Brief Reflections on God, Man, the Universe

Speculations about God (or gods), the visible universe and the place of human beings in these creations has been with thoughtful people since long before the days of the Assyrian empires. It is surely no surprise that they have become much more acute in recent centuries, perhaps especially with the Abrahamic religions, following the dramatic progress of modern and especially Western sciences.

In engaging with some of the enormous questions raised by the resulting compendium of issues, a good way to start might be to begin with several separate but interrelated matters: what science has so far told us about the origins and growth of the universe; the history, as far as we know it, of the evolution of Homo sapiens and the prospects for his further development; the great gaps that have appeared—and seem to be growing—between the beliefs of all three Abrahamic religions, and those of major non-Abrahamic ones; and the changing forms of life and work in the major, scientifically-based, works of the contemporary world.

What science has so far told us, of course, is that the universe originated, several billion years ago, from a “Big Bang”, an “explosion”, of an originating “singularity”. That apparently simple fact produces a number of critical consequences. As the universe emerged from the moment of creation, it was completely featureless and symmetrical. As it cooled towards lower and lower temperatures it broke one of its constituent symmetries after another and allowed more and more diversity of structure to come into existence including, at some point, the phenomenon of life.

These developments present human beings with currently unanswerable questions. It is, for instance, quite unclear whether ours is the only universe or whether, as some have argued, other universes, perhaps answering to other physical and scientific rules, might not exist or be in the process of being created. It is also, in the present state of human knowledge, uncertain whether, even assuming that this is the only universe, we are the only self-conscious and intelligent beings in it, or whether our continuing exploration of space will in time lead us to accept that other, and perhaps even more intelligent, life forms exist or have existed. We do not even know whether the present physical appearance, constitution and methods of human thought and action will eventually prove to be the end point of humanity’s evolutionary path.

What we do know is that from the point of origin of the universe to the present, the universe, and the small planet on which humans have evolved, appear to have developed in ways that do not suggest mere randomness, but rather an enormous and ever-growing complexity. If that is so, it seems more likely than not that the “Big Bang” itself was produced, or caused, by a mind that is inconceivably more powerful, subtle and complex than any human mind could approach or deal with. It is hard not to accept that we might well think of such a mind, and such power, as “God”.

Put in this form, belief in a god or gods is itself a notable deviation from the beliefs of more primitive societies of earlier times. For untold centuries, men thought of gods as beings living in groups and equipped with magical powers. But we also know about the beginnings of belief in the single, sole God, at first especially for the Jews. The writings of Tacitus and the Jewish historian Josephus explain that when Roman troops entered the Holy of Holies in the Temple at Jerusalem as recently as 63 BC they were puzzled to find it entirely empty. As Josephus puts it, “in the sanctuary stood nothing whatever” since, for Jews, the nature of the one God could not be captured in any image. We also know that early Christians often found themselves accused of being atheists since they did not believe in any gods as normally understood. As Etienne Gilson put it: “God is not a being, he is being.” Or, as God is said to have told Moses: “I am who I am.”

That concept itself creates, from the outset, some major and mutually incompatible possibilities. First, if the creative intelligence we think of as “God” is indeed the creator of our universe, did He also create the initial singularity? Second, was it created in such a way that all subsequent developments in the universe, and its creatures—including humans and their actions—were foreseen, anticipated and predetermined by Him? Or has the Mind felt it necessary to guide and direct the subsequent processes of evolution and the development of all forms of life, whether plant or animal or human? Or, indeed, the development of the earth itself, as it and its life-forms continue in the form of a “heavenly” body and as a (or the) carrier of life? Or there are alternative notions like those of “Socinianism”, which has argued that God is actually neither omnipotent nor all-knowing. He rather learns, grows and re-directs as the universe develops.

In considering these issues, several thoughts suggest themselves. One is that, if the first option is correct, the very idea of man’s free will—let alone the idea of an “elect” person or group—is an illusion. If so, that must mean that all notions of individual responsibility, of virtue or vice, of human goodness or evil, have never really existed and must fall away. So must any idea of human initiative in the creation or development of living things on our planet. Similarly, humans would surely have to accept that the story of Jesus Christ can only be relevant to one sector of the stories of Abrahamic religions on this single planet. That all seems rather unlikely (even allowing for the importance of theses like Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”) given the long-standing and continuing growth or disappearance in the sheer variety of all living things. Indeed, Darwinian theories themselves may well be the result of thinking and invention going far beyond the mind that created them. Which might suggest a continuing divine interest and care not just for human beings but for other living things on our earth.

