greece and among the Jews in the Middle East, groups having little interaction with one another.
The development of the scientific method in the 17th century
in Europe and its modern further advances have had at least as great a set of world-transforming consequences. There have
been many historical theories, but none capable, I would argue,
of explaining as fundamentally transformational a set of events as the rise of
the modern world. It was a revolution in human thought, operating outside any
explanations grounded in scientific materialism, that drove the process.
That all these astonishing things happened within the
conscious workings of human minds, functioning outside physical reality, offers
further rational evidence, in my view, for the conclusion that human beings may
well be made “in the image of [a] God.”
Different Forms of Worship
In his commencement address to Kenyon College
in 2005, the American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace said
that: “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to
worship.”
Even though Karl Marx, for example, condemned the illusion of
religion, his followers, ironically,
worshiped Marxism. The American philosopher Alasdair
MacIntyre thus wrote that for much of the 20th century, Marxism was
the “historical
successor of Christianity,” claiming to show the faithful the one
correct path to a new heaven on Earth.
In several of my books, I have explored how
Marxism and other such “economic religions” were characteristic of much of the
modern age. So Christianity, I would argue, did not disappear as much as it
reappeared in many such disguised forms of “secular religion.”
That the Christian essence, as arose out of Judaism, showed
such great staying power amidst the extraordinary political, economic, intellectual
and other radical changes of the modern age is another reason I offer for
thinking that the existence of a god is very probable.
Robert H. Nelson is a Professor of Public Policy, University of Maryland.
