The Inherent Uncertainty Of Nature Is A Basis For Religion

In his eloquent article, “Scientists, Face It! Science and Religion Are Incompatible,” William Provine raised points that have troubled many thoughtful scientists who find themselves unable to reconcile their views about science and religion in an intellectually honest way. He could have raised other compelling arguments against the meaningfulness of our lives, such as the prevalence of horrible human ills and suffering, shared even by innocent infants. In spite of these observations, however, I believe that scientists can rationally justify a belief in God and in the meaningfulness of human life. The use of the word “rational” in this context is exceedingly important. I have had long and generally unsatisfactory discussions with many religious persons; on occasion these led to painful or embarrassing incidents when my questions were perceived as threats or insults. When asked to explain why they believe in God, many such persons exhibit a profound lack of critical thinking, and appear to hold their beliefs on the basis of intuition. Many describe an unanticipated turn of events in their lives, or an emotional experience of special significance, and I have regarded these, in general, as wholly unconvincing. Ultimate Meaning I believe that Dr. Provine, however, too hastily excludes the God hypothesis. If a biologist is willing to work for a year to sequence a single gene, certainly it is worth years of thought and effort to explore whether or not human existence is ultimately meaningless, as Dr. Provine insists it is. Because “random genetic drift, natural selection . . . and many other purposeless mechanisms” were responsible for the origin of life and the course of evolution, Dr. Provine suggests that life is meaningless and that we have no free will. But here he is wrong. It is the very randomness and unpredictability of these processes that allow for the possibility of free will. This argument was lucidly outlined by Arthur Stanley Eddington in his much debated essay, “The Decline of Determinism” (New Pathways In Science, Macmillan, 1935, Chapter IV). Nineteenth-century physicists envisioned a “billiard ball” universe in which, if the position and motion of every atom could be known at a point in time, it necessarily followed that the position and motion of every atom could be known for all times in the past, and predicted for all times in the future. Although the feat of actually charting every atom was far beyond technical capabilities, the intellectually honest physicist of that era would have been unable to believe in free will—or indeed in any creative force, such as a god, outside of natural processes. But with the discovery of radioactivity and the rise of quantum physics, randomness and unpredictability entered the scene. Although Einstein and a number of scientists disliked the new indeterminism (“You believe in God playing dice,” Einstein wrote to Max Born in 1944), other physicists accepted quantum mechanics with a sense of liberation. “The old classical determinism of Hobbs and Laplace need not oppress us any longer,” wrote Hermann Weyl in The Open World (Yale University Press, 1932).. Because of these new discoveries in physics, Dr. Provine is incorrect when he argues that our choices “are determined by the interaction of heredity and environment.” By demonstrating a fundamental uncertainty in the basic processes of nature, science allows for the exis tence of free will—and for a belief in God. Thus, I claim that Dr. Provine’s “common sense” views about the nature of life and the world are flawed because they are based on an insufficiently representative sample of reality; he has sampled the universe only within a very limited range of temperatures, pressures, velocities, and times. As he well knows, we live in a relativistic and not a Newtonian universe, and this must be taken into account in the pursuit of intellectually honest religious views. Therefore, scientists can believe in God while still acknowledging that the world they study offers no empirical evidence for such an entity. I also believe that there is a reasonable argument for the existence of God. In his book How To Think About God (Bantam Books, 1980), philosopher Mortimer Adler reasoned that God may be presumed to exist only if it can be shown that the universe is created continuously, rather than having been created only once in the distant past. Many phenomena in quantum physics suggest to me that, in fact, the universe is being caused continuously. To cite but one example, an electron and a positron may suddenly appear out of nothingness due to a quantum fluctuation, whirl about, and then totally annihilate each other, all within a fraction of a second. Such quantum phenomena fulfill Adler’s critical condition for the existence of God; the “dice” that Einstein had complained about actually are being cast continuously. Reasonable Alternative Of course, it still takes an intuitive leap to say that the existence of free will and a belief in God imply that human life is meaningful. That intuitive step is one that I am willing to make because it seems more reasonable than the alternative—that God exists, but that in a universe that must be continuously willed into existence, a self-aware, rational creature is of no consequence to God. The age-old riddle of human suffering, as well as other obstacles to faith, must then be viewed in the context of a vast complex universe, which is itself impersonal and cares nothing for man, but in which conditions permit life and cognition to arise through natural and random processes. The same nerves that allow an organism to delight in the warmth of spring sunshine unfortunately also confer the ability to sense the pain of seared flesh. To wax theological, God is behind it all and provides the possibilities. He lets us find our own way through the maze of existence, laughing when we laugh, and hurting when we hurt. The latter may be dismissed as wishful thinking, but it is one important concept in my own personal struggle to make sense of the world. James A. Magner, M.D., is a clinician at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago and an ass istant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago.

The Inherent Uncertainty Of Nature Is A Basis For Religion

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of