It is therefore not surprising that the teachings of all major religions, whether Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Islamic or, in somewhat different ways Hindu or Buddhist, show that God, or the Divine, takes an intense interest not just in the behaviour of humanity but in the fate of individual human beings. Societies, cities and even organisations appear, like nations, to be quite secondary. It even seems that modern religion and science both oppose any kind of selfish nationalism and accept that major human achievements, whether in arts or sciences, let alone religion, have very little to do with nationalist separation between societies.

None of this is to avoid the point that the inherited Christian belief in God as a majestic old man with a long white beard (as painted so magnificently on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo) has become utterly incredible. But even here, allowances must be made. The Christian churches of the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, which gave us such pictures, were largely dealing with an illiterate or barely literate priesthood, not to mention ignorant peasant masses; and the need to convey lessons, beliefs and even passions in pictures has in any case fully survived into the television and computer world of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, there is no inherent and overriding impossibility in the idea that the governing Mind should choose to reveal itself in the form of a human being appearing in a particular time and place, preaching love and kindness while continuing to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.

On the other hand it also seems possible, even likely, that our current belief systems will not survive—at least not in their present forms—any future discovery of life, let alone of intelligent life, in other and hitherto unsuspected regions or bodies in other parts of the universe. After all, not only is the universe, as Emil Wiechert once pointed out, “infinite in all directions” but, as we now know, it is constantly expanding. At minimum, there is no reason to suppose that humanity is God’s final creation. And time-span is surely critical. We already know that there is no obvious reason to suppose that the physical and mental make-up of human beings will persist in their present form. After all, humans themselves developed from humanoids to Homo erectus before developing into Homo sapiens. It is not clear, therefore, that the physical makeup of humans, let alone our brain development, will persist in anything like their present forms. Even in the relatively shorter term, there has been a secular decline in ageing, let alone in morbidity and mortality that has contributed to quite important changes in human physiology in recent centuries. Indeed, the synergy between technological and physiological improvements has produced a form of human evolution that has been much more rapid than Darwin’s natural selection and has involved both physiological and thermodynamic aspects of economic growth.

The advance of the physical sciences generally has been remarkable and shows no signs of slowing down. By the 1920s three species of elementary particles were known to exist; by the 1980s that number had grown to sixty-one. Instead of three states of matter—liquid, gas and solid—there are nine. For modern physicists, there can in any case be no such thing as an objective world of space, time and matter independent of human thought; “matter” is just the way particles behave when large numbers of them have been put together. Which is why matter is an active and unpredictable agent in modern experiments.

That brings us into the fields of ecology. As that major scholar Edward O. Wilson has put it:

ecology is now seen as not just a biological but a human science. The future of our species depends on how well we understand that extension and employ it in the wise management of our natural resources. We live both by a market economy—necessary for our welfare on a day-to-day basis—and by a natural economy, necessary for our welfare (indeed, our very existence) in the long term. It is equally true that the pursuit of public health is largely an application of ecology. None of this should be surprising. We are, after all, a species in an ecosystem, exactly adapted to the conditions peculiar to the surface of this planet, and subject to the same principles of ecology as all other species.

Also, it is by now common knowledge that some 96 per cent of the human body is made up of its chief elements, which are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. The rest is made up of twenty other elements. Each element is composed of atoms that, in turn, are composed of protons (a particle with a positive electric charge), an electron (which has a negative charge) and a neutron (with a neutral charge). All atoms are electrically neutral because the number of protons and electrons in each atom is equal. Even so, considerable progress towards changing elements of human physical composition has already been made in recent times and more seems in prospect. For instance, there is the business of human genomes. The Nobel Prize winner J.D. Watson had this to say about the human genome project in his article “The Human Genome Project: Past, Present and Future” in 1990:

A more important set of instructions will never be found by human beings. When finally interpreted, the genetic messages encoded within our DNA molecules will provide the ultimate answers to the chemical underpinnings of human existence.

And there are already groups of scientists and technologists, not to mention industrialists, who believe that in not too many decades from now men and women will not only travel to other objects in space but will even be superseded by artificial “people” with artificially created brains. Other possibilities may include the transfer of “spores” of life to other possible worlds. Freeman Dyson, for one, has already argued that such a transfer is likely to be a “natural way to package biological and genetic information for rapid transit over interstellar distances”. It is pointless to speculate on the likely speed of such transformations since, of the several major transformations already taking place in our society (though not necessarily in our physical development), none is more subtle nor more explosive than the much-heralded megashift from an industrial to an information society.

There are, of course, other and much narrower explanations in terms only of the physical sciences. Two such views, which deny any need to believe in God, come from Professor Richard Dawkins at Oxford and Jacques Monod, a French biologist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology.

Dawkins’s view, in his book The God Delusion, is that ideas about God are mere hypotheses resulting from quasi-mystical and pantheistic references to God in the work of physicists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. He describes such pantheism as “sexed-up atheism” and maintains that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific fact about the universe which is discoverable in principle, if not in practice: “The temptation to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.” What is needed is a hypothesis, with supporting theories, that explains how, from simple origins and principles, something more complex can emerge. And the alternative to the designer hypothesis is not chance, but natural selection.

Dawkins does not claim to disprove the existence of God with absolute certainty. Instead, he suggests as a general principle that simpler explanations are preferable, while any omniscient or omnipotent God must be extremely complex. He goes on to argue that it is in any case logically impossible for a God to be simultaneously omniscient and omnipotent. Even something as central as human morality does not require assumptions about a God. Instead, our morality has a Darwinian explanation: altruism allegedly embodied in genes, selected through the process of evolution, giving people natural empathy.

Monod has a more positive and clear-cut view. He argues that the origin of life is solely a matter of chance. Not only that but:

mutations constitute the only possible source of modifications in the genetic text, itself the sole repository of the organism’s hereditary structures. It necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere.

Pure chance, then, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology (except that we now know cancers are due to a virus) is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition—or the hope—that on this score our position is likely ever to be revised. Indeed, a living being’s structure “results from a … process … that owes almost nothing to the action of outside forces, but everything, from its overall shape down to its tiniest detail, to ‘morphogenetic’ interactions within the object itself”.

These views have attracted intense interest, in the general public as well as in the scientific community. Nevertheless, science is by no means united on the subject of atheism. On the contrary, some of the most distinguished scientists have wrestled with the relationship between science and religion and most of them have come up with a non-atheistic answer. Albert Einstein, arguably the most famous scientist of the twentieth century, had this to say:

[This] interpretation of religion … implies a dependence of science on the religious attitude, a relation which, in our predominantly materialistic age, is only too easily overlooked. While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge. If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one … and inspired by Spinoza’s “Amor Dei Intellectualis”, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.

Very similar views were expressed by the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr and by the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences, which declared that “Science and religion are based on different aspects of human experience … [they] are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different ways …”

A different, and in some ways perhaps more sophisticated, view comes from Pope Benedict XVI, who argues that the purely scientific explanations are not so much wrong as inadequate because incomplete. In his widely noted 2006 lecture at Regensburg he said baldly that questions as profound and far-reaching as whether God exists and, if so, what God’s purposes and intentions might be, cannot possibly be resolved solely, or even mainly, on the basis of physical nature as understood by modern science. In fact, Benedict insists on the essential relationship between religion, philosophy as properly understood, and the notions of the physical sciences. Modern scientific, philosophic and related religious ideas stem ultimately from ancient Greece; but there has been, especially in Europe, a process of wanting to “bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason”, so that theology tends to be “something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific”. But in that limited modern sense, “working in everything on the basis of a single rationality” will not do. For faith (which is born of the soul, not the body) “seeks to correlate with reason as a whole”. Given this sense of broad coherence within the universe of reason, it is reasonable to raise the question of God by using reason, for it is contrary to God’s own nature not to act in accordance with reason. Indeed, there continues to be a close link between faith and the original Greek forms of inquiry, for “in the beginning was the logos (meaning both reason and word) and the logos is God”.

There is more. In the modern scientific view, only the certainties resulting from mathematics and empirical evidence can be considered scientific—as apparently confirmed by the successes of modern technology. That excludes human sciences such as psychology, history, sociology and even philosophy. But such a “scientific” approach must exclude the question of God; with human questions about origin and destiny having no place in “science” thus understood. The sole arbiter of what is “ethical” then becomes the personal and subjective conscience. To return to this wider “dialogue of cultures” should be one of the major tasks of the modern university.

So far so good. But if Christ not only represented, but partook of, the Godhead in ways and stories that could be understood by the illiterates of Europe and the Near East a millennium ago, can those same ways and stories still satisfy minds with an entirely different perspective on the world and the universe? In fact, Benedict XVI’s approach to theology and questions about God is reflected in a good many other views that question not only the division between religious faith and modern science but that between modern sciences as practised in most modern societies and universities.

Many modern opinions appear to be altogether less sophisticated than Benedict’s. From the days of Socrates into modern times, philosophy was something of a reigning deity in the intellectual realm and a major element in the formation of Western social, political and religious views. But in the twentieth century, and especially in its concluding decades, philosophy began an almost precipitous decline into the arenas of practical politics and the search for wealth. It began to be treated, especially in resource-needy universities, as just another social science, akin to psychology, sociology, politics and others; and limited by demands for student essays or statistically measurable numbers of publications or new “fields” of study rather than for more profound questions of life, beliefs and behaviour.

The changes are well illustrated in a recent article by two discontented philosophers from the University of North Texas, Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle, published in the New York Times earlier this year under the title “When Philosophy Lost Its Way”. It laments the way in which philosophy has declined from its traditional role as the leading element in the search for knowledge and wisdom, and into a mere handmaiden of social studies in the hands of administrators in modern Western “research” universities. They conclude:

Like the sciences, philosophy has largely become a technical enterprise, the only difference being that we manipulate words rather than genes or chemicals. Lost is the once common-sense notion that philosophers are seeking the good life—that we ought to be … model citizens and human beings. Having become specialists, we have lost sight of the whole. The point of philosophy now is to be smart, not good. It has been the heart of our undoing.

There are other and very different problems, for even the thinking of so subtle a philosopher as Benedict XVI cannot avoid the simple point that the evolution of humanity since 1700 or so offers only very short-term perspectives. Is it possible to say anything useful about the much longer-term and the even more fundamental questions: “How will humans develop? How long will humanity last?” No search for an answer can sensibly go beyond the search for survival for one or two small groups of representative humans, or spores of humans, capable of procreation and the growth of some form of mutually supporting group. Freeman Dyson, for instance, has thought about Earth’s vulnerability to comet showers, which seem to occur at an average rate of one every 26 million years:

The theory implies that life has been exposed, at regular or irregular intervals, to a drastic pruning. Every 26 million years, more or less, there has been an environmental catastrophe … Creatures which were too successful in adapting themselves to a stable environment suddenly changed. Creatures which were unspecialized and opportunistic in their habits had a better chance when Doomsday struck. We humans are perhaps the most unspecialised and the most opportunistic of all existing species. We thrive on ice ages and environmental catastrophes. Comet showers must have been one of the major forces that drove our evolution and made us what we are.

In other words, effective immortality—for the species, obviously, not the individual—may result from technology allowing the human mind to sustain its brain or perhaps reincarnate itself as an intelligent artefact. Human civilisation might then experience neither salvation nor extermination by nature, machines, aliens or gods. Humanity might, instead, spread throughout the Solar System and into the Milky Way, and be enriched by contact with other intelligent species and artefacts. Eventually humanity’s descendants might so improve their genes and minds that Homo sapiens might exist only as a revered memory.

Whether such unforeseeable changes in physiology, genes and brains can or will affect humanity’s conception of the mind of God will surely be an entirely different matter. But even that might not be certain. As recently as 1930 the British astronomer, mathematician and physicist Sir James Jeans wrote that: “from the intrinsic evidence of the creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician”. So if we humans explored mathematics long enough we would probably be able to read His Mind. Might that turn out to be the end of the human story? Probably not, for as the philosopher and mathematician Kurt Gödel proved in his famous incompleteness theorem, within any axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved on the basis of the axioms within that system. Therefore, such a system cannot be simultaneously complete and consistent.

But there are also some very different approaches to this matter of a human future and the changes and transformations of what we might mean by “human”. Perhaps not surprisingly, two of these approaches also come from noted scientists. The first is, once again, Freeman Dyson, the Princeton physicist and astronomer:

The infiltration of [human] mind into the universe will not be permanently halted by any catastrophe or any barrier that I can imagine. If our species does not choose to lead the way, others will do so … If our species is extinguished, others will be wiser or luckier …

The other comes from Martin Rees, the British Astronomer Royal, who has written:

the collective activities of human brains have underpinned the emergence of all our culture and science. They may not have been the first intelligences in the cosmos, however, and they are most unlikely to be the last … Our earth, though a tiny speck in the cosmos, could be the unique “seed” from which intelligence spreads through the galaxy … [In any event] our era of organic intelligence is a triumph of complexity over entropy, but a transient one, which will be followed by a vastly longer period of inorganic intelligences less constrained by their environment … aliens are likely long ago to have transitioned beyond the organic stage … It is a fair bet that machines, not organic brains, will most fully understand the cosmos. They may be our own remote descendants … [so] it will be the actions of autonomous machines that will most drastically change the world, and perhaps what lies beyond.

What might Dyson’s successor species or Martin Rees’s post-human machines ultimately make of this expanding universe?

God knows.